Trickster God notes: ch 74

I haven't been doing notes for each chapter for this fic, because there's 79 chapters and that's a lot of notes to write up.

But as I was editing up this chapter today, it occurred to me that this is another chapter that's going to get misunderstood owing to the unreliable narrator present. 

One of the hidden things this fic is addressing is the way in which an abuser can also be themselves a victim in a different context.  What was done to Loki is fucking horrible, but it doesn't justify his own actions.  But for Darcy, his being a victim first is what started this whole thing.  She knew who he was when she found him, and still chose to help because she's a good, kind person with morals and convictions, and it was obvious that he had been mistreated by some shady government organisation.

And that's never left her consciousness.  Darcy can exist in a space where she can hate him for what he did to her, but still empathise with what he went through.  And it creates a cognitive dissonance that ultimately results in her starting to justify his actions against her.   Because that's what Stockholm syndrome is.  A lot of people, I think, saw that tag and expected her to fall in love with him.  She was never going to fall in love with him, but her own convictions and empathy have made it impossible for her to separate what was done to her from what was done to him.

Something she keeps coming back to as well is how he wouldn't have been like this without what had been done with him.  This is such a flawed justification, but she has to believe it because the alternative is that he's completely evil.  If he were completely evil, he wouldn't be a victim, and SWORD would have been justified in their treatment of him.

So here she is, fully justifying Loki's actions, and starting to let an insidious little seed sprout.  Because she's in a position now where she feels like she's running out of allies.  The people who should be able to help her are the same people who she feels like escalated the situation in the first place.  She not only justifies his actions, but puts the responsibility of those actions on someone else.  He's only mean when he's angry, and he's only angry because SHIELD pissed him off.

And it's a mantra Darcy internalised early in their relationship.  And now because of that, she's clinging to the idea that if she'd stayed with him, things would be better.  And no matter who tells her otherwise, she won't be able to believe it, because everyone else has become the bad guy in her mind.

Why Trickster God went abandoned for five years

I don't think it's any secret at this point why this fic was initially abandoned. If you're reading my main series, which got caught in the crossfire, you probably already know the story. If not, here's what happened.

This fic went to dark places. It will continue to go to dark places. Hell, it opened up with fucking vivisection. There is nothing tame here. This fic is tagged and warned appropriately, with no subversions. And where it really went south for me was when Darcy was raped. Which she was, back in chapter 37. Up until that point, I was indulging my id, and thought most of the people in the comments were on the same page. That said, a lot of comments have now been deleted. I spent entirely too many hours arguing with people in the comments about my own intent with this fic.

There will be no rape=love in this fic. If you are looking for that, go elsewhere. Because that is not the trope I am playing with here. I hate to spoil it by putting it right out there like that, but I had also thought that it was pretty obvious that's not where this is going. What I am playing with is the mindfuckery that will make a victim think that rape=love.

So, I'm going to take a moment to lay it all out on the table. If you wish to proceed after this, please be aware that I will not entertain comments that wish to fight me on this. I will simply delete them and move on with my life. This is some good, old-fashioned darkfic. And darkfic is best when it apologises for nothing. If you do not like this kind of fic, find something else to read. Period.

Darcy has been kidnapped, used as a human shield, raped, and nearly killed multiple times. Her mind's ability to process all of this is next to zero, and she is so far down the rabbit hole at this point of the story that she is projecting sympathetic motivations onto Loki. Because that's what Stockholm syndrome does to a person. It doesn't make you fall in love with them, or join their side. Darcy knows that what Loki did was wrong, and horrible, and that he deserves to face consequences. But she also has convictions, and it's those convictions that have allowed her to get so tangled up inside over what has been done to her. She saw first-hand what was done to him. She continues to see it every day. She sees the suffering and the damage, and she has to believe that everything he's done to her is because he is as terrified as she is.

Loki had a plan. It was kind of half-baked and nebulous, but he had a plan for getting off Midgard. He was going to find somewhere to hide out for a while, regain his strength, and yolo the fuck off this rock. He may be a tough frightened, but mostly he's pissed. His plan was disrupted, and now he's being dragged all over hell and creation by this loud obnoxious woman who won't give him a moment's peace. At the same time, if she's allowed to escape, she'll have done so after putting his face on every screen in North America. He needs to move quickly in a foreign realm, with rules and magic he doesn't understand. He's not going to do that without Darcy. He needs to keep her on a short leash if he is going to get out of this alive. And if Darcy sticks around because she thinks he's scared, he's not going to correct her. She's easily manipulated through this, and as long as he can continue to keep up the lie, he's got a bargaining chip for when things go sour.

