Loki

Loki is not Odin's son by blood. He was taken as an infant from the Frost Giants of Jotunheim after a war, and raised as an Asgardian prince knowing none of it. The guide gives the adoption; the wider films name his birth father as Laufey and frame the taking as a spoil that might one day unite the two realms.

Loki discovers his own origin by touching a Frost Giant and not burning. The revelation collapses his sense of himself: everything he understood about why Odin favoured Thor is rewritten in a moment. He seizes the throne and tries to destroy Jotunheim — his own birth people — to prove he deserves it. He loses, and lets go of the Bifröst into the void.

Loki does not die in the void. He falls into the hands of Thanos, who gives him an army of Chitauri and the Mind Stone inside a scepter. The guide is explicit that what follows is coercion rather than alliance — though it also notes Loki genuinely wanted to rule Earth. Both are true, and that is the character.

He takes the Tesseract from S.H.I.E.L.D., enslaves Clint Barton and Erik Selvig with the scepter, and opens a portal over Manhattan. The Battle of New York is the founding public event of the superhero age. He is beaten and returned to Asgard in chains.

Frigga, Thor's mother, is killed. Loki and Thor reluctantly ally. Loki fakes his own death in the battle, then quietly deposes Odin and rules Asgard disguised as him for four years.

Sent to fetch Surtur's crown, he pockets the Tesseract from Odin's vault on the way out — opportunism, and leverage. But he returns with a stolen ship to evacuate the Asgardian refugees rather than saving himself. Thor's reaction, surprised then quietly moved, is the payoff of five films.

Thanos intercepts the refugee ship and takes the Space Stone. Loki attempts a knife and dies for it. This is the end of the Loki the films had been following since 2011. Every appearance after this point is a different individual. Nothing brings him back.

During the heist the Avengers fumble the Tesseract in 2012 New York, and the Loki of that year — freshly defeated, still in chains, having lived through none of the redemption arc — grabs it and vanishes. That escape creates a branched timeline. This variant is the Loki who is alive today.

Taken for the crime of branching the timeline, he is shown his own future — including his death — and recruited by Mobius to hunt a variant of himself. That variant is Sylvie, who has been bombing the timeline for years. He was recruited to catch her and switches sides; that is the arc.

Offered stewardship of the TVA or the freeing of the multiverse, Loki argues they should stop and think, because the alternative is a multiversal war. Sylvie cannot accept stewardship of the system that stole her life. She kisses him, pushes him through a time door, and kills He Who Remains alone. The multiverse opens.

The Temporal Loom was engineered to weave exactly one timeline and cannot handle infinite branches. After many failed attempts to fix it, Loki realises the machine is the wrong solution entirely — it exists to limit the multiverse rather than sustain it.

He walks out into the raw timelines, gathers the dying branches in his hands, and holds them himself — alone on a throne at the centre of a great tree of living timelines. The character who spent eleven years demanding a throne gets one, and it is a prison. The guide calls this the single most likely piece of setup for Doomsday.