UPDATE:
I have updated my theories and condensed the best ones into this post: https://medium.com/@rubywren/marika-and-radagon-are-melina-daedicar-and-shabriri-as-the-bringer-of-the-dawn-and-dusk-lina-b2b62bf4afaa
Not everything described in this article has been re-written and properly done up yet such as the historical connections and I have yet to post the pictures of the map overlapping stuff (I really need to get around to that, sorry) so feel free to still have a read of this but just check out the link above for my updated views on the games cosmology and symbolism.
End of update.
So about two months ago I became very obsessed with figuring out Elden Ring’s story, here are the results. A lot.
Below is a script for a never-made video essay
To summarize my script:
First of all the story is told using the map, you can discover the story by superimposing the map on itself like in the image above.
So far I have seen: A turtle with a popes hat, Rykardd, dogs, Melania’s bloom and oddly enough the Hindu God Ganesha just by taking Elden Ring’s map duplicating and multiplying it ontop of itself in Photoshop.
The locations that the map overlaid on top of itself highlights are relevant to the games lore, themes and story.
Second, the game is fractal, even the narrative is fractal. It is deeply connected to mythology and not your usual kind, the games overarching theme, if you’ll allow me an archaic concept, is something like: the myths of Hesiod and other the ancient Greek poets and ancient warrior poets in general who wrote about how women used the power of logos to reduce the physical power of men by controlling them blends easily with the modern struggle of the ideas of science with fascism, something touched on in most Fromsoft titles, especially Evergrace— which is to say that Elden Ring is as political as the still quite tense debates about Indo-European heritage are in academic settings given the extreme interest the Nazis and proto-Nazis had in Aryanism.
I think until people apply this lens to the game that it will basically remain a complete mystery. That is not just the feminist lens but also the racial lens, and the mechanisms of control and dominance via the propagation of shame and fanaticism.
The game is upfront with its intentionality here: Pandora’s box is referenced by the pot-people, women in the game are silenced by horse riding masculine warriors and literally placed where the sun doesn’t shine anymore, the sun God is masculine — because he is to horse riding warrior raiders. Part of what defines the sky deity in Indo-European linguistic-mythological studies is how surprisingly consistent this particular member of the God family is.
But the interesting thing is that Fromsoft don’t go full Marija Gimbutas and postulate a gynocentrism in which everything is peaceful and fine when femininity (as ancient warrior poets would write it, those who practice logos because they do not have bodily strength) rules and this is because the game has in its core a recognition of difference and othering wherein, I think, it takes the critical perspective that the search for a golden-age, in the past, is a failed effort. This ties into Japanese, American and German imperialism and probably others as well.
Below is a link to a video of Melina when she is burning herself to burn the Erdtree, which is an Old Venus reference by the way,
At 2:10 we see her hair is reddish/brownish/maybe pinkish and also grey and silver. Why is this?
- It is a glitch.
- It is intentional and a reference to the games central colour-coding of the masculine warriors as red-beasts and feminine magicians and witches who have silver-magic. Which is the magic of tears, also known as empathy and emotion and intelligence and to Heisod seductive logoi. Melina, like us when we burn ourselves for the Three Fingers, loses her clothes, her falsehoods and we see her for who she really is. True light, not honeyed gold.
OK.
Apart from this the game structurally attempts to follow the philosophical ramifications of its stance: if there is no golden-age then there is no future for ‘us’, the Volk, just the new (the third term, the third finger, difference, etc.) has a place there. There is no over-arching narrative, no origin story which will secretly reveal a betrayal, no plot to destroy the current hierarchy, so what does the future hold? People who pretend to be the Third or want to bring about the Third and people who want to bring about the One or the Two. So, more importantly what does this mean for games like Elden Ring?
The beings of the land form a dichotomy between oneness and multiplicity. Castle Morne has many small monster-men gathered around a fire, which is essentially the Erdtree, in Caelid the scene is mirrored in a camp which hosts a giant singular dog-monster, the beings of the land become one and then become many.
Elden Ring’s story and world is in a cycle it seems but it is more accurately like we are zooming out of a fractal pattern. For instance a small dungeon with a giant bear inside will convey the entire story within it as a minature vignette and this story is told with the games ‘mise en scene’ which is classic Fromsoft environmental storytelling through some vaguely Gestalt-like principles.
But more: when I overlaid the map ontop of itself I figured I’d try seeing if certain areas align with other areas and if visting those areas seemed to form any connections. They did. Often ones that made sense. I will try to re-collect my notes on those areas soon and update this post with them.
One final point. Elden Ring has a lot of references ranging from ancient to modern. It leaves a breadcrumb trail of very clear on the nose references and connective imagery that it forms a clear picture out of abstract elements or ‘missing’ elements. The Weepiing Peninsula is on the nose, people there are sad and it is raining. Caelid is not a real name or word but it probably, like Farum Azuela as we’ll see, is a reference to an obscure historical object, place or event. A lot of the games seemingly meaningless and obvious jokes and references are key to understanding what happened — a complete shift in approach to reading Fromsofts RPG games is needed for Elden Ring. There is a new found confidence in their abstract gestures.
The story is told through the map and combinations of it overlapping itself in various ways which mirrors the story itself, a story of reflection on the fantasy genre, human history, gaming and the souls series.
It all started when I noticed that Gowry and Miquella were connected by the games ‘mise-en-scene’ and some other tangential factors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hlbvnnwKus) — that video is relatively outdated because of how un-abstract (a bit dogmatic) my conclusions are and it’s more than likely that my findings below are a bit un-abstract as well but the general points will ring true.
This article is mostly just here for posterity’s sake, I’m confident my findings are correct and will be confirmed by others but I have no social media presence or skill in generating attention so just wanted to quiet my vanity’s demands to publish something first.
Anyway, here we go.
I will post pictures which will support my arguments as time goes on and I find the time to rummage through my hard-drives (will do this soon in the mean time you can prove a lot of what I’m saying by reading Old Venus or cracking open photoshop and overlaying the map on itself). For now this is just the script, unedited, copy-pasted here. If it seems like something is missing such as an image demonstrating something, I will add it when I can. I am not a scholar so while there are references to all sorts of ancient mythology I will miss a lot of it.
This was the script, please feel free to skip around:
The Mystery of Elden Ring Solved: Mirrorsouls, God Dies Twice
1: Chaos is a Latter
The first enemy you fight in Elden Ring is a grafted scion. A reflection of itself.
When everyone first started playing Elden Ring at the start of this year (it has now been longer than this since I started editing this post) I remember so many players being confused about how the game seemingly being balanced around the mimic-tear in the late game, people are still confused about it — what’s the point exactly? Also, what’s with Ranni mirroring this character which looks like Melina in her ending?
Well, we need to literally reflect, mirror and even invert elements of the game and superimpose them on top of each other to figure out the solution to the puzzle. This ranges from conceptual mirroring to literally mirroring the map and music in the game.
Any story we tell ourselves in this game cannot just explain its grand narrative — it must explain its molecular narratives — for instance, in the Earthbore cave we reach out for treasure and fall into the depths, we fight a Runebear and defeat it. Next to the bear are two corpses, one with a Smouldering Butterfly and the other with Trina’s Lily. Whatever story we tell ourselves, it must unveil who these two characters are.
Did you know that Pandora’s Box is a mistranslation? It’s Pandora’s JAR. What was Pandora hiding in there? Well to Heisod, the ancient Greek poet, it’s misery and evil. What a dick.
Have you noticed that where we find the map fragments we also see these columns with writing on them? As if to say ‘the map is a story itself.’
Do you remember when the snake person, says this;
Brave Tarnished. This is my true form. My real name is Zorayas. Please forgive the deception. Do understand. The duplicity is my own doing. Lady Tanith speaks no falsehoods, and the Volcano Manor is just as it seems. Lady Tanith is my mother. I am told I was born by the grace of a glorious king. That my mother cherishes this form I inhabit. I am proud of what I am. But people are cruel. If they saw my true form, the wouldn’t speak to me. And so I assume a guise when seeking new recruits. But you are not like the rest.
First of all notice that this is a likable kind person who happens to be a snake. Snakes are universally considered evil entities (that’s a lie) because they are inherently devilish (not true). Echidnas, snake women with the masculine snake body, are mentioned by, of course, Heisod, the woman-disliking ancient poet who helped Homer invent what we think of when we think about Greek mythology. There are probably more snake-women out there in the myth world but Hesiod’s direct condemnation of the ‘fem-power’ of not beating the crap out of each other and just talking it out is, I hope obviously, tied to Elden Ring’s themes.
(Important to note its ‘fem-power’ which includes feminine men, even for Hesiod who funnily mentions that sometimes men can talk it out to get what they want, how girlish, this isn’t because anything south of 1968 was utterly devoid of gender complexities but Hesiod just had a problem there. It seems the feminized tend to occupy some warrior-cultures views a little bit but that isn’t always negative such as with the Scythians)
Anyway, the snake girl here is speaking in more or less a reflection of Melina’s own words about her birth and her ‘mother’, it is a revelation — but Zoraya doesn’t quite understand — lady Tanith is not her mother — and the Manor is built to torture and consume heroes. Might you say she has a ‘missing’ mother? A lacking-presence kind of a mother? Mommy no-form? Hmm I’ll think of a better name soon.
Really… Oh, so there was a secret after all… Oh my… Lady Tanith, my own mother, has deceived me… Was I not… born by the grace of a king?
If this resemblance can tell us more — well maybe Zoraya’s origin is similar to Melina’s?
SERPENT’S AMNION
Amnion from the mother’s womb which cradled the poor unwanted offspring of a repellant birthing ritual. It will never dry out, remaining damp indefinitely.
Notice the connection to water or blood through its dampness. Zoraya says this when you give it to her;
I remember this scent, distinctly. Funny, isn’t it. I am certain of it. I was born inside this. It’s a part of my birth mother. You have my gratitude. Thanks to you, I am no longer afraid. I want to know. How I was born, and met Lady Tanith. One day, I hope to call her mother once again, this time from the bottom of my heart.
She asks the same of you as Melina does but out of shame not the desire for life to continue and births to occur;
Oh, it’s you… I’m afraid… there is something I must tell you. I was an unwanted child. Born not of grace, but of a hideous ritual. Something that can never be accepted, not by men, nor serpents. Even Lady Tanith shouldn’t accept me. I know that you have done so much for me. But I wish to ask one last kindness. Kill me, please. I thought that I feared nothing. But this… Free me from this accursed frame.
Tanith, Merika, would prefer if she simply forget her origin — it is shameful — killing Zoraya is wrong, she is ashamed of herself.
In this sense, like Milicient, she is not like Melina. Melina is different; shame is not what drives her to suicide nor is the designs of another such as with Millicent — it is her own choice.
The puzzle of Melina cannot be figured out by only tracing the resemblances with Zoraya and Millicent — yes, Merika is not her mother, and she is born of a ‘ritual’ of sorts — but what she is made out of is nothing but the sacrifice of Merika and Radagon — she contains their essence — but how? First lets point out the obvious; if Indo-European myth is important in Elden Ring, or perhaps more broadly speaking, myth in general, then the earliest myths surround metaphorical understandings of celestial bodies. Merika and Radagon being the sun and moon, when the moon ‘dies’ who is born? The dawn. Venus is the morning star, it is half of the name of a anthology G.R.R.M edited called Old Venus.
Battle hammer comprised of a globe attached to a handle. Though a bludgeon dealing strike damage, the appellative star is covered in spikes which cause blood loss.
Ironic given its graceful name, this weapon often reeks of blood.
I’ll get into that later. This is Melina’s version of the Serpments Amnion is the LARVAL TEAR –
Core of a creature of mimicry known as a silver tear. As much as a substance as it is a living organism.
Melina, like Merika and Radagon, are born from a reflection and mourning — a silver, material, which reflects a tragedy — a tear.
Rykardd and Tanith do no sacrifice themselves and so their combination — not their child, their fruit, Zoraya — a snake and a person — cannot understand herself — she feels shame.
