Covid has ushered in an age of anxiety. Mathematical models for mapping the spread of the virus are statistical and lived experiences that affect collective identities and relationships to illness are part of neoviralism (Nancy p. 34). This paper examines Loki, the 2021 Marvel TV series about the Norse God of Mischief who is caught by the Time Variance Authority, run by mysterious ‘timekeepers’ who are focused on protecting the ‘sacred’ timeline. The production of the show was paused on March 13, 2020. Loki is a variant disrupting the sacred timeline. He exists as the inevitable offshoot of the nature of causality, not as chaos, but as possibility. I argue in this paper that by reading Loki, one can imagine crip temporalities that bring together transhistorical temporal and spatial dynamics in media analysis. Examining the dynamics between certainty and never-ending uncertainty are not only metaphors for the issues at stake in the analysis of representation and matter, but they are also contradictory in nature. The disruption in production enables us to explore what disruption means for today’s convergent topographical media.
At that time, director Kate Herron, cutting the show at home, had a creative impulse to further the love story between Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Sylvie (Sophie di Martino), the female variant of Loki. Sylvie is another version of Loki from another universe. All Loki’s are considered Variants because they exceed the rules of the time line and cause nexus events which then deem then necessary to be removed from their time lines in the name of keeping order in the sacred chronological time line. In this multi-world story, there are many separate timelines and many Lokis. Through analyzing the disruptions in the production alongside the text and Loki as a transhistorical rhetorical and mythological figure, we come to view the film as a crip commentary on the complex ethics of collectives between the future and the anti-futurist lens of chora. I consider how disruption, argued to be a criptime, affects the convergence of media through alterations in the spatiotemporal fabric of human interactions enforced by social distancing, and how the enduring rhythms of lockdown/confinement experiences impacted the production, text, and potentialities of the show. The television show Loki expands the Marvel Cinematics Universe exploration of the character Loki, using time as the concept that brings the narrative to be. Picking up from Avengers Endgame (2012) the TV show opens with a clip where the Avengers were traveling back in time to get the tesseract and Loki time traveled escaping with the special stone. The TV show reused this movie directly from the movie drawing together the film world in. This brings us to the novel ways in which Marvel is making a move to television to further expand its reach into media. While previous television shows had been produced with less popular reception and an array of kids tv shows had been made, the partnering with Disney+ made WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki key new components of its lineup. WandaVision released on January 15, 2021 showing the powerful ways in which Marvel might use the shows to articulate further in depth characters. The shows analyze gender; Falcon and the Winter Soldier examines race and American identity, while Lokiintroduces the tricky bad guy from The Avengers Films and brings the concept of the ‘multi-verse’. The multi-verse describes the ways in which multiple universes operate at once. A part of the comics, and an important part of new films and merging timelines of characters and plot lines. This multi-layered notion of time is not unfamiliar to modern science fiction fans or physicists. Or even postmodern theorists. Literary scholars have taken up the critique of film and television as popular forms of media that both represent identities and cultural tropes, but also inform them. Comics are a particularly interesting place to question temporal issues and theorizing the temporality of disability and its relationship to media is a critical move in disability scholarship as Magnet and Watson note (p. 246-248). Fawaz argues for popular fantasy as a way of examining fantasy literature, “Popular fantasy describes the variety of ways that the tropes and figures of literary fantasy…come to organize real-word social and political relations.” (p. 27). Through looking for places and times in which collectives form the critique examines the affective relations of how we are ‘enchanted’ or seduced into collective identities and meaning making. This critique will also pay close attention to the effects and possibilities of “retro-futurism” an aesthetic that comes from Lloyd Dunn in 1983, which was used to describe the futuristic style of the past brought into new forms, creating a form of unease, both comforting nostalgia and sadness at the future that was never to be (Jihong 2019, Bublex, & During, E. 2014). Retro-futurism is seen in steampunk, Back To The Future, and Science Fiction novels, in all its variants it operates as a time traveling discourse to show us futures that could have been, but did not come to arrive. Glorious Purpose The show begins with Loki (Tom Higgleston) being taken to the Time Variance Authority (TVA), where he is stripped, goes through a metal detector like machine which destroys people who do not have