Chapter notes: Clear Weather
Feb. 13th, 2021 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokiofsassgaardI do not necessarily want to make it a running joke that Loki makes questionable choices that get him thrown from horses, but it's kind of becoming a running joke that he does exactly that.
Loki's entire experience on Jötunheimr so far has had him on the wrong footing, so the opportunity to do something he is familiar and comfortable with is not something he was going to pass up. This is another one of those ways in which he's grown up and matured, and we saw it in Midgard Legends as well. Learning to hunt was the last thing Loki wanted to do as a boy, and now he's got to a point where he's not only skilled at it, he will seek out the activity. And he's picked up skills that have allowed him to improvise in very different and unexpected ways, which I think Volstagg would be proud of.
I've been debating exactly how much magic he should be using while on Jötunheimr, and the answer keeps falling back to very little. He is trying to hide, and magic will call him out. He's already in danger from whatever this family thinks he's fleeing from, and word is no doubt spreading by now that they have him. If this runty little traveller also happened to be a skilled magic user, word would travel even faster. Best case scenario if he's found, he gets back to Asgard and has to abandon his quest. Worst case, a bounty is collected. But getting out to hunt, even for a few hours, is exercise and stimulation he sorely needs.
This whole chapter was another one that was outlined before I even knew where this series was going. I really loved the idea of Loki taking human weapons on a Jötunn hunt, and the Jötuns having no idea what to make of it. The line about the rifle looking Elvish comes from the comics, where light elves tend to be portrayed as these ridiculous Victorian gunslingers. It's a weird aesthetic I'm not even sure that I like, but there it is. It's a convenient cover story rooted in canon.
This hunt was also important because the people he's staying with needed a good way to really start seeing the truth from the lies and misconceptions. So far, Loki has been all talk and no walk. He's literate, but it's not enough. He needs to have skills that run in the face of what they believe. The very thought that he can hunt is ridiculous. Bjalfi doesn't believe he can ride a horse, and seems to think his grasp of how effective a bow actually is is low at best.
And then Loki makes an impossible shot on a caribou, and knows how to gut it, and what organs to keep. When Bjalfi agrees that he should get the pelt and antlers for trade, this is him accepting that maybe this strange visitor has actually been travelling the realm and getting by just fine on his own. Then, Loki knows his own limits, and stays the hell back from the polar bear. He also claims to have killed one before, but Bjalfi has seen his scars. He's torn between believing that Loki is serious, and dismissing him again. And then Loki can not only ride a horse, but ride one effectively bareback, while leading another. When the mammoth becomes a problem, Loki again does not hesitate to help once he finds a way to do so without making the situation more dangerous. He does not just run in screaming. He takes a calculated approach and does something that is both absolutely insane, and provides the extra help they need.
Mammoth hunts are absolutely a thing for these people, but they are not a thing you do with two men. Bringing home a mammoth had not been in the cards, but they weren't given much choice when every attempt to evade it only pissed it off more.
When Loki fell off the horse, I changed Bjalfi's line a few times, because nothing he said really seemed to capture the emotion. I eventually settled on something that called back to the general sentiment of Midgard Legends. I wanted him to not only survive something he probably would not have been expected to survive, but be able to more or less walk away from it. There is something fundamentally wrong about him on every single level, and as he spends more time on Jötunheimr, I want him to realise he fits in even less here than he does on Asgard. Not just because he's small, but because he's just wrong, in every single possible way.
As for what exactly is fundamentally wrong about Loki, he has spent 22 years living on Asgard. In Thor 1, the frost giants are pathetic. A little poke from an Asgardian blade, and they go down. I don't think they're quite that fragile, but there is something about Asgard itself that changes the people who live there. Hogun is human, and yet has all the strength and ferocity of any Asgardian warrior. Loki is tougher than he should be simply because he is a god.
And Angrboða is the first one to call this out directly. Eir expected his horns to start cutting around the time he was 15 or 16. Loki now has a benchmark for what that actually means. He has a rough age by Jötunheimr's calendar, and even finding out what his actual age is, his horns are still five years late. Even on Jötunheimr, he is missing milestones. He was not just born small. He was born wrong. Angrboða also calls out something else. Loki not only has someone who cares greatly for him, he is extremely pampered. He's had a life of adventure and mishap, but he is not experienced with hard work or strife. His injuries are the results of gunslinging and hunting accidents and childhood folly. They are not the restult of whatever she expects them to be.
