Characters / MCU: Loki Laufeyson (Variant L1130)

Main Character Index > Other Individuals and Organizations > Cosmic > Asgard and the Nine Realms (Odin Borson | Loki Laufeyson | Loki Laufeyson (Variant L1130) | Sylvie Laufeydottir | Other Loki Variants) | Knowhere | Nova Empire | Sovereign | Skrulls | Eternals

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

Loki Odinson

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

Birth Name: Loki Laufeyson

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

Species: Frost Giant (Variant)

Citizenship: Jotun, Asgardian

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

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

Voiced By: Alexis Victor (European French dub)

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

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

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

For his Sacred Timeline counterpart, see here.
For his L1190 variant, see here.
For his other variants, see here.

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#-F

• 11th-Hour Superpower:
  • He gains and masters the power of enchantment at the end of "Journey Into Mystery".
  • As of the end of "Science/Fiction", he has gained the ability to command his time-slipping.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Even in his own show, he is much weaker as a mage than his counterpart from the comics. He gains a couple of new or improved abilities (Hand Blasts, stronger telekinesis, enchantment), but it is Classic Loki, his Future Badass variant, who roughly corresponds to the character from the comics in terms of power, and Loki is not there yet - though he's getting there in Season 2, after he and Sylvie witnessed their Future Badass variant create a full blown illusion of Asgard and realised just how powerful they were, successfully enchanting Alioth. He is also nowhere near as strong or durable as he is in the comics, getting tossed around by Mooks like the guards in Lamentis-1. Comics Loki, in comparison, was strong enough to level a building with a single punch.
  • Ultimately subverted by the end of Season 2. He not only masters the ability to effectively time-travel to any point in the past or future, so long as he was there, he also becomes the new Temporal Loom for an infinite number of timelines, warping them into a form that resembles the World Tree Yggdrasil itself.
• Adaptation Deviation: In the comics, Loki has never helped the TVA, met a Kang Variant or fallen in love with his female alternate self. His story in Loki is more of an original story than an adaptation, although it is loosely inspired by a number of comic book plotlines.
• Affably Evil: In the beginning of the series, he is just as evil as he was in The Avengers. He politely inquires after Casey's name before proceeding to threaten him with "violent, painful death" by "gutting him like a fish". He is also polite with all the others, especially compared to Sylvie who swears a lot.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: He used to demand that others kneel before him, but being kicked in the groin and told he is nothing more than a pathetic loner over and over again inside the Time Cell makes him reconsider. The torture stops only when he begs on his knees for it to stop and apologizes to the memory of Lady Sif for his cruel prank.
• All for Nothing:
  • He tried so hard and got so far, but in the end, it doesn't even matter. Sylvie pushed him away, deprived him of the right to decide the fate of the multiverse and killed He Who Remains, unleashing countless Kang variants.
  • His attempts to repair the Temporal Loom were all destined to fail, as it was a failsafe meant to destroy everything that wasn't the Sacred Timeline anyway, and that the other timelines were multiplying themselves ad infinitum meant the Loom's rings could never be big enough to prune them all.
• Alliterative Name: His birth name is Loki Laufeyson. He never uses this patronimic himself, but the TVA call him this way in their files, and Judge Ravonna refers to him as such during his trial.
• Alternate Self:
  • In Avengers Endgame, the Avengers travel back in time to the aftermath of the Battle of New York in 2012 and encounter past Loki there. He manages to snatch the Tesseract and escape, creating a divergent timeline. The Loki series picks up from there.
  • By "The Variant", he's managed to mostly synch up with the prime-Loki's Character Development in a surprisingly simple plot mechanic: the TVA show him a time-recording of everything the prime-Loki did after the first Avengers movie — essentially letting him watch the events of Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, and his death at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. Seeing all this in compressed form has much the same effect as it had on the prime-Loki: his mother's death, that Frigga never stopped believing in him, that his father Odin's dying words were to say that he loved both Thor and Loki, that he even eventually reconciled with Thor to fight side-by-side against the Dark Elves and Hela, etc. The final blow is seeing that the "glorious purpose" that Avengers 1-era Loki thought he had turned out to be getting his neck snapped by the real Big Bad, Thanos, in a futile attempt to die a hero after realizing all his betrayals were for nothing.
  • All that said, within minutes of working for the TVA, he's already trying to manipulate Mobius into an audience with the Timekeepers. He then betrays the TVA and flees at the first opportunity to do so. So this is still an alternate version of the God of Mischief that we follow through the series.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: Zig-Zagged at first before being played straight. Despite initially being the same Loki from The Avengers (2012), he shows far more magical abilities than his Sacred Timeline self. However this is balanced out by him being far more of a Butt-Monkey while his female counterpart Sylvie is portrayed as being a better fighter with magical skills he doesn't have, while Classic and Kid Loki are portrayed as being better or more skilled than him. Season 2 however has him become a Time Master by gaining control of his time slipping and figuring out how to save every timeline by replacing the Temporal Loom itself, sacrificing his own happiness and freedom to ensure the stability of The Multiverse itself. Compared to all his variants, this is clearly the most powerful Loki of them all and the better version, having grown beyond all his flaws to become a true hero and a better god.
• Amazon Chaser: In the main continuity, Loki says that he likes Jane Foster after she slaps him in the face, smiles like a Cheshire Cat when Lady Sif holds him at swordpoint, and is excited to fight the Valkyrie. According to invoked Word of Saint Paul, Loki slept with Sif before he cut her hair. This variant falls in love with Sylvie, a headstrong Dark Action Girl. He agrees that she is terrifying, but says that is what's great about her. This is not surprising given that he grew up in a Proud Warrior society and his own adopted mother was an action girl.
• Ambiguous Situation: It is unclear why Loki keeps his Asgardian form inside the TVA realm where magic doesn't work. As shown in Thor, Odin used his powers on baby Loki to make him look like an Asgardian, but when Loki holds the Casket of Ancient Winters, he temporarily turns blue and looks like a Jotun. It is either an MCU Continuity Error, or Odin cast an irreversible spell on Loki, permanently changing his very nature.
• And Then What?: During the first interrogation Mobius discovers that Loki's plans are very vague. After conquering Earth, he intends to conquer something else, like the Nine Realms or, as Mobius suggests, space, because Loki believes that he was born to and "owed to" be a ruler, and this is it. In the end he comes to realize that even if he ruled all of time and space absolute power isn't what he wants and wouldn't make him happy. He says as much to Sylvie.
• Anti-Hero: After Loki meets Sylvie, learns her backstory and that everyone in the TVA is a Variant, and nearly dies on Lamentis, he changes his goal from ruling the TVA to breaking the system, and thus transitions from a Nominal Hero to a more classical one who is ready to risk his life for others. Loki attempts to take the blame from Sylvie and put it on himself, offers himself as a distraction for Sylvie to enchant Alioth, and plants himself in front of He Who Remains defenseless to stop Sylvie from killing him out of blind revenge. By the second season, he graduates firmly into heroic territory, having gone through enough development to be single-mindedly focused on saving every timeline, ultimately becoming the Big Good of the entire infinite multiverse.
• Appeal to Inherent Nature: Just like his prime counterpart, he often replies to criticism with It's What I Do.
  • In "Glorious Purpose," when Mobius keeps prodding Loki about his motives:
    Mobius: You're really good at doing awful things, and then just getting away.
    Loki: [bitterly] What can I say? I'm a mischievous scamp.
  • In "Lamentis," when Sylvie gets angry at him for blowing their cover:
    Sylvie: You got drunk on the train.
    Loki: I'm hedonistic. That's what I do.
  • Also in "Lamentis", then again in "Journey Into Mystery", he underlines their Determinator characteristics – Loki survives.
• The Atoner: Much like with his original counterpart, Loki's development as a character is one of finding the goodness inside him to do the right thing and fight for what matters. In the span of his first season, he goes from a megalomaniacal, self-centered asshole to a genuine hero who stands by his friends and fights to save the world, though he's still a little bit of an asshole. It's a very reluctant — practically forced — journey on his part, but he does come out a better man on the other side. Best exemplified in his image quote. Even he himself has realized the pain he has caused and aims to be better.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: At the end of the series, Loki becomes the show's version of the God of Stories, and places himself within the heart of the new timelines to watch over them eternally from his lonely throne.
• Attention Whore: In "The Nexus Event," he tells the memory of Lady Sif that he's done a prank on her because he craves attention, which in turn is because he is scared of being alone.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: As he reveals when put on trial by the TVA, he figured out that he was able to escape because the Avengers travelled back in time, in part because he noticed that the case with the Tesseract was moving on its own and also because he smelled Tony's cologne from two different sources.
• Background Halo: In the official poster for Loki, a golden clock frames Loki's head like a halo, while glowing hour and minute bars and multiple clock hands act as rays, and Loki's figure is lit from behind with faint yellow light. This contrasts the poster of He Who Remains, which is similar but has the dark purple background, giving sinner/saint vs devil vibes.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: In "Nexus Event," Loki and Sylvie have each other's backs when fighting the guards.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: His typical civilian attire is an all-black power suit, but once he's shanghaied into helping out the TVA, he begins to wear a much less badass-looking office-drone suit and cheap jacket with "VARIANT" monogrammed in all-caps on the back. In season 2, he switches out the TVA uniform for a suit and pea coat that's much closer to his usual style for most of the season.
• The Bait: He runs off to distract Alioth with a flaming sword while Sylvie attempts to enchant it, but Alioth quickly loses interest in him.
• Barrier Maiden: Loki ultimately becomes the binding force for the entire multiverse, his presence sustaining the countless branches from the Sacred Timeline into a World Tree.
• Battle Couple: Loki and Sylvie develop romantic feelings towards each other and fight both the guards on Lamentis and the guards who protect the Time-Keepers together. Later, they combine their powers to enchant Alioth.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: He starts the first season as an Ex-Big Bad monologueing about the evils of free will and his glorious purpose of subjugating others for their own good, all while heavily relying on Psychological Projection. He ends it as a thoughtful and humbled individual who doesn't want the throne to rule all of creation and would risk being killed to stop the person he cares about from making a wrong choice.
• Being Good Sucks: Loki's speech addressed to Sylvie in S02 E04 has shades of this, as he acknowledges the challenges of doing the right thing and staying optimistic, yet he maintains one should still do so.
  Loki: Sure. Burn it down. Easy. Annihilating is easy. Razing things to the ground is easy. Trying to fix what's broken is hard. Hope is hard.
• Beneath the Mask:
  • When Loki is most loud and theatrical, he is covering up his true thoughts and feelings. He is genuine with others when he is quiet. When he finds Casey, he nicely asks for his name, pauses and then threatens him in a completely different tone. When Mobius interrupts Loki's attempt to dramatically stand up, and then offers him to try again, Loki says in a quiet and mundane voice that it won't be meaningful now, considers the option, and then stands up to make a big hammy speech anyway.
