At the Prancing Pony in The Fellowship of the Ring, Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn barely has to move to get Frodo’s attention. He sits in the dark, smokes his pipe, and lets the hobbits wonder why a man who looks like he’s been sleeping outdoors is suddenly so interested in their table. It takes most of the trilogy to get that man into a crown. Even then, there’s a reason so many of us still picture him in the muddy ranger clothes.
Jamie Dornan is going back to those ranger years in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which takes place before the Fellowship sets out for Mordor. And while there’s plenty of curiosity about what a different actor will do with Strider, there’s another take on the character that goes in a much stranger direction. It keeps Mortensen’s shaggy hair and stubble and gives his permanent look of disapproval a lot more room to work.
Asmus Collectibles has turned Aragorn into a four-inch cartoon warrior for its first Lord of the Rings QBitz set. His head is almost as big as the rest of him, his sword is already drawn, and his enormous eyes make him look personally offended that anyone would pick a fight with him at this size. He’s one of five figures in the set, which Asmus lists for preorder at $120.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood
Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.
💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)
👒Grand Line(One Piece)
🐺The Continent(The Witcher)
🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)
01
What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.
02
Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.
03
Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.
04
How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.
05
There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.
06
Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.
07
What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.
08
A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.
The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.
The Rings of Power · Prime Video · Since 2022
Middle-earth
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
One Piece · Manga since 1997 · Netflix 2023
The Grand Line
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.
One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
it.
The Witcher · Netflix · Since 2019
The Continent
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.
Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
got told wrong.
Percy Jackson · Disney+ · Since 2023
Camp Half-Blood
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.
Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
something nobody thought to test for.
The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
What Comes With the ‘Lord of the Rings’ Aragorn QBitz Figure?
Aragorn’s newest figure.Image via Asmus Toys
The set includes Aragorn, Arwen, Gimli, Lurtz, and a Nazgûl. Putting Arwen and a Ringwraith in the same box makes it tempting to stage a little flight to the Ford, while Lurtz gives Aragorn somebody to square off against at Amon Hen. Each figure comes in its own box with a display base and roughly two to four points of articulation. Lurtz also has movable eyeballs, so if you put him next to Gimli, you can make sure he’s looking down at him.
Asmus has made a realistic sixth-scale Aragorn before, complete with Mortensen’s likeness and a detailed costume. The QBitz figure gets away with doing much less. The dark cloak and layered ranger gear put him squarely in his Strider days, and that scowl could belong to the guy who just found out Merry and Pippin lit a fire on Weathertop. Of all the versions of Aragorn you could shrink to four inches, the one who spends half of Fellowship trying to keep four hobbits out of trouble is an especially good fit.
Asmus lists the five figures together, with a $20 nonrefundable deposit and a limit of three sets per customer. The company says it will email buyers when the set is ready so they can pay the remaining balance. The preorder page currently does not list a shipping date.
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