FanFiction Can Burn Part 1: The Lord of the Mood Rings

Is anyone cool is junior high? We weren’t. We really weren’t. We’d just discovered the genius of such parody specialists as Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and Cleolinda Jones. We were also entirely obsessed with the Lord of the Rings. Consequently, and almost inevitably, one laaaate night, Beatrice and V concocted the idea to create a Lord of the Rings spoof, and in one evening, the characters were born and given what were assumed to be very clever spoof-like names. The title? The Lord of the Mood Rings. Clever.

It wasn’t long before Portia was informed, and, after another evening of highly caffeinated antics, we decided to write the story. At first, it was written in script form, which may or may not be in existence by this point. After the fact, we converted it into a fan fiction story and, though it causes us to cringe now, we did post it online for the geeky masses. Believe it or not, the reviews were pretty favorable, if few.

Now, we present the story to you in two forms: a collection of unfortunate quotes harvested from the still-viewable, still cringe-worthy, and still highly embarrassing fan fiction known as The Lord of the Mood Rings: The Mood Ring Club. The second form of the story was a film version, because we were that hardcore and that obsessed with bad, home film-making, of which there is still carnage to be found somewhere in Beatrice’s house. Given that we can’t actually post the video, as it is frighteningly lost to the world somewhere, we’ll present some highlights.

And thus, The Mood Ring Club.

Just so you know…

Frodo Baggins = Dodo Flaggins

Samwise Gamgee = Spamdumb Smarty

Gandalf the Grey = Bingaling the Silvery White

Pippin Took = Mitten Look

Strider = Strydex

Bree = Debris

Prancing Pony = Stampeding Elephant

…believe me, we know.

The Scene: Gandalf/Bingaling tells Sam/Spam where to meet him in Bree/Debris.

“Okay, so what am I supposed to do again, Bingaling?" Spam was practically dying from all the walking they did…all the way down to the road from Dodo's house. Yeesh!

 Bingaling sighed. "You're to look after Dodo, you hear me? You're to accompany Dodo to the village of Debris and keep your eye on him."

 "So, I'm supposed to go to Debris and leave Dodo here?"

 "NO! You and Dodo go to Debris. Meet me at the Inn of the Stampeding Elephant."

 Spam sorted through this for a second then said, "Right. So go to Debris without Dodo and be sure to stay away from the Inn of the Stampeding Elephant."

 "Argh! NO! Both of you go to Debris…"

 "Both of us go to Debris…"

 Bingaling continued. "And meet me at the Inn of the Stampeding Elephant, not to be confused with the Prancing Pony."

 "Meet you at the Inn of the Prancing Pony."

 Bingaling was nearly at the point of strangling the little bobbit when Dodo said, "Spam, just follow me, okay?"

 Spam smiled brightly, "Oh, okay, Mr. Dodo!"

 The two set out for Debris. They passed through beautiful country and farmland, all the while with a lovely soundtrack playing in the background. Soon, while passing through a cornfield, they chanced upon a very unfortunate pile of obviously placed thorny sticks. I suppose they weren't that obviously placed though, since both Dodo and Spam tripped over them.

The Scene: Pippin/Mitten inadvertently reveals Frodo/Dodo’s identity in Bree/Debris. Barney-related havoc ensues.

Suddenly he heard Mitten's voice saying, "Yes, his name is Dodo Flaggins. He's my second cousin's aunt's nephew's third roommate's girlfriend's brother's grandson's best friend's third grade teacher's sister's son's neighbor."

 Dodo abruptly got up in alarm, rushing over to Mitten. Unfortunately he tripped over another one of those unfortunate piles of thorny sticks (funny how those keep turning up, huh?). This sudden fall caused the mood ring to fly from his hand! Upon trying to catch it, the mood ring decided that now was a good time to find out what Dodo's mood was for the day, and I can tell you that it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows.

 Dodo suddenly entered a world filled with Teletubbies and horrible Barney videos! He screamed in terror and then he saw a vision that horrified him even more, and Barney videos are pretty horrifying already!

