#as an atheist I felt personally attacked during the ainulindale

[naruthandir]

I think the reason I like Melkor so much is because out of all the characters in Tolkien's world it's of the ones I connect to the most, that I have the most sympathy for.

(long post under the cut. nothing triggering I don't think, just a lot of words and pseudo-phylosophic rambling about order and chaos and nature and such)

From the beginning, I saw something of myself on the way he rebelled against Eru, who is pretty much a parental to him. He was not malicious in his attempts to create a melody of his own, and yet Ilúvatar ruthlessly shut him down, which in turn made Melkor bitter and contrarian. This was something I struggled with a lot growing up as an autistic child with ADHD: impulsiveness, clumsyness and lack of social awareness were severely punished, for reasons that were never explained to me. There was much talk about the importance of "respect", but I when I asked for a definition of that word no one was able to give it to me. I ended up believing that "respect" was synonymous with "compliance", and I grew to resent pretty much all authority figures around me as a result.

To me, Melkor represents the resentment one develops after trying the very best to be good and yet failing, time and time again, until you just lean into your role as a villain. "If evil the only thing I'm good at then why even try to be good? If everything I do is wrong why try to make things right?" And then you become a ball of pure hatred, towards the world and towards yourself, towards those who hurt you and those who love you.

Like. I just feel like Melkor is terribly unhappy. There is not one bit on joy in his life, the closest he gets is that rush of superiority you get from winning a fight, from bullying and tearing things apart and just the general gratification of being an asshole. But that isn't happiness. That's an unhealthy coping mechanism that leaves you feeling miserable every time.

Melkor is evil. I am not implying that he is not. But he is evil in that way Tolkien villains are so often evil: in a pathetic, genuinely pitiful way. And for me, also in an oddly relatable way. The actions of Melkor are by no way justified, they wouldn't be justified if he had the saddest backstory ever. That's not how it works. But I do think they were necessary, in a very strange way. Allow me to explain myself:

Nothing is perfect. We know this, that is just the way of things. Trying to change that, while understandable and oftentimes done with noble intent, is another sort of evil entirely (see: Mairon). And I think Melkor is just as much a part of the natural world as the rest of the Valar are. Eru created Melkor, after all, out of his own though, and it is said none of the Ainur can truly escape or contradict his will. That's entropy, baby: the universal constant that will kill the stars and that allows life all at the same time.

(note: entropy is often defined as a "tendency towards chaos", however this is a gross simplification of what it actually is. You could just as easily call it a "tendency towards equilibrium" and it'd be just as accurate, if not more. Truth is, this is a very complex concept physicist are still working to understand. And I am not a physicist. So don't ask any more questions.)

What I mean to say is that decay is a part of nature, and that seems to be a very relevant theme in Tolkien. And if a perfect God contains all possible attributes (we talked about this in phylosophy class) they must contain in their perfection evil and well. Flaws. And if the Ainur are just manifestations of different, often contradicting attributes of Eru, that means Melkor must be too.

I don't know exactly where I am going with this. Perhaps is just that I am a little annoyed, that people would call Morgoth (Or Sauron, for that matter) "plain villains", because thematically speaking they are very interesting, at least to me. I acknowledge there's a good bit of projection going on here, but really that's the only way I know of engaging with fiction and if Tolkien's words are worth anything, I do find this interpretation "applicable".