Ok so like, i just went off on a whole rant in defense of celegorm as a character talking about how his whole off page fall from the kind of person a 'Good' god would favor to the point of giving him one of his own hounds and taking him on as a PERSONAL STUDENT and Servant/follower/acolyte, making him his favorite among all his other followers, to the kind of dude who's trying to take and force a woman against her will and hold her prisoner and starting coups against people who have been (at least somewhat) helping him-
And that made me think about how in canon/narratively, you could argue that for all he's done by then, the actual moment Celegorm truly abandons and is abandoned by Orome is when Huan turns from him and leaves.
And then I thought about Ryn, and her being sent freely, able to make her own choices about when to speak and to stay, and how, in the greater themes of thread, you can read that- 'you don't get to stop caring bc it's hard' from Amras yes, but also like
The promise of there always being a way back from the brink if you're willing to do the hard work on facing and fixing yourself, and that for all you've done, you are not abandoned. You are not alone- the promise that someone is going to be with you on the road and waiting for you at the end. The extended hand and glimmer of hope that all of that painful work is going to be *worth it* - the same thing i mentioned before, about 'no fate is so immovable we cannot change it'
And then I cried bc Ryn is a Very very good girl and the best doggo who deserves everything and the world to boot 😭❤🥲
RYN IS THE BESTEST GIRL AND A GOOD DOGGO.
The promise of there always being a way back from the brink if you're willing to do the hard work on facing and fixing yourself, and that for all you've done, you are not abandoned. You are not alone- the promise that someone is going to be with you on the road and waiting for you at the end. The extended hand and glimmer of hope that all of that painful work is going to be worth it
How do you always manage to condense down all my nebulous thoughts and word vomit into something so concise and on point and worded so beautifully?????? Fucking hell I read that first line there and something in my brain sat up and went YES, YES I DID NOT SEE THIS UNTIL NOW BUT YES THIS IS TRUE. THIS IS FUNDAMENTAL.
I think a lot of the thinking and planning of thread happened around the time that the debate about redemption arcs was at (one of) its peaks on this hellsite, and that was one of the reasons that I am so so dedicated to there being nuance and layers to every person's decisions and actions in the thread verse. There are a couple things that I very much hold to be true, both in the thread verse and in life (this is not an exclusive list, but the ones that are relevant here):
Every single person has the capacity within them for terrific love and terrific violence, and those two things are not mutually exclusive.
People do better, can do more, when they are surrounded by people that love them.
You can see how these underpin the redemption arc for Celegorm (and Curufin and everyone else, other than Maeglin because he never did anything wrong ever in his life and I love him). At first, I looked at Celegorm and went 'dick'. And then I started writing him, and I wrote him off the bat as someone who is fucked but still loves his brothers so damn much, and then I started peeling back the layers and going why, and fucking hell it went deep. What makes the most religious of all of Feanor's sons turn his back like he did? What makes him kidnap someone, what makes him try to wrest power in Nargothrond and kill Beren, what makes Huan leave him?
The answer 'because he's evil/cruel/bad isn't really ever good enough for me, and it definitely wasn't with Celegorm because of just how far he'd fallen and from where. I've picked it all apart before in other asks, what the perceived abandonment by Orome did to him, what it did to him when it happened again, what it meant to him when Beren asked Finrod for help retrieving the Silmaril, etc etc etc. And importantly, none of this excuses what he did, but it does offer reasons, and that's so so important both in terms of building a compelling character that people connect with, but also in a broader term for understanding why people do terrible, awful things and therefore how to try and stop it happening again.
Anyway, this started off with redemption arcs. For me, and where I think a lot of people get angry potentially unnecessarily, each redemption arc has two separate parts. The person who committed the wrongs, and the person/people who were wronged. And, importantly, those two can be entirely separate. The people who were wronged do not have to forgive and forget for the person who committed the wrongs to redeem themselves, and the person who committed the wrongs doesn't have to follow a redemption arc for the people wronged to forgive and forget. They can intersect, to whatever degree you would like, but they don't have to.
Lúthien and Beren are never going to forgive Celegorm and Curufin. That's fine. Celegorm's redemption isn't about them, it's about him. They have their own arc and their own story.
So yes. To bring it back to the beginning, the idea that you can bring yourself back from the brink with enough effort, and with people around you who love you, is fundamental to thread. Utterly fundamental. And, importantly, still possible to fail in.
We're gonna see that one soon.