#if the choice is your mortal existence versus even a whole century or more she would say yes. because theres still time

[isaacathom]

i have so many thoughts about my campaign but absolutely nothing coherent. just snatches of ideas. the most clear thing i have in my head is that, if the acting-commodore steps down once he has liberty, and in the ensuing election and hullabaloo, naielle becomes commodore, there is absolutely no way she comes back from the jade sea

naielle understands how she gets when shes stressed, when theres crisis. theres a point along this bell curve of emotion, pursuant to context, where she stops thinking about herself and only those around her. and once that threshold is passed, she'll do damn near anything for them.

as commodore, her station would necessitate being that much more aware of the crisis. that much more aware of the state of play. that much more aware of the myriad lives that she holds in her hands.

she would cross that threshold far sooner.

she knows this about herself, and it applies outside of formal responsibility. she knows this, and does not know how to change it, and so instead she removes options from herself. like changing the phone's password just before wisdom teeth removal to prevent from saying something nonsensical online, she has to put the weapon away before she becomes of a mind to use it.

she's failed at that before. she told herself the weapon she had would be safe in her hands, that she'd use it only for 'good', and not ill. and in short order she had used it to enthrall, to even temporarily rob a man of free will.

she has such a weapon now. two, even, if you like.

the first, and least likely to kill her outright, is a caged king of dragons, whose essence is hostile to mortality but whose personality is not, who sees the crew as a means to liberate himself, his breathren, and their domain. she uses his power sparingly for its risk, but she's come close before, and been lucky not to be overwhelmed. there is far more power she could gain from him, but it would tear at her from the inside, like a hollowing parasite. she's seen a dragon's power wrought on a mortal, and seen that he marks a man decades older than he ought be. She may be an elf, but even decades would see her predecease a great many people, and that assumes it does not do her worse. She doesn't know.

the second is the offer, if it can be called that, of her patron. reach for the stars, young elf, and find the divine. channel his power in the storm to banish the dark, and in so doing lose yourself. merge with the celestial. its death, she thinks when out of crisis. sure, theres a lingering of the soul, bound in the eternal starlight of the astral sea. but the form is gone, and much of the person. to merge with him would change her, and she would never see her loved ones again.

but his power could save them all.

a naielle who is mere captain, whose responsibilites are smaller, who is delegated specific tasks, has the capacity to decide to be selfish. she has the capacity, and the excuse perhaps, to decide that she refuses godhood. she can risk success for her own soul, if she likes. she may yet do so.

a naielle who is commodore, and for whom's patron remains in earshot, will take that weapon and point it at their ultimate foe, and consider one life worth thousands.

[vardasvapors]

I started writing separate answers but realized I was repeating myself so I hope it’s okay that I combined these to spare my dash! Anyway SORRY THIS IS LATE I wasn’t quite sure how to word it concisely….also thank u for giving me an excuse to scroll up to a great convo I had months ago for reference >_o

re: Luthien’s song passage. It seems to be creating one phenomenon out of dual experiences of how painful it is for these two races to meet one another and bewitch one another and be doomed to different fates? The two closest peoples, like it’s described, on the world among the innumerable stars. And yet Mandos responds to this lament by…uh, enabling the peredhil, who are both, yet choose one fate. The grief and sorrow of this weaving-together isn’t removed – if anything it’s forced into continuing manifestations, yet Luthien transmuted this grief into song and by dint of it made it beautiful, and Mandos acknowledged its enormity, so people in-universe who know that story have a foothold for meaning. As part of the peredhil’s overall fates, they choose which anguish to endure, since they, unlike most elves and men in most eras, can’t avoid the perilousness — as Tolkien put it using this word so many times — of the contact between mortality and immortality, whichever side they view it from.

I guess one of the most interesting things about Tolkien elves for me is how life- and character-altering an influence and bond something as brief as a friendship of years or months with a mortal has had on multiple different elves. It’s pretty weird imo! It’s not like some stories where there are creatures that are very sheltered apart from contact with humans and get super-attached that way, you can’t really apply that particular revelation-factor to those Tolkien elves’ things for mortals. But I guess you can kind of reverse-engineer it from the way elves are a weird wish-fulfillment for humans – to be immortal, yeah, but the wish-fulfillment also extends to wanting to know immortals. I was just reminded of that passage from The Seafarer! Remember me! The most universal of desires that bargain with, rather than deny or rage at, death. If I must go, remember me! Remember my presence! Remember my deeds! Those people and places are gone, yet their presence remains, albeit subjectively and incompletely: “And so it is for each man / the praise of the living, / of those who speak afterwards, / that is the best epitaph.” That imprint they left is expressed in words, but it’s really the kind of shape they carved in the minds and lives of people left behind – which in this setting include immortal lives, of elves who can still speak of them centuries and millennia after. Not so unlike, those archeology discoveries? where we can be reached, one-way, from across the vast abyss of time, by ancestors from 10,000 years ago, via footprints of ancient peoples made in soft clay that hardened into stone. Sometimes a small bit of evidence of someone’s existence, and their imprint on their times, is immortalized. I will never forget you. So the other passage–

