Merry: we’ve been conducting an ongoing study to see what Legolas will and will not eat
Pippin: grass? yes!
Merry: moss? yes!!
Pippin: leaves? Ohh, yes!
Merry: bootlaces? Strange but true!
Pippin: worms? Sometimes!
Merry: Rocks? Nah
Pippin: twigs? usually!
Merry: Pippin’s cooking? Inconclusive!
Faramir: how did you… test this
Merry: you just hand him stuff and say ‘this is for you’ and if he eats it, he eats it
Faramir: …….I don’t know how to feel about this
Aragorn: IS THAT WHERE ALL MY SPARE BOOTLACES WENT
Pippin: well what did you need so many spare bootlaces for anyway
Aragorn: in case… the ones in my boots…. break!!!
Pippin: !!!!!ohhh!!!
Merry: aha!
Faramir: how could you not know that
Pippin: pff you expect me to know how boots work? *walks away*
Legolas: when I ate them, I did not know they were your bootlaces. I thought they were leathery and inferior worms.
Aragorn: so you didn’t even enjoy them
Aragorn: why did you eat them ALL if you didn’t enjoy them
Legolas: Merry and Pippin seemed to like it when I ate the gifts they gave me so usually I ate them
Merry: *slamming his fist down upon the table* you’ve COMPROMISED our test results!!
Gimli, from a distance:
Merry, yelling back: WHAT WOULD YOU KNOW ABOUT IT ARE YOU A SCIENTIST
Gimli: YES
This is UNFAIR because obviously Merry and Pippin are conducting a Single-Subject research design which is commonly used in fields like psychology where the subject works as its own control. They aren’t testing all elves willingness to eat twigs, they’re testing Legolas’ willingness to eat twigs.
By outing their testing in what is obviously the intervention stage and not allowing for a natural return to the reversal stage, Aragon has possibly ruined months of data.
In conclusion, Gimli is acting like a second year hard-science major who just took their first statistics course and both he and Aragorn should feel bad
Hell yeah! Tell em my social science sibling! Also it’s clearly a qualitative – observational case study!
I appreciate everyone defending them but Merry and Pippin DEFINITELY ruined their own results by laughing every time Legolas ate one of their ‘gifts’
Did they though? Technically their research question was just “will he eat it” not “does he eat it normally/unprompted”. The fact that he choose to eat it because they had conditioned him to eat things they handed to him doesn’t invalidate the premise, since he did still eat the Thing
That’s fair. I stand corrected, they were doing fine.
possibly their experiment was “can we condition legolas to eat anything we hand him”
Big Gay Dracula Does a Shitpost 