jossujb:
Another thing I find interesting in Gabriel lately is that if you strip down all the glorification he put on his exploits as the Trickster and later in the care of his Norse buds, it does rather paint him naive.
He seems to save Loki quite flippantly. He gets attached to him and considers him not only a friend, but a brother and ends up agreeing to term he couldn’t possibly keep. I guess in Loki’s point of view it makes all the damn sense to insist severing all family connections Gabriel has – but it is not something a true friend would ask with the penalty of torture.
And the fact that Gabe goes back to Loki just speaks volumes to me! He genuinely thinks this is good, even though Loki was playing him. How could you not know how he would feel about the whole Elysian Fields Hotel incident? You supposedly emulated Loki’s personality for centuries and yet you didn’t see that one coming?
I dunno, but I find this very fascinating! Cos though Gabriel is ancient and powerful it does still look like he was too trusting, and that shouldn’t ever bee a bad quality, yet it was.
I know what you’re saying here, and it is indeed interesting, and endearing.
But it wasn’t a bad quality, and it never is, to have faith in the goodness of the people you care for. It may be foolish, but it’s not “bad.”
And I wouldn’t call it naivety so much as I would call it suspending disbelief out of desperation.
Gabriel fled Heaven to begin with because the absence of his father and the feuding of his two eldest brothers was so intensely painful to him that he would rather forfeit his stature and the familiarity of all he loved, and run. I would not call Gabriel naive to leave Heaven and seek Loki’s affiliation, because he knew damn good and well that neither Michael with his powerlust and sanctimony nor Lucifer with his cruelty and vanity would have made any more fruitful or safe an ally in the end. It was as good a bet as any to bank on the relative unknown that was the pagan pantheon on earth (because remember, he didn’t just make alliances with Loki and his children, but also with gods and goddesses across the entirety of earth, including those in India and Africa). Was it risky? Yes, but I’m not sure he had any more favorable options, particularly in the immediate wake of escaping Lucifer.
Gabriel knew Loki was treacherous from the start, just like he knew his elder brothers were. But just like with his elder brothers, he found himself in the shadow of a formidably cruel being because his real flaw here is to be nonconfrontational, and he would rather bide his time with people he wasn’t entirely on the side of, out of the exposure of being totally alone. I also believe firmly that Gabriel is far more sentimental than he allows others to believe, exceedingly “softer” than his 3 elder brothers, and in order to quell his misgivings about Loki, he sought out emotional ties (for instance, the fact that both had cold, absentee fathers, Odin and Chuck) while willfully ignoring things that separated them (the fact that Loki would do terrible things for the family that didn’t even truly love him, whereas Gabriel far more healthily decided “this is crap, I’m distancing myself from this toxicity”) in order to delay their inevitable falling-out.
Tl;dr Gabe isn’t naive, he’s affectionate, and he’s nonconfrontational to a fault.
Tho I guess I should point out I didnt mean naivety or being so trusting to be a negative quality in a person – its just that the situation Gabriel was in left him in a vulnerable position with personality quirk like that Which is so not his fault.
I don’t think it’s fair to expect from anyone to be playing mindgames when it comes to your friends. Gabriel goes to Loki even after his faked death, cos he thinks it in a simple, kinda pure way. Of course his best friend would be hapoy to help! He doesn’t even judge Narfi, Fenrir and Sleipnir eventually wanting to kick him out. He understands that the situations with the apocalypse was heating up and they needed to get him out.
It’s the way they sold him out. Humiliated him with the fact that he honestly thought they were good for each other.
I don’t say he’s naive to be stupid – he’s naive like someone who hasn’t been in a relationships that are not truly mutual, but instead just a game of assets. I think Loki and the Norse Pantheon is intentionally imagined as a mafia – only language they know how to speak is in debts. And Gabriel didn’t realize he had no real family here.
I Aim To Misbehave 