#loki show discourse

[jimintomystery]

Wow

On Monday, Marvel put out a new Loki trailer, previewing the final two episodes of the season. The trailer briefly shows Mobius living out a normal life, presumably as he did before he was recruited into the Time Variance Authority.

Since then the Loki fandom, famed for its carefully considered reactions, has gone from debating whether Mobius is married/divorced/widowed to wondering if Mobius is secretly Thor. (Or Balder.) This is all based on approximately three seconds in a trailer for two episodes.

Apparently word got around that Mobius's real name is "Don," which could make him Don Blake. In the comics, Don Blake was the human alter ego of Thor. (Or Balder, in the other comics. This is confusing.) I have absolutely no idea how anyone decided Mobius is named "Don" in the first place. It's the same kind of logic that gave us "Someone said 'the devil' in WandaVision, so Mephisto is the next Thanos."

At issue here is, as usual, Lokius. If Mobius has a family life outside the TVA, you see, then he might not be willing or able to consummate his fanon romance with Loki. Or, if he's somehow a variant of Loki's adoptive brother, it would get real awkward for Lokius shippers who have insisted that it's wrong to pair Loki up with Sylvie because they ought to have more of a sibling dynamic. (Loki, who once fucked a horse, could not be reached for comment.)

Anyway, the next episode of Loki drops later tonight, and there's doom and gloom in the fandom about the possibility that Lokius has been Thorki all along. I've already seen someone denounce this "twist" as homophobia and queerbaiting. Because, you see, Disney deliberately designed this show to get fans to infer an mlm relationship, and now Disney is going to dick around with said relationship just to spite those fans, which wouldn't increase their profits by one cent, but for some reason they're bound and determined to do it anyway? I need to lie down.

[lokiusly]

extremely telling that people who don’t like Loki s2 are mostly people who didn’t get the sy*ki romance that they wanted

[worstloki]

oh god oh please not odin it's just a matter of time until frigga is here too

Upcoming discourse where people argue it’s more moral to bang a variant of your adoptee father than a girl version of yourself/your brother from another timeline

[lokiified]

listen man i understand the dislike for sylvie, i can get behind that. but i will forever defend loki’s character in the tv show. yes, he’s very very different and the change can feel drastic, but i think realizing that:

- the love and acceptance you always longed for from your family was there the whole time

- your own “glorious purpose” never existed

- you willingly die at the hands of your greatest fear

- the things you thought were the greatest powers in the universe (infinity stones) are being used as paperweights by a society that is in control of time as you know it

- your choices have never been your own,

would kind of change your perspective of yourself and those around you, and maybe make you act a little differently.

have whatever opinions you want, but that’s just my 2 cents on it

[lokidanger]

I will forever curse the MCU for calling their universe 616.

[nerdby]

If Loki knowing about the Infinity Stones in the television series has been tripping you up, please go back and rewatch the first Avengers movie--

In the first Avengers film, Loki had two Infinity Stones in his possession while battling the Avengers. One of them is the space stone which was encased in the tesseract and the other was the mind stone which was encased in Loki's staff. The mind stone was given to Loki by Thanos because Thanos knew it would aid him in making Loki betray Thor and try to take over Earth. This is because the mind stone acting as a drug that would allow Thanos to control Loki's thoughts and actions.

Because, like it or not, Loki is not stronger than an Infinity Stone.

So if you're confused about how TVA!Loki knows about the Infinity Stones, the answer is simple--

Thanos told Loki about the Infinity Stone in his staff and about the other Stones in the first Avengers movie, but also failed to mention the effect the stone would have on Loki himself. So TVA!Loki would NOT have needed to live through the events of any of the post-2012 MCU films to know of the Stones' existence.

[princesssarcastia]

you can absolutely make a character who was formerly a racist fuck-wit sympathetic and compelling, but ONLY if you (the narrative) and they (the character) own the wrong and the growth.

i mean, look, you tell that kind of story in the hopes that life will imitate art, right? there's gotta be a path out of the darkness. you can illuminate that path, but not if you lie about where the journey started. it's only compelling if you own it. don't shy away from the hurt and the sharp edges—cut yourself on them. bleed.

[mrsblackruby]

I used to be a really big fan of the MCU’s version of loki but I’m not a fan of the tv show at all but I understand that it resonates with some and want to respect that lolz. I just found this analysis really interesting and wanted to add to the discussion as someone who liked the version of Loki that was an agent of chaos and not the god of stories. Just want to respectfully add and engage my different perspective in this meta.

