When the Asgardians came down, no one thought they would be able to stay. There aren’t enough resources, they said; they’ll hurt us, they cried.
They were wrong.
It all started with the children.
Children were spirited away, popping up in places that were much better for their health. Children from war zones, abusive homes; those that are marginalized and cast away. They found themselves in better circumstances, those that woukd abuse and belittle them falling into an odd amount of Karma. Little pranks here and there told the people who it was. The God of Mischief.
Then came the rallies.
A god appeared as the swat teams and police rose their guns and prepared to fire of the peaceful protesters, begging for a future where they’re treated like people. With lightning in his eyes and a fist of iron he ordered them to stop, to leave, to give these people what they deserve.
“A people, they are precious,” The god said. “You must cherish them, because without a people, there isn’t a home.”
Hospitals start to become gentler. It’s said that a woman with a skeleton face visits the younger ones, the ones who are terrified because they are too young to die. And she plays with them, determined to make them laugh and smile before they pass, and when they do it is always with a quiet light in their eyes.
Drownings worldwide stop almost overnight. People who love by the ocean often report a gentle giant that lives there, playing with the friendly and curious minds and keeping the aquatic ecosystem in check.
Poachers are found dead all over the world. There are giant teeth marks in their bodies, and locals tell of a wolf that stalks in the night, keeping their wildlife safe from harm. Horses, too, have a share in this magic, and mistreatment of them stops dead. If you stay in the stables late at night, you’ll catch a glimpse of a beast with eight legs.
Global temputures start to even out again, and it is only at the top of mountians that you can find two brothers, polar opposites, working magic so deep and old that the human mind cannot process it.
Education sees it’s golden age as someone takes it into their own hands. Armed with a pen and a voice, a figure named Bragi goes from school to school worldwide, teaching about the pasts and the present. There is a woman with him too, who makes sure every child is healthy before she leaves.
Tucked away safe in their beds, the people sit in awe at these newcomers. These gentle people, who have helped them so even when they tried to cast them out. The gods have come to us, and they aren’t cruel or harsh or all knowing. They are kind, and careful with us, because they understand the importance of taking care of a world that can be so easily lost.
@icyxmischief reblogged this and I was inspired. I need you to imagine Loki in a bespoke suit though, okay? Now, picture it:
The principle is rambling on and on about discipline and safe environments, the other child and his parents nodding along with simpering smiles that indicate they believe their son is in the right. Loki is, of course, extremely doubtful of this. When the principle called home earlier to say Theophania had hurt another child, he’d been so very, very unfortunate to reach the more ruthless of the little witchling’s parents. Thea is delighted, absolutely pleased, because her daddy had only taken one look at defiant and furious little hazel eyes, seen the grim and stubborn set of her jaw, and smiled the subtle curve of smile he uses when he’s about to really enjoy something.
She sits, legs swinging in the adult sized chair, with daddy hovering protectively behind her. Her sweet little sundress of emerald velvet has mud on it now, one pigtail is askew, and both knees are scraped, as well as the palms of her hands. The other boy has begun his version of the tale— they were playing tag and she tripped and thought he pushed her so she knocked him down with a gust of freezing wind. The boy’s parents nod reproachfully, agreeing with their son’s version of events. The principle begins to issue a judgement when Loki speaks, silky and quiet and deadly calm.
“Wait a moment. It’s only fair and just to hear both sides of a story, isn’t that right?” He smiles again, a faint and fleeting curve of lips only his mate and children would have caught.
Thea looks up and behind her to smile at daddy because he’s right, people will stand by what they declare if they’re in front of people they want to make a good impression on. And the family next to them are from an ancient line of witches, so of course the principle wants to impress them! She begins in a clear, bell like voice, “Merci, daddy.” Looking back to the principle, she explains, “I was playing jump rope with Marisol, Ivy, and Tristan when we saw Edward—“ she shoots him a very dark look indeed, “push Delphinium into a big mud puddle. Daddy and papa always say that we must protect those that are smaller and stand up to bullies, so I ran over and told him to stop it. When I was helping Del out of the puddle, Edward pushed me onto the blacktop, which is how I got these scrapes.” She pulls the hem of her dress up an inch or two so everyone can see her bloodied knees— uncleaned yet as she’d been rushed into the principle’s office for punishment— “and these.” Now she shows dirtied, scraped palms. “I don’t like tag. It’s a silly game and I like jump rope better. You can ask anyone in my class and they will know I wouldn’t be playing tag at recess. When I tried to get up, Edward already was pulling my piggytail, see how messy it is?” She points to the curly brown locks that hang askew. “So my power protected me,” she explains, “because I was scared and hurt. I didn’t mean to push Edward with the ice wind, but that’s what happened because he hurt me and he scared me.”
