Characters / MCU Loki Variants

aka: MCU Sylvie Laufeydottir

Main Character Index > Other Individuals and Organizations > Cosmic > Asgard and the Nine Realms (Odin Borson | Loki Laufeyson | Loki Variants) | Knowhere | Nova Empire | Sovereign | Skrulls | Eternals

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Spoilers for Loki (2021) and all works set prior to it are unmarked.

Loki Variants

"You could throw a rock around here and hit a Loki."

— Mobius M. Mobius

Variants of Loki Laufeyson that appear across alternate timelines and parallel universes. According to Mobius, the TVA has pruned more Lokis than any other variants in the Multiverse. Here's just a few of them.

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In General

• Alliance of Alternates: Two appear in the Void: the first is led by Kid Loki and includes Classic, Boastful, and Alligator Loki who represent Loki's good qualities; and the second is led by President Loki with all of them representing what Loki would be if he doesn't change. Of course, it doesn't last as Boastful Loki betrays his friends, and then President Loki betrays Boastful before being betrayed himself by his group.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: Some variants are more successful or powerful than the Sacred Timeline Loki.
• The Chosen Many: Sylvie believes that the universe wants to break free from the TVA's control and manifests chaos to do so, implying that Loki is that chaos which is why there are so many variants. He Who Remains reveals that while everything that happened is still part of his plan he did choose her and the L1130 Loki to be his replacements. Except not really as revealed in Season 2: while he does seem to want Loki to replace him, it's only Loki and manipulated events to try and make him see that his way is the only way.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Being able to trust someone and be someone worth trusting is not an ability Loki normally has, and interacting with himself doesn't make it easier as it doesn't take long for the Lokis to betray each other while in the Void.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart: Inverted as while the Sacred Timeline version was killed by Thanos, all of his variants are still alive except for Classic Loki.
• Hero of Another Story: While somewhat apathetic and depressed with their situation Classic Loki, Kid Loki, and Alligator Loki are some of the few Loki variants to recognize their flaws and have formed genuine friendships with each other while moving on from their dreams of conquest, unlike President Loki.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Very few Loki variants learn to like each other, since they all have the same Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and narcissism you would expect from a version of Loki.
• Trapped in Villainy: According to the Sacred Timeline and the TVA, Loki isn't allowed to change and become a better person as otherwise Thor and the Avengers wouldn't become the heroes they are meant to be. This leaves the Lokis with two options: either embrace their villainy and be doomed to failure or try to change only to be pruned by the TVA.
• Villain of Another Story: President Loki's army is made up of more variants, each with different appearances to the usual version of Loki, and we don't know how they ended up being pruned or what their Nexus Events were.

Variants pruned by the TVA

Loki Laufeyson (Variant L1130)

Loki Odinson

"I know what I did. And I know why I did it. And that's not who I am anymore."

Birth Name: Loki Laufeyson

Known Aliases: "D.B. Cooper", L1130

Species: Frost Giant (Variant)

Citizenship: Jotun, Asgardian

Affiliation(s): Asgard (formerly), Thanos (formerly), TVA

Portrayed By: Tom Hiddleston, Chris Evans (illusion in Avengers: Endgame and Loki), Alex Van (illusion in Loki)

Voiced By: Alexis Victor (European French dub)

Appearances: ^note Technically speaking, he is the same Loki that appeared in Thor and The Avengers, but the Variant didn't exist until the timeline split in Endgame, so we aren't counting those as appearances Avengers: Endgame | Loki | Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ^note Post-credits stinger

"You called me a scared little boy. [...] You're wrong, though. You see, I know something children don't. [...] That no one bad is ever truly bad, and no one good is ever truly good."

In their quest to undo the genocide Thanos brought upon the universe, the Avengers ended up inadvertently creating an Alternate Universe in which Loki from that timeline escaped with the Tesseract after the Battle of New York in 2012. The Time Variance Authority then arrested this Loki (who they refer to as "Variant L1130") for "crimes against the Sacred Timeline", only for Mobius M. Mobius to recruit him to help the TVA track down another Loki Variant causing chaos throughout the Sacred Timeline.

