… this new one on his Instagram isn’t half bad…
Maybe it’s his blue eyes and the green shirt matching the beautiful setting in the sunshine so well?
Thank goodness we all downloaded that adorable picture from a few days ago, as it now doesn’t seem to be on Richard’s Instagram anymore! It was taken in, I think, around the same spot and with him wearing the same shirt. Now, why on earth would he decide to delete a sweet picture like that? Even Charlie Murphy, the actress with him in the picture liked it, so it could have been no offense to her…
Ah, the rollercoaster of Richard Armitage’s social media life remains a bit of a mystery…
The sea and the sunshine makes me long for our summer holiday that we have just planned this past week. It will be the first time in 21 years that Mr E and I will be spending it on our own! Junior will be heading to the south of France (possibly Marseille as well!) with a friend of his and mini me is staying at home to work and save up for her holiday to South Korea in the fall.
Mr Esther and I had been thinking of several options such as Scotland and Ireland but then someone mentioned Pompei, which is a huge dream of Mr E’s to visit. I want to see it too, although perhaps not in the same detail that Mr E plans on seeing it, so we’ll do part of that together and then when he goes into full out Pompei geek mode, I’ll go walk through Napels or find a relatively quiet beach spot to read. I researched and was able to find very afforable accommodation there during the summer high season and so we just went ahead and booked!
We decided on driving there, not flying, but it’s a looong drive (1850 km) and we’ve decided to take some time to get down there. We’ll be stopping in Germany and Austria and staying for a few days in the north of Italy on our way down. Then Pompei and surroundings for about 10 days before we head north again. On our way back it’ll be a little more north of Italy, then Switzerland, a day or two in France, a day in Belgium and then home again. 3 weeks and 2 days, accommodation in six countries is booked and I now can’t wait for mid-July to arrive.
The Book of Esther 
Your travel plans sound lovely, Esther! I like the recent selfie more than the one with Charlie Murphy where light and shadow “transformed” the man a bit. And yes, he can’t deny he’s an eye candy, this time in water colours…
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I like the one with Charlie Murphy because of the affection and intimacy it oozes. Richard himself does indeed look a little ‘off’. And yes, he does look very well in the new image. 🙂
Now that we’ve decided and planned some things, I am so very much looking forward to our trip.
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Je reposted the couple photo in his insta story in the meantime. 😉 I bet you are looking forward to it!
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Yeah, I had almost forgotten that he does this totally unappealing delete thing he does — it had been quite a while, I think. So of course there’s a kerfuffle going on about it as well. I was reflecting this morning about posting about how much I’ve changed as a fan given this example. APM just makes me roll my eyes now.
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There’s a kerfuffle going on? What about and where? APM – I wonder what Richard needs to be protected from? He’s a grown man, I’m sure je can protect himself. I saw the new picture, downloaded it and suddenly noticed the other one gone but didn’t read on to follow any reactions or possible dust ups. I tend to avoid reading most reactions on Richard’s posts anyhow.
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This reminds me a lot of the dustup around beard selfies in 2014, but it’s an even older conversation. Some people have been doing that casual kind of flirting with Armitage’s accounts (wish it were me you were holding like that) and others feel strongly that that kind of flirting is inappropriate and causes Armitage to withdraw from the fandom. To me it reads as “we’re upset that Armitage deleted the selfie, so we’re going to blame other fans for his decision,” something we’ve been hearing forever.
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Ok, that again. Sigh. The man is notorious for tweeting and deleting and unless he states himself why, it’s so very pointless arguing over this.
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I was thinking you meant ‘hairy’ beards, and was trying to remember what the kerfuffle was, but perhaps you meant companion beards ( or not, can’t remember 2014 much anyway!).
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in August of that year or maybe September, Armitage posted a selfie with bacon in the place of his beard. I think he also made a remark about “weird beards” around the same time (if not in that tweet). A fan organized a campaign to tweet pictures of themselves in beards back to him. Another fan took objection to that. The discussion spread from Twitter to tumblr with fans threatening to report other fans to Twitter for violating the TOS.