 It was the great Nose of the Dark, very dark, Lord Baron! It was sniffing around and it said, "I smell you!"


The Scene: Strider/Strydex grabs Frodo/Dodo after he accidentally puts on the Mood Ring in the Prancing Pony/Stampeding Elephant.

...a hand reached out and grabbed him from underneath the bench Dodo had crawled.

 "You draw far too much attention to yourself, Mr. Baggins"

 Dodo found that the hand was attached to a very strong arm which propelled him up some stairs to a room, where he was tossed in. He turned around and got up from the ground where he had been shoved and saw that the hand and the arm were not, in fact, just floating, severed appendages, but were connected to a rather broad chest and shoulders and neck and head and legs and, well, you get the picture.

 "That is no trinket you carry!" the man exclaimed. It was the same deep and gloomy voice that had belonged to the man that had passed him the salt. He started putting out the candles, only to burn his fingers. He started to run around, screaming, and sucking on his scalded fingers.

 Once he contained himself he said, "I can avoid being seen if I want to, but to disappear entirely…" He pulled off his hood gingerly, avoiding the tips of his burnt fingers, revealing a somewhat troubled face. "…That is a rare gift," he finished.

 "What are you?" Dodo asked.

 "Don't you mean 'who' am I?" the man, who Dodo now recognized as Strydex, asked, a little puzzled.

 "No, I mean who are you, not who am I? I know who I am."

 "But you said what am I? and I assumed that you meant who am I?" Strydex explained.

 "I don't need to know who I am; I've already told you that! And I know what I am too, thank you very much!" Dodo was tiring of this man and his stupidity.

 Strydex sighed and said, "Oh, never mind. Are you frightening?"

 "I don't know, am I? I don't think I look frightening, although I might since stupid Sad threw away my spare contacts and these aren't nearly as blue as the other ones….not that I wear any…"

 "No, I mean are you frightened?" asked Strydex.

 "But you said…"

"Oh never mind. I know what it is that hunts you!" He listened at the door, thinking that he heard something...

Don’t even ask about the pile of thorny sticks --which do indeed appear sporadically throughout the story—because we actually have no recollection of how we came up with them. If we needed someone to fall on the floor, we just put a pile of thorny sticks there to trip them. I guess we were holding to the idea that obviousness is funny.

As might be expected, the filming of this went really awry, really quickly, leading to just a few mishaps and/or questionable judgement calls.

You know the Ringwraiths? They became Ringroses, also called the Nasals (instead of Nazgul). After all, they serve the dark, very dark Lord Baron, who took the shape of a giant Nose. Nasals, therefore, seemed an appropriate correlation. But the creativity didn’t stop there. They didn’t wear black, scary cloaks. Instead, there were Barbie sheets. Ballerina Barbie sheets. Because that’s increasingly more horrifying. For many different reasons. Especially as time has passed.

Other costumes choices in the movie version were either incredibly questionable or incredibly brilliant, depending on how someone looks at it. The best? We’d have to say Lady Gladbags. Thaaat’s right, we went to the effort of literally making a dress out of Glad garbage bags for our Lady Gladbags to wear as she gracefully descended the stairs in Gothlorien. To our credit, it actually came out surprisingly well. But no, we won’t post pictures.

Several actual filming mishaps occurred as well, and always, for some reason, in the most dramatic of sequences. Case in point: when Arwen attempts to ward off the Nazgul while she’s transporting Frodo to Rivendell. In our scenario, Darwin, played to perfection by the incomparable V, raised her plastic sword dramatically, brandishing it in the faces of the evil Nasals, hoping to scare them away. Unfortunately, as she pointed that sword to the sky, the tip of it, already bent after years of wear and tear by younger siblings, finally fell over, smacking with ominous finality on the face of our Dodo Flaggins. I’m pretty sure you could actually hear the laughter of the other “crew members” in the background, but our actress portraying Dodo kept her calm and pretended that her moans of pain were a result of being stabbed by a Nasal a few scenes earlier.