For his Sacred Timeline counterpart, see here.
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• 11th-Hour Superpower:
  • He gains and masters the power of enchantment at the end of "Journey Into Mystery".
  • As of the end of "Science/Fiction", he has gained the ability to command his time-slipping.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Even in his own show, he is much weaker as a mage than his counterpart from the comics. He gains a couple of new or improved abilities (Hand Blasts, stronger telekinesis, enchantment), but it is Classic Loki, his Future Badass variant, who roughly corresponds to the character from the comics in terms of power, and Loki is not there yet - though he's getting there in Season 2, after he and Sylvie witnessed their Future Badass variant create a full blown illusion of Asgard and realised just how powerful they were, successfully enchanting Alioth. He is also nowhere near as strong or durable as he is in the comics, getting tossed around by Mooks like the guards in Lamentis-1. Comics Loki, in comparison, was strong enough to level a building with a single punch.
  • Ultimately subverted by the end of Season 2. He not only masters the ability to effectively time-travel to any point in the past or future, so long as he was there, he also becomes the new Temporal Loom for an infinite number of timelines, warping them into a form that resembles the World Tree Yggdrasil itself.
• Adaptation Deviation: In the comics, Loki has never helped the TVA, met a Kang Variant or fallen in love with his female alternate self. His story in Loki is more of an original story than an adaptation, although it is loosely inspired by a number of comic book plotlines.
• Affably Evil: In the beginning of the series, he is just as evil as he was in The Avengers. He politely inquires after Casey's name before proceeding to threaten him with "violent, painful death" by "gutting him like a fish". He is also polite with all the others, especially compared to Sylvie who swears a lot.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: He used to demand that others kneel before him, but being kicked in the groin and told he is nothing more than a pathetic loner over and over again inside the Time Cell makes him reconsider. The torture stops only when he begs on his knees for it to stop and apologizes to the memory of Lady Sif for his cruel prank.
• All for Nothing:
  • He tried so hard and got so far, but in the end, it doesn't even matter. Sylvie pushed him away, deprived him of the right to decide the fate of the multiverse and killed He Who Remains, unleashing countless Kang variants.
  • His attempts to repair the Temporal Loom were all destined to fail, as it was a failsafe meant to destroy everything that wasn't the Sacred Timeline anyway, and that the other timelines were multiplying themselves ad infinitum meant the Loom's rings could never be big enough to prune them all.
• Alliterative Name: His birth name is Loki Laufeyson. He never uses this patronimic himself, but the TVA call him this way in their files, and Judge Ravonna refers to him as such during his trial.
• Alternate Self:
  • In Avengers Endgame, the Avengers travel back in time to the aftermath of the Battle of New York in 2012 and encounter past Loki there. He manages to snatch the Tesseract and escape, creating a divergent timeline. The Loki series picks up from there.
  • By "The Variant", he's managed to mostly synch up with the prime-Loki's Character Development in a surprisingly simple plot mechanic: the TVA show him a time-recording of everything the prime-Loki did after the first Avengers movie — essentially letting him watch the events of Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, and his death at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. Seeing all this in compressed form has much the same effect as it had on the prime-Loki: his mother's death, that Frigga never stopped believing in him, that his father Odin's dying words were to say that he loved both Thor and Loki, that he even eventually reconciled with Thor to fight side-by-side against the Dark Elves and Hela, etc. The final blow is seeing that the "glorious purpose" that Avengers 1-era Loki thought he had turned out to be getting his neck snapped by the real Big Bad, Thanos, in a futile attempt to die a hero after realizing all his betrayals were for nothing.
  • All that said, within minutes of working for the TVA, he's already trying to manipulate Mobius into an audience with the Timekeepers. He then betrays the TVA and flees at the first opportunity to do so. So this is still an alternate version of the God of Mischief that we follow through the series.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: Zig-Zagged at first before being played straight. Despite initially being the same Loki from The Avengers (2012), he shows far more magical abilities than his Sacred Timeline self. However this is balanced out by him being far more of a Butt-Monkey while his female counterpart Sylvie is portrayed as being a better fighter with magical skills he doesn't have, while Classic and Kid Loki are portrayed as being better or more skilled than him. Season 2 however has him become a Time Master by gaining control of his time slipping and figuring out how to save every timeline by replacing the Temporal Loom itself, sacrificing his own happiness and freedom to ensure the stability of The Multiverse itself. Compared to all his variants, this is clearly the most powerful Loki of them all and the better version, having grown beyond all his flaws to become a true hero and a better god.
• Amazon Chaser: In the main continuity, Loki says that he likes Jane Foster after she slaps him in the face, smiles like a Cheshire Cat when Lady Sif holds him at swordpoint, and is excited to fight the Valkyrie. According to invoked Word of Saint Paul, Loki slept with Sif before he cut her hair. This variant falls in love with Sylvie, a headstrong Dark Action Girl. He agrees that she is terrifying, but says that is what's great about her. This is not surprising given that he grew up in a Proud Warrior society and his own adopted mother was an action girl.
• Ambiguous Situation: It is unclear why Loki keeps his Asgardian form inside the TVA realm where magic doesn't work. As shown in Thor, Odin used his powers on baby Loki to make him look like an Asgardian, but when Loki holds the Casket of Ancient Winters, he temporarily turns blue and looks like a Jotun. It is either an MCU Continuity Error, or Odin cast an irreversible spell on Loki, permanently changing his very nature.
• And Then What?: During the first interrogation Mobius discovers that Loki's plans are very vague. After conquering Earth, he intends to conquer something else, like the Nine Realms or, as Mobius suggests, space, because Loki believes that he was born to and "owed to" be a ruler, and this is it. In the end he comes to realize that even if he ruled all of time and space absolute power isn't what he wants and wouldn't make him happy. He says as much to Sylvie.
• Anti-Hero: After Loki meets Sylvie, learns her backstory and that everyone in the TVA is a Variant, and nearly dies on Lamentis, he changes his goal from ruling the TVA to breaking the system, and thus transitions from a Nominal Hero to a more classical one who is ready to risk his life for others. Loki attempts to take the blame from Sylvie and put it on himself, offers himself as a distraction for Sylvie to enchant Alioth, and plants himself in front of He Who Remains defenseless to stop Sylvie from killing him out of blind revenge. By the second season, he graduates firmly into heroic territory, having gone through enough development to be single-mindedly focused on saving every timeline, ultimately becoming the Big Good of the entire infinite multiverse.
• Appeal to Inherent Nature: Just like his prime counterpart, he often replies to criticism with It's What I Do.
  • In "Glorious Purpose," when Mobius keeps prodding Loki about his motives:
    Mobius: You're really good at doing awful things, and then just getting away.
    Loki: [bitterly] What can I say? I'm a mischievous scamp.
  • In "Lamentis," when Sylvie gets angry at him for blowing their cover:
    Sylvie: You got drunk on the train.
    Loki: I'm hedonistic. That's what I do.
  • Also in "Lamentis", then again in "Journey Into Mystery", he underlines their Determinator characteristics – Loki survives.
• The Atoner: Much like with his original counterpart, Loki's development as a character is one of finding the goodness inside him to do the right thing and fight for what matters. In the span of his first season, he goes from a megalomaniacal, self-centered asshole to a genuine hero who stands by his friends and fights to save the world, though he's still a little bit of an asshole. It's a very reluctant — practically forced — journey on his part, but he does come out a better man on the other side. Best exemplified in his image quote. Even he himself has realized the pain he has caused and aims to be better.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: At the end of the series, Loki becomes the show's version of the God of Stories, and places himself within the heart of the new timelines to watch over them eternally from his lonely throne.
• Attention Whore: In "The Nexus Event," he tells the memory of Lady Sif that he's done a prank on her because he craves attention, which in turn is because he is scared of being alone.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: As he reveals when put on trial by the TVA, he figured out that he was able to escape because the Avengers travelled back in time, in part because he noticed that the case with the Tesseract was moving on its own and also because he smelled Tony's cologne from two different sources.
• Background Halo: In the official poster for Loki, a golden clock frames Loki's head like a halo, while glowing hour and minute bars and multiple clock hands act as rays, and Loki's figure is lit from behind with faint yellow light. This contrasts the poster of He Who Remains, which is similar but has the dark purple background, giving sinner/saint vs devil vibes.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: In "Nexus Event," Loki and Sylvie have each other's backs when fighting the guards.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: His typical civilian attire is an all-black power suit, but once he's shanghaied into helping out the TVA, he begins to wear a much less badass-looking office-drone suit and cheap jacket with "VARIANT" monogrammed in all-caps on the back. In season 2, he switches out the TVA uniform for a suit and pea coat that's much closer to his usual style for most of the season.
• The Bait: He runs off to distract Alioth with a flaming sword while Sylvie attempts to enchant it, but Alioth quickly loses interest in him.
• Barrier Maiden: Loki ultimately becomes the binding force for the entire multiverse, his presence sustaining the countless branches from the Sacred Timeline into a World Tree.
• Battle Couple: Loki and Sylvie develop romantic feelings towards each other and fight both the guards on Lamentis and the guards who protect the Time-Keepers together. Later, they combine their powers to enchant Alioth.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: He starts the first season as an Ex-Big Bad monologueing about the evils of free will and his glorious purpose of subjugating others for their own good, all while heavily relying on Psychological Projection. He ends it as a thoughtful and humbled individual who doesn't want the throne to rule all of creation and would risk being killed to stop the person he cares about from making a wrong choice.
• Being Good Sucks: Loki's speech addressed to Sylvie in S02 E04 has shades of this, as he acknowledges the challenges of doing the right thing and staying optimistic, yet he maintains one should still do so.
  Loki: Sure. Burn it down. Easy. Annihilating is easy. Razing things to the ground is easy. Trying to fix what's broken is hard. Hope is hard.
• Beneath the Mask:
  • When Loki is most loud and theatrical, he is covering up his true thoughts and feelings. He is genuine with others when he is quiet. When he finds Casey, he nicely asks for his name, pauses and then threatens him in a completely different tone. When Mobius interrupts Loki's attempt to dramatically stand up, and then offers him to try again, Loki says in a quiet and mundane voice that it won't be meaningful now, considers the option, and then stands up to make a big hammy speech anyway.
  • He initially gets uncomfortable when Mobius shows him a recording of violent acts he committed in The Avengers, but keeps talking about his purpose of conquering and "liberating" his victims. By the end of the episode, Loki is sitting lost and disillusioned on the floor when he explains to Mobius that his viciousness is largely an act:
    Loki: I don't enjoy hurting people. I don't enjoy it. I do it (..) because it's part of the illusion. It's the cruel elaborate trick conjured by the weak [gestures to himself] to inspire fear.
    Mobius: A desparate play for control. You do know yourself.
    Loki: A villain.
  • When he finds a report about the complete destruction of his homeland Asgard and reads it alone, he cries. But when he later discusses it with Mobius, Loki quickly dismisses Mobius's condolences as if the event means nothing to him.
• Being Evil Sucks: After being apprehended by the TVA, interrogated by Mobius and seeing how his life is supposed to play out, he realizes that he does not enjoy hurting people, and that playing the part of the villain has brought him nothing but loneliness, pain, and eventually, an unceremonious death.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: As Loki puts it, Sylvie tries to hit him all the time. They switch between fighting verbally and physically, vehemently denying they care for each other and awkwardly attempting to spit it out, until Sylvie kisses him in the Season 1 finale only to betray his trust and push him through the portal.
• Break the Haughty:
  • Loki seeing the TVA have so many Infinity Stones they get treated as knick-knacks and witnessing the post-2012 events of his life in the main timeline through a Chronoscope shatters his arrogance into pieces. He believed himself to be a future God-Emperor, but in fact he is just a pest whom his former master is destined to nonchalantly strangle to death.
  • What's left is destroyed when he is placed in the Time Cell where he has to relive Lady Sif kneeing him in the groin and telling him he will always be alone over and over again. He only breaks the loop by begging on his knees to stop it.
• Brainy Brunet: Just like his main counterpart, Loki has black hair and proves his worth to Mobius by quickly deducing that the Variant a.k.a. Sylvie is hiding in the apocalypses.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Much like his prime counterpart, this Loki is quite a clever and thoughtful individual, as seen when he does some good old-fashioned detective work to deduce where his variant is hiding in "The Variant". However, Loki himself gets bored studying TVA terminology with Miss Minutes, and seems more interested in criticizing the TVA than he is actually helping them.
• Broken Pedestal: He comes to genuinely admire Sylvie, and tells anyone who would listen how great she is. In the end, she betrays his trust and pushes him away through the portal, making the decision to kill He Who Remains for both of them. Loki is devastated.
• Brought Down to Badass: Loki's magic does not work in the realm of the TVA, but he is still cunning, crafty, scheming Loki, and he is still dangerous. Despite being powerless, he steals the Time Twister controls from Mobius, leads everyone on a chase, and uses the Time Twister to get revenge on Hunter B-15. It only stops when he chooses to stop.
• But Not Too Bi: There's been a passing reference to him being bisexual, but his only romantic attachment shown on screen is to Sylvie, his female alternate self. He acknowledges he's had flings with both men and women, but never any "real" connection.
• Butt-Monkey: Played for both laughs and tears. This version of Loki suffers many, many misfortunes and humiliation, physical and psychological, as a crucial part of his Character Development. After all, a "seismic narcissist" like himself could only experience that crucial self-actualization by being knocked off his pedestal (a couple of times), (repeatedly) kicked in the balls, and forced to face some hard truths.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: It is established in both Thor and Age of Ultron that Asgardians need to drink insane amounts of alcohol to actually get drunk. In "Lamentis", Loki is able to get drunk from champagne in the brief amount of time Sylvie spends napping, suggesting Frost Giants aren't as hardy (or as a runt, he isn't as hardy as he normally would be). He must have been terrible at Asgardian parties, if he attended them at all.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Loki expresses doubt in the dogma according to which the TVA workers were created by the Time-Keepers as early as in "The Vaiant", but Mobius ascribes it to Arbitrary Skepticism. Nor does Mobius believe him later when the God of Mischief says that the TVA workers are just brainwashed variants. Mobius comes around though once he sees evidence that proves what Loki said is true.
  • In "Lamentis", Loki criticizes Sylvie's plan to kill the Time-Keepers and then walk away. He says that would just create a vacuum of power and implies nothing good will come of it. Loki repeats this sentiment in the Season 1 finale, but Sylvie brushes it off both times. This is precisely what happens — when Sylvie kills He Who Remains, the TVA and the entire multiverse begin to fall apart.
• Casting a Shadow: Loki is able to manipulate the shadows of his duplicates to mimic what they would look like were he in his full regalia, horns and all. In S02 E02, he uses this sharpen magic to restrain Brad. Mobius thinks it's a bit over the top.
• Character Development:
  • Due to being a variant of Loki after the Battle of New York, he never gained the development his prime counterpart endured throughout the movies and starts the series still very much the villain he was in The Avengers. However, thanks to the TVA's dimension nullifying his magic, him reviewing his future all the way up to his unglamorous death, being constantly questioned on his motives by Mobius, seeing himself in other variants he meets as in the mirror and falling for Sylvie he is humbled and becomes a better person. By the end of the first season of his solo series, he refuses the 'throne' of He Who Remains to control all of time and space itself, but also refuses to blindly kill him or hurt Sylvie. This is very much unlike the Loki who would stab his own brother in order to gain a pittance of power at the foot of Thanos.
  • He starts Loki employing a lot of Psychological Projection and accusing others of his own sins, just like he did in the Avengers. By the end of the series, after much introspection, he becomes increasingly self-aware, which allows him to see the truth about others. Loki does not respect Mobius lying to himself, because Loki did that too, he worries for Sylvie's wellbeing in the Season 1 finale because he's been there emotionally and knows that hate and revenge will get her nowhere, and he can get behind the explanations of He Who Remains despite suffering from his actions, because he's been a villain and a liar himself and can recognize a sincere Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Character Tics: Just like his main counterpart, Loki loves to assume the T-pose as a sign of confidence, and fidgets with his hands when he’s nervous or upset. For instance, in Pompei he speads his arms wide after he proves his theory right. On Lamentis he worries his hands as he and Sylvie sit by the lake, and again in the void while listening to Classic Loki tell his story. Another frequent tic is a quick Hair Flip to straighten his messy hair after a stunt or a timeslip.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: He struggles to get Mobius to trust him because Mobius fully expects that Loki will betray him. After seeing multiple Variants of himself all stabbing each other in the back he finally decides that even he's had enough of doing this. When Sylvie asks if they can trust each other he assures her that he's learned his lesson and this time he really won't try to betray her.
• Cloudcuckoolander: In "The Variant", Loki is eccentric, hyperactive and childish and annoys the hell out of Mobius with his clumsy salad metaphors and gleeful Latin speeches. He's just learned that his whole life was meaningless and almost succumbed to despair, and now he has someone to listen to him. His prime counterpart similarly became a bit too cheerful and annoying in The Dark World immediately after Thor found a wreck of Loki on the floor of his cell, so it must be his way to cope with stress. It does not last in both cases.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: While it is Played for Laughs, Loki is locked in a room he can't escape. A recreated memory of Lady Sif enters it to call him a pathetic worm who will always be alone, hit him in the face, knee him in the groin, and leave, only to reenter the room and repeat it all over again. Loki mutters to himself that he's heard Sif's first line too many times.
• Commonality Connection: Loki and Sylvie can't find any common ground when they discuss their names, goals and methods. But they bond over memories of their mothers, their magic, and over both of them being bisexuals who were never in any serious relationship. After this, Sylvie falls asleep in his presence, which she does not do around "untrustworthy" people.
• Contagious Heroism:
  • Before Loki meets Sylvie, he is contemplating how to take over the TVA and gain more power. Her backstory and her strive to destroy the TVA instead amaze him, and inspire him to join her in her fight and make a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Loki himself, along with Mobius inspire Classic Loki to change and find his "glorious purpose".
• Cool Sword: Kid Loki gifts Loki with a short sword that Loki sets on fire when he needs to distract Alioth.
• Cosmic Plaything: He Who Remains wrote his main counterpart's story in which Loki is destined to cause war, ruin and death and always loses to allow the "heroes" to change and grow, until his former master chokes Loki to death. He also paved the road for this Loki variant, who escapes in the middle of said story only to get apprehended by the TVA and do a prolonged Trauma Conga Line. So the "divine arbiter of power" in the universe wanted Loki to fail and suffer, and there is nothing Loki could have done to escape that fate.
• Dance Battler: Similar to his main counterpart, he often dives under weapons of enemies or employs acrobatics to avoid getting hit. His fight with Sylvie in the Season 1 finale looks like an angry dance between the two.
• The Dandy: Loki lampshades his love for looking stylish when B-15 asks him if a casually dressed man at Roxxcart could be his variant:
  Loki: I mean, I probably would have worn a suit, but, yes, maybe.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart: By Loki, Loki from a branching timeline created in Endgame is shown a recording of the death of his primary timeline counterpart. He is horrified.
• Deadpan Snarker: This Loki is still Loki, and so he has many dry insults and sarcastic one-liners to toss about. Given that Mobius and Sylvie are more than a match for him, this leads to much Snark-to-Snark Combat.
• Death Glare: During his interrogation, Loki stares at Mobius so intensely that he earns a joke from Mobius about looks that could kill.
• Defiant to the End: Loki has no means to escape his pruning in front of the Time-Keepers, so he says that he's already died countless times and dares them to do their worst.
• Deliberately Bad Example: Mobius concludes that this is the role Loki is meant to play in the Sacred Timeline:
  Mobius: You weren't born to be king, Loki. You were born to cause pain and suffering and death. That's how it is, that's how it was and that's how it will be. Everything so that others can achieve their best versions of themselves.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: In the Avengers, the Other says that Thanos has given Loki a new purpose, which Loki calls glorious. He believes himself to be a Dark Messiah who should rule the Nine Realms, if not all space. However, the TVA makes him realize that he can never reach it. Loki then settles on overthrowing the Time Keepers and ruling the TVA. When he meets Sylvie, he initially laughs at her desire to destroy the TVA, but then adopts her goal as his own. After he talks to He Who Remains, he reconsiders again. When Sylvie plants seeds for a new multiversal war, Loki takes the blame despite actively opposing her decision, and prepares to deal with its fallout. As his actor explains it:
  Tom Hiddleston: He feels that this is something he has done, a mistake that he has made, and he's invested in setting it right.
• Determinator: Not in the sense that he doggedly clings to a single goal or does not Know When to Fold 'Em, but in the way that he finds a will to get back up and go on despite all his failures or even in the face of imminent death, believing that the sun will indeed shine on him again.
  • He realizes this when he is about to die on Lamentis-1:
    Sylvie: Do you think that what makes a Loki a Loki is the fact that we're destined to lose?
    Loki: No. We may lose. Sometimes painfully. But we don't die. We survive.
  • One of the last scenes of the series is him processing what transpired in the Citadel. He gives himself some time to grieve before getting up and rushing back into action.
    • He spends centuries reseting the same few hours and training to achieve absolute mastery of temporal physics, purely to save his friends.
• Devious Daggers: Like his main counterpart, Loki is a character who relishes in chaos and who is fond of his twin daggers. He sometimes holds them in Reverse Grip, and occasionally uses them as a projectile. He is so obsessed with his weapon that the best metaphor he can come up with for love is a dagger.
• Did Not Get the Girl: He gave his all to Sylvie, but at the end of season 1 she shoves him away through the portal right after kissing him goodbye, betraying his trust and parting with him. By the end of season 2, he chooses to sacrifice his own happiness to live outside of time holding the timelines together, so she and the rest of reality can live their lives - without him.
• Disney Death: He gets pruned by Renslayer which seemingly kills him in "The Nexus Event", but The Stinger reveals that he was sent to The Void where he meets other Lokis.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The stuff he goes through in the series is similar to Real Life psychotherapy:
  • In the first episode, Loki sees the events of his past and future, like somebody with borderline personality disorder forced into dialectical behavior therapy, which focuses on making a client look at their behavior from a distance. Making Loki witness the hurt he has caused and learn the consequences of his actions by literally watching himself do everything is the physical embodiment of DBT.
  • In the Season 1 finale, Loki telling Sylvie, who is behind him in Character Development, "I just want you to be ok" is him answering the question "what would you say to your younger traumatized self?".
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Loki is initially too proud to allow anyone pity him. Mobius plays with this to get him on his side.
  Loki: Why are you in there sticking your neck out for me?
  Mobius: I'll give you two options, and you can believe whichever one you want. A, because I see a scared little boy, shivering in the cold. And you kinda feel bad for that ice runt. Or B, I just wanna catch this guy, and I'll tell you whatever I need to tell you.
  Loki: I don't need your sympathy.
  Mobius: Good, because I'm running out of it.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Not to the extent of Thor in Endgame, but Loki also sometimes drinks to cope with stress. After being captured by the TVA and faced with how meaningless his existence is, he gets "very full" on a train in "Lamentis", sings a drunken Homesickness Hymn and almost gets himself and Sylvie killed by accidentally breaking the TemPad. When he is forced to relive one of his worst memories in a Time Cell, he recalls how in the past he had a glass of wine so as to forget about it.
• Dual Wielding: He fights with two daggers, similar to Loki in Ragnarok.
• Emerald Power: Whether he casts an illusion or a Hand Blast, or enchants a giant angry cloud his spells are bright green.
• Emotionally Tongue-Tied: A smooth talker when it comes to lies, Loki struggles to find the words when he sincerely apologizes to the memory of Lady Sif, and later tries to tell Sylvie about his feelings for her. As he puts it, this is too new for him.
• Emotional Regression: After a traumatic experience of watching key future events of his life and his own death by strangling, Loki temporarily turns into a talky, enthusiastic and irresponsible Manchild with Mobius unwillingly filling in the role of a parent looking after a hyperactive kid. It ends with Loki getting drunk and dooming himself and Sylvie to die on Lamentis. After this, he comes to his senses, apologizes to Sylvie and starts to behave like an adult again.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: The first episode of Loki has Mobius show him what would have happened if he'd continued into the events of The Dark World. Loki is devastated to learn he would have played a role in his mother's death and watching a recording of her final moments distresses him even further. His demands to know where Frigga "really" is are the first time this version has shown concern for anyone other than himself.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Loki gets emotional watching his future where Odin calls him his son, and Thor reconciles with him. This shows that Loki cares about both of them despite stating otherwise in The Avengers merely a day ago. He then goes on to form a bond with Sylvie that's so strong it causes a Nexus Event during an apocalypse, something that isn't supposed to be possible.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • He's not a huge fan of the Time Variance Authority as he views them as people dictating the fate of billions of folks and thus eliminating free will.
  • He calls out the other Variant (Sylvie) on using a cowardly trick, Demonic Possession, even if it is clever, and urges her to fight him directly in the name of honor. Of course, afterwards he's interested in the technique, suggesting that he's trying to lure his opponent out.
  • He doesn't look favourably on how the wealthy of Lamentis-1 are leaving the poor ordinary citizens to die when the moon and its planet are about to collide.
  • He is disturbed when Sylvie tells him that the TVA agents are actually brainwashed Variants. When he later tries to convince Mobius that it is true, he is outright shouting in frustration because he is now referring to all Variants as "us" rather than "those random guys I don't care about". This is about the point that seals his Heel–Face Turn.
• The Evils of Free Will: In Loki, he gives another flowery speech about "liberating" people from making wrong choices by denying them freedom, but is very angry at the notion of the TVA restricting his own free will. When Mobius points out the inconsistency, Loki switches the topic.
• Ex-Big Bad: Loki was the Big Bad of Thor and The Avengers, a villain who lived long enough to become a protagonist and a hero of his own spin-off series.
