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kendrixtermina · 4 years

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Observations on the evolution of Maeglin’s character

One interesting thing is that while Maeglin’s role in the story had remained exactly the same (ie, being the dude who betrays Gondolin) since the very first draft version, his actual ‘character design’ underwet various radical changes everything from personality, appearance, background & his position in the city.

Maeglin Version 1.0 (Lost tales)

Appearance: Swarthy, unattractive

Personality: unlikeable, greedy, no fun to be around

Status: From a prestigious noble house that had somewhat lost its influence as of late, but unpopular for being a jerk, it was considered to make him related to the feanorians (who were at this point separate from the royal family and also just straight up scoundrels, at least the sons)

Backstory: Rumored to be part Orc. Had asked Turgon for Idril’s hand but Turgon kinda suspected that he largely wanted her cause she’s his only heir

Circumstances of Treason: Basically offered to betray the city as soon as he was threatened to “buy his freedom”, telling the orcs to take him to their leader cause he#d be more useful alive

So thus far a fairly unremarkable minor standard issue Slimy Villain à la Grima Wormtongue. Pretty boring. Only the idea that he’s a miner really survived from this stage

Maeglin Version 2.0 (Sketch of the mythology/Quenta)

Appearance: Still swarthy but distincly good-looking now

Personality: quite the opposite from before he’s now charming and a skilled sweet-talker, manipulative

Status: Because of the above charm he’s now actually rather respected in the city & Turgon likes him

Backstory: Here’s where his father first becomes one of the moriquendi, at this point a sindarin deserter of the war. Was one of the last few ppl to be allowed refuge in Gondolin (either alone or with his mom)

Circumstances of Treason: Got apprehended threatened. It’s stated explicitly that he wasn’t a coward or weakling, but this version was already plotting to overthrow Turgon before that happened

By this point he has at least become a cool villain

At this point Tolkien probably realized that he already had very many “charming silver-tongued schemer villains” (Morgoth, Sauron, Curufin...) and decided to give him another overhaul

Maeglin Version 3.0 (Final)

Appearance: Still good looking, but markedly pasty (to go with the new backstory of growing up in lightless dark wood)

Personality: Sort of intense, taciturn introvert, perceptive

Status: Still respected & popular but in this case it seems more deserved like he really worked his way up, cause he’s no longer a sweet talker but noted to be a brave warrior who marched out for the great battle, the gist is less “everyone was fooled by this jerk cause he was smooth” and more “if only he could’ve been content with the sucess he already had”

Backstory: You know this one already, the whole thing where he escapes from Eol with his mom only to get pursued & witness their deaths

Circumstances of Treason: Explicitly did get tortured & cracked eventually (at least it’s phrased that way in ‘Quendi and Eldar’)

Not coincidentally this is when Aredhel finally gets some characterization beyond “gets kidnapped” & emerged as this cool, likeable tragic character which probably made it seem only right that her kid get some reedeeming features as well (though this was probably also when he decided to make the elves more idealized as a whole, the lost tales have a lot more starring as episodic villains)- now he’s actually brave & did well enough as a lord, and initially just wanted to be free, get to know all those relatives he was always told about & learn more stuff. So a lot more distinctive than just some basic villain archetype.

That said it’s an overlooked aspect imho that he’s still ambitious, like its noted that he gets very interested once he hears Aredhel mention that Turgon is very rich & has no male heirs. Which is prolly why they made for Gondolin &not the much closer Feanorian territories cause those are just spartan war outposts & Celegorm has heirs a-plenty with his younger brother & nephew right there; (though part of it is probably that while Celegorm is fun to party with, Aredhel might’ve wanted to go to her reliable reasonale brother now that she’s in a real pinch, or she thought she wouldn’t be found in a more secret location) We’re also told that he very much pursued power & influence once he got to Gondolin (perhaps as overcompensation for having no luck with Idril)

Personally I’d say that wanting to be a respected influential leader isn’t necessarily bad in itself as long as it’s not pursued by crooked means (though some might disagree there) though it’s a character trait that I feel gets forgotten cause it’s not conductive to woobiefication.

Still, for the final version it seems unlikely that he would have done anything worse than quietly simmer in bitterness over being jilted and being a bit of a jerk to Tuor if Morgoth hadn’t got his hands on him; (Consider that Morgoth had a huge grudge against his grandfather, too) It’s not his fault he got tortured and while he did have exploitable character flaws you can see how if he’d had a better life he might’ve been as heroic as all the other nolofinweans, so he’s a lot more tragic.

