I Welcome My Sentence @longingandheartacheandlust - Tumblr Blog

brooding men who cannot communicate their feelings if their life depended on it are only hot when they're fictional. if i have to deal with one in real life i will curse him and pray for his downfall every night before i go to bed

kestrel-tree

It's because the writer communicates their feelings for them. If people wanna pull that off in real life they need to hire a guy to walk around behind them narrating.

bananonbinary

#can i be the guy#ill narrate SO incorrectly#theyll all learn how to talk for themselves just to shut me up (via @cirrus-grey)

i'm loving the implication that this isn't something they hired you for, but something you'd do as some sort of public service.

ahedderick

iskisaggie

An elegant and floral bard 🌺

[Please, do not repost] INSTAGRAM — TWITTER

natjennie

jaskier really created a whole mythos surrounding geralt of rivia, white wolf, hero of the people, for the continent to adore and get invested in and then fucking wrote and performed her sweet kiss with the lines "I am weak my love and I am wanting. if this is the path I must trudge, I'll welcome my sentence, give to you my penance, garroter, jury, and judge" and then had to like. live with the fact that he admitted he's in love with the subject of his songs. every tavern he plays at the whole crowd is just side-eyeing geralt in the back like. um. hello. and he grunts and stomps up to their room. and then burn butcher burn comes out and the whole continent is like whoooaaa shit there's drama!!! jaskier is literally out here taylor swift narrating his whole relationship and geralt just has to trudge into town like. does anyone need a swamp monster killed? and the mayor or w/e goes hey aren't you the guy from the song, you really pissed that bard off what did you do leave him at the aisle or something. and geralt just has to be like. nope, must be a different witcher he's talking about. anyway swamp monster?

its-bread-bitch

Here’s the thing:

Jaskier doesn’t have a horse. I mean yeah, technically he has Pegasus but in nw and most fanon media he doesn’t. The man walks at the same pace as a horse every day for twenty years. And I’m sure Geralt let him put SOME things on Roach, but probably not much. She’s Geralt’s horse and needs to carry his things AND Geralt, no one wants her to be over extended with bard stuff. So that means Jaskier carries all his stuff himself which is AT MINIMUM, his lute, notebooks, probably like 3 sets of relatively complex performing outfits and road clothes, all his fancy cosmetic stuff, a bedroll, and his METAL coin money. He also probably has first aid things like bandages and potions, frivolous things like baubles and jewelry, food, water, and probably other bard stuff like spare strings and such.

Yeah, Jask is depicted as traveling without bags but that’s just not possible. He probably carries his own essentials and as someone who backpacks— that alone is usually 20+ lbs. WITH modern technology aimed at making things lighter. Thats not counting all the fancy stuff he’s prone to and his career tools. Jaskier is probably hauling like 40-50lbs or more of stuff EVERY DAY while mostly roughing it off the land and keeping pace with a man on horseback. Oh, and this is WHILE SINGING AND TALKING the entire time. Can you imagine this man’s lung capacity? To sing and talk constantly while exerting himself?

This is all to say: Jaskier is strong as fuck and fit as hell. The thing is though, he probably doesn’t even recognize it. Yeah, he probably knows he’s got the muscle and such, but he still is largely perceived as a delicate person. He PROJECTS being delicate. Being fragile and pampered and in need of the finer things. He projects capable, but not strong. This. Is. Hilarious.

Jaskier, having already walked 12 miles at a moderate incline carrying 40lbs of stuff without breaking a sweat (it’s barely past midday): Geralt I am FRAGILE. I cannot POSSIBLY walk through this mud. (It’s like a 3 ft section) I’m not a rugged mountain man like you, I’m simply not BUILT for this!

Geralt, staring at Jaskier who’s as burly as most Witchers and has walked the path w/o Witcher training for over a decade: hm

penny-anna

Witcher fans when the beat drops on the hurdy gurdy

lassieposting

anyway jaskier is like. basically the human equivalent of those wild animals someone feeds who’ve lost all fear of people and now just break into houses to eat out of the trash and chill in the pool

he’s been travelling with a witcher since he was 18. he has zero fear of any of them. he associates witchers with Having Things Done For Him and Being Provided For and Give Love. he has no reservations whatsoever about going up to any random witcher he happens to pass when geralt isn’t around and asking them to help him with something or do something for him or just. trailing after them for a while because he knows if he whines perfectly on pitch they’ll hunt his dinner and store his shit in their horse’s saddlebags and keep him safe on the road, even if they’re grumpy about it. at kaer morhen he is like the stray cat geralt fed one time and now everyone is just like “well he lives here now i guess”. it just Does Not Occur to him that he might ever be in danger with a witcher around. this is a man who finds things lying around in the kaer morhen lab and just fucking. eats them

anyway. those “please do not feed the animals it teaches them to approach people” signs but. for jaskier and the oxenfurt students who start trying to imitate him and adopt a witcher

timothyolyphant

Joey Batey as Jaskier THE WITCHER: SEASON 2 (2021)

thewitchersdaily

#bard, poet, master of the seven liberal arts

ehay

Yennefer, Gym Leader of Aedirn

poisonousbuttercup

Anyone on the continent: Witchers are rough, coarse, unfeeling beasts.

