The sexual tension between Samwise Gamgee
and Frodo Baggins makes me want to fold up
like a partially done origami crane
that has been crumpled up and discarded
like so much bygone garbage.

Stop with the anime eyes of adoration and the
Samwise the Brave
and the I couldn’t have done it without you!
This isn’t a Warner Bros movie where
a closed-mouth kiss between
an awkward ginger and Dan Rad
can slide by with its PG-13 rating,
but is somehow more uncomfortable than
every eternal second
between Leonidas and his queen when your parents
are next to you and throwing altogether too penetrating
glances in your direction,
scalding into your skin their knowledge of
your escapades last night.

In case you hadn’t noticed, my dear hobbits,
you are heading into Mordor
to destroy a ring before it destroys you,
and before Gollum’s sticky fingers find themselves
threading around your neck
like the spider web you walk through
one time but somehow ends up in your mouth,
and before the Orcs and the Uruk Hai and Saruman
and the fire eye of Sauron all find you
and simultaneously kill you like some demented
team-building exercise gone horribly wrong.

This isn’t a first-person shooter; this is your life.
You can’t take a grenade to the face and still
beat someone down for the game-winning kill,
making your screen echo with the caps lock shouts
of praise from your 28-year-old man-child comrades,
half of which think you’re the best thing
to ever happen to them since, well, birth.
The bad guys will kill you for real
and take away your respawn safety net,
and they will dance an ungainly dance on your tiny hobbit graves.

I hate to break it to you,
my delicate little halfling friends,
but the need for nine hours of movie in the extended edition
is largely due to the fact that hobbits are the worst heroes on record
and have serious issues with goal-oriented problem solving.
The moral of the story here?
Stop being the stereotypical college frat boys of the fiction world and
get a move on with the task of saving Middle Earth.