When last we left him, he and his ersatz self were staring down a planetary collision on Lamentis 1. This is a show about Loki! God of Mischief. ![]() It’s disappointing here, even more so than the mark missed on gender expression another instance of Black characters enduring suffering on the sidelines of a white narrative.Īh, yes, white narratives. Again, that this is happening to characters of color, specifically to Black people, is an issue that seems ill-considered in the context of the show it’s never explored or interrogated, and the idea that a Black woman is, herself, at the head of it does not excuse this kind of thing. The narrative behind the TVA is truly repulsive when it’s revealed: Each of its soldiers are variants, each of them were stolen from lives where they were happy, brainwashed, and put to work for an oppressive regime without a say in the matter. It’s a depersonalization along the lines of Finn’s Stormtrooper identifier of FN-2177 in the newer Star Wars films, and it does not escape notice that it seems to be happening only to people of color. The treatment of the TVA soldiers is another while Mobius gets character and identity, the rank-and-file are referred to as B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) or C-20 (Sasha Lane), when they’re referred to at all. That is only one instance where the episode falters. It’s not fluid if Sylvie was always a woman, if Loki was always a man. The show takes care to point out that Sylvie was always a girl, which I expected, but was nonetheless disappointed by given the presence of the forms marking Loki’s sex as “fluid,” I was hoping for a bit more than “there are multiple Lokis and some of them are girls.” That’s not really the same thing fluidity of gender and sex is the concept that a single person can move through them, not that disparate, alternate versions of the same person have their own distinct genders. It was from Renslayer that Sylvie escaped, still as a child. As the episode starts we see exactly how Sylvie came to be an enemy of the TVA: It was Renslayer herself plucking Sylvie from her home on Asgard as a child and resetting the timeline. ![]() Of course, she doesn’t quite have that excuse. ![]() It’s easy to want to protect the familiar, the sense of safety that comes with it, and even easier to dismiss the injustice done to others if one can’t see it happening directly. She clearly has a vested interest in protecting the Time Keepers’ secrets, but … all of them? What is it about this situation that makes her side with the oppressors? I suppose that’s the trap of power and comfort. As this show goes on, Judge Ravonna Renslayer is proving a fascinating enigma.
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