Entry tags:
What are my feelings on Agent of Asgard
..ugh I forgot that the problem with the December Meme is that suddenly there's SO MUCH good content on my DW reading list that I am so busy reading I don't have time to write posts. BUT! I will persevere. And by persevere I mean "tl;dr on command."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dhampyresa asked "What are your feelings on Agent of Asgard?"
I'm afraid I won't have anything very deep for you, alas. My current thoughts on Agent of Asgard sort of go like this:
1. SO MANY things I want to talk about and/or want stories about, except there's so much canon out that I haven't read, and I know it's a comics fandom so I should just ignore that, but with a recent series it's hard, okay, augh, THIS IS WHY I TRY TO AVOID OPEN CANONS, by the time I figure out how I feel about something it's already out of date.
2. I NEED TO GET MY HANDS ON MORE BB!LOKI CANON LIKE YESTERDAY
3. The thing is, I have a TYPE. And that type is Really Old People (like, age measured in centuries old) who try very hard to stay young despite all their tangled history and memories, and as a result are usually the only Old One, living semi-incognito among mortals, who have really complicated relationships with morality and guilt and the concepts of good and evil (partly because you can't live that long without your morality going at least a bit blue and orange) and with their own identity (ditto the way that outliving worlds screws with sense of identity) and with their own mythology; but who are sustained by endless and unkillable - no matter how hard they sometimes try - reservoirs of love. Love for family, love for students and friends, all-encompassing love for that-which-lives, love for sunlight and cats and stars and breakfast meats. Oh and preferably they have a semi-adversarial, semi-flirtatious relationship with a peer who uses slightly different shades of blue and orange, but that's optional.
I think my first character who fit that archetype was Deth, the High One's harpist. (I feel like there must have been someone before him but I can't think of any offhand. Perhaps that is why Deth hit me so hard when I met him.) And, of course, Methos. And ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ. And the Doctor and the Master. And Crowley and Aziraphale. And certain of the more ambiguous avatars of the Lone Power. and Don Simon Ysidro, the Oldest Vampire in Europe. And I could probably go on into progressively more obscure stuff, but you get the gist. Basically, I should have known better, even leaving aside that it's Loki and I definitely know better than to mix it up with trickster gods.
4. Srsly why no Loki/Sigurd slash????
4a. Dammit if I have to write it myself does that mean that I have to start caring about the Volsungasaga? But I've worked very hard at not caring about the Volsungasaga for thirty years now.
5. LOOOOKI
5a. Oh hey it's Advent, that means I can put Lokes Rapsody and Gudesang back in the MP3 rotation!
Anyway for the under-the-cut rambling I'm going to choose to focus on #2, which sadly has less to to with Loki, and more to do with how I go about acquiring comics.
Basically if I want to read comics, there are a couple possible methods:
1. Go into my friendly local comic book store and attempt to buy them
2. Sign up for one of the ecomics sites and buy ecopies
3. Borrow them from my local library
4. Acquire them from a RL friend
5. "Acquire" them online from some other source.
I'm hesitating on "going to local comic book store" because, well, because one, I still get nervous about, like, going into a store, any store, and talking to a counter person, oh god, so hard. Also because most of my meatspace comics-buying experience has consisted of browsing for stuff that looks interesting just for the fun of browsing. I've had limited luck with going into a comic book store and saying "I want that issue and that issue and that particular trade." Usually the answer is "uh we can order that for you? and set up a pull box?" Which is great and all but if I go to the trouble of going to a real store for a thing I want to just walk out with the thing, not start a long-term committed relationship with the store. Plus, the primary downside: if I buy physical comics in a store I then own physical copies of comics that I have to deal with.
