I am rather pleased that the document ended up being 200 pages exactly, including title page, acknowledgments, references, etc. It’s 68,438 words excluding all the front- and end-matter, 71,125 words including. Which is still shorter than my longest work of fanfiction…
Writing about how in order to rebuild trust in a relationship where trust has been broken, you have to extend your belief in the other person’s trustworthiness a little past what the evidence warrants – in this case, the experience of past betrayal – in order to invite the other person to provide you with evidence that they’re trustworthy.
Officially it’s about William James’s “The Will to Believe,” but now I’m (internally) crying about Thor and Loki.
Yuuup. There is so much one can say about trust and trustworthiness with regard to Thor and Loki’s relationship arc. So much.
The funniest thing about this is that my reading of “The Will to Believe” was inspired by what my therapist said about the process of rebuilding trust in a relationship. Which had nothing to do with me or Thor or Loki; I was just talking about an example in the essay and she gave me a funny look and then gave the perfect description of how it works.
Writing about how in order to rebuild trust in a relationship where trust has been broken, you have to extend your belief in the other person’s trustworthiness a little past what the evidence warrants – in this case, the experience of past betrayal – in order to invite the other person to provide you with evidence that they’re trustworthy.
Officially it’s about William James’s “The Will to Believe,” but now I’m (internally) crying about Thor and Loki.
Loki is the Philosopher King 