  • He initially gets uncomfortable when Mobius shows him a recording of violent acts he committed in The Avengers, but keeps talking about his purpose of conquering and "liberating" his victims. By the end of the episode, Loki is sitting lost and disillusioned on the floor when he explains to Mobius that his viciousness is largely an act:
    Loki: I don't enjoy hurting people. I don't enjoy it. I do it (..) because it's part of the illusion. It's the cruel elaborate trick conjured by the weak [gestures to himself] to inspire fear.
    Mobius: A desparate play for control. You do know yourself.
    Loki: A villain.
  • When he finds a report about the complete destruction of his homeland Asgard and reads it alone, he cries. But when he later discusses it with Mobius, Loki quickly dismisses Mobius's condolences as if the event means nothing to him.
• Being Evil Sucks: After being apprehended by the TVA, interrogated by Mobius and seeing how his life is supposed to play out, he realizes that he does not enjoy hurting people, and that playing the part of the villain has brought him nothing but loneliness, pain, and eventually, an unceremonious death.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: As Loki puts it, Sylvie tries to hit him all the time. They switch between fighting verbally and physically, vehemently denying they care for each other and awkwardly attempting to spit it out, until Sylvie kisses him in the Season 1 finale only to betray his trust and push him through the portal.
• Break the Haughty:
  • Loki seeing the TVA have so many Infinity Stones they get treated as knick-knacks and witnessing the post-2012 events of his life in the main timeline through a Chronoscope shatters his arrogance into pieces. He believed himself to be a future God-Emperor, but in fact he is just a pest whom his former master is destined to nonchalantly strangle to death.
  • What's left is destroyed when he is placed in the Time Cell where he has to relive Lady Sif kneeing him in the groin and telling him he will always be alone over and over again. He only breaks the loop by begging on his knees to stop it.
• Brainy Brunet: Just like his main counterpart, Loki has black hair and proves his worth to Mobius by quickly deducing that the Variant a.k.a. Sylvie is hiding in the apocalypses.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Much like his prime counterpart, this Loki is quite a clever and thoughtful individual, as seen when he does some good old-fashioned detective work to deduce where his variant is hiding in "The Variant". However, Loki himself gets bored studying TVA terminology with Miss Minutes, and seems more interested in criticizing the TVA than he is actually helping them.
• Broken Pedestal: He comes to genuinely admire Sylvie, and tells anyone who would listen how great she is. In the end, she betrays his trust and pushes him away through the portal, making the decision to kill He Who Remains for both of them. Loki is devastated.
• Brought Down to Badass: Loki's magic does not work in the realm of the TVA, but he is still cunning, crafty, scheming Loki, and he is still dangerous. Despite being powerless, he steals the Time Twister controls from Mobius, leads everyone on a chase, and uses the Time Twister to get revenge on Hunter B-15. It only stops when he chooses to stop.
• But Not Too Bi: There's been a passing reference to him being bisexual, but his only romantic attachment shown on screen is to Sylvie, his female alternate self. He acknowledges he's had flings with both men and women, but never any "real" connection.
• Butt-Monkey: Played for both laughs and tears. This version of Loki suffers many, many misfortunes and humiliation, physical and psychological, as a crucial part of his Character Development. After all, a "seismic narcissist" like himself could only experience that crucial self-actualization by being knocked off his pedestal (a couple of times), (repeatedly) kicked in the balls, and forced to face some hard truths.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: It is established in both Thor and Age of Ultron that Asgardians need to drink insane amounts of alcohol to actually get drunk. In "Lamentis", Loki is able to get drunk from champagne in the brief amount of time Sylvie spends napping, suggesting Frost Giants aren't as hardy (or as a runt, he isn't as hardy as he normally would be). He must have been terrible at Asgardian parties, if he attended them at all.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Loki expresses doubt in the dogma according to which the TVA workers were created by the Time-Keepers as early as in "The Vaiant", but Mobius ascribes it to Arbitrary Skepticism. Nor does Mobius believe him later when the God of Mischief says that the TVA workers are just brainwashed variants. Mobius comes around though once he sees evidence that proves what Loki said is true.
  • In "Lamentis", Loki criticizes Sylvie's plan to kill the Time-Keepers and then walk away. He says that would just create a vacuum of power and implies nothing good will come of it. Loki repeats this sentiment in the Season 1 finale, but Sylvie brushes it off both times. This is precisely what happens — when Sylvie kills He Who Remains, the TVA and the entire multiverse begin to fall apart.
• Casting a Shadow: Loki is able to manipulate the shadows of his duplicates to mimic what they would look like were he in his full regalia, horns and all. In S02 E02, he uses this sharpen magic to restrain Brad. Mobius thinks it's a bit over the top.
• Character Development:
  • Due to being a variant of Loki after the Battle of New York, he never gained the development his prime counterpart endured throughout the movies and starts the series still very much the villain he was in The Avengers. However, thanks to the TVA's dimension nullifying his magic, him reviewing his future all the way up to his unglamorous death, being constantly questioned on his motives by Mobius, seeing himself in other variants he meets as in the mirror and falling for Sylvie he is humbled and becomes a better person. By the end of the first season of his solo series, he refuses the 'throne' of He Who Remains to control all of time and space itself, but also refuses to blindly kill him or hurt Sylvie. This is very much unlike the Loki who would stab his own brother in order to gain a pittance of power at the foot of Thanos.
  • He starts Loki employing a lot of Psychological Projection and accusing others of his own sins, just like he did in the Avengers. By the end of the series, after much introspection, he becomes increasingly self-aware, which allows him to see the truth about others. Loki does not respect Mobius lying to himself, because Loki did that too, he worries for Sylvie's wellbeing in the Season 1 finale because he's been there emotionally and knows that hate and revenge will get her nowhere, and he can get behind the explanations of He Who Remains despite suffering from his actions, because he's been a villain and a liar himself and can recognize a sincere Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Character Tics: Just like his main counterpart, Loki loves to assume the T-pose as a sign of confidence, and fidgets with his hands when he’s nervous or upset. For instance, in Pompei he speads his arms wide after he proves his theory right. On Lamentis he worries his hands as he and Sylvie sit by the lake, and again in the void while listening to Classic Loki tell his story. Another frequent tic is a quick Hair Flip to straighten his messy hair after a stunt or a timeslip.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: He struggles to get Mobius to trust him because Mobius fully expects that Loki will betray him. After seeing multiple Variants of himself all stabbing each other in the back he finally decides that even he's had enough of doing this. When Sylvie asks if they can trust each other he assures her that he's learned his lesson and this time he really won't try to betray her.
• Cloudcuckoolander: In "The Variant", Loki is eccentric, hyperactive and childish and annoys the hell out of Mobius with his clumsy salad metaphors and gleeful Latin speeches. He's just learned that his whole life was meaningless and almost succumbed to despair, and now he has someone to listen to him. His prime counterpart similarly became a bit too cheerful and annoying in The Dark World immediately after Thor found a wreck of Loki on the floor of his cell, so it must be his way to cope with stress. It does not last in both cases.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: While it is Played for Laughs, Loki is locked in a room he can't escape. A recreated memory of Lady Sif enters it to call him a pathetic worm who will always be alone, hit him in the face, knee him in the groin, and leave, only to reenter the room and repeat it all over again. Loki mutters to himself that he's heard Sif's first line too many times.
• Commonality Connection: Loki and Sylvie can't find any common ground when they discuss their names, goals and methods. But they bond over memories of their mothers, their magic, and over both of them being bisexuals who were never in any serious relationship. After this, Sylvie falls asleep in his presence, which she does not do around "untrustworthy" people.
• Contagious Heroism:
  • Before Loki meets Sylvie, he is contemplating how to take over the TVA and gain more power. Her backstory and her strive to destroy the TVA instead amaze him, and inspire him to join her in her fight and make a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Loki himself, along with Mobius inspire Classic Loki to change and find his "glorious purpose".
• Cool Sword: Kid Loki gifts Loki with a short sword that Loki sets on fire when he needs to distract Alioth.
• Cosmic Plaything: He Who Remains wrote his main counterpart's story in which Loki is destined to cause war, ruin and death and always loses to allow the "heroes" to change and grow, until his former master chokes Loki to death. He also paved the road for this Loki variant, who escapes in the middle of said story only to get apprehended by the TVA and do a prolonged Trauma Conga Line. So the "divine arbiter of power" in the universe wanted Loki to fail and suffer, and there is nothing Loki could have done to escape that fate.
• Dance Battler: Similar to his main counterpart, he often dives under weapons of enemies or employs acrobatics to avoid getting hit. His fight with Sylvie in the Season 1 finale looks like an angry dance between the two.
• The Dandy: Loki lampshades his love for looking stylish when B-15 asks him if a casually dressed man at Roxxcart could be his variant:
  Loki: I mean, I probably would have worn a suit, but, yes, maybe.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart: By Loki, Loki from a branching timeline created in Endgame is shown a recording of the death of his primary timeline counterpart. He is horrified.
• Deadpan Snarker: This Loki is still Loki, and so he has many dry insults and sarcastic one-liners to toss about. Given that Mobius and Sylvie are more than a match for him, this leads to much Snark-to-Snark Combat.
• Death Glare: During his interrogation, Loki stares at Mobius so intensely that he earns a joke from Mobius about looks that could kill.
• Defiant to the End: Loki has no means to escape his pruning in front of the Time-Keepers, so he says that he's already died countless times and dares them to do their worst.
• Deliberately Bad Example: Mobius concludes that this is the role Loki is meant to play in the Sacred Timeline:
  Mobius: You weren't born to be king, Loki. You were born to cause pain and suffering and death. That's how it is, that's how it was and that's how it will be. Everything so that others can achieve their best versions of themselves.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: In the Avengers, the Other says that Thanos has given Loki a new purpose, which Loki calls glorious. He believes himself to be a Dark Messiah who should rule the Nine Realms, if not all space. However, the TVA makes him realize that he can never reach it. Loki then settles on overthrowing the Time Keepers and ruling the TVA. When he meets Sylvie, he initially laughs at her desire to destroy the TVA, but then adopts her goal as his own. After he talks to He Who Remains, he reconsiders again. When Sylvie plants seeds for a new multiversal war, Loki takes the blame despite actively opposing her decision, and prepares to deal with its fallout. As his actor explains it:
  Tom Hiddleston: He feels that this is something he has done, a mistake that he has made, and he's invested in setting it right.
• Determinator: Not in the sense that he doggedly clings to a single goal or does not Know When to Fold 'Em, but in the way that he finds a will to get back up and go on despite all his failures or even in the face of imminent death, believing that the sun will indeed shine on him again.
  • He realizes this when he is about to die on Lamentis-1:
    Sylvie: Do you think that what makes a Loki a Loki is the fact that we're destined to lose?
    Loki: No. We may lose. Sometimes painfully. But we don't die. We survive.
  • One of the last scenes of the series is him processing what transpired in the Citadel. He gives himself some time to grieve before getting up and rushing back into action.
    • He spends centuries reseting the same few hours and training to achieve absolute mastery of temporal physics, purely to save his friends.
• Devious Daggers: Like his main counterpart, Loki is a character who relishes in chaos and who is fond of his twin daggers. He sometimes holds them in Reverse Grip, and occasionally uses them as a projectile. He is so obsessed with his weapon that the best metaphor he can come up with for love is a dagger.
