Anatomy of a miracle: Got 19-of-20 and no idea about the spider of Mordor. Had S----B. Tried SHLOOB. Laughed. But as we all learn on here, try something. Anything. Ya never know.
Figured I'd put a vowel in front and one at the end and try to guess the consonant. That led to SH-OB.
But it had to be 6 letters, not 5. So I needed an "S-C/H/L/T" to start, so just left the H in there. SH--OB.
Started with A. SHA-OB. Shalob sounded ridiculous, so I stared with an L in the middle. And apparently, that was close enough.
The odds of arriving at that must be a gajillion-to-one. I'm still shaking my head at this.
I didnt want to post it, bit since you did, basically the same happened to me! I had no idea, thought for a while, still no idea. So decided to leave it, tried to guess the only other I didnt know but atleast had a vague idea (wilbert, wilfred, winston, ). But didnt manage to get it and with still 2 minutes on the clock instead of giving up I thought I might aswell give it a go.
Somehow I decided it might be a good idea to end in lob, being organic and all. Felt silly but had no other ideas, atleast I didnt try blob,..(and cab and hub seem not so likely even for fantasy words) Also felt like there might be a joke about size, so did smallob, then realized it was still to many letters and tried smalob. From that I unaware casually tried shelob (I guess following s-consonant-vowel) And was shocked it was right!!
Or you could all just watch the lord of the rings, you know the greatest trilogy of films ever. Where the last one, the one that shelob is in, has 11 oscars
For some reason, at this obscenely early hour, my brain parsed “narcoleptic” as “kleptomaniac” (which is extra stupid because I actually have narcolepsy), and I was wracking my brain trying to figure out if I had been overlooking a dwarf named Stealy all these years.
This has got to be the quiz where my answers were the least similar to average. Shelob, Xanadu (from letter context), Uganda and Napalm all seemed obvious, but I only vaguely know who Travolta is, and have never heard of Raging Bull or Scream.
A suggestion: "People" clues the plural in "People who appear...", and if that wasn't enough, it needs to be the plural to six letters. There's no harm but it's unnecessary to have "(plural)" in that clue.
A nit: It's inconsistent have one fill-in-the-blank direct quote ("I love the smell...") enclosed in quotation marks, and one not so enclosed ("Toto, I've a feeling...").
Figured I'd put a vowel in front and one at the end and try to guess the consonant. That led to SH-OB.
But it had to be 6 letters, not 5. So I needed an "S-C/H/L/T" to start, so just left the H in there. SH--OB.
Started with A. SHA-OB. Shalob sounded ridiculous, so I stared with an L in the middle. And apparently, that was close enough.
The odds of arriving at that must be a gajillion-to-one. I'm still shaking my head at this.
Somehow I decided it might be a good idea to end in lob, being organic and all. Felt silly but had no other ideas, atleast I didnt try blob,..(and cab and hub seem not so likely even for fantasy words) Also felt like there might be a joke about size, so did smallob, then realized it was still to many letters and tried smalob. From that I unaware casually tried shelob (I guess following s-consonant-vowel) And was shocked it was right!!
A nit: It's inconsistent have one fill-in-the-blank direct quote ("I love the smell...") enclosed in quotation marks, and one not so enclosed ("Toto, I've a feeling...").