So I just got around to watching the first of the Lord of the Rings movies (extended edition of course) and they made me realize just how much Gandalf's death must've weighed on Pippin.
Like, when they come out of Moria, you see Pippin curled up on the ground with Merry holding him and at first you think "that's so sad look how much they're grieving that Gandalf is dead" but Pippin could reasonably blame himself for the death. He caused that corpse to fall down the well and let all of Moria know they were there, which probably alerted the balrog.
But!
Consider *book Pippin*.
Book Pippin did not poke an arrow and accidentally knock a corpse over the edge of the well. In the book "he groped for a loose stone, and let it drop. He felt his heart beat many times before there was any sound. Then far below, as if the stone had fallen into deep water in some cavernous place, there came a *plunk*, very distant, but magnified and repeated in the hollow shaft."
That was *not* an accident.
And that would be a lot of guilt for even someone like Aragorn or Boromir, someone accustomed to things going wrong and losing people, but Pippin is not even an *adult* yet!
Hobbits come of age at 33. Pippin is 28. Even if you are conservative about it and take that 33 to be more equivalent to 21, he is *seventeen years old*. If you go by the technical, legal adulthood of 18, he is *fifteen!!*
Like. Wow.
Imagine being fifteen and being the probable cause of death of an extremely powerful, possibly immortal being who has been involved in the history of your family (it's mentioned in The Hobbit that Gandalf has taken many Took boys and girls off on adventures through the generations) and community for probably centuries, because you were *bored and curious*
Like-
Can't wait to watch the rest of the movies and get emotionally whammied even more 👍