Bit of a waste that he never got to meet Fingolfin or Gil-Galad though they were alive at the same time. (though he could’ve conceivably have met Fingon at the pre-battle strategy meetings and C&C while he & his mom were making their escape, probably Celebrimbor too if he did wind up in Gondolin. )

Must’ve sucked to be the only one who didn’t personally know Fingolfin when Throndor dropped off his body & there was presumably a funeral. I’d also speculate that part of the reason he didn’t like the “Flee to the Sea” plan was that he had no idea what Valinor is like (probably feeling left out when Idril, Turgon & the other lords talked about it) & feared he might lose what influence he had if they got there.

#silmarillion #maeglin #lomion #maeglin lomion

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lightdancer1 · 3 years

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The flip side of having Nessa go to Arda:

Is that she is a full-fledged Valie....who is the least of her order. That puts her in a territory of powerful but less powerful than Sauron even before his fall, let alone when he turbocharges his power with the Ring. And the most powerful of the Maiar, Ilmare and Eonwe, are more powerful than she is in raw power.

As a Valie, however, her nature is less 'swing a big hammer' and more that she is the literal metaphysical embodiment of gaiety ,festivity, and well....joy and happiness in Valinor and in Aman. She shares with her Varda-verse incarnation (and every other version of Nessa who shows up in my stories) being the magic spirit of FTL, though it only comes up in a flashback where Nessa evades starlight aiming at her (where Varda just wades through it without issues because stars can't harm their creator).

When she goes full Destruction of the Endless and quits, essentially, and goes to live life as the Valie equivalent of a hippie she sucks all the joy out of Valinor with her, which when the Feanorians and the House of Finwe are starting to go full Game of Thrones is a very, very bad thing.

She is more of a hero antagonist in this story and a straightforward hero in others, mostly because she's working on improving herself and wanting to be known for 'more than the least of the Valar'.

It *also* means that the free peoples have a straight up Vala on their side all along, and that Nessa becomes deeply attached to becoming a more powerful prototype for the Istari (and an inspiration for them) not least because if it were a raw trial of strength she'd be FUBARed against Sauron and Morgoth until it's very late stage Morgoth.

To put it another way, this story explores the nature of the idea of power, strength, and the way these things work as well as deconstructing a bunch of ideas that come up in both fanfic and as various alternatives to how the Valar handled things canonically. With the metafictional irony that one of the Valar most interested in walling off Valinor is the one who happens to become Valie!Canon Galadriel in storytelling terms in this AU.

#marring of valinor au #nessa

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feanorianethicsdepartment · 3 years

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so @sunflowersupremes posted an au that i had this really viscerally horrified reaction to. couldn’t stop thinking about it, so i went to known peddler in all things horrible happening to maedhros @outofangband to chat about all the ways well-meaning tirion society could make late stage fëanorians even worse. we ended up talking in dms about it, topics covered include:

the noldor’s general ‘let’s pretend none of this ever happened’ vibe, and their subsequent failure to actually help with any of the brothers’ many, many mental problems

their preferal for keeping things nice and calm and peaceful over, again, actually helping

stopping an hour-long mae v mags shriekfest by gagging the boys and telling them to not make such a racket, like

this not helping maedhros’ angband issues At All

maedhros’ angband issues cause many, many problems! sometimes he’ll start acting like he’s still there, and none of the amanyar know how to deal with it

they just - they don’t get it. they weren’t there for the war, they don’t know how to deal with its wounds, they especially don’t know anything about angband survivors or the ways that trauma lingers

sometimes they get offended by how maedhros acts. sometimes they think he’s being deliberately insulting or sarcastic. fun!

(most of the angband stuff is nelyo’s, for the record, and i feel like i’m not doing it justice)

there just being so potential for abuse in this situation, intentional and well-meaning

how the only person they’re in regular contact with who might Get It is finrod

how finrod could very well bear a grudge. especially if he’s heard the the-fëanorians-left-us-to-die version of the nirnaeth

how they have very little access to their comfort items, mostly because the amanyar find them disgusting

granted there is probably at least one severed limb in there, but there’s also a piece of tangled cord one of the twins made that maglor has

it gets taken away because 'you caused those boys a lot of grief, you know? please stop romanticising your relationship with them'

this led into me going on a rant about how everyone is wrong about maglor’s relationship with the twins except me

but just - that. that mood

‘be the people we want you to be, and we can forget all this nastiness ever happened’

that reads so terrifying to me

#maglor #maedhros #homecoming au #suicide ///#self harm ///#mental health issues ///#late stage feanorians #sorry sunflower #i wouldn't even call this a dark au it's more the logical conclusion of the setup as presented #to me at least #finarfin did it to protect his nephews but i feel like they'd have been better off being handed over to the valar #they'd probably wind up in some permutation of elf afterlife therapy #where they could get professional halls-maiar help and see their loved ones again #it'd be better than *this*#i feel like i'm projecting onto mags way too much again

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feanorianethicsdepartment · 3 years

