So Once Again I'm Rewatching LOTR, And I Just..... Boromir Was JUST A MAN... He Was Just A MAN Who LOVED

we don’t talk enough about the fact that there was a period of time when bilbo was in possession of the one ring, the arkenstone, and a mithril shirt. that’s one hell of a collection and he was most excited about an acorn…

This is just an entire work of art holy shit

kill me again

john price x fem!reader

when your old life is too much to bear, you decide you ought to kill it and bury it. not knowing who else to turn to, you beg John Price to aid you in your endeavor. he decides he wants to give you much more than just a fresh beginning.

tw: inspired by kill me again (1989), domestic abuse/violence, blood kink, blood eating, smut, dub-con, unhinged john price, retired john price, manhandling, light breeding kink

The dreams start the day your husband first places his hands on you. 

Brutal violence completed in a drunken stupor that leaves you with a swollen eye and has your co-workers questioning what you’ve done to yourself—you exercise a rigid equanimity that has them believing the honey coated lies that drip from your tongue. You play this game well—practiced for many years, shrouded beneath quiet smiles and well placed clothing. You keep this composure no matter what falls upon you. Be it his fist, or his lips. 

There is no time to crack or fracture, lest your dream slip between your fingers like fine grains of sand. This liberation—your deliverance—grows closer by the day in the form of hidden clothes and a separate bank account. A suitcase wedged in the boot of your car. A full tank of gas. An internet history littered with searches for a new home. Apartments you can rent. Someplace out of the way. Far from the city. Hidden in the depths below lowering skies and thick forests. 

Except he finds it. The empty dresser drawers, vacant of your clothes, and the letters from the bank about your new account. How your other one is emptied. You find him sitting in his recliner, stupid fingers choking a beer bottle, breath heavy with liquor and eyes brimming with a virulent desire to teach you a lesson. 

And he does. It’s a lesson he teaches well. One that sets every inch of your skin ablaze and leaves snot pooling in the back of your throat as your hands claw at thick forearms. 

“Think you can fucking leave me?” he questions. It’s slurred, but you’re not sure if it’s because of the liquor or the squeezing of his fingers on your throat. “The only way you’re leaving me is when you’re dead. Get that through your thick skull you stupid cunt.” 

So close. Tender and ripe, seeds waiting to spill into your mouth, gullet waiting to swallow—then, taken. Dumped on the edge of the bed. Shoved into overflowing drawers. Fabric stained with tears, suitcase shredded with the knife meant for your gut, offals ready to taste the sour breath of your malevolent lover. 

Your fantasies fade like smoke on warm water. They dissipate into the air, vanishing, utterly forgotten by your mind and soul as you cook for a man who spits at you, dead bed heavy in the evenings, mornings algid enough to leave you shivering. 

Until—one day—you finally wake up. 

“I need you to kill me.” 

It’s been years since John Price has laid eyes on you. Several tours around the world have kept his mind busy with paperwork and his hands occupied with a gun. He’s spent so long wading through the gore of war that he’s not sure he’s gotten the gunpowder to wash free from his skin quite yet. 

Maybe that’s why you ask this question of him, trembling on the other side of his desk, nails digging into the bottom of your seat, bottom lip quivering. His wrinkled crows feet deepen in the creases of his eyes as he smiles at you, a chuckle rumbling in his throat. 

How strange for the one who got away to find his way back to him under such peculiar circumstances. 

“Not really kill me,” you clarify. You’re picking at your cuticles. He notices they’re not painted anymore like you used to when the two of you were younger—before he went off to be a hero and before you were stolen by another man. “I just- John, you’re the only one I can trust with this. I need to vanish.” 

“You want me to help you fake your own death?” he asks incredulously. 

“Tell me you’ll do it,” you beg. 

It’s far-fetched, even for him. Though it’s a set of skills he has honed for many years, that life is behind him now. Idolized in dog tags shoved in the back of the closet and pictures he can hardly stand to look at anymore. These days, he does office work. Paperwork that strains his tired eyes while wearing suits that make his skin crawl. 

“I think you’re taking the piss out of me with this one, sweetheart,” he says jocularly, cheeks pinching as he smiles. 

“He beats me, John.” 

