If you clicked this because of Loki I commend you for being a semi-man of culture. I say semi because I refrained from nerding out with a comic book reference title, and I can’t guarantee that your familiarity with Loki is outside the MCU narrative. Moving on, according to the series, a deviant is basically defined as a version of you living a life they’re not allowed to. Like when you stay out past curfew, and your parents act as if they are members of the upper echelon of the TVA or when your crush says yes.
To deviate is to divert from the usual of accepted standards. Assuming your life is going the way it was written in the books, imagine a version of you that turned left at a moment when you turned right, that decided to stay in tonight, to buy that jacket that you didn’t because fasting wasn’t in your plans for the next 3 weeks.
Imagine a version of yourself that said no when you said yes. Imagine what their life is like right now.
The concept or possibility that in a parallel world, there’s a version of you that thinks you’re really bad at making decisions and does the opposite. The possibility that there is someone who is like you, but not like you. For every choice you make, you create a world where a version of you deviated.
The sad truth for Loki is that he was destined to be the bad guy and fail.
That’s just how the books had his story written out, just like you and that one course unit that you really hate but since there’s no multiversal (probably not a real word) authority trying to keep us in line. Feel free to deviate as much as you’d like but not too much, there’s still a bit of authority to keep you at bay. It might not have magic wands that zap you into a universe with an entity that obliterates all life it touches out of existence, but it has the next great thing, parking tickets.
I could go on a rant about changing your destiny and all that, but this is more of how you think you’re playing multi-dimensional chess with yourself. Loki thought he was the “lok…iest of them all” (see what I did there) but to the uneventful truth, there were versions of him doing a better job at being him than him. A rather hilarious predicament if you ask me.
Imagine you being a better you than you, which would beg the question, who are you? What are you? And how is it possible for someone to do your own character better than you? What if you’re the side character? (Another slip in for the nerds right there).
Loki having realised his unfortunate fate, decides to defy his destiny with or by him or herself. If that didn’t make sense, it will when you watch the show where he eventually falls in love with himself. Kind of narcissistic if you ask me but nothing wrong with a bit of self-love.
The Lokis, having joined forces, decide to confront the organisation trying to erase them for being deviants and in the midst of their raid they take a brief moment to cherish each other right before one of them is sent off to oblivion with the aforementioned magic wand and like Romeo and Juliet, unable to live without him or herself, she Loki zaps herself with the magic wand to find her other half.
Now they’re in another world forced to face a creature that erases anything it touches from existence though instead of running, they decide to confront it just to find the puppet master of this whole charade in the belly of the beast which goes to show, for educational purposes, that the answer we always seek tends to lie in the place we most fear to look.
At the end of this terribly rushed summary of the 6-episode show, the Lokis come face to face with the orchestrator of these events who in turn expected them, bringing about another question, is our defiance of fate, an inevitability already preordained to occur whilst, in our ignorance, we think we’re toppling the hierarchy? Is anything you do predictable? If yes, you’re boring, if no, you’re delusional.
I wouldn’t say you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, but you’re stuck between 2 options that might define you in a rather unpleasant manner depending on how you look at it.
Delusional can be another word for optimistic. If you’re predictable, well, it’s not like that’s a bad thing. It’s just taken out of context.
In the season finale, our deviant overlord leaves our main characters with a choice. To replace him and manage the heavy responsibility of handling all the deviants across the multiverse, which is a 24/7 minimum wage job, thus preventing him from going astray or killing him with the inevitability of a worse replacement or an evil version of himself. Surprise, he wasn’t the villain, he was protecting the multiverse from his evil deviants. But as we all know in most movies, with every pair of terrible decisions comes a 3rd improvised and usually impulsively fuelled option that combines both the 1st and 2nd which you can ponder about in your free time.
The above is a random sequence of events that would seemingly take place should you one day bump into your alternate version as written by Michael Waldron.
If you were to write your own story, what do you think your deviant would do differently? Do you think their life is better or worse?
In the clone wars series, Darth Maul once said to Ashoka Tano, before their battle on Mandalore,
“every choice you have made has led you to this moment”. Maybe this is enough geek news for one article.
I might get carried away so I’ll leave you with this, what choices will you make to lead you to tomorrow? Cheesy conclusion? yes. Predictable? to some. Unnecessary? probably. Relevant? I’ll leave that up to you and how far down the rabbit hole your consciousness takes you.
Source of the photos: port.hu
Written by Tarique Katuntu
