#tw: discussions of suicide

[balrogballs]

Hi Balls, I love your writing and I just read your Maglor/Glorfindel story after your latest fic about Feanor. Can I just ask why your Maglor is sometimes, like in that story, kind of rude and sarcastic? Your style keeps me reading, but I’m used to Maglor being more wholesome, or regretful, and I wanted to ask your justification for him being like, kind of mean in his responses. Is it an anti fanon thing or what, because he’s supposed to be the most pentitent brother so it’s interesting to see

continueing here. See him being sarkie about Elrond, or cocky about his looks, when he’s characterized as being repentent and not so confident, because of his trauma? I love your prose and it makes it interesting to read, but maybe explain your justification? Is it that his trauma doesn’t xist in the story,? Has he got over it ooor is he using it as a shield? All 3 sound possible

Hello hello!

So I assume you mean this fic? It was a last minute pinch hit fill for the Slashy Valentine event, more of a short vignette than anything. This question skipped to the top of my queue just so I could make this joke: if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me to justify a fanfic decision in the last week, I’d have two nickels… (just joking, not @-ing you at all!). Sorry about how long this is, I am very insufferable and like to ramble, but yes enjoy some thoughts about my conception of Maglor (and a little bit of Maedhros as well towards the end) across most of my fics.

So two things: firstly, some of the wording in the setup of that Valentine fic is directly drawn from an old fic I had up, in which Maglor was a bird-guy living in a forest near Lindon running a bird conservation project, which I took down after a couple of months and repurposed for other writing ventures.

And in that one, Maglor absolutely is judgy, sarcastic and “lmao memes” about most things, will not hesitate a second to call Elrond out when he’s acting like a dweeb, and some of the most fun I had writing anything was when I was writing the dialogues between him and 4 y/o Baby Arwen (who if you’ve read my earlier LotR stories, you’ll know is extremely spoilt and very much daddy’s little princess).

Reason I mention that fic is because that was the first proper or substantial Maglor-centric bit of writing I’d ever attempted and so that characterisation carries over to other fics of mine to various degrees as well, depending on setting and the role Maglor plays in the fics…

It really isn’t some sort of “anti-fanon” move, whatever that is supposed to mean… I don’t exactly make it a habit to rail against fanon as a rule, the only fic I’d say fulfills that criteria to some extent is that Mae/Elw fic, but even that is just 80% me wanting them to fuck and finding it very hot.

I just like to interpret Maglor in the way I characterise him, as you describe, snarky, judgemental and droll. There are still fanon elements to it: he’s very parental, grandparental as well, he was a very involved parent regardless of what form it takes or effect it has, whether positive or negative. Maglor in my AU also follows along those lines, just in a different context… and his very close relationship with Arwen was a pretty solid thread in some of my older works, iirc The Great Impossible showcases that best… and yes, there too he’s very laid back and honestly can be a bit of a dick, especially with his “naming 3000 generations of cats after Thingol” and “finding a very ugly cat and calling it Teleporno, only to change its name after Teleporno was nice to him”.

I don’t think it’s a beyond-the-pale characterisation, or one that seems incompatible with canon. The guy spent his life in Valinor lauded as the world’s greatest singer and what not, was a professional mummy’s boy and was a prince for most of his life. Him having a stick up his ass wouldn’t really be out of the ordinary: imagine if Beyoncé and Prince Harry were combined into one person. You’d be sitting at court bitching about people’s outfits too if you were Maglor. And then you’re commanding forces in a war, so you still have a level of authority: the Fëanorians in Beleriand weren’t exactly destitute and begging on the street getting whipped by Thingol or whatever, they absolutely had power and wealth.

Maglor was weary of his Oath and heartsick by the end, but he was still a Fëanorian, he was still part of their wider project in Middle-Earth, not only took part in the slayings but composed music about it, etc. I used to have a little joke that Maglor was the Rudyard Kipling of the Noldor and that the Noldolantë was the pointy-eared equivalent to the White Man’s Burden poem but I stopped making it when someone tried to bite my head off for it… 😭 anyway, yes, I did not and don’t write him as someone who was opposed to it from Day One, but someone in whom regret and self-disgust grew as the Noldor-in-ME project continued.

So him not being a perfectly polite and “choose kindness always” uwu bean does track with his character in my view… it’s all just different interpretations, not exactly some act of rebellion against fanon or whatever.

Re: trauma and characterisation, I fielded this same question about Maedhros when writing Cast in Stone, but in that case it was “why is he literally deranged, like person-needing-a-straitjacket deranged instead of having a classic presentation of PTSD and depression?”