I could buy ecomics and I keep saying I'm going to, but I'm still pretty wary about paying significant money for ecopies of things. I've had too many experiences where files could no longer be accessed for various reasons and if I'm going to pay real money I don't want to have to worry about that. Plus that's a lot of money for a thing that takes me about ten minutes to read where they don't even have to produce a physical object for the money. Anyway, I like to spend my money on creative stuff where it's most likely to encourage more of the kind of stuff I want, so while I'd gladly pay for the AoA trade, I don't really want to give Marvel money for ecopies of stuff that's about 50% stupid crossover events that I dislike and don't care about, just because they thought they could blackmail me into it by including a character I like. That's just encouraging bad behavior. ...also since there's no physical copies to worry about it would be WAY too easy to buy WAY too many, I feel like. (I would probably be up for an ecomics subscription service that would let me read X number of new books a month-- even if it worked out in the end to paying just as much, it would work a lot better for me? But AFAIK none of the options work like that and also include brand-new major-publisher books.)
Lately, most of the comics I've been reading have been via trades checked out from the library. Since I work at a library now, it's extremely convenient. And by scoring checkouts for comics I'm encouraging the libraries to buy more comics, which can only be good for comics as a whole. Unfortunately, I've pretty much exhausted the bb!Loki comics I can read via the library, at least without descending to getting out-of-state ILL or something. Nothing past the first six issues of AoA has made it onto library shelves yet (And probably won't for at least a couple months, because comics don't get fastracked through cataloging like mainstream bestsellers.) I've been trying to backfill kid!Loki through library loans, but I made it up to the beginning of Journey into Mystery and then got stuck. A couple of the libraries I can borrow from have the first volume of the Complete Kid Loki hardcover, but none of them are willing to circulate it out-of-county, and my county doesn't have it. And the only individual Loki!JiM trade any of them have is, of course, the last one.
(It wasn't till I started working here that I realized why libraries never have the first couple books in a series. I used to think it was just a special case of Murphy's Law, but least around here, it's an inevitable consequence of the shelf-weeding rules: first, if a book is in bad condition, they just take it off the shelves, without notifying the book-buyers that it's gone. Since older books wear out sooner, the first couple books in the series will get weeded on condition before the others, and then nobody realizes we need new ones. And second, if that doesn't happen, they periodically check the shelves for books that haven't been checked out recently. If there's a series that hasn't been too popular lately - maybe it's been a couple years since the last book came out - it might end up as a 'maybe' to weed. 'Maybe's are decided partly based on age - so if book 1 is five years old, book 2 is four years old, book three is 2 years old, they automatically discard just book 1, but give books 2 and 3 another chance because they're newer, ignoring the fact that without Book 1, it's kind of useless to keep Books 2 and 3. And then of course nobody checks out 2 and 3, since we don't have 1, and by the time 4 comes out they're all gone.
Anyway I don't mean to disparage librarians - some of the ones I know are actually very conscientious about checking for stuff like that before they discard, and we recently got a new system in place to try to keep entire series on the shelf - but enough librarians just follow the procedures exactly that it's still a problem, and once the last copy of a book is discarded, it can take months/years to get a new copy in, even after we tell them it's needed. By which point all the patrons have probably given up. And that's without even adding the confusion of comics "series" - let me tell you about how we have 4 different "Guardians of the Galaxy Book 1" trades in our system, and none of them match the only "Guardians of the Galaxy Book 2" we own. I 100% blame Marvel for that one.)
SO ANYWAY I've pretty much exhausted the AoA-adjacent comics I can get through the libraries, it's really sad, no more opening the daily delivery of books in hopes there will be more Loki waiting for me.
Most of the physical comics I own these days are via friends who have connections that result in me getting lots and lots of free comics in exchange for reviews (...which I am way behind on writing, shhh, but I still get the comics.) This is in fact AMAZING, I have the most coolest friends, but it does mean I have a huge stash of recent physical floppies and trades to read (I brought home another boxful yesterday....) And none of them are ever Marvel or DC because Marvel and DC freebies are harder to come by than Dynamite or Dark Horse. SO there's no hope of Loki there. (Except "Northlanders". And "Loki Ragnarok and Roll" from Boom! which I just brought home and is going to be either Epically Awful or Epically Awesome, one of the two, possibly both.)
