the last of us is destroying me emotionally charle | 22 | they/them fics are tagged #my writing thots are tagged #charle talks main blog @mint-chapstick
Idle question. I'm getting lured into Witcher fandom, and my partner turned to me this morning and asked "would getting covered in digestive juices from weird monsters damage Geralt's leather armor, or would it just be at risk of getting torn up in battle? Would he have to hunt down someone who knows what they're doing to repair it at intervals, and how frequently might he need to do that?" You seemed like the person to ask!
✨ OH BOY it's my time to shine. ✨
Wherein a professional leather armor-maker weighs in on Geralt's costume.
First off, leather by itself is not particularly effective as armor. It helps soften the impact from blunt weapons or blows (ie, getting slapped with a tail) and is good protection against scrapes and abrasion (hence its popularity as motorcycle armor), but at the end of the day, it's just skin, and a combination of sharp edges + pressure (a heavy sword blow; sharp teeth and powerful jaws) will pierce/slice through it.
Which doesn't mean it's no use—if he were fighting something the size of a tiger, its teeth would be able to pierce his armor, but the leather would prevent them from going deep enough to cause real damage. At which point, the crushing pressure from its jaws would probably be more dangerous than the punctures from its teeth. (To a regular human, anyway; I'll accept that witchers can't be crushed so easily.)
And indeed, when we first see Geralt in his shitty armor in episode 1, it bears the evidence of having been mended countlessly many times:
Which Geralt 100% did himself. Making leather armor is a profession; upkeep on it is as basic a skill as knowing how to take care of his horse. This involves:
Repairing gashes. He needs a blunt needle and an awl—sewing leather is not like sewing fabric, because it's so tough that you have to pre-punch your holes with something else (the awl) before you can push the needle through it. He'd use either waxed cotton/linen thread or animal sinew, which is stiff when its dry and would need to be soaked in warm water beforehand to make it soft enough for him to sew with. Leather thongs are used as ties for armor, but are too thick for sewing with.
Conditioning the leather. Leather gradually dries out over time (and much faster when it’s getting hard outdoor use), and will start to get brittle and weak unless it's properly conditioned. There are a ton of products for this, some old and some new; in Ye Olde Fantasylandia, I'd venture to say that Geralt's best option would be a mixture of neatsfoot oil and beeswax. Many oils would work, but neatsfoot (literally, made from cow feet) is ideal because it has a much much lower freezing point than other oils and it doesn't go rancid like food oils. Beeswax by itself would make the armor too stiff (and way too sticky), but a small amount rubbed into the surface would help it to be very water-resistant. He'd be doing that pretty often, so picture it as a round-the-evening-fire activity, Geralt with a rag and his jar of oily wax, patiently rubbing it into his armor. (I regret to say that his armor conditioner cannot be used for lube, because beeswax is fuckin' sticky, y'all.)
Replacing straps. The straps used to buckle your armor in place are usually the first point to wear out, since they're made of thinner leather and also getting more stress put on them than anything else. Geralt would have to buy the blank leather strips from a tanner or an armorer, but he'd know how to fashion them into straps himself, to replace ones that break in the field. Honestly, the only time he'd need to go to a professional would be if a chunk of his armor got torn off and eaten, or if a piece was damaged beyond repair and needed replacing.
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If he got hit with a spray of monster digestive acid, I expect the leather would do a good job stopping that in its tracks. Leather is pretty non-reactive to solvents, so it would probably dull the surface but not actually eat through it. Geralt would just have to wipe it clean after the battle and buff the surface with more oily wax to make it look decent again.
Leather (indeed, all animal fibers, including silk and wool) is extremely flame-retardant, which probably also stands him in good stead.
Water isn't great for leather though. If he gets soaked through in the rain, or submerged in a lake, it is going to be deeply unpleasant to pry it off him, and then he's going to need to drape it or lay it out so that it dries in the proper shape. And then once it's dry, it's going to be unwearably stiff until he applies a comprehensive layer of oily wax to soften it up again.
(The season 2 armor is a different beast -- it’s not meant to be soft, it’s got a hardened breastplate and backplate that are buckled together on the sides to form a sort of carapace.)
And sweat = water. Basically, whenever he takes it off, he’s going to want to set it up so that it can air out before he puts it on again. Leather is an organic material and it will grow mold if it stays damp for too long.
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Which brings me to my next point, which is that there are many different ways to tan leather, and they result in entirely different materials, with different uses and different care requirements—and frankly, Geralt's costume is a bit anachronistic.
I've talked about this in detail elsewhere, but in brief: vegetable-tanned (veg-tan) leather is the thick, rigid stuff used for full-on armor—his pauldrons and bracers, legguards if he's wearing them, etc. If anything he's wearing is waxed or boiled, it would be those pieces, because both processes leave the leather hard and inflexible.
