Realizing I had posted about Loki in my gaming blog rather than this one, I copied it (I thought) and then deleted that post, only to find that what I had actually copied was some Blogger formatting information.
So, whatever insights I had there are now lost in the digital ether. Oh well.
Rather than just trying to repeat the process, I wanted to talk about time travel tropes, and how the season finale of Loki bring in two related concepts that I find utterly fascinating.
But, in order to talk about them, we've got to go beyond the Spoiler cut.
Loki and Sylvie arrive at the Citadel and the End of Time to discover, within a spooky manor that looks a bit like Orthanc from Lord of the Rings (Saruman's tower at Isengard) on the inside. Miss Minutes comes off a lot more sinister before we're introduced to the true man behind the curtain - "He Who Remains."
Though I don't know if it was ever officially announced, Jonathan Majors' casting as time-traveling supervillain Kang the Conqueror in Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has been known for a while. However, that is not his first appearance in the MCU... or will it be?
Loki and Sylvie meet the man behind the TVA, who explains that he was a 31st century human scientist from Earth who discovered many universes stacked upon his own. Being a genius, he and the versions of him from those universes reached out to one another, eventually crossing over and collaborating, sharing technology and wisdom from their various universes for the benefit of all.
However, some variants of him from amongst the countless (if not infinite) versions of the universe were not so benevolent, and instead wished to conquer or eradicate other universes. Everything devolved into a multiversal war between his variants, until this one discovered Alioth, which he used to seal off the timeline from the others, and then established the TVA to make sure that the barriers around his Sacred Timeline - his universe - could not be breached.
He offers Sylvie and Loki the option to either become the new masters of the TVA and let him retire, or to kill him and unleash countless other versions of him to invade the universe and, presumably, have the victor eventually just do exactly what he did to stay in control - but potentially in a less benevolent way.
Sylvie doesn't believe that there's a risk to killing him, and sends Loki back to the TVA so she can take her revenge, which He Who Endures accepts graciously.
Of course, almost immediately, Loki discovers that the TVA he's arrived in has been altered - not only does Mobius not recognize him, but in place of the giant Time Keeper statues, there are now sculptures of the variant of He Who Endures that took over - what I think we can call Kang the Conqueror.
Kang, and the other names he lives under, is a really interesting character.
Much of the way that we define both morality and identity is based on the finite human scope of life that we generally experience or expect to experience. Consider this: if someone dies when they are 25, it's invariably considered a tragedy. If someone dies when they're 95, we might mourn them if they were an important part of our lives, but we'll generally just see it as part of the way of things. Even though I, personally, have a deep existential dread about death, it doesn't really trouble me when a 100 year old person dies. Now, ask me again when I'm 99 and I might have a different answer.
The people we are also shifts significantly over time. While I think we carry our older identities with us, there's an inevitable transformation. One of the most interesting aspects of psychology is the "end of history" fallacy - people tend to act as if the person they are now is the truest version, and that the thoughts and beliefs they currently hold are the ones that they will for the rest of their lives. They can recognize that beliefs and opinions they held when they were younger might have changed, but it's a very difficult thing to accept that beliefs you hold right now are ones you might look back upon as naive, foolish, or otherwise wrong - even though, demonstrably, that has been happening your whole life.
I don't know quite how they intend to handle Kang in the MCU, as there are kind of two spectrums he exists on.
In the comics, Kang is the most famous, but only one version of the character, which includes Immortus, Rama-Tut, and Iron Lad, who are variously heroic or villainous versions of the person born as Nathaniel Richards. These identities are all part of the same, single lifetime of a person who has achieved both immortality and time travel. Thus, a younger version of him might be a superhero within the Young Avengers, who will nevertheless encounter an older, villainous version of him because, well, they both arrive at the same point in the timeline.
I remember conceiving of a superhero when I was first getting into the MCU that was based on the legend of the Wandering Jew - kind of trying to reappropriate what has been an antisemitic figure of folklore into something more interesting, nuanced, and potentially heroic. The idea was that his sole superpower was that he could never, ever die. If his body was burned away or vaporized or whatever, it would grow back from a single speck. And he has no idea how old he is, and has had total amnesia multiple times. But there are records of him going back as far as human history has records.
My concept was that over that incredibly long history, he would have, naturally, played many roles. He could be a benevolent guardian, and reclusive hermit, or a depraved monster, and yet with an infinite timespan, he would eventually grow out of that identity and into something new.
