Tag Archives: Watership Down

#FictionalDeathsIWillNeverGetOver – Good times with Twitter hashtags.

05/03/2013 – 15:09

I love a good trending hashtag on Twitter when it is one that I can get involved in. It’s always awesome to see as well when it’s one you’re interested in what other people have written in response to the hashtag and what their opinions are too.

When I went on Twitter yesterday morning I saw that #FictionalDeathsIWillNeverGetOver was in the top ten (by the afternoon it had changed to a more boring #FictionalCharactersIWantToMarry which I didn’t participate in) and the trend has still carried over to today (Tuesday 5th March). I did some research, and thought the answers as I scrolled through the hashtag not so much surprising, but just how many people agreed on the same ones.

Most popular ones I found were:

Mufasa in The Lion King.

Marley the dog in Marley and Me

Ellie from Up

Countless Harry Potter characters

Jack Dawson in Titanic

All worthy of inclusion, the most popular being Mufasa, Marley and Ellie. There was the odd surprising nomination of Boone (Ian Somerhalder) from LOST and Nicky (Joe Pesci) from Casino. Shocking and brutal as Nicky’s murder is, and the fact I have never listened to House of the Rising Sun in the same way since, I’m pretty sure I got over his death quite quickly. But if anything, the hashtag has shown just how much the death of a beloved character in a film or TV show can affect people and reduce the most hardened of hearts to blubbering emotional wrecks.

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So without further ado, grab your Kleenex and a tub of Phish Food and please join me on my top five run-down of #FictionalDeathsIWillNeverGetOver

5. John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) in The Green Mile

Just, so, so hideously unjust. Played to utter devastation by the late Michael Clarke Duncan, Coffey is on death row for the rape and murder of twin girls in Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s classic novel. What everyone apart from a select few of the prison guards don’t know is that Coffey has the power to heal sick people. Yes, a bit like Jesus. Sentenced to die in the electric chair, the prison guards silently weep to themselves as they know the truth behind Coffey, his abilities, and the identity of real murderer of the young girls.

4. Professor Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) in Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows

My favourite character in Harry Potter bar none. When Voldermort murders Snape in the final films, God how I cried. For two reasons; one, because he had just been killed and in a most horrific way, and two, the revelation of Lily Potter. We always knew Snape was a good guy. Always.

3. Coral the clownfish (voiced by Elizabeth Perkins) in Finding Nemo

Crikey if those guys at Pixar can do anything then surely it is stirring up snivelling emotion within people over the death of a tiny orange fish who has been on screen for less than ten minutes. Nemo’s mum, Coral, is eaten by a barracuda as she tries to protect her unhatched eggs from being consumed by said beast. It’s over in seconds but will stay with me forever. Three times I saw Nemo at the cinema, and three times I wept openly in public at her death.

2. Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner) in Star Trek: Nemesis

I will try and summarise this in a few lines, though inside I will always be seething in paragraphs of confused rage at Data’s death. To save Picard and get him off Tom Hardy’s enemy ship and back to the Enterprise, Data, the beloved android of the Next Generation, sacrifices himself by giving Picard the only transporter they have so that he can return safely. But it transpires that the transporter is a one-time-use, personal one. Go figure. The aftermath was poorly executed too and on the whole I still struggle to this day to see why Data was killed off. And don’t get me started on B-4.

1. Hazel the rabbit (voiced by John Hurt) in Watership Down

Oh God. Okay, so some people have Marley and Mufasa, I have Hazel. Watership Down deals with death and religion in every other scene and if you have managed to survive the whole film until this point without needing valium, then just you wait until the final scene. It reduces me to a catatonic mess each I watch as Hazel lies down to die and his spirit leaves his body to live in the afterlife. I’m welling up just writing these words. Bloody Simon and Garfunkel.

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If you aren’t familiar with these heart-breaking scenes of trauma then you can rectify this by buying the films here (and supporting your local independent bookshop, too):

The Green Mile

Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

Finding Nemo – not available at time of writing, being rereleased this summer in 3D.