Her adoptive father has kept a careful watch of the principle this whole time, calculating and assessing whether or not the man will realize the truth of the matter or continue to attempt to side with the other parents. When the other parents begin to make a fuss, the father indignantly declaring, “She’s lying!” he fixes them with the same flat, calculating look.
“Is she? I would be most interested in asking the other children what happened. Perhaps this Delphinium’s parents may want to also press assault charges,” he notes breezily.
The principle scrambles for a solution, clearly panicking and trying not to show it. “Now I don’t think there’s any need for attorneys, the boy will be suspended for three days for violating our safe space policies.” He overrules the parents’ sputtering, informing them, “He can come back Friday. I’m sure the other kids would back Theophania up. Er, Mister ah, Laufeyson-De Belasis, if you’d like to take your daughter home for the day, that would be alright. We’re very sorry that the situation escalated in such a manner, truly apologetic.”
The other parents leave sneering, dragging their sniveling boy along with them. Thea curtsies to the principle before she leaves, chirping, “Merci, Mssr Watkin. Au revoir!” She hooks her pinky with daddy’s, heading out with him and assuring that she doesn’t feel queasy and she didn’t hit her head, but her hands and knees sting.
Later, at home, with her scrapes bandaged and her pretty dress in the laundry, she snuggles up with daddy and they both enjoy a celebratory hot cocoa. It’s not every day a little witch succeeds in her mission to thwart the school bully, after all.
//YOU KNOW WHAT, I actually sit the fence on this one because I’ve heard great theories both ways.
I use this post to invite followers to reply and reblog with their ideas. Come at me!!!!
Ultimately I believe Loki IS the source of the magic that changed him into Asgardian form (as opposed to Jotun). I believe this because from the moment Odin picked Loki up, in the first Thor film, and looked at him, Loki turned beige skinned with bluish-green eyes. Many people interpret this to be Odin applying illusion magic to the child in order to give the infant safe passage into Asgard.
I think, as many have posited before me, that Loki was working in tandem with Odin’s magic, because Loki is a shape-shifter in ways that even Frigga never taught him, which one would assume to be an innate gift, and Odin, in picking him up, showed him kindness, and Loki was responding to it as Loki always does: by eagerly trying to prove his worth. “I look like you now, nice person!” as he ceases to cry.
HOWEVER. This is still speculation. Why? Because ODIN IS TELLING LOKI THE STORY in the flashback that we see, and Odin, as the narrator, is showing Loki WHAT ODIN WANTS TO. Is Odin lying? He might be. Because Laufey refers to Odin as “a murderer and a thief.” And we know from Ragnarok that Odin is certainly an accomplished imperialist/colonizer who had no qualms about reducing conquered Jotunheim to economic and social ruin. Stealing one of its babies? An immigrant, basically? Hey. To quote Laura Ingraham, who is also an imperialist asshole, it’s a “mercy” to the child of that “shithole country,” (Donald Trump’s words about African nations) right?????
See what I’m getting at???? Odin may have actually stolen Loki so we don’t know if what we see about Odin and Loki first meeting, and Loki first turning into an Asgardian-looking baby, is accurate or slanted.
So we really DON’T KNOW from whom the illusion of an Asgardian comes. Loki never drops that illusion after Thor 1, in part because the MCU writers are incompetent at following a story through thoroughly, and more interested in convoluted narratives with unwieldy ensemble casts that make shit tons of money. But why else? We just don’t know. 😦
So as a result, I’ve never known how to answer this question lol 😦 If you have ideas, lmk!!! ❤
Asgard, finally settling in Norway to repopulate: So, what are the Nordic lands famous for since we were last here? Swordsmanship? Hunting parties? Bloodbaths?!?!
Millenial sipping iced coffee: Abba
Asgard: ???
Asgard, twenty minutes later bopping to Dancing Queen:
I’m so proud of you. I always have been. I love you, Magpie. I always will.