• Existential Horror: Loki comes to realize that his "glorious purpose" was and always going to be as the villain that made his enemies "the best versions of themselves," and finally died an unglamorous death choking out a spiteful last line to a former master. When confronted with this fact, Loki has a mental breakdown and disoriented as he is, regresses into a Manchild. Shorty after that, he is gleefully yelling "nothing matters, nothing has any consequence", which reflects not only the reality of the apocalypse he visits but also the discovery he's made about his own life.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: After the Battle of New York, Loki has greasy slicked-back hair typically worn by sleeky villains. Skip forward to him working with the TVA and visiting Pompeii, and he has Messy Hair with more curls than in Ragnarok to show that he is now less evil, but more chaotic and messed up himself.
• The Face: Loki has ultimately taken on this role among his friends/loved ones at the TVA.
  • In "Lamentis", when he and Sylvie are facing imminent death with the destruction of the moon they are on, Sylvie is in a desperate state but Loki manages to make her feel better by telling her how amazing she is for having resisted the TVA for her entire life.
  • In "Breaking Brad", after Brad upsets Mobius by bringing up his previous life, Loki attempts to talk to Mobius and help him through his feelings, although Mobius makes it clear that he doesn't really want to talk about it and feels like he is better off not knowing anything about his past life.
  • In "Heart of the TVA", Sylvie berates Mobius for wanting to eat pie despite everything going on and accuses him of emotionally distancing himself from being a variant himself. Loki talks to her about it, defends Mobius, and then counsels Sylvie, telling her that she made the right choice to let Victor live and that trying to fix the TVA to protect the timelines is the best option that they have at the moment.
  • Loki's words are one major reason that convince Victor to help the TVA out by fixing the Temporal Loom. Throughout "Heart of the TVA", Loki keeps verbally reassuring him. When Victor first arrives at the TVA and is apprehensive, Loki tells Victor that it's ok and motivates him by telling him that he is the only one who can help them. Later, when O.B. asks Victor to scan his temporal aura, Victor is apprehensive again and O.B.'s literal reply that he hasn't tested it yet doesn't help to alleviate his concerns. But after Loki firmly assures Victor that he will be fine, Victor does it.
• Face Death with Dignity: When they are about to die on Lamentis, Sylvie tries to hold it together but visibly panics, while Loki serenly reassures and compliments her, and smiles at her almost unbothered by what is going on around them. The TVA save them at the last moment.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: He constantly falls victim to this before he gets humbled a bit:
  • Loki's dramatic speech falls flat because the Mongolians he's talking to don't understand English.
  • During his trial, Loki declares himself guilty "...of this!", and gestures dramatically. The guards just start snickering about his attempt to use magic, because the TVA is able to easily nullify it.
  • He stands up to deliver a dramatic speech only for Mobius to think that Loki is trying to attack him and put Loki back on his chair with the Time Twister. Mobius realizes his mistake and offers Loki to try again, to which Loki quietly replies that it won't be meaningful the second time around.
• Family of Choice: By Season 2, Loki's friends at the TVA and Sylvie have become his found family, as confirmed by writer Eric Martin.
• Fate Worse than Death: Loki's ultimate fate in the Season 2 finale. Loki has a final talk with Mobius, with the latter reminding him that most purpose are more burden than glorious. Having realized what he must do, Loki destroys the Loom and saves the multiverse by taking the place of He Who Remains, thus resigning himself to live with his fear of being alone — for all eternity.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Throughout most of the first season, Loki is fairly awful to Mobius, constantly lying to him, hiding things from him, and even trying to manipulate him. Mobius, in turn, isn't above punishing him cruelly for every misdeed. But after all of the crap they went through together, including in the Void, however, the two are finally on the same page, clearly seeing each other as best friends. By season 2, they're nigh inseparable.
• Fish out of Water:
  • Not only has Loki been dragged out of his dimension and stripped of his powers, he's also introduced to a whole new level of reality and power, having to work with an agency that exists outside of time and space as he knows it.
  • After having been pruned, he dives deeper down the rabbit hole and finds himself in the Void, where he is nothing more than a Naïve Newcomer compared to the more seasoned Variants.
• Flaming Sword: Kid Loki lends him his short sword/dagger Lævateinn, when he and Sylvie choose to go after Alioth. Loki conjures a back scabbard with straps for it. While he sets the blade on fire to get Alioth's attention, he promptly sheathes it back up once he sees Classic Loki conjure up a much better distraction for the abomination.
• Foil:
  • To Sylvie, his female Variant he falls in love with. Both are sarcastic loners with an affinity to magic, but Sylvie is goal-driven, not self-aware and too afraid to trust, and casually resorts to violence. Loki gets disillusioned in his "glorious purpose", becomes introspective and learns to connect to others, and prefers diplomacy and guile. In the end, Sylvie can't see past revenge, while Loki attempts to consider everyone's best interest.
  • To He Who Remains, the Big Bad of the series. Both are villains who are called devils and muse on the pitfalls of free will. However, He Who Remains distrusts his nature so much that he forces a narrative upon all of existence just to keep his evil variants in check, while Loki fails to become a God-Emperor but comes to admire some of his alternate selves and seeks redemption. As the antagonist and the protagonist, they implicitly take sides in the good old dispute between Hobbes and Rousseau about human nature.
• The Four Loves: In the series, he discovers the capacity for all four types in order, climbing a moral ladder of sorts. In the first episode, he expresses love for his family ("storge") when he watches the film with Frigga, Odin and Thor. "The Variant" shows his growing friendship ("philia") with Mobius. He meets Sylvie in "Lamentis", and by "Journey Into Mystery, they've developed romantic feelings for each other ("eros"). In the Season 1 finale, he drops his weapon and stands in Sylvie's way defenseless to prevent her from making a wrong choice. He tells her that the only thing he wants is for her to be ok, which is an expression of selfless love ("agape").
• Freak Out:
  • Loki has one when he watches a film via a Chronoscope with the major events of his life, from his mother's and his father's deaths up to Thanos strangling him to death. He is shocked and traumatized, and realizes that Being Evil Sucks and his entire life was for naught.
  • He has another one when he wakes up in the Void, not knowing if he is dead or alive. He struggles to understand what is going on and explains to his new companions that he's lost track of time and is overwhelmed by everything that's happened to him since New York.
  • In the Season 1 finale, Loki has the mother of all freakouts when he realizes that Sylvie's actions have allowed Kang the Conqueror to not only wreak havoc upon the multiverse, but that he has somehow ended up in the past of the TVA, and neither Mobius nor B-15 recognizes him at all. The God of Mischief is utterly terrified at the prospect of what's about to happen. He still hasn't gotten over this by Quantumania, as he is visibly shaken by the mere sight of one of Kang's variants, Victor Timely — who Mobius points out, looks even more unassuming than He Who Remains. Loki knows better.
• Geek: Proves to be a major geek toward magic during the series. In "The Variant" he stops Mobius' briefing to correct him, in detail, about magic terminology. He becomes increasingly interested in Sylvie's enchantment ability and spends quite a bit of time asking her how it works.
• Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: In "The Variant", Loki is the gleeful Manchild with too much energy, and Mobius is the jaded grump who is absolutely done with Loki.
• A God Am I:
  • He continues to pose as a God even after he learns how his life was supposed to play out. Mobius puts up with it and once calls Loki and Sylvie "orphan demigods" himself, but Sylvie won't have it and calls Loki a clown.
  • By Season 2, Loki has mellowed to the point that he still thinks himself a god but somberly acknowledges the responsibility that comes with that instead of boasting about it.
    Sylvie: Sounds like whatever we do, we're playing God.
    Loki: We are gods.
• Go Through Me: Loki drops his weapon and inserts himself between Sylvie's blade and He Who Remains, stopping her from killing He Who Remains in the last second. Sylvie is acting on emotions, and Loki sees no other way to make her think about the consequences, both for her own stake and the universe at large.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: Loki does not believe that anyone is "all bad" or "all good", which he tells to Mobius as seen in the page quote.
• Hair-Contrast Duo:
  • With Mobius. Loki has black hair and is unpredictable, talky and childish. Mobius has grey hair and is reasonable, unfazed and mature.
  • With Sylvie, whom Loki calls his "faded photocopy". She is his female Variant who dyes her hair blonde and apart from being a sarcastic magic user, is his opposite in every way.
• Hair Flip: Loki is concerned with his appearance, so he loves this move, just like his prime counterpart. This time around, Tom Hiddleston did not have to wear a wig, so in the first episode alone he flips his hair more often than in some films. Compare this to Sylvie who ties her hair before a battle so as not to fix it mid-fight.
• Hand Blast: In "Lamentis", Loki blasts the guards with green flames by pointing his hand at them. He's never used this ability in the films.
• Hates Being Alone: Loki was abandoned as an infant and ostracized by Thor's friends in his youth. In the Time Cell, he confesses to a memory of Lady Sif that he is afraid of being alone. So he would do anything to catch the attention of others, positive or negative. This also means that he greatly values genuine connections he forms with others, especially Sylvie and Mobius. In the end, his greatest fear comes true — he is completely alone again.
• The Hedonist: Loki cannot help but to relish in alcohol and song at the first opportunity to do so, even to the detriment of his own goals. He even names himself as a hedonist explicitly. Previously in Pompeii, he was shouting to doomed Roman citizens "enjoy your last meal" and "dance while you still can".
• Heel Realization: After Loki sees how his life was supposed to play out up until his death, he realizes that Being Evil Sucks and he is not a Dark Messiah with a "glorious purpose" but a villain who's wasted his life away:
  Mobius: You do know yourself.
  Loki: A villain [sighs].
• Heel–Face Turn: Largely sealed in "The Nexus Event", after steady character development. After he learns that all TVA workers are Variants and hears Sylvie's backstory, he decides to destroy it instead of taking over it, and tells Mobius the truth even though he gains nothing from it himself.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Loki is an Anti-Hero in the series, and he never puts his signature helmet with Horns of Villainy on until the Grand Finale.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: He starts the series as a villain turned a Nominal Hero whose primary weapon are his twin daggers, and he hides them with magic whenever he does not need them. He ends it as an Anti-Hero openly carrying around a short sword Kid Loki gave him.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Of the non-fatal variety. After He Who Remains reveals that the Temporal Loom is really a giant, sinister failsafe that will automatically prune all timelines but the Sacred Timeline, Loki realizes that no technology will stop it. So he steps outside himself, and mustering all of his magical power he destroys the Loom completely. But now, he must also be the one to keep the multiverse stable and together atop the throne that was once occupied by He Who Remains. The God of Mischief has become the God of Stories forever, completely alone.
• Hidden Depths: Loki is actually a decent singer, if his drunken Asgardian song is anything to go by.
• His Own Worst Enemy:
  • When Mobius re-captures him, Loki preemptively calls himself names to beat Mobius to it, one of them being the God of Self-Sabotage. Loki must have realized that getting drunk on Lamentis-1 and almost getting oneself killed as a result was not in his own best interest.
  • This becomes VERY apparent by "Journey Into Mystery" when he not only meets other variants of himself, but most of them betray one-another for a desperate power-grab. Even he can't believe it.
    Loki: This is a nightmare.
  • This then becomes the big turning point in the season 1 finale. After meeting He Who Remains, he learns that though the details had been changed a little, there truly was a Multiversal War that nearly destroyed all of reality, and that the TVA had become a Necessary Evil to keep it from happening again. Sylvie believes He Who Remains is lying and is too obsessed with her revenge to let it go, forcing Loki to fight her to keep the timeline from splitting apart.
• Holding Hands: Loki and Sylvie doing it yields unusual results:
  • She takes his hand when they are waiting for their doom on Lamentis-1, a moon that is about to collide with its planet, and he reacts in kind. The TVA immediately register a new timeline branch that is rapidly growing amidst an apocalypse, which was previously discussed to be impossible.
  • Sylvie realizes that she lacks the power to subdue Alioth by herself, so she takes Loki's hand and asks him to help her do it. They both close their eyes as they find strength within each other, and while Loki becomes an Instant Expert in Sylvie's core skill, enchantment, Sylvie then suddenly starts using his skills (Hand Blasts and telekinesis) in the Season 1 finale.
• Idiot Ball: Pretty guilty of this on numerous occasions:
  • After he lands in the Mongolian desert escaping S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, rather than snatch the Tesseract and escape, he instead wastes time posturing to some locals. This leaves him helpless when the TVA come for him.
  • While on Lamentis, he ends up getting drunk and causes a commotion despite him and Sylvie needing to be incognito. This results in the both of them getting into an altercation with the guards and the TemPad getting destroyed.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Despite his claims of wanting to rule the Nine Realms, Loki breaks into Tears of Joy after seeing his future in Ragnarok where both his father Odin and brother Thor acknowledge him and tell him they love him.
• I Just Want to Be Special:
  • Even after Loki realizes that his entire life was for nought, he won't give up on the idea of being special. If he can't be a God-King, he'll at least prove that he is the "superior" version out of all the Loki Variants. Mobius knows Loki well enough to try to exploit it:
    Mobius: I believed, stupidly, that insecure need for validation would motivate you to find the killer. Not 'cause you care about the TVA mission or being a hero, but because you know this Variant is better than you and you can't take it.
  • When the TVA have recaptured him and drag him through the corridors, his most pressing concern is that he is pacified by only two guards while Sylvie got four, which he finds insulting. However, when Mobius lies that Sylvie is dead and finally calls him the "superior" Loki, this praise brings him no joy and completely slips his attention since he is too busy Trying Not to Cry. He then drops this motivation for the rest of the series.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: After a good bit of needling from Sylvie, and a few stiff drinks, Loki finally admits what he's wanted his entire life: Friends. His narcissism, selfishness, scheming, pranks and destructive ploys for control, the attention whoring, they are all products of someone who is terrified of being alone, but doesn't know how to make and have friends. When he finally does find the place and people he belongs with - the TVA crew - it finally dawns on him that this is who he truly is.
• Immune to Mind Control: Sylvie is unable to enchant Loki because his mind is too strong and he is a skillful magic user himself.
• In Spite of a Nail: The Sacred Timeline Loki split off from this one following the events of The Avengers (2012), and throughout Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, and the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War was ultimately able to pull a Heel–Face Turn thanks primarily to the influence of his adopted family. While this version of Loki never again encounters Thor, Frigga, or Odin, he still ends up similarly becoming a bona fide hero thanks to the influence of people he ends up meeting on his journey, primarily Sylvie and Mobius.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: After some humbling at the hands of the TVA, Loki admits that he doesn't enjoy hurting and killing people but he does so anyway because it makes him feel strong and in control.
• Informed Flaw: His narcissism, which has been pointed out by many characters, including himself. But as mentioned in this video, this Loki displays few narcissistic traits beyond vanity, especially when compared to his Sacred Timeline variant who has displayed more self-serving traits post-Avengers than this Loki ever did. Even his feelings for Sylvie aren't really an example of him being a narcissist despite Mobius's judgments, given that the latter has very little in common with Loki that she could qualify as a completely different person.
• Instant Expert: Sylvie had years to teach herself the skill of enchantment and practice it on easy targets like ordinary humans. Loki has several minutes to learn how to help her enchant a giant sentient Fog of Doom before it devours both of them. Sylvie briefly explained how she does it back on Lamentis, and states that they "are the same", so the skill should come naturally. It does.
• Irony: Karma is a harsh mistress:
  • In The Avengers, Loki calls Steve Rogers, a Human Popsicle "a man out of time" in order to demean him. Loki doesn't know that his own timeline will soon be deleted and he'll become a prisoner to the TVA stranded in the dimension outside of time himself.
  • Later in The Avengers, Loki laughs at Nick Fury being deprived of the Tesseract and "reminded what real power is". In a few days, Loki himself is deprived of the Tesseract and faced with the greatest power in the universe.
  • Ravonna stabs Loki In the Back with her pruning stick similar to how Loki stabbed Coulson to death in The Avengers. Clark Gregg who plays Coulson was very satisfied with the payoff on his character's behalf.
  • In the end, Loki, who abused Thor's trust and tricked or betrayed him many times, gets betrayed by Sylvie, the one person he chose to trust.
  • He spent much of The Avengers (2012) and the first season of Loki claiming he is burdened with glorious purpose and wanting to sit on a throne to rule above all others. When he develops as a person and abandons his previous megalomaniac ambitions, he ends up burdening himself with the glorious purpose of maintaining all the timelines, sitting on the throne of He Who Remains, the man who stood above everyone else at the end of time.
• It's All About Me: Loki initially believes that the Variant wants to find him and to rule the TVA with him. He says that both to Mobius when he is bluffing in the tent and to the Variant when he meets her. This is what he wants himself, so he assumes the other Loki would want the same. To his astonishment, the Variant says that this is not about him at all right after mopping the floor with him.
• It's All My Fault: When Loki finds Mobius in the Season 1 finale, he says "we did it, we freed the Timeline", taking responsibility for what happened in the Citadel. He feels guilty despite literally putting his neck on the line to prevent it and not even being around when Sylvie killed He Who Remains, because she has tricked him and teleported him back into the TVA before that.
• It's the Journey That Counts: In the end, there was no real purpose behind all his struggles before the Threshold. He Who Remains wanted to meet him and could have easily plucked him from the timestream at any moment. Loki had to walk his road only because he needed to change:
  He Who Remains: You know you can't get to the end until you've been changed by the journey. This stuff, it needs to happen — to get us all in the right mindset to finish the quest.
• Jay Walking Will Ruin Your Life: He has attempted to wipe out or conquer civilizations, which does not ring a bell for the TVA, but is convicted to be erased from reality for picking up a blue cube that has landed next to him and teleporting into a Mongolian desert.
• Jerkass Realization: While being subjected to a Cool and Unusual Punishment in a Time Cell, he apologizes to the memory of Sif, and admits that he is a jerk:
  Loki: I'm a horrible person. I get it. I really am. I cut off your hair because I thought it'd be funny. And it's not. I crave attention... because I'm... I'm a... I'm a narcissist. And I suppose it's... it's because I'm scared of being alone.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Mobius is dead-on convinced that there's a heart of gold inside him with faith as the only thing to go on. Loki is given plenty of chances to prove him right, and eventually, he does — after a lot of false starts, betrayals and schemes, though.
• Jerk Justifications: During his first interrogation, Loki initially poses as a Dark Messiah who intends to save humans from the hardship of choice, but Mobius shows that his explanations are incoherent. Loki then attempts to appeal to his nature as the God of Mischief. Having run out of justifications, he dismisses the TVA and their line of questioning as irrelevant and absurd, even though he knows better.
• Kick the Dog: He just had to swat Miss Minutes, a cute living clock, with a magazine to prove that he is not exactly nice. Though in hindsight after the Season 1 finale this also counts as Asshole Victim.
• Large Ham: In the Time Theater, Loki stands up to deliver a dramatic speech that disparages the TVA, all while Milking the Giant Cow.
• Leitmotif: Loki Green Theme by Natalie Holt which underlines his chaotic and mysterious nature and has both dramatic and slower and pensive bits.
• Lonely Together: Both Loki and Sylvie never were in any serious relationship. She has been a survivor on the run all her life, and he was barely tolerated by Thor's friends before he severed all ties to Asgard. Since they are variants of each other, they quickly find common ground and fall for each other.
• Loner-Turned-Friend: When Mobius saves Loki from being "reset" and talks to him in the elevator, Loki refuses to shake his hand and is aggressive towards him. In a Time Cell, Loki realizes that the driving reason behind his cruel tricks is that he is afraid of being alone and is desperate for attention, even if it's negative. By "Journey Into Mystery", he refuses to shake Mobius's hand again... only to hug Mobius and call him his friend. Loki also becomes Sylvie's soulmate and refuses to leave her in danger.
• Loser Deity: Loki, the God of Mischief hears that losing is in his nature from two unrelated people in a single day, Coulson in The Avengers and Mobius in Loki. Coulson also notes that Loki lacks conviction to succeed, while Mobius comments on how Loki was not born to rule but rather to be a stepping stone for the heroes to achieve greatness.
• Love Hurts: Sylvie, the one person he chose to completely open up to and put above himself betrays his trust and deprives him of choice. She literally pushes him away (through the time door) right after kissing him goodbye. Loki is heartbroken.
• Love Redeems: His feelings for Sylvie are one of the key catalysts of his change of heart. He sincerely admires her, he sees himself in her, and loving her teaches him both to care for the other and to love himself.
• Manchild: When Mobius calls Loki a little boy desperate for validation, he is not too far off the mark. In "The Variant", Loki swats away Miss Minutes as if she were a fly, is hyperactive and won't shut up for a second, shushes back a TVA employee who shushed at him in the archives for being too loud, and is a bit too excited to explain his theory with a salad and then to prove it right in Pompeii.
• Manly Tears:
  • His eyes get wet when Mobius shows him his mother's death and explains how Loki inadvertently caused it. Later, he sneaks into the room with the Chronoscope alone and shamelessly cries as he watches the remaining events of his life and his eventual death at the hands of Thanos unfold before him.
  • Reading about the destruction of Asgard and the deaths of over 9,000 Asgardians in Thor: Ragnarok causes tears to start welling up in his eyes.
  • He cries in the Season 1 finale, when he confesses to Sylvie that he does not want a throne and just wants her to be ok. It moves her so much that she finally believes him and kisses him.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • "burdened with glorious purpose" is one of Loki's phrases which he liked to use when describing himself and his inflated ego in his villainous days. The finale of Season 2 of Loki is titled "Glorious Purpose", and indeed he is burdened with it. It sums up his character development and redemption perfectly, in order to defy He Who Remains and his sacred timeline, as well as save Sylvie's life and the rest of existence, Loki Takes a Third Option and instead replaces the loom and He Who Remains with himself, ascending into a position far beyond others to the point he is now the one who maintains timelines and existence as whole, but is left forever alone. Loki is indeed burdened with glorious purpose and it is self inflicted, but he did so to save his friends.
  • The observation "You're going to lose. It's in your nature." from Avengers and how through his villainy and failures Loki makes others shine all the brighter is also a recurring theme through the show. Loki constantly wrestles with the fact he is the villain, that his infinite possible lives are filled with defeat and death. Even after joining the TVA he's faced with no-win situations, such as choosing between the brutality of the Sacred Timeline or the seeming oblivion of the Multiversal War. The end of the series in season 2 episode 6 however has Loki turning this fact about himself on its head after having the fact he will lose brought up to him yet again by He Who Remains. This time, Loki decides to destroy He Who Remains's failsafes and use himself as a Barrier Maiden to hold back the worst horrors of the Multiversal War, saving the multiverse at the cost of his own happiness and freedom: Loki loses everything, but in turn makes everyone the better for it.
  • In Thor, Loki's last line to Odin and Thor is "I could have done it! For you! For all of us!" in regards to his genocidal campaign to destroy Jotunheim. At the end of Loki, his last line to Sylvie and Mobius is "I know what kind of god I need to be. For you. For all of us." as he goes to try to save all worlds, all universes, instead, bringing his story and character full circle.
• Mental Time Travel: Once he starts mastering his time slipping abilities, this is how he initially uses it.
• Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication: Inverted. Loki prefers "diplomacy and guile", while Sylvie prefers to go for brute force approaches where her possession ability won't work. This is reinforced by Loki's skill with illusion magic, while Sylvie's own magical abilities are limited to single-target possession.
• Metaphorgotten: This version has a habit of trying to use elaborate metaphors but losing track of the point he was trying to make. It happens with his salad metaphor in "The Variant" and again with the "love is a dagger" speech to Sylvie in "Lamentis". The second one, however, while initially seems silly, turns out to be very accurate in the Season 1 finale.
• Mind over Matter: Just like in the main timeline, he has some telekinetic powers. "Lamentis" has an impressive display where he stops and pushes back an entire building that was about to collapse on top of him with a flip of his head. In the Season 1 finale, he pushes Sylvie back without touching her and sends a chair flying across the room with magic to prevent her from reaching He Who Remains. His most impressive display is in the series finale where he destroys the overloaded Loom all by himself.
• Mirror Character:
  • To Sylvie, his female Alternate Self. Both are Frost Giants who were adopted by the Asgardian royal family. Both are talented magic users, Deadpan Snarkers and loners who use a lot of defense mechanisms to cover up insecurity. When they first meet, they immediately mirror each other's Slasher Smiles and echo each other's phrases ("me I presume", "you are in my way"). They eventually both fall in love and fight each other.
  • To Doctor Strange, another sorcerer. Both go through Break the Haughty, hear similar phrases "This isn't \ it's not about you" and "Open your eye(s)" from a female character and see visions of the multiverse (the Ancient One forces it on Steven in his first film, and Loki sees the Sacred Timeline and hears voices of various MCU characters when he helps Sylvie to enchant Alioth).
• Mirror Match: In the Season 1 finale, he fights Sylvie for the right to decide the fate of the multiverse. While she is attacking and he is defending against her, as Variants of each other they use similar moves and spells.
• Misery Builds Character: His arc in the series is a prolonged Trauma Conga Line, with him reacting to loss of anyone and everything he cares about on top of being emotionally and physically humiliated. In the process, he learns some hard truths about himself and changes for the better.
• Motor Mouth: Despite claiming otherwise, Loki loves to hear himself talk. Mobius is annoyed and comments on it several times, Hunter B-15 has to shush him down in Roxxcart, and Sylvie who does not share this trait resorts to Copycat Mockery when she first meets Loki.
  Mobius: Just shut up! Please. What happened to the guy I met on the elevator? Who didn't like to talk. Remember him?
• Mundane Utility: His mother started with teaching him non-offensive magic, and he often uses it for mundane purposes. He dries his clothes with magic, a handy spell for someone adventuring alongside the God of Thunder. He later summons tiny fireworks out of his palm to impress Sylvie, conjures a blanket around the two of them and gives himself straps with a scabbard on the back for the sword given to him by Kid Loki. He uses magic to set said sword on fire and use it as a flare to distract Alioth.
• Narcissist: Like his Sacred Timeline counterpart this version has an extremely high opinion of himself. Mobius notes that he's such a "seismic narcissist" that it makes sense he would fall in love with Sylvie as she's an alternate version of himself. Of course, given how drastically different Sylvie is from Loki that she could be considered a completely different person, this narcissism comes off as an Informed Flaw.
