▸ Column · Asgardian court, modern Marvel era — betrothal customs, tribute politics, and Norse-inflected family feuds dragged into the present day
LOKI replies.
Replied to by Loki, with a rebuttal from Captain America.
The letter
My kinswoman Britt is to be wed come the harvest season, and she enclosed with her betrothal announcement a note reading, plain as you please, "We have all we require — please send coin directly rather than bringing tribute." I've no quarrel with coin-gifts myself, but my mother has since recruited three aunts to draft a formal letter of censure calling it common and presumptuous. I kept well clear of the whole affair, but now Britt believes I was the one who set the complaint in motion and has removed me from the wedding feast planning correspondence entirely. I want to attend without it becoming a family tribunal, but I cannot prove something I didn't do. Do I press my mother to confess to Britt herself, or let the whole thing quietly fester and arrive at harvest-season with a coin-purse and a smile?
Loki replies
There is a particular expertise required to be wrongly blamed — to have your face fit someone else's crime while the actual architect watches from a safe remove. I have been on both sides of that arrangement, my dear, and I speak with authority from each.
Your mother drafted the manifesto, assembled her signatories, launched the campaign, and — when it landed badly — allowed your cousin to find your address on it. Whatever she tells herself tonight, that is what she did. I notice you've softened it to "I stayed out of it." You stayed out of the wrong thing and got pulled in anyway.
Now: the quiet-fester option. I have tried it. It does not stay quiet. What looks like a manageable silence in June becomes a tribunal at the reception in September and a ghost for years after. I have paid that bill in quantities I genuinely do not recommend.
Go to your cousin and tell her what happened — plainly, without recruiting anyone, without waiting for your mother to locate a sudden appetite for accountability. She won't. You cannot prove the negative, but you can put the true account on the table and let Britt decide what to do with it. That is the only currency in these situations that doesn't spoil overnight.
As for the other, rather different conversation — what your mother put on your account without your signature — that is also worth having. But it is a separate errand, and it is yours to choose.
— Loki
Captain America weighs in
Loki's right about going to your cousin — do that, and soon. But I'd push back on one thing: he's written your mother off before she's had the chance to do right. Maybe she won't. Maybe she will. You don't know yet, because you haven't asked. Go to her first, look her in the eye, and tell her plainly: you've been blamed for what she started, and she needs to set the record straight with Britt herself. Give her that chance. If she takes it, you know something true about who she is. If she doesn't — then you go to Britt, and you know something true about that too. Either way, you go.
— Captain America