On @nildespirandum
First things first: Tumblr Masterpost AO3 profile
There are good Loki stories here. Really good fan fiction – some of it closer to canon, some of it farther from it. I’ve been here a long time ago, around 2013-2015, and after a 7-year hiatus, I’m back. My first observation is that there are better stories than before. There are more stories: a lot more very, very short drabbles. They tend to stay closer to the top of the AO3 and tumblr, because it’s easier to read them. It’s faster. Attention span decreased during my time away from here. A lot of longer stories are ignored. I prefer longer stories. I want to drown myself in them, have my every waking moment consumed by them. This was a story I drowned myself in. It’s sort of hard to know where to start this impression, because my thoughts accumulated into barely perceptible word-strings from how excitedly taken aback by it was I. A Loki AU worthy of admiration. The reason I wrote this little introduction is to say that in this moment, Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. is the best (AU) Loki story I have ever read in my life. Certainly the best writing I came across here – along with @caffiend-queen‘s work, which I'm still powering through. Ok, I’ll try to pen some of this down.
The art by White Rabbit is making me salivate and it’s so deliciously inviting. The picture of incubus Loki is complete, immediately. Nora being a witch and this wonderfully fresh, whimsical on the surface and very knowledgeable approach to her told me I will like this story a lot. Later on, when I read she was inspired by Patti, I was floored; I loved Patti since I was a subbacultcha goth-y teenager who wanted to both fuck Rimbaud and be Rimbaud. Oh, on that same note, it’s worth saying: the syntax of the writing is impeccable – it’s rich and loaded and flows like literary honey, and I’m starved for style. I had to google meanings of some words (English isn’t my first language), and I just love that so much. It is perfectly aligned with what is being said, it drops down into badassery where it needs, it lilts up into alliteration and abstraction or gets wholly soaked in filthy eroticism. *A little break here: I was greedy and before writing down all of my thoughts I went about reading the Infinity Stone playlist and just continued until I read it all. If that level of drooling over screen and pulling at my own hair and crying and tightening my eyebrows in either gentleness or breathtaking admiration can be considered reading. Jesus fucking Christ. I can see now this impression will be a complete mess and I apologise; you deserve so much better. But it’ll come one day, I just need to get this out first.
It's hard to talk, to write – for some reason. That’s my default way of existing, I write my thoughts down and think by way of paper and often discover what I truly meant only by losing the membrane between already formed thoughts and the effort of fingers to put them down. But this time, it’s bizarrely difficult. It’s because I love it so much. I hadn’t expected it to be this good – yes, I think that’s it. I’ve read awful, bad, meh, acceptable, good, great authors in this smutty Loki/Tom kingdom; but I hadn’t thought I’ll encounter someone so truly incredibly well-expressed. And I feel like shit it’s taking me this long to say what I mean, because I always comment on everything with joy and extensively.
After devouring the incubus Loki series and now bathing in the richness of this one I started this longish commentary which I will post on tumblr because I don't know how else to give tribute to your writing, but I'm floored. Your style is so impossibly, painfully satisfying that I just re-read it and bathe myself in your stories to the point where it physically hurts.
Music obviously plays a very large part in this: good, very very good music. There was a post on tumblr, a game of sorts, where I mentioned I was listening to Iuka by The Secret Sisters and you said it was on your Loki playlist – I was slightly afraid to ask for the playlist due to my amazement by your writing, but pretty please, may I see the playlist? And not just the music, the literature, the art: I was in love with New Orleans ever since I learned of its existence through Anne Rice at around 12 years old, so seeing you incorporate the body of that city into your work simply made me love it and you even more. It takes a great deal of guts (and wet cunts) to pull that off, using all of what’s available to you to create a story such as this. Soul and bravery and exquisite body of true indulgence in what the world has to offer. Even the framework: crazy ass scenery of the worlds Loki and Nora traverse, snow monsters, Hel and Hell, Sakaar, shifting worlds underneath Baba Yaga’s wheels, Chicago (which is as wild and unknown to me as Asgard is to Nora when she was being explained to who’s who and what’s what and where’s where), various very much alive and half dying planets. Loki’s ship (I love Nora, so I’ll call it a ship instead of by its name as a tribute), everything Charles organises when anxious. The 999. The snow, the ice, the winter. By gods, your winters have kept me alive: I’ve been reading through this during one of the worst summers in my life, I’ve been yearning for winter. Which brings me to another endearing thing. I’m Slavic. I live on the Mediterranean, across from Italy, and I’m always torn in half by the two sides of my culture like that. I grew up both on sunny shores and the endless sea and olive oil; and on the enchanting darkness of the folk stories from my people’s denied past. So to meet those characters in your stories (even in the comments, where you mentioned liking them a lot), was a beautiful detail. I feel like one of your many strengths, not unlike Gaiman, is introducing a completely ludicrous and beautiful piece of information: an item, a setting, an off-the-rails circumstance, hilarious character, “historical” fact about any of the mentioned as it if were a completely normal and expected thing to occur in that moment in the text. It’s the intricate way you do it, where you aren’t hiding how completely new and askew it is, but weave it in with such devotion that it blows my mind. Charles is a good example of this, and how he’s mentioned throughout. A scene that also comes to mind is where Nora drinks with Yuan; the mention of the music, the setting, the empty bar, that very moment in space and time with those characters… It’s these fully surreal and very real palpable descriptions which show the prowess of the writer. To steal such a scene in the midst of that huge story? Alone in its quality and so much more worthy when considered in the grand scheme of the tale??
