Tuesday, October 12, 2004

I’m up to my neck in Google keywords right now, gentle reader, so I’ve got nothing but work on the brain. Staying late is a ritual I hope to repeat very rarely, but truth be told there’s something fun about digging up popular searches.

For instance, one of the bajillion promotionals we’re running is a giveaway for The Return of the King. Rather than guessing how millions of people are querying the movie, you’re better off using the built-in tool provided by Google, which lists the most popular keywords related to a subject. Type in “Lord of the Rings” and it will display hundreds of keywords: character names, actors’ names, actresses’ names, basically anything anybody could ever conceive.

After collecting a few hundred terms, I thought it’d be clever to type in individual character names to yield even more keywords. I entered the name “Aragorn,” Viggo Mortensen’s swashbuckling character in the movie, and what I saw boggled my mind. On one hand, I found pretty tame keywords such as “Aragorn pics,” “Aragorn’s sword,” “Viggo Aragorn,” and other ho-hum terms. On the other hand, I found “Aragorn foot fetish.” That’s right, Aragorn foot fetish.

At that precise second, under a rainy and darkening English sky, Tolkien’s undead hand probably burst through the firmament in an indignant fist. There is no way in hell, or in Middle Earth, that Tolkien ever predicted his literary imaginings would give birth to such a fetish. And for the love of hobbits, do you realize that a sizeable minority lusts for Aragorn’s toes, perhaps at this very moment? We’re not talking about a single bespectacled fan furtively Googling for forbidden search terms, nor are we talking about two fans sharing a keyboard in their deviant quest. We’re talking about hundreds, maybe thousands, of would-be Gollums tapping away at keyboards stained bright with Cheetos.

If you step back and think about it, the search term doesn’t even make sense. I don’t recall Aragorn skipping barefoot through the countryside during any of the nine hours of film. Do you? I don’t want to know the answer to that question. Now, the hobbits didn’t own any shoes–it wasn’t part of their culture or something–and there lies sweet, sweet refuge for these Aragorn fans. Do you hear me, Aragorn fans? Frodo had UNSHOD feet, hairy even. I mean, shit.