Month: November 2017

So let’s talk about how Melkor physics work in Wesley!verse:

Melkor is genderfluid– dark, glittering, gender fluid spilling all over the place, oh my god.

Whenever he changes shape, and whenever he makes something for himself out of himself– including his clothes, Grond, and the Iron Crown (which I think I had a different headcanon for originally but fuck it, this is way better), anything that needs to be able to change/size to match the rest of him, he achieves by manipulating his essence in a way that looks like magnetized ferrofluid.

He’s a very goopy boy, my Melkor. When he’s not actively trying to emulate having a fleshbody (and even sometimes when he is), he frequently dissolves, grows spikes when emotional, and gets drippy when depressed. The drips and spikes can extend, harden, or grow crystalline like ice when he wills it, and then fall into shapeless liquid again when he stops thinking about them.

In the beginning, this essence looks like molten gold or lava, but the longer he stays physically bound in Beleriand, the more oily and tar-like his transformations become. His body starts to look brittle and spiny, with bits of him crystalizing and hardening and chipping off as he gets less flexible. But liquid gold is still what he’s known for, and his go-to aesthetic for as long as he can still achieve it. (There’s a reason Gold is attributed to Melkor, why Glaurung is gold, why dragons are lured by gold and love it so much, why Sauron makes his Ring out of gold, and continues to associate gold with his Master. In my mind, the statues of the Giver of Freedom are gold, the floors of Utmno were gold, the throne of Angband began as gold.) 

Melkor’s blood, and really anything that detaches from him, reacts sporadically for a bit before sizzling into the ground. Every part of him is chaotic and generative– in my HC this is the origin of many unaccounted for creatures in Middle Earth like trolls that don’t really breed and aren’t a “corruption” of anything, they just sort of sprang out of Melkor’s teeth that got knocked out in fights with Tulkas or whatever. The results aren’t consistently biological or sentient or necessarily anything other than, like, brief cornstarch experiments, but leftover Melkor-bits are always interesting.

….I like to think that “can’t create anything new that didn’t originate with Eru” just means “can’t create new stuff out of nothing, but can still definitely make weird monsters out of my own body parts and children.”  

Anyway, the main takeaway of this post is: Ferrofluid. I enjoy science experiments far, far too much and will use any excuse to utilize weird fluid dynamics in character designs.

♫♩Hells made of iron and hot Orodruin,

Bright golden temples and dark ferrous fluid,

Mind-reading dragons and powerful rings,

These are a few of my favorite things… ♬ ♪