#im just turning it over in my head. how to connect the deep religious trauma with the possessed and wrong but its an angel narrative | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sleepingfancies · 5 years

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please go off abt detective loki,,, im curious to hear what u have to say abt him!!! 💖

*SLAMS CHAIR DOWN*

SO. YOU WANT ME TO GO OFF ABOUT LOKI.

Praying for you that this read more link works bc otherwise this is gonna be a Cursed Post to all my poor followers. Shit gets long. I have A Lot to say akdjfshfk

Thanks to the investigative skills of the amazing and wonderful @deputyrook (ily), I recently learned that Detective Loki’s backstory included such things as: serving time in juvie, he was formerly religious, and he also possibly suffered from some kind of drug addiction he’s now clean from. It was briefly mentioned in the movie that he spent 6 years in a boys’ home (a rather rough one, by the way Loki talked about it). Boys’ homes are, by definition, “residential sectors where boys are provided food and care when they cannot be adequately cared for by their families, either due to a family crises or the child’s own behavioral issues.”

What this tells me is that:

A) Loki most likely had some heavy childhood trauma that drove him into being a “bad kid” (not that such a thing actually exists, imo, but that’s another essay for another day). It probably took well over a decade to get himself stabilized.

B ) Loki of present day has no family, no personal connections, no friends, absolutely nothing to call his own except the clothes on his back, his car, and... maybe a place to live? I assume he has one somewhere, but we never see him there - he’s constantly either prowling around town or at the station.

C) Loki’s occult tattoos, and his general distaste for anything religious, probably come from an internal place of feeling like some higher power abandoned him along the way. I have no doubt he carefully selected each one to have some personal meaning, but ultimately they all tie back to distancing himself from Christianity (double that if he was religious as a child, or came from a religious family). This also makes me wonder if his last name was something else, and that he changed it to “Loki” upon getting himself back on his feet.

D) Heading off of the boys’ home note; boys’ homes, like most other institutions in the US, legally can’t force residents to stay once they turn 18. Assuming his time there ended at 6 years because he aged out and went off on his own, well, for one that means he was admitted when he was 12 years old. Which is... wow. For two, that means his behavior was never necessarily resolved. Which, given how Jake plays Loki, I’m inclined to believe (I’ll touch on that later).

All of this leads me to some interesting observations during the movie.

For one, Loki is amazing at staying the “adult in the room” in the face of belligerence (e.g. Keller Dover losing his shit in Loki’s car). I know personally, it is almost physically impossible for me not to get my back up when someone else decides they want to take some aggressive tone with me - and I am about as far as one can get from a “troubled kid.” So I have to wonder how many years and how much abuse Loki endured to be able to choose not to respond to people antagonizing him? I have a hard time believing it was just police training that got him to this place of neutrality. And it seems to me like he’s making a genuine effort to stay calm, and to calm the people around him (”please just let me do my job”).

Which leads me into something Mrs. Dover said. “They say you’ve solved every case you’ve ever had, is that true?” And to be fair, I assume Loki’s silence there is supposed to imply that that isn’t true, but it implies so much beyond that. It implies he puts 100% effort into his cases, that he barely sleeps when he knows there’s a chance he can put dangerous people behind bars and save innocent lives. It also implies he feels deeply about the cases he hasn’t solved, or the ones where he got the perpetrator put away but the victims didn’t make it out alive. He carries that with him, constantly.

We see more of this when Keller recognizes his daughter’s bloody sock. His immediate response is to blame Loki. “This is your fault. You didn’t try hard enough. You did this to my daughter.” And Loki says nothing, he doesn’t make any different expression - but his eyes twitch. Jake Gyllenhaal remarked that this was a physical tic he improvised for Loki, one that served as Loki’s channel for intense emotions and/or becoming overstimulated with thoughts and information. Rather than actually emote, his eyes twitch. There is nothing newly informative or particularly overstimulating about the bloody sock scene, which leaves only intense emotion to be the cause of that twitch. And given Loki’s panic when he was searching Bob’s house and boxes for Anna and Joy, I doubt it’s anger. I’m willing to bet it’s that Loki already feels that way. He’s blaming himself. Keller just spoke Loki’s own feelings into existence.

I’ll circle back to that in a minute, because I think Loki making his cases so personal is very telling of his character.

Now, to go back and touch on why I think it’s most likely Loki aged out of the boys’ home rather than graduated - Loki has adapted with his behavior, he hasn’t resolved it at all. It does not seem to me at all like Loki has therapeutic strategies, especially considering I’m 99% sure any therapist or behavior counselor would not encourage bottling up your emotions and disconnecting yourself from human contact. Loki made these steps on his own. He learned to redirect his anger to people who deserved it by becoming part of law enforcement. He decided that he was safer closed off and unavailable to intense emotions. He might’ve even decided other people were safer stuck on the other side of his walls.

