You know, with all the language throughout Star Wars about “giving in” to the Dark Side, how the Dark Side makes you more powerful, how the Dark Side makes you age strangely and destroys you, it sure doesn’t sound like an “opposite side of the coin” so much as the “deeper end of the pool,” like it’s actually the true form of the force and being a Jedi is about keeping it tamed so it doesn’t eat you the way it actually wants.
the force is entropy
Eldritch Jedi pls
This is one of the reasons i love the second Knights of the Old Republic game, wherein one of the major characters (who defines herself neither as Jedi nor Sith) actually views the Force this way, saying “I hate the Force. I hate that it seems to have a will, that it would control us to achieve some measure of balance, when countless lives are lost.”
It’s also the game that gave us the two most entropic, eldritch characters in the franchise: Darth Nihilus, whose dark-side-borne ability to feed on the Force and consume life itself has twisted him into a half-living “wound in the Force”, more presence than flesh
and Darth Sion, whose entire body is a ruin, his flesh nothing but ragged scar tissue, every bone and muscle broken and torn, kept animated by will alone as he forces himself, second by agonizing second, to exist
I wish there were more horrifying perspectives on the force like that
This is one of the reasons the term “Light Side” never felt right to me, even before it was used in any official media; The Force always struck me more like an ocean than a binary concept: the deeper you go, the darker and more crushing it gets — at a certain point becoming an effectually consistent darkness — and while light filters down and fades for some distance, if there is a truly light “side” it’d be the surface.
Which isn’t to say “the Force is evil unless you flounder about near the top” — just that it’s a natural force, and as such is something you need to respect and be adequately prepared for. (Take electricity, for example: super awesome and pretty dang useful, but OH HOLY SMOKES don’t try and harness it unless you REALLY know what you’re doing!)
In this sense, being tempted by the Dark Side is less a case of “Hey, I wonder what’s on the other side of this coin it looks pretty cool haha oh whoops I’m Space Walter White now,” and more one of “The deeper into this thing you go, the harder you’ll need to fight to resist the ever-increasing pressure, to remain whole, even to just see whatever the heck you’re actually doing.”
(which is why Jedi training is so important: those padawans gotta build themselves a mental Deepsea Challenger!)
THIS META BLESSED ME
Okay but let’s suppose, for a moment, that the Force is actually malevolent.
That would make a lot of sense.
Consider, for a moment, an eldritch parasite. This ancient being feeds off of the life-force of other creatures. Not that unusual, as most living things also consume other living things, to various degrees. But this one is technically somewhat removed from the usual structures of biology. It is a passive and opportunistic predator, for the most part. Whenever a living being that is connected to it – however weakly – dies, it consumes part of its energy, and gets bigger.
As life in the galaxy flourishes, and time passes, this singular entity gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Like a catfish; the only limit to its growth is how much it can consume to fuel it. The larger it gets, the more it is able to sink its invisible claws into other living beings, until eventually there is hardly any life out there which hasn’t been ‘infected’ by it, and slated to become its spiritual dinner as soon as its biological form gives out.
And here we actually come to – of all things – the midichlorians. Which, the Jedi use to measure someone’s sensitivity to the Force, which works because midichlorians are the vehicle for the predatory parasite to infest living beings. The immune systems in some people begin to develop a certain degree of resistance to them, which is why some folks have more, and some have less, and this directly correlates to their Force sensitivity. The more midichlorians you have, the worse your immune system is at fending off the parasite.
The Force counters the risk of being bred out of subsequent generations by developing camouflage, and adapting itself into a more seemingly-symbiotic relationship with its prey.
What the Jedi see as the ‘light side’ of the Force, is a reflective layer that this predator has created via its connection to all living things. This network is the honey trap that encourages the beings still strongly connected to it, to spread that connection, because it affords them advantages while they are still alive. But its elements are comprised mostly of echoes and reflections of their fellow prey organisms. Force Ghosts that resemble the departed. Emotions that are transmitted along this layer and between individuals. Small amounts of power that can be siphoned off to impact the environment, and can also spread the Force to whatever living thing it comes into contact with.
This being is huge now, it needs a lot of juice in order to maintain its existence, let along continue to grow. And like most predators it’s willing to expend a certain amount of energy in order to guarantee a bigger pay-off.
