on Journey into Mystery 645

[xparrot]

Series' end. And.

SPOILERS (do not read unless you've read it. I mean it, really, it's better not knowing...)

But I would just like to say, to everyone I got into this series...


...I AM SO SORRY ;__________;

...Though it was good, it was a fine ending in a lot of ways, but OMG NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

NOO NOO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

(and it was kind of as I called it after all, only it was the 50% even worse ending...)

...though at least Leah/Hela lives. And of anyone she's maybe the one most likely to realize the truth (or already guesses/knows it?)...though maybe that's worse still...


(In non-spoilery news, this issue also included a letter from Tom Hiddleston to Kieron Gillen, waah!:

Dear Kieron,
You and I see Loki the same way. He's one dark, anarchic, bottomless black hole of rage, hatred, pity and pain. An exiled outcast, a lost & lonely agent of chaos, who wouldn't know what to do with familial forgiveness if it walked up to him in the street and slapped him in the face. I've had as much fun playing him as you've clearly had writing him. I know your run of JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY has been so hugely popular. What an enormous honour to share Loki's legacy with you. Here's to bringing Norse back!
--Tom Hiddleston

ETA: A follow-up thought from gnine...

Comments

[pervert-bitch.livejournal.com]

I cried through it all... but call me stupid but... what happens in the end then? I got he won... and besides Kid Loki will still be there for Young Avengers, but how? He just ate the crow? What?
Also, oh Tom, your letter distracted me from me tears and confusion XD

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Kid!Loki ate the magpie and with it took back his old memories - old!Loki vanished because he was overwriting kid!Loki's mind. So now kid!Loki still looks like a kid, but has old!Loki's mind (and presumably all his magic back as well) - and Thor on his side, completely unaware. The worst part is, when he goes evil now - as he will, that's why kid!Loki was saying he won, because he did manage to change, while old!Loki is inevitably going to go back to his old ways - no one will ever know for sure that kid!Loki ever existed at all, that it wasn't just Loki lying all along...

[pervert-bitch.livejournal.com]

Ok, that's depressive. So is Kid Loki bad in Young Avengers... or he'll be gradually bad as he ages. He's still kinda cute in Point One though~

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure kid!Loki is actually entirely old!Loki now (in mind if not in body). However, he claims that he wants to change, that he wants to be something other than the villain he was. So it makes sense that he'll be acting good - may even be trying to be good - but...it's probably not going to last. And he's not as genuinely kind as kid!Loki was.

[josephina-x.livejournal.com]

Re: ETA -- but wouldn't Leah/Hela or somebody have to pay the Teller another price for that? (to try and get kid!Loki back?)

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, yes, someone would, at that (unless the Teller still wanted his story to devour, so made it longer...?)

[gnine.livejournal.com]

...I'll just continue to be over here in my corner SOBBING...or well, alternating between that and getting distracted by my shiny Nightwing...and then I wind up back on Tumblr and it's just tears all over again!! Have I mentioned that I HATE YOU! :--p *huggles* *CLINGS* LOKI!!!

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

SO MANY TEARS ;____; (the Nightwing made it! haven't started reading it yet, but...)

[gnine.livejournal.com]

So, sooo many tears! (Yay, glad it made it! Now just need to start reading it! Give in! Come to the Dick...err...Dark side! ^___-)

[bagheera-san.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the ending is really as bleak as it seems. I think the story isn't over yet - it feels more like there's going to be one more chapter with a counterpoint to this dark note. Gillen has been up-playing his whole "I'm a cruel writer" image, but throughout the series the pattern was pretty much always the same - Loki gets in trouble, people say Loki can't change, but in the end, there's a last-minute save (usually a meta-tastic literal deus ex-machina, not that I'm complaining). Leah seemed to die, but she came back, Thori seemed to die but came back (albeit as a traitor, in a way), Thor fake-died - so I'm fairly sure that what follows isn't just that old Loki usurps kid!Loki's body and picks up where he left off.

In any case I like the ending very much. Loki swallowing Ikol was simply awesome (the thing I love most about Gillen is that he knows how to emulate the tone and imagery of myth), and the last lines (if that is old!Loki saying: Damn me, damn you all) are like a five word character manifesto for old!Loki (he hates being who he is, and he usually channels that hate into hating others) but at the same time they're an admission that yes, kid!Loki did win - and in my opinion, kid!Loki isn't simply gone, it just means that the two of them have been re-united (and it was kid!Loki swallowing old!Loki and not the other way round). I think that we're going to end up with a Loki who remembers both his lives, has old!Loki's powers, and a hell of an internal struggle. That, or there's a loophole/someone saves kid!Loki.

Anyway, I liked the ending, but then I like old!Loki/Ikol as much as kid!Loki, and whatever flavour the Loki in Young Avengers will be I trust Gillen to write him interestingly.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Thori came back - but was a traitor. Leah came back - only to be banished back in time again and grow up as Hela, who is awesome in her way but not BFF material. Thor came back but that was comic mandate...I am really not sure if this is the fake-out, or if all the happy endings were fake-outs to make this ending the more tragic!

