One of the most helpful books I’ve read in my personal journey is Ann Belford Ulanov’s Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying. Envy is not the same as jealousy. Jealousy is based on fear and love, the fear that something or someone we love will be taken from us, while envy is based on low self-esteem and hate. We envy others who have something we believe, deep down, we cannot have, and we hate them for it. We see them through a distorted lens, not as the people they really are; we turn them into the objects of our own loathing. As Ulanov says, their “reality as a person is nullified.” And as a result, there is nothing the envied person can do that will reach the envier, for everything they might try, even giving the envier what they desire, will only be seen as a trick or worse, pity. Either only confirms the envier’s self-hatred.

Loki has always envied his stepbrother Thor. He is furious when Odin makes it clear he’s going to tap Thor to take the throne of Asgard; he disrupts the ceremony, calls Thor a “witless oaf,” and insists that he would make a much better king. He doesn’t believe that Thor actually cares for him; he sees Thor’s ability to love a human woman as proof that he is “soft” and manipulates Thor emotionally every chance he gets. But he also tries to justify his actions by saying “I only ever wanted to be your equal,” revealing his own deep conviction that he is, in fact, not Thor’s equal.

The only thing that Loki believes could make him Thor’s equal is to take the throne meant for Thor. It won’t work to have a separate but equal throne; he never attempts to take over Jotunheim, the Ice Giant’s planet, even though he is in fact the heir of Laufey, their king. He wants to rule Asgard, and he manages to usurp the throne briefly on two occasions by masquerading as Odin. He ignores the fact that Thor does not, in fact, want the throne, and in fact Thor deposes him each time.

When Loki breaks out of the timeline by seizing the tesseract, he becomes a variant, a deviation from what is supposed to happen (“the sacred timeline”), causing a new timeline to come into being. This causes him to come to the attention of the Time Variance Authority and he is quickly captured. In the usual course of things he would be “pruned” from existence to restore the sacred timeline. But Mobius, one of the agents of the TVA, thinks this Loki could be useful for hunting down another variant Loki who has managed to elude the TVA, and obtains a stay of execution.

Loki is not interested in helping Mobius until he watches what fate had in store for him. First, he sees that Asgard will be destroyed, meaning there will not be a throne to usurp; he sees himself helping to rescue the Asgardians; and he sees his own death at the hands of Thanos. He is deeply shocked. Being Loki, his next thought is to “take over” the TVA. He plays along with Mobius until he gets the chance to escape and joins up with the rogue variant he was supposed to help catch, a female Loki who calls herself Sylvie.

Sylvie doesn’t share Loki’s thirst for power; what she wants is to destroy the TVA, which she blames for taking her away from her happy childhood in Asgard. As they move from adventure to adventure, Loki and Sylvie share their ideas about who they are. Who is more likely to understand us than ourselves, after all? But that means also knowing when we are lying to ourselves. Loki owns to Sylvie that he’s a narcissist; he admits he’s betrayed everyone who ever trusted him. Yet then he says “I know what I did, and I know why I did it. But that’s not who I am any more.”

The other problem with envy, says Ulanov, is that it disrupts “one’s connection to the good,” to what makes life worth living. Loki is starting to see this. He is changing.

Sylvie has not changed. She is Loki’s double, the shadow self that shows us what will happen if Loki chooses to act out of envy. Sylvie manages to kill He Who Remains, who is the actual godlike force controlling the sacred timeline, only to cause a myriad number of new timelines to break out. Loki returns to the TVA but is now “time slipping,” jumping from one timeline to another. Yet he manages to forge an alliance with several of the TVA employees, including Mobius, Casey (the intake clerk from Loki’s first arrest), Hunter B-15 (who initially captured Loki), and Ouroboros or “O.B,” who is basically the TVA’s I.T. guy. Sylvie shows back up with “Mr. Timely,” who is the original incarnation of He Who Remains. For the rest of season 2, we watch as this team tries to fix the “time loom” that can reweave the variant timelines–and we watch them becoming friends in the process.

Loki’s never had friends before. Having friends changes him. We watch as Loki realizes he no longer wants a throne. He paraphrases a line from Richard II, saying that all his life he’s wasted time and now time is wasting him. What he wants now is to save his friends, and the universe, from the certain death of the timelines. He gains control of his time-slipping and uses that plus his near-immortality to spend a millennium learning all the theory he needs to fix the time loom.

Eventually Loki realizes that it can’t be done; the time loom can’t be fixed through technology. Traditional heroes reset things back to the way they were; they restore the status quo, but Loki will never be a traditional hero. As the team watches the timelines start to wither and die, Loki acts. He is no longer spurred by envy, but by love–and by the hard-won conviction that in fact, he is worthy, he is capable of doing what needs to be done.

Loki is the Trickster God, the God of Mischief, the god who often breaks things just to see what will happen. Trickster gods show up in most religions, some of which mistake him for the god of evil or destruction. But the Trickster’s ultimate purpose is as the catalyst for change when things have gotten stuck or gone too far in a certain direction. Loki sees at last that his purpose is to break the loom so that a new thing can come into being. He goes, unarmored, into the space of the time loom. As he forces his way forward, his Loki costume takes form around him, but with subtle differences. This new costume is somehow more solid; the crowning horns heavier. This is a Loki of more substance than he has ever had. “I think we have more power than we realize,” he said to Sylvie once. Now he uses that power, grasping timeline after timeline and restoring it, weaving them together in a new way.

And a throne appears. Loki ascends to it and sits down as the timelines continue to weave about him, obscuring him from view. The viewpoint pulls back and shifts 90 degrees, allowing us to see that the interwoven timelines have taken on the shape of Yggdrasil, the World Tree.

Loki has become a new god. His place at the center of each timeline, says Pauli Pousio, writing on Looper, makes him the God of Stories, “the most powerful god of all.” We can imagine that with Loki on the throne, stories will never grow old or become clichés. If they get too boring, we can count on Loki to shake things up. That’s always been his job, after all; he just needed time to grow into it.