The recently-announced Amazon Prime miniseries The Rings of Power has (understandably) hogged all the hype reserved for random background characters from Tolkien’s complex Middle-Earthen history. Notably missing from that production, however, is Stybba, the Rohan pony given to the hobbit Merry in The Return of the King. Stybba was kind of a tricky gift — a shaggy little foal who was too slow to keep up with the rest of the riders, intentionally given to Merry to keep him from the dangers that awaited at the battle of Minas Tirith.

While this of course lead Merry into other adventures … no one really knows what came of Stybba. Which is why someone decided to make this adorable ongoing webcomic about the plucky pony:

The Adventures of Stybba

…

This gorgeous art comes from animator and visual designer Leia Ham, who was struck by the idea of: what if The Lord of the Rings had been modeled after Chinese art aesthetics, instead of European? As she wrote on her website:

LOTR: Tale of the Middle Kingdom is a personal project that reimagines J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth in a Chinese setting. China is called 中国 (Zhōngguó) – meaning ​“The Middle Kingdom”. Taking inspiration from the books, movies, ancient Chinese artefacts and paintings, this project is a love letter to my own Chinese heritage, seen through the lens of medieval fantasy and historical design.

She gave a little more context in a series of tweets: …