Characters / MCU: Kang

Main Character Index > Other Individuals and Organizations > Multiverse > Time Variance Authority (Kang | Mobius M. Mobius) | Earth-838 | The Lighthouse

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Due to the nonlinear nature of the story of Kang and his many counterparts, several spoilers on this page — including character names — will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

Kang the Conqueror / The Exiled One

"I'm the man who can give you the one thing you want. Time."

Species: Human

Portrayed By: Jonathan Majors (2021-2023)

Appearances: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania | Avengers The Kang Dynasty | Avengers Secret Wars

"Let me make this easy for you. You will bring me what I need... or everything you call a life will end."

A man from the 31st century, who is more malevolent than even Thanos himself. When an Alternate Self of his made contact with his counterparts across the multiverse, the Conqueror took it upon himself to bring all of their universes under his control. This led to the Multiversal War, where opposing variants of Kang destroyed much of the multiverse in the process. Eventually, Kang's actions led to his exile by his counterparts, which left him trapped in the Quantum Realm — first seeking assistance from Janet Van Dyne to make an escape, before striking a similar bargain with Scott Lang years later.

The TVA was formed by one of his variants, "He Who Remains", with the explicit purpose of preventing another Multiversal War by any means necessary, usually to prevent additional Kang variants appearing and threatening the multiverse once again.