I'm still somewhat vague on how far I want to take this relationship. I can tell you it's not going to be endgame, and he is very likely to break her heart by the end of this. And part of me wants her to end this story pregnant. Loki has not had a real adult relationship through this entire series, and whatever he had with Fandral doesn't count. I think, in that ridiculous, over the top teenage way, he did love Fandral, but they both lacked the emotional maturity to carry their relationship beyond mad teenage hormones. They both made mistakes at the end of that relationship, some bigger than others, and Loki has avoided attachment ever since.
I think I want Angrboða to terrify him. I want him to be so scared of having these emotions that the only way he copes is to break her heart. Real relationships are new, and scary, and he doesn't belong anyway.
But I wanted her to see him as he is from the very beginning. She has to recognise that what she has already been told is not the truth, even if she does not know what the truth is. She's younger than the others, and that plays a big part of it. Because she's also missing a certain amount of context. There is something the older adults know that has either not been discussed, or not been adequately explained. And without that context giving her any pre-conceived notions, Angrboða is quicker to make her own assumptions. Her observations are more easily reconciled with the truth. She doesn't have this thing at the back of her mind, telling her that everything Loki says is a lie.
She doesn't see whatever it is they see. She sees a man who's short and scrawny, with a terribly interesting secret. He's well-mannered, educated, tough as nails, and a little bit forbidden.
Loki is also doing something else new. Something he did not do during Midgard Legends. This time, he is giving Heimdall a brief chance to see him, to know that he is alive and all is well. He still does not like to be spied on, so he conceals himself otherwise. But he is not leaving everyone completely in the dark.
All in all, it's a longer chapter that mostly reinforces everything in the previous one. At the same time, if Loki had not yet been convinced that he is staying somewhere safe, he is now. When he returned injured, he was cared for. His things were respected in more ways than one -- not only did someone prepare his antlers and hide for him, and leave everything packed neatly, his rifle was respected in a different way. Bjalfi saw that thing and wanted it nowhere near his children. It wasn't taken and removed from the house, but instead put somewhere high, out of reach. It means it's also out of Loki's reach as well, but he knows where it is. He can get it later when he wants it.
Loki's entire experience on Jötunheimr so far has had him on the wrong footing, so the opportunity to do something he is familiar and comfortable with is not something he was going to pass up. This is another one of those ways in which he's grown up and matured, and we saw it in Midgard Legends as well. Learning to hunt was the last thing Loki wanted to do as a boy, and now he's got to a point where he's not only skilled at it, he will seek out the activity. And he's picked up skills that have allowed him to improvise in very different and unexpected ways, which I think Volstagg would be proud of.
I've been debating exactly how much magic he should be using while on Jötunheimr, and the answer keeps falling back to very little. He is trying to hide, and magic will call him out. He's already in danger from whatever this family thinks he's fleeing from, and word is no doubt spreading by now that they have him. If this runty little traveller also happened to be a skilled magic user, word would travel even faster. Best case scenario if he's found, he gets back to Asgard and has to abandon his quest. Worst case, a bounty is collected. But getting out to hunt, even for a few hours, is exercise and stimulation he sorely needs.
This whole chapter was another one that was outlined before I even knew where this series was going. I really loved the idea of Loki taking human weapons on a Jötunn hunt, and the Jötuns having no idea what to make of it. The line about the rifle looking Elvish comes from the comics, where light elves tend to be portrayed as these ridiculous Victorian gunslingers. It's a weird aesthetic I'm not even sure that I like, but there it is. It's a convenient cover story rooted in canon.
This hunt was also important because the people he's staying with needed a good way to really start seeing the truth from the lies and misconceptions. So far, Loki has been all talk and no walk. He's literate, but it's not enough. He needs to have skills that run in the face of what they believe. The very thought that he can hunt is ridiculous. Bjalfi doesn't believe he can ride a horse, and seems to think his grasp of how effective a bow actually is is low at best.
