Oops, I got distracted. I was getting this round-up together after breakfast this morning. And then I spontaneously decided to melt up all my candle stubs and make some new candles. It’s a time-consuming business, but cheapskates like me stop at nothing when it comes to reusing material *evillaugh*. Several hours later I have poured seven candles. Here’s hoping they will actually work…
Still waiting to cool and set
Lots of Armitage this week, right? An article in Metro, two BBC radio interviews, lots of tweets by the man himself. Gosh, we have been spoiled. That’s the way I like it.
We also discussed and polled the viability of a December fundraiser, and here are the results of the international jury poll:
Well, I am delighted with that result and am absolutely up for organising and hosting it. Here’s my thinking: Let’s have it in very early December, in time for items to be received by the buyers/bidders by Christmas. (For this we also need the postal cut-off points in mind; the Irish mail service is quoting Dec 17 for Europe, Dec 11 for the US and Dec 7 for the rest of the world. An important consideration!) The resulting donation will count as a Christmas gift for Mr A. Caveat: Let’s make it a slightly smaller event (in terms of number of items on offer) than the birthday auctions. Just so we don’t blow all our fan items just yet but keep some for next year’s event. Especially as we will have a fixed-price fundraising sale at the same time.
Speaking of which: Suggestions have come in for items that might be interesting for such a fixed price sale. I particularly like the idea of a RA fan photo calendar. (Using fan photos allows us to circumnavigate the copyright issue – given that we receive files and permissions from fans who are willing to share their own photos with us so that we get 12 high-quality images that can be blown up for a decent-size calendar.) I am currently researching prices and comparing with self-print option, as well as postage costs. It has to be affordable, yet also generate a bit of money for the donation. As a general consideration, I think we ought to keep postage costs in mind, i.e. light and flat objects that can be easily shipped in envelopes (rather than packages) are the best way forward. Idea collection welcome in the comments below!
And now, finally, the round-up:
- I admit I haven’t watched all of Castlevania, and I know even less about the computer game on which it is based, but I agree with reinadefuego anyway
- If you enjoyed the previous Hobbit watch parties, here is another one, summarised by lathalea
- Astrovian transcribed the whole Radio Cornwall interview with Richard – fabulous fan service, thank you
- You don’t often see an almost full-length Guy of Gisborne gif. Thank you, riepu10
- Oooooh, here we go with the first Halloween post. Angelpretend has a few spooky edits
- I’m pretty sure that this is in fact an edit, but I have to say that those chunky arms look really good on Thorin. Posted by amerlia307
- For the Raybo fans among you, here is a set of edits by torahana
- Astrovian has put the Dan Kennedy photos for Jackman through various filters. Looking good
- LOL. Not sure whether that is really true, but I laughed at crypticdruid’s quip nevertheless
- Ooh, ouch, I would beg to differ with iwontmakeusasandwich on her scathing reasoning why Guy is hate-worthy. I mean, yeah, he *is* sexy, and that accounts for the initial double-take on him, but when you look closer, there is more to him than hate for hate’s sake
- *umph* Sorry, it’s honestly is just coincidence that I am linking to *this* particular What a Guy Wants by nfcomics right underneath number 10
Hope you have a nice weekend!
Sonja ❤️
Guylty Pleasure 
Hi Sonja,
Great to hear about the auction again for December. I ordered the screenplay for UV and turns out I ordered two! So I can send you the second one for the auction, if that’s okay with you.
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Oh, that sounds brilliant. Yes please!!!
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Great. I’ll get onto that as soon as it arrives.
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You’re a star – many thanks already xxx
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6 is definitely an edit. Way too much hair on the forearms. #FangirlScience
10. I’ll refrain from (much) comment. I’ve just thrown down on behalf of Romancelandia. Just one thing: If you’re hot for Robin, why not write about that instead? It’s not like we go around writing essays about what a wet noodle he was. Let people like stuff in fiction FFS.
Yay for the fundraiser result!! Do you want to focus on flatpack items for the auction as well or just the fixed price items? Just so I know what to consider.
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#6 was very appealing, and on first sight looked right, but as you say, they were definitely not RA’s arms…
#10 I had to hold myself back from getting all defensive in a reply to the poster. I mean, sure, I get it. Guy is *meant* to be the baddie of the piece. However, the show quite clearly also gives him a lot of ambiguity. There have plenty of posts been written about the times when he acts *against* the sheriff. In short – I think he is a multi-layered character, and the “hate-worthy bad man” label does not quite stick. – On your other point: Absolutely right. I often wonder why people have to piss on others’ fandom, or compare it with RL. RH was hardly realistic or even realistically mediaeval. It’s pure fantasy, and in that particular realm, even a cartoonishly uber-masculine character has its merits.