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A-K

• Adaptational Badass: In status, at least. While Kang is one of the Avengers' primary foes, he's usually outclassed by more dangerous villains like Ultron or Dr. Doom, and his schemes are primarily contained to Earth. In the MCU, however, he's hyped up to be a multiversal threat who's more dangerous than Thanos himself. In practice, owing to not even surviving his first story against Ant-Man and his team, he becomes an Adaptational Wimp.
• Adaptation Personality Change: One of comic Kang's biggest personality issues is he's an unbelievable sexist. If this is true for his counterpart here, he doesn't show it. Likewise, Comic Kang has a strong sense of honour and fair play when it comes to battle (and it's shown he likes the thrill of it too). While this Kang is a Blood Knight too, it's also clear he hasn't got a shred of honour in him and doesn't give his enemies a chance to fight back before he vaporizes them on the spot.
• Alliterative Name: "Kang" and "Conqueror" begin with the same sound (/k/).
• Always Someone Better: Scott's ability to overcome the Probability Storm shows that it's possible to reconcile with alternate, conflicting versions of oneself to achieve benevolent goals, a route that the Kangs are too paranoid and ambitious to take.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • To Janet van Dyne. Having been responsible for him nearly escaping from exile and subsequently gaining control over the Quantum Realm as a dictator, Janet spent 20 years of her life fighting his tyranny to prevent him from getting any more powerful. In turn, Kang is furious at Janet's betrayal, and when she comes back to his realm in Quantumania, his first goal is to acquire Pym Particles and escape to the Quantum Realm to conquer the universe, but goal 1.001 is to exact revenge on her.
  • Becomes one to Scott Lang in Quantumania. Kang captures both him and his daughter Cassie, threatening her life to get Scott to do what he wants. When he reneges on their deal anyways, Scott is utterly furious, and spends much of his time smashing Kang's footsoldiers and buildings in retribution. Kang himself comes to acknowledge Scott as a genuine threat and by the end of the film is actively trying to kill him for thwarting his plans.
  • As in the comics however, Kang's true archenemy is...himself, with all other Kang's from different timelines and parallel universes voting to exile him to the Quantum realm in the first place because of the massive threat he posed to them, and Kang vowing to get revenge on them and to get his destiny back on track.
    Kang: I WILL BURN THEM OUT OF TIME FOR WHAT THEY DID TO ME!
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: While he's Faux Affably Evil, Kang can never go long without revealing he's a monster. The only reason he's able to build his empire is because he's an unparalleled genius who drapes himself in impossible technology. In the climax of Quantumania he leaves his tower and starts blasting La Résistance, mowing them down and turning the tide of the battle all by himself.
• Bad Boss: When Darren/M.O.D.O.K. tries to say something while Kang is trying to get Scott to help him, Kang uses telekinesis to painfully push Darren into a corner of the room for speaking out of turn i.e. saying anything while he is in the room. He even declares that Janet was a better servant compared to him, just to rub salt in the wounds.
• Badass Boast: In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, he responds to Scott's attempts at a Badass Boast of his own by invoking his Avenger status with "You're an Avenger? Have I killed you before? ...They all blur together after a while.", implying he's killed so many Avengers across the multiverse that he doesn't bother keeping track.
  Kang: Are you the one with the hammer?
• Badass Cape: His armor comes complete with an impressive-looking cape, giving him a noticeably regal appearance with an imposing edge.
• Badass Normal: Kang doesn't have any superpowers, but he does have armor that has numerous powers and allows him to overpower an army by himself, as well as an impressive intellect and combat skills honed from unnumbered conquests, making Kang a force to be reckoned with even without his technology.
• Beard of Evil: Inverted. In contrast to He Who Remains' Perma-Stubble and goatee, Kang is completely clean-shaven.
• Big Bad: He's the main villain for Ant-Man and the Wasp in Quantumania, and is set to be the titular antagonist of The Avengers in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Kang tricked Janet into helping him repair his ship by pretending to be an innocent scientist who had accidentally gotten trapped in the Quantum Realm. In truth, he had been banished there for the horrific crimes he committed in his quest to rule the multiverse.
• Blood Knight:
  • Understated, but it's clear that Kang has a taste for war and violence, as he (and seemingly all his variants) has built his legacy around conquest. When Janet peers into his mind, she sees countless flashes of him decimating armies, destroying worlds and vaporizing his enemies to dust with great vigor.
  • This is reinforced during the final battle. When Kang finally takes the field, he initially descends on a Hard Light platform, striking an extremely dignified pose. However, once he actually starts fighting, his demeanor becomes downright animalistic, howling like mad as he unleashes his power wildly upon everyone he can reach.
• Brought Down to Badass: During the final battle against Scott, Hope and the others, Kang's tech is severely damaged. However, he has enough left in him for one last prolonged fistfight against Scott.
• The Bully: At his core, Kang is just a schoolyard bully who picks on other worlds and timelines just because he can. The fact that he's reduced to kicking Scott and throwing a tantrum during his Villainous Breakdown only shows how immature the Conqueror truly is.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Kang apparently deals with rebellions against his empire so often that it's just another day of work for him. He's killed hundreds of Avengers during his conquests, to the point where he doesn't even bother to remember any of their names. That said, he does at least recognize who Scott is, as after tossing him and Cassie around with his immensely powerful tech, Kang directly identifies him as Ant-Man to drive home that he's way out of his league here.
  Kang: You think this is new to me? Do you know how many rebellions I've put down? How many worlds I've conquered? How many Avengers I've killed? And you think you can beat me?! I AM KANG!
• Card-Carrying Villain: In sharp contrast to Thanos and other notable MCU villains who had noble goals or at least claimed to, Kang makes no secret of the fact that he's a monster whose sole aim is to bring the entire multiverse under his tyrannical rule.
• Celebrity Paradox: In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve's notebook containing pop culture media over the last 70 years includes the Rocky movies. Majors played Damian Anderson in Creed III which is a Spin-Off of the Rocky films.
• Clothes Make the Superman: He has near godlike powers thanks to the incredibly advanced technology in his armor, but without access to his technology he's just a normal man.
• Cold Ham: Veers into this territory when blackmailing Scott into helping retrieve his power core; although the threats Kang makes sound drastic on their own, he delivers them in an eerily cold tone.
• Collapsible Helmet: His translucent blue helmet can be collapsed to protect his face.
• Combat Breakdown: Eventually getting fed up with Scott's witticisms and tricks, he spends the closing minutes of their final battle trying to murder him with his bare hands.
• Composite Character: Design-wise. Seems to be one with Iron Lad, another variant of Kang’s in the comics. His helmet looks shaped a little more like Iron Man’s helmet than Kang’s more rectangular/cylindrical helmet design from the comics, and when he is serious in combat, he retracts the flowing parts of his tunic like armor into his upper body, giving his armor an appearance more similar to Iron Man’s armor. Also, sometimes when he is firing his energy blasts, he fires them from his palms likes repulsor beams when he is not shooting them from his fist.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • Seeing as though he's a variant of the same character, it only makes sense that Kang is this to He Who Remains. Both of them are authoritarian dictators who rule over a place beyond time. However, while HWR was a kooky, yet somewhat friendly Cloudcuckoolander who was actively trying in earnest to help Loki and Sylvie in stopping disaster from breaking out, Kang is a strict and cold No-Nonsense Nemesis who has no problems with manipulating those he wants, and is shown trouncing the living shit out of Ant-Man once provoked.
  • He's also one for Thanos, the other Greater-Scope Villain of the MCU. Both of them are powerful villainous characters associated with the color purple, have entire armies at their disposal and are feared by everyone they know. However, while Thanos at least tried to give off the veneer of being a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wanted to save the world from itself, Kang doesn't bother putting up such a front to hide his desire to Rape, Pillage, and Burn any universe that gets in his way. Also, while Thanos was a very impersonal foe who sympathized with the heroes trying to stop him (to an extent), Kang is incredibly vengeful, wanting nothing more than to get revenge on Janet for stopping him from escaping, and to hurt Scott as much as possible by holding his daughter hostage. Thanos was also gigantic, owing to his Titan heritage. Being human, Kang is taller than average but doesn't tower over the heroes like the Mad Titan (assuming his height is the same as his actor Jonathan Majors, Kang is 6'0" / 183cm). Similarly, while Thanos looked alien with his massive frame and purple skin, Kang looks like a normal human being. And while Thanos was already extremely powerful even before getting any of the Infinity Stones, Kang, while highly intelligent and very physically formidable by human standards, is entirely dependent on his armor for his powers.
  • Compared to Ant-Man and the Wasp's previous Big Bad, Ghost; Ghost was a superpowered Tragic Villain with only a single ally, her only goal was to escape a painful death, and she was more or less an equal to the heroes in terms of power and combat skill. Kang, on the other hand, is a Badass Normal who uses Powered Armor who commands a vast army, aspires to multiversal conquest, and he dominates the heroes in almost every encounter. Ghost was also an Anti-Villain, having been forced into villainy, and whose sympathetic qualities led to her undergoing a Heel–Face Turn by the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp, whereas Kang is a dyed-in-the-wool tyrant driven by his own ego whose sympathetic qualities are minimal at best, and who remains a villain through and through.
  • In a way, Kang also is a sharp contrast to Loki as he was depicted in The Avengers, which only makes the God of Mischief's utter terror of the Conqueror all the more serious.
    • Both of them are wear green as part of their wardrobe, and are egotistical conquerers who want to take what they believe is rightfully theirs. However, while Loki was only interested in conquering Earth and nothing else, Kang wants to subjugate the entire multiverse to his whim.
    • Loki also committed his evil acts due to being in Thanos's employ at the time, while Kang does what he does for himself and no one else, with nobody pulling on his puppet strings.
    • And finally, Loki makes a spectacle of his villainy to get people to pay attention to him, and did what he did because he twisted his rationale into thinking the subjugation of Earth was what would get his adopted family to love him again. Meanwhile, Kang's villainous deeds are done out of naked revenge and genuine hatred for those who aren't subjects to his rule, and is a stoic, serious character who never so much as cracks a smile when confronting the main characters.
• The Conqueror: Indeed; before his first appearance, Kang has conquered countless worlds, and in Quantumania, despite being marooned there by his own variants, he launched a campaign in the Quantum Realm so effective that he's known and feared far and wide, with no one willing to so much as utter his name. His plan in the film is to escape the Quantum Realm so that he can renew his multiversal campaign of conquest and avenge himself upon those who trapped him there to begin with.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Scott got in a few good hits in giant form, but once it comes time for the two of them to fight hand-to-hand, it's not even a contest - Kang utterly pulverizes him and the few hits that Scott does get in do not even come close to matching the No-Holds-Barred Beatdown that Kang was laying down on him. Had it not been for Hope coming back to rescue Scott, Kang would have killed him.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the Doctor Whomage. Kang is without a doubt a scientific genius who not only figured out inter-universal and temporal travel but built technology that makes him damn near close to a Reality Warper. The problem is that despite his intellect, the complexities of the multiverse and time travel prove too big for him to properly manage, and he’s far too narcissistic to admit it, even when his hubris has led to the destruction of entire timelines. He does seem to think he has better ways of managing the time stream (and He Who Remains shows that it is possible to do so to an extent) but he is seriously lacking any kind of moral fetters to restrain his actions; he will rationalize any mistake or all-out slaughter he commits as The Needs of the Many so that he can continue to live out his delusion that he’s a put-upon Science Hero that just knows better than literally everybody else (even his own alternate counterparts) rather than what he truly is–a dangerously powerful and irresponsible rogue who believes he is the center of the entire multiverse. Coming off less like a Multiversal Messiah and more of a Space Satan (see below). Thus, he resembles not the Doctor, but instead the Master or Rassilon.
• Deflector Shields: He's covered in Some Kind of Force Field that renders Scott and Hope's attacks harmless, and can create a large barrier around himself to deal with larger threats. However, the shield is eventually overwhelmed by a swarm of hyper-intelligent ants as well as Darren Cross throwing himself at it.
• Determinator: When Kang landed in the Quantum Realm, all he had were the clothes on his back and his broken time chair; with Janet's help, he got the chair working and regained his armor, and even after Janet sabotaged the chair, Kang, with only his armor, his intellect, and his ruthless might, conquered the Quantum Realm so thoroughly that the few pockets of resistance fear to even speak his name. At the end of Quantumania, where Kang is injured and his armor is torn to ribbons and rendered non-functional, he still refuses to give up, savagely pummeling Scott to get a chance to escape the Quantum Realm once and for all, with only his apparent death finally stopping him (and it's implied that even that might not be enough to keep him down for good).
• Disintegrator Ray: His suit can fire blasts of energy and laser beams that instantly turn anyone they hit into a puff of blue smoke (unless it's hitting one of the protagonists, that is).
• Disney Villain Death: He gets collapsed into his self-destructing ship engine, but we never actually see him die, hence Scott and the Council of Kangs are unsure if he actually died.
• The Dreaded:
  • The TVA can casually handle vampires, gods, Titans, and the Infinity Stones. That everything He Who Remains does is to keep another version of this guy coming into existence speaks volumes about how dangerous he can be, and the damage he could unleash. When Loki tries to warn Mobius and B-15 of what's coming, he is positively freaking out. Come Quantumania, and Loki is still utterly terrified of him — even his dweeb-looking variant Victor Timely, much to Mobius's doubt.
    Loki: [sees Timely] It's him...
    Mobius: What? You made him sound like this terrifying figure.
    Loki: He is.
  • Quantumania show that Janet van Dyne is just as terrified of Kang as Loki is/was/will be, with her barely able to talk about him or even mention his name, immediately snapping at Cassie to shut off her Quantum reading device once she learns what it's doing, and actively warns Scott not to trust Kang at all. La Résistance against his rule, such as it is, is just as scared of attracting his attention, and refers to him simply as "The Conqueror".
  • The people of the Quantum Realm all fear and loathe him and even with their numbers are very reluctant to face him head-on. Even Krylar admits he's afraid of him.
  • Even his own variants feared him, as they conspired to trap him away in the Quantum Realm when he became too bloodthirsty and warlike for even them.
• The Emperor: Kang rules a massive empire in the Quantum Realm and wants to expand back into the wider universe.
• Empowered Badass Normal: With his glowing blue eyes, there are hints that Kang hasn't just put super-tech into his armor.
• Endearingly Dorky: He surprisingly has one moment. When Janet is having snail horses tow his ship, he can’t help but flash a dorky, genuine smile that he can barely hold back afterwards.
• Et Tu, Brute?: It is clear that besides trapping him in the Quantum Realm and delaying his conquest, Kang wants revenge against Janet because he took her betrayal personally. He valued his friendship with her on some level because he was willing to honor his promise to her and even asks what she even saw in his brain when it shouldn’t really matter because he was likely going to execute her after capturing her anyway.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Unlike many of the other villains in the MCU, Kang understands and appreciates the value of gratitude and is most certainly not an Ungrateful Bastard. After Janet helps him repair the Time Chair, he was perfectly fine with sending her back to her Earth and leaving it alone in his warpath because he was sincerely thankful for her help. Unfortunately for him, Janet couldn't just allow him escape the Quantum Realm and wreak more havoc out of a strong sense of morals.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Zigzagged. On the one hand, he's The Sociopath who has no issue threatening Scott's loved ones for personal gain. On the other hand, it's because he does understand their familial bond that he's able to manipulate them in the first place. Likewise, he doesn't even try to rationalize his behavior to Janet when she uncovers his true nature, but he also understands her horror and was still willing to help her escape because she saved his life, showing he understands gratitude and heroism.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Besides their names rhyming, he's this to Lang as a man who discovered how to time travel, but used it for his own megalomaniacal goals rather than helping others.
  • To Tony Stark/Iron Man, being that they're both prodigious scientific geniuses that figured out time travel, built fantastically advanced Power Armor, and suffer from narcissism. However, a combination of life-altering events and trusted companions who were able to call him out when he was in the wrong helped shape Tony into a better person and a true hero capable of a performing a Heroic Sacrifice. Meanwhile, Kang doesn't respect anybody enough to listen to their objections–even those who've saved his life (like Janet)–and is fully convinced he is in the right no matter what he does. There are even startling parallels between Tony's capture by the Ten Rings and Kang's exile into the Quantum Realm–the difference is that Kang learned nothing from the experience or Janet betraying him, and becomes even more committed to being a Multiversal Conqueror.
  • To Doctor Strange. As Multiverse of Madness demonstrated, Stephen Strange and his variants wield unfathomable levels of power that can both save and destroy entire universes, and his intellect is only matched by his belief that he alone must be the one to make decisions for everybody else. The difference is that the best Stranges recognize their limitations and when they're wrong; Kang is utterly incapable of admitting he's wrong, and that very same hubris has driven him to commit atrocities on a literally incalculable scale.
• Evil Plan: As soon as he detects the Ant-family's arrival in his realm, Kang sets his sights on capturing them so he can use Pym Particles to recover his universe-ship's engine and escape the Quantum Realm so he can resume his war with his variants.
• Evil Sounds Deep: In addition to being considerably more villainous than He Who Remains, Kang also speaks with a lower, more menacing timbre than his eccentric variant. It's possibly an affectation though because there are moments where it wavers and because when he screams in pain and shock, his voice sounds higher.
• Evil Virtues: Determination and gratitude; even stranded in the Quantum Realm with nothing but a broken time chair and the clothes on his back, Kang refuses to give up, and when Janet helps him repair his machine and regain a portion of his power, Kang sincerely offers to bring her home and leave her world in peace, even as she's reeling in horror at the carnage he's also planning to unleash.
• Eviler than Thou: He believes the other Kangs are ruining the multiverse for him with their meddling of time and space, so he launches a campaign of conquest across the multiverse. This results in a Multiversal War that destroyed countless timelines and universes (and the incalculable number of life lost in the process), causing the other Kangs to banish him to the Quantum Realm in order to save what's left of the Multiverse for themselves.
• Facial Markings: He has two scars on his face on his eyes that give the illusion of facial markings, also very reminiscent of the lines on Kang's helmet in the comics and other adaptations.
• Fatal Flaw: Pride and Wrath, as detailed below. Kang is ultimately undone in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania due to A) seeing the Ant-Man family as beneath him, and B) his desire for revenge.
• Faux Affably Evil: Kang rarely raises his voice, is generally polite on first encounters, and seems to like explaining himself, without too much ranting, to other people. However, if you irritate him enough he'll smash you into a wall with a gesture, and if you have something he wants, he'll threaten to torture your loved ones to death in front of you if he doesn't get it.
• Genius Bruiser: Kang wields and can manipulate technology beyond anything the people of Earth can manage, as well as being tactically intelligent enough to conquer nearly all of the Quantum Realm despite only having a suit of Powered Armor to begin with. On top of all that, he's an extremely muscular, extremely skilled warrior who can single-handedly turn the tide of a battle, and who can brutally beat down Scott with nothing but brute strength and skill.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Without his helmet, Kang has two scars on his face that protrude from his eyes, making he appear to have Facial Markings and easily differentiating him, visually at least, from He Who Remains.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The existence of malevolent variants of He Who Remains, such as Kang himself, is what caused He Who Remains to create the TVA.
• Green and Mean: His suit is partially green and he's a cruel, psychotic tyrant who's decimated countless worlds in his conquest.
• Hated by All: While He Who Remains warned Loki and Sylvie about how evil his variants were, Kang was apparently so horrible that the Council of Kangs had to exile him to the Quantum Realm. He doesn't get much better after becoming its dimensional dictator, with several freedom fighters striving to end his reign, and even those who come to serve him are either robots built by him, or do so either out of fear or for personal benefits.
• The Heavy: In contrast to Thanos, who preferred to operate through intermediaries and middle men up until becoming fed up and searching for the Infinity Stones himself, Kang is very much front and center for the MCU's Multiverse Saga as the new Big Bad. He has multiple prominent appearances leading to the upcoming climax of the story arc in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars.
• Hero Killer: Implied by his retort "You're an Avenger? Have I killed you before?" in response to Scott claiming to be an Avenger. He even asks if Scott is "the one with the hammer", suggesting that he has killed at least one variant of Thor. He later kills Xolum in the final battle.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: After Scott serves his use and persists in being an annoyance, Kang screams about how beneath him he believes the hero is.
  Kang: YOU TALK TO ANTS!!!
• His Own Worst Enemy: As literally as possible. He may hate Scott, but his true Arch-Enemy is the Council of Kangs that exiled him, all of whom are variants of one another.
• Humans Are Insects: Being a Multiversal Conqueror who's destroyed entire timelines in the past with no remorse, it’s no surprise that he holds little value towards others. It's especially ironic considering (much to his disdain) his current foe is Ant-Man.
• Hunk: A rare villainous example. Kang is played by the rather good-looking Jonathan Majors, and is an incredibly muscular man, with his strength being demonstrated when he manages to smash Scott's helmet in with a powerful kick.
• Informed Attribute: During Quantumania, he's cut off from most of his higher technology that would allow him to encroach upon and manipulate time like He Who Remains. This does nothing to stop him from boasting of how he's still the master of it though.
• It's All About Me: More-so than even Thanos himself. As it takes a special kind of egomania to decide that even other versions of yourself lack the vision that you have; Kang looks down on his own variants, to say nothing of the trillions of lives he's destroyed in his campaign of conquest, for lacking the ability to perceive time as he does, and he's ready and willing to destroy virtually anything to resume his efforts to "repair" the Multiverse by forcibly reforging it to his liking.
• Knight of Cerebus: Kang doesn't show any of the humorous traits exhibited by his Alternate Self He Who Remains, being Faux Affably Evil at best, making him a far more serious threat to Scott and company than either Yellowjacket or Ghost — all fitting for a villain who's set up to be the next major Big Bad after Thanos. It's significant that the first trailer for Quantumania, is rather fun and whimsical until Kang shows up — at which point all humor stops. In the film, Scott tries to preserve his line in snarky backchat, but Kang tends to make his jokes a No-Sell. He even lacks quips, the main source of humor in the MCU, which even Thanos dabbled in occasionally.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Scott and Hope attack Kang's fortress head-on and loudly challenge the villain's authority so they can buy Hank time to assemble his army of ants, but Kang doesn't rise to the challenge and would've just escaped the Quantum Realm if not for Cassie's jailbreak. Later, when a different chance to leave presents itself, he focuses on trying to get to it rather than kill Scott, and only tries to do so because the hero keeps getting in his way.

