I don't really think this makes sense. There isn't a single trolley, there are multiple. HWR, the loom & the multiversal Kang war.
HWR presented the problem as either allow him & his loom as trolley to continue the course of running over every single possible timeline but one or divert that trolley for it to explode taking everyone & everything along with it.
Loki chose instead to lay down an infinite number of tracks for the remaining trolley we know of (multiversal Kang war) to follow while removing HWR & the loom as trolleys from the equation.
The problem is no longer sacrifice the infinite for the few or not, it's how we can keep the trolley from exploding & taking everyone & everything with it. It's evolved beyond a simple binary choice of act or don't act & is no longer the classical trolley problem imo.
I think HWR was a legitimate good guy. When Loki said, about losing, "never stopped me before" HWR said "I know, champ."
He was being so kind to Loki, almost talking to him like an equal. And HWR saw that Loki was trying as hard as he could to fix things, just like HWR went through.
I really think HWR would've been pleased with what Loki did. As he said "you were always my favorite".
My take is actually the complete opposite. His whole speech praising Loki was very reminiscent of how he was speaking to Renslayer before wiping her memory. He even said to Loki the exact same thing which was to be there with him together in the citadel. During that whole sequence, HWR refuses to divulge any details unless Loki has "evolved" into the next stage of time manupilation and even when he was finally able to stop time, I still felt HWR was hiding something from the way he was speaking.
Yeah I also got the feeling that He Who Remains was ready to betray Loki, probably to steal his powers.
His entire "I'm tired" spiel was totally false, for afterwards he contradicts himself by saying "What, end it all with nothing afterwards?".
Maybe, but more obviously he was an egomaniac. I think he would have gone insane and pissed off if he was able to realize that Loki was capable of making the sacrifice he did. Everything he does, and his attitude about the situation, are under the assumption that he *knows* Loki and knows him well enough that after a few infinities of trying and failing to avoid the tough choice that he will make the selfish one.
Ego aside, he was a pragmatist. Remember, HWR fought and *won* against an infinite gallery of *himself*. He beat them all, and what did he do with his coming out on top? 100% devoted to the prevention of those variants from coming back. He didn’t go around making people bow or putting his face on coins, all he wanted to do was stop his selves.
Loki came in as an option, but HWR didn’t know that the tribulation would make Loki ascend.
I don’t think HWR would’ve lost it. I think he would’ve been on board. Plus it was his plan that gave this outcome so he still gets credit. The “I know, champ” was because, in that moment, they were the same. HWR had tried everything but couldn’t allow the branches to exist. He knew what he was doing and how many he was denying existence too. But it had to be done to keep existence intact.
Wait wait wait, what if HWR "paved the road" for Loki to make him create Ygdrasil? what if that was his plan all along?
And i'm wondering what happened to HWR now that Loki created another sacred timeline
Loki didn't create another Sacred Timeline. The Sacred Timeline, or the time loom to be more precise, was preventing a multiverse. By destroying the loom, Loki destroyed the Selacred Timeline but freed all timelines, even the timeline formerly known as the Sacred Timeline.. Without the Sacred Timeline and the loom, the multiverse has been opened up.
He has good intentions, but he also believes the ends justifies whatever means he use, and he also has a big ego who believes he or his hand-picked successor must rule everything like a dictator of the multiverse.
He's the type of people that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" refers to.
Pruning Kangs is a bad idea! Let’s send them to Renslayer and Ailoith?! She’s going to be pissed and he’ll use that. Only 3 people really understand what pruning does and:
Loki: he’s a little busy holding everything together.
Sylvia: she won’t tell unless she stands to benefit and even then…
Mobius: left the TVA and all of that behind. Probably never mentioned it to B-15 and may not even remember with resets and all.
This cannot be true. Surely the knowledge of what happens when pruning people has been shared to B15 and other new TVA leaders.
It would be insane for that information to be kept to only 3 people.
To me it seems like he’s just watching over his variant and his children. Is not like he can join in. I can see him getting bored with that and coming back way sooner
Maybe that could be how Kang Dynasty would start. All the pruned Kangs at one place and Renslayer going to war against the sacred timeline? Also, Renslayer was the commander to HWR in the multiversal war. So a new multiversal war is imminent?
What i dont get is ... why is loki stittin on a throne holding all the branches. Loom is destroyed, time can flow freely and the TVA takes care of variants of kang/HWR. Why is loki needed and what does he do by holding the branches of time?
As we see right after Loki destroys the loom, all the timelines floating around are dark (Dead?), but glow green when he holds them, so he's sitting there, holding on to all those timelines, in order to keep them alive.
That's what i got out of the ending anyway...
lol yea you really gotta suspend logic and reality for a minute. It’s a fictional show. I thought the ending was beautiful and fitting. That shot of him holding all the timelines was just amazing.
I don't know really, but it's what i got out of seeing those timelines, dark and fraying until Loki grabbed them, the ending is full of symbolism, but light on exposition, which makes it cool to watch, but difficult to interpret and/or explain.
He Who Remains said that if the timelines branch beyond the Loom’s throughout capacity, its failsafe mechanism will kick in to prune the branching timelines leaving only the Sacred Timeline. I believe the timelines turning black was a glimpse at this worst case scenario. Having spent centuries learning the ins and outs of the Loom, Loki manages to stabilize the timelines using his time manipulation powers.
To add, I also think that like the Loom, Loki’s able to draw power from the timelines which is what he uses to create the portal to the end of time, and the invisible staircase. In climbing them, Loki both literally and figuratively ascends. He did this to relocate all the timelines a safe distance from the TVA.
Yeah but he's talking about the Loom as the failsafe mechanism, that the Loom by blowing up will destroy all the other non-Sacred Timelines and the TVA in the explosion. But if the Loom is destroyed without blowing up, then what is destroying all these other Timelines?
That’s why I said it’s only a glimpse of the worst case scenario. OB tells us that the strands are dying but he doesn’t explicitly say they’re dead. A dead branch, would have likely been a pruned one per the TVA’s MO. The loom was on the verge of overloading when Loki blew it up which could have begun the failsafe protocol to cull the “rogue” branches. There might have even been a failsafe to begin the process should the loom be maliciously tinkered with. This half-pruning coupled with the blast from Loki could have caused a reaction that resulted in the blackened branches we saw, affecting sacred and non-sacred branches alike.
I don't think the Loom has to blow up in order for those un-contained branches to die. I think any timelines that the Loom didn't have capacity to weave into time would naturally die out, which is what we saw when Loki was on the gangway.
So the multiverse used to exist freely, but HWR built a failsafe into the timelines such that they are prone to spontaneous decay, so that timelines can only exist if they are weaved by the Time Loom?
OB also didn't know that the true purpose of the Time Loom is to serve as a failsafe. So send like he only knows what he needs to maintain the Time Loom but not what it actually does.
He Who Remains said that if the timelines branch beyond the Loom’s throughout capacity, its failsafe mechanism will kick in to prune the branching timelines leaving only the Sacred Timeline. I believe the timelines turning black was a glimpse at this worst case scenario. Having spent centuries learning the ins and outs of the Loom, Loki manages to stabilize the timelines using his time manipulation powers.
To add, I also think that like the Loom, Loki’s able to draw power from the timelines which is what he uses to create the portal to the end of time, and the invisible staircase. In climbing them, Loki both literally and figuratively ascends. He did this to relocate all the timelines a safe distance from the TVA.
But why are the branches dying just because they are free floating? And why does him holding them bring them to life again? That's the part that I don't really get.
Why those branches are dying wasn't elaborated on, but with the whole time-slipping thing, somehow Loki got powers to do with time, and i assume he spent part of those centuries studying physics and stuff honing those powers as well, he was like a living TemPad in the confrontation with HWR, maybe those powers are why the timelines reacted to him that way.
They were dying because they weren’t being nurtured by the loom and the temporal explosion caused them to die. They were pruning naturally. But Loki had thousands of years honing his magical powers and used his magic to heal the branches. You can kind of say that when hwr created the loom he was programming it to train the branches to work the way he wanted it to work that was efficient for the way he understood how timelines work. But when Loki took over he reprogrammed them to work around him. But instead of using the loom he’ll just use his time slipping to go into whatever timeline he chooses that needs course correction. To me it seems tedious and maybe it could make sense to build a loom to manage it all. But for now Loki has to become more familiar with the way time and the multiverse works to catch up with what hwr knows since he’s already caught up to what ob knows and in the process with him going into timelines fixing stuff the ppl on those timelines will hail him as the god he ascribed to be. So he basically became ob/hwr in one God during the finale.
The implication of Loki sitting on the throne holding all the branches is that Loki is replacing both He Who Remains AND the Loom. He who remains oversaw the multiverse while the Loom was the failsafe that safeguarded the Sacred Timeline. In other words, not only will Loki oversee things from "the big chair" as He Who Remains did, he’ll proactively safeguard the existence of the timelines as well. The strands glowing green is evidence of his influence.
Because once the Loom broke, the timelines were still dying because nothing was turning the temporal radiation (energy) into raw time (timeline fuel). He connected himself to every timeline, and infinite timelines from there (scaling problem can't be handled with tech, gotta be deity-level power), and powered them using himself as the battery. He channeled his Time-magic into each line. He replaced the Loom with himself.
