Lean into the funny idiot archetype so that when you’re unexpectedly hypercompetent at something they give you The Look where you can see them reexamine their entire perception of you in confusion, respect and no small amount of fear, and when you keep playing funny idiot they will be forever wary of you. Let them find out, incidentally, that the jester keeps a knife under his hat, and never figure out how to deal with that because they won’t abandon their boxes.
The Fellowship gets on the topic of their ages one night and Boromir comes to the dawning realization that he has absolutely no idea how old any of his companions are supposed to be at all
Boromir, pointing at the hobbits: I don’t know how your ages work
Boromir, pointing at Legolas and Gimli: I definitely don’t know how either of your ages work
Boromir, pointing at Aragorn: I thought I knew how your age worked but apparentlyI was wrong
Boromir, pointing at Gandalf: I especially don’t know how your age works
Gandalf: It doesn’t, but carry on
Listen I will die on this hill. I don’t care what it says in the assorted apocrypha, if you go by the Actual Text of LOTR you can make a very good argument that Boromir is the youngest member of the group.
The hobbits are the only ones given official ages in the text, and are between fifty or fifty-one and twenty-nine. Elves and dwarves notoriously age slowly, and Gimli is the offspring of one of Bilbo’s pals, so okay, we’ve established that he’s old enough to call the hobbits young, and Bilbo confirms for them that Aragorn is Pretty Old For A Bigjobs. Gandalf is, of course, eternal.
But we are never given any context for Boromir and Faramir’s ages, except that a) they are humans and, though Sons of Gondor, not much longer lived than most Bigjobs, and b) Faramir is A QuiteYoung Man. I was absolutely convinced, when I read the books as a youngun, that Boromir, being in ‘the flower of manhood’ iirc, was probably between 25 and 30.
And it would be Freaking Hilarious, okay, for Boromir to finally get around to actually asking how old this baby-faced hobbit carrying The Ring is, and get told ‘oh, he’s only fifty, but he’s very steady for his age.’
Boromir: ?!?!?!
And then Pippin and Merry start asking everyone how old they are because this is fascinating are we all official adults here except for Pippin or what.
Boromir: …. Pippin isn’t an adult HOW OLD IS PIPPIN.
Pippin is just 29, which is why everyone calls him Pippin, it’s gonna be at least another 20 years before he can make Peregrine work. Why, how old is Boromir?
Boromir, who would rather DIE than admit to being 28 right at this moment: ….43.
All the others, weighing up his apparent age compared to theirs: Sure, sounds legit.
Gandalf, who knows for certain, does not say anything because he is absolutely certain that telling Pippin that he’s older than Boromir will be an unmitigated disaster.
BOROMIR is the BABY???????!!!!!!!
Love the take that Boromir’s canon age is just him being a fucking liar.
i am going to write this right now, i stg
someone check up on me in like 30 minutes i swear i’m writing this at this very second
every culture has their ethnic donut and every culture has their ethnic dumpling… humans be frying dough
Every culture also makes a sword. If they got metal they make a sword, if they don’t have metal they take obsidian or shark teeth or whatever it is that they’ve got and they make that into a sword.
Coincidence? I think not.
2 constants in all civilizations:
Tasty Fried Food
Danger Murder Sticks
World building tip: the bare bones of all civilizations are fried dough and sharp things.
To this day it blows my mind that when Naoko Takeuchi and Yoshihiro Togashi started dating, Togashi looked haggard to the point where he told an assistant that police regularly stopped him on the street for looking “suspicious”. And Ferrari-driving, couture-wearing Naoko still gave him a chance. The man was swimming in a pile of trash
looking like THIS
And he still married THIS WOMAN
His personality must be great
@nightstitcher that picture never fails to kill me. Like…the scene in hxh greed island arc with the trash…that was real…
