#ig thats why dont vibe with fanworks that tries to give melkor a tragic mtivation

[lime-bucket]

its lowkey fascinating to me how despite melkor embodying the most basic of fantasy villains archetypes (dark lord whos evil fr evil sake) he never comes off as boring or stagnant in such a complex story like the Silm.

The first thing we see of melkor is how utterly powerfull he in terms of cunning & strength & yet he gets weakened, but not to a degree it feels the vala was nerfed fr narrative convinience,& throughout the book melkor is aware of his deminishing powers as he keeps creating ways to work around it in order to spread destruction & bloodshed

And things r kept interesting as with almost each L the legions of morgoth take,next chapter they lock in & secure a terrible victory against howvr angband sets its terrible eyes on.not only its brilliant to keep readers engaged but also it feels the story remind us even when melkor faces multi humilating defeats,he is not a joke & theres a reason he is feared & loathed.

Hell even at the end where melkors loses in the most typical villain way of being too pridefull the story doesnt go and everyone lived happily ever after! instead it solemnly acknowledge that even if he lost,melkor had prevailed for hatred & pain were sowed in middle earth staying fr ages to come (not to mention the loyal disciple sauron gonna continue his master work).thus his goals were all along accomplished.

melkor might not be 3 dimensional in the sense most modern fictional antagonists r,but it doesnt make him less of a well thought out villain cuz tolkien understood what makes the nature of evil a terrible blight on the world is its continuous changing