If you fail to understand Zoraya’s quest you meet with Shabriri’s closest resemblance;
DAEDICAR’S WOE
Disturbing likeness of a woman whose skin was flayed. She smiles with a serene tenderness. Increases damage taken. It is said that this woman, named Daedicar, indulged in every form of adultery and wicked pleasure imaginable, giving birth to a myriad of grotesque children.
This is an image of woman which from Hesiod to modern day Christianity contains the secret-sauce of patriarchy and fascism. Apart from this, in the lore-sense, its a riddle: whose skin was flayed? Well it also means someone was exposed. To make an important jump here — what if the exposure caused the birth of the ‘grotesque children’?
Yes, someone has popped the Malenia pimpled before.
Why was she popped? Well if its a riddle maybe we can look at the name following the, assume with me for now, logic that the game will present two dualities with one having a real name as a reference and the other having one which is disguised: her name sounds like Daedalus. He built the labyrinth which contained the minotaur.
This is important because a female character containing a dangerous masculine-coded monster in an inescapable labyrinth is easily connected to Marika’s condemnation of the Fire Giant, who is suspiciously generically named perhaps indicating the Marika’s name is a disguise as well, to staring into the fire forever is a kind of similar action. But this only works if this condemnation commits him to forever wandering — and yet he seems to simply watch over the fire (which connects to many other myths, of course, ignoring the most obvious connection to the Si-Te-Cah and Balor myths). But he isn’t just watching over it, his actions which put him there, like Marika’s are keeping them stuck in a repeating cycle, their own maze of their own creation. This is the main point I will try to stress again and again. We are given dualities, male Gods against female Gods, knowledge against strength, but we are told millions of times: they are hurting themselves. Ainsel’s river, my own self.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Own_Self)
Elden Ring connects these parallels between quests usually via the reward item. This is true for Miquella’s needle tying in with the Sacred Relic Sword, more on that later.
Anyway, if you fail to understand Melina’s quest you side with Shabriri;
SHABRIRI’S WOE
Disturbing likeness of a man whose eyes have been gouged out. The corners of his mouth are upturned in an almost flirtatious manner. Constantly attracts enemies’ aggression. It is said that the man, named Shabriri, had his eyes gouged out as punishment for the crime of slander, and, with time, the blight of the flame of frenzy came to dwell in the empty sockets.
It’s as if these are two pejorative accounts of two parents who have recently divorced. Shabriri is a real name of a Jewish demon. He isn’t hiding who he is, in fact, that’s part of his character, he is full of ressentiment towards life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment).
If DAEDICAR is the one who, when she popped she made all the creatures of the land, then who is SHABRIRI? Well he is the man who popped her, who doesn’t pop her and who is popped by her. This is the cycle, I think.
In our cycle masculine-coded people have the spirit of the sky, the day, also known as *Dyḗus (lit. “daylight-sky-god”), and they desire Oneness, however they are blind (magically and ideologically) but they were blinded intentionally by feminine-coded people who wanted to bring about the age of the Moon.
Hence when they achieve this what occurs is a change in the dualism, men become the Earth and women become the sky, the night, Nyx. We see this is the Nox’s plot: to make Godwyn, the male daylight God, into the land and Ranni into the sky. This is the cycle. The reason it continues despite the misguided desire for immortality (cit. Evergrace, Dark Souls, Sekiro, Bloodborne) is that neither of the two recognize each other just like how the player doesn’t recognize Marika and Radagon in Boc or Melina or many other characters. Shabbiri and Daedicar’s hatred for each other causes the cycle to continue, their love for each other also does, their desires for each other do, it’s the wheel of Saṃsāra which cannot be disentangled from the chariot as the ancient tool of power and because of Elden Ring’s dizzing array of precise mythological connections I will just assume their is some clever point there to be made about that.
What this means is that not only are there no ‘outer Gods’ there are not specific individuals really, it is just like the infinite zooming out of the fractal in the map. Red gunk, bugs, tiny-guys with big hats, silver frog-men who look like aliens(its an Old Venus reference) and crabs, men and women, Marika and Radagon, giants, repeat. But it didn’t end with One, giant(s) plural — what happened? Who is the One? (Spoiler: It’s Melina, probably)
(Speculation: The dusk-coded characters use weapons which split into two whereas the daylight-coded characters use weapons which have two become one. I think this is to do with the idea that during the day there is only one major celestial object in the sky whereas during a shift such as at dusk for a moment both are present. That’s just a guess though.)
Now, granted it could be that my idea that they (let’s keep it on Shabbiri and Daedicar) become each other over and over again until they realise the truth (read: Buddhism) actually is only happening this time around, because of Ranni.
They both (which also, thanks to the logic that Radagon is Marika, means they as in one person i.e. you and they as in everything and everyone in the land) are engaged in a bit of ressentiment, they smile even though they are being punished — resentiment is a Nietzchean term which, for brevity, points to something like the psychological avoidance of the reality of life, the pent up anger at having recieved an attack without giving it back (the law of the conservation of energy applied to vibes )— to simplify the term — it’s something borne out of suffering and ‘power structures’ — enforced with actions such as extreme punishment — one is ressenting it up when behaving and thinking as if one were beyond life and in contact with another world which is better than this world in order to say avoid dealing with harsh realities. Such as in Christianity when Jesus says to turn the other cheek because God is the one with real power not these violent soldiers — or when in Dark Souls you blame the game for suddenly just being really bad and unfair or in Elden Ring when you act as if the reason you don’t understand the games difficult story is because it is meaningless, a result of budget-cuts and bad writing or is actually easily understood by file digging and pure reliance on logical deducations based on the given lore. You could see this as a way to disempower violence and cruelty — which are real things — by affirming Heaven and God — which are not real. That is, to bring it back to Hesiod, the feminine seductive logoi a.k.a…
…the logos the power of the ‘seductive’ feminine being who cannot fight with their muscles, which would later become Plato’s logos — philosophy, itself from the point of view of warriors feminine, which was central to the development of Christianity, also known as the World Leaders in Guilt, Shame and Imperialism, but in Elden Ring this was secretly all along a plot to feminize the warrior men into cute blonde non-binary people on estrogen by making them intelligent.
I am dead serious this is what I think. I mean I put it in a funny way but yeah.
Ah but that would require Fromsoft, Miyazaki studied social science by the way, and G.R.R.M actually know incredibly specific details about one of the most important writers of ancient myth and it would require that they able to make the connection of how the mythological masculine, as well as its attempted revival as fascism since the 19th century, is antagonistic with the soft-power of seductive logoi which it sees as weak. Miyazaki and G.R.R.M, by the way, aren’t very good at hiding how much they do not like genocide, cultural or otherwise, in fact. Evergrace is also very beautiful, to me anyway, and it was made prior to Miyazaki joining the company (afaik), it is also strikingly progressive in its messaging, if ‘progressive’ at least means against fascism and genocide.
Nietzsche then is an important touchstone because if this is my interpretation of Elden Ring then there's a problem: the fems nearly screwed everything up. Well, to invite further hate to a political reading of the game, it isn’t Leninist which is to say that a violent mind-control plot doesn’t work but keenly also probably didn’t happen.
What I mean is that we are led to believe, although I think people don’t look at the game this way, that the underground Matriarchy tried to take over using mind-control magic and silvertears. I think there is evidence for this and I’ll get into that. But this is what is presented, I think in some ways it isn’t the full story.
Let’s move on and think about something seemingly different though, for now— don’t fret;
Please, no. Dear me!. I haven’t a clue. No secrets lie with me, not a one. Oh please, leave me be.
It was discovered that Godwyn’s body is shaped like the Lands Between — but oddly he is inverted — that’s strange, no?
Let’s read this literally, if Godwyn’s shaped like the Lands Between he is the Lands Between, so if we invert things, like the map, we can see his world. This is on the face of it really silly but try to ignore that for a second.
If you invert the map, to get to Godwyn’s world, and place our anchor point in photoshop on Farum Azuela and superimpose Farum Azuela on Leyndell which has been found to be very similar to it, and then we rotate the map using that anchor point — just like the Dragonlord does in the cutscene in order to go back in time — so that Leyndell and the Farum match then you see Ordina, the puzzle town which lets you access the Haligtree lines up with a retelling of the entire story using locations in Caelid —
‘ — wait what the fuck are you talking about—’
Humour me for a second, let’s do some map magic.
Ordina is full of female assassins, scions of the Eternal Cities snooping around with their black blades, and Albinauric archers are waiting on top of the buildings — are they searching for each other but never find each other? Are they working together to defend the Halgitree? Are they looking for it? –
Hold onto those questions, following the ‘superimposed map logic’ Ordina leads into the War-Dead catacombs full of male spirits fighting, these are Rahdan’s warriors, some are also archers, fighting against the rot warriors — the further into the catacombs you go you eventually find the rotting tree spirit, behind it a tree with human-bodies entwined within it — sacrifices or children of this tree.
This in turn leads to Lenne’s Rise — Lenne means something like lion, Lion’s rise — recall that guy with the white lion on his back that kind of looks like that guy from Evergrace:
The white lion to me symbolizes Aryanism, incase this finally triggered anyone who doesn’t like politics in their games recall that this game was written by famous adults who write fictional stories with adult themes who referenced Hitler’s rise to power in a video game about laying to rest the souls of genocide victims. The lion is ancient masculine-warrior authentic pride which later became transformed into inauthentic Nationalistic pride using whiteness and Aryanism, whiteness being the desire for purity as opposed to simply being pure.
ASH OF WAR: WHITE SHADOW’S LURE
This Ash of War grants an armament the Occult affinity and the following skill:
“White Shadow’s Lure: Hold armament in a brief, silent prayer to create a white shadow. The apparition lures in foes of human build who are not in combat, drawing their aggression. Effective on demi-humans even if they are already in a combat state.”
Usable on all melee armaments.
Within the Lenne’s rise we find a strange sight; a giant ball of masks, the ones the mages wear — a group of mages have joined themselves together again as One, in front of strange rocks — red-glintstone — after this is a bridge which is lower than the bridge above — a multitude of little guys are here, they use a ton of green poison — meanwhile on the bridge above walks a ONE giant dragon — at the end of the journey we face a great building, the Beastial Sanctum, guarded by a stone monster– inside is one who eats death and holds destined death —
— the death-eater is someone pretending to be someone else.
With the superimposed image (will post soon) we see that the Halgitree grows from the left, it’s as if the journey to destiny was halted and we went towards the left hand — so to speak — this is the start of a connection.
What if this area is a miniature of the entire map? Which is itself the story of Elden Ring?
(Okay so I’m going to bed, tomorrow hopefully I’ll update the rest of this and add images, I need to dig up that old harddrive with a billion map pictures on it, the rest of this is the unfinished script, it may contain contradictions or unfinished lines BE WARNED…)
Wait, then, you’re not one of them? Well, what a relief… Oh, goodness me. I am Albus. An Albinauric, as you can see. We are finished. The whole village is finished. The cursemongers have destroyed everything. Not one that remains has their wits about them
Okay, hold onto that thought about maps being stories, what if you mirror the map so that the Haligtree is superimposed with itself? It looks a bit like a magical symbol, doesn’t it? And that site of grace in the centre; where does it take us? Well it’s a room with four people — hm, four fingers? That doesn’t work — wait, unless you are a finger as well?
Okay, okay, still not a lot to go on yet — and maybe it is just a coincidence that the area around the Bestial Sanctum has similar themes to Ordina and the Halgitree — I mean it isn’t a coincidence but we’ll get there.
So, anyway, what if destined death is represented by the Beastial Sanctum in the map and that when we find what something in the map represents we can treat the map like a puzzle?
I’ll note here that even though what I’m saying means the game, through the map potentially, is deferring to the idea of representation (i.e. this icon represents this spell, it’s true self) this is not really the case — the various game elements stand on their own.
So, anyway, what if we invert and overlap destined death with itself? First we should ask — what does that mean symbolically? Well the opposite of destiny isn’t easily defined –but let’s just say un-destiny — what was not destined — and the opposite of death, for simplicities sake, is life — so un-destined life.