The smut is its own category which I’ll talk about, but the moments of romance and love (the two not always being linked to each other) make me feel like I’m dissolving. It’s ethereal and soft and so simple and delicate it feels like it will crumble beneath my eyes if I don’t read it with special gentleness and care. Each part of the text requires an enormous willpower to find the appropriate care with which to approach it: smut needs me to be tantric and beyond the superfluous clit twitch – I need to be six orgasms deep in with my gaze in to fully comprehend the almost psychedelic experience of mind-altering gushing of the character. (The second Polar Vortex fuck is in my top three, by far and large. That stuff was WILD) The magical aura of the characters needs me to be child-like and wide-eyed and fully expectant of anything, no matter how fantastical it gets. The humour requires a vast cultural, slightly cynical understanding of a person that has gone through angst and absorbed the knowledge of the music and literature and the world so thoroughly there exist no levels they’d stoop down to in order to laugh. A renaissance approach. Anything and anyone can be subjected to laughter. And the romance? The gentleness is so sincere, so truly soft and honest and unimposing that I literally have tears in my eyes thinking about it. The world stops at the word treasure. It is stripping, it is yearning and peacefulness in a single word. Tranquil, assured love. Without pretense. It's that honesty which floors me. The angst and the fear are also its own category of drowning inside the story; this is the note I’ve written when Loki was trying to obtain the apple: I am actually crying at the end of this, exhausted and still somehow afraid that the time jumping in the ending would lead to horrible but incredibly beautifully written ending of Nora dying. I was slightly shivering with that fear.
Despite the hefty pre-requisites to fully enjoy everything the text so lavishly gifts us with, it manages to feel fresh. (This is probably due to the poetic devices, which require an actual analysis.)
Another thing that was an immense personal satisfaction (gee, what wasn’t?) are the socks. My personal idea of absolute luxury is having new socks to put on every time: well sewn, with good quality fabric, utterly warm and comfortable. And the number of times you mention cashmere or wool or silk socks which get even richer and more lavish with the chapters and one shots made me feel cozy and toasty and snuggled :D What about Nora? She’s amazing. I love her, I slightly want her. What truly set the tone is that ethereal transition from how Eddie sees her to how Loki sees her. Physical appearance changes so much with how we view someone, to the point where it resembles actual magic. “Good legs, but in no other way remarkable. But now! The curve of her cheek, the gleam of her eyes, the fullness of her mouth, the length of her neck. Eddie’s stupid mortal eyes were patently incapable of understanding how achingly lovely she was. And right now he was having a very deep ache of his own.” This, this is it. Stupid mortal eyes of mild interest are incapable of perceiving someone. You have to look with your god eyes. Oh the beautiful Nora. Since I’ve read the incubus!Loki story first, I’ve retained that image in my head for her, that of young Patti. And it ties in with her character, with that utter goodness in her which doesn’t feel cheap, it doesn’t wear out, it is true and puts a smile on a reader’s face: from treating her colleagues with respect to being worried about everyone, including her enemies, dying a painful death. Nora is good people. And yet, as stubborn and as smirking and aroused by wickedness as Loki is. That duality comes about often, especially after that one fight when she was appalled to be turned on by his brutality. Their love making and fucking and playing deserves to be written about endlessly. I think I want to do that in the actual comments, because there’s a lot. Another thing that’s absolutely hilarious is that Nora is actually, utterly bored by Loki’s temple rites, whenever they visit an actual temple, I love that detail so much, it’s so Nora, so true to the character. I’ve made this little note for myself: “Asgardian music was bad enough, but Asgardian liturgical music was the worst! As the new High Priestess in this joint she was going to be commissioning a few new tunes. Tom Waits. Tom Waits and maybe Patti Smith. Nothing like the classics. At least the fire dancing that accompanied it was sort of entertaining.” I fucking died laughing at this, and then I was crazy excited because that’s insanely good, IMAGINE THAT, if there’s anything else that would be an incentive to worship Loki and erotically pray, that would surely be a bit of Goin’ Out West or like a recording of Patti braiding her hair during that one concert in Germany in the 70’s while screaming “she looks soooo fine”. Or is that just an added bonus to make a little Nildesperandum writing room/temple next to Loki’s temple so he can visit you and with a feigned boredom which hides a leather squeak in his crotch ask *what else* have you written about him? And while I’m on the subject of Loki being a god with actual worshippers, this:
