Avengers #4 OR Jason Aaron and the Case of the Dueling Lokis
Long spoilers short for the latest Avengers
-evil space bugs
-big scary goth Celestials
-Odin flashback, battle battle, all is lost, did I mention I totally banged the Phoenix, trufacts
-bad times, sad times
-monologues
-Avengers doing avengeful stuff, etc
-and...Loki. Oh, Loki.
I’ve kind of circled past aggravation and hit a wall of pure confusion. It’s a confusion that gives me a very, very, very small, nigh microscopic iota of hope, but confusion nonetheless. That confusion comes from the fact that Jason Aaron is currently writing two series with Loki as part of the main cast. Specifically, Loki as played by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Aaron is currently in charge of Thor and Avengers, the first with Loki as the impish tag along slash wild card to Thor. The other with Loki as the ominous and increasingly Siege-flavored mouthpiece for the Dark Celestials and a warped version of the Humans are a Plague, Very Terribad, Salt the Earth spiel--which, if we remember Loki’s bit of prologue back in Legacy #1, is likely (hopefully) all a very roundabout way of conning the Dark Celestials into opening the door to some kind of power source.
Point being: Jason Aaron is writing two series simultaneously (time being the utter clusterfuck it always is in comics) featuring two extremely opposite Lokis.
Here’s the Loki we just saw in Thor #2:
Versus what we see with the Avengers:
This guy is being penned by the same writer. Neither of them seem particularly in line with the more roguish God of Stories we’ve seen fleeting glimpses of with Ryan North and Donny Cates and--horrendous art aside--with the Vote Loki iteration given to us by Christoper Hastings...but the fact that these Lokis are both coming from Aaron means that they must ultimately share the same goal (as dictated by Aaron’s admittedly cockeyed view of the character).
What I’m sure will happen is that Loki, in both series, will suffer some kind of asskicking, but ultimately slip away with some ulterior motive successfully paid off. A power source, another segue into the Infinity War hullabaloo, whatever. Playing the parts he needs to play as hero/villain/anti-villain to steer the narrative towards his needs.
What I would really, really like to happen--and thus it won’t--is to have Loki pull a Multiple Man gambit. You know, this guy:
In his own comics he once tried to live up to his name and live as multiple men having their own separate lives, absorbing more experience and intel than he could alone. It backfired because all of his copies wound up getting attached to said lives and had no desire to fuse back together into one dude and leave everything behind. It was a mess.
You know who has canonically pulled off several successful schemes, consciously and subconsciously, always with self-destruction and evolution at the root, with every single incarnation???
These guys:
I won’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen. At best Aaron will pen it so that his version of Loki is playing any side and role necessary to reach some Huge and Ominous Power Boost for Reasons.
But for the sake of this god, the one stitched together by Gillen and Ewing with so much love, I’ll imagine there is more than one of them at work. Some out in space, some dangling from the World Tree’s branches, some playing herald to out-of-towner horrors, some in the city capering with Squirrel Girl or splitting a red bottle with their best friend.
And at least one, alone. Sitting in a vast white space with a number of comics spread in front of them. Watching and orchestrating the faraway selves he made to tilt the stories as required.
Waiting.