And you, Thanos? You will die in the most insignificant, lonely, and forgettable of ways, the way someone who has never loved anything or anyone dies. People will yawn. “Anyway,” they’ll say, and you will be as unremembered as a case of indigestion in the middle of the night. You will be banal. Unceremonious. Finite. You will be nothing.
“Ok, let’s recap here for a sec – you tried to brainwash me, I made adick joke, you threw me off a building. Any ref worth their weight in spam would call that in my favor.”
Stark still shifted nervously. Pepper had a hard time wrenching the horrors Tony kept close to his chest, and to offer them freely to the former starring role of his nightmares was difficult.
“Look, I… I’m glad you’re here. And I need to get this out before I explode – none of us are perfect. Someone got into my head, and I used the glowstick of destiny to create a program that almost destroyed the world. And I did that with the best intentions. Nobody knows Natasha’s body count, but it’s gotta be staggering. The other half of Bruce’s body murdered people gladiator style for two years. Steve’s made tactical mistakes that cost lives. Wanda got in our heads and-”
He stopped, a cold, broken laugh bubbling from his throat.
“-she’s dead so I guess it doesn’t matter. Clint was such a disaster of a human being for so long, Coulson told me they quit making extraction plans for his missions because he never showed up for them. And I’m not trying to put them down to raise you up, I’m just trying to say we all have to be on the same team. They all got the same speech. Clint’s supremely unhappy, but he lost kids and he knows what’s at stake. Nat’s indifferent, Bruce trusts you. Cap’s on the way to forgiving you. When vision told us, Steve said even then you had the perfect chance to slice his head clean off, but you didn’t. I don’t want anyone digging up the past because it’s over. I just-”
The engineer broke off, swiping a hand down his mouth and chin.
“I want this to work. I really really want this to work. Because right now, the only thing I see when I close my eyes is a 15-year-old kid disintegrating in my arms. Fucking APOLOGIZING to mewhile his body turned to ash. I don’t know how to live with that! I don’t know if I CAN live with that! So as far as I’m concerned, nothing that happened before last week matters. NOTHING. I will throw my only friends on the street if that’s what it takes to keep moving forward, because the only thing in the world that matters is that we FIX THIS!”
Tony, who so easily and readily masked his true emotions, shook in the aftermath of laying them bare. Maybe it was because Loki was the last person he’d approached with this, and he was worn thin. Maybe it was because Loki might understand better than the rest.
“This is the worst nightmare of my life, and I want it to be over. I don’t care what we have to do along the way, I just want it to be over.”
“Twas but a jest,” Loki hastens to clarify, “made by a god who perhaps chafes at the idea of open apology.”
Whether Tony hears him or not remains unclear. Both of them are too engrossed, already, in the human’s broken dam of confessions, some startlingly intimate. Loki is uncomfortable in the presence of such raw rage and grief, for they too closely resemble his own past agonies, and he has never felt at ease withexcesses of candor. But he makes no mistake of the privilege of being the person on whom Tony unburdens.
Perhaps it’s only an anomaly of timing. Perhaps he’s a familiar face and there is freedom for Tony in speaking to him, for Tony can hardly give a damn about Loki’s opinion of him.
But Loki feels honored all the same.
Tony speaks of a “Wanda” and of her death. Then of a boy called “Peter,” and his. A child. Loki, who is both mother and father, feels his heart tighten like it’s filled with razors.
Death. By a wormhole. Resuscitation by beings of a locust-like hivemind. War, war, they chant, in their strange metallic tongue. Chitauri, they call themselves. By torture and experimentation, incessant forms of cruel resuscitation. The Other, he calls himself. By impalement, via his mother’s killer. Resuscitation, because of the “enhancements” previously administered. By strangulation, while the only person in all the universe for whom Loki would die watched. While what remained of Loki’s scattered people in diaspora lay, smoudering carcasses, on the ground. Carcasses Loki was destined to join, but never for good. Never in rest. Never gifted Valhalla. Never. Always coming back, always a little more diminished. Always thrown back into an existence in which there is no rest. But the same bruise-hued mottled face with the same cold fanatical compassionless eyes looms, again and again and again. Waiting to kill and revive him again and again. The same being superimposed over his own father, an imperialist, a warmonger, a falsely benign patriarch of so many scattered “children.” The same creature forever unworthy of godhood.
