simaethae replied to your post:
                   some more replies                

   i think tho we may be cross-talking a little bc i honestly don’t
feel like i often come across the phenomenon you describe? i get very
irritated by victim-blaming or attempts to make it so that nothing is
your faves’ fault, and i agree “they’re all just as bad other” is a
shallow and boring take, but i’ve more often seen it in a context of…
deepening complexity, it’s very difficult to achieve a good motive
without unintended consequences, etc    

No yeah that’s probably true – I have seen the vague ruining thing a lot, so I’m super sensitive to it. But yeah, different fandom exposures can cause super different opinions or feelings about what the norm is or whatever. 🙂 Like, idk, while IA that the deepening complexity thing can be done well, it eventually becomes obvious when a writer is actually doing it to deepen complexity/show things from a specific character’s personal perspective for its own sake/the larger story’s sake, and when a writer is doing it to try to make something else look worse in comparison to the thing they like. And like, I’ve had the impulse to do that too abut some things and know how tempting it is. But often it’s hard to tell right away, so resentment about the number of fics I have backspaced out of in the middle of like, chapter 5, when the shoe dropped, has just made me very touchy about it.

   i mean like, this is all fandom factional stuff, the feanorians were
all dead about from maglor and celebrimbor by the time numenor was a
thing and fortunately neither of them ever ended up involved with
numenor outside certain distressing AUs, so i def think there’s a lot of
scope for us just having… not stumbled across the same posts :p    

Oh no yeah totally! Errr…sorry if my ideas came all disjointed timeline-wise! I was just putting out like, examples of the phenomena I had seen – I have not seen the, uh, The King’s Men were right stuff firsthand, but I have seen lots of the Feanorian stuff and of course I have seen lots and LOTS of the ‘make the Arafinweans in general awful in order to deny and discredit their moral high ground’ – sometimes in the context of silencing the legitimacy or sympathy of their anger at the Feanorians about the mass murder against their maternal family’s/half their cultural heritage, and pretend that it’s just them being holier than thou or disloyal or sycophants – but I’ve also seen it in other circumstances that weren’t just about the Feanorians, so the King’s Men thing kareenvorbarra mention def rings a bell in terms of that particular aspect of it.

    but what’s unsympathetic about hubris? :p more
seriously i’m into that kind of, tangle of sympathetic and shitty
motives into this inextricable knot of fear and insatiable hunger, but
that’s just subjective personal taste                

Haha *insert one of those ‘oh you!’ gifs here* but no yeah I totally feel you on this, but I guess just….well, you know, the word ‘like’ as applied to characters is really headache-y and unclear tbh. Like…I really like their feelings but don’t like…them…? Like I find them sympathetic but not tragic, or…more empathetic than sympathetic, if that makes any sense…?

Like I think, ‘well, tbh, if i wasn’t someone living in a world where immortality doesn’t exist, but was instead an almost-elf who was almost-immortal living almost in sight of paradise full of immortals, how would i feel and behave about immortality and the possible prospect of becoming immortal and being denied something that i like to think just might maybe hold the possibility of making me immortal?’ and while the answer is not ‘massive colonial conquest of the inferior races to stoke my crumbling ego and feed the inevitably encroaching void’ it still……moves the needle 😛

(Also I guess my greater interest in a more crystallized and sincere fear-of-death motive would probably back up to Tar-Minastir and Tar-Telperien)

elesianne replied to your post:                   some more replies                

   I want to click like on all your posts and replies where you speak
for nuanced and interesting interpretations of canon/characters without
unnecessary hate but instead I’m just going to leave this reply here    

awwww 🙂 thank you! I’m glad i come off that way i guess, though imo i feel like a lot of my opinions are just ‘well idk which is right, but this one is wrong’ laziness

crocordile replied to your post:                some more replies                

   Honored u remember + like something I wrote uwu    

Always!!! ❤ The ‘selling mastery over others as freedom’ etc. And tolkien putting a lot more thought into his depictions of idealism and fake idealism than people give him credit for  🙂

unfortunatelyimaginary replied to your post: other replies

ack,
I have to go to work so I guarantee this won’t be well written but I
appreciate this whole Feanorians discussion so very much – Maedhros was
my favorite character from the first time I read the Silmarillion but it
makes me feel so uncomfortable to see his and his brothers actions
treated lightly/excused because, well, it felt like something he/they
wouldn’t approve of and that doesn’t quite sound right but I really
don’t want to be late for work so apologiesifwrong

No yeah exactly, this makes total sense! It just comes off as so, tin-eared?