• Did Not Get the Girl: He gave his all to Sylvie, but at the end of season 1 she shoves him away through the portal right after kissing him goodbye, betraying his trust and parting with him. By the end of season 2, he chooses to sacrifice his own happiness to live outside of time holding the timelines together, so she and the rest of reality can live their lives - without him.
• Disney Death: He gets pruned by Renslayer which seemingly kills him in "The Nexus Event", but The Stinger reveals that he was sent to The Void where he meets other Lokis.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The stuff he goes through in the series is similar to Real Life psychotherapy:
  • In the first episode, Loki sees the events of his past and future, like somebody with borderline personality disorder forced into dialectical behavior therapy, which focuses on making a client look at their behavior from a distance. Making Loki witness the hurt he has caused and learn the consequences of his actions by literally watching himself do everything is the physical embodiment of DBT.
  • In the Season 1 finale, Loki telling Sylvie, who is behind him in Character Development, "I just want you to be ok" is him answering the question "what would you say to your younger traumatized self?".
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Loki is initially too proud to allow anyone pity him. Mobius plays with this to get him on his side.
  Loki: Why are you in there sticking your neck out for me?
  Mobius: I'll give you two options, and you can believe whichever one you want. A, because I see a scared little boy, shivering in the cold. And you kinda feel bad for that ice runt. Or B, I just wanna catch this guy, and I'll tell you whatever I need to tell you.
  Loki: I don't need your sympathy.
  Mobius: Good, because I'm running out of it.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Not to the extent of Thor in Endgame, but Loki also sometimes drinks to cope with stress. After being captured by the TVA and faced with how meaningless his existence is, he gets "very full" on a train in "Lamentis", sings a drunken Homesickness Hymn and almost gets himself and Sylvie killed by accidentally breaking the TemPad. When he is forced to relive one of his worst memories in a Time Cell, he recalls how in the past he had a glass of wine so as to forget about it.
• Dual Wielding: He fights with two daggers, similar to Loki in Ragnarok.
• Emerald Power: Whether he casts an illusion or a Hand Blast, or enchants a giant angry cloud his spells are bright green.
• Emotionally Tongue-Tied: A smooth talker when it comes to lies, Loki struggles to find the words when he sincerely apologizes to the memory of Lady Sif, and later tries to tell Sylvie about his feelings for her. As he puts it, this is too new for him.
• Emotional Regression: After a traumatic experience of watching key future events of his life and his own death by strangling, Loki temporarily turns into a talky, enthusiastic and irresponsible Manchild with Mobius unwillingly filling in the role of a parent looking after a hyperactive kid. It ends with Loki getting drunk and dooming himself and Sylvie to die on Lamentis. After this, he comes to his senses, apologizes to Sylvie and starts to behave like an adult again.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: The first episode of Loki has Mobius show him what would have happened if he'd continued into the events of The Dark World. Loki is devastated to learn he would have played a role in his mother's death and watching a recording of her final moments distresses him even further. His demands to know where Frigga "really" is are the first time this version has shown concern for anyone other than himself.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Loki gets emotional watching his future where Odin calls him his son, and Thor reconciles with him. This shows that Loki cares about both of them despite stating otherwise in The Avengers merely a day ago. He then goes on to form a bond with Sylvie that's so strong it causes a Nexus Event during an apocalypse, something that isn't supposed to be possible.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • He's not a huge fan of the Time Variance Authority as he views them as people dictating the fate of billions of folks and thus eliminating free will.
  • He calls out the other Variant (Sylvie) on using a cowardly trick, Demonic Possession, even if it is clever, and urges her to fight him directly in the name of honor. Of course, afterwards he's interested in the technique, suggesting that he's trying to lure his opponent out.
  • He doesn't look favourably on how the wealthy of Lamentis-1 are leaving the poor ordinary citizens to die when the moon and its planet are about to collide.
  • He is disturbed when Sylvie tells him that the TVA agents are actually brainwashed Variants. When he later tries to convince Mobius that it is true, he is outright shouting in frustration because he is now referring to all Variants as "us" rather than "those random guys I don't care about". This is about the point that seals his Heel–Face Turn.
• The Evils of Free Will: In Loki, he gives another flowery speech about "liberating" people from making wrong choices by denying them freedom, but is very angry at the notion of the TVA restricting his own free will. When Mobius points out the inconsistency, Loki switches the topic.
• Ex-Big Bad: Loki was the Big Bad of Thor and The Avengers, a villain who lived long enough to become a protagonist and a hero of his own spin-off series.
• Existential Horror: Loki comes to realize that his "glorious purpose" was and always going to be as the villain that made his enemies "the best versions of themselves," and finally died an unglamorous death choking out a spiteful last line to a former master. When confronted with this fact, Loki has a mental breakdown and disoriented as he is, regresses into a Manchild. Shorty after that, he is gleefully yelling "nothing matters, nothing has any consequence", which reflects not only the reality of the apocalypse he visits but also the discovery he's made about his own life.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: After the Battle of New York, Loki has greasy slicked-back hair typically worn by sleeky villains. Skip forward to him working with the TVA and visiting Pompeii, and he has Messy Hair with more curls than in Ragnarok to show that he is now less evil, but more chaotic and messed up himself.
• The Face: Loki has ultimately taken on this role among his friends/loved ones at the TVA.
  • In "Lamentis", when he and Sylvie are facing imminent death with the destruction of the moon they are on, Sylvie is in a desperate state but Loki manages to make her feel better by telling her how amazing she is for having resisted the TVA for her entire life.
  • In "Breaking Brad", after Brad upsets Mobius by bringing up his previous life, Loki attempts to talk to Mobius and help him through his feelings, although Mobius makes it clear that he doesn't really want to talk about it and feels like he is better off not knowing anything about his past life.
  • In "Heart of the TVA", Sylvie berates Mobius for wanting to eat pie despite everything going on and accuses him of emotionally distancing himself from being a variant himself. Loki talks to her about it, defends Mobius, and then counsels Sylvie, telling her that she made the right choice to let Victor live and that trying to fix the TVA to protect the timelines is the best option that they have at the moment.
  • Loki's words are one major reason that convince Victor to help the TVA out by fixing the Temporal Loom. Throughout "Heart of the TVA", Loki keeps verbally reassuring him. When Victor first arrives at the TVA and is apprehensive, Loki tells Victor that it's ok and motivates him by telling him that he is the only one who can help them. Later, when O.B. asks Victor to scan his temporal aura, Victor is apprehensive again and O.B.'s literal reply that he hasn't tested it yet doesn't help to alleviate his concerns. But after Loki firmly assures Victor that he will be fine, Victor does it.
• Face Death with Dignity: When they are about to die on Lamentis, Sylvie tries to hold it together but visibly panics, while Loki serenly reassures and compliments her, and smiles at her almost unbothered by what is going on around them. The TVA save them at the last moment.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: He constantly falls victim to this before he gets humbled a bit:
  • Loki's dramatic speech falls flat because the Mongolians he's talking to don't understand English.
  • During his trial, Loki declares himself guilty "...of this!", and gestures dramatically. The guards just start snickering about his attempt to use magic, because the TVA is able to easily nullify it.
  • He stands up to deliver a dramatic speech only for Mobius to think that Loki is trying to attack him and put Loki back on his chair with the Time Twister. Mobius realizes his mistake and offers Loki to try again, to which Loki quietly replies that it won't be meaningful the second time around.
• Family of Choice: By Season 2, Loki's friends at the TVA and Sylvie have become his found family, as confirmed by writer Eric Martin.
• Fate Worse than Death: Loki's ultimate fate in the Season 2 finale. Loki has a final talk with Mobius, with the latter reminding him that most purpose are more burden than glorious. Having realized what he must do, Loki destroys the Loom and saves the multiverse by taking the place of He Who Remains, thus resigning himself to live with his fear of being alone — for all eternity.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Throughout most of the first season, Loki is fairly awful to Mobius, constantly lying to him, hiding things from him, and even trying to manipulate him. Mobius, in turn, isn't above punishing him cruelly for every misdeed. But after all of the crap they went through together, including in the Void, however, the two are finally on the same page, clearly seeing each other as best friends. By season 2, they're nigh inseparable.
• Fish out of Water:
  • Not only has Loki been dragged out of his dimension and stripped of his powers, he's also introduced to a whole new level of reality and power, having to work with an agency that exists outside of time and space as he knows it.
  • After having been pruned, he dives deeper down the rabbit hole and finds himself in the Void, where he is nothing more than a Naïve Newcomer compared to the more seasoned Variants.
• Flaming Sword: Kid Loki lends him his short sword/dagger Lævateinn, when he and Sylvie choose to go after Alioth. Loki conjures a back scabbard with straps for it. While he sets the blade on fire to get Alioth's attention, he promptly sheathes it back up once he sees Classic Loki conjure up a much better distraction for the abomination.
• Foil:
  • To Sylvie, his female Variant he falls in love with. Both are sarcastic loners with an affinity to magic, but Sylvie is goal-driven, not self-aware and too afraid to trust, and casually resorts to violence. Loki gets disillusioned in his "glorious purpose", becomes introspective and learns to connect to others, and prefers diplomacy and guile. In the end, Sylvie can't see past revenge, while Loki attempts to consider everyone's best interest.
  • To He Who Remains, the Big Bad of the series. Both are villains who are called devils and muse on the pitfalls of free will. However, He Who Remains distrusts his nature so much that he forces a narrative upon all of existence just to keep his evil variants in check, while Loki fails to become a God-Emperor but comes to admire some of his alternate selves and seeks redemption. As the antagonist and the protagonist, they implicitly take sides in the good old dispute between Hobbes and Rousseau about human nature.
• The Four Loves: In the series, he discovers the capacity for all four types in order, climbing a moral ladder of sorts. In the first episode, he expresses love for his family ("storge") when he watches the film with Frigga, Odin and Thor. "The Variant" shows his growing friendship ("philia") with Mobius. He meets Sylvie in "Lamentis", and by "Journey Into Mystery, they've developed romantic feelings for each other ("eros"). In the Season 1 finale, he drops his weapon and stands in Sylvie's way defenseless to prevent her from making a wrong choice. He tells her that the only thing he wants is for her to be ok, which is an expression of selfless love ("agape").
• Freak Out:
  • Loki has one when he watches a film via a Chronoscope with the major events of his life, from his mother's and his father's deaths up to Thanos strangling him to death. He is shocked and traumatized, and realizes that Being Evil Sucks and his entire life was for naught.
  • He has another one when he wakes up in the Void, not knowing if he is dead or alive. He struggles to understand what is going on and explains to his new companions that he's lost track of time and is overwhelmed by everything that's happened to him since New York.
  • In the Season 1 finale, Loki has the mother of all freakouts when he realizes that Sylvie's actions have allowed Kang the Conqueror to not only wreak havoc upon the multiverse, but that he has somehow ended up in the past of the TVA, and neither Mobius nor B-15 recognizes him at all. The God of Mischief is utterly terrified at the prospect of what's about to happen. He still hasn't gotten over this by Quantumania, as he is visibly shaken by the mere sight of one of Kang's variants, Victor Timely — who Mobius points out, looks even more unassuming than He Who Remains. Loki knows better.

