From the Art of Thor (paperback edition): Jotunheim, environments (part 1 of 3). Sorry in advance, my scanner is too small so the bottom parts are a little cut off. However, some pages have been splice together to show the whole page. This will become more obvious with character designs.
DO NOT USE FOR GRAPHICS, DO NOT REPOST.
You can use them for personal wallpapers, etc. If you want to use for a meta post and need one page, let me know and I can send you the one page you want. Or I can rescan. Ask and I will do my best.
“Jotunheim is one of the Nine Realms and in its day was a powerful advanced civilization not unlike Asgard but will a malevolent intent underneath it all. So with that in mind, Odin was forced to take their Casket of Ancient Winters, and it’s pretty much destroyed the place. It’s slowly splintering away and falling into deep space.”
So… pretty much Odin felt threatened from his little top-of-the-food-chain spot and was “forced” to destroy a whole planet & doom his mother’s race so he’d have something to brag about at the dinner table next time someone tries to compare him to his father.
First of all, how DARE people make a fuss about Loki supposedly committing genocide!! Look at what Daddy Dearest did to that place!! Because he wanted to have his little trophy, a quarter of the planet is missing and the rest is literally crumbling away, bit by bit, and the dying and starving population (according to the artist who designed the Jotun, they were supposed to look ‘starving but still powerful’) can’t escape their doomed planet!!!
Secondly, what was that purpose Odin said he had by taking Loki? ‘To unite their people’?!! How the flying fuck do you ‘unite’ with a people who are doomed to live on a dying and eroding planet, a quarter of which is already GONE?!!! Is that what Odin meant with his ‘the reason is no longer important’? Because by the time Loki was old enough to be planted as a puppet King on Jotunheim the place had eroded enough to be no longer interesting enough as a vassal Realm?
Thirdly, remember that Odin’s strictest law concerned Jotunheim? Everybody was forbidden to go to that place for a thousand years. Do you also remember that the throne of Asgard has a build-in ‘Realm Vision Thingy’, which enables the King to see whatever it is in the Nine Realms? Wanna know my idea about why Odin took Loki and why he was so adamant that nobody visited the damn place and was furious that Loki tried to mercykill destroy the planet?
Okay, headcanon scenario: Odin really, really hates Laufey. He really hates the Jotun. So he finds an excuse to go after them. He kills thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Jotun, wades through a river of blood and defeats Laufey but he doesn’t kill Laufey. He hates Laufey too much to simply kill him. If he killed Laufey, if he killed all the Jotun, then they would be dead and that wouldn’t be fun. Nooo… Laufey and his people insulted him, tried to take what was his (Midgard), thought they could do what he did (conquer another Realm), thought they were equal to him! Better than him! Killin them outright would be too easy! Much better to nearly kill them slowly, and to be able to watch them do so from Hjildkjalf (or whatever the name of Asgard’s throne is) and gloat. But to defeat Laufey, to slowly kill Laufey’s people while Laufey has to see them slowly die, to slowly destroy the planet, chunk for chunk, to have Laufey anticipate the looming end… that wasn’t quite enough for our All-Father. No, to grind Laufey truly under his heel is to take Laufey’s child and raise it to hate his own species. To a sadistic prick like Odin, this would be the final victory; not only is he (slowly) committing genocide, killing all of Jotunheim and killing their reputation (by demanding praise for having ‘saved Midgard and defeated the monstreous Jotun’ for so long that nobody remembers the time when Jotunheim was known as a Realm with a highly sophisticated culture), he also derives great pleasure from watching them dying inch by inch and having two things that are dear to Laufey - his child and the Casket - and which Laufey will never possess again.
No wonder then that Odin is displeased when Thor goes to Jotunheim to bag him some Jotun - Odin doesn’t want the Jotun to die quick, he wants them to suffer! Even worse when Loki kills Laufey and tries to destroy Jotunheim - not only did Loki, in one fell swoop, end Odin’s fun, he also destroyed the only reason Odin kept him around. Without Laufey, there’s no point, as far as Odin is concerned, to keep Laufey’s son and so he says ‘no’ to the boy when he dangles from the Bifrost. But then the annoying jotun boy turns out to be alive after all, so Odin conjures up a reason to send Thor to fetch him. Loki has the tesseract and is Up To No Good! Sure, Odin, but since you didn’t blink, let alone interfere, when the bleeping Nazi’s had the tesseract, I’ll take that with a hundredweight of salt, shall I?
So Thor brings Loki home what does Odin do? What Odin does with any Jotun! He condemns him to a sloooow death in isolation! What did you say there, Odin? You decided not to execute Loki because your wife begged you for his life? As if you ever listened to Frigga! You didn’t budge when she begged you to bring back Thor when you made that son mortal and banished him to a backwater Realm, so why would you be swayed when she pleaded prettily for the life of the Jotun offspring of your mortal enemy? But hey, this way you get to watch a Laufeyson suffer instead of a Laufey, right?
Really people, look at the pictures above, read how this destruction is the direct result from Odin stealing the Casket of Ancient Winters and remember the scene where Odin tells the story of his ‘glorious’ victory over the ‘evil Jotun’ to his son and the son of Laufey whilst standing in front of that selfsame Casket, and tell me I’m wrong.
And you know, apart from all this (which is totally plausible, by the way, and fits a lot better than any stated description of Odin’s motives), what really gets me here is the wording. “Powerful, but with a malevolent intent underneath it all” (as opposed to…?) and of course how Odin was “forced” to take their shiny toy. Uh-huh. Let’s go over that again: An entire race/people/culture was so “malevolent” that their enemy was “forced” to doom them to extinction.
And we learn in the newest film that it’s not the first time that’s been done by Asgard’s ruler, either.
BUT RACISM IS WRONG AND GENOCIDE IS BAD YOU GUYS, DON’T EVER FORGET IT!
Oh God, yes, the ‘I was forced to do this/look at what you made me do’ line, aka ‘reframing of abuse into something the victim did to him/herself’! The most beloved tactic of narcissists and fascist leaders everywhere!
I just realized that by Thor The Dark World Odin would condemn Loki to the same fate that he condemned Jotunheim to. Not killing them outright but leaving them to slowly rot away and treating it like a mercy.