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time travel aus, amirite? since we’ve all decided to start talking about our ideas, i thought i’d throw my hat into the ring. i’ve actually had this idea for a while, i just wasn’t sure what to do with it because i barely have the patience for one-shots, let alone the continuous plotted longfic this would need

it’s not my idea, of course, i’m incapable of original thought. it’s based off this can-i-really-call-it-a-genre-if-it’s-two-fics-with-the-same-premise where some combination of maedhros, maglor, elros, and elrond land in the blessed realm before - even the unchaining, in my take, when the ambarussa are still children and the world is blissful. it’s more specifically my take on this fic, which takes elrond and elros from very early in their captivity and maedhros from just before the silmaril theft and maglor from several centuries into the second age. i just plugged my own characterisations into it, and, uh. the specific setup this not-genre uses is that maitimo and makalaurë *~mysteriously disappear,~* throwing their extended family into chaos, blah blah blah, and then a few decades later -

well. with my characterisations, we have a nightmare hellbeast who’s burned up everything he used to be in singular pursuit of an unreachable goal and has carved his very self into a weapon, a completely drained beaten-up husk barely cognisant of reality past the screaming in his mind who’s so utterly broken it’s debatable if he even counts as an elda, and two extremely young extremely traumatised children in a completely unfamiliar land- and skyscape whose only adult they can maybe-kind-of trust is currently bleeding from the eyes and shrieking wordless notes of utter despair

yeah, this au’s Fun. elrond and elros have maybe eight words of quenya between them, most of which are obscene, maedhros will act completely normal until he suddenly stabs himself in the arm because can’t this stupid hallucination end already, he has a character arc to tank, and maglor seems completely unaware he’s not still on the beach having the same cyclic arguments with the ghosts of the people he failed. the elves of valinor aren’t completely unprepared to deal with this, at least not the ones who remember cuiviénen, but it’s still a massive shock to see two of the children they came to the land of the gods to protect twisted and scarred like the worst victims of the dark. especially since noone can figure out why

so yeah. i have trouble finishing oneshot collections, so i doubt i’ll ever write this out in full, but i do have a lot of Scenes. fëanáro staring in utter horror at the oath, whispering ‘i made this.’ elros and elrond’s somewhat hole-filled explanation of their backstory devolving into a sindarin argument, and when the family asks tyelkormo what they’re talking about he freezes before saying ‘they’re arguing about whether maitimo killed their mother.’ the moment maglor finally managed to get through what happened after they got the silmarils to maedhros, who immediately switches from off-the-cuff self-harm to well-planned suicide attempts. the five-minute period the family hellspawn’s working theory was ‘they’re maitimo and makalaurë from an alternate universe where we’re evil’ (‘is there an evil version of me??? does he eat kids???????’ - tyelko) finwë going full bulldoze taniquetil in the background. fun times, might write some snippets in the future

but i like to think through the mechanics of this kind of time travel story too much, so i started wondering where maitimo and makalaurë, yanno, went. i quickly came to the conclusion that they probably swapped places with their evil future selves, giving me three time travel aus for the price of one! technically four but (a) i’m not sure if or with who the twins would swap and (b) if they did their alternate selves are probably having a really bad time and i don’t particularly want to think about it. the stories maitimo and makalaurë are in... they’re not necessarily any happier, but they are a lot more wtftastic

maitimo falls asleep under the light of the trees, on a relaxing retreat from the demands of court life and family-induced disasters. he wakes up in a world that’s almost completely dark, surrounded by plants he’s never seen before and wearing clothing designed for a much warmer climate, the scent of death in the air. now permanently separated from all his old problems, maitimo rapidly acquires several exciting new ones, including but not limited to:

everyone he ever loved being dead or worse

the lone possible exception, his last surviving little brother, being an almost unrecognisable blood-drenched kinslayer who hates everything in the universe especially himself

said blood-drenched kinslayer almost immediately imprinting on him like a grouchy murderous duckling

his future self having apparently wanted to kill even more people, why

getting dogpiled by like thirty dudes in full armour the instant they showed up at the army of the west’s camp to surrender

getting soul-scanned by eönw two minutes later. not fun

arafinwë pulling him into an enormous hug and then bursting into tears

the subsequent explanation as to just what happened to him and his brothers, which somehow got worse after he’d already thought they’d hit rock bottom like four separate times

proceeding to lose a staring contest with findaráto

the way everyone in camp looks at him like he’s an incredibly dangerous wild animal that might bite at any time

how if half of what arafinwë said is true he can’t even blame them, fuck, fuck

the twin half-elven(?????????????) princes he and his brother apparently kidnapped and held hostage for years, inflicting unimaginable cruelties as far as anyone knows

his first meeting with the kids happening when elrond broke into where they were holding maglor to scream at him in very loud very fast very angry sindarin for like half an hour

maglor just staring at him, eyes wide, ears pinned back, the whole time, and then trying to maul the first guard who mocked him for it

