#who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet

[kinnoth]

I don't know how to phrase this but I think the difference between thor and Loki is that Loki loves thor more (will do anything for thor, kill anything, break anything, sell anything) but Thor loves Loki more completely?

Like Loki's love for Thor is numerable. He loves Thor for the reasons he is Thor, for how he is: his strength and beauty, his generosity and gentleness, his patience and his abiding commitment to being just. Loki loves him for how Thor loves him. But take away one of those things, and Loki will balk. He can deal with it, potentially, eventually, but first he flinches. He steps back and evaluates and he cannot help the horror that rushes through him.

(It's to do with his own self regard, I think. He was always bade to hide himself when he was sick, when that sickness disfigured him. He has an unquenchable fear of ugliness in both himself and others. This is Frigga's baggage more than anything: all about image and presentation at all times. She won her place in the empire by being the perfectly calibrated amount of graceful and powerful and beautiful, and she keeps it that way too. She sets the example and the expectation and she means for those around her to follow it. I think it matters that Loki spent the first 15 years of his life solely amongst the asynjur. Thor has his damage but loki also has his.)

Thor on the other hand does not flinch, has never flinched, will never. He has loved Loki through every alteration and disfigurement, even when Loki could not show himself to him. He walks right through Loki's confession that he's a frost giant; he lays his hands on him when his body rebels and covers his skin in blisters and sores; he welcomes him back with open arms when Loki comes back from the giants with an entirely new body, a stranger in everything but name. I think it's the reason why Loki's illusions don't really work on Thor; he can fool everyone else, but Thor sees him always.

(I think this is something of an enduring mystery to Loki. His glamours are perfect; his illusions are indistinguishable from the real thing. He can make perfect replicas of anything that he's seen or that's been described to him -- everyone says so. Everyone acknowledges his skill. He can catch Thor off in moments of inattention or distraction, but when he's looking right at him, looking for him, loki falters)

#internal thorki fic tag #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet #internal thor tag #this is groundwork for like 5 major fics i still haven't finished ~

[kinnoth]

Sure, Loki does creepy shit like sniffing Thor's pillows and stealing Thor's clothes and sneaking what are clearly courtship tokens into the presents he gives Thor, but Thor's the one who unconsciously chooses his lovers based on the single criterion of how much they remind him of his brother so who's the real freak??

#im having a bad day so have some #thorki #crack meta #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet #''all his lovers'' its like three lol h #he's had like two girlfriends and one boyfriend and none of them felt like his heart was really in it

[kinnoth]

Oh yeah, for the record, in case this wasn't made sufficiently explicit throughout all the narratives I've been crafting:

Thor is not the favourite. Hela was the favourite, and the eldest, and perfectly vicious and bloodthirsty and obedient in every way. Odin felt for her the closest thing he had ever felt to love, and deeply regrets having to have had her put down, even if it was necessary. In her subsequent absence, her faults have only grown dimmer and her virtues only ever brighter.

No, Thor is the middle child who never knows he is the middle child. He never had a chance; he was always second choice; there was never any way he could compete with a memory, and so there is nothing he can ever do completely right. But he's what's left and Odin has to make do with him. Odin continually thinks that Thor is too soft and too sentimental and too squeamish, growing up. He is not what Odin thinks a man ought to be bc what Odin thinks a man ought to be is a target that never truly materialises or, for that matter, exists. Odin is disappointed in Thor for the same reasons he is disappointed in himself, and they are vague and inarticulate.

Odin is never satisfied, and even at the end of his life, he looks back on his own life with a sense of waste and regret. He should have done things differently, if only he had known. He should have been a different man, if only he had known. What that is and what that should have been changes moment by moment, and Odin projects his failures onto his heir. Thor has a lot of contributing vectors for his lifelong anxiety and lack of self-worth, but Odin's implacable disappointment with him growing up is at the top.

Loki was never in consideration for Odin, but he was Frigga's charge and she was lenient to him in a way that Thor, the heir to nine worlds, could not afford to be spoiled. She was crafting a king out of Thor, but the sculptor's chisel is neither kind or loving.

