Joey Batey is really approximately the same size and shape as Henry Cavill, and there are a number of clever techniques in pretty much all Jaskier’s costumes to hide this fact and make him look about three or four inches narrower than he actually is. The costumers work really really hard to make him look that twinky, often with cleverly cut shoulder decorations that pretend he’s trying to look bigger than he is and have the actual effect of making him look a lot lighter.
On a Doylistic level this makes sense, because it’s hard to make Geralt look Huge and Imposing next to your non-combatant harmless sidekick if said sidekick is a jacked six foot burly man.
On a Watsonian level, however, the notion of Jaskier as this big meaty dude aggressively arguing with all his tailors to ensure that he looks as non threatening and foppish and entertaining as possible while also looking as sexy as he can (for a Jaskier definition of sexy, at least) is generating considerable entertainment for me this fine morning.
“No! My shoulders must look slender!”
“But, sir, you could look ripped!”
“Absolutely not! I must look slim and gentle and unassuming!”
“As you wish, sir… So do you wish it to be cut with much excess fabric, so that you look small and also very wealthy to afford so much?”
[howling] “No! I must look slender and gentle and also above else very attractive!”
Geralt doesn’t notice any of this until they try to share a tiny hostel bed on the road and Jaskier cuddles up to him and abruptly there is no more room in that bed
I need a full picture costume run down of this by someone in the fashion field stat
Ask and ye shall receive! I may not work in the fashion field but I do work in the costume production industry for theatre/film so this is totally my area. Using clothes to change someone’s appearance is super common, and Tim Aslam’s costume design for The Witcher is actually a really good example of this, so buckle up because this is a long ride!
Creating an illusion like this has two main components:shape(the style lines created by the clothes), and fit (the way the clothes hang on the person’s body), and is the result of close collaboration between the designer and the production team.
We’re going to talk about season one, because that’s where the difference is the most obvious. Take a look at Geralt:
First, let’s talk about shape. The goal here is to make Geralt look strong and imposing, and the best way to do that is to exaggerate the triangle of his upper torso. See how much broader his shoulders look than his waist in both images? A loose shirt over tight pants is a classic way to establish this, because the shirt blousing at the waist (note that the pants sit high up at the natural waist) makes the hips looks narrower in comparison. Note also that his shirt has an asymmetrical closure - a centered vertical line down the shirt would make him looks slimmer, while the off-center one adds width.
His armor does this by giving him those massive shoulder pieces, which both lengthen and raise his shoulder line. I would estimate that they raise Henry Cavill’s shoulder line by a good two inches just from the bulk of the leather alone. His torso armor also does a really clever thing by having a very subtle V shape to the vertical lines, making his waist look smaller. If you count the number of stripes above and below his belt (again, sitting high at the natural waist), you’ll notice that the narrow stripe at the front edge of the armscye disappears, which allows the side stripes to make that V shape.
Now let’s talk about fit. The fit of Geralt’s shirt looks simple but is actually super specific. It’s very easy for an actor to get lost in a shirt that is too loose - if there’s too much extra fabric then it will just make the actor look smaller by drawing attention to how baggy it is. This shirt fits just right: the sleeves are full enough to allow for movement but still relatively fitted (and rolling up the sleeves actually also helps add breadth to Geralt’s torso by continuing the horizontal line at his waist). The body of the shirt fits smoothly across the shoulders and chest, and has just enough fullness to drape at the waist without feeling baggy.
Now let’s look at Jaskier.
We’ll start with this look. Shape and fit are very interconnected here so it’s just gonna be a jumble. First thing I notice: the jacket. Unlike your traditional fantasy/historical doublet, all of Jaskier’s jackets end at the waist, rather than continuing into a peplum/skirt like Geralt’s armor does. This cropped jacket is evocative of childhood/immaturity, an association that is generally considered to have its roots in schoolboy uniforms of the 19th and early 20th century (see the image of schoolboys wearing “Eton Jackets” below)
Jaskier also tends to wear his jackets open. This creates a vertical line down his torso, which is generally slimming, but it also totally obscures the shape of his torso. The brain is going to take the line of his hip, which we can see, and the armscye of his jacket, (which actually looks to be cut ever so slightly artificially narrow but it’s hard to tell) and fill in a line between them, which is likely going to end up being slightly narrower than his actual ribcage. He does have poofs at the top of his sleeves, which can be a technique used to add width, but if they’re cut and fit carefully you can actually hide some of the breadth of the shoulders inside the poof and make it look like the fullness comes from the poof and not the body.
