#also this just in: Mobius is not a therapist he's a cop

[nostalgia-tblr]

You know, a lot of Loki fandom wank could be avoided if people just stopped assuming that everything Mobius says is definitely the literal truth and that he would never tell lies for whatever reason (like to GET A REACTION!) and can never just be wrong about things.

[thelightofthingshopedfor]

not people on Reddit being wrong about Loki again

“I'm pointing out exactly what happened on the screen and what was explicitly stated by reliable narrators” please tell us who you consider to be reliable narrators. please. because you’re obviously considering Mobius as one of those reliable narrators and that’s hilarious for like 50 reasons so who else is on that list? anyone else from the TVA, who has a huge agenda? Odin, who lied to Loki from birth about his origin and literal species, and oh by the way lied to everybody about the entire existence of another child and also his own entire personality and warmongering ways for the first, I don’t know, two-thirds of his own life? Thor, who was also lied to about everything Loki was lied to but somehow remained a lot less suspicious about all of it and kept coming back to “wow gosh Odin ur so wise” even when repeatedly confronted with evidence of Odin actually being kind of awful? Thor’s friends, who also believed all of Odin’s lies but were pretty clearly Thor’s friends anyway and not Loki’s, and therefore biased? Frigga, who was complicit in all the lying? ...I don’t know, fucking Thanos, who’s literally the least reliable narrator I can imagine?

“I love the character, but” I dunno, do you though, you’re making an awful lot of assumptions about what he does and doesn’t know, and what he is and isn’t capable of doing, and we don’t actually know...any of that

like I’m not denying that Loki made a lot of bad decisions, particularly in the first Thor movie, but a) he was having a mental breakdown at the time and b) oh my fucking god do not call that interrogation scene a “tough love version of therapy,” fucking do not, it was interrogation and quite frankly psychological torture, Mobius just wanted information, there was no reason for him to care about Loki at that point, come on, all he wanted to do was break Loki down enough to make him useful, how are you not seeing this. how can you possibly accuse other people of, I don’t know, going too easy on Loki and then falling for this therapist interpretation of Mobius?? he’s a cop!! yes he came to care about Loki but in episode 1 he just saw Loki as a potential asset for catching the rogue Loki variant! please be reasonable and watch the interrogation scene with that perspective!

[bebx]

Apologies if this has been asked before, but do you have any theories/headcanons on what Mobius' nexus event could be?

For me, it's that he was originally supposed to die during Loki's attacks during Avengers 1, but his nexus event was being able to talk Loki down.

Talking about Mobius is actually one of my favorite things to do so no need to apologize!

I’ve briefly mentioned about what I think might be... not exactly his Nexus Event but his life before the TVA a while ago here and basically the theories I’ve come up with are a.) Mobius was just a regular guy with wife and kids before the TVA took him, b.) Mobius was a therapist in his old life, which would explain why he’s so good at listening and comforting people, and c.) Mobius was an agent or a cop, maybe he used to work for S.H.I.E.L.D?

So now let’s talk about what might be his Nexus Event based on what I think might be his old life!

The first theory I thought of is that Mobius had a family before the TVA came in, and perhaps something happened to them. Maybe an accident? And, I don’t know, maybe they died when he was supposed to be the one who died but somehow he survived? So that was his Nexus Event. Would be heartbreaking nonetheless, but still a possibility.

(I’ve also heard people point out maybe Mobius’s family died during Loki’s New York attack, so basically Loki had something to do with the death of his family, whether or not it’s intentional, which would be more heartbreaking to think about the possibility of Mobius finding out he had a family and his only friend killed them. Or maybe Loki found out he killed them and couldn’t stop blaming himself. Either way, this would probably be the most painful theory I’ve read)

I used to think Mobius having a family in his previous life was something that’d most likely happen at the finale of the Loki series (season one) and that might be the last we saw of him, at the end of episode 6 he returned to his old life. But since that turned out not to be the case, and from what it looks like, we’re going to see a lot more of agent Mobius (which I am indeed very relieved and happy about that) I don’t think him going back to his old timeline is the case anymore?

