#seriously though why not just ship the kids to balar if you have the time to stash them somewhere

[feanorianethicsdepartment]

"unless you go for the cave thing but that's dumb" what's the cave thing

:cracks knuckles: the cave thing, anon, is an alternate version of how the fëanorians discovered elrond and elros during/after the third kinslaying that's... somewhere in home, probably, i mostly know of it by reputation. it goes (again, as far as i know) that elrond and elros weren't at sirion during the kinslaying at all; they were playing in a cave and a nearby stream outside of town somewhere, which is where maedhros found them - fans tend to extrapolate the situation as them being sent away from sirion for their safety, but i don't actually know if that's part of the passage as written. it's less commonly used in fic than the published silm's framing of the encounter, but i have come across now and then

this... isn't an interpretation of events i particularly care for. on the more petty side of things, i have serious doubts there'd be any such peaceful bubbling brooklets left in beleriand that far into the war. none you could leave a couple of six-year-olds unattended near, anyway. more to the point, i think it... dampens a lot of the really interesting aspects of their characters. sirion is a defining trauma for them, in my eyes, and a lot of the effect it has on them as they grow comes from being there, hearing the screams, smelling the ash, seeing the people they love die. it’s a horrible object lesson that happiness is fragile and evil will always seek to break it, and it’s the reason they hold onto the happinesses they do find, much, much later in life, so tightly. which isn’t to say it wouldn’t affect them if they were off playing in the woods somewhere and only learned about it later, but i do think it would affect them in noticeably different ways

it also does things to their relationship with the fëanorians i don’t particularly care for. it’s very important to me that elrond and elros know what maglor is and what he’s done from the moment they meet, that they know the truth of the third kinslaying from harsh, direct experience, forming a painful subtext to their relationship which for all the love that grows between them never really disappears. but if the twins weren’t at sirion, it suddenly becomes possible to lie to them about what happened there, to soften the worst bits for their young ears and let their regret for doing it overwhelm the fact that they did it anyway. and even if they are completely honest, it’d be so easy for the twins to convince themselves it wasn’t that bad, that they had no choice or they did as little damage as possible. but they did, and they didn’t, and as soon as they come into contact with people outside the fëanorian camp’s bubble the twins will inevitably learn the truth. it’s a lie so big when it gets uncovered it’ll almost certainly shatter their whole relationship, a reveal that the fëanorians are actually the monsters they (whoever ‘they’ is) spent their entire childhood trying to deny they were. that breach of trust makes it so easy to interpret the fëanorians as pure-black villains who gleefully manipulated the twins for decades, easily cast into the dustbin of history as the defeated bad guys of their personal stories. it makes their relationship simple, and y'all how i feel about this relationship being simple

just, in general, i think that if elrond and elros weren’t at sirion for the third kinslaying they’d grow into massively different people, with massively different relationships with their peoples and their pasts. which isn’t to say i couldn’t see an elrond and elros who were off in the cave, but they would be, again, a different elrond and elros. my problem with the cave thing is less with it as a concept per se, and more with how it gets treated as interchangeable

#ask #my terrible headcanons #elrond #elros #feanorians #third kinslaying #i think this ask's been sitting in here for a literal year #but hey! i think i've had enough of a break from the fandom to get some of the old spark back #and i've finally found a work schedule wherein i can actually write things #again to be 100% clear: #i'm not saying that if the elro twins weren't actually at the kinslaying it wouldn't traumatise them #i'm just saying it would traumatise them in different ways #ways i personally... well i prefer the other version #seriously though why not just ship the kids to balar if you have the time to stash them somewhere #no orcs on balar #anyway i'm gonna empty this askbox if it takes me the entire rest of the decade