#There's a line in the yet unreleased muspelheim fic that goes something something #''Thor knows it all at once: Loki is the only one who loves him; the only one'' bc kinda? Honestly? He was? #the only one who didn't want anything out of him and didn't want him to be something else? #internal thor tag #internal thorki fic tag #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet

[kinnoth]

so the aesir don't use any form of long range weaponry. no arrows, no throwing spears, no war machines, no javelins, etc. i noticed this first when i was like "oh yeah, loki uses throwing knives. i wonder why they don't let him use a bow like all the other twinky fantasy characters".

but i think this actually fits into their cultural definitions of honour and honourable combat. a death isn't honourable unless it was done by your own hand, and to kill someone via long range projectile is not "by your own hand"

I think Thor gets away with mjolnir bc it comes back to him when he throws it which makes it primarily a melee weapon. So theoretically, the aesir would be ok with attack boomerangs lol

Even women don't appear to be trained in long range combat. Frigga carries knives and fights with a sword as if it is a knife. I think women's weapons are usually shorter than a forearm and single bladed, and they will only carry the one knife. It's meant to be used in single combat self defence and in the tradition of not allowing themselves to be taken alive.

So I think Loki isn't using knives designed for throwing. I think he just carries a dozen or so women's knives along with his long daggers (a double bladed weapon of vanir fabrication, but still shorter than a forearm and therefore not not technically a "man's weapon"). The knives are his primary offense; his daggers are used in single combat self defence. He has been taught to fight with a sword and also a spear, but he is not generally strong enough to go close quarters with an aesir warrior. His whole MO is to try and strike his opponents down before they get close enough to go hand to hand with him. He never misses.

Nobody thinks he's honourable for this, though, even though he is lethal and effective. It's one of the things that make him contemptible to the aesir ruling class. When they were younger, Thor would really try to build him up to get him to fight using a sword, to try to protect him from the nasty things people were wont to say about him, but even then, Loki was only ever a middling swordsman and only marginally better with a spear.

#who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet #loki was alienated by every aspect of aesir society and had a much more comfortable time fitting in with vanir culture #he spent way more time on vanaheim than thor did as a child and would go with frigga every time she visited #his house and his hall were styled after a vanir fashion and he himself spoke primarily vanir to the members of his household #this gave him a certain... reputation since we are still making use of the vanir/greeks::aesir/romans analogy #thor also having grown up with their vanir mother also spoke vanir easily #and when the two of them are alone they will still sometimes speak vanir amongst themselves #internal thor tag

[kinnoth]

So the rules to thorki endearments are:

"brother" for equality, at the bottom of everything, they neither accept nor assert rule or authority over the other, there is loyalty but first there is independence

"husband" for responsibility and codified, legal and formal attachment, they are bound as a pair, they are one working unit, there is affection but first there is duty

"beloved" for personal devotion, not because they have made public vows but because they have made private ones

"lover" because Thor is a fucking tease and because it makes loki pink and pleased to hear him say it

"my heart/my love" because that is what Thor is to Loki, it's not even endearment, it's like calling the sun the sun

"my god" for when somebody's getting their fucking mind blown

#kings of new asgard #internal thorki fic tag #sappy piece of shite #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet

[kinnoth]

ok since i'm on the subject

alfheim was given to frey (freya/frigga's twin brother) as a present by odin for recompense for stealing his queen (freya) and his kingship (given to frigga, queen of vanaheim)

alfheim has its own king and line of kings, but echtach -- having witnessed the aesir war against vanaheim from literally next door -- gracefully and cheerfully bowed out. there was never a war against alfheim by the aesir, and so echtach and his people retained their rights and lives and peace in exchange for their sovereignty

alfheim has its own armies but they were never much to speak of. they defended against pirates on occasion and helped keep the elvish cities free from seawolves

ectach has four sons, but only nuada, the heir, can remember a time before alfheim was an asgardian vassal state. he is canny enough to bide his time. no empire lasts forever.

frey is a sort of absentee king. he knows he is not wanted by the elves and he knows that odin considers alfheim a mere plaything to keep frey busy. "baby's first kingdom". it is exile in all but name. his resentments are deep and immovable. echtach and his family are allowed to maintain their rule for the most part, even if they cannot keep their lands and titles. frey's wife gerth cannot be queen and is known as consort. also a resentment.

