Tag: Bonafide Eldritch HC™

Oromë is another one I’m having to write for a project, so I’ll hit up that UUUUUNNNNNGLLLLEEEEESSSSSSS *bew bew bewwwww*

I fucking love Ungles and I’m happy to report that I have some Bonafide Eldritch Headcanons™ about her. 

Canon wants us to believe that she’s a corrupted spirit from Ëa who joined Melkor but then fucked off because that’s how spiders do.  I AM NOT CONVINCED. You can’t have your “Melkor is the mightiest of the Valar and Valar are exponentially greater in power than Maiar” cake and …. have….a  spider eat that cake. 

So, in so much as Ainur are beings derived from Eru’s thought, Ungoliant is not a Maia. She’s not a Vala. She’s not one of the Ainur at all. Ungoliant is something Melkor ran into when he was searching the outer darkness for the Secret Fire, which only Illuvatar has. The Void is at least as old as Eru, being timeless. It is vaster than He (if one can even use size as a metric for measuring infinite cosmic entities), though empty. It is the birthplace of all potential, the void that must be in order for things other than it to exist. It is ready to quicken around any particle of matter and form pearls of chaos that expand infinitely and succumb to entropy just as quickly as they form. It is a writhing, frothing, sightless, soundless, Nothing that devours itself in perpetuity.  

Melkor was not made of matter when he ventured into the depths of the Void in the beginning, and did not stir the ancient darkness when he passed through it. But he did speak to it– told it about the world that was to be made, of his part in the making of it. And the Void listened in its own fashion, forming around the Idea that had been planted into it and growing. All the Nothing in the universe can fit into the back pocket of a quark, so the resulting consciousness was both very small and very big; just a grain of sand that could expand as much as anything that was put into it. And that Thing waited around in the deeps of the void until Melkor came into the outer darkness a second time–this time pissed off, and nursing a sore cheek from where Tulkas punched him, and he said “hey, want to come fuck things up?” And it said “ssssssss” and crawled up his sleeve. 

Now, it may seem irresponsible to bring the sentient equivalent of a black hole into the realm of matter and just let it go hog wild, but Ungles is only as powerful as what you put in her. She devours light and matter and energy and creates darkness and sticky void-webs that eventually sort of clog up her ability to intake more of those things; this is why her dens are isolated wastelands of Scary Shit and darkness, because once she’s devoured everything in the area, nothing else can easily get in, and going OUT takes too much energy for her when she’s starving. So she’s not too much to handle if you’re the mightiest of the Valar, or even a sufficiently powerful Maia or Eruhini.  

However, when you let her drink two full trees’ worth of Vala Juice, you’re in for a bad time. 

–Just for kicks, here’s a crusty old unfinished story-board experiment of the Tree Incident– 

In terms of personality, she’s pretty straightforward; she knows what she wants, she can never have ENOUGH of what she wants, and she doesn’t trust Melkor any more than Melkor trusts her. She’s not especially malicious (except when someone Wrongs Her and then gives her a chance to get even)– just predatory by nature and aware of her own otherness. She’s very intelligent; I imagine she picks things up from whatever she eats, and she’s been around a very long time and eaten a LOT of things. She can feel amusement, anger, anticipation, greed, hunger, interest, wariness, hatred, fear, and possibly even a distant affection for any of her daughters that are strong and clever enough to avoid being eaten by her long enough to grow up and spread to Middle Earth. She’d still eat them if given the chance, and they’d probably eat her if they could figure out how– but that’s just how the spider do. 

She also diminishes with time; the more she eats, the more personality and self-awareness she has, and the longer she starves the more she reverts to being a mindless consuming force. She acknowledges a certain affiliation with Melkor– he was the one that facilitated her coming to earth where she could Eat Things in the first place, giving her awareness of the world. But spiders are fairly self sufficient from the get go; she doesn’t need anyone to nurture her or teach her anything, and she doesn’t feel obliged to show continued loyalty to someone just because they seeded her into the universe. Especially not Melkor, who would be the first to say they didn’t owe each other shit for just existing.

She views Melkor as the hand that feeds, and also the hand that forgets to feed her, and sometimes denies food to her even though it promised to feed her, and also the hand that would probably taste ssSSsssooo good if it ever got accidentally stuck in a web.