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[bedlamsbard]

I don't know if you're sitll doing the ask thing, but how do you think will thor and loki reunite in the mcu (and how would you do it better)?

I feel...reasonably confident that there is going to be some kind of Thor and Loki interaction sometime in the future; the problem is that I'm also pretty sure it's going to be show!Loki rather than OG!Loki. I don't have anything against show!Loki, it's just for me (and this may be because my default as a writer is to work with multiple versions of the same character within the same story) he's a distinct character from the OG!Loki, and between him and 2014!Gamora and white!Vision it kind of seems like we have a pattern of Marvel killing off a character, bringing in an alternate version of them, and then going, "oh, it's basically the same, right?" obviously we have no idea what they're going to be doing with 2014!Gamora and white!Vision in the future, but that's the vibe I've got.

I don't think there's going to be any Loki in Thor: Love and Thunder, though I do still kind of predict that it's going to be doing multiverse nonsense (fond, I love multiverse nonsense); this is a prediction vaguely based on the Gorr the God-Butcher arc in the comics, where it's time travel nonsense rather than multiverse nonsense, but it's the multiverse Phase 4's set up for right now, so I think they could integrate that very easily. (I mean, easily for me, I don't know what their writers are capable of lol.) Knowing how Marvel functions, however -- I would bet cash money that show!Loki is going to be in a post-credits scene on Thor 4 somehow. (On a craft level, I love how Marvel uses their mid- and post- credits scenes. I don't always think they do it well, but I think it's fascinating.) I also have an outlying suspicion that it could be a different (new) Loki rather than show!Loki; I would love it to be OG!Loki, but that death scene was so final that I don't know that Marvel would undo it. Anyway, I expect a post-credits scene with show!Loki coming in and Thor seeing him, but no dialogue, just the shot of Thor's face. That's what I predict; I'm probably wrong, but you never know. I'd be really surprised if we didn't get Loki in a post-credits scene somewhere; Thor 4 is the most obvious place, but it could be Multiverse of Madness, it could be Quantumania, it could be one of the ones I can't predict because he's not really connected to the others as a character, but that doesn't stop Marvel with their post-credits action. Where it would go from there...I don't know. That really depends on what happens in Thor 4, since we haven't seen Thor since Endgame. Without that piece of info, I can't make a prediction on how this would fit into the long arc of Phase 4 or any of the other Events.

(btw, I'm predicting a Thor: Love and Thunder trailer to drop during the Superbowl, though a second Multiverse of Madness trailer might be more likely.)

How I would do it -- please give me that sweet, sweet multiverse/time travel nonsense with the Gorr the God-Butcher plot. I'd tie it in somewhere with that. (This is unfortunately one of the few comics arcs I've read -- I say "unfortunately" because I firmly believe that the more you know about Marvel comics the worse off you are as an MCU viewer and like. I count myself in that category. Unfortunately.) I have been struggling with the Yonder sequel with how to deal with the IW Loki death problem and coming up with a blank, so I don't actually have a good answer. From what I've seen, I'm a fandom outlier in that I don't think Classic Loki in the show is actually supposed to be OG Loki, no differences; it's one of those things where I see people talking about it and I have a "I don't think we watched the same show" reaction. Anyway, that's to say I don't think his method of surviving works for OG Loki. One could go for the handwaved thing that I did with Thor in Yonder where he was healing, got snapped, got desnapped, and is fine -- which could they do; that would be the easiest way to do it. Obviously I have already done that with Thor so I wouldn't do it again with Loki.

This is just a situation where like -- I don't have enough story context to build a "this is how I would do it with the canon set-up." I mean, we've already seen how I would have done it with the show set-up in Morning -- and I have run main timeline Loki's storyline forward about six times trying to figure out if I can fix the IW/Endgame Loki problem for a Thor reunion and I can't in a way I feel comfortable with because they're different characters and I don't think they're interchangeable, which is really the sticking point for me; I want the same versions of the characters to be interacting. For me, I don't want to slot one version of a character for another and then act like it's the same. Anyway, there's not a good answer to this. It's basically an "I need more context" situation.

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