“Our god’s worshippers - liars, artists, lovers, thieves, misbehaving children, anyone with a missed deadline, actually everyone at one time or another - save those barbarians with the red squiggles on their skin, they are weird - are growing in desperation.” That’s it. Without our god, what are we? Desperate. Loki is that principle, that deeply satisfying mischievous principle which runs deep through our veins and arteries and makes as much for the flavour of life as it does for the rounded taste of it. Writing about Loki is always writing about that, if one pays attention. And you do. It feels glorious to understand and be understood on that level, and that’s how this makes me feel. Wonderful and jaw-gritting pleased.
And if we ever (which we often do) forget that we are talking about an actual god, this writing is here to remind us, and remind the eternal Nora, that a god her lover truly is: “The chaotic, mad universe was laid out before him, and Loki basked in its untamable insanity, bathing his skin in starlight and cold.” A creature of barely imaginable attraction, on the brink of perceivable universe, faced with a brimming abyss of chaos? Starlight and cold. This reminds me of the birth of yearning when I first started reading about powerful creatures and being attracted by them. It’s just expressed better here. You know, you’re thirteen, want to orgasm with an actual god, or at least somebody over four hundred years. You’re thirty, you still want it. Forever. And that’s just the sexual aspect of it. To fathom how strongly such a being would love? Jesus H. Christ. Imagine the strength, the eons of desire and exploration condensed into the feeling of love? All the talk of possibly crushing Nora with the obvious weight of his body constantly through the story gives both physical, tangible imagery and transliterates into the ever-expanding idea of crushing her completely with what he feels. But he doesn’t. He never crushes his treasure, their love reads as blissful. I’ve also written this note during reading the A Hex Of Infinite Binding: Loki’s quintessential, carved into the collective imagination say my name received a five-chapter ascension of searing understanding what it actually means. That was a touch of pure genius, seriously. I am about to read the whole series again. I can’t wait. I’ll comment. Certain things about him are engraved now. Not necessarily cannon, because there are endless versions luckily, but people have already said it; your Loki is so succulent, and lush, so perfect that it would be an immense pleasure to have that as an eternal reference point, e.g.:
” He made himself shrug, in as much as he could, feigning boredom. It was as if she had flayed the skin from him, with her touch and words. Loki loved to be looked at - admired, feared, lusted for - but he loathed to be seen. And now Nora examined him like some subject for testing or an anatomist’s cadaver. He hated it.” This impression has this tone of adoration because I had to hold back from continuous commentary: that would mean pages and pages of non-stop comments and notes. And I wanted to do it justice; take a step back, steady myself and try to thank you for everything you have given (us) me with this. That’s the point: thank you, truly, from the bottom of my heart for writing all of this and putting it out there. It’s gold. I think I read somewhere in the comments that you were writing a novel. Is it done? May I read it? If you need more time to write, I can do your dishes and laundry, walk all of your animals, fetch you anything and everything you could possibly need. But please, never stop, for the love of everything that’s holy and good in the universe. Because the universe needs evermore of your “orgies minus the grapes”, and haughty Lokis, and effervescent original characters, and “stone cold bitches and heartless dicks”, and peaceful comprehensions of love.
Thank you. I love you.