getting saddled with kinslayer containment duties in the aftermath of that whole incident

elrond punching him in the collarbone when he tried to apologise, shouting ‘you weren’t there, don’t you dare try to tell me what it was like’

elros’ visible half second of pure terror after the blow hit home

elros then using recognisable techniques from maitimo’s debate team circuit during a speech to the edain

like, clearly some shit did happen, but it’s obviously not what the local leadership’s afraid of

this sour-faced scar-covered warrior slipping out of the shadows in an unpopulated part of camp, kneeling before him, intoning ‘the swords of the host remain at your disposal my lord’ and then immediately vanishing

he didn’t recognise them until after they’d left but they were definitely one of his philosophy club friends, what even

just generally having woken up in a future a thousand times worse than his darkest nightmares

his natural instinct is to try and fix things, but how?? what’s even left to fix????

maglor sometimes goes into these unhinged desperate spiralling rambles directed at the older brother who exists in his head rather than the one in front of his eyes. whatever’s left of maitimo’s biggest little brother is clearly in so much pain

all the things he’s trying extremely hard not to think about because if he slows down enough to he’s pretty sure he’ll collapse

all the people he’s never met who hate him for pretty understandable reasons and whose social structure he now has to learn to have any hope of making it out of All This

the edain’s collective insistence on calling him pasthros

curufinwë isn’t even a hundred how does he have a kid

makalaurë, on the other hand, wakes up on a beach beneath a giant glowing orb. finding himself in a land so much barer than what he knows, among people whose souls don’t even work like his, his initial working theory is he’s been abducted by aliens

#silmarillion #my terrible fic #maedhros #maglor #elrond #elros #house of feanor #suicide ///#self harm ///#or in other words #late stage feanorians #other mental images include:#nelyo getting stupidly drunk with a bunch of edain enablers #random human fisherman: better not go out to the shore by night. there's a wandering spirit that sings of death and devours souls #kano: wow. you got a lot of those around here or #nelyo and kano glowing like beacons (they were just in the treelight after all) and constantly being surrounded by curious humans #nelyo talking the elro twins into talking to earendil while they still have a chance #galadriel: how dare you show your face around here kinslayer!!!#kano: ... wait are you artanis #he subsequently meets elrond and then serves as a sounding board for elrond's maglor issues #elrond: you know you act a lot like he did when he was blatantly faking being happy #kano: ... WELP #honestly i do feel like nelyo hangs out more with the edain than the other elves #for fun at least. he is bodily dragging mags into lorien he's never going to see these people again ever #as for the political situation... bless him he's trying #idk how all these aus interact i suspect there's divergent timelines involved #one last image:#seeing as how if he continues how he is everyone and everything he's ever loved will burn and die #feanaro steels himself up for the impossible #making up with nolofinwe

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feanorianethicsdepartment · 3 years

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some scattered thoughts about what i’ve started calling the homecoming au, that au where maedhros and maglor come back to tirion after the war of wrath, end up prisoners-in-all-but-name in finarfin’s palace, and nothing is beautiful and everything hurts. credit for @sunflowersupremes for writing the au that for lack of a better word inspired me, credit to @outofangband for listening to me blather about this over dms, warning to everybody, this au is dark. it’s essentially about maedhros and maglor being abused for being mentally ill, talk of suicide, late stage fëanorians somehow getting worse, generally not a fun time. caveat lector

i feel like it’s worth emphasising that by the end of the war of wrath maedhros and maglor are in a bad, bad mental state

they’re so inured to violence death means nothing to them, and neither of them really remembers what it feels like to be happy. they’ve lost everything, whether to the fires of war or the maw of the oath. there are so many things maglor can’t let himself think about or he’ll tip off the precipice into madness, so many things maedhros has quietly put aside to deal with after the end of the world. they’ve got nothing left but ash and nowhere to go but their own destruction. they’re fully aware of the monsters they are, and they loathe those monsters as much as anyone else

finarfin’s offer of mercy feels like a miracle. it’s a way - it’s a way out, first and foremost, a way to somewhere else, because what could possibly be worse than this? maybe it’s even a way back to the dreamlike world of their childhood, when they were more than their sharp edges and they could look on the future without despair. i figure this is an au where maglor won that last argument, predicated entirely on the possibility of an existence without pain

maedhros is skeptical, but logics himself into going along. on one condition

‘please’ maglor tells their uncle, trying to let his guard down and show as much vulnerability as his pride will allow. ‘do not give us to the valar’

he’s more successful than he realises. the last remaining sons of fëanor have been growing visibly more and more unstable for decades now. even the elves who were once their closest lieutenants approach them with caution now

finarfin catches a glimpse of what his nephews have become. he makes a conscious decision to choose pity over fear

