While Kid Loki just made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut, the young Asgardian god played a pivotal role in one incarnation of the Young Avengers.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Loki Episode 5, “Journey Into Mystery,” streaming now on Disney+.
Kid Loki may very well be the most controversial member of the Young Avengers team. But in the Loki series on Disney+, Kid Loki proved to be the most competent version of the Asgardian trickster by leading a group of his fellow variants through the wastes of the Void and keeping them safe from harm.
He has a small but important role in the show, despite being so powerful that he killed the Thor of his timeline. In the comic book Marvel Universe, Kid Loki’s involvement with the Young Avengers was instrumental in making the team’s heroes the very best versions of themselves and helping them stop a powerful otherworldly entity.
In order to understand why Kid Loki was so significant, it is important to establish some context. Two of the main characters on the Young Avengers team are the couple of Billy Kaplan’s Wiccan and Teddy Altman’s Hulkling. Wiccan uses powerful reality-altering magic, while Hulkling is a half-Kree/half-Skrull shapeshifter who was raised as a human by his adoptive mother. Tragically, Teddy’s mother was killed right in front of him.
Both characters were fleshed out more in the 2013 Young Avengers comic by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. At the start of the series, Hulkling was still struggling with the loss of the only parent he had ever known. Trying to help, Wiccan used his magic to find a version of Hulkling’s mother who was still alive somewhere in the multiverse and bring her to their own reality. However, the person he found was actually an interdimensional shapeshifting parasite called Mother who preyed on Wiccan’s inexperience to gain access to their reality.
By assuming the form of Hulkling’s adoptive mother, she was able to fool Wiccan. Shortly after arriving in the main Marvel Universe, she brainwashed the other adults, including Wiccan’s parents and the Avengers. Kid Loki became aware of Wiccan’s actions and tried to prevent Mother from being summoned, but arrived too late. After Mother imprisoned Wiccan in a pocket dimension, Loki rescued him. He then helped the Young Avengers team stop Mother.
During his time with the Young Avengers, Kid Loki unsurprisingly caused quite a nit of mischief. He also revealed that Wiccan would one day become an omnipotent magical being called the Demiurge. The trickster god helped Wiccan learn to access and control his powers, and by the end of the series, Wiccan managed to briefly manifest the full might of the Demiurge. But before that happened, Kid Loki stole Wiccan’s powers in the middle of a fight against Mother. Thankfully, the younger less-jaded Kid Loki was racked with guilt in a way his adult self would not have been for erasing and taking the place of another heroic Kid Loki. Accordingly, he returned said powers before everyone died.
A large part of the series also involved the team of heroes leaping between alternate dimensions where they encountered variant versions of themselves, which draws obvious comparisons to the alternate timelines that are a core part of the MCU’s Loki TV series. In the end, Kid Loki helped Wiccan and the other Young Avengers defeat Mother and reach their full potential.
While Loki ended with the reshaping of the timeline and creation of a new MCU multiverse, Kid Loki’s fate was left somewhat uncertain. While the MCU has gradually been introducing the Young Avengers, there’s no telling if Kid Loki will end up on any MCU Young Avengers team, or if he could even face them as a villain.
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