Second, note the possible colour theory here of destined death, it is red and black — the opposite is green and white. Maybe when we flip the map, like Godwyn’s body we enter the realm where ‘destined death’ is called ‘undestined life’ and it is green and white. As far as I’m aware there is no flame in the game which is green and white — death blight is green and black — perhaps it could be called ‘undestined death’ or ‘destined life’ — I’m just brainstorming here. In any case Elden Ring’s colour theory is incredibly precise. Yellow and purple are seemingly dichotomies — to which the beings of the land construct Manichaeistic religions out of — but the spectrum of light is a gradient — that said, the colour wheel is as important to Elden Ring as the map — as we shall see.
Note that this map configuration puts Malenia’s Divine tower very close to itself. What if we make it so Malenia is superimposed with herself — well the map says a few things, firstly, if we visit the most highlighted area, what is directly above her overlapping tower is a giant with fire beneath it, smouldering butterflies — this makes complete sense — Malenia is associated with the Aeonian Butterfly or Rot God. The fire slug beneath her, who is that? Additionally the Halgitree’s nearby circles form two circles directly above — Malenia is two in one being — and we see in this little scene with the giant and the slug — two characters. Who are they representing?
What if the map overlapping itself is telling some kind of story if we move up? Well I decided to follow this path, the first thing I noticed was that a voice started to speak as I was snooping around this — literally vertical slice — of the game — it said this;
When we were 14… etc.
I was struck because I was looking for information about Malenia as it relates to Miquella — and I hear this — well if you summon the jellyfish you have it appears but it’s red to this jellyfishes blue — they even are overlapping — amazing, really. What is your reward for figuring out this rather basic puzzle? The PRIMAL GLINTSTONE BLADE which says;
The old sorcerers would slice open their hearts with these blades to imbue a primal glintstone with their soul, and thus did they die.
A ‘primal glintstone’ — what’s that? Is it maybe the glintstone we found in Lenne’s Rise? Not quite, that one is just red, and it’s also not the common glintstones with their blue tint –
SELLEN’S PRIMAL GLINTSTONE
Glintstone from within the sorceress Sellen’s body. Seemingly half-alive, blood vessels are visible within. In essence, a primal glintstone is a sorcerer’s soul. If transplanted into a compatible new body after their original body dies, the sorcerer will rise again.
“My apprentice, do you think it distasteful?”
It’s also a kind of grafting ritual itself but different — it isn’t forced onto Sellen-
“Everyone’s…been grafted. Everyone who came with me. They crossed the sea for me. They fought, for me. Heh… Only to have their arms taken. Their legs taken. Even their heads…taken. Taken and stuck to the spider. Did you know? If you’re grafted by the spider, you become a chrysalid. It’s quite the lark, when you think about it.”
CHRYSALIDS’ MEMENTO
Memento left by the chrysalids sacrificed for grafting. A brooch wrapped in red velvet. Traces of blood are visible. Faintly visible spirits try to convey something, but their voices cannot be heard.
I think, without understanding the interrelated cross-pollinations of the games elements that players may never understand who the ‘spider’ is — because the spider is more than any single enemy — it is Rykardd as much as it is the Elden Beast as much as it is Goddrick. Rodricka, as I’ll get into, is Merika’s sister.
“It was a pleasure to see you. Oh, can you pass on a message for me, if you see the little chrysalids in Stormveil Castle? Tell them I love them. And that, despite my craven heart, I’m sure I’ll be joining their club soon enough. I’m finally getting the hang of this whole “pain” thing, you know.”
Anyway, Sellen considers this non-dualistic ritual stone, which requires anothers death, to be potentially shameful — Zoraya’s is a snake and a person and her origin, whatever it is, is considered a deep shame to her. This makes sense considering that affirming dualism and disavowing sacrifice is the central motor behind the ideologies in the cults in the game.
So if you follow me here the map is pointing to Malenia being related to a giant and a fire slug and close to two jellyfish spirits who when they are reunited reveal a secret — self-sacrifice is tied to the notion of the ‘primal’, to a combination of red and blue glintstone but also the idea of a giant birthing or vomiting out a burning slug and smouldering butterflies.
The jellyfish travelled with you, a lot of spirits actually travel with you, including Melina -
“Oh, I know. Can you take this little one along with you?” [Gives you the Spirit Jellyfish Ashes] “The poor thing deserves someone braver than myself… And the spirits look rather fondly upon you. It’ll be glad of your company, I think, the little’un”.
But if I think Melina is Marika/Radagon how can this fit with Rodricka’s parallel with Marika? We have to keep in mind that Rodricka and Hewg are not at the same stage as Marika and Radagon — they are still separate entities, which, like most ‘parents’ in the game treat their child — which is a combination of the two parents — as something which can be used — Rodricka, on the other hand, does not have this relationship to her ‘children’, the spirits.
The jellyfish she gives us is incomplete — she longs for her sister — Rodricka, as well, like Thops with Sellen, is unaware of the ocean which separates her from her sister, Marika. I personally prefer to see them as sisters but I think it’s probably equally correct to see them as reflections of each other at different phases — like most other characters –
“You’re all on your own, are you? And heading to Stormveil Castle? Enticed by the one in the white mask, I suppose. Oh, you’ve come to be one with the spider? Well, that makes us two peas in a pod. But I don’t have your courage. It’s scary, you know. Having your arms cut off. Or legs. Or your head. I want to be like everyone else, but I’m just too scared. I’m nothing but a craven.”
As well see later on Iji, who is like Marika and Radagon, is also scared — scared of his rebelliousness — like Boc and Zoraya’s these good characters are restrained by their negative feelings towards themselves.
Additionally if we look at the maps vertical slice that this moment leads into two becoming one — this makes a lot of sense — red and blue have been diametrically opposed since the start of the game — crystal magic, stone lifeless bodies with pale blue magic against red organic bodily force and blood magic. The primal glintstone is a red and blue glintstone.
If you follow this vertical slice closely something should stick out — that there are related meanings nearby it — for instance below the divine tower is a giant (they are called trolls but they are just small giants) with a flaming sword.
Side note about the ‘trolls’ — becoming shrivelled up — does it make you a new species? In a way, yes, to the others — but shrivelling up into something smaller is not really how it works in Elden Ring;
Upon talking to Morgott once: Tarnished, thou’rt but a fool. The Erdtree wards off all who deign approach. We are… we are all forsaken. None may claim the title of Elden Lord. Upon talking to Morgott twice: Thy deeds shall be met with failure, just as I.
By moving the map’s vertical symmetry we seem to move through a kind of narrative space — and the map isn’t agnostic about this — a very meaningful puzzle is displayed at the top of the map — The Halgitree’s nearby circles have meaning which relate to the events in the vertical slice. For instance, two beings overlapping — or two circles overlapping appears when you overlap the jellyfish sisters together. Two separate circles form when you overlap the divine tower which highlights the giant and its molten slug.
This to me suggests that the circles around the Halgitree are puzzle tools, certain configurations of these circles should result in sensible results — or at least ones which are interesting and invite further investigation.
n Recording from here
If we configure the circles to be parallel reflections of two becoming one the symmetry — following the concepts given in the game which revolve around this idea — the below highlighted vertical slice takes the form of a literal ‘X marks the spot’ — this spot is significant its where the Redmane painting is from — and it lines up with the artist phantom who is next to a golem — notice that the golem is using a magical weapon but has a fiery soul — he breaths fire yet he uses blue magic — red and blue.
The other paintings do similar things, for instance the “Prophecy” painting is painted from the perspective of Church of Pilgrimage — first let’s notice these two birds here — with the fact that we can discover the narrative by overlaying the map with itself in hand these birds take on a new meaning — they form an ‘X’ in the sky heading in two different directions — the centre is on the Giants Flame — considering that this location ‘the Church of Pilgrimage’ is also an anchor point then this X motion the eagles makes is also one the superimposed map can make — if we rotate it.
As a side note recall that near the Church of Pilgrimage is the Earthbore cave with the Runebear and two corpses, the Smouldering Butterfly and Trina’s Lily takes on a new meaning considering what we have found out through the red-blue Jellyfish and the blue magic wielding golem with his firey red soul. The question to me at this point isn’t what they represent — it’s quite clear what picture is forming here — the question is how the Earthbore cave relates to the map narrative.
What meaning does it point to potentially? Well the Earthbore cave is a molecular vignette of the entire game, as usual. The two corpses are Merika and Radagon and the Runebear is the Elden Beast — but more the two corpses are Rodricka and Hewg and the Runebear is the spider — the grafted creation that is the Elden Ring itself — more still these two are Miquella and Malenia and the Runebear is the Red Haired Giant, the Dragonlord, the cycle of repetition — so on.
Recording from here
Note that Earthbore cave is underground, it’s important to see that we cannot access it using the map with simple horizontal inversion. That means unlike inverted world of Godwyn, the underground is accessed by flipping the map vertically — like the tower of inversion implies, it being an invention of Leurnia.
An iron greatshield large enough to cover the entire body. Features an inverted hawk crest.
Dropped by FALLEN HAWKS SOLDIER who are underground.
It’s probably fruitful to look into how Earthbore cave works as a centre for a miniature map. I’ll leave that to you or future me.
Anyway the artist of “Prophecy” fearfully stares at the headless statue ahead of him. He is facing the direction of Learnia — Rykardd is connected to the idea of a prophecy — he makes one in fact — one which changes his perspective — Rykardd also ‘loses his head’ — he becomes obsessed with power. This prophecy of Rykardd’s is important, it is the prophecy that everything will return again, that the Lands Between is a cycle but more accurately an eternal return. Rykardd seemingly inherits not only the imagery of Orchimaru from Japanese myth but also Orchimaru from Naruto –
Completeing this painting puzzle gives you the warhawk spirit ashes — it says;
Spirit of a Stormveil warhawk, the talons of which have been sliced off so that razor-fine swords could be grafted in their place. With its lord vanquished, and its wings wounded, the hawk perished as it solemnly gazed at its former home. The storm is a warhawk’s cradle.
Now, to me this reads alongside the two eagles next to the artist — who represent for me Malenia and Miquella, Merika and Radagon, the two sisters, the two siblings, the two parents, who themselves represent many other things in the game, but the warhawk, on the otherhand, is not two eagles it is one — one wearing blinders with two swords. It has been augmented, ‘grafted’ with unnatural weapons where natural ones once existed.
The most important takeaway here is that ‘the storm is a warhawk’s cradle’, Stormveil castle is hiding the storm — Learnia and its consequence, Leyndell and the Mountaintops of the Giants. This is the figurative storm; the literal storm which cradles one who is two is the Dragonlord. A being out of time. The Dragonlord has also been disfigured but where is the augmentation? We must ask this as this question is tied to the disfigurement of the hand of fate.
Note that twoness is standing out here — two hawks, two blades on the warhawk, two heads on the Dragonlord — twoness is tied to the two-fingers of course but also certain weapons — note also that even at the level of the Warhawk blindness is tied to the two-fingers — a trait commonly tied to the three-fingers — when it comes to the digits of weapons and their meaning fist weapons are good ones to look at;
RAPTOR TALONS
Claw comprised of two sharp, thin blades, wielded by the assassins of Ravenmount, this weapon allows them to imitate the attacks of Deathbirds. Besides excelling at airborne attacks, its charge attack mimics the vicious swoop of a bird of prey.
Interesting that this connects the twoness motif to Deathbirds as well, the fist-weapons tie oneness — the one finger — the lone being — with poison — green poison to be specific.
This connection ties Deathbirds to Merika and Radagon and therefore Melina — Deathbirds have half their face missing and are said to be;
… graveyard fire keepers; it is said they rake out the ashen remains of the dead from their kilns.
Elden Ring ties the player to the notion of one- the one finger, the one person, humanity is tied with greenness and poison, ripeness but also the snake — this means that the snake is tied up with oneness and with the individual. Zoraya is a snake and a person — she craves her own death just like the Frenzied Flame does — she cannot bear her ‘origin’ and its lack of sacredness. This works well, Rykardd is an egoist who fed himself and seeks to feed others to the One, the great snake. Even the most miniature connection to humanity also tends to be covered in posion — recall that the journey from Lenne’s Rise to the Beastial Sanctum has many little guys using poison against you.
