Thor’s step-brother, the trickster deity Loki, is one of a number of characters who’s been overused in past years. Now, Cheat Sheet’s making things worse by sugarcoating news about whether the comics and upcoming TV productions based on Marvel characterize him as “gender fluid“:
According to a recent promo video for the show, a TVA profile of Loki lists that character’s sex as “fluid.” This revelation has divided fans, some of whom aren’t sure what to make of it. Although Hiddleston’s Loki has often gone from villain to anti-hero and back again, the character has seemingly always been presented as male. Perhaps Loki suggests the character has been gender-fluid the entire time, though fans just didn’t realize it.
This is nothing more than another example of blurring distinctions between people’s perceptions of fiction and reality, and already, the article is a dud. Yet it drones on:
At this point, it’s unclear how directly Loki will tackle this question. After all, the god of mischief has a lot of time-travel adventures to go on throughout the series’ six-episode run. In the meantime, the debate rages on about whether this is an accurate depiction of the character. Many defenders of Marvel’s choice to proclaim Loki gender-fluid harken back to Marvel Comics. But how exactly is the character portrayed on the page?
How indeed? Well here’s something to consider:
When Loki first debuted in Marvel Comics, the character was presented as male. Even now, Loki’s comics profile on Marvel’s official website is classified as “male.” However, in recent years, the god of mischief has often taken various different forms, including female ones. As the Marvel profile mentions, the character is known as Lady Loki at times too.
See, it’s only in the past decade or so they really began to ramp up this absurdity to such extremes; hence, the feeling this is all politicized propaganda, because they make it look as though it’s that big a deal, when it stopped being so long before. Yet the news site themselves continue to gush with the following:
Rumors have claimed the Disney+ series will introduce a female Loki. So it’s quite likely the character’s gender fluidity will be addressed somehow. And truth be told, this development gives Hiddleston an opportunity to not only expand the character. In the process, he’ll bring some much-needed LGBTQ representation to the MCU.
Wow, I thought they already long did work on that, recalling the way Scott Lobdell for starters employed heavy-handed emphasis on Northstar’s homosexuality, yet here we have a bunch of Orwellian lecturers acting like they didn’t, because it’s never enough, and won’t be even after the MCU in its entirety embraces their sleazy views.
Also, wouldn’t you know it, here’s a site called Glitched recommending 3 very new Loki-centric stories, written as they were by Daniel Kibblesmith, Al Ewing and Christopher Hastings, and the latter’s tale was titled Vote Loki:
An unbelievable mashup of comics and politics. Vote Loki is basically just a giant satire of the American Presidential Election system. The story is centred around Loki’s controversial political campaign to be the new President of the United States and one reporter who’s trying to prove his duplicity.
Loki’s campaign is nothing if not true to who he is as a character. He pledges that he will have the guts to lie outright to all the American people, unlike the other politicians who try to hide their lies. It’s a strange place to see Loki, but it’s also oddly fitting. Vote Loki manages to draw you in and show you just how ridiculous both Loki and politics truly are.
Well I’m sorry to say, but satire doesn’t make it artistically palatable, and some of these items were written as anti-conservative metaphors anyway. What’s more, partisan politics have been flooding mainstream comicdom so noticeably for so long now, that’s but one of the reasons why they’re not fun, and not funny anymore. Certainly, politics have become ridiculous, but so has the modern focus upon them in entertainment, and nobody argues whether that’s become a disadvantage from an artistic perspective.
And through all this time, nobody asks whether we’ve taken the obsession with villains too far. Loki may have been depicted in the past as a more honorable villain, but even such characters have been put so front and center in focus lately, it still begs serious queries whether these villain-centric books have become too much.
Originally published here.
