Loki is one of the gods of Norse mythology created in the 13th century, originating from a poem. He has a unique place among the tales of the gods. A modern-day version of Loki appears in Marvel comic books starting in 1949 and in Marvel movies in 2011. Loki of Marvel is based on the Norse god Loki of the same name. There are similarities but mostly the Marvel Loki is very different. In the Marvel movies, Thor and Loki have a hate/love relationship that goes up and down constantly. Thor can’t trust Loki and Loki doesn’t hesitate to backstab Thor. Loki is part giant in Marvel and mythology. The actual family Loki has in mythology isn’t carried over into the Marvel movies. He is not a blood relative of Thor or Odin in mythology or Marvel. Loki faces many issues and is both villain and hero in Marvel and mythology.
Although Loki spends much of his time tricking the other gods or behaving badly, he also occasionally worked for their benefit. He loved trouble and would deliberately set out to cause as much trouble as he could like when he just decided one day it was a good idea to cut off the golden hair of his brother Thor’s wife Sif. She was very proud of her hair and was devastated at losing it. Thor threatens to kill Loki if he didn’t bring her hair back. So, Loki went off and asked some dwarfs to make Sif some beautiful hair. While with the dwarfs he taunted them as well, and they wanted to kill him. Loki also loved to put people in embarrassing predicaments so he could help them and be their hero. After all, his brother Thor was one of the greatest heroes that existed and Loki was very envious of him. Their relationship moved from love to hate over and over again their whole lives due to their clashing personalities.
Marvel has brought many mythological characters to the big screen, and this is where I fell in love with Loki’s character. The story of Loki is spread over several movies and shows his hero’s journey in a variety of ways. Interestingly enough the actor who plays Loki in the Marvel movies was only hired for the first Thor movie but before Thor even started filming he was told by Marvel’s producers that he’ll be in the future Avengers movie coming out later down the line.
In the Marvel movies, Loki lives in Asgard with his parents, Odin and Frigga, and his brother, Thor. He is the second-born prince, which means that the throne of Asgard belongs to Thor. When Thor was chosen to take the throne, Loki devised a plot to make sure Thor didn’t take Asgard’s throne before he thinks Thor is ready for it. Loki’s jealousy of Thor causes conflict throughout the myth and the movie. Later on, Loki finds out he is not the true son of Odin and that he was taken from Jotunhiem by Odin after a war was fought between the Jotun and Asgardians.
Near the end of the “Thor” movie Loki and Thor battle it out. Loki is hanging on the edge of a bridge with a huge void beneath him. Loki’s father, Odin, is angry at him for trying to wipe out the Jotun in Odin’s honor and lets go of his grip with Loki plunging into the dark void. Loki is found by a leader of the Chitahuri, an alien race, working for a titan named Thanos. It is implied in the Avenger's movie that Thanos tortured Loki and thought he broke the trickster, which is why he was sent to Earth to retrieve the Tesseract (a cube that holds a stone and gives the owner infinite power) for him.
Loki is given a scepter by Thanos that makes people do anything he wills. This scepter contains the mind stone, one of the infinity stones, which gives it its mind-controlling powers. No one knew how it worked except Loki. Loki then arrives at a top-secret military facility, a lab of SHIELD's (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), through a portal created by the Tesseract. He ends up blowing the facility up and taking control of Clint Barton and Erik Selvig's minds, as well as a few unnamed SHIELD employees. He is later challenged by Thor, Hulk, Iron-Man, and then has a brief fight with Captain America, the result being his capture. At the end of the Avengers film, Loki allowed himself to be captured, scepter and all. This not only prevented Thanos from taking the Tesseract, which is one of the infinity stones but also take his scepter from him. Viewers at this point really see Loki as a villain but it wasn’t until later that they started to see him as a hero just like in mythology.
In the movie Thor: The Dark World, after Asgard has been attacked by a vicious army of dark elves and Frigga has been murdered by the mutated elf Kurse. When Loki found out Frigga was murdered, it broke him. She was the one person who’s always believed in Loki. Despite Odin not allowing anyone to visit Loki after he was captured, Frigga used her magic to send illusions of herself to Loki to keep him company. To comfort him and try to make him see the error of his ways. When Thor later goes to Loki’s cell to ask Loki for help, he sees an illusion of Loki, an illusion of Loki trying to make himself look like he’s kept it together. When Thor calls him out on it, the spell breaks and his cell is a wreck while he is a mess. Thor then offers Loki a deal to kill Kurse and his master, Malekith, as revenge for killing their mother, Frigga, and Loki accepts, which forms a tentative alliance between the two brothers. Loki and Thor come face to face with Malekith and Kurse, where they battle the dark elf to stop him from taking the power of the Aether, another infinity stone.
