if you’re ever thinking of underestimating how easily i can distract myself from doing anything important or productive you should know that i just spent nearly an hour trying to find out and list in order of convenience every method i could use to color my nails black in a hypothetical scenario where the world ended and in the post-apocalyptic mad max-esque wasteland that was left black nail polish became a scarce and coveted resource. as if this is something i should actually be worried about.
me writing papers for class
vs me researching how i could acquire and store an empire of black nail polish and/or nail polish production supplies in a post-apocalyptic world and defend it with my life if necessary
So before I get into any specific characters I want to lay out my process for creating them. My preference for headcanons and aus is to keep them close to canon. It’s just what I find most fulfilling! The little tweaks, the puzzle of what needs to be different when you make a small change, stuff like that. And the Silmarillion - and Legendarium in general - is very good for that kind of headcanoning!!! I prefer to be conceit conscious, to consider the texts as if they are real historical accounts rather than works of fiction, because that gives me room to analyze why this is included while that is left out. The many watsonian scribes and historians who compiled the Quenta Silmarillion were doing their best to accurately tell the facts of first age beleriand but they also had a specific narrative that they wanted to portray - the fall of the Noldor - and that is a massive bias! Furthermore what their sources are, whether or not they witnessed the events themselves, and how they interpret what they saw/heard will greatly impact what we can understand.
A good example of this is Jenny’s pet theory that the Union of Maeðros wasn’t actually called that until after the Fifth Battle became the Unnumbered Tears. They likely would have named the alliance after Fingon if it had a formal name at all. But then it becomes a massive disaster, and well, it’s easier to blame it on the surviving general who then goes on to commit several atrocities, than to keep the name of the beloved martyred High King. By reframing the Nirnaeth as the Union of Maeðros it becomes another black mark against the Fëanorions, a precedent for the mass murders that Maeðros will lead in the coming years. This allows the survivors to shift the blame off of themselves, and to keep with the neat historical revision that Maeðros was bad all along.
All of this to say: the big puzzle with these spouses was working out why they weren’t included in the Quenta Silmarillion. From a doylist perspective it’s just that Tolkien didn’t develop them beyond a brief mention that Caranthir and Maglor were married, and that Curufin must have had a wife for Celebrimbor to exist. But it’s much more fun to ask why they weren’t considered to be part of the histories of the first age - even as a name in a list of genealogies. I wanted the reasons to vary from “no one knew that they were married” to “remained in Aman” to “it’s politically valuable to leave out this fact”, and then you get to work out the whys behind that. Why stay behind, why hide the marriage, why obscure the history, why did they die?
The secondary puzzle is to look at the canon character and go “what kind of person would they marry?” That’s a much simpler question, but still requires a lot of work! Then by the time I had a solid grasp on both, I had a fairly fleshed out character who only needed a name and some more little details before I felt comfortable to finish with development. So now I’ve got four in-laws and a solid method for filling in the character lacunae in the Silm.
Now that MCR is making new music (!) I need to once again restate my love for Danger Days. It’s my emo band and I get to choose the neon apocalypse. Danger Days hate will not be tolerated on my watch. It’s literally louder than god’s revolver and twice as shiny
