#anyway again many feelings about the ADHD/creative generalist personality

[insufficient-earth-skills]

Yes yes YES! You touch upon all the points and beats that make this scene one of my favourites and one I always rewind at least once because it makes me giggle but also makes me wanna do fisticuffs with Elendil, like so:

In the beginning, when Isildur’s sitting on that edge/fence, I looked really hard at those passersby and thought like one of them could be Valandil? There’s a dark head of curls BUT he walks by with his head ducked down and that does not seem like Valandil lol. He would just stone cold ignore Isildur.

It’s like in that interview you linked in your previous post, where Maxim talked about how in that episode Isildur is going through his options that have the best chance of him getting what he wants and I think that’s something we cannot forget: he has ambition. I’ve only started to grasp this after a couple of rewatches, but like, Isildur and Valandil are not that different. They both have a goal of ‘getting somewhere’, of serving Numenor, even, they just have very different ideas of how to get there.

Isildur has the luck that he’s from a rather well-off family, with a father who has followed the obvious career path for a competent man in the sea guard. And yeah, in the aftermath of his mother dying and the grief taking up a significant amount of your energy, narrowing his bandwidth, it probably seemed like the most prudent option to take his father’s advice and go for the same career. (Maybe he had a hand in getting his friends on the ships as cadets, too? Even though Valandil is clearly proud about the fact that he’s wanted this since he was a child. But how does that work if the 3 of them are set to take their sea trials at the same time, if Valandil was already training as a cadet while Isildur was getting himself thrown out of other guilds before signing up as cadet? Or is it like an age thing where you train with each other but you can taken the trials when you hit a certain age, no matter the amount of training you had? Thinking too hard about the world building is my forté, sorry, I digress.)

I want to add too, that in that first scene with Elendil, Isildur and Eärien, Isildur references that he heard from Anarion that Elendil himself deferred his sea trails TWICE!!! And then in trying to convince Isildur to stay on, he tells him that ‘the watery part of this world has a way of healing even the deepest of hurts’. Isildur counters with ‘The way it’s healed your’s?’ (which at this point we do not yet know refers to his mother but point still stands -) and it really throws into sharp relief for me that yes, 1. Elendil may not be over the loss of his wife and 2. he kinda threw himself into his career and expects his children to do the same, in order to make sense of his life as a widower. That may very well be why, as you mention, he doesn’t really put that burden on Eärien because even though she is struggling with getting accepted into the builders guild, she is clearly working hard for it and more importantly in this discussion, she has one goal, one ambition: making it into a specific guild. Which on the outside looks like she has it together but that is not necessarily the case. It’s just that for Isildur, it looks more obvious because he is constantly changing his mind about his occupation.

And then in the ‘recruitment’ scene I can really see Elendil’s POV really well because obviously, there is more at stake than his son’s individual career. If Elendil makes the mistake of signing someone up without the correct training, this might be a danger to the other ensigns (ensignees?). So there is his opinion as a captain to take into account, as well as him being a father who wants his son to succeed within the structures of their society, which all in all is not a bad thing. (And then Elendil’s line about how Isildur has been feigning fidelity to the traditions of this island while all the others around them have been living it for years, what a fucking line in light of the fact that the most faithful thing to Numenor Isildur will do is to grab a bunch of people and fuck off out of there on a couple of ships right before the island drowns, FUCKING WILD.)

Like, Elendil is obviously a very skilled captain which is not just being able to steer a ship in a harbour but also warrants people skills and being a mentor and such. So he knows how to coach people in a professional setting. And that’s what he’s trying to do with his son, except he’s kinda glossing over the fact that that’s maybe not the right way to convince Isildur. Like, he may have just explained to him the reasons for why he deferred his own sea trial when he was a youth. ‘Listen, these were my reasons and I worked through them or whatever and then I decided that I wanted to contribute to society in this way and worked hard for where I am now.’ I mean, big chance Isildur would still say no, though.

Isildur very much listens to his inner voice instead of people around him so his actions will always follow this.

Anyway I did not expect this show to make me feel so many things about a boy in his early 20′s but here we are, 5 paragraphs in and I could keep going. I will save it for a later time, however, like somewhere next year maybe when we’re starved for content.

Bonus:

Heavy side-eye Elendil when he sees his son sitting and knows what is coming.

Bonus 2:

VERY much a fan of Isil’s leather sleeve ties!

personally i feel like we don't talk about this scene enough