L-W

• Lack of Empathy: Played With. Kang is a sociopath who sees everything around him as nothing more than another conquest. On the other hand, he does occasionally show traces of empathy, as he did understand Janet's desire to reunite with Hope. He likewise recognizes Scott's love for his daughter Cassie. With the former, he even offers to keep his promise to Janet after she discovers who he really is, despite it not gaining him anything, simply because he is genuinely grateful that she saved his life and helped rebuild his ship. However, he has no qualm with using this to manipulate and extort those very same people and he's chillingly dismissive of all the lives he's ruined and entire worlds he's destroyed over the years.
  Janet: You'd be wiping out entire timelines, murdering trillions of people!
  Kang: I wish that mattered, Janet.
• Laser-Guided Karma: A warlord contemptuous of size-changing scientists like the Pyms, the Langs, and Darren is painfully crumpled into his own ship engine.
• Made of Iron: During the climax of Quantumania, Kang is swarmed by hyper-advanced ants who do enough damage to render Kang's Powered Armor shredded and almost totally non-functional, but Kang himself survives and is still strong enough to give Scott the beating of a lifetime.
• Marquee Alter Ego: Zig-zagged. Kang's famous television helmet in the comics is translucent and shows his face. In Quantumania, Kang sometimes wears his iconic helmet with his translucent blue face, but he frequently turns it off when when he's speaking to other characters (activating it tends to indicate Serious Business), and he loses it in the final showdown.
• Mecha-Mooks: With the exception of M.O.D.O.K, most of Kang's footsoldiers consist of robot beings that are implied to have been constructed by him in the years he's spent trapped in the Quantum Realm.
• Mirror Character: To Thanos, his predecessor Greater-Scope Villain. Both are the Big Bad of the MCU, both have connections to other characters (Thanos to Iron Man, the Guardians and Thor, Kang to Janet, Scott and Loki), both are genius leveled-intelligent combatants who command great armies, both are sadistic and ruthless and both pose an immense threat to Sacred Timeline Earth and its universe. However, while Thanos was an Affably Evil antagonist who thought he was doing the right thing for all of the universe, Kang, however is a manipulative and unscrupulous conqueror who only wants nothing more to acquire power and control. Thanos is an ancient alien known as a Titan born thousands of years ago, while Kang is a human from the future (and likely a different timeline or universe). Additionally, Thanos was monstrously strong and durable by his own nature and didn't need to rely on his armour or weapons to dominate his enemies. By contrast, Kang is very strong on his own, but it's nothing compared to his superior tech and Powered Armor. Kang also has absolutely no respect for the heroes of Earth as he's killed countless versions of them in other different timelines, but Thanos had genuine respect and admiration for quite a few of them, despite being enemies.
• Mundane Utility: Tries to use the heat from his high-tech multiverse ship engine to burn Scott's face off during their final battle.
• My Death Is Only The Beginning: If anything, his defeat at the hands of the Ant-Man family have only made things worse for the superhero community and The Multiverse as a whole. Now that the Council of Kangs know what the people of Earth are capable of by (possibly) killing Kang the Exile, they're a high priority on their radar and their paranoia of their growing understanding of the Multiverse is the catalyst of the Second Multiverse War.
• Myopic Conqueror: While he claims that he "Conquers" universes to prevent his variants from causing incursions, it's pretty clear that he's just a Control Freak with a God Complex, invading and destroying entire timelines out of a sense of superiority to others.
• Narcissist: Kang is such an egomaniac that he considers himself superior to even alternate versions of himself, and he's prepared to engage in conquest on an unimaginable scale to reforge the multiverse to his liking, which he feels justified in doing because in Kang's own mind, no one sees or understands time the way he does. At best, he wants to preserve them just so he can continue to have places to conquer.
• Near-Villain Victory: In the climax, Kang has all but quashed the rebellion and the heroes all by himself, and seems poised to win... and then the "smart ants", which rapidly evolved thanks to the Quantum Realm's time dilation, arrive and take him off guard. And then a reformed Darren shows up, which eventually leads to him being overwhelmed and carried away by the ant swarm. He survived, but was injured with his tech damaged.
• Necessarily Evil: How he sees his actions; seeing the persona Kang as "who [he] need[s] to be".
• Never Found the Body: Scott has some doubts that he's actually dead after the events of Quantumania. The Council of Kangs aren't completely sure either.
• Never My Fault: When he betrays Scott, Kang dismissively notes that Janet's mind has a tendency to change, showing that he holds a grudge over her turning on him years before. Naturally, Kang doesn't consider Janet discovering that he's a tyrannical mass murderer to have had anything to do with it.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Unlike He Who Remains and his other variants, Kang is a completely serious man who is entirely focused on trying conquer any and all worlds that stand in his way.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: From his own perspective, he's the only one who can stop himself — all of himself and that he seeks to stop the Multiverse from collapsing. Although the truth of the matter makes it seem like he just wants less competition, within and without, so he can conquer the Multiverse without any real opposition. Plus Janet refutes his claims; saying that he is just after vengeance against his variants for imprisoning him.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • By his own admission, Kang has killed so many Avengers that they've all started to run together in his mind. Like most of Kang's multiversal conquests, the battles are left to the viewer's imagination.
  • After being overwhelmed and swarmed by giant ants during the climax, Kang shows up right when the heroes are escaping the Quantum Realm, injured and with his armor shredded, but still alive, with no sign of how he survived or escaped from the ants.
• Omnicidal Maniac: As Janet's glimpse into his mind shows, Kang has obliterated entire timelines, murdering people on a literally incalculable scale. At best, he's dismissive of the countless lives he's destroyed, and at worst, he boasts of the worlds he's burned on his campaign of conquest.
• One-Man Army: He's not called "the Conqueror" for nothing. He single-handedly turns the tide of the battle for the Quantum Realm just by entering the battlefield and completely demolishes morale to fight. The few brave enough to face him soon find themselves dead or falling back at Jentorra's order.
• Other Me Annoys Me:
  • Based on He Who Remains' story, it's implied that Kang felt irritated by the existence of other versions of himself, leading to the big multiverse war between himself and his variants. In Quantumania, he expresses contempt for his variants, considering them myopic and ruining the Multiverse, claims which Kang uses to justify his conquests. When his actions get him exiled to the Quantum Realm by said variants, Kang is hellbent on revenge.
  • Just as he dislikes them, Kang's variants don't particularly care for him; they exiled him to the Quantum Realm, and after Kang's apparent demise, none of the Council of Kangs is sorry to see the end of him; Scarlet Centurion is annoyed that he didn't get to kill Kang himself, and Immortus is more concerned by the implications of Kang's defeat than anything else.
• Pet the Dog: Kang gets a few moments of this.
  • His first action in the movie (via flashback) is to use what little strength he has to rescue Janet from a Quantum creature. Arguably this was all part of his plan, but considering he'd literally just crashed into the realm and had no idea who Janet was or what she was capable of, it was more than likely a genuine moment of heroism.
  • Even after Janet discovered his true nature, he was still willing to help her go back home, since she saved his life and helped repair his ship. He also promises that he won't ever attack her universe, due to his gratefulness for her help.
  • He rescued Darren Cross from death and reformed him into being M.O.D.O.K. Though this one does come with the fact he treats him as more a somewhat useful lackey than a friend.
  • When Cassie wrestles free from one of Kang's guards to hug her father, Kang puts up a hand to prevent the guard from shooting her, opting to give Cassie and Scott a moment before sending the latter on a highly dangerous task. Also, despite backstabbing Scott once he has what he wants, Kang shows no interest in harming Cassie until she actively takes a stand against him, implying that Kang was planning to live up to the spirit of his deal with Scott, if nothing else.
• Powered Armor: Kang's armor is significantly more advanced than any of the Iron Man suits, considering that it came from the future. The armor gives Kang, among other things, superhuman strength, energy blasts, telekinesis, platform and shield projection, and is durable enough to withstand direct punches from Giant-Man.
• Pride: Kang's ego is immense, enough that in his mind, only he, even among other iterations of himself, can see time the proper way, which fuels his belief that only he can repair what he sees as the broken state of the multiverse. During the climax of Quantumania, he rants furiously at the heroes for daring to challenge him, boasting of the rebellions he's quashed, the worlds he's conquered, and the heroes he's killed while making it clear that he sees them all as beneath him.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Think of a man with an immense godlike power that can overthrow anyone he wants, but with the personality of a spoiled child that doesn't get what he wants, his wish to have the whole multiverse in his hand without any of his variants is more the behavior of a kid that doesn't want to share his toys; not to mention his habit of throwing massive tantrums while destroying anyone that stands in his path with his energy beams.
• Purple Is Powerful: His suit is primarily purple and gives him a lot of useful superpowers.
• Race Lift: The MCU version is black, while in the comics most versions of Kang were unambiguously white. The only outlier is Earth-65, as Reed Richards—his ancestor—was black in the Spider-Gwen comics, making this a possible Mythology Gag to that.
• Revenge: While he frames it as a need to curb their actions, Kang is clearly eager to take swift, brutal revenge against his variants for exiling him to the Quantum Realm, explicitly saying so in a Rousing Speech to his army at the climax of Quantumania.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Kang's vengeance can, and has, shattered whole timelines. Upon hearing of Janet's return to the Quantum Realm Kang puts everything on hold to find her and punish her for betraying him. Once Scott has the MacGuffin Kang needs to escape the Quantum Realm, instead of taking it and letting Scott and company leave Kang instead decides to double-cross Scott, leave him for dead, and keep Cassie and Janet hostage, presumably to torture them. This need for vengeance directly leads to the destruction of his empire and his defeat.
• Satanic Archetype: He was cast down from a celestial heaven into a lower prison realm where he used his incredible power to quickly become the de facto ruler. He lies to and manipulates everyone around him, constantly makes deals that he will usually renege on, commands an army of faceless heavily-modified footsoldiers, and dominates all through intimidation and fear, to the point where no one dares speak his true name even in private conversations. Despite his undisputed mastery of his new kingdom, he is still trapped in his prison and all he truly wants is to be free, which would spell doom for everyone should he succeed.
• Scary Black Man: Kang has a rather threatening and intimidating presence (though he can dial it back when it suits him), unlike his Alternate Self "He Who Remains" who was calm and humorous. Kang lacks humor and is quite serious and aggressive.
• Screaming Warrior: Although he tries to keep his composure in combat, there are times when Kang completely loses his shit while unleashing energy attacks, screaming at the top of his lungs with white-hot fury as he attacks his enemies.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Kang is "the Evil" and the Sacred Timeline is "the Can". Long ago, the original variant of He Who Remains discovered the Multiverse and interacted with his variants. However, malevolent variants sought to conquer the Multiverse, which resulted in the Multiversal War. He Who Remains discovered the Alioth and used it and the Time Variance Authority to prune divergent timelines and create one singular timeline to prevent his evil variants from destroying everything. Sylvie killing He Who Remains allows the timelines to branch without restraint and as a result "unleashes" Kang the Conqueror.
• Sealed Evil in Another World: Kang the Conqueror was exiled to the Quantum Realm by the Council of Kangs due to his bloodthirstiness, and he had no way to get out until he met Janet van Dyne, who was also stuck there. They manage to get his energy core working, but once Janet realizes who he really is, she quickly destroys it to prevent him from leaving, dooming her to live the rest of her days there, but also preventing Kang from escaping.
• Secondary Color Nemesis: His costume is green and purple, and serves as the Big Bad of the Multiverse Saga.
• Self-Deprecation: Gets a small moment during his first meeting with Scott. When he asks after Janet and what Scott knows of him from her, Scott tells him that she has nothing good to say about him and he cannot be trusted. Kang pauses, but smiles slightly and acknowledges she has a good reason to think that way. Not that it stops him from trying everything in his power to seek his revenge on her.
• Slouch of Villainy: Kang demonstrates this pose briefly at one point, possibly as a reference to his comics version, who was also capable of a good slouch. For that matter, He Who Remains managed to slouch a bit while sitting behind a desk.
• There Can Be Only One: Kang's so unfathomably narcissistic that he thinks he and his story are what the entire multiverse revolves around–he and his variants are the only ones who worked out inter-universal travel, so from their perspective, they are the most important person in the cosmos, and Kang himself believes that one of them must be the best of them all. Naturally, he thinks that's him.
• The Sociopath: Kang displays all the telltale signs; he's ruthless, amoral, utterly without mercy, he sees everyone and everything around him as nothing more than something to conquer and he hides his sadistic nature beneath a veneer of charm and elegance. He's also very quick to violence and threats and has very little regard for life.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: He doesn't so much as raise his voice when he threatens to murder Cassie right in front of Scott, then force him to relive the moment over and over until Scott himself begs for death.
• The Stoic: Kang presents himself as a stone-faced, humorless tyrant who never raises his voice even while delivering threats and showing that he's not afraid to carry them out. Even in difficult situations, Kang does his best to keep a cool head, although he also shows a terrifying capacity for rage when in the heat of battle or when his ego is sufficiently bruised.
• Strong and Skilled: Downplayed. His true strength comes from his Powered Armor, but he's still very powerful, capable of reducing hordes of enemies to dust and thrashes both Ant-Man and Wasp at the same time without much effort. Even without his armor he possesses incredible strength and skill, taking on Scott, a veteran hero, and beating him to a pulp with his bare hands. He almost makes it look relatively easy.
• Smug Super: Kang is supremely confident in his own supremacy, dismissively telling Ant-Man that he's out of his league in dealing with the Conqueror. While Kang isn't entirely correct to dismiss his foes, his own immense power shows that his confidence isn't misplaced.
• Time Master: Played With. He claims to see time in a way no other being can (and there is evidence to back his claim up) and he views time as "a cage" that one should break free from as he did. He's destroyed and rewritten entire timelines using his superior technology (mostly his ship) that allows him to travel through time at will. His variant, He Who Remains, was able to harness time itself through technology to create and power the TVA. However, Kang himself can't control time in the conventional, superpower sense, such as with Doctor Strange's use of the Time Stone, and it's also clear that time isn't set in stone even for him. Without his tech, he's unable to travel through time and space, hence why he was trapped in the Quantum Realm.
• Uncertain Doom: Kang is last seen seemingly being shrunken into oblivion along with the power source for his chair. However, Scott reflects, after all is said and done, that he's not completely certain if this actually killed Kang, and even the Council of Kangs isn't 100% sure if he's gone for good.
• Underestimating Badassery: Kang's greatest flaw is his (not unjustified) assumption he can't lose. He's very quick to dismiss both the Quantum rebels and Scott as a credible threat. Of course, he also has no idea how far Scott will go for the sake of his daughter, so when Kang threatens her life and reneges on their deal, he finds out the hard way that Scott is a true threat. Even in their final battle when he has Scott as his mercy, he laughs at the idea Scott thought he could win. This also comes back to bite him when Scott is able to destroy the multiversal regulator again, then works alongside Hope to trap him in it, possibly killing him.
• Villain Has a Point: After Kang's defeat, Scott wonders to himself about Kang's warnings of something even worse than him coming about if he doesn't escape from the Quantum Realm; the mid-credits scene of Quantumania shows that Kang wasn't wrong, with the Council of Kangs convening to discuss what to do about the Earth that produced heroes capable of defeating someone as mighty as Kang.
• Villainous Valour: Credit where it's due, Kang does not give up easily; even stranded in the Quantum Realm with nothing but his Powered Armor, he proved able to build an empire so extensive and powerful that what little resistance stands against him dreads to even speak his name. Even with his armor shredded and mostly nonfunctional, Kang fights his hardest against Scott to get the chance to escape the Quantum Realm in order to renew his multiversal campaign of conquest.
• Walking Spoiler: His implied existence and takeover of the TVA is a massive twist for the ending of the first season of Loki.
• Worf Had the Flu: According to Janet, Kang only retains a portion of his power after they repaired his time chair, which was still enough for him to conquer the Quantum Realm.
• Would Hit a Girl: He attacks Janet when she takes the Multiversal Engine Core, stopping him from escaping the Quantum Realm to wreak more havoc, though he does give her a chance to hand it over without having to kill her afterwards. In the final battle, he pulls no punches against Hope and Cassie.
• Would Hurt a Child: Takes Cassie hostage in order to coerce Scott into doing his bidding and threatens to murder her and force Scott to relive the moment for all eternity if he doesn't comply. Plus, it's basically a given that he has either personally murdered or at least caused the deaths of countless children both in his prior exploits and while ruling as a dictator in the Quantum Realm.
• Written by the Winners: Has this viewpoint (as do many of his variants). Of course, in his mind he's the winner and believes that in the end, his name will carry through all space and time as the greatest of all.
  Kang: History is not written. It is forged.