A blink—then, there’s red. Ichor stains his vision, casting you in vermillion light. A glossy sheen coats your eyes, reminding him of the lacquered dolls his grandmother used to collect when he was a child; sitting pretty and pristine on ivory shelves. Hair so delicate and meant for petting, but always just out of his reach. 

“I tried to get away, but he caught me. He nearly killed me that night. I was terrified, and I just- I can’t go to the cops. They won’t work fast enough, and I have nowhere else to go, he’s taken everything I have. Please. If you don’t do this, if you don’t kill me, then he will.” 

John folds—wet tissue paper caught in the wind. “I’ll take care of it.” 

That night, John Price does not sleep. 

There’s a cottage that lines the environs of a lake where the bramble is thick and the bushes produce sweet berries in the summertime. Bequeathed to him after the death of his grandfather, it’s been sitting vacant for decades. Rotting from the inside out as time decays the wood and bevels the roof. 

His hands dance. Hammer and nails. Saws and axes. Paint drying on walls. Within three weeks it’s fit enough to be a home. A bedroom large enough for two, and a second room to be whatever you wish—a library, an office—

—a nursery. 

“How much do you need?” 

Your voice is quiet; squeaky like a mouse. The needle pinched between his fingers has your hairline glistening and throat bobbing. There’s swelling on the apex of your cheek, edema bleeding into your eye, but he does not mention it as he pierces your arm, drawing blood into a tube and letting it drip into a bag. 

“Only enough to kill you,” he quips. 

He does this three times. Spread over aching weeks where you’re riddled with migraines and dizzy spells so violent you find your hands gripping the walls at work. Your co-workers look at you with narrowed eyes as they pass you in hallways despite your gracious smiles and reassuring nods. 

Five months after the day you begged John Price to kill you, he finally does it. 

Stale bleach stings your nose as you stare at the hotel bed, stiff sheets perfectly creased along the edge of the mattress, pillows fluffed and pristine. John stands behind you, leather gloves stretched over his hands as he toys with the bags of your blood and the knife he intends to leave behind. 

Your heart thuds so violently in your chest that you feel it traverse up your throat where it swells, ready to burst. Freedom is so close you can nearly taste it. 

“Ready?” John’s voice is even—rough like steel. You shouldn’t be surprised. You doubt the blood scares him anymore. 

Nodding, you glance over your shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” 

There are several steps to John’s plan—ones he stresses the importance of following perfectly. Obeying, you knock the lamp over at his command, letting it topple to the floor where the lampshade bends and the bulb flickers. When he shoves you onto the mattress, leaving you to stare up at him with wide eyes, he only chuckles. Tells you that he has to make it look believable. There’s no murder without a struggle. 

Gloved fingers rustle the blankets up around you as he manhandles you into different positions along the bed. Despite his firm touch, there’s no pain that lingers or blood that pools in your arms like when your husband touches you. You giggle. Anxiety and relief coalesces into a raging river in your stomach, frying your nerves until there’s nothing left but adrenaline. 

Quirking a thick brow, John looks down at you, leather gloves tracing your ankle as he straightens himself. “Having fun?”

“Sorry, I’m just… so nervous.” But you’re smiling wider than he’s ever seen you before. 

When it comes to the blood, John spills it on top of you. Legs caging the side of your hips, he pierces the bag with his knife and lets it drip over your chest, your stomach, the mattress—when it stains his pants he tells himself he has nothing to worry about. Soon enough, your DNA and his will be used to mingling. It’ll be natural. Necessary. 

“I can’t believe this is really happening,” you breathe. The blood is cold against your skin but it spills as if it were warm. Pooling in your neck, sticking to your palms, John tells you to paw at the duvet, and you do. “You said there’s a cottage I can stay at? We’ll be heading there next, right?” 

“Mhm. Fixed it up nice and pretty for you, sweetheart,” he confirms. 

You beam, skin illuminated with your own blood, clothes sticking to every curve of your body. John tosses the first bag to the side before adding another one, this time making sure to wet his knife and fling it, high impact splatters staining the wall, the ceiling, your own face. 

Then, he grabs you again, leather pressing into your wrists as he pins you. He assures you that he’s just making the scene more realistic, an act well done, but the whimper that leaves your lips is very much real. He stares down at you, and the way your eyes trace the way his beard lines his mouth, and he thinks you’ve never looked more beautiful than this—on the precipice of escape. 