Jaskier, completely calmly, sipping his wine: Actually, Witchers are smooth as hell.

dresfaggot

Witchers are smooth when you pet them one way and rough when the other

poisonousbuttercup

They're smooth both ways, they're absolutely as smooth as a well oiled raw chicken breast. I don't know what Witchers you're touching but every Witcher I've ever touched has been smooth as hell.

Say it with me: every Witcher is completely smooth no matter what angle you're touching them from.

tigerinkangel

Hi, um, Witcherologist here, and on a serious note, Witchers are NOT smooth.

You can TRY petting them but you'll get your hand shreaded. Witchers are not smooth, doesn't mater the direction you pet them.

Their skin is made of tiny scales that are rough enough to cut you.

poisonousbuttercup

I'm touching a Witcher right now. Rubbing them every which way. No direction is off limits. Witcher skin is smoother than the finest of silks.

tigerinkangel

There is no way that is true, please stop spreading misinformation about Witchers. They are not smooth, you need gloves like these to touch them when you encounter them in the wild if you want to touch them without injury.

It is likely you are thinking of Sorcerers, THEY have smooth skin, Witchers have rough skin.

poisonousbuttercup

You might be thinking of mages, who absolutely have a rough, sandpaper like texture. But Witchers are extremely smooth- smooth as hell. You don't need gloves to handle a Witcher- I have one with me right now and I'm petting them and they're smooth all over.

izzy-hands

The Witcher (2019—) ✦ Our Flag Means Death (2022—)

grison-in-space

idle Jaskier-related notion:

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.

grison-in-space

"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!"

grison-in-space

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

gossip-girl-of-middleearth

I need a full picture costume run down of this by someone in the fashion field stat

redhorsedawn

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!!

magiclamd

…ok I love this but … why didn’t they just hire a real twink?

grison-in-space

They hired Joey Batey because he showed up to the audition with an actual lute upon which he played and sang a song he’d written the night before called “The Lion Cub of Cintra” based entirely on the role he was auditioning for. Batey happens to be basically built as a fairly meaty guy, one of those people who seems to put on both muscle and fat fairly effectively, although judging from his music he is often worried about being seen as fat. He is not a small man and will never be a small man, but he is very committed to the role, a musician in his own right when he’s not playing Jaskier, and generally plays the role fairly well. Personally I am glad we went with “musical talent” as a higher priority in our casting than waifish slimness.

one thing the tags have been quietly driving me nuts about on this discussion is also... look okay, my original shitposting from last year? is very much based on the belief that the body you’re born with does not define who you choose to be. Jaskier’s costuming choices are most interesting to me as a conscious choice for several reasons, and I’m gonna rant for a sec because look I had a point there I wanted to jokingly but very seriously talk about and the costuming shit is all very well and good but I wanted to talk about what it means for the character to choose to dress and present himself this way. what does it mean in story fucking terms to have a big buff dude that presents himself as non-combatant, as vulnerable, as gossipy and a little swish but not a physical threat?

see, masculinity is often defined negatively, as “whatever isn’t feminine”, and the constructed artifice of deliberate appearance modification is pretty clearly coded feminine in mainstream Anglo culture (which is what I have access to, gender is complicated, but I’m going off here). what this means is that visibly trying to control your appearance and the way that people perceive you is something that is often assumed to undermine masculinity, which has all kinds of super special social drawbacks for men/AMAB folks who don’t perform masculinity well because misogyny+sexism+transmisogyny do fun things together.

you’re allowed to control your appearance if you pretend that the reason you’re doing so is totally divorced from the way you look (I’m lifting weights to be strong/lifting weights because I want to be hot) and the artifice you use to execute the effects is completely invisible to the viewer (not wearing any kind of visible makeup, for example). so just from that perspective, the fact that Jaskier dresses consistently to make himself seem a certain way is interesting to me. his gender presentation is a deliberate choice, and it is a deliberate choice that erodes his social status in masculine posturing rather than shores it up.