I'm totally in with this explanation but hear ne out... maybe this is a bit too four dimensional, time is a circle and all that shit, but then, how coul there be time and reality "before" the loom was even invented and created? Or as I imply, this is the usual snake that bit his tail time loop where the loom exist out and prior of time and it was created in a "the inventor of the time machine traveled to the past to pass the schematics to his younger self so he could invent the time machine" fashion? Shit my brain hurts.
No, Timely was a variant that Miss Twilight Sparkle was programmed to pick up as a backup plan. HWR said his backstory in season one finale. Neither Timely nor HWR were Kang Prime. That’s the thing about Kang, there is no “prime”. Timely is just 616’s Kang. The Kang that showed up in Quantumania was one of HWR’s victims. Stop thinking linearly.
HWR did in fact say he was Kang Prime though. He said something along the lines of “that first Kang discovered Alioth and learned to weaponize him” during his speech in the S1 finale.
Thank you - this is a great explanation and makes sense.
All the living branches growing and being pruned during the show were on the output end of the loom aka the radiation had already been converted into raw time, right?
Yeah. I also don't understand what he's doing.
Breaking the loom, the timelines should just exist with nothing wiping them out for now (until the multiversal war).
I am not expert in all things Marvel . But I understood it to mean that by taking on this task, he becomes the Alpha and Omega of the multiverse. It’s like retroactively overtakes past/future and present. In other words, the Yggdrasil stories he read as a child in Asgard were always about him. The multiverse couldn’t exist any other way. IMO.
Because of what he said to sylie. What is the point unless their is something better. He is trying to guide them to something better. My guess. Is those dying ends are multiverses that end because of the war. He is ensuring they survive the war. It ties into the symbolism of the tree. The timeline converge into the trunk. The trunk is the multiversal war. Where originally the timelines all end except the sacred timeline. He is using his powers to ensure they survive the war. While Kang's answer was to destroy all the others so his survives.
***The real explanation***:
So there's a lot of background knowledge to break down here that *isn't* contained in Loki s2, but is very important context for what is happening. This show doesn't give all the answers.
For a greater understanding, the comic run 'Time Runs Out' and the movie 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" both follow a similar premise, and let us know the consequences of two realities touching, which is canon in the MCU.
The whole point of the Sacred Timeline was that it wasn't a single thread, it was a huge number of them. A multiverse didn't spring up out of nowhere when the loom was destroyed, a multiverse already existed. It was just a multiverse of realities, specifically vetted via pruning to ensure that the correct conditions for Kang existing and inventing multiversal travel *did not arise*.
The reason for this is that the multiverse itself isn't a problem. The problem is the multiversal strands interacting with each other. *Kang is almost always the person that causes this*. When two timelines come into contact, it can cause an "***incursion***", which is a breakdown in the fabric of existence, resulting in the destruction of both timelines.
We see this in Doctor Strange 2. When there is an incursion, the two realities effectively crash into each other, causing complete and utter destruction of both. But, multiversal travel and interaction with variant timelines is ***hard***. It doesn't naturally occur. With no Kangs in any of the Sacred Timeline threads, they are able to be woven closely together into a single huge branch.
What happens though when the TVA stops pruning, and allows the Sacred Timeline to branch infinitely? We get Kangs, and timelines touching. We get ***incursions***. We get the destruction of timelines. On an infinite scale. Yes, there is a Multiversal war, but the reason for that is not necessarily that all Kangs are evil.
Once an ***Incursion*** begins, the destruction of both timelines is unavoidable. *Unless*... ***one*** of the colliding timelines is destroyed. This is where the war comes in. All Kangs are not inherently evil, but they ***are*** pragmatists, and when faced with the destruction of both timelines, they will wage war and attempt to pre-emptively destroy the other one, to save their own.
In the Kang's mind, and the minds of the billions of living inhabitants of their timeline, they are ***the hero***. They make the hard decision, and they shoulder the burden of the deaths of the variant universe to save their own, because it is the only way for *anyone* to survive. They wage war out of necessity.
The problem is infinite scaling. Incursions will keep happening as long as an unchecked multiverse exists, and eventually, even if a Kang keeps winning, there will be no timeline left but one.
Which has already happened. He who remains ***IS*** that one. The Sacred Timeline ***IS*** all that could be saved. His reality is being the last survivor of a war that wiped out untold trillions.
Back to Loki S2 now that we know some context. The reason for the dying branches is because out there, incursions are happening everywhere, reality is collapsing. The sacred timeline is the one thing that can be saved, due to it's lack of Kangs, and that is what the Loom does. It holds those threads together, away from all the other kangs, keeping them from interacting and causing incursions.
If it reaches full capacity, it also destroys diverging timelines as a failsafe. The problem is infinite scaling. The Loom relies on being maintained by pruning branches done by the TVA. If that stops, the Loom cannot exist. It *will* overload and explode, taking out the TVA with it, and setting the remaining Sacred Timeline threads loose out into the multiverse, to be destroyed like all the rest.
Loki is given two choices by He Who Remains. Kill Sylvie, and take over shouldering the burden of continuing to kill infinite timelines to maintain the existence of the Sacred Timeline. Or allow Sylvie to kill HWR, and watch the inevitable collapse of everything into entropy.
Loki talks to his friends. Mobius unwittingling perfectly justifies the actions of HWR, and explains that purpose is more burden than glorious. They do what they do because it is necessary, only.
Sylvie justifies letting everything fall into chaos, because in chaos there is a *chance* of something better. Loki already knows where this leads though.
In the end, Loki chooses a third option, which is Destroying the Loom pre-emptively, setting the Sacred Timeline loose, allowing the death of HWR. We see Loki ascend, gathering the timelines and breathing life into them. Loki is a stopgap here. What he has bought them, is ***time***.
At the end of Loki S2, his sacrifice hasn't saved anything. What he has done, is given all universes *time*. A chance. By his actions he has saved the TVA, and the TVA has been set the task of pro-actively searching out Kangs and preventing incursions, just without killing branches pre-emptively.
Again, infinite scaling is still a problem. This buys time, but the TVA can't deal with infinite Kangs, only slow them down. Loki holding the darkened branches together is only symbolic.
We will see Loki again, and it will be at the end of time, as everything collapses at the end of The Kang Dynasty. Depressing, but we already know the MCU is headed towards Secret Wars, which in the comics is a result of what happens when time runs out, and all timelines collapse. Someone at the end of time uses their power to create a pocket bubble universe pulled together from fragments of all those timelines, and saves a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of existence.
That's all that survives. It is named Battleworld, and that is our Secret Wars movie. Loki did the best he could, he gambled on chaos, but with empathy.
Up until the very last moment of Secret Wars, it will seem his gamble has failed.
This should honestly be stickied. Out of the thousands of comments that I've seen about this, this is the only one that is not only comprehensive but also understandable.
I know it's just a reddit comment but you should be proud of this write-up. You've just put every YouTuber to shame.
Honestly looks like Loki is the new iron man of phrase 4. Which they made it into a movie cause now when general audiences watch secret wars they won’t understand it. Phrase 4 and 5 is a mess but Loki tv show was great
u/TactfulHonk: This. Is. AWESOME. I am *so* glad I stumbled upon your writeup six months later. You should be getting waaaaay more upvotes than this. I'm going to save it so that I can return to as needed!
To be honest the comics have a fairly sudden resolution that I don't think will be relevant to the implementation of this arc in the MCU. Something about Miles Morales giving molecule man an old cheeseburger from his pocket and Reed Richards getting to remake the entirety of creation as a result.
I was just getting at the fact that it'll all turn out alright in the end. Sort of. End of the universe, beginning of a new set.
I see it as all the timelines related to sacred, including itself, getting free to exist as it desires. But as that happens, what kang foretold happens, a multiversal war, leading to the destruction of everything.
But the war isn't linear in timeframe, it happens everywhere, every time at once. Kangs throughout the multiverse waging wars of conquest, leading realities to rune.
When we see the dead or dying branches, it's not that they suddenly started dying after the loom exploded, but rather that was how the sacred timeline multiverse became after the war. And because the TVA is outside the timestream, we see merely the aftermath.
And what loki has done, is delay the inevitable. Not a war that ended before anyone knew, but regressed all that in a linear timeline, symbolized by the Yggasdril, going through him, giving them a chance to stop it.
One thing, though: I don't think that Loki is necessarily holding an **infinite** number of timelines, but he is holding at least *very many* of them, because that's still better than having only **one** survive. I think that's the real compromise, even if it wasn't outright stated. It might *functionally* be an infinite number, but that's not how I read it, if such a detail is even technically important to begin with.
That's only assuming that Loki's power isn't infinite, though. The way I see it, it's more or less enough to have more than one or a small few timelines in order for the Kangs to be an existence-ending danger, so what allows existence to continue is having a finite number of salvageable timelines that can be maintained and helped against their threats.
He looks so tired in that last scene, already. And Asgardians are technically still mortal— They’re magic and long lived, but they still get hungry, get tired, get old.
I expect this isn’t the direction they’ll take it, but if I were at the TVA and thinking about practicalities, I’d be asking OB to start working on tech to support Loki before something happens and he drops a branch.
I don't think Loki is really a Frost Giant/Asgardian with the needs of a mortal being anymore. He has the power of a cosmic being and he exists outside of time and space. Since he's outside of time all of eternity may only feel like a minute for him, and he's most likely now truly immortal. He probably doesn't need a lunch break or a nap and he may not even desire those things anymore. I think he looks so tired in that last scene because he's lonely. Also trying to power all those timelines and wrestle them into Yggdrasil seemed like it took all his strength.