“John…” His name bleeds off of your tongue.

He’s done for. 

You keen pretty for him when his knife slices through your shirt, exposing your breasts, torso gleaming with ichor like wine. When he decides to have a taste for himself, you can hardly wiggle against the flat of his tongue on your stomach. He smothers your protest with a kiss. You’re rigid against him, lips like cement left out to dry in the sun, but then, you melt. You deliquesce beneath his touch, gloved hands raking down your body, yanking your pants off before your mind can fully make sense of it. 

When he feeds his cock into your aching cunt, he tells you this is how he seals the agreement—a proper bond, an unbreakable promise. This is how he kills you, with thrust after reaming thrust, nestling into the deepest parts of you that your husband has yet to destroy. And when you clasp your hand over your mouth to stifle the moans that leave your mouth, and he catches the glint on your ring finger, he snatches it. Metal free from your skin, he tosses it; lets it topple along the musty carpet before interlacing your fingers with his. 

Then, you’re a corpse. Lifeless beneath him, chest heaving with heavy gasps as your eyelids flutter shut, thoroughly fucked until your brain is mush. He spills the final bag and drowns the room in it before he wraps you up in the blankets and moves you to his car. Bridal style. White linens like a dress. Red blood like the breaking of a hymen—this is your union. 

This is your fateful conjugality. 

Three weeks go by in the blink of an eye. The hours feel like mere minutes when your husband is no longer breathing down your neck, huffing his hate and vitriol into the shape of your spine. John brings you fresh groceries every few days before leaving you on your own to wander the edge of the lake and collect flowers to place in your windowsill. Every morning you wake up and the bed is warm. You can cook without the television blaring or a man grumbling. Your fridge is not marred with alcohol. 

On the morning of the third week, there is a forearm around your waist.  

You startle until you feel John’s voice purr against your ear as he wishes you good morning. His comfort fuzzies your mind to the point you don’t even bother to ask him why he’s here, or why his chest is pressed against your back. Instead, your muscles relax, body morphing to the shape of him. 

“Is everything okay?” you ask. 

John nuzzles his nose into the back of your neck. “Of course they are.” 

Truly, they are. He’s here in this bed with you, half naked and lazy, enjoying the way the daybreak gleams across your form. Everything is just as it ought to be—

—at least where you’re concerned. 

You have yet to notice the reports of your fictitious murder, or how the police found your diary where you recounted the events of your abuse. You have yet to notice the news of your husband’s arrest, or how he’s being charged with second degree murder.

You have yet to notice the fresh flowers resting on your nightstand, or the new ring on your left hand. 

But John tells himself you’ll learn all about this in due time. 

“How long are you here for?” you question, voice thick with your lingering slumber. 

John’s grin sticks to the back of your neck. 

“For the rest of my life.” 

*Elrond after the fellowships leave Imladris

Elrond : bring the best one we can offer to Thranduil, and also tell him that we sent his son, his only son, his only heir, the only family he had, to the most dangerous quest with bunch of hobbits who looks like kids who can't even lift a sword, a wizard, two men who can't even stand each other, and..... A DWARF.....

Lindir : shall I prepare your departure to valinor too, just in case, My Lord?

To everyone saying that technically Tolkien never said male elves have long hair.

Glorfindel did not get pulled into the abyss by his long blond hair for you to dismiss his hairstyle!

Celeborn doesn't translate to 'silver tree' because he had a buzz cut!

Finrod's golden locks aren't mentioned multiple times for no reason!

More behind the scenes pictures of the LOTR cast 🤩

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

dir. Peter Jackson

just thinking about bilbo thinking about how in love with thorin he is and how grateful hes alive and of their lives together in the shire and how theyre both just so happy and at peace and O;IRGAO;HIERGO;ALEIGHO;AIERG

Ghost thinks he's cracked the code when he gifts Johnny an ultra complicated lego set for Christmas. Something to keep his hands and mind busy for a while.

He's watching, with terror and awe as Soap burns through a 1000+ pieces in an hour, with half a bottle of whiskey in him - drinking more while he's at it. He smiles the whole way through, though - and Ghost gets a tipsy peck on his cheek. Which might or might not have made the whole endeavour worth it.

