#this is why i don't vibe with theories that odin was lying in the vault scene tbh

[tyrannuspitch]

#he is the only king among slaves and the only slave among kings

yesss exactly!!

the ableist undertones are such an interesting point... i'm always saying that loki has jester vibes, and that's partly about the role he plays (companion, entertainer, magician, trickster) but it's also about like... othering? jesters are outsiders, they don't play by the usual (social) rules, they're frequently mocked (both as in self-deprecation being rewarded and as in just having to put up with awful treatment)... and as a group they have a massive overlap with "freaks".

and i mean... obviously the alien dwarfism(?) situation specifically has the same paradox as the space racism, because you wouldn't know loki was small if you didn't know he was jotun, much less small enough to be a victim of child exposure... but there's still somehow this ever-present undertone of everyone seeing loki as a weakling. and sure, it could be about other things too (gender, mental health, competition with thor) but it's still kind of maddening because it's both not true at all (he's a highly skilled elite warrior) and literally true (he does have a major but currently-invisible disability, but how did you know?)

(maybe they're picking up on odin and frigga's attitudes towards him; maybe whatever's up with loki physically is not asymptomatic even if you don't have the context to see how small he is; maybe it's just really unfortunate thematic resonance throughout his myth of a life. maybe all of the above. whichever is true, he's still the strongest of the weak and the weakest of the strong.)

and disability also interacts with space racism in a really fucked-up way because like, loki is doubly "monstrous", an outcast from the outcasts, but that can actually bring him back into the asgardian fold because where else does he have to turn? if odin had to save him from his home-world and birth parents by bringing him to a world that might well kill him on sight if it ever actually saw him, then loki has every reason to fear that odin and frigga (parents and asgardians) will try to kill him too and yet they're the only ones who have ever known who he is and shown him mercy. they've betrayed him so fundamentally and yet they might be the most trustworthy people in his life, not because they are trustworthy but because there's just. nothing else.

(and also, of course, the sense of debt... and ownership. they saved your life [kept you from dying] so you owe them your life [a lifetime of service and a useful death]. you were given up as useless and therefore unworthy of life, but they found a use for you, and you should be grateful for that, you should be begging for the chance to be useful. they decided to keep a "monster" in the world, and so it's their right and responsibility to control it.)

(AND there's the fact that loki's disability literally, physically makes him look more asgardian. a key part of what allows him to survive among asgardians IS his "weakness", because if he were any less vulnerable the threat of his "monsterhood" would be overwhelming. odin took the smallest of the giants, an abandoned, disabled infant, and chose to make that one into his pawn. there's no way that's a coincidence. imagining for a second that laufey might have abandoned an abled son... would odin have saved that child? even if he had, i honestly think he might have stunted his growth himself.)

sorry this reply is absolutely all over the place. casually losing my mind in your notes. but god it's just so much. sooo many different entangled power dynamics, all leading back to the same place: the servant-prince trying desperately to serve his purpose, and to convince himself that's power. [head in hands] [screams]

it also really frustrates me sometimes when i want to talk about One Specific Aspect of loki's whole deal but i can't find a more specific word for it than "power" or "hierarchy".

like, it *is* about space racism, but for the vast majority of his life he and most of the people around him didn't *know* that. and it *is* about class/rank... kind of...? but in a weird paradoxical way where he's still nominally a prince, and maybe he's arguably being treated like a servant but even if he is he's a pretty high-ranking servant, used for politics rather than manual labour... but also at the same time, as a jotun he's lowlier than anyone on asgard and the only one (that we know of) who might actually be better described as a slave than a servant, because if he was "stolen" then he is property... and none of it's really summarisable in any particular way because this has always just expressed itself as people being Weird About Loki in particular. like there is SO much secrecy and hypocrisy surrounding this power dynamic that odin has had to make loki into his own unique personal category of disempowered outsider. but also. maybe that's just what a combination of domestic and peer abuse looks like. but it's still hardly a typical relationship when your household and its power dynamics envelop the whole kingdom because your father is THE ALLFATHER. hhhhhhhhhh