The One who contains All, like Malenia will, like the Dragon on the higher bridge will, contains everything inside of itself and gives birth to everything again — this is a cyclical universe akin to the ancient Greek cosmological ideas about a universe which resets itself after a great fire.
If we go along with this fist-weapon blade-count method you may think we run into a problem — the three-bladed fist weapons have nothing at all to do with the Frenzied Flame — they are weapons which cause bleed effects.
In my previous video on Miquella and Gowry I made a connection between these two characters which connected scarlet rot with the formless mother — there is also a stronger hint in the FLOCK’S CANVAS TALISMAN, which looks both like a collection of people and a creepy bug with many eyes which is fitting for Gowry’s quest, it says;
The figures represent the flock at prayer, their firm belief in the intangible inspiring even the solitary founder of their religion. What is faith if not an affirmation?
This connects three different characters and groups — the rot pests have a solitary founder of their religion — Malenia — but they believe in something intangible, the ‘rot god’, Mogh is a solitary founder of his Mogwyn Dynasty, he developed it deep below ground and he has a faith in the intangible — a literally intangible, formless, mother but also a no-yet existing dynasty.
The third character and group, of course, is the Frenzied Flame, Shabriri is a solitary founder and his flock has a firm belief in the intangible — the false light they see even though they are literally blind. Through the Fire Giant the Yellow Flame is connected up with what might be a reference to the infinite tsukuyomi — and before anyone cries Naruto at me — spoiler alert this game has very on the nose Evangelion references — like this shield –
BLUE-WHITE WOODEN SHIELD
Small wooden roundshield that has been reinforced with metal.
It is light and easy to handle, but cannot offer the damage negation
of a true metal shield.
The design is said to represent the stars of the night sky,
portending fate.
Or the dragon skin soldiers design, or, like Naruto with the nods to it’s various usages of Japanese myth.
Elden Ring’s main plot references Evangelion with the idea of two impacts — one carrying that which gives form the Lilian and another carrying that which has no distinct form Adam — it references Naruto with the idea of a cosmic entity falling into the land in the form of a great tree which absorbs the locals power by lending them power –
Are these both references which could be connected back to ancient myth? Yes, they are, but still there are nods regardless to these artists who came before Elden Ring tackling a similar subject matter — the transformation of mythology into entertainment for young people.
Oh GOD NO — some of the lore buffs are shouting — how could I miss all of the deep references to mythology and fixate on anime? Well, I haven’t actually fixated on anything — you did — you missed the entire name puzzle which points us to Venus (specifically Old Venus which contains most of Elden Ring’s inspiration) and the Indo-European God of the Dawn — which I’ll cover in another episode.
For instance not only are there snakes in this game — a snake man who wants to consume someone powerful and is experimenting on people — but there are slugs as well and frogs — but the frog people are mostly from Old Venus.
Additionally by avoiding the connection between boys anime, old GRRM anthology series and ancient myth as well as biology the lore community as it stands does not really get the whole mushroom thing at all — specifically — there are actually existing mushrooms which feed on fire and there are real-life ants which feed mushrooms so that they grow — and of course without the hyper fixation on the biology in the game the entire joke about Mario is mostly missed.
Because, at the end of the day, Elden Ring is very clever with it’s writing — and I don’t mean how the item descriptions are written — I mean like how the story is constantly able to ask ‘how is a raven like a writing desk’ in many different ways and it expects you to answer it or else you simply cannot continue — how is a hocrux from Harry Potter like Orchimaru’s cruel experimentation but also like ancient ideas surrounding rebirth and ultimately the cycle of the Dawn and the Dusk from the lost Indo-European age of shared language?
Look it burns quote –
Who burns? In the sky? It’s Old Venus — it’s the magical mirror — Melina is a laser which burns a tree down.
Hewg is a reference to Hewsos because Zaraya’s name, through the name puzzles, would actually be Zarya –
Hewg being Hewsos connects to an enormous amount of myth, anime, film and history and makes his ‘forgetting’ at the end of the game ultimately the reveal that this is the fate of life as it is in a world where the sun sets eventually — we forget ourselves when we die.
This is the ‘revelation’ I promised in the title; the games central puzzle revolves around a continuity between the one and the many, a shifting world of deception and honesty. But it sounds far-fetched — it’ll take a few more episodes to really convince you — for instance, one problem a lot of people have is finding GRRM in the story — well look no further than the German Throne Dispute — but how did I get there and what do we find there? I’ll get to it.
Anyway, let’s take a biiiig step back and save all of that for later; if white is an important part of the game given that the opposite of destined death, un-destined life would be white and green — well — where is it? And does it point to anything like what I’m saying? It’s a recurring theme for me that the item descriptions more or less act in a similar capacity to the map — they do not give information but more or less direct the flow of concepts — for instance, ASH OF WAR: WHITE SHADOW’S LURE description says the following;
White Shadow’s Lure: Hold armament in a brief, silent prayer to create a white shadow. The apparition lures in foes of human build who are not in combat, drawing their aggression. Effective on demi-humans even if they are already in a combat state.
My only question is that does this make sense with my idea about the colour of destined death and its inversion? Well, yes it does, the white shadow is indeed luring a human who is not in combat to it — it’s luring me to it, specifically, its shadow is what is luring me to it — it is not present visibly, its shadow is.
Additionally the fact that demi-humans are drawn to it even in combat is interesting, what might this be saying? Well we have non-combative humans like Horah drawn to a white shadow of sorts — Serosh. If Miquella is the Light, with Malenia the Dark, then perhaps the beings of the land are also drawn to him — to the purity of all-encompassing light which would be white not yellow. What’s starting to form here is a colour connection to the shame and guilt of the lands towards impurity — Tarnished implies impurity — Malenia’s fate suggests that redness is infecting something pure — but is her body experiencing a body-horror form of what is essentially weaponized psychological guilt? I think so; but it’ll take more time to build towards that.
Spirits of demi-humans that are small in stature, but have a Violent, brutish disposition. Though they seem somewhat intelligent, when night falls, their blood boils and they become feral.
So this whiteness is effective on demi-humans who become feral at night — we can easily draw lines from the demi-humans to the omen curse — DEMI-HUMAN QUEEN MARGOT has a similar name to Morgott and she also uses her weapon like a cane — Demi-humans are also hated by most of the institutions we encounter in the world — Morgott and Mogh, in a very clear sense, are the emergence of the demi-human quality within the nobility — what’s important about this is that the guilt and shame are used as tools to confine those with natural power — making this a distinctively Nietzchean point.
Here we can start to talk about the idea of a curse and how Elden Ring treats it — Morgott uses his sword as a cane and the Demi-human queen uses her staff as a cane — Sword of Cane — this is clearly tied to the Mark of Cain. Now if that were it we couldn’t do much more with that — is Morgott Cursed with the Mark of Cain? No, it is closer to the modern usage of the Mark of Cain as a deeply racist way to justify slavery.
Additionally the colour theory here works to form a kind of, well, social critique by attaching whiteness to purity as a negative and unhealthy thing which is not at all unusual given the connections this game has to Old Venus.
CANE SWORD
Beloved sword of an aged knight whose last quest was long behind
him, repurposed into a walking stick. The tip is rather worn.
Though bent of back and without the brawn required even to
raise the sword aloft, still he wished to meet his end with weapon
in hand.
Apart from the game interfacing with the idea of witch-hunting abstractly through the red-coded beings blaming Sellen — what other references might suggest that Morgott and the demi-human (which is a pejorative not unlike calling shrivelled up giants ‘trolls’) is a reference to the Mark of Cain?
D, he’s hunting deserters and marking them. There have been suggestions he’s a reference to a vampire anime I’m unfamiliar with — but here is something important — the idea that something can be more than one thing is related to the references.
D is essentially a Death racist and he and his brother summarises a kind of extreme allegiance to the ‘order’ which is for purity and against the cursed ones –
From Wikipedia;
It continued in the United States until at least 1864, during the American Civil War, when the faces of some deserters from the Union Army were branded with the letter “D” as a mark of shame that was intended to discourage others from deserting.
Honeyed rays of gold — Melina means honey, and gold is a false light, he is following an artifical God which is reflective of himself and doesn’t even recognize the truth, the actual light of Lina — Tainting its truth. And in doing so he spouts off essentially genocidal rhetoric — in a game which explicitly references the Nazis -
D saying vermin, etc
D is not a good guy. What these connections do is add emphasis to the various characters in the game that think they are ugly, shameful, disgraceful, — this feeling is something used against them — Nietzsche
“Oi! You there! Could you help us out, cully? You, yeah, you there! Stop pretending you can’t see me”. “Why won’t anyone look me in the eye? I’m not that ugly”.
It’s not a coincidence that Boc is pretending to be a tree — Marika was also, in a sense, pretending to be a tree. But more specifically Boc is introduced early on in order to show that not only are there people who are pretending to be something or someone else but that recognition is an important theme in the story.
So, anyway, unlike in the usual lore-unpacking strategy which attempts to puzzle out a semblance of a lore-dump what my idea about the colour white does is make sense of the colour in every part of the game — Ranni’s snow witch set is white — the sky could be blue and white — which is an odd way of putting it but the game reaffirms this idea in another items description, the BLUE-WHITE WOODEN SHIELD,
Small wooden roundshield that has been reinforced with metal. It is light and easy to handle, but cannot offer the damage negation of a true metal shield.
The design is said to represent the stars of the night sky, portending fate.
WHITE REED ARMOR SET contains many connections between the white with the black — Okina means separation in Hawaiian — Hawaii of course must have nothing whatsoever to do with a game that has a deity be killed by its sibling and become a landmass –
The more he sharpened his mind, the more the absurdities of the world came into stark relief. And so Okina renounced it all, and rose to a higher plane. There was only himself. His katana. And its mastery. Before long, Okina became a demon of a swordsman.
So I think this item description, like most elements in the game, is the whole story of Elden Ring. Miquella is Okina and his weapon is Malenia — which yes makes this kind of start to seem like a story akin to Thor losing Mjolnir. Like most of this introduction keep in mind that it’s difficult to explain how this is true without touching on everything else but I wanted to plant this seed early.
Ask yourself though: can Merika be Okina and Radagon be the katana? Or vice-versa? Does it work? Well, maybe, but I don’t think so. Merika and Radagon are more similar to Hewg and Rodricka — Radagon’s weapon is a hammer not a katana — but there is a similarity in that Radagon is alone like Malenia — but I’ll stress that the Radagon we fight is an illusion — just the remnant of a vessel — he is a vessel for the spirits trapped inside the Erdtree.
As I suspected… Victory… was impossible. This vessel… was found lacking… My thanks, I knew you were the stuff of champions. It was a marvellous battle. I implore you, take what I bequeath…from inside me… All vessels are destined to one day break. But the great Alexander lived as a warrior to his last! Ha ha ha ha!
The most important problem with thinking Okina as Merika and his sword as Radagon is that Merika and Radagon is one person — this is important — the game directs interpretation using divine logic which is given in the game as a revelation.
No, the true ‘lone swordsman’ in the final fight is the Elden Beast and his weapon is the Sacred Relic Sword.
Sword wrought from the remains of a god who should have lived a life eternal. Thoughts on what the weapon portends are many and varied. Some consider it the mark of a great sin, or a sign of great devastation. Some think of it as the end of an age, while others; the beginning.
The weapon represents two becoming one, the double-helix spirals into one point — the end which does violence to the other; the return to the beginning when all was one is a weapon. There are many interpretations of this weapon — the return to the same, the splitting of one into two or two into one, any configuration of the weapons meaning can be considered a beginning or an end, sacred or a sin. It’s in essence just like the map — it is not unlimited in its potential connections but it is more than a reference which the map in most open world games are –
But who is the Elden Beast? The one who lost their mind? I’ll leave that as an open question but I am aware that people have begun to see it as the will of the beings of the land trapped in the Erdtree — that is, just like our will, it’s ‘reason’ matches ours antagonistically — the demon has simply renounced all and waits, holding onto power potentially forever.
