About

"So It Begins" is a memorable quote uttered by the character King Théoden (played by Bernard Hill) in the 2002 fantasy adventure film Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The quote is often used to convey a sense of foreboding, and is associated with an image macro series featuring a photograph of the character Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings films.

Origin

On December 5th, 2002, the film Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was released, in which the character King Théoden utters the phrase "So it begins" in preperation for the Battle at Helm's Deep. On January 24th, 2013, the YouTuber Michael Sabater^[2] uploaded the snippet from the scene in which the phrase is said, earning over 84,000 views in 11 years (shown below).

Spread

On February 9th, 2013, Redditor lionzion submitted a post titled "So it begins" to the /r/funny^[5] subreddit, featuring a photograph of a child standing next to a pole on top of a table (shown below). Prior to being archived, the post gained over 2,000 votes (92% upvoted) and 370 comments.

On October 28th, a Quickmeme page featuring a picture of Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings with the caption "So it begins" was created (shown below, left).^[3] The following day, a version of the image was uploaded with the caption "So it begins / the great shitstorm of our time" (shown below, right).^[6]

On June 20th, 2014, the same image macro template was uploaded to Meme Generator,^[1] where over 3,600 images were created over the next several years. On October 4th, 2015, Redditor clap_yo_hands submitted a post titled "And so it begins," featuring a photograph of people pushing shopping carts while riding self-balancing scooters above a screenshot of futuristic humans from the 2008 animated film Wall-E to /r/funny^[4] (shown below, left). On September 15th, 2016, Redditor Stlcards31 posted a photograph of an apple ear bud titled "Found this on the street. So it begins," mocking the iPhone headphone jack controversy (shown below, right). Within one month, the post gained upwards of 7,700 votes (83% upvoted) and 480 comments on /r/funny.^[7]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References