big fan of characters with abandonment + attachment issues so profound that they leave claw marks in everything they touch but would sooner gnaw off their own leg than admit they just want someone to stay for once. in a totally normal well adjusted and not at all projecting way of course.

big fan of characters who are always leaving. who constantly have a suitcase in their hand. characters who start planning their exit the moment they arrive and get nervous when the people in their lives start to Know them. in a totally normal well adjusted and not at all projecting way of course

Over the past month, 256 artists collaborated to recreate 310 frames of Ed and Stede’s S1 kiss to express our love for this show and these characters. This is animation is the result

If you'd like to take a look at each frame, check out the project website here

Also check out the project credits here! The doc has all the artists who participated listed in frame order with their social media links and ways to donate to them

So, what makes Ed Happy?

This side by side comparison sure is something

on the one side we have GORGEOUSLY handcrafted armor. Looks like actual plate, the white tree of Gondor clear and easy to see and echoed on the pauldrons and even pressed into his belt! Which is folded in a LOVELY knot to hold it in place. The chainmail is REAL chainmail. And over all there’s some good wear on it, it looks like Boromir has owned and worked and lived in this armor

And on the other side we have stuff that looks like it was created for a shoe string budgeted made-for-TV Camelot production. It’s CLEARLY plastic. And wtf is that LENGTH that leaves a huge swath of his VITAL ORGANS unprotected???? The symbol is PRINTED on it, not even embossed, and so poorly you can’t even really tell what it’s supposed to be. It looks, as far as I can tell, like someone smooshed a bunch of pseudo celtic symbols together. Those shoulder things are NOT pauldrons. They seem to be some half arsed attempt at coin style chainmail? Maybe? I have NO idea what that shirt is. It looks like maybe the designers were going for a type of Gambeson, but it’s just way WAY too thin. It ALL looks like they hit the after halloween sale at party city for supplies.

cc: @petermorwood

This was a show with no grasp of time, no grasp of distance, and no grasp of even fantasy realism - swimming from Valinor back to Middle Earth? Shrugging off a pyroclastic flow? - so I'm not surprised it has no grasp of Hero Props.

"Hero Prop" is the term for Boromir's armour, indeed any armour, costume or accoutrements worn by a Principal Character in LOTR or any other movie.

"Hero" has nothing to do with the character's alignment, applying to Sauron and the Witch-King as well. It means any costume, weapon etc. made as detailed as possible because the character wearing it will be front and centre in very close shots, where an IMAX screen might make any flaws a metre high.

(Bernard Hill was amazed by the details in Théoden's armour, some of which only he and his dresser ever saw. More here.)

Now there's the Numenorean bargain-basement rig up there, and the full plate of the Action Heroine here.

I don't know what it's made of, but it looks like vac-formed, spray-painted plastic.

Compare it to an example of Elven armour from The Hobbit movies, which notoriously didn't have anything like the development time of LOTR...

No further comment.

WETA were involved in some of the design work and creation for the props and weapons for Rings of Power and you can easily spot them compared to the spray-painted chainmail and ill-fitting costumes on the leads.

These images are from a post they put on facebook about the sun motif they developed for the Numenorean armour

They also worked on details for the Silvan elves, including Arondir’s weapons (and armour, based on quality and aesthetic alone)

And these lads

The difference is staggering. Look at the last image and the scaled texture of the armour: this looks like a lad who has made armour and a helmet out of dragon bits, cobbled together with rusted mail from a fallen enemy. It tells you something about the character. Compare it to the bland, shapeless shrink-wrapped stuff they put the leads in.

i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back

someone should remake lord of the rings as a grandfather telling a fantasy story to his grand child with flashbacks to world war one showing the dead boys and men the characters were based on. grandpa why didn’t they just fly. because they didn’t. they didn’t.

i’m fine

I will never get over how Tolkien & Lewis took the horrors of war and spun them into fantasy.

