He may have been forced to the Time Variance Authority against his will, but poor Mobius' salad gets sacrificed in the process of explaining it, but it has some interesting implications for how the Marvel Cinematic Universe's timeline works.

As helpfully explained by Avengers: Endgame.

Related: Theory: Loki's Time-Keepers Don't Exist

Loki's theory explains how someone could change events on the timeline without creating a nexus point: by doing so near an apocalypse event. Apocalypses effectively work in the same way as the TVA's reset charge. They destroy anything that the variant may have affected, so that the variant's actions have no long-term impact on the timeline. The TVA doesn't detect any variance energy, and the variant remains off their radar.

Loki Ruining Mobius' Salad

Loki demonstrates this theory using Mobius' lunchtime salad bowl as a metaphor for the timeline. He first covers it in salt and pepper, to represent the variant messing around with a timeline event. Then he drenches the whole salad in Boku juice, at which point it doesn't matter that it's been over-salted or over-peppered, because no one would want to eat it anyway.

Though what the Avengers did in Endgame was meant to happen, implying that Steve Rogers was meant to go back in time and marry Peggy. And so long as Steve remained low-key and didn't try to change larger events, he could have lived his new life without disrupting the sacred timeline.

If Loki's explanation of alternate timelines is correct (and his Pompeii experiment more or less confirms that it is) then what matters to the TVA is not whether or not an alternate timeline exists, but whether enough is changed to push that timeline past the red line. In Miss Minutes' PSA, the Time-Keepers were shown gathering up the many different timelines and merging them into a sacred timeline where they coexist peacefully. With that in mind, the sacred timeline is less like a single thread and more like a rope made out of many different threads. As long as those threads generally point in the same direction, the sacred timeline is maintained and the TVA doesn't need to step in.

More: MCU's Multiverse & Alternate Timeline Rules Explained (Based On Loki & Endgame)

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