The season 3 announcement got me thinking about Last Life again and how nobody had to die
“We waited, and then all it took was a simple 3, 2, 1, and you all obliged.”
Even if you don’t want to take the Watcher lore as canon, nobody ever had to kill each other. The Boogeyman curse took them down to red, but that was it. Theoretically, if they had all waited it out (“Bar one,” like Scott), they could have all survived on red, on their last lives. 3rd Life would have been even easier, because greens weren’t allowed to actively kill and reds didn’t have to.
The tragedy of the series is not the fact that only one person can win, it’s that everyonecan win together, but it’s their own personal flaws that drag them down with each other.
I will NEVER be over the way that Fëanor makes predictions that are not true of himself, but that are true of other characters—or predictions that are true, but not in a way he intends.
He tells the Valar, ‘if I must break them, I shall break my heart, and I shall be slain; first of all the Eldar in Aman’—but as he says this, Finwë has already been slain.
He tells Eönwë, ‘Such hurt at the least will I do to the Foe of the Valar that even the mighty in the Ring of Doom shall wonder to hear it’—but it is Fingolfin who wounds Morgoth eight times.
He tells Mandos, ‘the deeds that we shall do shall live in song until the last days of Arda’—but they live on in the Noldolantë, the lament of the fall of the Noldor.
And I will also NEVER be over the fact that one of Fëanor’s few accurate predictions is one that he makes at his death: ‘And looking out from the slopes of Ered Wethrin with his last sight he beheld far off the peaks of Thangorodrim, mightiest of the towers of Middle-earth, and knew with the foreknowledge of death that no power of the Noldor would ever overthrow them; but he cursed the name of Morgoth thrice, and laid it upon his sons to hold to their oath, and to avenge their father.’