The second theory: Mobius was a shrink in his old life, which would explain his being so good at comforting and listening to people. And, I don’t know, maybe something that wasn’t supposed to happen, happened? Maybe he made a mistake with his patient and it ended terribly? Discharging someone who was supposed to remain institutionalized and said patient ended up hurting themself or someone else. The possibility is kind of endless here.

And the last theory, Mobius was a cop or a S.H.I.E.L.D agent.

I think this one’s similar to yours because maybe Mobius was supposed to die during Loki’s earth invasion, but somehow he didn’t. Maybe in that timeline he even managed to talk some sense into Loki? Because Loki wasn’t himself when he attacked earth, and it was Thanos mind controlling him, so if Mobius, a normal human, was able to help Loki see what he really was doing — that he was hurting innocent people and that this wasn’t who he was — then I can see why that’d put the timeline in chaos, hence a Nexus Event.

(These are all just my personal opinions, so obviously I could be wrong. So just take anything I said with a grain of salt lol)

[twh-news]

‘Loki’ Gives Tom Hiddleston’s Antihero the Spotlight, but Sticks to Marvel’s Superhero Basics: TV Review

It should only take a few minutes before “Loki” viewers know whether they’re down for what the show is serving up or too tired of the Marvel Cinematic Universe machine to follow this chapter of its increasingly complex saga.

[NOTE: Maybe read further after you've seen the first ep 😁]

The new Disney Plus show — the third under Marvel’s burgeoning TV offshoot — opens with dashing villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in the Avengers’ custody circa the 2012 movie that first brought the team together. In this version of those events, however, Loki manages to escape — thus upending the reality in which the character eventually dies at the hands of Thanos and freeing him up to anchor a show all his own.

Unfortunately for this Loki, his spontaneous getaway gambit sends him straight into the path of an armored guard (Wunmi Mosaku) who stares him down and declares that, “on behalf of the Time Variants Authority, I hereby arrest you for crimes against The Sacred Timeline.” Imbuing such a wholeheartedly cheesy line with hyperbolic gravitas is a superhero story staple, and yet this one’s grim righteousness still made me laugh in a way it was probably not supposed to.

For a new Marvel production, introducing a powerful league of militaristic cops is practically a prerequisite for whatever story is yet to come. But it’s nevertheless a bit of a letdown when you realize halfway through the dense first episode that one of the MCU’s ostensibly most unpredictable lead characters has somehow landed in the most predictable of setups.

To be fair, some of this irony is by design. As written by Michael Waldron, Loki very purposefully couldn’t be a worse fit for the monochromatic, bureaucratic order of the Time Variants Authority (or “TVA”), nor more offended when he understands exactly what it represents. As a chipper cartoon clock (“Miss Minutes”) informs him in an explanatory animated video, the TVA is an organization tasked with keeping every multiverse moving forward on the same “sacred timeline” as prescribed by three almighty  “Timekeepers,” which sometimes means snuffing out “Variants” like Loki who might mess it up.

The implication, Loki quickly grasps with real horror, is that there’s almost nothing anyone can do to change their fate; even his tricks are preordained parts of the greater whole. That emphasis on fate, paired with Kasra Farahani’s deliberately drab and vaguely midcentury production design, is what sets the TVA apart from something like SHIELD, though both share the same affection for unilateral authority and quips without punchlines.

I’ll leave it to bigger Marvel fans than me who can unravel exactly what the TVA’s level of authority means for the MCU at large. At first glance, though, it does seem as though the mere existence of the TVA should have huge implications, especially as upcoming big screen installments are set to explore the multiverse in more depth (including “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” also written by Waldron). For now, Loki has found himself outsmarted by this seemingly omniscient organization, forcing him to reluctantly team up with Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson), who’s convinced Loki can help them sift through an infinite number of timelines to track down one particularly pernicious Variant.

