Spider-Kid

Queerness (or Lack Thereof) in Loki

Comic book superheroes have always been about creating representation outside of legacy media. Captain America was born from the desire of a group of Jews to bring awareness to the atrocities happening in Europe in the early 1900s. The popular Marvel team, the X-Men have been used since their 1963 debut as an allegory for different marginalized groups, such as people of color or queer people, trying to exist in a society that hates and fears them. Today, comic books continue to create representation and have transcended the page and become a staple of TV and movies. Loki brings a fan-favorite character from big screen to small and introduces nuance that is only allowed by its new medium. From the beginning, Loki has always been queer, or at least queer coded. Loki is a bisexual, genderfluid alien. While Loki provides a type of representation, the effort is not genuine in practice due to the fact that most of the representation is hidden or occurs outside of the show. The lack of overt diversity is caused by the fact that ultimately, Disney is a corporation and cares only about the bottom line. The queerbaiting of the creators and actors takes away from the opportunity provided to explore the titular character’s inherent queerness. 

While Loki has existed in some form or another for centuries, he made his Marvel debut in Journey into Mystery #85, which was released in 1962. In Norse mythology, Loki is the trickster god who is one of many prophesied to bring about the apocalypse. The comic book version is a villain who is the original antagonist of the Avengers. As of his first on screen appearance in Thor, Loki is established to be an alien from the icy planet/realm of Jotunheim. He was taken by Odin, the All-Father and ruler of Asgard, from his father Laufey and raised as if he was Asgardian like his adoptive brother, Thor. When he learns that he is different, he realizes that Odin hid his heritage from him. His outsider status allows many groups to project onto him, which is a key feature of sci-fi. The otherworldliness of sci-fi provides space to explore social issues in an allegorical way. The genre allows us to approach issues that are hard to explore from a contemporary standpoint. It also allows us to view things on a larger scale and imagine a possible future. 

In sci-fi, social commentary is traditionally done through typing and stereotyping. Typing is simply applying traits to a group of people, while stereotyping reduces that group to the trait while essentializing and naturalizing it (West 102). A common example of this is gender essentialism, which argues that gender and sex are inherently linked as biological categories, literally that they are part of nature. This appears in Loki not on screen but in the promotional material. In June of 2021, the official Twitter account of the show shared a promo clip that featured Loki’s personnel file. It is quite literally a “blink and you miss it” moment, but that file includes Loki’s personal information, including his sex, which is listed as “fluid” (@LokiOfficial). Loki’s alien nature allows him to shapeshift, and therefore his biological sex is quite literally fluid; however, Marvel wanted avid fans to take this as evidence of Loki’s genderfluidity in order to attract a queer audience. Even in mythology, Loki has taken on a variety of gender presentations and roles, but to say he has always been genderfluid would be to misappropriate history. However, even from just a modern standpoint, Loki’s genderfluid nature, which Marvel attempted to show, is not new. In a 2014 run written by Al Ewing, Loki: Agent of Asgard, Loki reveals that he is genderfluid and always has been. Since gender is a social construct, gender functions differently from culture to culture. Therefore, Loki being genderfluid may be linked to his shapeshifting ability, but that is not necessarily the case. Loki can alter his body, but to argue that is what inherently makes him genderfluid is to reduce the complexity of his gender and naturalize and essentialize the fact that he is trans.

In addition to being genderfluid, Loki is canonically bisexual, making him Marvel’s second “first” queer character. Loki’s bisexuality is not explicit, rather it is construced through context and lighting. The constructionist representation is found in one specific exchange between Loki and Sylvie, the “female” Loki variant and antagonist turned love interest. In a conversation between the two characters, Loki asks about her past partners. Sylvie then turns the question back to him, asking, “What about you? You’re a prince. Must have been would-be princesses. Or perhaps another prince?” To which Loki responds, “A bit of both, I suspect the same as you” (Karasik). Viewers create meaning through context and the exchange is used as proof of the titular character’s bisexuality. The scene takes place in the bar car of a train where the two sit and drink. The lighting of these scenes in particular is important because it acts as another way of coding queerness. The combination of neon blue and neon pink/purple give the scene an aesthetic matching that of the bisexual flag, playing into the motif of bisexual lighting.