And then Loki makes an impossible shot on a caribou, and knows how to gut it, and what organs to keep. When Bjalfi agrees that he should get the pelt and antlers for trade, this is him accepting that maybe this strange visitor has actually been travelling the realm and getting by just fine on his own. Then, Loki knows his own limits, and stays the hell back from the polar bear. He also claims to have killed one before, but Bjalfi has seen his scars. He's torn between believing that Loki is serious, and dismissing him again. And then Loki can not only ride a horse, but ride one effectively bareback, while leading another. When the mammoth becomes a problem, Loki again does not hesitate to help once he finds a way to do so without making the situation more dangerous. He does not just run in screaming. He takes a calculated approach and does something that is both absolutely insane, and provides the extra help they need.
Mammoth hunts are absolutely a thing for these people, but they are not a thing you do with two men. Bringing home a mammoth had not been in the cards, but they weren't given much choice when every attempt to evade it only pissed it off more.
When Loki fell off the horse, I changed Bjalfi's line a few times, because nothing he said really seemed to capture the emotion. I eventually settled on something that called back to the general sentiment of Midgard Legends. I wanted him to not only survive something he probably would not have been expected to survive, but be able to more or less walk away from it. There is something fundamentally wrong about him on every single level, and as he spends more time on Jötunheimr, I want him to realise he fits in even less here than he does on Asgard. Not just because he's small, but because he's just wrong, in every single possible way.
As for what exactly is fundamentally wrong about Loki, he has spent 22 years living on Asgard. In Thor 1, the frost giants are pathetic. A little poke from an Asgardian blade, and they go down. I don't think they're quite that fragile, but there is something about Asgard itself that changes the people who live there. Hogun is human, and yet has all the strength and ferocity of any Asgardian warrior. Loki is tougher than he should be simply because he is a god.
And Angrboða is the first one to call this out directly. Eir expected his horns to start cutting around the time he was 15 or 16. Loki now has a benchmark for what that actually means. He has a rough age by Jötunheimr's calendar, and even finding out what his actual age is, his horns are still five years late. Even on Jötunheimr, he is missing milestones. He was not just born small. He was born wrong. Angrboða also calls out something else. Loki not only has someone who cares greatly for him, he is extremely pampered. He's had a life of adventure and mishap, but he is not experienced with hard work or strife. His injuries are the results of gunslinging and hunting accidents and childhood folly. They are not the restult of whatever she expects them to be.
I'm still somewhat vague on how far I want to take this relationship. I can tell you it's not going to be endgame, and he is very likely to break her heart by the end of this. And part of me wants her to end this story pregnant. Loki has not had a real adult relationship through this entire series, and whatever he had with Fandral doesn't count. I think, in that ridiculous, over the top teenage way, he did love Fandral, but they both lacked the emotional maturity to carry their relationship beyond mad teenage hormones. They both made mistakes at the end of that relationship, some bigger than others, and Loki has avoided attachment ever since.
I think I want Angrboða to terrify him. I want him to be so scared of having these emotions that the only way he copes is to break her heart. Real relationships are new, and scary, and he doesn't belong anyway.
But I wanted her to see him as he is from the very beginning. She has to recognise that what she has already been told is not the truth, even if she does not know what the truth is. She's younger than the others, and that plays a big part of it. Because she's also missing a certain amount of context. There is something the older adults know that has either not been discussed, or not been adequately explained. And without that context giving her any pre-conceived notions, Angrboða is quicker to make her own assumptions. Her observations are more easily reconciled with the truth. She doesn't have this thing at the back of her mind, telling her that everything Loki says is a lie.
She doesn't see whatever it is they see. She sees a man who's short and scrawny, with a terribly interesting secret. He's well-mannered, educated, tough as nails, and a little bit forbidden.
Loki is also doing something else new. Something he did not do during Midgard Legends. This time, he is giving Heimdall a brief chance to see him, to know that he is alive and all is well. He still does not like to be spied on, so he conceals himself otherwise. But he is not leaving everyone completely in the dark.
All in all, it's a longer chapter that mostly reinforces everything in the previous one. At the same time, if Loki had not yet been convinced that he is staying somewhere safe, he is now. When he returned injured, he was cared for. His things were respected in more ways than one -- not only did someone prepare his antlers and hide for him, and leave everything packed neatly, his rifle was respected in a different way. Bjalfi saw that thing and wanted it nowhere near his children. It wasn't taken and removed from the house, but instead put somewhere high, out of reach. It means it's also out of Loki's reach as well, but he knows where it is. He can get it later when he wants it.
