The Order of the Stick

If he did that he might have ended up with a Chest Burster scenario.

I wonder if getting Sleipnir was part of the plan. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to see the potential of the pairing of megahorse and a god.

Maybe Loki's Catholic.

So he's full of guilt, and wants there to be clear rules to follow?

Why are we assuming he didn't want to give birth to an eight legged horse?

I mean he's a deity. Their is no reason he couldn't shape shift and still keep the horse fetus.

May pregnancy causes Mode Lock? Wouldn't be the only story to have that.

I imagine that a divine super horse fetus is difficult to properly terminate, and that changing back into human form would have some... undesirable consequences.

plus the question of where the baby would go after turning back into a male

Oh, so NOW you start talking about Loki giving birth to a horse! Yet when I brought it up, I got bupkiss!

I got the message! I’ll pay for the stamp!

...Being facetious.

Edited by fredhot16 on Aug 22nd 2019 at 12:12:23 PM

Different pantheon, but I remember one came out of Zeus' calf and another from his head.

The head birth was pretty painful, being a literal splitting headache.

Love the latest strip. Both the insight into Hel's motivation (and Loki's apparently being surprised by it), and the depiction of Hel herself.

She's often depicted as a dualistic representation of the threshold of death: both living and skeletal. We've so far only seen a fleshy Hel^note  — what fleshy Hel is this?, but in this strip she goes all ghostly, gaunt-faced, and black-speech-ballooned. Is that just a depiction of exhaustion (the speech balloon in particular makes me skeptical), or is she going to go all One-Winged Angel on us?

I think Loki figured Hel was "playing the game" thus far, and didn't realise she was entirely willing to overturn the board in order to not lose, and that's what concerns him here. Tricksters may expect they're the only ones who'd think to Take a Third Option, but if you piss someone off enough...

Edited by johnnye on Aug 22nd 2019 at 5:02:40 PM

One wonders how far he would go to eliminate her as a threat.

I just think Loki's feeling dismayed at the fact that his daughter would rather fade away and die than acknowledge that she was wrong - and that she thoroughly, irrevocably despises him personally over it.

What Loki Wanted: Hel to be like, "You know what? Good game. You win. I was wrong. I didn't value clerical followers enough and I accept this important lesson you have taught me about how to properly influence the world as an Evil God."

What Loki Got: Hel is having a Miko Miyazaki-style Never My Fault meltdown that might actually kill her, and if it does, she will die cursing his name to the heavens. Their relationship is smashed beyond repair and so too may be her continued existence.

So. Yeah. Loki's feeling a bit torn up about all this.

He damn well should.

He caused it.

As someone who's played board games to the bitter end with siblings, someone who refuses to admit that they've lost is one of the things that can nearly break your soul. And usually, you can't even decide that you've lost without them losing it.

And the lesson here is...

...don't do bad things to your god daughter, otherwise she might hold a grudge...

...and endanger the entire universe!!!!!

Ironically enough, she'd probably be an ally of the Dark One if he wasn't so determined to tell all of them to shove their heads up their butts.

Oh, I'm sure she and the Dark One would get along swimmingly. They both want to destroy this world in order to achieve their agendas. It's the Dark One's B-plan, sure, but he'd be totally fine going along with it.

And if they pulled it off, it'd work out really well for Hel. While the Dark One fizzles into nothingness from the consequences nobody told him about, and all his hopes and dreams for goblinkind vanish forever alongside him.

So. Uh. Yeah. He might have made the right call, at least so far as she's concerned. Now if only Thor hadn't been so trigger-happy at the start....

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 22nd 2019 at 3:53:48 AM

Is it a given that he can't survive? He already has literally every goblin that's died since his ascension.

Thor's pretty sure the Dark One wouldn't survive the downtime, and he'd know better than any of us.

"I've seen new gods with more worshippers than he has fail to make it."

Poor Metron. Poor Orion.

maybe their function as EXP fodder empowers him in weird ways?

That sounds like something that would make him less likely to survive, if it matters at all. And I don't think it would.

Edited by Gilphon on Aug 22nd 2019 at 9:11:37 AM