So that leaves the less-legit ways of acquiring them via the internet, which I'm not terribly enthusiastic about. It's not that I have any deep ethical objections to the concept, especially as long as pirate ecopies are easier to deal with and less likely to disappear on me than legit ones, but I would prefer to support the books I like, so at least the AoA issues themselves would be nice to get at least semi-legit. Also the bit about them being "easy to acquire" does require a certain amount of knowledge of where and how, and since I've been working at the library I haven't done much piracy, because I have a surfeit of stuff I can get free and legit. And in the meantime apparently the piracy landscape had changed enough that I would have to put actual effort into figuring out how to make it work for me again...
All of which is just to say, I will probably not get to read the rest of Loki until I either figure out why torrenting won't work on my new-ish laptop, I give in and sign up for ecomics, or somebody gives me them for the holiday... <_<
dhampyresa asked "What are your feelings on Agent of Asgard?"I'm afraid I won't have anything very deep for you, alas. My current thoughts on Agent of Asgard sort of go like this:
1. SO MANY things I want to talk about and/or want stories about, except there's so much canon out that I haven't read, and I know it's a comics fandom so I should just ignore that, but with a recent series it's hard, okay, augh, THIS IS WHY I TRY TO AVOID OPEN CANONS, by the time I figure out how I feel about something it's already out of date.
2. I NEED TO GET MY HANDS ON MORE BB!LOKI CANON LIKE YESTERDAY
3. The thing is, I have a TYPE. And that type is Really Old People (like, age measured in centuries old) who try very hard to stay young despite all their tangled history and memories, and as a result are usually the only Old One, living semi-incognito among mortals, who have really complicated relationships with morality and guilt and the concepts of good and evil (partly because you can't live that long without your morality going at least a bit blue and orange) and with their own identity (ditto the way that outliving worlds screws with sense of identity) and with their own mythology; but who are sustained by endless and unkillable - no matter how hard they sometimes try - reservoirs of love. Love for family, love for students and friends, all-encompassing love for that-which-lives, love for sunlight and cats and stars and breakfast meats. Oh and preferably they have a semi-adversarial, semi-flirtatious relationship with a peer who uses slightly different shades of blue and orange, but that's optional.
I think my first character who fit that archetype was Deth, the High One's harpist. (I feel like there must have been someone before him but I can't think of any offhand. Perhaps that is why Deth hit me so hard when I met him.) And, of course, Methos. And ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ. And the Doctor and the Master. And Crowley and Aziraphale. And certain of the more ambiguous avatars of the Lone Power. and Don Simon Ysidro, the Oldest Vampire in Europe. And I could probably go on into progressively more obscure stuff, but you get the gist. Basically, I should have known better, even leaving aside that it's Loki and I definitely know better than to mix it up with trickster gods.
4. Srsly why no Loki/Sigurd slash????
4a. Dammit if I have to write it myself does that mean that I have to start caring about the Volsungasaga? But I've worked very hard at not caring about the Volsungasaga for thirty years now.
5. LOOOOKI
5a. Oh hey it's Advent, that means I can put Lokes Rapsody and Gudesang back in the MP3 rotation!
Anyway for the under-the-cut rambling I'm going to choose to focus on #2, which sadly has less to to with Loki, and more to do with how I go about acquiring comics.
Basically if I want to read comics, there are a couple possible methods:
1. Go into my friendly local comic book store and attempt to buy them
2. Sign up for one of the ecomics sites and buy ecopies
3. Borrow them from my local library
4. Acquire them from a RL friend
5. "Acquire" them online from some other source.
I'm hesitating on "going to local comic book store" because, well, because one, I still get nervous about, like, going into a store, any store, and talking to a counter person, oh god, so hard. Also because most of my meatspace comics-buying experience has consisted of browsing for stuff that looks interesting just for the fun of browsing. I've had limited luck with going into a comic book store and saying "I want that issue and that issue and that particular trade." Usually the answer is "uh we can order that for you? and set up a pull box?" Which is great and all but if I go to the trouble of going to a real store for a thing I want to just walk out with the thing, not start a long-term committed relationship with the store. Plus, the primary downside: if I buy physical comics in a store I then own physical copies of comics that I have to deal with.