which - yeah, alright. maglor and maedhros need therapy, they need to process their emotions in healthy ways and build selves they can be comfortable in the skins of again. and the general mood in tirion is one of reconciliation. it was the younger generation that went to beleriand, so many people have children they feel like they’ve failed

but if they can un-fail these two, maybe there’s hope. maybe there’s a chance for them to heal

except, well. nobody who stayed in aman - nobody who’s seen cuiviénen, really, beleriand was nasty - can really process just how much healing needs to be done

like. i’ve said this before, but screeching furiously at each other at high volume for multiple hours is a regular thing maedhros and maglor do. they’re the last people in the world either of them is even slightly close to, their relationship is shot through with as much bitter hate as it is steady reliance, and really, who else can they yell at

it’s a maladaptive coping mechanism. their minders recognise this inside five minutes, i’ll give them that much

it’s just. their eventual method of stopping the fight, after trying and failing to talk the brothers down, is to jump them and gag them to stop them making so much noise

partially they were worried it might escalate into a physical fight, which to be fair, these screaming matches occasionally do. but partially they just wanted them to stop

(this is the first really big incident, but things have been subtly, uncomfortably wrong for a while now. there’s this vibe that everything would be so much easier if the brothers just behaved. acted like the nice normal princes they used to be)

(but they can’t. they’re trying (well, maglor is; maedhros is mostly going along out of resignation) but they can’t. and when all the little tensions of this supposed-to-be-happy-ending get too much, they take it out on each other, like they always do. what are they supposed to do, unleash their own corruption onto the innocent valinoreans?)

(as is usual with these shriekfests, it got vicious fast. it was maedhros saying that he should have just killed the both of them back in beleriand that makes their minders decide they have to stop this now)

the whole situation’s a mess. the way the non-exile noldor are thinking, if they can just put all the unpleasantness behind them, things can go back to normal and they can forget any of this ever happened

the valinoreans are trying to help, you understand. it’s just that their definition of ‘help’ involves sweeping everything under the rug so they can all be happy again

and everything the brothers do to remind people of all that makes them... uncomfortable

maedhros and maglor are never left alone. there’s always someone within at least hearing distance, keeping an eye on them. they initially say it’s for the brothers’ own benefit - so there’s always someone nearby in case they need help, like - but the first time maglor gets so frustrated he starts trashing his room he is immediately seized

the valinoreans get very good at stopping the brothers from doing the thing. they are less good at addressing the reasons why the brothers feel the need to do the thing

maglor is by far the angrier of the two. when he has a bad day, everyone around him knows it. he snarks, he glares at people from corners, he refuses to be at all cooperative. even on his good days, his mood never goes far above ‘melancholic’

maedhros, on the other hand, is quiet. he does what people tell him to, mostly. he sits in place and acts the perfect patient and only occasionally tries to kill himself. a poisonous plant picked here, a window’s lock subtly fiddled with there, he’s good at waiting for his minders to lower their guard enough he can take a chance

(neither of them are particularly violent towards the valinoreans to begin with, and their violent tendencies towards themselves, each other, and inanimate objects quickly recede. lashing out like that always, always makes things worse)

sometimes he’ll regress back into behaviours he learned in angband. the first time this happens and the valinoreans figure out what’s going on, he gets a very polite finarfin asking him to please stop equating them with the enemy, finarfin knows they aren’t settling in as well as they might but it’s very offensive to be compared to morgoth

still, they learn. there’s this one incident when maedhros is having a fit, and while all their minders are running about trying to make him stop, maglor, who happens to be in the room, is standing completely still, staring at nothing

one of the minders snaps ‘come on, help! don’t you care about your brother?’

... he does. they’re closer now than they were in beleriand, leaning against each others’ bodies, quietly holding hands. the palace is full of people all the time, but they’re still so isolated from the rest of the world

it’s just hard to protect someone else when you’re barely hanging on yourself

you ever write a perfect closing line, and also it’s 1:30 am? yep, yep, i’m going to bed. more tomorrow, i’d guesstimate three parts in total

#homecoming au #suicide ///#abuse ///#mental health issues ///#ableism ///#late stage feanorians #maedhros #maglor #finarfin #noldor #this ain't gonna get any prettier #my terrible fic

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feanorianethicsdepartment · 3 years