I think seeing Loki time slipping could’ve been an interesting plot device and I feel like even though i don’t really like how Sylvie’s character gets depicted overall in the show. I don’t think Loki had to betray her. And the scope showing that to be the outcome of the show feels narrow to me personally. I don’t feel like the TVA makes a good anchor for my understanding of Loki a god of mischief. Like going by the show’s cannon universe it is an anchor ( I would’ve liked to see an extremely different picture painted as an anchor for Loki) but I would’ve wanted loki to help it evolve into something else entirely like he said in one of the first trailers “he’d burn the place to the ground” instead he keeps theses timelines and the tva kicking against their own will (or maybe The better word autonomy independence) and he does it alone? The version of Loki’s story i was more familiar and interested in I probably would’ve resonated with more personally. But I agree that this story feels like there are actually a lot of plot holes and it doesn’t feel resolved yet but I think this end is a (predictable? Conclusive?) a pretty good match for the show overall.

the only thing that did feel “right” about the show was the end of the show to me. the spoilers I heard about the ending of Loki going tree mode and baby sitting every time line made some sense Because personally I don’t like the ending at all but because I recognize I don’t really like any of the other parts of the show it follows well with the direction the show went in to me.

and to reduce confusion I hate seeing loki feel like he has to sacrifice himself to seek repentance

but full disclosure I only watched season 1 and two episodes of season 2. So how I’m describing events might be ill judged and heavily biased.

Like Tom said, Loki tends to try and achieve repentance through self-sacrifice. So, I'm really glad that Mobius stepped up and made solving the time slipping a priority and didn't let Loki go chasing after Sylvie and Dox at the expense of his own health and wellbeing at the end of 2x01. It's one of my favorite little moments in the series. Mobius could see that Loki was upset that he'd had to betray Sylvie, and that he was already making the assumption that he was in the wrong in the situation and needed to make it up to her through self-sacrifice. And so Mobius called bullshit and didn't let him, reminding Loki that his needs (not capricious wants, but genuine human needs) were as important as everyone else's. B-15 backed this up when she volunteered to go looking for Dox and Sylvie in his stead.

It's this brief, wonderful contrast to the start of the episode, where Loki is wandering the TVA alone, unable to anchor himself to any point in time and completely unsure of what to do next. Mobius, then B15, become the anchors that he needs (and OB, too), and suddenly, even without Loki prioritizing himself, there's a solution to the problem that he was trying to ignore and white knuckle his way through.

And maybe it's because of this that I feel like there has to be another chapter to this story. Loki has done what he always does and has sacrificed his own happiness (and possibly health - we don't know what effect powering the whole timeline may have on him) for everyone else. So, imo, it's time for everyone else to call bullshit and work their damndest to get him out of there. Or, at least, it should be.

[jimintomystery]

@sunflowerdigs replied to your post “Wow”:

It wouldn't be to spite queer fans (though it would do that). It would reassure straight viewers that Lokius could never happen. It would be classic queerbaiting, really. Rope in queer viewers with subtext, but then appeal to the straight majority audience that Marvel actually wants once D+ has its subscription money. It's definitely not unheard of. The panic based on unsubstantiated rumors is silly but the distrust of a major franchise isn't.

For what it's worth, I'm willing to believe some media has intentionally queerbaited its audience. The problem is that all I've read about the topic relies on anecdotal evidence: "I expected this queer ship to be endgame, but then it wasn't, so those awful producers must have tricked me." If there's an interview or something, where somebody in the industry admitted to using queerbaiting as an actual strategy to increase viewership, then I'd be very interested in reading that. But even then, I'm skeptical that the strategy works at scale, or that Disney would bother employing it on Loki.

The motive for queerbaiting, as you've laid out, is to "rope in queer viewers" without alienating homophobic viewers, to maximize total viewership and therefore profits. That seems plausible for a show on the CW that's subsisting on a deeply hardcore audience. It makes less sense on a major streaming service that owns Star Wars, the Simpsons, and all the Marvel superheroes and all the Disney princesses. Disney+ doesn't have to do some intricate balancing act to play two opposing audiences against one another in a single show. For one thing, Loki is a spinoff of a billion-dollar movie. For another, if Disney just wanted to maximize profits, they would have used their Loki budget to make Iron Man vs. Darth Vader instead.

So I think it's fair to say Disney already has a stranglehold on "the straight majority audience that Marvel actually wants." That's not to say they wouldn't go the extra mile to string along queer subscribers as well. But if that was the play for Loki, they kinda gave away the game two years ago, when Sylvie kissed Loki, and the fandom denounced the show for queerbaiting. Why bait your queer viewers, and then chase them off before the second season? Granted, a lot of Lokius shippers weren't chased off, although a great many of them expect to be queerbaited some more. At this point the bait analogy falls apart--the fisherman crafts the perfect lure, but then tries to scare away all the fish, except the ones who would jump straight into the boat without any incentive at all.

