What Makes a Loki a Loki?: Managing Multiplicity in Loki (2021)
*here be spoilers*
Welcome to Phase 4. Welcome to the multiverse.
Marvel Studios’ most recent foray into television content, Loki (Michael Waldron, 2021) marks the start of a new phase in the development of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – one guided by multiplicity. Multiplicity is an inherent feature of franchised media products, an inevitable consequence of the sharing of intellectual property sources across multiple sites of production. In its attempt to unleash multiplicity upon the MCU, Loki engages in a metacommentary on the structures of industrialised creativity. Charged with ushering in a newly iterative stage of storytelling, Loki sets out to negotiate the relationship between repetition and variation that underpins franchised media production on terms favourable to the Walt Disney Company. This blog post argues that Loki functions as a reflexive example of how contemporary media franchises engage their own multiplicities to cultivate audience’s capacities to respond to the narratives that emerge from franchising as a dominant production logic. It is in this very celebration of variation and iteration, as exemplified by Marvel’s Loki series, that such media franchises are able to procure their own licenses for further multiplied production.
Multiverses are a popular device for managing the multiplicity inherent to franchised media production, particularly within fantasy and science-fiction. At its core, media franchising describes the “industrial multiplication of cultural production” (Johnson 2013, 50). This industrial multiplication involves the sharing of intellectual property resources across a wide network of different communities of production, a process that typically produces variation between iterations as multiple creators negotiate and struggle for creative agency, authority and legitimacy while participating in the construction of a shared imaginary world. Reviewing how multiverse logics have been employed across recent film franchise entries Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009), X-Men Days of Future Past (Bryan Singer, 2014) and Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015)– Johnson argues that multiverses are a means by which media franchises assert control over multiple, conflicting versions of a single intellectual property. Folding competing iterations into a multiverse allows creators within a franchise to assert control over multiple or conflicting interpretations, while at the same time respecting and rewarding audience’s familiarity with (and thus consumption of) differing iterations of the same individual media property. Loki bears out Johnson’s contention that when it comes to contemporary media franchises, “it is not just the building of worlds, but also the multiplication of worlds that is the order of the day” (Johnson 2017, 131). Yet where Johnson’s study examines multiverse logics as a response to the contradictions and discontinuities that emerge from multiplied production, in Loki we see a franchise constructing a multiverse not to contain multiplicity, but to unleash it.
The Disney+ series picks up where Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo & Joe Russo, 2019) left off, following the adventures of the Loki (Tom Hiddleston) who escaped during the Avengers’ slightly botched attempt at a “time-heist”. Time travel is a recurrent feature of multiverse narratives, a device that allows a franchise to pay respect to previous iterations while simultaneously clearing a path for a new, different future. In the case of Loki, the Avengers’ foray into time travel has allowed a past iteration of Loki to escape his predetermined fate and instead teleport to the Gobi Desert. As this Loki attempts to usurp control of the local population, he is promptly arrested by agents of an organisation named the Time Variant Authority (TVA), who accuse the God of Mischief of having committed “crimes against the Sacred Timeline”. From here, the series follows Loki’s adventures as a TVA agent, tasked with hunting down another more dangerous Loki while also trying to solve the mysteries of the TVA and to answer the question: who keeps time for the timekeepers?
Fig. 1 - I hear some guys use them as paper weights.
Loki thus establishes multiplicity as the natural state of the MCU, with the TVA standing in for the multiple industrial sites wherein this multiplicity is managed. The TVA exists on an ontologically higher level of the narrative that reframes the events of the MCU as a production of sorts, one managed and overseen by the TVA and its agents. Inside its halls, the fantastical powers that define so many of the MCU’s heroes cease to function; the most powerful relics in the universe – the seven infinity stones (Fig. 1) – are reduced to mere props; and all of the MCU’s events – both those which have already passed and those yet to unfold – are just film strip. When confronted with power that comes with this level of creative control, an overwhelmed Loki is moved to ask “Is this the greatest power in the universe?”
