Fic rambling

Parallels in my fic nobody picked up on, but I’m going to talk about them anyway: Frigga getting accused of coddling her children too much.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that Frigga did nothing wrong, and is the perfect mother. She 100% knew what Odin was up to in how not only Loki, but all of the kids were raised.

In the first screenshot, Odin is accusing her of coddling Loki. Loki has been allowed to shirk responsibility for far longer than is acceptable, because Frigga knows what he is and holds him as too young for said responsibility. Meanwhile, Odin is trying to raise a proper Asgardian boy, and that’s never going to happen as long as he’s treated differently to every other Asgardian boy on the realm. Frigga has the power to override Odin in some decisions, and has been doing so in very subtle ways for Loki’s entire life. Now it’s reached a tipping point where the rules have gone broken for too long, and Loki is just incapable and unwilling to take on the role he’s supposed to have within the palace. As far as Odin’s concerned, Loki is a grown man, being treated as a child, and it’s infuriating.

In the second screenshot, Loki is accusing her of coddling Viðar. Viðar is about six years old, and is totally non-verbal. Whether by choice, or because he cannot speak, I honestly haven’t decided, and may leave it up in the air forever. It’s a weird quirk from the myths, and I love it too much to dig into it too deeply. But because of this quirk, he’s treated like a baby, never allowed out of her sight, and hinted at not being educated. When Thor and Loki were the same age, Odin was taking them to taverns and meeting foreign royals on other realms. That Viðar is not allowed to go to the market (which is, admittedly a lie. They went other places as well) strikes Loki as infuriatingly hypocritical. Why was he allowed to go on adventures, while Viðar can’t even leave the nursery?

These two scenes are farily close together on the timeline. And both Odin and Loki are right. Frigga coddles both of them too much. If it were Thor who had liberated Viðar for the day, Frigga would have had his ear off. Instead, she’ll “discuss this later” over the matter.

But in this, Frigga is just as much to blame as Odin. She at once enables Odin’s idiotic plan by going along with it, and puts herself into this “good cop” role by spoiling and coddling both boys to the point neither of them is prepared to do what they’re meant to be doing. Rather than giving Loki support, she’s given him none at all. He’s directionless and lazy as a result. Because Odin is right in this. Loki is a grown man, acting like a child. They’re stuck in this good cop, bad cop routine that has not only put Loki on a bad path, but has been subtly pitting him and Thor against one another for years. And now she’s doing the same to Viðar, ensuring that the only person in the world he has is her. He doesn’t socialise, and his own brothers aren’t even allowed to take him out of the nursery.

Frigga has power in this situation. And instead of using it to get Odin to back the hell down from this plan, she’s instead using it to sabotage everyone involved. She agreed to the lies, and even perpetuates her own. And that’s something I’ve had a lot of fun playing with in this series. That at any time, Loki’s Big Damn Identity Crisis could be resolved if either one of them decided to be honest. Odin’s response was to admit that he’s lying, feed Loki just enough truth to piss him off, and then give him permission to effectively go throw a tantrum over it. Frigga’s response was to double down on the lies and tell Loki something that is blatantly and provably false.

I reblog a lot of these “mama Frigga” posts because they’re cute as hell. But I don’t believe it for a single second

More fic stuff

Parallels in my fic nobody picked up on, but I’m going to talk about them anyway: Loki being a weirdly fussy eater.

This one has been some really fun, subtle character development, tangled up with subtle cues that Loki is not Asgardian. He's very inconsistently fussy about his eating habits, with some of it coming down to a genuine dislike, and others being a dislike by association. At the same time, he'll eat things that other people around him find absolutely disgusting. He's six years old when he has his first taste of ale, and he loves it. Hákarl is one of his favourite snacks, and Lutefisk is another one he'll happily chow down on. But don't you dare put a carrot on his plate.

During Midgard Legends, he's presented with some variety of root vegetable which he hates to the point that he won't even bother identifying it, but I think I had swede in mind when I wrote the scene. The potato is acceptable, because it's stuffed with pork and coated in pork fat.

Later on, while watching Bjalfi and Gudrun's children, he has to cook supper with the limited winter stores. And nasty root vegetables are on the menu. Instead of balking like an absolute child about it, Loki uses what's available and gets on with it. While he'll happily fry his fish in seal oil, he has to kind of trick himself into eating his vegetables by masking them with roe.

Later on when he's talking to Gudrun, there's no masking what's in his bowl. So he just grimaces and gets on with it, because he cannot afford to skip on the calories. He hates it, and he's upfront and honest about it, but he knows he'll go hungry if he doesn't eat it.

It's a very subtle little thing with how much his time on Midgard took him from the coddled child in the last post, to someone who is more mature and grown up. Most of this fic focuses on the darker aspects of how Midgard changed him, but not all changes are bad. Loki needed to grow the hell up, and Midgard provided.