"Yeah, but having children so that we have the numbers for a war seems - sort of awful. I know everyone else does it. There haven't been children yet. I expect when this planet's finished and peaceful and most peoples' day-to-day experience of the war is that they spend far more time than they'd like enchanting things for sale on other worlds, some people will decide that counts."

"Makes sense on both counts."

"The King's family seems unlikely to. We have a lot to work through. It may take a few centuries. Much as the galaxy could benefit from some more of my father's blood..."

"Well, mine'll be grown up in a few non-Valian decades and does periodically assert that he wants ten kids..."

"Eru help us all. Actually, no, Eru can stay the Halls out of it, Loki help us all. Or various instances of her. Who's he having them with, my mother's not going to have left Valinor."

"She hasn't. He has not considered this aspect of the process yet and was for a while worryingly considering finding some way to have them on his own but hasn't brought that up recently."

"That is very worrying. And easy with galactic tech, unfortunately. Clones are also possible."

"...I will try to convince him not to clone himself."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. I think it will help that he can just go look for more of himself, apparently, without having to homemake them."

"Yeah, that has ours intrigued too. He's trying to think how to hop dimensions looking. I am harboring a hope that interacting with more of himself will curb some of his annoying interpersonal tendencies but having Curvo didn't do it, so perhaps not."

"He takes strongly after him?"

"He's not a clone, but I am sure of that only because Valinor didn't have the technology. Same aptitudes, same temperament though my father's better qualified to raise my father than anyone else so he's a much happier person generally."

"Should I be collecting raising-a-Fëanáro tips? All he actually said was 'let him do things'."

"They mostly talk projects. All the time. My father's generous with compliments when one is really deserving of them, and he likes being praised by people he thinks are qualified to praise him."

"Projects I can do, at least where we overlap enough, I can't eat languages like they're individual pieces of breakfast cereal or anything but there's wizardry."

"I'm glad. Ours was a well-adjusted and happy person until the Enemy started meddling, for what that's worth, and his father messed up about as badly as one can."

"I was... not super impressed with the parenting there, no."

"And if you saved his mother, you were there before it got much worse."

"It got worse?"

"She died. My grandfather decided he wanted to remarry. One of his stated reasons was wanting more kids, which my father took as proof he wasn't good enough. The Valar let him remarry on the condition Miriel agree to stay dead forever, even if she later found a way she wanted to return, because if she did return then someone would have two wives."

"Fucking Valar."

"Yup. So then the King tried to force my father to get along with his new wife and his eventual siblings, and he ended up - not disliking any of them, but certainly not loving them, which was a great disappointment to the King."

"...yeah, I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to say it would be conceptually impossible for him to like those people in that situation but it would require way more finesse than I ever saw Finwë deploy with Fëanáro merely to not completely sabotage the possibility unless his half-siblings were reaaaaally great in Fëanáro-appealing ways. Finwë seems like a good king to me - calibrated on a Materian scale, which would honestly be very friendly to anyone who found themselves kinging in Valian circumstances instead - but not like a good parent, and blended families are hard mode."

"My assessment of the King is that he was a great King and terrible father. And he didn't begin in Valian circumstances, and was at least partially responsible for bringing them about, so." He shrugs. "He spent the rest of his life trying to make it up to Fëanáro, once he realized how badly he'd hurt him.

And his half-siblings have their merits but are also not the sort of people my father'd innately like, they're all capable political types with interests in things like architecture and boating."