• Nature Versus Nurture: Despite being a Variant of the same being, Loki does not have much in common with Sylvie, because unlike her he was raised as an Asgardian prince with a loving mother not knowing that he was adopted. They share natural affinity to magic and snark, but he is more insecure and more educated, and has different skills and quirks.
• Nervous Tics: Just like his Sacred Timeline counterpart, Loki has a tendency to fidget with his hands when he is nervous. One moment where he does this is when he is waiting outside of Renslayer's office in "The Variant" after having busted Mobius's mission.
• Nice Guy: It took a long, long, long time, but after a heaping helping of humbling and existential horror, Loki the God of Mischief grew as a person and is firmly on the side of the angels as of Season 2, becoming one of the most heroic characters in the MCU. There's very few people he doesn't get along with, manages to bring out Sylvie's best traits, and his kindness towards Victor Timely is the reason why the latter chooses the TVA over Renslayer and Miss Minutes. He considers the main TVA crew to be his friends, and there's very little he wouldn't do for them, even Casey and B-15. That said, he does still have occasional bouts of ruthlessness, such as when he tortures Brad, though that was also planned out by Mobius.
  • To a smaller extent, his kindness and plucky attitude towards facing Alioth is also what convinces Kid Loki, Classic Loki and Alligator Loki to help them. He even introduces them as "my friends" to Sylvie and Mobius, despite only knowing them for a couple of hours at most.
• Nominal Hero: In the first half of the series, Loki is blatantly only helping the TVA out of a sense of self-preservation and a desire to overthrow the Time-Keepers, even trying to recruit Sylvie as his lieutenant. As he goes through Character Development and more about the TVA is revealed, he becomes more of a traditional hero rather than the villain he started off as.
• Not Afraid to Die: When Loki and Sylvie are about to die on Lamentis as it collides with its planet, he is dissonantly serene, and only looks anxious for a split second when he sees the debris raining down from the sky. When they are brought for an execution before the Time Keepers, he is defiant and dares them to do their worst. In the Void, Classic Loki says that if Loki leaves their hideout, he'll be murdered, to which Loki replies "so be it" because this is the fate he was destined to anyway.
• One Head Taller: Sylvie seems tiny next to Loki who is much taller than her.
• Only Sane Man: Becomes this when surrounded by variants of himself in the Void. During Boastful Loki's coup of Kid Loki's bunker with President Loki, he quickly becomes exasperated and embarassed at the multiple betrayals between the variants that happen in very quick succession, his body language saying "Is this really what it's like dealing with me?"
  • In fact, his very first words at being confronted by the gang of Lokis outside the trap door are "This is a nightmare."
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Loki finds Mobius and tries to explain what happened in the Citadel at the End of time, he is frightened, agitated and speaks too quickly. He's never behaved this way before, which speaks volumes about how dangerous Kang is in Loki's opinion.
• Opportunistic Bastard: In Endgame, he immediately snatches up the Tesseract after it was accidentally dropped and opened from its case to teleport out of the place and escape imprisonment. During his trial in Loki, he attempts to not only prove himself not guilty, but also secure the TVA's people and resources to continue his crusade against the Avengers... only to find out that this time his charms won't work.
• Oppose What You Suffered: His main motive throughout the second half of the series. He's been through TVA processing, Kangaroo Court and fancy interrogation techniques and does not want it on himself or anyone else, so he needs to stop them together with Sylvie.
• Orc Raised by Elves: He is a Frost Giant raised by Asgardians, and the series makes it clear that he identifies with his foster nation. He recalls an Asgardian proverb (that is actually from The Saga of the Volsungs), sings an Asgardian song (that is actually Norwegian), and calls Asgardians "my people". Even the soundtrack for Loki uses Nordic instruments, such as a Nyckelharpa and a Hardanger fiddle.
• Order Versus Chaos: As a God of Mischief, Loki should default to chaos, which he does when it comes to his pranks. However as a Dark Messiah and a would-be ruler in The Avengers he is rooting for "order" with him in the lead. While he ditches this particular goal, he remains torn on the matter. He both praises free will and realizes the danger of an Evil Power Vacuum, and pauses when He Who Remains offers to choose between the two. At the end of Season 2, he takes a third option by not replacing He Who Remains, but the Loom, reweaving the timelines into something like Yggdrasil as he takes the lonely throne at the end of time, becoming the God of Time/God of Stories - Free Will is Free (Chaos), but it's stabilised and maintained by an external force (Order).
• Other Me Annoys Me: He quickly realizes why Thor was so annoyed with him after five minutes of talking to Sylvie – though in that case, there's another undertone. He has a rather less flattering opinion of most of the other variants he meets in The Void, especially when they all start betraying each other.
• Overshadowed by Awesome:
  • He manages to guess the potential hiding place of the Variant during Mobius's lunch break, something the entire TVA were unable to do for a while. However, Sylvie successfully enacts her plan and gets away, making Loki look Too Clever by Half in comparison.
  • He attempts to distract a gigantic cloud of doom with a flaming sword, and later enchants it together with Sylvie, subduing the creature that devoured entire realities and helped He Who Remains to end the multiversal war. However, this pales in comparison to Classic Loki creating a copy of Asgard with his magic and sacrificing himself to help the two of them.
• Paradox Person: In Endgame, he disappears with the Tesseract the time-travelling Avengers are after, a move he never made in the prime timeline. In Loki, the Time Variance Authority catch him, delete the branching timeline he created and are ready to erase him because he is a Variant that's not supposed to exist. Hunter B-15 outright calls him "a cosmic mistake."
• Perspective Reversal:
  • In the beginning, Mobius is challenging who Loki is and forcing Loki to reinvent himself. In "The Nexus Event," Loki is the one who says that Mobius is lying to himself, and forces Mobius to re-examine where his loyalties lie.
  • When Loki meets Sylvie, he is the unreasonable one with Skewed Priorities who gets the two of them into trouble, and Sylvie constantly calls him out on his half-baked plans. In the Season 1 finale, Loki is the sole voice of reason, while Sylvie blindly rushes into action disregarding the consequences.
• Pet the Dog: When Hunter B-15 is released from Sylvie's mind control and collapses to the floor, Loki instinctively reaches out to check if she's alright, despite her antagonizing Loki before that. This shows that he is not entirely selfish.
• The Power of Love: Loki and Sylvie holding hands is a Nexus event that results in the timeline branching off so steeply that the TVA are able to register it even amidst an apocalypse - when everyone dying means that nothing matters from a timeline perspective. The implication is that, somehow, they were about to survive the apocalypse through The Power of Love before the TVA arrived to arrest them for it. Mobius laughs when he realizes that the two Variants of the same being formed a romantic bond so strong that it was literally shattering reality.
• The Power of Trust: In one of their first conversations, Loki tells Mobius that trust is for children and dogs. As further events unfold, he has to learn to trust and be trustworthy, which earns him friends, allies and small perks like a Cool Sword. In the end, Sylvie betrays his trust by sending him back to the TVA while she finishes her mission alone.
• Proverbial Wisdom: Mobius both lampshades Loki's habit of using flowery sayings by calling him a "big metaphor guy" and deconstructs it by pointing out that it is merely a play that "makes [Loki] sound super smart." Even after seing his scripted future in the Time Theater, Loki still tries to appear more profound than he is, but repeatedly falls flat on his face. When Loki refers to an Asgardian proverb, Mobius realizes that Loki is stalling for time. Later, Mobius does not appreciate his "salad" metaphor, and Sylvie calls his "dagger" metaphor terrible. In the second half of the series, Loki drops all pretense, including this manner of speech.
• Physical God: While Loki was already a god in a technical sense, thousands of years developing Time Master powers raise Loki to the point that he ends up becoming the God of Stories, Barrier Maiden for the entire multiverse and one of the most powerful beings in existence.
• Psychological Projection: His default psychological defence in the first episode, just like in The Avengers:
  • He states that for most people "choice breeds shame and uncertainty and regret", because others always take wrong paths. When Mobius asks if Loki is an exemption from this rule, Loki insults Mobius to avoid answering the question.
  • When he watches a video of his supposed death, it looks like his future self is saying "you will never be a god" to the Variant Loki rather than to Thanos. The worst insult Loki tossed at Thanos when he died was the thing he himself feared the most.
  • He initially accuses the TVA of being a fraud, the weak who claim divinity and who've conjured a cruel elaborate trick to control others through fear. After seeing the recording of the future events of his life and his eventual death, the disillusioned and broken Loki repeats this diatribe word for word, but now he refers to himself.
• Queer Establishing Moment: In the Loki episode Lamentis, when Sylvie asks Loki about his romantic interests, her specific wording is whether he "had any interest in other princes or princesses". Loki replies to this "a bit of both", establishing him as bisexual, which is true to his orientation in the comics and his status as a shapeshifter. Loki director Kate Herron expressed great eagerness at including this detail, as it made Loki's orientation MCU canon.
• Quirky Curls: After Loki gets apprehended and processed by the TVA, his hair becomes messy and curly, especially in the Pompeii scene. Loki meets almost every stereotype associated with such hair: he is non-conforming, energetic, eccentric, intelligent and fun.
• Redemption Demotion: As soon as he stops being a villain, he becomes weaker in physical combat. Similar to how his prime counterpart could not put up much of a fight to Valkyrie, this Loki has a hard time fighting guards and enchanted humans. This effect does not extend to his magic.
• Redemption Promotion: In Season 2, as he becomes more classically heroic, he becomes more and more magically powerful - possibly as a result of witnessing what Old Loki was capable of - and masters his time slipping to the point of becoming a fully-fledged Time Master who can beat He Who Remains at his own game, and then combining the two to become the God of Time/God of Stories, outgambitting He Who Remains by replacing not him but the Loom, protecting the timelines.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni:
  • In the early episodes, Loki, the energetic Cloudcuckoolander, is the Red Oni, and Mobius, the jaded mentor, is the Blue one. Mobius is calm, reasonable and mature, while Loki is agitated, eccentric and childish.
  • By the Season 1 finale, Sylvie, the feral cat, is the Red Oni and Loki, the thoughtful prince is the Blue one. She is defiant, determined, rough around the edges and easily resorts to violence, Loki is pensive, introspective, cultured and prefers to talk things out.
• Recruiting the Criminal: Mobius saves Loki from being "reset" by recruiting him to stop another Loki Variant that's been killing TVA agents across time.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl: A male variant. He gets subjected to the franchise's trend of Manservice in the first episode, when he's stripped of his Asgardian clothes, with the camera angled in such a way that the audience doesn't get to see everything.
• Rich Language, Poor Language: Loki grew up as a prince and speaks "upper-class" posh English like all Asgardians from previous films. Unlike him, Sylvie speaks with a less prestigious local British accent (Nottingham, to be precise) to reflect her relative lack of education and life on the run.
• Rousseau Was Right: The TVA tries to convince Loki of the opposite, stating that he is doomed to cause pain and suffering and death and will always be an "evil lying scourge." However, his experiences turn a seemingly sadistic and power-hungry would-be god into a decent person capable of friendship, trust, and love, proving that he was never intrinsically evil.
• Sadistic Choice: He Who Remains offers Loki and Sylvie to either kill him and destroy the TVA, which would lead to a multiversal war with numerous Kangs in command or rule the TVA together, restricting free will. Loki recognizes that both options are bad and wants time to consider, leaning to the second one. Sylvie makes the choice for him by killing He Who Remains, but Loki still feels responsible because he says to Mobius "we" made a terrible mistake. He gets to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and take a third option, balancing both - the multiverse opens up, but he stabilises it so that the TVA can still protect the multiverse from the Kangs.
• Screw Destiny: He's not exactly fond of the idea of the Time Variance Authority and how they seem to control all of time (including his actions), viewing it as an insult to what he's achieved.
• Screw Yourself: Loki develops genuine feelings for Sylvie who's an alternate timeline version of himself. Mobius calls him out on how narcissistic that is. He claims that two versions of the same being becoming romantic is pure chaos and the reason they caused a Nexus Event with a branched timeline growing with unseen speed amidst an apocalypse which are established as not causing Nexus Events because everything gets wiped out regardless of what changes someone makes. After several episodes of longing looks and Holding Hands, they acknowledge their feelings in the Season 1 finale and kiss only to immediately break up after that.
• Seen It All: After all he's been through, Loki takes the existence of an alligator version of himself in stride:
  Loki: ... and now I'm surrounded by Variants of myself, plus an alligator, which I'm heartbroken to report I didn't even find all that strange!
• Seriously Scruffy: By the end of season 1, Loki looks like he's been through hell and back. His clothes are dirty and shabby, and he is in desperate need of a shower and a comb. He is usually very concerned with his appearance, and his indifference to it shows how stressful his last experiences have been for him.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Loki is prone to using long, rare or dated words as he tries to explain things, either because he deliberately tries to make an impression or when he is too excited.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: At the end of "Science/Fiction", Loki learns to control his timeslipping and turns it into this trope as a superpower. He now can, among others, go back to any point in time where he once was, and change what happened there. He takes it to the next degree in "Glorious Purpose" by going all the way back to the confrontation with He Who Remains, mastering his temporal powers, and finally not fixing the Loom, but replacing it.
• Sexshifter: Due to being a shapeshifter, the TVA lists Loki's sex as "fluid" in their file on him in Loki.
• Shabby Heroes, Well-Dressed Villains: The costume of He Who Remains is a bit of a mismatch as different elements of it pertain to different time periods, but he is still imposing in his purple and green outfit with the cloak. When Loki and Sylvie arrive at his doorstep, they look like they've crawled out of a dump.
• Shameful Strip: While being processed by the TVA he's forced into a room with a robot that burns away his Asgardian clothes. Shoulders-Up Nudity and a bit of Scenery Censor preserve his modesty to the audience, but considering how modestly dressed his main timeline counterpart was it's particularly jarring to see this version so exposed.
• Shapeshifters Do It for a Change: Loki is a shapeshifter whose TVA file states that his sex is fluid and who mentions that he is bisexual.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: In Loki, he once again wears suits: One where he assumes the identity of D.B. Cooper and a casual suit with a TVA blazer. Loki himself lampshades his love of suits when coming across a suspicious person in 2050, claiming he would've worn one even if he was disguising himself as someone else.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Loki is initially oblivious that he likes Sylvie, and when Mobius points out his crush on her and calls Sylvie his "girlfriend", Loki says this verbatim. He continues to deny that there is anything between them until the Season 1 finale.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: Both Sylvie in "Lamentis" and Mobius in "The Nexus Event" call him out on being a prince who has no idea how the real world works.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift:
  • He is forcefully stripped of his Asgardian costume and made to wear Institutional Apparel, and later a TVA costume to denote his change of status from a would-be God-Emperor to a prisoner to a hired expert. Shortly after he escapes that role by following Sylvie through the portal, he loses the TVA jacket and rolls up his sleeves, and as things go From Bad to Worse his clothes become increasingly dirty and disheveled — he has too much going on to bother hiding it with magic.
  • At the end of Season 2, he changes into a variant on his classic horned costume, becoming the God of Stories.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: He attempts to lecture Mobius on the futility of trust, but Mobius would have none of that:
  Loki: Trust is for children and dogs. There's only one person you can trust.
  Mobius: Yourself? I like it. Slap it on a T-Shirt.
• Skewed Priorities: Loki can't get his priorities straight after he's been deprived of his glorious purpose in the Time Theater. Getting drunk amidst an apocalypse to hamper your chance of survival? Great idea. Complaining that too few guards are dragging you towards Room101 and this is insulting? Priceless. He eventually abandons this behavior around "The Nexus Event".
• Small Name, Big Ego: He has a huge opinion of himself (at first), to the point that he really expects a much more competent and dangerous version of him to agree to be his lieutenant.
• Smart People Know Latin: In Pompeii, Loki proves himself smart by not only confirming his theory but also warning Roman citizens of their impending doom in fluent Classical Latin. He must have picked it as an elective while Thor was studying Groot. Loki's actor learned Classical Latin at the University of Cambridge, so he is able to deliver correct pronunciation.
• Spanner in the Works: Sylvie's plan to bomb the Sacred Timeline and lure out as many TVA agents as possible in order to get to the Time Keepers was years in the making. Loki botched it by opening a random portal underneath himself and Sylvie to escape getting pruned by Ravonna. It sent them away from the TVA without the means to quickly return.
• Strong as They Need to Be:
  • When it comes to magical strength, as a protagonist of his own spin-off show, Loki displays powers that he's never or barely used in the films where he is a supporting character. They don't contradict his established skill set, but these abilities would have come in handy in his previous appearances as well. In "Lamentis", he shoots green Hand Blasts at his foes and employs telekinesis to hold off a huge collapsing building, a skill that he used for minor Tantrum Throwing in The Dark World.
  • When it comes to physical strength, in The Avengers Loki has proven stronger than Steve Rogers, a super-soldier. However, it takes effort for Loki to subdue B-15, a human Hunter in the Time Theater; an ordinary human Sylvie enchants in Roxxcart mops the floor with him; on Lamentis (which is a Kree world in the comics) drunk Loki fights off Ambiguously Human train guards until two of them throw him out of the window; and in the room with the Time Keepers, Loki is able to defeat yet another two Ambiguously Human guards only after Sylvie tosses her blade to him. Still, in the Season 1 finale he evenly matches Sylvie who's shown to be a capable fighter inside the TVA when she is without their collar.
• Suddenly Shouting: This Loki did not lose his main counterpart's habit of abruptly raising his voice:
  Loki: Her name was Sylvie.
  Mobius: Ah, Sylvie. Lovely. How do you spell that? Is that with and I-E or just an I?
  Loki: IS SHE ALIVE?
• Surrounded by Idiots: He felt this way while watching the other Loki variants compulsively betray each other in an attempt to rule a wasteland. Loki realized that he needed to find a way out of the void on his own. What makes this a unique twist on the trope is that in addition to dealing with the fact that everyone in the void is useless, Loki has to come to terms with the fact that the idiots he's surrounded by are all him.
• Take a Third Option: He Who Remains leaves Loki with 2 options as the timeline collapses: Either kill Sylvie and stop the collapse, or let the Loom, which can no longer contain the branches even after being expanded, purge them all and destroy the TVA. Loki instead uses his now-mastered time powers to destroy the Loom and take its place, protecting the multiverse as a whole rather than ruling it.
• Taking the Heat: Loki attempts to take the blame from Sylvie and put it on himself by lying that he was the mastermind behind "the plan", and Sylvie is nothing but a meager pawn. This shows that he has come to care about her.
• Tantrum Throwing: In Loki, when Mobius shows him how Frigga died and taunts him about it, he is unable to use his magic, so he throws a chair at the screen of the Chronoscope instead.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With Sylvie on Lamentis. They stop fighting and make a truce in order to recharge the TemPad and use it to escape imminent death before the moon collides with its planet. This does not stop them from bickering.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: While there was a scene in The Avengers where Loki looks down from the Stark Tower upon all the destruction he caused in horror and even sheds a tear, little else in that film suggests that he is not a sadist who inflicts pain For the Evulz. However, as explored in the series, after the events of Thor he merely decided that he can only be a villain and played that part to perfection. He gets uncomfortable watching the scenes of violence from The Avengers via a Chronoscope, confesses to Mobius that he does not enjoy hurting people, and when He Who Remains calls him out on doing horrendous things, looks down in shame.
• The Three Faces of Adam: When he ventures in the Void alongside two other male Loki Variants, he is the Lord to the Kid Loki's young ambitious Hunter and the Classic Loki's older and wiser Prophet.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: "He Who Remains" instilled such unimaginable, existential dread in Loki that the mere glimpse of a Kang variant causes him to drop his usual nervous tics and just freeze. After Sylvie kills He Who Remains, Loki spends a good couple of minutes just staring into nothing, scared out of his mind of what's coming. Even looking at Victor Timely, who is by all accounts completely unassuming and just harmless all-together, completely fills him with terror, at least at first glance.
• Time Master: After what is implied to be millenia of practice, Loki's timeslipping evolves to the point that he can control time itself through thought alone and is able to pull others outside the flow of time and into his own personal timeline. It's to the point he ultimately replaces the Temporal Loom and manages the infinite number of branches himself.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Loki is taken out of the time stream at his rock bottom in The Avengers, where he hardly has any empathy left for anyone. In his series, he becomes a nicer and kinder person, from small acts like checking on B-15 when she collapses to deeply caring about the wellbeing of Sylvie and Mobius for their own sake, and being gravely afraid to make a wrong choice when it comes to the fates of every living being in the Season 1 finale.
• Trauma Conga Line:
  • Having just been defeated and beaten by the Hulk, Loki is captured by the TVA, stripped of his clothes, subjected to their tedious procedures, and is sentenced by a Kangaroo Court to be "reset".
  • Mobius saves him, but says that Loki has no agency in his life and is destined to always fail and cause pain, suffering and death as a deliberate example to others. He escapes only to find out that the TVA are so powerful that they use Infinity Stones as paperweights, and thus everything that he was just told is true.
  • Loki watches a film with future events of his life, including the deaths of his mother and father, and his own horrific death at the hand of Thanos, and has a Freak Out when he realizes that his existence is pitiful and meaningless.
  • He escapes the TVA but gets stuck on a moon that is about to crash into its planet with Sylvie, a female Variant of himself Loki comes to care about. He calmly accepts his fate.
  • The TVA save them in the last minute only to put Loki in a Time Cell where he has to relive the bad memory of being beaten and humiliated by Lady Sif over and over again until he begs on his knees for it to stop.
  • Mobius releases him but lies to him that they've killed Sylvie, which Loki does not take nicely, and then puts him back into the cell. Mobius has a change of heart and comes to help Loki only for Loki to witness how the TVA "prune" his friend. Shortly after, Loki himself is pruned.
  • He wakes up in a desolate wasteland called the Void surrounded by Variants of himself. They tell him that he is doomed to stay there, prompting another Freak Out.
  • He helps Sylvie to leave the Void, but Sylvie distrusts and betrays him. Back in the TVA, Mobius does not recognize him, so he believes he lost two people who cared about him.
• Troll: After Loki manages to put the Time Twister collar on Hunter B-15, he gets his revenge on her by endlessly resetting her location and yanking her back to the room entrance as she runs towards him and screams "stop it". He then gets bored and teleports her into the hallway. Though given his facial expression and the fact that he had just seen his Sacred Timeline counterpart's death, he's doing it more to vent his frustration than for amusement.
• Trying Not to Cry: He can barely hold it together in "The Nexus Event" when Mobius lies that Sylvie has already been pruned, and later when Mobius himself is pruned for real while Loki is Forced to Watch. The fact that Loki got so upset is a sign of just how much he cares about them.
• Twice Shy: Loki and Sylvie agree that Mobius's theory about their nexus event on Lamentis is totally wrong and ridiculous, even as they struggle to verbalize how much they mean to each other while cuddling under a single blanket. Having never been in a real relationship, both feel awkward and come off as two teenagers.
• The Unapologetic: Since Loki picks up after The Avengers, this variant initially acts as if he hasn't done anything even mildly reprehensible in his entire life, ever. Then Mobius thoroughly breaks him.
• The Unchosen One: Unlike his brother Thor, Loki was not destined for greatness, which Mobius makes clear when they meet.
• Unstuck in Time: At the end of Season 1, Loki has somehow ended up in the past of the TVA, before He Who Remains went into hiding behind the Time Keepers. Loki spends S2 E1 timeslipping between the past, present, and future until O.B. and Mobius pull him back into the present. After the Temporal Loom is destroyed, it starts to happen again in "Science/Fiction". A.D. Doug notes that his timeslipping actually is not random: Loki always ends up where he needed to be for some reason. He also tells Loki that he might be able to control it and after Loki identifies his motivation, namely protecting the people he cares about, Loki eventually gains the power to rewrite time.
• Villainous BSoD: After finding Casey's drawer full of deactivated Infinity Stones, and seeing how his life was supposed to play out, Loki realizes the meaninglessness of it all. When Mobius finds Loki, he expects further resistance, but Loki is no longer attempting to escape the TVA or defend his previous villanous actions and goals. He is just sitting on the floor, burying his face in his hands and Trying Not to Cry.
• Warrior Prince: Downplayed. Like his Sacred Timeline counterpart, this Loki relies more on magic and illusions instead of brute force.
• Weapon Twirling: As a show off to Sylvie, he tosses his twin daggers up and catches them mid-air.
• We Can Rule Together: When Loki first meets Sylvie, he offers her to become his lieutenant and help him overthrow the Time Keepers to take their place, but she is not interested. In the end, He Who Remains offers the two of them to take his place and rule over the TVA together. This time around, Loki no longer wants the throne, but recognizes the danger of an Evil Power Vacuum. Sylvie forces the choice on Loki by killing He Who Remains and unleashing the multiverse.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: When Hunter B-15 comes to "prune" him, he fights with her for his life. He also fights with Sylvie when they first meet each other. However, he does not really hurt either of them. He puts a Time Twister collar on B-15 and teleports her away, and sheaths his daggers mid-fight with Sylvie whom he repeatedly tries to talk down. In the Season 1 finale, he explicitly says that he does not want to hurt her and is merely defending himself against her until he drops his sword and just stands in her way.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: After all the "The Reason You Suck" Speeches Loki has heard during the first 4 episodes, Mobius gives him a word of encouragement:
  Mobius: You could be whoever, whatever you wanna be, even someone good. I mean, just in case anyone ever told you different.
• You Can't Go Home Again: He admits as much after learning about the TVA and his status as a Variant. Even if the timeline he came from hadn't been reset he wouldn't have been allowed to go back with the knowledge he now has of his intended path and fate. It appears to weigh on his mind — in "Lamentis", Loki drunkenly sings a song in Norwegian about him wandering alone in stormy black mountains while a voice calls for him to come home. Also, there's the fact that Asgard itself was completely destroyed in Ragnarok — so even if he manages to take the place of his now-deceased counterpart in the Sacred Timeline, he literally can't go home again.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Even Loki can't handle the incessant amount of backstabbing from all his other Variants in the Void, highlighting his Character Development throughout the show.