The deeper you go into the Force, the more the Force starts exerting its own will through you. And the less you see of the reflected camouflage of it, and the more apparent it becomes that the Force wants large swaths of death to feed it. Which is why Dark Siders often become so preoccupied with things like Death Stars.
But it’s a balancing act. A large population of relatively peaceful Force sensitives, like the Jedi, cost more than they’re worth, because beyond a point they take too much energy from the Force and don’t kill enough people to pay for it. A single individual abusing their powers for self-gain and murdering left and right, though, accomplishes the goal of feeding it. The Force obviously doesn’t want its food supply to die out completely, but this explains the persistent cycles of the Star Wars universe – as a soon as a group of peaceful Force users becomes prominent, they get wiped out by a few Dark Siders who have tread too deeply past the reflective surface of the Force, and become actual vessels for its will.
And then when the Dark Siders have finished killing a whole bunch of people, it’s time for them to go, too, so that they don’t wipe out the entire populace and kill off the Force’s food supply beyond its ability to reasonably recover. The peaceful types then see an upswing, as they are more adept at spreading the Force. So the cycle goes – Jedi spread the Force, Sith kill the Jedi and feed the Force, Jedi kill the Sith and resume spreading the Force. It’s a planting and harvest cycle, and the galaxy is populated with the Force’s living spirit crops. Anakin Skywalker, who was arguably one of the beings most closely connected to the Force, and had an extremely high midichlorian count, basically lived this cycle in its entirety as an individual – he spread the Force as a Jedi, he killed people as a Sith, and then he ended it all in order to preserve his progeny for the next round.
tl;dr – the Force wants to eat your soul. The reason the ‘light side’ types always get so up in their own asses is because what they perceive as the Force is basically their own reflections dangling in front of them like an angler fish’s lure. The reason the ‘dark side’ types get so messed up is because they’re basically the equivalent of those grasshoppers who get infected with a parasite that makes them drown themselves.
This point of view would actually explain both No-Attachment rule and the Order’s cradle-robbing – some more self-aware Jedi saw the Force for what it is and pushed for a rule that potentially would cut births of Force-sensitive kids to a bare minimum. And those who were born Force-sensitive thanks to a quirk of the Force are to be taken from the society in the quickest way possible before they mess up, given tools to keep it at bay, and indoctrinated to never want to dabble in the deeper ends of their ability. It would also explain the whole debacle of Unifying vs Living Force and why Jedi seem to prefer the former – all of the description of the Living Force I came across present it as more ever changing, nearly organic entity and Jedi that use is as more responsive to its nudges, so potentially more inclined to being “corrupted” by it.
Loki was convinced his brother was invulnerable and indestructable.
His big brother. His personal god.
He “tried to kill him” lots of times, but it was always really just to get his attention, because nothing could hurt Thor. When he sent the Destroyer to attack him on Earth, he might have told himself it was to kill him, but he just wanted Thor’s attention back on him, and somewhere, buried deep, he knew Thor would find a way back to him if he needed to. And dropping Thor out of the Helicarrier? Brotherly fun.
When he sees Thor’s lost his eye, he doesn’t quip. He has nothing clever or biting to say. He just looked shocked. Shaken to his core, as his certainty in Thor’s invulnerability is shattered.
So he hauls ass to bring about Ragnarok, because… he suddenly knows that Hela might actually kill Thor.
And it’s only then, knowing his brother can break, that he goes to Thor and doesn’t say a single hurtful thing, and offers his support. He tells him the eyepatch suits him, he tells him he’s there, he goes to his coronation, and supports him as king. We never see him being difficult with Thor after Thor loses his eye.
And, knowing his brother can break, he trades an infinity stone for him. He flings himself bodily between Thor and two giant fighting monsters that *personally* terrify him.
Once he knew Thor could break, Loki did anything and everything to protect him.
Oho! Judge Nonny! Fair enough, I submit for your review the following essay…
I honestly view Quinn as an Imperial doing his best to retain a semblance of honor in a system built to screw him over. When the writers talk about Quinn, they talk about him as a character who is intensely loyal to the Empire as an ideal. Without getting too deep into lore, part of the history he was exposed to since birth was the idea of the Republic as being an evil, corrupt government who used their Jedi to go on a genocidal rampage against the Sith. And Republic very much DID issued orders to commit genocide against the Sith after they had been defeated. The propaganda machine has since skewed the attack and made Imperials believe they survived because of the strict Sith hierarchy, but more importantly, because of the Emperor. Lord Scourge himself sheds some light on the subject. The Emperor is viewed as a savior god, and the Jedi are used as boogeymen. They literally tell their kids “Behave or the jedi will get you.”