As the space where multiplicity is managed, the TVA is also the means by which the series mounts its negotiation of the relationship between repetition and variation. Unleashing multiplicity requires meaningfully differentiating the act of multiplication from that of repetition. Repetition is, as Kamilla Elliot puts it, “a bad theoretical object” (2020, 274); the legacy of Romantic originality and its reframing of creativity as “as the individual expression of original genius” (Elliott 2020, 50) has resulted in what Elliott describes as an “abiding hostility to similarity” (2020, 20) that finds expression in the castigation of iterative media formats – such as remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, spin-offs, tie-ins, covers, and other adaptive phenomena. Theorists approaching such media products have tended to underplay repetition in favour of valorising variation, emphasising how any given iterative media product diverges or improvises upon its avowed source material. Multiplicity depends on both repetition and variation for its identity – the repetition of intellectual property resources across a host of varying media products. Yet rather than dismantle this binary, Loki leans into it, constructing variation as a natural state of existence upon which repetition is artificially and brutally imposed.
As an organisation dedicated to “preserv[ing] and protect[ing] the proper flow of time for everyone and everything”, the TVA is dedicated to the existence and survival of a singular, unified timeline – at the expense of all others. There is one version of events that must play out over and over again, and anyone who attempts to improvise over this structure will be labelled a “variant” and sentenced to either perpetual servitude or execution. Repetition is not just the TVA’s mission; it structures their preferred methods of punishment – whether it’s the “Time Twisters” that rewind an individual’s movements through space, or the “Time Cells” that imprison variants in infinite, unalterable time loops. In Loki, repetition, true repetition, is not just tyranny; it is torture. The approach to multiplied production adopted by the TVA is in turn constructed as the product of a singular author’s creative vision – an author who does not yield and, more importantly from a franchising perspective, does not share. In Loki’s final episode, “For All Time. Always” (Fig. 2), we meet this singular author – a character referred to only as “He Who Remains” (Jonathan Majors). He Who Remains argues that the unified authority that the TVA imposes through its military enforcement of repetition is a necessary evil, a product of his own experience with multiplicity. The meeting of his own multiple variants is supposed to have caused a multiversal war that almost brought about the end of all realities, leading He Who Remains to believe that when multiple iterations are forced to share space with one another, competition is inevitable – a moral that echoes the anxieties of replacement that have long haunted the field such as adaptation studies and contributed yet further to the castigation of iterative media formats.
Fig. 2 - Death Match: Self-Loathing Edition!
And yet, Loki challenges this narrative of multiplicity and its apparent discontents. Where He Who Remains espouses an understanding of the relationship between multiple versions as one characterised by competition, Loki’s own interactions with his other variants more closely aligns with contemporary understandings of multiplicity within contemporary media and entertainment. As Constantine Verevis notes, film culture of the new millennium increasingly reveals itself to be a culture in which “multiple versions proliferate and coexist” (2017, 149). More than this, they actively inform and enhance one another’s value, as consumers set out to consume, compare, and contrast different iterations of already familiar content. We see this most clearly through Loki’s interactions with Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino): a female Loki variant who has spent her life on the run after the TVA attempted to prune her as a child. As an adult, she has become what might best be described as a multiversal terrorist, who, unlike Loki, seeks not to rule the TVA but to destroy it. While their relationship is initially framed as one of antagonism, by the end of episode 3 “Lamentis” they have forged a bond that springs from not only from the similarities that they recognise in one another, but from the better understanding of themselves that they each gain through tracing their mutual points of variation.
The potentials for collaboration over competition come to the fore even more strongly in episode 5 of the series, “Journey into Mystery”. After being “pruned” by the TVA, Loki is transported to a realm at the end of time, described only as the Void, where he encounters a multitude of other Loki variants (Fig. 3). True to the prophecies of He Who Remains, most of the Loki (Lokis? How does one pluralise a god?) fall to infighting, competing for the right to rule the MCU’s own land of the lost. Those that work together, however, are able to not only escape the fray, but to defeat Alioth, the fearsome beast that guards the entry to the He Who Remains’ citadel.
Fig. 3 - Sometimes a family is 4 versions of the self dispersed across time and space, an alligator, and their parole officer.
