Chapter Notes: Those Who Hunt Monsters #4: Runes

Oh boy, I'm back with this.  I actually never left, but it kind of looked that way for some of you.  For newsletter subscribers, this is like, 98% identical to what you already read ages back, and that will continue to be the trend.  Mostly the same, but better (I think.  I hope).

Anyway, chapter notes.  There's a lot going on here, so let's talk about that.  The vault scene toward the beginning of this chapter is the only thing that existed in the original version of this fic.  The whole thing with Loki's teacher and learning blood magic came later, from one of the fics I posted earlier this year, when I realised I'd fucked up in how much I cut out originally.  And even that got expanded upon in this version.

The vault scene in particular got expanded to include things I'd kind of hinted at, when the prose was a little more vague and wishy washy.  That's one of the things about the original fic I really wanted to fix.  Most of the fic had a very tight POV, telling the story almost entirely from Loki's perspective.  I've been trying to open that up, giving insight to what everyone in the scene is thinking.  And in doing that, I wanted to make it very clear early on that Loki has been lied to.  Odin insists again and again that Loki wasn't stolen, but Odin cannot prove that.  The opening chapter shows that there are scenarios where Loki was placed in the temple for safe-keeping, and that Odin's assertion that he was abandoned doesn't hold a lot of water.

I rewrote this so long ago, and now that episode of What If...? even supports the idea that Odin was talking out his ass, and I love it.  Just... Odin, shut the fuck up. 

I also took out a joke about Odin pretending to hear Frigga calling the boys to give him a little more screen time with Frigga.  They're not on the same page here, and that's only going to become more and more apparent as the boys grow up.  To Frigga, these are both her children.  She doesn't care that she only gave birth to one of them (at least, I assume that's where the MCU was going, because it is so not the case in the comics).  To Odin, Loki is a convenient tool.  A tool he happens to have formed an emotional attachment to, but still.  A tool all the same.

Over the last few newsletter issues, I've been talking a lot about how I don't really subscribe to the idea that Loki is anything other than a spoilt brat.  When I first wrote this fic, popular fanon was that Loki was horribly abused, while Thor was the golden child.  In this story, they're both doted on.  But in a high fantasy, vaguely Norse society with backwards laws and ideals, being spoilt looks a little bit different.  At one point, Thor flinches away from Odin, expecting to be hit.  By modern western standards, that's a yikes from me, dawg.  But Asgard is not a modern western society.  Norse laws came from Asgard.  And at this point in the story, the Norse have only been gone for maybe 200 years.  Snorri's Edda has only just been written.  I include this sort of behaviour for a few reasons.  One, that's how Odin do in the comics.  He slaps those kids silly.  There was a really good panel a couple years back after Angela got on her bullshit.  After Odin took mercy on her, Frigga very coldly pointed out that if it had been one of the boys to have done what Angela did, Odin would have skinned them.  Alive, probably.

But I also include it because eventual plans for this story is to take the whole thing forward to the present.  A big point of allegory with the Thor comics lately has been this kind of divide between the Boomers and their old ways, and Gen X and Millennials taking a step back and saying no.  None of this is okay.  I want to give the boys this kind of cultural background that they have to very quickly grow out of later, if they want to survive in a universe where somehow Midgard is top dog within Yggdrasil.  And to do that effectively, I need to not be as hesitant about showing Asgard's baseline.  This almost kind of casual abuse that is just parenting to an Asgardian.  And that's why this fic has so many big, scary warnings on it.  That underage warning is on there because teenagers be having sex.  Loki's been drinking Thor under the table since they were six.  Odin slaps his kids.  It's not pretty, but this was always a story that took the best and the worst bits from all available sources.  And that includes Odin's A+ Parenting.