#but the mythologizing of what are fundamentally political maneuvers feels really similar to me

[anghraine]

I'm not watching ROP (Amazon boycott where I can, although AWS is half the internet so) so I'm only following distantly, but THANK YOU for you Aragorn and kingship post. It's one thing where even if I can buy into the high fantasy narrative of kingship by rights, I can never forget its real-life implications. I know the last book is literally named The Return of the King, but it's really worth questioning it and not forget that Gondor was actually fine without a king for generations.

Honestly, I can respect an Amazon media boycott when it's not blatantly about fandom shit more than anything else. So more power to you on that.

With regard to the post, thanks, and no problem! Tolkien walks a narrow and complicated path with Aragorn and kingship in LOTR, which is part of the reason it doesn't bother me more. But I can't deny that it does bother me, and all the more because Tolkien is so insistent on the Stewards' virtues and competence (very much including Denethor's) right up to the last ... two days? of their 969-year reign. In a way, that only makes the royalist reasoning more pronounced.

It took awhile for me to figure out why deposing a long-standing dynasty and instituting a different one for reasons of blood bothers me so much more than having dynastic rule in the first place. But yeah, "we're going to keep having basically autocratic rule because we always have" requires a very different sort of buy-in than actively changing a long-established government to the same sort of government but with a different guy in charge for legalistic primogeniture reasons.

Aragorn is only able to get away with this because of his personal qualities, heroism, popularity, etc, but he's only in the running at all because of firmly royalist (and patriarchal) rationales, and you have to accept those at some level for the mystique to work. And there are reasons that some of us can't do it!