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Ugh. Yeah, I remember that.
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Ah, I remember the bacon beard but not the fall- out, luckily.
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It was awkward insofar as it caused me to do two things I wouldn’t normally do: contradict a close friend publicly, and participate in something I considered ridiculous just to make a point. Not a beloved moment in my fan journey.
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Esther Pompeii is a great place. I went in 2014 for a day trip when I visited Rome. Be careful with the heat though. I went in September and almost had a heat stroke.
Where in Switzerland and Austria are you both visiting?
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We’ll be stopping in Innsbruck in Austria on our way down and Lausanne (Lake Geneva) in Switzerland on our way back.
Yes, we were thinking about not going in that heat but figured we survived Greece and Spain and Israel in the summer, so we can survive Pompeii as well. 🙂
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Your holiday sounds wonderful and so is driving through countries , gazing out of windows, ( as a passenger!)
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Yes! We’ll take turns driving but I suspect Mr E will do most of it, he likes driving more than I do. 🙂
I gaze out of windows and sometimes fall asleep… I like that we’ll be stopping in places and doing a little extra sightseeing along the way.
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Oh Pompei!!!! I’d probably be a geek like Mr E but in any case, I’m sure it’ll be a great trip. And I admire your roadtrip!! Sounds really fun, stopping over in so many different places. Fantastic.
As for the new picture – very nice selfie. Much nicer than the previous one (weird distortion in that one). So in that sense I don’t regret that he’s deleted it. What I *do* regret is the virtue signalling and rule making that comes with any such delete occasions. Sometimes I find fandom very annoying.
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I’m really excited for Pompeii but I don’t need to study every single stone like Mr E does. So, I’ll probably go there one or two days and Mr E more, I think. 🙂 Yes, we’ll be doing a bit of a European tour, I’ve been able to get some very reasonable deals on hotels which makes this afforable. Also helps we’re not paying for extra rooms for the kids. 😉
Yeah, the previous RA selfie did have something weird, esepcially around the eyes and forehead, but I love the affection it conveys. Was just saying in reaction to Servetus that I have completely missed the kerfuffle that seems to have emerged from delete-gate. Yes, fandom can be very annoying, which is why I tend to not read reactions to Richard’s posts.
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Same here. I don’t wade in there anymore. Self-care. Because it invariably makes me feel bad. I only saw the fall-out on SM and the immediate blaming and finger-pointing. Which also makes me feel bad. It all could so easily be avoided…
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Blaming for what, I wonder? Fans blaming other fans for him taking the picture down again?
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yeah. Fans cause him negative feelings with our comments, which causes him to take down the picture (extrapolating onward: “withdrawing” from the fandom, being unwilling to share anything private or candid, him developing bad feelings toward us, etc.)
When he reposted it, someone made a comment about marital prospects that immediately brought out the fan police.
I am really down to almost zero engagement with the fandom anywhere except my blog, which is now mostly people whom I consider friends, but somehow whenever I do make it to Twitter or Instagram, something’s going on.
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I am beginning to understand (and share 😬) your POV, Serv. It has only taken me longer to get there…
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I think it’s just timing. You were a little bit behind me in “appearing” on tumblr initially.
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Slowly coming of age in fandom 😂 😉
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I tend to miss these dust ups on Twitter but maybe that’s because I follow accounts that don’t generally wade deep into these arguments? I’m quite selective in what I choose to read and scroll on quickly when things annoy me.
As to why Richard deletes? Who knows? He’s a very private person and I think is always second guessing himself about how much to show or not. Maybe him taking it down is influenced by fan reaction, maybe it isn’t. We just don’t know so in my view really no point whatsoever in getting in fights over this.