Variants

In General

• Death Is Cheap: A natural, almost unavoidable consequence of writing for a character who if killed, can easily be brought back by another variant of him time travelling/universe hopping. The result? See They Killed Kenny Again.
• Evil Counterpart: To the Spider-Man variants, who immediately after meeting work together to save the MCU reality while the Kang variants waged a war against each other. To a lesser degree the Loki variants, as some showed enough character growth to become genuine allies.
• Informed Attribute: Their Hero Killer, The Dreaded nature is more discussed than demonstrated between their installments, with ones like the Exile talking about having killed many Avengers without ever actually showing the audience. The fact that they seem to die every time they show up and have wildly different personalities from one another also throws a wrench into the whole "there are countless versions of him" idea, as he is only really seen losing on screen and talking about how threatening he is or his reputation is purported to be. By Season 2 of Loki, it is unclear why he is supposed to be threatening at all.
• It's All About Me: As can be seen with the Narcissist entry, Kang's mission is all about himself, whether as the Conqueror who wants to rule the Multiverse or as He Who Remains, whose purpose is to prevent any other version of himself from existing. Upon discovering the multiverse, his first act was to meet other versions of himself so they could all pat each other on the back about how awesome they were, and then they went to war with one another because they all had to be the best.
• Narcissist: While there's plenty of variance among the variants, one consistent quality seems to be a massive ego; according to He Who Remains, before open war broke out amongst them, the variants originally spent a lot of time congratulating and complimenting each other in a manner he explicitly called "narcissistic". Individual variants run the gamut from greatly enjoying their own company (the Council of Kangs) to setting themselves above even other variants (Immortus, Rama-Tut, and Scarlet Centurion) to being an outright Multiversal Conqueror (Kang himself). Even He Who Remains, who is comparatively more noble than other versions of Kang, is egotistical enough to take on stewardship for all of history.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Taken to its logical extreme, the Kang variants waged a war against each other across the entire multiverse.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: In the comics Rama-Tut and the Scarlet Centurion were early identities used by Kang (the former being the one he had when first introduced) while Immortus was an identity used by himself in the future. While there is some issues fitting all these characters into an order that makes sense, they are canonically the same version as opposed to variants like they are here.
• They Killed Kenny Again: In every installment featuring Kang, at least one of his various selves dies, to the point of practically being a Running Gag. Examples include He Who Remains being stabbed by Sylvie in Loki Season 1, Kang the Conqueror, a.k.a. The Exile being blasted into nothingness by Scott and Hope in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Victor Timely being repeatedly spaghettified by temporal radiation in Loki Season 2. Even when at least one of those versions was brought back through time travel, it still makes for a Kang death once per installment.

Independent Variants

"He Who Remains"

"He Who Remains"

"You came to kill the devil, right? Well, guess what? I keep you safe."

Species: Human

Portrayed By: Jonathan Majors

Appearances: Loki

"He Who Remains. She still calls me that? Creepy, right? But... I like it. Come on. Come on, let's talk in my office."

A variant of Kang and the one responsible for the creation of the Time Variance Authority and the Time-Keepers, who resides beyond the Void at the end of time. "He Who Remains", as Miss Minutes calls him, was originally a scientist from the 31st century who discovered alternate universes and made contact with his other selves, which ultimately led to a multiversal war that threatened all of reality. He later devised an elaborate plan to streamline the timeline by any means necessary, keeping his most dangerous Variants at bay in the process.

