#shazza stuff

Bought myself a present that I thought some of you might be interested to see...

Front and back of box (no sideviews - they're just logos, nothing interesting):

Thinking about the bit in A Thousand Sons where it mentions Magnus had his hair pulled back into three braids for his appearance at Nikaea. Thinking about how this differs from his appearance any other time, and what that means.

Like, the other big event he attends in A Thousand Sons is the Triumph of Ullanor, and even for that huge big deal party the book doesn’t mention him getting his hair dolled up. And he doesn’t pull it back out of the way for battle or anything like that. (Probably it just magically doesn’t get in the way, I guess.)

Plus, besides the books, official art always depicts him with his hair out, flowing free from behind his, you know the face-helmet thing, what’s the proper word for it, I dunno. So in this context it stands out to me that he had his hair braided for Nikaea.

In the book, it sort of sets up this idea that Magnus is expecting Nikaea to be something like a scholarly conference, not a court trial. But even so, he would have known there were going to be people with some Strong Opinions about him and his embrace of psychic abilities and the power of the Great Ocean, etc etc

So I’m thinking about his braided hair as a symbolic gesture of sorts. Whereas usually he just goes around being unabashedly himself, in this case he is kind of making a show of restraint. It’s like the opposite of a threat display, but it’s not an act of submission. It’s more like when you hunker down to talk to a small animal that is scared of you.

I got myself a Magnus the Red kit, yay!

I was looking at his box and I noticed the translations of his name. French/Spanish/Italian are pretty straightforwardly 'Magnus the Red'. The Japanese one basically says 'Thousand Sons: "Red" Magnus'. Then there's the Chinese one that I couldn't really read. So I applied a bit of dictionary research, and found out that the translation is pretty nifty.