[art by SemperViridis]
Here we have my Blorbo Of Blorbos, who I've had a crush on since I was 15 [I'm in my forties now].
Origins/Background
Here's the Cliffs Notes version of Maglor in canon.
While I have written canon-era Maglor, most notably in my universe Seeds Of Fire and my longfic Shades Of Silver-Gold, for the most part I tend to focus on Maglor post-canon, playing with the concept that he's still wandering Middle-Earth, and Tolkien's fiction is [in-universe] not actually fictional. [Tolkien IRL had "Beren" on his headstone and "Lúthien" on his wife's headstone, and my multiverse puts forth the (fictional) idea that Tolkien was actually Beren in a past life and is writing from a combination of his memories and sometimes, having met Maglor in-person and "comparing notes", though Beren's perspective on Maglor's family is decidedly more negative than Maglor's probably because Beren was jealous of Celegorm but that's neither here nor there.]
So when we encounter Maglor in my multiverse, it's usually modern era [sometime between the 1980s to the 2020s], and he's traveling from place to place pretending to be human [hiding his ears and using illusion magic aka "glamour" to make his eyes appear more human, and turn down the brightness/shiny aura around him]. He tends to use the alias Mark or Marcus [or Magni when he's in Iceland], though when he's introduced in my fic In Chains [Northern Lights universe] he's using the alias Alejandro Magalhães.
My multiverse's modern-day Maglor is of course always a musician, though he tends to eschew fame [even if he has a recording career]... with exceptions, like 1. Silmarella, my friend SemperViridis's fic contribution to the multiverse, and 2. that time he was the other guy from Wham.
Finally, some controversy - in my multiverse, Maglor tends to be incestuous with at least some of his relatives, usually his father Fëanor, uncles Fingolfin and Finarfin, older brother Maedhros, and older brother's boyfriend Fingon [who is also his cousin]. Obviously, this is problematic as fuck and I'm not into incest IRL, but I find the dynamics of "us against the world going a little too far" to be interesting. -shrug-
Appearance
I've used both Cherif Fortin [90s romance cover model] and Ian Somerhalder as faceclaims for Maglor, though he looks more like a cross between the two of them; I really like the way my friend SemperViridis does art of him.
Maglor, being one of the Noldor, is tall - when he's cis he's around 6'9" [nice], when he's a trans man he's closer to six feet tall - and whether he's cis or trans he prefers to wear his hair long, to the middle of his back. This is also a glamour - it tends to be down to his ass/thighs unglamoured. In older eras, like the first half of the 20th century, he glamoured his hair short but he wasn't comfortable with this, and has a special nostalgia for the 60s/70s "when I could look like me again".
He has black hair, grey eyes, and sometimes wears glasses as a low-maintenance way of masking that his eyes don't look human - I headcanon that Maglor's unglamoured eyes look like labradorite.
Maglor has pointy ears. He also has a significant burn scar on his right hand from the Silmaril.
In universes where Maglor is a trans man, his father was supportive while his mother was... less so, wanting a daughter. Maglor used a combination of herbs and magic to keep his breasts from growing, though he still has the usual AFAB downstairs parts, and he's used magic and vocal training [same thing with Mags, really] to make his voice deeper.
Maglor's speaking voice naturally has a pleasant, silky, ASMR type sound to it - one could call it sexy. I don't really have a voiceclaim for his speaking voice, but as far as his singing voice, I headcanon that he sounds a lot like the late singer Jeff Buckley.
This is in fact my favoritest song EVAR, so you get to learn more about me with this, yay!
As an elf, Maglor does not age. In earlier times when life was nasty, brutish and short, Maglor typically had to move around somewhat frequently to avoid suspicion with his lack of aging when life wore harder on other people. These days, Maglor usually claims to be somewhere between 27 to 42, with early forties being the maximum age he can get away with claiming, looking like he does. Maglor is in truth at least ten thousand years old, he's seen the rise and fall of civilizations, he remembers wooly mammoths. While the rise of plastic surgery means Maglor's "shelf life" for staying someplace is extended, it's usually only a decade or two if that - anything further into forties/fifties and he has to pretend to be a Botox junkie, which is not his personality at all.
Suffice it to say, Maglor roaming from place to place every 10-20 years, changing his name/backstory, starting his life over again, gets old, and usually when we catch up with him in modern Middle-Earth, he's very tired and sad both from the trauma of having lost all his family and the trauma of uprooting so many times, watching so many friends/partners die or leaving them behind.
That leads me to:
Personality and Other Details
So Maglor has issues, being that almost everyone in his family is dead, and died traumatically at that; he idolized his father and watched him die, and he still carries the scars from that... and he's been wandering alone and lonely all this time. He's lived through war, famine and plague, and has a truly epic amount of survivor guilt.