Slavery, Sith infighting, treating imperials as expendable, social castes… the propaganda machine would no doubt pose all of these necessary evils. “We need slaves because we’re outnumbered. Sith need the freedom to lead. Don’t question your betters…” Quinn is born and indoctrinated deep in this Empire and his loyalties reflect that. He was written as a character who does his duty even if it comes at great personal cost. Drukenwell could have very easily cost him his life for insubordination/mutiny, however he was willing to challenge Moff Broysc. He puts the Empire before his own wants and needs. Is it problematic? Yes. On so many levels!
And then to add on to this flaming garbage of a situation, Baras rescues him.
I don’t think people realize what a huge deal this is. He was looking at incarceration or possibly execution and Baras rescued him. Quinn being Quinn only focuses on his salvaged career but he owes the man EVERYTHING. A lot of players get upset because Quinn betrays you on the transponder station. This is due to the fact that we expect our companions to be loyal to us! (I know I’m guilty of this, but that’s a different essay.) But the point remains, he is indebted to Baras. Per the writers, Quinn’s sense of honor meant that he had to act against you, but his love/loyalty to you meant he was never going to seriously try to kill you. Essentially Quinn was committing suicide by Sith on the transponder. Convoluted and poorly written perhaps, but at least my Sith understood it was a situation of an Imperial being caught between two Sith.
Why do people hate Quinn? I think most of it has to do with that expectation we have of having our companions be 100% loyal to us. You don’t expect someone on your team to just say ‘Hey by the way you suck, Baras rocks. Come at me!’ Another part is a somewhat unfair perception that he has more say in the matter than he actually does. He’s an Imperial caught between two Siths, serving a government that has repeatedly screwed him over. Baras is a Dath serving on the Dark Council. Baras IS the Empire at this point. Quinn then follows the only thing that has gotten him through his life, his sense of honor. Misplaced honor in the case of Darth Baras, but that is what he has. It’s his flaw. He doesn’t expect to come out alive from this, in fact he expects you to punish his deceit with death. Some people don’t see that, they just see someone they trusted turned out to be a snake. One of my SWTOR buddies killed Quinn on Iokath, and I told him he pretty much reacted how Quinn expected.
Which brings me to a somewhat controversial third reason… Quinn is disliked because he is written as a submissive man. He is competent, intelligent, brave but all of that is drowned out by the fact that he is deferential to the Sith Warrior. He stood up to Moff Broysc, single handedly rescued Major Ovech, and protected Vowrawn ‘with no thought as to his own personal safety’. And yet, people still refer to him as opportunistic, cowardly, or at best fickle. Why? Because he defers to you and if he was a real man he wouldn’t grovel like that. If he was a real man, he’d stick it to the Sith and defect to the Republic. Nevermind that he literally spent years in an Imperial prison because he defied orders to stop looking for you. Nevermind that in all that time he stubbornly refused to move on and accept the Wrath was dead like the Empire wanted him to believe. No, he’s spineless because he is reverent to who you are as the Sith Warrior and real men don’t fawn over someone like that.
I can’t help but feel we’d be having different conversations if Quinn’s character was a woman.
Tl;dr Quinn is an nuanced and complicated character. His personality is a product of his upbringing but he is worthy of love and understanding: 1) He’s just not some people’s cup o’ tea. 2) He’s got great character traits, but is stuck in terrible social caste system that screws him over. 3) Some people just can’t respect a man who was written as a submissive regardless of redeeming qualities.
You are correct, if Quinn had been a women the reaction would be far different, the sheer visceral hatred from the fandom would be overwhelming. Having a female love interest companion betray a sith lord? This fandom would implode.
This fandom (and video game fandoms in general I’ve seen) wants both companions that are actual characters who have depth and motivation…but also who never ever go against the all powerful player.
And the just have not figured out that you can’t have both.
Thank you for articulating what I’ve seen in Quinn’s motivations fir a long, long time. I still can’t convince some of my friends that there are seriously obvious in-character reasons for this man to behave as he does. An Imperial caught between two Sith is SCREWED and they know it, not even love (in the case of romanced Quinn) can really breach that ingrained need to repay what’s essentially a life debt.