I think one thing it’s important to mention when it comes to fandom/fanwork, not just in this fandom but in general, is that trauma presents in many ways, and they’re not all going to be a) relatable b) easily mappable into Anglo DSMV terminology c) palatable. As a general rule, for both personal and literary reasons, I am always keen on exploring “madness” in fantasy. I wasn’t interested in writing Maedhros as a “guy who did big violence and then felt bad about it” neat binary, wanted to show a fractured psyche which, in my writing, presents as outright mental instability.

And yeah it’s clear in Prayers what’s going on in his head, but because Cast in Stone was set in canonverse I had a few questions in about why I did that, to which my answer was: while the story was as a whole an exploration of historiography/who-writes-history-and-how, the emotional climax of it was when Elrond admits to Estel that the reason for all that historical cherrypicking and statue-building was not due to his own personal opinion about either the Fëanorians or his parents or anything like that which you’d expect, but rather the result of a residual, misplaced anger towards Maedhros for taking his own life. And that perspective is absolutely a thing with the immortal Eldar (see: Elwing being put into a fucking tower and having to live apart from the rest of the Eldar??? 😭) but it’s also a prevalent attitude in the real world, the language of blame and accusations of “selfishness”.

And what the fic was doing was also trying to explain Maedhros’ psyche, his own outlook towards his pre-reembodiment actions, even outright telling Elrond that he’d have done it again if he was in that spot with those stakes again. Not a palatable response nor a “mentally well” one, but re-embodiment/immortality =/= cure-all, and Maedhros still being a freak on his second round in ME was just more interesting to me. And personally again, I don’t want to write Maedhros grovelling to Elrond apologising for his suicidality: in CiS he straight up says he won’t apologise, and that’s just my preference and outlook when it comes to something like that. In fact, the only explicit apology I’ve ever written for him across all my fics has been a direct one to Elwing as an individual, which takes various forms in various works, and that is not even for the violence or kinslaying or any of that (because it’s not exactly something you can “apologise” for) but rather for the specific action of driving her to attempt exactly what he later also did.

And it’s a similar sort of view I hold with Maglor, just much less intense: where the child-rearing is genuine, he grows to love them swiftly and he’s good to them, but there’s definitely a sense of atonement to it at the start, a la Kite Runner (🙄 reference, i know sorry). And someone who I write to take that approach and views things through a self-fashioned morality code (which has both good and kind elements but also elements inherited from Fëanor/general Noldor worldviews), I don’t think—again I’m talking about how I write him, not how anyone should, or even talking in canon terms—he necessarily needs to explicitly beg everyone he meets for forgiveness on *their* terms if that makes sense?

I kind of regret pulling that bird-story now because it makes stuff a bit clearer re: what I’m trying to explain here, but yeah that was his and Elrond’s first meeting since the First Age, and it very much operated on a “yeah this happened and it was shit, and you know I regret it and that I’m sorry, but okay let’s solve the problem you have now” basis. And that’s just the approach I took, I have enjoyed reading stuff where there’s an explicit forgiveness narrative especially when it’s not tropey or woobified, but as a writer I chose this other option, that’s all.

Essentially, I don’t think he needs to perform his insecurities and be outwardly self-disgusted until someone tells him he shouldn’t. Insecurity and self-hatred, if present, can manifest in ways other than weeping at Elrond’s feet, I think? Again, there’s works that do that very well and unpick it nicely, it’s just that I didn’t go that route. Especially because I don’t write Elrond as a paragon of virtue whose primary trait is unequivocally-good-despite-trauma, that trait is present yes but I still write him to have flaws, ie historical blindness (interesting in the context of him being a living archive) as well as his own biases that come from his experiences, some inherited and others from serving under Gil-galad in the Second Age… so achieving Elrond’s forgiveness, specifically, isn’t the crux of any of the kidnap-fam related stories I’ve written?

Finally, I also don’t think being someone who is sorrowful/lonely/abject needs to be someone who spends all their time crying (Maedhros in Prayers is a good example of that opinion of mine lol!) and carrying over some personality traits from your Beyonce x Prince Harry era I think is not exactly either a rebellion from fanon or canon, nor a particularly impossible characteristic to have in his circumstances.

So yeah, just my interpretation, which I’ve explained above… I love reading other takes on him and think other readings work well too of course, this was just what I chose.

Hope this all makes sense and sorry for the essay, but hey, you asked! 🤪 I was in the middle of writing some meta re: Prayers (because I’m still very irritated about that one condescending read) when this turned up and distracted me…