"Thought that might keep you busy a while longer." he admits later, when he's deep into his own cups.

"Ach, dinnae sound so disappointed Ghostie, not'ing in there tha' can explode. Can work fast and sloppy."

Ghost just spent an hour staring at Johnny's hands and the concentration painted on his face. He knows there was nothing sloppy about that assembly. But he has to admit that compared to Soap's usual jobs, this is bound to be rather calming.

His eyes meet Price's over in another corner of the room. And the message, conveyed by a single raised eyebrow is clear. Ghost is not to add explosives to any gifts, even if it would make Soap very happy.

So naturally the next time - at Johnny's birthday - he slaps down a timer and a fully assembled lego set.

"Better get it done in time Johnny. And no cheating."

The way Soap's face lights up at the implication that there might be a bomb in his birthday gift should be concerning. But all it does is make Ghost wish there actually were some.

Johnny is a good sport about properly disassembling the marzipan compromise inside though. And just to prove he can immediately rebuilds the legos into the other figure they can form - taking a shot every time he has to look at the manual.

And when he carries his way too drunk partner to bed, Ghost vows to apply for Christmas leave. Which is something he hasn't done since...well for a long, long time.

Johnny, being the man that he is, never questions why they are going to spend Christmas in the countryside. A small cottage barely worth the name, as far away from other people as you can get on the Isles.

He just takes the chance to kiss Ghost every chance he gets, enjoying the fact that their isolation means he's getting an unprecedented amount of mask-free Simon.

"Got a surprise for you out in the shed, sweetheart." Ghost whispers when he catches Soap from behind while the man is about to open a bottle.

"Sounds like what a serial killer would say to lure ye into the open."

Ghost decides not to ponder that. With the reality of their jobs that answer... more than he's willing to argue right now.

"Should wait with that until you've had the surprise." he says instead, gently taking the bottle from Soap. Who for the first time frowns.

Ghost relents and they bring the scotch to the shed.

When Soap sees what he cooked up, he whistles low, no need to confirm that what he's seeing is the real deal.

It has taken all of Ghost's knowledge about explosives to craft the abomination. The two lego sets combined with a new third one, 6 sets of cables - all the same colour, and of course a live charge inside.

Johnny goes all still. Stalks closer like he's trying to get the drop on the inanimate object.

Watches it from all sides before turning to Ghost, "Do Ah need to follow protocol?"

His voice clearly tells him he hopes he does not have to. Ghost once again feels vindicated in his choice to move them out here, just pressing the bottle back into Soap's hand with a smile.

If this is what takes them both out then it's already worth it for the unhinged grin it gets him. Johnny's feral joy is infectious, and when he finally steps away raising his hands like he's expecting a crowd to cheer, Ghost honestly couldn't tell you how much time had passed.

He doesn't get a chance to ponder it either because the next second he's tackled by a full grown Scot with a half empty bottle of scotch in his hand and taken clean of his feet.

And if he hadn't already convinced this had been worth it, then the way Johnny makes sure to say thank you certainly is.

They do not make it back to the cottage for a good long while.

(This whole thing was inspired by my dear beloved @dismightyman who's singlehandedly holding it down in the Ghoap trenches with me)

I just wanna say, about the Montana Rally, that supporting Tim Sheehy was a terrible move. As a montanan, we all hate the guy. The smear campaign on him is crazy, and he goes against a lot of widely held values. Supporting Tim Sheehy probably lost Donald Trump a lot of votes in Montana, which is a pretty red state

August 12, 2024 (Monday)

The 2024 election is shaping up to be bizarre on the Republican side. The party’s presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, has largely stayed home and posted on social media while his vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance has been trying to cover the campaigning for the team. Indeed, Vance’s offer on Wednesday during a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to debate Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris suggests that Vance is not unwilling to be seen as the face, if not the leader, of the Republican ticket.

The actual presidential nominee appears even more unstable than usual, and it certainly appears that his handlers are trying to keep him off stage. As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted yesterday, “When Trump is on TV a lot, his approval goes down. When he’s in hiding and his surrogates are rearranging his bonkers crazypants word salads into something like real thoughts, his approval goes up.”