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• Adaptational Attractiveness: In the comics, He Who Remains is depicted as an elderly, decrepit man. In the MCU, he is played by the younger and more handsome Jonathan Majors.
• Affably Evil: He has a rather friendly and eccentric demeanor, despite running a brutally oppressive bureaucratic quasi-cult that routinely commits genocide against alternate timelines.
• The Ageless: Despite having existed for literally eons, He Who Remains doesn't look all that old. He's still spry enough to jump up on a table and make erratic hand motions.
• Age Lift: Not in terms of actual age (since he has existed for pretty much an eternity), but physical appearances. In the comics, He Who Remains looks like a frail, skinny old man. He Who Remains in the MCU looks much younger and more imposing in comparison.
• Alliance of Alternates: When he first discovered the Multiverse, he and several of his variants formed one. Unfortunately, Evil Counterparts inevitably appeared, and the alliance collapsed as each variant prioritized protecting their own timeline.
• Alternate Self: Met with several of them For Science!. Unfortunately, several of them turned out to be bad, leading to a war that nearly destroyed the Multiverse. Thus his life's work is making sure no more alternate versions of himself ever arise again.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: Tells Loki and Sylvie about how the first and oldest of his variants found and tamed Alioth, before admitting without ceremony that he is that variant.
• Anti-Villain: At the end of the day, He Who Remains is trying to prevent his variants from causing a Class Z Apocalypse. While his methods are unambiguously horrifying, his intentions are noble.
• Armor-Piercing Response: When Loki returns to the moment of their confrontation at the Citadel, he spends what is implied to be hundreds of loops dying repeatedly at Sylvie's hand, until Loki finally asks him in a fit of frustration why he never bothers to do anything to defend himself. In response, he immediately uses his Tempad to freeze Sylvie in place (an ability that was barely foreshadowed and never before used), before revealing the true scope of his design for Loki. Loki is at first completely flat-footed to realize that He Who Remains was lying when he said they had passed a threshold beyond which his knowledge of future events ends - until he reveals that he had actually lived through that conversation several times already and was ready to take things to the next level himself.
• Bad Boss: He ultimately doesn't care all that much about the TVA he created and used to win his war. He erased their memories in order to ensure none of them remember who he was or what their original purpose was. Then it's taken a step further in "Glorious Purpose;" his "failsafe" of the Temporal Loom was bound to wipe out every timeline but the Sacred Timeline and destroy the TVA, which he writes off as easily replaceable.
• Barrier Maiden: A male villain example. He Who Remains' life mission and the TVA's purpose is to preserve the timeline in which he originated and to prevent any variants of himself from coming into being, which was the only way he could stop a multiversal war amongst different variations of himself that threatened all of existence. Unless someone carries on the work of the TVA, countless versions of the 31st century scientist who became He Who Remains will diverge from the timeline and cause another multiversal war in which "everything burns".
  He Who Remains: You came to kill the devil, right? Well, guess what? I keep you safe.
• Beneath the Mask: In Glorious Purpose (S2), he reveals that his goofy and non-chalant behavior from the Season 1 finale was all part of his act to hook Loki and Sylvie into his plans for both of them. Once Loki uses his mastered timeslipping to return to their confrontation, he drops the facade and speaks much more directly to Loki about his intentions, while also revealing that the entire storyline of Season 2 was just the next step in his plan to groom Loki to take over his position as monitor of the Sacred Timeline - and that he intended for Sylvie to die all along.
• Berserk Button: He is friendly and affable to Loki and Sylvie, even when they are trying to kill him, but Sylvie acting like He Who Remains is doing this For the Evulz or that she has any kind of moral high ground here is enough to get him to yell.
  Sylvie: You treated real people's lives like some kind of game.
  He Who Remains: It's not... personal. It's, it's practical —
  Sylvie: It was personal to me.
  He Who Remains: Grow up! Grow up, Sylvie! Murderer! Hypocrite! We're all villains here.
• Better the Devil You Know: "If you think I'm evil, well... just wait until you meet my variants."
• Beware the Silly Ones: He is goofy, playful, and unpredictable, but make no mistake: this one man is responsible for leashing the entire Multiverse, and preserver of the current order.
• Big Bad: For the first season of Loki. As the founder of the TVA, he's responsible for all of their atrocities committed in the name of protecting the Sacred Timeline. Despite this, he only appears in the final episode of the first season, with Renslayer being the direct source of conflict. He becomes Loki and Sylvie's primary target after Renslayer causes them to get pruned. He briefly returns to this when Loki goes back in time to their confrontation at his Citadel, representing the main threat to the new order the protagonists are trying to create.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: He has seen all and knows all, and grew a bit insane. The questions he ponders on are, as Loki puts it, beyond our experience, and his views on morality are unconventional at best. He has the idea of what is good and what is evil, but as the self-proclaimed guardian of the Multiverse, he has put himself above it.
  He Who Remains: I understand your moral objections to what the TVA does. And my methods are deceptive. But the mission, it never was. Without me, without the TVA... everything burns.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Thanks to deeming himself as Necessarily Evil. During his argument with Sylvie, he directly acknowledges that he is a villain while dismissing her claims to hold the moral high ground.
• Cassandra Truth: Sylvie thinks that his talk of all his variants, many even worse than he is, being set free if the Sacred Timeline is destroyed is just a lie to protect himself. As Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania shows, he was absolutely right.
• Cloudcuckoolander: He is incredibly weird, twitchy and giddy. A justified case though, as he has lived for billions of years alone in a castle, if not longer. Sanity has literally aged out of him, though he is still cogent enough to make his point. Season 2 shows that He Who Remains wasn't always so kooky, as he's shown to be quite serene and composed when talking with Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes before wiping the former's memories and creating the Time Keepers.
• Composite Character: His character in the MCU is a combination of He Who Remains from the comics, who created the Time-Keepers to protect the flow of time; and Immortus, a version of Kang the Conqueror who mellowed out of his villainy and helped to preserve timelines instead of conquering them. That said, the mid-credit scene of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania reveals that Immortus also exists separately to HWR, making this a downplayed version of the trope.
• Dark Horse Victory: While his counterparts focused on balkanizing the past, He Who Remains thought to travel forward in time for a way to beat them, and found and eventually tamed the Alioth which let him turn the tide of the multiversal war in his favor.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart: He's the first Kang variant to die on-screen.
• Dead Guy on Display: Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes come across He Who Remains' corpse in Season 2, which Sylvie apparently left in his chair to rot in the Citadel of Time after choosing to make a new life for herself.
• Deadpan Snarker: He is able to make some snarky remarks while explaining the truth of his existence to Loki and Sylvie.
• Death Seeker: Doesn't really try too hard to keep Sylvie from killing him after all his eons of life. Even after she prompts him to beg for mercy, all he does is nonchalantly acknowledge that he could do that, but he doesn't bother.
• Deity of Human Origin: While physically a normal man that can be killed as easily as any other, this man through science alone acquired near omniscience and absolute governance of the timeline.
• Demiurge Archetype: Miss Minutes states "He created all and he controls all", an actually accurate statement, considering he established the Sacred Timeline, born from what remained after the First Multiversal War, and established extremely strict measures to keep it on that course, a parallel to the most extreme depictions of God having a set plan for the universe with no room for free will. He also is untold eons old and lives in a cathedral-like citadel outside of normal spacetime. However, at the end of the day, he himself admits he's still "flesh and blood".
• Didn't See That Coming: The one element of Loki's development that he failed to anticipate was that Loki would end up mastering all of the same powers that his Tempad provides, granting him not only complete Mental Time Travel, but the ability to externally manipulate time as well. This allows Loki to loop time even within the Citadel, which, given it resides outside the flow of time like the TVA itself, is supposed to be Beyond the Impossible.
• Doctor Whomage: A very dark example. He is an eccentric all-powerful time-lord that resides in his base beyond time. Here, his eons of managing the Sacred Timeline has driven him slightly (or totally) mad, and is very blatant about the amorality he needs to maintain his “life’s work.”
• Double Meaning: His comment in For All Time that the point of laying out the events of Season 1 was to get Loki and Sylvie into the right mindset for their confrontation applied not only to Season 1, but to everything that takes place following his death in Season 2 as well. Once Loki returns to the Citadel, He Who Remains reveals that Loki's journey to master timeslipping was also part of the plan.
• Eternal Recurrence: Believes that this applies to himself, which is one of the reasons he's not that bothered with the outcome of him dying: even if he does do so, and the Multiversal War breaks out once again, then eventually a version of himself will triumph over all the others and make it his mission to protect the timeline in order to prevent something like that ever happening again. He likens it to a form of Reincarnation.
• Evil Is Petty: He mocks Victor Timely’s stutter simply out of disdain for him. What makes this this trope is that Victor has next to no bad traits.
• Evil Me Scares Me: He's well aware that he's a monomaniacal and megalomaniacal villain who commits enormously evil deeds to preserve the single timeline he's allowed to exist... and he does so because he's seen what other versions of himself are capable of.
• The Evils of Free Will: Specifically, He Who Remains believes in the evils of his free will, which is why he created the TVA to prevent his evil variants from existing.
• Evil Plan: He orchestrated the events of all of Season 1 of Loki to create someone with a somewhat similar moral compass to himself who was capable of controlling Alioth, allowing the continuation of his scheme to delete any timeline where another more evil version of himself could arise and start another multiversal war. All because he has been doing this for untold eons and needs a replacement. In the end it turned out that the someone who could control Alioth was both Loki and Sylvie, leading to him offering them his position.
• The Extremist Was Right: For all his flaws, He Who Remains was right to warn Loki and Sylvie that Variants of himself are dangerous, as shown in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Even without his Variants, the TVA quickly falls apart without him, putting all of creation in jeopardy.
• Face Death with Dignity: Doesn't even try to defend himself from Sylvie, and even acknowledges that he could beg for his life, but opts not to anyway. When he dies, he even winks and laughs. This is because in his eyes, it doesn't matter — his death will result in the same series of events that put him into his position in the first place.
• Fluffy Tamer: Somehow he not only survived encountering Alioth, but he also tamed and weaponized it against the rest of the Multiverse, and then put it into service as his personal cosmic guard dog.
• Foil: To Loki. Where Loki is Chaos and a proof that Rousseau Was Right, He Who Remains is Order and a proof that Humans Are Bastards and Hobbes Was Right.
  • While all variants of Loki are convinced that it is in their nature to be "outcasts", but ultimately come to seek redemption or change, He Who Remains is so sure of the destructive nature of his variants that he has taken Loki's Motive Rant about The Evils of Free Will from The Avengers (2012) and the first episode of Loki (2021) and pushed it to its Logical Extreme, shaping the Multiverse itself so that his malevolent variants are not able to exist.
  • Loki seems destined to always fail in his ambitions, while He Who Remains regards the Multiversal War as inevitable if even one variant of himself is allowed to exist. Loki always desired to become a God-King, while He Who Remains is the character closest to being an actual God in the MCU, and very much doesn't want to be so.
  • Early in the series, Loki was disheartened to hear from Mobius that his role in the Sacred Timeline was to be the villain; He Who Remains, meanwhile, firmly committed himself as the villain directly and indirectly responsible for many atrocities, including pruning countless timelines, but is clearly exhausted from the experience.
  • And of course, He Who Remains is the direct obstacle in Loki's desire for free will while at the same time sharing his philosophy that free will leads to misery.
• Friendly Enemy: While Loki and Sylvie are understandably distrusting towards the man, He Who Remains is rather cordial and accepting of the duo from the start. He only really acts villainous upon Sylvie pressing his Berserk Button, and when he offers them his Sadistic Choice.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Aside from how overseeing something like the TVA would do harm to one's sanity, his loneliness clearly got the worst of him. He prepares tea for a pair of assassins and "paved the road" they would walk to reach his office. That's how lonely he is. He is also prone to eccentric actions, such as suddenly jumping on the table and singing "Amen" when Sylvie mockingly repeats the TVA's dogma.
• Go Out with a Smile: After Sylvie fatally wounds him, he dies with a smile on his face, as he is not really concerned with dying.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For the entire Infinity Saga of the MCU. All of the events that happened within the 23 films of that saga were all ordained by him, including the formation of the Avengers, the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Sokovia Accords and subsequent fracturing of the Avengers, Ragnarok, Thanos’s conquest for the Infinity Stones, the Decimation and Blip, and the deaths of Black Widow and Iron Man. Played with in that He Who Remains didn't personally plan out these events, he's just enforcing the existence of his personal timeline, where they took place.
  Loki: [on seeing the full scope of the TVA] Is this the greatest power in the universe?
• Hobbes Was Right: He postulates that his other Variants are so evil that they will inevitably start a multiversal war and doom the universe. He establishes an oppressive bureaucratic organization with him in the lead to restrict free will and prevent said war from happening.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He Who Remains granted Loki time-slipping abilities, which eventually evolved into full-on Time Master powers, just so he can show Loki the futility of a multiverse without him and force him to either kill Sylvie to maintain the status quo or allow the Temporal Loom to destroy all branch timelines. Loki instead Takes a Third Option and uses those powers to maintain the multiverse himself, which means that HWR remains dead and the multiverse is allowed to grow infinitely.
• Humans Are Bastards: His primary justification, along with Hobbes Was Right. He believes that the evil and power-hungry nature of his Variants can't be helped, and forces a single narrative upon all of existence to prevent them from making any choices.
• Humans Are Special: A very dark twist on the MCU's overall theme of this trope. A human managed to break through the confines of spacetime and develop technology that would change the fate of the entire Multiverse forever. Only instead of using this to fight the battles no one else could, he enslaved the entirety of existence and every moment goes by his design.
• I Did What I Had to Do: His justification for creating the TVA is that the alternative is worse. He created it for the purpose of stopping variants of himself from coming into existence and eventually destroying everything in a multiversal war.
  He Who Remains: I've lived a million lifetimes. I've gone through every, every scenario. This is the only way.
• I Have Many Names: He says as much to Loki and Sylvie when they ask who he is. "The Founder" and "He Who Remains" are just two of his aliases. The post-credit scenes of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania reveal just how many variants of him there are, and how many names they have. Kang the Conqueror, Immortus, Rama-Tut, Scarlet Centurion, and Victor Timely are all but a few of his identities across the multiverse.
  He Who Remains: Oh, I've been called many names by many people. A ruler. A conqueror. He Who Remains. A jerk.
• I Lied: In the Season 2 finale, he reveals that rather than not knowing how future events will play out once they cross some unseen threshold, he actually planned his own death and all of the events of Season 2 that followed, correctly anticipating that Loki would return to their initial confrontation in desparation to find some way to avert the destruction of the multiverse that results from his death. From there he launches his real pitch to Loki to convince him to take over as the new overseer of the Sacred Timeline.
• It's All About Me:
  • When he, in his distant past, started exploring the Multiverse, all he did was set up conversations with other versions of himself. He's not quite the Narcissist, because he does think of others... a bit, but even permitting Loki and Sylvie to breach his fortress is because he's a Death Seeker who's tired of immortality rather than because he thinks they'd do a better job.
  • On a broader scale, the entire creation of the TVA and all their endless, abominable, Multiverse-pruning work was done for one reason and one reason alone- to prevent the possibility of more Variants of him from existing. It's not narcissism that drove him to do this, but a sincere belief that he is the biggest possible threat to existence and that, as bad as the things he does are, any Variants of him may (or given enough alternate timelines, inevitably will) be worse.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • While He Who Remains may have created a totalitarian bureaucracy that prevents anyone in the MCU from having free will, he points out how the alternative outcome is nothing short of a chaotic catastrophe. Notably, after his death causes multiple timelines to begin sprouting up, the former Sacred Timeline suffers two different multiversal catastrophes within a year while Infinity Ultron nearly ends up destroying the entire multiverse (and by proxy, the Sacred Timeline as well) himself.
  • He Who Remains insists that while he may be evil, his Variants are even worse; in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, one such Variant, Kang the Conqueror, is shown to be a merciless tyrant responsible for obliterating entire timelines of people (and unlike the TVA's sterile and dispassionate pruning, Kang does it through violent, bloodthirsty conquest), killing countless trillions, to satiate his own monstrous ego, lacking He Who Remains' conscience or good intentions.
• Large Ham: He Who Remains is a very dramatic and eccentric character who's almost as hammy as Loki. Some of this is a facade. Some of it.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Season 2 reveals he inflicted this on the entire TVA except for Miss Minutes, in order to cover up the fact he was its original founder.
• Leitmotif: As revealed in the first season finale of Loki, the actual TVA theme is his, though he does have his own particularly sinister variant of it.