Sylvie Laufeydottir

Spoilers for Loki (2021) and all works set prior to it are unmarked.

Sylvie Laufeydottir

"I want a life. I want to live. What's wrong with wanting something?"

Known Aliases: Loki, The Variant, L0852, L1190, "Randy"

Species: Asgardian

Citizenship: Asgardian (Variant)

Affiliation(s): Asgard (formerly)

Portrayed By: Sophia Di Martino, Cailey Fleming (young)

Voiced By: Mireya Mendoza (Latin American Spanish dub), Elisa Beuter (European Spanish dub), Mayumi Sako (Japanese dub), Jennifer Gouveia (Brazilian Portuguese dub)

Appearances: Loki

"I grew up in apocalypses, Loki. I've lived through enough of them to know that sometimes it's okay to destroy something."

A female variant of Loki, hell-bent on a crusade against the TVA to avenge the life that was taken from her, evading and slaughtering their Minutemen as she plots to discover the way to the chamber of the Time-Keepers within the TVA headquarters and kill them.

For her Sacred Timeline counterpart, see here.
——

• Action Girl: Gets into a lot of melees and almost always wins, as she physically overpowers her opponents one on one (it always takes at least 2 people to be able to hold Sylvie down, and even then it's a struggle).
• Adaptation Amalgamation: A fairly complicated mix. The concept of a female version of Loki primarily comes from when evil-616 Loki hijacked Lady Sif's body, and also the female form of his genderfluid God of Stories incarnation (in 616, Loki has and is aware of multiple incarnations of himself that replace each other every time Ragnarok kills him and he must be reborn). Her name 'Sylvie' comes from Sylvie Lushton, a mortal girl who looked and had the power of Amora the Enchantress, who turned out to be an artificial creation by Loki primarily to amuse himself and annoy Amora. MCU Sylvie's powerset, moniker, and role as both a romantic love interest and someone being of similar personality to Loki come from Amora the Enchantress, who was presented in the 60s as being Loki's female equal in treachery and sometimes cohort in schemes. Their mutual attraction and pursuit of a romantic relationship were brought up even then◊, but both realized they were too similar and untrustworthy to make it work as they would just backstab each other. 50 real-world years later, they briefly became a couple when both became heroic due to magical morality inversion during the AXIS comic event, though the relationship did not last after the inversion ended.
• Adaptational Dye-Job: Lady Loki in the comics kept her original incarnation's black hair. Since she's combined with Sylvie Lushton in this continuity, as a grown-up she is portrayed as a blonde. However, as a child, she is shown to have dark brown hair, so she must have dyed it.
• Adaptational Modesty: Played with. Her namesake the Enchantress and the form of Sif that evil Loki hijacked both had Stripperiffic outfits. Sylvie Lushton alternated having a regular Midgard outfit and something similar to Amora the Enchantress' outfit. The female form of the God of Stories Loki, who was also an inspiration for Sylvie, always wears the same outfit as her male form, which is a feather-collared jacket over a mail shirt and three-quarter pants. Sylvie generally displays less skin than all the aforementioned Lokis however. The only bare skin Sylvie displays is her fingers and head. It is still very much a Form-Fitting Wardrobe Distaff Counterpart to Loki's Ragnarok-period garb though.
• Alternate Species Counterpart: Sylvie's file states that she's Asgardian, not a Frost Giant like Loki, though she was still adopted. Perhaps in her timeline, Laufey the Frost Giant was King of Asgard?
• Always Someone Better: She is a much better fighter than Loki as he is unable to subdue her without killing her no matter how many times he tries with his timeslipping abilities.
• Affably Evil: Gives a little boy in 16th century France a pack of bubble gum to enjoy, after the boy watched Sylvie massacre the entire TVA unit she lured there. Subverted as she's not actually evil.
• All for Nothing: As with most Lokis, her "glorious purpose" ultimately doesn't bring her anything she really wanted. She ends season 1 having betrayed the Loki that actually cared about her to kill He Who Remains, which rather than making her happy leaves her sobbing on the ground. And meanwhile, it seems an infinite number of even worse variants of He Who Remains have indeed already started to step into the vacuum created by killing him.
• Alliterative Name: She was born as Loki Laufeydottir before changing her first name into Sylvie.
• Alternate Self: She is a female Alternate Universe version of Loki, who was told that she is adopted. The TVA captured her and erased her reality when she was a child who was playing and admiring the Valkyries. She stole a TemPad and fled before her trial. Sylvie changed her name and has been hiding in apocalypses, killing TVA agents and stealing their reset charges for a very long time.
• Alternative-Self Name-Change:
  • She rejects being called "Loki." She took the name Sylvie when going on the run from the TVA, and kept it.
  • When she first sees Loki, she asks to be called "Randy" after seeing a nametag from a person she possessed. "Randy" is a relatively common nickname in America, being a diminutive of "Randall", but you'll find very few Randys elsewhere, especially in the UK, since "randy" is old slang for "aggressively horny". Not only does Loki take it as a childish insult, but it could also be a punny reference to the horns and attitude common to most Lokis!
• Always Someone Better: "The Variant" plays her up as a much more capable, intelligent version of Loki, with the TVA considering her far more of a threat and the male Loki being completely unable to match her in their first encounter. This is subsequently downplayed in the next episode, however, where Loki manages to get one over on her almost immediately after this. It is also shown that while her enchantment is powerful, it happens to be the only magic she knows due to having to learn it on her own.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • In the finale, Sylvie says that she was pruned before Loki even existed. Does she mean, "existed as a Variant" or was she born before him and Thor and had a different backstory?
  • Her ID in the TVA files Loki looks through in "The Variant" is L0852, however, her ID in the script He Who Remains shows her in the finale is L1190. Is it a Series Continuity Error, or were there several Sylvies?
  • Was she assigned female at birth, or did she use gender-bending magic at an early age to give herself a feminine body?
  • Who were her parents? What was her family like? While Laufey was definitely in the picture somehow (given her surname is Laufeydottir), Sylvie's TVA file gives her species as Asgardian, not Frost Giant like Loki rather traumatically discovered about himself. She also knew she was adopted all along and didn't carry any angst over it, and her mother died early in her childhood. She never mentions a Thor in her life, either. Was Sylvie perhaps adopted from Odin by an alternate-universe Laufey who was King of Asgard, in an inverse of Loki's situation?
  • What was her nexus event? Sylvie can't figure out what she did wrong as a child to cause the TVA to destroy her entire life, and Ravonna Renslayer claims not to remember what it was. The brief glimpse we're given of Sylvie's childhood, when she was still Loki, Princess of Asgard, suggests her "crime against the timeline" was simply being too well-adjusted and showing too many signs of growing up to become a physically-inclined hero who would have fought to defend Asgard and not a sly, resentful Anti-Villain like Loki is "supposed" to be. We see her playing a game with her toys where she acts out a brave Valkyrie slaying a dragon that was imperiling Asgard, and that's when the TVA showed up to arrest her, but it's never clarified if that was a would-have-been definitive point for her personality or not— though of course, it ended up being the moment that turned her into the TVA's worst nightmare.
• Anti-Hero: She opposes the TVA because they suppress free will and kill or brainwash Variants, so her intentions are pure. However, her methods are not — she's killed countless Variants who served the TVA, and she never acknowledges that her actions were far from benign or apologizes for that. She is also hell-bent on revenge and unable to see past it. Even when she finally moves on from her mission after killing He Who Remains by starting a mundane life in Broxton, Oklahoma, she's essentially a heroic version of a Retired Monster about it.
• Backseat Driver: When Mobius picks her up in the Void, she gives him advice on how to drive the car from the back seat not dissimilar to how main Loki did it to Thor in The Dark World.
  Mobius: God, you really are one of you.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: In "The Nexus Event," Sylvie and Loki have each other's backs when fighting the guards of the Time-Keepers.
• Battle Couple: Sylvie and Loki develop romantic feelings towards each other and fight both the guards on Lamentis-1 and the guards who protect the Time-Keepers together. They later combine their magical powers to enchant Alioth together.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: As Loki puts it, Sylvie tries to hit him all the time. They switch between fighting verbally and physically, vehemently denying they care for each other and awkwardly attempting to spit it out until Sylvie kisses him in the finale only to betray his trust and push him through the portal.
• Big Entrance: She loves them, proving she really is a Loki. She takes the time to set up dramatic reveals during her ambushes on the TVA. They're also quite telling for how she sees herself: her ambush in the Renaissance Fair is set to "Holding Out For a Hero", and she's even arguably right!
• Black-and-White Morality: She sees everyone around her either as an ally to help her on her mission or as an enemy to deal with, with little in-between, and she solves moral dilemmas by Cutting the Knot.
• Black Cloak: She wears a dark cloak with a large hood. It's spooky, especially at night and in the field with a lantern. She loses it in Shuroo on Lamentis-1 shortly before she tells her backstory to Loki, revealing that she was Good All Along, and never gets a new one.
• Blood Knight: Sylvie is more of a brawler who enjoys fighting and can be often seen smiling while doing it.
• Body Surf: She has the ability to not only "enchant" and control one person at a time, but also quickly switch the target she is possessing by making the previous victim touch the next one, the first one then drops unconscious to the floor.
• Brought Down to Badass: Her enchantment abilities do not work in the TVA realm. This does not stop her from fighting her way to the elevator through the guards with her bare hands and feet.
• Commonality Connection: Loki and Sylvie can't find any common ground when they discuss their names, goals, and methods. But they bond over memories of their mothers, their magic, and over both of them being bisexuals who were never in any serious relationship. After this, Sylvie falls asleep in Loki's presence, which she does not do around "untrustworthy" people.
• Composite Character: She is both this and Decomposite Character. She is a combination of Lady Loki and Sylvie Lushton (the second Enchantress). Both she and L1130 refer to her powers as "enchantment" within the show.
• Cop Killer: She has been killing TVA Hunters and Minutemen and stealing their reset charges to enact her revenge.
• Create Your Own Villain: The TVA abducted Sylvie for no apparent cause other than that she had a life in which she was well-adjusted and quite possibly destined not to break bonds with her family - or, worse, in which she presented as female, unlike Sacred Timeline Loki and literally every other variant we've seen. This act causes her to develop into the most ruthless and cunning temporal fugitive the TVA has ever faced and ultimately the one who ends up causing a multiversal war.
• Crippling Overspecialization: While her enchantments are powerful, they're the only magic she knows due to being self-taught, and she relies much more on her sword and hand-to-hand combat skill (unlike the main Loki, who tends to mix and match both in a fight depending on the situation). As a result, while she initially has the upper hand against Loki, once he gets her measure she's careful to avoid a direct confrontation.
• Dark Action Girl: Just as much of a cunning fighter as the more familiar male versions of Loki.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Her costume is a dark forest green, and in low light, looks completely black. She initially appears to be a villain but turns out to be Good All Along.
• Deadpan Snarker: Her jabs can give Loki a run for his money, which leads to much Snark-to-Snark Combat between them.
• Decomposite Character: In the comics, "Lady Loki" is just the normal Loki taking female form, most notably when he possessed Lady Sif. Here, she's a timeline variant of the original Loki completely separate from his destiny and the current variant protagonist.
• Defiant Captive:
  • Even as a small child who's just been through Kafkaesque TVA processing, she was defiant enough to bite Ravonna who was holding her, step on her foot, snatch the TemPad and escape.
  • When she's left alone with Ravonna and TVA minutemen come after her, she ignores Ravonna's offer to spend her remaining days in a pleasant memory in a Time Cell. Instead, she takes her chances and prunes herself, not knowing for sure if she'll die or be reunited with Loki in the Void as Ravonna told her.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Sylvie initially reveals herself as a vengeful, hostile, and untrustworthy individual due to her traumatic childhood of being taken by the TVA and having her entire reality erased. But after meeting and surviving an apocalyptic event with Loki, she starts to open up and become warmer towards her male counterpart, even to the point of genuinely falling in love.
• Demonic Possession: Sylvie makes use of enchantment spells to take control of other people simply by touching them. She utilizes this to attack other Minutemen using one of their own and to mock L1130 by jumping from person to person and using their bodies to attack him. It appears to be limited to one person at a time, though she can still control her own body while also puppeting someone else. She also notes that with some people, it's effortless, but with those who are strong-willed, she has to concentrate, implying her own body might be vulnerable while possessing a person like that.
• Determinator: She's survived in countless apocalypses, and nothing can stop her from achieving her goal — not endless mooks, not a living Fog of Doom that has devoured entire realities, not even the loved one she'd have to abandon and betray. This is reflected in the wild boar's head with which her sword is decorated: wild boars are a symbol for power and perseverance because they fight back until their last breath.
• Deuteragonist: Of season 1, where she is the second character in terms of total screentime and the third one in terms of total word count. TVA's hunt for Sylvie and her quest to find the person behind the TVA and exact her revenge on him drives much of the plot.
• Didn't Think This Through: Literally. She refuses to take a minute to think about the consequences of her plan despite Loki begging her to do so, and she ends up killing He Who Remains out of revenge.
• Disc-One Final Boss: She's set up as the main antagonist in the first few episodes, but it quickly becomes apparent that the TVA is the true villain. Subverted somewhat in the finale, where she and Loki come into conflict again and their battle is the final showdown of the first season.
• Distaff Counterpart: Played with. Loki has his sex listed as "Fluid" in the TVA's files, but is referred to with masculine pronouns and looks male; Sylvie looks like a woman, is identified with feminine pronouns, and says that she was born a Goddess of Mischief.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": She tells Loki L1130 not to call her "Loki" and instead suggests he call her "Randy", after the guy she's currently puppeting. Loki takes this as the trolling it's meant to be. When pressed, she tells him to call her Sylvie, as she took the name when going on the run and came to like it.
• Emerald Power: Like other Lokis, she casts green magic, even though her magical skill set is completely different from that of her Sacred Timeline counterpart.
• Emotionally Tongue-Tied: Just like the main Loki, she struggles to find the words to express her feelings, because she's always been alone.
  Sylvie: I don't know how to do this. (...) I don't have... friends. I don't have... anyone.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even though Sylvie has killed many innocent people, and made her intentions to kill any variant of He Who Remains she comes across, she ultimately falters when she sees Victor Timely plead for his life, as she realizes that the man is genuinely innocent of any wrongdoing, much less anything that has ruined her life.
• Expository Hair Style Change: When Loki first sees Sylvie, she is wearing a horned tiara that keeps her hair tidy. She then puts half of her hair up in a ponytail so it won't be a nuisance in a fight. When she jumps off the train, she loses the tiara and lets her hair down, and wears it this way for the rest of the series. This is also the moment she starts to open up and agrees to trust Loki.
• Fatal Flaw: Inability to trust. Both Loki and He Who Remains comment on it. In the finale, she fights Loki because she doesn't believe him not wanting power for himself, and kills He Who Remains after dismissing all his explanations as lies. Both were sincere, and as a result, she loses the only person who cared about her and inadvertently plants seeds of the next multiversal war.
• Foil:
  • To Loki, her male Variant she falls in love with. Both are sarcastic loners with an affinity to magic, but Loki gets disillusioned in his "glorious purpose", becomes introspective and learns to connect to others, and prefers diplomacy and guile. Sylvie is goal-driven, not self-aware and too afraid to trust, and casually resorts to violence. In the end, Loki attempts to consider everyone's best interest, while Sylvie can't see past revenge.
  • To her enemy, Ravonna. It's Personal between them because it was Ravonna who captured Sylvie and then failed to stop her from escaping, and later pruned Loki, the only person Sylvie cares about. Both are tough Dark Action Girls, but Ravonna is one of the TVA's top members who want to protect it at all costs, while Sylvie is a rebel outside the system that wants to bring it down. The two of them fight each other, and Sylvie wins.
• Friendless Background: At the beginning of the series, Sylvie doesn't have anyone as a friend due to her being taken by the TVA as a child and being on the run ever since. And because of this, as Loki explains in the season 1 finale, she doesn't trust anyone.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Goes from one of the variants about to be pruned by the TVA, to a multiversal criminal determined to stop them at any costs, even killing numerous Hunters and the Time Keepers to do so, causing chaos. She is also responsible for The Multiverse to expand, only because she killed He Who Remains who was responsible for maintaining the timelines.
• Gender Flip: Sylvie is in-universe a female version of Loki, though in many ways she's also a feminine twist on Thor.
• Gone Horribly Right: She wanted to kill the person she considered a tyrant to give everyone free will. She succeeded, but by extension, she also gave free will to said tyrant's more evil variants who are intending to start a multiversal war.
• Good All Along: The TVA turns out to be the real villains of Loki, as Sylvie works with her counterpart to stop them. She is an extremist though, so "good" is neither nice nor soft.
• Green and Mean: Sylvie shares her male counterparts' affinity for green clothing, and she can be incredibly hostile to those who have the intention of foiling her plans.
• Had to Be Sharp: Apocalypses are the only place where ordinary Nexus events don't register. Because her very existence causes Nexus events everywhere she goes, the only place Sylvie could hide from the TVA for very long was at the end of a world. She grew up living among thousands of apocalypses, always needing to keep her TemPad recharged to jump to a new one at the right time.
• Hair-Contrast Duo: With Loki, who calls Sylvie his "faded photocopy". He is her male Variant who has black hair and apart from being a sarcastic magic user, is her opposite in every way.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Sylvie dyed her hair blonde as an adult and she possesses the intention of ending the TVA's oppression.
• Hand Blast: When she fights Loki in the season 1 finale, she starts shooting green energy blasts similar to how Loki's done in "Lamentis". It is unclear if she always knew how to do it or learned it the moment Loki himself learned enchantment when they linked their minds to subdue Alioth.
• Happily Adopted: Unlike Loki, she was told that she is adopted early on and judging from the flashback in "The Nexus Event", she had a happy childhood until the TVA showed up.
• Happiness in Minimum Wage: Sylvie ends up working at a McDonalds after killing He Who Remains. Despite how much of a comedown this might seem for a literal goddess, she clearly loves her job and is very good at it, due to it allowing her to make friends and find a permanent place in a community for the first time in her very long life.
• Hat Damage: The horn on the left side of her tiara is broken off. She is shown to use it as a weapon, so she must have lost it in a fight.
• The Hedonist: She claims to be an even bigger hedonist than Loki, but according to her never at the expense of the mission. Even when she's happier in Broxton, Oklahoma, though, the only fun she goes out of her way to have is hanging out at a record store where she's friends with the manager and occasional sedate visits to a local watering hole, though, so how much this is true is up to interpretation.
• Heroic BSoD: After the explosion of the Ark, Sylvie loses all hope and calmly waits for the planet to collide with Lamentis-1 and to kill her:
  Sylvie: And so that's where I grew up, the ends of the thousand worlds. Now that's where I'll die.
• Holding Hands: Sylvie and Loki doing it yield unusual results:
  • She takes his hand when they are waiting for their doom on Lamentis-1, a moon that is about to collide with its planet, and he reacts in kind. The TVA immediately register a new timeline branch that is rapidly growing amidst an apocalypse, which was previously discussed to be impossible.
  • Sylvie realizes that she lacks the power to subdue Alioth by herself, so she takes Loki's hand and asks him to help her do it. They both close their eyes as they find strength within each other, and while Loki becomes an Instant Expert in Sylvie's core skill, enchantment, Sylvie then suddenly starts using his skills (Hand Blasts and telekinesis) in the finale.
