You don't think so.

(No.)

I was wondering whether to tell you I'm rapidly running out of plausible deniability on the horribly trivial but culturally insulting accusation thing.

I take it it's less so, where you're from.

By far.
Not even the universe objects, for once, or practitioners would pretend they cared out of self-preservation, but it's just not an insult.

This universe disagrees with you. Eru does. Valar do.

And everyone acts like they agree out of self preservation and habit, or they do agree because they just trust higher beings?

A mix, I think, but if I wouldn't get arrested it's only because my father has the good sense to have noticed that I'm actually indispensable and hard to keep in prison and obviously it's so much worse because it's Maitimo.

So much of my thinking recently has been based on the assumption that he never cared about me and just saw some very convenient strings to pull and if that's not true then I can't fathom why he burned the ships.

He was going to march into near-certain death because the math worked out. If whatever possessed them to burn the ships sounded like a good idea otherwise, I could imagine him thinking ruining two more lives wouldn't tip the scales.

He is an idiot with no self-preservation instincts and now he doesn't have anyone to talk him down from it anymore. 

The boats being burned did turn out pretty badly for him on that front.

I hope he doesn't get himself killed.

I hope he doesn't kill other innocent people because the leverage with his father is more important, don't you know...I hate Feanaro for ordering his children to do these things almost as much as I hate him for the crimes themselves.

I'm with you there. Though I'd object just as much to whatever stops them from getting an order and saying no.

Maitimo once explained it to me - and I have no idea how much I can trust him - but what he said was he can't stop his father, there's no precedent for taking power out of the hands of an unworthy king, and if he can't prevent something he'd rather be the author of it, try to do it with as little harm as possible, and not sacrifice all his leverage to keep his father in line for the sake of keeping his hands clean.

But there has to be a point, with that logic, at which you say 'okay, keeping my father in line by obeying him isn't working, what about disobeying him'.

This is the kind of problem that gets solved by not giving kings unlimited power. But if everyone here is either king or not king, I can see how keeping them in line would be hard.

In Valinor kings didn't have unlimited power. But in the Outer Lands the only check on the powers of a King is what his people will obey and his people trust him too much.

Did they just not notice him swearing that oath? Why would they trust him?

Unswerving loyalty is one of the major things wrong with both worlds, it seems.

You could ask Maitimo, I'm sure he'd have a really convincing answer for you. Might not be true, would be convincing.

He spins the ring in his hands. 

Huh. It might even be safe for me to talk to him, now that he's already figured out all the politics or strategy things we were trying to hide.

I still doubt asking that would help much.

Me too. There isn't a good reason, so he'd just parrot you whatever bad reason made you think most sympathetically of him and be most confident of his future not-as-stupid decisions.

Yeah.

At least most of the worst decisions were things he went along with, instead of causing; with Fëanáro having as few political ideas as possible they should be less stupid.

Yeah.

Trying to save my cousins from themselves is a dangerous trap to get into.

The one you were in, until the ships.

For the last several decades. 

I'm still hoping we can figure out a way to win the war, and they will then be sufficiently saved. Though that might be underestimating their capacity to need saving.

Probably. But I don't have to do it anymore. I certainly don't have to do it just because Maitimo still wants me to.