Again, I'm willing to keep an open mind about this stuff. But from what I've seen so far, if the Loki showrunners are queerbaiting, they're doing a shit job of it, for an audience that sees right through the trick and pays to watch anyway, which makes the bait a complete waste of effort. It makes no sense. So it's easier to buy the alternative--nobody was trying to deceive the Lokius shippers, and they played themselves.

[ivystoryweaver]

I'm resurrecting Jonathan Levy Discourse from March

vid 1/3 below vid 2 vid 3

@guruan was amazing enough to find the clips mentioned in this ask

I think it could be great if you could reblog with a clip of his talk with Mira (about how he feels with his new life) so people that haven't watched the show can get a bigger picture of his own introspection about how he ended like that (heart breaking-) I know some people don't want to watch the show because it's angsty, but I think that clip it's okay just to understand in what place Jonathan is in the last episode ❤️

I can only do 1 vid at a time, but I'll link the other 2

So what do we think?

Since some of the discordies are binging SFAM today, I re-thot all these thots

discourse here by me and here by @eyelessfaces and here by @missdictatorme and @reallyrallyauthor (I think @cosmickid-inmotion was in there somewhere too)

somewhat related fics here by @loki-hargreeves and here by @missdictatorme, moodboard and thoughts here by @loki-hargreeves

[lilu787788]

I feel a quiet yet undeniable irony in the fact that the most fervent critics of Aleksander have become his most reliable promoters. While they insist they want him gone, canceled, buried beneath fake moral outrage and threads on TikTok or Tumblr, the truth is far more amusing. They are actually one of the reasons why the Darkling remains one of the most talked-about and beloved characters in the Shadow and Bone universe.

Today, I won’t focus on his supporters and our boundless love for him or our understanding of his actions. Instead, let’s turn our attention to the ones who drip venom.

From a purely technical standpoint, social media platforms thrive on engagement. They don’t stop to examine whether a post is righteous or malicious. They don’t ask if your opinion is virtuous or vengeful. All that matters is how many people interact with it. A post screaming “Stop romanticizing the Darkling” accompanied by clips of his darkest scenes will reach just as many people as a fan-made tribute. Why? Because controversy ignites attention. Comments flood in, people argue, repost, and reply. The algorithm watches the chaos and concludes: this character matters. Let’s show him to more people.

And just like that, the critics end up doing something incredibly beneficial for Aleksander. It’s no wonder that the very people who tried to ruin his image are refreshing it for a new audience. In fact, they do it so consistently, it starts to make you wonder — is it really hatred, or something more complicated?

You don’t keep talking about a character who bores you. You don’t quote him, you don’t edit his scenes, and you don’t spend hours crafting multi-slide condemnations of someone you’ve supposedly forgotten. What they call denunciation is starting to look suspiciously like obsession — the kind that seeps under your skin and never truly lets go.

Characters that spark this kind of discourse are rarely forgotten. History is full of examples. Characters like Kylo Ren, Loki, Paul Atreides, Roy Batty — they are morally grey characters. What made them endure wasn’t just universal love. It was, and still is, the endless debate about who they were, what they did, and whether it was justified.

Aleksander belongs in that pantheon — not despite the arguments around him, but because of them. A clean-cut character, widely accepted or rejected, fades fast and is forgotten even faster. A character that divides opinions becomes legend. And what a beautiful kind of legend it is.

As is often the case in fandoms, the harder one side pushes, the stronger the other becomes. Every angry thread accusing Aleksander of emotional abuse, manipulation, tyranny, or worse leads to thoughtful essays defending his actions and exploring broader themes of military history and moral ambiguity. Fans respond not out of wounded loyalty but because the discourse gives them a stage. It gives them a chance to analyze a character whose actions can be interpreted through lenses of trauma, politics, survival, and love. That kind of complexity is irresistible to anyone who finds depth more compelling than labels.

Even the idea that Aleksander must be “defeated” by discourse is unintentionally flattering. It means he still matters. It means his presence is still felt. He still haunts the narrative, the fandom, and the people who claim to despise him. Meanwhile, characters who once caused outrage but now gather dust have truly lost. The silence that surrounds them is the only kind of cancellation that works.

Aleksander, on the other hand, is alive and well. He’s reposted and reinterpreted every day, still lighting up the collective imagination of those who cannot let go — those who love him, and those who hate him.