• Lesser of Two Evils: Describes himself as this. While he admits that he is a villain, he believes there are far worse versions of him. The TVA's mission is to keep any other version of him from developing. Given the horrors that Kang the Conqueror proves capable of in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, this belief is shown to be perfectly justified. Though, as season 2 of Loki shows, even him being Necessarily Evil is a dubious proposition at best: He routinely wiped the memories of everyone in the TVA, cared nothing for even his own partner Renslayer, built a gigantic bomb beneath the TVA as a failsafe in case he died which would destroy everything but the sacred timeline (read: his native timeline), wrote the TVA off as completely replaceable, and played Loki and Sylvie like fiddles just to prove his points. It all paints a rather particular picture: He Who Remains wasn't some "benevolent" Kang who tried in earnest to stop his most dangerous variants. He was the Kang who won. He found a way to win the Multiversal War, then found a way to remain as the winner by getting rid of all of his variants at once. What supports this point is that Victor Timely has next to no evil traits and would have likely not developed multiversal travel because of the time period he came from. Although it’s possible he used Timely as his contingency specifically because he is his least dangerous variant and maybe because he was his least evil variant. That is, until Loki showed up and made a very different choice.
• Load-Bearing Boss: His death produces two immediate events. From Sylvie's position from the end of time, she can see the Sacred Timeline branching into more and more variants. And it turns out the TVA's machinery is designed so only he (or one of his Variants) can control it.
• The Man Behind the Curtain: He is the one behind TVA and the creation of the Sacred Timeline. He wryly notes that he is not what Loki and Sylvie were expecting. Also, he is not truly omniscient. After a point, which he calls The Threshold, his knowledge of events end.
• Manipulative Bastard: As he cheerfully explains, while Loki and Sylvie walked their respective paths, he was the one who paved the road for both of them to get to him. Then, it's taken a step further in Season 2, even after his death - when Loki gets control of his time-slipping and keeps going back further to try and stop the Loom exploding, before finally going back to the confrontation with HWR, and tries countless times to prevent Sylvie from killing him, he casually reveals that he set all this in motion and that he could have stopped Sylvie whenever he felt like it. The Loom was always going to explode as it was only ever meant to protect the Sacred Timeline, the explosion working as a failsafe, wiping out the TVA so he can start again, effectively coercing Loki into doing what HWR wanted all along and taking his place - having become a Time Master in the process. Fortunately, Loki figures out a third option.
• Meaningful Name: His current title, He Who Remains, is not out of presumed vanity: he is literally the only person left at the absolute end of time... and also the only variant left after a multiversal war waged by different versions of himself.
• Mr. Exposition: He has a lot of explaining to do in the final episode of Loki Season 1, giving the real backstory behind the Multiversal War, the motivations for the TVA's creation, and why he was "closely monitoring" Loki and Sylvie over the season through the Time Keepers.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: He warns Loki and Sylvie that if he dies, variants of him will appear who are much, much worse. When Sylvie fatally stabs him, he alludes to this trope with his final words.
  He Who Remains: I’ll see you soon.
• Mythology Gag: While he's never specifically identified by name in Loki Season 1, his costume is based on how Immortus looks in the comics. He also alludes to being called a "Conqueror".
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • Downplayed. He Who Remains sounds like a fairly foreboding name, which he even lampshades. However, while the man himself is a bit of an oddball, he doesn't actually do anything to harm Loki or Sylvie minus offer the Sadistic Choice of taking his place or unleashing his variants, who most certainly are this trope played straight.
  • In season 2 of Loki, Mobius remarks that it's a "lofty title", comparing it to calling oneself "Last Man Standing", but Loki counters that it isn't lofty if he can back it up.
• Necessarily Evil: He deems that absolutely everything he does is to prevent the start of another multiversal war.
• No Name Given: We never learn what his name is aside from his "He Who Remains" epithet. Going by the comics, it should be Nathaniel Richards, but this isn't brought up in the show.
• Non-Action Big Bad: The head of the TVA, and a powerful individual, but the most he does in terms of physical combat is dodge. When Sylvie kills him, he does nothing to try to save himself - though as it turns out he could and didn't because he knew he didn't need to, having already set events in motion, mockingly asking Loki if he really thought he'd just let Sylvie kill him without a plan for what would happen next. If Miss Minutes is to be believed, he was like this during the Multiversal War; Ravonna Renslayer actually led his armies to victory.
• Nonchalant Dodge: His TemPad easily teleports him away from Sylvie's attacks since he knew the exact moments, to the second, of when she would try to kill him. At least up until the events in his transcript end, in which case he's a sitting duck.
• Not Quite Dead: Dies at the end of Loki Season 1. But as he points out, without him around to prune timelines, an infinite number of his variants are now free to exist once again. He similarly compares the process of another multiversal war between his variants until only one remains once more to a form of Reincarnation. Furthermore, he's planned matters so Loki has no choice but to go back in time, kill Sylvie and take his place to prevent multiversal destruction. Loki, being Loki, took a third option.
• "Not So Different" Remark: When Sylvie tries to admonish him for playing with people's lives including hers, he immediately gets riled up, and loudly points out that she's a Hypocrite and a murderer who's crossed many of the same lines herself, and that "we're all villains here."
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: The final episode of Loki shows that he's more concerned with keeping the Sacred Timeline on script to how he feels it should go, rather than try to Take a Third Option to balance out all the branching timelines like Loki did.
• Nothing Personal: He confessed that whenever he pruned or ordered the pruning of a branching timeline, no matter how innocent or sinful it is, he did not do it out of spite or malice. He simply did what he needed to do to prevent another multiversal war from breaking out.
• Obfuscating Insanity: When he reappears in Season 2 of Loki, after Loki masters his time-slipping, he reveals that he's not half as kooky as he initially seemed. He's still a little quirky, but he reveals that he even planned the aftermath of his own death, so it would lead Loki right back to him. Oh, and he can stop Sylvie any time he likes.
• Older Than They Look: Refers to himself as being this. He appears to be a human in his 30s but is actually much older as he predates the current Sacred Timeline. Being alive for such a long time is why he wanted Loki and Sylvie to take his place as head of the TVA.
• The Omniscient: Living outside of time allows him to see how everything plays out. When Loki and Sylvie arrive to confront him he presents them with transcripts of how their conversation will proceed. But there is a limit to his knowledge — after laying out everything he knows he tells Loki and Sylvie that they've passed "The Threshold" and he no longer knows what will happen next. The key factor appears to be whether they will choose to kill him or take over his position.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: While he might be a bit of an oddball, He Who Remains is relatively patient with Loki and Sylvie as he explains his role and why the TVA has to exist. However, when Sylvie tries to present herself as an innocent victim of the organization's dogma, He Who Remains loses his cool and screams that she has no legs to stand on given her own history of taking and ruining lives. He also drops his kooky demeanor when he senses that the chaotic branching timelines have now reached the point where even he doesn't know what happens. And he does it again when Loki re-encounters him via time-slipping in Season 2 and HWR finally decides to take him seriously as a fellow Time Master.
• Order Versus Chaos: He believes that the order he imposes through the TVA in a form of a single narrative for all universes is better than the alternative of countless timelines which may contain more malevolent variants of himself.
• Other Me Annoys Me: The entire reason He Who Remains created the TVA is because of his distaste towards his variants who could destroy the multiverse. In particular, he doesn't appear to have a high opinion on Victor Timely, cruelly imitating his stutter and mocking his lack of understanding of the Loom.
• Psychopathic Manchild: It's clear that He Who Remains is batshit crazy. Throughout his conversation with Loki and Sylvie, he alternates being as giddy as a child and making emotional outbursts, all while eating an apple.
• Purple Is Powerful: He is the one who controls the TVA, and through it the Sacred Timeline, and he wears a bright purple cloak. He is also the only character in the series to get the official poster with a purple background, all the others have a golden-yellow one, which is a complimentary color to purple.
• Race Lift: Both He Who Remains and Immortus (the two characters that the MCU version is based on) are depicted as white men in the comics, whereas here He Who Remains is a black man. This treatment also applies to Kang the Conqueror, which became his variant in the MCU.
• Retired Monster: He's quite open about how he's done many terrible things, both during the multiversal war and as the real leader of the TVA. One reason he gives for welcoming in the Lokis to kill him is that he's been doing this for so long that he's tired of it all and wants to stop.
• Sanity Slippage: Season 2 shows that He Who Remains was much calmer and more reserved when he was actively running the TVA himself, to the point where he has a lot more in common with The Exile. By the time Loki and Sylvie meet up with him though, he's become much more of a loopy chatterbox.
• Satanic Archetype: He calls himself a devil, is introduced holding an apple, says that he's seen all and knows all, and tempts a pair of characters, a male and a female, both created from the same source, with a choice to maintain or disrupt the status quo. His Citadel with pointed arches, rose windows and candelabrum looks like a dark gothic church, and on his official poster, he has a Background Halo on the purple background.
• Secondary Color Nemesis: He wears a dark green costume and a purple cloak and is the Big Bad of Loki.
• Shabby Heroes, Well-Dressed Villains: His costume 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 the Lokis arrive at his doorstep, they look like they've crawled out of a dump.
• Shadow Archetype: The ultimate version of the "benevolent" God-Emperor Loki dreamed of being in The Avengers and the start of Loki, ruling over all of time and reality... and Loki is utterly horrified and disgusted by him.
• Shadow Dictator: He controls the TVA (and thus the timeline) from behind the scenes, with not even the TVA staff being aware of his existence.
• Shipper with an Agenda: He orchestrated the series of events that made Loki and Sylvie meet and fall for each other because he needed them to be in a certain state of mind before they find him and hear his offer. When the two of them kiss before his desk, he is enjoying the show.
• The Snack Is More Interesting: Casually says everything while simultaneously eating an apple. Even when Sylvie tries to kill him, he's still more interested in eating than avoiding her sword. In Season 2, when a time-slipping Loki desperately demands to know why he isn't doing anything to protect himself, he keeps eating, before finally revealing that he can stop Sylvie any time he likes.
• So What Do We Do Now?: He appears to be at a bit of a loss for words after completing his speech to Loki and Sylvie, as he wasn't sure of what happened after a certain point in time despite being aware of the nature of time. He dies shortly afterward, although he's pretty content with this. Season 2 of Loki is his massive gambit to undo this, and force Loki to take his place. Loki took a third option.
• Superhero Movie Villains Die: Played With. While he ended up dying, alternate universe versions of He Who Remains end up appearing because of his death (meaning that Loki shall not be the last time we get any variation of this character within the MCU).
• Stable Time Loop: He believes that a bootstrap paradox is the inevitable outcome of his death. He Who Remains is all that, well, remains of the multiversal war that spanned all of time and space. If Sylvie kills him, the war will happen again, which will lead to a variant of Kang traveling into the future, taming Alioth, and creating the TVA, being the only one who remains — putting everything exactly back to square one. Since he knows everything that happened, is happening, and will ever happen, he has a pretty strong argument to claim.
• Threshold Guardian: Serves as the final test of whether Loki and Sylvie are truly capable of Character Development at the end of Loki Season 1, with him representing everything Loki wanted to be at the start of the show and everything Sylvie wanted to destroy regardless of the costs. Loki succeeds, only caring about his friend's well-being rather than the throne He Who Remains offers, while Sylvie fails, betraying the one person who cares about her for the sake of her revenge. At the end of season 2 he returns for the role one more time, giving Loki the impossible choice of managing the Sacred Timeline himself or letting the Loom failsafe destroy all the other timelines instead, which would be going back on every bit of character development Loki had gained over the show. In the end, Loki takes a third option, destroying the Loom and using his mastered enchantment and time powers to subtly push the timelines away from the original outcome where the Kangs destroy every last branch of the multiverse, proving himself better than HWR by sacrificing his own happiness and freedom for everyone else's.
• Time Abyss: He Who Remains is impossibly old, having predated (and essentially created) the Sacred Timeline and its branches and claims to have lived through countless scenarios and timelines seeking an alternative.
• Token Good Teammate: To his various Variants as a whole. What he does is monstrous, but it's done to prevent a multiversal war that would destroy everything. As he states, while he admits what he does is bad, his Variants are even worse. Season 2 later subverts this however, as when Loki timeslips back to when he first met the man, it becomes apparent that he's primarily interested in keeping himself in a position of power in the TVA, and doesn't actually care about the multiverse all that much outside of stopping his variants.
• Unperson: As Loki finds out at the beginning of Loki season 2, he initially had his likeness plastered all over the TVA's headquarters, but somewhere along the way it was all covered up and replaced with images of the Time Keepers.
• Victory Is Boring: He originally defeated his Variants and kept them in check by using the TVA to prune all timelines but his. However, he grew bored with knowing everything up to Loki and Sylvie's arrival at his citadel and is excited to reach a point that he can't predict.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • In charge of the ruthless TVA and therefore, an accessory to multiple atrocities across space and time, but he's proven correct with Kang's actions in Quantumania that the alternative is the potential doom of everything.
  • His point is further proven when Infinity Ultron emerges from a branched timeline and not only lays waste to his universe, but destroyed several universes (with a goal of ending all the Multiverse) before being stopped; and Doctor Strange's spell almost destroys the balance of the Multiverse, things the TVA under his reign could have easily avoided.
  • In season 2 episode 6 after Loki destroys He Who Remains's final failsafe against the Multiversal War, the Loom, all the branched timelines do in fact immediately start dying from the return of that Multiversal War, forcing Loki to constantly use his enchantment and time powers to subtly influence the myriad timelines away from their original doom.
• Villainous Legacy: Despite being killed in the Loki season 1 finale, his presence and the legacy of his actions via the TVA are still heavily felt in season 2.
• Villains Never Lie: Discussed; after hearing all that he has to say, Sylvie dismisses every word out of He Who Remains' mouth as a lie, preferring to kill him as she'd always wanted to rather than believe anything he says. Loki is less confident, trying to avoid doing anything too rash until they're absolutely sure one way or another. Played straight in the end, where, once Sylvie kills He Who Remains, he's revealed to have been honest; his death immediately makes the timeline start branching off in all directions, allowing his variant Kang the Conqueror to start trying to conquer the multiverse again, and, as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania shows, allows the creation of the Council of Kangs.
• Villain Respect: He likes Loki and Sylvie, more the former than the latter, but this really comes to the fore when he reappears in Season 2, after Loki demonstrates he can stop time. After this, though he remains a bit smugly superior, he talks to Loki as a peer rather than as a pawn and is (or at least seems to be) very genuine with and even comforting to him only becoming antagonistic again when Loki refuses to go along with his plan.
• Walking Spoiler: He's both the true mastermind of the TVA and a version of the infamous Kang the Conqueror. As such, it's hard to talk about him without delving into some major spoiler territory.
• We Can Rule Together: He offers Loki and Sylvie control of the timeline as an alternative to the chaos that would ensue if they kill him. Sylvie brushes it off, while Loki at least seriously considers that he's telling the truth about the alternative.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: He Who Remains dies in his first appearance on Loki, with an alternate version taking over the TVA Loki ended up in around the time of his demise.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • He claims that while the Sacred Timeline may be oppressive and restrictive, the stifling order he maintains is better than the chaos and catastrophic multiversal war that truly evil variants of himself would bring about instead.
    He Who Remains: And if you think I'm evil, well... just wait until you meet my variants. Aaaaaand that's the gambit! Stifling order or cataclysmic chaos! You may hate the dictator, but something... far worse is gonna fill that void if you depose of him.
  • The original version of him also counts as one. Upon first discovering and journeying throughout the Multiverse, the original — and his other selves — merely sought out to acquire knowledge from one another, use that knowledge to better their universes, and in general experience a weirdly narcissistic sense of fun. But as He Who Remains explains, not every one of his variants was so "pure of heart." What began as an ego-stroking science experiment quickly turned into hostility, then conquest, then the all-out war that very nearly destroyed all of Creation.
    He Who Remains: He was a scientist and he discovered that there were universes stacked on top of his own. At the same time, other versions of us were learning the same thing. Naturally, they made contact. And for a while, there was peace. Narcissistic, self-congratulatory peace. "I love your shoes." "I love your hair." "Oh, man, nice nose." "Thanks, man." Et cetera. They shared technology and knowledge. Using the best of their universes to improve the others. However... not every version of me was so... so pure of heart. To some of us, new worlds meant only one thing, new lands to be conquered.
• We Will Meet Again: After Sylvie stabs him, he says, "I’ll see you soon", winks, and then dies.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: He is ancient, with eons overlooking the timeline from the shadows taking a noticeable toll on him. By the time he meets Loki and Sylvie, he is all but begging them to take his place, either by killing him or by replacing him, thus letting him retire.
• Xanatos Gambit: He outlines his plan as this. Either the Lokis replace him in running the TVA and preserve the order he's been dedicated to protecting, or they don't and another multiversal war between his Variants will unfold, that one of them will ultimately win and 'resume' his position as He Who Remains. Either way, he himself gets to retire. He would, however, prefer the former as he knows that most of his Variants are much more malevolent than he is. Season 2 reveals he has another plan going at the same time, having Ms. Minutes and Ravonna spur another variant of himself into learning about the TVA and filling his shoes.
• Yellow/Purple Contrast: His poster for Loki is not like all the others. It is the only one that has the dark purple background compared to the yellow one all the rest of the characters get. He still gets a Background Halo, though. If the rest are sinners/saints, he is the devil in this setting.