As for flatpack items (LOL, great term, so appropriate) – nope, I’d say that applies mainly to the fixed-price money spinner rather than the auction.
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Why would Trevor B speak with an American Accent at all???? Weird. (And yeah, I know Trevor is speaking with an English accent, but still…)
And haters gonna hate. I found robin to be more unsavory. Guy was the only character in that show that grew!
Also notice – 1 note. A clue!
Nice roundup! Thank you!!!
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Robin was definitely one-dimensional. However, I don’t feel the need to write a whole essay about that *haha*. Funny that the Guy-critic did 😉
I may have to check out that English accent, soon…
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Every now and again, you get some angry person who wants to rant on Guy – who to be honest – was the best character on that show.
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He was certainly the most interesting character, and – imo – the best looking. But the latter is subjective, I concede that. Not sure why it is necessary to apply RL yardstick to pastiche characters.
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I have NEVER understood that – applying current day beliefs to a culture that is either sci fi/fantasy or historical. Just because it’s the norm today, doesn’t make it the norm back then!
And why get so upset about it? If it bothers her THAT much, holy cats why bother watching!
(The first chapter of the Ghost of Nottingham is up pretty much everywhere, including Tumblr! I”m thinking of putting up a segment every 10 days, so Friday??? There are 4 chapters and an epilogue.
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You read my mind! I couldn’t get at the radio interview earlier, and I let it drop, figuring you might highlight it today somewhere else, and you did. Thank you much!
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At your service 😉 – plenty of interview links on tumblr and twitter. We’ve all been on it, haha.
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Oh good, I like that you’re going to host another fundraiser! I could send you some pictures I took at the Red Dragon Con in Jan 2019, have a look if they are usable (I’m not mad if not), I’d gladly give permission to use them for a calendar.
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FFS – am I realising it for the first time that you were at RDC, Jali?????? Damn it, I had no idea (or I have a memory like a sieve) but I wish I’d know. We could’ve met.
And yes please, send me your best, if you have any! xxx
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Huh…. I did not reallize either, but that’s possibly because we didn’t “know” each other yet back then? And I am pretty sure we HAVE met, even if we probably didn’t speak. I served as a volunteer and was guarding Richard’s autograph session 1 and took care that fans stayed in line the first day, and guarded the back door of the autograph room the second day so I could ogle Richard for about 5 hours straight. :-)))
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What??? You worked Richard’s autograph line? So did I!!
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😂 The world is small.
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Well, I am sure that in that case we have… I certainly got myself a few autographs from Mr A, so I must have passed by you 😁.
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Somehow I missed the poll 😳😱 I am definitely yes/за/🙋♀️
Thank you!❤️🤗
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Fab – that’s great to know. Planning has started 😌. Apart from researching calendar prices, I have sent off an order for something that I need for creating something for the sales… I’m already excited, even though I haven’t even started making anything yet 😂
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Not liking Guy, not seeing subtlety in the character, and writing about it — perspectivally speaking:
(a) that was a mainstream fan position once upon a time. The main person I associated it with was Mulubinba, but she wasn’t the only one; and
(b) it’s sort of wild to me that anyone would recycle the JA/RA // Robin / Guy rivalry at this point. I remember when JA still had a reasonably substantial fandom (“Armstrong’s Angel’s) and some of them were very aggressive, and to me that was already old in 2010 when I was a new fan. One thing that has really tired me out about fandom is that we seem to have to keep recycling the same discussions.
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Oh yes, always the same discussions… I am tired of them, too, but I guess they happen because there is a continuous stream of new fans who are retrospectively discovering old material that RA has been in. And so the questions pop up again. It’s a problem that I find almost insolvable: I guess “old” fans could just ignore topics like, and sometimes I personally do so. However, the dichotomy between old and new fans already existed when I joined, and sometimes I felt somewhat excluded or even patronised as a new fan when old fans were blasé about a particular issue “because they had already discussed it before”. That kind of excludes the new fans – who would like to discuss those points as much as the older fans did. Not sure if there is any solution to that conundrum…
In terms of the Guy hate: a) When you say “mainstream fan position” – does that apply to the RH fandom or specifically to the RA fandom? If the latter, then: *whoa*, I am surprised. I always thought that Guy – despite his faults – was one of the beloved RA characters, “Guy Day” and all…
b) Rivalry between JA and RA? OMG, where do people get that sort of stuff? Honestly, why can’t we just allow each other to fangirl whichever way and whoever we want to. Just because I love Guy doesn’t mean I have to HATE Robin. He’s not my favourite, I think he is a very flawed character, but no need to hate on him…
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I think the problem comes when legacy fans don’t come up with new things to talk about because we are too worried about how people will see us.