Shivering in the trenches dreaming of cozy hobbit holes, shaking as bombs pockmark a forest and imagining each shallow mud-filled crater contains a new world—that maybe there are still as many beautiful things in the universe as there are bombs—that maybe the world is bigger than this moment and this ugliness and one day this will be a peaceful forest again full of small ponds.

I mean look at these photos of the shell craters in Sanctuary Woods, near Ypres Belgium and tell me it’s not the Wood Between The Worlds:

I'm sure this poll's been around before, but I don't remember the results and I'm interested ...

you’ve got to embrace being weird or else you’re going to die both spiritually and for real life

Pictures from Rhys Darby in New Bank, NJ, 6/30/22. Did my best to get pictures despite Rhys constantly buzzing around the stage like a glorious silly bumblebee!! 🐝 Set 1 of 3.

Ed’s “I can’t believe I’m in love with this dork” faces

We should all just start pretending like we don't know who jkr is. make it the next goncharov joke or whatever to just suddenly completely stop paying any kind of attention to her & when someone brings her up go "fucking who"

i was going to say man i don’t know why i expected something new and original to be behind the red door but i just finished the episode and i do have to say the ending got to me

Boy (2010) dir. Taika Waititi

reblog to diminish the horrors from the person you reblogged from

Andrew Robinson about his first scene on Deep Space Nine

BONUS:

Okay so a production of Hamlet that ends with “Goodnight, sweet prince,” etc. and then Horatio looks up and sees the audience for the first time and is both shocked and furious, because his world is falling apart and you sat there and watched.

This idea would go fantastically well with my director’s idea that Hamlet knows the whole time that he’s in a play. He had me (when I played Hamlet) interact with the audience, exchange looks with people in the front row, deliver my soliloquies to people in the first few rows casually like I was just talking to them, and I even had the idea to not freeze and just walk about the stage when other characters had their little ‘asides,’ which he allowed me to keep in.

Basically, if Hamlet continuously acknowledges the audience unnoticed by all the other characters (almost Fleabag-style) and then suddenly he’s gone, and obviously he knew he’d have to be gone at the end, and then poor Horatio is left all alone to finally realize there was someone else there the entire time, now that would make it all the more devastating.

There’s no difference between the Danish courtiers, who showed up because they wanted to see the Mad Prince get his butt kicked in a staged sword-fight, and us the audience (who… also showed up to watch Hamlet loose a sword fight.) 

I want to see a production where Horatio just stares at us, and screams “Now cracks a noble heart!” with the subtext “You fucking fuckers. He was better than all of you, you watched him die, and you just stood there.

Then, he just silently cries over the body. For like FIVE MINUTES. And the courtiers peel away into the wings, one by one, until Horatio is alone on stage with a lot of dead bodies. It starts getting uncomfortable. You’re thinking… is the play over? Am I supposed to go? (hamlet is just about the *only* play where the final scene is cut about 50% time, so use that uncertainty, use that ambiguity.) Maybe some people do get up to go. There’s definitely muttering. And then there’s smashing sounds coming from the direction of the box office, and Horatio looks up, with an expression like something’s gone wrong. 

But then he says, “Why do the drums come hither?” Fortinbras enters though the audience, and the play continues. 

(I *also* think it would be really cool to cut for intermission right after Claudius freaks out and breaks up the play-within-a-play. Just imagine it: king yells “Lights! Lights! Lights!” And the houselights come up.) 

All good. And also–

As Hamlet is dying in Horatio’s arms, he puts his hand on Horatio’s face and turns it toward us. And that’s when Horatio sees the theater.

“What makes Ed happy…is you”

from samba schutte: “season one is about stede going from a puppet to a real boy… and season two is about stede becoming a man.”

Weird niche poll time.

The idea here is that the abduction actually happened, so the question is more hypothetically which of the tcf boys would be most likely to be taken by aliens in a world where we know that can happen.

Feel free to say why in the tags etc, and how the others would react.

* it would be wrong not to include him