However, the absolute best moment took place during Boromir’s depressing death scene, shot down by an Uruk-hai. Our version? Doromir is shot by a Dork never pictured on camera. Except…the arrow shot by V from off-screen never hit Doromir. It, in fact, was a brilliantly aimed shot delivered with perfectly deadly accuracy at Sad, our version of Merry Brandybuck.

Nevertheless, our dedicated crew remained in character and, despite the realism of Sad’s injury by foam-tipped arrow, Doromir dropped to the ground as if dead. Miraculously, Sad made an instant full recovery. Doromir did not.

We could go on, but our pride can only take so much. Therefore, given that we’ve clearly put ourselves out there, ripe for insults due to this humiliating product of our junior high imaginations, we encourage you all to relate your most hilarious, albeit immature, and potentially embarrassing memory of a time you’ve had with friends. We know you have some. You can’t deceive us. We made Lord of the Mood Rings. We can’t be the only ones.

Six Days in the Camping Life of Portia

Day One

Arrived, relaxed. Buffness of V breaks fork while eating steak dinner.

Day Two

Rain! Lightning! Some hail as well. Camera left under awning made by tarp; only casualty.

Buffness of V once again breaks fork, this time while eating pork chops.

Also, minor moth altercation.

Day Three

Discover hardiness of moths. Slight panic ensues.

More rain.

Dutch-blitz provides liveliness.

No broken forks.

Day Four

Spend more than an hour watching squirrel dubbed Chadwick. Wish I could stuff cheeks full of pancakes.

Yet more rain.

Yet another broken fork.

Day Five

Watch chipmunks fight over absurdly, over-sized marshmallow.

More rain.

Chadwick is joined by Carl, the rabbit, and Gus, the ultra fat chipmunk.

Day Six

Moth falls down my shirt. Don't wish to discuss.

It rains.

We leave.

A Tale of Dinosaur Llamas, Boats Propelled by Swing Sets, and Stanley Tucci, by Portia

     I am an insomniac. While this makes me incredibly fun company around 2 am (or prompts me to post a new blog entry for a blog we just created because I'm so wide awake and excited about it, I can't be patient), it is, for obvious reasons, somewhat detrimental to my sleep patterns. Consequently, I often find myself needing to turn to the aid of non-prescription pharmaceuticals in order to actually get a decent amount of sleep at night. My go-to is Benadryl, although I did once take a prescribed Ambien when I was sick. It’s seriously the closest I’ve ever come to being high and I absolutely hated it because the walls were moving and I kept running into them and the inside of my throat felt furry. No joke. I actually got the Ambien for an overseas, thirteen-hour flight to New Zealand, but I never took it because I was afraid I’d be one of those people who sleep walks when they take sleeping pills, and I’d wake up to find myself sitting in some random person’s lap in first class and then get arrested for attempted molestation or something. In hindsight, I actually probably should have taken it because I had a panic attack mid-flight due to my severe claustrophobia, which is the reason my doctor prescribed the Ambien in the first place.

    But I digress.

    When I’m not an insomniac, I’m one of those people who is entirely dead to the world when asleep. Being such a comatose sleeper, I don’t often dream. In fact, the only times I ever do dream are when I take Benadryl. And boy, are those dreams trippy.

     One of the most infamous dreams of mine has been dubbed by my friends as the “Jurassic Park Llama Dream”, which is just as straightforward as it sounds. I dreamt I was in one of the jeeps in Jurassic Park toward the beginning of the film, when everyone’s still optimistic and the sun’s still shining and the electric fences are still working. We turn a corner in order to come out from behind a hill and there, in all of their glory, is not a herd of brontosaurs or whatever they’re called, but a herd of giant llamas, the size of, well, dinosaurs, munching on some trees and looking all fuzzy and adorable. And that’s when I woke up, rather saddened that giant, gentle, dinosaur llamas do not, in fact, exist.

