The closest you can get to it is Rosie, who I bet always sort of resented Sam for “abandoning” the Shire right before all that unpleasantness happened, and probably never really appreciated or believed his stories of heroism.
The American equivalent is a character like Cotton Hill, who is a racist asshole but if you do anything he can identify as “Nazziist” in front of him he’ll be at your throat with a bowie knife.
It’s why the use of “Human” in Rings of Power rather than “Men” bugs me. (Orcs saying “trebuchet” is fine though, as is Jackson’s infamous use of “menu”—Tolkien often put weird anachronisms in Orcs’ mouths himself.)
The complication here is that the Easterlings and Southrons have their own Númenorean ancestors. The Men of Gondor and Arnor were descendants of what was in fact a small minority in Númenorean culture at the time of its Fall.
This is exactly right, Ioreth understands it from the Monarchist folklore POV but the reader understands it as skill and herblore from Aragorn’s Ranger background. Which is almost certainly the IRL origin of the idea—the king is one of the few people with an actual education.
A useful counterpoint to this are the Hobbits, who are understood as a subrace of Men who have absolutely no Númenorean heritage but who are very much the heroes of the whole affair.
It is, but it’s just an inherent problem with the kind of legislature elections we have in the US where we all have serious reason to care about the outcome elections we have no vote in.