(after the empire dissolves, frey goes back to vanaheim and takes up his puppet rule there. he is given the title of king only because it is due to nobody else, but the nations of vanaheim have long been semi-autonomous with their queen gone half the year. nobody minds frey but nobody really pays him any mind either. even when she is dead, frey is second to his sister)

(at one point after asgard, thor suggests that he and loki take their people to alfheim or vanaheim. vanaheim is out of the question: frey will not even speak to them, but alfheim is the one with the axe to grind. loki sums this up as "alfheim is not the friend to asgard she once was" but asgard has never considered the elves to be worthy of anything except whoring, servitude, and the occasional crafted good. Problematic.)

#internal thor tag #there are no innocent colonisers #none of the surviving aesir on the statesman personally colonised anybody but they all benefited from the system #that is especially true to thor and loki #most of the work of ''lokis gap year'' is in the reparations made to the giants #but thor has to deal with everybody else -- and he can't do it to anyone's satisfaction bc the resources just aren't there anymore #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet #internal thorki fic tag

[kinnoth]

new asgard, from above

New Asgard is something else. Suspended eight thousand feet in the air by some sort of proprietary tech that the Asgardians just won't share, it hovers along the grey North Sea, just level with the clouds. Tony approaches from above. It's like something out of a flat earther's wet dream: a nearly circular disk, covered in fields and hills and streams and forests. Water streams from the edges like a curtain, dropping into the sea below. Tony's never been, personally, not ever since the Asgardians up and took off and took their city with them, but he's seen it plenty enough times on magazine covers and in the news. It's smaller than the pictures make it look. There's really only the one settlement, a small town of A-frame houses at the center of a web of roads that lead out to farmland.

Tony descends steadily through the clouds and, then all at once, he hits New Asgard's atmosphere, which is another crazy thing Tony just needs the opportunity to figure out. It's midmorning here somehow, and summer, mist crawling down from over the mountains, a pale pink and yellow opalescence refracting off the dome of the sky.

#kings of new asgard #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet #oh yeah i'm still writing that tony pov fic that again nobody asked for

[kinnoth]

More meta nobody asked for.

Aesir and Jotun reproductive biology

(with an aside about aesir economy and a separate aside for jotun linguistics)

For the record this is for my own notes and nobody else needs to read this

Aesir babies are born twice. The mothers carry the soul but the fathers must hew the bodies. Procreation involves the parents pulling their children's souls out of the cosmos (to which their souls will eventually return). Aesir mothers foster that soul within their own for the duration of "pregnancy". Meanwhile, Aesir fathers must carve their children's bodies out of the landscape of Asgard (to which their bodies will eventually return). Sex of the offspring is therefore still male determinative. Aesir bodies are made of Asgard. "Nursing" aesir babies is siphoning a soul into its vessel. This is really where the "genetic" lines and class lines come in.

("class" being heavily scare quoted bc asgard is operating in a post-scarcity economy -- land heritability is the only real thing separating the commoners' quality of life from the aristocrats' -- I have a whole separate other post about asgard's economy that i haven't finished but tl;dr asgard just takes what it wants from its colonies like a gang extorting protection money lol, actual legal tender exists only vestigially for personal off world use-- it's like trading glass beads for pelts you know -- the only viable currency is honour, death, and bodies bc death cult)

Anyways if you're born into a pleb family you're gonna end up with a less sturdy, lower quality body than if you're part of the aristocracy. If your father was made of fuckin bramble and chalk and pigiron, that is what his father had to work with and likely what your father will have to work with. In this way, the only real currency in this society is quality of the body and its ability to hold up to to its 5000+ year life. Aesir souls are functionally immortal; it is only their bodies that eventually break down.

(this is also why the lines "Asgard is not a place it's a people" and "[Hela] like [Thor] draws her power from Asgard -- the longer she's here the more powerful she grows" is compatible with the fact that even after Asgard is destroyed, Thor continues to be able to use his powers -- his people are Asgard, they carry Asgard literally in their bodies.)

