Author’s Notes—For the long unfinished Solid Frodo

I have to say up front that I never intended to abandon this, and I honestly want to continue it some day, but the task, she is daunting, and the fic, she is old, my style has changed, my voice has changed...every time I opened the file, I saw how far I had to go and...it just hasn’t happened yet. I can’t guarantee it will happen, but I’ve always felt bad for leaving it, since I’ve always liked the story.

I didn’t expect this silly little idea born of a simple thought that "Hobbits are sneaky too" (I swear, it was that little tiny mustard seed of a thought, nothing more!) would end up so long! I blame it on the Hobbits—they like to talk, and they keep doing it no matter how long it makes the fic. MGS is a short game, but long on paper as a friend observed...I hope someone actually reads this whole entire monstrosity and even gets to these notes! (It’s nice to know that some people at least have :)

I used two text files in writing this, Timothy L. Wilson’s metal_gear_solid_z.txt FAQ and Artemio Urbina’s metal_gear_solid_text.txt text dump (available at GameFAQs) for the MGS walkthrough and for some of the text. I also consulted Ardalambion, a site concerning the languages of Arda for the Elvish that appears (it all appears in LotR as well, there’s nothing particularly new.)

Also—about the turns for the very serious this fic takes: I tried to follow the MGS plot to the best of my (and the Hobbits’) abilities, and there is some serious stuff in MGS. There was also a lot of humor, so...consider this a flip-flop: humor with a bit of seriousness in it.

As for placing the Hobbits in time as it pertains to the War of the Ring: Frodo and Sam probably would be on the Morgai, Pippin would have recently helped save Faramir and Merry would have helped slay the Witch-King. Merry and Pippin are also grown to their full height...and I know that’s not just three inches taller than Sam. Nevertheless, they all come as if they had just left Lothlórien, and Merry still has his Númenorean dagger. I don’t know how they got in Alaska any more than they do...give me a break, it’s a humor fic (for the most part).

That quote of Pippin’s in Chapter 17 is ruthlessly yet lovingly swiped from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m certain Kuduk isn’t the Hobbit name of their dialect, but it sounded like a good choice to me...I think I found it in a tabletop role-playing game and used it before I realized it wasn’t actually any sort of canon.

Also, when I wrote the chapter "The Stairs of Shadow Moses", I had no idea how a Stinger worked. Now that I do...well, I need to re-write that part if I ever get back to finishing this!