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it’s not the burning of their hands that drives the last two fëanorians over the edge

i mean, the silmarils do burn their hands. the hallowing of varda is caustic to the marring of arda, and after all of the murder those two are marred like hell. thing is, this isn’t exactly new information? they’re both well aware that they’ve been faceplanting the void for the past century, it would be more confusing if they didn’t burn. it hurts a lot, but they’ve both known worse, especially maedhros. enough to have the presence of mind to put the things down, at least. and honestly, if they cared about the valar’s opinion of them they wouldn’t have stolen the rocks in the first place

it’s a little more accurate to blame their mutual breakdown on the realisation that they’ve thrown away absolutely everything they ever held dear in pursuit of some shinies they don’t even know what to do with now. their dreams went up in smoke, one by one, and that glittering future built beneath the silmarils’ light is so impossible it’s ridiculous for a ragtag band of war criminals who’ve burned every conceivable bridge. at heart, the fëanorians are idealists, and to have those ideals finally, definitively fail -

except that revelation was less an instantaneous shattering and more a gradual erosion. pretty much everyone left in beleriand lost all hope in the last years before the armies of the west came, and even after that the kinslayers still had nothing left. despair has been a permanent fëanorian camp follower for decades before the theft of the silmarils, and i doubt anyone in that camp thought getting them back was going to magically fix everything. the mere fact that the brothers chased away the last of their minions before sneaking into the valinorean camp shows that they already knew they were almost out of options. maybe that knowledge would have driven them to destruction in the long term, but i don’t think it would have been as immediately violent

no, what causes the last sons of fëanor to finally, finally snap isn’t the hallowing of varda or the realisation that they’ve failed. it’s the light

the light of the silmarils is the light of the trees is the light of the lamps is the fire of creation. it burns from beyond the circles of the world, unmarred by the distortions of matter and energy. no illusions can survive beneath that perfect light, in its rays all hidden things are revealed. beneath the radiance blazing at the heart of eternity, all things show their true forms, and all lies burn away. in the instant maedhros and maglor touch the silmarils, all their flimsy justifications and petty self-delusions are scoured away by the incandescent brilliance, and they are left face-to-face with their true selves

and then the screaming starts

for so, so long now, maglor’s been lying to himself. ‘i’m okay with this,’ ‘this is what needs to be done,’ ‘it’ll all be worth it in the end,’ a thousand little lies that at some point became the only thing keeping him moving on, a bitter ash-tasting duty that grew into a substitute for hope. he built his identity around the oath, forged his body, his voice, his very soul into a weapon, and now he can suddenly see how pointless it all was, how little a chance they ever had, how thoroughly he deceived himself, how he turned himself into a monster for absolutely nothing. the part of himself that was horrified by alqualondë which he thought he’d strangled by doriath comes roaring back into his consciousness, the line between sanity and madness vanishes and he careens into the void, and somewhere deep within the twisted mockery he’s become, makalaurë is screaming

but while maglor’s mind is crashing on like ten different levels, maedhros slowly stands up. without the last desperate remnants of hope clouding his vision, the only path forward is perfectly and completely clear

#silmarillion #maedhros #maglor #silmarils #my terrible headcanons #non dumb headcanon #late stage feanorians #i feel like that should be a content warning tag #god endgame mags' headspace is Not Fun #this is why i'm in favour of him going back to valinor at some point #bitch needs like turbo therapy #while monsterdad era mags seems a lot happier he's less resolved all this than papered over it #as and for mae... honestly the results speak for themselves

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feanorianethicsdepartment · 3 years

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more thoughts about the homecoming au, the au where maedhros and maglor get brought back to tirion after the war of wrath to be prettied-up trinkets on finarfin’s shelf, with painted-over scars and muffled screams. it is dark, it’s full of all kinds of emotional and caretaker abuse, and the brothers weren’t exactly in a good state of mind before any of this happened. @sunflowersupremes wrote the initial au that wasn’t even meant as horror, @outofangband - this au is as much theirs as mine, several of the concepts here were originally theirs, and a lot of this originally came out in dms with them. part 1 is here. this part contains gaslighting, loss of autonomy right at the end, more suicide mentions (thanks mae) and just general abuse from people who care more about their own comfort than the people they’re supposed to be caring for. it’s worse than the first part, honestly

most of the stuff the fëanorians had on them when they surrendered got taken away pretty fast. which is honestly understandable; some of it was cursed, a lot of it was weaponry, all of it stank to the high vault of the stars

but they both managed to hold onto some personal effects, or get them back before they went in the incinerator. a broken locket, a torn-up book, nothing fancy, nothing large, but things that still mean a lot to them

the valinoreans aren’t entirely comfortable with this. they find a lot of the brothers’ comfort items mildly disturbing, stained with darkness and (occasionally literal) blood as they are. maedhros had this dessicated finger he refuses to explain anything about that got disposed of very quickly

maglor has a few strands of brightly coloured thread, spun around each other somewhat inexpertly. he tends to pull it out when he’s feeling depressed, working it between his fingers until he feels like he can face the world again

one day, one of his minders who gets along better with him asks where he got it. from the twins, maglor admits. it’s part of some embroidery elrond abandoned when they left -

and it’s snatched out of his hands. his minder looks down at him compassionately. ‘i know you miss them, but you caused those boys a lot of pain, you know? you shouldn’t romanticise your relationship with them’