I generally headcanon Loki as someone who has a very good and very sharp memory – maybe not exactly photographic, but he tends to remember things well and for a long time. (it’s part of what makes him so good at holding grudges.)
on the other hand, Loki also tends to be someone who focuses very much on the negative of things – for whom the bad sticks harder and much longer than the good. I’ve had Thor think multiple times in different fics about wishing Loki’s memory was a little less precise – and that’s usually in reference to the way Loki absorbs the things Thor says, the precise words he uses, and holds onto them. as someone who is – if not careless at least often less than careful with his language, and speaks from emotion sometimes without thinking of implication, that has consequences for the way Loki thinks about how Thor sees him.
so things like “imagined slights” and “you had her tricks, but I had her trust” and “know your place” – for Thor, they’re things he said once, spoke in anger or frustration or without thinking, or things he’s changed his mind about later, but for Loki they often become immutable truths.
in a lot of ways, Loki doesn’t think of anything as being “idle words.” even lies have meaning. and when it’s someone like Thor speaking, or Odin (“your birthright was to die”), who loom so large in Loki’s life and whose opinions are so important – that goes even more so. and post-facto it is very hard to dislodge that language or replace it.
Sorry for not answering this sooner, I had to think about it, haha. I really enjoy the concept of pre-Thor Loki because there is just so much we don’t know about who Loki was before everything went to shit. We have a basic idea of his general personality, of course – the envious younger brother, the mischief-maker, the less-favored prince. Even despite these attributes, though, Loki clearly holds Thor in high regard (”sometimes I’m envious, but never doubt I love you”) and never meant for things to go as far as they did.
When I think about pre-Thor Loki, the quote I always come back to is when Kenneth Branagh states (in his commentary on the Vault scene): “This is the moment where the thin steel rod that’s been holding your brain together snaps.” Truly, this moment is life-altering and devastating for Loki, but Branagh implies that Loki’s mind was fractured to begin with. We don’t generally think of healthy brains as being “held together with thin steel rods,” and it begs the question, why was Loki so unstable in the first place? Certainly as a result of his upbringing, as far as I can guess. (Whether or not mental illness is inherent in his brain chemistry is a different question, but it bears mentioning that mental illness includes conditions like anxiety, depression, etc, and that these conditions can be a result of one’s upbringing.)
I (like so many others) take such issue with Thor calling Loki’s grievances imagined slights because they are very much not imagined and, if anything, they are the worst kind of slights because by nature they are designed to break a person down steadily over time. If you tell a dog it’s bad enough times, the dog will eventually believe it. In the first twenty or thirty minutes of Thor, if we include deleted scenes, we see Loki being openly laughed at by a servant (!!), admitting he’s envious but telling Thor he loves him anyway, only to get a “Thank you” in response (without any reassurance of Thor’s feelings in return), a nasty comment from Volstagg on the rainbow bridge about Loki’s silver tongue, and Thor snapping for Loki to “know your place” when Loki tries to talk Thor down from literally starting an intergalactic incident.
Furthermore, after Thor’s banishment, Loki admits that he told the guard of their plans. It’s important to note that he’s not being sneaky or underhanded – he straight up admitted, “yeah, I told them we were going, and I’m not sorry because Thor is out of control and his idea was fucking stupid.” And what’s his payback? As soon as he leaves, the Warriors 4 talk about him behind his back, say he’s always been jealous of Thor, and wonder out loud if Loki is the traitor Laufey spoke of. Why would they immediately assume that Loki is a traitor to his family and his kingdom? Like, that escalated really fucking quickly.
All of these things show us that Loki is treated as less than, for no real reason other than he’s very different from Thor. Different, in Asgard, seems to mean, not as good as. The narrative tells us we should just accept this treatment of Loki because he turns out to be the villain (although the argument has been made, many times, that his actions weren’t villanous at this point – but, I digress) so one can assume that the same is true of Asgard – everyone should just accept that this is how Loki is treated, everyone is used to Loki being the punching bag, and no one should feel badly about it.