(addendum: part of the problem in "kings of new Asgard" is that now that there is no longer an Asgard with which to make new aesir bodies, there can be no new aesir. I haven't decided what I'm gonna do about that yet but the options are theyre gonna have to go back to the place Asgard used to be and fuckin scrounge for the dust that was asgard, they're going to have to create bodies out of midgardian material (truly suboptimal, it will definitely fuck up their lifespans), they're going to have to institute a very strict birth/death ratio where birth rate can never exceed death rate, or my favourite they're gonna have to go to go around the fucking universe trying to pick up dead Asgardians so that they can recycle their body stuff with which to make new aesir)

Conversely, giants are born the "regular" way***

But first: In Jotun mythology, after the fall of ymir, all his giant offspring were crushed beneath his body save one. But somehow, that one giant was able to become two giants, and those two giants were able to become four, etc. All giants are biologically hermaphroditic (they can circumstantially be either male or female; clown fish rules) -- but can they asexually reproduce? Their mythology seems to imply that, but who's to say?

The concern with fate and fated pairs comes from this idea that at one time there was one giant who became two, and it is fate's intent that that separated giant one day become one again.

(fated pairs are matched by their brow lines; matched pairs share the same lines -- the concern with "illegitimate" children born outside of fated pairs is that ones lines become scrambled and asymmetrical the further from "legitimacy" ones birth is, thus decimating the hope that one will ever be matched with ones other half which is the whole point of pairing to begin with)

Giants appear as "male" to aesir eyes bc they lack breasts. They lack breasts bc giants do not nurse their young. Their babies are born "normal" sized by human standards, but giants themselves stand 10-12 feet tall. The size of the baby's head is therefore not restricted by the birth canal, and this there is no biological reason to be born "half baked" so to speak. Giant babies are born fully developed and with teeth and capable of eating solid foods.

(I'm going with like, fuckin, wraeththu rules for Jotun genitalia unfortunately for everybody. Everybody keeps their genitalia tucked up inside their bodies in the "female" appearance normally bc why expose that liability unless you're using it? It can be popped out into "male" appearance when it would be convenient to have an external appendage. Urinating is done in the "male" appearance. Cleaning oneself is done in the "male" appearance. Obviously fucking is 50/50 if one is looking to reproduce.

Jotun society is mono gender and thus without gender. When two giants love each other very much, and they want to make a baby, they decide which one of them wants to carry a child and that one carries a child.

Linguistically, the only term the jotnar have for "male" and "female" refers to animals which are a different set of words than what is used for inanimate objects and separate from the pronouns used for people. The 3rd person pronouns used for people is specifically used for people and only people. Allspeech translates that pronoun to "he" bc Asgard is a patriarchy.

Jotnar who learn to speak languages of other species who have separate genders tend to have a difficult time keeping the pronouns straight; typical speech pattern is they will use a singular gendered pronoun and stick with it regardless of context. They also generally have a difficult time distinguishing between men and women in the first place and it is a frequent complaint among the jotnar is that the separate sexes look so similar anyway it would simply be more sensible to consider them all one thing like the jotnar do.

The language being limited to what it is, jotuns talking about for example "vanir woman" need to use the animal sex term bc that is the only female sex word they have. This is considered super fuckin rude tho (imagine "cow" and "bull"; "that one there is a vanir cow" --rude af) so the more PC jotnar use euphemisms. "Hairy face"/"smooth face" is popular, though it only really applies to the vanir/aesir whose men reliably wear beards.

Why is this significant:

Odin, who is a half giant, was born by a Jotun mother and therefore was born of a flesh body (jotun) and a celestial soul (aesir). He therefore had no access to seith of his own, as seith requires a soul descended of Ymir and his far reaching hands and infinite sight. His gift of seith is literally a gift from his mother, who divided her ability evenly between her three sons on her deathbed. Odin "made" himself aesir by the same method by which Bestla was "made" aesir. Bestla's aesir skin is literally a skin. Odin's aesir skin is literally a skin. He made it for himself when he remade himself from Wod into Odin. In this way he is actually more fragile than an aesir born of two aesir parents.

