I have never played the “Angry Birds” video game but I am assaulted almost daily by news tidbits concerning its record-breaking sales and cultural ubiquity. My entire exposure to the game itself was when Conan O’Brien constructed a live action version and shot giant balls painted like birds out of a eight-foot tall slingshot at Ikea furniture. Stuffed pigs were hiding in the furniture. Rather than continue to be on the outside of this apparently wonderful pop culture phenomenon I have decided to do a little research and solve the mystery behind the game and its origin once and for all.
In 1309 BCE Horgoth the Ample-Bottomed, overlord of the Terwastian swine hordes, ruled over all of what would become Livonia. Terwastia was a cold, dark place for much of the year yet produced perhaps the world’s most bountiful harvest in the space of its three-week summer. As a result the populace was in possession of far too much free time. Only so much of that time could be spent eating (“ample-bottomed” was a title that could really have been applied to even the meanest swine horde pauper) and so the razor-toothed hogs became known also for their cruel pastimes. Most modern practical joke archetypes actually evolved from these ancient pigs’ pranks. Where today’s college student might carefully balance a bucket of water atop a door to soak his unsuspecting roommate, Horgoth’s clan might booby-trap a sty door with marinade, then laugh as their victim was dragged off and eaten by golden eagles. Equally grim was the tradition of tying a sleeping hog’s tail to a post while he slept. A friend would then rouse him of a sudden, crying that he was late for class, and watch as the victim sprinted in a panic for the door only to tear the entire lower half of his body off at the waist (for everyone knows that a pig’s tail is wired directly to his lower vertebrae). His blood would form the mud bricks from which his burial monument would be constructed, as the hogs of Terwastia were never lacking in their misapprehension of irony.
Horgoth begat three sons, each fouler in stench and ampler in posterior mass than the last. Their formal names are long forgotten as none, not even their father, ever called them by any name suitable for recording in a proper history. Thus they have come to be known by modern scholars simply as !, *, and ~. !, the eldest son, was expected to carry himself always with the dignity of a lord and the grace of a dancer. Being Terwastian, most simply hoped that he would abstain from befouling his seat in the course of any given dinner party. These hopes were rarely realized. *, the middle son, was formally expected to learn the fine arts of diplomacy, management and subtle manipulation, the better to serve as his brother’s right hand. Again, most in Terwastia would have been delighted had he simply abstained from befouling their chair when they took their leave to visit the powder room during dinner and, again, few were ever so fortunate.
The youngest, ~, had only one expectation laid across his sweaty, filth-smeared shoulders. He was to carry on the royal family’s tradition as tetherball champions, a simple enough task given the clear implication that any who beat him faced swift death by marinade-and-eagle. Time and again, though, ~ failed to so much as show for his annual title-holder match against the best player in the land. After a few years it became increasingly difficult to invent loopholes to excuse his absence, so one day an enterprising tournament official had the idea to bring the tetherball poll to ~, bump the ball once off his expansive sleeping behind, and immediately declare the match over. ~ did the official one better by wheeling with surprising speed at the tetherball’s touch (though any speed at all would have been surprising in ~’s case) and promptly eating the ball itself. At this point it was decided that until ~ relinquished possession of the ball, in some manner or other, he would remain title-holder and the tetherball farce could be laid to rest.
As years drifted by !, * and ~ became restless. They slept twenty-three hours a day, ate dinner for forty-five minutes, but then fell to intolerable boredom for the remaining quarter-hour. They sought solace in many ways: ! tried his hand at lawn bowling. * once read a book. ~, however, opted for that most Terwastian hobby of practical humor. Even here he was not satisfied, though, as none responded to his barbs with anything beyond a grimace and “thank you, sir, may I have another?” The one target who could satisfy his lust for reaction was Horgoth. Thus it was that ~ began devoting each day’s quarter-hour of wakefulness to devising increasingly ludicrous means of torturing and humiliating his father. Only Horgoth’s incredible strength and stamina allowed him to survive the repeated assaults on his health, dignity and genitalia, and only ~’s incredible stable of whipping boys enabled him to avoid a swift beheading. This went on for many years.
