#i rewrote this whole thing from scratch where's my prize

[beaft]

to the anon who asked for my thoughts on the lokey show (tumblr ate your ask and my response, i’m sorry)

context note: i have not seen the last two episodes yet. but here are some thoughts under the cut.

my prevailing stance thus far is "it could have been worse." 

my slightly more complicated stance is that it's not a bad show, per se. the acting is great, the character work is great, the script is mostly great - but it does suffer from having too many moving parts. there are a lot of clashing themes and ideas and plot threads and the whole thing just ends up tripping over itself a little bit. 

theme number one: God of Stories. (i’m doing little titles like it’s a video essay, isn’t that fun?) okay so. we've got the whole question of fate and predestination to play with, and that connects nicely with loki's "performative villainy" thing (i.e. the notion that he's cosmically doomed to be The Bad Guy, so there's no point trying to be anything else). honestly, i kind of wish they'd gone with that as their central thesis - stories that acknowledge their own fictionality and provide a commentary on the nature of storytelling are my jam - but so far, there just hasn't been as much of that as i would like.

 two: Investigating The TVA. this is more a thriller plotline - what is the TVA? who created it? is it benevolent or not? who are the timekeepers? this plotline was really prominent in the trailers, so it was a little jarring to find that loki and mobius only actually worked together for one episode. the writers seemed to be going for a sci-fi mystery coupled with “loki learns the meaning of friendship”, but then they backtracked and shifted focus from loki/mobius to loki/sylvie before we even had the chance to get a handle on mobius and loki’s dynamic.

which brings me to three: sylvie! i love sylvie, i really do. but (of course there’s a but) i’m a little confused about what her role is supposed to be, narratively speaking. she almost feels like more of a protagonist than loki himself does, in the sense that she’s the only one with clear goals and motivations (as well as more to gain/lose). not a bad thing, necessarily, but it does muddy the waters further in terms of who we’re meant to be following and rooting for. she's not a straightforwardly "evil" version of loki, which could have been interesting and tied into the whole “performative villainy” thing. she's a love interest, but also she isn't. she's an antagonist, but then she's not. there’s this weird tension between the loki-and-mobius buddy-cop friendship and the loki-and-sylvie fuck-the-cops friendship. 

finally, four: the romance. i don’t know exactly what the writers are trying to go for with loki/sylvie, and honestly, i don’t think the writers know either. is it narcissism or self-love/forgiveness? is Cosmic Destiny or is it two lonely people confusing friendship with attraction? it doesn’t feel necessary, and in the end it only serves to complicate an already-byzantine plot. i think this is partly due to the show’s brevity. six episodes aren’t really enough to do as many things as Loki is trying to do, and as a consequence the pacing feels very off: things happen too fast, relationships develop off-screen to save time, the status quo is constantly shifting and being upended. as soon as we get used to one dynamic or one situation, it’s replaced with another and the rollercoaster continues. i personally think it could have benefited from being twice the length, if only to give the characters some breathing room.

i’m also - forgive me - a little bit salty that we were promised genderfluid loki and didn’t get it. the bisexuality was a genuinely unexpected and lovely reveal, but i do feel that if you give an interview where you talk explicitly about genderfluidity and the importance of trans representation, you have a responsibility to deliver on that. (and no, a female loki variant does not a genderfluid character make, especially if she’s the only one. there’s also a variant that’s just a crocodile. it means nothing.)

and those are (some of) my thoughts on the lokey show, aren’t you glad you asked :)))

#the lokey show #loki spoilers #loki negativity #(it's not ALL negative! there's plenty of stuff i liked it's just easier to talk about the stuff i didn't like lol) #loki 2021 #replies #i rewrote this whole thing from scratch where's my prize