Victor Timely

Victor Timely

"Time to be brave."

Species: Human

Portrayed By: Jonathan Majors, Nasri Thompson (young)

Appearances: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania | Loki

"Time is everything. It moves... through each and every one of us. It shapes our... lives. Our... futures. But perhaps we can shape... it!"

A variant of Kang who lived in the early twentieth century as an inventor/conman. After the Temporal Loom goes haywire following the death of He Who Remains, Loki and Mobius find themselves in dire need of a spare Kang to help them fix it. And as if by fate, they just happen to run into Timely while on the hunt for Judge Renslayer and Miss Minutes. Unfortunately for all parties involved, this meek swindler wants nothing to do with their multiversal shenanigans.

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• Absent-Minded Professor: Con Man routine aside, Victor's lab proves he actually does have a genuine inventor's talent; that said, even when not swindling, he's rather squirrelly, nervous, and spacey.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: The Victor Timely of the comics was actually Kang Prime from the future (the 31st Century specifically), using his time-travel technology to hide in 1901 Wisconsin, where he founded and became the mayor of a small town called Timely. Here, Victor was born and raised in the 1800s, and only begins to build wondrous things (though not nearly as grandiose as the comics) when Ravonna secretly gifts him a TVA handbook in his childhood.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Victor in the comics used his technological prowess to make himself a powerful politician and inventor in the 20th Century and was intent on finding a way to take back control of time. This Victor does some minor swindling and is distrustful towards people who want to be his "partner", but otherwise is a fairly nice (albeit somewhat self-absorbed) man who just wants to live his own life. When he's forcibly swept into the TVA to assist our heroes in preventing its destruction, Victor proves very resourceful and is affable to everyone.
• Adaptational Location Change: Played with. Originally setting up shop in Wisconsin in the very early 20th Century, this version of Kang is shown doing his sales in 1880s Chicago while having his lab across the lake in Wisconsin.
  Victor: Lower taxes.
• Adaptational Personality Change: Victor was a confident, manipulative man in the comics, using his knowledge of the future to create technological marvels that stood the test of time. In Loki, Victor is shown to be a much more timid man who speaks with a stutter and immediately runs when his life is in danger, though he is shown to have a slight dark side to him.
• Adaptational Wimp: In the comics, Victor was able to build an entire Egopolis in early 20th Century Wisconsin that was highly technologically advanced. In the MCU, Victor is barely scraping by as a Snake Oil Salesman in 1800s Chicago, and doesn't possess nearly as much advanced knowledge of the future that his comics self had. Furthermore, his comics self had some fighting skills whenever he was backed into a corner, while this Victor is quick to flee at the first sign of trouble.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Unlike both Kang and He Who Remains, Victor values his life to the same extent as any other normal man would, and turns into a sobbing mess when he's threatened. It's likely this huge distinction between him and He Who Remains that played a part in Sylvie showing him mercy.
• Ambiguously Evil: As a variant of Kang's, he's heavily monitored by Loki and Mobius and certainly has the capacity for evil, but his brief appearance never shows him doing or saying anything outright villainous. Mobius even doubts if he's dangerous or not. This Kang is revealed to be a con man swindling rich barons out of their money, which suggests a very loose sense of ethics, but even Sylvie relents in trying to kill him because–as he points out–he hasn't done anything to deserve death. As it turns out, he stalls Miss Minutes and Ravonna while the others try to fix the problem, and dies a tragic hero's death after volunteering to put the loom enhancer in place as he's the only one who can fix it if something goes wrong, despite knowing he risks a horrible death. He even repeats to himself, "time to be brave". And he is. But it's not enough.
• Ambiguous Situation: Also Riddle for the Ages because there's a large chance we will not see Timely again. Why is there a Kang variant in the 1800s? Kang is specifically from the 30th century. Was he time displaced? He is explicitly not an adult age Kang who was stranded in the 1800s like in the comics. Or will he eventually develop time travel and travel to the 30th century. This question is important because all variants of characters so far seem to have the same origin. What disproves the latter is that he seems to not amount to much without Renslayer giving him the handbook. What proves the latter is that he is from a branched timeline and He Who Remains ensured he wouldn’t exist. Of course it's been shown earlier with the Peter Parker variants that given how vast the multiverse is, variants can be drasticallly different even to the point of being born decades earlier than the versions seen in the Sacred Timeline. So while most Kang variants might have been born in the 30th century, it's not impossible for there to be a universe where he was born in the 19th instead.
• Berserk Button: Anyone who proposes being his partner, though this is combined with Tranquil Fury.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Loki certainly thinks so, responding to Mobius's doubt that this eccentric scientist is really that dangerous with a simple "He is." In the episode itself, he doesn't demonstrate anything like HWR's threat, or Kang's inclination to conquer, beyond an ambition to succeed as a scientist. However, while his "inventions" are almost all cons, they're funding his real lab, which includes a fully functional prototype pruning rod. Additionally, while he seems a bit silly and out of his depth, he is resourceful, intelligent, and very shrewd, picking up on little giveaways that Ravonna would rather he didn't. Namely, that she's singing more or less the same tune as Loki about fixing the TVA, and based solely off a slight change in her facial expression, that she was the one who slipped the TVA manual through the window.
• Bungling Inventor: Played With. Most of his inventions are utterly useless, like a chair with a built in refrigerator or mechanical pants that most certainly do not cure Height Angst. However, these are all for swindling purposes. His actual laboratory does have things that work as intended, such as a fully functional pruning rod, and some other device clearly meant to work in concert with the Temporal Loom. Not for nothing does OB rhapsodise that given the chance he could have outdone Einstein.
• Con Man: In the face of Loki's overwhelming fear of coming face-to-face with a Kang variant, all parties are surprised to learn that Timely is decidedly not some grand multiversal threat (yet), but rather a cheap swindler and huckster who sells bogus and borderline useless inventions to part unsuspecting fools from their cash. That being said, he does have a real fondness for science and seems to be quite enamored with O.B.
• Cosmic Plaything: He's introduced as a pawn of cosmic-level powers beyond his comprehension, getting kicked around by the likes of Judge Renslayer and Miss Minutes (who want him to become the next He Who Remains), Sylvie (who fears he will become the next He Who Remains and wants him dead for it), and Loki and Mobius (who want to use him to stabilize the new status quo at the TVA). He manages to assert himself and start making his own choices, noble ones, but in the end it's All for Nothing.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: His character arc (seemingly) ends abruptly when the Temporal Loom's radiation immediately slices him into ribbons. Fortunately, thanks to Loki's Time Master powers, he gets better. Eventually.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Victor only appears in the post-credit scene of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania as a teaser for his role in the second season of Loki.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: In the end, Victor is allowed to live a life free of He Who Remains' influence after being pushed around by strangers who want to decide his fate and being spaghettified in countless loops.
• Einstein Hair: Victor's hair is very frazzled and poofy, emphasizing his victorian scientific-like nature.
• Fan Boy: He's quite enamored with Ouroboros, likening his own recreations (failed or otherwise) of various TVA technology from O.B.'s handbook to a "correspondence" between the two. That being said, given that most of the TVA's tech was actually created by He Who Remains, this is technically a case of unintentional narcissism. Victor fell in love with his own work without even realizing it. Goofy and bumbling or not, a Kang will always be a Kang.
• Good Counterpart: Insists that he is this to his variants, once he understands the concept, that he is not the same man who made Sylvie's life hell. It is unclear whether he is telling the truth, but it isn't impossible.
• Insistent Terminology: No, his inventions aren't broken, they are prototypes!
• Large Ham: He's actually a Shrinking Violet with a near-crippling speech impediment, but whenever he gives a big presentation he hams it up with a very specific style of delivery to circumvent it. He comes off as equally showy as ridiculous.
• Laughably Evil: Initially a possibility. This guy is even sillier than He Who Remains was, with his overly hammy way of speaking and squirrelly nature making Mobius question whether he's really as scary as Loki is making him out to be. However, it turns out that he really was a decent man.
• Nerd Glasses: He wears a pair of very round spectacles, and is shown giving a scientific presentation in The Stinger for Quantumania.
• New Era Speech: His monologue sounds like an impassioned research pitch to those in his era, but Loki and Mobius are able to recognize it's a barely veiled instance of this trope.
• Nice Guy: Setting aside the fact that he's a shameless Con Man for just a minute, Victor Timely is actually a very decent and genial chap. Despite being something of a Nervous Wreck, he's incredibly polite to everyone and appreciates genuine kindness from strangers. When he's brought into the TVA, despite some initial fears, he quickly gets along with everyone and even develops a special rapport with his hero Ouroboros. In the end, he even makes the ultimate sacrifice for the TVA, though it unfortunately ends up being a case of Senseless Sacrifice. Despite all of the supposed "good" He Who Remains has done, he ultimately proved far too manipulative, ruthless and creepy to be considered a "good" Kang, never-mind the fact that he's unapologetically a genocidal murderer. Victor Timely, on the other hand, is virtually everything Kang the Conqueror isn't. Above all, just a good man.
• The Nicknamer: Due to not knowing the God of Mischief's name, Victor exclusively refers to Loki as a "wizard", due to his magical abilities.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Loki Season 2 Director Kasra Farahani noted that Victor Timely was heavily based on Granville Woods, an African-American inventor in the 1800s who primarily specialized in mechanical and electrical engineering. Like Victor, Granville also had to deal with people trying to steal or otherwise take credit for his inventions, even winning against Thomas Edison himself in court.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Nearly every single word that he says is drawn out in this fashion, particularly as Timely is giving a presentation. It's likely due to his stutter, which is otherwise quite prevalent when he talks.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: His quite understandable reaction on more than one occasion, both in regard to dissatisfied customers and Ravonna, Sylvie, and Loki and Mobius all after him.
• Snake Oil Salesman: Most of Victor's "inventions" that he demonstrates at the Chicago World Fair are actually bogus; he really only demonstrates and sells them so he can swindle people out of their money to fund his real experiments.
• Speech Impediment: Victor constantly stutters and stammers whenever he's speaking. Though befitting a Con Man, he (mostly successfully) attempts to circumvent it by speaking loudly and in a very grandiose manner during presentations and sales pitches. Even then, it still creeps in now and again.
• Stable Time Loop: When Victor finally meets his hero O.B., O.B. in turn gets to meet his hero...Victor Timely. As Victor points out, he based all of his inventions from O.B.'s TVA handbook. As O.B. retorts in turn, everything he invented and put in the book was inspired by the late 1800's inventor Victor Timely. Cue beat. When they try and exchange signautures for their respective copies of the handbook, they both quickly learn that they already signed each others' books. As a certain Time Lord once eloquently put it, time is a non-linear, non-subjective big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Loki's ability to control his time slipping allows him to try and get Victor to expand the Temporal Loom over and over again until he gets it right, but this means each time he gets it wrong Victor dies horribly. In addition to his many deaths that are shown, he's implied to have died at least dozens of times offscreen.
• Token Good Teammate: Positioned as this to the various Kangs. While he's got a mild ruthless streak (what with casually swindling people out of their money, even if they are rich), and does not tolerate partners (being willing to ditch Ravonna when she states that they're going to be partners), he seems to lack any real signs of true malice and is befuddled (and a bit horrified) by what he's being dragged into. His decision to sacrifice his own life (unsuccessfully) stabilising the Temporal Loom seems to confirm his lack of evil intentions.
• Unwitting Pawn: To Ravonna, Miss Minutes, and He Who Remains, with their scheme seemingly providing him with the TVA's knowledge and inspiration to invent. Initially it was believed that he was meant to be He Who Remains, or his successor at least. However, from Miss Minutes' final revelation before she was shutdown ("You'll never be him") and He Who Remains' own dialogue, it turns out that Victor Timely was merely a tiny part of the grand scheme by He Who Remains to prove to Loki the futility of saving the multiverse.

