Based on the reactions online, a great deal of Loki fans were relieved that the Season 1 finale didn’t end with Tom Hiddleston’s trickster and Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie taking the moral high ground and returning to the Time Variance Authority’s headquarters as the organization’s new power couple, even if the kiss still left a lot of people feeling a little queasy.
On one hand, falling in love with yourself is an unusual idea to say the least, but it’s also perfectly in keeping with Loki’s nature, so both sides of the argument make sense. However, there’s been some suspicion that Sylvie only smooched the Asgardian God of Mischief to lull him into a false sense of security before booting him back into the wrong reality and continuing about her business of murdering the entity tasked with overseeing the entire multiverse.
That doesn’t appear to be the case, though, after director Kate Herron revealed in a new interview that the moment of passion between the Lokis was intended to be genuine, and Sylvie was instantly wracked with regret over putting her own quest for vengeance in front of the greater good.
“Honestly, the way I always read that kiss is that her feelings were genuine and that it was a goodbye. Sylvie is sort of where our Loki was in Thor. She’s driven by revenge, pain and anger, and that’s what he’s saying to her. He’s like, ‘I’ve been where you are, and I just want you to be okay. You’re not going to get what you want’. But she’s not there yet. On her journey of self-healing, she’s not where he is. So she’s not going to see it that way. So there was a sense that she was turning to get the TemPad, but I don’t think it meant the kiss wasn’t genuine. In my head, it was always a horrible goodbye, really, but the feelings were real.”
It’ll be interesting to see where Season 2 picks up, especially when we’ve got Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and possibly even Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania arriving before we get to the next batch of reality-bending Disney Plus adventures. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s canonical Loki has every right to feel aggrieved, and the consequences could be dire for every pocket of the franchise, so he’ll definitely have a bone to pick with Sylvie when they eventually reunite under a much different set of circumstances to the ones that first brought them together.