• Horns of Villainy: She is the Cop Killer who wears a tiara with two horns, one of them broken, while the protagonist Loki does not wear his signature horns this time around. As her character is explored and she becomes more sympathetic she loses the tiara after using it as a weapon and doesn't pick it up again.
• Hot Goddess: A beautiful, svelte woman who's also the Goddess of Mischief.
• Hypocrite: She calls out He Who Remains on treating people like pawns in his game, while she herself has been killing Variants in service of the TVA and believes herself to be right. He immediately calls her on it.
  He Who Remains: [growling] Grow up! Grow up, Sylvie! Murderer! Hypocrite! We're all villains here.
• I Did What I Had to Do: When Mobius notices that she did "some annihilating" and killed quite a few TVA minutemen, she replies this way. As Mobius has just put it when you think the ends justify the means, there's not much you won't do, and her goal was surviving.
• In the Hood: Her first appearance features her entirely cloaked in a dark cape, hiding her features.
• It's All About Me: After her identity is revealed, the narrative and Loki as the POV character treat her as someone who has the moral high ground because she seeks to destroy the unjust system that polices the Multiverse. The finale shows that the one thing she truly wants is to get revenge on the mastermind behind the TVA who personally wronged her. Sylvie disregards the negative consequences for the Multiverse at large and the opinion of Loki without whom she wouldn't reach the End of Time and kills He Who Remains.
• It's Personal: Justified. First, Sylvie was taken away from her life as a young child by none other than Ravonna Renslayer back when she was a hunter, who in the present callously claims that Sylvie's nexus event was nothing but a minor event she doesn't recall the details of. Then, just when Loki was about to announce his love for her, Ravonna prunes him on the spot. Sylvie's aghast/angry face shows that Ravonna has officially become an enemy she can take personally. She then says this almost word-for-word when she confronts He Who Remains.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's incredibly rough and gruff but isn't a bad person. In many ways, her moral compass is even straighter than that of L1130 and it's partly her influence that makes him a better man. She's capable of loving and caring for those she grows close to and is fiercely determined to take down an oppressive organization. But her methods can get extreme, and she's ultimately unable to see past her need for revenge.
• The Lad-ette: Sylvie is a tough, physically skilled Lady Swears-a-Lot who prefers to present fairly unisex. As a child, we see she had long hair but still dressed in a style closer to what other MCU media have shown young Asgardian boys wearing, and her hair was left loose and unstyled. Throughout Season One, she does have a bob haircut, but this is probably the easiest style for her to maintain on the run, and she dresses in a mix of scavenged TVA armor modified to look more like her childhood clothes. By Season Two, her hair has grown out into an androgynous shag/mullet and she wears muscle tees in her spare time. All of this contrasts with Loki's delicate manners and carefully arranged hair.
• Lady Swears-a-Lot: She will call you an "arse" and ask you to "piss off" because she has "shit to do", while her male counterpart is always impeccably well-mannered and eloquent. This is because she lacks the education he got as an Asgardian prince.
• Large Ham: Sylvie can be just as dramatic as her male counterpart.
• Lean and Mean: She has a thin frame and is quite gruff and vindictive. She does have a soft side underneath that though.
• Leaning on the Furniture: She is so rebellious and unafraid of the TVA that Hunter B-15 finds her in the interrogation room sitting on a chair with her feet on the table.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Loki realizes that killing He Who Remains will just leave an Evil Power Vacuum that invites his worse Variants to take over. Sylvie doesn't care.
• Letting Her Hair Down: She initially ties half of her hair and uses a tiara to keep it in place. In the middle of "Lamentis", she lets her hair loose and agrees to tell Loki a bit about her powers. She never ties it from this point on.
• Lonely Together: Both Sylvie and Loki never were in any serious relationship. She has been a survivor on the run all her life, and he was barely tolerated by Thor's friends before he severed all ties to Asgard. Since they are variants of each other, they quickly find common ground and fall for each other.
• Love Can Not Overcome: Unlike Loki, whose Love Redeems him, Sylvie is too focused on her mission to let her feelings get in her way. She refuses to listen to Loki who voices reasonable concerns about her choice and goes through with it after betraying Loki's trust and pushing him through a portal.
• Malicious Misnaming: He Who Remains calls Sylvie "Loki" several times to unnerve her, even though he knows that she goes by Sylvie.
• Man Bites Man: Sylvie escapes the TVA as a child by biting Ravonna and stealing her TemPad. In a deleted scene, she also bites Loki's arm on Lamentis-1 shortly after they end up there. Alligator Loki must be Sylvie's soulmate!
• Man of Kryptonite: Sylvie's unique ability to create Lotus Eater Machines out of her possessed victim's memories make her uniquely dangerous to the TVA, the vast majority of whom are brainwashed variants, unaware of their true origins. Both targets Sylvie used her possession on ended up breaking down and turning against the TVA upon realizing they'd been lied to, once they realize they had a past and existence before the organization. It's heavily implied Renslayer's focus on Sylvie isn't just because she feels responsible for her initial escape, but also because Sylvie's powers threaten the stability of the entire TVA.
• Meaningful Appearance: She wears fingerless gloves as a part of her "cool" image, just like Loki did in Ragnarok.
• Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication: Inverted. Sylvie prefers to go for brute force approaches where her possession ability won't work, while Loki prefers "diplomacy and guile". Sylvie, unlike Loki, has very little knowledge of illusion magic beyond her self-taught enchantment ability.
• Mind Rape: She can use her victim's memories to place them into a Lotus-Eater Machine. At the beginning of "Lamentis", Sylvie fishes for information from Hunter C-20 by making her believe that she is sitting in a bar with Sylvie and Sylvie is her best friend.
• Mirror Character:
  • To Loki, her male Alternate Self. Both were adopted into the Asgardian royal family (though whether they were alternate versions of the same family is ambiguous). Both are talented magic users, Deadpan Snarkers and loners who use a lot of defense mechanisms to cover up insecurity. When they first meet, they immediately mirror each other's Slasher Smiles and echo each other's phrases ("me I presume", "you are in my way"). They eventually both fall in love and fight each other.
  • She's also one to Thor before his Character Development in his solo movie. Both of them are blonde hotheaded Blood Knights who are more than willing to fight or kill anyone who gets in their way, and both of them are prone to performing Leeroy Jenkins-like actions without thinking of the consequences of what will happen as a result.
  • This, by extension, also makes her reflect on Hela, who was a depiction of what Thor could have become had said character development not made him a better person and who was also a powerful sorceress/Asgardian princess on a vengeance mission after her life was stolen from her. Sylvie is nowhere near as bad as Hela, but with Hela reflecting the absolute worst of both Thor and Loki, and Sylvie having many of both of their grimmer qualities, it's hard to not see her as a parallel to Hela but with a moral compass.
• Mirror Match: In the finale, she fights Loki for the right to decide the fate of the Multiverse. While she is attacking and he is defending against her, as Variants of each other they use similar moves and spells.
• Missing Mom: She has very few memories of her mother, who died when Sylvie was a child.
• Moral Myopia: She gets called out for this a couple of times. She's understandably quick to condemn the TVA for its immoral actions but she's hardly a saint herself. He Who Remains outright calls her a hypocrite and that she's a villain just like he is.
• More Deadly Than the Male: One of the most elusive Variants the TVA has had to deal with an impressive body count and running circles around them. Compared this to the (male) Loki Variant whom she slaps around like a rag-doll and spent the episode constantly being referred to as her "inferior". She also demonstrates the ability to enchant others and control them remotely, something Loki himself has never done (he does understand what she's doing, but doesn't know the technique himself). This is downplayed in later episodes once he has her measure; Sylvie may be a better fighter, but Loki is nearly as good when he's fighting seriously and is explicitly the better sorcerer, having been formally taught.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: The second-best solution, to be precise. If her possession ("enchantment") skills won't do it, she casually resorts to violence. In the finale, she adamantly refuses to consider alternatives even though Loki begs her to, and kills He Who Remains.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Overlapping with Vengeance Feels Empty, after she kills He Who Remains and succeeds in her lifelong goal, his only response to his death is a cheery (but no less ominous), "I'll see you soon." The despondent and shocked look on Sylvie's face afterward says it all.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Her crown with one broken horn comes from the Loki design introduced at the end of the Loki: Agent of Asgard comic.
  • An even older one is the child in 1549 France equating Sylvie to the Devil, most likely due to her horned crown. Christian scholars painted Loki as a Satan equivalent due to his trickster persona when they were recording the Norse tales. It also may be a reference to how Loki's actual first appearance in Marvel Comics was as a Satanic Archetype in Venus #6.
• Nature Versus Nurture: Despite being a Variant of the same being, Sylvie does not have much in common with Loki, because she was born female (or, given Loki's genderfluidity, chose to present that way - it's a bit hard to tell), told that she was adopted, taken by the TVA as a child, and grew up alone hiding in apocalypses, with any connections she ended up forming being quite short-lived and doomed. They share a natural affinity to magic and snark, but she is way more mature and less cultured and has different skills and quirks.
• Never My Fault: She's very quick to blame anyone but herself for the circumstances she finds herself in. This reaches feedback loop levels once Loki has gone through enough character development that he stops embodying this trope himself and starts taking responsibility for things Sylvie and only Sylvie did.
• Nice Girl: In a Hidden Depths way. Sylvie is a ruthless pragmatist where her mission against the TVA is concerned, but she's kind enough to offer a scared young boy gum after he witnessed her take out a Minutemen unit in Renaissance France, loves and takes deep pride in helping people at her job at McDonald's in Broxton, and makes sure her teenage supervisor Jack has a safe way to get home after an evening shift. She has a clearly evident soft spot for kids and families after her own childhood was ripped away from her.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Killing He Who Remains allows a variant of said founder to rule over the TVA, and allows all the multiversal chaos that follows to occur.
• Noodle Incident: The nexus event which caused the TVA to initially bring her in. Sylvie has no idea what she did "wrong" to catch their attention, and Renslayer doesn't remember the details.
• One Head Taller: Sylvie seems tiny next to Loki who is much taller than her (Tom Hiddleston is 6'2", Sophia Di Martino is 5'7").
• One-Woman Army: Sylvie is powerful enough to take down multiple TVA Agents who get in the way of her vendetta against the Time-Keepers.
• Order Versus Chaos: Sylve is firmly on the "chaos" side of the conflict. She fights for "free will" and her plan is to kill those in charge of the TVA, the "order," and then walk away, creating a power vacuum.
• Out of Focus: In season 2, where after being the Deuteragonist of season 1 she is still an important side character who provides an outside perspective on the TVA as an institution and acts as Loki's conscience, but is only the fifth in terms of screentime and fourth when it comes to word count.
• Paradox Person: Just like L1130, Sylvie is a Loki Variant who is not supposed to exist.
• Perspective Reversal: When Loki meets Sylvie, he is the unreasonable one with Skewed Priorities who gets the two of them into trouble, and Sylvie constantly calls him out on his half-baked plans. In the finale, Loki is the sole voice of reason, while Sylvie blindly rushes into action disregarding the consequences.
• The Power of Love: Loki and Sylvie holding hands is a Nexus event that results in the timeline branching off so steeply that the TVA are able to register it even amidst an apocalypse - when everyone is going to die and nothing matters. The implication is that, somehow, The Power of Love was going to allow them to survive. Mobius laughs when he realizes that the two Variants of the same being formed a romantic bond so strong that it was literally shattering reality.
• Properly Paranoid: As Loki is drunkenly singing to the passengers, Sylvie notices a shifty man leaving the car. Loki doesn't see the problem until the man comes back with several guards who are suspicious of the rowdy passenger.
• Pyrrhic Victory: She finally gets her revenge on "He Who Remains" for ruining her life by killing him, but unfortunately, doing so causes multiple branches of the Multiverse to form, and a far worse Variant to take over the TVA.
• Queer Establishing Moment: In the episode "Lamentis", when Sylvie asks Loki about his romantic interests, her specific wording is whether he "had any interest in other princes or princesses". Loki replies "a bit of both", and says that he suspects the same is true for Sylvie. She does not deny that, establishing her as bisexual.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: By the end of the series, Sylvie, the feral cat, is the Red Oni, and Loki, the thoughtful prince, is the Blue one. He is pensive, introspective, cultured, and prefers to talk things out, she is defiant, determined, rough around the edges, and easily resorts to violence.
• Refreshingly Normal Life-Choice: After spending the majority of her life hiding in apocalypses, Sylvie is happy with her new, mundane life as a McDonald's worker.
• Revenge: Sylvie's primary motivation, as Hunter B-15, who had a link with Sylvie, tells Ravonna. Sylvie's life was taken away from her by the Time-Keepers, so she wants to kill them. Once she learns that they are nothing more than mindless androids, she goes after those who created them. Deconstructed in the finale, as her desires for revenge lead her to a decision that has a lot of consequences down the road.
• Revenge Before Reason: In the end, she's so blinded by her hatred for the TVA that she refuses to listen when Loki tries to convince her that killing He Who Remains is a terrible idea, and does so — with dire consequences.
• Rich Language, Poor Language: Loki grew up as a prince and speaks "upper-class" posh English like all Asgardians from previous films. Unlike him, Sylvie speaks with a less prestigious local British accent (Nottingham, to be precise) to reflect her relative lack of education and life on the run.
• Sadistic Choice: He Who Remains offers her and Loki to either kill him and destroy the TVA, which would lead to a multiversal war with numerous Kangs in command, or rule the TVA together, restricting free will. She does not hesitate when she chooses the first option, more out of revenge than thoughtful consideration.
• Samus Is a Girl: "The Variant" reveals this alternate version of Loki as a female.
• Satanic Archetype: A child from 1549 France who's seen Sylvie points to the stained glass with Satan's image in a cathedral when Mobius asks who killed the TVA men, equating Satan's horns with Loki's horns. In 2077, an old woman calls Sylvie and Loki "devils".
• Screw Destiny: She is dissatisfied with her role on the Sacred Timeline and ultimately finds the man behind it all, He Who Remains, "the author" of the universal narrative. He offers her via Miss Minutes to write a new story for her, then asks her to take over and become "the author" herself. However, she wants revenge rather than more "fiction" and kills him, spawning endless Alternate Universes.
• Screw Yourself: Sylvie touching Loki's hand is a Nexus event that results in the timeline branching off so steeply that the TVA is able to register it even amidst an apocalypse. Mobius laughs when he realizes that the two Variants of the same being formed a romantic bond so strong that it was literally shattering reality. After several episodes of longing looks and Holding Hands, they acknowledge their feelings in the finale and kiss only to immediately break up after that.
• Slasher Smile: Sports one of these sometimes when she gets into fights — which she does frequently. It's another aspect that she shares with every other version of Loki.
• Super-Empowering: It's implied that she can enhance the physical strength of those she possesses, as we see ordinary humans under her thrall being able to go toe-to-toe with the other Loki, who is, after all, a Frost Giant.
• Sword and Fist: She is carrying a kukri around, but she fights with a lot of bare-handed punches and kicks as well.
• Taught by Experience: Sylvie's ability to "enchant" people is something that she learned to do entirely on her lonesome, and is something that Loki doesn't know how to do despite being formally taught magic by his mother since he was a child.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With Loki on Lamentis-1. They stop fighting and make a truce in order to recharge the TemPad and use it to escape imminent death before the moon collides with its planet. This does not stop them from bickering.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Sylvie says this word-for-word before she and Loki are about to hijack the Ark on Lamentis-1.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: She tosses her sword at one of the Time-Keepers in "The Nexus Event", which reveals that they are mere animatronics and don't actually run the TVA.
• Timeshifted Actor: Sophia Di Martino plays Sylvie as an adult, while Cailey Fleming plays her as a child.
• Tomboy: She wears an unfeminine costume that is practical for battle, has shoulder-length hair, loves melee fighting, and swears a lot.
• Trickster God: She's the Goddess of Mischief, much like how every other Loki is a God of Mischief.
• Trying Not to Cry: In the finale, she struggles to contain her emotions when Loki asks her to stop and tells her that he is not attempting to betray her but rather just wants her to be ok.
• Twice Shy: Loki and Sylvie agree that Mobius's theory about their nexus event on Lamentis-1 is totally wrong and ridiculous, even as they struggle to verbalize how much they mean to each other while cuddling under a single blanket. Having never been in a real relationship, both feel awkward and come off as two teenagers.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Her enchantment magic is self-taught but still impressive enough that Loki wants to know how she does it. It's also the only magic she knows, unlike Loki's vast array of magical tricks.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Sylvie lived a happy life with her loving adoptive family in Asgard. However, when the TVA abducted her and pruned her reality, she started to become bitter and vengeful, with all that she can think about is destroying the bureaucracy that took everything from her.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: She betrays Loki's trust and pushes him away in order to complete her mission and kill He Who Remains, the man behind the Time-Keepers who took her life from her. Once she is done, she sits limply on the floor, completely alone. Her actress explains that Sylvie does not feel any happier than before, just like Loki warned her:
  Sophia Di Martino: That final moment is just utter devastation. She thought she was going to get the relief that she's been waiting for her whole life. She's built this up so much. She finally kills the guy right at the top and feels nothing. Still feels sort of angry and bitter and sad, as she always has. But nothing, just emptiness, and that's really sad.
• Waif-Fu: She is a small, slender woman who successfully fights her way through half a dozen TVA minutemen armed with rods that vaporize the target in an instant. And she does it with her bare hands and feet, without resorting to her magic or her kukri. Justified in that she's an Asgardian, who are stronger and tougher than humans, and the TVA employees we see are all (seemingly) human.
• Walking Spoiler: Everything from her name and backstory to her plot involvement is a major spoiler.
• Warrior Princess: Sylvie grew up - briefly - as a princess of Asgard, and she has transformed into a formidable warrior in her adult years.
• Weaponized Headgear: Sylvie uses her horned tiara as a weapon against the train guards, similar to how the main timeline Loki used his helmet in Ragnarok.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Her goal extends beyond merely killing off a bunch of TVA minutemen — she wants to kill the Time-Keepers who've been kidnapping and memory-wiping the Variants, turning them into TVA employees who believe they were "created" by the Time-Keepers. Mobius calls her a "terrorist", and Sylvie demonstrates in the finale she will pay any price to protect "free will".
• You Killed My Father: Sylvie holds a vindictive grudge towards He Who Remains and the TVA since they erased her family and her entire reality out of existence. Although she manages to successfully kill He Who Remains, his death only creates more chaos throughout the Multiverse.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Mobius calls Sylvie a "terrorist girlfriend" because she has killed a large number of minutemen, who are revealed to be brainwashed Variants and thus are not actually "bad". But from Sylvie's point of view, she acts in self-defense — if her plan succeeds and she kills the Time-Keepers, she will be free from the oppressive organization that has hunted her for her entire life and converted other Variants into obedient functionalists.

Kid Loki

Loki Laufeyson

"I killed Thor."

Known Aliases: Kid Loki (credits)

Species: Frost Giant

Citizenship: Jotun, Asgardian

Affiliation(s): Asgard (formerly)

Portrayed By: Jack Veal

Appearances: Loki

"Whenever one of us dares try to fix themselves, they're sent here to die."

A Loki Variant who managed to kill his brother Thor, who appears in the form of a child. He leads a group of pruned Lokis including him, Classic Loki, Boastful Loki, and Alligator Loki.

