also btw...... when i say mike would be an elf in lotr... i dont mean the calm and graceful and silent third age elves we see in the LOTR movies.... no, he’s a silmarillion elf.

he’s not one of those calm, chill elves staring at leaves and singing hymns. he’s a feanorian frothing at the mouth and hastily making poorly thought-out oaths and jumping into situations. he’s flipping off the valar and walking backwards into hell. he’s having his s2 ‘yelling and punching hopper’ scene except it’s him yelling and punching melkor. he’s in his ‘get thee gone from my gate, thou jail-crow of Mandos’ era. i need u guys to know this. he is not one of the calm chill elves with patience and wisdom, he’s fingolfin strategizing for battle, he’s maedhros lamenting about his doom and then doing a backflip into the core of the earth. he’s pursuing the people he cares about to the end of the earth to save them even if it brings him face-to-face to hell incarnate!! even if it destroys him!! he’s the feeling of promising everything you are and will ever be to somebody and giving so much of yourself that you are doomed to your own destruction and your only hope of salvation is those who love you enough to carry your burdens no matter the fact that they are infinite and eternal. he is the feeling of wretched self-loathing and lack of purpose that festers into a growing anger at the world but more than that, into an anger at yourself that you take out on the world. he is the feeling of struggling not only against a fate that feels inevitable but against a fate that feels inevitable at his own hand!! he is the feeling of getting wrapped up in your own web of lies in your misguided attempt to save yourself!! he is the feeling of when family goes from comforting to suffocating!!! when the expectations of your family drive you to your doom!!! he is the feeling of escaping eternal forces against all odds only to be threatened by your own hand!!! when I say Mike would be an elf THIS is what I am talking about!!! I can see him being a human too with the indomitable passion and love of life and the tragedy of mortality but there’s also just something soooo Mike about being an immortal race who dies young at their own hand because of the circumstances of the world around them!! like the thing with humans is the feeling of being short-lived by nature, not by choice, the feeling of an inescapable end but when it comes to the elves it’s about the feeling of being short-lived by choice the feeling of escaping horrible atrocities and creatures and being immune to the passage of time only to find yourself standing on a cliff above the sea or above a hole burrowed into the core of the earth, ready to throw yourself into it so that the burdens you carry are not passed to anyone else!!! so that you can try and save them from your fate!!! Mike, like elves, embodies the feeling of watching those around you that you love die and suffer, especially mortals, as you watch and absorb all of it and try to save them but you know that in the end even if you save them from war and from beasts and from vengeful gods, you cannot save them from their ultimate fate and so you watch them pass and you wait for your grief to fester into something that bursts out of you eventually despite your attempts to wrangle it!!!

THIS is what I mean when I say that Mike would be an elf!!! it’s about digging past the stereotypes of the calm graceful, emotionless elves and instead staring at the feelings of repression and guilt and saviour complex and rage and passion and the endless pursuit of purpose that comes with the silmarillion elves!! the burden of it all!!! the complex familial dynamics of it all!!!! the following people that you love into hell and mutilating them in your attempts to save them from that hell of it all!!! and you do save them!! but you feel like it’s your fault that they needed to be saved in the first place so you still don’t FEEL like you saved them!!! the accidentally hurting people because it feels like you’re doomed by your nature to hurt people of it all!!! the feeling like a curse of it all!!! the LOVE of it all!!! the love that spurs your grief!! that spurs your self-sacrifice!!! the love that spurs all of it!! the love that sealed your fate!!! THAT IS WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT!!