#they made the divine Loki-horse after MARVEL

[windfighter]

I named one of my horsies Loki because it looked like a Loki only to discover afterwards that oooh it was a female horse and it was even more perfect than I thought. And then I got curious if others have horsies named Loki and...

I am very disappointed at the amount of male Lokis in the howrse-stats. Nope. You're doing it wrong

Everyone with a female Loki: I see you and you are amazing!

[stevenrogerssss]

Idk if you know much about Loki from the Norse mythology but what about a cute Mother's Day prompt where the reader is pregnant with his baby but is also is babysitting the Loki's other kids -he does trust uncle Thor- his twins, the snake, wolf and horse, Hela (his daughter, not sister lol) while he is off on a mission or something lol. I would love to see worrywart dad Loki ( consoling text in the reader if everything's okay lol) I love the idea of Marvel mixed with mytholog 💚🖤💚🖤

ahh I know absolutely nothing about Norse mythology  I wish I did :((  I took the basic idea and just made it more to my knowledge.  

Description:  Loki is off in New Asgard with Thor, checking on the people after the snap which brought everyone back.  Reader is back at her and Loki’s home with their two children.  Reader is six months pregnant with their third child but Loki won’t stop texting reader worried about the four of them.  

 how is everyone doing?

This was the fourth text this hour asking how you and the children were.  You loved Loki, you really did, but he worried more than anyone you had ever met.  Especially now that you two were parents, and while you were pregnant he had somehow gotten worse about it. You were snuggled up on the couch with your three-year-old while your five-year-old ran around chasing the dog. You reached for your phone and texted Loki back,

we’re fine, babe.  we love you, and we will see you tomorrow!

Loki’s response was almost instantaneous :

Y/N it’s normal for me to be worried! you’re pregnant with my baby! and you’re watching my other babies!

Lok, we’re fine

You sent the text and called your eldest over, “daddy wants a picture of all of us, do you think we can do it?”

“Of course mama!”  His sweet voice rang out as he climbed onto your lap next to his brother.  You held up the phone and took a picture of the three of you.  Both of the boys had put their hands on your bump which was starting to show finally.  You sent the picture to Loki and set down your phone.  The boys had requested a movie be put on and you happily obliged.

About an hour into the movie, both of your boys were fast asleep on the couch with a blanket over themselves. You had gotten up and started cleaning up the tornado of a living room they had created while playing. You had picked up the front room and finally sat back down intent on watching the end to whatever children’s movie was on when the front door opened and shut quietly with a quick snap of the lock.

You looked over and saw your husband moving quietly throughout the house and you laugh to yourself as he tiptoes around.  

“Love what are you doing?”  You whisper, not wanting to wake the sleeping children.  You get up out of the comfort of the chair and walk over to Loki, wrapping your arms around his shoulders.

“I came back a little early, I missed my beautiful family a little too much.  Especially my divine wife.”  He purred into your ear before kissing your cheek.  "Thank you for sending me that picture, it was lovely to see all four of you,“ his hands move to your bump and he sighs heavily. “I cannot wait for her to be here.”  

“Me neither.  So far off, yet so soon.  I hope she has dark black hair as you do. ”

“She’s going to be just as beautiful as her mother, that is for certain.”

[galleryofphantasms]

Odin, the All-Father.

One of highest revered from the Norse Pantheon, and the most widely-known next to Thor and Loki (in no small part thanks to Marvel). Odin (or Woden, or Wotan) rules over wisdom, royalty, knowledge, writing, sorcery, poetry, war, and last, but definitely not least, death and the gallows. He is also a key foundational figure to the Norse-Germanic paradigm by aiding the creation of the world after slaying Ymir. The events of Ragnarok foretell his demise.

So far, this is the design I’ve had the most fun drawing. Modern depictions tend to paint him in a similar light as Thor - kind of super-hero-like. This has extended to his depictions in the Megaten series, the one from SMT IV Apocalypse exhibiting some golden gravitas in particular. I do enjoy this style, but I opted for something darker, more akin to his traditional depiction as an old man. I took further inspiration in terms of demeanour from some darker, even villainous incarnations, such as Mr. Wednesday from American Gods and Woden from The Wicked + The Divine.