The Council of Kangs

In General

The Council of Kangs

Species: Various

Portrayed By: Jonathan Majors

Appearances: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

An alliance of various iterations of Kang the Conqueror throughout the Multiverse.

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• Alliance of Alternates: Much like as in the comics, they are a whole gathering of variations on the same guy.
• Blood Knight: Many of the Council members are shown barking, letting out war cries, or otherwise cheering with extreme enthusiasm as they prepare to engage in war with the Avengers.
• The Cameo: A Kang in a business suit, appearing to be Mister Gryphon, appears in the middle of the coliseum.
• Composite Character: Of the comics' Council of Kangs and the Council of Cross-Time Kangs. The former was a straightforward assembly of versions of Nathaniel Richards in a gambit by Immortus to eliminate the Kang variants. The latter had the distinction of being an assembly of beings, humans and aliens, who usurped the Kang mantle from their universes' Nathaniels. The MCU's depiction of the Council shares the former's name and membership of Kang variants while sharing the latter's inclusion of aliens taking the Kang title.
• Even Evil Has Standards: They were responsible for banishing the Exile into the Quantum Realm because even they found the Exile's bloodlust to be too vile and dangerous for them.
• Evil Laugh: When the Triumvirate enters the assembly, many of the Kangs are seen laughing maniacally.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Part of the reason why the Council of Kangs was formed is because they realize their war against each other was destroying their timelines and universes across the Multiverse. When one Kang variant proved to be too successful and dangerous in his multiverse conquest, the Council of Kangs banded together and took down this Kang, banishing him into the Quantum Realm where time and space are beyond his reach.
• Kill and Replace: One of them is a Skrull, implying that he killed the Kang of his universe and took his place.
• Mad Scientist: A shot of their assembly showcases a collective of howling, power-mad lunatics.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Their appearance in Quantumania is a live-action recreation of the Council's reveal in Avengers #267, albeit acting much rowdier than originally depicted.
  • One of the variants is dressed exactly like Kang was in his original comic book appearance.

Immortus

Immortus

"None of us killed him. They did."

Species: Unknown

Portrayed By: Jonathan Majors

Appearances: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

"They're beginning to touch the Multiverse. And if we let them, they will take everything we have built. So let's stop wasting time."

The leader of the Command Triumvirate of the Council of Kangs. Immortus is tasked with preventing the rest of the multiverse from tearing down everything the Council has established.

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• Adaptational Villainy: In the comics, Immortus is an Anti-Villain at worst, and generally tends to blur the line between ally and enemy of the Avengers. While he did secretly create the Council of Kangs, it was with the hope that their clash of egos would result in infighting that would eventually lead them to destroy each other. Here, Immortus openly leads the Council and they follow his agenda, with He Who Remains taking his more sympathetic traits.
• All of Them: After the Exile is killed by the Lang-Pym family, Immortus calls a meeting of the Council of Kangs. The Scarlet Centurion asks how many he called, and he replies with this.
  Scarlet Centurion: How many did you call?
  Immortus: All of us.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Unlike his other named variants, Immortus has blue skin.
• Beard of Evil: He has a very bizarre mustache-beard, and leads the villainous Council of Kangs.
• Continuity Nod: His facial hair vaguely resembles one of the android Time-Keepers from Loki, albeit less bushy and alien-looking.
• Composite Character: Of his comic book counterpart and of Kang Prime, who leads the Council in the comics.
• Evil Old Folks: Certainly looks and sounds like he's got a considerable amount of years on him compared to all his variants.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: Speaks with a quiet but very husky and dark voice.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Leader of the Council who chose to exile the Conqueror, setting the plot of Quantumania — and eventually, Phases 5 and 6 — into motion. After the supposable death of the Conqueror, Immortus decides to call the Council together, believing that the Sacred Timeline is becoming a threat to the Council.
• Humans Are Special: Deconstructed. Unlike the other leaders of the Triumvirate, he is fully aware that the Exiled One being killed by a hero from Sacred Timeline Earth, much less a hero that isn't even all that powerful compared to numerous others within that timeline, spells extremely bad news for the Kangs. He even acknowledges that humans of Earth have incredible potential even he is frightened of and wants to stomp out before the embers spread to flame. However, this means that Earth is now on high alert from an extremely powerful and unknowable Council of Kangs and Scott (as he feared) has now unleashed something far worse than Thanos ever was onto the universe he calls home.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Though he is not sure whether or not the Exiled One is actually dead, he considered that fact that a hero from the MCU's "Prime" timeline was even able to defeat a Kang variant at all to be a big enough cause for concern that he summons every known living Kang variant, apparently intending to unleash them on said hero's home universe.
• Technicolor Eyes: He has distinctively yellow eyes, unlike the rest of his variants.
• Weird Beard: Immortus has a very odd-looking mustache that grows down over his face and is braided to look almost rope-like in nature.

Scarlet Centurion

The Scarlet Centurion

"How many did you call?!"

Species: Human

Portrayed By: Jonathan Majors

Appearances: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

One of the Triumvirs of the Council of Kangs.

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• Alliterative Name: Both Scarlet and Centurion start with the same sound: /s/.
• Bald of Evil: Unlike most other variants who have a full head of hair, the Centurion sports a shaved head.
• Co-Dragons: He and Rama-Tut are subservient to Immortus.
• Color Character: Scarlet Centurion.
• Non-Indicative Name: Despite being the Scarlet Centurion, his armor does not actually have any red detailing.
• Noodle Incident: Why he hated the Exiled One and wanted to be the one to kill him isn't explained.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Implied to have harbored this feeling toward the Exiled One/Conqueror variant.
  Rama-Tut: Must really eat you up that you're not the one who killed him.
• Other Me Annoys Me: If what Rama-Tut says is to be believed, Scarlet Centurion had a great deal of enmity towards "The Exiled One". That said, he's displeased to learn that he died at the hands of Ant-Man instead of his own.
• Powered Armor: Wears an armored suit that makes him look like a hybrid of Brainiac and RoboCop.

Rama-Tut

Pharaoh Rama-Tut

"So, the Exiled One is dead. You sure he's dead?"

Species: Human (cybernetically enhanced)

Portrayed By: Jonathan Majors

Appearances: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

One of the Triumvirs of the Council of Kangs.

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• Co-Dragons: He and Centurion are subservient to Immortus, with him even bowing his head when their leader approaches.
• Cyborg: Rama-Tut sports a pair of cybernetic arms and some modifications to his torso. If one looks closely, it appears that at least his midsection has been replaced by a robotic spinal cord, and based on how his movements are slightly shaky and stiff, it is possible that his whole bottom half is robotic.
• Easter Egg: His existence was previously alluded to via an image on the jacket of one of Harrow's cultists in "The Friendly Type".
• Evil Sounds Deep / Evil Sounds Raspy: Has a deep voice but his voice is also raspier than The Exiled One’s.
• Eye Twitch: Has a more severe condition of this than the Exile.
• Facial Markings: Rama-Tut sports a version of Kang's facial scars, though Rama-Tut accentuates his with gold face paint.
• The Gadfly: Revels in rubbing in that Centurion wasn’t the one to kill the Exiled One.
• Interservice Rivalry: He takes the time to rub it into Centurion's face that he wasn’t the one to kill the Exiled One.
• Nepharious Pharaoh: In keeping with his standard portrayal.
• Psychotic Smirk: He gleefully smirks at Centurion when pointing out his failure to kill the Exiled One.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Unlike his counterparts, he goes around sans shirt to go with his pharaoh attire.
• You Don't Look Like You: He wears a typical nemes instead of the green hybrid of a nemes and a pschent like in the comics.

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"I'll see you soon."

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