This is one of those moments when I see how badly social media conventions (the normalization of the word “hate” for any negative feeling, so that it becomes simultaneously provoking and meaningless) distort conversations. I can only ever speak about the Armitage fandom, but there were absolutely fans at the time who did not like the character and (as with every project he does that seems directed at a niche audience) there was an exodus among those who thought he did not do the character well, or thought the show was just stupid and not worthy of his energies.
I would not say that people who recognized the evil qualities of the character “hated” Guy, though. I ran into this myself early on as a fan, when I wrote that the scripts did everything they could to make him look evil and unredeemable, especially in series 1; the post the topic of a conversation on a RH forum in which the consensus was that I was totally wrong and ignoring all kinds of evidence. When I say that it was a mainstream position to not like the character, to find his portrayal unsubtle, I don’t mean it was a majority position — but it was a position that a significant enough minority had that it was controversial. (Armitage himself said, repeatedly, that Guy was a villain and he had to be played in certain ways and suffer certain consequences for his behavior — even as he was frustrated with the cardboard qualities of the evil that he encountered in early scripts.) To me it seems obvious on the face of it that Guy is, at the very least, unlkeable and distasteful, and that the scripts / character exploited the legal / moral conventions that modern audiences attribute to the medieval period to make him look cruel, mean, evil, etc. from our perspective. But people are regularly telling me how Dolarhyde was misunderstood, and I don’t understand that claim, either.
Guy is still one of my top 5, but primarily because of (a) what Armitage did with the role — I can not admire the character but appreciate the artistry that went into it and (b) because it seems to me the character suffers certain conflicts that I identify with. It’s not because I want to excuse his behavior, which is regularly execrable (and was supposed to be, notwithstanding the reasons the scripts gradually revealed for that).
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I agreed with most of what you said. The one exception being that Guy is my absolute favorite character. Heh
I was “called out” last week by a long time buddy (Dr. Bourne in UK) of mine on Twitter for an RA/Guy reblog from my Tumblr acct. asking if it was my crush or had someone hacked me?
Most men that’ve noticed my posts usually ask me about it to my face. Malcolm was the first to post a question about it.
I felt my face burn red when I saw his inquiry. 🤦🏻♀️ Even tho I try not to be secretive or anonymous, I still get a little uncomfortable when those in the mainstream (men) inquire. But maybe this is too off topic.
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I think it gets to the whole point of whether people think they should have qualms about liking characters who are in some way questionable.
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Hey G🧡 whoa, a Guy bashing critic. Well, it’s not worth my time to engage. Especially when I could catch up on your posts or other friends posts I’m always and forever behind on.
🎃
As to the fund raiser, I’ve managed to save a few bucks and am ready to spend it on Christmas charity. 👻 Yay
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You’ve hit the nail on the head – no need to engage directly. I think their position is pretty hardened, anyway, so no amount of engagement will make a difference.
Hooray on the fund for fun fandom stuff 😉. You’re worth it 😍
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Thank you girl! I look forward to the next fundraiser. 🌻👻🍂🎃
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Like the candles and you’ve solved a mystery, Guylty – I’ve often wondered how the wicks stay in the middle.It is very good of you to take on the organising of the auction, particularly hot on the heels of the last. Keeping it small-scale makes sense. There must be 12 good ones photos out there for the calendar. If there are many, perhaps December could be a compilation?I actually agree with ‘Iwontmakeusasandwich’ about Gisborne. I know his character was more nuanced (and he did good in the end) but he did do wicked things. I think there is a tendency to see good in him (like Dolarhyde) to justify fancying him so much (paralleling RA in looking for the good in the bad characters he plays).
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Hehe, not sure whether my wick suspension was particularly professional there. (The secret, imo, is actually to dip the wick in wax beforehand so that it becomes more stiff and won’t move in the receptacle. Put two of the candles to the test last night – worked a treat.)
