10 fantasy characters you must never admit to wanking over

31st March 2023

FOR some reason, society frowns upon finding Tolkien-style fantasy characters sexually attractive. Unless you want to be a social pariah, never confess your lust for these.

Eowyn

Just being able to name this minor Lord of the Rings character immediately marks you out as a tragic nerd. Sadly it’s deemed normal to admit to wanking over a glamour model like Lucy Pinder, but not the brave shieldmaiden who killed the Witch-King of Angmar. Society is so messed up.

The covergirl of Dragon magazine

This Dungeons & Dragons magazine frequently featured meticulously painted airbrush images of a female character, eg. a large-breasted warrior in skimpy armour. Or sometimes just a naked chick looking at a dragon hatching from a giant egg. It was all good. However you may not want to drop it into the laddish banter with the blokes at work when they’re swapping shagging stories.

Rutger Hauer in Ladyhawke

Rutger was one of the better-looking heroes of swords and sorcery nonsense in this 1985 film. Female nerds could do a lot worse when it comes to masturbatory material, and it is at least a proper film, unlike the genre’s many low-budget knock-offs with titles like Gronan the Barbarous.

Elrond

Middle Earth’s sexiest DILF. In Lord of the Rings he’s 6,497 years old, so he’s going to be an experienced lover, unlike the mere stripling Legolas, who’s always f**king around with hobbits and probably doesn’t last long in bed.

Beautiful chaotic good level 10 elven mage

Any red-blooded D&D player would fancy this intelligent, sexy, independent-minded enchantress with pointy ears from the fantasy roleplaying game. It gets a bit weird if she’s your character, but it’s hardly uncommon for D&D players to have sexual encounters with just themselves.

Hank the Ranger

The handsome Luke Skywalker-esque hero of Dungeons & Dragons, the 80s cartoon based on the game. Rest assured, people will think you’re a f**king weirdo for remembering this, never mind wanting to shag one of the characters.

Any woman from the Gor novels

A horrifically sexist series of novels by John Norman in which earth’s most beautiful women are abducted by flying saucers to become the sex slaves of barbarians on a deliberately primitive planet, where they come to enjoy their submissive role. We are not making this up. Literary classics such as Slave Girls of Gor invariably featured these hapless, frequently naked, hotties on the cover, but they’re hard to come by now, and don’t expect a Virago reprint.

Spyro the Dragon, all platforms

With his cute little face he’s actually better-looking than your boyfriend, and definitely more manly, despite being a small purple dragon. A boring night in with a spag bol ready meal and mundane sex, or an adventure in the Dragon Kingdom followed by prolonged lovemaking with a plucky dragon with boundless energy? No contest.

She-Ra

Even as a child you noticed She-Ra was a bit too, er, adult, for a children’s cartoon. In a milestone for feminism, a later version of the character got a dress that didn’t stop at the very top of her thighs. A bit dated but a fairly healthy sexual fantasy, certainly in comparison to frenziedly wanking over Orko.

One of the Galadriels

There’s Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel and Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel. Obviously they’re both great, but in The Rings of Power Galadriel has a slightly annoying tendency to be right about absolutely everything. It’s not much of a fantasy if it’s too much like a real relationship.

Glue, and six other ways Britain used to get f**ked up

31st March 2023

WITH nitrous oxide off the menu, join us on a trip down the seedy bit of memory lane and remember the cheap-and-nasty highs the nation used to love.

Glue

The only form of drug abuse that required you to pretend you were building an Airfix kit of a Spitfire. Once free from suspicion, glue was dirt cheap, though reputed to kill brain cells in alarming quantities. These days glue sniffing is looked down upon. Honestly, people are such snobs.

Soapbar

Before Blueberry Haze and Bubblegum Kush there was soapbar. For £10 an eighth you just put up with all the bits of plastic, and you could measure your usage by the holes in your sleeves. Very much the ‘unlucky dip’ of soft drugs, bulked out with anything from beeswax to coffee granules. Handy for the stoner who wanted to polish their parquet flooring then have a Nescafe.

Cider

Before it came with gold medal rosettes and the name of each individual apple listed on the bottle, cider was for forgetting your own name. Enjoyed on its own or as a mixer with lager and blackcurrant, aficionados lived by the delightful rhyme: ‘If the bottle is clear, it’s too dear. If the bottle is blue, I’ll have two.’

Reef

If you found the cocktail of sugar and artificial flavourings in Sunny Delight too healthy, there was Reef. Made with orange and passion fruit flavourings, vodka, regret, and the urge to bum fags off strangers, Reef dominated urban chain pubs like a drunk divorcee at last orders.

Speed

A designer drug in the sense that Adidas is designer clothing, ‘speed’ referred to a mix of various substances containing up to 0.05 per cent amphetamine. That’s not to say there were no other active ingredients. Caffeine, paracetamol and possibly catnip all combined to make you feel like shit for days afterwards.

Hairspray

Cheap and readily available in Boots, its popularity was limited by the high chance of instant death, never much of a selling point. For some reason it never caught on with the glitterati in the way that cocaine did. Was it something to do with the classy technique of huffing it out of a bucket of water to avoid getting a mouthful of L’Oreal? Who can tell?

Amyl nitrate

Still has its devotees, but the high – more of a head rush similar to the start of a mild panic attack – is incredibly short-lived and known to cause headaches. Not ideal for something sold to enhance your sex life.