I don’t think Fëanor reminding Finwë of Míriel is the reason he’s Finwë's favorite child.

Míriel is the catalyst of course, since it was her absence that led to the codependency between her husband & their son

...but I still don't think Finwë's love for Fëanor was an extension of his love for her in the slightest.

Finwë's love for Míriel was honestly weak and proven to be very very conditional whereas his love for Fëanor was far stronger and fully unconditional by the end of his life.

Elrond loved Celebrían unconditionally, Eärendil loved Elwing unconditionally, Finwë did not love Míriel unconditionally.

He didn't love Míriel more that he loved the idea of having several kids, he didn't love her at her lowest when she was suffering and going through unimaginable pain & exhaustion.

The reason why Fëanor was Finwë's favorite is explicitly stated: Finwë raised Fëanor alone and had to be twice the parent to him, both a father and a mother, so he had twice the love for Fëanor and Fëanor had twice the love for him.

The reason is definitely not because Míriel was some great irreplaceable love, he certainly proved she was replaceable to him and even after her death he chose to disrespect her by calling her Serindë rather than honor her memory by calling her Þerindë like she had wanted.

If Míriel was his "favorite" wife and he treated her like that... it just goes to show how much of an idiot Indis was for thinking she would be important to Finwë when that man already proved how little the mother of his existing child meant to him. Or maybe she just didn't care as long as she could live out her fantasy.

Saw this comic, and immediately thought of the silm.

I just love Feener too much and couldn't resist.

The divine right of kings but it's a curse

You will wear the crown, you have no choice, the spikes growing on your head have a metal sheen to them and coalesce into a mock halo. You will command, for your voice is a terrible thing, you are a terrible thing. You will be just, and you will be fair, for any grievances you cause to your people scar your body and leave lasting pain and false promises sizzle on your tongue like hot oil. Your god is watching and it won't forget what your ancestor did and it won't let you go

Things that run in the House of Finwe:

Credits to: lorica-art, Elena Kukunova, Bella Bergolts, alystrea, Kinko-White, & Serwen-101

Very important poll 2

This is the funniest fucking thing i've ever read. Get it, Melian!

No one:

House of Finwë naming their kids:

Finwë is like “Of course I love all my sons equally. Right, Fëanor, Falafel and Finances?”

Same night,

Feanor, writing in his diary: My father has given my both my half-brothers endearing nicknames. I feel he doesn't love me as much as he does them. I am one step closer to being replaced. >:'( I will make something nice gems to try and win back his favor.

Concept for a Silm-adaptation pilot:

See, I would want any adaptation worth its salt to at least touch on the beautiful, poetic opening segments of the book that describe creation and the Ainur. But there are some things that humans are just not able to adequately portray in a realistic fashion, and I'm willing to take a stand that a choir of thousands of heavenly beings singing reality into existence is one of those things.

So, instead: they don't try to portray it realistically. Instead, the first episode of the Silm series opens with an animated sequence (a shadow puppetry style seems thematically apropos) that doesn't even come close to capturing the grandeur and majesty of it all. That's not the point of it, because it's telling a children's story version.

There's a voice, narrating everything, and we the audience are trying to guess who it is. Maybe Maglor? Maybe he's telling this story to Elros and Elrond? But the voice doesn't sound quite right--it's a good voice, for sure, but not that kind of good.

And we see creation and the Valar coming to Ea and the fall of Melkor and the great battles before people came into the world, all through the lens of a children's story, and at the end, the narrator says, "And that, Curufinwe Feanaro, is why the world is marred and not always as it ought to be. It is for us to make the best of the world we have."

It's Finwe, telling this whole story to a young Feanor.

And we finally see the two of them, in live action or whatever the look will be for the rest of the show, and Feanor is justifiably suspicious and says, "Why are you bringing this up now?"

And that's how Finwe leads into telling his son that he's about to remarry.

Music swells. Smash cut to the opening credits.

And when we come back, Feanor is an adult slightly pre-Silmarils, and on we go...

I feel like these would be the most likely candidates but feel free to add others (e.g. maybe Celegorm for having Míriel's hair)!

See, here's the thing. I like Finwë. He's genuinely a nice guy, and a lot of the hate he gets, he doesn't deserve. But he did make a lot of blunders when raising his children.

The main thing he wanted to do while raising Fëanor was to make him happy because all he'd had was sadness (because of Míriel's death). So he did that in what he thought best way possible: by indulging Fëanor's every whim and interest to the point of unhealthiness (like Fëanor's obsessive work habits), which ended up doing more harm than good.

The other thing was that Finwë himself wasn't in the best place to be a parent because of his grief and loneliness. I feel like until he married Indis, Finwë clung to Fëanor as the only good thing left in his life/the only memory he had of Míriel JUST AS MUCH as Fëanor clung to Finwë as his only remaining parent/the only person who could even come close to understanding his grief, which inadvertantly normalised this codependency.

And then when Finwë did the healthier thing and married someone else, Fëanor understandably felt abandoned, because now Finwë had someone to understand and comfort him, but Fëanor seemed to have no one. Finwë was slowly moving on with life by having more children and spending time with Indis, and I can see why Fëanor might have felt that his father, who had ONLY loved and cherished Fëanor before this, had replaced him and his mother with a better wife and children. Which led to the rivalry between Fëanor and Fingolfin.

But Fëanor was STILL high on Finwë's priorities. He didn't want to see Fëanor sad, so he continued praising and indulging him, leading to Fingolfin (and to a lesser extent, the rest of Indis' children) feeling insecure about his father's love. And because Fëanor tended to need a lot more of Finwë's comfort and care, Finwë might have assumed that his other children were alright and focused his attention more on Fëanor.

What we have to remember was that all this time, Finwë WAS actually trying his best. He was doing the best he could in the worst of circumstances, but there was no precedent to what was happening to his family, and little help to be had from the community or the Valar or anyone else. He was trying his best, but he got it wrong firstly because he had practically no experience, and secondly because his chief intention was always to make his children feel happy rather than help them heal. And he would have found it impossible to change this focus because he himself had not healed from the trauma of Míriel's death. (Her death probably meant he focused on Fëanor's happiness more as well, because he might have felt he 'owed it to her' to raise her child as a happy one).

Basically, what I think is that if he and Fëanor had been able to process their grief and heal in a healthy way, both halves of Finwë's family would have got along a lot better and the parenting situation would have been much healthier.