In the end, the critics — the antis — are not destroying him. They’re giving him the spotlight, the platform, the legacy. With every hashtag, every frame, every outraged paragraph, they solidify his place in fandom culture. They remind the internet that he’s worth talking about. They remind the studios that he draws attention. They remind the fans why they fell in love with him.

The louder the outrage, the more irresistible the puzzle becomes. Why? What? When? And just like that, people start to discover him — and in most cases, they fall in love.

So truly, I thank them. They make sure he’s never forgotten. They feed the algorithm. They expand the discourse. They build the myth.

Aleksander doesn’t need to defend himself. His critics are doing all the work.

And to make this boring post a little more fun, here’s a set of cute graphic showing the popularity of Shadow and Bone characters over the past 12 months 😊

[verysium]

I’ve been seeing some discourse around twitter about the blue lock boys and whether they’d be a loyal bf or not 😭 Curious to know who do you think would be more inclined to cheat or who just wouldn’t at all!!!

I saw someone say sae would 100% cheat like whattt I feel like he wouldn’t even bother looking at anyone else if he already has someone (Cuz I mean dating him would likely mean you actually mean something to him) but I digress

ok anon you had me pulling up a whole argumentative essay here cus WHO TF SAID SAE WOULD 100% CHEAT??? 😔 that mischaracterization is so painfully inaccurate. twitter really took the whole emotionally unavailable itoshi archetype and ran with it. let me just clear the air here because my man deserves some explanation.

sae itoshi would not cheat. as in capital N and capital O. he took nearly an entire decade off his life just to work on his own issues and finally form a functional and healthy relationship with another human being. and you're telling me he's just going to let all that wash down the drain for someone else? 😒 twitter logic really be showing its illogical side here. apparently a man can be loyal to a professional sports career for eighteen years, but he can't be loyal to his significant other.

i think this misunderstanding probably happened cus of shidou. people read the manga and saw that sae dropped rin for a bug-eyed freak and automatically assumed he was disloyal. 😑 let me just say two things here:

(1) sae and shidou's relationship is strictly professional. imagine being stuck in an god awful corporate office with coworkers who bore you with their weaponized incompetence and a boss who annoys the living shit out of you. and then one day, the company hires a new recruit who is probably the most unhinged and debauched creature known to man. you're probably left wondering how he even got hired in the first place. but then you find out...he's useful. he takes risks and gets a high return on what he invests. it's impulsive and stupid, really. but at least it's unconventional and outside-the-box. he has your interest piqued. that's basically sae and shidou in a nutshell.

(2) just because sae gave shidou his number after the u-20 game does NOT mean he would do the same to any other person who would try to encroach on your relationship. and let's be real here. sae would get one text from shidou and block his contact.

anyways, here is my analysis on the bllk boys in general. introducing the anti-cheating to pro-cheating spectrum:

(A) cannot cheat under any circumstance (as in they already hate the fact that they live on a planet with 8.1 billion other people who are not you):

itoshi brothers (atp they don't even have the physical or mental capacity to entertain a third party), ness, reo

(B) cannot cheat due to physical incapability (literally cannot pull anyone within a five-meter radius to cheat with):

ego, igarashi, raichi, bachira (not that he's in any way unattractive...it's just...i feel like he would purposefully act weird to drive off people who aren't you)

(C) could not cheat (basically option A and B but less problematic version)

yukimiya, barou, kunigami, noa, loki, gagamaru, chigiri, niko, hiori, karasu (baby boy literally felt inferior cus his crush was the cutest in his class), kurona (head empty, just you)

(D) would not cheat (on you but everyone else is not included)

isagi (unintentionally a homewrecker to others but would never let anyone homewreck his relationship with you), leonardo (idk why but i just don't trust him entirely)

(E) could cheat (depends on what they get out of it):

kaiser, shidou (honestly what did you expect when you willingly dated a blonde man...)

(F) would cheat (either proven by canon or they accidentally fucked up somehow):

otoya, oliver, nagi

[catlady48]

Sometimes I feel like such a fake fan. This has mostly to do with the fact that I prefer Loki's characterisation in Thor 1 and 2 over Avengers!Loki. I also always heavily insist it was not actually his true desire to conquer Earth or rule anything, mostly because that's the way the first movie was written. I even think that plot idea is a left over from when they wanted Red Skull to be the villain of Avengers (2012). Because to me it just never made sense that all of a sudden he'd want to rule this planet he considers a backwater. I know some people argue that after having been on the throne for a bit during Thor 1 he grew to enjoy it too much or something, but I just can't see it considering his state of mind during that movie?

