Elrond Putting Together the Fellowship Roster / Moneyball x LOTR

About

Elrond Putting Together the Fellowship Roster refers to a series of memes which imagine The Lord of the Rings character Elrond putting together the Fellowship of the Ring as if it was a sports team, akin to baseball manager Billy Beane in the 2011 film Moneyball, with memes referencing both films. Spawned by a viral tweet, the format achieved popularity on X / Twitter in lade December 2023.

Origin

On December 25th, 2023, X^[1] user @ToLey88 posted a viral Let Him Cook reaction image, captioning it, "Saruman seeing that Elrond spent 4 Fellowship roster spots on hobbits." The post (shown below) received over 2,000 reposts and 23,000 likes in three days (shown below).

On December 26th, 2023, X^[2] user @HeylKatme quoted the post with a cover art for the 2011 biographical sports drama Moneyball, which starts Brad Pitt as baseball manager Billy Beane who uses an unconventional strategy to assemble a competitive team, commenting, "Elrond putting together the Fellowship roster." The post (shown below) received over 4,600 reposts and 36,000 likes in two days.

Spread

The post was followed by users posting memes in which GIFs and screencaps from Moneyball were captioned with Moneyball dialogues humorously rewritten to reference The Lord of the Rings. For example, on December 27th, 2023, X^[3] user @LucasFields posted a meme that received over 450 reposts and 7,800 likes in one day (shown below, left). Later that day, X^[4] user @BenjaminCrew1 posted a meme that gained over 2,300 reposts and 28,000 likes in one day (shown below, right).

The meme achieved major popularity on X / Twitter in late December 2023, with multiple variants going viral on the platform.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References