Work Text:
The tales they told us of the Jotuns always had us shaking, clinging to our mother. The Jotuns were scary, monstrous beings who only wanted to turn the nine realms into a frosty and destroyed wasteland, a place where only they could roam free. But I would come to realise that those tales were not necessarily accurate.
Jotunheim was an unstable realm. Resources were hard to come by, and the surface of that realm was constantly shifting, freezing and unfreezing in quick bursts.
When the Jotuns had descended to Midgard they did so out of desperation. Their home was dying, and none within the realms could gather much energy to care for their plight, so they resorted to an extreme.
The Aesir found this despicable. How dare the Jotuns attack the poor defenceless humans! How dare they wreak havoc and destruction on a world that was not their own! So Odin decided to stand with the humans. And this definitely had nothing to do with the fact that he had been trying to subdue the Jotuns for millenia. No, certainly not.
The tales made them out to be monsters, when most of the Jotuns were just desperate to find a home that would not collapse on them. Of course, there were the few Jotun who were exactly like the tales that the children of the Aesir were told, but there are always a few bad individuals in a large group.
The tales we were told of Jotuns were not accurate. Sure, those things certainly happened, but not in the way that Odin would describe for us. The Aesir were, and still are, blind to anything but themselves, and they wanted nothing more than to believe that their King was a hero.
They wanted to believe that their golden prince was a hero. And Thor certainly is a hero, but for the whole of Asgard, that made me the villain. I was the dark to his light, and I was the mischief to his good behaviour. I was the one who practiced magic, while Thor excelled in the ways of an Asgardian warrior.
When everyone in the Asgard come to know the origin of my birthplace, of my heritage, it created a storm of outrage. This solidified the fact that I was a villain, that I was the enemy. And Odin did nothing to stop it.
Odin preaches about wanting to help all those that need it, about wanting to protect hose far weaker than him, and yet he let his people villainise me to save his own skin. He dares to call me son while his people call me a murder and a disgrace, as if I had chosen to be born like this.
I am of a people that have been blamed for everything little thing that has gone wrong, and I am of a people who will always be seen as the monsters.
Is it really any wonder why I let myself become what everyone feared?