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I don’t communicate with friends on Twitter anymore (even via PM) and I don’t really read the accounts I am following. It’s mostly leftover from when I *was* doing that and I followed everyone I knew who followed me. So I only read the #richardarmitage tag and it’s intended purely as an information search. But that means I am also more heavily exposed to drama when it happens there. I acknowledge that I’m not using the tool in a way that would lead to other results than the most disastrous, but I can’t be bothered. It doesn’t yield enough for me to make it worthwhile to restructure my account.
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I very very rarely think to go into the Richard Armitage hashtag, which is why I think I may also be missing stuff but I’m fine with that. 🙂
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Yeah. I might be more and more so, too. In general if I’m interested in something i want to be well abreast of the very latest, but I may be changing with regard to this particular topic.
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That – and for Richard distancing himself from fans. Or that is what I read (again) today.
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which always kills me. He’s tweeting, isn’t he? Posting on instagram regularly if intermittently? It’s like we’ve returned to the discussions of 2010.
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Precisely. This has happened before. And yet he hasn’t stopped (his intermittent) SM posting. Since he doesn’t engage, anyway, I don’t think we have to worry about any drastic changes.
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Yeah. He’s never going to turn into Hiddles (or whoever the current social media celebrity of the moment might be). No matter how “good” and “obedient” we are.
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Exactly that! He’s always been a reluctant and slightly doubtful SM user and has always gone in bursts. This is just part of his cycle. He will never be the garrulous, very social, (over-)sharing type and that’s fine! He’s just not a social media tiger and never will be.
As you may have noticed I have been obsessing over Ronald Colman lately and he was similarly reluctant about publicity. He said somewhere that if you know too much about the person, it takes away from seeing the character portrayed. He also said that just because he’s famous, he doesn’t owe anybody anything. He does his job, people enjoy it and that is that. He gives through his work, the public takes and enjoys, why should he owe giving them even more? Reading that reminded me of Armitage. Maybe that similarity is part of why I feel this strong attraction to Colman now?
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Such an interesting comment. In general I would agree with Colman — what I “know” about certain Hollywood actors means I’m reluctant to watch any of their work ever again. It does distract from my enjoyment of their projects because I’m always thinking “there’s the anti-Semite” (Mel Gibson, Gary Oldman). In the former case his work is never good enough to justify the aggravation and in the latter — I still can’t erase the aggravation. That hasn’t, so far, applied to Richard Armitage for me — even his nonsense position on cyberbullying, which was probably the worst thing (to me) that I’ve found out about him, didn’t kill the crush (although it did ding it hard). In his own case, I think he has maybe realized that what he says off the cuff is not so great (I’m thinking of his remarks after Love, Love, Love). So the question is just learning not to say un-thought-out things — something I’ve had to do, too.
At the same time, it’s much more difficult now for actors than it was in Colman’s time. There was a whole machine in place to protect them from the consequences of the public discovering things about their private lives that wouldn’t have been acceptable in that atmosphere (think of all the “straightwashing” the studios did around people like Rock Hudson).
re: Armitage — the frustration back in the 00s was that initially he had sent a lot of messages and then he went down to 1-2 a year. Now we get dozens every year. So I don’t really see a problem with the amount he is in touch, anyway. He’s hardly withdrawing.
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This is true about the Hollywood publicity machine but it could also be very restrictive. Colman was very resistant to certain stories that were made up about him, with suggestions of love affairs with certain co-stars to help sell a movie. It got so bad that he actually quit Hollywood for a year or two and went travelling. He was at a stalemate with Sam Goldwyn who wanted him to serve out his contract and Colman refusing to make any films for Goldwyn anymore. He’d rather sacrifice his career than make any films for Goldwyn and his publicity machine. In the end he came back and became very succesful in films like A Tale of Two Cities and The Prisoner of Zenda. A little more on that here, in case you’re interested…
https://books.google.nl/books?id=TbMAAAAAQBAJ&pg=PP232&lpg=PP232&dq=ronald+colman+lawsuit&source=bl&ots=374dzYNXWx&sig=ACfU3U020MvHHlqmtJcs6Gle-kwt0W57Uw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxhoqr8_X3AhXFhv0HHe4QCLYQ6AF6BAgbEAM#v=onepage&q=ronald%20colman%20lawsuit&f=false
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For clarity’s sake – he came back after his contract with Goldwyn ended.