G-L

• Geek: Proves to be a major geek toward magic during the series. In "The Variant" he stops Mobius' briefing to correct him, in detail, about magic terminology. He becomes increasingly interested in Sylvie's enchantment ability and spends quite a bit of time asking her how it works.
• Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: In "The Variant", Loki is the gleeful Manchild with too much energy, and Mobius is the jaded grump who is absolutely done with Loki.
• A God Am I:
  • He continues to pose as a God even after he learns how his life was supposed to play out. Mobius puts up with it and once calls Loki and Sylvie "orphan demigods" himself, but Sylvie won't have it and calls Loki a clown.
  • By Season 2, Loki has mellowed to the point that he still thinks himself a god but somberly acknowledges the responsibility that comes with that instead of boasting about it.
    Sylvie: Sounds like whatever we do, we're playing God.
    Loki: We are gods.
• Go Through Me: Loki drops his weapon and inserts himself between Sylvie's blade and He Who Remains, stopping her from killing He Who Remains in the last second. Sylvie is acting on emotions, and Loki sees no other way to make her think about the consequences, both for her own stake and the universe at large.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: Loki does not believe that anyone is "all bad" or "all good", which he tells to Mobius as seen in the page quote.
• Hair-Contrast Duo:
  • With Mobius. Loki has black hair and is unpredictable, talky and childish. Mobius has grey hair and is reasonable, unfazed and mature.
  • With Sylvie, whom Loki calls his "faded photocopy". She is his female Variant who dyes her hair blonde and apart from being a sarcastic magic user, is his opposite in every way.
• Hair Flip: Loki is concerned with his appearance, so he loves this move, just like his prime counterpart. This time around, Tom Hiddleston did not have to wear a wig, so in the first episode alone he flips his hair more often than in some films. Compare this to Sylvie who ties her hair before a battle so as not to fix it mid-fight.
• Hand Blast: In "Lamentis", Loki blasts the guards with green flames by pointing his hand at them. He's never used this ability in the films.
• Hates Being Alone: Loki was abandoned as an infant and ostracized by Thor's friends in his youth. In the Time Cell, he confesses to a memory of Lady Sif that he is afraid of being alone. So he would do anything to catch the attention of others, positive or negative. This also means that he greatly values genuine connections he forms with others, especially Sylvie and Mobius. In the end, his greatest fear comes true — he is completely alone again.
• The Hedonist: Loki cannot help but to relish in alcohol and song at the first opportunity to do so, even to the detriment of his own goals. He even names himself as a hedonist explicitly. Previously in Pompeii, he was shouting to doomed Roman citizens "enjoy your last meal" and "dance while you still can".
• Heel Realization: After Loki sees how his life was supposed to play out up until his death, he realizes that Being Evil Sucks and he is not a Dark Messiah with a "glorious purpose" but a villain who's wasted his life away:
  Mobius: You do know yourself.
  Loki: A villain [sighs].
• Heel–Face Turn: Largely sealed in "The Nexus Event", after steady character development. After he learns that all TVA workers are Variants and hears Sylvie's backstory, he decides to destroy it instead of taking over it, and tells Mobius the truth even though he gains nothing from it himself.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Loki is an Anti-Hero in the series, and he never puts his signature helmet with Horns of Villainy on until the Grand Finale.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: He starts the series as a villain turned a Nominal Hero whose primary weapon are his twin daggers, and he hides them with magic whenever he does not need them. He ends it as an Anti-Hero openly carrying around a short sword Kid Loki gave him.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Of the non-fatal variety. After He Who Remains reveals that the Temporal Loom is really a giant, sinister failsafe that will automatically prune all timelines but the Sacred Timeline, Loki realizes that no technology will stop it. So he steps outside himself, and mustering all of his magical power he destroys the Loom completely. But now, he must also be the one to keep the multiverse stable and together atop the throne that was once occupied by He Who Remains. The God of Mischief has become the God of Stories forever, completely alone.
• Hidden Depths: Loki is actually a decent singer, if his drunken Asgardian song is anything to go by.
• His Own Worst Enemy:
  • When Mobius re-captures him, Loki preemptively calls himself names to beat Mobius to it, one of them being the God of Self-Sabotage. Loki must have realized that getting drunk on Lamentis-1 and almost getting oneself killed as a result was not in his own best interest.
  • This becomes VERY apparent by "Journey Into Mystery" when he not only meets other variants of himself, but most of them betray one-another for a desperate power-grab. Even he can't believe it.
    Loki: This is a nightmare.
  • This then becomes the big turning point in the season 1 finale. After meeting He Who Remains, he learns that though the details had been changed a little, there truly was a Multiversal War that nearly destroyed all of reality, and that the TVA had become a Necessary Evil to keep it from happening again. Sylvie believes He Who Remains is lying and is too obsessed with her revenge to let it go, forcing Loki to fight her to keep the timeline from splitting apart.
• Holding Hands: Loki and Sylvie doing it yields unusual results:
  • She takes his hand when they are waiting for their doom on Lamentis-1, a moon that is about to collide with its planet, and he reacts in kind. The TVA immediately register a new timeline branch that is rapidly growing amidst an apocalypse, which was previously discussed to be impossible.
  • Sylvie realizes that she lacks the power to subdue Alioth by herself, so she takes Loki's hand and asks him to help her do it. They both close their eyes as they find strength within each other, and while Loki becomes an Instant Expert in Sylvie's core skill, enchantment, Sylvie then suddenly starts using his skills (Hand Blasts and telekinesis) in the Season 1 finale.
• Idiot Ball: Pretty guilty of this on numerous occasions:
  • After he lands in the Mongolian desert escaping S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, rather than snatch the Tesseract and escape, he instead wastes time posturing to some locals. This leaves him helpless when the TVA come for him.
  • While on Lamentis, he ends up getting drunk and causes a commotion despite him and Sylvie needing to be incognito. This results in the both of them getting into an altercation with the guards and the TemPad getting destroyed.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Despite his claims of wanting to rule the Nine Realms, Loki breaks into Tears of Joy after seeing his future in Ragnarok where both his father Odin and brother Thor acknowledge him and tell him they love him.
• I Just Want to Be Special:
  • Even after Loki realizes that his entire life was for nought, he won't give up on the idea of being special. If he can't be a God-King, he'll at least prove that he is the "superior" version out of all the Loki Variants. Mobius knows Loki well enough to try to exploit it:
    Mobius: I believed, stupidly, that insecure need for validation would motivate you to find the killer. Not 'cause you care about the TVA mission or being a hero, but because you know this Variant is better than you and you can't take it.
  • When the TVA have recaptured him and drag him through the corridors, his most pressing concern is that he is pacified by only two guards while Sylvie got four, which he finds insulting. However, when Mobius lies that Sylvie is dead and finally calls him the "superior" Loki, this praise brings him no joy and completely slips his attention since he is too busy Trying Not to Cry. He then drops this motivation for the rest of the series.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: After a good bit of needling from Sylvie, and a few stiff drinks, Loki finally admits what he's wanted his entire life: Friends. His narcissism, selfishness, scheming, pranks and destructive ploys for control, the attention whoring, they are all products of someone who is terrified of being alone, but doesn't know how to make and have friends. When he finally does find the place and people he belongs with - the TVA crew - it finally dawns on him that this is who he truly is.
• Immune to Mind Control: Sylvie is unable to enchant Loki because his mind is too strong and he is a skillful magic user himself.
• In Spite of a Nail: The Sacred Timeline Loki split off from this one following the events of The Avengers (2012), and throughout Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, and the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War was ultimately able to pull a Heel–Face Turn thanks primarily to the influence of his adopted family. While this version of Loki never again encounters Thor, Frigga, or Odin, he still ends up similarly becoming a bona fide hero thanks to the influence of people he ends up meeting on his journey, primarily Sylvie and Mobius.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: After some humbling at the hands of the TVA, Loki admits that he doesn't enjoy hurting and killing people but he does so anyway because it makes him feel strong and in control.
• Informed Flaw: His narcissism, which has been pointed out by many characters, including himself. But as mentioned in this video, this Loki displays few narcissistic traits beyond vanity, especially when compared to his Sacred Timeline variant who has displayed more self-serving traits post-Avengers than this Loki ever did. Even his feelings for Sylvie aren't really an example of him being a narcissist despite Mobius's judgments, given that the latter has very little in common with Loki that she could qualify as a completely different person.
• Instant Expert: Sylvie had years to teach herself the skill of enchantment and practice it on easy targets like ordinary humans. Loki has several minutes to learn how to help her enchant a giant sentient Fog of Doom before it devours both of them. Sylvie briefly explained how she does it back on Lamentis, and states that they "are the same", so the skill should come naturally. It does.
• Irony: Karma is a harsh mistress:
  • In The Avengers, Loki calls Steve Rogers, a Human Popsicle "a man out of time" in order to demean him. Loki doesn't know that his own timeline will soon be deleted and he'll become a prisoner to the TVA stranded in the dimension outside of time himself.
  • Later in The Avengers, Loki laughs at Nick Fury being deprived of the Tesseract and "reminded what real power is". In a few days, Loki himself is deprived of the Tesseract and faced with the greatest power in the universe.
  • Ravonna stabs Loki In the Back with her pruning stick similar to how Loki stabbed Coulson to death in The Avengers. Clark Gregg who plays Coulson was very satisfied with the payoff on his character's behalf.
  • In the end, Loki, who abused Thor's trust and tricked or betrayed him many times, gets betrayed by Sylvie, the one person he chose to trust.
  • He spent much of The Avengers (2012) and the first season of Loki claiming he is burdened with glorious purpose and wanting to sit on a throne to rule above all others. When he develops as a person and abandons his previous megalomaniac ambitions, he ends up burdening himself with the glorious purpose of maintaining all the timelines, sitting on the throne of He Who Remains, the man who stood above everyone else at the end of time.
• It's All About Me: Loki initially believes that the Variant wants to find him and to rule the TVA with him. He says that both to Mobius when he is bluffing in the tent and to the Variant when he meets her. This is what he wants himself, so he assumes the other Loki would want the same. To his astonishment, the Variant says that this is not about him at all right after mopping the floor with him.
• It's All My Fault: When Loki finds Mobius in the Season 1 finale, he says "we did it, we freed the Timeline", taking responsibility for what happened in the Citadel. He feels guilty despite literally putting his neck on the line to prevent it and not even being around when Sylvie killed He Who Remains, because she has tricked him and teleported him back into the TVA before that.
• It's the Journey That Counts: In the end, there was no real purpose behind all his struggles before the Threshold. He Who Remains wanted to meet him and could have easily plucked him from the timestream at any moment. Loki had to walk his road only because he needed to change:
  He Who Remains: You know you can't get to the end until you've been changed by the journey. This stuff, it needs to happen — to get us all in the right mindset to finish the quest.
• Jay Walking Will Ruin Your Life: He has attempted to wipe out or conquer civilizations, which does not ring a bell for the TVA, but is convicted to be erased from reality for picking up a blue cube that has landed next to him and teleporting into a Mongolian desert.
• Jerkass Realization: While being subjected to a Cool and Unusual Punishment in a Time Cell, he apologizes to the memory of Sif, and admits that he is a jerk:
  Loki: I'm a horrible person. I get it. I really am. I cut off your hair because I thought it'd be funny. And it's not. I crave attention... because I'm... I'm a... I'm a narcissist. And I suppose it's... it's because I'm scared of being alone.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Mobius is dead-on convinced that there's a heart of gold inside him with faith as the only thing to go on. Loki is given plenty of chances to prove him right, and eventually, he does — after a lot of false starts, betrayals and schemes, though.
• Jerk Justifications: During his first interrogation, Loki initially poses as a Dark Messiah who intends to save humans from the hardship of choice, but Mobius shows that his explanations are incoherent. Loki then attempts to appeal to his nature as the God of Mischief. Having run out of justifications, he dismisses the TVA and their line of questioning as irrelevant and absurd, even though he knows better.
• Kick the Dog: He just had to swat Miss Minutes, a cute living clock, with a magazine to prove that he is not exactly nice. Though in hindsight after the Season 1 finale this also counts as Asshole Victim.
• Large Ham: In the Time Theater, Loki stands up to deliver a dramatic speech that disparages the TVA, all while Milking the Giant Cow.
• Leitmotif: Loki Green Theme by Natalie Holt which underlines his chaotic and mysterious nature and has both dramatic and slower and pensive bits.
• Lonely Together: Both Loki and Sylvie never were in any serious relationship. She has been a survivor on the run all her life, and he was barely tolerated by Thor's friends before he severed all ties to Asgard. Since they are variants of each other, they quickly find common ground and fall for each other.
• Loner-Turned-Friend: When Mobius saves Loki from being "reset" and talks to him in the elevator, Loki refuses to shake his hand and is aggressive towards him. In a Time Cell, Loki realizes that the driving reason behind his cruel tricks is that he is afraid of being alone and is desperate for attention, even if it's negative. By "Journey Into Mystery", he refuses to shake Mobius's hand again... only to hug Mobius and call him his friend. Loki also becomes Sylvie's soulmate and refuses to leave her in danger.
• Loser Deity: Loki, the God of Mischief hears that losing is in his nature from two unrelated people in a single day, Coulson in The Avengers and Mobius in Loki. Coulson also notes that Loki lacks conviction to succeed, while Mobius comments on how Loki was not born to rule but rather to be a stepping stone for the heroes to achieve greatness.
• Love Hurts: Sylvie, the one person he chose to completely open up to and put above himself betrays his trust and deprives him of choice. She literally pushes him away (through the time door) right after kissing him goodbye. Loki is heartbroken.
• Love Redeems: His feelings for Sylvie are one of the key catalysts of his change of heart. He sincerely admires her, he sees himself in her, and loving her teaches him both to care for the other and to love himself.

