What I’m about to say would probably be considered sacrilegious to the entirety of the UD campus, but for the amusement of my peers, I’m willing to sacrifice my public image of a standard UD student and possibly lose my ability to attend this school anymore afterwards. Thus, setting myself up for disaster, I’ve come to say that before this semester, I had never seen the world-renowned classics, the “Lord of the Rings” or “Harry Potter.”
I know, I know, shocking.
When I say I have never seen them, I also mean I knew nothing about them prior. Somehow twelve years of Catholic school before college meant nothing in terms of Tolkien knowledge, and it would be called a tragedy furthermore if you happen to know my current major.
Nevertheless, I have recently entered into the real world and spent my summer watching half of the Harry Potter movies and spent the last week watching the first of the “Lord of the Rings” movies, the extended edition so that you know I’m committed.
If anything, watching both only lead me to believe that someone, *cough* *cough* J.K. Rowling, was heavily inspired by Tolkien. My god, the similarities were uncanny.
Regardless, before this, when ignorance was seemingly bliss, my friends took it upon themselves to use my situation for their own amusement. And thus, one night in our student apartment, they set out to see how bizarre it really is to be a UD student who has never seen “LOTR” or “Harry Potter.”
They first began by setting the environment up like I was a defendant in court. They all sat on one side of the table while I was across from them. Through the midst of laughter and suggestion of names I had never heard of, they compiled a Word document of pictures of characters from “Harry Potter”, and a few from “LOTR” to trip me up, and told me to guess what the name was of each character and a general description of what I think their personality would be like.
For you, I will pick out a few gems to really explain my lack of knowledge on the subjects and if you ever want to know how I named and defined every character, there is a Word doc out there somewhere.
Perhaps my greatest blunder to start was the mistaken identity of the evil antagonist of “Harry Potter.” When I say that, I’m sure everyone in their mind right now is saying the exact name that I guess should never be said according to the legend. However, as infamous as he was, I guess he wasn’t that infamous.
I thought that his name was Snape.
Please forgive me. I think that in terms of “Harry Potter” there were certain names I had heard before. But somehow, I pieced together that Snape was a name that sounded more sinister to me than Voldemort. And don’t even begin to mention who Snape actually is because someone spoiled that for me before I reached the last movies. Spoilers can happen years later, trust me! Maybe I just wanted to believe in Snape, he seemed like a cool guy.
Later on, my friends flashed on the screen a picture of an old man from “Harry Potter.” According to my brain his name is Gandalf now, sorry. I’ve annoyed my friends many times saying that they look like twins to me.
The same tragedy of misnaming happened to, perhaps my now favorite characters of the franchises, Hagrid and Gimli. Maybe I was picking names based off of vibes alone but now due to my love of them, I feel ashamed to say I ever messed up their names. Though I’ve realized recently how ludicrous this mistake was given their drastic height differences. It’s actually quite comical that I couldn’t distinguish between an obvious dwarf and an eight foot giant. Sorry to my comedic kings. Y’all didn’t deserve that.
And now what lives in infamy among my friends, something I will probably hear till my dying day, was a quick, off-hand name I deemed to two minor characters of “Harry Potter,” of which now whenever we see them on-screen, they have to go by the names I bestowed upon them. According to my friends, I named them better than J.K. Rowling ever could. So, if you see some red-head twins on screen when watching back through “Harry Potter,” just know that their names are Zeke and Beke.
So, if they have to escort me off campus before I graduate at the end of this year, I understand. They should tweak the application process going forward, so that no one, who mistakes Aragog for a French spider named Antoine or “Schmeagle’s,” not Smeagol’s, other name for Gorgle, should be admitted to call themselves a true UD student.
My bad, my bad.