No matter what you want to do with the Elden Ring the Elden Beast will fight you -
In this case not only does the tragedy at the centre of the game revolve around the loss of a child or mother in birth, or the genocide of a people, but also the ritual suicide of samurai — called seppuku. But equally it speaks to certain responses to Fromsoft’s games, not in the media, but in play — players and game creators, and I know this from experience, can avoid dealing with challenge in various ways and one such way is to hyperfocus only on mastery of a certain element of the game and ignore all others — it is what stops the proper ‘end’ of the game.
PVP players and perhaps fanatical consumers like me do not let things end — we are your enemies to overcome as much as the Elden Beast.
— -
Keen-eyed viewers may have noted I didn’t mention the WHITE MASK, here it makes sense with my conception of what WHITE represents — first of all, it’s a mask, its someone pretending to be the Light so to speak, the item description says;
“Bloodstained, faintly grinning mask. Worn by war surgeons who were effectively mercy killers. The Lord of Blood’s curse enlivens the wearer when bloodletting occurs. Slightly raises attack power when there is blood loss nearby.”
The faint grin, what does it mean? The ‘mercy killing’ of others what does it tie to? Well, Shabriri — the actual false light — the false mask of the white light. He is also the one who smiles — he advocates for the end of sacrifice to bring the greatest mercy killing of all — the end of life, he is an anti-natalist — his followers are all blind but see a false light.
Additionally we need to connect blood in Elden Ring back to the Morning Star — Zorya. This is essentially a connection which forms the main pejorative of the game — that the Dawn is bad — The Red Maiden is bad — the red dawn is bad –
Okay okay okay — hold on — are you seriously saying that this is going to lead into something about WW2? Well yes probably but I don’t know enough about it to say much.
But importantly the hyperfixation on blood and killing and the bloodiness of the Morning Star
MORNING STAR
Battle hammer comprised of a globe attached to a handle. Though a bludgeon dealing strike damage, the appellative star is covered in spikes which cause blood loss. Ironic given its graceful name, this weapon often reeks of blood.
Morning star, most commonly used as a name for the planet Venus when it appears in the east before sunrise
Why is Venus surrounded by a bright ring? Sometimes called a ring of fire, this rare ring is caused by the Sun’s light being visible all around an object
The sunrise is tied with blood — war is disgusting — shameful. Elden Ring, like the Soulseries is about the aesthetic enjoyment of war as much as any other war-game — DND was originally a war-game.
Disturbing likeness of a man whose eyes have been gouged out.
The corners of his mouth are upturned in an almost flirtatious manner.
Like many elements of the game the reflections are deep but not infinite — Shabriri is like the White Mask who is like the Erdtree — a false light — and so on — but this actually has a sensible limit and it’s not merely open to interpretation or relativistic — because, actually, White Mask Varre does not seem to want what Shabriri wants — the end — he wants the beginning, Mogh’s dynasty. The reflection between these two smiling characters is chiral — The White Mask reflects Shabriri but is his opposite — he wants to sacrifice the maiden to begin the cycle anew. He wants the dusk but he wants it because there he will have power.
Varre, like the Grafted Scion, is one of the first and last important characters in the game we interact with — the faceless one and the amalgamation of the many, the beings of the land who want a God, who want their divinity.
The Grafted Scion is the most sensible first enemy for us to encounter for this very reason, it represents not only the Elden Beast but also what becomes of us, the player, in the end, we begin to contain the Lands Between within us.
And, naturally, we can start to ask bigger questions; why do the beings of the land want to bring about a divinity? And what does it have to do with whiteness and therefore the bloodless enemies in the game who drop white flesh like the ORACLE ENVOY and various sea-creature type enemies?
What does the sea have to do with this whiteness? Well it’s notable that white flesh is ‘taken from a bloodless creature’ and blood is associated with curses — Mogh and Morgott’s blood is cursed, Malenia is cursed with blood — she is rotting away from redness. To have no blood is to not be cursed. Again keep in mind these are not ‘real curses’ — they are viewed as curses by certain groups — this is the Roshomon effect.
Horah represents the relationship that this whiteness has with the noble warriors of the land — it takes the form of a white lion — something which can hold back the power within. Serosh is Miquella — Mogh follows in his father’s footsteps. The power of ascetism.
Additionally the sea is tied to reflection through Farum Azuela — Azula means ‘blue’ like the ocean — it also looks like an eye when you superimpose it on the map in certain places. Looks a bit like Obito’s eye from Naruto when he’s doing his thing.
“Oi! You there! Could you help us out, cully? You, yeah, you there! Stop pretending you can’t see me”. “Why won’t anyone look me in the eye? I’m not that ugly”.
There is something forming here — consciousness, the eye, is where bloodless creatures originate from. Blood is tied to sin — what these connections accomplish is the de-mystification of various game elements, for example the fact that the molten slugs drop SMOLDERING BUTTERFLY and Strip of White Flesh is itself a story that makes complete sense using my analytical approach — whereas I assume a purely lore driven approach would struggle to make sense of how a molten slug is related to the purity of bloodlessness when it also drops a butterfly which clearly references Malenia — who is suffering from the impurity of blood. It’s a seeming contradiction which renders the Molten Slugs as indistguishable from a normal RPG’s slug enemy — that is to say, meaningless, as meaningless as a boar dropping copper coins.
“Ow! What’d you go and do that for! Hm? Oh, yes, I remember. Some clod turned me into a tree. You were just breaking the spell, weren’t you. Thank you. The name’s Boc. I was pushed out of the cave. Told not to come back, not ever. Then I ended up as a tree. Lucky you came along, really. Boc the seamster, at your service, Master”.
Who turned Boc into a tree? From a Lore-Analysis perspective — we just don’t know or maybe it’s some kind of uninteresting plot detail — but from a more poetic cross-pollination perspective Boc is might be speaking for and with Miquella and Malenia as much as Marika and Radagon. But Boc is one person which means he must be speaking from the perspective of a unified version of these two characters — Melina.
– This is Fromsoft’s distinct style, to engage the RPG as a 3D world seriously, — when Rom’s spiderlings drop Madmen’s knowledge we know from the consistency of the games use of that item — it is usually on the corpse of a human — that the spiderlings were probably human at some point — also we know that Rom being called Vacuous is a pejorative — she is literally enlightened and capable of the most powerful arcane magic in the game. In any Fromsoft game we cannot trust pejoratives but we can trust item drops.
Here the narratives fruit pay out but it’s challenging to imagine this connection at first — because games do not typically engage in experimental narratives in ways that aren’t simply meant to be intentionally obscure or confusing. The challenge with Boc is the same as any other character — who is he? Without relying on ‘some kind of reference to Dobby’ and unlike Bioshock with it’s nice-and-easy method of leaving recordings everywhere — we don’t find out who he is — and it doesn’t actually matter because Boc is a function that unlocks certain narrative complications he is not simply a container for a secret easter-egg.
“Oh, what a shame. When they threw me out of the cave, they took everything I owned, and so this is all I have to express my thanks. I hope you can forgive me”.
[Hands over x10 Mushroom]
“Or, if you can afford to wait for a while, I could sneak back into the cave, and bring back something of actual value. Then I’d be of some real use to you, I reckon”.
“Right, but I’ll need a moment. I-I’m frightened of them… So I have to gather myself. My knees start knockin’…just thinking bout that god-awful cave on the shore”.
Here Boc expresses the same concern and desire that Marika and Miquella do — they will give their multitude of scions, such as the Tarnished, food — mushrooms to be specific — so that they can grow — like Mario and like ants who grow mushrooms to feed on them. But with patience maybe Boc and the player can get something of real value — with patience maybe Melina or Ranni and the player can get something of real value.
What ties Boc to Marika and Miquella isn’t just his characteristics and dialogue — his word choice and motivations — but also the imagery of his mise en scene, his items and appearance.
· “Wait, is that what I think it is? You got it back for me? My sewing needle!
What made you go and do a thing like that….
My mum was a seamstress…and that sewing kit was all I had to remember her by.
I always wanted to be just like sweet old Mum. Then, I suppose I-I can’t just curl up and die, can I?”
After receiving the Sewing Needle
· “Thank you. You’re very kind”.
SEWING NEEDLE
A large sewing needle, curved like a fang. Boc the demi-human’s prized possession.
The needle — this connects up to Miquella’s needle.
MIQUELLA’S NEEDLE
One of the unalloyed gold needles that Miquella crafted to ward away the meddling of outer gods. Capable of subduing the flame of frenzy if inherited, allowing one to cheat fate and avoid becoming Lord of Frenzied Flame. However, the needle is as yet unfinished and can only be used in the heart of the storm beyond time said to be found in Faram [sic] Azula.
FROZEN NEEDLE
A razor-thin piercing blade of ice. Forged by Ijii, the carian Royal Blackmith. Can inflict frost upon enemies, and launch its blade with a strong attack. The blade immediately regenerates
Boc, Iji and Miquella are lined up together with his connection — and the secret mechanism of the game is to not treat them as separate characters at all — they do not represent each other — they are each other. This connection, if it works, must pay off with insight — but not gamified insight — actual insight into the characters.
What I am trying to outline here is that Elden Ring has managed to capture the connectivity of Dark Souls in an open-world, against all odds, they’ve done it. It’s incredible — so incredible it’s hard to even notice.
For instance the dialogue style and characteristic connections are so consistent that most of the game becomes legible because you can trust it — after awhile — for instance Gowry knowing about Miquella’s needle, thinking Miquella is amazing, being surprised he’s getting old, secretly being a mind controlled bug, and being connected to Rot God as well as Mogh through a poetic dual-meaning item description points to him being Miquella.
Jerren speaks in a clear-cut warrior-like manner saying;
Malenia also speaks like this — she has a distinctly blunt way of talking
“Sellen, Graven Witch, enemy of Caria. I vow this time to crush both your frame and your primal glintstone. I am Jerren, bringer of your death. Do not forget.”
Jerren is a witch-hunter — and as we saw with the Mark of Cain the witch-hunting and the projection of guilt and shame onto others is a rich vein in Elden Ring.
But intriguingly it seems that Jerren is not simply a bad-guy, similar to Iji, he is against Sellen because of the harm she did — he wants revenge for the people of Caria — which yes if Cain is connecting to up to various narrative elements perhaps Caria is like Cain — Jerren and Iji are continuing the cycle of revenge which led to the problem of the game in the first place — most likely.
Wait — what! Yes, it’s quite complicated — this is a game where a Christ Figure who is also like Naruto’s Targyaran dad get’s Roshomon’d at the beginning and it’s hinted at by the term ‘night of long knives’ that he was like Hitler — what the hell? What does it mean?
Well, it requires unpacking the reference to Se-te-cah and the literal embodiment of the guilt which comes with total victory which the Fire Giant is a reference to, apart from Balor, and maybe the Uchiha clan as well as one of the Norn’s and probably ten other things.
Of course becoming the other is not something which should make one feel guilty or ugly — and that’s the point, ultimately, again let’s take it slowly and take a few steps back.
· “In all honesty, what do you think of me? Am I fit to serve a lord such as you, in all my ugliness?
Must I be reborn, no matter what ill fate awaits me?
Oh, I’m such a fool. I don’t even have answers to the simplest of questions”
Boc isn’t an isolated character even if his resemblances place him with characters like Marika, Iji, Radagon and Miquella, what he is saying could come from the mouth of Zoraya as much as anyone else — perhaps even Melina earlier on in her life — it is the focal point of the guilt and self-hatred which stirs the motivations of the characters in the game. His quest can result in you using this item -
Twisted clay sculpt in the shape of a demi-human head. Emits a voice that says “You’re beautiful.” A wistful fetish that imparts voices and words on an eternal journey. Unconditional love. Unrestrained assurance. It must have been a mother speaking.
