Baelfire trudged through the forest with heavy steps. He kept one hand on the warm bundle of Gideon underneath his cloak. His other hand lingered on the dagger at his belt. The dagger he could use to kill the Dark One. The dagger he had to use to kill the Dark One.
The belt was new, or had been on his birthday back in the spring. Sturdy leather and a pewter buckle. Papa had given it to him, to celebrate him being a man. Back then, he’d thought he knew what being a man meant. Now he wasn’t sure he knew what anything meant.
That had been the day he’d found out about Gideon for the first time–though he hadn’t known he’d be Gideon. He hadn’t known what it meant to have a brother. To have a helpless baby in his life who needed him, who he would do anything to protect. He hadn’t known about Belle, hadn’t known her name or anything about her. All he’d known then was that the Dark One had done something terrible to his father. All he had wanted was to make it all go away.
There are so many wonderful photographs of the Coronation… but there is one hero of the day who has been largely ignored by the mainstream media… My friend Seamus.
Seamus, (officially titled Turlough Mor, 17th Regimental Mascot of the Irish Guards) looked immaculate in his newly tailored scarlet jacket as he led the troops to the garden of Buckingham Palace on Saturday. Just two days earlier, Seamus had celebrated his third birthday… but, he was sensible and didn’t drink too much Guinness!
Seamus joined the British Army when he was 6 months old in 2020. He did not have a problem in completing his basic training, aided by Drummer Adam Walsh. However, initially he was a little uncomfortable when soldiers wearing big furry hats and playing loud musical instruments kept following him around. He eventually learnt to ignore the pipers and drummers… after all, they needed to go for walkies too!
Then Seamus became distracted by people standing on the pavement watching, and some called out his name. He wanted to bound over to them and say “hello”, but Drummer Walsh wouldn’t let him.
Early in 2022, there were concerns that Seamus would not be ready to take part in Trooping The Colour to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee, due to his youthful exuberance. At an informal meeting with off-duty “Micks”, I had a little word in Seamus’s big hairy ear. He promised me that he would try harder to be a good boy, as he did not want to miss The Queen’s Official Birthday. Seamus kept his word, and behaved very well at the Trooping The Colour parade… although he was a little restless at Horse Guards when he had to stand to attention for such a long time.
Now Seamus has successfully taken part in the largest ceremonial event for seventy years. Probably the pinnacle of his military career.
Well done you, Seamus! I will be bringing some special treats next time I visit the barracks.
Reblogging this once again because, once again, it made me laugh.
I never thought about the fact that the Aether didn’t react to Loki after he grabbed Jane. The only person it attacked was the guard who’d just been told to take Jane back to Midgard. The obvious conclusion is that the Aether did not want to go back to Midgard. Either to it, Midgard felt the way a low oxygen world might feel to us – except Midgard was low magic, or it specifically wanted to get back to Malekith, and here Loki has facilitated that by bringing Jane to Svartalfheim. It was either Thor or Odin who said, on Asgard, that the Aether wasn’t protecting Jane, it was protecting itself. So it’s fine with Loki manhandling Jane, because it’s close to where it wants to be right now.
Hello, since my last Loki meta did really well, I’m going to do another, because my self-appointed job is now apparently Analytical Waffling at the whims of my hyper fixations.
Okay, so I want to talk about why Loki stabs Thor— or at least, why I think Loki stabs Thor. Because it’s become a bit of a joke in the MCU that Loki just goes around randomly trying to kill/hurt/stab Thor constantly for no reason, and I’m tired. Someone has definitely analyzed this scene before, but I can’t find those metas right now, and I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring because I keep thinking about it and why it speaks far more to his favor than not.
Just as a start off, Loki has (if you count TR) canonically stabbed Thor twice in the MCU, that’s it (unless you count the metaphorical kind, which would increase that number drastically). Once when they are children (which we lack context for), and in this scene right here:
THOR: Look at this! Look around you! You think this madness will end with your rule?
Thor and Loki have been going at it for a while at this point. And neither of them seem too committed to really hurting each other more than necessary. They’re both tired, they’re both scared (though they wouldn’t admit it), and they’re both hurt (in more than one sense).
And then Thor tries to reason with Loki again. He holds him still, leaving no room for escape, and forces him to confront the destruction this is causing, and Loki does.
Loki looks around and sees, truly, what is going on around him, and he’s horrified. Hedoesn’twant this, this wasn’t his goal, and now that it’s happening, it’s nothing like what he thought it would be.
And then we get this:
LOKI: (tries to look away) It’s too late. It’s too late to stop it.
This isn’t gloating, this is grief. He looks like he genuinely wants to put an end to the violence, but he doesn’t think it’s possible. He’s in over his head.