Leather garments are a trickier proposition, because keeping leather soft and pliable through the tanning process takes more effort. It would have been infused with oils, and worked by hand to keep it from stiffening up.
In the old days, garment leather was largely buckskin, made by a process that involved smoking it, and the result was a matte, tan-colored leather that was indeed very thin and stretchy, excellent for pants that showed off one’s well-turned calf. (You can see this in 18th century men’s portraits, my favorite being the one of Alexander Dumas’s dad. Like, damn, dude, do you have to ROLL those up your legs??)
These days, garment leather is chrome-tanned (ie, using chromium salts, turned in massive drums with rocks), leaving it with a shiny finish -- and that's what Geralt's costume is, but that process was not invented until the industrial revolution. Just putting that out there.
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I’ve read some fics that have Geralt tanning whatever deerhides/monster hides he picks up in his travels and selling them for extra income -- sorry, but he can’t, he doesn’t have the wherewithal for that. He might be able to salt the hides to keep them from rotting for a few days, and sell them to a tannery if he gets to one quick enough, but tanning requires way more time and equipment than he can spare on the road.
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Interestingly, it is not anachronistic to have Geralt in head-to-toe black. I've seen people discussing that, laughing that he's either wearing super-expensive black armor For The Aesthetic™, or that monster guts make a black dye so he's basically a walking advertisement for his profession, but neither are necessary. Iron dissolved in vinegar makes vinegaroon, which has been used as a leather dye for centuries; it's not a true black the way modern dyes are, it's a very dark grey, but it will appear black after it's been conditioned with that oil and wax. That also means that when Geralt's armor is new, he smells like vinegar. 👍
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Going back to my first point, which is that leather by itself is not very effective armor—but you know what leather does go well with? A coat of plates:
(The Anders brigandine -- for them who’s interested, I’ve written a full tutorial on that.)
It's a way to combine flexibility with protection—a bunch of small plates made out of metal or rigid heavy leather, riveted to a garment of canvas or thinner leather. These days you'll often see it with the plates on the outside (for the Aesthetic™), but historically, they were usually made with the plates facing inward—because the coat-of-plates was worn over chainmail, so the plates were insulated from both the wearer's skin and from tearing up whatever surcoat they were wearing over it. An inward-facing coat of plates looks like this...
(Not my work -- from armstreet.com)
Which looks awfully similar to Geralt after he gets some coins tossed to him and upgrades his armor--
...Granted, I don't believe that the costume designer had coat-of-plates in mind when they made Geralt's armor—because he's not wearing chainmail underneath it, because it doesn't move like coat-of-plates does. I think they just liked the look of eleventy million rivets, but that's what it should be, goddamn it. A layer of steel plates would provide infinitely better protection than just leather.
(Though I also like to headcanon that the rivets are silver-plated, so that when monsters try to grab him it's like grabbing a hot potato. 🤣)
(And I’m low-key amused that the pattern of his shitty armor vs. his shiny armor is identical -- which says to me that he’s figured out how he likes his armor, and he doesn’t like change. That he dropped his old, falling-apart armor in front of some leatherworker and went, “Same as this, but better.” Which, fair -- I am also Stubbornly Set In My Ways.)
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Anyway, I hope that was informative! Feel free to hit me up with more leather-related questions, I enjoy being able to put my skillz to fandom use. 😀
fun alternative: cruise ships. cruise ships exploit workers and can pollute as much as a million cars on a daily basis while dumping endless shit into the ocean and endangering all passengers on board because the on board air quality rivals some of the most polluted cities in the world while being a breeding ground for disease. cruise ships deserve to have negativity associated with them
also all crimes commited aboard a cruise ship is under the juristiction of whichever country they’re registered to once they’re a certain distance away from land so you have the added bonus of the crimes being very unlikely to be properly investigated (due to usually being physically so very far from the actual police whose juristiction they’re under)
As an ex cruise ship employee, let me give you some stuff to work with!
Water tight doors! You get a special training video on interacting with these correctly because they will literally cut you in half if you try and go through them while they’re closing!
Freezer vaults for food in the sub decks - you can only get into these with the correct code and they have very thick walls. Good luck if you get shut in one of these just after the last round of checks bucko
There are cameras everywhere…except in the crew cabin corridors. Also there are no windows down there because unless you’re an officer, you live below the waterline. Day and night have no meaning because everything is in the same slightly unsettling yellow light.
Don’t piss off the guys who deal with the rubbish. They have machines down there that can crush metal barrels
As well as morgues, cruise ships usually have one basic operating theatre with all the attendant horrifying equipment in it
One cigarette thrown carelessly in the wrong place WILL start a fire that will gut half the ship.
