Chapter Notes: Temptation
Feb. 20th, 2021 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokiofsassgaardWe are getting into a section of less plot, more slice of life worldbuilding. I've said before that one of the things I really wanted to do with this series, and this story in particular is to humanise the other races. Especially the traditionally villainous ones. And there are a few really good ways of doing that, so why not do them all.
Loki is right now some kind of weird interloper in these people's lives. They have welcomed them into their home, and have even given him a small area that is his, but he still does not truly belong here. He's mostly an observer, completely foreign to this way of life. And yet, he knows that even if he had remained on Jötunheimr, and somehow grown up and thrived on this realm, he would not have grown up in a place like this. He was found in Utgard, a place he is well-familiar with. He's spent a lot of time there with or without approval, and Utgard is all he knows about the realm. Abstractly, he knew there were other places in Jötunheimr where people live, but to him that's like telling a person that there is a random deli three towns over. It just absolutely, fundamentally does not matter, and has never been worth a moment's thought beyond processing the sentence as it's spoken.
In TWHM, two things were made clear in the trip to Utgard: he is known as a prince of Asgard, and he is known to be half-breed. For Loki, one of these was a given, and one of them was a lame insult. Utgard is a noisy, messy, chaotic place, not unlike Asgard in many ways. And now he's out here in this tribal village, slightly alienated and uncomfortable by this completely different way of life. All the horrible, boring, tedious crap he had to learn as a boy is useful out here. Why should a prince ever need to learn to hunt, or build a fire, or muck stables, or or or. But I think before the war, it was much more common for even Asgardian nobility and royalty to travel the realms. It isn't so much anymore, but the traditions of preparing them to do so have remained intact. Except everything's a farce. It's peer pressure from dead people without the context of why it was done before. Kids take a week-long camping trip, and come back with a chipmunk, and somehow this means they're a hunter. They spend a year in exile, and piss it away in ale houses and brothels, and apparently come back knowing more about the world. Aside from training to fight, they don't really learn anything useful.
Loki is a rare Asgardian who still travels. He's the only person he knows who has taken everything he's learned and applied it. And this is probably a big part of why Odin allows it and looks the other way. He could very easily put a stop to Loki roaming the Nine, sowing chaos and mayhem in his wake, but every time he returns, it's with brand new perspective. On the surface, he travels the realms to piss away his time in ale houses and brothels, but he always comes back with knowledge and treasures and a new appreciation of the other realms. Something Odin himself would have done at Loki's age.
He has never seen a tribal Jötunn village, and he is fascinated by it. He hasn't even seen that much, because he's been hiding away for one reason or another. But there is zero reason for him to stay. He could have very easily zipped back to Asgard, waited out the bad weather, and returned to finish his task. Instead, much like Vigdís' willingness to step in sheep shit when she marries the sheep boy, Loki is choosing to live in squalor for the experience. He chooses having to hunt for his next meal, and not being able to bathe. He chooses dirt beneath his feet, insetad of polished stone. And in choosing this, he sees a side of Jötnar culture he has never witnessed before.
He obviously knows that these people are people. He doesn't need to be told this. Jötunn mead halls are no different from Asgardian ones, attracting the worst of the worst. But he's never seen Jötunn culture at its best. He's never seen their family squabbles, or what their children are afraid of. And he wants to.
So he gets to see all of this slice of life mundanity. He gets to hear about the sheep boy, and the excuses children use to get out of chores. But he also gets to know their Adult Fear. All the best horror is Adult Fear for a reason, and Loki gets to see this village at its worst, even if it is just from his isolated corner. A family has gone missing in the storm, and the entire village disrupts their own safety and stability to go out and find them. This is not a culture of every man for himself. If it were, Hrapp and his wife and child would not live in Bjalfi's home. Instead, they're bunking up to combine resources. Even now, from just this small window Loki has, it's becoming more and more clear that the village operates as a single unit.
Angrboða is another part of that. The kids are between 10-12 years old. They probably do not need a constant babysitter while their parents are out searching. Having someone pop in to check on them likely would have sufficed. But with Loki injured and unconscious, it was safer to have another adult in the house at all times. At this point, he has become part of the collective. Angrboða was there to make sure that he would be taken care of and informed should he wake up.
