random thoughts

[fannishliss]

***April Swap.  Thanks to mahmfic for the awesome postcards! and to verdande_mi for the terrific fanmix! I am developing good ideas for your fics in response, and hope that I will get them done soon.  I am sorry that April is kicking my butt. But I will get the fic done soon

Comments

[bleodswean]

You're planning on studying Norse mythology? Or you mean the comics version of such?

I'm still astounded by this desire of so many today to romanticize him as some sort of a misunderstood anti-hero of the myths. The degenerate liar, the one who embodies ergi, the slanderer, the pervert. It's becoming fascinating to me, this appropriation of the mythology.

[fannishliss]

Yes, I've been reading about some of the mythological sources. Most were recorded very late into history after the mythological meaning of Loki had begun to degrade, or at least that's how I read it.

I'm trying to work free of the Marvel universe stuff, though it's certainly very compelling. Branagh clearly read the character as a Shakespearean bastard, which are always my favorites anyway... my husband never got to play Edmund, but we're still hoping for Iago. :)

As for the stuff about ergi, that's certainly a big part of my fascination with the character.

I guess I'm a little surprised, since you are so poetically attuned to images of skulls and skeletons and death, that you are not more drawn to Loki, who fathered the beasts of Ragnarok. I guess I really see him through a Yeats kind of lens... a crucial part of the endless cycles of destruction that are necessary to that gyre theory of the universe.

[bleodswean]

Loki is not a God of the underworld. As a matter of fact, he isn't a god, is he? He is destruction for destruction's sake. Again, with the projection backwards.

I am so wary, my Irish Catholic upbringing, of romanticizing personified Evil. It just feels...unlucky to me.

You sound as though you're creating your own interpretation of this mythological figure, combining Marvel, neo-paganism, and some of the mythology?

[fannishliss]

It seems unclear whether he's Aesir, if that's what you mean

[fannishliss]

I found a horrible page called the simple.wikipedia. OMG, what is this world coming to. D