God of Outcasts rewrites

I can't get individual chapter stats on AO3, but I can see that one person clicked on my announcement for this morning's God of Outcast chapter, and followed it to AO3.

But this chapter in particular, Rötgart, is one of the big reasons for not only the rewrite, but for shuffling around some of the chapters to put them first.  Particularly, this is a big callback to the second chapter, Dwarf's Ransom.  Previously, that one had been posted as its own standalone fic, and very few people read that one as a standalone.  Which is hilarious, because like, three days after I posted it, Marvel dropped a comic where the entire plot sprung from the myth I used as the basis of that fic. 

But God of Outcasts is really funky, because the first 20k+ words have nothing to do with the main character of the story.  And I know this puts a lot of people off.  I've talked about it before, even.  But now I find myself wondering how many people actually read that second chapter.  Like, how many people skipped it, and are now wondering what the hell is going on as Loki winds up retracing Old Loki's steps.

I'm going to start off each arc with a Tales of Yggdrasil story, using those to establish for the reader things that Loki doesn't know, because Loki has been lied to.  And Dwarf's Ransom answers a lot of questions posed in Those Who Hunt Monsters.  One or two people have even commented on that, and I love it.  But the weird shit presented without context is the context.  Dwarf's Ransom is a twist on the backstory presented in Agent of Asgard #3, where Old Loki and Odin go on this mad romp together.  But it's a different myth, and a different context to their friendship.  Once which wound up being hilariously relevant within canon.

But I am curious, if you're reading God of Outcasts, did you read the first two chapters, or did you skip them?  Laufey and Odin are not popular characters, so I know it's an odd choice to open a story with them as central characters.  But I wanted to open the story with them so when Loki started uncovering weird secrets, the reader is one step ahead of him.