Loki is literally the Norse god of mischief. Let's break that down.
Norse god
Unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the 616 Marvel universe, the Asgardians are literally gods. They exist in and are shaped by myth and legend, and Loki is one of the classic villains of the Norse mythological pantheon. This is a fact that Loki is unable to escape.
But he tries.
Loki hates to be constrained by anything. He wants it all - all the power. All of it. He has died to escape the bonds of story, which had driven him away from his more light-hearted trickster origins onto a darker and purely evil path. He avoided the cycle of Ragnarok, and made a deal with Hela to ensure that his spirit wouldn't go to Hel after he died. Everything he does, wheels within wheels within wheels, are ultimately with the long-term goal of gaining more power for himself, and escaping anything that might smack of fate or control of others over him.
Nothing he does is for only a single purpose. He might seem to be fighting for a particular cause, but every time you think you've got a handle on what Loki really wants, it turns out that he's got three other things he's working towards as well.
He's a millennia-old god. He is capable of shaping the very fabric of reality. He's superior in every way to the mortals he hangs around with, and that's just the way it is. And he's also cute and charming as heck.
of Mischief
Debatably, though Loki continues to thirst for power, he no longer seeks deliberately to cause rampant destruction and murder. The old Loki has a body count probably in the literal millions, and never cared one bit. He had so much anger and resentment towards his adopted family that he fought to kill Thor and the other Asgardians over and over again, and many times he has nearly succeeded. In fact, recently he really did succeed - but at the last moment he sacrificed his own life to stop the total destruction of Asgard.
Of course, that was for his own purposes as well.
He was reincarnated and it turns out that his sacrifice was for the express purposes of escaping the fat that he had gotten locked into - to become the god of mischief again, instead of the god of evil. The new Loki seems to be trying to accomplish at least some good in the world and make up for what he's done. He feels guilt for what he has done in the past, and he doesn't actually want the world to end or anything. I mean, that's where he keeps all his stuff.
Also if he were all by himself, who would he show off to? That'd suck.
So Loki is struggling not to fall back into old patterns, and he's only half succeeding. He was reborn as a child, innocent and mischievous and really determined not to be old evil Loki. Just as he managed to mostly convince everyone that he really did honestly want to be good and change, the spirit of his old self devoured him and took over his body.
Welp. So much for that, right? He's evil Loki in cute Loki's body, right? We're all going to die. Also, hardly anybody knows this happened.
But it seems as though cute Loki has had a strong influence on his old self, and who knows? Maybe he really has changed. Old Loki destroyed New Loki, and was himself changed through that act. Form follows function - and to a god, perception, story, and myth are real. He's taken on the physical form of the New Loki, so possibly, just possibly, Loki didn't so much destroy the new version of himself, as merge with it.
So Loki is a trickster, he's a planner, he's supremely power hungry, he's fiendishly, terrifyingly intelligent and almost completely merciless in carrying out his plans. He's also lonely as heck, mistrusted by all and pretending that he doesn't care, and occasionally possibly, he is just a tiny bit heroic, though usually that's at least partially in service to some other selfish cause.
Most significantly in terms of change, the new(ish) Loki appears to be capable of forming emotional connections in a way he couldn't - or perhaps wouldn't - in the past. Loki seems to love his brother, seems to have actually cared for Leah for real, and seems to have overall left behind quite a bit of the anger that used to drive him to destruction and murder.
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