    However, that’s only the beginning.

    A few nights ago I had a very creative dream of a fantasy world in which I was somehow an outcast superhero with a twin sister and a mother whose magic got her kicked off our island. As a result, I had to hijack a boat and try to make my way to the place where my mother was marooned in order to save her. Unfortunately, these boats were propelled, for some inexplicable reason, by swing sets. Yes, that’s right, swing sets, like we used to ride when we were kids. I had to get into a swing set and swing my little superhero heart out in order to get that dang boat to move. By the time I woke up, I was entirely exhausted from all that swinging and the boat had barely moved from the dock. Oh, and I was almost buried in an avalanche of books from a book mountain that I scraped with my swing boat because, apparently, swing sets doesn’t steer boats very well.

    In yet another dream, I was in a Safeway with a friend of mine, V. V and I are wandering about the supermarket, browsing in the greeting card section, checking out the coloring books because we’re such mature adults, when we encounter a guy we know from back in high school, who we’ll call Flirtface McSmarmalots. Flirtface is hitting on every available (and unavailable) female in the store because, let’s face it, it’s clearly in his nature. Upon seeing us, something happens in my dream that still remains a little fuzzy in my memory and we soon find ourselves in an all out food fight. I’m sorry, did I say food fight? I mean food WAR. Stationing ourselves in the dairy section next to the frozen foods (which makes a lot of sense in retrospect; all of those frozen foods make very handy, solid, damaging projectiles), V and I are flinging stuff at Flirtface and attempting to win the battle, but to no avail.

    Dream!Portia: We need back up!

    V: But who?

    Suddenly, a figure comes running to our rescue! He turns down the frozen dinner aisle, sprinting heroically to our aid, my dream sequence practically in slow motion as he comes into focus before my very eyes. It’s…it’s…

    Dream!Portia: It’s Stanley Tucci!

    Stanley Tucci: :D

    Dream!Portia: Wait, it’s Stanley Tucci.

     Stanley Tucci: … :) … :|…?

     Dream!Portia: Stanley Tucci, what good are you in this situation?

     Because, let’s face it, Stanley Tucci, while being horribly underrated by the big wigs in Hollywood despite his talent and versatility, is not the individual I would have called upon for aid in such extreme circumstances as a supermarket food war with Flirtface McSmarmalots.

     Stanley Tucci: :(

     Consequently, the war rages on in the aisles of Safeway, with Flirtface gaining ground, forcing us to retreat nearer the bakery, a bad location given the softness of our ammunition at this point. As I’m about to dive into the back of the bakery in search of some stale bread products to hurl at our enemy, V cries out in jubilant surprise. Do my ears deceive me? She seems to think we’ve won! But how?

     Another figure springs from the vicinity of the deli, fully armored, hair dramatically swishing in the breeze that spontaneously appears out of nowhere in the middle of Safeway because it’s my dream and that can happen.

     Dream!Portia: It’s Prince Caspian!

     Prince Caspian: *hair flick*

     Dream!Portia: That’s more like it!

     Stanley Tucci: *is bald*

     And thus, Flirtface was defeated by the mere sight of Prince Caspian’s full head of dramatic hair and his sword which, I must admit, was rather menacing given the fact that all Flirtface had was a carton of milk with which to defend himself.

     Believe it or not, I’ve had far tenser dreams than that, although I don’t, on average, experience nightmares. My dreams are usually more random, with my dream self looking at all events with an incredulous skepticism typical of my real self. Even so, I had one particularly stressful dream that was, per usual, highly random, as it involved a bunch of Death-Eaters, several characters from the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender, and a shirtless Draco Malfoy/Zuko hybrid.

     Yes, I’m an adult. Why would that possibly be called into question? ...

