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bookishwenchWithin the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a wide variety of villains have played their roles in hurtling our heroes towards ever greater heights of selfless bravery and service, but none of them comes close to the damage done by Thanos, who succeeds in wiping out half of all life in the universe and nearly disposes of the remaining half until Tony Stark completes a successful suicide mission to stop him. During Endgame, several characters time travel, and one, Rhodey, even suggests the possibility of killing Thanos as an infant to avoid the wholesale slaughter of the universe, but we are told this would not work as it would merely create a different timeline, not fix the one the characters are in. It does raise the question, though, of at what point the events that play out in Endgame become locked into place. Thanos’s birth? Thor’s choice not to go for the head? The primordial creation of the Infinity Stones?
I would argue that the most direct blame lies with Odin.
Hear me out.
Nothing in the events of Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, or Iron Man 2 directly affects Thanos. These stories are entirely earth-bound aside from the credit sequence showing Mjolnir. It’s not until Thor that plots from off-world start showing up. This leads us to Asgard. So, what’s going on in Asgard, and how do Odin’s bizarre choices set the wheels in motion that lead to the Snap? The answer is simple.
Odin is an idiot.
Again, hear me out.
We start this film with Odin regaling an audience about his fight against the terrifying, cruel, heartless Frost Giants of Jotunheim and how he protected the inhabitants of Viking-era Norway from their invasion. Anthony Hopkins is brilliant as Odin, but he still sounds a bit like Galadriel at the beginning of Lord of the Rings giving backstory on how humanity was dumb enough to have a shot at destroying the ring and instead became overwhelmed by it and morphed into the bad guys. It’s a great storytelling device, but the problem is who is hearing the story. In Galadriel’s case, she appears to be directly addressing the audience, which is a little odd, but we can go with it despite the fact we, the humans, are now cast as the villains. There’s some guilt involved, maybe some uncomfortable shuffling of feet from the viewer. I mean, who would want to be part of the group of awful beings Galadriel is talking about? In Odin’s case, it sure as heckfire appears he’s telling the story to his two young sons as a history lesson, and that’s fine and great and all until one realizes that one of those children is in fact a Frost Giant. Granted, Loki doesn’t know that yet, which actually makes it worse. From earliest childhood, the man he thinks is his father tells him bedtime stories about the horrible, terrible, completely irredeemable inhabitants of Jotunheim, selling it but good that Odin is the hero and all Frost Giants are EVIL with a capital everything.
And he’s saying this to his son, whom he claims to love, who happens to be a Frost Giant.
Ouch. That’s gonna leave a mark.
Odin literally builds Loki’s earliest childhood memories around the idea that Frost Giants are incurably bad. At what point Odin was planning on telling Loki that his Aesir appearance is a spell and he is in actuality one of the creatures he has been taught to hate on principle is intriguing since it had to come out eventually. It was part of Odin’s plan that Loki would help “unite” the kingdoms, which wouldn’t be possible without his knowledge of his biological parentage.
Honestly, Odin’s plan makes little to no sense. If he really did adopt the son of Laufey who had been doomed to infanticide out of a desire to somehow link Asgard with Jotunheim to prevent future wars, how was he planning to do this? Would an adult Loki have been told he was a Frost Giant after Laufey was dead in an attempt to claim the throne? If Laufey thought so little of him that he decided to kill him, he would undoubtedly have had some other heir in mind to replace him, one he found more suitable. What was Odin’s endgame here? He raises Loki to hate himself, then wants him to somehow bring about universal peace by… moving to a dying frozen wasteland? Becoming the king of a people he despises? Heck, Loki can canonically swap genders, so was Odin thinking of having Thor marry Loki to produce a combined dynasty? Weird as that last one sounds, it almost seems like the sanest scenario.
The incredibly sad thing in all this is Odin never even pretends that he originally adopted Loki out of love or compassion for an abandoned baby. He wants some form of bargaining chip, and he dangles the possibility of a crown in front of Loki from childhood despite never having any intention of putting Loki on Asgard’s throne. He was destined for the frozen throne of Jotunheim instead.