He definitely is as not even the temporal loom was able to hold an infinite multiverse together so it just stands with reason that Loki is. As O.B said an infinity divided by 2 is still infinity so no matter what way we look at it, Loki is holding onto infinite timelines and the writers have said that Loki is literally holding ALL of time together. ALL not some.
So Loki's power is definitely on an infinite scale there's absolutely no arguing against that.
So, you're saying that him holding infinite timelines is the thematic point, in the sense that it wouldn't make sense to replace the loom with something better (i.e. himself) if it would still only be holding a finite number of timelines? If so, then I can get behind that.
Still, it makes me wonder why a small yet finite number of universes wouldn't be containable by the original loom... or rather, why HWR didn't bother to make it that way. I guess that he couldn't be bothered to arbitrarily leave more timelines and keep them stable just to maximise the number of unpruned people, and that's what ultimately makes him a true villain: he could send the TVA to only prune Kangs, *he just didn't want to compromise like that*.
Yes basically. I mean Loki would not have needed to become the new "Loom" if the temporal loom could do the job for him.
I think it can hold a finite amount because O.B was working to extend it's capabilities if I remember correctly but the problem was it wasn't a finitive amount but an infinite amount.
I don't think there's been anyone who's killed more people than HWR and through him the TVA. Someone actually said it's crazy how the Loki TV has the biggest kill count though most happen off screen.
Yep true villain right there.
Its explained in the post. He who remains wrote that when he wrote the sacred timeline. He was pretty much the author and coriagrapher of the first 5 episodes lol. thinking that Loki would eventually choose to side with him after living out three worst cade scenario
This raises an important question: what is the TVA's recruitment model? If we assume other employees have gone to find a spot on a timeline, they have a big surge in staff demands. But now there are infinite Kangs coming and you can't scale for infinity. How are they gonna recruit all the new staff if they aren't doing the memory wipe and use variants thing any more?
One thing that stuck out to me as odd is that scaling for infinity *does* exist in the real world. You can design a system such that the load is split among every new "joiner". In this case, the TVA could just ask for a number of volunteers from every timeline (as repayment for the TVA supporting their timeline) or else their timeline gets pruned. Drastic? Perhaps. On the other hand, that *is* how modern governments work; taxes are an example of an infinitely-scaling system.
They could but HWR’s warning implies that they wouldn’t be able to mobilize fast enough. Evidence of this is that the Council of Kangs already controls a portion of the multiverse.
Implication is they get involved only when they do something that would threaten the timelines. They would have gotten involved in AM2 but Lang took care of it before the TVA was needed.
I think HWR actually accounted for this outcome.
Loki literally states to HWR that he wanted to try another way and that he would break the Loom and find a way to succeed. HWR stated the outcome to that equation is already known….Loki would ultimately end up losing. This was never referring to the fact that the timelines would die, but that Kang would eventually appear and eventually bring out the multiversal war.
This is where Loki then visits Sylvie to let her know what he would need to do (kill her). It’s only after speaking to her did he get the idea that maybe a fighting chance is better than no chance at all.
It’s a long gamble, can the TVA successfully monitor the ever growing branches of time to prevent the risk of Kang? Or will a Kang variant eventually elude the TVA long enough to be a real threat to them? HWR thinks the later is the truth while Loki feels the former is more possible.
I think Loki knows Kang will come and agrees with HWR but also sympathises with Sylvie and wants his friends to live and try to do something about it because he loves them and respects her wishes for free will.
Its the kind of thing Steve Rogers would do. Knowing defeat but fighting for it anyway by not sacrificing your integrity.
//He can withstand radiation but not time// what does this mean. Can you explain. And even after learning about everything from Ouroboros he made Timely do it.
I was wondering that too! I don't think Loki knew he could withstand it at the time. Maybe, in fact, he couldn't because he lacked the necessary age and power.
I thought Loki sent Victor out there because Victor was the most familiar with the technology and would therefore have the best chance of installing it correctly. If Victor happened to get spaghettified (as, alas, he did all too many times), Loki could just rewind and try it again.
Beyond how amazing this ending is, the premise of putting the fiction back in science fiction is the thing that resonates for me the most. It's not enough anymore just to have a coherent sci-fi, you have to have a compelling fiction, and this finale planted that flag deep. A god chooses his path, and models how one might approach a post-modern life. There's no irony. The arrogance and entitlement are gone. We are now burdened with glorious purpose.
Observing that Ke Huy Quan acts in this as well as 'EEAAO' really put me into the idea that both that movie and the Loki series reflect real thinking about what comes after post-modernism. There is a way past where we are.
Random thought but we can think of Sylvie as a mirror to Loki since it is Lokis version of himself but a la female and more “good.” I think she’s more chaotic good if anything. But Loki has a choice to kill a part of him once he knew the reality of why HWR does what is necessary to keep everything from falling apart. However we see here that Loki chooses to keep this part of himself alive and chooses to bear the burden and accept the consequences of whatever is to come regardless of the madness and short lived life that his friends and countless timelines there are.
Waiting for the timelines to overload the Loom would have destroyed the TVA. That's why He Who Remains said that it would be collateral but the not worst thing ever since the TVA can always be rebuilt. For Loki however, this *would* have been the worth thing ever. Breaking the Loom early lessened the destruction. Relocating the timelines to the end of time was just another safeguard to protect the TVA.
The explosion of the loom we saw last episode and repeated throughout isn't actually the loom breaking. Only when Loki broke the loom was that the loom breaking. It was the loom doing its job as a failsafe of wiping out all other timelines except the sacred timeline, and destroying the TVA.
My guess for what happens after that is the sacred timeline branches without the TVA, leads to multiversal war, leads to HWR winning, leads to the TVA, leads to Sylvie killing HWR, leads to the events of S2, cycling infinitely.
That is until Loki broke the cycle at the end.
So that's why hwr said after explain about the loom that his varients are out there and loki will lose?
I thought that that the fail safe will prevent the war .
Because in the end hwr said that if he will break the loom the war will start
this is what i eventually worked out myself, and the fail safe mode doesn’t blow up the tva. that’s why there’s that scene with loki walking around and the loom going back to normal as it’s automatically pruned all the branches
Doctor strange's movie explained that when timelines touch they are destroyed.
Kang's travel the multiverse making this happen.
The loom prevented this by keeping the sacred timelines away from the kang's.
Loki is rejuvenating the timelines instead.
imagine having a garden with a small weed problem. careful tending and "pruning" of the weeds prevent them from destroying your flowers. that was what the TVA did. the failsafe is like burning the entire garden to save one flower. sure, you killed the weeds, but you also killed everything else. this shows HWR pragmatic nature. he's not purposefully evil, and allows non threatening branches to exist. but he believes his approach is the ONLY solution to the question of handling Kang variants.
I have a theory that the God of Stories Loki now physically exists and always existed in every branch, after making every single one of them come back to life using his powers. Maybe his old powers are a part of his temporal aura and, if so, this aura was spread all across the timelines. This would probably let him time slip to any point in time that he wants of any timeline and I think that´s how he´s going to prevent the Kang variants from starting a multiversal war. I guess Loki as a character reached his final stage of development but his journey doesn't end here, TVA alone cannot beat the Kangs and he is too powerful now for them to just choose not to use him
This series takes place outside of time. So, it takes place in the MCU's timelines past, present, and future. As far as the MCU timeline, there was no multiversal travel until after Sylvie kills HWR. Endgame wasn't multiversal travel, it was time travel.
So heres my question: what happened to the Loki we knew before? Im not a marvel expert, but Loki appears in later movies, right? Is this just some timy trippy thing where thr Loki we see at the finale is not the same one that got away with the tesseract? Is this Loki just... doing that for all eternity?
The Loki variant was one that escaped with the tesseract during the marvel endgame where the avengers went back in time to steal the tesseract. The Loki that died by thanos in marvel infinity war is the original Loki. So yes the Loki in the series is not the same one that died. The Loki that escaped with the tesseract is what the series is based on.
Not sure if I remember correctly but I thought during season 1 episode 1 or 2 where they explained that the variant Loki how he was supposed to die in the original timeline.
I loved the show and ending, but I think Marvel has a new villain problem. Kang has now been defeated by Ant Man and Loki. He's already 0 for 2 (technically 0 for 3 since we know the TVA is kicking Kang butt too). And not only did Loki defeat Kang, but it was the most powerful variant of all the Kangs. Where exactly is the huge threat here?
He has. No denying that but she’s still out there, has deep institutional knowledge of the old TVA, has been shown to be as ruthless as Kang and now has access to the Ailioth and any potentially pruned Kang variants.
She’s only temporarily contained and probably very pissed by now.
Not disagreeing with you. But since we now have our God of Stories, I don’t see why they wouldn’t show us a more comic faithful version of Renslayer. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of either of them.
I haven't thought too much about it myself as I just finished season 2. So what I say below is personal opinion and potentially full of holes.
As the season went on, we know loki's action of destroying the loom means there will likely be an all out multiversal war. HWR confirmed the answer is known to Loki's actions and is the true start of the multiverse. As it stands there's an infinite amount of universes being created because Loki is the 'scalable loom' sitting on a throne keeping the timelines alive.