Star Trek Nemesis

Watership Down (currently unavailable)

By hivenetwork | Posted in Hive's Blogs | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

The skin I live in.

06/03/2012 – 17:08

Skin up, pin up: Some of the books people take inspiration from for their inky tributes.

Bit of a specialist one this blog. If you love books, then please continue to read. If you have an interest in tattoos then please, do carry on too. But what I wanted to discuss with you is what happens when both these worlds collide. Answer… something like this, which I found whilst idly browsing recently on t’interweb.

Being a connoisseur of some things literary, most things popular culture and all things tattoo, I feel I can critique some of the tattoo art that has been famed on this website. Looking at the ones of verses, there’s something about a whole limb which has been taken up by simple black script I find very beautiful. Providing it’s not, for example, a Piggyback game guide or similar which thankfully I don’t think anyone has had. (No offense to the good people at Piggyback). But skin was made for the prose of Dickens and Byron, so this without question gets my vote (as long as it’s legible).

As I scrolled down the page the most popular pieces it seems are much-loved children’s books and cartoons. We have a fondness for remembering the stories that made us happy when we were children which have still haunted us in our adulthood, and in tribute we have had the images of countless, not to mention the most eccentric, authors’ imaginations etched onto our skin for the rest of our lives. The Curious George ones look rather amazing, and of course the simplistic-yet-beautiful drawings of Antoine de Saint Exupery’s Le Petit Prince make for beautiful skin art with the colours of deep purple, bright yellow and oceanic blue all coming together. One very popular children’s tale seems to serve for endless inspiration for tattoos – Lewis Carroll’s timeless Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which further reinforces my personal belief that those stories with a vast array of wonderful characters and limitless fantasy are most used in literary tattooing. A possible explanation for this could be because in an ensemble cast, there’s bound to be one you will identify with.

Arguably not every children’s classic story makes for elegant ink. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury I give you exhibit a: Winnie the Pooh tattoos. Let me establish quickly I am a fan of AA Milne’s small, red-shirted, fat honey-loving bear and his friends of the Hundred Acre Wood. My favourite character is Rabbit. Many parallels I have always seen in him as like me he is quick to react, highly opinionated and gets worked up almost instantly. However even my admiration for these characters cannot condone the justification of the horrendous act of Pooh n’ Tigger tattoos. No matter how much shading or fine needles are used no-one should ever get Winnie the Pooh or any associated characters tattooed on themselves. At the risk of sounding snobbish, I apply this only to the Disney incarnations. I would definitely put them into Room 101 as they are hideous and they are the sort of tattoo people get done when they don’t know what else to get done and I for one think they should be prohibited.

And so we move onto other greats of literature whom have no doubt been increased in their popularities by their enormously successful film franchises. I have often thought about getting some kind of tribute to the world of Harry Potter on me. I probably will do, but at the moment I have yet to decide exactly what. I absolutely love the word ‘Always’, which was tattooed in tribute to the answer Snape gives Professor Dumbledore when asked if he still loves Lily Potter. Not too sure how I feel about the enormous back tattoo of Dumbledore next to – Lord have mercy, the worst kinds of tattoo ever conceived on this earth – tribal. JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, with its huge universe of hobbits, wizards, elves and orcs makes for interesting tattoos and it seems that the possibilities are endless in how people want the famous trilogy immortalised on them. Going a bit further down the page I was really happy to see someone had had El-ahrairah the rabbit from Watership Down on them which in the same vein as the Lord of the Rings, has a great amount of visualisation thanks to the iconic film created from the book.

Matilda, by Roald Dahl.

The Marzipan Pig, by Russell Hoban.

Well I need to justify my opinions and I do so now dear readers through the medium of photography. Here you can see two of my literary tattoos; Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Russell Hoban’s the Marzipan Pig, both illustrated by Quentin Blake. Fantastic.

By hivenetwork | Posted in Hive's Blogs | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
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