I read the "Damn me, damn you all" the same way and loved it much (no one hates Loki as much as Loki hates Loki, and to handle it he projects like mad...) Though I was reading it as kid!Loki being gone - that he had to be gone, for the fear crown's power to be canceled, so even if old!Loki has his kid-self's memories, he's still looking at them through the prism of his millennia of grudges. I took the eating of Ikol as taking the evil into that body - so kid!Loki's body, old!Loki's mind. (It's definitely open for interpretation, though!)

What I'm more wondering about now is what old!Loki's motivations actually are. He said all along he wanted to change, and while he said his reason for that was because he had become too predictable - what I couldn't tell was whether he was annoyed that his evil-doing was predictable and wanted to still be wicked but no one to catch him (in which case problem somewhat solved, as all the realms have now seen Loki doing something heroic and will be more inclined perhaps to think better of him?) or if he was tired of being the bad guy in general, in which case he may make an actual attempt at going good? (though with the "damn you all", that's not going to go well...)

Either way, whatever his motives, and how much of kid!Loki actually remains intact in his head (or elsewhere) - the thing is, kid!Loki always *was* Loki, who Loki used to be...the only difference between this kid!Loki and the first time around is that he knew what he had the potential to become, so was fighting against it. But even if old!Loki doesn't get back this kid!Loki's memories, he's still got most of the same memories himself, somewhere deep inside. Which will have been stirred up. So yeah, he's going to be even more conflicted than usual no matter what...(and I am so glad Gillen is writing him, because I don't trust many others to do justice to his nuances...)

The more I think about, the more I love this ending; it's a lot more satisfying than a lot of other possibilities. Still, at least what we have of it so far - ow~!

[bluepard.livejournal.com]

Losing Kid Loki makes me sad. I enjoyed JiM so much. I did have 3 thoughts on whether it was final, though:

1) What was that conversation with the former disir where Loki asked if she could devour him? I didn't understand why he asked, so it makes me suspicious that I missed some angle on Loki's part.

2) Loki ripping into Ikol really makes it look like Ikol died, not Kid Loki. I get the metaphor of absorbing his memories but it wasn't my first thought.

3) If Old Loki really wants to change Kid Loki is his way of doing that. And Kid Loki may not have had time to find another way to stop the crown and save everyone but Old Loki did, so we can't tell by the effects if Old Loki went through with it or not.

I have to admit, though, I understood very little of what was going on in this event. Switching back and forth between everything just confused me more and more. Weren't we on Surtur? Now it's Mephisto and the crown? What? I guess it's Mephisto's fire really not Surtur's? I need to reread it but I hated the Mighty Thor half of it so ...

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Loki's conversation with the Disir, I took to be that he would have rather died than become his old self again, so he was hoping he could be devoured - not just dead but entirely gone, and so the threat of the fear crown would be mitigated. Not an option, though.

It's funny about eating the magpie - I immediately took it to be how he was taking the memories back, swallowing old!Loki's lies (literally) and it didn't even occur to me to interpret it as otherwise - but a lot of people took it that way, so yeah, ambiguous! I am curious...

And yeah, this event moved too quickly to really follow well (but then most comics seem to, to me...) And the overlapping with Mighty Thor really illustrated how much a difference both writers and artists make with characters. As I understood it, Surtur's fire was the main threat, but then at the end Mephisto took advantage of the confusion to steal the crown and then he would have spread his own (different) hellfire across the realms...but yeah, there might've been more there that I missed!

[bluepard.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, that makes sense.

I suppose I'm mostly just happy that JiM's part worked as well as it did. It's bad enough to lose a character you like without losing them to a story you don't like and didn't get! And that happens annoyingly frequently in comics.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah...in some ways, if you lose a character to a bad story, it's easier to ignore it, just invoke fannish denial. But JiM was amazing and I don't want to deny it; even if this is all we ever get of kid!Loki, it was worth it...

[bluepard.livejournal.com]

Still. He was so cute. )=

At least he's popular, so there should be remaining fanfic/art. Whenever I get around to actually looking at it.

[sholio]

I finally got caught up on recent issues and ... *SOB*

That was ... sort of the worst of all possible endings, wasn't it? And yet I loved it for its operatic tragedy and mythic feeling.

I kinda feel done at this point, though. Not really in a bitter way, but more of a "... ready to leave this particular universe for a while" kind of done. It feels wrapped up -- at least, the part of it that I was interested in is wrapped up, and anything beyond that would just end up destroying the parts of it that I liked.

At the same time ... I keep thinking it's too easy. Kid!Loki had to have been planning something; it's just not like him not to. And I keep coming back to his conversation with Leah, because he made very sure that it wasn't a conversation, which means that he said things to her that he wouldn't have been "allowed" to say if it had been an actual conversation. Except I can't figure out what was in there that might give him a loophole to come back or retain some vestige of himself ... unless he's simply trusting Leah to remember him and find a way. (Which doesn't really seem like him, but hey, any port in a storm ...)