M-Q

• Manchild: When Mobius calls Loki a little boy desperate for validation, he is not too far off the mark. In "The Variant", Loki swats away Miss Minutes as if she were a fly, is hyperactive and won't shut up for a second, shushes back a TVA employee who shushed at him in the archives for being too loud, and is a bit too excited to explain his theory with a salad and then to prove it right in Pompeii.
• Manly Tears:
  • His eyes get wet when Mobius shows him his mother's death and explains how Loki inadvertently caused it. Later, he sneaks into the room with the Chronoscope alone and shamelessly cries as he watches the remaining events of his life and his eventual death at the hands of Thanos unfold before him.
  • Reading about the destruction of Asgard and the deaths of over 9,000 Asgardians in Thor: Ragnarok causes tears to start welling up in his eyes.
  • He cries in the Season 1 finale, when he confesses to Sylvie that he does not want a throne and just wants her to be ok. It moves her so much that she finally believes him and kisses him.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • "burdened with glorious purpose" is one of Loki's phrases which he liked to use when describing himself and his inflated ego in his villainous days. The finale of Season 2 of Loki is titled "Glorious Purpose", and indeed he is burdened with it. It sums up his character development and redemption perfectly, in order to defy He Who Remains and his sacred timeline, as well as save Sylvie's life and the rest of existence, Loki Takes a Third Option and instead replaces the loom and He Who Remains with himself, ascending into a position far beyond others to the point he is now the one who maintains timelines and existence as whole, but is left forever alone. Loki is indeed burdened with glorious purpose and it is self inflicted, but he did so to save his friends.
  • The observation "You're going to lose. It's in your nature." from Avengers and how through his villainy and failures Loki makes others shine all the brighter is also a recurring theme through the show. Loki constantly wrestles with the fact he is the villain, that his infinite possible lives are filled with defeat and death. Even after joining the TVA he's faced with no-win situations, such as choosing between the brutality of the Sacred Timeline or the seeming oblivion of the Multiversal War. The end of the series in season 2 episode 6 however has Loki turning this fact about himself on its head after having the fact he will lose brought up to him yet again by He Who Remains. This time, Loki decides to destroy He Who Remains's failsafes and use himself as a Barrier Maiden to hold back the worst horrors of the Multiversal War, saving the multiverse at the cost of his own happiness and freedom: Loki loses everything, but in turn makes everyone the better for it.
  • In Thor, Loki's last line to Odin and Thor is "I could have done it! For you! For all of us!" in regards to his genocidal campaign to destroy Jotunheim. At the end of Loki, his last line to Sylvie and Mobius is "I know what kind of god I need to be. For you. For all of us." as he goes to try to save all worlds, all universes, instead, bringing his story and character full circle.
• Mental Time Travel: Once he starts mastering his time slipping abilities, this is how he initially uses it.
• Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication: Inverted. Loki prefers "diplomacy and guile", while Sylvie prefers to go for brute force approaches where her possession ability won't work. This is reinforced by Loki's skill with illusion magic, while Sylvie's own magical abilities are limited to single-target possession.
• Metaphorgotten: This version has a habit of trying to use elaborate metaphors but losing track of the point he was trying to make. It happens with his salad metaphor in "The Variant" and again with the "love is a dagger" speech to Sylvie in "Lamentis". The second one, however, while initially seems silly, turns out to be very accurate in the Season 1 finale.
• Mind over Matter: Just like in the main timeline, he has some telekinetic powers. "Lamentis" has an impressive display where he stops and pushes back an entire building that was about to collapse on top of him with a flip of his head. In the Season 1 finale, he pushes Sylvie back without touching her and sends a chair flying across the room with magic to prevent her from reaching He Who Remains. His most impressive display is in the series finale where he destroys the overloaded Loom all by himself.
• Mirror Character:
  • To Sylvie, his female Alternate Self. Both are Frost Giants who were adopted by the Asgardian royal family. Both are talented magic users, Deadpan Snarkers and loners who use a lot of defense mechanisms to cover up insecurity. When they first meet, they immediately mirror each other's Slasher Smiles and echo each other's phrases ("me I presume", "you are in my way"). They eventually both fall in love and fight each other.
  • To Doctor Strange, another sorcerer. Both go through Break the Haughty, hear similar phrases "This isn't \ it's not about you" and "Open your eye(s)" from a female character and see visions of the multiverse (the Ancient One forces it on Steven in his first film, and Loki sees the Sacred Timeline and hears voices of various MCU characters when he helps Sylvie to enchant Alioth).
• Mirror Match: In the Season 1 finale, he fights Sylvie for the right to decide the fate of the multiverse. While she is attacking and he is defending against her, as Variants of each other they use similar moves and spells.
• Misery Builds Character: His arc in the series is a prolonged Trauma Conga Line, with him reacting to loss of anyone and everything he cares about on top of being emotionally and physically humiliated. In the process, he learns some hard truths about himself and changes for the better.
• Motor Mouth: Despite claiming otherwise, Loki loves to hear himself talk. Mobius is annoyed and comments on it several times, Hunter B-15 has to shush him down in Roxxcart, and Sylvie who does not share this trait resorts to Copycat Mockery when she first meets Loki.
  Mobius: Just shut up! Please. What happened to the guy I met on the elevator? Who didn't like to talk. Remember him?
• Mundane Utility: His mother started with teaching him non-offensive magic, and he often uses it for mundane purposes. He dries his clothes with magic, a handy spell for someone adventuring alongside the God of Thunder. He later summons tiny fireworks out of his palm to impress Sylvie, conjures a blanket around the two of them and gives himself straps with a scabbard on the back for the sword given to him by Kid Loki. He uses magic to set said sword on fire and use it as a flare to distract Alioth.
• Narcissist: Like his Sacred Timeline counterpart this version has an extremely high opinion of himself. Mobius notes that he's such a "seismic narcissist" that it makes sense he would fall in love with Sylvie as she's an alternate version of himself. Of course, given how drastically different Sylvie is from Loki that she could be considered a completely different person, this narcissism comes off as an Informed Flaw.
• Nature Versus Nurture: Despite being a Variant of the same being, Loki does not have much in common with Sylvie, because unlike her he was raised as an Asgardian prince with a loving mother not knowing that he was adopted. They share natural affinity to magic and snark, but he is more insecure and more educated, and has different skills and quirks.
• Nervous Tics: Just like his Sacred Timeline counterpart, Loki has a tendency to fidget with his hands when he is nervous. One moment where he does this is when he is waiting outside of Renslayer's office in "The Variant" after having busted Mobius's mission.
• Nice Guy: It took a long, long, long time, but after a heaping helping of humbling and existential horror, Loki the God of Mischief grew as a person and is firmly on the side of the angels as of Season 2, becoming one of the most heroic characters in the MCU. There's very few people he doesn't get along with, manages to bring out Sylvie's best traits, and his kindness towards Victor Timely is the reason why the latter chooses the TVA over Renslayer and Miss Minutes. He considers the main TVA crew to be his friends, and there's very little he wouldn't do for them, even Casey and B-15. That said, he does still have occasional bouts of ruthlessness, such as when he tortures Brad, though that was also planned out by Mobius.
  • To a smaller extent, his kindness and plucky attitude towards facing Alioth is also what convinces Kid Loki, Classic Loki and Alligator Loki to help them. He even introduces them as "my friends" to Sylvie and Mobius, despite only knowing them for a couple of hours at most.
• Nominal Hero: In the first half of the series, Loki is blatantly only helping the TVA out of a sense of self-preservation and a desire to overthrow the Time-Keepers, even trying to recruit Sylvie as his lieutenant. As he goes through Character Development and more about the TVA is revealed, he becomes more of a traditional hero rather than the villain he started off as.
