I Am the Horse in the Fantasy Film
Much like my hero rider, I am impossible to kill and impervious to physics.
I am the horse in the fantasy film.
My name, if I have one, is in the language of the elders who came long before my hero rider, whether he is a strapping man with sword and shield or a fair maiden with billowy skirts and impractical sleeves that would send a modern-day horse into hysterics. They do not make horses today like they made me, the star of the fantasy film.
If you’re not riding into battle without a saddle or bridle, you’re doing it wrong.
I am capable of galloping long distances, day and night, through storm and wind and blazing sun, over broken ground and across raging rivers, no pause to catch a breath or maybe stretch a little or I don’t know, check my shoes for rocks I picked up about fifteen miles ago. My shoes don’t pick up rocks. I’m not actually magical, for horses don’t have magical properties in this fantasy world (only certain humans and maybe a dragon or two, those lucky lizards) but my shoes don’t pick up rocks and I never get tired. I can gallop up and down stairs, near-vertical inclines and kick open doors with a front hoof. Riddle me that. Physics means nothing in this land.
FOR PHYSIIIIIIICS
I’m bonded with my hero rider — whether I come to a whistle or to some inner sensing of his suffering and his need for me, I will come across miles of war-torn land. Ours is not a magical bond (horses are just horses in this world, remember?) which makes moviegoers believe that perhaps their horse too would walk through fire and rain to find them. Do not blame me when your horse doesn’t let you even catch him in the field.
Such a bond.
I’m very good at rearing. And even bareback — maybe especially bareback — my hero is very good at not sliding off my backside. Nothing is less noble than sliding off the backside.
Like my hero rider, nothing can kill me — not the extraordinarily scary chain-tack wearing black steeds of our enemies, who roar and moan and make noises that no horse should ever make — nor the rain of arrows from the armies of evil nor the heroic battle charge in which we get nary a scratch despite the fact that we were on the front line of cavalry and therefore should most certainly have gotten a scratch or two. Or many. Thanks to the enemy’s improbably bad aim that prevents such a warrior as my hero rider from being wounded, I live to carry my hero rider to his throne or his fair maiden or whatever we’ve gone to war over.
This was a bad call, guys.
Nameless characters and their less-famous horses may be killed by the dozens (don’t worry, no horses are actually harmed in the making of these films) but nothing shall take me down.
Well, perhaps the occasional very sad swamp. I’ve been known to falter in a certain sad swamp.
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