Bisexual lighting is a recent visual motif in which queerness is coded through quite literally, the color of the lights. This acts as a form of queer coding because also visible, the meaning of the detail is invisible unless you know what you are looking for. Loki’s bisexuality is left for the discerning viewer (typically Marvel fans) to infer.

Inferencing a character’s queerness is not a modern phenomenon. Most tropes involving queer characters are the result of the Hays Code, a  “self-imposed industry set of guidelines for all the motion pictures that were released between 1934 and 1968” (Lewis). These rules banned many controversial topics from being discussed on screen. Once such topic was the idea that queer people could have happy lives. This then forced writers to decide to kill the queer characters, make them villains, or just not show them at all. Disney, long before Loki, went with the villain option, giving stereotypically queer characteristics to the antagonists in the media they produced. One example of this is Ursula in The Little Mermaid, whose design comes from a famous drag queen, Divine, from that time period. The historical coding of villains as queer is what leads many viewers to easily project their queerness on characters portrayed as evil in media. When it comes to Loki, the situation becomes slightly more complicated. Loki is certainly queer coded, but the show takes this to an extreme through the use of queerbaiting. Queerbaiting occurs when, in addition to coding a character as queer, creators directly imply to the audience that the content will be explicitly queer in order to increase both viewership and profit. In Loki, Loki’s genderfluidity and bisexuality are examples of queerbaiting rather than true representaion. 

Loki leans into stereotypes to an extent, but only for the purpose of luring in queer viewers. The coding of Loki as queer is seen both in the show and outside of it. However, the document discussed earlier where Loki’s sex is listed as fluid is technically representation. Characteristics and details that are confirmed by the creators outside of the piece of media itself is called “word of god” representation, which is a type of intentional representation. The coding that exists within the show itself is considered constructivist representation because it is on the audience to infer. While both of these are types of representation, they are not true representation because they rely on outside knowledge. This is disappointing for queer viewers because there is a lack of overt queerness in the super hero genre. Mainstream media has avoided positive depictions of queerness since the beginning. Only now are doors opening for stories about queer people that do not rely on queerness being a tragedy or trope. 

In “Black Popular Culture,” Stuart Hall argues that more representation opens the door for bad representation. Loki is that bad representation. Loki’s genderfluidity is flattened into gender essentialism by having his sex listed as fluid rather than his gender. In an episode focused on a whole group of Loki variants (versions of the character whose lives turned out completely different because of one choice somewhere in their timeline), viewers learn that all but two Lokis are “male.” In an article for Comic Watch, Lillian Hochwender writes that “the show’s writers didn’t simply undermine Loki’s genderfluidity: they erased it… Rather than establish female or feminine gender as something some or all of them had experienced, the dialogue made it clear that Sylvie’s gender made her different from any other Loki. And more unbelievable than an alligator” (Hochwender). Erasing Loki’s genderfluidity negates any of the positives that would have come from the attempts of other forms queer representation. The erasure means that there is no genderfluidity represented in the show itself. Bad representation is worse than no representation, but Loki provides both bad and no representation at the same time. 

Comic book fans for the most part hated Loki due to the erasure of Loki’s transness. The way the Disney creators went about the queerbaiting in the series means that only those who had knowledge of the comics even knew to look for any speck of queer representation. Loki provided the perfect opportunity to explore a complex topic through a complicated character. However, the showrunner and writers decided instead to pair off Loki with himself, thus choosing selfcest over legitimate representation. Ultimately, Disney disappointed its queer fanbase in order for more profit and lost the potential to represent marginalized groups. 

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