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Thor: The Dark World

Interesting point, Saellys: is a plot point ever "unnecessary"?

I'd say it's not so much that any character "needed" to die-- there are always other ways to make things happen, unless the theme has focused on some elements so much that they're the logical choice. And it's not often that an event is just too big or too dramatic, even if it's openly redundant with other pressures; usually a problem's is if it's under-justifying what it's there to do (or sometimes that a big event rushes the pacing, or a character under-reacts to how much happened). Hitting harder than you might need to isn't usually a fault.

The real problem is that our patience for any "motivation" ought to be worn pretty thin when it happens to take the form of a female getting hurt. AGAIN. :banghead:
 

Mindfire

Istar
I haven't actually seen the movie yet, but from what I can gather, wouldn't it make sense that Frigga's death was needed to get Loki to help Thor? After all, she was the only one on Asgard who he still cared the slightest bit about.
 

saellys

Inkling
Interesting point, Saellys: is a plot point ever "unnecessary"?

Yeah, loads of times.

I'd say it's not so much that any character "needed" to die-- there are always other ways to make things happen, unless the theme has focused on some elements so much that they're the logical choice. And it's not often that an event is just too big or too dramatic, even if it's openly redundant with other pressures; usually a problem's is if it's under-justifying what it's there to do (or sometimes that a big event rushes the pacing, or a character under-reacts to how much happened). Hitting harder than you might need to isn't usually a fault.

The real problem is that our patience for any "motivation" ought to be worn pretty thin when it happens to take the form of a female getting hurt. AGAIN. :banghead:

Exactly. This is getting into fridging territory, so I'll probably discuss it more in Feo's thread rather than clog up this one, but for now suffice it to say that there are lots of reasons to kill a given character, but if the character happens to be a woman and the only thing her death accomplishes is an emotional response from the men, we as an audience need to side-eye that pretty hard.

I would just love it if the Marvel fandom denied Frigga's death as hard as they denied Coulson's and managed to get her resurrected, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen. Barring that, a prequel movie (or, hey, graphic novel!) about Frigga being the finest mage in Asgard and scoring herself a crown prince and eventually teaching her adopted son everything he knows would be pretty great.

I haven't actually seen the movie yet, but from what I can gather, wouldn't it make sense that Frigga's death was needed to get Loki to help Thor? After all, she was the only one on Asgard who he still cared the slightest bit about.

Based on what the movie established about Frigga's relationship with Loki, it would have been just as effective if she lived and asked Loki to help Thor.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
Based on what the movie established about Frigga's relationship with Loki, it would have been just as effective if she lived and asked Loki to help Thor.

IMHO that wouldn't work because it would be very obvious that Loki would betray Thor the second he got the chance. An elf hurt his mother but she's OK, so his life is more or less unaffected by the dark elves. In real life, how often does Mom telling two brothers to play nice together work? From my experience, tragedy brings family together. Frigga's death gave Loki the strongest possible motivation to want to get involved in destroying the dark elves. And after all was said and done, he did his part in helping Thor taking them down and only then did he start thinking of himself.
 

saellys

Inkling
IMHO that wouldn't work because it would be very obvious that Loki would betray Thor the second he got the chance. An elf hurt his mother but she's OK, so his life is more or less unaffected by the dark elves. In real life, how often does Mom telling two brothers to play nice together work? From my experience, tragedy brings family together. Frigga's death gave Loki the strongest possible motivation to want to get involved in destroying the dark elves. And after all was said and done, he did his part in helping Thor taking them down and only then did he start thinking of himself.

The "Loki will betray Thor the second he gets the chance" angle is exactly what they ran with anyway, and it's what he ultimately did. He was thinking of himself the whole time. It was part of a much larger con. I'm not going to get too far into Loki's overarching motivation and what it really means to occupy the trickster archetype with its chaotic neutral alignment (which Marvel itself ignores when it's convenient for them with that whole "I want to rule everyone!" thing). Suffice it to say that some measure of Loki's motivation after Frigga's death had to do with that moment when he told her she wasn't his mother. He wanted to make up for that, and if he'd been given a chance to do so without Frigga dying, he would have taken it.
 

Mindfire

Istar
I don't think Loki is Chaotic Neutral. In the first Thor film I'd say he was actually Lawful Neutral, and then in Avengers he'd slipped into Neutral Evil.
 
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