StarShadeEmily

Can we please talk about how the most criminally underrated comedic aspect of the legendarium is the length of Elros’ kingship. Like bro caused the funniest succession crisis known to mankind when he died because his son, who was almost 400, abdicated on the spot because he was too old and passed the kingship to his own son right.

Which implies that abdication due to age was absolutely a possibility. An option, in fact. One which Elros clearly didn’t take up. Why? Because in my book, motherfucker was having way too much fun. Bro watched his son start to hobble around the place and was like ‘yeah but I like fucking and dining and wining and hunting, I’m keeping the crown, sucks to be you, major loser’. He gives me young Robert Baratheon vibes right. I know my beloved himbo was drinking to excess every night and streaking nude through the courtyards with his hunting buddies while Elrond learned to play depressing tunes on the harp and pulp herbs or whatever the fuck he was doing back in Middle Earth. I know Elros laughed like 20 times a day. I know you could hear him from four streets away. I know he had like 30 illegitimate children because his wife probably didn’t live even half as long as him. At least 30. I know his sneeze was audible from the moon.

Anyway just imagine being Vardamir and being like ‘dad is it my turn for the crown now?’ every fifty years and your dad just lifting a finger and going ‘no 😇☝🏻’. And you have to tell yourself not to take offence at this because your dad grew up in like the worst time to grow up ever and had the most traumatic childhood and was practically orphaned by six. Like of course he wants to spend his dying days drinking and dancing right. Unfortunately his dying days last 400 years long. I tell you this, in my mind, the only reason why the Númenoreans canonically have a tradition of abdicating a few years before their death is because final-stage Elros went down in history as the most irritating monarch to exist.

Because even though his children and some other descendents lived to 3/400 etc, even the longest reigning ones only spent like 150 years on the throne at most. Not so with Elros. Elros’ ass was parked firmly on the throne for four hundred years straight. And Númenor is canonically a swift-advancing society right. Four hundred years is a wacky amount of time. In terms of technological advancement at least. Imagine Queen Elizabeth the First was still kicking around on the throne right now. Imagine her managing Brexit and having to do a TikTok dance to get tourists into Buckingham Palace. Imagine the President was still George Washington. Imagine George Washington having to deal with ChatGPT and taking publicity photos with Beyoncé. Imagine Emperor Jahangir encountering a Big Mac.

POV: you just woke up Lord of Himring Maedhros Fëanorian from his afternoon nap and he’s pissed off at you because he had to put on his dressing gown and his ‘I just woke from a nap, you asshole’ bling to come greet you. You’re dead meat. WYD?

me personally? i would strip, bend over, and hand him this. anyway, latest commission, featuring maedhros, a delight to draw as always!

illustration from forever months ago that never escaped the rough sketch stage, probably because it is too depressing to paint. words from my elwing fic, she that was young and fair

tagged to share a soupçon of WIP delight by winsome friends @starshadeemilyart and @ecofutural, so have a little soon-to-be-dropped eärnur torture labyrinth long paragraphs mayhem. baby's first time loop, everybody cheer! floating this gently in the direction of @angamaite-der-ritter, @tobermoriansass, @seaemberthesecond, @balrogballs, @ulmondil, @antlered-vixen, @annarobots, and @gaydhros should you like :-)

There was no sound to presage the blows, for there was no one who flogged him, no hand in that room of dead air wrapped round the stem of the whip which did not fall and slice apart his yielding flesh with the ease of paring a ripe fruit. Only the slight twitch of the fingers in the pelt of the warg—but he could not see it, that trifling spasmodic movement; how did he know the way in which each delicate joint curled beneath the skin and drew the digits in no pattern of arcane learning, but only the merest languid flicker upon the beast it caressed? He saw nothing but the dark stone of the floor and the bursting stars of white pain when he closed his eyes, seaming across the field of his inner eyelids in jags of spiking force. For desertion, for insubordination, he had ordered soldiers brought to the post and whipped: but they had been punished standing, like men. He had watched it only because he had to, to tell them once they’d bled that they were forgiven. He had not liked to put himself in the way of heaving chests and sweat that trickled down sides filthy with dust and blood. He could not move his tongue from the roof of his mouth, but could hear, in the vast static silence of his agony, the Witch-King murmuring to his pets, or issuing orders to attendants that came and went around him in a mellow low voice like the notes of viols. Evidently it took little effort to rend Eärnur to the very endings of his nerves. Pain had him in its unrelenting grip, abating without ever ceasing fully, so that he would grow a little used to it, or think himself to have gained back some of the mastery he had spent his life in cultivating, and then be dashed once more against the rocks as the agony rose again to the quivering vibrato that silenced thought and turned his breath to stabs between his ribs. He could feel the brush and weight of things walking by him: he lay unnoticed and entirely without importance, less than the slavering beasts with their yellow eyes and fangs, and he tried in vain to make some sound, to press from his lips some word of unconquerable defiance that was choked before it breathed by the iron bonds of the spell.

two sides of the same coin

flipped version under the cut:

I’m specifically thinking of a post-flight context, when vague rumors of one of the princes returning reach Tirion, and Indis flees to the outskirts of the city, flees her own pride because gratitude washes through her anger and pain. The world is darkness, the stars barely outline the tall and noble figure walking toward her with bowed head. Her son! Her beloved son!

And then, at last! He truly stands before her.

tagged by @starshadeemilyart, thank you! Here's something from the beginning of aredhel the kinslayer pt 3:

I know that you have offered an exchange of the Silmaril for Nimloth queen of Doriath. Rumors I have heard as well that my kinswoman and aunt Aredhel was present at Doriath’s ruin; that she was wed to a Sinda of Nan Elmoth; and that her son betrayed Menegroth to your army. Of these rumors of Aredhel's family I do not know what to credit. I cannot believe that she has allied yourself to you, and more, was a willing participant in that Kinslaying. It would not be the first time you tricked one of Fingolfin's house into violent defense of you. As refugees now alongside the Doriathrim, we at Sirion possess little. Yet there is one dear item I can offer you from my own possession for Nimloth and Aredhel. The Green-stone of Feanor my uncle Fingon bequeathed to me before the Tears; my father brought it back to Gondolin for me, after Fingon fell.