Loki however, is a jotun who was transfigured from his Jotun body into an aesir body that Odin crafted for him. In this way, Odin is kind of his father. Loki is without precedent; no one else has ever attempted something like this and no one else since. It is kind of an ethical abomination. Nobody really knows how Odin did what he did. (It was a massive misuse of seith. Odin severed Loki's fate/soul from the fabric of fate and with it took the yet unwritten story of his young life and reformed it for his own contexts. To remove Loki from his fated pair, Odin mechanically beat his and Thor's soul into one. It is a shocking perversion of fate's intentions)

Because Loki's body was disrupted in the way it was, he is unique in his ability to shape shift the way he can. It is a basic charm to make oneself bigger or smaller in aspect (Loki at one point creates charms for angrboda et al that bear the commands "grow" and "diminish" on them for ease of transfiguration), but Loki can do it by will. It is a simple illusion to appear as a different shape or aspect (Frigga has a magnificent coat of feathers that could make her into a hawk), but Loki can make himself into the thing itself. Odin tried to make for him a girl's body but Loki rejected it, and he was able to change himself to be the sex he wanted to be because his body has been made and remade many times over.

#internal thor tag #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet #''hey loser why don't you just write original fiction--'' WHY DON'T YOU SUCK MY DICK?!

[kinnoth]

Angrboda was kind of lost track of after the fall of the royal court of Jotunheim. Both his parents died during battle or were executed as part of Odin's punishment for Jotunheim's uprising. Most of the first house was extinguished and the second house was outright killed. Mass deaths, mass graves, giants who could not be identified by their markings or their faces, and just, nobody kept track of a child

He spent 10 years alone in the woods. He took his wolf form and chased game, ate raw meat, slept in earthen dens. By the time anyone found him, he had nearly forgotten he was ever a person.

Skrymir retrieves him to vanaheim to live with the other refugees but he has spent too much time alone now. He doesn't see the point of polite society; he wears his furs instead of cloth; he is sullen and watchful and does not have the patience for courtly games. But skrymir tells him that he was meant to be a king. Angrboda hardly knows what that means, but he does remember his ceremonies: how to bow and hold it, how to kneel without ever touching the ground, how to hold his head. He walks gracefully -- muscle memory; he was thoroughly trained; he was once meant for a prince.

He still prefers to live out on his own, though the woods of vanaheim are neither as deep nor as dark as the woods of Jotunheim. Skrymir keeps a room for him in his house. That is proper.

When Loki shows up, skrymir's just like "oh thank God you're here, he's your problem now"

#loki as foil; people who are uncomfortable in the bodies they have to wear #kings of new asgard #internal thor tag #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet

[kinnoth]

Ok so the Aesir are made out of Asgard right

So once there's no more Asgard, no more Aesir can be made

There's bound to be some sort of tragedy. Some early aesir babies are gonna be born into inadequate, Midgard Stuff bodies and probably die

The plan was to make them go back to where Asgard used to be and just like load up on corpses, but I wonder if that's too literal

I'm wondering if this is where I can bring in idunn's apples? Idunn's trees can only be grown on Asgard, so the corpses are to feed the trees.

Two possibilities:

Idunn's trees only produce mature fruit after a very long gestation period, which absolutely puts a cap on their popularity growth bc until the trees mature and fruit, there can be no aesir babies that survive their infancy. The only ones that do live are half giant born, which would absolutely help to integrate the two societies together. Idunn's fruit are tasteless and mealy. Bone white that start to rot the second they're removed from their branch. They are eaten by the fathers. They only serve the one purpose.

I wonder if the trees can be used to terraform new Asgard to make it into stuff suitable to produce new aesir. If they're cut down, the land reverts. They produce inedible fruit.

#who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet #kings of new asgard #internal thor tag

[kinnoth]

So I've made Loki a chronically ill child among a race of gods who do not experience illness or disease and boy it's fun to try and work around that logistically.

