#an unknowing person would think these were animatronics

[downtherabbitholewithlucy]

My last two braincells scheming to fuck shit up

[vulpinesaint]

ok fuck it angery about loki show again time for a rant about how the golden elevator fucks up everything about the concept of the timekeepers

so the timekeepers are meant to be god figures! i think we're all aware of that. they're held up as unknowable, unreachable beings, and the whole tva REALLY BLATANTLY runs on blind faith reliant on god figures that are only effigies! i think that's fairly clear.

now, what makes a god figure a god figure is the degree of separation between them and the mortals. the greek gods are atop mount olympus, where they can't be reached by mortals, and they strike down those who try. the christian-judeo god lives in heaven and listens to your prayers, but doesn't exist in earth. god figures are god figures because they're inaccessible to normal people! they have to be separate in some way for them to fulfill that trope. their power makes them Distinct from the class of mortals that makes up the majority of a given world (for a poignant example, loki is a god on earth because of his powers, and when he's on asgard with other beings with the same capabilities, he's just another person.) they're beings that don't really exist in the same reality as the rest of us. with the worldbuilding they did, having the timekeepers able to access the workings of the timeline, as some cosmic beings, i think it's safe to say that the timekeepers Should inhabit a different kind of dimension, whether that's Physical or Metaphorical.

so what the FUCK is with the golden elevator.

yes the aspect of an elevator brings with it the implication of Rising, going somewhere. HOWEVER: that door is just?? in a hallway in the tva? it's accessible by anyone, as we see when sylvie and loki just walk right fucking up to it and get in without a key or a password or any special knowledge about how to use it. and this elevator isn't displayed as something special or reality-traversing, other than the fact that it's gold; it kinda just feels like we're going up a floor. like the timekeepers are just sitting in the tva penthouse.

also: ravonna says at one point that she talked to the timekeepers, and they gave her clear instructions as to what they wanted. this fucked me UP when i heard it because you know what that means? EASE OF ACCESS to your gods. that absolutely defeats the purpose. it removes the mysticism, and it brings the gods down to your level just as much as them having a public-access elevator in the hallway! if you can straight up talk to your gods whenever you want, how do you have blind faith? how do you support that? sure, you could argue that only the higher-ups are allowed to see the timekeepers, but as far as i've seen, ravonna seems to operate on that same blind-faith principle as the rest of the tva; and if not, someone in that position of power has no reason to revere something that's just like. a general manager that you call up because they don't call into the office. some random person from the tva coulda just gone right up there!! like hello??? hello?????

honestly, when they went up that elevator, i was expecting nothing to be there. following the tropes of the show, inferring from what i've seen of other media, i was expecting an empty room; i was expecting ravonna to have been lying this whole time, delivering false directives from silent gods, which i think would have been a MUCH more interesting take on it than "hurr durr the timekeepers are fake robots" (which i ALSO expected, the moment they showed that their GODS were just SITTING THERE, ACCESSIBLE BY ELEVATOR RIDE.)

what an empty room would have provided is a Poignant representation of blind faith: a physical representation of the way that people will do awful things for something that doesn't actually exist. what the shoddy timekeeper animatronics provided: kind of? nothing? there were Beings there. they just. weren't real. (big surprise. they were accessible by an elevator that doesn't even need authorization.)

also like??? the whole concept of timekeeper automatons? who's controlling those. who is sitting there remote controlling a bunch of puppets and putting words in their mouths. jesus christ.

as a conclusion; the timekeepers are set up both narratively and socially as god figures, and then the loki show does EVERYTHING possible to destroy their credibility and believability as god figures, killing both the legitimacy of the entire faith of the tva and the surprise when they're revealed to be fake.

(also as my friend pointed out! the design of the fake timekeepers clash drastically with the vibe of the tva?? so they don't fit in the narrative from a literary perspective OR aesthetically. food for thought.)