garashirs:

not to step on anyone’s toes but trying to make out that mairon and melkor could be good guys is…kinda problematic? like these guys literally kept people as slaves and tortured them (see: maedhros, beren and finrod and co., gwindor, hurin), attempted to kidnap and rape luthien, and generally fucked up the world with their inventions and poisonous plagues and natural disasters. like, i’m not saying you can’t like them as characters, i just don’t Get how you can argue that they were good guys from any angle.

this post has received at lot of backlash and i realise now that i could have been a lot more sensitive with my wording, so here’s an expansion on my original point:

i’m not saying that anyone is a bad person for liking these characters or relating to them. i’m not saying it’s bad to want to give them depth as characters and explore their personalities. i’m not even saying you can’t argue that SOME of their actions were good. but i have beef with saying “melkor and mairon were actually good people, from a certain point of view” because to me you just can’t argue that actions like mass slavery are good, or the people who engage in them are good people, no matter how you skew it. and that’s not a case of me “moralising”, i’m just tired of seeing people gloss over it like it means nothing when it’s actually a pretty serious topic, fictional or not.