souls. He then signs papers on everything he has ever seen, we see the bureaucratic functions of seemingly wasteful time taking processes elaborated here step by step. He is given a grey jumpsuit with the TVA logo and a neck collar which allows the TVA agents to control him where they can move him and even erase him; a cage of the body and time in its entirety. He is forced to go through multiple bureaucratic functions, like an intake into a medical process. An educational video orients Loki to the TVA, where Miss Minutes, a cute cartoon clock, explains the TVA. The animated film breaks down the essentials of the TVA, her job is to inform variants before they go to trial, in a history told, she says long ago a multi-versal war happened where almost everything died, but then all knowing time-keepers emerged to bring peace merging all time into one sacred timeline in order to protect and preserve time and the proper flow of everything. Variants are those who created a nexus event, by being late to work or doing something against their role. To make sure these nexus events do not branch into new timelines, the TVA takes variants and places them on trial to make sure that the sacred timeline stays in tack. “For All Time Always”. In Loki’s trial Judge Rensselaer, lays judgement on Loki, they ask him to plead, and he pleads guilty, but in typical Loki fashion he fails. He tries to use his powers to leave, but then learns that his magic powers do not work in the TVA. He is sentenced to be reset. Mobius (Owen Wilson) steps in to intervene on his judgement and says he thinks he can use Loki for his own purposes. We begin to see the futility of Loki’s pictures of his free will versus destiny complicate a simple reading of Loki’s character. The TVA itself is a retro-future throwback. Mobius brings Loki back to his office, where they go through a series of films run on projector film and displayed in digital imaging on a theater wall, showing Loki what his life would have been like and reviewing his past. Loki begins to break down emotionally at the weight of his future ones, where he sacrifices his mother for his own gain of power. The breaking down of Loki happens through an institutional room where we see written 5, time theater printed on the back of the wall. The computer Mobius uses is a round orange computer. The colors of Orange and grey dominate the TVA and the episode. They force him to review his life and understand that he has no future, except with the TVA. Loki begins the questioning by saying that choice is the biggest lie ever given to humanity, but he himself is the exception and weaker beings must live by that. Mobius questions Loki’s ideas of himself as a ruler through pointing out his multiple failures which all took place in previous Marvel films. Mobius reframes Loki as a murderer and his escapes including placing Loki as D.B. Cooper. Loki emerging here as another historical mischief maker, marks the disjunctive nature of Loki’s transhistorical narrative. Beyond the comic books and the movies there underlie his Norse mythological roots. Loki’s trajectory from Norse myth brings to light the ways in which any text is haunted by its past. Loki comes from Norse mythology, with his earliest written appearances in Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, and Heimskringla, compiled in the 13th century. The invocations of Loki vary in their uses throughout history but have often been called on for transgressive political arrangements. Loki is known in contemporary representations for his “pathological anti-social destructiveness...this prominence invites curiosity and uneasiness” (Hume 298). Tricksters are rhetorically disabled, a way in which disabled critical theory can be conceptualized and deployed to challenge normative logos (Delmoge). Loki is gender bending, time traveling, and an inevitably complex character. He is sometimes the brother of Thor and sometimes the brother of Odin, depending on who tells the tale. In my attempts to articulate a crip temporality within the Marvel TV series, the historical trajectory of Loki cannot be dismissed. Perhaps Loki is a call towards a ‘glorious purpose’ for crip theory, I think Loki as a character in the show, comics, history and reincarnations employs, Mētis that Jay Delmoge defines as a rhetorical trickiness, or sidestepping, as a movement of crip. Delmoge invokes Hephaestus as a symbol of the crip body that functions to discern our orientations of normativity and is also necessary. One interesting way in which the discourse around Loki has been mined is in the work of Grundtvig, a Danish political writer who typifies what Kulik and Rydstrom describe as a more anti-authoritarian attitude, embodied by Denmark when compared to its northern neighbor, the more uptight statist individualistic Sweden. With this, the phrase quoted is “freedom for Loki as well for Thor…a reference to the Norse deities associated with trickery (Loki) and righteousness (Thor). It means that society must facilitate the space for debate, and for coexistence between different extremes of opinions and values” (226 and 245). Swedish notions of individualism place a high value on independence, and both cultures have developed state welfare systems. The Swedish system of welfare aims to destroy its own systems and, as Kulik and Rydstrom note, sounds positively utopian for disability. However, there is a catch in