This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame and the wider MCU
Our first look at Marvel‘s merchandise for its summer-set Loki series has arrived, and in the words of the great American poet Billy Ray Cyrus, there is much to think about.
The initial wave of merch, which has been described by some Twitter fan accounts as “cursed”, “ugly”, “horrible” and “some kind of punishment”, was on full display in the Zazzle store this week far ahead of Loki’s June premiere, but despite a few of its questionable design choices, it does give us a better idea of how much of the show is going to be about time travel: a lot.
The timey-wimey nature of the merch tracks with Loki’s first trailer. When we last saw the God of Mischief, he had snatched the Tesseract from the possession of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes during the Time Heist in Avengers: Endgame, presumably creating a branch reality in which he didn’t return to Asgard for punishment and never really went on to learn any of the kind of lessons that led to him – albeit accidentally – sacrificing his life when challenged by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. Yes, Loki is a scoundrel, but this Loki is a slighhhhtly bigger scoundrel than the one who helped Thor, Hulk and Valkyrie escape Hela and the massive Asgardian destruction that was Ragnarok.
Loki’s spinoff show sees him being acquired as a potential asset by the Time Variance Authority, led by Owen Wilson’s Mobius M. Mobius. The bureaucratic organization acts as a sort of temporal clean-up and monitoring service that tries to keep tabs on every reality in the multiverse and correct problems in the timeline, so it’s no surprise that Loki has suddenly caught their eye, and clearly the TVA thinks that they might be able to “convince” the puny god to assist in cleaning up some temporal mess.
If the first Loki trailer is anything to go by, this employment doesn’t exactly go smoothly, but would we expect anything less than inevitable disobedience from the MCU’s most beloved villain?
Still, the merch does confirm that Loki will spend at least some time working for the TVA before perhaps deciding that chaos is much more fun. We also get a look at what appears to be the TVA mascot, Miss Minutes, and get a sense that the series will see Loki encountering multiple versions of himself. Since we’ve already seen a little of Marvel Comics’ Vote Loki run referenced in the trailer, it makes sense that the story would also embrace a little more of his comics history by putting its own spin on something like Journey Into Mystery or Agent of Asgard, too.
“What makes a Loki a Loki?” indeed. You can see the merch for yourself below…
If you cba clicking on those tweets, just hit this link to peruse the Loki merch via the store at your leisure!
Loki stars Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Sophia Di Martino, Sasha Lane, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Wunmi Mosaku and Richard E. Grant, and will start streaming on Disney+ from June 11.