Note: the “armscye” is the technical name for the armhole, but specifically the torso part. The corresponding sleeve part is the “sleevehead.”
Again, we have another open jacket, this one with strong vertical lines. See how the line of Jaskier’s hip flows up through the edge of the doublet all the way up through the armscye? This makes his torso look narrower despite the jacket’s shoulder tabs. In contrast, this line is always broken on Geralt’s outfits, whether at the waist with his shirt or with the giant shoulder pieces with his armor. Jaskier’s pants also tend to fit more loosely, which de-emphasizes the triangle of his shoulders to waist.
Okay this is my favorite image to illustrate everything we have going on here. Look at Jaskier’s jacket. What’s the first thing you notice? The bright yellow inset slashes in his chest. The high contrast in color draws the eye inwards and distracts from the breadth of his shoulders, where we have another cleverly cut poof. His jacket is again cropped, with strong vertical lines, over the baggiest pants he wears in the season.
Now look at Jaskier and Geralt together. Jaskier is all about long vertical lines, while Geralt’s predominate lines are either horizontal or diagonal. Additionally, Jaskier’s hips look even to his shoulders, even if they’re not, and Geralt’s shoulders are exaggerated. The two characters have a very different presence, even if the actors underneath are similar.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to costume design! Creating the illusory effects like this is one of my favorite things and I am excited to share!!
Sociocultural identities within the whump community [Summary of research/results]
Full title: “Sociocultural identities within the whump community: Investigating whump and hurt/comfort genre, whump interest and the whump community, and the application of whump in narrative processing”
About the research: This research was part of “Interdisciplinary Research Project”, an undergraduate research paper at IPU New Zealand. It was conducted by Renée Nielsen and supervised by lecturer Mark Hall.
This research considered the fictional genre of whump and hurt/comfort, a genre centred on predominant themes of a character’s experience of pain and often recovery. The study aims to inquire about the nature of whump interest from an academic perspective, and thereby to develop a more informed understanding of the genre and the engagement of the whump community as its primary audience.
do you think wishverse sam and dean weren’t close because way deep down in his subconscious dean believes the only way sam can be truly happy is without dean in his life?
Yes.
I think Dean thinks that he’s poison and that Sam would do so much better without him in his life. In the Wishverse, Dean was a total drunk asshole who was responsible for driving Sam out of his life and Sam’s life was so much happier without Dean in it.
SAM: Yeah, right. That’s another thing. Since when do you call me Sammy? (beat) Dean, come on. We don’t talk outside of holidays.
DEAN: We don’t? Well, we should. I mean, you’re my brother.
SAM: “You’re my brother”?
DEAN: (laughing) Yeah.
SAM: You know, that’s what you said when you snaked my ATM card, or when you bailed on my graduation, or when you hooked up with Rachel Nave.
DEAN:Who?
SAM: Uh, my prom date. On prom night.
DEAN: Yeah, that does kinda sound like me. Well, hey man, I’m sorry about all that. (walks towards SAM)
Dean gave himself a fairly shitty life in comparison to Zachariah, who gives him a huge pay raise and a fancy apartment.
As Crowley says:
But what I find interesting is that even though Dean thinks so poorly of himself, and acknowledges that he treated Sam like shit in that universe (and wants try to to make up for it), he still thinks of Sam like this:
He knows Sam loves him and will follow him to hell.
PHOBIA SAFE (no real creatures shown in post itself) with clickable source links for every single fact!
Arthropods are wonderful amazing living things, but often poorly appreciated. This post dispels some common arthropod myths, but also collects some generally cool, fun or surprising facts!