It also doesn't help that this series regularly confuses me so horribly that I'm entirely dependent on the characters and/or the narration telling me what's going on in order to follow it. This issue is definitely one of those times. I don't know ... I'm done, I guess, and content to leave it where it is, but I'll probably keep reading spoilers to find what direction things develop in.

Also, have you read the Coldfire books? I have a relevant comment, but I can't mention it without horribly spoiling the ending of the books. So I figured I'd better ask. XD

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Kieron Gillen posted his own take on what happened (though he's pretty cool with death of the artist/folks forming their own ideas). Which was pretty much how I read it (though there were a lot of other interpretations floating about tumblr etc!) and something I really agree with story-wise, think it's very effective and powerful (even if it breaks my poor wee fangirl heart...)

I'm probably going to keep reading some of the upcoming series out of curiosity (and also because I really do like Gillen's writing) but yeah...fannishly I'm probably going to be checking out (of comics anyway, but I still have movie!Loki, will be at least a year before canon can fuck with me there!) But it was worth it!

(and no, haven't read Coldfire...should I? ...maybe when I'm in a better place for heartbreaking, right now I need something cheerful! XD)

ETA: oh god, if kid!Loki did have some plan for Leah to save him, that makes it worse...because he doesn't realize that Leah is Hela, and Hela...has lived too long to care, I think...

[sholio]

... well, so much for HOPE. Thanks a lot, Gillen. *heart crumples like small paper cup*

That Gillen statement is really interesting from a writerly standpoint, though. It's interesting because I can see just where he's coming from and yet ... don't really agree at all, possibly because I've always been quite fond of "happy for now" endings, where there's little chance that the "happy" state of affairs can persist, but it feels happy because the characters have found a temporary state of balance. I don't really like finality in endings. I definitely want SOME closure, but I like having it left with a little uncertainty and the sense that things could go any direction -- forward or backward or stay in the status quo. To me, the possibility that the ending will be messed up in the future doesn't negate the value of what happens now.

But I've also experienced the unhappiness of having a different writing team completely unwrite the aspects of the characters that I liked most (I think we all have!). Creatively, I can respect what Gillen is trying to do -- that he wants to give his beloved character, and his deeply heartfelt thematic arc, such a very final ending that no Marvel exec can ever fuck it up. I get it, but I don't really agree that it's necessary. I feel like Gillen is going for a kind of narrative finality that just doesn't resonate with me. He basically torched the character so that Marvel can't have it, and while I can understand why he did it, I'm really having trouble seeing it as better than a more open-ended conclusion that would have allowed Marvel (six months or one year or ten years down the line) to undo what Gillen did, thus undermining his theme -- but would also have left the door open for years of future kid!Loki stories. I think it's just a different way of looking at story. For me it's not impossible to consider the kid!Loki arc a complete story, with a compelling and satisfying redemption theme, while still (mentally) allowing the possibility of future kid!Loki stories that take the character in a different direction. For Gillen, obviously, it is.

... and yet, there is also something rather satisfying about knowing that Marvel won't ever be able to taint Gillen's run on JiM (like DC did with retconning away all the best parts of Justice League International -- I have to consciously separate the 15-years-later retconning from the original run of the series in my head, in order to continue to enjoy the part of it I loved). I always appreciate a good ending to a story, and this really was a good ending, and it's kind of nice to know that this is a complete story right here -- that's something you don't get in comics very often.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the thing - while I see where you're coming from, I really liked the ending, and think it was necessary. In general I tend to prefer uncertain endings myself (it's the fangirl in me, I like room to play and imagine)! But in this case, the story he was telling, I agree with Gillen that the theme was best suited by ending kid!Loki, because otherwise it would have been rewritten no matter what. The possibility that the ending could be messed up in the future to me would indeed negate the entire point of the story; it needed to end, because its whole point was to be a counter to the normal fixed and immutable nature of comics and comic villains. In some ways, heartbreaking as it is, I do prefer this way - I was rather worried where they would take kid!Loki once he was out of Gillen's hands, because they would inevitably screw him up. So there's a weird sort of relief knowing that won't happen, that JiM will stand on its own as a beautiful and complete story.

--At the same time, being comics, I don't think Gillen did manage to successfully erase kid!Loki; someone could always find a loophole and bring him back. (Heck, just erasing most of old!Loki's memories would get you the same kid!Loki JiM started with, and he did not change terribly much over the course of the series...) 'Tis the tragedy and triumph of comics, and even Loki can't escape it...

[sholio]

Oh, and regarding Coldfire, yeah -- that series will rip your heart out and stomp all over it. Best not to read it unless you're in a resilient frame of mind. ^^;

[ericadawn16.livejournal.com]

I read what I'm able to find at the bookstores so...

Does the issue with Loki and young X-Men happen before or after this? Because they mentioned something about a different universe or something?

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Loki and the young X-men - if you mean the Exiles crossover event, then yep, that happens two arcs before this one. If you mean with the Young Avengers, that issue happens after this. (Agh comics are confusing! ^^;)