• Not Afraid to Die: When Loki and Sylvie are about to die on Lamentis as it collides with its planet, he is dissonantly serene, and only looks anxious for a split second when he sees the debris raining down from the sky. When they are brought for an execution before the Time Keepers, he is defiant and dares them to do their worst. In the Void, Classic Loki says that if Loki leaves their hideout, he'll be murdered, to which Loki replies "so be it" because this is the fate he was destined to anyway.
• One Head Taller: Sylvie seems tiny next to Loki who is much taller than her.
• Only Sane Man: Becomes this when surrounded by variants of himself in the Void. During Boastful Loki's coup of Kid Loki's bunker with President Loki, he quickly becomes exasperated and embarassed at the multiple betrayals between the variants that happen in very quick succession, his body language saying "Is this really what it's like dealing with me?"
  • In fact, his very first words at being confronted by the gang of Lokis outside the trap door are "This is a nightmare."
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Loki finds Mobius and tries to explain what happened in the Citadel at the End of time, he is frightened, agitated and speaks too quickly. He's never behaved this way before, which speaks volumes about how dangerous Kang is in Loki's opinion.
• Opportunistic Bastard: In Endgame, he immediately snatches up the Tesseract after it was accidentally dropped and opened from its case to teleport out of the place and escape imprisonment. During his trial in Loki, he attempts to not only prove himself not guilty, but also secure the TVA's people and resources to continue his crusade against the Avengers... only to find out that this time his charms won't work.
• Oppose What You Suffered: His main motive throughout the second half of the series. He's been through TVA processing, Kangaroo Court and fancy interrogation techniques and does not want it on himself or anyone else, so he needs to stop them together with Sylvie.
• Orc Raised by Elves: He is a Frost Giant raised by Asgardians, and the series makes it clear that he identifies with his foster nation. He recalls an Asgardian proverb (that is actually from The Saga of the Volsungs), sings an Asgardian song (that is actually Norwegian), and calls Asgardians "my people". Even the soundtrack for Loki uses Nordic instruments, such as a Nyckelharpa and a Hardanger fiddle.
• Order Versus Chaos: As a God of Mischief, Loki should default to chaos, which he does when it comes to his pranks. However as a Dark Messiah and a would-be ruler in The Avengers he is rooting for "order" with him in the lead. While he ditches this particular goal, he remains torn on the matter. He both praises free will and realizes the danger of an Evil Power Vacuum, and pauses when He Who Remains offers to choose between the two. At the end of Season 2, he takes a third option by not replacing He Who Remains, but the Loom, reweaving the timelines into something like Yggdrasil as he takes the lonely throne at the end of time, becoming the God of Time/God of Stories - Free Will is Free (Chaos), but it's stabilised and maintained by an external force (Order).
• Other Me Annoys Me: He quickly realizes why Thor was so annoyed with him after five minutes of talking to Sylvie – though in that case, there's another undertone. He has a rather less flattering opinion of most of the other variants he meets in The Void, especially when they all start betraying each other.
• Overshadowed by Awesome:
  • He manages to guess the potential hiding place of the Variant during Mobius's lunch break, something the entire TVA were unable to do for a while. However, Sylvie successfully enacts her plan and gets away, making Loki look Too Clever by Half in comparison.
  • He attempts to distract a gigantic cloud of doom with a flaming sword, and later enchants it together with Sylvie, subduing the creature that devoured entire realities and helped He Who Remains to end the multiversal war. However, this pales in comparison to Classic Loki creating a copy of Asgard with his magic and sacrificing himself to help the two of them.
• Paradox Person: In Endgame, he disappears with the Tesseract the time-travelling Avengers are after, a move he never made in the prime timeline. In Loki, the Time Variance Authority catch him, delete the branching timeline he created and are ready to erase him because he is a Variant that's not supposed to exist. Hunter B-15 outright calls him "a cosmic mistake."
• Perspective Reversal:
  • In the beginning, Mobius is challenging who Loki is and forcing Loki to reinvent himself. In "The Nexus Event," Loki is the one who says that Mobius is lying to himself, and forces Mobius to re-examine where his loyalties lie.
  • When Loki meets Sylvie, he is the unreasonable one with Skewed Priorities who gets the two of them into trouble, and Sylvie constantly calls him out on his half-baked plans. In the Season 1 finale, Loki is the sole voice of reason, while Sylvie blindly rushes into action disregarding the consequences.
• Pet the Dog: When Hunter B-15 is released from Sylvie's mind control and collapses to the floor, Loki instinctively reaches out to check if she's alright, despite her antagonizing Loki before that. This shows that he is not entirely selfish.
• The Power of Love: Loki and Sylvie holding hands is a Nexus event that results in the timeline branching off so steeply that the TVA are able to register it even amidst an apocalypse - when everyone dying means that nothing matters from a timeline perspective. The implication is that, somehow, they were about to survive the apocalypse through The Power of Love before the TVA arrived to arrest them for it. Mobius laughs when he realizes that the two Variants of the same being formed a romantic bond so strong that it was literally shattering reality.
• The Power of Trust: In one of their first conversations, Loki tells Mobius that trust is for children and dogs. As further events unfold, he has to learn to trust and be trustworthy, which earns him friends, allies and small perks like a Cool Sword. In the end, Sylvie betrays his trust by sending him back to the TVA while she finishes her mission alone.
• Proverbial Wisdom: Mobius both lampshades Loki's habit of using flowery sayings by calling him a "big metaphor guy" and deconstructs it by pointing out that it is merely a play that "makes [Loki] sound super smart." Even after seing his scripted future in the Time Theater, Loki still tries to appear more profound than he is, but repeatedly falls flat on his face. When Loki refers to an Asgardian proverb, Mobius realizes that Loki is stalling for time. Later, Mobius does not appreciate his "salad" metaphor, and Sylvie calls his "dagger" metaphor terrible. In the second half of the series, Loki drops all pretense, including this manner of speech.
• Physical God: While Loki was already a god in a technical sense, thousands of years developing Time Master powers raise Loki to the point that he ends up becoming the God of Stories, Barrier Maiden for the entire multiverse and one of the most powerful beings in existence.
• Psychological Projection: His default psychological defence in the first episode, just like in The Avengers:
  • He states that for most people "choice breeds shame and uncertainty and regret", because others always take wrong paths. When Mobius asks if Loki is an exemption from this rule, Loki insults Mobius to avoid answering the question.
  • When he watches a video of his supposed death, it looks like his future self is saying "you will never be a god" to the Variant Loki rather than to Thanos. The worst insult Loki tossed at Thanos when he died was the thing he himself feared the most.
  • He initially accuses the TVA of being a fraud, the weak who claim divinity and who've conjured a cruel elaborate trick to control others through fear. After seeing the recording of the future events of his life and his eventual death, the disillusioned and broken Loki repeats this diatribe word for word, but now he refers to himself.
• Queer Establishing Moment: In the Loki episode Lamentis, when Sylvie asks Loki about his romantic interests, her specific wording is whether he "had any interest in other princes or princesses". Loki replies to this "a bit of both", establishing him as bisexual, which is true to his orientation in the comics and his status as a shapeshifter. Loki director Kate Herron expressed great eagerness at including this detail, as it made Loki's orientation MCU canon.
• Quirky Curls: After Loki gets apprehended and processed by the TVA, his hair becomes messy and curly, especially in the Pompeii scene. Loki meets almost every stereotype associated with such hair: he is non-conforming, energetic, eccentric, intelligent and fun.