And she may have even stayed, had the night not gone so horribly wrong. But she 100% left because it got awkward. Because there's a culture clash here. And a big one. And Loki does not really understand that his attempt at not being the worst guest ever came across as a massive rejection. He grew up in a palace, where there are strict rules about everything, and everyone has their own space. Even the king and queen have their own separate chambers. Now he's in a small house where the entire family shares a single bedroom, and holy cow nope, this is super uncomfortable. He is not going to have sex with anyone with children right there in the next bed. Their parents might, and surely have, but that thought has not even crossed his mind. And ultimately, why should it? This is an entirely foreign culture. He doesn't know their rules, or what's acceptable, or completely forbidden. So he goes to bed frustrated and angry, and accidentally humiliates someone he would 100% smash under almost any other circumstance.
And he sort of realised that the second she said she was going to leave.
The whole scene with them in bed was a surprisingly difficult one to wrote too. Aside from Fandral, Loki has never had a relationship with anyone. And he and Fandral parted ways when they were 16. It was not only a very immature, hormone-driven relationship, but it's one that was vaguely predatory at the same time. Loki's first sexual experience was kind of coerced. He didn't not want to, but he also didn't really want to either. At least up to the point where the scene cut, he was not an active participant at all. I don't think that in and of itself necessarily shaped how he approaches sex, but the relationship as a whole definitely did. It's never explicitly stated, but one of his first dalliances after Fandral was visiting Salem (or somewhere nearby) as a woman to get absolutely used, and ended when he was tried for witchcraft (proably for being a ho). Both times he's with someone else in Midgard Legends, it a hurried, almost rough affair; something extremely temporary and meaningless.
Loki has very rigidly defined ideas for how different types of relationships work, and relationships that involve sex are not gentle, languid things. I'd wager very few of his platonic relationships can even be called this. And now he's being touched in a way that turns him on, and he doesn't understand why. I also don't think he has ever once had sex in his natrual body. I think he has fucked Jötunn women, and been fucked by Jötunn men as either gender, but nobody has ever been allowed to see him this vulnerable and exposed. So now he's just confused and horny, and and ten shades of uncomfortable and the only thing he can do is run away. Only in trying to avoid making what he perceives as a big mistake, he winds up making an even bigger one. Were the kids not right there, that scene would have ended very differently. But ultimately, it's good for him that it didn't. Because it's going to force him to examine the best way to move forward.
Another way of really humanising these people is having Loki spend really good moments with the kids. I am struggling with what to do with Vigdís, if only because putting him alone with a twelve year old girl feels kinda icky, just on a fundamental level. The next chapter will definitely have more with all three of them though. But the kids are raw and open and completely lack filters, and are asking questions their parents are too cautious to ask. Sigtrygg doesn't fucking care if it's rude to ask if Loki's a witch. He's gonna ask it. He's also going to completely throw Loki under the bus the next time Ozur doesn't go chop the damn firewood, because he is sick to death of doing it himself.
And this is Loki, once again sowing chaos and mayhem without even trying. Gudrun even told him that Sigtrygg would do it, but Loki didn't even consider that this was the sort of task she meant. At the end of the day, there aren't many things I think Loki is truly incapable of around the house, even if the scale is a little bit off. But it's not like everything is comically large. He's just the size of a ten-year-old, if a ten-year-old were six and a half feet tall. Everything is just a little too tall to be dignified. So he sits on the floor, like a fucking weirdo, because at least he's in control of the situation that way.
And as someone for whom the entire world is just a little bit too tall, yeah. Half the time, the floor is just the better place to be tbh.
Loki has also been entirely too dour and cagey here, but he's needed to be. He's been learning from them more than anything else, and he's been worried about overstepping or revealing too much. So he's just quiet and polite, and keeping himself out of the way for the most part. And now, they have made the fatal error of putting him in charge of their children. Loki would never harm them, or even allow them to come to harm as much as he could help it. But he is alone with them for less than an hour, and he is already shaving their heads and giving them mohawks because a twelve-year-old told him to. He truly does have a fundamental inability to say no. Whether that's because Thor has worn it out of him, or because curiosity and temptation are strong forces, who knows. Maybe it's a bit of both. But twice in this chapter, he has put himself in a dangerous position by just rolling with something because someone else suggested it. But this is also the first time he's allowed himself to truly relax and just be his dumbass self since arriving on Jötunheimr. And he needs to. It's good for him.