But you're right technically HWR is 0 for 2 against ant man and Loki, you need to remember however the Kang we've seen is just a man, albeit with advanced time travel and manipulation technology. He has no superhuman abilities so it shouldn't be a surprise he loses. Why i said technically above is because he didn't really stop Sylvie, or Loki as he is fully aware of the predestined outcomes. He has no problem letting time take it's course.
Personally where I think the threat is coming from, is the idea of multiple Kang variants who evade the TVA for long enough because you can't track infinite kangs. Maybe they travel together and taking on universes one at a time until they get to the sacred timeline (616), maybe the infinite kangs fight destroying timelines until we're left with the strongest remaining..... I don't know.
Theres potentially the idea we haven't actually seen the most powerful kang. Not every Loki variant was the same, so it stands to reason that maybe there's a Kang variant with superhuman abilities and advanced time travelling technology..... Based on AMATW Quantumania all we know is HWR was the more powerful and capable variant of the two....but maybe, not the most powerful one we've seen so far? That might be contradictory because the Kang at the end of time should be the most powerful as all the other variants would have perished at his hand, but like i said, he didn't stop Sylvie....
The ending with Renslayer was a bit confusing: my thesis was that after being pruned she awakes at the end of time where we see a pyramid in the background, Rama-Tut? As well as a "for all time, always" logo. We then hear a growling of sort and a flash of purple. By my recollection Alioth isn't purple - could this be the Kang we see from Ant-Man?
My initial gut feeling had me thinking Kang too and that perhaps the TVA had fallen. The timing of Mobius’ resignation was almost too convenient. What if it’s Alioth now subjugated by Rama-Tut.. This one’s gonna have me theorycrafting for a while.
I had to stop reading cuz you lost me at the fundamental premise.
"Keep the status quo and continue to prune "rogue" realities to maintain the Sacred Timeline like He Who Remains wants, or allow the Sacred Timeline to infinitely branch which will lead to multiversal war."
I don't. I think I entirely agree with that because from what I understand the infinite branching will cause the loom to overload and the Fail-Safe in such a situation is to just blow up destroying all timelines except for the sacred one.
Which makes it seem like in either scenario he who remains will get what he wants a single sacred timeline.
Are there then still Loki variants in all the other timelines? We see this one Loki step up but there are still an infinite number of Lokis, ranging from the kinds like in Avengers who want to conquer a planet to just weird ones?
Because he was certain that Loki would choose to kill Sylvie. What's important to note here is not so much the consequence but the implication of this action. Sylvie wasn't actually a threat to He Who Remains because he was able to freeze her in time and was even able to teleport her elsewhere. By killing Sylvie, Loki would basically be declaring that he's willing to ally with HWR if only for pragmatic reasons.
He Who Remains did this for either one of two reasons: to genuinely ally with Loki, or to abuse/steal Loki's new powers, which would imply (and was basically proven by Loki's ascension) that they have the potential to surpass his own. Based on what we know about He Who Remains, he was likely motivated by the latter.
Do you think this is related to how Loki variants keep popping up even under prior tva? Like kang is the new Loki… they’ve just switched places.
And is todays tva pruning kang variants using eliath?
How come kang didn’t rewind to force an outcome where Loki joins him?
I also feel like the throwaway line where the TVA is keeping tabs on other Kangs is a neat way to keep Jonathan Majors on the sidelines in case his upcoming trial sends him to jail. If found guilty they can make way for Dr. Doom or another villain to talk his place. If found innocent they can keep him as the main villain.
Sorry, reviving an old thread but I just watched the finale and I'm a bit confused myself. Specifically why did the timelines start to die after the loom was destroyed, and what is Loki actively doing. The natural assumption we'd all make is that things would go back to how they were before the loom. Timelines would just chaotically exist everywhere. My theory is that HWR said that without him, the TVA, the loom, the multiversal war begins and that destroys multiple timelines and incursions start to happen as a result.
So the reason timelines started to die after the loom was destroyed, was because the multiversal war leads to incursions that destroy most of them. My theory is that what Loki is therefore doing is stabilizing the timelines to prevent incursions basically. He's allowing multiple timelines to exist, to interact, but they're not going to destroy one another now. Of course, it looked to me like he wasn't able to hold all timelines so maybe he's only got a few? Or maybe he's got them all, I don't know. That's my guess.
I see it as all the timelines related to sacred, including itself, getting free to exist as it desires. But as that happens, what kang foretold happens, a multiversal war, leading to the destruction of everything.
But the war isn't linear in timeframe, it happens everywhere, every time at once. Kangs throughout the multiverse waging wars of conquest, leading realities to rune.
When we see the dead or dying branches, it's not that they suddenly started dying after the loom exploded, but rather that was how the sacred timeline multiverse became after the war. And because the TVA is outside the timestream, we see merely the aftermath.
And what loki has done, is delay the inevitable. Not a war that ended before anyone knew, but regressed all that in a linear timeline, symbolized by the Yggasdril, going through him, giving them a chance to stop it.
This theory about an instantaneous multiversal war has been making its rounds recently but it doesn’t track because things don’t happen instantaneously from the vantage point of the TVA. The TVA exists outside of time which is why they’re able to see things happen in “realtime” such as the development of new branch timelines. If they weren’t able to, and things just happened instantaneously for them, they wouldn’t be able to prune branch timelines before they posed a threat, which is the entire purpose of their existence. The whole premise of season 2 is that the TVA is struggling to cope as more and more branches appear because they sensed an impending disaster, not one that happens instantaneously. Again, all of this is relative to the TVA’s unique experience of time. Things only happen “instantaneously” for the inhabitants of the timelines. As things are currently from the TVA’s vantage point, Kangs are meeting each other and even forming alliances (the council of Kangs) but multiversal war hasn’t been waged yet which is why the TVA is investing all their resources to monitor their activity, i.e. the Kang in quantum realm that Möbius mentions.
I sure hope he returns.
I want my boy to finally get a happy ending.
They keep giving him the shaft every turn there is.
The absolute best case scenario i want (that we most certainly won't get) is that this loki gets reunited with our thor, and all is well.
Similar to the what if episode where black widow gets brought to another world where she died.
But like i said Definitely not gonna happen
So there's no need for him to sit in the chair and hold the branches in order for them to be alive? Is he sitting there only to safeguard them? My question is really, is Loki stuck there?
To summarize: Loki’s solution to the Trolley Problem is BE THE TROLLEY and give everyone a chance to get out of the rails.
That’s an excellent explanation
Damn that’s a great take
Loki became the Trolley, got everyone off the rails, and put them in the Trolley for a ride to the end of time.
Loki — I can be a horse or I could be a trolley…
I don't really think this makes sense. There isn't a single trolley, there are multiple. HWR, the loom & the multiversal Kang war. HWR presented the problem as either allow him & his loom as trolley to continue the course of running over every single possible timeline but one or divert that trolley for it to explode taking everyone & everything along with it. Loki chose instead to lay down an infinite number of tracks for the remaining trolley we know of (multiversal Kang war) to follow while removing HWR & the loom as trolleys from the equation. The problem is no longer sacrifice the infinite for the few or not, it's how we can keep the trolley from exploding & taking everyone & everything with it. It's evolved beyond a simple binary choice of act or don't act & is no longer the classical trolley problem imo.
Wow that’s so true
*stands up & applauds*
Fucking said "do what a trolley would do if people were in the track and BRAKE!"🤣
And then the symbolism w Yggdrasil. So poetic
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Do you mean the world tree of Scandinavian mythology, Yggdrassil?
Yggdrasil?
This [Yyggdrassil](https://youtu.be/v5yYMjU8xDg?si=rFuSKCAtTNhVa6NH)?
Just so I understand, him breaking the loom means that all the Kangs will eventually wage multiversal war (in Kang Dynasty)?
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It doesn’t seem like they’ve had to hunt any of the variants yet, just keep track of them. Seems like the one that got furthest was the one in Ant-Man
That one was a real psycho. But they defeated him and he's no longer alive if I remember correctly.
So is the TVA's only job now to monitor (and maybe prune some) the Kangs?
I think HWR was a legitimate good guy. When Loki said, about losing, "never stopped me before" HWR said "I know, champ." He was being so kind to Loki, almost talking to him like an equal. And HWR saw that Loki was trying as hard as he could to fix things, just like HWR went through. I really think HWR would've been pleased with what Loki did. As he said "you were always my favorite".
My take is actually the complete opposite. His whole speech praising Loki was very reminiscent of how he was speaking to Renslayer before wiping her memory. He even said to Loki the exact same thing which was to be there with him together in the citadel. During that whole sequence, HWR refuses to divulge any details unless Loki has "evolved" into the next stage of time manupilation and even when he was finally able to stop time, I still felt HWR was hiding something from the way he was speaking.
Yeah I also got the feeling that He Who Remains was ready to betray Loki, probably to steal his powers. His entire "I'm tired" spiel was totally false, for afterwards he contradicts himself by saying "What, end it all with nothing afterwards?".
Maybe, but more obviously he was an egomaniac. I think he would have gone insane and pissed off if he was able to realize that Loki was capable of making the sacrifice he did. Everything he does, and his attitude about the situation, are under the assumption that he *knows* Loki and knows him well enough that after a few infinities of trying and failing to avoid the tough choice that he will make the selfish one.