Frigga knows something about illness at least; while the vanir are built like the aesir, they lack the technological advances and must rely on the healing of their own bodies to keep them healthy

Frigga's witches know something is up but lack the skill to divine the cause or reason behind his illness. Loki is, after all, unprecedented

Thor doesn't really understand what it means one way or another. On a practical level it means to him that Loki is not allowed to come out and play, and that makes him sad. He has been injured before, and illness is explained to him like an injury, but when he asks how long it will take Loki to get better, the answer "he might not get better" confuses and scares him. He has been introduced to the concept of death, just not the concept of a suboptimal life. He asks every day if Loki is going to die. It's one of the first manifestations of his lifelong anxiety.

I think his illness manifests as a kind of whole body transplant rejection. His body seems like it is constantly trying to expel itself from itself. He is constantly weak with fever; he can't keep down his food. His skin blisters and breaks like it's trying to slough off his bones. Some days he is in so much pain he can't even turn his head.

He was never the strongest baby but he doesn't start really getting sick until they move him to solid foods. Frigga was genuinely concerned that he wouldn't make it through childhood. He starts getting better around age 6ish when he figures out he can change his body. I think his first shapeshifting incident is probably accidental. He is read a story one night about a hero with blue eyes and he goes to sleep wishing he had blue eyes. When he wakes up his eyes are blue. He repeats the trick every night for a couple of weeks, delighting in the fact that he can wish for something of his body and change it and also get one over on his nurses who don't notice it when he wakes up with one violet eye and one yellow eye. He starts improving. They let him outside for more hours of the day. He learns to make himself into all sorts of animal shapes, which everybody seems to find amusing, even if he can't hold the shapes for long. He gets to play with Thor.

Then one day, while his nurses are tending to him, he overhears them talking about how the boys will be leaving Frigga's garden soon and getting their breeches. He asks whether or not he's going to be going with them, and the nurses laugh, of course not, he's not a boy. He asks if Thor is a boy, and of course he is. This disturbs him. He's never really thought about this before. They're all dressed in the same skirts in Frigga's garden, they all get fed the same and taught the same and they all play the same games. They are all the Allmother's children, but Thor is his favourite. He doesn't want to stay here if Thor isn't.

He goes to bed wishing he was a boy and when he wakes up, he is. His nurses are horrified when they go to get him changed and discover him with a different set of genitalia than what they left him with. Frigga has him checked at random multiple times a day for a period of 6 months and has him punished if he is caught. Loki goes back to being a girl but immediately gets sick again. It's worse than before. It's the worst he's ever been. He might actually die. He has to be put into a stasis.

Odin has to decide what to do about this. Frigga is fond of Loki at this point, because she is fond of children in general, but also because Loki is clever and quite sweet, but she will not contradict Odin's decision whatever it may be. This is Odin's plan. Frigga is complicit, but if Odin wants to give up on his son's intended bride and go for some different plan to get seith back into his line, Frigga is not going to object.

(Odin and Frigga are already on sour terms personally bc of Odin's whole bargain he made with Thor's soul. All the children are Frigga's children, but Thor is her son. She will never publicly contradict her husband but he has also been barred from her chambers for eight years at this point)

Odin is peeved off to hell. He does not understand why this isn't working. His mother was a jotun who wore an aesir woman's skin without complaint (as far as he knows) and Odin has done one better on that by crafting an actual aesir body for Loki out of the same stuff he used to craft his own daughter. A child should have very easily inhabited a new body.

But Odin wants seith more than he wants anything else, so he decides fine. He will simply incorporate the foundling child into his line another way. He will make them brothers, and any progeny of his son's will have jotun blooded sorcerers they call cousin at their side. Further down, the lines might merge. That is not optimal but it is sufficient.

They bring Loki out of stasis and they don't talk about his life as a girl anymore. They breech him without any discussion or ceremony, almost two years after all the other boys his age, but no one comments on it. He gets better, but nearly a year in stasis has wreaked havoc on his physical condition. He has deteriorated physically. He's unable to stand on his own and walking is a great difficulty. He is nine years old. But they do return him to Thor.

Thor is overjoyed to have him back. Two years is a long time in a short life, but he had worried about him and asked about him. He is being fostered in Tyr's household and has been learning the fundamentals of war craft and command. When he asks about his old life and Loki, His tutors had always answered, "that is a question for the All-Mother", but when he'd asked her, the all-mother had only ever answered in evasions: "loki is tired, loki is resting, loki is not well". But one day, they bring him back to his mother's garden and she greets him and asks him if he would like to see Loki. He says yes.

