As heinous as the actions taken by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War may have been, a newly-introduced MCU villain one-upped him.
One of the most important moments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Thanos’ Infinity Stones-powered snap, which got slightly retconned thanks to one recent MCU project. By clicking his fingers, the Mad Titan erased half of all life, not just on Earth, but in the entire universe.
Marvel Studios has introduced some pretty bad hombres over the past 15 years, and many of them have racked up some considerable body counts. But they might not compare to what went down in the most recent episode of Loki.
General Dox's Multiversal Mass Murder Dwarfs Thanos' Kill Count
Season 2, Episode 2 of Loki on Disney+ ended with the TVA’s General Dox going rogue and leading her team of Minutemen on a mission to prune all the new branches off of the Sacred Timeline that came about when Sylvie killed He Who Remains.
Loki and his friends attempted to intervene, but the deed was done and tons of timeline branches were decimated, all with people living on them. Unfortunately, the heroes were powerless to stop this catastrophe. As Hunter B-15 concisely put it, “Those are people… those are lives…”
Whereas Thanos wiped out half of all life in the universe, Dox killed all the life in what essentially amounts to multiple universes. This single act made her one of the most lethal villains the MCU has ever known.
Now, it’s important to note that otherwordly entities such as Dormammu, who has decimated a number of dimensions, and time-traveling despots like Kang (and all his Variants) who have laid waste to countless universes, would have a higher kill count. What If''s Infinity Ultron's Multiversal attack also can't be forgotten, with his munch of the Multiverse causing some heavy damage in its own right.
He Who Remains was responsible for destroying billions of universes in order to distill everything down to the Sacred Timeline, likely meaning that he still has the record for the highest kill count in the MCU.
Still, General Dox is unmistakably a force to be reckoned with.
Did Important MCU Timelines Get Pruned in Loki?
When General Dox committed her crime against time itself, presumably thousands of branches became pruned and eliminated from existence. So where does that leave the worlds of the other Peter Parkers (from Spider-Man: No Way Home) or Deadpool and his little band of weirdos?
It’s almost impossible that Marvel Studios would destroy timelines and universes that hold valuable storytelling potential. This is the Multiverse Saga, after all.
Therefore, it’s extremely likely that all the fans’ favorite heroes are present and accounted for, like Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Men, the elderly Steve Rogers, and the entirety of the Fox X-Men. A recent interview with Loki director Dan DeLeeuw (via Screen Rant) serves to back all of this up.
Per DeLeeuw, the creators were deliberate about which timelines met their end:
“We didn't get too specific about who was gonna go, but I definitely made my list of what the same lines were.”
Furthermore, there is, in fact, a distinction between timelines and universes as they pertain to the MCU. Marvel producer Richie Palmer previously implied that Garfield and Maguire’s worlds exist in alternate universes, seemingly making them exempt from timeline shenanigans in the first place.
Marvel Studios’ Loki Season 2 drops new episodes just in the nick of time, Thursdays at 9:00 p.m., only on Disney+.