the fact that Jaskier’s size also makes him a potential threat to other people and that he acts to minimize that is also interesting in the context of the way he earns his income. it’s heavily implied that he probably secures some of his patronage through a form of sex work (i.e. his patron the Contessa, who is both paying him and sleeping with him, which ends when she throws him out of the sexual relationship). moreover, he’s an entertainer, and being muscular and large isn’t very helpful when you earn your living via your fine motor skills: damaging your hands is potentially devastating if you earn your bread playing a lute, and getting into fights is therefore dangerous for his livelihood. threatening entertainers don’t relax people into parting with money and food and shelter.

we think of being threatening as an asset in all circumstances but that is fundamentally not the case. a large, hulking, threatening Geralt will incur a certain amount of posturing from dudes who want to feel big and scary and important in their home communities; Jaskier is likely to get ignored by coming across as meek and fairly non threatening. it’s a deliberate strategy, and we know it’s deliberate because he has the bulk and body size to present himself the way Geralt does if he wants. so he doesn’t want to do that, he must want to be perceived as expressive and a little swish and not dangerous at all and approachable, and he has clearly worked hard enough to get that across that it fooled a really ridiculously high fraction of the folks in my notes here.

this post has been really resonating with delighted surprised trans folks among other things and hey! I see y’all! you are still whatever gender you feel most comfortable in even if your body isn’t cooperating right now. you can choose a lot of the way you will be perceived by thinking about your clothing, your movement, and your postures, and you can learn to do all those things with practice and thought.

and I just think it’s neat seeing a character who easily has the body type to do a very normative gender thing choose to do a non-conforming thing in a way that you absolutely do not see much in media, because usually they fucking hire the twink instead of doing all that work to get the right gender presentation, and the story fucking suffers for it and people who aren’t naturally skinny waifs don’t get to see nice things that look like them in the show.

so.

that’s why.

athousanderrors

I already reblogged this for the fascinating costume design, but adding this because it's important.

micshrewart

Realized i never posted my jaskier version of stańczyk by jan matejko

Its one of my faves lmao

transwitcher

they hated him for his he/they/she/fae swag

maddie-w-draws

Jaskier having a normal time in the forest

jerry-of-rivia

I posted this as a joke and am cursed with every new addition.

But! I like that many of you have correctly noted that both sets of armor are perfectly serviceable AND have historical context. Geralt's leather armor isn't going to hurt him a bit, and the exaggerated muscle sculpturing IS 100% a hilarious design choice, but it's also one ancient cultures employed all the time. (Romans in particular loved this shit)

The problem with feminized tiddy armor that hugs each breast isn't that it's sexualized, but that it will kill you. Armor cupping each boob and having an indention in the middle of your chest means that any blow to the torso drives the mid-tit indention RIGHT INTO YOUR STERNUM. It's not decorative, it's arguably more dangerous than no armor at all. Meanwhile I'm looking at Geralt, and his flexible leather armor has minor intentions and is probably over a base plate, Roman style. He's not in danger he just wants to be cute.

Both Calenthe and Geralt are fully protected and you're doing amazing, sweetie.

stele3

Nothing will ever be as hilarious to me as discovering from bts interviews that Henry Cavill helped design that armor. That man knows what he’s about.

abeautifulblog

MOAR costuming shenanigans

So @grison-in-space got a follow-up comment to that viral post…

…and then she tagged me in, so OH BOY, here we go!!

(Here’s the photo set so you can follow along at home.)

I didn’t weigh in on the last round of the joey vs. hcav costuming-optical-illusions debate, because I know nuffink about theatre stuff, but now we’re talking about SUITS and gremble can talk about suits. :D

Okay, so—there were two things that IMMEDIATELY jumped out at me:

#1: GORGE, a.k.a. how low is the V down the front of your chest? One of these creates the impression of less chest, and one of them gives the impression of MOAR CHEST!!!

Joey is wearing a waistcoat (fashion-forward choice, I dig it 👌), which gives him a very high gorge. Meanwhile, hcav’s two-button suit creates a substantially lower gorge, maximizing the amount of chest he has on display. It is, for anyone who knows about men’s fashion, a mildly conspicuous choice here, because the two-button suit is generally the province of younger men. It reads as more fashion-conscious, and hcav is admittedly a movie star, but I daresay the default choice for someone of his age and height/build would be a three-button suit—

🚨🚨 KILL BILL SIRENS 🚨🚨

OH. OH. OHHHHH.

So I went back and double-checked that photoset to make sure I was counting his buttons correctly (because the watermark was making it hard to see in that pic), and it turns I wasn't—

—because hcav isn’t wearing a two-button suit, he is wearing a goddamned ONE-BUTTON SUIT, which.

What the FUCK. What EVEN.

You can no longer pretend this was an accident.

Deep breaths.

