Originally Posted by
Raye
YAAAY! and look, he's in his current body/outfit, so that's a good sign.
Wait, why does he have Mjolnir? why is he ABLE TO LIFT Mjolnir?
It's a little fuzzy, but (since i presume you are cool with spoilers) Loki died at the end of Siege, got blown to bits by the Void (hence why he was so afraid of it in Dr Strange, to the point that he kinda froze up, if you read that, but also another sign that the old Loki is still in there) but it turned out this was actually kind of part of his plan. Before his death, he had arranged to have his name struck from the Book of the Dead, so that he would not go to the afterlife, and instead be reincarnated. He also created a backup copy of his mind, along with a set of simple instructions for it to follow once he died. Kind of think of it as a backup of a computer, with a program to restore it if the original computer is wiped. This backup was to seek out his reincarnated body, and when the time was right, overwrite the mind of the reincarnated Loki so the original personality/memories would be in the drivers seat again. He wanted the new Loki to establish a new role and fate and make people trust him once again, because he felt he had become too predictable and had done too much damage to the relationships with Thor etc. Make no mistake, he was thinking in a very self serving way here, he wasn't, at that point, really trying to restore those relationships for a good reason, he just wanted to shake up the status quo so that people wouldn't be able to predict what he did next. So this backup followed Kid Loki around as the magpie Ikol, and when he saw his opportunity, he overwrote Kid Loki's mind. Loki later justified this to himself as Ikol being the weapon of the old Loki who was the one who really fired it, which is where it gets fuzzy. But imo, while Ikol was technically just a copy of the original Loki's mind, he did have all his memories and personality traits, so in all the ways that matter he is the same, and his 'murder weapon' justifications were just him trying to escape the guilt he was feeling. Was this guilt due to some of Kid Loki remaining behind? was it something that was always there, just a step too far even for him? a glitch in copying the 'code'? I dunno, but he has all the memories of the old Loki, so as far as I am concerned, it's the old Loki in all th ways that matter, and apparently his family feels the same way. And at the end of Agent of Asgard, it seemed he came to accept this himself, right before trying to redefine his role.