which those who are not able to be fully independent are left out of the identity, and thus, their ability to love or be loved is deemed impossible and not supported by the welfare system (Kulik and Rydstrom 229-231). This nuanced examination of the differences between seemingly similar cultures in the Western historical hegemonic conglomerate has led to what we understand culturally as Viking culture, and Scandinavian roots are rarely explored. The overarching Norse myth has been passed down as a hegemonic belief system. Loki’s bisexuality is noted in the television series, albeit briefly, in a conversation between him and Sylvie, in which they both comment that they have had both “prince and princess” lovers in the past. Loki in Norse mythology is associated with gender bending and even helps his brother go drag. In the story, Thor’s hammer is stolen and held for ransom by a frost giant, who demands to be married to Freya. Loki and Thor are given a plan by Odin to trick the giant into believing that they are Freya and her handmaiden. As they are dressing, Thor protests that no one will believe their drag performance, and is told in response, “Oh, yes they will.” Loki twirls in his long dress and head scarf. “I look quite beautiful, don’t I” (Alexander 67). Loki also gives birth to his own child in one tale: the child is Sleipner, a horse. This comes from references in the poem Hyndluljóð, “Lopt was impregnated by a wicked woman, from whom every ogress on earth is descended” (Larrington 250). These mythologies have ran through Loki’s trajectory as a transhistorical identity, one who both is tricky, has non-heteronormative birth to monsters and enjoys drag. This certainly places Loki as a queer figure amongst other Norse deities. Norse mythology occupies a smaller space of academic interest than its Greek and Roman kin. In Edith Hamilton’s bestselling 1942 book Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, Norse mythology is placed in the final chapter after “Less Important Myths.” In an important summary of the shallower interest from Hamilton’s perspective lies her final quote: “By race we are connected with the Norse: our culture goes back to the Greeks” (353). From their mythological systems stems some interesting differentiations in the conception of time as opposed to chronological time, which we associate with most narrative storytelling and history. One event precedes another, and thus follows the inevitable future. Even reading Loki’s past is done through a Christianized co-option of the text. As Lindow writes, the linguistic confusion between past and present tense is frequently mistranslated, or purposely translated, particularly where Ragnarök, the end times in Norse mythology, is written from a now-past Christian present. This leads to the new Christian God placing Thor and Christ in a battle, with the inevitable winning of Christ and the Norse mythology being placed in the past, and possibly past tense. Current readings of the Scandinavian texts are primarily from Latin texts, which were written in the “time and space of early Christianity” (45). The confusion is both in the translation proper, and in the rewriting of the past from its pre-Christian original. In Norse mythology, the gods fight with the people, and their fates are not necessarily predestined. Marvel creates disruptions in mythology and its reinterpretations. In Thor: Love and Thunder, (2022) Zeus were the Head of Gods but Thor was able to defeat him, the liberal reuse and deployment of Marvel causes multiple waves of possible historical disruptions to chronological storytelling. Thor is Loki’s brother, his stepbrother according to most myths. Loki is half frost giant, half god of Asgard. He is often evil, sometimes good, and always embodies trickery. “Loki makes the world more interesting but less safe. He is the father of monsters, the author of woes, the sly god. Loki drinks too much, and he cannot guard his words or his thoughts or his deeds when he drinks. Loki and his children will be there for Ragnarök, the end of everything, and it will not be on the side of the gods of Asgard that they will fight” (Gaiman 14). Loki is in a popularly retold tale: he and Thor go to get something back, and he is dressed as a woman to trick the giants into believing that he and Thor are women. Thor gives them away after burping over beer, but they get what they need. The theme of Loki as excessive is common, his association with drinking and being unable to hold back his truth is one way in which we see Loki’s excess. Viking culture and its Norse gods were incorporated into Christian timelines. Unlike other colonialisms, the story is more of assimilation than one of destruction and new peoples arising. Interestingly the Swedes were the last to convert, even further complicating the now uptight nature of the Swedes. Perhaps the Christian notions of dependency lay root to the dangers of assimilation via any relinquish of individualism. Regardless of such speculation, as history goes Vikings thus become another tale in the conquest of Christian Colonialism and the greater European project. Variangent: Agents of Time And back to the TV Show, Loki breaks down watching images of his father and brother, realizing that his ideas of who he was are not where he is. The memories on the wall break him down and we get a tender side of Loki not yet seen in the films. Seeing his