#/ i figure we give ur marvel verse a try !

[ravagerpatharchived]

⸻    @hiddensteel​ liked for a thing !

“ take a seat, no one will bother us. “ he chose aisling’s diner for a reason, it was public but also private as one of aisling’s coworkers made sure to instill runes that would make sure that no one outside of their shared booth would notice their particular conversation. 

“ now my friend mentioned that you were looking for someone? “ though it could be more, said friend was purposely vague for various reasons. still, corvus decided to take the job, mostly because of the fact that he has a large network to aid him in it and he genuinely wanted to help this woman. 

“ and he was a tad... vague on some details, perhaps you can fill me in on who you’re looking for and i can get started. “

[alleyesonthehindenburg]

hi! wanted to say ur fic law of probability is really pretty, and i hope this doesn’t sound mean but im a bit confused? i understand what happens but i feel like im missing something

Hi anon, that’s very kind of you to say! Don’t worry, I am also confused about law of probability, and if you feel like you’re missing something, that’s probably on me. I banged out this fic in an hour while also taking a test for my online course, and it shows. Anyway, I tried to disentangle it below and it turned into a goddamn dissertation, so feel free to ignore that if you want.

law of probability is a mess of things bouncing around in my head, but in large part it stems from my frustration with how Marvel presents Loki as the god of mischief. As a disclaimer, I am by no means an expert in Norse mythology, but it’s been a subject of interest to me for many years. My understanding, based on the limited selection of surviving myths remaining to us, is that Loki isn’t the god of anything. Some scholars have suggested that he is the god of fire or wind, but these two attributes are based on mistranslation/etymological confusion. Calling him the god of mischief has the most solid foundation, but also… no? That designation follows from scholars identifying Loki as a trickster figure, and he certainly fits a lot of the criteria for it! But that has to do with his actions – hindering the gods one moment and helping them the next – and his role in the narrative; it doesn’t make ‘mischief’ his aspect in the way that fertility is Thor’s or wisdom is Odin’s. 

All of which means that Loki’s real aspect is sort of *noncommittal hand-wiggle*, and Marvel doesn’t want to go into that. Which I totally understand! That’s a lot to try and portray concisely at a storytelling level, especially in a ‘verse as crowded as the MCU. But I’m still salty about it in the privacy of my own mind (and, in this case, my personal ao3 account).

My own personal interpretation of Loki is that he is representative of chaos (not the god of chaos, but a manifestation, I guess). His capricious nature, the way that he can turn on a whim – so many stories involve him creating a problem, and then going back and fixing it himself. I personally think of chaos and order as two opposing forces, neither of which can exist as an absolute, and Loki serves as an agent of sorts for the former.

The Death of Baldr is a story that, I think, perfectly captures why Loki seems to me like a manifestation of chaos. Frigg, seeking to avoid the death of her son Baldr, extracted a promise from every living thing that they would do him no harm, except for one: mistletoe. No clear reason is given for why she couldn’t extract a promise; maybe it refused, or maybe she considered it so unthreatening that she didn’t even bother. I read this as an example of her trying to force absolute order, trying to remove all potential for chaos, and failing. But even with just one exception, the scales are tipped precariously in favour of order, and Loki serves to balance this out. The gods are playing a game with Baldr’s newfound immortality, throwing things at him and marvelling when he takes no damage. So Loki fashions a weapon made of mistletoe (maybe a spear, maybe an arrow; sources differ), and gives it to Höðr, Baldr’s brother. Here’s my favourite part of this theory: Höðr is blind. Loki  could have thrown the mistletoe himself, if his intention was to guarantee Baldr’s death, and shapeshifted so as to avoid blame; he could have cast an illusion to disguise the weapon, and handed it off to someone else. But he gives it to a blind man, thus leaving it to chance whether or not it will hit, and chance, in my opinion, is a form of chaos.

All of this is why I included these lines in law of probability:

In every story fate tells, she embeds a shred of what came first: chaos. It is flame, and wind, and mischief, and none of these things, and this is what she takes from death. The titan sought to master chaos, and so she will turn chaos on him.

I’m explicitly referencing, refuting and accepting the various interpretations of Loki’s role within the Norse pantheon. Which is paradoxical, but I think that it’s a very narrow view of the world to think that paradoxes and contradictions cannot and do not exist.

The MCU, however, is not just dealing with Midgard. Within Norse mythology, yes, I think Loki is exceptional; but when we’re dealing with an entire universe, I specifically didn’t want to portray him as ~oh so special only he can do it~. Which is why I introduced the character of fate.

fate, in this story, is a personification of order much as Loki is a personification of chaos, although to a much larger scale. I used female pronouns for her as a reference to the Norns, and portrayed her as a sort of master storyteller. Within the story of Yggdrasil, and the Avengers, Loki plays a role that is repeated in the millions of other stories she tells; it just so happens that this is the story that Thanos has most directly impacted, and so Loki is in the best position to take action. So she defies order itself, and resurrects him – not because I think that Loki can singlehandedly take down Thanos, but because given the range of his abilities and his knowledge (which Marvel seems to forget about, but no, I’m not bitter) it will be a lot easier.

Fate has written a million epics, but the titan ran head first into one and destroyed the rest by proxy. So as the coins are tossed, she tears into herself, tears into the core of herself until she finds the one true shard of inevitability, and she sets it aflame.

But why not just, you know, kill Thanos herself and start over? Well, fate is not all-powerful. She can lay out the bare bones of her stories, and hope that they go as she wants them to, but she cannot directly influence the actions of her characters. There’s too much chaos in all of them for that; and Loki, and the others like him, are especially resistant to her meddling. Which brings us to this line:

Fear is the most primal emotion. The first coin toss is deferred.

With the Snap, Thanos invoked pure chance, which is a form of chaos. fate cannot influence what he’s doing, she can’t do anything but watch as half her work is destroyed in an instant. There is no order in this situation, which means she can’t do anything.

Except.

If there’s one thing that Infinity War practically shoved down our throats, it’s that Thanos, too, has emotions. And the most base emotion that we all have, the one that evolution has universally decided is Good and Useful, is fear. Thanos snapped his fingers, and gave every living thing in the universe a 50/50 chance; but he held the power of reality in his hands, and like all other things he was afraid. So, consciously or not, he deferred his own coin toss and guaranteed his own survival. That’s a tiny shred of order in a mess of chaos, but it was enough for fate to intervene. Death’s gates are overwhelmed, and in the confusion it is not difficult for her to steal a single soul away, throwing her own rules to the wind as she does so.