Concerning Horses

So it was my birthday a couple weeks ago, and I had a really hard time thinking of anything practical in life I wanted. But I’ve also been going through a rough patch lately and I am an avid believer that every now and then it’s important to do something for yourself – to treat yourself with the kindness you’d treat others. Or, in the famous words of one Tom Haverford and one Donna Meagle, “Treat yo’ self!”

So I did! As you know from my last post, I got my warden to level 75 and got him his own customized war horse. But that was not where the fun stopped 🙂 You know how there are auto generated war steeds all throughout the cities of Bree and Minas Tirith (not to mention ALL OVER Rohan), well I like to look at them. And occasionally, I get inspired. So I started taking screenshots of my favorite ones – the ones that really stuck in the back of my head or just really struck me – so, for my birthday, I decided to try to match some of my faves! For example, I have run across numerous grey pintos and paints that are absolutely gorgeous:

here’s one of them – but there are a BUNCH all over. And they’re very pretty.

Since my RK already had the grey color pack, I got her a paint hide pattern and voila!

I also got the bay hide for my alt champ to see what it would look like:

I’ve been curious about it for a while now, and for the most part had written it off. After all, it just makes the coat color a bit lighter and dolor and gives dark, charcoal colored stockings to the horse. But I will say this, I love this particular combination of brown that essentially creates a liver chestnut, and it would be impossible to get without the bay coat. I doubt I’ll invest in the bay coat for any of my other toons, but I’m glad I have one who can run around with it. It probably works best with shades of brown anyways, as those are the hues you’d normally find a “bay” horse sporting (In reality bay horses have brown coats and black manes and tails as well as some other highlights – or darklights? – so the in game option is close, except you’d never find a “bay” that had some other color mane).

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but when I ran across this particular horse in Aldburg I was really taken aback – when I was a young kid my uncle owned an old Arabian mare that looked almost exactly like this horse – she had a flea bitten coat with light brown specks (fun fact, often times a flea bitten coat is the result of a horse’s coat becoming increasingly grey (white in the horse world refers to having white hair and pink skin and is very rare, white hair with black skin is called grey and is much more common) as they age. Anyways, I absolutely loved her. Every time we went out to visit them, I’d bring my riding helmet and boots and I’d ride around the corral. She was actually my cousin’s horse, but young me felt like we had a special bond. Sadly, she passed away a few years ago (she was in her 20’s so it wasn’t a shocker, but still). I would never have thought to actually buy this combination of colors in game, but seeing this horse standing there in Aldburg like some digital horse ghost inspired me.