R-Y

• Redemption Demotion: As soon as he stops being a villain, he becomes weaker in physical combat. Similar to how his prime counterpart could not put up much of a fight to Valkyrie, this Loki has a hard time fighting guards and enchanted humans. This effect does not extend to his magic.
• Redemption Promotion: In Season 2, as he becomes more classically heroic, he becomes more and more magically powerful - possibly as a result of witnessing what Old Loki was capable of - and masters his time slipping to the point of becoming a fully-fledged Time Master who can beat He Who Remains at his own game, and then combining the two to become the God of Time/God of Stories, outgambitting He Who Remains by replacing not him but the Loom, protecting the timelines.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni:
  • In the early episodes, Loki, the energetic Cloudcuckoolander, is the Red Oni, and Mobius, the jaded mentor, is the Blue one. Mobius is calm, reasonable and mature, while Loki is agitated, eccentric and childish.
  • By the Season 1 finale, Sylvie, the feral cat, is the Red Oni and Loki, the thoughtful prince is the Blue one. She is defiant, determined, rough around the edges and easily resorts to violence, Loki is pensive, introspective, cultured and prefers to talk things out.
• Recruiting the Criminal: Mobius saves Loki from being "reset" by recruiting him to stop another Loki Variant that's been killing TVA agents across time.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl: A male variant. He gets subjected to the franchise's trend of Manservice in the first episode, when he's stripped of his Asgardian clothes, with the camera angled in such a way that the audience doesn't get to see everything.
• Rich Language, Poor Language: Loki grew up as a prince and speaks "upper-class" posh English like all Asgardians from previous films. Unlike him, Sylvie speaks with a less prestigious local British accent (Nottingham, to be precise) to reflect her relative lack of education and life on the run.
• Rousseau Was Right: The TVA tries to convince Loki of the opposite, stating that he is doomed to cause pain and suffering and death and will always be an "evil lying scourge." However, his experiences turn a seemingly sadistic and power-hungry would-be god into a decent person capable of friendship, trust, and love, proving that he was never intrinsically evil.
• Sadistic Choice: He Who Remains offers Loki and Sylvie to either kill him and destroy the TVA, which would lead to a multiversal war with numerous Kangs in command or rule the TVA together, restricting free will. Loki recognizes that both options are bad and wants time to consider, leaning to the second one. Sylvie makes the choice for him by killing He Who Remains, but Loki still feels responsible because he says to Mobius "we" made a terrible mistake. He gets to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and take a third option, balancing both - the multiverse opens up, but he stabilises it so that the TVA can still protect the multiverse from the Kangs.
• Screw Destiny: He's not exactly fond of the idea of the Time Variance Authority and how they seem to control all of time (including his actions), viewing it as an insult to what he's achieved.
• Screw Yourself: Loki develops genuine feelings for Sylvie who's an alternate timeline version of himself. Mobius calls him out on how narcissistic that is. He claims that two versions of the same being becoming romantic is pure chaos and the reason they caused a Nexus Event with a branched timeline growing with unseen speed amidst an apocalypse which are established as not causing Nexus Events because everything gets wiped out regardless of what changes someone makes. After several episodes of longing looks and Holding Hands, they acknowledge their feelings in the Season 1 finale and kiss only to immediately break up after that.
• Seen It All: After all he's been through, Loki takes the existence of an alligator version of himself in stride:
  Loki: ... and now I'm surrounded by Variants of myself, plus an alligator, which I'm heartbroken to report I didn't even find all that strange!
• Seriously Scruffy: By the end of season 1, Loki looks like he's been through hell and back. His clothes are dirty and shabby, and he is in desperate need of a shower and a comb. He is usually very concerned with his appearance, and his indifference to it shows how stressful his last experiences have been for him.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Loki is prone to using long, rare or dated words as he tries to explain things, either because he deliberately tries to make an impression or when he is too excited.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: At the end of "Science/Fiction", Loki learns to control his timeslipping and turns it into this trope as a superpower. He now can, among others, go back to any point in time where he once was, and change what happened there. He takes it to the next degree in "Glorious Purpose" by going all the way back to the confrontation with He Who Remains, mastering his temporal powers, and finally not fixing the Loom, but replacing it.
• Sexshifter: Due to being a shapeshifter, the TVA lists Loki's sex as "fluid" in their file on him in Loki.
• Shabby Heroes, Well-Dressed Villains: The costume of He Who Remains is a bit of a mismatch as different elements of it pertain to different time periods, but he is still imposing in his purple and green outfit with the cloak. When Loki and Sylvie arrive at his doorstep, they look like they've crawled out of a dump.
• Shameful Strip: While being processed by the TVA he's forced into a room with a robot that burns away his Asgardian clothes. Shoulders-Up Nudity and a bit of Scenery Censor preserve his modesty to the audience, but considering how modestly dressed his main timeline counterpart was it's particularly jarring to see this version so exposed.
• Shapeshifters Do It for a Change: Loki is a shapeshifter whose TVA file states that his sex is fluid and who mentions that he is bisexual.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: In Loki, he once again wears suits: One where he assumes the identity of D.B. Cooper and a casual suit with a TVA blazer. Loki himself lampshades his love of suits when coming across a suspicious person in 2050, claiming he would've worn one even if he was disguising himself as someone else.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Loki is initially oblivious that he likes Sylvie, and when Mobius points out his crush on her and calls Sylvie his "girlfriend", Loki says this verbatim. He continues to deny that there is anything between them until the Season 1 finale.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: Both Sylvie in "Lamentis" and Mobius in "The Nexus Event" call him out on being a prince who has no idea how the real world works.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift:
  • He is forcefully stripped of his Asgardian costume and made to wear Institutional Apparel, and later a TVA costume to denote his change of status from a would-be God-Emperor to a prisoner to a hired expert. Shortly after he escapes that role by following Sylvie through the portal, he loses the TVA jacket and rolls up his sleeves, and as things go From Bad to Worse his clothes become increasingly dirty and disheveled — he has too much going on to bother hiding it with magic.
  • At the end of Season 2, he changes into a variant on his classic horned costume, becoming the God of Stories.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: He attempts to lecture Mobius on the futility of trust, but Mobius would have none of that:
  Loki: Trust is for children and dogs. There's only one person you can trust.
  Mobius: Yourself? I like it. Slap it on a T-Shirt.
• Skewed Priorities: Loki can't get his priorities straight after he's been deprived of his glorious purpose in the Time Theater. Getting drunk amidst an apocalypse to hamper your chance of survival? Great idea. Complaining that too few guards are dragging you towards Room101 and this is insulting? Priceless. He eventually abandons this behavior around "The Nexus Event".
• Small Name, Big Ego: He has a huge opinion of himself (at first), to the point that he really expects a much more competent and dangerous version of him to agree to be his lieutenant.
• Smart People Know Latin: In Pompeii, Loki proves himself smart by not only confirming his theory but also warning Roman citizens of their impending doom in fluent Classical Latin. He must have picked it as an elective while Thor was studying Groot. Loki's actor learned Classical Latin at the University of Cambridge, so he is able to deliver correct pronunciation.
• Spanner in the Works: Sylvie's plan to bomb the Sacred Timeline and lure out as many TVA agents as possible in order to get to the Time Keepers was years in the making. Loki botched it by opening a random portal underneath himself and Sylvie to escape getting pruned by Ravonna. It sent them away from the TVA without the means to quickly return.
• Strong as They Need to Be:
  • When it comes to magical strength, as a protagonist of his own spin-off show, Loki displays powers that he's never or barely used in the films where he is a supporting character. They don't contradict his established skill set, but these abilities would have come in handy in his previous appearances as well. In "Lamentis", he shoots green Hand Blasts at his foes and employs telekinesis to hold off a huge collapsing building, a skill that he used for minor Tantrum Throwing in The Dark World.
  • When it comes to physical strength, in The Avengers Loki has proven stronger than Steve Rogers, a super-soldier. However, it takes effort for Loki to subdue B-15, a human Hunter in the Time Theater; an ordinary human Sylvie enchants in Roxxcart mops the floor with him; on Lamentis (which is a Kree world in the comics) drunk Loki fights off Ambiguously Human train guards until two of them throw him out of the window; and in the room with the Time Keepers, Loki is able to defeat yet another two Ambiguously Human guards only after Sylvie tosses her blade to him. Still, in the Season 1 finale he evenly matches Sylvie who's shown to be a capable fighter inside the TVA when she is without their collar.
• Suddenly Shouting: This Loki did not lose his main counterpart's habit of abruptly raising his voice:
  Loki: Her name was Sylvie.
  Mobius: Ah, Sylvie. Lovely. How do you spell that? Is that with and I-E or just an I?
  Loki: IS SHE ALIVE?