Finally the day came when ~ had lost his final whipping boy to Horgoth’s guillotine. On this day ~ had a plan of which he was particularly proud. Hunting swine had been dispatched to capture live birds from every corner of the realm. These had been gathered atop a large hill overlooking the site of that day’s feast, a birthday party for some noblewoman, which Horgoth was obligated to attend. As he left the palace that morning Horgoth was startled, but not surprised, to receive a bucket to the head. Horgoth was grateful, however, that this bucket did not contain marinade, nor gravy, nor even melted butter, but tar. The sticky blackish goo did little to affect the generally slovenly appearance of a Terwastian overlord so he set off to the party in good spirits (though he did spare a few glances for the sky, lest tar be some heretofore unknown eagle delicacy).
When he arrived at the feast all rose to greet their monarch. It was at precisely this moment that ~ initiated phase two of his plan. By use of an unusually long and wide straw he began to blast birds in rapid succession towards the tar-spattered lord of the swine. With each impact a pointy beak pierced Horgoth’s thick hide and an explosion of feathers adhered to his enormous, now writhing buttocks. He was soon reduced to a howling, multi-colored spectacle, screaming and shaking his polychromatic posterior in a manner most unbecoming a dread lord of the hogs. All in attendance shook with the intense effort of holding back decades of laughter at ~’s antics, lest a slow and painful death be deemed to good for them, but it was of no use. Once the first titter escaped trembling lips the game was up and the whole Terwastia’s nobility roared as one at the plight of their fearsome head. ~ simply took his bow from atop the hill and slipped away to a well-deserved twenty-three hour nap.
What ~ did not realize at the time was that one of his birds, a particularly nasty grosbeak, had been sighted so squarely at the center of his father’s rear end that it actually came to rest neck-deep in a most undignified location, necessitating three days of delicate surgery to remove this most indelicate avian intruder. Horgoth was furious and demanded not one but three of ~’s whipping boys be summoned. Here he faced an unexpected dilemma. No suitable stand-in for his son’s misdeeds could be found, yet Horgoth could in no way do damage to his malevolent offspring himself. The court lawyer was summoned. After convincing him that the overlord was not, in fact, simply waiting for him to let his guard down before disemboweling him for his laughter at the feast he set to work looking for some means of sating Horgoth’s need for judgment that would avoid harm to ~. Three days later he returned to Horgoth with his verdict: the birds did it. The birds, he argued, were obviously intended to be shot skyward in a brilliant display of multihued fireworks to celebrate the noblewoman’s birthday. Only their perfidious avian nature prevented ~’s lovely gesture from going off without a hitch. Clearly the birds had turned on Horgoth as an act of war and they, the true culprits, must thus be brought to justice.
Six months of birdocide followed. Even innocent winged species of non-bird persuasions, bats and butterflies and flying fish, were not spared. All came to a head when a young member of Horgoth’s personal guard turned his ballista on a uniquely lovely swan and brought her, broken, to earth at the monarch’s feet. She was Faelywen, high priestess of the birds, come to parlay with Horgoth and determine the cause of this unprecedented violence. Her death became a rallying point for birds across Terwastia. From hummingbirds to condors, all took up the cry, and the birds, lacking weapons of their own, began assaulting the hogs the only way they knew how: with their bodies.
Thus did ~’s prank find its dark reflection in the near-constant menace of the skies. Suicide bird-bombers rained feathery destruction on any pig foolish enough to show his snout beneath the open expanse. Horgoth’s once-robust realm shriveled to a few caves beneath the earth and his people starved or capitulated to domestication, in the hopes that the watchfulness of human farmers might keep them safe from black eyes and sharpened beaks. Yet to this day no bird will pass up the chance to hurl her body from the heavens at the sight of an untended hog and no hog dares walk alone beneath those cruel skies.
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