I especially hate that comparison during the Stuttgart scene, even if I agree you should always stand up to oppressors (especially these days). It's just created takes like "Loki is explicitly a fascist", which is factually wrong (even if he wanted to do as he stated, that'd be absolute monarchy not fascism. But also since I personally believe he wasn't doing all of it of his own will. It's also a bit weird since the movie heavily implies Loki was both tortured and to some degree influenced and this comparison contradicts it. So which is it? Did he want this and is he a despicable dictator or is he a somewhat sympathetic (even if his actions are of course still horrible) guy who was kind of forced into doing these horrible things in order to survive. It feels like the movie tries to forcibly frame him into "wait we've shown him as to sympathetic, now we must show him as the worst evil ever to compensate so that the audience will applaud at his defeat" and it doesn't match his own subtext. What doesn't help is that a lot of this was probably supposed to have been revealed during the original plans for Infinity War and that never happened so we'll never know what the true intention was. Furthermore, I think the Stuttgart scene was mostly intended to be at least partially an act and that makes that comparison even more unlogical to me.

I think I'd have preferred it that they wrote his villainy differently, without bringing the whole "he's powerhungry" stereotype into it. I know, part of that is because of what they wrote him into later, which wasn't explicitly the fault of Avengers as a movie and I also know it's a huge thing in the older comics, but mcu!Loki was explicitly not written like that before that and I think they should've stuck with that. I mean after his character arc in Thor 1, if they truly wanted him as the villain, "if I couldn't be your equal that way, I'll be your equal through being your archnemesis" was right there along with all the angst that could come with that. They wouldn't have needed to write in the torture and stuff to make it make sense with his character.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy most of Avengers and I do enjoy Loki throughout the movie. It's just some of the discourse that surrounds it that bugs me to no end. I'm afraid that I'm woobifying him too much by claiming he isn't as villainous as Marvel wants to paint him, even though this is genuinely how I interpret the movie. It feels like people are claiming that I need to embrace this (in particular the Stuttgart scene) as his true personality in order to not be woobifying him, while I think that is not the case at all based on textual evidence and I'm so tired of it. Does that make me a fake fan?

[pumpuwukin-sweeties]

I’ve seen a funny discourse about this game somewhere last year. It seems some people who have played the game wasn’t too familiar with the greek myths and was surprised the original has incest/things considered problematic and want the game cancelled. Somr antis agreed with them but a lot of people just made fun of them.

(Also, wasn't this done in Percy Jackson, too? I think it's the "they're not humans and have no dna so it's not incest." or so I've heard)

I found out "Hades" tone down the "incest greek god stuff", change the pantheon, etc etc to fit "Modern audience" and I'm just so baffled. I can get why they change some rapey story, but to just swap the greek god relationship to fit "modern audience" is just... Wow.

Idk, it feels kinda weird when they push "modern audience" when they are playing around with pantheons to "avoid incests" from a culture that still exists and a religion that still have worshipper.

--

[digitalwizard01]

Not to get into shipping discourse that I don't really care about from a show from years ago, but I saw a take that I had thoughts on. I saw a TikTok comment saying that shipping Loki and Sylvie shouldn't be weird because its the same as shipping Miles and Gwen because it's the multiverse and they're both spider-people. I don't understand the comparison here. The main difference is that Miles and Gwen are two different people. People thought Loki and Sylvie was weird because of the familial relationship. They are the same person. they share the same DNA. Theyre basically twins. Like you can't blame people for thinking of them as siblings when The MCU itself backs this up a couple months later when Spiderman NWH had them refer to each other as brothers.

[godblooded]

hey! do you like

genderfluid tony stark combined with alana bloom from the cannibal show

tony who is way less of a dick and way more of a fr philanthropist

autistic but actually because armor accessibility aids and ai assistance

a family of 45 children made from the extremis program over @avalior because leon is king and stark deserves an entire family

three prosthetic iron man limbs and one left arm that’s survived her life. no other way to describe it. yes, all the limbs are the mech ones. he’s owning the identity

cool sick badass facial scars and half a face embedded by the sick badass red helmet that’s melted into her eyebrow

he/him, she/her pronouns, alternatively, whatever

image inducer where he’s literally charlie in perks of being a wallflower

baby blue eyes

made the plot of the first avengers movie internalized transphobia

gender and sexuality discourse for years in between bad science jokes and writing like if he was a bishounen

arc reactor as an allegory for gender-affirming care

plots where loki is the low-key (haha) deus ex machina whose internalized transphobia ALSO made the antagonist for the first avengers movie AND is the reason stark survives the reverse snap

engineer supreme but she deserves it

then you’re in the right place.