Kids These Days by Babblecat
Fanwork Notes
A series of drabbles depicting Ungoliant struggling with her unruly spiderlings, as well as her beta-simp husbands.
- Fanwork Information
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Summary:
Ungoliant's brood cause her annoyance as they grow up and turn into normies.
Major Characters: Ungoliant
Major Relationships: Shelob & Ungoliant
Challenges: Kids These Days, New Year's Resolution
Rating: Teens
Warnings: Creator Chooses Not to Warn
Chapters: 25 Word Count: 2, 305 Posted on Updated on This fanwork is complete.
Scandalous dancing
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After eating a couple of spicy trees (and almost, almost eating a very spicy man and his spicy jewels) Ungoliant looks to settle down somewhere agreeable and safe, eventually coming upon a nice mountain range in a good location, where she finds a number of beta bucks spidermen. Can't be a queen without a kingdom (king optional).
It takes a couple months to lay her first egg sac, and a couple more for it to hatch, but it takes the resulting spiderlings less than a week to begin irritating their mother.
“What are you doing.” she asks her swarm of tiny offspring where they have gathered in the biggest cavern. Wind whistles through the caves, but this one in particular is pleasantly calm, and she has yet to drop prey amongst the spiderspawn, so she can't understand why the creatures are all swaying back and forth, shaking their abdomens in strange, anxiety producing ways.
“Dancing!” squeaks her largest daughter, Shelob, the spiderling possessing the fattest abdomen, and the one performing the most dangerous dance as a result.
“Stop this elf nonsense! Stop it now before I eat you!” roars the outraged mother arachnid.
The spiderlings cease twerking…for now.
Back in my day…
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“Back in my day we ate trees, we didn't grow them.” muses the great Gloomweaver one dank afternoon upon discovering that one of her most problematic children -Bob Junior- has been cultivating a garden in a part of the cave system that receives starlight. The spiderling, who is shaggy brown rather than the pitch black of his mother, waves his pedipalps at her as she inspects the miniature oak sapling which is his pride and joy.
“Your father will hear about this.” hisses the arachnid monolith. Except Bob's father will not hear about this, because Ungoliant has already eaten him.
Destroying established industries
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Spider silk manufacture is one of Ungoliant's most lucrative side-hustles, occupying the time left in between mating and eating mates, or brooding about her ex-boyfriend and his bling. Edgy elves love purchasing her silk for their awards shows.
But everything changes once Ungoliant’s brood of children become teenagers. Being raised to be chaotic evil, they begin stalking and eating their mother's client base, for miles and miles around, and also the caravans who arrive to trade.
“Do you want to be poor?! Do you want to send your mother to an early grave?” she asks them, during a family meeting.
Full of themselves
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“Dark Lords require extensive tenderising if you mean to steal their bling-”
“Ah.”
“To invade Elvish kingdoms, all you need to do is walk in through the front door-”
“Yeah.”
“Extensive meditation in a cave is something you can put on your CV….are you listening to me, Shelob?!”
“Huh?”
A massive pedipalp slams down on a massive spider head. “No, you're not! By the One, you kids are so full of yourself. I'm giving you insider advice and you're playing with your toys?!”
Shelob taps the orc fidget spinner she's playing with, earning herself another blow to the cephalothorax.
Loose morals
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One day an indeterminate time since Ungoliant the Great arrived in some scary mountains, spiderlings begin appearing in the caves which the gargantuan demon-spider did not birth, making her a grandmother, sending a chill down her non-existent spine. Spiderlings do not spontaneously develop out of the ground, even she cannot produce them out of thin air, which means monsters are breeding which are not her. Of all of her children, she suspects Shelob most of all of being the most degenerate. It's definitely not Bob who's breeding. It's enough to tempt her to eat all of them and start over.
Loud music
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Getting tipsy on distilled starlight and waking up with a Maiar level hangover is one thing. Ungoliant deals with such suffering regularly. However she cannot tolerate being woken by the pling pling of loudly played elf music. The elves inventing the harp has been nothing but a curse upon the world. And they wonder why she and Mellor trolled them so hard. Uncurling her legs and heaving herself off her back is an extreme mission, but she is driven by a need worse than the usual one.
“Stop that racket!” she roars, when she comes upon the culprits. In the largest cavern a horde of her children are swarming over an ivory harp filched from some elf kingdom or other, each spiderling plucking a different string. It's hell! It's hell! To the void with it!