To let him hear his mothers voice.
“Thank you very much. Mum was always the only one who said I was beautiful. And now, my dear lord let me hear her voice. Please, if I may dream, just once… Do you feel the same way my mum did m’lord? Do you think I’m beautiful, despite these looks?” (If you say yes): “M’lord, my dear lord… I, Boc the seamster, am forever in your service. May the throne of Elden Lord be yours.”
Boc’s quest isn’t an amusing side-quest, like most quests in Elden Ring, it is the games narrative journey. It’s connected up to other quests through what as this point could just be called Fromsoft’s gesture — items, words, appearances, motivations and challenges as intersecting branches of meaning. Ugliness, like calling horns a curse or an omen, is harmful to life, but these are not isolated quests — they are connected to each other. Boc is a seamster — he works with threads using a needle — perhaps it is only a coincidence that there are three giants in the game and three Giants who weave fate in Norse Mythology — perhaps the idea of the ‘thread’ as fate is only a coincidence, perhaps. There are three giants in the game who haven’t shrunk into empty vessels called trolls — the three Norns.
“Oh, what have we here? Very well, let us both learn together. Heresy is not native to the world; it is but a contrivance. All things can be conjoined.”
If you’ll allow a digression –
In World of Warcraft, we have the opposite situation, item drops, appearances, and sounds, are not justified — as I like to say — in anyway whatsoever. World of Warcraft has a confusing and confused narrative — not Elden Ring. The brown boar sounds like a normal boar, it drops some coins or a backpack, it’s as if the the creators were like ‘let’s have a boar here so that players can fight a normal enemy and make later enemies more exciting’ and that was the extent of its conceptualization. The fate of Blizzards bloated and uninteresting story is here — you can see the ‘wouldn’t it be exciting if?’ behind every intense moment and ‘don’t we need something here to fill out the space?’ behind every slow moment.
A similar boar in a Fromsoft game would clink-and-clonk as it approached you; there are coins in its stomach, nearby are piles of gold that it was eating — it’s colour is a pale yellow, it’s transforming into a golden statue slowly, it’s scream sounds disparate and strange — something unnatural is happening here. The coin’s item description would say something like — and this is totally made up — ‘A coin of the first empire, a lingering trace of ancient stench surrounds it’ — that’s not very good — a bit too blunt — but you get the idea — the ancient stench points to the boar being or becoming ancient, as if he were around during this ‘first empire’ — perhaps there could be land ships as well — making this a kind of distorted reference to the Golden Goose fairy tale.
With Fromsoft almost everything is justified — for instance the colour yellow, just like white, means something and is consistent in its meaning in Elden Ring — just like item drops. Cyberpunk’s use of the colour yellow is purely a brand decision — it has no relevance to the actual story and the creators even are willing to admit this;
‘Cyberpunk yellow’ became a part of that effort on the branding side: “Most people, when they are thinking about cyberpunk, it is like a red colour, a bit of blue,” said Janiszewski, “but we wanted to have something new, something fresh; that’s why we picked the yellow colour. It is new, it is like ‘California style’.”
Just because a choice was made because it’s ‘cool and different’ (sadly Cyberpunk is neither, of course) doesn’t mean it can’t have a consistency in the game — like the consistency of the eye-lash sun-flower motif in A Clockwork Orange or the consistency of the reflection-water association and avoidance-desert association in Paris,Texas. But Cyberpunk, as far as I remember, does nothing with colour in terms of meaning.
In fact Cyberpunk does this with most of its game elements — the sexual imagery is associated with sex workers but it is not consistent — sex imagery can appear anywhere in the world and it simply suggests that this ‘area feels very cyberpunk’ — like many open world games it’s as if developers start with a vast space and then are solemnly are tasked with filling it with stuff that has the bare minimum of making some aesthetic sense with its surroundings.
This is the opposite for Elden Ring — each enemy placement, reference and item location is either a molecular version of the overarching story or is an important reveal — such as this scene in the Eternal Cities which reveals that one of the giants formed the Finger slayer blade — a weapon born of a corpse just like the Sacred Relic Sword or Miqella’s needle.
This is the challenge for the ‘open world game’ or the game with a map — the question first asked properly by Mario’s map.
If you want to map this map into a world what do you put in the world? Most answers have been orientated towards flows of dopamine — such as World of Warcraft tactically filling space with peaks and troughs of excitement to keep people locked into their subscription. A boar is boring because it has to be in order to make the next hit exciting.
Some answers to the open-world challenge of Mario refuse to even engage beyond ‘a cool city’ — like Cyberpunk. Nothing is justified in Cyberpunks open world — cars, like NPCs, disappear and reappear where they would most likely need to be — whereas Elden Ring places a crab delicately and intensely meaningfully next to a weird looking alien guy in order to reflect the entire games conceptual array — the weird frog alien and the crab are so loaded with meaning that these two staring at each other like this is essentially the story of the entire game — looking for yourself in the other -
To put it another way, the amount of thoughtful artistic labour dissipated into having molten slugs drop white flesh and smouldering butterflies to tell the story of Malenia is beyond the meaning behind the entirety of Cyberpunks city — which ultimately signifies nothing but a reference to the ‘cyberpunk genre’ and GTA.
But if Elden Ring is a grafted creation which is uninterested in hiding its reference points is it not exactly like Cyberpunk? Well, no, there is nothing objectively wrong with references of course Cyberpunk was just poorly executed.
The distaste for naive ‘post-modernism’ you see with a lot of ‘gamers’ complaining about the lack of a narrative in Elden Ring is often set against a naïve indulgence in a vulgar relativism also seen with a lot of ‘gamers’- even people who probably decided it was this year’s best narrative without knowing what the game was ‘about’ — including lore analysts on Youtube who like to proclaim that Elden Ring is meaningless because they can’t figure out the games lore through the expected means but it’s still good though because you it’s open to interpretation — I’m willing to diagnosis this as the fault of games like Cyberpunk 2077 not some inherent failure on the part of lore analysts.
Bethesda’s Open World Fallout series is worth mentioning as well — it usually localizes situations and environmental stories, especially in the non-New Vegas games, often its environmental story-telling will be a joke or simply add character instead of being tied to the overarching concepts. A crazy man trapped in his own house due to his paranoia can lead into further interactions and quests in New Vegas and even itself add emphasis to the games major themes — but play in an open world RPG like Fallout 4 grows outward like the branches of a tree, it defers to it’s origin point — the parents mission to save their kid -– you are a survivor who is looking for his son.
This is not the case in New Vegas or Elden Ring — you are an outsider who has been hurt by another –and you don’t quite understand the full picture — and yet you still must act, you must make decisions. The environments in these games do not turn the environmental story into a mere vignette of an apocalypse, a generic stereotype of a well-trodden scenario, but these games refuse to consider the world as detangled from the primary themes — in New Vegas this is of course political and it’s been too long since I’ve played it to remember specifics but Elden Ring is also political — the target is the same, the image of the fascist potential that exists in a historic moment where there is no leadership. Elden Ring, unlike New Vegas, tells this story through chiral narrative puzzles which utilize all the elements of the game instead of the format of dialogue and environmental stories — although it uses these two things extensively.
It goes on — Mario becomes a giant — the small beings of the land become a giant — consuming mushrooms turns Mario into a giant — consuming the whole world into a single body forms a giant in Elden Ring, a mushroom world, I’ll get to how this works later on.
Additionally Mario’s colour palette becomes white when he consumes a fire flower — the Fire Giant, again not a mere reference to this, becomes a fire-thrower through the consumption — the destruction or burning up of a sacred flower, Malenia — the blossoming plant which begins the world.
Miquella is tied to this whiteness or perhaps silver, not just through his name but through his colour palette — his mis en scene — but also what he represents in the plot — purification or the desire for it.
This ultimately begins to uncover what is perhaps the most Easter Egg-esque reveal in Elden Ring — the map is shaped like the Mushroom Kingdom, yes, the colour theory matches up with the Mario cast — yes — but with further insight, for instance that the White Mask Varre is pretending to be the light, the whiteness, but it is a mask of what he truly is — blood, redness — this makes him essentially conceptually a Shy Guy. A White Mask over a red form.
This sounds silly but again Elden Ring is a grafted creation — one which forms a complete cycle, a reflection on its constituent parts. For instance Majora’s Mask is clearly a present stem in the game — the Moon looks like it’s about to crash into the land — we have a world of characters pretending to be other people and intentionally trying to bring the Moon into the Land.
What this means then isn’t that Elden Ring is secretly adult Mario or Majora’s Mask but that it transforms the recognition of a resemblance into the motor which generates insight into the deeper aspects of the lore — all of that to say that Elden Ring successfully makes insight a reward for a challenge to do with knowledge and wisdom instead of simply making it gamified in Bloodborne and other titles.
To put this way — yet again — Elden Ring’s connection to Mario or Majora’s mask is not an Easter egg or mere reference, it is not a funny surprise, and it is the key to the games narrative puzzle. Not these two games in particular — but the overlapping of all of the various references. This is what will allow me to ultimately suggest that Melina is just going into the pipe — the Great Flame, back underground, to the beginning again. We go underground through cylindrical objects as well — it isn’t a revelation that we are Mario — but that the gestures of Mario — mushrooms, giants, fire balls, pipes, underground zones, are being used in the composite of Elden Ring.
It is not a game with an obscure narrative — the narrative is itself a challenge akin to the challenge of the combat which, as Miyazaki is known to say, is built around ‘fairness’ — which I think is better called ‘justification’. This ‘fairness’ I think is why Elden Ring is so incredibly precise with all of these references, the colour theory of Elden Ring maps onto Mario’s colour theory perfectly — Mario and Luigi are red and green, Wario and Walugi yellow and purple — Walugi isn’t present in most of Nintendo’s games and purple isn’t common in the Lands Between.
Now, again, Elden Ring’s colour theory is its own animal but it’s consideration for its reference to Mario exceeds my expectations — it matches up very well.
Let’s get back to destined death and the map.
The colour and characteristics of the map which represents destined death and the map which represents un-destined life, together as attributes, form a paradoxical two-as-one which covers the span of all possible colours and intensities as well as all forms of life and fate. This is pretty significant, if the map is indeed more than a simple map, whatever it produces should point to something which represents such as combination — such as Melania’s divine tower. The Halgitree looks like two separate hands
The ‘focus’ of this map overlapping is her divine tower, where you activate Malenia’s Great Rune; its description says it should have been the most sacred of all the Great Runes. What happened to make it not be ‘sacred’? Well, we know she is apparently cursed, we know she interacted with a water warrior and we know her brother — who is also her pseudo-child — was taken from her — or left intentionally. She is cursed with scarlet rot — and I’ll make an important point about this that could be its own video but scarlet rot is not different in kind to any other red substance in Elden Ring, it is a different phase of it, a different configuration of red — Melania is cursed with the same red blood which runs through our veins, through the colour of the beasts hair, which burns in certain fires, which crystalizes on rare occasions.
Anyway, let’s assume that one of these things or perhaps all of them made the sacred Great Rune less sacred — the blood went bad, she lost her son or her brother or both, she had an interaction with a warrior-of-water. But also note it ‘should have been the most sacred’ does not mean that we can trust this is a good thing, for instance, we rarely should trust holy sentiments in this game — this is a common Fromsoft — starting mainly with Evergrace afaik, and it’s a GRRM trope — a curse is not a curse and a holy sacred ritual is often a curse under certain conditions.
Red and green make brown, it contains every colour and white and black together are both the highest and lowest ‘amount’ of energy colour can have. Black in art is every colour and white in physics is every colour. It’s everything. So the map focusing on Melania’s divine tower makes sense — she is in some sense black and red — her name means black and her colour is red, she is the life — associated with red blood but she is of death — this blood is killing her, and I could go on and list all of the seemingly paradoxical things she is — but the question is of course where is the white and green? Well the hands aren’t quite overlapping — so this question has something to do with Miquella, it has something to do with everything else in the game — this game has too much green and yellow — it’s as if the world is deeply ill with this colour.