Observers, including Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles Times, have been clear that “Donald Trump’s state of mind should be under debate.” “Trump’s fire hose of cray-cray has inured Americans to his outrages,” Calmes wrote today. “But now that President Biden, a normal and empathetic man, has been pushed out of the 2024 race over concerns about his age and mental acuity, Trump’s more manifest unfitness for office should be ignored no longer—by the media, former advisors and military leaders who remain silent and, yes, Republicans.”

Trump held a surprise “press conference” on Thursday, where, according to a team of reporters and editors at NPR, he misstated things, exaggerated, or lied outright at least 162 times in 64 minutes, a rate of more than two times a minute.

He said that the United States “is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in from an economic standpoint,” and warned we could end up in another depression like the Great Depression of the 1930s. In fact, the economy is strong and growing at a faster rate than it did in three of the four years of Trump’s presidency.

He warned of a national crime wave although crime has been plummeting after a surge in 2020, during Trump’s term, and said that we are “very close to a world war,” which illustrates that Trump’s main lever to turn out voters is fear. With the successes of the Biden-Harris administration having neutralized the economic fears that worked in the past, and with the goals of antiabortion activists achieved in 2022 with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Trump is apparently going for broke with the threat of World War III.

Altogether, the event did Trump no favors.

Poll numbers for Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz have climbed since President Joe Biden announced on July 21 he would not accept the Democratic nomination, and observers have reported that Trump’s anger is leading him into unforced errors, picking fights with allies and seemingly unable to let go of his focus on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, a focus that his advisors warn is turning off voters.

Trump has repeatedly seemed to fantasize that Biden will return to the head of the Democratic ticket, and on Sunday, seemingly frantic about Harris’s huge rallies while he can no longer attract big crowds, released a rant accusing Vice President Harris of using AI to create fake footage showing large groups of supporters greeting her airplane. Faking crowds with AI is a technique we know Trump uses, but there is no evidence Harris does. Immediately, people who attended her events released their own videos proving the size of the crowds, and political pundits openly questioned Trump’s mental health.

Then, this morning, Trump posted on his social media channel: “I’m doing really well in the Presidential Race, leading in almost all of the REAL Polls, and this despite the Democrats unprecedentedly changing their Primary Winning Candidate, Sleepy Joe Biden, midstream.” He went on until his closing: “We are going to WIN BIG and take our Country back from the Radical Left Losers, Fascists, and Communists. We will, very quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” This afternoon, Five Thirty Eight showed Harris up 2.7 points in the national polling average.

Trump’s advisors are pleading with him to stop name-calling and to stay on message. His campaign began today to run ads on X that look like his tweets but are much more like standard political ads.

Tonight, X owner Elon Musk planned to “interview” Trump, although it seemed pretty clear the event was intended simply to be a long advertisement for him. European Union commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton wrote an open letter to Musk warning about E.U. laws against amplifying harmful content “that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.” Breton warned that his team “will be extremely vigilant” about protecting “E.U. citizens from serious harm.” Musk responded with a meme that said: “TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY, F*CK YOUR OWN FACE!”

Last month the European Union charged X with failing to respect its social media law by letting disinformation and illegal content run rampant. X faces fines of up to several million euros.

In the end, technical difficulties delayed the start of the X Spaces event. Instead, wrote BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, who specializes in exposing disinformation, a “deepfake livestream of the Trump-Musk interview” was playing “on a fake Tesla channel on YouTube, with 200,000 people watching.” Sardarizadeh noted that the channel was running a crypto scam, and YouTube finally suspended it. When the real X channel finally began to function, it showed Musk and Trump heaping praise on each other. But Trump was slurring his words, and when HuffPost White House journalist S.V. Dáte asked the campaign about his inability to articulate, it answered: “Must be your sh*tty hearing. Get your ears checked out.”

Trump went to Montana on Friday in support of Republican candidate Tim Sheehy, who is running to unseat popular Democrat Jon Tester, but otherwise has said he is not planning to hit the road until after the Democratic National Convention concludes next week, an odd lack of campaigning at this point in a presidential contest. He seems to be trying to regain control of the political narrative through tweets and social media. Today he said he is suing the government over the raid on Mar-a-Lago that recovered hundreds of classified national security documents, but this is almost certainly posturing to try to make him look strong: he would never be willing to undergo the discovery phase of such a lawsuit.

