Her attitude was baffling to me, too. But anytime a character— especially one meeting with strangers— leads with negativity and hostility, I’m always confused. Like, haven’t they heard the saying, “catch more flies with honey?” lol. It just didn’t track with what she’d just gone through. Saved from the open seas,…

The Gray Havens are not to the west of Middle-earth. They are a harbor  city within Lindon, also called Mithlond. 

The people who built Gondor are descendants of the people of Numenor, who had a serious hard-on for boats and the sea (as well depicted in this week’s episode). In the books, this is how Minas Tirith is described:

The timeline is sped up. Which makes practical sense, I guess. If you want the human characters to be consistent over several seasons, you have to speed up and squish the timeline. Since the canon version is defined by the lifespans of deathless elves.

The Dwarves seem like they’ll be more important further down the line, so this season might just be getting us generally acquainted with them.

Aesthetics intended to evoke a vast ship, I assume. Makes sense since Numenor is a nautical culture and Gondor is made up of Numenorians descendants. 

I found myself rather liking how the design of Numenor clearly takes a lot of inspiration from ancient Mediterranean civilizations. It feels perfectly appropriate considering it’s sort of the Tolkien version of Atlantis.

Well if Halbrand isn’t Sauron, he and Theo (they may be relative) definitely going to turn into Nazgul.

There’s little expected to be accurate in this film, it’s a joke biopic.

No one is saying it can’t be done. However, it will be a huge headache to do it properly. The royal family is not the actual problem here, it’s our legislative system and how Parliament works. I’m no monarchist, but I recognize that it isn’t a matter of just switching out the art on the money.

It’s not symbolic in the way you're thinking. The way laws are made in this country, they require royal assent. Sure, no GG is going to refuse to give it, but the PM can't just declare something a law. We need someone/thing to replace that system. All government is symbolic when you get right down to it. The royal…

And so begins the dissolution of most of the remainder of Britain’s formal links to its former Dominions - and given how badly the Tories have screwed things up, probably not much more than even odds on England remaining in union with Scotland too.

They can finally get to work on the finale now!

crown lands(highways, lands, forests, title claims etc), and a lot of legal instruments in property are derived from royal prerogatives. it would be very complicated to create a whole new system of operations, and a huge burden expecting each province to adapt to the changes.

She meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people, as figureheads often do. Some of my friends are mourning, others are celebrating.

Yeah , in her defence when they visited Ireland a few years back she was fairly respectful, and seemed on the whole like a nice enough person.

No lover of any monarchy, but - damn - there will never be another woman (or human) like her.

Whereas every year is a bad year for bigotry signaling.

The Tarleys are a well known Hobbit family.

*sniff* This is so sweet and heart-warming that it’s almost all I can do to yell  NEEEERRRRDS!!