The Sims is no stranger to parody. These games have changed the words of a Katy Perry song to fit its own language and turned the sitcom How I Met Your Mother into How I Dumped Your Father. Not even pieces of literary history are safe, as The Sims 4 even has a parody of The Lord of the Rings known as The Lord of the Swings.
Parodies of The Lord Of the Rings are nothing new. There have been plenty of these over the years in the form of books, TV shows and online content. For example, the show American Dad had an entire sequence with Roger acting as Gollum. However, The Sims' parody changes a major facet of the books.
The Lord of the Swings is described as a story about a young boy named Eduado whose playground has been terrorized by a school bully. Everyone in the story is vying for the one Swing -- a swing that can swing higher than all the rest -- and Eduado needs to destroy it before the school bully can claim it. What makes this so funny is that, despite being a short and basic descriptions, all the major notes of Frodo's journey are there.
The Lord of the Rings is one of the best examples of high fantasy, a story where the characters, themes and plot are all of epic proportions. The rules of the world are fully consistent, even if they do differ from the real world, and its events impact the entire world and characters living in it. Of course, the plot of The Sims 4's version is much smaller in scale, but it arguably has just as much of an impact on the children who play there. What happens to the swing will affect the entire playground, and that is the world for the characters in question. It also allows for the rules to remain quite inconsistent -- children rarely follow rules after all.
The best parodies take a reference to a well-known subject and bring it to an extreme, often for comedic effect. The idea of reimagining Lord of the Rings as a childhood urban fantasy opens it up to some interesting character representations. For instance, how would Gollum fit into that world? Would he simply be the weird little sniveling kid who nobody likes, like Randal from the old Recess cartoon? The idea of translating Sauron as a simple school bully doesn't provide the depth the character has in the books, but it also allows him a greater physical presence in the parody than he originally had.
The chance of The Sims taking any of this any further is unlikely, but it wouldn't be the first time that the series released DLC based on a popular series. Maybe players could see some content come to a DLC pack like last year's Star Wars: Journey to Batuu Game Pack. Anything is possible but fans can only hope that, someday, we'll get The Lord of the Swings: The Two Dodgeballs.