They do both manage to defeat Kurse together, but not Malekith. Loki is killed by Kurse and is supposedly dead. After Thor leaves his brother's "corpse" on Svartalfhiem to search for Malekith, who had fled, it is revealed that Loki is not, indeed, dead, and has faked his own death. After Loki faked his death, no one was looking for him anymore so he figured if no one is out to kill him any longer he can do whatever pleases him. Even though Loki could be mean-spirited at times, he also had moments of kindness and remorse. Loki stated, “I don’t enjoy hurting people. I don’t enjoy it. I do it because I have to, because I’ve had to…. Because it’s part of the illusion. It’s the cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear. A desperate play for control” (Glorious Purpose). So finally being free and having a sense of redemption in avenging his mother’s death, Loki wasn’t interested in causing another war, he just wanted to go back to being who he was, the trickster.
Oddly enough, his death in Thor: Dark World was supposed to be the end of his story. This was meant to be his redemption arc and the actors who played the roles of Loki and Thor played the finale of Thor: Dark World for real, thinking this was Loki’s end. When they were test screening the movie though, the audience refused to believe that this was how Loki dies. Marvel understanding this, decided to add a scene at the end that revealed Loki faked his own death.
After the ordeal on Svartalfhiem, Loki returns under the guise of an Asgardian guard to Asgard and confronts Odin, telling him that Loki is supposedly dead. It is revealed later in Thor: Ragnarok that Loki somehow removed the real Odin from the throne and took his place, now under an illusion that makes him appear to be Odin. Thor returned to Asgard to talk to his father and Loki let Thor off easy, not something his father, Odin, would have done. When Thor realized what was going on, he dragged Loki with him to find Odin. Upon finding their father, he praised Loki saying his mother would be proud of him for casting such an effective spell. Loki was shocked having never heard such praise from Odin before. Then after telling the brothers about their sister Hela and that he loved them both, Odin died. This moment stuck with Loki as for the first time in his life, Loki finally felt like he was accepted by his father as a worthy son even after the monstrosities he’s committed. When they were about to return to Asgard, Hela arrived.
She bested both Loki and Thor and sent Loki to another world. Loki thinking Thor was dead, never planned on returning to Asgard and staying in this new world. Later he found Thor was also on this planet and when Thor tried to leave, Loki agreed to help. During this time, they finally reconnected as brothers while fighting their way off the planet. Loki has craved to fight side by side with Thor, to be seen as his equal, not live in his shadow. When they arrived to Asgard, they found out Hela has taken it over. Loki helped get the Asgardians to safety as Thor fought off the attackers, even smiling seeing Thor’s destructive might. Unfortunately, they were not strong enough to save their kingdom but came to a realization that Asgard wasn’t a place, but it was wherever the Asgardians stood. So they destroyed the Asgard they knew in order to kill Hela.
After discovering that he is a Jotun, and not Aesir as he thought, Loki must deal with immense amounts of internalized self-hate. He has learned his entire life that Jotuns were nothing but heartless, brainless creatures, whose only intentions were to kill. When he learns that he is one of these creatures, Loki sees himself as a monster. The biggest struggle Loki has is with the conflict that exists between his brother and himself.
Loki's struggles with the conflict between him and his brother, Thor. He has always been envious of the attention people lavished on his brother and wishes he wasn't always pushed to the side or stuck in the shadows. Loki and Thor fought constantly throughout all the movies they were in together and it got to the point where Thor seemed to give up on trying to care for his brother Loki, which only spurred his hatred even more feeling like the only family he’s ever known has given up on him.
Because Loki uses magic during battle, which has been considered by others as an unfair tactic, he is shunned by many and deemed a trickster, up to no good. Asgard is a society of warriors and masculinity, where honor is very important, as is an honest fight. Loki's use of magic distances him from others, as his fighting tactics are considered dishonest or, even possibly, womanly. With Loki’s issues with family and people in general, he seemed destined to be the bad guy, a villain. He is called a trickster by Thor's friends and is immediately suspected of ascending to the throne through wicked plotting when it all fell to coincidence. Although Loki doesn’t want to be seen as a villain, he also never tried to change people’s opinions about him.
After all, was said and done, Loki and Thor, the two brothers standing side by side with their people head to Earth to start a new life when Thanos shows up and ruins things. Slaughtering half of the Asgardians on the ship and besting the brothers. As Thanos is torturing Thor, Loki steps up and pretends he doesn’t know where the Tesseract is but offers to help him find it by asking Thanos to be his partner. He was trying to fool him, just so he can get close and kill him. Here Loki wants to protect his brother, showing selflessness and immense growth on his part. It backfires though and Thanos kills Loki by snapping his neck and taking the Tesseract from Loki. In the end, feeling accepted by not only his family but his people, the Asgardians, in Loki’s final moments he finally accepted who he was, Loki, the prince of Asgard, Odin’s son. He died a hero, trying to stop the mad titan Thanos and save his brother Thor.