Lokis don’t just survive – they survive together. Their multiplicity does not make them weaker but stronger, a reflection of the mutually-reinforcing relationships that have come to developed between versions in an increasingly franchised media landscape (see Kelleter and Loock 2017; Verevis 2017). Through the fiction of the TVA, Loki presents audiences with a model of multiplied production structured around repetition that the series can then define itself – and other Marvel productions like Disney+’s upcoming What If series – in opposition against. Loki constructs repetition as a weapon of authoritarian control that places limits creativity – limits that are dissolved by the liberation of variation that the series in turn implies is the “natural” outcome of multiplied production. Multiplicity thus becomes a tool through which each and every-pre-existing Marvel product can be opened up for re-interpretation and reimagination as multiple new creators are offered the chance to explore the newly liberated potentialities therein. At the end of the day the TVA must fall for the simple reason that, at the metatextual level, they’re bad for business; after all, a story that only has one “correct” version is a story that leaves you with only one product to sell.
And yet, that’s not quite the whole picture.
The final episode of the series reveals Loki as something less than the uninhibited celebration of variation that the series has signalled up until this point. Again, it is Sylvie who proves illustrative. Sylvie’s driving ambition is complete liberation from all forms of narrative control. She seeks to liberate variation and this entails a liberation from hierarchy. As Johnson writes, “the inherent multiplicity of narrative worlds in the context of media franchising does not mean all iterations are equally embraced, supported, or legitimated. Instead, media worlds are subject to industrial logics that regulate and authorize some potentialities (and not others) as viable, valuable, or virtuous” (2017, 130). Excised from the timeline as a child, Sylvie is one such apparently unviable, unvirtuous potentiality. Sylvie has apparently been found wanting, and while the reason for her pruning is never specified, it is not impossible that her crime is simply that of being born female – after all, none of the other Loki’s we meet have ever encountered a female variant, with Richard E. Grant’s “Classic Loki” affirming that the prospect “sounds terrifying”.
Fig. 4 - Can you spot the Hidden Mickey?
And there’s the rub: while multiplied production makes variation possible, it rarely makes it permanent. Even Lady Loki, the female incarnation of the comic book character on whom Sylvie is in part based, only lasted a year within the pages of Marvel comics before the status quo was reasserted – a variation that was only permissible within certain limits and for a limited period of time. Sylvie’s quest amounts to nothing less than her right to exist. In her desire to eliminate “the man behind the curtain”, Sylvie seeks to remove the mechanism by which relationships between different iterations are measured and managed, and thus render all iterations equally viable.
Of course, a world in which all iterations are equally valuable is a world in which intellectual property rights have no value, and as such, the series stops short of endorsing Sylvie in her quest to kill the wizard. Faced with a choice between the unyielding authoritarian control of He Who Remains (Fig. 4) and the anarchic indeterminism of Sylvie, our protagonist – our Loki – hesitates, the conclusion of the episode and the series rewarding his caution. Sylvie’s murder of He Who Remains means that the TVA that Loki returns to is not the TVA that he left. The fiction of the timekeepers is replaced with that of a singular figure – one who looks a lot like the recently deposed ruler and who may be much worse.
We are left with a series that would like us to think less about whether creativity is an impulse that should be controlled, and more about who gets to have that control. And we already know the answer – what was that thing Steve Rogers said in Captain America: Civil War (Anthony Russo & Joe Russo, 2016)?:
“I know we're not perfect, but the safest hands are still our own”
**Article published: July 30, 2021**
References
Elliott, Kamilla. 2020. Theorizing Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Derek. 2013. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: NYU Press.
Johnson, Derek. 2017. ‘Battleworlds: The Management of Multiplicity in the Media Industries’. In World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries, edited by Marta Boni, 129-142. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Kelleter, Frank, and Kathleen Loock. 2017. ‘Hollywood Remaking as Second-Order Serialization’. In Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter, 125–47. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
Meikle, Kyle. 2019. Adaptations in the Franchise Era 2001-16. New York: Bloomsbury
Verevis, Constantine. 2017. ‘New Millennial Remakes’. In Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter, 148–66. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
Biography
Madeleine Hunter is a PhD candidate the University of Cambridge researching adaptation in twenty-first century children’s media. Her dissertation “We are in Convergence: Intergenerational Synergies in Twenty-First Century Children’s Media Franchises” explores how twenty-first century adaptations of children’s media properties participate in a wider remediation of the adult-child relationship in the context of convergence culture. She is the 2018 winner of the Adaptation Essay Prize for her article “Bric[k]olage: Adaptation as Play in The LEGO Movie” and her work has also appeared in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures and The Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film and Television. She is also a moderator for the Meme Studies Research Network based at the University of Edinburgh, a subject she frequently posts about from her Twitter @HuntsLeine.