     Essentially, I was walking around my hometown one night, and found myself outside a house I knew, for some reason, to be Malfoy Manor (Harry Potter geekdom ahoy!), despite looking like a perfectly modern, suburban home. Inexplicably, I peeked through the front window, saw a bunch of Death-Eaters in their creepy robes and masks, started to book it away from the place, and then was plowed over by Draco who was attempting to flee his own home. A big chase via broom ensues, although I’m hightailing it out of there on foot and, at some point, Draco, who had taken to the air, falls down right on the top of me (and I mean that literally), totally unconscious. So there I am with an unconscious Draco Malfoy while Death-Eaters are swirling around overhead, hurling curses everywhere, and Dream!Portia is scared out of her mind. Nevertheless, with my enhanced dream strength, I am able to carry Draco (what?!) to a house that looks just like Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in X-Men and, upon entering, encounter the gang from Harry Potter and several characters from Airbender.

     Understandably, things get a smidgen hazy here, but somehow, Malfoy switches sides, my brain draws random parallels between him and Zuko, there’s division in the ranks of wizards and benders and mutants regarding whether we should let him join, and then all hell breaks loose. A bunch of earthbenders, firebenders, and airbenders (no waterbenders because even my subconscious self can’t stand any excuse to have Katara present; is it weird that I’m this opinionated about a children’s TV show? ...) start fighting with Harry’s group, though who’s on who’s side, I couldn’t tell.

     The rest is completely blurry, except for the fact that Draco was definitely shirtless at some point in there, which I’m thinking might tell me something about my subconscious, but I’m a little afraid to dwell on it too much. Just rest assured that, apparently, Dream!Portia has a thing for Tom Felton.

     Oh, and it gets worse. Because I had yet another HP-themed dream in which Dumbledore lived upstairs, Fawkes lived in my side yard, Tom Felton visited me often just to hang out, and my cousin, who lives next door and looks strikingly like Neville Longbottom, actually turned into Neville Longbottom.

     ...Can I just pause for a moment to say that if I had Neville for a next door neighbor, my life would be complete?

     ANYWAY, this brings me to a dream I had last week while on, you guessed it, Benadryl. What stuck out was how normal everything was. I was in a coffee shop I often frequent and there was this guy whom my companions and I have affectionately dubbed “Coffee Shop Guy”. I’ve seen him around for several years now (thaaat’s right, years) but I don’t know his name, or really anything about him. The reason? The coffee shop doesn’t give its’ employees’ nametags. Why? I don’t know, why?!

     Regardless, for some time now, Coffee Shop Guy has been the butt of several jokes between my little group of friends. He’s a lovely man, to be honest. He just looks like a nice guy. I like nice guys.

     And, apparently, my brain likes nice guys named “Ryan” because my dream only consisted of me being in the coffee shop and looking at Coffee Shop Guy. He turns around and he’s finally wearing a nametag and it says “Ryan”. I don’t know a “Ryan”. In fact, I haven’t the slightest idea where “Ryan” came from. However, my head is clearly distressed at the lack of name. Frankly, I’m a little surprised his nametag didn’t read “Coffee Shop Guy”.

     Regardless, he remains a man I adore from afar, in a half-joking sort of way. I remember commenting once to a friend of mine that I thought he was good-looking, in an off-handed kind of way, and it turned into this huge inside joke about how Coffee Shop Guy is my soul mate who is also rich and will whisk me away from here. Oh, and he is also a man who will put up with my shameful ken of knowledge regarding Tolkien, Harry Potter, and classic literature. And maybe take me to the Harry Potter theme park for our honeymoon. And then possibly back to New Zealand.

     Dang, Coffee Shop Guy named “Ryan”, you’ve got big shoes to fill.

     As a result of this entire experience, if I find out that this guy’s name is really “Ryan” and my dreams somehow have prophetic properties, we’re screwed, ya’ll. Because the future must then contain dinosaur llamas, supermarket food wars with Stanley Tucci, swing-set-propelled boats, and Death-Eaters chasing me around my hometown. Although, what the heck, at least I’ll have Neville for a neighbor and a shirtless Tom Felton running around Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, which will be conveniently located not far from where I live. It can’t be all bad.