own evil nature, he truly has a reckoning with his own identity. The title of this episode is, Glorious Purpose. Loki has employed the term in earlier Marvel films. In the film franchise Loki has used Glorious Purpose as a phrase to outline his ultimate goal of ruling the universe – in the process of his conversation with Mobius and watching his entire life, his own sense of agency is disrupted and his perception of him being the bearer of free will against a world out to get him is turned around. This change in perspective leads to him deciding to join the TVA as a variant agent. Loki now joins the hunt for disruptive variants, incorporated into the sacred timelines purpose. We first meet the other variant who we later learn is Slyvie in a cut scene where minute men from the show go to 1858 tracing down variant energy in the town of Salina, Oklahoma. The A figure in a red hooded cloak setting fire to fields she has drawn the agents there to steal their time temps, the power needed to traverse time and jump timelines. The space and time here are significant, this was the place where oil was first discovered in Indian Territory. Sylvie has brought the minute men to a place and point in history where she wants to disrupt and call their attention, the discovery of oil in Selina. A newspaper clipping from 1906 states, “The oil springs in this nation are attracting considerable attention, as they are said to be a remedy for all chronic diseases. Rheumatism stands no chance at all, and the worst cases of dropsy yield ot its effects (Wright 1906). The idea that oil was a cure for disease disrupts and combines histories of medicalization and capitalism. The Osage tribes wealth and their mysterious murders is documented in Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Gran (2018). This historical novel unveils the hidden history of how in the early 1900’s the Osage tribe members were the wealthiest people in the world due to their oil rich land in North Eastern Oklahoma. Newspapers and public imaginaries were fascinated with these ‘rich Indians’. A series of murders in the 1910’s – 1920’s led to the newly formed FBI sending in agents, who eventually discovered a conspiracy to marry tribal women and kill family members. Not only that but in Gran’s work he discovers the way coroners and doctors covered up deaths by proclaiming them to be from alternate causes than murders. The systematic killing of the Osage was part of a medicalized process to eliminate the Osage. Many deaths were undocumented due to Hoover’s desire of realizing his dream bureaucratic institution, the F.B.I. This brief historicizing of the blood in the land, leads us to the layers of depth in the show. The T.V.A. itself is a bureaucratic institution obsessed with recording and documenting as seen in scenes where Loki and Mobius delve into the files of the organization.[i] Covid Surprise Time: Crips’ Temporality and Neoviralism Loki’s timing coincides in terms of production and reception with Covid-19, a specific instance of global cripping that reordered the spatial and temporal rhythms of neoliberal production and life. This moment provided a pause by way of a ‘surprise event,’ following Jean-Luc Nancy’s articulation of a ‘surprise event.’ In Nancy’s terms, this is a way of allowing for new potentialities that allow us to think about the ways in which Covid itself was aa collective break in time of typical working order. As Covid stopped the clock, people entered lockdown. The fear of an unknown virus caused society to pause. That pause was not equal, front-line workers, mostly under-paid necessary workers and health care workers were forced to encounter the unknowns at a consistent rhythm. The fear was that we may all become disabled. The break in time put people in their homes and away from their families and normal day to day rhythms. This pause in life was done with heroic notions in its rhetorical gesturing, but as lockdowns wore on the rise of neo-viralists led to decries against the government encroaching on individual liberties. At the same time the surprise event of Covid forced us all to reckon with the possibility of society collapsing, something that previously had seemed impossible in the never-ending teological machine of never ending neo-liberal growth. The director gets more time to visit the film’s development and decides to focus more on the love story. Kate Herron, the female director, said, “When we were locked down…I started editing everything we filmed already, and..something that became really clear…was just that the heart and the tone of it was definitely leaning towards, you know, the show definitely wears its heart on its sleeve” (Crowley 2021). The focus on Loki and Sylvie’s relationship growing was essential to portraying the effect correctly in the story. Sylvie deserves more attention at this point. Her power is as an enchantress in the show. She was abducted as a child by the Time Variance Authority (TVA) for creating a nexus event. The taking of a child reflects how far the TVA will go to enforce its time authority. After going through screening, she escapes by biting a captor and stealing a TemPad. The love story is a crip story. First both characters come out as bi-sexual in the show. They are both the same people, in different forms on other timelines. It problematizes even the homonormative nature of loving one’s own gender. Loki’s non-equal