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• Adaptational Badass: He was able to kill Thor when both were kids. Neither the Sacred Timeline Loki nor the comic book version were able to do that.
• Adaptational Heroism: In the comics, Kid Loki was created as a version of the character with none of his moral baggage, who could be a true hero. This one killed Thor and chooses not to face Alioth with the others. However, he shows genuine sadness when he agrees with Classic Loki's point that every version of Loki is "broken" and every time they try to fix their mistakes, they're taken by the TVA and sent to die. He also helps Loki and Sylvie reach Alioth so that they can find whoever is behind the TVA, and even gives his dagger to Loki.
• Adaptational Personality Change: In the comics, Kid Loki was mentioned to be childish and a troublemaker, usually lying, cheating, and using tricks to manipulate people, but had a good heart and a moral compass. This Kid Loki is clearly acting wise and reasonable, and shows annoyance when other Loki Variants begin backstabbing each other and lead themselves into a brawl.
• Age Lift: A weird example. Despite this Loki having the appearance of a child, he is supposedly older than even Classic Loki, due to being pruned thousands of years before the events of the Loki TV series. By contrast, Kid Loki in the comics is a reincarnation of the original Loki who is more or less the same age as he looks.
• Alliance of Alternates: He leads a group of pruned Loki variants, and accepts TVA Loki into his group as well after the latter too was pruned.
• Alternate Self: He is the youngest-looking Loki variant whose story diverged from the Sacred Timeline when he killed his brother long before the events of Thor. He leads a group of variants in the Void.
• Ambiguous Situation: The circumstances that led to him getting pruned by killing Thor is left unclear. It's unknown if he killed Thor on purpose or by accident, but it's clear that he regrets what he did.
• Anti-Hero: He proclaims he killed Thor, which made him a variant (it's unclear if it was on purpose or not, or just the bad temperament of a child). Regardless, he helps Loki, Sylvie, and Mobius try to escape the Void and find out who's behind the TVA.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: He is the leader of the group despite his apparent youth, as he is the only version who killed Thor.
• Badass Adorable: He is a cute child, who is also a powerful god.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: He's the youngest looking Variant introduced in the Void, and also happens to be the leader of a small group of Lokis that are trying to survive there without backstabbing each other for the sake of power.
• Decomposite Character: Downplayed. In the comics, Kid Loki is the original Loki reborn as a young boy following his death at the hands of The Void, but is generally treated as a separate individual and used as a vessel from which the original is able to truly resurrect himself. This version is another Variant of Loki, unrelated to the original's machinations.
• Drink-Based Characterization: Because he doesn't look old enough to drink alcohol, he toasts with a box of Hi-C Ecto Cooler juice drink, while the other Lokis toast with goblets of wine.
• Everyone Has Standards: Unlike his other counterparts, he drinks juice instead of alcohol because he's aware of how young he appears.
• Foreshadowing: The flashback at the beginning of the fourth episode "The Nexus Event", which sees Sylvie being arrested by the TVA as a child, shows that even children can be considered Variants.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Kid Loki explains that the fate of any Loki who tries to turn over a new leaf, such as Classic Loki and himself, is to be pruned.
• Heel Realization: After escaping the Loki brawl, Kid Loki implies and expresses with genuine sadness that, just like the other Lokis, he tried to fix himself after killing Thor, but he was pruned by the TVA and sent to the Void to be killed.
• I Choose to Stay: When Mobius offers to bring Kid Loki out of the Void, he declines.
• Mythology Gag: "Kid Loki" is one of the many forms the character has taken in the comic books.
• Older Than They Look: Despite having the appearance of a child and being called "kid", Kid Loki's actor has suggested that his character is actually the oldest of all the Lokis trapped in the void, due to pruning burning out his ability to age naturally. If that's the case, him being the leader of the Ragtag Bunch of Lokis is very much justified.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Inverted. Despite being a child version of one of the world's most childish but dangerous villains, Kid Loki is actually the most mature and intelligent of all the Loki variants, being able to figure out how to survive in the Void without trying to backstab anyone, and help two of his variants survive alongside him. The implication that he's actually the oldest Loki variant encountered may have something to do with this.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: All the more so awesome since he's potentially the oldest Loki in the Void despite looking like the youngest. We find out that, on realizing none of them could escape, he took command of the few Lokis that would listen to reason, to make a home for themselves. When one of them betrays the Kid, he's not even surprised but gets his remaining allies out of dodge. Kid Loki and Classic Loki also take the time to talk down the L1130 variant and remind him not to be rude to Alligator Loki. He agrees to help L1130 Loki and Sylvie find a way out but refuses to risk his life or that of his comrades personally because no one has found a way out of the Void for eons. With that said, he gives L1130 his dagger, and wishes him the best of luck.
• Sibling Murder: His Nexus Event was killing Thor. He doesn't elaborate on if it was an accident or not, but the sadness in his voice about the TVA taking him away when he tried to fix himself says that he regrets it to a degree.
• The Three Faces of Adam: He is the young ambitious Hunter to Classic Loki's older and wiser Prophet and the protagonist Loki's Lord.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: His Nexus Event is caused by killing Thor, when he is still a child.
• Walking Spoiler: His existence, along with Classic Loki and Boastful Loki's, reveals the fact that pruned variants do not immediately die, but are instead teleported into another dimension.
• Young and in Charge: Despite being much younger looking than the other Loki variants, he's the leader of his own bunch. It turns out that Boastful Loki, though, is not content with this, and betrays the rest of the group to President Loki so he can take over leadership.

Classic Loki

Loki Laufeyson

"We, my friends, have but one part to play: the God of Outcasts. Nothing more."

Known Aliases: Classic Loki (credits)

Species: Frost Giant

Citizenship: Jotun, Asgardian

Affiliation(s): Asgard (formerly), Thanos (formerly), Revengers (formerly)

Portrayed By: Richard E. Grant

Appearances: Loki

"We lie and we cheat, we cut the throat of every person who trusts us, and for what? Power. Glorious power. Glorious purpose! We cannot change. We're broken, every version of us. Forever."

A visibly older Variant than his counterparts. Unlike his Sacred Timeline counterpart, this Loki had survived his encounter at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and isolated himself from the rest of the universe before loneliness got to him, inevitably getting arrested and pruned by the TVA.

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• The Ace: In terms of magic, Classic Loki is the most powerful and skilled among his fellow variants, capable of feats that no other Loki can accomplish.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Inadvertently managed to hide himself from the TVA for centuries, simply by doing a less extreme version of what Sylvie did, living in hiding and isolation. Unlike her though, he was entirely unaware of the TVA, and only got caught because he missed his Thor and tried to leave to find him, which would ruin the illusion that he was killed by Thanos.
• Adaptational Curves: Inverted. Comics Loki whom Classic Loki was based on has been shown to be pretty muscular, which his costume emphasizes. Meanwhile, Classic Loki's costume is somewhat baggy, not helped by Richard E. Grant being someone you wouldn't exactly call buff.
• Adaptational Heroism: Despite his name and look, he has little in common with the classic comic book Loki, who's the Ax-Crazy Arch-Enemy of Thor. Here, he's a variant of MCU-Loki who only differs from the main Loki in that he managed to trick Thanos with his illusions and survived. In addition to that, he pulls off a Heroic Sacrifice to buy time for TVA-Loki and Sylvie, making him probably the most heroic Loki in the Multiverse.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Classic Loki's appearance is based on the original comic iteration of the character, which is among the most evil. Here, Classic Loki is just a variant similar to the Sacred Timeline Loki who managed to live to old age, and is among the most loyal and noble Lokis portrayed.
• Age Lift: He looks much older than any of the other Loki Variants.
• The Alcoholic: While he and the other Lokis are hiding in their underground base, Classic Loki can be seen taking frequent gulps of wine.
• Alternate Self: He is the oldest-looking Loki Variant who lived through all events up to Endgame, but fooled Thanos and lived in solitude on a desolate planet for a long time. When he dared to leave it, the TVA pruned him and sent him to the Void, where he pledged loyalty to Kid Loki.
• Awesome, but Impractical: How he feels about knives and fancy bladework in general, believing that they inhibit a Loki's true potential which lies in their magic. When Boastful Loki argues that they look awesome while using them, Classic Loki sarcastically agrees that they do...until the moment they are disarmed and rendered helpless as a certain Mad Titan snaps their neck.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: This Variant was able to live to old age by hiding out alone and never interacting with the Timeline. He eventually realized he missed his Thor too much and got pruned when he started looking into ways to leave his planet and see his brother again.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He might be a Grumpy Old Man in a Cheap Costume, but he's still survived in a wasteland at the end of time and is capable of truly spectacular feats of sorcery.
• Big Damn Heroes: He arrives just in time to distract Alioth from killing L1130 Loki and Sylvie.
• Broken Ace: One of the most powerful Loki variants out there… and a Grumpy Old Man who really misses his brother and can never see him again.
• Changed My Mind, Kid: When Classic Loki, Kid Loki, and Alligator Loki decide to help Sylvie and L1130 Loki in their mission to enchant Alioth, they only agree to bring them as far as Alioth itself before leaving so they don't die. Classic Loki, who was the most adamant about not wanting to fight Alioth, ends up coming back and creating a massive illusion of Asgard to distract it for the time Loki and Sylvie need to enchant it, even dying in the process.
• Cheap Costume: Unlike all the other Lokis we've met, his outfit looks like a cosplayer's Loki costume slapped together from cheap cloth, linen and foam, compared to the other Lokis' costumes which are made of leather with bits of metal. He does wear a metallic horned helmet common to Lokis to complete the look, however. This is a throwback to when superhero and supervillain costumes looked cheesy and garish.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Discussed after watching all the Lokis other than himself, Kid Loki and TVA Loki turn on each other.
  Classic Loki: Damn it! Animals, animals! We lie and we cheat, we cut the throat of every person that trusts us, and for what? Power. Glorious power. Glorious purpose! ... We're broken, every version of us. Forever.
• Come with Me If You Want to Live: He and a few other pruned Loki variants appear before Variant L1130 Loki, telling him to come with them if he wants to live.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart: He gets consumed by Alioth while casting an illusion of Asgard to distract him so L1130 Loki and Sylvie can get the opportunity to sneak up on and enchant it.
• Dead Hat Shot: After Alioth eats him, all that's left is his damaged helmet lying on the ground.
• Die Laughing: He lets out a loud, defiant laugh, moments before he's disintegrated by Alioth, as he finally achieved what he sees as a truly glorious purpose: selflessly helping others.
• Face Death with Dignity: Out of power, surrounded, and with no hope of escape, Classic Loki chooses to laugh in the face of death, in his final moments shouting, "Glorious purpose!"
• Faking the Dead: Long before Classic Loki got pruned, he managed to evade his death at the hands of Thanos (as dictated in the Sacred Timeline) by using his illusion magic to make a realistic copy of himself for Thanos to kill, while hiding as a piece of debris.
• Future Badass: Through his greater experience, Classic Loki is able to perform one of the most impressive displays of magic seen in the MCU.
• Go Out with a Smile: Laughs at the face of his death with a big Loki grin.
• Grumpy Old Man: He is quite grumpy and done with everything. He is especially annoyed with the other Lokis who fight each other to rule, and calls them animals.
• Heroic Sacrifice: He conjures a replica of Asgard to distract Alioth so Loki and Sylvie can sneak up and enchant it, leaving himself open to getting consumed by Alioth.
• Large Ham: Classic Loki could have stepped straight out of the original 60s comic books, with his speeches, bombastic attitude and magical gesticulations. Being played by Richard E. Grant helps too.
  Classic Loki: GLORIOUS PURPOSE!
• Master of Illusion: While all Loki are capable of illusion and conjuring magic, his illusion magic is far more powerful and effective than any other Loki's. He managed to escape Thanos by conjuring an illusion of himself for Thanos to kill, and in order to distract Alioth he creates an illusion of Asgard in its entirety, though it does take a heavy toll on his strength. By contrast, the largest illusion Sacred Timeline Loki was shown creating was that of a room's contents.
• Meaningful Echo: Happily shouts "Glorious purpose!" while giving his life to save Sylvie and Loki, after deriding how ridiculous and hollow every Loki variant trying to pursue the "glorious purpose" of power was throughout "Journey Into Mystery".
• Me's a Crowd: He can create duplicates of himself and others, which he uses to allow him and his allies to escape while the other Lokis are busy fighting amongst themselves.
• Mythology Gag: Wears Loki's classic '60s costume, and drinks from and then drops a large jeweled goblet, which are all from the comics.
• No Body Left Behind: His helmet is the only thing that is left after Alioth killed him.
• Older and Wiser: Classic Loki actually managed to mature and learn lessons that many variants did not, such as the importance of his family bonds. In the end, Classic Loki is a rare Loki to find a "glorious purpose", by sacrificing himself to save others.
• Old Master: While kind of goofy looking, him living longer than the other Lokis gave him more time to master his magic, prompting the protagonist Loki to remark that Lokis are stronger than they realize.
• Only Sane Man: Compared to his other counterparts, Classic Loki appears to be the most sane of all of them, as he's aware of how meaningless his other counterparts' conquests for power are, and was able to figure out how to survive in this new dimension alongside Kid Loki, Boastful Loki and Alligator Loki.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Being a Loki who has undergone the same Character Development he had in the movies and outlived his supposed death, Classic Loki despises his alternate selves' power hungry and backstabbing tendencies, especially when he sees a group of them fighting each other over a small throne despite the circumstances they are in.
• Redemption Equals Death: Defies the fate of all Lokis by using what he had left of his magic to create a construct of Asgard and dies a warrior's death for his sacrifice.
• Self-Imposed Exile: After faking his death at the hands of Thanos, Classic Loki decided to spend the rest of his days on an isolated planet upon realizing that his actions would only bring pain and suffering to those around him. He got pruned when he decided to end his self-imposed exile.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: He able to understand whatever Alligator Loki is saying.
• Stronger with Age: Capable of feats of magic that MCU Loki can only dream about, though this is also partly due to Classic Loki devoting most of his life to mastering his magic rather than bladework. MCU Loki acknowledges this and sees Classic Loki's abilities as inspiration as to what he himself might accomplish if he only applies himself to it.
• Thinking Up Portals: He can conjure up portals, which he uses to get himself, Kid Loki, Alligator Loki, and Loki out of the bunker while everyone else brawls. Unlike Doctor Strange and other sorcerers of Earth, he doesn't seem to need Sling Rings for this either. This is also an ability that shows how much more powerful he is than MCU Loki.
• The Three Faces of Adam: He is the older and wiser Prophet to Kid Loki's young ambitious Hunter and the protagonist Loki's Lord.
• Took a Level in Cynic: Unlike his Sacred Timeline counterpart who died a hero, Classic Loki survives his encounter with Thanos with the realisation that he would only bring more pain and misery to those he loves, which was why he chose to exile himself. But he only truly dips into cynicism after getting pruned by the TVA and discovers what his "glorious purpose" was, not helped by him seeing the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder of countless other Lokis. However, he grows out of this after encountering Loki L1130 and Sylvie, sacrificing his life to enable them to escape Alioth and fulfill his "glorious purpose" at last.
• Translator Buddy: He is the only one who understands what Alligator Loki says.
• Truer to the Text: Adaptational Heroism aside, Classic Loki is more in line with his comic book counterpart, from his physical appearance (including the iconic 60s costume) to his reliance on sorcery instead of hand-to-hand combat.
• Walking Spoiler: Despite Richard E. Grant being announced to play a character long before his appearance in the Loki show, Classic Loki (along with Kid Loki and Boastful Loki) was deliberately kept under wraps because his existence not only spoils the fact that he's one of the pruned Lokis, but also that pruned variants do not immediately die; they are simply teleported into another dimension.

Boastful Loki

Loki Odinson

"The TVA doesn't care what happens here."

Known Aliases: Boastful Loki (credits)

Species: Frost Giant

Citizenship: Jotun, Asgardian

Affiliation(s): Asgard (formerly)

Portrayed By: DeObia Oparei

Appearances: Loki

"So, after I vanquished Captain America and Iron Man, I claimed my prize: all six Infinity Stones."

A Loki who claims to have killed Iron Man and Captain America, conquered Earth, and claimed the power of all the Infinity Stones for himself. Not that anyone believes him.

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• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: Subverted. Boastful Loki claims to have killed Iron Man and Captain America, collected all six Infinity Stones, and conquered Earth. However, the others immediately call him out as a liar.
• Bald of Evil: A bald Loki who sold out Kid Loki and his party to President Loki in exchange for leadership.
• Beard of Evil: Unlike the other Lokis, he has a full beard. Like the other Lokis, he's an opportunistic, traitorous schemer.
• Boisterous Bruiser: He's all laughs when he's fighting other Loki variants, and he's set apart from other variants by relying on his physical prowess.
• Casting Gag: This isn't the first time DeObia Oparei is cast as a character named Loki; in the first season of Santa Clarita Diet, he portrayed a criminal named Loki Hayes.
• Canon Foreigner: He doesn't correspond to any specific version of Loki like the others do.
• Carry a Big Stick: He is seen holding a large, crudely-made hammer at the end of episode 4. He uses this hammer to attack President Loki's men during a fight.
• Divine Race Lift: This is the first, and so far only, black Loki we see in the MCU. In mythological illustrations and the Marvel Comics pages, Loki has almost always been portrayed with white skin.
• Dumb Muscle: He's a physical powerhouse, but certainly not the sharpest tool in the shed considering how easily President Loki played him like a fiddle.
• Fights Like a Normal: Despite being a Loki variant, he doesn't use any magic when he fights his alternate counterparts.
• Miles Gloriosus: Claims to have defeated Captain America and Iron Man, captured all six infinity stones, and conquered his Earth. The others don't buy it.
• Mythology Gag: Boastful Loki's outfit strongly resembles the costume worn by both Loki in the late 2000s as well as King Loki's in the comics. Him wielding a hammer and claiming to have possessed all six Infinity Stones may also be one to the Loki variant in Infinity Wars (2018), who possessed all the stones AND was worthy of Mjolnir.
• Pelts of the Barbarian: He wears a fur pelt around his neck, and he appears to be larger and tougher than the other Lokis.
• Smug Snake: He worked out a deal with President Loki that if they took down Kid Loki, he'd house and shelter him and all his followers, in exchange for Boastful Loki holding ultimate power; President Loki betraying him comes as a genuine shock, as he hadn't expected him to object to that absurdly one-sided offer, or even thought that he might've wanted more out of the deal.
• Token Evil Teammate: He betrays Kid Loki's pruned Lokis group to President Loki in exchange for leadership, and is the only one who stays in the Loki fight while L1130 Loki, Classic Loki, and Kid Loki escape from them.
• Uncertain Doom: He is left behind in Kid Loki's lair to fight back against President Loki and his army. We do not see whether or not he survives.
• Walking Spoiler: His existence, along with Classic Loki and Kid Loki's, reveals the fact that pruned variants do not immediately die, but are instead teleported into another dimension.
• You Don't Look Like You: He bears no resemblance whatsoever to any other Loki Variant seen; apart from being the only one who is black, his mannerisms and fighting style are more like those of Thor than Loki, and his costume, while inspired by some Loki costumes from the comics, doesn't share the motifs that all other MCU Lokis carry; even Alligator Loki dresses the part better.

Alligator Loki

Loki Odinson

Known Aliases: Alligator Loki

Species: Frost...Alligator?

Citizenship: Jotun, Asgardian

Affiliation(s): Asgard (formerly)

Appearances: Loki

"Well, at least my Nexus Event wasn't eating the wrong neighbor's cat."

— Boastful Loki

A variant of Loki that is somehow also an alligator. It's best not to question it.