There are a whole of two times Loki clearly loses his temper - when Bob keeps drawing mazes rather than giving him a straight answer, and when Bob kills himself and Loki realizes he just lost his best lead. While these are both reasonable things to get worked up about, he reacts so intensely and so personally to them that (circling back to my earlier point) it tells me, deep down, there is an incredibly soft and vulnerable heart in there that’s been locked up for decades.

Loki didn’t want Bob to kill himself. He didn’t mean for things to escalate that far. You can hear it in his voice, he’s genuinely shaken and upset by what just happened. In the following scene when he basically destroys his desk, that is directed at no one and nothing but himself. He’s so angry at himself - for not understanding Bob’s maze, for getting Bob killed, for having to tell the Dovers their one suspect is gone, for feeling helpless when it comes to finding the girls. Loki doesn’t deal well with other people’s failure, but he doesn’t even accept his own.

And I mean - do I even need to mention when he finds Anna? The man is bleeding profusely from a bullet wound in his head, he’s half unconscious, he’s a long way from the hospital, but he doesn’t even think about any of that. He makes it his one singular goal to get her to the emergency room even if he dies trying. And the way he talked to her? “Stay with me Anna, don’t die, just hold on.” I know on the surface it’s obviously just a tactic to keep her (and himself, let’s be honest) awake. But it was so deeply feeling, so honest, so raw, so panicked?

I don’t know, man. I’ve said things to other people before that I wished someone had said to me, and that’s what those lines sounded like to me. Which, if he had been a drug addict at one point, and if he overdosed but no one was there for him? The puzzle pieces fit.

And then to have people visit him in the hospital? To have someone call him a hero? He has no idea how to react to that, because I’m guessing neither of those things have ever happened to him before. And he isn’t really sure what to say to someone being so overwhelmingly grateful for and to him. So he doesn’t really say anything. His eyes just twitch. We can fill in the blanks.

The man has a soft heart, a vulnerability that he refuses to let anyone see, but it’s there. He’s just as scared and angry and confused as Keller 90% of the time. He just hides it better.

Which, ultimately all of this leads me to the conclusion that - for as far as Loki’s distanced himself from religion, as clean as he is now, as stable as he is, as well as he��s channeled his anger, as guarded as he keeps himself - this entire job, to him, is a chance at redemption.

Loki doesn’t think he’s deserving of love. He doesn’t believe he’s capable of having the kind of stability the Dovers are so familiar with. He doesn’t think he can just slide into a friend group after all these years. He doesn’t regard his own life highly. But the ability to save other people’s lives and keep dangerous people locked away - that’s his apology to the world. Of course he cares about these cases because he’s a good man, but it’s more than that. It’s that he believes this is the only way he cant repent for not always being a good man.

Which leads me to his first name. I’ve rambled about the symbolism of his name to @deputyrook before, but David. David. Given all of the Biblical symbolism in this movie, personally my mind immediately leaps to David and Goliath.

David - detective Loki and his desire to be a good man - is in a constant war against Goliath - Loki’s own trauma and troubled past. And there really isn’t a way to have one without the other, which makes Loki’s character so tragic. He isn’t ever going to heal, not completely, not when his entire career is him trying to apologize over and over again. He solves almost all the cases he’s given because he won’t, can’t, accept more failure.

Loki’s last line in the movie is “pray for the best, prepare for the worst.” For being a character so deeply centered in anti-religion, that’s an odd line to make his last. Combine that with how strange it is that he wouldn’t also change his first name, if he changed his last name to distance himself from religion. His name, and that last line, might just be symbolic of the few shreds of hope he has for himself. Hope that maybe he can have what the Dovers have, the hope that maybe one day when he’s gone he’ll be remembered by somebody and for something good.

Because that’s really all he wants, all he can hope, for himself. Since he doesn’t think he’ll ever have human connection, or love, or a family - as much as he would like to have those - he’ll settle for being just a little more than somebody’s bad memory, or being a little more than some name on a headstone.

