Re-Working Loki Annoys the Marvel Universe

I've got this bug up my ass lately to fix up some older fics that just never sat right with me.  I normally will go back through any large fic and re-edit it months after the fact, once the whole thing's had a chance to fade into obscurity and I've forgotten most of it. 

But so much of this series has bothered me from fairly early on.  At the time I started it, in 2012, I had never done anything on this scale.  I think the biggest fic I had ever completed by that point was about 40,000 words.  Which is still pretty respectable, but also about a quarter of the size of the most recent fic I finished.  Putting these big ideas into something coherent was a new challenge for me.  I was also still very much bogged down by Western narrative standards, and as that first fic, Those Who Hunt Monsters, grew I began to panic.  Because the plot I wanted to explore did not fit in this story.  It was reaching about 60k, and nothing had happened.  I was still bogged down in exposition.  I was still setting up the story I wanted to tell.

At the time, I didn't realise you were allowed to write 100,000 words of just character exploration.  I realise 100,000 words of worldbuilding was something people might want to read.  And I also chickened out hardcore with the relationship between Loki and Fandral.  I was very worried about exploring a relationship between two teenage boys in any kind of explicit context.

And the series suffered for it.  I had all these ideas in my head, and on my soundboard, and none of it on the page.  As I progressed through the series, I found myself having to go back and add these little interludes, saying "this takes place around Chapter X of fic Y."  And that's confusing for readers.  It's confusing for me. 

Lately, I've been really frustrated with the super tight POV I married myself to within the main narrative.  We don't get to see the shady business between Odin and Frigga as much as I'd have liked.  There's still a big secret I'm playing with, that I won't reveal until Loki learns of it personally, but I want to make it more clear from the beginning that for all of Odin's desire to avoid raising Loki in a lie, he's still done it.  That there is still something Loki has not been told.

I've also been really frustrated with the the structure itself.  From the very beginning, I wanted this story to feel like a comic book.  I wanted it to have that same endless narrative flow, with arcs and threads that wove into one another.  I kept getting criticism on the longer fics that the story just ended, and then I never saw that person again comment again on the fic that followed.  People would come into Part 6 or whatever and be like, oh cool, a Captain America fic with Loki in.  And they didn't understand why Loki's magic had these specific rules, or why he didn't just do this one thing.  And they didn't understand why only half of the story resolved in the end.  I noticed more and more that people never came back for what came next, because they subscribed to the fic, and not to the series.

And as I've been posting all of these little interludes and seeing them only get a few hundred hits, I started to realise that even the people who were coming back for the next part weren't seeing the little fics.  They weren't seeing that added context. 

After reading the comments on Not Æsir, I decided that the series needs to die.  I've discontinued it, and will be re-writing it the way I should have done originally.  I'm going to focus on those character bits more, even if they do nothing to advance the plot.  I'm going to focus on those worldbuilding elements more, even if they do go on wild tangents.  Because that's what the series needed. 

And it needed to not be a series.  It needed to be one continuous narrative.  If I was going to structure it like a comic book, I need to commit.  It needs to be a single, cohesive unit with 300 chapters and no end in sight.  And what I'll probably wind up doing is setting up .1 or .NOW chapters, so if someone doesn't want to read through everything, they can start somewhere easy.  They can jump right into the WWII narrative, or the Jötunheimr adventure.  And everyone else can follow along with the entire adventure if they want.

I counted last night, and the series itself has 75 chapters.  A lot of those are going to be combined, re-arranged, and shuffled around a lot of new content that never made it in originally.  I've been trying to work out a big interlude from Odin's POV, because that POV has been sorely missing.  That's all making it back in, in the form of entirely new chapters.

I know it's going to put some people off, but I do believe the story will be stronger for it.