I’ve talked about Odin and Loki before. How I’ve known them since I was small. How they gave me my earliest lessons in magic.

I call them Dad and Mom, respectively. I’m sure there are people who would find that disrespectful; I don’t really care. Odin and Loki have never complained, and they’re the ones who have the most right to.

What does that mean? It means I still turn to Odin when things are painful. I don’t expect him to make it go away – he wouldn’t. But he helps me figure out what I should be doing.

It means I turn to Loki when I can’t stand being misgendered anymore, and when I know myself to be as much a monster as any of his children, and I find enough comfort to know that the problem is our society’s refusal to understand monsters. (Children, of course, have no trouble with monsters. It’s adults who fear us.)

I’ve been thinking about the Two Man Con in relation to my shifting understanding of the Gods and Powers. In relation to Odin in particular, it’s… well, Odin’s a timey-wimey kind of guy. He’s got dozens of names for different faces and places, enough that I’ve wondered in the past if I was even working with the same guy the Asatruar talk about.

I’m pretty sure the answer is “yes and no” because that’s always the answer with Odin.

I was all set to do some meditation, to “really learn” what the Two Man Con, the manifestations of Fire and Air, looked like in my worlds and in my earliest practice. But the thing is… they look a lot like Odin and Loki, no matter what I do. Name-shifted variants that are very much still Odin and Loki as I know them are the manifestations of Fire and Air in one of my stories.

Every time I think I’m making progress with this tangle, I pull on an end and the whole thing tightens up again. Not unsurprising where those two are concerned, I suppose. Maybe I should fall back on calling them Wodinaz and Wehaz – though that’s a whole different argument with heathens, isn’t it? Too lore, or maybe not enough lore, or not the right lore. I’ve always been certain that Vé/Lóðurr was Loki, again, without much academia to back it up. It’s just a thing that’s true for me.

(My favorite lore is Diana Wynne Jones’ Eight Days of Luke, for the record. She made Kid Loki cool way before Marvel did.)

This is turning out to be much more complicated than I had in mind, but I suppose if they’re there, they’re there, and ignoring them for the sake of “making something up” is not going to solve anything in the long run.