• Surrounded by Idiots: He felt this way while watching the other Loki variants compulsively betray each other in an attempt to rule a wasteland. Loki realized that he needed to find a way out of the void on his own. What makes this a unique twist on the trope is that in addition to dealing with the fact that everyone in the void is useless, Loki has to come to terms with the fact that the idiots he's surrounded by are all him.
• Take a Third Option: He Who Remains leaves Loki with 2 options as the timeline collapses: Either kill Sylvie and stop the collapse, or let the Loom, which can no longer contain the branches even after being expanded, purge them all and destroy the TVA. Loki instead uses his now-mastered time powers to destroy the Loom and take its place, protecting the multiverse as a whole rather than ruling it.
• Taking the Heat: Loki attempts to take the blame from Sylvie and put it on himself by lying that he was the mastermind behind "the plan", and Sylvie is nothing but a meager pawn. This shows that he has come to care about her.
• Tantrum Throwing: In Loki, when Mobius shows him how Frigga died and taunts him about it, he is unable to use his magic, so he throws a chair at the screen of the Chronoscope instead.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With Sylvie on Lamentis. They stop fighting and make a truce in order to recharge the TemPad and use it to escape imminent death before the moon collides with its planet. This does not stop them from bickering.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: While there was a scene in The Avengers where Loki looks down from the Stark Tower upon all the destruction he caused in horror and even sheds a tear, little else in that film suggests that he is not a sadist who inflicts pain For the Evulz. However, as explored in the series, after the events of Thor he merely decided that he can only be a villain and played that part to perfection. He gets uncomfortable watching the scenes of violence from The Avengers via a Chronoscope, confesses to Mobius that he does not enjoy hurting people, and when He Who Remains calls him out on doing horrendous things, looks down in shame.
• The Three Faces of Adam: When he ventures in the Void alongside two other male Loki Variants, he is the Lord to the Kid Loki's young ambitious Hunter and the Classic Loki's older and wiser Prophet.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: "He Who Remains" instilled such unimaginable, existential dread in Loki that the mere glimpse of a Kang variant causes him to drop his usual nervous tics and just freeze. After Sylvie kills He Who Remains, Loki spends a good couple of minutes just staring into nothing, scared out of his mind of what's coming. Even looking at Victor Timely, who is by all accounts completely unassuming and just harmless all-together, completely fills him with terror, at least at first glance.
• Time Master: After what is implied to be millenia of practice, Loki's timeslipping evolves to the point that he can control time itself through thought alone and is able to pull others outside the flow of time and into his own personal timeline. It's to the point he ultimately replaces the Temporal Loom and manages the infinite number of branches himself.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Loki is taken out of the time stream at his rock bottom in The Avengers, where he hardly has any empathy left for anyone. In his series, he becomes a nicer and kinder person, from small acts like checking on B-15 when she collapses to deeply caring about the wellbeing of Sylvie and Mobius for their own sake, and being gravely afraid to make a wrong choice when it comes to the fates of every living being in the Season 1 finale.
• Trauma Conga Line:
  • Having just been defeated and beaten by the Hulk, Loki is captured by the TVA, stripped of his clothes, subjected to their tedious procedures, and is sentenced by a Kangaroo Court to be "reset".
  • Mobius saves him, but says that Loki has no agency in his life and is destined to always fail and cause pain, suffering and death as a deliberate example to others. He escapes only to find out that the TVA are so powerful that they use Infinity Stones as paperweights, and thus everything that he was just told is true.
  • Loki watches a film with future events of his life, including the deaths of his mother and father, and his own horrific death at the hand of Thanos, and has a Freak Out when he realizes that his existence is pitiful and meaningless.
  • He escapes the TVA but gets stuck on a moon that is about to crash into its planet with Sylvie, a female Variant of himself Loki comes to care about. He calmly accepts his fate.
  • The TVA save them in the last minute only to put Loki in a Time Cell where he has to relive the bad memory of being beaten and humiliated by Lady Sif over and over again until he begs on his knees for it to stop.
  • Mobius releases him but lies to him that they've killed Sylvie, which Loki does not take nicely, and then puts him back into the cell. Mobius has a change of heart and comes to help Loki only for Loki to witness how the TVA "prune" his friend. Shortly after, Loki himself is pruned.
  • He wakes up in a desolate wasteland called the Void surrounded by Variants of himself. They tell him that he is doomed to stay there, prompting another Freak Out.
  • He helps Sylvie to leave the Void, but Sylvie distrusts and betrays him. Back in the TVA, Mobius does not recognize him, so he believes he lost two people who cared about him.
• Troll: After Loki manages to put the Time Twister collar on Hunter B-15, he gets his revenge on her by endlessly resetting her location and yanking her back to the room entrance as she runs towards him and screams "stop it". He then gets bored and teleports her into the hallway. Though given his facial expression and the fact that he had just seen his Sacred Timeline counterpart's death, he's doing it more to vent his frustration than for amusement.
• Trying Not to Cry: He can barely hold it together in "The Nexus Event" when Mobius lies that Sylvie has already been pruned, and later when Mobius himself is pruned for real while Loki is Forced to Watch. The fact that Loki got so upset is a sign of just how much he cares about them.
• Twice Shy: Loki and Sylvie agree that Mobius's theory about their nexus event on Lamentis is totally wrong and ridiculous, even as they struggle to verbalize how much they mean to each other while cuddling under a single blanket. Having never been in a real relationship, both feel awkward and come off as two teenagers.
• The Unapologetic: Since Loki picks up after The Avengers, this variant initially acts as if he hasn't done anything even mildly reprehensible in his entire life, ever. Then Mobius thoroughly breaks him.
• The Unchosen One: Unlike his brother Thor, Loki was not destined for greatness, which Mobius makes clear when they meet.
• Unstuck in Time: At the end of Season 1, Loki has somehow ended up in the past of the TVA, before He Who Remains went into hiding behind the Time Keepers. Loki spends S2 E1 timeslipping between the past, present, and future until O.B. and Mobius pull him back into the present. After the Temporal Loom is destroyed, it starts to happen again in "Science/Fiction". A.D. Doug notes that his timeslipping actually is not random: Loki always ends up where he needed to be for some reason. He also tells Loki that he might be able to control it and after Loki identifies his motivation, namely protecting the people he cares about, Loki eventually gains the power to rewrite time.
• Villainous BSoD: After finding Casey's drawer full of deactivated Infinity Stones, and seeing how his life was supposed to play out, Loki realizes the meaninglessness of it all. When Mobius finds Loki, he expects further resistance, but Loki is no longer attempting to escape the TVA or defend his previous villanous actions and goals. He is just sitting on the floor, burying his face in his hands and Trying Not to Cry.
• Warrior Prince: Downplayed. Like his Sacred Timeline counterpart, this Loki relies more on magic and illusions instead of brute force.
• Weapon Twirling: As a show off to Sylvie, he tosses his twin daggers up and catches them mid-air.
• We Can Rule Together: When Loki first meets Sylvie, he offers her to become his lieutenant and help him overthrow the Time Keepers to take their place, but she is not interested. In the end, He Who Remains offers the two of them to take his place and rule over the TVA together. This time around, Loki no longer wants the throne, but recognizes the danger of an Evil Power Vacuum. Sylvie forces the choice on Loki by killing He Who Remains and unleashing the multiverse.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: When Hunter B-15 comes to "prune" him, he fights with her for his life. He also fights with Sylvie when they first meet each other. However, he does not really hurt either of them. He puts a Time Twister collar on B-15 and teleports her away, and sheaths his daggers mid-fight with Sylvie whom he repeatedly tries to talk down. In the Season 1 finale, he explicitly says that he does not want to hurt her and is merely defending himself against her until he drops his sword and just stands in her way.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: After all the "The Reason You Suck" Speeches Loki has heard during the first 4 episodes, Mobius gives him a word of encouragement:
  Mobius: You could be whoever, whatever you wanna be, even someone good. I mean, just in case anyone ever told you different.
• You Can't Go Home Again: He admits as much after learning about the TVA and his status as a Variant. Even if the timeline he came from hadn't been reset he wouldn't have been allowed to go back with the knowledge he now has of his intended path and fate. It appears to weigh on his mind — in "Lamentis", Loki drunkenly sings a song in Norwegian about him wandering alone in stormy black mountains while a voice calls for him to come home. Also, there's the fact that Asgard itself was completely destroyed in Ragnarok — so even if he manages to take the place of his now-deceased counterpart in the Sacred Timeline, he literally can't go home again.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Even Loki can't handle the incessant amount of backstabbing from all his other Variants in the Void, highlighting his Character Development throughout the show.

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"I know what I want. I know what kind of god I need to be... for you. For all of us."