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Google only let me read a little piece of it (publicity about him being drunk, and feeling like the audience wouldn’t accept him in roles that were different than his celebrity persona). And it sounds like had the power to extricate himself from the machine, so good for him. I’ve always seen Armitage as ambivalent about this question — simultaneously principled, AND ambitious. I’m sure that makes it hard for him (as well as there potentially being things about himself that he saw as dangerous to reveal, at least in the past).
I think what Colman’s story gets to is where the real problem is: is it the machine, or is it the desires of the audience that the machine feeds? The audience wants straight, heroic, blemishless, goodlooking male leads. So the machine gives them that (and works hard on blurring any info to the contrary, or even running disinformation games like fake romances). So the audience grows to expect this narrative from the machine, which means the machine pressures the artists to provide the appropriate story. It’s a basic principle of capitalism that the consumer should get what they want and this is to everyone’s benefit. But I’ve gotta wonder.
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Good point. Vicious cycle.
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If you don’t see every single stone, you could miss something important! (j/k)
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Don’t you start! 😂 That’s exactly Mr E’s argument as well.
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This isn’t the first time I’ve thought Mr E and I could be good friends. LOL.
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I’ve had the same thought as well. 😊
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According to me: “If you see every single stone, you would miss something important elsewhere.”
Sorry, but I am happy not to understand every English language article.
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I was kind of teasing her (j/k = just kidding). But I also think it’s a matter of perspective. If I ever go to Pompeii I will be very intense while there, because it will be a one time thing. When I visit places in the US, I am usually more laid back.
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🙂 Pompeii , on my list when retired.
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We travel 1850km and are still in the same country so I envy those of you living in Europe in that respect! It sounds like a wonderful trip, especially Pompeii.
Both photos are beautiful – I love that the affection and respect between the two co-stars shines through in the first one, the second one is simply beautiful with the green/blue colouring, his eyes, the silver in his hair……..
I’ve only recently discovered that Charlie Murphy played Isuelt in The Last Kingdom, so now that I know who she is, I want to rewatch her episodes.
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This is true about the distance, we get to a new country with different languages and customs quite easily here in Europe. I was actually thinking when I typed that, that people in the US or Australia might perceive that distance as less great than I perceive it to be.
Yes, I love the affection shining through in that first picture too.
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There are Texans who will drive 90 mi for dinner.
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Yeah. That wouldn’t happen here so often…
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sounds like a fun road trip, what do you prefer about driving yourselves rather than flying/taking the train? i have some friends who are planning to drive to Iceland soon! no idea how that happens lol!
nice pics from Richard, i didn’t see the comments on the Instagram and obvs we can only speculate exactly as to why he deleted.
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In driving you can see more, stop along the way more. So, yes, the end destination is Pompeii but we’ll be seeing so many different things (and hearing many different languages) along the way, You’re freer to do as you please and it is cheaper and less hassle for us than flying and then renting a car there.
Exactly on that deleted picture – we don’t know why so what’s the point of fighting over it? I haven’t read those comments either and don’t plan to. I tend to avoid reading any reactions to Richard’s SM posts anyhow. 🙂
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Well I hope you have a fantastic time in the trip.
I don’t mind reading reactions (mostly on twitter tho) and if I don’t like what people are saying I just scroll past. There’s always going ro be stuff I disagree with and tbh I can’t be arsed arguing with anyone…I just leave them to it!
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Oh, me too! I do catch a whiff here and there but I too scroll past.
Thanks, I’m really looking forward to that trip. 🙂
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non sequitur, icymi: https://www.vulture.com/2022/05/david-bowie-documentary-moonage-daydream-trailer.html?utm_source=flipboard.com&utm_medium=social_acct&utm_campaign=feed-part
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Thnak you! I knew something was in the works but this looks awesome. Will definitely see this when I can. 🙂
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