Nerding Day: Bokee's Trek

Imagine you wanted to build a Lord Of The Rings resort, but you don't want to pay Lord Of The Rings licensing money. What do you think the best solution to this problem would be? Build another kind of resort? Raise money? Or, write a terrible Lord Of The Rings fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off and base the resort on your very own IP. Since option three is both stupid and still illegal, you've probably guessed I'm going to talk about that one.

Nestled deep in the enchanted hills of Knoxville, Tennessee sits Ancient Lore Village. A fairytale themed resort based on the book Bokee's Trek: Outcasts Of Inner Earth, a book with two Amazon reviews and a grand total rating of two and a half stars.

You might be thinking; sure, this sounds like something someone would try to pull in the 1970s when no one would find out about their little illegal theme park until it had been running for thirty years and the original Bokee character actor was long dead of syphilis. Part of what makes this resort so unique is someone had the audacity to try it in the year of our lord 2021. In 2021 they built a resort around a book with one positive review that said they didn't like the book, but the resort made them feel like a real Hobbit. Hobbits don't exist in Bokee's Trek.

I agree the book does have a good premise. It's about a magical guy traveling around a world of fairytale creatures on a noble quest. It's the premise of Lord Of The Rings. Katy should try reading that because Bokee has nothing on Frodo. For one thing, Bokee looks terrifying.

Most of the creatures in the book are non-copyrightable fairytale staples like leprechauns, gremlins, yetis, etc. It does have some LOTR crossover species, including Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs... you know, the free ones. If you add big hairy feet to those leprechauns and make them high as hell, the Tolkein estate is coming for you. There's exactly one species created for the series. They're called Willows, and they're just elves with weirdly long earlobes and arms. Stay tuned for my next great character: Tall Mickey Mouse.

I barely have words for how bad the writing in this book is, and it's my whole job to have words for bad things. It reads like a hotel brochure, occasionally interrupted by yetis that the reader probably doesn't care about except to hear about the exact dimensions of their house. As we all know, the most entertaining part of any fantasy story is the painfully detailed mathematical statistics.

So, a Willow converts to precisely two yards, or "this is pointlessly useless" in English.

That's not very much in WoM dimensions, but very spacious in Willows. Maybe? The point is, they use our exact same rulers, but call it a dumb name every six feet. Which are often used as a unit of measurement anyway by the author instead of Willows, so what are we doing here, fucking Bokee?

This man is just pulling from the building instructions for the resort as he half pays attention to his Hobbit rip-off book. I'm surprised he didn't throw in that the home decor was from a mystical Homegoods by TJ Maxx. The endless buffet in the Gremlins Village was an unbelievable $14.99 gremlin dollars on the weekends.

The moral of Bokee's Trek is supposed to be about all races coming together peacefully. Something we need more eighty-year-old white men to write about, in my opinion. According to the Ancient Lore Village website, the author was inspired to write Bokee's Trek after joining his son on the campaign trail and finding, "There was so much hatred, intolerance, and misunderstanding of others." His son was a Republican candidate for governor who spent 19 million dollars on his own campaign and lost because he ran so many negative ads against his opponents that it just convinced everyone he was dick. Tennessee Republicans thought this guy was too cruel to be the governor. That's like being told to calm down by Kanye West.

I hate to analyze this truly terrible book from a literary perspective because it doesn't deserve it, but the moral of the story is not that all races should just get along and love each other. Bokee lives in a world where all the different creatures are separated by a magical mist they can travel through, but their God OOoomah has told them not to. Bokee defies God, and travels through the mist to meet the other creatures, but they are mostly all scary, weird, and terrible to him.

The other fairytale creatures know they aren't supposed to communicate with each other, so they treat Bokee as a curiosity. They creep him out and play terrible tricks on him. The Leprechauns turn him into a foot, and the Gremlins hang him upside down from the ceiling and laugh at him. These creatures can't help it. It's in their nature. The moral I'm getting from the story is: look, we all know minorities are scary, but we gotta rise above and try to get along with these creeps, I guess?

Leprechaun nationalists, please stop disfiguring and torturing me and let me go home. Thanks!

Although it may be true there wasn't enough thought put into this book to have any real moral at all. This man named an elf Brigadoon. He named an elf after a famous play that's been adapted to both film and television multiple times? He gave the fairies Asian features and then named one of them Ube, a purple yam used in Filipino cooking. He named a yeti Blowdon and didn't write LOL after it.

Lots of the creatures have animals in their village, and the animals are always dogs with wings. He had one idea for a mythical animal, and he stole it from pegasuses, and he couldn't even steal a second thing for another mythical creature? Here I'll do it in three seconds: fire breathing dog, very tall dog named Clifford, dog that is smart enough to use a toilet. Simple, elegant, cool ideas that took me thirty seconds. Here's a description of the Dwarves' dog and a picture of the Fairies' dog so you know I'm not exaggerating.

"Why am I typing all this? It's just a goddamn bulldog, reader." - Bokee's Trek

The Gremlins also have a dog that's described as being so beautiful because the gremlins are so ugly, and OOoomah wanted them to have something beautiful to look at. Then the writer threw in a photograph of what is clearly his own dog. So, it's just a regular pretty dog. The mystical creatures created for this book include an elf with long ears, a dog with wings, another dog with wings, and a regular dog.

I guess if you're writing a book designed to rip off Lord Of The Rings and teach people to be nicer to your angry son, you might as well throw in a humble brag about your hot dog while you're at it. This Hank Hill ass author grows more Hank Hill by the second as he rounds out his story.

Bokee's Trek ends with him returning home and getting exiled from his village into a fiery unknown. However, on the path to the fiery unknown, they run into all of the families Bokee met on his journey who were also exiled for talking to Bokee, and they all end up in a new valley where a directive from their God OOoomah tells them to start a new world together. Then this fellowship, you might call it, of generic fairytale creatures and one long-armed freak make a ring of homes near a waterfall in Tennessee, the famous land of equality. That way, people can "see that different people can live in harmony together and possibly change their paths to the acceptance of all as one race."

Just think, if people had been nicer to Randy Boyd on the campaign trail we might not have this wonderful book, and the resort that came from it. It just goes to show you that sometimes people really do deserve to be bullied, and good things can come from bullying them.

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