But Thor hasn’t given up yet. He still believes that they can work together, that their bond is strong enough to get through to Loki now that the seed of doubt has been planted. And you can practically see it working on Loki’s face. That he’s at war with his goals and his true desires and truly wants to say yes.
But Loki’s backed into a corner. At this point it’s important to remember he’s still under Thanos’s thumb, physically linked to the Other, being manipulated by the mind stone, and under threat and duress. To Loki, the choice Thor is giving him is not one he has the power to make. Still, he can’t trust himself to say no. He’s compromised, emotionally, and as long as Thor’s there daring to believe in him, he’s in danger.
THOR: No. We can. Together.
So Loki no longer wants to win, but he can’t, can’t say that, and so he gives himself an out the only way he thinks is possible. If he can’t make himself say no, and he can’t let himself say yes, he has to put distance between them, he has to get Thor to stop trying.
And so he stabs him— with a dagger that nominally would never do major harm to an Asgardian, aimed in an incredibly non lethal area.
To Loki at this moment, he’s acting out of desperate self preservation (admittedly in a way that is in reality self destructive, but, still…) And it works! His terrible plan works! (Yay for everyone but Loki!)
God he looks heartbroken. It’s like he knows if this works that Thor will give up on him, maybe, but that’s what he’s wanted, right? Right? (Wrong!)
It’s said in a mocking tone, but not necessarily to Thor. This, to me (and other people I’ve heard analyze this scene) is said to himself. Forletting himself be swayed by what he considers his greatest weakness, sentiment (and, possibly even more, Thor himself).
I don’t have a gif for this one, but I love when people reference him leaving the staff behind. Because it’s very clearly an act of helpfulness through omission. Loki cannot accept Thor’s help, or his entreatment to help, so he does the next best thing— leave the staff— which effectively grants the Avengers the final (literal) key they need in order to win.
I always think of this scene as a great climax of all the pressure Loki is under to perform in this movie. His mask breaks, and he nearly gives in, but in the end his fear is too strong. And so, like a trapped animal, he lashes out in order to remove himself from the situation.
At least, that’s what I think.
And then you see the dagger when Thor pulls it out, and there’s blood coating about a quarter inch of the tip of the blade. That’s it. That was not a blow meant to cause any kind of serious injury at all to Thor.
For my linguistsics degree, I did a project on why I’m seeing more people saying “on accident” instead of “by accident.” I looked at almost a million pieces of writing pulled from news sites, blogs, academic articles and television transcripts. I found almost three hundred cases of “on accident” being used. It was a surprisingly even spread across sources. Even more interesting, I organized the hits by date and tracked an upward swing in use as time goes on. This means that the use of “on accident” is increasing over time, and may eventually supplant and drive out the classic usage of “by accident.” I like to call this prepositional shift.
Now, looking at my data and looking at the age ranges of the writers or speakers, the majority of them were under the age of thirty. So I interviewed a panel of people, choosing twenty with a spread of about half above thirty, and half below. Those older than thirty years of age felt “strongly” or “very strongly” that “on accident” was wrong in all cases, and that “by accident” was the only correct phrase. However, those younger than thirty were much less rigorous, with more than half feeling “ambivalent” or “less strongly” about which was correct. This demonstrates a generational link in preposition usage.
When presented with options for the definitions of “by” and “on,” we also get some interesting data. For by, there are two main definitions according to the Oxford English Dictionary: 1. Identifying the agent performing an action. Or 2. Indicating the means of achieving something. Whereas “on” has many more definitions, the pertinent ones being 1. To indicate the manner of doing something or 2. To indicate active involvement in a condition or status. By the above definitions, either “by accident” or “on accident” is a correct usage of the term. However, native speakers of English could not successfully define either preposition, instead just choosing one, the other, or both as “sounding correct.”
The only evidence for a rule-based shift that I could find was a correlation with the paired phrase for the opposite condition “on purpose.” While the younger interviewees were ambivalent about the correctness of “on accident,” they uniformly rejected the correctness of the suggested phrase “by purpose.” So the shift can only be in one direction according the the native ear, towards the preposition “on.”
Whether this means that the particular usage of “by” is becoming archaic or the definition of “on” is expanding is a possible subject of further study using a wider range of phrases. But I found the wider acceptance of “on accident” versus “by accident” to be a fascinating look at how prepositions can shift meaning and usage over time.
So now I’m curious, five years from my initial study (and itching to try the Tumblr poll feature):
Female, Michigan. Currently deeply invested in the happiness of space vikings. Also Robert Carlyle fandom and anything that makes me smile or laugh. Expect fluffy animals. Will tag for blocking upon request.