Some people don’t like looking at arthropods, and I won’t pretend to get it, but they still deserve cool and (to the best of my ability) accurate facts, so there will be no real photos in this post. It’s also extremely long, so I’ve put a cut after the first few items! I apologize if any links change or go down, and will fix them when possible.
First: “Bugs” ARE animals. An animal can really be as simple as a jellyfish or a sea sponge, but Arthropods are on the more complex side of the animal kingdom with such familiar adaptations as legs, eyes, muscle tissue, neural cells, egg-laying and more. Possibly only rivaled by nematode worms, they may also represent the majority of animal life in terms of both species and actual biomass, making arthropods the foremost representatives of what constitutes an animal.
Wasps are at least as important as bees. Wasps can pollinate almost all the same flowers, even if it’s with slightly less efficiency, but many plants also attract wasps alone for pollination, and wasps pull additional duty regulating every food web that involves insects at all.
Mosquitoes are also necessary, sorry. The viral claim that “scientists” have “proven” them to be useless is a misunderstanding of one researcher’s opinion that it would be safe to eradicate one variety of mosquito from a limited area. All over the world, mosquitoes are a massive part of the nutrient cycle, and little else could multiply as rapidly in the same range of conditions if they were to go missing.
Ants and bees are effectively just specialized wasps themselves, together forming the order Hymenoptera along with the less famous “sawflies.” You can think of ants as super-social, super-successful subterranean wasps for having evolved from the same ancestors.
Fireflies are carnivorous beetles, which feed primarily on slugs and snails during their larval stages. In some species, adult female fireflies also prey on the males of other fireflies, imitating their light signals as a lure.
Termites are cockroaches. Totally unrelated to ants despite their very similar lifestyles, termites were always considered closely related to roaches but were more recently proven to actually just be very oddball roaches themselves. There are even some highly social wood-eating cockroaches that bridge the evolutionary gap, still alive today.
okay this is a post i wrote to convince a few specific people that el’s the demogorgon so it’s all over the place and i apologize
el opened the portal to the upside down on the night of will’s disappearance. she’d never met him, but what happens in the UD is frequently linked to d&d and other media will consumes. in d&d lore, the demogorgon has two heads. when el comes up to the demogorgon in the void (a space where we know different minds can be linked from far away), perhaps she is walking into will’s mind, and behind the demogorgon we briefly glimpse something that looks vaguely like an egg:
i think this can be taken as el sort of being reborn once she opens the gateway, and this new version of her has strange connections to the demogorgon, particularly their powers:
later on in s1, nancy and jonathan find an injured animal that gets yanked away from them by an invisible force. earlier on in the ep, el throws lucas into a wall in much the same fashion. just as the demogorgon uses telekinesis to maim, el uses it to save the day - they’re two sides of the same coin. and of course in the finale, they both seemingly disintegrate into flakes, but when el reappears in the UD afterwards, the demogorgon doesn’t. similar-looking flakes appear in s3 on the beach in billy’s mind, possibly connecting them to mindscapes.
as for the s4 promo and the lab massacre, it’s pretty clear that el kills other children at the lab and blocks out the memory, and much of the promo implies a demogorgon was involved in killing the kids, despite one of the lines used in advertising - “it’s not the demogorgon” - and in one of the first teasers, mike’s s1 “something is coming” voiceover getting placed over a shot of s1 finale el, rather than the monster. this would most likely mean it happened the same night as the portal opening, but bloodied el in the rainbow room wears a lab gown which raises the question, who got her out of the tank? amidst the panic, did someone open it, take the time to dress her and send her off to kill the demogorgon? we know el escaped through a pipe, but in the 002 poster there’s a trail of blood leading up to an opening in the ceiling, so did she follow its up there? or are they one and the same and the el we see for the rest of the show sprung from the void too?
finally, we have potential foreshadowing from terry ives in the s2 void, who says “no” and vanishes after el tries to talk to her. to me this clearly implies that there’s something wrong with this el, that she’s not the kid terry expected.
there’s also this figurine:
tl;dr: the real jane died in the tank or the void and the one we know was created along with the upside down irreversibly linked to the demogorgon will had made up when she discovered his mind in the void. she’s both his hero and his monster
