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Part fandom-commentary and part literary-critical reading, this essay considers the interpretive ease with which Elrond’s “kindness” is conflated with moral coherence, particularly when it comes to treating his affective attachments to the Fëanorians and/or Elwing and Eärendil as absolute ethical verdicts. Drawing on affect theory, trauma theory and adaptation analysis, I explore a way to read Elrond’s kindness as a cultivated practice which is not incapable of bias or harm. By reframing Elrond as a figure whose kindness arises from ambivalence rather than moral certitude, I try to offer a perspective that considers how 'virtue' is not an innate or fixed quality but one shaped by violence, grief, loss and the structural constraints of doctrine.

A reunion on the eve of Dagor Dagorath.

Beleg loves Turin. Despite everything, because of everything, forever.

A moth, attempting escape, perhaps out of the artist's studio.

Beleg comforts Gwindor in Taur-nu-Fuin, and is rewarded. 

They passed out of Lhûn and the wider coastline of Middle-earth opened up before his eyes. He had wandered those shores for centuries, and even now he felt the pull of that same wanderlust, and knew he would miss them for the rest of his life. Their wildness, the untamed waves, the rocky shores and the cliffs and the sandy beaches. The gulls, and the dunes, and the tide pools with their ever-changing denizens. Someone began to sing a song of farewell, and other voices took it up. He did not join them. 

Maglor keeps a promise, and comes to Valinor, only to find the ghosts he thought he'd left behind are alive and waiting for him. 

Following Maglor as he suffers through captivity in Dol Guldur, and his journey to healing afterward. 

In Gondolin, a fat elf attempts to befriend a sad elf. 
At first, things don't look very promising. 
But maybe the friendship will turn out deeper and more real for it, in the long run.

Now added: a prologue and six chapters.

Maitimo was crossing the courtyard, thinking of lunch, when his father burst out of his workshop, where he had been holed up for the last several days, neither eating nor, as far as anyone could tell, sleeping. “Maitimo!” he cried, eyes alight with the fire of success. “Come! Come and see!”

Turgon confronts Maeglin in Mandos.

"...for none of the Eldalië ever hated Melkor more than Fëanor son of Finwë, who first named him Morgoth; and snared though he was in the webs of Melkor's malice against the Valar he held no converse with him and took no counsel from him."

Fëanor meets a stranger. There aren't many strangers in Tirion.

The night after Eöl’s execution, a young orphan sits in his mother’s room and waits for his fate to catch up to him.