He's kind of easier to push around than I imagined a kinslayer being. Makes you feel really guilty.

I don't know why you thought you had information about what he'd be like based on having identified a crime he committed.

There was also Galadriel's description.

Not likely optimized for unbiased fact.

I'm realizing that. She thinks he's manipulating us even now, that he pushes my father into being harsh specifically so we'll all feel guilty about it.

Maedhros is very charismatic and insightful, but I find it convenient that Galadriel's story casts herself as the only person clever to see through him.

She's also the person who's known him the longest.

Of the three of us, sure.

Of everyone in Doriath. And she hints at knowing a lot more than what she's said.

You know I sometimes get information from outside of Doriath, right? I have what may be a genuinely unique ability to collect many sides of stories.

Is it true that he's more in charge of the Kinslayers' decisions on a day-to-day basis than his father? Is it true that he threw himself wholeheartedly into a series of bald-faced lies to cover his family departing with the ships, until they were all across and could light them on fire? That he killed children, on the beaches? That he's a homosexual, that he kept people in line in Tirion with blackmail to that effect, that he spent several hundred years pulling strings on both sides of the Finwean succession dispute in his father's favor expecting his father to get himself killed and leave the crown in his hands?

I don't know the answers to all those questions and the ones I do know I'm not going to tell you.

I'm trying to do right by everyone in Middle-earth, Loki, including him, but having more information would really help with that.

I cannot think of any way in which doing right by everyone in Middle-earth requires you to know whether or not your prisoner is a homosexual.

So she's right.

Among many other things she touched on one of my pet complaints about Elf culture; everything else on the list is less overwhelmingly balanced toward the personal and away from the strategic. You have no idea how stupid it sounds to me to even care.

Eru cares.

And he sounds very stupid to me for doing so, if in fact the Valar didn't garble that somehow.

Well, you can withhold information that in your opinion is irrelevant, and others can decide that it's relevant to them.

This is indeed is a thing that can happen.

She says the alternative is that he isn't and just seduced men for political reasons. If you think that's any better.

Loki.

What.

I assume not all possible Oath-bound people you could have sent us have such a particularly notorious and manipulative reputation. So why this one?