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• Alternate Self: He is believed to be an animal variant of Loki who got pruned for eating a wrong neighbour's cat and follows Kid Loki and his group of variants in the Void.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's not clear if the alligator really is a Loki, even though he is accepted as one. For the most part, he has mannerisms that would be expected for normal alligators, Mobius doesn't remember an alligator variant of Loki existing, and even Classic Loki only offers the defense that "he's green" as a reason why this alligator with a nice hat should fall under the category. But for what it's worth, he's far more intelligent than a normal alligator, as he can understand English well enough to the point of knowing when he's been insulted, and is shown willfully drinking alcohol, which is something a regular alligator doesn't usually do. Furthermore, Mobius admits that the idea of the alligator deceiving other Lokis that he's also a Loki when he's not just makes it more likely that he's telling the truth and is really a Loki.
• Amplified Animal Aptitude: Alligator Loki appears to be far more intelligent than regular alligators, being able to understand English well enough to the point of being insulted, and (if Classic Loki is to be believed) snarks at the situation he's in through growls and hisses.
• Animals Not to Scale: He looks like an alligator, but nowhere near the size of a Real Life adult alligator. Downplayed, as his larger eyes and the yellowish stripes on his tail and belly mark him as an adolescent, though he's still somewhat smaller than the age his features would suggest. As a Jotun, the main Loki is too small for his species either.
• Berserk Button: He gets really angry when reminded of how he got pruned.
• Beware the Silly Ones: The whole concept of him is extremely goofy, but he’s still capable of chomping your hand off, as President Loki learns the hard way.
• Bizarre Taste in Food: Or drink in this case. While hiding out in Kid Loki's underground base, Alligator Loki is shown drinking red wine alongside Boastful and Classic Loki, which isn't exactly on an alligator's food palette.
• The Con: Conversed between Mobius and Classic Loki. While Mobius is initially skeptical of the idea of Alligator Loki actually being a Loki, he quickly realizes that the idea of a Loki variant pretending to be a mindless animal for an extended period of time in order to fool people would be very in-character for Loki to do (as noted in Thor: Ragnarok, Sacred Timeline Loki once pretended to be a snake in order to give Thor a nasty surprise); or, depending on how you take Mobius's phrasing, that a non-Loki alligator convincing a bunch of Lokis that he's one of them is a con worthy of the title Loki regardless.
• Green Gators: He is dark green; more realistic-looking than the cartoon crocodilians usually encompassed by this trope, but still greener than a real gator. His coloration is lampshaded when Classic Loki offers "he's green" as a justification for the alligator being one of them, due to Loki commonly being associated with the color green.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: He never speaks and only communicates in hisses and growls. However, Classic Loki is able to understand what he's saying, becoming his Translator Buddy.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Downplayed. While he is loyal to Kid Loki and his crew, he doesn't hesitate to fight the other members of the crew should they insult him. He also leaps towards President Loki and eats his right hand off after the latter yells at him.
• Noodle Incident:
  • According to Boastful Loki, he was pruned for eating the wrong neighbor's cat.
  • There's also the question of how he came into existence. He is accepted as a Loki variant, but nobody seems willing (or able) to explain how he came about… and the response to questioning it is very much "just go with it".
• Phrase Catcher: Any variation of, and including, "Why the hell is there an alligator in here?"
  • "HE'S A LOKI!"
• Pretty Boy: Described by director Kate Herron as being an alligator that's very handsome with beautiful eyes.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Potentially. There is no indication either way that his being an alligator all the time is by choice or if he's stuck. Mobius and the other Lokis aren't even sure if he was ever a shapeshifter in the first place.
• Team Pet: He is accepted as a fellow Loki by Kid Loki's crew, which wouldn't make him a pet. However, the way that Kid Loki looks after him and carries him around gives off the perception that he is a pet.
• This Is Gonna Suck: When he hears L1130's plan to kill Alioth, he starts praying because he knows the plan is very, very likely to get them killed.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: L1130 Loki is "heartbroken" that an alligator calling itself a Loki Variant isn't the strangest thing he's seen yet.

President Loki

Loki Laufeyson

"Come on. What did you expect?"

Known Aliases: President Loki

Species: Frost Giant

Citizenship: Jotun, Asgardian

Affiliation(s): Asgard (formerly)

Portrayed By: Tom Hiddleston

Voiced By: Alexis Victor (European French dub)

Appearances: Loki

"Not so good a bargain. How about this one? My army, my throne?"

A variant of Loki who became President of the United States, or at least ran for the office… or something, who had rallied an army of other Loki variants for himself in the Void.

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• Adaptational Villainy: President Loki in the comics was created when Loki had long since become a heroic figure, who only ran for president as part of a deal with one of the presidential candidates. This variant is an ambitious backstabber who wants to rule over the other Lokis.
• Advertised Extra: Trailers prominently made use of him, oftentimes implying that this was the same Loki as the main character of the show. However, he only appears in one episode, and briefly at that.
• Alliance of Alternates: He rallies an army of Loki variants, which outnumbers Kid Loki's group. Unfortunately, said alliance didn't last long, as his men betray him when he suggests that he should take the throne for himself.
• Alternate Self: He is an evil, nasty and vain variant of Loki who wound up in the Void and survived long enough to gather a bunch of misfits in an attempt to rule over it. He is betrayed by them, and Alligator Loki bites off his hand.
• An Arm and a Leg: He gets his right hand bitten off by Alligator Loki when he invades the base of Boastful, Classic, and Kid Loki.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Sees himself as a major threat to all other Lokis everywhere, but his ambitions simply amount to nothing more than ruling over a glorified junkyard, not to mention that he gets betrayed and disposed of as soon as he appeared.
• Butt-Monkey: Nothing goes right for him. He gets betrayed by his own army, his hand is bitten off by Alligator Loki that leaves him screaming like a little girl, gets chucked head-first into a popcorn machine and left flailing like an idiot thinking that Alligator Loki (actually an illusion conjured by Classic Loki) is attacking him again.
• Evil Counterpart: He is an evil, vain and selfish copy of the protagonist Loki played by the same actor.
• Evil Sounds Deep: He speaks with a slightly deeper and raspier voice than the main L1130 Loki which makes his high-pitched screams after getting his hand bitten off even funnier.
• Horns of Villainy: He wears a golden headgear with four horns protruding out of it, and he rallies an army of pruned variants to invade the other Lokis' base and attack them.
• Hypocritical Humor: When betraying an enraged Boastful Loki, President Loki simply laughs in his face and asks his variant "What did you expect?". When his entire army turns on him shortly after, President Loki is similarly enraged, even shouting the same thing Boastful Loki did as seen in Moral Myopia before.
• Laser-Guided Karma: His army betrays him immediately after he betrays Boastful Loki.
• Moral Myopia: When Boastful Loki complains that "We had a deal!" during President Loki's betrayal, President Loki laughs in his face. Then he becomes just as indignant when his army of Lokis betrays him, and he says the very same thing, "We had a deal!"
• Mythology Gag: His appearance is pulled straight from the pages of the Vote Loki comic series.
• Noodle Incident: Very little is actually known about President Loki; even less than Alligator Loki. For starters...why is he "President" Loki? Did he actually become President of the United States, or simply run an unsuccessful presidential campaign? What were the exact circumstances behind that to begin with? Why is his suit all torn up? How did he manage to rally an army of Loki variants for himself who all look like Rummage Sale Rejects? Why do the variants all wear "Vote Loki" badges? Why does one variant have his World War I-era helmet decorated in random kitchen utensils? Why does he scream like a little girl? So, so many questions, and not a single answer in sight.
• Paper Tiger: Despite presenting himself as a formidable threat, being able to command an army of his own variants, he turns out to be all bark and no bite the moment he gets betrayed by said army. He displays no combat ability (getting trounced by his fellow Lokis) nor is he as durable (getting his hand bitten off by Alligator Loki when other Lokis have been seen shrugging off far worse injuries).
• Screams Like a Little Girl: He lets out a high-pitched scream after Alligator Loki bites his hand off, and again when he believes he's wrestling it off him.
• Shadow Archetype: Despite having very little screentime, President Loki can be considered a shallow reflection of both Sacred Timeline Loki and L1130 Loki prior to their Character Development, highlighted by the fact that he's the only other Loki Variant seen in the Void who is also played by Tom Hiddleston. President Loki has ambitions to rule over the other Lokis as the superior variant, eerily similar to what L1130 Loki planned to do with Sylvie before eventually coming to bond with her. L1130 Loki's exasperation at his counterparts' backstabbing antics shows how far he had come compared to them. Tom Hiddleston himself considers President Loki to embody all the worst traits of all Lokis, being "the least vulnerable, the most autocratic and terrifyingly ambitious character who seems to have no empathy or care for anyone else".
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Wears a three-piece suit with a green waistcoat that's a bit torn in places, but still far more stylish than what his followers are wearing.
• Small Name, Big Ego: President Loki especially stands out among the Lokis we see, which is saying something. He considers himself the superior variant, but all that he really is is a cowardly snake who gets betrayed by the variants he deemed inferior.
• Smug Snake: President Loki actually lampshades this trope, preferring to think of himself and his army as snakes rather than Classic Loki's declaration that they're wolves. More to the point, he thinks of himself as a Manipulative Bastard who’s in complete control of the situation. He’s not.
• Suddenly Shouting: "WHY THE HEL IS THERE AN ALLIGATOR IN HERE?!"
• Uncertain Doom: It is unclear whether or not he makes it out of the Loki brawl.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Shortly after he gets introduced, his hand gets ripped off the bone by Alligator Loki, then one of his men shoves him into a popcorn machine during the brawl; after Classic Loki summons an illusion of Kid Loki throwing Alligator Loki onto him, they leave him shrieking in terror, presumably thinking the creature's ripping at his face. He's never seen again, only appearing for less than two minutes in the only episode he's in.

Other Variants

King Loki

Loki Laufeyson

"Good evening, my loyal subjects."

Species: Frost Giant

Citizenship: Jotun, Asgardian

Affiliation(s): Asgard

Voiced By: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson (illusion), Alexis Victor (European French dub)

Appearances: What If…?

On Earth-51825, Loki arrives on Earth with the Asgardian army after Thor is killed before reaching Mjolnir after being banished, hungry to deliver justice upon his brother's murderer.

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• Adaptational Wimp: The Loki of the sacred timeline could withstand explosions without problem, take hits from a Super-soldier and even withstand attacks from Thor and the Hulk. This version is knocked down by Black Widow with a single kick.
• Affably Evil: This is one of the nastier Loki variants (though still not quite as bad as President Loki), but he still possesses the trickster's natural charm and affability — even if he's just full of crap while doing it.
  Loki: [to a beaten Hank Pym] Hello. Trickster God. Hi.
• Alternate Self: He is an ambitious variant of Loki whose story diverged from the Sacred Timeline in the middle of the first Thor film. His brother is killed and he comes to Earth to avenge him, having not conspired with Laufey or met Thanos. Unlike his prime counterpart, who has just had a mental breakdown after discovering his Jotun ancestry and hated it due to Internalized Categorism, this Loki has no problems with it and proudly calls himself the King of Jotunheim. By the end of the episode, facing no resistance from the Avengers, he becomes the God-Emperor of Earth.
• Ambition Is Evil: He starts as a relatively neutral character with justified grievance against the Earth. After it is settled to the mutual benefit of all parties, his ambition gets the better of him. Instead of leaving, he decides to conquer the planet and successfully becomes its dictator. This Loki has never met Thanos, so the idea is entirely his.
• The Bad Guy Wins: By the end of episode 3 of What If…?, Loki has both found his brother's murderer and subdued Earth. However, Loki is defeated in the finale of season 1.
• Continuity Snarl: In the season 1 finale, he has somehow gotten hold of the Chitauri scepter containing the Mind Stone, despite the fact that Loki should not have met Thanos.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Hank Pym, a seasoned S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and former super-hero in the Yellowjacket suit is absolutely no match for him. Loki literally just toys around and takes the piss out of him for their entire "fight."
• Doppelgänger Spin: He uses the trick his prime counterpart employed in Thor and distracts Hank Pym with multiple copies of Nick Fury whom Loki pretends to be before turning into himself.
• Enemy Mine: He agrees to help Nick Fury and impersonate him to confront Thor's murderer.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In the main continuity, Loki attempted to kill his brother after Thor proved to be unwilling to stay on Earth. Here, Thor is murdered before it comes to that, and a furious Loki arrives with Asgardian forces to avenge him. When he learns that Hank killed his brother just because he could, Loki gets angry enough that his Bad "Bad Acting" gets dropped for a moment.
• Even Evil Has Standards: While disguised as Fury, Loki is incredulous at the idea that Hank would kill the Avengers candidates—who are innocents in his crusade against S.H.I.E.L.D—simply because it would upset Fury. In particular, he is disgusted when he learns that Hank killed Thor with no reason beyond that Fury would gain an interest if he lifted Mjolnir.
• The Evil Prince: He introduces himself as the crown prince of Asgard, and he turns out to be just as much of a power-hungry two-faced bastard as he was in the Sacred Timeline.
• God-Emperor: In this timeline, Loki fulfills his glorious purpose and briefly becomes the ruler of Earth while posing as a god.
• Gone Horribly Right: His plan to banish Thor worked even better than he thought when Yellowjacket killed Thor, but Loki still cared for his brother and is upset at his death.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the season finale, he's thwarted when Natasha uses his Scepter to enthrall him.
• An Ice Person: He uses the Casket of Ancient Winters with more proficiency than his prime counterpart, freezing the field S.H.I.E.L.D. confront him on with all their vehicles. He also uses it to capture Hank Pym when he tries to escape.
• I Lied: He promises to depart Earth peacefully if Thor's killer is turned over to his custody. When Nick Fury does so, he goes back on his word and conquers Earth anyway.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite having never met Thanos in this time, not only he decides to also launch a conquest of Earth like his Sacred Timeline counterpart, but is actually successful in it, if only for a while. He even is somehow able to get a hold of the scepter containing the Mind Stone like his Sacred Timeline, despite getting it from Thanos in the Sacred Timeline, who he never met here.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Although he seems genuine in his sense of avenging his brother, he is an arrogant jerk whose last act is to conquer the Earth.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: In the Sacred Timeline, Loki was at the time a Tragic Villain and Well-Intentioned Extremist whose actions were less out of desire for the throne and more a misguided yearning for his adopted father's approval. Here, Loki is more like how his main variant was in The Avengers in that he wants to conquer Earth, although he does show he truly cares for Thor.
• Just Toying with Them: His fight with Hank Pym consists of him just showing off and mocking Hank while barely exerting any effort in the fight.
• Kung-Fu Wizard: Shows himself to be a formidable hand-to-hand fighter even without his magic or weapons. Hank Pym learned this the hard way.
• Large Ham: He repeats some of the big speeches main Loki made in The Avengers while being just as theatrical.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: When Thor is killed, he takes this opportunity to bring an army to Earth to avenge him. After Fury talks him into helping him apprehend the guilty party, he conquers Earth anyway under the flimsy pretense of furthering their "partnership".
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Loki as a super-villain isn't really special in the least, being easily overshadowed by other global threats, but in a world without Avengers, Loki is practically unstoppable in his conquest aspirations.
• Opportunistic Bastard: He comes to Midgard to avenge his brother, but after learning that the Earth has lost its defenders, seizes the opportunity and conquers it in one day.
• Out-of-Character Alert: Loki manages to impersonate Nick Fury quite well when confronting Hank Pym, but makes one minor slip-up in that he expresses shock that Janet van Dyne was a S.H.I.E.L.D agent. It's definitely something the real Fury wouldn't have done, given that he knows everything about what goes on in S.H.I.E.L.D. Hank even lampshades this, believing that Loki-as-Fury is playing dumb to mess with him.
• Perma-Stubble: Has a slight, but noticeable five-o'clock-shadow when compared to the other, usually clean-shaven Lokis, with Boastful Loki being the only exception. Even in the face of their antagonism, Loki still loved his brother deep down so this could be the start of a Beard of Sorrow due to his untimely death.
• Post-Final Boss: After Infinity Ultron is finally beaten, he's the next villain the Natasha Romanoff of Infinity Ultron's world has to fight after being transported into a new world. He's beaten with less effort in comparison.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: In this timeline, with Thor dead and Odin deep in the Odinsleep, Loki is the King of Asgard for keeps. And after he screws over Fury and conquers Earth from the United Nations Assembly Hall, he's technically also the....Secretary General, too.
• Smug Super: He knows he's a powerful sorcerer and he's got the ego to show for it. During his fight with Hank, he constantly shows off and gloats when he could've taken out Hank at any time during the fight which just shows how arrogant he is.
• Strong as They Need to Be: In his debut episode, he trounces Hank Pym without any effort with just his hand-to-hand combat abilities alone. In the final episode, he gets knocked down by an alternate Black Widow and defeated with minimal effort.
• Super-Reflexes: Loki is able to swat tiny Hank Pym who is unnoticeable to humans and flying at high speed in his costume like an insect, and easily defeats him thanks to his reflexes where Nick Fury himself would have died.
• Villain Has a Point: He's still the same ambitious prick he was in the Sacred Timeline, but he's well within his rights to want recompense for his brother's murder on Earth's soil. He falls out of this once he gets his hands on Hank Pym and decides to conquer Earth anyway.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: He is one of the few versions of Loki who manages to achieve his desired throne, only to be easily defeated in the final episode of the first season.

Party Thor's Loki Laufeyson

Loki Laufeyson

"You’re my brother from another mother, man, I mean it."

Species: Frost Giant

Citizenship: Jotun

Affiliation(s): Jotunheim

Voiced By: Tom Hiddleston (English), Alexis Victor (European French dub)

Appearances: What If…?

The Loki Laufeyson of Earth-72124 was not adopted by Odin and instead raised by his biological father Laufey, allowing him to fully embrace his Frost Giant heritage. He gets along rather famously with his "brother from another mother" and likes to join his parties.

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• Adaptational Angst Downgrade: All the character flaws and events that led to his villainy in every other universe never happened here, leaving him much happier than he has ever been shown to be.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: This version of Loki holds no ill-will towards Thor (or Earth) and happily joins in the massive parties. He does plan on ditching Thor to deal with the consequences of the party on Earth, but it's more about saving his own skin than malice towards Thor, and he and the other Jotun are quick to pitch in once Frigga is brought into the equation.
• Alternate Self: A Loki who was never adopted by Odin, being raised as a Frost Giant instead. He still is friendly with Thor and his comrades, however.
• Ambiguous Situation: It is unclear why he is so tall when his main counterpart was apparently a runt. Either he was indeed born sickly but grew because he was properly raised among his own kind, or this variant wasn't born a runt in the first place. Alternatively, the main Loki might not be a full Frost Giant, while the height of this one implies he might be.
• Bash Brothers: Despite not being raised as Thor's brother they became friends anyway and enjoy partying together. Doesn't stop Loki from ditching Thor to deal with the "clean up" and a scolding from Frigga.
• Dirty Coward: Despite the fact that this Loki variant is on much better terms with Thor, he's still not above his expected cowardly instincts. The moment he hears word that Frigga is coming to put an end to Thor's party, he promptly hauls ass, leaving Thor to clean up the mess himself.
• Fair-Weather Friend: Genuinely gets along with Thor but immediately bails when serious trouble looms.
• In Spite of a Nail: Even though he was never raised as Thor's brother, he still gets chummy with the God of Thunder in this timeline, albeit more as party-going Fair-Weather Friend.
• Large and in Charge: This version isn't as much of a "runt" among Frost Giants as he appears to be a full-grown giant that towers over Thor. The reason behind it is unclear.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: On hearing that Frigga is coming to check up on Thor's antics on Earth this Loki immediately abandons his friend, pointing out that Frigga isn't his mother so he doesn't have to deal with her.
• Totally Radical: He talks almost exclusively in millennial brospeak, hilariously contrasting Tom Hiddleston's natural voice and accent, though it's in keeping with the image of most everyone in this particular universe being an obnoxious overgrown teenager.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Doesn't wear much clothing in general; just a loincloth and some shin guards.

Captain Carter's Loki Laufeyson

Loki Odinson

Species: Frost Giant

Citizenship: Jotun, Asgardian

Affiliation(s): Asgard

Voiced By: N/A

Appearances: What If…?

The Loki Laufeyson of Earth-82111, who invaded the Battle of New York and faced off against The Peggy Carter-led Avengers.

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• The Cameo: He makes a brief appearance in the Action Prologue of "What If... Captain Carter Fought the Hydra Stomper?".
• The Voiceless: He has no lines of dialogue.

Loki 1602

Loki Odinson

"Mind the champagne. It's very expensive."

Species: Frost Giant

Citizenship: English

Affiliation(s): Asgardian Royal Family

Voiced By: Tom Hiddleston

Appearances: What If…?

A variant of Loki who was an actor in 1602.

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• Actor Allusion: Loki being portrayed as a Shakespearean actor harks back to him being played by an actual Shakespearean actor. He's even playing Hamlet, a role Hiddleston has played on stage.
• Adaptational Comic Relief: His main purpose in the episode is to relieve tension and make the viewers laugh.
• Adaptational Wimp: In this universe, Loki doesn't appear to have any sort of magical powers to speak of, merely being a simple actor for King Thor's court. Furthermore, he doesn't seem to have any combat skills to speak of, mostly staying out of the way when things start to go haywire.
• The Bore: It's made very clear that nobody finds Loki's conversations about Shakespeare's plays interesting.
• Companion Cube: He's very attached to his Yorick skull and is visibly upset when Peggy takes it from him.
• Drama Queen: Peggy considers him one, just not as much as Thor is. Loki takes this as a compliment.
• The Hedonist: Knowing that he is the youngest of three siblings with a weak claim to the throne, this Loki does not seek power and instead indulges in all pleasures the life of a prince has to offer, including fine drinks, cakes, delicious food, ladies' company and attention of the audience.
• Insult Backfire: When Peggy says that Thor is even more of a Drama Queen than Loki, Loki is visibly flattered.
• Non-Action Guy: Loki is intent to stay away from battle both when Rogers Hood and his band rob his carriage and when Thor asks him to join the last fight.
• Tuck and Cover: When Peggy sends everyone back to the future after the final battle, Loki is last seen holding and shielding Wanda.

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