"Loki" and The MCU Moving On

In the previous Strange Log I said I was more than likely done with The MCU (after "Spider-Man: No Way Home", "Doctor Strange and The Multiverse Of Madness" and maybe "Shang-Chi") this decision was largely inspired by Marvel now planning to trend more woke and appeal to people who aren't fans of these characters but would rather use these characters to push a social/political agenda. While my position hasn't changed the finale of "Loki" does give me hope for what Marvel has planned next. There has been much speculation on the man behind the curtain and many were correct in their assumptions. I'll be addressing my opinion on "Loki" the series and what I think will be The MCU moving on. SPOILERS AHEAD, you've been warned.

Okay, out of the 3 series that were announced for the Disney+ streaming service "Loki" was the one I was most curious about, "WandaVision" had my curiosity, "Loki" had my attention. What I liked about "Loki" is that The MCU was finally introducing the stranger elements into their universe (growing it even more) by introducing The TVA, an obscure group in the MCU that are essentially time cops. I'm not an expert on Marvel (I'm a DC guy 100%) so I won't pretend to be more familiar with The TVA than I already am, but needless to say, unless you're a hardcore Marvel fan you probably don't know much about The TVA either. "Loki" saw a variant of Loki before all the growth from "Thor: The Dark World" and "Thor: Ragnorok" snatched up by the TVA to hunt down a variant of himself.

The variant turned out to be a female Loki named Sylvie who has been hunted by The TVA for literal years (as she was a child when she was taken). To make a long story short Loki and Sylvie go on a quest to find The man behind The TVA and BOY, DO THEY EVER! As it turns out everyone guessed right in predicting Marvel's next big bad and that comes in the form of;

Now I'm gonna be serious, I could never take Kang seriously, the character looks BEYOND goofy, with his stupid helmet and purple/green outfit, not to mention the fact that Doctor Doom bitched him out in "The Infinity War", not to mention his beyond convoluted backstory and history, the character is an absolute mess! When people speculated that Kang would be the next big bad of The MCU, I scoffed. His name is a generic bad guy name and he's just not a character that posses enough of a threat like Thanos did with The Infinity Stones. But maybe this was thinking too small. "Loki" established that there was only one timeline and all other timelines were destroyed essentially destroying the multiverse HOWEVER, now that we have the finale of "Loki" was have now officially introduced the multiverse and therefore have effectively opened the door for ANYTHING! Literally, ANYTHING! I said Kang was not a villain I could take seriously, but I never considered the other versions of Kang and "He Who Remains" as the current (semi-decent) Kang was the perfect introduction to the character.

This was genuinely well done.

"Loki" was an exploration, Loki dealt with variants of himself and saw just how broken and damaged they all were, the same exact thing happened to "He Who Remains"on a much grander scale for him to witness a literal war fought across multiple universes all fought by different versions of him. When you know what you're capable of...you KNOW WHAT YOU'RE CAPABLE OF. So when "He Who Remains" stated that he was terrified of himself, I literally felt that. And the prospect of a multi-universe coming in actually scary and creates a different level of stakes than "The Infinity Saga". Kang is NOT Thanos, and with a character like Kang they can really take the time to tease him as a cold and calculating schemer planning his war from afar. The character's introduction as a villain is slated for "Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumnmania" but I doubt he'll be the main villain but it'll be interesting to see how they handle this character.

The MCU moving on will be interesting, to say the least. I'm afraid Super Hero Fatigue has got me, mostly because The DC movies were so trash it burned me out on getting excited about anything DC related, and for my money, The MCU concluded with "Endgame", the build for that took so long in the making that it's going to be hard to top EVEM with a potential multiverse war looming in the background. The fact that The MCU now wants to trend more woke is VERY sad because this is literal geek heaven. Who ends up in the grand war against Kang and his no doubt army of variants is beyond me, but they're gonna have to work to recreate the "umph!" that "Endgame" had. I'll catch you guys later at "Loki" Season 2. Good gravy...