In the midst of Trump’s frenzy, J.D. Vance has been doing the usual appearances of a campaign, although, unable to generate rally crowds himself, he has been reduced to following Harris and Walz to theirs and trying to grab headlines there.

On Sunday he did the rounds of the morning talk shows, where on CNN he complained that Democrats are bullying him by calling the MAGA Republicans “weird.” Political journalist Brian Tyler Cohen promptly answered: “Crooked Hillary, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Sleepy Joe, Coco Chow, Lyin Ted, Ron DeSanctimonious, Birdbrain Nikki Haley, Old Crow McConnell, Gavin Newscum, Pencil Neck Schiff, Pocahontas, Cryin Chuck, and Kamabla would all like a word.”

Republicans have made punching down a key part of their rhetoric since at least the 1980s, and Vance’s frustration that the tables have turned feels a bit as if someone is finally standing up to the schoolyard bully.

Outside of the MAGA frenzy, Harris and Walz last week held big, joyous rallies in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, contrasting their happy campaign with the MAGA Republicans’ drumbeat of carnage and revenge. A cover article from Time magazine today by Charlotte Alter described the scene of one of her rallies as a mashup of a Beyoncé concert, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and “the early days of Barack Obama”: “a kind of reception a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t gotten in years. Fans packed into overflow spaces, waving homemade signs made of glitter and glue as drumlines roared. When Harris introduced her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the cheering lasted more than a minute.”

At the same time, the grave issues that are propelling the Democrats continue to gain traction. The Associated Press today reported that in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, more than 100 pregnant women have been treated negligently or turned away from emergency rooms despite federal law. Two women, each of whom lost a fallopian tube to an undertreated ectopic pregnancy—one also lost 75% of one of her ovaries, and the other nearly bled to death—have asked the federal government to investigate whether the hospitals that sent them home to miscarry without medical assistance violated federal law.

On Saturday, Trump’s campaign said it had been hacked, after Politico reported that it had received communication from an account called “Robert” about internal Trump campaign documents. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo put together a helpful timeline of the story today, explaining that on Sunday the Washington Post said it had also received some of that information and said it believed the information to be that referred to in an August 9 warning from Microsoft that Iran was engaged in an influence campaign. Today the New York Times also said it had received the information, and this afternoon the FBI said it is investigating attempted hacking against both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns.

CNN national security and justice reporter Zachary Cohen reported tonight that the hackers apparently were able to access the campaign by compromising the personal email account of Trump operative Roger Stone.

“Buckle up,” Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, wrote on X. “Someone is running the 2016 playbook, expect continued efforts to stoke fires in society and go after election systems—95% votes on paper ballots is a strong resilience measure, combined with audits. But the chaos is the point….”

- Heather Cox Richardson, Political Historian

Let's talk about Boromir

He was deeply human. Not immortal like Legolas. Not immune to the allure of the ring like Gimli. He doesn't possess Gandalf's wisdom or the innocence of Merry and Pippin. He had a Sam-like loyalty in him, but he didn't grow up with a Frodo to be loyal to in his formative years, and so he learned to be loyal to himself. Nobody handed him a quest, a divine task to fulfill like Frodo. He didn't know the love of a good dad. His honor was never hailed like Aragorn's. If he displayed goodness and kindness in his childhood, it was never praised, only disparaged as a weakness. His father valued him, yes, but never as a person or a son, only as a trophy, a marker of success. He made real mistakes, succumbed to the draw of the ring.

Even so, he came to love and care for the hobbits with the kind of love he needed so deeply and never got from Denethor. He came to love Aragorn as a brother even though he would never be as widely beloved and his heroism never as widely known. He recognized his mistake, and he lamented it. And when the moment came at which it most counted, he sacrificed all of himself to protect the hobbits, to fulfill his duty and right his mistake, but most of all because he loved them. And they loved him too, enough to hurl themselves at the orcs even though they were hobbits of The Shire.

Boromir was defined not by his swipe for the ring's power, but by this love and heroism. And in his dying moments, Aragorn made sure that Boromir knew that his honor was as true as that of Aragorn himself.