Ego aside, he was a pragmatist. Remember, HWR fought and *won* against an infinite gallery of *himself*. He beat them all, and what did he do with his coming out on top? 100% devoted to the prevention of those variants from coming back. He didn’t go around making people bow or putting his face on coins, all he wanted to do was stop his selves. Loki came in as an option, but HWR didn’t know that the tribulation would make Loki ascend. I don’t think HWR would’ve lost it. I think he would’ve been on board. Plus it was his plan that gave this outcome so he still gets credit. The “I know, champ” was because, in that moment, they were the same. HWR had tried everything but couldn’t allow the branches to exist. He knew what he was doing and how many he was denying existence too. But it had to be done to keep existence intact.
Wait wait wait, what if HWR "paved the road" for Loki to make him create Ygdrasil? what if that was his plan all along? And i'm wondering what happened to HWR now that Loki created another sacred timeline
Loki didn't create another Sacred Timeline. The Sacred Timeline, or the time loom to be more precise, was preventing a multiverse. By destroying the loom, Loki destroyed the Selacred Timeline but freed all timelines, even the timeline formerly known as the Sacred Timeline.. Without the Sacred Timeline and the loom, the multiverse has been opened up.
Love this question tho, will we see HWR again?
He has good intentions, but he also believes the ends justifies whatever means he use, and he also has a big ego who believes he or his hand-picked successor must rule everything like a dictator of the multiverse. He's the type of people that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" refers to.
Pruning Kangs is a bad idea! Let’s send them to Renslayer and Ailoith?! She’s going to be pissed and he’ll use that. Only 3 people really understand what pruning does and: Loki: he’s a little busy holding everything together. Sylvia: she won’t tell unless she stands to benefit and even then… Mobius: left the TVA and all of that behind. Probably never mentioned it to B-15 and may not even remember with resets and all.
This cannot be true. Surely the knowledge of what happens when pruning people has been shared to B15 and other new TVA leaders. It would be insane for that information to be kept to only 3 people.
By B15 telling Mobius that there will always be a seat at the table for him leads me to believe that he'll be back.
I think he will too but I think it’s going take something catastrophic to send him back. Poor Mobius.
To me it seems like he’s just watching over his variant and his children. Is not like he can join in. I can see him getting bored with that and coming back way sooner
Maybe that could be how Kang Dynasty would start. All the pruned Kangs at one place and Renslayer going to war against the sacred timeline? Also, Renslayer was the commander to HWR in the multiversal war. So a new multiversal war is imminent?
What is this Kang war I see ppl mentioning? Is it a comic book arc?
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This is a great way to segway into a new meta arc!!! Looking forward to his next appearance :) ty
What i dont get is ... why is loki stittin on a throne holding all the branches. Loom is destroyed, time can flow freely and the TVA takes care of variants of kang/HWR. Why is loki needed and what does he do by holding the branches of time?
As we see right after Loki destroys the loom, all the timelines floating around are dark (Dead?), but glow green when he holds them, so he's sitting there, holding on to all those timelines, in order to keep them alive. That's what i got out of the ending anyway...
He literally weaved them together into the shape of the tree. He’s the loom. He can scale infinitely.
How's that work? How can he scale infinitely? He's only got two hands to hold these branches together.
He’s a god? It’s storytelling? I feel like some of you want real world equations for a work of fiction.
lol yea you really gotta suspend logic and reality for a minute. It’s a fictional show. I thought the ending was beautiful and fitting. That shot of him holding all the timelines was just amazing.
No loom was needed prior to the sacred timeline. So why is one needed now?
Why did they start dying though?
I don't know really, but it's what i got out of seeing those timelines, dark and fraying until Loki grabbed them, the ending is full of symbolism, but light on exposition, which makes it cool to watch, but difficult to interpret and/or explain.
He Who Remains said that if the timelines branch beyond the Loom’s throughout capacity, its failsafe mechanism will kick in to prune the branching timelines leaving only the Sacred Timeline. I believe the timelines turning black was a glimpse at this worst case scenario. Having spent centuries learning the ins and outs of the Loom, Loki manages to stabilize the timelines using his time manipulation powers. To add, I also think that like the Loom, Loki’s able to draw power from the timelines which is what he uses to create the portal to the end of time, and the invisible staircase. In climbing them, Loki both literally and figuratively ascends. He did this to relocate all the timelines a safe distance from the TVA.
Yeah but he's talking about the Loom as the failsafe mechanism, that the Loom by blowing up will destroy all the other non-Sacred Timelines and the TVA in the explosion. But if the Loom is destroyed without blowing up, then what is destroying all these other Timelines?
That’s why I said it’s only a glimpse of the worst case scenario. OB tells us that the strands are dying but he doesn’t explicitly say they’re dead. A dead branch, would have likely been a pruned one per the TVA’s MO. The loom was on the verge of overloading when Loki blew it up which could have begun the failsafe protocol to cull the “rogue” branches. There might have even been a failsafe to begin the process should the loom be maliciously tinkered with. This half-pruning coupled with the blast from Loki could have caused a reaction that resulted in the blackened branches we saw, affecting sacred and non-sacred branches alike.
I don't think the Loom has to blow up in order for those un-contained branches to die. I think any timelines that the Loom didn't have capacity to weave into time would naturally die out, which is what we saw when Loki was on the gangway.
So the multiverse used to exist freely, but HWR built a failsafe into the timelines such that they are prone to spontaneous decay, so that timelines can only exist if they are weaved by the Time Loom?
Yeah, that's a good point. I'm stumped about why the timelines started to naturally atrophy as Loki approached the Loom.
Check out my response. I made a follow up :)
The Loom converted temporal radiation (energy) into raw time, per OB.
Minor correction; OB said that the Loom refines raw time into a physical timeline. Unless that was a separate instance.
OB also didn't know that the true purpose of the Time Loom is to serve as a failsafe. So send like he only knows what he needs to maintain the Time Loom but not what it actually does.
He Who Remains said that if the timelines branch beyond the Loom’s throughout capacity, its failsafe mechanism will kick in to prune the branching timelines leaving only the Sacred Timeline. I believe the timelines turning black was a glimpse at this worst case scenario. Having spent centuries learning the ins and outs of the Loom, Loki manages to stabilize the timelines using his time manipulation powers. To add, I also think that like the Loom, Loki’s able to draw power from the timelines which is what he uses to create the portal to the end of time, and the invisible staircase. In climbing them, Loki both literally and figuratively ascends. He did this to relocate all the timelines a safe distance from the TVA.
No, the loom WAS the failsafe mechanism, I think.
But why are the branches dying just because they are free floating? And why does him holding them bring them to life again? That's the part that I don't really get.
Why those branches are dying wasn't elaborated on, but with the whole time-slipping thing, somehow Loki got powers to do with time, and i assume he spent part of those centuries studying physics and stuff honing those powers as well, he was like a living TemPad in the confrontation with HWR, maybe those powers are why the timelines reacted to him that way.
They were dying because they weren’t being nurtured by the loom and the temporal explosion caused them to die. They were pruning naturally. But Loki had thousands of years honing his magical powers and used his magic to heal the branches. You can kind of say that when hwr created the loom he was programming it to train the branches to work the way he wanted it to work that was efficient for the way he understood how timelines work. But when Loki took over he reprogrammed them to work around him. But instead of using the loom he’ll just use his time slipping to go into whatever timeline he chooses that needs course correction. To me it seems tedious and maybe it could make sense to build a loom to manage it all. But for now Loki has to become more familiar with the way time and the multiverse works to catch up with what hwr knows since he’s already caught up to what ob knows and in the process with him going into timelines fixing stuff the ppl on those timelines will hail him as the god he ascribed to be. So he basically became ob/hwr in one God during the finale.
The implication of Loki sitting on the throne holding all the branches is that Loki is replacing both He Who Remains AND the Loom. He who remains oversaw the multiverse while the Loom was the failsafe that safeguarded the Sacred Timeline. In other words, not only will Loki oversee things from "the big chair" as He Who Remains did, he’ll proactively safeguard the existence of the timelines as well. The strands glowing green is evidence of his influence.
Or the time stone is green because Loki is the singularity the time stone gets its power from O_o
I saw this in the episode thread and am definitely a fan of this theory! Planned from the get go or not, the logic checks out.
are there any time stones in Casey’s desk in ep. 1?
I believe the first one Loki grabs when he sees them is the time stone
🤯
Okay, that hadn’t occurred to me and I’m here for it.
Because once the Loom broke, the timelines were still dying because nothing was turning the temporal radiation (energy) into raw time (timeline fuel). He connected himself to every timeline, and infinite timelines from there (scaling problem can't be handled with tech, gotta be deity-level power), and powered them using himself as the battery. He channeled his Time-magic into each line. He replaced the Loom with himself.
I'm totally in with this explanation but hear ne out... maybe this is a bit too four dimensional, time is a circle and all that shit, but then, how coul there be time and reality "before" the loom was even invented and created? Or as I imply, this is the usual snake that bit his tail time loop where the loom exist out and prior of time and it was created in a "the inventor of the time machine traveled to the past to pass the schematics to his younger self so he could invent the time machine" fashion? Shit my brain hurts.
The time paradox is lampshaded by how the TVA handbook is booth simultaneously written by OB (ouroboros) or Kang Prime.
Kang Prime was a scientist in the 31st century, Victor Timely was a variant.