I could buy ecomics and I keep saying I'm going to, but I'm still pretty wary about paying significant money for ecopies of things. I've had too many experiences where files could no longer be accessed for various reasons and if I'm going to pay real money I don't want to have to worry about that. Plus that's a lot of money for a thing that takes me about ten minutes to read where they don't even have to produce a physical object for the money. Anyway, I like to spend my money on creative stuff where it's most likely to encourage more of the kind of stuff I want, so while I'd gladly pay for the AoA trade, I don't really want to give Marvel money for ecopies of stuff that's about 50% stupid crossover events that I dislike and don't care about, just because they thought they could blackmail me into it by including a character I like. That's just encouraging bad behavior. ...also since there's no physical copies to worry about it would be WAY too easy to buy WAY too many, I feel like. (I would probably be up for an ecomics subscription service that would let me read X number of new books a month-- even if it worked out in the end to paying just as much, it would work a lot better for me? But AFAIK none of the options work like that and also include brand-new major-publisher books.)
Lately, most of the comics I've been reading have been via trades checked out from the library. Since I work at a library now, it's extremely convenient. And by scoring checkouts for comics I'm encouraging the libraries to buy more comics, which can only be good for comics as a whole. Unfortunately, I've pretty much exhausted the bb!Loki comics I can read via the library, at least without descending to getting out-of-state ILL or something. Nothing past the first six issues of AoA has made it onto library shelves yet (And probably won't for at least a couple months, because comics don't get fastracked through cataloging like mainstream bestsellers.) I've been trying to backfill kid!Loki through library loans, but I made it up to the beginning of Journey into Mystery and then got stuck. A couple of the libraries I can borrow from have the first volume of the Complete Kid Loki hardcover, but none of them are willing to circulate it out-of-county, and my county doesn't have it. And the only individual Loki!JiM trade any of them have is, of course, the last one.
(It wasn't till I started working here that I realized why libraries never have the first couple books in a series. I used to think it was just a special case of Murphy's Law, but least around here, it's an inevitable consequence of the shelf-weeding rules: first, if a book is in bad condition, they just take it off the shelves, without notifying the book-buyers that it's gone. Since older books wear out sooner, the first couple books in the series will get weeded on condition before the others, and then nobody realizes we need new ones. And second, if that doesn't happen, they periodically check the shelves for books that haven't been checked out recently. If there's a series that hasn't been too popular lately - maybe it's been a couple years since the last book came out - it might end up as a 'maybe' to weed. 'Maybe's are decided partly based on age - so if book 1 is five years old, book 2 is four years old, book three is 2 years old, they automatically discard just book 1, but give books 2 and 3 another chance because they're newer, ignoring the fact that without Book 1, it's kind of useless to keep Books 2 and 3. And then of course nobody checks out 2 and 3, since we don't have 1, and by the time 4 comes out they're all gone.
Anyway I don't mean to disparage librarians - some of the ones I know are actually very conscientious about checking for stuff like that before they discard, and we recently got a new system in place to try to keep entire series on the shelf - but enough librarians just follow the procedures exactly that it's still a problem, and once the last copy of a book is discarded, it can take months/years to get a new copy in, even after we tell them it's needed. By which point all the patrons have probably given up. And that's without even adding the confusion of comics "series" - let me tell you about how we have 4 different "Guardians of the Galaxy Book 1" trades in our system, and none of them match the only "Guardians of the Galaxy Book 2" we own. I 100% blame Marvel for that one.)
SO ANYWAY I've pretty much exhausted the AoA-adjacent comics I can get through the libraries, it's really sad, no more opening the daily delivery of books in hopes there will be more Loki waiting for me.
