Divine Intervention page 5

In which Loki is complicated and loquacious.

As I said in my ramblings about the last page, Loki is one of those complicated figures that attracts a lot of argument, which I imagine he’d be pretty pleased with. As he appears in the surviving myths, he’s complex and changeable. One minute he’s fun and surprisingly generous, the next he’s cruel and malicious. He’s fiercely intelligent and always scheming, but he often acts on impulse and is capable of phenomenal lapses in judgement. He’s a string of contradictions, but knowing Loki, maybe that’s part of the plan. My version of him is pretty self-aware, and very comfortable with his paradoxical nature. He knows exactly what he is, but he’s not letting on because that would spoil the fun. As god of mischief, he revels in the trouble he causes.

But I don’t think he’d be quite so happy with how stories about him always end. There’s seems to be a bit of a tradition in the myths of him ending up in some sort of pain or indignity, and that has somehow managed to translate into modern stories, partly because we tend to depict him as the villain and we like to see the villain get his comeuppance. I can’t help thinking it must really suck if your place in the universe is getting violently and repeatedly hurt. Anyone would get fed up with that eventually.

And before anyone says anything, yeah I know Loki does a lot of magical things in the myths. But I'm a sucker for the Lokasenna and in that he has a bit of a tirade against Odin for using magic because it's unmanly (referring to a type of magic called "seid" which was largely practiced by women. From what I've read, it seems we don't really know what seid involved. It was symbolically linked to spinning and weaving, which were considered women's work, and seems to have involved divination and curses, which was presumably why it was considered unmanly: using magic in battle isn't exactly "fighting fair".) I just really like the idea of Loki having strange standards and thinking magic is beneath him. Cos y'know, taking on the form of a woman and bearing children is totally fine for a guy to do, but magic? Pfft! And, yeah, he's a bit of a hypocrite.

As always, comedy fonts are from [link]


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