#shazza stuff

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Him again

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MerMagnus swimming in the Great Ocean, for Mermay.

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Magnus the Red Joy Toy Unboxing

Bought myself a present that I thought some of you might be interested to see...

Front and back of box (no sideviews - they're just logos, nothing interesting):

And here he is, all snuggled up inside!

Close up on the extra bits. The hands pull on and off the ball socket on the wrist. The bracer can slide off when there's no hand.

Striking a pose:

It's pretty easy to swap out the bits.

Here he is close-up:

The back view - check out the motion on that cape!

And here are some armour details:

Pretty!

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A silly meme about my favourite guy

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Good evening, tumblr. Here is my latest nonsense, please enjoy~ 💜

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This was really just an overly complicated way to say “what if treasure trail, but feathery?” 🤔

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Magnus’ Hair Braids

Thinking about the bit in A Thousand Sons where it mentions Magnus had his hair pulled back into three braids for his appearance at Nikaea. Thinking about how this differs from his appearance any other time, and what that means.

Like, the other big event he attends in A Thousand Sons is the Triumph of Ullanor, and even for that huge big deal party the book doesn’t mention him getting his hair dolled up. And he doesn’t pull it back out of the way for battle or anything like that. (Probably it just magically doesn’t get in the way, I guess.)

Plus, besides the books, official art always depicts him with his hair out, flowing free from behind his, you know the face-helmet thing, what’s the proper word for it, I dunno. So in this context it stands out to me that he had his hair braided for Nikaea.

In the book, it sort of sets up this idea that Magnus is expecting Nikaea to be something like a scholarly conference, not a court trial. But even so, he would have known there were going to be people with some Strong Opinions about him and his embrace of psychic abilities and the power of the Great Ocean, etc etc

So I’m thinking about his braided hair as a symbolic gesture of sorts. Whereas usually he just goes around being unabashedly himself, in this case he is kind of making a show of restraint. It’s like the opposite of a threat display, but it’s not an act of submission. It’s more like when you hunker down to talk to a small animal that is scared of you.

Magnus is trying to reach out to an audience that is at best wary and in many cases hostile. He knows people are afraid of him. He can’t stop being himself but he can contain his silhouette so that he seems less wild and unpredictable. It’s a visual indicator of control and therefore safety. “See? I’m okay really.”

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Magnus' Chinese Name is Pretty Neat

I got myself a Magnus the Red kit, yay!

I was looking at his box and I noticed the translations of his name. French/Spanish/Italian are pretty straightforwardly 'Magnus the Red'. The Japanese one basically says 'Thousand Sons: "Red" Magnus'. Then there's the Chinese one that I couldn't really read. So I applied a bit of dictionary research, and found out that the translation is pretty nifty.

It starts off fairly predictably: 千 (qiān) - thousand 子 (zǐ) - son/child

Then we get an absolute banger pair: 红 (hóng) - 'red', but also 'revolutionary'. Which I guess makes sense in the context of Chinese political history, but coincidentally works pretty well for the Horus Heresy too. I'm definitely going to stop saying 'traitor primarchs' and start saying 'revolutionary primarchs', hehe. 魔 (mó) - conveniently means both 'demon' and 'magic'. Perfect for Magnus.

So, 'Thousand Sons' and 'Red Demon'. That certainly checks out. Then we get into transliterating 'Magnus'. 马 (mǎ) - this means 'horse', which sounds a bit weird until you see that it also denotes a piece in Chinese chess and also the knight in Western chess. Like, yeah! He is definitely a chess piece in a big game. That's bang on.

格 (gé) - this has a bunch of meanings, but the one that really caught my eye was 'to study exhaustively'. Yup, he sure do.

努 (nǔ) - this means 'to exert/ to strive'. Ough, he tries so hard. (I'm not crying, you're crying.)

斯 (sī) - this one puzzled me a bit, it has some general meanings like 'this' or 'such', and is used for emphasis. But it also means 'to lop off', and I wondered if it's a reference to his lost eye?? Bit of a stretch, I'm almost certainly missing some nuance here.

But anyway, I thought that was kinda cool and interesting.

The final disclaimer here is that I only ever took beginners Mandarin like ten years ago, and my ability to look up Chinese characters in a dictionary is based on having learned to navigate kanji in Japanese. So if there are any actual readers of Chinese out there who would like to improve on my interpretation, I would love to hear from you!