As a bit of a side note, I had Ian McShane’s reveals as Odin from the American Gods adaptation series on repeat while finishing. Neil Gaiman’s writing is amazing on its own. Shane made it a religious experience.

“This is what I'm called. I am called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One Eyed, I am also called Highest and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and the Hooded One. I am All-Father, Gondlir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, and many titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn: Thought and Memory. My wolves are Freki and Geri. My horse is the Gallowed. I AM ODIN!“

[helshades]

Question! Darcy stated that older civilisations could have worshipped Asgardians as gods, which other characters support throughout, but - if this is the case - Thor and Loki weren't born at the time of most myths, so how did humans incorporate them into the myths? Or did Odin like the myths so much that he named them after the stories?

 A long, long time ago, we were discussing this with people like @fostertheory​, @diana-godkiller​ (back when she was Romanovasledger) and, someone who was of immense help when it came to pondering Asgardian lifespans, amongst many other things, @survivingrealitywithoutnormality​; I recall one of the results was this:

The Young Gods: a zany theory on the possible origin for the Asgardian reputation of godliness on Earth, with the unwilling help of Norse poets.

Thinking about it again now, after three films (plus two) and a couple episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I’d say we could reprise the idea without risking complete dishonor, in fact.

Obviously, MCU!Earth is meant to imitate our own as closely as possible, and we usually are better off assuming that most events have occurred there just the way they have here. On the other hand, we know that certain things are entirely different: there is no such place as Sokovia or Wakanda, Tony Stark didn’t save the President of the U.S.A., and the rules of physics of our universe don’t actually all apply to MCU!Earth or Bruce Banner would have died a very painful death in that explosion and there wouldn’t be a Hulk in the first place to break Lavoisier’s law repeatedly with brutish application.

So I wouldn’t be cocksure about MCU mythologies matching our own in every respect, either, and I wouldn’t be so sure about their chronology. But even if we choose to be lazily reasonable and assume that the Norse myths followed roughly the same course in European history within the MCU they did in our world… well:

maybe Odin’s Asgard was, like in some comics, a repetition of past events, with Ragnarök having already happened several times and the Asgardians getting revived for a new cycle by Those Who Sit Above In Shadows (there was an Easter Egg for this theory in Thor, actually, in the form of a tablet that read exactly this in runes, next to the Eternal Flame) and there has already been a Thor and a Loki before, or several;

there is always the possibility that Odin gave his sons the names of legendary characters in Asgardian folklore; 

… or the Thor and Loki of Midgardian mythology are a mixture of reality and more or less irreverent stories woven from both older Scandinavian myths and whatever iconoclastic bullshit Asgardian deserters have been feeding their new human friends.

I tend to find the latter option more… harmonious, not to mention exceptionally tantalising: I love the idea that people like Berserker defector soon to be known as Elliot Randolph took every opportunity to secretly troll the royal family of Asgard by telling grand tales of dashing exploits to his human friends and adding a lot of frankly insulting tidbits to mock the aristocrats back home.

It’ll never happen but I’d love to see Randolph get to meet Thor, like Coulson once promised him, and suddenly realise that all the lewd jokes mayn’t have been the greatest idea, now that the brother of the King happens to be the former(?) butt of said jokes.

Chronologically speaking… as of 2017, Thor and Loki—who, it is now official, are basically twins—are 1052 or 1053 years old. The former stone mason who would become known on Midgard as Elliot Randolph enlisted in the Berserker army for a mission on Earth sometime during the late 12th century: the late 1100s, then, so back when Thor and Loki were already over a hundred years old—to be exact, they turned 135 at the beginning of the century, and would have been breaching 200 at the very least when ‘Randolph’ departed for Earth with the berserkers. If we consider the fact that Loki was already able to cast convincing illusions at only eight years of age… I say the brothers had already had ample time to make a name for themselves as an insufferable pair of royal nuisances by then, and Randolph enough material onto which, er, embroider.

Sure, the Asgardians have a lifespan or life expectancy of 5,000 odd years, and they certainly undergo decades of studies, especially the aristocrats, especially the two princes of the Crown; but, in spite of Loki’s disparaging comment in The Dark World about a human lifespan of a mere century being, to an Asgardian, ‘a heartbeat’, they probably experience the passing of time everyday roughly like humans do—and they probably age like we do before they reach adulthood. So, aged a hundred years and more, they will have had time enough to go on many a dangerous quest, and generally behave like pricks around the palace for long enough that an imaginative stone mason turned dejected soldier who decided to desert his home planet and the army to live amongst the quick-lived, ever-changing human race indefinitely, such a man certainly had ample material to work with, and a few grudges to exorcise. After all, we know a little by now the way the aristocrats themselves perceive their own actions, exploits and respective persons… but who shall give us the point of view of the ordinary folk on the subject?