So, as Loki is out of the running for taking Odin’s place, who does the Allfather think is worthy of becoming king?
Thor.
Specifically, Thor as he is at the beginning of the film bearing his name.
One wonders just exactly what Odin was smoking when he thought that was a good idea.
It becomes clear immediately that this was a very, very stupid idea, possibly the same level of stupid as adopting a Jotun child, hiding his identity, and teaching him to hate Jotuns, so at least Odin is consistent in his inability to think anything through. Thor at the beginning of his story is brash, willful, violent, easily manipulated, and pretty much a spoiled brat, albeit a charming and handsome one. Unfortunately, the only one who seems to notice that Odin is about to hand the crown over to someone completely incapable of ruling well is Loki, and Loki has his own gargantuan problems, not least of which is his unrelenting jealousy regarding his brother. Consequently, he is rightly suspected by the audience and the other characters of acting out of malicious intent. And he is.
The problem is Loki is also completely correct about his brother’s ineptitude.
Loki contrives not merely to “spoil [his] brother’s big day” through “a bit of fun.” He brings Thor’s coronation to a grinding halt by allowing Jotunheim’s warriors into Odin’s treasure room to steal back the Casket of Ancient Winters. It’s embarrassing that this could happen at all, and it puts at risk Asgardian warriors and leads to the death of the Jotuns involved, but as Loki has been raised to hate them on sight, his lack of remorse over that is pretty understandable.
Thor, now in the midst of a complete hissy fit over the incident, literally has a temper tantrum by flipping over a banquet table. He thinks his father is weak for not invading Jotunheim over the incident, and, seeing an opportunity, Loki very skillfully gets Thor to direct his anger towards an incursion to Jotunheim on his own. Loki is obviously manipulating him, and Thor falls for it hook, line, and sinker. This is, again, not a good sign for a prospective king.
Two things happen next that are crucial to understand what Loki’s plan actually is, which is nothing. He has no intention of going to Jotunheim at all. Instead, he gets a message to the Einherjar to tell Odin what Thor is doing so that he will be stopped before using the Bifrost. Unfortunately, for some reason, they do not inform the king quickly enough, so Loki moves to Plan B. He attempts stalling for time on the Bifrost by offering to speak with Heimdall for the group, a ploy to buy more time, but the Warriors Three cut him off, joking that his “silver tongue” isn’t needed.
By this point, he has no choice but to hop on over to Jotunheim. Even now, Loki manages to talk the group out of trouble, getting Laufey to let them go. It’s only when Laufey insults Thor by referring to him as a “little princess” that Thor goes, to use the Viking term, berserk. Loki’s quiet muttering of “damn” in response shows that he knows his brother will be so angered by the insult that he will literally start a war with Jotunheim over it, and he does. Again, this guy is supposed to be king now. Odin finally arrives to stop them all being killed, but Laufey has already declared a war as a result of Thor’s invasion of Jotunheim.
Odin, furious, realizes too late that Thor is, as he says, a “vain, cruel boy,” accusing him of “arrogance and stupidity.” Odin is right on all counts here, but the problem is, until Loki stopped the coronation, Odin was so blind to Thor’s major faults that he was going to make him king in spite of the fact he is anything but worthy.
This brings in Mjolnir. Thor’s hammer does not seem to agree with Odin’s assessment of his son as Thor has been able to wield it just find through all of his stupid choices. Only after Odin takes it away does the hammer’s concept of worthiness no longer include Thor. One wonders what the definition of “worthy” is by Odin’s standards. Regardless, it appears that Mjolnir is similarly flawed when it comes to judging Thor’s fitness because the qualifications for that, whatever they are, appear to be created by Odin. The hammer doesn’t really prove Thor is worthy in the sense that he is making wise or just decisions or else it would have rejected him on Jotunheim. It just essentially means he has Odin’s blessing, regardless of his choices. So, to sum up:
Loki was right.