which - maglor’s relationship with the twins was complicated, and while it wasn’t nearly as hellish as elwing fears, it wasn’t entirely healthy. maglor was dependent emotionally on the kids a lot more than any adult should be to children, and vice versa

because the twins were the last people he had left. when maedhros executed celegorm’s servants with no warning at all, this rift began to grow between the sons of fëanor and their followers. they’d always been terrifying, but they’d also been comradely and inspiring, the white-hot stars around which their people orbited. but when they turned their fangs on their own host, all that started to fall away, leaving only the fear behind

it got worse after sirion. by the time vingilot rose in the sky, maglor’s only real remaining relationships were with maedhros, who he hated as much as he loved, and the twins. watching over them, talking to them, not hurting them - it kept him grounded in reality, kept him sane

he knows, he knows, he knows, they’re better off without him. but his time with them is the only happiness in his memories that still feels real

but the valinoreans can’t accept that. the exile was an awful time with nothing in it worth keeping, and the sooner he can recognise that the faster he’ll be back to his old self

besides. their caretakers don’t like being reminded of their more... unpleasant deeds

(elwing sidebar: elwing and eärendil are having an easier time, because the teleri have experience dealing with trauma and are also just more accepting of the right to have your own take on your own experiences. still, though, elwing occasionally hears that a proper telerin mother would have stayed with her children, even if she had to give up the treasure her people died for to the monsters of her childhood nightmares)

(elwing was a young adult in a horrendous situation with no obvious way out, elwing is dealing with her own damage as best she can, elwing is valid, we stan elwing. she’s also one of the few direct-ish sources the noldor have for beleriand and what the fëanorians did there, and her (perfectly reasonable!) perspective colours a lot of their treatment)

in general the valinorean noldor are quite sure they know what beleriand was like and how it felt to be there, and aren’t particularly interested in being proven wrong

it was miserable, it was harrowing, it was nothing anyone should want to think about. it was a long nightmare maedhros and maglor are so fortunate to have finally woken up from

and you can kind of see why they think like that? the ones who have seen the hither shores saw them when ash rained from a void-black sky and almost everything was dead, and the survivors told stories of a long hopeless defeat and cruelties beyond imagining

but that deep black image blots out the genuine joy they felt in those five hundred years, the chance to prove their own greatness, the knowledge they were doing something good, nights when music echoed across the gap, warm hands in a cold fortress. there were things in beleriand worth remembering, aspects of the people they became there legitimately worth keeping

and even if there wasn’t - five hundred years. the scars on their bodies make it plain to see, every little piece of who they are was shaped by beleriand, for worse and for better. they just can’t leave it behind

their valinorean caretakers find this horrifying

maedhros likes to exercise. it keeps him calm, gives him something to do. it’s not something nelyafinwë was super into - he was more the peripatetic type - but it’s a feasible hobby for a noldorin prince to have, so he’s allowed to do it

sometimes, though, he’ll unconsciously shift into the old combat forms, precisely timed drills ingrained into his bodies. the first few times he does this, his minders are bemused more than anything, but then one day he happens to have a stick in hand to use as a mock-sword

then every time he starts to slip away into that meditative trance, hands reach out to stop him and hold him in place. ‘there’s no need to fight here, maitimo,’ an elf he knew before the unchaining tells him ever so gently. ‘you’re safe now’

... they say that, but maedhros’ nightmares keep getting worse

it’s like that with everything that makes the valinoreans uncomfortable. whenever they try to speak of their time in beleriand, no matter what they say, they’re told that oh, they know it was hard, but it’s all over now and they don’t have to dwell on it

but even after they’ve spent years in paradise, maedhros and maglor still won’t let go and allow themselves to heal

they just can’t come to terms with the truth of their ordeal

the narrative the valinoreans have constructed erases all of the bright spots, but it also bleaches out the true darkness

certainly they did horrible things, but did they really have a choice? in such a harsh world, they always had to be on guard, lest they themselves be killed. these poor boys never meant to harm anyone, but their father’s cruel madness and the painful chains of their oath and the vileness of beleriand forced them into atrocities they never wanted to commit

(surely the monsters the sindar spoke of wouldn’t cry. they wouldn’t lose themselves in waking nightmares or curl up shivering in well-hidden closets, they wouldn’t jump away from a casual touch or watch every new person like they might be a threat. they wouldn’t convince themselves the children they stole were happy, or talk to the shade of a dead kinsman they abandoned. surely they wouldn’t. surely)

(because if they are, and they’ve let a couple of orcs loose into the royal palace...)