Only two episodes of “Loki” were screened for critics, making it hard to know exactly how successful the 6-episode season might be in shaping its own identity within the onscreen Marvel universe. Of these first two episodes, however, the second was far more engaging. The pilot has such an extraordinary amount of ground to cover that director Kate Herron only gets a couple opportunities to find humor in between the exposition, and Hiddleston can barely get into the pithy groove that made Loki such a standout in the first place. The second, at least, can have a bit more fun.

Waldron’s scripts do their best throughout to layer in moments of pathos for its central antihero to make clear exactly where his head is at in this point of his life. (To make it even clearer: this version of Loki has only lived through the events of the first “Thor” movie and “The Avengers.”) By the time Wilson’s Mobius extracts Loki from the TVA’s courtroom, presided over by an annoyed judge (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), Loki is so exhausted and annoyed that he can barely muster the energy to resist too many of Mobius’ probing questions about his end goals. “Why does someone with so much range just want to rule?” Mobius asks, voice thick with pity and admiration. Loki has no good answer besides the one he’s resisted ever since arriving at the TVA: he wants to rule because harboring that burning desire is just his fate.

After establishing all the wheres and whys, the series is then free to move on to the second episode, which gives Loki a bit more room to explore his surroundings and make some calculations of his own. (Emphasis on “a bit”; Hiddleston never quite gets enough time to play around with his character given the show’s pressing need to get to the next timeline and/or twist.) From there, the show establishes a new rhythm as Loki, Mobius and Time Monitor B-15 (Mosaku) ricochet throughout time. Given his experience on “Rick and Morty,” Waldron is comfortable with this dynamic of an odd couple traveling through time and space to potentially disastrous results, but still constrained by the ever-complicating Marvel narrative web surrounding Loki and Mobius. The end of the second episode teases an intriguing new direction for the series to take, but without knowing what happens next, it’s hard to say how much it might deviate from the usual script.

The most fun “Loki” has is when Hiddleston and Wilson get to banter — a distinction from when Mobius playacts as Loki’s placid therapist, a dynamic neither the character nor actor can fully sell. But Wilson’s singular comedic delivery, which somehow combines both a dry deadpan and puppy dog enthusiasm still strikes an amusing balance against Hiddleston, especially when he gets to drop Loki’s existential angst for genuine curiosity about the strange new world around him. And yet: when Loki sighs in frustration about the TVA’s tedious overreach dictating his story when he could be doing something much more dangerous and strange, it’s hard not to agree.

“Loki” premieres Wednesday, June 9, on Disney Plus.

[bebx]

What if it turns out that Mobius is Asgardian? Also, I truly feel with how popular Mobius is with just about everyone that they wouldn’t kill him off. I don’t really think there’s an “end” for Mobius. He’s a ray of sunshine that they’ll keep around to spread his light onto a ton more mcu projects. So anyway to make him immortal would probably be best for the writers. An Android? Asgardian? Or something else completely? Though, I do love that he’s, as far as we know, just your everyday man. He’s just so average and that’s what makes me feel like he’s so special.

About this ask

Anon, I can’t explain why but reading this actually made me feel better after my own thoughts had basically gave me all the worst case scenarios it could come up with. (Being an overthinker isn’t fun!)

And I actually agree with you about why killing off Mobius would be a bad idea and a mistake Marvel wouldn’t be dumb enough to make, considering how popular and loved Mobius was, is.

I also believe his stories are far from over. Like I can literally see him in so many upcoming Marvel projects, not just Loki. And I mean why not? The fans love him, so putting him in as many projects as they can will only help promote those projects so… win win situation here?

I don’t necessarily think he’s an Asgardian? But I do know that anything could happen when it came to MCU. Though if anything I think he’s human, and — if we’re going to see his backstory — his life before the TVA involved jet skis? I don’t know… there’re so many theories about who Mobius was before the TVA took him. I actually think he might be a therapist? That’d explain why he radiates comfort and is so understanding. Some said he could be a cop? A detective? Who knows! But you’re absolutely right; his being an average little guy is what makes him so, so very special to all of us.

I just love him.