I don’t even think I’m answering your question right, I’m sorry, but what I’m trying to get at is, if this is the sort of treatment we see Loki getting just in the beginning of the movie, imagine a (very, very long) lifetime of the same sort of treatment. Imagine how broken down someone would have to be after that. Even if Loki’s upbringing wasn’t bad, in that he was privileged with wealth and title and family and all of that, it was definitely emotionally abusive. And I think that it’s very possible to feel like you have a nice life, to feel like other people have it worse than you, to feel like you deserve all of the imagined slights heaped upon you, until you snap. This is why Loki was hanging onto mental stability by a thread. This is why he suffers a complete mental breakdown – because, in addition to this toxic environment and mindset he’s been conditioned into, now he learns that he is something he’s been taught to believe is savage and disgusting and inferior. He loses all hope of ever being worthy, which makes him double down on his efforts to attain that worthiness. In his heart, maybe he knows it’s a lost cause, and maybe that’s why he fights so hard for it, anyway.
So, did he have safe havens? Probably. He probably holed up in the library with his books and scrolls, or maybe he had a favorite reading spot in the gardens, or maybe he liked to lay in the grass and watch the stars. Did he have secrets, things that were only his? Most definitely, as Loki in general (I think) is a private person who wants things to keep for his own, things that he doesn’t have to share with Thor. Did he hang out with Thor’s friends for obligation? No, I think that at first, he really wanted to be a part of their group. They’re all shown to be so close in age and class (except Volstagg, who seems older) that it seems like these are the people he should be friends with, and would be friends with, were he just more like Thor. I’m sure, eventually, he realized that they didn’t like him (and he didn’t really like them, either) but it was probably also a situation where Loki didn’t have any other friends, so he might as well hang out with the ones who tolerated him, sometimes, sort of.
Sorry for babbling at you and I don’t know if that answered your question or not, but I have a lot of Feels about Loki’s treatment in the first movie, and also the implications it has on his life beforehand. Thank you for the ask!
The second most irritating thing a person can say in regards to Loki is that that he faked his sacrifice in TDW. Bonus points if they’re a fan of Ragnarok, which goes out of its way to point out how Loki’s illusions are not solid. THEY ARE NOT SOLID. They become distorted when touched. So how the fuck did Loki fake being stabbed? And when he nearly got sucked into a black hole grenade saving Jane, was that part of his master plan to take the throne of Asgard, too? What about offering said throne to Thor? Ugh!
The most irritating thing a person can say in regards to Loki is that he faked his death/suicide in Thor. I have no words for these people. They render me speechless.
So I have been mulling over how to answer this, because I do have thoughts on that line but, again, something about the complexity of this movie and Loki’s characterization in it renders me flaily with the words putting into sentence doing (™Gilmore Girls).
As with much of Loki’s dialogue in this movie, this line is profound and full of layered meaning. I think that, for Loki, freedom as a concept is something that has always been out of reach. He grew up as a prince, yes, and therefore had certain privileges and advantages that other people didn’t have, but those privileges likely came at the cost of the freedom to be his own person.
Royal families, throughout history, have always been bound to a sense of duty and honor, of government and politics, of retaining power. I would imagine Asgard to be much the same, in that Loki and Thor’s choices in life were limited to what would be best for the kingdom, not best for them personally. We’ve seen how Loki is scorned for practicing magic, even though he has a great talent for it; it is considered womanly, unbefitting of a warrior and a prince, a dereliction of duty. His skill is irrelevant, as is his personal satisfaction in having mastered something so powerful; it only looks to others like he is full of trickery and deceit, and actively works against him when he finds himself on the throne.
If this is what we’re shown when it comes to skills he’s learned, what does that imply about the princes’ lives behind the scenes? How are their choices limited? What awaits them when it comes to the issue of marriage and producing heirs? Can they marry for love or are there arrangements already in place? We even see how restrictive the role of king is once Thor grows past the idea of glory and realizes how much he will have to give up in order to become king. Thor abdicates because he knows that if he doesn’t, he will not be free to live his life as he chooses.
So, yes, I think that Loki has been raised with the idea that freedom doesn’t truly exist. So if you consider that mentality to be ingrained in him due to his upbringing, then when you follow it to what happens to him after he falls from the BiFrost, the concept of freedom must seem even more absurd to him. He’s tortured, brainwashed, and manipulated by Thanos. His free will, his body, and his mind have been taken from him, even once he comes through the portal, as we see that the Other still has the power to communicate with Loki telepathically.