Keep in mind. This is told from Darcy's point of view, by design. If you read Tarbell, I did something thematically similar. Loki let Darcy think he was in a vulnerable state, because it benefited him to do so. But in Tarbell, I changed the formula and showed his point of view as well, making it clear that they were not on the same page. And people saw the ending coming. I don't think anyone was surprised they didn't get together at the end of that one. But apparently by obscuring what I thought was a lot more obvious than it seemingly was, people are taking the narration and projections at face value. And what resulted was some truly disturbing comments on this fic. I think I've managed to delete most of them, if not all, but if you come into my comments telling me that I am wrong, telling me that Loki is acting out of love or affection, telling me that Darcy needs to get over herself and kiss him already, etc, it will not be tolerated.

And I'm sorry about coming out of the gate on this defensive and angry, but this is the fic that single-handedly made me burn out of fandom and delete most of my social media a few years back. It started off as just taking a break from this particular fic but the comments kept coming on it, some straight up bullying and cruel toward the end.

But I want to finish this. I've had enough time to step back from it, and I do hate having such a huge piece sitting unfinished on my profile. Especially since it is my most popular fic literally ever. So I'm going to plough through it under my original outline, go where it was always intended to go, and try to figure out how I came up with the end chapter count that's listed on the upload.

And if you want something that's considerably less fucked up, well. I'm also working on a sequel to Tarbell. And might have accidentally talked myself into doing an eight-part series with it because fuck me I guess.

A final note on How To Train Your Norse Trickster God

This used to be in the main body of the notes on AO3, but I've moved it here because I feel like the fic has reached a point where it's no longer necessary for this to take up an entire city block on the page.  But it's still a necessary note, so I'm putting it here.

I've always had a tendency to explore the ugly and broken parts of humanity in my fic, and in over twenty years of writing, have never shied away from themes of death, addiction, and violence. I once wrote a fic where Basil of Baker Street suffered a drug overdose, so in many ways, this fic is not a departure from my usual output. What has been unusual is the reception. Never, in anything else that I've written, have I had so many people arguing with me about my own fic as I have with this one. I wrote the goddamn thing; I know what happened in it. There's no room for argument, which is why the comments will remain moderated until the end of time.

This is a fic about abuse, and the trajectory that abuse might take on the victim. Yes, it's set against a somewhat fantastic backdrop, with traditional roles being exaggerated, but this is some of the realest shit I've ever written. The idea came from a few places, but the crux of it stems from two of Loki's lines from the MCU—first in Thor 1, when he threatened to "pay [Jane] a visit" himself, and again in Avengers 1 when he threatened to have Clint "undo" Natasha in every way he knew how. Both of these were very thinly veiled code for something violent, and though they could both go a variety of ways, they still present this potential for truly reprehensible behaviour. That's what I wanted to explore with this fic. If you click on the Villain Loki tag above, you'll get (as of May 2021) just over 120 uses, across the entire website. In ten years of being the villain, Loki is very rarely allowed to be the villain within fandom. And so many comments, which both remain and have faced deletion, completely failed to accept the reality of what this fic is about entirely because the commenter would not or could not accept Loki in a villainous role. So many people came into this fic hoping for a redemption that was never in the cards, because that is not what this fic is about.

So many people got upset at Chapter 45, having completely missed what happened in Chapter 37. I will not argue whether or not the first time they had sex was rape.

It was rape. Full fucking stop.

Because that's what this fic is about. This fic is about all the ways in which an abuser will wear their victim down, pushing boundaries, testing limits, until they get their way. This fic is about the gaslighting that happens to a victim, to make them question their own perception of reality. The fact that Darcy herself questions whether it was rape is part of the point. Because, like so many commenters, she's come to believe that she hasn't said "no" often enough. She's come to believe that because her body had an involuntary response to fear and trauma, that she wanted it to happen. She's come to believe that despite all the things Loki has done to her, he is the only person in the world who cares about her, and who will keep her safe.

This is how abusers do.

To the people in the comments who kept correctly calling out what would come next, predicting the trajectory of a fic that's already written, you're wonderful. I see you, I appreciate you. These are the insights that kept me from giving the fuck up on this fic all over again, because it meant that somebody understood, and that I'm not just shouting into the void.

If you came into this fic expecting redemption, or a happy ending, I'm not sorry. Neither the prose nor the narrative hid behind metaphor or obfuscation. Nothing in the tags or warnings should have even remotely suggested this would be a light or romantic read. This fic is ugly, uncomfortable, and brutal by design, because it's about something that's ugly, uncomfortable, and brutal.

If you can't accept this, it's not my fault. I'm done being nice, and I'm done apologising for this fic. If this fic makes you uncomfortable, good. That was the entire goddamn point from the beginning.