#hettolandija

tell me about your favorite trees

​oh we have a lovely japanese maple in the yard! it gets to a bright shade of deep red that looks really beautiful. a house in my street has a similar one but much bigger and i'm a little jealous lol. not that ours should be bigger because it's between the driveways for the cars to get out of the garage...

a couple years ago i planted two decorative cherry trees (as in they make flowers not cherries), they were soooo dead looking at first but then started spouting leaves and eventually did flower - one makes white flowers and the other pink flowers. sadly the blooming period is so short lol. and also now they've been attacked by invasive asian beetles that ate so many leaves :/

i really should plant more trees bc most of the ones we used to have in our garden have died during the years (house was built in 1970 i suppose the trees were placed in the yard then), only the willow and the magnolia are still going strong, plus the maple.

speaking of the willow, last year or so i accidentally unearthed and broke a root while working the soil around it. my aunt was like be careful that hurts the tree! guess what, the broken root sticking from the soil just started spouting lil branches and leaves... trees are so badass.

anyway my favorite trees are olive trees i suppose. where i live you need to protect olive trees during the winter because it gets too cold for them, but my cousins have one in their garden, maybe one day i'll get one for our garden too.

heck neighbors have palms in their garden, i think a olive tree can handle our winters.

♦ - quirks/hobbies headcanon

Hm. Let me think...

I feel like Loki’s the type to secretly dabble in a bunch of different hobbies. He doesn’t really want everyone to know about them, because if he turns out to be bad at them, that’s terrible for his image, but he will occasionally show up extremely skilled at some new hobby or skill and it drives everyone crazy because it just looks it’s coming easily to him (and of course he cultivates that perception by being all like ‘what like it’s hard’ when people ask him about it) when in reality there’s been a lot of sleepless nights practicing (that only Frigga and/or Thor are ever witness to.)

oh boy I have headcanons about this [cracks knuckles] because I’m a professional at thinking my way out of all the continuity knots that Ragnarok introduced to the Thor timeline, I’ve spent a stupid amount of time resolving them in my head

and my headcanon about this is that there’s basically a made-up conflict. which means that there needs to be an opponent who was plausibly menacing, hostile, and wouldn’t say anything to dispute the account if the massacre of the Valkyrior was credited to them.

the Dark Elves are gone by the time Odin comes to power. he could go to a threat from outside the Nine Realms, but that gets risky in terms of people asking questions about what Asgard was doing fighting a war that far out, since...trying to avoid that “history of conquest” thing.

so you know who makes a very, very good scapegoat?

Jotunheim.

if there’s existing hostility there - and I think there is, and has been for a long time - then it’s very easy to weave a story about Odin sending the Valkyrior to respond to some kind of attack, whatever, he can be pretty loose about that part because, again, that’s not the important part of the story. the important part is the treacherous ambush that caught the Valkyrior by surprise and led to their horrible deaths, lost to the snow and ice. 

it’s neat, and Odin really doubts that a) anyone’s going to ask a frost giant about it and b) that they’d dispute it even if someone did, because it makes them look more fearsome and powerful. and then you have another brick in the “storybook villain” wall, because now the Jotnar are the ones who killed the Valkyries.

and that story takes on, as time goes by, the quality of legend - so by the time Thor and Loki are children it’s probably not totally clear whether it’s history or myth or a little of both. I can see Loki in particular being skeptical about whether the Valkyrior really existed or if they were just another story. (Thor finds Loki’s doubt offensive.)

but the core of the Valkyrie myth becomes very much about their slaughter in an underhanded ambush, and it is possible that this is another piece of Odin’s mythmaking that comes around to bite him in the ass - after all, if it’s a significant piece of Asgard’s mythos, then it’s probably one of those stories that comes up a lot around frost giants and Why They’re So Awful. 

I assumed that he just used a lot of magic earlier in the battle (off screen) and conjuring knives was the only thing left that he had strength to do. In T3 Loki managed to overpower Odin an place him on Earth. Odin himself had admitted that it was an impressing spell.

but you got me intrigued with this crippled magic theory tho

lol, i’d forgotten about the odin bit. but then really, the same movie that tells us loki defeated and exhiled odin all by his lonesome then turned around and showed loki getting owned not once but twice by some mortal that’s been practicing magic for five minutes. it tells us loki’s capable of greater feats (beating odin, turning into a snake as a child) of magic than it’s ever willing to show (more magic doubles, yawn, whatever he did to valkyrie). but to be fair, it didn’t start (nor stop) with ragnarok - all the movies have been guilty of short-changing loki’s magic. and that’s not even touching on how steadily they’ve been powering down thor since the first movie until suddenly *gasp* he realizes he’s been packing some serious juice all along. (like no duh? i remember him laying waste to jotunheim in thor 1 pretty well, thanks).

and again, loki’s powerful enough to bind odin - odin fucking allfather! - in magic but can’t evade strange? or find a way to use that infinity stone he’s got stashed in his back pocket to knock thanos back a couple steps?

i guess i’m mostly annoyed that they’ve had this magic-wielding character all along and yet were, i don’t know, afraid to use him as such? but then strange comes along and gets a whole movie about magic? like - ??? but i guess if mcu deployed loki - and thor - with the kind of powerset they each come built-in with, it would have made the human characters look pretty lame by comparison. of course having the human characters look like such featherweights next to the actual gods should have been the point - not to mention funny as hell - but no one asked me, too late now.

but back to loki’s magic being crippled - i mean this goes back to avengers 1 where loki’s magic seems, i don’t know, kinda spotty? he can cast energy shields to protect himself one scene, but then later a ring of doubles look all staticky. later still, a single double looks perfect enough to fool thor (and coulson). loki’s magic still seemed weak throughout thor 2, did he do much besides cast illusions? plus there’s this deleted exchange:

Frigga: Cast enough illusions and you risk forgetting what is real.

Loki: Precisely.

(i swear there’s a much more interesting movie in the dark world begging to be dug up and set free. but again, no one asked me, and see what happens?)

so loki uses illusions to hide when he doesn’t want to think about his shitty life, or doesn’t want people to see what he’s feeling, could also be a way for him to hide something of a larger magnitude (mommy, daddy, the bad titan man broke me).