All right. There’s a lot to talk about here, beyond just this barely-2,000-word chapter. Because I’m going to repeat something I posted about two years ago when I started trying to rewrite this thing the first time, not knowing that I would wind up not writing a single work for nearly a year after Life sucker-punched me in the face. And that is that this fic (the whole thing, being God of Outcasts) does something incredibly goofy. I’ve done this thing where like, the first 25k seems completely irrelevant, and almost acts as a gatekeeper. But one of the problems I always had with the original version was that there were all of these background elements that never really got adequately explained because they weren’t included in any of the main fics, and got very easily missed by a lot of readers. I’d written them, but they weren’t part of the main story, so I posted them separately, just assuming that anyone who cared would follow this other series as well. But no one did, and then those stories went completely missed. The whole, “there are two Lokis in the story” thing, for instance. That confused so many people, because they missed the stories where Old Loki was out clowning around on a different spot on the timeline.
So now I’ve got this really bizarre setup that serves the narrative so much better, but which I think winds up being really off-putting to people. It opens up with Laufey, of all people, as a POV character. In the next chapter after this, we go to Odin and this weird version of Loki and his kidnapped dwarf, just going on an epic road trip to find a few jars of blood. And only if you get past all of that does the story finally start using familiar characters. And when it reaches about 60,000 words in does it finally start to come around to a point where Old Loki becomes relevant again, though still only tangentially. It’s still going to be about another 20k after that before some real connections start to be drawn.
And there’s so much more that I wanted to include in this story that there was not room for. And I knew it wasn’t relevant, so it never went in. And I agonised over it, and right as I figured out how to fix it, I had to genuinely face my own fucking mortality, and everything got sidelined. So I’m going to put this right here, straight out of the gate. There is a second upload. This one is not required reading, but it is supplemental. A lot of what happens in this second fic will be woven through the narrative of God of Outcasts. It won’t necessarily be referenced, or even effect it, but it is baked into the narrative. These are all of the worldbuilding elements that have been living in the back of my brain for literal years that I never figured out what to do with, until I read Fire & Blood. And then I got so annoyed, because that was the answer. Literally. Just write the damn books that Loki keeps stealing from the library. There are maps as well, which I’ll be posting as well, probably over the next few weeks. I wanted to post them this week, but well. This week sucked, and the newsletter was already late to begin with.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about this first chapter. Laufey is an under-used character, in my opinion. The frost giants in general are under-used. So I’ve decided to shoot myself in the foot and open this story with Laufey’s point of view. This fic started out as a simple meme fill on Norsekink, about a century ago, and with a few little tweaks, it fit perfectly into this timeline.
There are five scenes in this bit, and I’m so annoyed that I cannot find my original notes on it, because every single one of them was meant to be a different bit of canon, from the myths, to different comic continuities, and the MCU. I think the ones represented are these:
- ?
- Myth
- Thor: Season 1
- J Michael Straczynski’s run
- MCU
Basically, I’ve done the Edgar Wright thing on this one. The first chapter tells you what the whole story is going to be. If you can figure it out from these 2,000 words though, good luck, because it’s probably still not going where you think it is. I cannot for the life of me remember what the first one was meant to be, and it’s driving me nuts because I feel like it should be obvious. How many versions of Loki are there where he got flattened by Laufey? Annoyingly, I can only think of one, and it happened after this was written. What’s more annoying, is I can find evidence in my email archives that I might have commented on AO3 what the five parts were meant to be, but that comment has been long-deleted, and I never set it to receive copies of my own comments. Augh. Oh well. If I ever figure it out, I’ll edit this and put it in writing. Until then, I’ll remain vexed and confused. I’m sure it’s written down somewhere, but my Scrivener file for this project is an absolute nightmare.
And since I shared this for the other fic in the newsletter, I thought I might as well share my playlist for this fic as well. Probably unsurprising, it’s the same one. However, this time it’s at least thematically appropriate, and the fic I started building this playlist for in the first place.