Kang the Conquerer, Loki, and why metadata is bad for fiction: Unsettling Futures - Issue #12
Kang the Conquerer does not appear in the Disney+ series Loki.
(I realize I'm late to the cultural moment here, but the "Loki introduces Kang to the MCU" thing has been bugging me for weeks, so please allow me a belated rant on this topic.)
About 0.003 seconds after the conclusion of season one of Loki dropped on Disney+, the internet was full of talk about Kang, a character who is not named in Loki or any other Marvel film or TV show, ever. No glimpse of the iconic/weird blue-purple-green outfit, no armies invading from the future. Just a dude who put a very slight emphasis on the word "conquerer," once, in an interminable monologue.
And yet, the discussion was all Kang! This was setting up Kang to be in the next Ant-Man movie! The multiverse was being created for the next Dr. Strange movie! What does this tell us about the future of the MCU, about Kang, about Immortus, about phase 3.5 or whatever this current iteration is called?
Which is all very weird. Because Kang, as mentioned, does not appear in Loki. At all.
If you come to the series cold – and by "cold" I mean as someone who has only seen every single previous Marvel movie, plus Wandavision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, you'd have very little idea who Jonathan Majors was playing. He Who Remains? Was he a big deal in the comics or something? He sure gets to talk a lot for a guy who has a considerably lower profile than second-tier Spider-Man villains like Rhino or Scorpion.
But we don't come to anything cold anymore. We are deluged with the nerd-o-sphere's metadata.
Remember back in the 1990s, when there was that one guy at the comic book store who had a lecture ready for every occasion, the smug neckbeard who smelled of unwashed laundry and social failure, the guy who claimed his cousin Chuck Norris* had taught him how to do a lethal roundhouse kick? Remember how you could just walk out of the store and not think about him for weeks?
Well, he has a YouTube channel to lecture on now. And he's on Twitter. And Twitch. And he has thousands of fans, who are all smaller, less monetized versions of himself.**
Whether they're slick and socially adept, working for some paying entertainment news site, or some dude with a cheap mic wearing a slanket and reaching a dozen followers, it's impossible to avoid the Guy Who's Going To Explain The Easter Eggs.
We don't even really try to avoid these quasi-spoilers anymore. We absorb them, like air pollution that's going to get deep into our alveoli, no mask or filter capable of keeping them out. And so we are all aware, by osmosis, that the dude at the end of Loki was Kang, or at least a version of Kang. More Kang is on the way. It is known.
My objection to this is not that we are deluged with people building parasitic explainer-fiefdoms (although that kind of sucks) it's that it has become more difficult to judge a piece of art/media on its own merits.
Look, if you liked Loki, fine. I didn't care for it, and if you need to know why, I'd just direct you to this episode of Overinvested which sums up my thoughts very thoroughly and more clearly than I could. One of the hosts on The Coode Street Podcast also described it as, (possibly paraphrasing a bit here), a series made entirely of connective tissue, which I thought was very apt.
The bone I have to pick with Loki is that a lot of reviews, even at established, professional venues, looked at it not as a piece of art that could be judged by how well it accomplished its storytelling goals, but as a series of clues to what comes next in the MCU. By mixing those two evaluations, the criticism failed.
Vulture, for example, digs into the "but what does it all MEAN!" in the second paragraph of its recap/review:
He’s played by Jonathan Majors, who is already announced as playing Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but the refusal to call the character by that name here is fascinating. Is it a case of Marvel wanting the big name-drop to be a part of an actual movie, rather than a Disney+ show? Is it an allusion to Kang’s comic-book origins, and the many aliases by which he’s known? Probably both!
The AV Club attempts to have it both ways:
Although he’s billed as “He Who Remains,” MCU aficionados will know that Majors has already been cast as the villainous Kang the Conqueror in the upcoming Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania. That means there are two ways to watch this latest bit of MCU franchise storytelling: Those who are steeped in comic book lore and have long been theorizing that Kang will turn out to be this show’s Big Bad were no doubt thrilled from the very first shot of Majors. Everyone else was presumably just as confused as Loki and Sylvie.
That really puts the button on it. Loki not only doesn't stand on its own, it isn't supported by anything that comes before it in the MCU. It only makes sense if you're plugged into the metadata – the world of explainers and speculation and Easter eggs. And because everyone who cares to can Google "he who remains loki who?" the creators no longer feel a need to connect the dots. There's a volunteer army out there ready to do it for them.
This is a bad thing. The scaffolding of the explainer-verse can easily encourage more lazy, shallow storytelling. And it's definitely going to happen again, with the MCU, or Star Wars, or the DC films, or whatever the next big ever-expanding franchise is.
The tendency towards interconnectedness in the MCU has been building for years, and it's been very successful financially. Loki is its inevitable outcome, both as an artistic product, and as a product of the entertainment media ecosystem in which it exists. For a click-driven outlet to review it alone – to ask whether it works on its own merits – would probably be a mistake, at least from a corporate point of view. If your review or recap can't tell you who He Who Remains really is, then you'll seem out of touch.
None of which changes this fact – Kang does not appear in Loki. He just isn't there, no matter what you read on the internet.
End notes:
*True story – my local comics shop used to be haunted by a guy who made this exact claim. It was very sad.
**See also: Fandom Is Too Big To Fail – And That's A Problem, by, um, me.
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