It’s easy to forget that the Loki we’re seeing in his Disney+ series is one who, mere weeks ago, presumedly (time works differently in the TVA) was conquering Earth with the help of the Chitauri. The Loki we see now is matured, almost altruistic, and, thanks to the natural process of Tom Hiddleston existing in 2023, looking noticeably older.
That emotional growth is very clear in one scene of Loki, a scene that completely shifts how we watch The Avengers and turns it into something completely new a decade later.
In their downtime in Loki Season 2 Episode 2, Loki and Mobius bond over a slice of radioactive-green pie. They discuss the fact that Mobius has a whole life on the Sacred Timeline, and Loki tries to relate to him by mentioning his last entanglement with the Avengers.
“Do you remember that time I was so angry with my father and brother, I went down to Earth and held the whole of New York hostage with an alien army?” Loki says, “I tried to use the Mind Stone on Tony Stark. Didn’t work, so I threw him off a building.” This reveals his grand quest for power in The Avengers wasn’t really fueled by a quest for the Space Stone, but his own family trauma. The Odinson family’s complications fueled much of Thor’s Marvel Cinematic Universe career, but we didn’t know it went this deep through Loki’s character.
The Avengers was probably the MCU’s most clear-cut story: Loki is evil and powerful and has a crop of aliens invading Manhattan, which forces the Avengers to band together to defeat him. Loki has an army, the Avengers have a Hulk. But this new perspective revealed in Loki shows that the interpersonal Nordic God drama has permeated every instance of Loki’s career.
Though not much time has passed in this version of Loki’s life, in our chronology, Loki has grown and changed so much. But maybe, with this new insight into his character, it isn’t Loki that’s changed, but the amount of vulnerability he’s shown in his appearances.
Knowing Loki, that vulnerability goes even further. In The Avengers, Loki clearly didn’t even know his own true motivations. What we’re seeing in this episode is him coming to terms with his own self in a way that’s incredibly rare for Marvel villains, and rarer still for Nordic gods of mischief whose whole character is built around narcissism and evil. Through the TVA, we’re seeing a variant of him. He still has a trickster side, still dabbles in torture, but now he has something that’s far more valuable than any Infinity Stone in the TVA’s drawers: emotional self-awareness.
