helianthus-annus-thoughts

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have the urge to ask about your thoughts on maedhros, particular or otherwise

*vibrating with giddiness* where do i even start!!!!

it's no wonder that he's a fan-favorite. it's not just about him being good-looking and tragic (because that applies to most of the characters haha) but it's about how well-written and compelling his arc is. it's the embodiment of this part of the doom of mandos: "to evil end shall all things turn that they begin well".

from the moment he ALONE refuses to burn the ships to the time he ALONE searches for elurid and elurin, he stands out among his brothers as The Good Feanorion. his defining characteristic throughout almost the entirety of the silmarillion is that he tries to be an honorable person, to do things the right way, to fix what his father broke and minimize the harm of the oath. he holds on to that determination for so long, but despite his best efforts, he fails and fails and fails.

and then the third kinslaying happens and maglor has a mom-said-it's-my-turn-on-the-moral-compass moment and it's like the last remnant of goodness in maedhros has been snuffed out. he has no more hope or willpower left in him. and it is SO !! because there used to be so much of it in him!!! but he's the one who willingly lets go of it. he becomes convinced that everything good he ever did was in vain (i want to shake him by the shoulders and tell him that it is NOT) so there's no point in trying anymore. it pains me that he thought it impossible that eru could release them from the oath or that their crimes could ever be forgiven. his despair became his downfall, and that ties in well with the recurring theme of hope in tolkien's works.

i'm not sure if you might be referring to this post of mine but here you go anyway: i like to imagine a scene in which maglor snaps at maedhros after the second-kinslaying. he resents maedhros for agreeing to it and letting it happen in the first place, and he resents maedhros for leaving him to deal with the aftermath of it (e.g. burying the dead) while maedhros himself goes on his hopeless search for dior's children. i guess it was a moment of weakness for maglor in which the combination of guilt, grief, horror, and anger overwhelms him, and he takes it out on the nearest target. he can't take it out on celegorm, who came up with the idea, because celegorm is dead. and i think that after the third kinslaying, maedhros envies maglor. he envies maglor for being able to save elrond and elros (unlike his own failure to save their uncles) and he envies maglor's ability to still experience hope and compassion. but the only reason maglor still has those things is because he wasn't the one trying and trying and trying and experiencing soul-crushing failure every time.

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im a fucking sucker for the “character gets so badly injured that they can’t think clearly and start calling for help in a distressingly vulnerable way.” characters who start using nicknames for their friends they haven’t used since they were kids. characters who start begging for their brother they haven’t seen in years to be there. characters who would usually use their parents’ names or call them mother/father/etc crying out mama when they go down. u understand.

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they watchin u

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You have to give it to Maedhros to hear about Lúthien and Beren's theft victory and be like LOVE! love is how we will win !!!! And go and plan a huge battle plan with Fingon. Because he believed in the cause! He truly believed that love would be enough. And then Fingon died. And everything went to shit and he stopped caring. Because love actually matters not in these lands. Because Fingon gave him another life, and Maedhros' failure took his as payment. Because all he has left now is the Oath. And death.

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🐯

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prev how could you put this in the tags

t shirt that says “i used to be worse”

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(I'm gonna show you) how it's done, done, done

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As a Korean girl, I just love KDH to another level...

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Huntr/x Art

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this is so wild

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The urge to pick her up and pet her was so strong

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it's just a little bit of wind

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@thescrapwitch

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

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When a small mammal scrunches up and cleans its face and whiskers with its little hands very rapidly. I just wanted to give you that thought for a moment did u like it.

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chinese hanfu by 惊羽原创设计

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