New media causes brainrot
Read New media causes brainrot
The elves continue to curse a single mother for no apparent reason. Last time it was the harp. This time they have invented a thing called ‘books’. All Ungoliant's children have fallen into the trap, sitting ‘day’ and night stock still in various corners around her home while they turn page after page of the hot new Beleriand romance called Twilight.
“Stop reading that! You're going to rot your brains! Elves do not sparkle!” she roars, when she discerns what it is they’re staring at with their many eyes.
“Spiders don't have brains.”
“Yes they do, Bob. Get a grip.”
Spoiled & coddled
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For some reason the one thousand fathers of Ungoliant's immense horde of spiderlings, the surviving ones anyway, care a great deal for their offspring, something which pisses the Queen off because it results in spoiled brats who let other people do the hunting for them. It’s time to right this wrong. She cannot be birthing weaklings content to rot away in the roots of her mountain.
“No! You go bring some orc back from the supermarket, not dad!” Ungoliant eats Shelob’s father right in front of her. It has no effect, and some other male makes the desired supermarket trip.
"Why is THAT back in style??"
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Once upon a time, a couple thousand years ago at least, if memory serves, it was a fashion amongst horrific demon arachnids to backcomb their hair. Ungoliant once made this hideous mistake in an attempt to lure Melkor to certain doom, and she still feels extreme cringe upon reflecting upon this youthful error. Thankfully, the elves had not invented cameras yet. She is again prodded to violent despondency when the trend makes a resurgence and her horde of children wake up one day to present themselves before her at breakfast with backcombed hair. In revenge, she comfort eats a few.
Bad language
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“You're a sauron!” screams a spiderling.
“Na ah! you're a sauron!” screams another.
“No, you're a sauron!”
“If I'm a sauron, what are you then?”
“Not a sauron!”
Bad language zig zags around the dank, dark, and dingy mountain Halls of Ungoliant. One of her many husbands, under the influence of jealousy, decided that it would be a great form of revenge for him to teach bad language to the spawn of another of Ungoliant's spidery men, hoping thereby to promote the interests of himself and his brood. Instead he simply succeeds at annoying her, and she consumes everyone involved.
Need to toughen up
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The new generation of spider demons is incapable of eating giant trees whole the way the older generation could, but because the Valar haven't bothered to grow trees in Middle Earth or even turn on the lights, Ungoliant can't blame her children for this insufficiency as much as she'd like to. Starlight is capable of nurturing only miniature plants that can train nothing but ants in the art of sap sucking.
Although it's not their fault they're so weak, Ungoliant nonetheless beats her children regularly for their shortcomings, a form of discipline that doesn't prejudice her goal of creating monsters.
Bizarre fads
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Rollerblades. Another dastardly elf invention. Blasted elves! Blasted elves! Although she lives in enviable rural peace and quiet, the insane fad of elvish rollerblades somehow makes it to Ungoliant's stronghold, and of course her stupid, sheep-like normie progeny immediately take up the practice of shooting about on silver wheels around the immense warren of caves and tunnels that is their home. At least the roughness of the stone floors, walls, and ceilings means they often crash and burn. This upsets Ungoliant’s husbands for some reason, but that is why she has multiple of them (and also because she likes men).
FREE SPACE (TikTok)
Read FREE SPACE (TikTok)
It is a little known fact, but the elves have been torturing the world since before Ungoliant and her big chested goth boyfriend trolled them and made them uber sad. The elves, all of them, whatever their silly clan, are inherently a diss and a troll upon the world by Eru Ilúvatar after all. Ungoliant and Melkor were simply retaliating, acting in self defence and for the good of the public interest. As such, Ungoliant continues to be righteously indignant and upset when the elves invent TikTok a hundred thousand years too early, turning all her children into brainrotted Zoomers.
Incomprehensible slang
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“Did he crash out?”
“Let him cook.”
“fr.”
“Skibidi.”
“Hey, Unc.”
Ungoliant is not the first one to be made upset by something her children have. Instead she receives a delegation from their primary caregivers - her surviving husbands.
“We can no longer understand the youth.” sighs Bob Sr, father of Bob and a thousand other equally eccentric sons. He is very distinguished, with salt and pepper fur. If Ungoliant had to pick a favourite husband, it would be him. She thought he was dead.
