Phase 4 Has Proven Loki Doesn’t Need Thor (But Thor Needs Loki)

Marvel’s Phase 4 has seen Thor and Loki going separate ways, and now the Loki series and Thor: Love and Thunder have proven Thor needs Loki more than Loki needs Thor. Following the game-changing Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, the often intertwined journeys of Thor and Loki became separate for the first time since the beginning of the MCU. Loki is now the star of his own show while Thor has been in his first major adventure without Loki, and the way Loki and Thor: Love and Thunder were received shows that the former worked better than the latter.

Technically, the Loki who had been slowly redeemed after Thor: The Dark World and that was willing to die to save his brother no longer exists. That Loki died in Avengers: Infinity War, and while Avengers: Endgame’s time-heist made it so that a version of Loki could return, the character Tom Hiddleston now plays is not the same character whose death Chris Hemsworth’s Thor cried for. More than allowing Loki to return after his death in Infinity War, the time travel and multiple realities set up made it so that Thor and Loki could finally walk separate paths in the MCU.

Thor and Loki needed to be in separate stories after a decade of fighting either against each other or side by side. Keeping Thor and Loki separate would allow the MCU to take both characters to unexpected places, and it would assure that their roles in Phase 4 and beyond would feel different from what audiences had watched throughout the Infinity Saga. However, Thor: Love and Thunder struggled with tone and with how to nail its main character whereas the Loki series knew exactly how to craft a Loki solo adventure. This shows that, while splitting the pair up was a necessity, Loki is actually faring better by himself than Thor.

The Loki Series Worked Perfect Without Thor

Taking a character who is usually tied with gods and mystical arts and placing them in a sci-fi background could have gone incredibly wrong. However, Loki season 1 proved that Loki works surprisingly well as a sci-fi character within the MCU’s multiverse. One of the first Disney+’s Marvel shows, Loki was released far before the MCU announced its plans for the Multiverse Saga, yet it was the franchise’s first step into the journey that will lead to Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars.

There were little to no references to Thor in Loki, and while Loki missed his brother and cried upon learning the events of the Asgardian Ragnarok, the emotional weight of the series was not Loki’s Asgard story. Loki was a character study, one that purposely removed everything familiar from Loki to then deconstruct the villain. Essentially, the reason that Loki worked so well without Thor or anything Asgard-related is that it asked the question of what it means to be a Loki – and the answer had to be more meaningful than just “Thor’s brother”.

Loki Could Have Improved Love & Thunder

The first Thor film not to feature Loki, Thor: Love and Thunder struggled to recapture the magic of Thor: Ragnarok. Love and Thunder had the difficult challenge of repeating everything that worked in Ragnarok while continuing to reinvent Thor as a character, but the result was an unbalanced film whose tone did not match its story. Ragnarok brought a breath of fresh air to Thor’s character, replacing the soulless broody temper seen in Thor, Thor: The Dark World, and the first two Avengers films with a more charismatic, relatable Thor. Ragnarok reinvented Thor while still giving the character and the world around him some level of emotional weight, something that Love and Thunder failed to replicate.

Love and Thunder’s Thor felt sometimes more like a parody of Ragnarok’s Thor than an evolved version of the character. While that is a consequence of Love and Thunder’s tonal problems, it could have been eased by Loki’s presence in the film. Loki is Thor’s emotional anchor in the MCU even when the brothers are placed in comedic moments like Ragnrok’s “get help”, and that is exactly what Love and Thunder lacked.

Thor’s Best MCU Moments Are Still With Loki

The Loki series has some of Loki’s best moments in the MCU, including Loki watching a movie of his life, his earnest conversations with Mobius, and his dynamic with the Loki variant Sylvie. However, when it comes to Thor, the God of Thunder’s best MCU stories are still the ones featuring Loki. The MCU’s Thor is defined by his relationship with Loki, especially because Marvel’s Phases 1 and 2 still hadn’t nailed what the Chris Hemsworth character should be like. The Thor audiences cheered for during Infinity War only came to be because of Loki’s death, which exemplifies how essential Loki is to Thor’s story and how significant Loki’s absence from Thor: Love and Thunder was. As a villain who later becomes an antihero, Loki would always have an easier path to become a “solo main character” himself. Thor, on the other hand, will forever be a hero, which means he will often be defined by his villains.