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This week, we dive deep into the history of William, and how he has a trickster spirit that lives in his head and makes him push everyone’s buttons. Oh, and we talk a little about Loki. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
All hail, What mythological God or being do you hold a fascination and/or kinship too? –AnubisTalon
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Loki is mythologically a shapeshifter too and even gives birth to Odin’s horse. So a great precedent for that.
I love the McElroys, been listening to them for years.
Bad Movies? We have been on a killer Bigfoot kick. Primal Rage was hilarious, Willow Creek was unexpectedly good.
Loki the show, I am enjoying. Tony is right, Winter Soldier and Loki are good shows but just shows. I don’t hate Owen Wilson in this, and I usually do. But I think that WAS from Party Crashes and I was hating on Vince Vaughn more and Owen Wilson got spun up into it.
Oh, yeah! Loki shapeshifted into a mare and had sex with a Stallion, and gave birth to Odin’s freaky horse.
This has come up recently, but I can’t remember why…
I think Loki’s gender fluid identity is probably going to affect the story line in this show, aside from whether it allows for a change of actors in future. I don’t see Tom Hiddleston giving up this role soon and I don’t think it would be necessary.
Tangentially, I read that he was asked by the director to fill the crew in on some of Loki’s backstory and this developed into “Loki Lectures (including info on the mythology) especially for Owen Wilson as his character is supposed to be an expert on Loki.
Just a bit of trivia about Loki’s full name, Loki Laufeyson. In the Marvel Universe they made Laufey into Loki’s father (a frost giant). But in the mythology, Laufey is Loki’s mother and a goddess. So Loki has a matronymic rather than a patronymic–sort of increasing the whole gender fluidity thing.
Pete and I were talking about one of the things wrong with Shadow & Bone the other night and decided that its actually pretty prevalent on most TV today. The characters are mostly plot devices. Everything is in service to the plot. It seems like there are really two main things that are valued in shows at the moment, dazzling visuals and plot.
One thing my students don’t like about reading is that there’s too much time spent describing settings and character and on character development. They find this boring. They want to know what is going to happen next.
This all seems symptomatic of larger cultural issues to me.
Oh, and that was one of the great things about Loki’s first episode–almost completely about character.
Wandavision escaped the plot problem by its eccentricity of presentation at first. I think by the fourth (?) episode it succumbed.
Oh! Good point! Yeah, I think you might be on to something there.
It does seem to me that something about what is valued–learning proper professional behavior and identity rather than the knowledge and skills of the profession–feed into the neuroses that Will’s describing.
I found out about the trickster figure in the Orisha pantheon for a course I was teaching this semester. The trickster is called Eshu. Eshu’s main functions are to get people to see things from a different perspective and to disrupt the status quo so that things can change. One story about Eshu is that s/he (Orisha’s are gender fluid) wore a hat with a face on the back so that one couldn’t tell whether s/he was coming or going. S/he also wore red colors on one side and black on the other. The point of the story is that changing the perspective from which one saw Eshu changed how Eshu was perceived. The costume is generally thought to be a source for the jester’s costume. The second “face” is often put on the end of a stick. The hat also had long phallic parts to it that are sometimes now called the “asses ears” part of the jester’s hat. In the movie Black Panther, the character of Shuri owes a lot to Eshu–as someone who does not accept tradition or makes fun of it, and is a force for change.
Wow… so medieval jester costumes owe their origins to Africa? That’s very cool, and surprising.
Also, Eshu sounds a little like Jigsaw, from the Saw films. 🙂