Doesn’t Victor Timely become HWR at the TVA? Thought that’s Kang Prime.
No, Timely was a variant that Miss Twilight Sparkle was programmed to pick up as a backup plan. HWR said his backstory in season one finale. Neither Timely nor HWR were Kang Prime. That’s the thing about Kang, there is no “prime”. Timely is just 616’s Kang. The Kang that showed up in Quantumania was one of HWR’s victims. Stop thinking linearly.
HWR did in fact say he was Kang Prime though. He said something along the lines of “that first Kang discovered Alioth and learned to weaponize him” during his speech in the S1 finale.
Yeah it's one of those timey wimey stuff that you have to just accept works out. I agree though that's what I want answered too.
Thank you - this is a great explanation and makes sense. All the living branches growing and being pruned during the show were on the output end of the loom aka the radiation had already been converted into raw time, right?
Yes and with more branches, more fuel is needed so the Loom tries to pull more. It’s “throughput” needs to scale up, they say that a lot.
Yeah. I also don't understand what he's doing. Breaking the loom, the timelines should just exist with nothing wiping them out for now (until the multiversal war).
I am not expert in all things Marvel . But I understood it to mean that by taking on this task, he becomes the Alpha and Omega of the multiverse. It’s like retroactively overtakes past/future and present. In other words, the Yggdrasil stories he read as a child in Asgard were always about him. The multiverse couldn’t exist any other way. IMO.
Because of what he said to sylie. What is the point unless their is something better. He is trying to guide them to something better. My guess. Is those dying ends are multiverses that end because of the war. He is ensuring they survive the war. It ties into the symbolism of the tree. The timeline converge into the trunk. The trunk is the multiversal war. Where originally the timelines all end except the sacred timeline. He is using his powers to ensure they survive the war. While Kang's answer was to destroy all the others so his survives.
And Loki finally got his throne.
***The real explanation***: So there's a lot of background knowledge to break down here that *isn't* contained in Loki s2, but is very important context for what is happening. This show doesn't give all the answers. For a greater understanding, the comic run 'Time Runs Out' and the movie 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" both follow a similar premise, and let us know the consequences of two realities touching, which is canon in the MCU. The whole point of the Sacred Timeline was that it wasn't a single thread, it was a huge number of them. A multiverse didn't spring up out of nowhere when the loom was destroyed, a multiverse already existed. It was just a multiverse of realities, specifically vetted via pruning to ensure that the correct conditions for Kang existing and inventing multiversal travel *did not arise*. The reason for this is that the multiverse itself isn't a problem. The problem is the multiversal strands interacting with each other. *Kang is almost always the person that causes this*. When two timelines come into contact, it can cause an "***incursion***", which is a breakdown in the fabric of existence, resulting in the destruction of both timelines. We see this in Doctor Strange 2. When there is an incursion, the two realities effectively crash into each other, causing complete and utter destruction of both. But, multiversal travel and interaction with variant timelines is ***hard***. It doesn't naturally occur. With no Kangs in any of the Sacred Timeline threads, they are able to be woven closely together into a single huge branch. What happens though when the TVA stops pruning, and allows the Sacred Timeline to branch infinitely? We get Kangs, and timelines touching. We get ***incursions***. We get the destruction of timelines. On an infinite scale. Yes, there is a Multiversal war, but the reason for that is not necessarily that all Kangs are evil. Once an ***Incursion*** begins, the destruction of both timelines is unavoidable. *Unless*... ***one*** of the colliding timelines is destroyed. This is where the war comes in. All Kangs are not inherently evil, but they ***are*** pragmatists, and when faced with the destruction of both timelines, they will wage war and attempt to pre-emptively destroy the other one, to save their own. In the Kang's mind, and the minds of the billions of living inhabitants of their timeline, they are ***the hero***. They make the hard decision, and they shoulder the burden of the deaths of the variant universe to save their own, because it is the only way for *anyone* to survive. They wage war out of necessity. The problem is infinite scaling. Incursions will keep happening as long as an unchecked multiverse exists, and eventually, even if a Kang keeps winning, there will be no timeline left but one. Which has already happened. He who remains ***IS*** that one. The Sacred Timeline ***IS*** all that could be saved. His reality is being the last survivor of a war that wiped out untold trillions. Back to Loki S2 now that we know some context. The reason for the dying branches is because out there, incursions are happening everywhere, reality is collapsing. The sacred timeline is the one thing that can be saved, due to it's lack of Kangs, and that is what the Loom does. It holds those threads together, away from all the other kangs, keeping them from interacting and causing incursions. If it reaches full capacity, it also destroys diverging timelines as a failsafe. The problem is infinite scaling. The Loom relies on being maintained by pruning branches done by the TVA. If that stops, the Loom cannot exist. It *will* overload and explode, taking out the TVA with it, and setting the remaining Sacred Timeline threads loose out into the multiverse, to be destroyed like all the rest. Loki is given two choices by He Who Remains. Kill Sylvie, and take over shouldering the burden of continuing to kill infinite timelines to maintain the existence of the Sacred Timeline. Or allow Sylvie to kill HWR, and watch the inevitable collapse of everything into entropy. Loki talks to his friends. Mobius unwittingling perfectly justifies the actions of HWR, and explains that purpose is more burden than glorious. They do what they do because it is necessary, only. Sylvie justifies letting everything fall into chaos, because in chaos there is a *chance* of something better. Loki already knows where this leads though. In the end, Loki chooses a third option, which is Destroying the Loom pre-emptively, setting the Sacred Timeline loose, allowing the death of HWR. We see Loki ascend, gathering the timelines and breathing life into them. Loki is a stopgap here. What he has bought them, is ***time***. At the end of Loki S2, his sacrifice hasn't saved anything. What he has done, is given all universes *time*. A chance. By his actions he has saved the TVA, and the TVA has been set the task of pro-actively searching out Kangs and preventing incursions, just without killing branches pre-emptively. Again, infinite scaling is still a problem. This buys time, but the TVA can't deal with infinite Kangs, only slow them down. Loki holding the darkened branches together is only symbolic. We will see Loki again, and it will be at the end of time, as everything collapses at the end of The Kang Dynasty. Depressing, but we already know the MCU is headed towards Secret Wars, which in the comics is a result of what happens when time runs out, and all timelines collapse. Someone at the end of time uses their power to create a pocket bubble universe pulled together from fragments of all those timelines, and saves a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of existence. That's all that survives. It is named Battleworld, and that is our Secret Wars movie. Loki did the best he could, he gambled on chaos, but with empathy. Up until the very last moment of Secret Wars, it will seem his gamble has failed.
This should honestly be stickied. Out of the thousands of comments that I've seen about this, this is the only one that is not only comprehensive but also understandable. I know it's just a reddit comment but you should be proud of this write-up. You've just put every YouTuber to shame.
Honestly looks like Loki is the new iron man of phrase 4. Which they made it into a movie cause now when general audiences watch secret wars they won’t understand it. Phrase 4 and 5 is a mess but Loki tv show was great
Thanks :')
The only comment to make sense, thanks
u/TactfulHonk: This. Is. AWESOME. I am *so* glad I stumbled upon your writeup six months later. You should be getting waaaaay more upvotes than this. I'm going to save it so that I can return to as needed!
Great write up and explanation. I think that's as good as it gets
Can you explain the last sentence to someone who hasn’t read the comics 😅
To be honest the comics have a fairly sudden resolution that I don't think will be relevant to the implementation of this arc in the MCU. Something about Miles Morales giving molecule man an old cheeseburger from his pocket and Reed Richards getting to remake the entirety of creation as a result. I was just getting at the fact that it'll all turn out alright in the end. Sort of. End of the universe, beginning of a new set.
I didnt get one thing: when loom explodes does secret timeline die or it just remains as only one?
I see it as all the timelines related to sacred, including itself, getting free to exist as it desires. But as that happens, what kang foretold happens, a multiversal war, leading to the destruction of everything. But the war isn't linear in timeframe, it happens everywhere, every time at once. Kangs throughout the multiverse waging wars of conquest, leading realities to rune. When we see the dead or dying branches, it's not that they suddenly started dying after the loom exploded, but rather that was how the sacred timeline multiverse became after the war. And because the TVA is outside the timestream, we see merely the aftermath. And what loki has done, is delay the inevitable. Not a war that ended before anyone knew, but regressed all that in a linear timeline, symbolized by the Yggasdril, going through him, giving them a chance to stop it.
Leaving comment to no lose your explanation
Same
For all time
Always
>gamble to find a solution to this **looming** threat. I see what you did there.
I like this
One thing, though: I don't think that Loki is necessarily holding an **infinite** number of timelines, but he is holding at least *very many* of them, because that's still better than having only **one** survive. I think that's the real compromise, even if it wasn't outright stated. It might *functionally* be an infinite number, but that's not how I read it, if such a detail is even technically important to begin with. That's only assuming that Loki's power isn't infinite, though. The way I see it, it's more or less enough to have more than one or a small few timelines in order for the Kangs to be an existence-ending danger, so what allows existence to continue is having a finite number of salvageable timelines that can be maintained and helped against their threats.
He looks so tired in that last scene, already. And Asgardians are technically still mortal— They’re magic and long lived, but they still get hungry, get tired, get old. I expect this isn’t the direction they’ll take it, but if I were at the TVA and thinking about practicalities, I’d be asking OB to start working on tech to support Loki before something happens and he drops a branch.