Most of the physical comics I own these days are via friends who have connections that result in me getting lots and lots of free comics in exchange for reviews (...which I am way behind on writing, shhh, but I still get the comics.) This is in fact AMAZING, I have the most coolest friends, but it does mean I have a huge stash of recent physical floppies and trades to read (I brought home another boxful yesterday....) And none of them are ever Marvel or DC because Marvel and DC freebies are harder to come by than Dynamite or Dark Horse. SO there's no hope of Loki there. (Except "Northlanders". And "Loki Ragnarok and Roll" from Boom! which I just brought home and is going to be either Epically Awful or Epically Awesome, one of the two, possibly both.)
So that leaves the less-legit ways of acquiring them via the internet, which I'm not terribly enthusiastic about. It's not that I have any deep ethical objections to the concept, especially as long as pirate ecopies are easier to deal with and less likely to disappear on me than legit ones, but I would prefer to support the books I like, so at least the AoA issues themselves would be nice to get at least semi-legit. Also the bit about them being "easy to acquire" does require a certain amount of knowledge of where and how, and since I've been working at the library I haven't done much piracy, because I have a surfeit of stuff I can get free and legit. And in the meantime apparently the piracy landscape had changed enough that I would have to put actual effort into figuring out how to make it work for me again...
All of which is just to say, I will probably not get to read the rest of Loki until I either figure out why torrenting won't work on my new-ish laptop, I give in and sign up for ecomics, or somebody gives me them for the holiday... <_<
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
It is ever the way.
I've heard great things about Agent of Asgard, but I'm already so behind on all of my reading/watching that I can't bring myself to delve back into Marvel comics. :/ (I escaped in...1997 or so, and every movie tries to tempt me back, but it seems like a risky move for me.)
no subject
I started with just, uh, reading Hawkeye, since they had the first trade at work, and then I figured I should try the second trade, and since I had to do in-state ILL for that I went ahead and asked for Captain Marvel at the same time, and, well, it went from there.
I'm trying to keep my Marvel strictly limited, which means so far I'm only trying to keep up with stuff related to Captain Marvel, Hawkeye, Young Avengers, Kid!Loki, and the contemporary Guardians of the Galaxy. And it still feels like it's totally out of control I need to stop. :P
no subject
(In the spirit of full disclosure, I've also read some trades via the library--some Captain Marvel and Black Widow and Winter Soldier. But that's surely more like dipping a hand in the water, not falling back in?)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
But the Tenth Realm tie in is basically totally unconnected. It is partly about Angela, but honestly, the main thing it's about is Loki's complicated relationships with his family.
no subject
You could try caring about Wagner's Ring instead of the Volsungasaga, if that works better for you, which it might not.
I look forward to your Verity feelings! And yeah, definitely don't miss the Tenth Realm mini series.
You have to review "Loki Ragnarok and Roll". You simply have to.
Btw, is there a version of Jul i Valhal with English (or French) subtitles anywhere on the internet?
no subject
And I now want Verity/Loki fic based on that Craigslist ad about the guy who will be your horrible fake-date for the holidays in order to make your family stop wanting you to find a boyfriend. ['Loki, you're coming home with me for Christmas to meet my parents.' 'What? Verity, I don't do Christmas. I'm not Christian. I'm Pagan. I'm a Norse God.' 'Perfect. Just like that. Also can you mention how you're sometimes a girl? And hit on my Uncle Fred? It will freak him the fuck out.' 'Wait. You want me to go home with you so you can pretend we're dating and I can ruin the family holiday?' 'Exactly. I understood that ruining parties was one of your special talents. But if you'd rather not--' 'No, no, I'd be delighted. Have I ever mentioned how much I appreciate that you like me for who I really am?']
And I haven't actually found a full version of Jul i Valhal anywhere on the internet, even in Danish. At least not when I was looking last December? I only know the music videos because somebody Scandinavian linked me to them long ago. Some of them were on youtube with English subs last year, but they seem to have been region-locked since then.