Toffee, The Lord of the Rings, and the significance of the missing finger.
Today I’ll be talking about Toffee and his missing finger. I believe there are some connections to The Lord of the Rings that may give us some additional insight into Toffee’s motives.
There still seems to be some confusion over just how Toffee’s finger came to be inside Star’s wand. Many believe that Toffee placed his finger in the wand during “Storm the Castle.” But if this is so, what purpose does it serve? Why would Toffee give up the finger by placing it into the wand – only to later threaten Moon in “Starcrushed” by saying that he’s coming for his finger? I think it’s reasonable to conclude that, after his fight with Moon, he never got his finger back.
In “Into the Wand,” we learn that Moon’s “darkest spell” blasted Toffee’s finger off. We can extrapolate a couple things from this: Toffee can’t grow the missing finger back, nor can the finger itself regenerate – both of which are likely due to the spell Moon placed on the finger. Yet we still have some blanks to fill in.
Here’s what I speculate: after blasting Toffee’s finger off in battle, Moon took the finger and hid it inside the wand – not physically inside but rather hidden within Inception-style – the one place where Toffee would be unable to reach it. This would explain why Toffee forces Star to destroy the wand, cleaving the crystal in half. The cleaved crystal weakens the wand’s defenses so much that it can no longer continue hiding the finger, causing the contamination we see in “Into the Wand.”
The contamination is what prompts Star to fix her wand by retrieving the finger from it – just as Toffee no doubt intended for her to do. But why does Toffee need the finger at all? Why is it so important to him?
Connections to The Lord of the Rings
Toffee seems hell-bent on retrieving his finger, but his reasons for doing so are unclear. I doubt that his desire is due to something as simple as vanity; it could be that Toffee is somehow significantly less powerful without the finger – and that idea merits a comparison to Sauron from The Lord of the Rings.
Sauron is the main antagonist in The Lord of the Rings; he is a malicious and utterly evil being who cares about nothing more than dominion over the world. To that end, he forges the One Ring to help him control others – but he also pours much of his own spirit into the Ring, making him weaker without it. During a major battle, a man named Isildur cuts off Sauron’s finger, separating him from the One Ring, and delivers a killing blow. But Sauron is not defeated – he is immortal, and he later returns after thousands of years. It isn’t until the One Ring is destroyed that Sauron is truly defeated.
Take a look at this image, which is a mural used in The Lord of the Rings films. It depicts the moment just before Isildur cuts the One Ring from Sauron’s hand.
Now compare the mural to Moon the Undaunted’s tapestry from “Into the Wand”:
The tapestries seem to have similar composition – a light figure and a dark figure engaged in battle with one bearing down on the other and with a mountainous vista in the background – though the respective positions are inverted.
It seems likely to me that there is at least a little influence from Sauron’s concept in Toffee; there’s even a connection in the name Sauron, a name which has a real-world etymological connection to the word saurian – or lizard.
This has nothing to do with The Lord of the Rings, but since it involves Toffee’s missing finger, I thought I would include it with this post as something worth noting. I was reading this page on TV Tropes when I stumbled across an interesting observation:
“Marco Grows A Beard” sounds like an odd title for an episode that starts out lighthearted and ends with Toffee causing mutiny and tossing Ludo out of his castle. Then you realize it’s a pun on Growing the Beard; Marco wants facial hair to impress Jackie and appear more mature, while Toffee revealed his intentions.
The writers’ choice of deliberately (and somewhat stealthily) including a trope name in an episode title was intriguing to me; at the time, however, I thought no more of it – until Endless Nameless, a user from the Star vs. the Forces of Evil Discord I frequent, happened to mention the Complete Monster trope in discussion one day, which led me to wonder: when Toffee gets his finger back, will he become a complete monster in more ways than one?
As we can see from “Marco Grows a Beard,” it wouldn’t be the first stealthy trope-based pun the writers have used.
Thanks for reading! As usual, feel free to send me an ask with something you’d like to see analyzed in Star vs. the Forces of Evil or in the guidebook. I’m also still accepting suggestions for additional animated series to write about. A Samurai Jack post should be up this weekend.
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