Oooh, controversial statement there, J 😉😉. Hey, come on, by your own admission you like a bad boy. And who is the epitome of bad boy if not Guy??? – Ok, but seriously: Yes, he does wicked things (killing people etc.) but he has this underlying redeemability through his pursuit of Marian – which also results in some surprisingly “good” things… However, you are *totally* hitting the nail on the head with your last sentence. Of course we look for the redeemable qualities in him because we need to justify our interest. Otherwise would feel really awful to lust after an arsehole 😂. But hey, personally I am fine with that. He’s a fantasy character; he doesn’t *have to* be realistic for me to fall for him. I gloss over the pillaging and murdering, telling myself that he’s a mediaeval man – dark, uncivilsed times…
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Yes, that was my point too. I do like a bad boy and, as a fantasy figure [only!] as far as i’m concerned, GoG can be as bad as they come. He doesn’t have to have redemptive qualities for me to fancy him but for some others he does.
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I think that’s really true, there’s the whole “what does it say about me if I am attracted to an evil character” question.
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I also think, for a lot of long term fans, there’s the complication of fan fic. (I notice myself doing this with Thorin Oakenshield.) Many of us read fanfics that add headcanon to the performance, and that becomes part of our own picture of the character. Arguably, the majority of fanfic writers who write Guy fanfics will see something positive in him that makes him worth continuing to write (I don’t find a lot of fanfic written by people who can’t stand the characters). That potentially colors our own view.
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That’s certainly true. Fanfic about characters despised by their author must be quite a niche market!
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and then there’s the whole “I know I can change him” thing that so often works itself out in fanfic.
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I was pleased to see what you did with the wicks, too! Great candles. I quite fancy having a go at that myself.
It’s interesting, thinking about Guy, that when you rewatch episodes you remember just how bad he is… instead of just looking at the photos and gifs (those full length ones are dynamite!) and seeing sex on legs 🤣🤣🤣
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I so agree, Helen. I bought DVDs of the show one time and turned it off after 10 minutes. 10 minutes, I kid you not. I realized that I didn’t care about the plot of the show (which looked, honestly, really terrible, after only 10 minutes in!) or any other characters. I just wanted to look at “fan edits” (gifs and music videos) of Richard Armitage walking around look sexy in black leather. Yup, that’s all I need to know about Robin Hood or Guy of Gisbourne/burn/whateveritis. (Those DVDs may end up on one of G’s auctions one of these days. Keep your eyes peeled, those of you who want the dialogue with the pictures.)
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The other problem with the dvds is having to wade through all the TEDIOUS stuff with Robin and Much… though I did come to appreciate the ghastliness of the Sheriff 🤣
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Yay, auction coming up! 🙂
I’ve never been a Guy fan, despite Richard’s portrayal (and I know I’ve said that before here and there) so I do get where that lady is coming from. He was somewhat redeemed at the end but I could never love him like other characters although I do admit he’s very sexy to look at.
Great job on the candles!
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Definitely in auction mood and mode 😉
You know, I totally get that not everyone loves Guy. He *is* the sheriff’s henchman, so yeah, there are things he has done, that are unforgivable. I think the main thing I take issue with in terms of that fan, is that she is kind of raining on other people’s parade. It’s fine to say you don’t like Guy – that’s fair enough. It’s just a bit shitty to go to great length to tell Guy fans that their guy is an arsehole 😉
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Perhaps i misunderstood the post but I didn’t at all get the sense that she was doing that. Apart from one sentence about not understanding why people liked him or would defend a Guy/Marian ship apart from his sexiness, that could be considered passive aggressive criticism of Guy fans, the post is pretty much entirely a listing of reasons for thinking Guy is evil. I think it’s one of the consequences of social media that we encounter opinions we don’t care for.
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Maybe I take offence at the suggestion that he is “evil”. There’s no denying that he is the henchman and that he has done bad things. But there is more to him than that, which is not reflected in her argument.
But yeah, I guess it’s a case of “don’t like, don’t read”.
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Tbh I think the preponderance of the evidence is on her side. I thought that before #metoo but it’s become clearer to me since then, and I wonder if a show intended for children would be made in quite this way nowadays — esp the end of series 2. That said, if it bothers you, you can always write a reply!
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She doesn’t sound like someone who has time to listen to anyone extolling Guy’s redeemable qualities 😉. It’s fine.
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