other from another timeline is a woman; is this heteronormativity Loki and Loki’s love is especially non-heteronormative because they are destined for death throughout. It is key to look at the story and where they are forced to hide—the only place where they would not be found. It is at the end of any timeline, with the inevitably of apocalypse, that they can go unnoticed. “All the crises in which we are caught – and of which the COVID-19 pandemic is only one minor effect, in comparison to many others – proceed from the unlimited extension of the free use of all the available forces, natural and human, in view of a production that has no end other than itself and its own power...” (Nancy p. 43) The limits of neo-liberalism appear to hang on the possibility of death itself and uncertainty. To embrace uncertainty as a radical call for response, is to in the face of death still go on. Nancy’s body of work focuses on collectives, and, I will argue, is in line with McRuer’s call for crip collectives of radical politics that do not attempt to get rid of the messy. Badious event does exactly that, in favor of truth. No matter how complicated it is, it still does not allow for the uniqueness of a collective deviance, which is what we are reaching for in crip politics. I believe COVID was a crip time, collective felt, yet a surprise event. Allison Kafer wrote that the AIDS epidemic could be viewed as a crip/queer time in a footnote. Kafer refers to McRuer’s call for the importance to focus on examining queer theory, AIDS, and disability studies, which calls attention to the need to view the AIDS epidemic and queer and disability studies as necessary allies in a non-pathologizing collective. I would hope that in the aftermath of what may be an endemic, we may use the lessons of Covid, the memory of Covid to gather our crip collectives. “The virus that follows the routes and rhythms of the global circulation of goods (of which humans are a part) spreads through a contagion that is more effective than that of rights” (Nancy 22). Disability scholars and crip theorists seek to form collectives of the deviants, or in the case of Loki, the variants. FORM/FUNCTION The rhetorical power of Loki exceeds its historical discourse and its name; as a visual rhetoric, the show engages in retro-futuristic aesthetics that bring the viewer into the argument I am making here. The show’s use of 1950s- and 1960s-imagined technological futures highlights an imagining of a future from the past that never came to be. On a rhetorical level, the use of retro-futurism shades the show’s crip reading, placing the viewer in apprehension and questioning something that is both unreal and yet familiar. It conceptually raises the idea that there are imagined futures that hold potentials, good and bad, to reimagine futures to come. You know this is not the present; it is haunted by the colors, technology, and typology of worlds that never fully came to be. Perhaps this is particularly exemplified by the jet ski. In one scene, Mobius flips through a magazine and looks at a jet ski. Loki asks him why he is looking at it, and Mobius says the jet ski is an example of a particularly beautiful combination of form and function that highlights the perfection of a jet ski. Loki asks if he has ever been on one, and Mobius replies no, because it would certainly cause a break in the timeline. This somewhat hilarious commentary brings to light the impossibility of both Mobius’s and Loki’s futures. This impossible future will be further teased out in the analysis. Why a jet ski? The jet ski did see its future, but was Mobius part of that future? Indeed, we also see the failure of nostalgia, a trap criticized by feminist, queer theorists and crip scholars as a longing for a perfect past place. In light of later in the show when we learn that Mobius has had his memory erased and himself was a variant, this scene becomes sad. We learn this when Sylvie tells Loki that TVA employees are variants who have had their memories erased and then been incoluated into the quasi-religious bureaucratic TVA. The TVA functions here as a religious colonial metaphor that could be argued to be the final realization of Plato’s theory on forms as has been traced to theories and the focus on the straightness of time, in which our futures are pre-destined towards the winning narrative of the European project. As de Certeau uncovers settler discourses consistently made a native other that was part of an uncivilized past, that could then be dominated by the more modern righteous settler. Jet-ski is both a verb and a noun. Its both is an object, and to use it, is to jet-ski. The jet-ski is double itself. It is both a vehicle for use on water, and a way to traverse the water on such a vehicle. Chora emerges here, as the necessecity for form and function from Plato’s Timeaus. The perfectly ordered world of Plato can be seen as the teological foundations of science, but even that perfectly ordered world holds a messy, inchorent third discourse. The jet-ski is the individualistic watercraft with no use but recreation, capitalism gone wild, it is purely for fun, it is in fact the excess of utility commodified both to jet-ski and own a jet-ski are ironies of a dream of technological perfection that Mobius does not remember and cannot remember. The story of the jet-ski is never clarified in the narrative, and we do not know if Mobius