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musclesandhammering · 3 years

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On Loki’s “Adoption”

It’s great that the majority of Loki fans agree that Odin was a dick, but it also pains me that so many of them don’t seem to grasp how much of a dick he was.

People always talk about Loki finding out about his heritage in terms like “He was raised to hate the frost giants so when he found out he was one, it fucked him up. Odin should’ve told him he was adopted and stopped the anti-jotun propaganda.” Which?… Ok, yeah. Definitely. But that whole statement is just hugely sugar-coated. Allow me to explain.

First of all, he wasn’t “adopted”. No matter what Odin’s motivations were, Loki’s biological parents weren’t there at the exact moment Odin found him, so there’s no way Odin could’ve known without a doubt that Loki had been abandoned. So here’s a child whose parents are still alive, are still in the same realm, and haven’t directly stated that they don’t want him… and Odin took him anyway. Just… based on his own assumptions, without consulting the baby’s literal parents who are literally right there, Odin just grabs a baby and runs. ..That’s called kidnapping, good sir. It’s a war crime. You know, like all the other war crimes he’d just got done committing like 10 minutes prior. Loki was not a child adopted from another realm, he was a spoil of war. “Another stolen relic” indeed.

Now, let’s move on from that. We know damn well Odin did not take Loki because he felt compassion for him. Even Loki knew that was bs as soon as he heard it, and Odin even admitted that he had ulterior motives. After all, after murdering a large chunk of their population, Loki couldn’t possibly have been the first child left in dire conditions that Odin came across. So why, out of all those poor jotun babies, did Odin only choose to help the king’s son? What a coinky-dink. No, Odin had a scheme going on, and if there’s any truth to what he said in the Vault, his intention was to use Loki to force a permanent alliance between Asgard and Jotunheim. Considering that I don’t think Odin’s demented enough to try to make Loki marry one of his biological family members, that leaves only a few options. Either 1.) he was going to implant Loki on the throne of Jotunheim as a puppet king 2.) he was simply going to announce to Loki and the jotuns alike that he was one of them and try to use that as leverage to forge ties 3.) he was going to use young!Loki as a hostage to broker peace with Laufey. I personally think option 1 is the most likely, but all of them have a few things in common: they’re gross, colonialist schemes that manipulate and abuse both the jotuns in Jotunheim and the jotun in Asgard by grooming him to hate his own kind and then eventually using that hatred to convince him to act as Odin’s tool toward finally conquering them in full. Pure malicious manipulation intended to cripple both the frost giants and Loki himself, all so that Odin could expand his empire and get back at an old enemy that had the gall to resist him.

All of this is not even to mention the practical disadvantage Odin put Loki at just by bringing him into Asgard. He’s not just a different race, he is a different species. First off, Odin violated his bodily autonomy hugely by changing his skin as an infant. Even with him doing that, though, it’s highly likely that at least some of Loki’s natural biological differences would’ve come into play, like, eventually. Asgard is way warmer than Jotunheim- and we know jotuns are fundamentally creatures of ice anyway- so how uncomfortable could the Asgardian climate have been for Loki? Jotuns probably have vastly different diets than Asgardians- the fact that Laufey had sharp teeth in Thor 1 makes me think they probably eat a lot more meat- so did Odin cater to a Loki’s dietary needs specifically? I doubt it. We know Loki never got much bigger, but what if he had? Did Odin have a plan at all for how to deal with that? Not to mention just the shear level of otherness Loki would’ve felt, even if just subconsciously.

So, on top of finding out that he is the thing he was taught to hate and that his parents aren’t his biological parents and that said adoptive parents have in fact been lying to him his entire life… he also has to deal with the fact that he was kidnapped as a war trophy, and that the man he’s been calling father actually decimated his home world and his native people before taking him, and that he has a family out there that he knew nothing about (they might’ve discarded him as Odin said or maybe Odin lied and they loved him, how is Loki supposed to know?), and that his family allowed him to be exposed to all the anti-jotun sentiments intentionally when he was growing up possibly to further indoctrinate him against his own race, and that he was never even in the running for the asgardian throne but his dad told him he was anyway to goad him into competing with Thor, and that he was being groomed his entire life to be used as a weapon by his “father” against his real father, and that his entire place in the Odinson family and in Asgard hinged on his usefulness in further dominating and destroying his birth family and birth realm, and that no matter what he did a large chunk of the people around him were always going to hate him simply because of natural differences that were due to his fundamental being… it’s just- it’s so much more than adoption revelations and bad parenting. What Odin and Frigga did to Loki was illegal and extremely morally wrong and, quite frankly, just despicable.

Side note: this kinda reminds me of the movie Tangled, actually. Rapunzel’s story is eerily similar to Loki’s- taken as a child by a greedy and narcissistic yet powerful figure, raised as said figure’s own child just so the figure could exploit her for their own selfish gain, taught all her life to fear her actual family/people just to keep her loyal to her “parent”, parental figure turns to aggression and gaslighting anytime she gives any pushback… That’s actually pretty uplifting, though, because it further validates his place as a Disney Prince/Princess 😌.

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musclesandhammering · 3 years

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It’s not at all likely, but I’m firmly on board with the theory that, the reason Loki and Hela look so similar is that, when Odin first found Loki and picked him up, Loki saw into his memories (like he did with Valkyrie) and saw a little girl he loved- one that was his child and, even though she turned out to be a “monster”, Odin couldn’t bring himself to kill her. So, naturally, Loki- who Odin may or may not have been about to kill because he saw him as a “monster”- shapeshifted to look like her (pale skin, blue eyes, asgardian-looking) as a form of self protection, in hopes that it would endear Odin to him. And it worked.

He was a baby, so he obviously wasn’t thinking in quite as complex terms as that- it was more of an instinctive reaction, considering we know he had strong magic from a young age. And he doesn’t even remember it later, so it makes sense he wouldn’t know about Hela. But, considering how their first meeting went, maybe as kid!Loki grew, Odin dressed him in a lot of greens and blacks, and was wary of him becoming a witch, and had an unjustified sense of mistrust toward him- because, subconsciously, he still mirrored Hela in Odin’s mind.

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