Loki (2021): an Islamic Critique

Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers of the Disney+ original Loki (2021).

I’ve always been fascinated by the media that children are consuming as a marker of philosophical sentiment. With globalization delivering Western media to the rest of the world, our youth are undergoing widespread colonization by Post-Modernist thought.

As you would expect for a Disney+ original, the show is rated TV-14 LV, for “language and violence.” What you might not expect from this rating, however, is the show’s focus on spacetime and Multiverse Theory. Long endorsed by Marvel and DC, and persistent in modern blockbusters such as Interstellar (2014), spacetime alterations have become a dogma of sorts in modern TV. And yet they rely on postmodernist subjectivity of perception to depict teleportation, shape-shifting, leaping through multiple timelines, and the purported existence of multiple versions of oneself: ideas that are ungrounded in empiricism but that certainly obstruct objectivity. This is, of course, not to mention anything of the deception and treachery part and parcel of the Loki family.

To drive home the nihilistic tendencies of Postmodernist thought, the show takes children through countless apocalypses, where the aim is not to prevent destruction, as literary heroes ought to, but rather precisely to emphasize their inevitability and exploit this attribute to their own advantage. In a celebration of Chaos Theory, and while tiptoeing around free will, an existential discussion ensues between Mobius and…