The TVA’s pruning stick looks like a delete button. In “Loki,” agents tap a target and the target disintegrates. Viewers took the obvious meaning, and TheWrap admitted in June 2021 that it had “kinda assumed that meant they were being erased.” But “Loki” and “Deadpool & Wolverine” both show something else. Pruned characters do not vanish but wake up in a place called the Void, and some of them walk back out.
Here is the short version. Pruning is a transfer, not an execution. It sends you to the end of the timeline, and the Void is where the dying happens. A cloud creature named Alioth eats whatever lands there. That split matters now because “Avengers: Doomsday” arrives on December 18th, and at least one of the heroes stranded in the Void is confirmed for it. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Loki” and “Deadpool & Wolverine”.
Pruning is a transfer, not an execution.”
The turn comes at the end of “The Nexus Event,” episode 4 of “Loki.” Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) hits Mobius (Owen Wilson) with a pruning stick and he disintegrates. Later in the episode she does the same to Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Inverse noted that Mobius was dead by the show’s own logic, then pointed out that “most of what they say is a lie.” A mid-credits scene proves the point when Loki wakes up in a ruined city, and four other versions of himself are standing over him.
Those Lokis are the Void’s survivors. Looper names them as Boastful Loki (Deobia Oparei), Kid Loki (Jack Veal), Classic Loki (Richard E. Grant) and Gator Loki, though Laughing Place calls the last one Alligator Loki. Episode 5 goes inside their lair. Laughing Place says they explain that the TVA dumps its trash in the Void and that Alioth makes sure nothing ever gets back. Their plan is simply to stay alive, and Looper adds that they end up betraying one another.
Ravonna spells out the rule for Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) in the same episode. Laughing Place summarizes it this way: everything pruned goes to a point at the end of the timeline where every timeline collides and stops. Looper puts it plainly: the batons do not kill variants. They transport them to the Void, where Alioth can vaporize them. Slashfilm describes the same mechanism: the energy from a prune stick shifts all matter it touches to the Void, where Alioth consumes it. The TVA is not erasing anyone. It is outsourcing the killing to a monster.
Mobius is the cleanest proof. He was pruned in episode 4 and turns up in episode 5 driving a car through the Void, where he picks up Sylvie. She pruned herself on purpose to follow Loki, and the two outrun Alioth together. When the group reaches the creature, Mobius uses a TemPad to jump back to the TVA, according to Laughing Place. Looper says he heads back to work. A pruned man walked out of the end of time with a time-travel device in his hand.
The Void can still kill you, and Classic Loki shows how. Looper says he survived the “Avengers: Infinity War” era by hiding from Thanos. Laughing Place says the TVA pruned him after years alone on a remote planet. He lived on in the Void until the end of episode 5, when he conjures a fake Asgard to distract Alioth so that Sylvie and Loki can enchant the beast. Alioth destroys the illusion and consumes him, and Laughing Place notes that he laughs at the moment of his death. The baton did not end him. The monster did.
Sylvie’s own history shows what the TVA does before it ever prunes anyone. “The Nexus Event” opens on a flashback to Asgard, where a little girl is playing with her toys. The Nerd Daily recap says the TVA arrives, led by Renslayer back when she was a Hunter, and arrests the child. In court Sylvie steals Renslayer’s TemPad, opens a time door and escapes. Afterward she is constantly on the run and grows up “at the ends of a thousand worlds.” In Binge Rampage’s chronological cut, that arrest lands about 37 minutes into its opening chapter, dated to the year 983.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” reuses the Void and the rule. Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) tells Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) that an anchor being cannot be replaced with a variant. When Wade and a variant Logan (Hugh Jackman) protest, Slashfilm says, Paradox has the two of them pruned and sent to the Void. Wade even breaks the fourth wall to explain that the place was last seen at the end of the first season of “Loki.” The film treats pruning as a shipping label, and nothing about the trip itself hurts them.
The Void has changed since Loki’s visit. Slashfilm reports that it is now ruled by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), Charles Xavier’s mad twin sister, who lives inside the corpse of a Giant-Man variant. Nova has a symbiotic relationship with Alioth and tries to feed Wade and Logan to it, but they escape on a jetpack. The place is a kingdom of discarded movie characters now, and the crumbling 20th Century Fox logo in the ground tells you who has been dumped there.
Other discarded heroes do not fare as well. Slashfilm says Nova strips Johnny Storm (Chris Evans) of his skin, and Inverse says Alioth consumes Blade (Wesley Snipes) and Elektra (Jennifer Garner) on screen, though “we never saw any bodies.” Neither fate involved a baton, because both came from the place the baton sends you. That is the same lesson as Classic Loki’s, and it is one the TVA never mentions. The Void is the weapon, and pruning only hands over the target.
Wade and Logan do get out. Slashfilm says they free Nova from a helmet in exchange for a portal home, which she opens with a Sling Ring taken from a Doctor Strange variant just as Alioth arrives for lunch. Back on Earth-10005, the two pruned men stop Paradox and save Wade’s timeline. X-23 (Dafne Keen) gets out too. Slashfilm says she is back with the gang in Wade’s universe at the end, thanks to help from the TVA. Gambit (Channing Tatum) may have found his own exit. A clip Reynolds posted shows him turning to face a portal, and Inverse reads it as a ticket into the MCU’s main timeline.
Gambit is the only hero from that group confirmed for “Avengers: Doomsday.” Soap Central says his name appeared on a chair at Marvel’s March 2025 cast reveal. Tatum is also on TechRadar’s August 2026 list of 30 cast members and on Dexerto’s earlier roster. Johnny Storm is a different case, because Dexerto lists Joseph Quinn in that role while Evans is back as Steve Rogers. Blade and Elektra are on neither list. Keen said at FAN EXPO Canada in 2025 that she had “no idea” and hoped so, according to GeekTyrant. At D23 this August, T-Break reports, Jackman pitched himself and Reynolds for the film, and Marvel has not confirmed either one.
Robert Downey Jr. is on the same TechRadar list as Doctor Doom, and the plot has whole worlds colliding. Neither TechRadar’s nor Dexerto’s plot rundown mentions the Void. But the pattern is already on screen. Being sent there is survivable, and Mobius, Sylvie, Wade, Logan and X-23 all prove it. Staying is the problem. Whatever Doom does to the multiverse, the rule that pruning is not death has been set up for years.
What Do You Think? Does the Void work better as a prison or as a doorway? Was Classic Loki’s death a sacrifice or a cheat, given that the TVA had already pruned him? And if Gambit is the only Void survivor in “Avengers: Doomsday,” who should be the next one to walk back out?
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