“Beat and or eat them until they speak sense!” She commands.
“We've tried that.”
“Not enough!”
Don’t respect elders
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Drama erupts in the First Age. A traffic jam occurs in the halls of the Queen of Gloom. An old spider encounters a young spiderling in a narrow tunnel.
“Step off the pavement.” instructs the spiderman. The youth does not immediately do so, disallowing the adult to pass without either barging into it or stepping into dust.
“Why should I?” drawls the youngster.
“Because I'm older than you!”
“Why does that earn you respect?”
Unfortunately for the callous youth, this is spider society, and not namby-pamby elf society, so his elder immediately demonstrates why it deserves respect, by consuming it.
Inscrutable technology
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“What is that?” asks Ungoliant of her child.
“A Palantír .” replies the spiderling.
“...What is that?” asks Ungoliant, an immensity the size of a mountain.
“A seeing stone.” replies the tiny, hill-sized spiderling.
“What is that?” asks Ungoliant, a demon.
“A seeing stone.” responds the spiderling, a demi-demon.
“What does it do?” asks Ungoliant.
“Sees things far away.” replies the infant.
“How?”
“Magic.”
“....Why would you want to see things far away?”
“To spy on things. Or talk to relatives.”
“Why would you want to talk to relatives far away? They want to eat you. Honestly.”
Ungoliant eats the Palantír.
Know less
Read Know less
It is Learning Time With Ungoliant, Gloomweaver and Destroyer of the Two Trees of the Valar (and elves). She crouches in the most massive of her underground caverns, an immensity darker than the Void and even hungrier. Before her crouch her many thousands of half-spider, half-Maiar offspring, who are all very ignorant and in need of a decent primary education. Ungoliant has very little need for education, but Melkor once said that education is how you take control of the next generation and therefore the world’s destiny.
“Who is the elf who made the bling which Melkor stole?”
“Elrond.”
“No!”
Whine & complain
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The Valar have been the worst custodians of the world that the world has ever seen. Recently they set the sky ablaze, an event which awoke some sort of naked, noisy orc. A naked, noisy ape which is at least more tasty than the original variety. As a cook celebrated in the songs of the more edgy sort of evil creature, such as the dragons, Ungoliant has a need for fresh ingredients for her pantry.
“I don't care if the sky is on fire, go outside!”
“But mooooom-”
“No buts! Go outside! I need fresh orc for my orc flan!”
"They just don’t listen!"
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“We're moving. Put the dead mice in that box over there. And use bubblewrap! I don’t want broken mice when it comes time to unpack.” Ungoliant points to a jet black cask she stole bought whilst attending one of hot goth babe boyfriend Melkor’s many ‘going out of business’ boot sales.
Instead of doing what she commanded, Bob Junior, one of her older sons (a couple hundred years), goes and puts the dead mice in another jet black cask functionally and visually no different to the other one. He at least remembers to use the fungiform bubble wrap, very carefully.
Lack discipline
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“Yes, it is difficult to ambush a squadron of elves, but that's why you need practice. That's why you need discipline.” You can't give up at the first hurdle or you'll never achieve anything or get anywhere. You'll certainly never complete a fanfic.” hisses Ungoliant, to her army of terrible arachnid monsters. It’s probably about time that she taught them how to take over the world and steal and eat bling. Melkor hasn’t been answering her texts lately, but he’s probably languishing in some prison somewhere. He likes doing that. His lapdog, Sauron, seems as if he’s inherited the habit.
Lazy
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A spider of such size and malignity that it is impossible to quantify, crouchs over a child’s cot, in which lies a much tinier monster spider, which is suckling on its eight thumbs. “It's midnight, time to get up and go hunt. I require man-flesh for my lasagne.” roars the giant.
“Awww, another hour, mom.” squeaks the baby, which is nonetheless the size of a house.
“No, full darkness fell several hours ago, and the oven has reached the proper temperature.”
“But mom, it's always dark.”
“I don’t care. It’s light enough to go hunting. Bring me man-flesh or starve.”
... But think they know everything
Read ... But think they know everything
“But there’s no PROOF that Ilúvatar exists-”
“Got to bed. Go to bed before I consume you like Melkor’s shinies.”
Tasty!
More Bob!
Petition for more Bob!
Thank you! I know right 😂🕷️🌲
Scandalous dancing
Very amused by the idea of Shelob twerking!