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holyscream
I have two basic rules for posting images online:
One:
Downscale to biggest displayed size x2 to accommodate HiDPI screens.
Two:
No image gets published without proper alt text.
The only times I’ll budge on these are when platform restrictions apply, like MFC’s BB code not allowing alt text or Dreamwidth not serving 200px icons for HiDPI screens. But while I love image editing, writing image descriptions of any kind or length has always felt like pulling teeth. As a result, I have a bunch of graphics-based posts sitting in my files simply because I’m often too lazy to start/get overwhelmed while writing their resprective alt texts and IDs.
All that preamble is to say: This is one of those posts, so it’s more than a year out of date.
And what exactly is “this”? I’m still not sure what to call it but on my computer the related files are saved in a folder called “IRR”—Iwan Rheon Retrospective.
There’s a joke in there to be made about how the German word “irr(e)” means crazy…
At some point in 2022 I realized that through my regular rewatches of the Ramsay Bolton themed Game of Thrones supercut I’d made (I literally had the video files on my phone to bring with me everywhere) I had managed to acquire an almost Pavlovian reflex of happiness to the actor portraying him. I’ve never really been a fan of an actor before—the closest I ever came was making viewing/listening decisions based on voice actor casting—so since this was new ground I thought it would be fun to go through Iwan Rheon’s IMDB page and watch as much of it as possible.
There were a handful of items I excluded because I’m allergic to their genre (military dramas, MCU stuff) or because of unavailability, but I did end up with the following watchlist:
| Watch Order | Title | Medium | Year | Seen? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Game of Thrones | TV Show | 2013–2016 | Y |
| 2 | Grandma’s House | TV Show | 2010–2012 | Y |
| 3 | Vicious | TV Show | 2013–2016 | Y |
| 4 | Y Golau | TV Show | 2022 | Y |
| 5 | Riviera | TV Show | 2017–2020 | DNF |
| 6 | I Don’t Care | Short Film | 2010 | Y |
| 7 | The Existential Hotline | Short Film | 2020 | Y |
| 8 | FOUR | Short Film | 2019 | Y |
| 9 | The Back of Beyond | Short Film | 2012 | Y |
| 10 | A Christmas Number One | Film | 2021 | Y |
| 11 | Misfits | TV Show | 2009–2011 | Y |
| 12 | Wild Bill | Film | 2011 | Y |
| 13 | Residue | Miniseries | 2015 | Y |
| 14 | Barbarians | Film | 2021 | Y |
| 15 | Wolf | TV Show | 2023 | Y |
| 16 | The Toll | Film | 2021 | Y |
| 17 | S.U.M.1 | Film | 2017 | Y |
| 18 | The Magic Flute | Film | 2022 | Y |
| 19 | Men Up | TV Movie | 2023 | in progress |
| 20 | On the Edge | Miniseries | 2024 | Y |
| The Rise | Film | 2012 | N | |
| Those About to Die | TV Show | 2024 | N | |
| Charlotte’s Song | Film | 2015 | N | |
| Under Milk Wood | TV Movie | 2014 | N | |
| Pobol y Cwm | TV Show | 2004 | N | |
| Caerdydd | TV Show | 2006 | N | |
| Secret Diary of a Call Girl | TV Show | 2011 | N | |
| Daisy Winters | Film | 2017 | N | |
| Berlin, I Love You | Film | 2019 | N | |
| The Snow Spider | TV Show | 2020 | N | |
| American Gods | TV Show | 2021 | N |
My film diet is normally pretty homogeneous with so-bad-they’re-good shot-on-video flicks, award-winning documentaries, and A24Pictures faire, so it was an interesting experience to watch more genre films, tv shows, and even a Christmas romcom. While I have opinions on everything I watched as a whole, the character fan in me obviously also had fun giving extra attention to Rheon’s characters. My motto was “gotta catch ’em all!”
I started this watchlist in 2023 when I was also trying to get back into drawing, which resulted in an unusually high amount of fanart output, which for me basically means “creating any fanart at all”. After every watch, I’d add Rheon’s role to this lineup. The next characters would have been Simon, Pill, Jonas and Adam Barbarians, but a few days after I’d added Blake Wolf finally became available to me and Honey/Molina started taking up most of the operational capacity of my brain that wasn’t already being occupied by Ramsay.
I still wanted to visualize the project though, and as graphic design has been much easier for me to make time for than than drawing since going to university (I think it’s just because I have less of a complex about it, haha) I pivoted to an infographic. Here is the result—a blorbo chart categorizing these individuals by very scientific criteria. Can you tell I’m a Tumblr transplant?