Kang more or less seems to already do this - I guess the lesson is don't ever expect your idea to be original.
The MCU could play in this way with time, but it seems they're also stretching infinity in a different direction. Indeed, I've sometimes thought of alternate universes as kind of another dimension of time - if space has three dimensions, then other timelines and parallel universes could almost be thought of as being another direction in time than past and future. I think a string theorist would have things to say about that.
However, again, infinity does strange things.
Consider, for example, that on a quantum level, weird things happen constantly. A particle can spontaneously come into existence and then disappear. Hawking radiation, for instance, is when this happens at the event horizon of a black hole. Normally, a particle and its antiparticle will pop into existence (and use up non-existent energy to do so, creating negative energy) but then immediately annihilate one another back into energy, which pays off the energy debt, so to speak, and nothing is left to show the loss.
However, if this happens at the event horizon of a black hole, one of those particles - the particle or the antiparticle - will shoot off away from the black hole while the other gets sucked in, and thus they can't mutually annihilate, so the energy debt remains, depleting the energy (and thus mass) of the black hole, meaning that over a very, very long time, the black hole "evaporates," shooting those decoupled particles off as the eponymous radiation.
Now, this kind of spontaneous stuff happening can happen in places other than black holes, and sometimes even if they don't have a black hole to pull them apart, they shoot away from one another for other reasons. Which means that matter can spontaneously pop into existence on the quantum scale.
Quantum physics is all about probability - things have a chance to happen, but there's nothing specific that makes them happen one way or another. You might have heard of radioactive decay and a "half-life." The idea is that, over a certain period of time, a particle of this sort will decay into a different particle (like shooting off a spare neutron to become a lower isotope of that element) 50% of the time. Given that we're looking at massive amounts of these particles, that probability is very reliable, and so we can expect for, for most intents and purposes, precisely half of those particles to decay during its half life. But not decaying the first instance of that half-life doesn't make you more likely to do so in the next, so we just halve it again, and again, becoming a quarter and then an eighth, etc.
The thing is, there is nothing saying that a 3 pound block of Uranium cannot just have very single atom decay at the same time. It's just that such an event is so, profoundly unlikely that we can practically say that that will never happen.
But probability becomes weird with an infinite sample size. Even if something has a one-in-a-googleplex chance of happening (a number that has too many zeros for anyone to write it down using all the matter in the observable universe as ink,) if you truly have an infinite variations of something, you'll eventually get some (actually, an infinite number) that are weird and exceptional.
Getting back to comic books: it's very possible that He Who Endures really wanted the best. But as universe reached out to universe, with variations allowed between them, inevitably, one was eventually going to find a version of him who did not have benevolent intentions - one who would use his powers to conquer and destroy.
There is a paradox in the infinite universes multiverse, though:
Consider this: if there are infinite parallel universes, some portion of them will have multiversal conquerors. And if there are infinite multiversal conquerors, one of them will eventually come to ours. However, if there are infinite parallel universes, then there is some portion of them that will never be invaded.
If we look at our real, nonfictional reality, there don't seem to be armies from alternate universes invading us. There are a couple possible conclusions to be reached by this. The first is that the idea of a multiverse is false, and that there really is only the one version of reality. While this is certainly how we experience the world, physics seems to suggest it might not be the case. Another interpretation is that it is impossible for people to travel from one universe to the other, making conquest impossible. The third conclusion you could draw is that we just happen to exist in a universe that has not been invaded by other universes - so far (or at least not within historical record.)
One of the major ideas in the show Loki was the idea that Loki could be many different kinds of people. Even though we empathize most with the central one on the show, who we think of primarily as the same one from the rest of the MCU (which is wrong - we saw that character's arc to his death,) the others are all people who think of themselves as the one true Loki, and have every reason to scoff at the idea that others would deny them their authenticity.
He Who Endures is the first version of this character that we meet. But he is dead. Kang the Conqueror, whom we have not yet met, will naturally think of himself as the one true version of this character. Who, after all, is to say which timeline is the "true one."
I don't know if the various Nathaniel Richards are from timelines that branched or parallel universes, but we're introduced to some very weird ideas about who deserves what. He Who Endures had entire realities erased (or at least mushed together into the Void,) which seems to be morally repugnant. But if it's truly what was required to keep all of reality from collapsing, is it actually wrong?
Anyway, it's late, and this is the second time I've written this post. But my mind is definitely engaged with this science fiction prompt.
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