                   SKYE

So… Asgardians are aliens from another planet who visited ours a thousand years ago…

                COULSON

Or more.

                   SKYE

And, because we couldn’t understand aliens, we thought they were… gods?

                COULSON

That’s what our Norse mythology comes from.

A few moments later in the episode, Skye makes this remark to Coulson:

‘You should give your buddy the God of Thunder a shot. He gets his powers from his hammer, right?’

Please notice that only a few moments before, Skye—known today as Daisy Johnson—acknowledged the fact that Asgardians are not divinities but aliens; yet she reprises the term rather matter-of-factly and speak of Thor as ‘the God of Thunder’. Once again, I don’t think, even now that Thor himself chooses to refer to himself as such, that Marvel filmmakers have ever changed their minds about the nature of the Asgardians: what truly changed is Thor’s perception of himself and his place in the grand scheme of things and his powers—if anything, I would argue that Asgardians gain the right to refer to themselves as ‘gods’ when they have accomplished enough exploits that they have become the stuff of legends, especially known for one special power. Loki is the master of illusions and Thor is basically an Asgardian mutant with an uncanny ability to manipulate electricity—for centuries, Mjöllnir served as a catalyst, but with Odin dead, Thor probably inherited certain abilities derived from the same source of Hela’s own: Asgard itself.

The stuff of legends, then. Naturally, Asgardians live for so long and are so resistant to body damage (and, arguably, psychical—the thing is, when you live that long, you must be able to withstand millennia of existence in the margins of worlds where people wither and die before you’ve had the time to love them, and you have to be vaccinated against boredom and repetition…) that the most notable of warriors end up having songs sung and theatre plays played about their Dashing Exploits whilst they’re still alive, and still going on adventures… then, as we know, they come back to Asgard and have more stories told. They don’t always have to be perfectly accurate, but they ought to be entertaining, and full of symbols, propaganda teachings and virility. I have a suspicion few Asgardian parents will prevent most of these stories to reach children’s ears, by the way.

So… as for the ancientness of Midgardian stories about gods who were born in an era corresponding to the early Middle Ages, when the stories themselves, in our reality, have their roots in Antiquity, and in fact certain figures, like this of Loki, might well have hailed from prehistoric times, surviving in one form or another. The thing is, the old peoples of Northern Europe transmitted these ancient tales orally, and some of them got written down only after this part of the continent was Christianised and clerks copied down a few—unfortunately, not without superimposing their own interpretations, integrating the Gods know how many exegetic elements… Which, mind you, is actually an excellent thing for the worldbuilder, who will then be able to cheat safely enough in stating that we simply have no proof that mediaeval clerks didn’t fuse together pieces of the stories people like Elliot Randolph would tell and (much) older myths. Indeed, in our world we may put a couple of archaeological proofs forward; but let’s agree for a moment on the idea that, in the M.C.U., it doesn’t have to be exactly like this. Let’s weave our own tales of dashing (literary) exploits.

To conclude, as a matter of fact, I’d like to attract your attention on the most grotesque (the grotesquest.) of these stories: I say there is some argument to be made about the idea of Asgardian defectors, fed up with the monotony of their old life, falling in love with the utter diversityof  Midgardian landscapes and cultures, and charming maidens of yore with self-aggrandising stories as well as narratives interlacing the enchanting, symbolist Asgardian lore with anti-elite pamphlet mocking the types and habits of Asgardian aristocracy. Beauty and burlesque together. And the story about the one time the younger prince of the Crown turned into a mare and got fucked by a horse and gave birth to another horse, with eight legs, no, not the first horse, the second horse, anyway he became two-legged again after that, no, not the horse, neither of the horses, well, not the actual horses that is, the one who was a prince in the first place, because, yes, of course my love, that’s totally a thing that could happen to them magic wielders, you see, I’m telling you the events exactly the way they happened, and then there was this one time—