once used a jet-ski in his former life. Jet-Ski’s have been the downfall of political hopeful Mitt Romney, in his presidential campaign he was photographed on a jet-ski with his wife driving the jet-ski. The photo was capitalized by the Obama campaign and its image put him out of touch with ordinary Americans. Jet-Ski’s are not owned by many people and are loud, an item of individualistic pleasure. More strange is the outcry from people, the photo led to a public outcry about Mitt Romney being out of touch with the common person. Perhaps more than his one ride on a jet-ski it was the way the photo became a media sensation that led to a discussion of the parellels of white-trash toys versus yachts. In another strange twist on the jet-ski and Mitt Romney, he also saved a family whose boat capsized on a jet-ski. That event was not as nearly wide-spread in the discourse surrounding Romney, but the jet-ski itself served as the downfall of one politician. Perhaps jet-skis are one of the retro-futures that came to be, and its usage aggravates a cultural memory. In an image from 1932, one such image of a future jet-ski can be seen. Some futures did come to be. (Reddit 2021) The jet-ski is a trickery rhetorical device in the show. Its usage has slippages into perhaps neo-liberal failed dreams – the haunted spaces of Mobius’s own memory. Covid Crip Abyss: God of Nothing–Chora–Crip Abyss In episode five, Loki is captured and sent to the Void. The Void is important to speak of in depth. It is a place where matter and form collapse, and it is patrolled by Alioth, the monster who eats all matter and form. Sylvie opens a time door after a scene of confrontation, and Loki decides to follow her instead of staying with Mobius. They escape to another apocalyptic scenario where they find themselves stranded due to the loss of the time machine. They end up developing a friendship, and Loki learns about Sylvie’s backstory within the show. She was captured as a child for causing a nexus event but escaped after biting a member of the TVA, and they have continued to hunt her and force her into hiding her entire life. She is determined to destroy the TVA, who took her from her family. After barely escaping the end-of-the-world scenario, they decide to return to the TVA and wake up some members. Renslayer recovers and prunes him. Angered, Sylvie overpowers her and demands the truth about the TVA. Loki awakens in the Void surrounded by multiple variants of himself—Alligator Loki, Child Loki, Classic Loki, and Boastful Loki—and learns that he is in the Void. The head of the TVA at the headquarters tells Sylvie that the Void is the collapse of matter and form, where all those pruned for crimes go. She believes that this is where the time authority is hiding and is determined to go there to find Loki and rescue him. The theme of nostalgia is raised in the Void when Loki is in conversation with Classic Loki, a Loki dressed in a 1960s comic costume, a variant of himself from another timeline. Our Loki asks him, How did the TVA find you? His response is that he was lonely and wanted to find his brother Thor. He then says that when he left his timeline, he was captured because in the world, in all realities, he has only one part to play. They all have one part to play: the God of Outcasts. This band of misfits comes together when Slyvie travels to the Void, working together and with classic Loki sacrificing his life, they are able to defeat Alioth who eats all matter in the void. They see a citadel beyond the Void and go toward it. The collective Loki’s ability to gather as a collective can be thought of as a crip collective. Anti-sociality is a key trope in academic conversations surrounding queer temporality. Edelmen’s claims for anti-social queerness pose a problematic version of such queer orientations in his demonizing of the heteronormative cries to save the child. McRuer calls out the problematics of such a restigmatizing critique that leads to disidentifying with disability and children with disabilities (according to McRuer, Edelmen is also saying “Fuck Tiny Tim”). Anti-social is a useful term for McRuer, and one that he writes is necessary for disability theory. At the outskirts of time, the misfits somewhat ban together in chaotic and unpredibticle ways, all Loki’s of one kind or another, an arm gets bitten off (disability as comedy). Classic Loki says, “Glorious purpose,” as he is eaten by Alioth, laughing as he is destroyed, for the future, for the children of himself, perhaps. Classic Loki’s glorious purpose is that of the collective crips and misfits, a queer rejection of self. Loki and Slyvie march forwards to the TVA’s ultimate space of unity, the citadel, where they finaly meet “He Who Remains”, the true master of the TVA who created the TVA after a multi-verse war where the tiemlines had gone crazy. He created the TVA to trap Alioth and keep order in the universe. Slyvie wants to kill him for all the trauma he has caused her, Loki begs her not to. They share a kiss and then we learn Slyvie does indeed kill him and we see Loki back at the TVA. The TVA is in disarray with timelines branching off in all directions and he goes up to Mobius who does not remember him. In a strange form of futurism, Mobius does not remember Loki. We are left wondering what is of this new breaking world as the series ends. Why does Loki know who he is and Mobius does not? Perhaps