Tag: fic notes: god of outcasts

This is exactly what I was talking about last week, about how I’d done something goofy with this fic, quite unintentionally.  Originally, when I had first posted this, it had been all over the place.  Multiple series, with interludes and asides, and it didn’t make any sense.  In the reposts, I’d decided to structure it as a single upload, so that nothing got missed, and then use chapter titles to separate all of the different sections.  But the idea is that it’s structured like the comic books are, where there are different titles that all take place within the same lore, but are all kind of doing their own thing.  So there’s the Ragnarök title, which is Laufey’s story (and is actually quite small overall).  Tales of Yggdrasil is Old Asgard.  Not Old Old Asgard, but the previous generation.  Odin’s generation.  All his stupid friends that he ran around causing trouble with.  And this one seems like such a departure from what the summary promises that I feel like it put a lot of people off.  But in a lot of ways, it’s just a giant prologue.  A 22,000 word prologue.

This story is pulled straight from the Eddas, and only has a few minor changes.  Although, what I was not prepared for was the day I posted this to AO3, Marvel published a comic in which Kvasir was revealed to be alive and well.  That was both hilarious and surprisingly annoying.  He’s such a nothing, nobody obscure character that I thought surely Marvel will never use this bitch.  I can do whatever I like with him, including use him exactly in the context in which he originally appears in the Eddas, present him as a corpse, and move on with the story.  So that’s what I did, and then Marvel exhumed his ass from the grave right out from under me.

But the whole point of starting with this one was to show Odin as a character in his youth.  Odin is 17 years old in this story.  We’re seeing this story through Jari’s eyes though, who has never seen an Asgardian until now.  He has no idea what an Asgardian even is.  The other Loki, by contrast, is in his 40s.  The reason Odin is fucking around on Niðavellir, which may or may not become apparent later on, is because he’s taking a rite that all Asgardian boys take at 17.  Although in his case, he’s likely taking it less as a matter of tradition, and more to get away from his tyrant king brother, Cul.  If you read what was posted to AO3 already, you’ll remember our Loki doesn’t take his until much later than 17, and doesn’t even take it properly.  So taking this rite for the wrong reasons, and not doing it correctly clearly runs in the family.  But you won’t hear that from Odin.

I like Odin as a character, because he’s complicated and contradictory in a lot of ways.  He wants everyone to see him as this stern, serious person, but he’s anything but these things.  He’s just as stupid and bone-headed as the people he hangs around, and over the course of this story, that façade of his wears down until he’s making the same insane choices as everyone else.  By the time he’s king, and dealing with ruling a realm and being a father to a gang of horrible children who don’t follow anyone’s rules including the ones he lays down, he’s at the point of giving up.  If he weren’t king, he’d be the sort of dad who wakes up one Tuesday morning and announces at breakfast that he’s decided to wilfully go senile out of spite.  But at the same time, he’s got no one to blame but himself, because he was the exact same way.  Our very first introduction to him in this series is him running around with a half-giant and a dwarf, wrecking shit on Jötunheimr over a few jars of mead.  Not because of any attachment to the man who was killed, either.  Neither he nor Loki seem overly fond of Kvasir; in fact, they both seem to have hated the man when he was alive.  Odin just doesn’t want anyone else to have the mead.  He doesn’t even seem too fucked about the actual justice part of the mission.  They find Jari’s brothers, and oh, well that’s sorted then.  Odin deals with that with a heartless out line, and continues on his journey with single-minded determination that even Loki finds crass and distasteful.

How fucked up you gotta be for a Loki to call you out on your bullshit?

But I love characters who are complicated and terrible, who do contradictory and hypocritical things.  Odin is the epitome of “do as I say, not as I do” parenting.  Everything he gets on Loki’s ass for doing, he’s guilty of himself.  Which is why I wanted to open with this part, before going into our Loki’s story.  Yes, this is the wrong Loki.  Yes, Odin is a great big bag of dicks.  But everything in this part informs why he and Loki will spend the next 25 years butting heads with one another.  Because Loki knows that Odin is absolutely full of shit, and isn’t allowed to call him out on it without being accused of treason.

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:

1. ?
2. Myth
3. Thor: Season 1
4. J Michael Straczynski’s run
5. 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.