–I would say, if Elwing chose to become immortal because of Luthien, she chose to become immortal because Luthien became mortal. Doriath is gone, Luthien is gone, her parents and brothers are gone, but as long as Elwing lives, that tale of Luthien still lives, including her choice to become mortal and leave the world, and all the hope that may lie therein. ‘I’m alive! I survived, I survived everything, even the waters themselves, I risked everything and survived it, and I’m still here, I’m still alive, and I will be here to prove it and to be alive until the end of time, as Luthien could not’ Or something like that. I guess the distinguishing rub of being an elf – even if most elves aren’t super self-aware of it – is that if they wind up in such a situation by choice or chance, then in a world subject to death, or entwined with people fated to death, all that is part of an elf’s life will hold an echo of fleeting things and their very fleetingness forever, because that elf’s life goes on forever.

For Elwing it’s probably not much about humans, outside of her pride in Luthien, just as elves aren’t always the source of these issues for mortals, Bilbo whisked out over the water under a strange moon by the dwarves’ song. It’s just that elves/humans are used as a proxy for the whole arda marred crossed-signals problem a lot – the myriad roads and not enough time to take them all versus the impermanence that will crumble them all beneath their very feet. But as humans are to inherit the world, elves are tied to it – not observing it or performing on it, but being part of it, letting its fluctuation leave its mark on them so it becomes part of their immortality – eternal life is just the prerequisite. Like you know, normal human life, but for keeps. Memory’s cool! Pls listen to me mix my metaphors about it.

With the Luthien and Elwing passages together, as Elwing choosing immortality “because of Luthien” makes no sense as imitation, I like to think the other peredhil’s choices aren’t always only (or at all) about a connection to one heritage over another, or feeling like one race and not the other (like Eärendil), which is a totally legit interpretation that can definitely be supported, but I’m not super interested in it and have a hard time buying it as how the characters think about this stuff, when a mortal/immortal fate is so much more overwhelming a factor. What strikes me more is the element of choosing which role they want to have re: Luthien’s song thing. This is just my two cents so if it’s not you guys’ thing just ignore it, but I really love the concept of choosing one fate being intimately associated with the potential relationship with the alternate fate, not a lack of interest in it. Although with Elwing it’s more about loss in arda marred generally, and comes while poised on the brink of apocalyptic war that she believes might well wipe out all memory of her people, rather than in the aftermath of war’s costly victory, the more human-adjacent role of elves I described above is very much how I interpret the choice for Elrond, and headcanon-predict the choice of Elladan and Elrohir, and perhaps to some extent, Tuor (tho Tuor’s a whole other issue /)_o). There is a folded-in heroism of immortality in such a frame, though I don’t think of it as a mainly dutiful thing for those characters above, but – like and yet unlike Luthien, and Eärendil, and Arwen – done for love, but in the other direction: for who and what they loved and grieved for and most fiercely desired to keep alive in the world in the form of word and deed and memory, by immortalizing it within themselves:

Then Andreth looked under her brows at Finrod: ‘And what, when ye were not singing, would ye say to us?’ she asked.

Finrod laughed. ‘I can only guess,’ he said. ‘Why, wise lady, I think that we should tell you tales of the Past and of Arda that was Before, of the perils and great deeds and the making of the Silmarils! We were the lordly ones then! But ye, ye would then be at home, looking at all things intently, as your own. Ye would be the lordly ones. “The eyes of Elves are always thinking of something else,” ye would say. But ye would know then of what we were reminded: of the days when we first met, and our hands touched in the dark. Beyond the End of the World we shall not change; for in memory is our great talent, as shall be seen ever more clearly as the ages of this Arda pass: a heavy burden to be, I fear; but in the Days of which we now speak a great wealth.’

Anyway….uh….I forgot that 12 year old me was much smarter than current me. You know the LOTR timeline, with character after beloved character inevitably dying, after the end of their awesome happy life, until Legolas and Gimli sail? That was my thought as a kid – the kind of, elves in LOTR are a lot of what gets the weight of backstory and context to materialize for the mortal characters, and hey if we swing around the timeline from backstory to what-happened-after, the fellowship all eventually die, on earth they would eventually be forgotten, but Legolas would never die, and he would never forget them.