Relationship Spotlight: Loki & Sylvie (Loki)

*Spoilers."

The next MCU Disney+ series has started up, with Moon Knight premiering last week, but I’ll hold off on talking about it for now. I’ll stick to my usual process of writing about a Disney+ show once its season is over, so in the meantime, let’s swing back around to a little more Loki talk.

There are places where I feel like Loki, and the evolving relationship with Loki and Sylvie, doesn’t quite stick the landing, but there are a lot of interesting things to consider here. When Mobius recruits the post-Avengers Loki to help find a rogue Variant of himself, he’s thrown for a loop when that Variant reveals herself as Sylvie. Initially, the same shared qualities that make him ideal for hunting “a Loki” also make him vulnerable to one. Both Loki and Sylvie are dangerous tricksters with an incredibly flexible sense of loyalty, looking out for themselves above all else. Loki may think that he can see through Sylvie’s deceptions to catch her when the TVA can’t, but she knows exactly what sort of trap might entice him.

This makes them well-matched opponents early on, neither one fully besting the other. Loki figures out where Sylvie is hiding, she gets into his head about whether he can really trust the TVA, and they both wind up stranded on a dying moon, racing to escape before it’s taken out in an apocalyptic event. Along the way, they bicker, battle (with words, knives, and magic equally,) and try to one-up another. However, they also come to the realization that neither is getting off of Lamentis alone.

This is where things start to get interesting. Loki and Sylvie are both Variants of the same Asgardian-adopted Jötun, and that means their relationship with one another tells both of them quite a bit about themselves. We see the ways that they’re different—Sylvie always knew Odin and Frigga weren’t her birth parents, and her enchantments are unlike any magic Loki has done before—but more crucially, we see the ways that they’re the same. Both feel wronged by life and circumstance, and neither trusts easily even as they constantly break the trust of others. Both present themselves as self-sufficient but are deeply lonely. Both are intelligent, arrogant, and sensitive (though neither would readily admit to the latter.)

These parallels allow both Variants to reflect on themselves, to think about their choices and mistakes, their blind spots. Dealing with one another even helps them see how their own qualities could be aggravating to other people. Over the course of season 1, Loki certainly goes further down this journey of self-reflection than Sylvie (with a lot of additional influence from Mobius,) but Sylvie also begins to view herself somewhat differently through the lens of Loki. Furthermore, relating to another Variant of themselves serves as something of a baby step for these two lonely, distrustful people who rarely connect with others. Even if it starts as an attempt to best the other and grows into an internal examination of themselves, this slight move to think outside of themselves is crucial too.

I know there are a lot of strong feelings about Loki/Sylvie shipping. There are those who are wholly in favor of it, those who think it’s getting in the way of a Loki/Mobius ship, those who think it “invalidates” Loki and/or Sylvie’s bisexuality (which I’m on record as disagreeing with,) and those who argue that it’s some sort of “self-incest,” since both characters are Loki Variants. Personally, my feelings aren’t at any extreme. I’m not an active shipper, but I’m not against them coming together in that way. While I can take or leave the romantic side of it, I do love watching how their relationship progresses and how it impacts each character individually as well as the two of them together. The Loki on this show is very different from the Sacred Timeline version we followed through Endgame, but he’s already very different from who he was at the start of the series, and his connection with Sylvie has a lot to do with that.

Finally, I just want to note how much I appreciate the mostly-casually inclusion of Sylvie’s gender. Even if, in the beginning, Loki questions whether Sylvie is really a Loki, it’s more about her actions than the fact that she’s female. He never invalidates her gender or views her as somehow less of a Loki because of it, and once she tells him she doesn’t like to be called Loki, he sticks with her preferred name of Sylvie. They’re little things, but they make a big difference in how the character is treated.