Words that have little to do with the matter at hand escape in a hitched breath:
“The dead do not always thusly remain.”
He narrowly stops himself from suggesting that Tony’s friends who are dead may have enjoyed the most merciful fate of them all. True though it may be, Loki is not a truth-teller. Not in this moment. It is not what his comrade in arms needs.
“ … anyroad. You do not have to ‘live with’ a grave injustice. You can let the rage consume and anesthetize you, guide you fixedly in your purpose. You can honor your child, for that is what he was, for all intents and purposes, with the sacrament of revenge. But I caution you: you will become me, on that tower, unleashing that alien army, for the sake of survival, and due justice, and very little else.”
He licks his lips, thin and pale and chapped.
“I am sorry for the losses that you have borne, which are innumerable and cruel. If you tell me all these things because you want a guarantee of my aid, then you have it.”
You and I, Stark. We both had fathers who doubted us, excavated and displayed our insecurities, until the end, didn’t we?
We both have something to prove, and someone to prove wrong, don’t we?
//I think it’s unfortunately true that that can be extrapolated from a very vague passage of dialogue, in which Loki uses psychological warfare, threatening to use Clint to kill Natasha:
“I won’t touch Barton. Not until I make him kill you! Slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he’ll wake just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I’ll split his skull! This is MY bargain, you mewling q**m!”
However it’s important here to distinguish a few things:
1) “Not until I make him KILL you…” implies brutal physical torture, and murder, by a trained assassin, not rape.
2) Loki is stuck in a glass cage and he is using whatever weapons in his arsenal to try to rattle Natasha. He’s learned from observing humans that gendered slurs and violent threats is an effective way to coerce them when at a personal disadvantage. In other words, this is a strategy, not necessarily a truth.
But let’s say that IS what he meant, in which case … .
3) “Slowly and intimately” can be taken as sexual, but that’s the point at which it’s important to note that Joss Whedon’s writing is rife with unnecessary misogynistic tropes, despite his performative allyship as a “feminist” (I take issue with his self-proclaimed feminism, STRONG issue, as an intersectional feminist). For instance, despite claiming to be fond of Natasha, he finds a way to slip “c*nt” past the censors as “qu*m,” which is an Old English version of the same word. Later, in Age of Ultron, he makes Natasha see herself as a monster because she was sterilized, as if a woman not having children–the traditional “purpose” of the female gender– is the worst thing can can possibly happen to her. He also makes a tasteless joke about Bruce falling face-first into Natasha’s boobs.
The measure of misogynistic tropes in a film is as simple as asking the question, “Was that necessary? Did it add to the plot even remotely? Did it enrich the character at all?” And if your answer is no, as it repeatedly is in the case of Natasha, you’ve got yourself a Problematic Writer.
Using rape threats in a work of media against women when said threads are entirely unnecessary is a symptom of misogyny in the writers, not the characters.
In other words: the problem is not Loki, who, in all four of his other film appearances, HANDLED BY WRITERS OTHER THAN JOSS WHEDON, shows women nothing but respect–particularly his mother, Frigga, who raised him and whom he literally, canonically, emulates. It is highly implausible for any man (and Loki is actually genderfluid) to be such a misogynist that he would ever threaten rape if his highest role model was a woman, and if he respects women in turn. Rather, the problem is the writer at the helm of Avengers Assemble.
So how do you move forward from this? Threats of rape can never be taken lightly. There is no more profound violation of a human being. But what people claiming “Loki threatened rape” need to do is be aware of the source of that highly out-of-character moment. What was the purpose of having a villain enter that particular terrain? Whose agenda is being pushed here, and forced onto a character’s dialogue?
I personally wholesale reject that entire scene. Loki is not Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, whose entire character centers on violating another person’s autonomy, mental, physical, emotional, and sexual. No matter who wrote Kilgrave, he would still be a serial rapist. Not true with Loki.
I invite others to respond to this post by sourcing the many incidences of Joss Whedon’s misogyny toward his female protags, including, for instance, having Cordelia’s actresss (Buffy, Angel) fired because she became pregnant.
Always, always ask: what’s the agenda of the creative team manufacturing a product for your consumption? Human beings always have an agenda. Sometimes their goals are less honorable than others.
icyxmischief 