manwe

IDK like, I feel like I feel more positively towards him than a lot of the fandom, but more because I disagree with fandom’s level of, like, offendedness/outrage/bad-faith-about-motives regarding his and the rest of the Valar’s often rather flawed and slightly ridiculous behavior, not because I actually disagree with their points about how weird/dumb/iffy/disastrous/out of touch some of the actions Manwe or the other Valar undertook are. Like, I love how the Valar don’t totally understand the incarnates and are guessing and trying and failing and making mistakes all along the way? And I love how a lot of the Valar’s mistakes and stupid/short-sighted actions come from intense and protective/possessive love and emotional entanglement and indelicacy about the problems of power differentials when it comes to expressing that love, not from cold detached calculation. It’s like, a really fascinating and believable character trait that makes so much sense and is so different from most depictions of fantasy gods. Whether the “infallibly good and all-knowing” type or the “unfeeling dogmatic tyrants” type, a lot of fantasy gods are depicted as being above the passions of lower beings, which is not only not-true for the Valar, but if anything it’s closer to the opposite.

Oh right that’s part of my opinion – I really don’t agree with assumptions I often see in fandom that Tolkien genuinely thought the Valar were perfect or that the dictates of Manwe were supposed to somehow magically be Pure Unassailable Truth. I think it’s pretty strongly implied (and stated, piecemeal) that Tolkien thought that the Valar were reasonably fallible and that some of the acts of disobedience against the Valar wound up having very positive consequences, and that when the elves glorify them excessively or are scared or shushing when they hear people speak against them, that’s a subjective in-universe thing.