Image Description
The above scatter chart sorts 17 characters along two axes: From “wet” to “creepy” and “poor little meow meow” to “evil bastard man” respectively. The individual characters are also color coded to the author’s level of enjoyment of them. The positioning of each character is as follows:
- Ramsay (Game Of Thrones), who as his own category named after him – very creepy, maximum evil bastard man
-
Category “Blorbo”:
- Molina (Wolf) – mild creepy, very evil bastard man
- Simon (Misfits) – very creepy, maximum poor little meow meow
- Joe (Y Golau) – maximum wet, maximum poor little meow meow
-
Category “So Special to Me”:
- Pill (Wild Bill) – maximum creepy, very evil bastard man
- Adam (Barbarians) – very wet, medium evil bastard man
- Luka (I Don’t Care) – very wet, very poor little meow meow
- S.U.M.1 (S.U.M.1) – mild creepy, very poor little meow meow
-
Category “Certainly A Character of All Time”:
- Dom (The Toll) – mild wet, very evil bastard man
- Ash (Vicious) – mild wet, mild poor little meow meow
- Ben (Grandma’s House) – very wet, mild poor little meow meow
- Blake (A Christmas Number One) – mild wet, medium poor little meow meow
-
Category “Shrug Emoji”:
- The Hitman (Four) – medium creepy, medium evil bastard man
- Papageno (The Magic Flute) – neither creepy not wet, mild evil bastard man
- Petesey (The Back of Beyond) – medium wet, neither evil bastard man nor poor little meow meow
- Fred (The Existential Hotline) – medium creepy, mild poor little meow meow
- Jonas (Residue) – neither wet nor creepy, mild poor little meow meow
- Category “World’s Smallest Violin for This Fucking Guy”: Adam (Riviera) – greyed out, medium wet, medium evil bastard man
They’re color coded because adding more visual hierarchies to a graphic makes it more fun to create and I wanted to see if the resulting shapes would be comparable. Here is a tier list rating the blorbo-ness of these characters in a more traditional way:
Image Description
The same set of characters sorted into a tier list with 7 tiers:
- 💕Ramsay💕: Ramsay
- Blorbo: Molina, Joe and Simon
- So Special to Me: S.U.M.1, Luka, Pill and Adam Barbarians
- Certainly A Character of All Time: Ash, Blake, Dom and Ben
- Shrug Emoji: Jonas, The Hitman, Fred and Petesey
- World’s Smallest Violin for This Fucking Guy: Adam Riviera
- TFW your favorite actor who has already played your all-time favorite character plays another one of your favorite characters, but it doesn’t work, and also the movie is kind of a mess but then again it is meant for children and if they like it, it does its job: Papageno
I omitted the Magic Flute tier in the chart because it was too long, but I had to express my feelings somewhere. Watching that movie feels like you’re sitting on the remote and alternately fast-forwarding and skipping whole chapters. Genuinely insane pacing, even for a kid’s film.
I’ll stop myself there, otherwise I’ll end up writing mini reviews for half of these films. I could go on forever about The Magic Flute, Barbarians, S.U.M.1 and A Christmas Number One, because all of them managed to be partially bad/bizarre but were still enjoyable. Not in a so-bad-it’s-good way (okay, Barbarians almost makes the cut there), but in a genuine “this made me feel something” way. I will, however, give special mention to S.U.M.1 for its unintentional meta scares:
The first one was when I saw the poster thumbnail on IMDB and thought they’d put Rheon in some sort of Megamind cosplay (I told myself I couldn’t handle that in combination with the title and was gonna skip it at first), but it turned out to just be his hairstyle.
The second was a scene in the movie where our hero ventures out into the forest and I was terrified that it was going to turn into a Don Dolar thing where they just have actors run around in the woods for 40 minutes because it’s free to shoot there. Thankfully he went back inside soon after and I got to see more of the simple set instead. At least it was a set, you know!
The third scare was during a scene where the character was frolicking in the woods naked (it makes sense in context) and the camera pans down the front of his body and I literally yelled, “Not for this movie!” out loud. Thankfully there was a cut because, no, we are not going dicks out for Harambe in a movie called S.U.M.1 with a megamind poster, thank you very much.
I love low budget movies; you just don’t get moments like this in blockbusters. And I really did enjoy S.U.M.1, to my own surprise, and it wasn’t just because of the presence of the cute rat that originally got me to give the film a shot after all.
See, I almost started going into review mode there! I’ll make a cut here and instead focus on creating some more icons (like the one for this post :^D). I still haven’t gotten around to doing the current icontalking challenge.
I also gotta get around to finishing Men Up and starting Those About to Die, now that I have permanent access to them. Something something Biggus Dickus joke.