Okay, so:

Three-button suits are the standard, the default, the thoroughly unremarkable option. You can wear them open, or you can do up the top two buttons. When wearing a suit jacket, the lowest button is always left unbuttoned, full stop; it is purely decorative. (You’ll notice that Joey is wearing his waistcoat correctly by leaving the bottom button undone.)

I’m not sure when two-button suits went mainstream, but they definitely enjoyed a renaissance with the “metrosexual” trend of the late 90’s/early 2000s. They can be part of a full suit, or just tossed on over a t-shirt and jeans. By virtue of the lower gorge, they look less stuffy than a three-button suit—more casual and lived-in, perhaps more athletic. Even people who aren’t consciously aware of the two-button/three-button distinction can nonetheless feel the vibe difference between them.

Meanwhile, one-button suits are.

Uhm.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but—

For women.

Women’s white-collar wear, hampered as it is by the conflicting directives of “do all the same power-signaling stuff that menswear does, but do it suited to a female body, and also be sexy~~!!” results in… norms that are far less standardized than white-collar menswear.

Womenswear invented one-button suits, because they are power-signaling while fitting better to female curves. One-button suits, on women, will give the same LIKE A BOSS profile that two- or three-button suits give men.

But one-button suits on men are so rare that they’re practically a mutation that doesn’t occur in the wild.

Like, for people who aren’t nerds for men’s fashion, I’m pretty sure I can’t convey to you just how fucking weird it is to see hcav in a one-button suit. Like. This is akin to watching him walk out onto the red carpet in a thong. You’d have to go out of your way to even FIND a one-button suit for men. This was not an accident.

Someone—and I seriously doubt it was hcav himself, considering that his ‘brand’ is a conservative, conventional sort of masculinity—picked out a one-button suit that lowered his gorge practically to his navel in order to put all that chest on display.

And as I’d pointed out to grison in groupchat—hcav’s jacket is too small in the torso. That crease you can see coming off the button, and the way his lapels are spreading across his pecs? Means it’s too tight. Which is also contributing to the impression that his manly busom is so huge that it is BURSTING to be free of this cruel prison. If hcav were wearing a suit that actually fit his frame, his physique would be far less noticeable.

(An aside: This is, in fact, the entire point of men’s suits. With the right fit, they will make literally any body appear to be the conventional mesomorphic ideal. They are designed to make average dudes look like hcav; when they get an actual hcav, they are playing down his musculature.)

But yeah. Gorge. It’s a thing.

#2 thing that jumped out at me was the width of their ties:

And while we’re at it, the width of their lapels and collars too, because these elements tend to coordinate across an outfit. Joey’s everything is very slim, from his tie and lapels, to the cut of his sleeves and trousers—and what that reads as, very distinctly, is a young man’s look.

In fact, everything about Joey’s look signals “young man who knows and cares about fashion,” because nothing about his suit is the standard/conventional choice. Super-slim fit. Three-quarter length jacket in contrasting fabric. (With weird buttoning pattern.) Waistcoat. Peak lapels. Clipped collar points. Highwater cuffs. He’s wearing a suit, but it’s a fashion suit not a corporate suit. Every element of that outfit is a marked deviation from the default.

(And as @redhorsedawn pointed out in the original costuming post, the open jacket also serves to obscure the shape of Joey’s torso, by suggesting that the width of his hips goes straight up.)

Meanwhile, hcav’s dressed like he’s auditioning for a Mitt Romney biopic. Everything about his suit is subtly (or not-so-subtly) cut to emphasize width. The tie. The lapels. That collar that’s spreading so fucking wide it’s taking up three seats on the bus. And while his suit is tight around the torso, it is cut very loose in the sleeves and mirrored in the loose cut of his trousers (I jacked the contrast down to make it easier to see):

(Incidentally, both of their jackets are too wide at the shoulder, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Except for that weird one-button, hcav’s suit is very much that of a businessman/politician—conventional design, with nothing that pushes the envelope like Joey’s outfit, and cut to enhance the impression of breadth and age.

If you still don’t believe me, here, have hcav vs. hcav-in-a-suit-that-fits-him:

Higher gorge, slimmer tie and collar, looser torso, closer fit in the sleeves and trousers. Bam.

In conclusion, whoever picked out their red-carpet looks for this event was deliberately doing everything in their power to make Joey look young and skinny and metrosexual, and hcav look broad and powerful and mature. (lol, sound familiar?) But it is, in fact, more lies and trickery and optical illusions, just like in the show.

(For people who would like further resources on how to become a nerd for men’s fashion, I recommend Alan Flusser’s Dressing the Man.)

(lol and tagging you in this @hellotailor cuz it’s your wheelhouse)

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