Mobius is like his name means a trans-historical figure of time and space itself. A Mobius strip is a a surface that loops on itself. If you take one strand of paper and twist it then attach it to itself, you have a mobius strip. When Slyvie kills He Who Remains, time exploded and twisted back on itself, and the true break of time was not the revolution they dreamed of. But merely a return to a new but different TVA, as Loki looks at a statue that has now changed from One Time Keeper to Three Time Keepers. The result of any action risks the start of a new reaction. And the show leaves us there. The debates on form and matter were a critical part of philosophy before Mobius and Loki’s discussion on jet skis in the show. A key term raised in critical philosophical debates from Plato, Heidegger, Whitehead, Derrida, Kristeva, Irigrary, Butler, Nancy, and others is ‘chora’. Chora emerges in Plato’s Timeaus as a concept that may destroy his own project. Chora is a sort of side term to describe. Chora is deployed precisely as an errant cause in Timeaus; the placement of chora is rarely noted in depth, but its displacement is described precisely after a long space on the optical nature of the origin of the universe. All the world makes sense in a Euclidian mathematical formation in Timeaus, but then an errant cause interrupts the ocular cause. Perhaps this errant cause is, in fact, the cripping of Western philosophy that we could not see, but that keeps smudging up our history. “For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of this universe. So if I’m to tell the story of how it really came to be in this way, I’d also have to introduce the character of the Straying Cause—how it is its nature to set things adrift” (Plato 48). Here, Plato engages in some Loki crip rhetorical Loki-ing. Before we begin to articulate the ever-continuing discourse on chora, we first have a messy birth. Perhaps Plato’s own crip horizon was more radical than we had imagined. In describing the beginning of order, it was necessary to describe an opposite and a third—that third is chora, and that third is of a necessarily errant cause. Our conversation about Slyvie and Loki evoked another person Mobius and his jet-ski and the political utility of the conversation may seem to have lost its power. The crip future is perhaps the only future. There is no future in the present, but only a future of those dreams of the past that sometimes comes to be, and sometimes does not. An important argument comes to surface which is that Slyvie and Loki and Classic Loki all act. They choose to act and run and continue on, despite the instability of their own future. The trickster is not tricky for inaction, but for manipulating and finding ways out of situations. Mobius turns on itself, and the politics of crip must escape the return of the same. Butler’s post-structuralist accounting of gender argues that gender is a performance and not a stable identity, arguing that the conception of, “gender as a constituted social temporality.” Is necessary, and agency does not happen through that identity, but rather through, “discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this ground.”(1990 p. 2388). I take this temporal focus to be critical in understanding agency and identity. Through reading visual media, in this case television, with attention to disjunctions that disrupt the temporal ground of normal chronological conceptions of gender, identity and narrative, we find places where the grounds upon which what Butler calls, compulsory heterosexuality and masculinist domination lie. Chora also haunts the discourse of articulation about the sources of identity. Somewhere in the Void is a void we all keep falling into. This haunted discourse extends in the same way that Loki extends our ability to be tricked into and away from futures. But what if something exists beyond the Void? It would, in a retro-futuristic reimagining of what Norse myth might have said on time, be possible that there is another something, past chora. Perhaps chora was confusing us the whole time. The origins of Plato, which confounded some of the deepest thinkers of our time, a debate on origin versus endings, could maybe be reworked into simply thinking beyond the chora; what lies behind the chora. To put it in another way, we could say that Sylvie and Loki’s journey beyond the Void is metaphorically linked to the possibilities of critique itself. We are always looking to unveil the chora, to either damn or liberate it. There is a digging and questioning on those things that we cannot quite capture. Chora is not alone here; multiple variants uncannily represent similar strains of thought. Loki embodies the process of crip philosophy, or the crip philosopher, searching, tricking, and using the language one has, to articulate a future that is not there. As is always the risk, we may fold into ourselves. But there is an ethics of risk, that opens in the temporal spaces of uncertainity. One which the critique embraces, in an attempt to not resolve but further open strands of possibility. I would argue that chora itself is a crip-space-place following Derrida’s interrogation in a different way than Michael O-Rourke argues in the roguish future of queer studies. I think the problem with chora’s placement as a haunted discourse in philosophy is that it is not so easily contained. It is not just a no-place, which