I think, overall, it’s clear that Elden Ring’s colour motifs are really quite simple and very precisely related to the narrative — just look at this colour chart — purple on the bottom and yellow on the top, flanked by two diverging paths which lead to yellow, this is the colour mechanism of the game but there is no reason that any point of the chart is privileged — yellow is not the ‘best’ colour but in the game the cultists we interact with treat it as such.
So, anyway, it’s interesting that the inverted Beastial Sanctum, the inversion of destined death, let’s assume, is this divine tower associated with a Circle of Power — the Great Rune — which lost its sacredness because the light left it, or water entered it or it was cursed with redness — or all of the above. If the opposite of destiny and death is this — well this is what life is in the Lands Between, swollen sealed immortal blind beings who resist destiny.
Now you don’t have to just take my word for it — you can ask the map — let’s ask where is this concept from and going? We can treat the map in the same way the Dragonlord does or how the inverted Tower does or how Godwyn’s body does — I’m hoping it’s becoming evident that a lot of the game’s choices are not mere references or lore but extends further because this applies to more than the map but also names, aesthetics, symbols and folk-lore references and music. It’s what I like to call a chiral narrative.
Your hand is chiral, chiral in some sense means handedness, if something looks like its opposite in the mirror it is chiral if it looks the same it is achiral. Elden Ring’s narrative is ‘about’ chirality because in order to resolve the puzzles you have to do this mirroring and superimposing to figure things out.
For instance this scene in the Rot lake is intriguing — we have a lone Ancestor walking around looking for something presumably and hidden beneath it is a giant dragon soldier which is rotting. We have to ask what it means — and not get lost in ‘lore’ or ‘it’s all subjective, man’-isms — we can ask simple questions — who is like the Ancestor and who is like the Dragon solider? We can even ask stranger questions — how are the snails like the Lands Between? How is the spiral shape of their shell like the condition of this world? What does it mean that the white flesh with the smouldering butterfly transforms a magician capable of summoning crystal spirits to its aid into a monster which breaths fire?
Apart from ‘molecular vignettes’ and ‘chiral narratives’ I’d like to point out one more thing here ‘the transference of the mise en scene’ — this is common in film and is just called a ‘Match cut’ — the most famous being this scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, this scene from the Fall is a good one — Sound bridging is a similar technique but with sound, a good example is from the Matrix –
Films are not games, so how can a game do a ‘match cut’? A novel or album possibly could mimic the feeling of the match cut in various ways but without regressing back into attempting to mimic the film or novel using in-game cutscenes or lore dumbs — how can a game do a ‘match cut’?
I think that is the question Elden Ring is engaged with — and it takes seriously the fact that the player has freedom to move continuously between scenes and form their own frames of the 3D world’s mise en scene. It accumulates imagery, text, RPG elements like enemy type, placement of objects and items, into a distinct composition which then bridges easily to another composition.
For instance the Ancestor in the Rot Lake is in a foreign place — we know this because of how Fromsoft makes it known where something tends to be using NPC placement — at this point we can ask ‘why is it here?’ — is it looking for something? What is in the rot lake that it’s trying to find? What is actually in the rot lake?
Once we have something like an answer, not the answer but an answer, we have a composition which we can plug into another one — if they make sense we have a story.
This is ultimately how I’m going to show that the Ancestor in the Rot like is like us, tarnished warriors, and the Dragon solider is like Melina, but the Ancestor is also like Melina and the Dragon solider is like the Tarnished organic beings of the land.
That is the mise en scene transference is located in the discovery of the games ‘match cuts’ where we cannot just see that ‘ah this is like that’ but also that within the scene is a reflection of itself — the entire game. Which is a story about becoming-the-other, attacking yourself, blaming yourself, tilting at windmills, Balor and the Si-Te-Cah — internalizing guilt and wishing to restrain becoming and transform destiny into a weapon.
I’ll get to that but first;
People have noticed that the Farum seems to line up with a lot of the architecture throughout the map and some have even dragged and dropped a crop of it onto stuff — this is what you are supposed to do. But the way people have stumbled upon this is by locating similarities in the architecture not the concepts, as far as I am aware.
But this is where the games ‘is not a reference’ thing comes in — if the Farum matches places on the map then the Farum’s mise en scene, it’s enemy placement and mechanisms, applies everywhere as well.
This means that the Dragonlord rotating time backwards is a part of the map puzzle as much as the inverted undeath concept we get from Godwyn.
You centre your anchor point, the Farum, on what you want to learn about and rotate it — wait, you very tuned in listeners might be saying; isn’t Godrick’s Great Rune called ‘the anchor’ of the Elden Ring? Why yes, how astute. How could you test this theory with the map? Let’s try it out. It almost makes the map look like it has a completely different perspective — as if the inverted tower isn’t small, just further away. Interesting, right?
Also, think about what it means that Melania’s divine tower, which I tied to the tragedy of the game, can be accessed by the Tower of Return in the Weeping Peninsula — what does it mean to return to this point? Why is it possible from the Weeping Peninsula?
Okay keep those questions in mind and consider this overlapped image where Melania is two becoming one, in a poetic sense, well it’s suggesting that the Castle Sol is eclipsing itself –
The story in Castle Sol, just like the story from superimposing the inverted world to find out how Odina leads to the War-Dead Cataboms — you can see how the story of Castle Sol is a retelling of the story — a mushroom covered figure pleads for an eclipse;
[Quote ghost]
And then when you reach the top, which is basically a metaphor for reaching the top of the Mountain from the lowest point on the map, the ghost says ‘we couldn’t give your comrade a soul, we failed, I’ll never see your divine tree.’
The GHOSTFLAME TORCH — like most item descriptions — is basically illegible unless you’ve already gained enough insight, it says;
Metal torch that burns with cold ghostflame. Tool of the Fallen Hawks who prowl the underground rivers. When the band’s last embers were used up in their long search, they began to burn the bones of their fellows, acquiring the cold ghostflame, but sealing their fate as dwellers of the underground for all eternity.
In their search for what? Well in their search for their God — the one which is lost and stolen and taken underground — sacrifice of others in pursuit of any task — including the search for what was stolen is resulting in their God being stolen again — the guilt and shame imposed on Mogh, on all of the Lands Between, in the pursuit of a God causes the eternal return of Miquella being stolen.
This is essentially the entire story of Elden Ring using an item description and a map combination — in fact a lot of the games ‘molecular vignette’ tell its entire story — sometimes it is incredibly blunt –
FIRE MONK ARMOR
The grotesque face sculpted on the chest is said to depict the corrupt ancient god of the flame.
Taboos transform into lasting obsessions by virtue of the fear that they inspire.
It’s quite fractal, it’s non-linear, but the map itself is a story of the development from the Beastial Sanctum to the Fire Giants Great Flame, but to get there I need to explain a few things,
First of all, no, the basis of the mystery in the game is not all based around the map — it’s actually inverted — you form a conceptual connection and then you test it out in the map, or the colours, or the characters dialogue, or the item descriptions, — but you need them all together to form a substantive narrative — that’s how it works.
The map does tell a story of a tragedy — one to do with people on boats, mostly, some who were ‘left behind’ so to speak –
While the Tarnished left the Lands Between with their Lord, one boat alone was said to have been left behind.
For instance I think that the story is about a cycle of a mother unable to let go of her miscarriage and a child unable to accept the loss of his mother. How can I test that? Well I can look at the Weeping Peninsula and just take it quite literally; the only thing on the map associated with tragedy is the little people on the boats getting hit by one of those tide pools. This must be what we need to understand so I put the Farum on it and spun it around.
Now the map may be pointing to abstract ideas but you still have to follow the logic you’re leaning into, so if the whirlpool has a farum all the whirlpools should have one — Farum should be called Azula — meaning blue or ocean, basically, — which I’m just going to call an ocean eye.
Note here that there are three demi-God-esque characters for every coupling — Rahdan, Rykardd, Ranni — Mogh, Morgott, Godwyn, Miquella Malenia Melina — that last triplet is confusing — they are not really children they are all reflections of Marika and Radagon’s tragedy — hence Melina is not really Marika’s daughter she is a reflection of her — if Marika is a silver magical mirror and Radagon is as well — then what they produce together when they reflect each other is a laser — basically. Just like in Old Venus.
Anyway, the naming conventions in the game works a bit like the inheritance of characters — characters inherit their mothers spirit or intelligence and their fathers bodies — which should jump out as strange considering that blood is tied to the Formless Mother — recall Sellen’s situation — needing to replace someones soul with hers basically — or the Nox, desiring to replace the spirit ruling the world with their desired spirit, cutting and grafting — the Formless Mother is displaced because her space is occupied by Godwyn — she was the body of the world prior to this -
Sorry — I got distracted there for a moment — the names of places also are to do with this concept of occupation and false dualism. For instance think about these place names in the game;
Ainsel River, Stormveil Castle, Roundtable Hold — poetic or conceptual followed by what it literally is — this isn’t the case with Farum Azuela, its reversed — maybe you could say reflected? Farum is a town in Denmark but frankly it sounds like Forum which is like a meeting place for discussion — it’s not just an internet thing, they had them in ancient Rome.
So Farum Azuela’s name is more like Castle Morne then Redmane Castle — the Castle associated with crying a lot shares a similar name structure to the oceans eyes.
So I bring all this up because it’s important to recognize that, yes, all of this is very intentional — Stormveil, just like the weeping Peninsula literally veils the storm — but what is the storm? Well it surrounds the Dragonlord, the castle hides Lerniera — it hides knowledge.
What about ‘Ainsel’ — which means My Own Self — this is a real Northumbrian fairy tale. Which like virtually everything in Elden Ring is not a mere reference, the story says something about the narrative.
From Wikipedia:
“One night her son would not go to bed, so she went to sleep on her own. A small fairy girl came down the chimney and told him that her name was “My Own Self”, and the boy told her that he was “Just my own self too.” They played together for a time, and when he stirred up the fire a spark landed on her foot and made her cry out. Her mother’s voice came down the chimney, demanding to know what had happened, and the girl said “Just my own self” had burned her foot. Her mother told her that if she herself did it then she shouldn’t make such a fuss about it, and a long arm came down the chimney to pull the girl back up.”
All of the above in mind what if what happened in the Lands Between was just like this story? But what if this happened and involved a river or water? Well it adds a level of reflection to the story, the boy would’ve blamed his own reflection in the water.
The girl has come a long way. As ever, time and technique have made her stronger. Tis good to see. An imprisoned monster does not deserve an apprentice, or a daughter. But at times, that’s precisely what she feels like to me. I’ve gone soft. And it isn’t easy.
Hmm. You might be saying why would a boy be upset at something that happened in the water? Well, if someone drowns then they watch as the person drowning slowly disappears and is replaced by their own face.
“Irina…How could this be…My daughter deserved better…The fault lies…with me. I chose duty over my daughter’s safety. And that is how fate has answered…I’ll find them. The foul wretches responsible for this. I’ll hunt them down, and exterminate every last one of them. Rest assured, Irina. It will be done.”
There are points in Elden Ring with very striking extreme language and references. The Night of Long Knives, for instance — and the words exterminate and as we shall hear in a moment, whore — the game is pretty mild with its adult rating when it comes to language so this is notable. There is a distinct rage being pointed at with the choice of words.
This seems very Weeping Peninsula — very tragic. But it’s the name of Ainsel River, what does this place have to do with this concept? Well, Ainsel River is full of stone guys trying to stab you with blue glint stone — weaponized tears you could say. In fact, weaponized tears I do say — the Weeping Peninsula is conceptual where Ainsel River isn’t and Ainsel River is conceptual where the Weeping Peninsula isn’t.
Take a moment — ‘weaponized tears’? Is that not a funny way, almost like calling someone a mutant noble a ‘grafted scion’ of talking about revenge?
“Ha! Prince of Death, take a good long look! See the wrath of the Golden Order! The Order’s justice, writ in blood! This is what’s become of your precious witch! Naught but expired meat and bone! Look at this rotten *****. No more children can be got from this useless flesh! Behold, your mother is dead! Heh heh heh heh…This is revenge, you witch! And you, you ghoul! This is the wrath of D!”