When we’re pitching side to side, the anchor swings out and then back in, striking the metal outer shell with a noise that shakes half the ship
People disappear overboard more often than you’d really want to be a thing
A lot of cruise ships now have theatres on board (usually towards the front) with all the potential for dark corners, creepy costumes and electrical calamities you could want.
And as op says, you can’t really escape a ship in the middle of the ocean. Particularly during a storm, as then you can’t even evacuate to lifeboats unless the whole ship is going down. On the upside being on board during a storm means most guests hide in their cabins and the staff walk around like drunks, which would likely throw off a skilled murderer’s plans.
You also have the bonus of a corporate overlord who doesn’t give a shit about anything but profits and can be reliably counted on to downplay any disaster in an attempt to avoid publicity.
Norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships show just how fast a highly contagious virus spreads, how hard it is to avoid catching it due to surface contamination and food transmission, and how disgusting the ship rapidly becomes. Unnavigable with filth. (Seriously I won’t go into it but accounts are sometimes horrific.)
If you want a zombie virus outbreak or something like that, a cruise ship could create up to NINE THOUSAND infected. (Based on the capacity of the current largest cruise ship.)
so, you can also rent cruise ships for private events, so if a rich weirdo wants to do a ghost hunting party, you’re set. (thinking house on haunted hill). Or a ghost hunter convention on a haunted ship!
it’s super easy to get turned around on a cruise ship, according to my friend who has been on one. The halls are very samey- some ships have systems to designate what side of the ship you’re on, and the numbers should indicate deck, but if you’re drunk…
(some people decorate their doors so they’re easier to find, although I imagine that some cruise ship lines frown on this kind of thing.)
point is, a chase scene? thinking you’re almost to your room but whoops you’re on the wrong side of the ship/wrong deck? or maybe taking a while to realize you’re being led in circles… but by what?
you can use seasickness as a plot point- staying on deck is good for someone who’s seasick, so maybe the character sees something they otherwise wouldn’t whilst trying to tame their seasickness. maybe they miss some mass-spreader zombie event because they’re sleeping off seasickness meds. seasickness is actually great because it can be debilitating but usually wears off in 24 hours, so you can have someone be pretty sick and then bounce back and be running in terror with relative ease.
decommissioned cruise ship for sale. the rich weirdos strike again. (journalist following rich weirdos on their creepy cruise ship social experiment/crypto thing/cult thing, perhaps, at least one of which I know was attempted)
I think it's inch resting that some people will pick out certain details of a certain character from a certain book series to prove that she's an evil abuser but completely ignore the problematic details of their male fave from the same book series. Hmm.
when it's the woman it's always her worst traits from every canon mashed together with all of her best traits conveniently ignored, and when it's the man it's always his best traits from every canon mashed together with all of his worst traits conveniently ignored. this is good, consistent characterization and not at all indicative of fandom's misogyny problem.
obsessed where stories where it is like. the mistakes are unfixable and the worst thing that could happen happened and nothing can go back to how it was. but there was still love in this and love will continue after this and love endures always.
I was wondering the same thing as the other anon actually; i was taking a break from social media when i heard about Henry Cavill leaving twn and i thought people were taking his side but never really dug any further.
So honestly if you have time, i wouldn't mind hearing more.
lmaoo alright so here’s a semi deep dive for anyone who wasn’t present for the deuxmoi hcav gate of 2022
okay so everyone started speculating when the news of his recast broke and the general consensus was that he left for the superman money which imo was definitely a big part of that. i don’t believe he left due to “creative differences” im not saying there weren’t any, on the contrary there must’ve been a ton, but everyone who worked in the industry or knows someone who did will tell you that “creative differences” is code for there was something else going on. plus quitting a job that pays you 1 million per episode due to a petty thing like creative differences in literally insane.
and then dc dropped him like a week later which was honestly one of the funniest days of the year.
so when the internet is arguing about all of that the deuxmoi podcast comes out initiating that there was a lot more going on to his twn departure.
believe it or don’t believe it i think there’s definitely some kernel of truth to it. a lot of this checks out with what we already know. he already refused to do a sex scene with anya in s2 so that turning into a refusal to do ANY romantic scenes is not far fetched (i’m not strong enough to get into sex scene discourse as well, everyone should do what they’re comfortable with i agree with that wholeheartedly, but geralt is a role that requires romantic and sexual scenes so don’t take it if you’re not comfortable with that)
the weird alliance thing is about beau de mayo who was actually fired. he’s also the one who accused the other writers of not respecting the source material and started this whole weird thing. here’s a tweet from one of the current writers speaking about him (cropped for x’s legal safety, it’s been since deleted)
then an entire storm started on reddit and here are some posts of people speaking up that i managed to find
believe it or don’t but i’d rather be wrong than support a nasty misogynist. i think he was a nightmare to work with, wanted more creative control and a bigger pay rise and netflx didn’t agree in the end and that’s how it ended.
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