#1. speedrun right into making fascism

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

just remembered the time in my high school science fiction class where we were put in groups and had to figure out what a utopian society would look like for us and that across the room I could hear one of the students in the other group bragging that in his utopia the elderly and disabled and anyone who couldn't contribute to his idea of a utopia would be left in a deserted area to fend for themselves. the project was part of a lesson on utopia vs dystopia and was fucking leading up to us reading. The Giver. The Fucking Giver. the irony cannot be clearer and also I hope he's miserable.

[mobius-m-mobius]

Pt. 1: My apologies in advance for the essay this is gonna be but I've been rewatching Loki s1 and. On a first watch I resigned myself to what seemed the inevitable heterosexuality of Marvel's choices, but rewatching now it's wild how much a Lokius reading of s1 sticks the landing, despite the apparent Sylkie triumph??

See. Okay for starters. Taking as read the adorable speedrun at which Loki and Mobius start revolving around one another and Mobius sticks his neck out for Loki and Loki lights up like the sun under Mobius’ attention. I don't think Loki's betrayal was inevitable. Sure he’s telling himself it is, grasping for a sense of continuity with himself, but when he chooses to run after Sylvie there’s real hesitation. (I don’t think he’d ever just go ‘yeah TVA fascism seems cool!’ but I think part of him was starting to wonder whether there was a way forward with Mobius instead of against him).

Specifically in this watch it hit me so hard that right before he runs after Sylvie he has this exchange with B-15 and Mobius:

Loki: “You can trust me. I understand I have to earn that, so, I will.”

Mobius: “Why is it the people you can’t trust are always saying ‘trust me’?”

And it lingers on Loki after that. Mobius walks away, and Loki watches him go.

Then I think about the fight with Sylvie at the end of time, Loki referring to himself as someone who categorically cannot be trusted even though he has no intent to betray her—because even though he knows he's changed, he’s lied too many times for anyone to reasonably put faith in him. So I just imagine him in this exchange with Mobius being on the cusp of meaning it, of really truly considering earning trust and then honest to goodness being trustworthy, only to think—if even Mobius can’t believe him. Where is the good in being trustworthy if he nevertheless cannot be trusted?

And so he regresses. In ep1 he says “you can trust no one but yourself���, which Mobius hand-waves as a cynical platitude. But in the very moment it seems there is no path forward with Mobius, Loki is in a position to make that platitude reality. Sylvie—a person he currently thinks of as himself—is there. Perhaps Loki could have trusted Mobius; but surly he can trust this other himself more? And, perhaps even more crucially, it may be that he himself is the only creature in the universe who can trust him back. Perhaps he himself is thereby the only one it is possible to build a relationship with.

And so when the moment comes, he runs after Sylvie. But even so, he hesitates. Is torn. And I wonder truly if, had that exchange with Mobius not just occurred, he might have made a different choice. Even so early as that.

But the really interesting stuff is when you properly get into ‘Sylkie’.

(Continued in Pt2. Once more. I am sorry)

Wanted to post your messages in opposite order so part 1 is above 2 and hopefully makes the entire thing a bit easier for anyone who wants to read through all of it at once, so I hope it's all right that I kept the bulk of my reply to part 2!

It honestly means so much that you'd think of me when wanting to discuss the show or be excited about new thoughts or theories running through your mind so please don't think of apologizing for a moment 💖