(maglor and maedhros’ movements are pretty restricted. this is mostly for their own protection, but it’s partially - well, just in case. just in case)

this rankles at maedhros, though he tries not to show it. terrible they might have been, but his choices were his own

he was a warlord, he was a king. he expected to be hated for the things he had done. he didn’t expect to be pitied. he didn’t expect to be dismissed

sometimes, when he’s surrounded by people earnestly telling him that he’s not a bad person, he never was, it was all pressure from his father and the oath, he wants to scream that he chose to attack sirion because he was so, so tired of diplomatically dancing around problems he knew he could solve with his blade

but he stops himself, always. he knows how much what little freedom they do have is based on them not being a threat

and he will not wash this peaceful, innocent land in blood. he’ll kill himself first

maglor has lost all such scruples

it’s not often, but when they’re behaving themselves and no one who’s likely to take offense is in town, the brothers get taken out to court events

they paint makeup over their scars (which still won’t heal, everyone is concerned by the implications of this) dress them up in finery, string them with jewels, and show off how well they’re doing

(even if maedhros rarely says anything, and they never leave each other’s side)

tonight, it’s a feast. a minor celebration, nothing too crowded, nothing too loud. there’s revels and merrymaking and all kinds of fun

and after the food has been cleared away, there’s music

would his nephew like to play something, finarfin asks. it’s hard to tell if it’s a request or a politely phrased order

maglor decides he doesn’t have the patience to be taken aside and tell how much everyone wanted to hear his music, and accepts

finarfin smiles kindly. he’s thinking about how maglor’s minders have been talking about how he’s finally stopped trying to sing depressing or horrifying songs and how his voice grows more melodious by the day

maglor is thinking about how they won’t even let him sing about his wife. he wrote no odes to her beauty or her skill in the forge, but he sang ballads about the swiftness of her spear and her laughter after a battle

none of which the valinoreans want to hear. they want to pretend that love never existed, that there could be any joy found in darkness, that she’s at all worth remembering -

he gets up to play, and launches into the most vicious, most hopeless, most painful part of the noldolantë

they try to stop him, but he’s the greatest warsinger the world has ever seen, he’s sung with blood in his lungs over the roaring of dragons, there’s little they can do to block out everything they’re trying to ignore. he wails defeat and death and grief and death and despair and death

when they finally manage to knock him out, their whole petty festival in tatters, shock on their faces, tears streaming from their eyes, all he can think is that if they understand now, even a little, it’ll have been worth it

for the first time, but not the last, he wakes up in a cell

finarfin comes to visit, and starts giving a very disappointed lecture maglor is in no mood to hear. instead he just snarls that nothing they’ve been doing is helping him at all, and he’s so sick of false sympathy and no one listening to what his actual problems are

finarfin shuts his eyes, says ‘i’m sorry to hear you feel that way’ and leaves

a few days later he wakes up with a collar around his neck

it’s demeaning, but he gets released that morning, so he rolls with it. he gets told to never do that ever again, first by his minders and then by maedhros

his minders he nods at until they leave him alone. maedhros he snarks back at that it’s not like he’s doing anything to improve their condition

only he can’t

the words don’t just freeze in his throat, they can’t even form in his mind. what’s happening, he can’t say. what did you do to me, he can’t say. he can’t even scream

as maglor is clutching at his neck (he can’t get it off he can’t get it off) and all the colour is draining out of maedhros’ face, the minder in the room smiles

‘see? this way you’ll stop making yourself and everyone around you miserable. you can still talk about happy things -’

‘they did this in angband!’ maedhros roars, a statement that provokes his first actual fight with their minders. he’s harder to pin down than maglor. bigger

but their caretakers are becoming annoyed with the brothers’ obstinate refusal to let themselves get better. they may be content to wallow in the misery of their past, but inflicting it on others is a step too far

they clearly aren’t going to move any further down the road to recovery on their own volition, so it’s become clear they need a gentle push. is it a little distasteful? yes, but such things are sometimes necessary in medicine

the bright cheerful princes they will be again will thank them for it

oh god how did this end up so long. the last one should be shorter, it’s mostly clearing up some loose ends. why did i write this

#maedhros #maglor #homecoming au #my terrible fic #finarfin #noldor #late stage feanorians #abuse //#mental health issues ///#suicide mention //#gaslighting //#eeeeeeeeesh #i am not sure what i was trying to get across actually comes across in this #i ran out of unova pokedex before i ran out of fic #(the long one from b2w2. no i'm not explaining that)#it is three am!#and i'm not trying to start anything with that section about how the noldor minimise the feanorians' deeds #other people have their headcanons and that's cool. i have mine #i don't see them as 'entirely evil' (whatever that means) but i have felt like my own imperfections mean i don't deserve help before #... can you tell this is a vent fic yet #mags gets more focus because mags is the character i project onto #i've thought about him more; i have a more solid grasp of what i think his character is #'s why i got nelyo in on this. they're the creme de la creme at bad shit happening to maedhros and i wanted someone to cover his corner #this au is awful why am i writing it

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