They bring him to an inner room and they stand him at the door. Loki is sleeping, his mother tells him, but she will go and see if he is awake. She lifts the curtain on the bed and peers inside. This much is familiar to Thor; sometimes Loki would be too sick to receive visitors, and the most they could do would be to talk to one another between with the curtains drawn. He lines up the toes of his boots to the mosaic lines on the floor, planting himself over the familiar shapes in the glass. Thor hears the movement of fabric and he hears his mother's murmuring voice, but then a small face appears from behind the drapery.

"Thor," Loki exclaims, and Thor jumps up into the bed before anyone can stop him.

"Loki," he cries out, grabbing at his hands. But he looks different. His hair is shorter and his face is a little different shaped. Thor has a moment of doubt. "You are Loki, right?"

"Yes!" Loki laughs. He wraps his arms around Thor's neck and the allmother laughs also. She puts her hand in Thor's hair.

"Of course it is. You remember your brother Loki, don't you?" and Thor's young mind remembers something, but it is quickly overwritten. Yes, of course he remembers his brother. He had just forgotten a little, because it had been so long. Of course he remembers his Loki.

#internal thor tag #notes for me incomprehensible for thee #internal thorki fic tag #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet

[kinnoth]

Nobody asked but my headcanon is that Odin, as a half-giant through his mother Bestla, gives off an intense chill from his breath that one can palpably feel when one stands before him. It is a point of personal freakiness that no one can account for and it makes it real uncomfortable to be in his presence for any amount of time. Frigga never appears to let it affect her, but in private, her women know to have her hottest baths drawn for her after his visits

(Bestla was a prince/ss of the second royal house of jotunheim. Her abscondment was an unspeakable shame. Her intended mate killed himself. She was angrboda's ancestor. This is his precedent)

(Bestla was only ever presented to Asgard in the white skin that Bor crafted for her. Of her children, only Odin ever found out about the legacy of seith she left for them because Odin has been seeking to stop Ragnarok since he was touched by the fates)

(Odin fell into the well of Mimir as a child, when one day Bestla told them that she was going to have another son, and Odin then Wod ran away from home. He was stuck for three days and three nights. One of the norns at last took pity on him and pulled him out. He saw the end of all worlds when her hand touched his, and he saw Ragnarok, though he didn't understand it at the time. When he told her his woes, she assured him, offhandedly, that he would one day be king -- that's another story)

(On that note, Odin is the second of three brothers, between Vili, the oldest, and Ve, the youngest. Aesir laws of inheritance are such that the crown falls to the oldest son unless his brothers contest this. Odin manipulated Ve into contesting -- Ve was brightest and fairest and Bor's favourite child, why shouldn't he be king. Vili and Ve dueled with the poisoned weapons Odin gave to them both ("here brother, have this, I had it made especially for you, luck be on your side eh?") and Odin became king)

#internal Thor tag #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet #odin worst-dad

[kinnoth]

I think the rule for shapeshifters is that they can take on all sorts of different shapes, but that staying in different shapes requires active concentration

When that concentration is broken, they "relax" back into their base shape

I think what this means for Loki is he can be anything, but he is most comfortable being one thing. One form takes the least effort out of all his other forms. One form is the most comfortable to wear.

(gender would hypothetically work on Jotun rules for Loki's body, bc that is a racial trait inherent to the Jotun, but it still kind of works the same as shapeshifting for Loki in experience. Loki experiences a huge amount of discomfort when he inhabits a female body at this point. He doesn't like the way he looks or feels, he doesn't like how other people treat him. Even when he keeps his body dimensions and just changes his sex, he still feels like he's wearing something else's skin, the same feeling he gets when he's turned into someone else. So he doesn't like doing it. The giants he meet don't understand his attachment to his male form bc they have not experienced his cutural gender trauma. To them, it is all one anatomy, just different presentations.)

#notes for me incomprehensible for thee #who's enjoying all this background meta for fic that doesn't even exist yet #internal thorki fic tag