Indis Headcanons

From this ask, a few of my personal Indis thoughts.

Hello! (｡･∀･)ﾉﾞI have some thoughts on Indis!

I've talked about her before in the context of her relationship with others (as well as a little fic), but Indis is so interesting to me as someone who was willing to marry Finwe even with the complexity surrounding the issue.

My general thoughts on Indis--based purely on headcanon--are:

• Indis tends to be soft-spoken. She's not in-your-face audacious the way Miriel was; she doesn't like to attract that much attention. She's not someone who enjoys conflict, so if she disagrees, she's not likely to start an argument about it, which leads to:
• When Indis is upset, she tends to be very passive-aggressive about it. Because she doesn't want to confront a problem head-on, she finds a thousand other little ways to show that she's upset and some people find this extremely off-putting.
• She's a relatively down-to-earth person. She did not marry Finwe because she had any interest in his wealth or in being queen of the Noldor; she just loved him, and she would have loved him if he was a farmer or a shepherd just as much as when he was king. She tends not to dress as ornately as Miriel did.
• She struggled a lot with feeling that she had to "live up" to Miriel's memory, which only seemed to grow grander with time. There were some Noldor who never came to consider Indis a legitimate queen and remained loyal to Miriel and it took Indis a long time to accept she was never going to win those people over. I tend to imagine Miriel as a very strong personality (Feanor takes a lot more after her than after Finwe), which made her feel like hard act to follow up on, for Indis.
• Indis was someone who loved being a mommy. She loved having her kids, she loved watching them through each phase of their life, and it was something that was really rewarding to her. She wanted to try to fill this role for Feanor, but it became clear to her that he was not interested in that.
• She definitely babied Finarfin, as her youngest and last child.
• As her first grandchild, Fingon got so spoiled at grandma and grandpa's.
• While she got along well with Anaire and Earwen, her relationship with Nerdanel was heavily strained by each of their relationships with Feanor, and after the Darkening, Nerdanel bowed out of the royal palace. Indis never said she wasn't welcome there anymore--but see above about the passive-aggressive thing.
• She sings a lot to herself while doing chores and things.
• Had virtually no relationship with Feanor and Nerdanel's kids. What she did have was only because Feanor liked them to spend time with Grandpa Finwe, and she was usually around for that.
• I like to imagine her taking the time to get to know Celebrian, after Celebrian sails west <3 Galadriel can now look forward to her grandma and her daughter ganging up on her when she gets back to Aman.
• Like most Silm characters, I think of her as a naturally flawed, but overall good person who is trying her best. She makes mistakes, but she's trying.

If you haven't had the chance to read any of History of Middle-earth yet, there's some fun Indis tidbits in there, like Tolkien's description of one of her meetings with Finwe before their marriage.

Recent Playing: Tell Me Why

Tell Me Why is an output of DontNod studios, which is for some reason not included in the Life is Strange universe, although it follows the same pattern as their other games. I'm not sure why it's never taken off in the fandom, because it hits many of the same sweet spots as the other games.

In Tell Me Why you play as a set of twins, Tyler and Allison, who are returning to their childhood home in Alaska to sell the property now that their mother is dead. Tyler has just been released from juvenile detention and a rehabilitation program. Like the LiS protagonists, Allison and Tyler discover they share a strange new mental power, and use it to uncover their family's past and understand the circumstances that led up to Tyler's arrest years earlier.

DontNod released Tell Me Why free in June for Pride month because Tyler is trans, which is not the sum of his character, but neither is it irrelevant to the plot of the game. Tyler's reception by the locals of their small town and his perception of that reception shapes his relationship with the town and his history with it. No one is openly transphobic to him, but occasionally they do make deeply insensitive comments, which Tyler can either gently call them out on, or more aggressively shut them down. Tyler's struggle with whether or not his mother would have accepted him if he had come out before her death is central to his emotional journey.

The game does a great job of setting up two young adults who had been essentially two halves of the same whole as children coming back together and wondering if any of that closeness can be regained, or if they're simply too different. And part of that is up to you as the player--in lieu of LiS' famous "this action will have consequences" notice, you'll get one of two symbols after making choices, which will indicate either Allison and Tyler growing closer or further apart.

The game also posits some really interesting emotional difficulties with the twins' relationship with their mother, Mary-Anne. Obviously they loved her, and they exclaim at various points over how imaginative and creative she was, as well as how well she managed with little resources. However, it's also clear that Mary-Anne's erratic behavior damaged the twins growing up, and their deeply isolated childhood created strange dynamics in the house where Allison and Tyler were often each other's only company, with no Internet and limited technology to reach beyond the boundaries of the property.

Like DontNod's other games, Tell Me Why firmly situates itself in the locale, with vast expanses of Alaska's wilderness serving as the backdrop for the family drama. And like its other games, Tell Me Why follows the same pattern of ferrying you around to different locations in town so you can explore, have conversations, and then use your powers to wring more information out of the moment.

My overall thoughts are that if you enjoyed any of the other games in the Life is Strange universe, you'll also enjoy Tell Me Why. I did and I'll probably play again to see what changes if you pull the twins apart rather than pushing them together.