This picture from Syria protesting war in Ukraine actually made me tear up.

In such a world women's health problems become the norm. It's no wonder female athletes compete with unexplained or hidden injuries, that psychiatry keeps reinventing hysteria, that menstrual agony is supposed to be "accepted" (but isn't an excuse to miss work), that extreme and dangerous birth control side effects go widely unaddressed, that pregnant women and new mothers are treated like zoo animals instead of vulnerable people.

But if you thought they were the only ones, let me draw your attention to this man:

Viggo Mortensen, aka Aragorn son of Arathorn, aka Sexiest Ranger in Middle Earth

would hike, often for more than a day, to remote filming locations, in costume, for the sake of authenticity

was the best swordsman Bob Anderson (swordsmaster/instructor for LotR, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc) says he has ever trained

occasionally writes poetry (more book!canon than film!canon but um hello)

does all his own stunts

lived all over and speaks about 23940209384 languages

you know that scene at the end of Fellowship when he’s fighting the Uruk-hai? And one throws a dagger at him and he hits it away with his sword? Yeah, the guy who threw it was supposed to miss, but accidentally threw it directly at Viggo. Who just casually Aragorned and hit it away. 

Would randomly give chocolates to the hobbits

According to John Rhys-Davis (aka Gimli), whenever you have a large cast, one or two actors will naturally become the leaders. Guess who ended up in that role.

Single-handedly convinced cast and crew to camp out to shoot a scene in the sunrise

Once hit a wild rabbit with his car by accident. Promptly stopped his car and went to see if the rabbit was dead, needed a vet or if the only merciful thing to do was to finish killing him. The rabbit was dead. Viggo realized he was hungry. So he took the rabbit, made a fire by the roadside and ate it.

According to cast and crew, sometimes you’d just see him disappear in the middle of the night and suddenly he’d come back with fish he’d caught

Had his sword with him at all times. Slept with once.

The best horse rider of the cast, hands down. Rides better than lots of pros, according to a horse trainer. Couldn’t bear to part with his horse at the end of the shooting, so he bough him. The next movie of his also involved horses, and he bought his horse in that one, too.

Knows how to survive in the wild. I’m not kidding.

Hand-stitched a few things in his costume for an authentic “I live away from civilization” Ranger feel. Also told the weapons department to make him a small bow because “Aragorn lives in the wild, he needs a hunting bow, or he’ll starve to death” - literally nobody else had thought about that. Also requested a small stone to sharpen his sword. Suggested that Aragorn would take Boromir’s arm guards after his death. 

Speaking of hand-stitching, once he was touring Japan with a reporter for an article. Walked into a store, took a tshirt, bought it, cut off the print and hand-stitched it into the hat he was wearing. The reporter was going “?????????” the entire time.

Once nearly got arrested because he was walking down the street after rehearsal practicing sword moves and someone called the cops on him

Broke his toe during filming and the result is onscreen because he just rolled with it 

Spent the whole running montage at the beginning of TTT running with a broken toe

Also broke a tooth off while filming Helm’s Deep and legit tried to just stick it back into his mouth and keep going but the crew dragged him to a dentist over lunch break. in costume. 

liked to take photographs and put them around his mirror in his trailer, by the end of the shoot there was no mirror left

insisted on filming the scene with Aragorn floating down the river in TTT himself, almost drowned doing it

also, IIRC, bought a horse for another person (I think it was Liv Tyler’s riding double?) after filming because she got super attached to it too 

it contains human existence.

116 images— the sun, the location of our solar system, mathematical and physical unit definitions, and our planets, including a blue and swirling white sphere simply labelled "Home." it contains images of human dna, of our atoms, their structure, the way they divide, our anatomy, our conception, our birth.

it does not contain an image of war. nor of disease, nor poverty, nor crime, religion, or ideology.

it does contain a father looking lovingly at his daughter. it does contain the picture of a tree toad in a gentle hand, of a woman eating a grape at a supermarket.

the remainder of the disk is audio. a 90-minute selection of music from all over the world, sounds, and greetings. there are greetings in 55 different languages, one akkadian, spoken in sumer about six thousand years ago, and one wu, a modern chinese dialect. the greetings call out to a friend. it wishes them well. it asks them if they have eaten yet.

but it contains other sounds too. it holds the sound of rain, of thunder, of a volcano and an earthquake. it holds the sound of mud pots and trains. it holds the sound of a mother kissing her child.

with little to erode it in space, the golden record would probably outlast all human creation. it will be 40,000 years before it approaches another planetary system. if it does, it cannot find intelligent life. intelligent life will have to find it, retrieve it from where it floats silent and small through space. we still don't know if they would understand it.

in 7.5 billion years, the evolution of the sun would burn the earth up, and we would not exist any longer, but the voyager would fly on, bearing a memory.

a child 10,000 years ago left a handprint on a wall. they were fingerpainting. a viking climbs up a rock just to carve the words "this is very high" 10ft off the ground. somebody centuries... milennia... ago burned their dinner so thoroughly that they buried the ruined pot in the backyard rather than attempt to clean it. shakespeare got drunk and wrote dick jokes. tutankhamun was a little boy who liked ducks more than anything. a roman carves his name into a monument in another country saying "i was here". a prisoner, centuries ago, in the tower of london scratches lines into the wall as a tally marking the days. a medieval monk scrawls in the margins bemoaning the boredom of his work.

but all of us, every one, has a deep primal need to persist. we leave handprints on the wall, scratch our names into stones, carve initials into a tree, mark our growth as children on a wall, bury little time capsules. write in the margins of a book. hide notes behind the wallpaper.

reaching out into the future to some unknown human long after we're gone to say

Tegalalang, Bali

Spring happens and it's not photoshopped!