#silm morality kitchen sink

[edennill-archived]

...you know you can like Indis and think her stepson hating his siblings just for the circumstances of their birth was a jerk move and think Indis & Finwë & Míriel didn't handle things well and sympathise with Fëanor's position...

[edennill-archived]

Strictly speaking, Sauron is not humanity xd

uh-oh, people might empathize with sauron! uh-oh, people might have to consider that the people who cause insurmountable unfixable suffering are also people, that humanity is capable of enacting horrible things on each other, that we must constantly evaluate our own role in the cycle of violence lest it consume us entirely! uh-oh!

[edennill-archived]

The entire discussion was completely tangential to this but I partly misread a post as a joke to the effect that "Well, the people actually responsible for all the deaths in [game] are the devs", and tbh as a statement this is quite relevant to my main fandom.

I will write about it more at length one day, but to be concise — I do not think we can discuss questions such as "Why didn't the Valar do more?" and ignore the very doylist reason that if you've decided to have the spiritual embodiment of evil wage very physical war upon your heroes, you do have to come up with an excuse for why the spiritual embodiment of Good (I'm simplifying the moral pattern a bit here, but I don't want to discuss fictional theology at length right now and ultimately it all boils down to the same in this context) doesn't equally physically solve the problem for them — in order to even have a story.

As far as such excuses go, "the collateral damage — which the antagonist is the only one with approximately minus hundred reasons to care about — would be too high" is not a very poor one, but most of the surrounding discussion scrupulously avoids admitting why it even needs to exist.

[edennill-archived]

...also another reason why I like to maintain that (at the very least before the Leithian) the Silmarils are thematically about the duties of the artist and not about property rights, is that it works for my Fëanor as a romantic hero agenda

[edennill-archived]

people stanning the king's men because of having problems with religion is kind of ridiculous though. like, yeah, late númenor has a tyrannical cult that severly punishes dissidents instigated by someone with ulterior motives and it's not the faithful.

[edennill-archived]

I vaguely kind of agree with this, but I have to quarell with the people in the notes because... Fëanor being "spoiled"/"favourised" is not incongruent with his father being selfish and his upbringing being directly hurtful to him. That's exactly how it works! Sometimes bad parenting is very much the result of your faults and the choice of the path of least resistance and/or a misjudged attempt to appease your own guilt/sadness/et cetera...

(I will also very strongly argue against the one specific comment that said Finwë was cruel to Fëanor specifically through... letting Fingolfin holf a position that allowed him to speak against his half-brother. I thought we cared about free speech and non-absolute rule here but whatever)

"finwë chose fëanor over and over again"

idk man it feels more like he chose himself over and over again

[edennill]

Honestly, I think that Tolkien himself isn't writing from a modern Western capitalist framework either! He's writing from within one, sure, but I'd argue the influence on his writing is minimal — on the other hand, the Catholic frame he usually worked from is in this case, as in many others, remarkably similar to the Muslim one.

Anyway, yes, my "the conflict over the Silmarils isn't about property rights, it's about the artist's relationship with the Divine!" agenda is still going strong.

If you felt like talking about it I’d love to hear your thoughts on the silmarils as (not) property! Only if you want to though :)

Well, my thoughts aren't really coherent enough to write a deep analysis about this or anything. To me, the whole debate comes down to three points: one, mass murder is not in any way justifiable, legally or morally, to recover stolen property; two, the Feanorians in my opinion forfeited their right to the Silmarils the moment they decided to go after Doriath instead of targeting Melkor; and three, the light of the trees is what made the Silmarils special and that did not belong to Feanor.

I think there's a tendency in the fandom to view the text within a Eurocentric, capitalist framework. And I get that, given that that's how Tolkien was writing it, but as a South Asian Muslim, I just see things very differently. I grew up with the idea that the more private property you have, the greater your responsibility is to others, and that everything ultimately belongs to the Creator. So the Feanorians' actions to me are repugnant, and I'm not inclined to give them the leeway that most fans do. They could have tried to recover the Silmarils from Melkor instead, and died heroes or maybe even succeeded, but they didn't. My culture values martyrdom, so the way the Feanorians die, compared to for example Finrod or Fingon, is very dishonorable.

Also, the Silmarils don't have a will of their own the way the Ring does, but they do seem to reject or accept bearers. If it was as simple as them being stolen property and only the Feanorians having a right to them, then why were Luthien, Beren, Dior, Elwing, and Earendil all able to bear them? And why did they burn Maedhros and Maglor, the supposed rightful owners?

More importantly, the Light did not belong to them. Tolkien himself points this out. I think that the moment Feanor damns himself isn’t even the Oath, it’s when he refuses to give up the Silmarils to restore the Trees. It’s a direct parallel to Galadriel freely giving the Phial to Frodo, and Celebrimbor giving away the three Rings.

Of course this is just my perspective. I prefer to interpret the text within a spiritual/moral context rather than a legal/political one.

[edennill-archived]

Hmmm, my basic assumption was always that Morgoth was already acting a bit... untrustworthy. Not necessarily being anything else than charming, but just vaguely quietly stirring up trouble. So if you paid attention to that, you could distinguish a decrease in interpersonal harmony in places where he was and that translated as a bad vibe.

I don't unironically write pro-Melkor posts, and this one isn't what I would call pro-Melkor either, but…

I have a bit of problem with late YoT. Somehow, the Silmarillion seems to say both of those:

Manwë trusted that Melkor had changed, and this is a good thing on Manwë's part. (I know much of the fandom disagrees, I do agree, but anyway let's just talk about the book)

the Noldor (especially Fëanor) did not trust Melkor, don't give him any gems (which they happily gave to all other Valar) and Fëanor doesn't want anything to do with him. And that's… also good? Or at least not commented on in any way by the narrative?

I can see some solutions to this (in order of most likely to least likely):

Melkor was acting entitled. They would give him gems and what not if he behaved about it like all the other Valar, but he demended things, so was ignored. I could make a long digression here about being evil vs being shaped by your previous evils, and bad manners != bad morals, and "becoming better is a process" but let's now ignore this for sake of simplicity.

The Noldor should have been nicer (give him gems but fact-check his advice), but the book is edited by a Noldo (Pengolodh) who has a lot of trauma around Melkor (because the First age), so is understandably biased.

Some Noldor were in fact nicer to Melkor, but Pengolodh censored it for the abovementioned reasons.

The Noldor, especially Fëanor have a D&D-like "detect" evil ability and just knew that he was up to no good and Manwë should have listened to them

(Also, a more doylist explanation: Tolkien was writing the behavior of the Noldor based on his knowlesge of the story, not based on what they would realistically know, because genre.)

But even if the Noldor were acting lke this, being biased and discriminating against you for your past is not an excuse to murder someone's father (or anyone else) or to permanently steal their stuff. (Slightly messing with / displacing their stuff is debateable if a) you're probably designed to be the trickster of the pantheon b) the genre is somewhat fairy-tale-ish c) it may help them to learn to not value their stuff too highly — AKA my "Melkor stealing Fefe's stuff may have been a thing even if he got better" agenda).

Just in the same way as unjustly keeping your property is not an excuse for murder (no matter what oaths you swore).

Still, those behaviors aren't ok either.

(Please let's not quote the "jail-crow" situation in the comments to this: it happenned after it was known that Melkor was at his bs again, so is not really relevant. )