Of course, the problem with Loki is once he gets comfortable with it, he will never stop.
Loki is right now some kind of weird interloper in these people's lives. They have welcomed them into their home, and have even given him a small area that is his, but he still does not truly belong here. He's mostly an observer, completely foreign to this way of life. And yet, he knows that even if he had remained on Jötunheimr, and somehow grown up and thrived on this realm, he would not have grown up in a place like this. He was found in Utgard, a place he is well-familiar with. He's spent a lot of time there with or without approval, and Utgard is all he knows about the realm. Abstractly, he knew there were other places in Jötunheimr where people live, but to him that's like telling a person that there is a random deli three towns over. It just absolutely, fundamentally does not matter, and has never been worth a moment's thought beyond processing the sentence as it's spoken.
In TWHM, two things were made clear in the trip to Utgard: he is known as a prince of Asgard, and he is known to be half-breed. For Loki, one of these was a given, and one of them was a lame insult. Utgard is a noisy, messy, chaotic place, not unlike Asgard in many ways. And now he's out here in this tribal village, slightly alienated and uncomfortable by this completely different way of life. All the horrible, boring, tedious crap he had to learn as a boy is useful out here. Why should a prince ever need to learn to hunt, or build a fire, or muck stables, or or or. But I think before the war, it was much more common for even Asgardian nobility and royalty to travel the realms. It isn't so much anymore, but the traditions of preparing them to do so have remained intact. Except everything's a farce. It's peer pressure from dead people without the context of why it was done before. Kids take a week-long camping trip, and come back with a chipmunk, and somehow this means they're a hunter. They spend a year in exile, and piss it away in ale houses and brothels, and apparently come back knowing more about the world. Aside from training to fight, they don't really learn anything useful.
Loki is a rare Asgardian who still travels. He's the only person he knows who has taken everything he's learned and applied it. And this is probably a big part of why Odin allows it and looks the other way. He could very easily put a stop to Loki roaming the Nine, sowing chaos and mayhem in his wake, but every time he returns, it's with brand new perspective. On the surface, he travels the realms to piss away his time in ale houses and brothels, but he always comes back with knowledge and treasures and a new appreciation of the other realms. Something Odin himself would have done at Loki's age.
He has never seen a tribal Jötunn village, and he is fascinated by it. He hasn't even seen that much, because he's been hiding away for one reason or another. But there is zero reason for him to stay. He could have very easily zipped back to Asgard, waited out the bad weather, and returned to finish his task. Instead, much like Vigdís' willingness to step in sheep shit when she marries the sheep boy, Loki is choosing to live in squalor for the experience. He chooses having to hunt for his next meal, and not being able to bathe. He chooses dirt beneath his feet, insetad of polished stone. And in choosing this, he sees a side of Jötnar culture he has never witnessed before.
He obviously knows that these people are people. He doesn't need to be told this. Jötunn mead halls are no different from Asgardian ones, attracting the worst of the worst. But he's never seen Jötunn culture at its best. He's never seen their family squabbles, or what their children are afraid of. And he wants to.
So he gets to see all of this slice of life mundanity. He gets to hear about the sheep boy, and the excuses children use to get out of chores. But he also gets to know their Adult Fear. All the best horror is Adult Fear for a reason, and Loki gets to see this village at its worst, even if it is just from his isolated corner. A family has gone missing in the storm, and the entire village disrupts their own safety and stability to go out and find them. This is not a culture of every man for himself. If it were, Hrapp and his wife and child would not live in Bjalfi's home. Instead, they're bunking up to combine resources. Even now, from just this small window Loki has, it's becoming more and more clear that the village operates as a single unit.
Angrboða is another part of that. The kids are between 10-12 years old. They probably do not need a constant babysitter while their parents are out searching. Having someone pop in to check on them likely would have sufficed. But with Loki injured and unconscious, it was safer to have another adult in the house at all times. At this point, he has become part of the collective. Angrboða was there to make sure that he would be taken care of and informed should he wake up.