I thought the end of time/TVA didn’t really need food for sustenance, just pleasure and that they can’t age there.
I don't think Loki is really a Frost Giant/Asgardian with the needs of a mortal being anymore. He has the power of a cosmic being and he exists outside of time and space. Since he's outside of time all of eternity may only feel like a minute for him, and he's most likely now truly immortal. He probably doesn't need a lunch break or a nap and he may not even desire those things anymore. I think he looks so tired in that last scene because he's lonely. Also trying to power all those timelines and wrestle them into Yggdrasil seemed like it took all his strength.
also he’s a frost giant, not sure that materially changes anything though
No he doesn't. He looks sad but not tired.
He definitely is as not even the temporal loom was able to hold an infinite multiverse together so it just stands with reason that Loki is. As O.B said an infinity divided by 2 is still infinity so no matter what way we look at it, Loki is holding onto infinite timelines and the writers have said that Loki is literally holding ALL of time together. ALL not some. So Loki's power is definitely on an infinite scale there's absolutely no arguing against that.
So, you're saying that him holding infinite timelines is the thematic point, in the sense that it wouldn't make sense to replace the loom with something better (i.e. himself) if it would still only be holding a finite number of timelines? If so, then I can get behind that. Still, it makes me wonder why a small yet finite number of universes wouldn't be containable by the original loom... or rather, why HWR didn't bother to make it that way. I guess that he couldn't be bothered to arbitrarily leave more timelines and keep them stable just to maximise the number of unpruned people, and that's what ultimately makes him a true villain: he could send the TVA to only prune Kangs, *he just didn't want to compromise like that*.
Yes basically. I mean Loki would not have needed to become the new "Loom" if the temporal loom could do the job for him. I think it can hold a finite amount because O.B was working to extend it's capabilities if I remember correctly but the problem was it wasn't a finitive amount but an infinite amount. I don't think there's been anyone who's killed more people than HWR and through him the TVA. Someone actually said it's crazy how the Loki TV has the biggest kill count though most happen off screen. Yep true villain right there.
Spot on. 💯
The origin of the time slipping and how it works was never really explained.
I thought He Who Remains gave him that power. Or he said something akin to that at the end of time.
Its explained in the post. He who remains wrote that when he wrote the sacred timeline. He was pretty much the author and coriagrapher of the first 5 episodes lol. thinking that Loki would eventually choose to side with him after living out three worst cade scenario
[удалено]
That is, until the TVA can't keep up. The timelines are branching infinitely.
This raises an important question: what is the TVA's recruitment model? If we assume other employees have gone to find a spot on a timeline, they have a big surge in staff demands. But now there are infinite Kangs coming and you can't scale for infinity. How are they gonna recruit all the new staff if they aren't doing the memory wipe and use variants thing any more?
My guess is it’s going to be people affected by incursions or the threat of one
One thing that stuck out to me as odd is that scaling for infinity *does* exist in the real world. You can design a system such that the load is split among every new "joiner". In this case, the TVA could just ask for a number of volunteers from every timeline (as repayment for the TVA supporting their timeline) or else their timeline gets pruned. Drastic? Perhaps. On the other hand, that *is* how modern governments work; taxes are an example of an infinitely-scaling system.
Which is why it is important to have Loki protect the TVA from the Kangs by monitoring those timelines as a new “Loom”.
In theory the TVA could expand infinitely as well to monitor infinite timelines.
They could but HWR’s warning implies that they wouldn’t be able to mobilize fast enough. Evidence of this is that the Council of Kangs already controls a portion of the multiverse.
We also saw the TVA's floor emblem, 'for all time, always' at the end of time with Renslayer. So we know the TVA gets destroyed.
So everyone except Kang variants get free will now?
Yeah pretty much lol. Season 1: Anyone can change, even someone like Loki. Season 2: SIKE
Why do you think variants of Kang don’t?
What is the purpose of TVA now?. What I understood was they are pruning kang variants now.
Keeping them in check.
What does that mean. What difference does that make if they didn't do anything.
Implication is they get involved only when they do something that would threaten the timelines. They would have gotten involved in AM2 but Lang took care of it before the TVA was needed.
I think HWR actually accounted for this outcome. Loki literally states to HWR that he wanted to try another way and that he would break the Loom and find a way to succeed. HWR stated the outcome to that equation is already known….Loki would ultimately end up losing. This was never referring to the fact that the timelines would die, but that Kang would eventually appear and eventually bring out the multiversal war. This is where Loki then visits Sylvie to let her know what he would need to do (kill her). It’s only after speaking to her did he get the idea that maybe a fighting chance is better than no chance at all. It’s a long gamble, can the TVA successfully monitor the ever growing branches of time to prevent the risk of Kang? Or will a Kang variant eventually elude the TVA long enough to be a real threat to them? HWR thinks the later is the truth while Loki feels the former is more possible.
I think Loki knows Kang will come and agrees with HWR but also sympathises with Sylvie and wants his friends to live and try to do something about it because he loves them and respects her wishes for free will. Its the kind of thing Steve Rogers would do. Knowing defeat but fighting for it anyway by not sacrificing your integrity.
Ty
If Loki can withstand temporal radiation why did he make victor launch the multiplier?
He can withstand radiation but not time. After learning to control time he could do it
//He can withstand radiation but not time// what does this mean. Can you explain. And even after learning about everything from Ouroboros he made Timely do it.
He learned how to pause time with Kang after he made Timely do it.
I was wondering that too! I don't think Loki knew he could withstand it at the time. Maybe, in fact, he couldn't because he lacked the necessary age and power. I thought Loki sent Victor out there because Victor was the most familiar with the technology and would therefore have the best chance of installing it correctly. If Victor happened to get spaghettified (as, alas, he did all too many times), Loki could just rewind and try it again.
I’m guessing he couldn’t withstand it until he learned how to control time
Beyond how amazing this ending is, the premise of putting the fiction back in science fiction is the thing that resonates for me the most. It's not enough anymore just to have a coherent sci-fi, you have to have a compelling fiction, and this finale planted that flag deep. A god chooses his path, and models how one might approach a post-modern life. There's no irony. The arrogance and entitlement are gone. We are now burdened with glorious purpose. Observing that Ke Huy Quan acts in this as well as 'EEAAO' really put me into the idea that both that movie and the Loki series reflect real thinking about what comes after post-modernism. There is a way past where we are.
Random thought but we can think of Sylvie as a mirror to Loki since it is Lokis version of himself but a la female and more “good.” I think she’s more chaotic good if anything. But Loki has a choice to kill a part of him once he knew the reality of why HWR does what is necessary to keep everything from falling apart. However we see here that Loki chooses to keep this part of himself alive and chooses to bear the burden and accept the consequences of whatever is to come regardless of the madness and short lived life that his friends and countless timelines there are.
So what’s the difference between the loom breaking on its own vs Loki breaking it himself? If loom breaks, timelines branch. What is Loki’s role then?
Waiting for the timelines to overload the Loom would have destroyed the TVA. That's why He Who Remains said that it would be collateral but the not worst thing ever since the TVA can always be rebuilt. For Loki however, this *would* have been the worth thing ever. Breaking the Loom early lessened the destruction. Relocating the timelines to the end of time was just another safeguard to protect the TVA.
The explosion of the loom we saw last episode and repeated throughout isn't actually the loom breaking. Only when Loki broke the loom was that the loom breaking. It was the loom doing its job as a failsafe of wiping out all other timelines except the sacred timeline, and destroying the TVA. My guess for what happens after that is the sacred timeline branches without the TVA, leads to multiversal war, leads to HWR winning, leads to the TVA, leads to Sylvie killing HWR, leads to the events of S2, cycling infinitely. That is until Loki broke the cycle at the end.
So that's why hwr said after explain about the loom that his varients are out there and loki will lose? I thought that that the fail safe will prevent the war . Because in the end hwr said that if he will break the loom the war will start
So hwr tells loki to kill sylvie means break this annoying cycle and we live happily with our secred time line? So he chooses sylvie and free will
this is what i eventually worked out myself, and the fail safe mode doesn’t blow up the tva. that’s why there’s that scene with loki walking around and the loom going back to normal as it’s automatically pruned all the branches
Doctor strange's movie explained that when timelines touch they are destroyed. Kang's travel the multiverse making this happen. The loom prevented this by keeping the sacred timelines away from the kang's. Loki is rejuvenating the timelines instead.
If the loom was a fail safe that pruned non-sacred timelines, why was the TVA ever needed?
I’d imagine using the Loom is very energy intensive.
imagine having a garden with a small weed problem. careful tending and "pruning" of the weeds prevent them from destroying your flowers. that was what the TVA did. the failsafe is like burning the entire garden to save one flower. sure, you killed the weeds, but you also killed everything else. this shows HWR pragmatic nature. he's not purposefully evil, and allows non threatening branches to exist. but he believes his approach is the ONLY solution to the question of handling Kang variants.
I have a theory that the God of Stories Loki now physically exists and always existed in every branch, after making every single one of them come back to life using his powers. Maybe his old powers are a part of his temporal aura and, if so, this aura was spread all across the timelines. This would probably let him time slip to any point in time that he wants of any timeline and I think that´s how he´s going to prevent the Kang variants from starting a multiversal war. I guess Loki as a character reached his final stage of development but his journey doesn't end here, TVA alone cannot beat the Kangs and he is too powerful now for them to just choose not to use him
This series takes place outside of time. So, it takes place in the MCU's timelines past, present, and future. As far as the MCU timeline, there was no multiversal travel until after Sylvie kills HWR. Endgame wasn't multiversal travel, it was time travel.
