I swear, the dumbest things get crossover AUs stuck in my head.
Okay, so in Undertale, Asgore’s battle anthem is called “Bergentrückung“. This is the German name for a folkloric trope whereby a great hero is laid to rest in an enchanted sleep, typically within a mountain tomb, awaiting the day of his people’s greatest peril, whereupon he will rise again. In English, this trope is usually known as the king in (or under) the mountain.
In The Hobbit, Thorin Oakenshield’s title is “The King Under the Mountain”. Like many of Tolkien’s titles, this has a double meaning: it’s both a literal reference to the fact that he’s king-in-exile of a domain that lies under a mountain, and an allusion to the aforementioned trope, poetically framing him as a “sleeping king” who will one day rise from death (i.e., return from exile) to save his people.
That got me to thinking: Bilbo’s theft of the Arkenstone represents a failed attempt to broker peace between Thorin’s people and the people of Laketown, just as – in Undertale’s normal route – Frisk’s confrontation with Asgore reflects an ultimately futile effort to put an end to human/monster violence. In both cases, the motif is the same: in order to bring about peace, the king under the mountain must die.
Of course, in Undertale, that end can be averted, albeit only by literally breaking reality. But now that parallel is stuck in my head, and I can’t decide what would be more hilariously wrong:
Bilbo Baggins doing a True Pacifist run of The Hobbit?
Or Bilbo Baggins doing a No Mercy run of The Hobbit?
Yeah, roll that one around in your head a bit.
I can totally picture how the climactic confrontation of an Undertale style No Mercy route would go, too.
Most of the game would keep Bilbo as a member of Thorin’s party, as he is in the source material, while carefully arranging for all the horrible No-Mercy-route stuff you do to happen out of sight of most of the dwarves. (This isn’t difficult to manage, as Bilbo’s role gives him regular excuses to go on solo missions.) The other dwarves would frequently remark on Bilbo being a creepy little guy, but whatever – he gets results, right?
Meanwhile, in your interactions with Thorin, you’d deliberately enable his bloodthirstiness and paranoia, encouraging him to resort to increasingly extreme measures in pursuit of his goals, especially as his companions start to die off (not that you have anything to do with that, right?). Eventually, you’d reach a breaking point where he realises that a. he’s betrayed everything he stood for in a mad quest for gold and vengeance, and b. Bilbo himself is the one who’s responsible for his friends’ deaths.
And there’s your final battle: freaky little hobbit with the power of Ultimate Evil in his pocket versus a repentant and grief-maddened Thorin Oakenshield. If you wanted to really drive the point home, instead of having him dodge or parry all of Bilbo’s attacks, you might give him a big wooden shield that cracks a little more with each attack, until you finally shatter it to deal the killing blow.
where does gandalf fit in in all of thise
I figure Gandalf is the game’s other major boss fight – basically your Undyne analogue. Naturally, No Mercy Bilbo can’t defeat him for good, but he manages to tap just enough of the Ring’s power to cloud Gandalf’s mind as he goes in for the killing blow; by the time Gandalf’s mortal form reincarnates, it’s too late for him to stop anything that follows. This all happens out of sight of the party, so from the dwarves’ perspective, Gandalf goes off on one of his mysterious errands and simply never comes back – just like he nearly did in the book.
And I’m guessing the pacifist route isn’t Tolkien’s canon but an AU where Bilbo befriends the Goblin King, spiders, Smaug, Bolg, and the Necromancer?
Bilbo definitely explicitly took the Mercy option with Gollum. But maybe in Pacifist, Gollum reappears later?
Totally.
Like I said in the initial post, the canonical story of The Hobbit is clearly the normal route for the same reason as Undertale’s normal route: ultimately, the protagonist is unable to find a peaceful resolution, a great battle is fought, and the king under the mountain dies.
Our hypothetical True Pacifist run of The Hobbit basically spins off into a massively divergent AU where Sauron’s ambitions are pacified through the power of friendship, and the events of The Lord of the Rings never happen. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Sauron is actually redeemed – remember that even in Undertale’s True Pacifist route, Frisk can’t save Asriel from his fate – but he’s at least taken off the board as an immediate threat.
I have absolutely no idea how all that could possibly happen, mind, but it’s the way it would have to go.
Plot Designing 