Aurora 2022-Final

Braden Kelsey

Braden Kelsey

Fear and Loathing in Mordor

to Isengard,” Sam’s “If I take one more step, this will be the farthest I’ve ever been from home”—his “PO-TA-TOES! Boil’em, mash’em, cook’em in a stew,” Gandalf’s “son of a Took!” when Pippin knocks a helmet down a well and into the goblin-filled cave system. We would bond over these clips, rewind them endlessly to make sure we each got the vocal pitch right when saying “...and my axe!” These phrases were all regularly shouts of power among my two brothers and me—phrases of comfort, phrases that you knew somebody would always shout back. We rewound the movies at the same parts: when Aragorn says “It’s the beards” when explaining why it’s hard to distinguish dwarvish men from women; when he throws Gimli onto the orc-infested bridge to protect the Helms Deep gate, or when the Rohirrim charge with the mornings’ break. These scenes were usually out-of-place or extraordinary moments, but there was one we would always try to get perfectly on a still-frame paused screen: when Bilbo asks Frodo if he could hold the ring one last time, before producing perhaps the most frightening moment across any of the films. In the books, when Frodo first visits Rivendell, it had been approximately 17 years and 39 days since Bilbo last had the ring in his possession. Yet, after living with the ring for 60 years preceding Frodo’s obtaining it, it is during Bilbo’s time without it that he physically demonstrates his dependency. He has aged drastically, turning him frail and his mind dull. In the terrifying scene, Bilbo’s teeth suddenly turn sharp and his pupils un-seeing. A black sleeplessness surrounds his eyes and he screeches for the ring at turn-it-down volume. If you get the pause just right, you can see how little distance there is between Bilbo and Gollum, and between Frodo and his inevitable future. Frodo’s eyes are full of fear, yes, but they also have a sense of understanding. It’s at this moment Frodo realizes that his greatest enemy may not be swords and impending treacherous travels, but rather the ring of power hanging around his neck like a noose. It’s not just about destroying the ring anymore; it’s about overcoming the synthetic necessity it has created for itself in his mind—it’s a battle for control, the battle of addiction. * I started smoking regularly on the morning of my 18th birthday. In 2018, this was the legal age, though I had just enough time to become addicted to nicotine before they changed it to 21. I had been in bed the night before my

I recently confessed: all those times I told my parents I was sick and couldn’t go to school? Faked. Obviously, they didn’t get red about it— it being a decade-old crime committed by a middle schooler—but what is success without a vain villain speech explaining every detail of its occurrence? And it’s not like it wasn’t impressive—I duped them. My mother was either working long hours in the ER or as a hospice nurse. My dad was the principal at my school and hardly needed at-home proof that I was a delinquent. It took legitimate brains to get past them, I explained, cutting my mother off just before she could say that she knew I was never actually sick—which was bullshit, because I had a technique. This is how it would go down: I would wake up an hour or so before I needed to be up for school, then layer every blanket I could find and put them over my head making a vacuum-tight space. I would sit there for that hour or so, building heat below the blankets with my exhales, regularly venting out the carbon dioxide by lifting the blanket’s edge. This ultimately either raised my body temperature or gave the appearance that it was raised. When my parents would wake up, I would hide the excess blankets. Although my forehead was scalding hot, I would act cold—pretty good for a pre-teen, I thought. My mother asked why I would go through all that effort just to avoid getting out of bed, but it wasn’t about simply missing school on principle alone. It was all about freeing up my day and watching the entire eleven-hour Lord of the Rings extended cut trilogy in one sitting—a two-liter of Sprite by my side, and one of my dad’s cool whiskey glasses to pour into. * Fantasy ruled the culture in my house. I used to watch my dad play Champions of Norrath on PlayStation 2, and his dad would play Final Fantasy when we’d visit him in Florida. My dad also had this tall oak-finish display cabinet in the hallway, just outside my bedroom door. It contained hundreds of small metal figurines—each no larger than a domino—all hand-painted by him. They were blue wizards, battle-crying dwarves and hairy-footed hobbits, steeds and dragons and gnomes. Most of them served the purpose of fitting with the fantasy theme but weren’t themselves in reference to anything—all except two small childlike figures, both wearing green capes atop brown beaten shirts. Alongside them, a tall white steed, and atop it, Gandalf the Grey. My brothers and I were enveloped in this culture and simultaneously existed in an era of internet parodies; Legolas’s “They’re taking the hobbits

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