Odin was wrong.
Thor was an idiot.
Somewhat predictably, Odin’s reaction to Thor’s failed invasion is to throw his own temper tantrum, stripping Thor of his powers and hammer and sending him, for some bizarre reason, to Earth to make the humans deal with him. Rather than realizing at least some of this is his own fault for nearly crowning a completely incompetent prince as king and taking the responsibility of teaching Thor right and wrong himself, something he might perhaps have considered doing previously instead of telling grizzly bedtime stories meant to incite his children into racism, he dumps him on Earth and decides he is now their problem. It should also be noted that, despite his heroic saving of Norway about a thousand years ago, Odin doesn’t seem to like Midgard very much. This becomes clearer in Thor: The Dark World when he refuses to allow Jane Foster to seek medical treatment in Asgard until he finds out she has an Infinity Stone lodged in her. To that point, he appears disgusted to be in the presence of a human, even one his older son loves. Father of the Year, there. Regardless, he ships Thor off to the other end of the universe to learn some basic manners.
Now, Loki is no dope. He can do basic math, and two minus one equals one son remaining for the crown. With Thor out of favor, he’s become the defacto heir to the throne. The problem is Loki has his own stockpile of big honking problems. For completely different reasons, he is no better a choice than Thor for the throne. He too is vain and cruel and filled with hate. The difference, though, is he’s also very smart. Machiavelli probably would have readily endorsed Loki’s kingship because the guy is a master manipulator and most likely would have had quite an easy time taking over large portions of the Nine Realms. But, that’s not going to happen because now we get the wrench thrown in that Loki is told of his adoptive status, that he is, in fact, a Jotun himself. Loki is about a thousand years old. For that long, he’s been taught to hate Jotuns and think of them as animalistic barbarians incapable of love, honor, or civilization. He has never heard differently from anyone, and it has never occurred to him to question this incontrovertible truth.
And now he finds out he is one.
Whoops.
Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t take it well. Odin conveniently passes out into a stress-induced coma and Loki the Currently Slightly Unhinged Jotun is now the acting king of Asgard.
Hooray?
Why not just give the crown to Frigga, who appears to be the only level-headed one in the family? Oh, right, she’s a woman. Next!
It’s from this point on that Loki starts acting like a villain. He doesn’t lie in the film until now (at least as far as we can tell). He attempts killing the entire race of Jotunheim as a present to his father, something Thor was previously bent on doing, in an effort to show that he’s Aesir, not Jotun. He blows up a small town and nearly kills his brother. Then, he attempts suicide. Possibly. Or maybe he was making a dramatic escape and covering his tracks, because by this point Loki is lying so much it’s likely he doesn’t even know what the truth is anymore. The audience certainly doesn’t and is left guessing.
Whatever his intention, Loki lets go and winds up in the hands of Thanos, who uses the Mind Stone to convince him to invade Earth to get the Tesseract, which is the Space Stone. Granted, I’d also like an explanation for why Odin thought it was a nifty idea to move the Tesseract from Asgard to a church in Norway in 965 A.D. because that seems like a really unsafe move on top of everything else, but hey, it’s pretty clear Odin has made his fair share of boo-boos. The point is we haven’t even heard of Thanos until now. Whatever his plans are, they don’t seem to begin until Loki shows up. If he hadn’t? Well, who knows, but undoubtedly things wouldn’t have followed the same path.
To rephrase it, Odin decides it’s time for Thor to become king. Loki correctly realizes this will be a disaster of epic proportions and intervenes. The outcome of this is Loki’s attempted suicide (or possibly just bungee jumping off the Bifrost without a cord, whatever the heck his plan was), and that’s what sets in motion Thanos getting his hands on the Infinity Stones. Had Odin simply realized Thor was not even close to being ready to be king to start off with, none of this would have happened.
So, yes, it’s all ultimately Odin’s fault.