In the way that people with heavy trauma tend to be kinder and more empathetic [but not always], Maglor is a basically decent person... except when he's not; if provoked, he has a filthy temper and has racked up a body count, though only if someone has earned it**. In the Northern Lights universe he kills Justin Roberts, Sören's abusive rapist ex.
**Obviously in canon he... made some mistakes. I do headcanon that the First Kinslaying, Fëanor and his family were attacked first and responded accordingly and only a couple dozen people died. But I'm not going to try to justify Doriath to y'all except that he believed the Silmarils hold special power and he needed to keep them out of the hands of evil at any cost, so he did the wrong thing for the right reason.
Maglor tries to atone for his past by random acts of kindness and generosity, as he's able to. The one thing my version of Maglor WILL NOT do is crawl back to the Valar [he is brought to the Valar for atonement in Shades Of Silver-Gold but he puts on an act and still hates Manwë], but as he keeps himself alive to keep the memory of his family alive, he tries to do some good here and there.
In most of my universes he's well-off, having accumulated wealth over centuries, often just by virtue of being at the right place at the right time - he often has or once owned a genuine Stradivarius violin. However, in OnlyMags he ends up homeless and living in a van.
Maglor has been all over the world several times over, and across multiple eras of history. One of my more amusing/cracked out headcanons is that back in the days of the Roman Empire, Maglor posed as a nice Jewish boy and worked as a carpenter, hung out with social outcasts like prostitutes and lepers, fed a bunch of people with lembas and fishes, and got mad at some moneychangers and flipped their tables, and said people should mayyyybe try not to be dicks to each other, and almost got crucified for it.
My multiverse's Maglor not only plays harp and sings, but also plays guitar, piano, drums, and sometimes other instruments like violin.
Maglor's "superpower" is the power of his voice, which he can use to influence people [for good or ill] as well as heal or harm. He's in tune with the Song itself [he pretty much is the Song, incarnate] - in my multiverse he tends to encounter famous musicians in his travels and is known for inspiring them directly or indirectly, including Led Zeppelin, Elton John, and Trent Reznor. In one universe he talks Kurt Cobain out of suicide. [If you read nothing else by me but want a feel for my writing style/themes, read the Cobain fic.]
Maglor is sensitive, quiet and brooding, though when he "blooms" and lets people in past an arm's length he's quite warm and nurturing, fiercely protective, and he has a playful/trollish sense of humor [like his father; like Sören]. He tends to be a big fan of classic rock and hair metal; in most universes he has some rock paraphernalia including KISS action figures dolls. He also likes music typically associated with goths [The Cure, Depeche Mode, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Black Tape For A Blue Girl, etc]. And of course, he enjoys classical and jazz - one of my favorite things was having him turn a young Anthony onto the music of Alice Coltrane in my fic You Sang To Me.
To quote something I said somewhere else:
I wonder sometimes if part of why I constantly write about Maglor [besides hot emotionally tortured long-haired musician guy] is because the idea that he's still wandering around thousands of years post-canon and pretending to be human while keeping people at an arm's length so they don't find out he's not, is something I viscerally relate to, as a very autistic person who's bad at masking....I also think part of the appeal is he's old as fuck and has a very "not this shit again" feeling about the world and... yeah. I've gotten to that age where I also feel like that much of the time, especially lately.
Maglor can be submissive or dominant, depending on the situation and the other relationship dynamics. He tends to like it rough and a bit kinky, whether he's giving it or receiving it.
Maglor tends to be bi/pan but leans strongly towards men. In the Northern Lights universe he has an adorable daughter named Elanora with an Australian Aboriginal woman named Ali. [I need to do Ali's character sheet sometime, yes?] Tolkien fandom has, er, a bit of a racism problem, so it gave me great pleasure to give Maglor a non-white daughter who he is very proud of, and who's a musical genius just like her dad.
In the modern era, Maglor's path inevitably crosses with the mortal reincarnation of his father and uncles: Sören [Fëanor], Anthony [Finarfin] and Nicholas [Fingolfin]. The variables change, meeting under different circumstances, but that is a consistent thing that happens.
[Maglor and my OC Anthony, made by me and CogitatingKerfuffle]
In addition to having raised Elrond and Elros like his own sons, I often present Maglor as Ecthelion's sire [sometimes via Daeron, whether Daeron is Omega or a trans man], and Maglor has had a few Peredhel kids [in OnlyMags where he's a trans man, he's had two half-human kids, and had two abortions in the days when you took herbs and hoped it didn't kill you, because MAGLOR SAID ABORTION FUCKING RIGHTS GODDAMMIT].
Maglor usually claims Saint Patrick's Day as his birthday when asked, so for all intents and purposes we'll say he's a Pisces. He's an INFJ, like Sören, but his enneagram type is 4w3 [unlike Sören who is a 4w5].
Want to get to know my version of Maglor better? Here are some places to start. All of these can be read as standalones, even though some of them are parts of larger universes: