#when talking about the palantíri. elendil was directly descended from silmarien and her husband making his house technically the 'true'

[exercise-of-trust]

not that it matters this late in the game but i want to put in a word for my beloved silmarien, and also say something in defense of pelendur, who was the main voice in gondor opposing arvedui's claim in favor of earnil ii, and in defense of earnur especially, who i think is getting a bit unfairly maligned here. (that silmarien should have been queen is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me, i will die in it at the stake, etc, not least because it does away with the fíriel issue entirely by firmly establishing a legal precedent of strict gender-blind primogeniture from the earliest opportunity in númenor's newly minted line of succession.)

anyway, i'd stand behind fíriel's bid all the way if it were fíriel making the bid. canonically, though, it's a blatant power grab by arvedui and i won't fucking stand for it. like, go on, asshole, tell me you're descended from an unbroken line of 24 firstborn male children. not ONE older sister in the bunch. go on! didn't think so. as pelendur says, "in gondor this heritage is reckoned through the sons only; and we have not heard that the law is otherwise in arnor," implying that this has been an issue before, and arvedui is only showing an interest in the inheritance claims of daughters when it benefits him personally. if he were ACTUALLY concerned with the legal precedent of succession in númenor, he'd have hunted down whatever nth-cousin-m-times-removed was the firstborn child of the firstborn child all the way back to isildur and given them the crown, or at the very least he'd have argued for fíriel's queenship and maybe the high kingship for aranarth after them both. but he didn't, because it was a power grab; malbeth the seer can kiss my fucking ass. "my wife is the rightful heir of ondoher" sure, fine, sounds good "therefore i should be king in gondor" WRONG. INCORRECT. GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200. pelendur was absolutely right to tell his ass to fuck directly the hell off; i'd rather have no king than this shitheel motherfucker.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO MY BOY EARNUR. i'll admit to some degree of personal bias because i love boromir, "a man after the sort of king earnur of old," so i'm disposed to love earnur by association, but also he deserves better than this in his own right. he does bear some measure of responsibility for the succession crisis after his death, but i think the vast majority of blame for that really rests on the post-kinstrife atmosphere in gondor as a whole. to quote rotk appendix a:

now the descendants of the kings had become few. their numbers had been greatly diminished in the kin-strife; whereas since that time the kings had become jealous and watchful of those near akin. often those on whom suspicion fell had fled to umbar and there joined the rebels; while others had renounced their lineage and taken wives not of númenorean blood. so it was that no claimant to the crown could be found who was of pure blood, or whose claim all would allow; and all feared the memory of the kin-strife, knowing that if any such dissension arose again, then gondor would perish.

the whole reason there's a succession crisis after earnur dies is because there are no promising young relatives to name. because gondor, as a whole, has been marinating for generations in the firm conviction that those not of númenorean descent are lesser and will contaminate the bloodline and result in weak kings who die early. and on the other hand, castamir the usurper, long may he fucking rot, was true blue númenorean, and so the kings after him were left with the nagging worry that their relatives who had a better pedigree would do the whole revolt-and-murder-my-kids thing. so you have a bunch of xenophobic assholes who won't accept a king who's not sufficiently númenorean, and a lot of vaguely royal cousins frantically marrying into non-númenorean families to prove they're not a threat, all of which makes a problem greater than one king alone can possibly solve. i don't think it's a stretch to say that even if earnur had named someone who wasn't his own child as his heir, he'd have met with significant opposition in his lifetime, possibly to the point of another civil war. all of which to say: this isn't on earnur, or at least it's no more on him than it is on gondor's virulent númenorean superiority complex, and i personally am inclined to try to take a more understanding view of his choices.

Felt like a Tolkien poll: