actualelffucker:

some meta about those disaster boys

The fundamental difference between Celegorm and Curufin is that Curufin believes he is right. And Celegorm tolerates this, because he knows his brother needs to believe it. He won’t bring it up when they argue unless Curufin pushes him so far that anger totally overtakes the genuine care Celegorm feels for him underneath all the tangled and twisted bullshit of their relationship (however you choose to read it).

Curufin holds near-unshakeable belief in these things:

– His father was right, in everything

– The ends always justify the means

– Anything done in pursuit of the Oath cannot be morally condemned

Of course, this means a hell of a lot of denial. It’s not easy to maintain such a belief structure while actively doing such terrible things, and that’s an important part of why his interpersonal relationships tend to break down (see also: Celebrimbor); he’s lying to himself at least as much as to everyone else around him.

Curufin’s relationship with Fëanor never moved beyond the idealisation phase. You know what I’m talking about: the stage in a child’s life where they genuinely believe their parent is the best in the world and can do no wrong; an image generally slowly tarnished during the teenage years, or shattered by some defining event. As the favourite son, striving to be like his father in all things, Curufin had every reason to keep this image alive far longer than his brothers. And let’s not forget that (aside from Ambarussa of course) he was the youngest of all of them when Fëanor died.

I’ve read first-hand accounts of the anger some people feel upon finding out that the parents they lost as children or young adults had imperfections and faults (the discovery of a letter from a father to his illicit lover, for example). The idealised image of a parent, frozen in time by their death, is a brittle and fragile thing; when broken (as is almost inevitable), it requires hard psychological work – and a good deal of inner bravery – to face up to the truth and reconcile the pieces into a more realistically flawed memory. Would Curufin be willing or able to put in that sort of work, with the value of the Oath tied to that golden image of his father, and both in turn ruling the course of his own life? I think not. He would choose instead to protect that conceptualisation with layers of half-truths and amoral reasoning, and lock it away in a box labelled “fundamentally true and right” without looking at any of it too closely. And if anyone dared to question such a conclusion, it would trigger anger on a level vicious enough to prevent him from having to actually think about it.

Imagine building your life upon something, having it guide (and force) every one of your deeds, leading you down a path from which there can be no return – only to question it and discover that it was wrong all along. Better, surely, to never question it at all. (This, incidentally, is why I believe that Curufin would have been the one most broken by finding that the Silmarilli burned them all by the end (or even from the start.. but that’s a whole other meta)).

It is easier for Curufin to tell himself that the Oath is both intrinsically right and worth anything and everything to achieve; then he does not have to question any of his deeds – or, for that matter, feel any kind of guilt for them.

Celegorm, for his part, thinks this is one of the most irritating things about Curufin. They don’t talk about it, because Celegorm knows that without that convoluted web of circular reasoning and denial his brother would simply break, but he thinks it’s ridiculous for Curufin to have such a self-righteous stick up his ass over something that’s clearly morally grey at best.

Not that Celegorm feels any guilt either, of course; he chose the path of simply not caring about whether they happen to be right or wrong, and (most of the time) it works.

I believe that one of the reasons Celegorm has a more realistic image of Fëanor in his mind is that he was the one of his brothers to be least affected by his father’s favouritism and the subconscious competition for his approval that went on between the others. My personal headcanons for their Valinor-era family dynamics could make up several metas on their own, but an important part of my interpretation is that Celegorm was always different enough from his brothers that he wasn’t vying for the same position in his father’s eyes that the others mostly seemed to be (example: how do you think Maedhros felt about Curufin being the obvious favourite, right down to his name, when he himself was originally named as his father’s heir and probably raised as such until his little brother came along?).

I think Celegorm knew almost from the start that the Oath had the potential to lead them to terrible things. But where Curufin chose denial, Celegorm never saw the point in pretending that they weren’t all slowly becoming the monsters they claimed to fight.

Imagine Celegorm, at Alqualondë. The first time he killed – of course, he had taken animal life many times before, but with respect and the blessing of a Vala; this was more jarring than that, up close and personal and wrong. The hot blood on his hands felt so terribly different from every other time he had felt the same sensation, and the life draining from the blue eyes in front of him tugged on his fëa in a way that made him feel sick.

He was not Celegorm the Cruel then.

Celegorm was always the most free with his emotions, never bothering to hide what he felt or wanted – and so I think he would have instinctively felt the damage that Alqualondë did to them. He knew there could be no going back.

And so, he chose to embrace the direction they were headed rather than pretending it wasn’t happening – enabling him to keep that brash freedom of emotion which was always so intrinsic to him. His character stayed the same, bright and wild and expressive, yet filtered now through dark, cracked glass rather than the clear crystal of Valinor.

The delight Celegorm takes in the atrocities he and his brothers commit is a brittle, angry thing; the inverse of Curufin’s righteousness, a little too wild – and his sanity, too, is somewhat fragile for having chosen such enjoyment of cruelty. It damages his capacity for empathy and makes him more selfish than he used to be; just as Curufin’s self-absorbed denial turns him inconsiderate and vicious.

Celegorm knows they are wrong. I doubt he would be surprised at all when the Silmarilli burned to the touch. But then, Curufin might be surprised on the surface.. yet beneath all those layers of lies there would be an unacknowledged, long-silenced part of him which would have expected it too.