Loki (Series)

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A Spin-Off to Thor based on the character of the same name, Loki is the 26th entry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its third original television show for Disney+.

Set after the Avengers' time travelling back to 2012 New York in Avengers: Endgame allowed the past Loki to collect the Tesseract and escape, the Alternate Self to Loki is arrested by the Time Variance Authority, the local Time Police, and drafted into helping them.

After a six-episode first season, it became the first of the Disney+ shows to get renewed for a second. Something of an Innocuously Important Episode, it connects to WandaVision, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

Tropes used in Loki (Series) include:

• A Lighter Shade of Black: Essentially how He Who Remains summarizes himself. True he's not the nicest guy in the world, but wait until you meet his Evil Counterpart, Kang the Conqueror.
• Adaptational Heroism: Takes Loki's already established Adaptational Heroism and pushes it even further by quickly making him an Anti-Hero. After six episodes, he learns to give up his quest for a throne.
• Alternate Self: The series follows Loki Variant L1130, who diverged from the Sacred Timeline in the denouement of The Avengers.
• And Then What?: Mobius asks Loki what he would have done after conquering Earth. Loki can't offer an answer.
• Anti-Magic: The TVA headquarters exist in a space where neither magic nor the Infinity Stones function.
• Aw, Look -- They Really Do Love Each Other: It's clear several times that Loki hugely misses Thor. Classic Loki even got himself arrested by the TVA because he tried to reunite with his version of Thor.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: D.B. Cooper was the result of Loki having lost a bet to Thor.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Loki and Sylvie.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Through the Chronoscope, Loki realizes that he's this. After waxing about how he's owed to become the God-Emperor of Earth, he sees that his actual fate is to be unceremoniously chocked to death by Thanos.
• Bigger Bad: Kang the Conqueror. The whole purpose of the TVA is to ensure that he is never given the chance to exist.
• Cerebus Callback: When Loki is first brought to the TVA, the whole affair is Played for Laughs, milking Loki's Butt Monkey traits. In the opening of the fourth episode, when Sylvie is brought in, the whole process is framed as horrifying when seen through the eyes of a small child who can't properly process what's going on around her.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Loki of course, to the point that Mobius notes that he's literally stabbed people in the back around fifty times. It's a big problem for all the Lokis who live in the Void.
• Chronoscope: The TVA use one to show Loki what his life should have been like from Thor: The Dark World right up until his death in Avengers: Infinity War as a way to quickly give him the same Character Development of his prime counterpart.
• Darker and Edgier: Steadily so. The series starts out quirky enough, somewhere halfway between Doctor Who and Rick and Morty, but the existential horror keeps building to the point where it easily ends its first season as of the MCU's darkest entries.
• Decomposite Character: In the comics, Kid Loki and Lady Loki were personas of the original. Here all three are separate Alternate Selves.
• Deliberately Bad Example: Loki's life purpose, as dictated by the Sacred Timeline, is to inspire others to be better people.
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: For an organization dedicated to protecting the timeline, the TVA seems to pay an inordinate amount of attention to Earth's timeline, along with their entire organization running by Terran customs. Because the organization's true goal is to prevent the human Kang the Conqueror from ever existing. They need Earth's history kept as it should to prevent him from rising.
• Eldritch Abomination: Alioth.
• Enfant Terrible: Kid Loki's Nexus event was him killing his version of Thor.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: The TVA "prunes" any timeline that deviates too far from the baseline of the Sacred Timeline.
• Heel Realization: Seeing his predetermined life causes Loki to undergo one. He even acknowledges Odin as his father once again.
  • As he aged in solitude, Classic Loki, who survived Infinity War, finally understood that all he does is bring suffering to everyone around him.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Classic Loki gives his life to distract Alioth and allow Loki and Sylvie to reach He Who Remains.
• Homeworld Evacuation: The people of Lamentis-1 try to flee their world when a planet is going to smash into it. Try.
• The Multiverse: Constantly alluded to. The multiverse used to be a massive place but after a Great Offscreen War, it was limited to a small collection of universes all based off the Sacred Timeline. When Sylvie kills He Who Remains, the true multiverse returns.
• Nature Versus Nurture: Discussed. All the Loki variants share similar traits but their life experiences have moulded them into very different people.
• Non Standard Character Design: The Time Keepers. Because they're androids.
• Not Brainwashed: It's confirmed that everything Loki did in The Avengers was his own choice, not because of anything Thanos might have done to him.
• Older and Wiser: Classic Loki. He survived Avengers: Infinity War and had thousands of years to both develop his magic and reflect on the fact that he's a Narcissistic asshole who does nothing but bring pain to everyone around him.
• Other Me Annoys Me:
  • Most of "Lamentis" is Sylvie and Loki engaging in Snark-to-Snark Combat and who can piss the other off the most.
  • About 85% of Classic Loki's dialogue is this mixed in with I Hate Past Me.
• Samus Is a Girl: To Loki's shock, the variant he's been tasked to hunt is a female version of him, calling herself Sylvie.
• San Dimas Time: Mobius tells Loki that time travel works this way.
• Screw Yourself: The TVA is disgusted to learn that Loki and Sylvie were developing feelings for one another.
• Spiritual Successor: In many ways feels like a continuation of Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, though if the Master was running the show instead of the Doctor. Even Sylvie looks and sounds rather like the Thirteenth Doctor.
• Static Character: Sylvie. Unlike the fluid Loki who goes through Character Development and changes his goals, Sylvie stays largely the same and is focused only on killing the head of the TVA.
• Time Police: The Time Variance Authority.
• Tomato in the Mirror: All of the TVA staff are variants.
• The Unreveal: The first season never reveals what Sylvie's Nexus Event was.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Sylvie is destructive terrorist who has little regard for anyone that's not her, but when she was first brought to the TVA, she was just a little girl playing with horse toys and begged the Minutemen to help a variant who was being harassed.
• What Is This Feeling?: Loki seems quite confused by the feelings he's developing for Sylvie.
• The Worf Effect: To establish the sheer power of the TVA, they use de-powered Infinity Stones as paperweights.