You know, I used to roll my eyes at almost all time stuff in science fiction. Occasionally I'd run into a story where it seemed like they kept it nice and simple; The Terminator comes to mind. Otherwise I tended to think that "time" was a sort of magic wand that a thoughtless writer waved over a confused plot, in order to give the confusions some semblance of a coherent explanation. Or maybe "time" was simply added in for flavor, the way that "space" often is. Want to tell a story about cops, but with a bit more pizzazz? You can write about space cops, sure, but that's old hat. Time cops, now that's cooking with gas!
(Where do I even get my slang? I'm talking like a grandpa. I guess I usually do.)
It's taken me a long time (har har) to realize that even if there's no gonzo time-travel technology anywhere in sight—but then, why would it be, eh??—and no evidence that anyone's actually jumping around in time, it's still possible to have a time war. It's possible to control people's experience and appreciation of time, through clumsy brute-force methods. And it's possible to control the past, and thereby the future; George Orwell may have been a dirty snitch, but he was at least correct about how authoritarians manipulate time.
Eternity, or the successful emulation of eternity, is the important thing here. To be powerful in Western society is to have this greatest of luxuries: you get to feel like you've got all the time in the world, although that comes with the paradoxical fear that everything's going to come crashing in at any moment. (A luxury always corresponds with some complementary horror.) The wealthiest and most deeply-entrenched corporate titans get such an exquisite degree of control over their surroundings and personal associations that they're able to wallow in their pleasurable experiences to a degree that's impossible for anyone "on the clock" to understand. They can luxuriate in long lazy vacations and weighty conversations with their peers in which they discuss the evils of the wicked world in a spirit of mild detachment, and consciousness of having so much grander and broader a perspective on Earth's affairs than that of the various ants scurrying about on its surface, with their piddling meaningless complaints. And being able to savor such interludes of approximate timelessness gets to be so rarefied a pleasure as to justify any measures, however harsh and forbidding, in order to protect this feeling of being above and beyond the small concerns of mortality.
A glimpse of eternity, as it turns out, is one of the most intoxicating of all stimuli.
The rest of us are driven and lashed about by the mechanisms of time-keeping. It is not Time per se who torments us—though our society has taken care to heap as much of the blame as possible on Time himself, as if being tormented by time-keeping were somehow an inevitable state of existence. It's not Time to blame, though, but clocks and calendars and a tyrannical insistence upon punctuality. Punctuality is that horrifying and poisonous thing, an imitation virtue, and it's no accident that the British national character is dominated by an insistence upon rigid time-keeping. You can ruin a person simply by tapping on your watch or pointing to a calendar date and saying, "You lose." It's the secret to the capitalist notion of "wealth", which is intimately tied up with the collection of interest on a rigid schedule of time. In a thousand different ways, capitalists expect one thing above all others: that by a certain date and time, all the time, they're going to get money that's contractually owed to them.
That's not how it used to be. "Wealth", if it comes from anywhere on Earth, comes from the Earth itself. Even the gaseous "wealth" produced by such unreal-seeming financial manipulations as those which sustain blockchain businesses and cryptocurrencies require the consumption of vast amounts of earthly resources—the techlords who profit from these things have, however, done their absolute best to pretend that some miracle will eventually provide these things in infinite abundance, in defiance of the limited capacity of Earth to yield up her bounties. Until then, however, Earth does not produce her resources on a tight schedule. One cannot hope to find new copper mines at a moment's notice. One cannot hope for harvests to occur at exactly the same time every year. Human civilization used to be more generally aware that one must work at the pace the Earth sets; one must adapt to changing weathers and variable harvests and ever-changing populations of other creatures. The capitalist, however, has abstracted away all of these things into mere monetary propositions. All things are money to them, and they expect their money to be delivered to them on a predictable schedule, and in ever-increasing amounts. And we must all be forced to jump according to that schedule.
And so we all feel the sword dangling over our collective necks. I think I'm correct in guessing that I'm not alone in feeling this way—feeling as though any moment, our clock is going to run out, and we'll be ruined by all the things that we've never seemed to have time to do because we're run ragged and exhausted by competing demands on our time. Not by Time himself, I stress, but by what our leaders have done with time. We are bombarded constantly with inexorable calendar dates, with appointment times, with deadlines. The capitalists, the people who've devoted themselves to money and success on capitalist terms, laugh at us because we're forced to hop around on a schedule. They feel like they've got the secret, they finally know what true leisure feels like, because all they need to do is collect "passive income" for a living. (It's still "hard work", though. They say so.)
~Chara of Pnictogen
this one scene from the first episode of Loki seems almost like something cooked up for the sole purpose of creating a teaser-trailer for the show, making it look far more whimsical than what we actually get. we could have gotten Loki as a sort of Carmen Sandiego figure but nope, it's Loki the awkward sidekick to a time cop.
if we take the D. B. Cooper joke seriously, this puts Loki—well, Disney Marvel Loki—in the Pacific Northwest in 1971. what's the significance of that? probably nothing ~Chara