You don’t have to be a diehard Sylki shipper to notice that something felt off in Loki season 2, especially when it came to the series’ female characters. Now, one viewer has compiled data indicating that it wasn’t just our imaginations.
Loki season 1 introduced four powerful new female characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), a variant of Loki who’s determined to destroy the Time Variance Authority, ends the season by singlehandedly unleashing the multiverse. Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) are fierce TVA loyalists trying to protect the Sacred Timeline. Miss Minutes (Tara Strong) is a cheerful A.I. with a sinister side. The season also had great minor female characters, like Hunter C-20 (Sasha Lane).
In season 2, though, the gender balance didn’t feel as healthy. Although the season introduced one new female character, Judge Gamble (Liz Carr), the women in the series seemed to be overshadowed by male newcomers O.B. (Ke Huy Quan), Brad Wolf (Rafael Casal), and Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors), along with Casey (Eugene Cordero), who was promoted to a series regular.
Sylvie’s character felt particularly sidelined. Although I held out hope until the very end that the season was leading up to something really interesting for her, when the season concluded, Sylvie felt more like a foil for Loki than a character in her own right. The romance that begins in season 1 never goes anywhere, and the season finale’s battle in the Citadel even contains a problematic trope: Loki and He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) both make Sylvie freeze and disappear so they don’t have to deal with her while they talk about the fate of the timeline.
All in all, the series just didn’t seem to care about its female characters. And now there are numbers to prove it.
On X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, a user named Elyse (@shoalsandsuch) read through episode transcripts and totaled up the number of words spoken by each character. Elyse then visualized that data into charts and graphs. Here’s one of Elyse’s starkest findings:
“On the whole,” Elyse writes, “from Season 1 to Season 2 female dialogue decreased by 25% (1509 words) while male dialogue rose 22% (2038 words).” The character who loses the most dialogue is, unsurprisingly, Sylvie, with her word count falling by 1103 words. In terms of screen time, Elyse explains in the intro to the Reddit thread that Sylvie’s season 2 screen time is half of what it is in season 1.
Of course, the data has complicating factors, too. For instance, Elyse found that Loki’s own screen time dropped by about 45 minutes in season 2. And it’s important to remember that despite Loki’s genderfluidity in the comics and his TVA file, the series has no actual genderfluid or nonbinary characters that we know of.
“I was inspired to do this work largely by my background in research on comic books and gender representation,” Elyse told The Mary Sue. “I’ve found that having quantifiable numbers can help in appreciating abstract issues like gender representation.
“My hope in sharing the data was that people who felt like female characters were underserved by the season got a sense of affirmation being able to see that there was definitive data supporting those feelings,” Elyse explained, “and that people who may have been dismissive towards concerns about gender representation in season 2 or just hadn’t thought about it could see that there is actual evidence demonstrating the issue.”
I should note that I haven’t verified Elyse’s data. However, Elyse explains her methodology in the Reddit thread, so anyone with the time and inclination can repeat the experiment.
The larger point here is that film and TV, especially comic book and superhero media, have always had a problem when it comes to gender representation. You can head over to Reddit or X to take a look at some of the other statistics Elyse compiled, but here’s hoping that someday, threads like these won’t be necessary.
(featured image: Disney+)
