absynthe–minded:

cyrefinns:

absynthe–minded:

@ the Silm fandom

stop assuming Elwing was suicidal, stop assuming she was a bad mother, or Silmaril crazy, or that she wanted to desert her sons.

if you can extrapolate from the canonical evidence that Skilledhair Firesoul over there was a complex and sympathetic character with valid motivations, if you can make the legitimate argument – which I’ve heard, actually – that he did nothing wrong even including Alqualondë and the slaughter? you can extrapolate that Elwing Dioriel was not some kind of awful terrible person who abandoned her kids to die selfishly with the cursed jewelry. all we know is that she jumped. we don’t know that she wanted to die. we don’t know that she assumed the jump would be lethal. we don’t even know if she knew she was going to shapeshift (and considering she’s got Maiarin blood it’s a good fucking bet she had some kind of clue). how is it somehow Wrong to say, for example, that she recognized Maedhros and Maglor as the family members of the people who (as far as she knew) murdered her brothers and destroyed her childhood home and decided that Elrond and Elros were at least going to be alive if they were hostages?

What if, realizing that her enemies had killed children before when presented with the threat of not getting this particular jewel, and building on that information and the memory of Doriath that even if she cooperated they might still kill her and her boys anyway, she decided to remove herself from the equation and set up a scenario wherein her children were literally more valuable alive than dead? (After all, if she’s gone with the Jewel they can always negotiate. It’s not ideal, but this way, no one fucking dies.) What if she knew it was a terrible chance but it was the only way she, with her limited knowledge of Fëanorian social skills/past deeds, could see a way for her boys to even glimpse the possibility of living? How is this not possible?

how is it somehow more logical to assume she’s just the local crazy lady who is a worse parent than the guys who kidnapped the children in question? longtime followers will know I love Maedhros and Maglor, and I think that raising the boys and growing to love them in their own way was not entirely terrible, but

come on. 

I agree with this, for the most part, but I don’t think it would even make her terrible if she /had/ jumped intending to die.
Like, the Feanorians killed her family and destroyed her homeland before, despair isn’t at all an unreasonable response to them coming back.

No I’m ten thousand percent with you on that too.

I’ve been suicidal, more than once. My sympathies lie with her regardless of her motivations in jumping, and even if she did make a Bad (for a given value, of course, of “bad”) Decision that doesn’t make her a Bad Mother or a Bad Person. My issue is that everyone automatically assumes that she was doing one specific thing, which strikes me both as kind of sexist considering the massive amounts of meta/reinterpretation/headcanon surrounding other characters who’ve made decisions detrimental to the psychological wellbeing of their children and as kind of offensive to those of us who’ve been suicidal or are dealing with serious mental illnesses – are we automatically going to get hated because of decisions we’ve made in the grip of those illnesses?

Basically I’d like there to at least be room for “Elwing wasn’t being a bad mom” discussions without somebody turning it into a “Maedhros and Maglor were better parents!” argument.