Mind control as a general rule is such an intimate violation of one’s privacy and freedom. I imagine Loki as walking around with invisible shackles on throughout the entirety of the movie, because everything that he did and said was being observed, and the threat of Thanos loomed over every choice he made. Even when his face told us he desperately wanted to trust Thor, wanted to stop what he had done, he could not. He had to violently rid himself of the idea of sentiment and simultaneously stop Thor from trying to convince him he could be saved so that he could survive. To be saved by Thor would be to be condemned by Thanos. Having to make an impossible choice is more or less the same thing as having no choice.
In a way, when he’s bound and muzzled at the end is probably the most free he’s been in his life. He’s a prisoner, but he’s already failed Thanos. He’s going back to Asgard, far out of Thanos’s reach. He is no longer a prince, no longer bound to the duties and expectations required of him therein. He has nothing left to lose and, ironically, there is a great freedom in being in that position. (Somewhat relatedly, I sometimes headcanon that Loki was never meant to serve that life sentence; that Odin’s mind could have changed down the line, or Loki would have found a way to escape eventually. So even though he’s a prisoner, he still has more choices than he did before, and a great amount of time ahead of him in which to do whatever he wants.)
So I feel like, to Loki, freedom is absolutely life’s great lie because nobody is truly free. Everyone is bound to something, whether it’s duty or obligation or family or whatever. And this is especially true of Thor. Thor is bound to his role as Asgard’s heir, his role as Earth’s protector and, also, he’s now been thrust into and bound to the role of having to maintain a certain perfection that maybe he doesn’t always feel. Loki’s fall elevates Thor even higher, which means there’s less room for him to make mistakes or screw up.
And Thor does not consider himself perfect or flawless or always worthy, anyway. After he falls out of the Helicarrier, we see him hesitate to pick up Mjolnir in the field even though, objectively, he’s not done anything to be rendered unworthy. So what was he thinking and feeling? What private turmoil was going on inside of him to make him feel like he’d been left wanting? That pressure is Thor’s burden, and I’m sure Loki realizes that.
I have no idea if this made sense or not, but yeah, I feel like Loki just has a lot of Feelings about freedom and this line sums them up as succinctly as possible, even while revealing so much more.
Sometimes I think about the fact that Wanda Maximoff, as a child, was BURIED ALIVE with her twin and the corpses of her dead parents for TWO DAYS staring at an unexploded bomb. TWO DAYS. At the age of TEN.
Like. No fucking WONDER she was so angry and ready to burn shit down in AOU. She came through that level of trauma and then subsequent YEARS of growing up in refugee camps in a warzone. The fact that she still did care about people, though and was willing to put herself back in that situation – with bombs and explosions and the only family she had left on the line – to take down Ultron and make things right? Says a lot about her.
Hmmm, I’m actually not sure that it was. I mean, I can see it being potentially couched in those terms, or at least couched in the possibility of those terms, but I don’t think Loki was ever explicitly in a position where he was going to be a child of Thanos.
I tend to headcanon that Loki was…kept on the edge. Not quite a child of Thanos but not quite not, either, his status very nebulous and unclear. Not exactly a prisoner, definitely not a guest, not fully adopted but the possibility is almost there, sometimes, held out as something to potentially aspire to (that’s at the same time out of reach). I’ve talked before about how one of the best ways to control Loki is to keep him off balance – not just uncomfortable, or hurting, but uncertain. Loki can deal with pain, and deal with being in bad situations, but uncertainty is much harder, particularly because at that point what Loki wants and needs more than anything is certainty.
And Loki, I think, was caught in a place of not knowing if he should be trying harder to escape or trying harder to earn a place under Thanos.
I tend to think Thanos has at least sometimes a tendency to…rather than just clamping down immediately, give people enough rope to hang themselves with, which is kind of how I read the way he treats Loki in Infinity War.
I don’t think there was ever a situation in which Loki was going to walk away from that encounter alive. But for one thing, Thanos needed the Tesseract from him, and for another, I think there’s a certain amount of seeing what Loki will try to do to weasel out of it.
One thing about Thanos that I’ve always headcanoned, and that was actually substantiated by Infinity War, is that he plays (head) games with people. The way he lets Gamora seemingly “kill” him to see what she’ll do, or waits to let Peter try to shoot Gamora to see what he’ll do, even (potentially) using Nebula or Thor against Gamora and Loki. So I think letting Loki act like he has any kind of leeway is that, too.
I'm a defeatist but I don't have to be 