Three Wolf Moon meme has infiltrated Middle-earth

Unlike Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, you rarely see pop culture referenced in Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine can be quite sticklers for lore, as do many of the game’s players. But every now and then, the devs manage to sneak in something that’s just too silly to resist. Such as a cloak featuring a very familiar image of three wolves howling at the moon.

For those not up to date on their memes, the “three wolf moon” shirt hit the internet a few years ago when Amazon started selling these really horrible looking T-shirts only a proper redneck would love. The shirts would have likely disappeared in anonymity had it not been for one very clever Amazon commenter named B. Govern who wrote the greatest review of a T-shirt ever.

Here’s a snippet of his epic review. You can read it in full by scrolling down a bit on the T-shirt’s Amazon page that I linked above. Other Amazon commenters have tried to duplicate or even improve upon this review since, but really, B. Govern wins it all.:

This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that’s when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to ‘howl at the moon’ from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn’t have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn’t settle for the first thing that comes to him.

Since then the shirt has been parodied countless times, usually replacing the wolves with other animals. Now, even Middle-earth has gotten in on the act by featuring this classic image on a cloak you can purchase (with real money) from the in-game Turbine store. So if you’re a LOTRO player and want to give your toons a bit of a white trashy flavor, by all means check out this cloak. The official name of this cloak is, “Cloak of the Mountain Wolves” so that’s what you type in when searching for it in the Turbine Store.

Incidentally, LOTRO isn’t the first game to borrow the “three wolf moon” theme. During Comic-con 2010 Capcom was giving away Okamiden T-shirts that featured three Okamis howling at the moon.

Site [LOTRO Weekly] Via [Bio Break]