Review: Loki: Mistress of Mischief

 

    This book was so irritating on so many levels. I’m genuinely shocked that this was released (in its collected form) in 2021. First of all, there was nothing terribly compelling about the story in the first place. Second, I didn’t like the art at all. Someone please explain to me why Asgardian women are tall, skinny, and hypersexualized while the men have lumpy cubes with faces for heads? I didn’t find it at all appealing to look at, and while that could certainly be forgiven or even appreciated if it interacted with the story appropriately, but it didn’t. It was just there. But by far my biggest problem with the book is the way it dealt with Loki having a female form (note: I’m going to refer to Loki with he/him pronouns in this review due to him expressing continued identification with maleness, something I’ll discuss in a moment). I can’t really explain my problems with this without getting into spoilers, so: you’ve been warned, spoilers ahead.

    Basically, the idea here is that after the destruction of Asgard the cycle of Ragnarok has been broken and the Asgardians have been reborn scattered across Earth. And Loki has ended up in a female body. He promises Thor and the other Asgardians that he’s ready to turn over a new leaf, that he is now free from his role in the cycle of Ragnarok. But all the while he’s manipulating people left and right in an elaborate plot to gain control of Asgard. And it turns out specifically that he deliberately took a female form as a way of tricking everyone into seeing him differently. Also, the body he took belonged to Thor’s girlfriend Sif.

    So I hope everyone can already see why this is deeply problematic in terms of what it says about genderqueer people and trans women in particular: that their existence is a trick and a manipulation, that they are not who they say they are, and that they’ve stolen from ‘real women’ to become who they are. And I want to be super clear here: this isn’t implied or written between the lines. Loki very specifically references using a female form to trick people and expresses relief when he returns to his ‘real’ form.

    To see a character who has long been associated with queerness and gender fluidity treated this way is honestly heartbreaking. I am pretty sure the only reason this series was written was to draw Loki with big boobs. There is literally nothing I can think of to recommend it. I don’t like writing harsh reviews like this, but there is no excuse to release a comic book this steeped in transphobia and misogyny, especially in the current political climate where trans people are having our rights legislated away on the basis of the ideas expressed in this book.