I surprised myself by genuinely enjoying the War of the Rohirrim movie. When Citadel miniatures released a 28mm miniature for Héra, daughter of Helm, I bought it as an addition to my Middle Earth army. This is my review of the kit.
The box actually includes 2 models. There's Héra mounted on Ashere, and there's a separate model entirely for Héra on foot. This accounts for the rules in Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game for dismounting a hero, either by spooking or killing the mount. Being a Citadel miniature, it's pretty expensive, but then again you do get 2 models, and they're both very good sculpts.
Sculpting an anime character as a realistic human
The sculpt is, as usual for Citadel, beyond reproach. Every detail comes through, sharp and clear. You can tell what everything is, down to the last leather binding. It a thing of beauty, in the technical sense.
There's dissonance between what you see on screen in the War of the Rohirrim movie and the model in the box, though. The model is sculpted with broad shoulders, broad hips, and a severely rugged face. In the movie, Héra is drawn as a pretty typical anime heroine, slight in stature and youthful in appearance. I think there's a good argument to be made that the miniature is more apt for a human hero of Middle Earth. Without getting into questions of any individual's capabilities, you can imagine a battle-trained horse-wrangling woman of the harsh "medieval" world of Middle Earth being fit and weather-worn.
In other words, I don't think it's a problem that the miniature doesn't visually match or even echo the same character as she appears in the animated movie. But if you're a fan of the movie, and you want to buy that character in miniature form, then be aware that Citadel seems to have adapted the script, as it were, and not the drawings.
Building the model
Models for Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game are a true 28mm scale, making them a little smaller than, say, Warhammer models. Also, female models tend to be a little more slight than male models. What I'm getting at is, this model kit is small, and Citadel doesn't do you any favours in how the parts are provided on the sprue. Most egregiously, one of the heads is attached to the sprue by the chin, which gives you exactly two choices:
- Clip well away from the chin, and then file the plastic down in hopes of not filing away her lower jaw.
- Clip close to the chin in hopes of not cutting off half her face.
Both are risks.
I chose the second strategy, and ended up cutting off her face. So the lower face of my mounted Héra is a poorly re-constructed jaw, which I feebly painted orange in hopes of making it look like hair was blowing into her face.
I'm no miniature designer and have no idea what variables are involved in this sort of thing, but boy do I wish Citadel had flipped her head on the sprue so that it was attached by her hair and not her chin. Clipping a chunk of hair off by accident is an easy fix. You fill in the gap with sprue goo, and paint it. It looks like hair. Clipping off somebody's chin is detrimental. This is the single most disappointing thing about the model kit, even if it was half my fault for not being better at building models.
Painting
This one needs a small brush. Héra on foot is a tiny little 28mm model with lots of belts and riding gear, and Héra on Ashere is a tiny little 28mm model with all the same belts and riding gear plus riding tack.
There's opportunity for lots of detail, and if you don't like painting minute detail then there are plenty of cheats. She's wearing shin guards, for example, which are green with gold trim in the movie. Unlike a Chaos Space Marine, the trim on her shin guards is impossibly small (it's really just a raised edge). I managed to paint most of the trim, but in retrospect the only thing you actually notice is the fleur-de-lis style ornamentation. Paint that gold, forget the trim, and it reads basically like you've painted the shin guards green and gold.
I used broad strokes (if you can call strokes that are mere millimetres in width) a lot. Her bodice, under her riding jacket, is dark brown in the movie. I painted her jacket with Skeleton Horde, and her bodice and its laces with Cygor Brown. Good enough for me.
The same goes for her hair ties. It would be cool if I were good enough at painting to hit every binding that holds her braid in place, but sometimes you just have to recognise your own limitations.
Here's the official painted version, far beyond what I could ever do:
Cool addition to an army
The nice thing about the Héra model is that it's a fun artefact from a surprisingly good movie adaptation of basically 3 sentences out of the appendix of Return of the King (and probably some stuff in the Silmarillion, I don't remember). Plus, there's a deficiency of women miniatures for Middle Earth, so it's nice to have one of the few that are available on the tabletop.
I don't actually have a Rohirrim army, but I play fast and loose with Middle-Earth canon and timelines when I'm gaming so Héra will, anachronistically, be fighting alongside the Fellowship and whatever generic miniature I feel like adding to the game. It's fine. I'm not recreating the movies, I'm just playing with toy soldiers. And this toy soldier is a satisfying addition to my army.