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One of the many excellent things about sharing a library with inlandsea is that she has a collection of vintage Dungeons & Dragons manuals, including a Deities & Demigods that still has the Nehwon, Melibone, and Cthulu mythos in it, before copyright caught up with the multiverse.

I remember as a youth being appalled that the D&D manual listed Loki as Chaotic Evil. I mean, okay, he lies, he steals, he causes the death of Pretty Boy Baldur, he hastens/hastened/will hasten Ragnarok. Still my loyalty was (is) unreasoning. And if I loved him, how could he be evil? (O that dangerous sleight of heart.) Chaotic, emphatically, the very embodiment of random energy -- which is generative as well as destructive. None of the other Aesir ever did anything remotely as sexy as turning into a mare and giving birth to Odin's eight-legged steed Sleipnir.

stitchinmyside, I think we are up for another use of the Word of the Minim: abject. Loki embodies abjection, and he's the only god who is made larger by being made ridiculous. Thor looked a fright in his wedding dress.

I think that's what I always liked about Prometheus, too. Chained to a rock. Tell me there isn't something ineluctably sexy about that.

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