And she may have even stayed, had the night not gone so horribly wrong. But she 100% left because it got awkward. Because there's a culture clash here. And a big one. And Loki does not really understand that his attempt at not being the worst guest ever came across as a massive rejection. He grew up in a palace, where there are strict rules about everything, and everyone has their own space. Even the king and queen have their own separate chambers. Now he's in a small house where the entire family shares a single bedroom, and holy cow nope, this is super uncomfortable. He is not going to have sex with anyone with children right there in the next bed. Their parents might, and surely have, but that thought has not even crossed his mind. And ultimately, why should it? This is an entirely foreign culture. He doesn't know their rules, or what's acceptable, or completely forbidden. So he goes to bed frustrated and angry, and accidentally humiliates someone he would 100% smash under almost any other circumstance.
And he sort of realised that the second she said she was going to leave.
The whole scene with them in bed was a surprisingly difficult one to wrote too. Aside from Fandral, Loki has never had a relationship with anyone. And he and Fandral parted ways when they were 16. It was not only a very immature, hormone-driven relationship, but it's one that was vaguely predatory at the same time. Loki's first sexual experience was kind of coerced. He didn't not want to, but he also didn't really want to either. At least up to the point where the scene cut, he was not an active participant at all. I don't think that in and of itself necessarily shaped how he approaches sex, but the relationship as a whole definitely did. It's never explicitly stated, but one of his first dalliances after Fandral was visiting Salem (or somewhere nearby) as a woman to get absolutely used, and ended when he was tried for witchcraft (proably for being a ho). Both times he's with someone else in Midgard Legends, it a hurried, almost rough affair; something extremely temporary and meaningless.
Loki has very rigidly defined ideas for how different types of relationships work, and relationships that involve sex are not gentle, languid things. I'd wager very few of his platonic relationships can even be called this. And now he's being touched in a way that turns him on, and he doesn't understand why. I also don't think he has ever once had sex in his natrual body. I think he has fucked Jötunn women, and been fucked by Jötunn men as either gender, but nobody has ever been allowed to see him this vulnerable and exposed. So now he's just confused and horny, and and ten shades of uncomfortable and the only thing he can do is run away. Only in trying to avoid making what he perceives as a big mistake, he winds up making an even bigger one. Were the kids not right there, that scene would have ended very differently. But ultimately, it's good for him that it didn't. Because it's going to force him to examine the best way to move forward.
Another way of really humanising these people is having Loki spend really good moments with the kids. I am struggling with what to do with Vigdís, if only because putting him alone with a twelve year old girl feels kinda icky, just on a fundamental level. The next chapter will definitely have more with all three of them though. But the kids are raw and open and completely lack filters, and are asking questions their parents are too cautious to ask. Sigtrygg doesn't fucking care if it's rude to ask if Loki's a witch. He's gonna ask it. He's also going to completely throw Loki under the bus the next time Ozur doesn't go chop the damn firewood, because he is sick to death of doing it himself.
And this is Loki, once again sowing chaos and mayhem without even trying. Gudrun even told him that Sigtrygg would do it, but Loki didn't even consider that this was the sort of task she meant. At the end of the day, there aren't many things I think Loki is truly incapable of around the house, even if the scale is a little bit off. But it's not like everything is comically large. He's just the size of a ten-year-old, if a ten-year-old were six and a half feet tall. Everything is just a little too tall to be dignified. So he sits on the floor, like a fucking weirdo, because at least he's in control of the situation that way.
And as someone for whom the entire world is just a little bit too tall, yeah. Half the time, the floor is just the better place to be tbh.
Loki has also been entirely too dour and cagey here, but he's needed to be. He's been learning from them more than anything else, and he's been worried about overstepping or revealing too much. So he's just quiet and polite, and keeping himself out of the way for the most part. And now, they have made the fatal error of putting him in charge of their children. Loki would never harm them, or even allow them to come to harm as much as he could help it. But he is alone with them for less than an hour, and he is already shaving their heads and giving them mohawks because a twelve-year-old told him to. He truly does have a fundamental inability to say no. Whether that's because Thor has worn it out of him, or because curiosity and temptation are strong forces, who knows. Maybe it's a bit of both. But twice in this chapter, he has put himself in a dangerous position by just rolling with something because someone else suggested it. But this is also the first time he's allowed himself to truly relax and just be his dumbass self since arriving on Jötunheimr. And he needs to. It's good for him.
Of course, the problem with Loki is once he gets comfortable with it, he will never stop.
