Ragnar had never pretended to be anything less than what he was: a stern father. He remembered actually worrying that he might be too stern for infant children considering in that sense he was a new father. Sveinn had been old enough for Ragnar to be stern too without feeling the ugly and unnecessary weight of guilt that tended to plague him when he was a little too stern with the boys (in particular because Gyda had yet to do anything that required him to be overly stern towards her). It wasn’t, he realized, necessarily a bad thing if Thistle coddled them because it was something he had no intentions of doing and in that way, similar as it was to in most ways, they balanced one another out. Thistle was the good cop and Ragnar was the bad cop (literally).
To Ragnar there had always been a clear line between being deceptive and outright lying. He was as deceptive as he needed to be as the situations arose, but he was not a liar. To others, perhaps, this manner of thinking was horrendously flawed where it was a fine line to walk. Ragnar’s thought processes didn’t seem to follow along the lines of what was ‘normal’. The Viking spoke what he meant because he didn’t like to encourage any misgivings. He wanted to be understood clearly and definitively at the very least when it mattered. Admittedly, there were times when he had allowed other’s their wrong assumptions of him, especially when it came to raids and he was a small team against an entire force of a pack.
Or in Ragnar's case: men.
Ragnar watched as Thistle ghosted forward a step and he scratched absently at his side with his back paw as he considered her question.
He liked to think he was a loving father but he would also not take any crap, either, whether it’s because it was how Eitri raised him or because he was simply a harsh man Ragnar wasn’t sure.