privileges no one nowhere, but it is the messy, bubbling spaces: “It is a glitch in the mechanism, a preface or footnote that would also be the body of the text and its conclusions, a quality that would not solely be measured ‘by the nonmythic character of its term,” and thus, in the end, would take up its value of disorder. Chora is necessary for Kosmos, but it is also potentially fatal to it. The entire issue is all right here” (Nancy and Barrue 79). Perhaps even more poignant for a crip future, ”It is the end, the center and the beyond of the horizon” (Nancy and Barrue 80). And in this way reading into the Void, Looking back to Loki’s Norse Horizons, and Plato’s own undoing, we worked through a process of rhetorical cryptology. Works Cited Alexander, Heather. A Child’s Introduction to Norse Mythology, illustrated by Meredith Hamilton, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2018. Bublex, & During, E. (2014). The future does not exist : retrotypes. Éditions B42. Crowley, Liam. “Loki Director Reveals How the Pandemic Improved the Disney+ Show.” The Direct. June 14, 2021. https://thedirect.com/article/loki-disney-plus-show-episodes-production Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod, Stanford University Press, 1995. First published in 1993 by Éditions Gailée. Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric (Critical Perspectives on Disability). Syracuse University Press. Kindle Edition, p. 16. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York and London. New York University Press, 2016 Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. (2017) Doubleday New York. Larrington, Carolyne (Trans.) The Poetic Edda. Oxford World’s Classics, 1999. ISBN 0-19-283946-2 Liu, Jihong. "The Origin and Application of Retro-Futurism." Journal of Landscape Research 11.5 (2019): 104-8. ProQuest. Web. 29 Sep. 2022. Lindow, John, and John Lindow. Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2002. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=316382. Loki. Created by Created by Michael Waldron, Disney+, 2021. Magnet, Shoshana and Amanda Watson. “How to Get Through the Day with Pain and Sadness: Temporality and Disability in Graphic Novels. Disability Media Studies, edited by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, New York University Press, 2017. Mcruer, R. “Any Day Now: Queerness, Disability, and the Trouble with Homonormativity.” Disability Media Studies, edited by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, New York University Press, 2017. McRuer, R. “No Future for Crips: Disorderly Conduct in the New World Order; or, Disability Studies on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” Culture-Theory-Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies, edited by Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ingwersen. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript-Verlag, 2017, pp. 63–77. McRuer, R. “Disability Nationalism in Crip Times.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 4.2, 2010, pp. 163–178. doi:10.3828/jlcds.2010.13 Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/xambk2/ocean_jet_ski_1932/ Wright, Muriel H. “Newspaper clipping concerning 1859 oil strike in Mayes County.” 4127.7 Mary Jane Ross Manuscript Collection. May 1906. Tulsla: Gilcrease museum, https:///collections.gilcrease.org/object/41277(07/25/2019). Sharon L. Snyder, David T. Mitchell. Cultural Locations of Disability (Kindle Locations 1441-1442). More history to include? Loki has three children in an affair with the ice giant Angrboda. He already has two with his wife, Sygn. In this story, the three children are bound and seized by the gods, who bring them to Odin in Asgard. Hel is monstrous. “Those on the right of the third child saw a beautiful young girl, while those on the left tried not to look at her, for they saw a dead girl, her skin and flesh rotted black, walking in their midst.” (687) Hel is made the ruler of the deepest dark places and is the queen of those who die in “unworthy ways—of disease or of old age, of accidents or in childbirth.” (687). Does this foreclose the loop again? Does an examination of Norse mythology only reveal a series of narrative protheses in which the crip is always sent to death as sacrificial redemption? Hel’s possessions are a bowl, hunger, a knife, famine, and her bed. Monsters, queers and crips have a laden history of being made invisible and the association of disability and homosexuality as monstrous have made both active modes of resistance to heteronormative histories. Affirming and recapturing these tales can possibly be modes of re-writing those history would rather write out. [i] We can see the power of the Eugenic movement, as Mitchell and Snyder write about out the transatlantic eugenics movement created ideas of deviance as a way of identifying disability and dehumanizing disabled and racial others in a process of elimination of deviance While the histories of Native Americans, African slaves, Jewish gentry, and disabled people are often historically and culturally distinct, the shared social marginality of these groups arises from the view of the "deviant" body as that which automatically disqualifies individuals from cultural participation (and biological desirability).” This predictive science falls in line with the predictions of capitalism and its markets.
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