#anon you are the kindest person i've ever known for indulging me about this #sksksksk #detective loki #it's my fucking boyfriend!!#anonymous #answered #i am VERY soft about this man #because he feels *so much* but he'll never let anyone know that #deep down he's just some 12 year old angry kid who never got what he needed #so he's settled for never getting it #UGH i'm soft #tw drug mention #tw suicide #tw suicide mention #long post #longpost #Anonymous

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soreavs · 4 years

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⌠ RYDER MCLAUGHLIN, 20, CIS MALE, HE/HIM ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, SOREN AVERY! according to their records, they’re a FIRST year, specializing in UNDECIDED; and they DID NOT go to a spy prep high school. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of hands crossed tightly over his chest, the uneven collar of a muddied school uniform and a reluctant smile. when it’s the virgo’s birthday on 10/27/1999, they always request their POTATO DUMPLINGS from the school’s chefs. looks like they’re well on their way to graduation.

hello again , i couldn’t help but bring in a new chara !! unlike lucie, soren is a completely new character, so i rly went all in . i’m gonna tldr his bio as much as i can but this intro post will mostly be about his personality and some wcs , b/c i wrote a full bio which u can read here ! it explains everything in far more detail , but it’s a beefy boi , and also tw for, death, delusional disorder, implied suicide, implied murder . i’ll be yeeting out a starter soon but as always , please feel free to slither into my dms or ims !

okay so my tldr of my bio is gna sound kinda .. crass cos im truly just stating what happened but i understand that not everyone has the time to read long ass bios so please forgive if this sounds v apathetic to some of the traumas he endured.

biography

mother left when he was born, leaving him with his dad and twin sisters who are eight years older than him. she apparently left for work with the intention of coming back, but never did. his family was always religious but turned to a strain of evangelical christianity which was very intense. when his sisters grew up they prevented him from attending. his life has been characterized by death or disappearances, four in particular. 1) his mother, who he never really knew. 2) his baseball coach who he knew well 3) his grandpa and 4) his sister. he never really processed this as grief because he had a really really overactive imagination and a rly fluctuating support system. he watched a lot of alien movies, and because his grandpa who had dementia was always going on about aliens he really started to believe that their disappearances had something to do with aliens. his father just believed he was enthused about aliens, space and physics, but never knew how that was affecting his grieving processes. it kinda all blew up in his face, when he was eighteen and his sister went missing after an argument with his dad. seven months later after the body is never found but there are indications that she may have been murdered, they have a funeral. he doesn’t believe she’s really dead, and he’s sure that he, like his mom, grandpa and sisters are in some part alien. he tells this to his sister and dad and they immediately send him to get help. because that drains them of all funds (they even have to ask extended family to help out), he feels super ashamed, but remembers the letter from gallagher he’d gotten just before he graduated high school. since it’s free and prestigious he hopes to make up for some of the harm he caused them, even though the faintest part of him still believes there’s something amiss with their disappearances. it’s likely his mother was a spy, and never told any of her family, but has somehow been trying to protect them over the years and that his sister is somewhere alive but yeh!

personality

bb boi is rly just trying to recover from his whole life lmao .. he had baseball friends and school friends, but never rly friend friends?? he’s always been an athlete and gotten very good grades which is why his father kinda overlooked what else may had been going on with him??

anyways, he’s a bit shy at first but he’s pretty crackable dhjfg like an egg , just one tap on the table and he’s a gooey mess . still at the point where all he wants to talk about is aliens but as per his therapists advice, he’s trying to tone it down

spy school wise ?? he’s into it , definitely , there’s always something to keep his mind occupied , with the extensive library and gym and pool , it’s more than enough . he did cross country and baseball in high school so he has the agility, but a binch is scared for bootcamp have u seen his twig arms

also he’s undecided in his major b/c he wants to try everything but also he’s just a mess , he’s into this but also lowkey his main factor when deciding was the rep it had to outsiders and the fact that it was free

he’s p soft spoken even when he’s excited , only a sliver of what goes on inside his head makes it out in the world wide world dfjhgk .. just realized none of this shit is personality based what can i say i have no braincells

he’s nice! a little sensitive, a little moody, a little disconnected, can be chatty but can also be very nervous to talk in general constantly second guessing himself boom .

wanted connections

lit rally anyone who’s an Expert in their major because he’s undecided but also a binch could have probably been valedictorian in the class had things not gone off the deep end towards the end of the year , so he wants to do well obviously . so one person for each major maybe ? he Shall rise as the King Of Jack of All Trades

a solid friend group ? maybe a best friend? has never had one of those, sounds nice .

jogging buddy .. he likes to run . it’s nice to run with someone . or so he’s heard , has also never done it .

he’s in first year so the likelihood of exes is a lil slim , but i wld be down to plot smth that just didn’t work out cos he was not in the right mental frame at all like two weeks into starting Spy School and trying to hold a relationship . it would have been a v short term thing !

someone who tempts him to talk abt aliens , but to the point where it sounds crazy , or alternatively someone to suggest that someone in his family prolly had something to do with spydom

hookups mayhaps

anything else come @ me !!

#gallagher:intro #it's ya Boi #Skinny Penis #listen im sry my thing atm is getting wayyyy Too Invested in LA/NY celeb subcultures #n im in skate culture rn .. but at least ryder Acts unlike cough #alana #so we will be having some nice seksi big gifs

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