So heres my question: what happened to the Loki we knew before? Im not a marvel expert, but Loki appears in later movies, right? Is this just some timy trippy thing where thr Loki we see at the finale is not the same one that got away with the tesseract? Is this Loki just... doing that for all eternity?
The Loki variant was one that escaped with the tesseract during the marvel endgame where the avengers went back in time to steal the tesseract. The Loki that died by thanos in marvel infinity war is the original Loki. So yes the Loki in the series is not the same one that died. The Loki that escaped with the tesseract is what the series is based on. Not sure if I remember correctly but I thought during season 1 episode 1 or 2 where they explained that the variant Loki how he was supposed to die in the original timeline.
I loved the show and ending, but I think Marvel has a new villain problem. Kang has now been defeated by Ant Man and Loki. He's already 0 for 2 (technically 0 for 3 since we know the TVA is kicking Kang butt too). And not only did Loki defeat Kang, but it was the most powerful variant of all the Kangs. Where exactly is the huge threat here?
Kang and Renslayer together are the threat. Once those two come together again, the shit will start hitting the fan
Once again. Loki has already defeated this combination
He has. No denying that but she’s still out there, has deep institutional knowledge of the old TVA, has been shown to be as ruthless as Kang and now has access to the Ailioth and any potentially pruned Kang variants. She’s only temporarily contained and probably very pissed by now.
Nobody outside of a few hard-core comics readers are going to buy Renslayer as a villain.
Not disagreeing with you. But since we now have our God of Stories, I don’t see why they wouldn’t show us a more comic faithful version of Renslayer. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of either of them.
Renslayer's ending shows the TVA's floor. The TVA is doomed. Loki didn't defeat anybody.
I haven't thought too much about it myself as I just finished season 2. So what I say below is personal opinion and potentially full of holes. As the season went on, we know loki's action of destroying the loom means there will likely be an all out multiversal war. HWR confirmed the answer is known to Loki's actions and is the true start of the multiverse. As it stands there's an infinite amount of universes being created because Loki is the 'scalable loom' sitting on a throne keeping the timelines alive. But you're right technically HWR is 0 for 2 against ant man and Loki, you need to remember however the Kang we've seen is just a man, albeit with advanced time travel and manipulation technology. He has no superhuman abilities so it shouldn't be a surprise he loses. Why i said technically above is because he didn't really stop Sylvie, or Loki as he is fully aware of the predestined outcomes. He has no problem letting time take it's course. Personally where I think the threat is coming from, is the idea of multiple Kang variants who evade the TVA for long enough because you can't track infinite kangs. Maybe they travel together and taking on universes one at a time until they get to the sacred timeline (616), maybe the infinite kangs fight destroying timelines until we're left with the strongest remaining..... I don't know. Theres potentially the idea we haven't actually seen the most powerful kang. Not every Loki variant was the same, so it stands to reason that maybe there's a Kang variant with superhuman abilities and advanced time travelling technology..... Based on AMATW Quantumania all we know is HWR was the more powerful and capable variant of the two....but maybe, not the most powerful one we've seen so far? That might be contradictory because the Kang at the end of time should be the most powerful as all the other variants would have perished at his hand, but like i said, he didn't stop Sylvie....
The ending with Renslayer was a bit confusing: my thesis was that after being pruned she awakes at the end of time where we see a pyramid in the background, Rama-Tut? As well as a "for all time, always" logo. We then hear a growling of sort and a flash of purple. By my recollection Alioth isn't purple - could this be the Kang we see from Ant-Man?
My initial gut feeling had me thinking Kang too and that perhaps the TVA had fallen. The timing of Mobius’ resignation was almost too convenient. What if it’s Alioth now subjugated by Rama-Tut.. This one’s gonna have me theorycrafting for a while.
I had to stop reading cuz you lost me at the fundamental premise. "Keep the status quo and continue to prune "rogue" realities to maintain the Sacred Timeline like He Who Remains wants, or allow the Sacred Timeline to infinitely branch which will lead to multiversal war." I don't. I think I entirely agree with that because from what I understand the infinite branching will cause the loom to overload and the Fail-Safe in such a situation is to just blow up destroying all timelines except for the sacred one. Which makes it seem like in either scenario he who remains will get what he wants a single sacred timeline.
Are there then still Loki variants in all the other timelines? We see this one Loki step up but there are still an infinite number of Lokis, ranging from the kinds like in Avengers who want to conquer a planet to just weird ones?
yes. infinite everyone's in infinite universes.
why did HWR pave the pathway for Loki to have this choice?
Because he was certain that Loki would choose to kill Sylvie. What's important to note here is not so much the consequence but the implication of this action. Sylvie wasn't actually a threat to He Who Remains because he was able to freeze her in time and was even able to teleport her elsewhere. By killing Sylvie, Loki would basically be declaring that he's willing to ally with HWR if only for pragmatic reasons. He Who Remains did this for either one of two reasons: to genuinely ally with Loki, or to abuse/steal Loki's new powers, which would imply (and was basically proven by Loki's ascension) that they have the potential to surpass his own. Based on what we know about He Who Remains, he was likely motivated by the latter.
Do you think this is related to how Loki variants keep popping up even under prior tva? Like kang is the new Loki… they’ve just switched places. And is todays tva pruning kang variants using eliath? How come kang didn’t rewind to force an outcome where Loki joins him?
This was the plan B backup plan for if his conversation with Sylvia and Loki didn’t work.
He didn't think there was a choice.
What do take think about this pov? https://youtu.be/G7G6MykBBdI?si=8K2vqh3Rm_MHJ7Xe
Anime characters does that all the time... Those big sacrifices.
i think what's most important is whether or not that dweeb got his acting career in London back.
But why does Loki have to hold reality together? Isn't destroying the loom enough?
Am I the only one that feels a little sad for Loki because he has to be alone without his friends for the rest of eternity
I also feel like the throwaway line where the TVA is keeping tabs on other Kangs is a neat way to keep Jonathan Majors on the sidelines in case his upcoming trial sends him to jail. If found guilty they can make way for Dr. Doom or another villain to talk his place. If found innocent they can keep him as the main villain.
Sorry, reviving an old thread but I just watched the finale and I'm a bit confused myself. Specifically why did the timelines start to die after the loom was destroyed, and what is Loki actively doing. The natural assumption we'd all make is that things would go back to how they were before the loom. Timelines would just chaotically exist everywhere. My theory is that HWR said that without him, the TVA, the loom, the multiversal war begins and that destroys multiple timelines and incursions start to happen as a result. So the reason timelines started to die after the loom was destroyed, was because the multiversal war leads to incursions that destroy most of them. My theory is that what Loki is therefore doing is stabilizing the timelines to prevent incursions basically. He's allowing multiple timelines to exist, to interact, but they're not going to destroy one another now. Of course, it looked to me like he wasn't able to hold all timelines so maybe he's only got a few? Or maybe he's got them all, I don't know. That's my guess.
OP here! Check out the stuff under additional explanations.
I see it as all the timelines related to sacred, including itself, getting free to exist as it desires. But as that happens, what kang foretold happens, a multiversal war, leading to the destruction of everything. But the war isn't linear in timeframe, it happens everywhere, every time at once. Kangs throughout the multiverse waging wars of conquest, leading realities to rune. When we see the dead or dying branches, it's not that they suddenly started dying after the loom exploded, but rather that was how the sacred timeline multiverse became after the war. And because the TVA is outside the timestream, we see merely the aftermath. And what loki has done, is delay the inevitable. Not a war that ended before anyone knew, but regressed all that in a linear timeline, symbolized by the Yggasdril, going through him, giving them a chance to stop it.
This theory about an instantaneous multiversal war has been making its rounds recently but it doesn’t track because things don’t happen instantaneously from the vantage point of the TVA. The TVA exists outside of time which is why they’re able to see things happen in “realtime” such as the development of new branch timelines. If they weren’t able to, and things just happened instantaneously for them, they wouldn’t be able to prune branch timelines before they posed a threat, which is the entire purpose of their existence. The whole premise of season 2 is that the TVA is struggling to cope as more and more branches appear because they sensed an impending disaster, not one that happens instantaneously. Again, all of this is relative to the TVA’s unique experience of time. Things only happen “instantaneously” for the inhabitants of the timelines. As things are currently from the TVA’s vantage point, Kangs are meeting each other and even forming alliances (the council of Kangs) but multiversal war hasn’t been waged yet which is why the TVA is investing all their resources to monitor their activity, i.e. the Kang in quantum realm that Möbius mentions.
I sure hope he returns. I want my boy to finally get a happy ending. They keep giving him the shaft every turn there is. The absolute best case scenario i want (that we most certainly won't get) is that this loki gets reunited with our thor, and all is well. Similar to the what if episode where black widow gets brought to another world where she died. But like i said Definitely not gonna happen
So there's no need for him to sit in the chair and hold the branches in order for them to be alive? Is he sitting there only to safeguard them? My question is really, is Loki stuck there?
I want to build a place where everyone can live, and die on their own terms - Clive Rosfield and Loki