So the Peninsula warriors don’t literally have magical tears to fight with but they are sad, the place oozes sadness and literally is a few millennia away from being named ‘bad vibe city’. Chimeras are running around wreaking havoc and bloodshed. These chimera’s, are easily tied to omen and demi-humans who have received the majority of blame — apart from Sellen — who is literally considered a witch to hunt — Fia, as well, is blamed and cursed despite having completed her task — D screaming obscenities at her is pure rage, pure meaningless violent revenge born out of a complete lack of understanding at what’s going on. The kind of decision making skills that befits someone who chooses the Frenzied Flame ending -
The people underground in the Eternal Cities with the crystal magic and stoney gaze, however, have literally weaponized tears and are literally made out of stone — it’s as if their sadness, grief and desire for revenge has become some kind of — I don’t know — philosophy? Religion? Science? (Nietzsche picture)
I am 100% dead seriously about to say this; yes, ‘cry’-stal, it’s a pun just like ‘Grafted Scion’ is a pun.
Sellen is captured in the Weeping Peninsula. She entrusts you with ‘her own self’ — which is a clear connection to Ainsel river. (quote her) Melina and Ranni also do this to a certain extent which makes what D says here very potent –
“Ah. Hello. The rotten witch is dead. The Golden Order, unsullied. Now I can look my brother Darian in the eye. Honeyed rays of gold, deliver my spirit.” “Darian, now I have no regrets. Honeyed rays of gold, deliver my spirit.”
Ohhh, there it is, the tower! Finally, I can return. To our home, bathed in rays of gold!
Honeyed — Melina, her fake name, means something quite banal — ‘sweet like honey’- here we have a textual connection with honey and gold — gold being of course a colour between orange and yellow — D doesn’t understand what Fia was doing and he desires the world to burn, honeyed rays of Gold — the yellow flame — the return to the beginning — the age which was of guilt, blame and revenge — most players do not see Melina, honey, for who she is — Lina, the light.
Are all you Tarnished the same? Was taking my other half not enough for you?
Ōkami, Evergrace and Ico might seem strange to bring up now but these are all Japanese games which fixate upon the idea of a living sacrifice, God’s pretending to be other things or not being recognized, the loss of belief in legends and the restoring of balance. Okami is a pun meaning wolf but also meaning God — this pun is the foundation of all names in Elden Ring, I think. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus is referenced in the horned-esque ‘cursed children’ Mogh and Morgott — but it is not just a reference, it inherits the attributes of the horns — they indicate a curse, what is seen as a curse. Naturally I’m sure some viewers will be surprised that I find this is the Team ICO connection and not the giant wandering castles — well I’m hoping we can move past the obvious stuff for now. Cruelty as a means of expression is the motif of SoTC — is this not Fromsoft’s motto?
And besides what is important about the connection to Shadow of the Colossus is its connection to Godzilla. Which yes, I’m starting to unpack where the ‘bomb’ is in this game, make no mistake it is in here, it is perhaps the very shape of the Erdtree itself — a mushroom cloud shape, the twice-ness of the tragedy of Japan — not one bomb but two — not one tree, two trees, not one blossoming, two blossoming.
This makes Shabriri ultimately the one who brings about annihilation — the third impact.
And here is ultimately where I find connections to important Japanese anime — Akira and Evangelion — both are the question of a third impact — let’s say — the explosion of machinic eros — the human explosion of technological obsession mixed with the archaic reference to folklore.
Evergrace’s connections to Elden Ring deserve its own three hour lecture as the focal point of Fromsoft’s engagement, as far as I can tell, with these concepts.
Okami’s relation to Elden Ring is more than its use of mythology and the similarity the main character has with Radagon’s dogs and the games relation to the conditions of a world which cannot recognize the sacred anymore –
Remember the Zorya connection?
There are in the sky three little sisters, three little Zorya: she of the Evening, she of Midnight, and she of Morning. Their duty is to guard a dog which is tied by an iron chain to the constellation of the Little Bear. When the chain breaks it will be the end of the world.
The final boss of Elden Ring references Okami’s final boss — Elden Ring grafts Okami’s final boss with the Orphan and the final boss in Smash Bros — the hand, the hand of fate, the hand of the developer, the hand of the player with the tragic subject of the game — the one who suffers from the violence — but also the hand of the God which sealed the cave Amaerstau was hiding in after we tricked her into coming out with a mirror — which is called Marika in the game who is also Pandora’s Jar and Pandora herself — I’ll get to it later don’t worry — anyway the subjects of violence are the victims of a genocide. The hand as a boss battle isn’t a cliché Elden Ring is fixated on; it is directly connecting with Nintendo’s usage of the hand and to me the implications of the hand are its ability to create and destroy.
Now all of this conceptually is not merely trying to hide the fact that there was a sad story behind it all, no, but it’s far more interested in a more abstract narrative and poetic emphasis. It’s a bit like, well, music with clear spaces in between segments — it’s a call waiting for a response. And yeah I think some music in this game works like this, especially the ambient music mixed together with other ambient tracks in the game which is playing now — hopefully.
You can do this with mostly anything — for instance I think that ultimately the tragedy in the game is that Miquella, The Silver Anti-Racism Light basically, cannot get back to or face Melania, the Darkness, and Melania cannot find Miquella because she is literally blind and dying — at a loss without her brother-son. They will become Shabriri and Daedicar.
They are both dying and suffering in a cycle of rebirths where Malenia laments the loss of Miquella and Miquella seeks a way to influence the world to starting over until they form a child which can overcome the cycle. Miquella best fits with the descriptor ‘undestined life’, he is alive but his destiny is to die — which I’ll get to — Melina, when she is denied her sacrifice, fits this description as well.
In any case, their avatar, Melina has become herself — capable of her own decisions, freed from her jail — Rodricka, Young Marika most likely or her sister, has matured a bit — although her limitations remain the same -
“You’re willing to make me a chrysalid? Ah, but I’m still a milksop craven… I can’t even govern myself to step beyond the bounds of this ward. Please. You’re only wasting your strength.”
Marika, against being a very quiet — perhaps even boring — character is the one with the most dialogue in the entire game — she speaks through so many characters — it’s not really a question what challenged she faced — and, through Melina, what she became — to shatter herself as Pandora’s Jar, to sacrifice yourself for others, this is what Erika — German for the Eternal Ruler — the Ever Powerful — is — life and death, the affirmation of life in self-sacrifice — not murder, not self-hatred -
“I know you you must feel. But please, I’m not ready. Or are you like me? You’re so far out of your mind with fear? You’ve divested yourself of all reason?”
Lina and Erika. I know you’re real names. リナ and 恵里香 — in English or Japanese these names carry with them some significant weight — but Lina in Japanese is interesting — Renna (レナ) is the name Ranni pretends to have at the beginning — look at the names リナ and レナthe way they look has a distinct meaning that maps perfectly to the characters in the game — Melina is two- the two strokes of リwhile Ranni, as Renna, forms one stroke in レ.
Her name is Arika then, with an A? Well like the Gainax and Nintendo references this is fine — it’s multiple things at once with only one requirement that the character which holds all of these references have some connection to it. I mean Elden Ring doesn’t reference Street Fighter does it? Oh well — wait — he’s like Axel — but that other move doesn’t WAIT DOESN’T CHARIZARD DO THAT MOVE?
Yes, you’re starting to see it. The Matrix.
Ah. Okay. So the spirit summons their like –
Pokemon.
If I’ve convinced anyone of anything in my videos I want to convince you that sometimes art isn’t attempting to just make references, even if it is using them, sometimes you have to be a bit childish with your approach.
Ashes? Like Ash Ketchum? Rodrickera is a Pokemon master and her cloak is … red?
Oh right well just like the references to Naruto and Evangelion and ancient myth this isn’t just a reference — the Pokemon movie — the first one — is basically the plot of Elden Ring. I’m saying that a lot — remember this trailer? All the hands connecting together? This motif is pointing to the connecting of other artists hands together into a chain of meaning — this is the Elden Ring.
The Pokemon movie has brain-washing, a storm used as a veil, Vikings on a boat, a battle of clones, a mysterious innocent character and it’s bitter clone, magical tears, sacrifice as capable of moving an embittered artificial clone — and on and on –
Why reference Harry Potter, Pokemon, Naruto and perhaps countless media which I haven’t seen but maybe you have? Especially when all of these properties borrow a lot of their ideas from mythology?
I think this is the more interesting question about Elden Ring rather than how ‘deep it’s lore is’ — I think the game is attaching our stories –Naruto, Harry Potter and Pokemon — New Vegas and Majora’s Mask — all of these games form myths that we know by heart but we don’t know their histories — by connecting the Indo-European Dawn-Dusk worship with Pokemon and relatively recent history using direct references Fromsoft is in a sense de-mystifiying the myths borrowed in these properties — in a sense. They are connecting what we all already know with our own collective heritage which has been disguised as something like Pokemon and called, well, a curse, and worth forgetting.
Naruto, on the other hand, is very similar to Elden Ring with its explicit references to ancient myth. Naruto fans probably could’ve anticipated the direction of the story if they were aware of the majority of Japanese myth — in this way it’s got a deep sorrow within it — I am especially perversely enjoying that the references to Pandora’s Jar, containing pure feminine chaos — itself a pejorative which Heisod introduced to Pandora’s character and still effects us today, is missed because people still think that it’s Pandora’s Box — maybe Elden Ring is a critique of education while at the same time affirming our, the audiences, enjoyment of fiction and sci-fi as beautiful.
This is of course where the injection of Nazism and genocide comes in as an important buffer to this idea — a warning, perhaps.
If what I’m saying here is true what does it mean that this game won best narrative and scored multiple 10/10’s without recognition of this underlying meta-textual game of communication, memory and art? Well it means it’s a very good game, of course, but maybe something more worrying perhaps?
Let’s try it with the map — if Miquella is tied to the Yellow Flame then what happens when we invoke the map and centre it on the flame? Well it tells a story, we see that the Giants Flame lines up with this point on the map — and this point is a molecular vignette of the entire story but more specifically how the Giants Flame relates to the story. When we go to this spot in the map we fight a giant bear who seems to be programmed to grab and smash us into his stomach more often than usual and behind him is a corpse with an eagle next to him, the eagle flies away presumably down into the valley — back to the beginning back to the start of the events that have transpired in the world. This is a poem about what’s happened to Miquella and Malenia and its about what’s happened to all the beings of the land — it’s not an unintentional left over bit of atmosphere — the map, including the terrorities, tell stories. It might also be a reference to Thus Spake Zarathursta — but honestly, I am just one person here, I need to keep this moving.
You can plug different parts of the world into other parts and find out the narrative, not tell yourself a made up narrative, but actually unlock the games story this way, — you can’t, for instance, imagine that the colour blue means life-force and expect to find anything that affirms this perspective — apart from the only ‘final’ suggestion in the game — which is ultimately all was One and that regressing to this state through destruction is fascistic — the Frenzied Flame ending is not unintentionally or coincidentally tied to Japanese Nationalism through the Sun imagery, just like how references to Nazism in the game are not just quaint meaningless references. Calling Godwyn’s murder the Night of Long Knives would be incredibly tone-death if he didn’t represent anything to do with Nazism or fascism — at the very least it may be that the inference we’re meant to pick up here is that Godwyn’s role as a Nazi is a pejorative account coming from the side of the Eternal City assassins who murdered him — a strange narrative decision perhaps but it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the intent considering Godwyn is actually not a bad guy at all — D is.
Here it’s important to see the poetry here — Godwyn’s spirit dies but his body lives on — the spirit of Nazi Germany had to die — but it’s body, it’s populace, didn’t.
This does make, as some have probably already suggested, Ranni’s ending the affirmation of difference and chance as well as becoming — it makes sense it has the most favoured cinematic perspective –aka budget- out of all the endings — Elden Ring is a game about affirming difference, chance, distance and abstraction at the same time as compassion and empathy. Ranni’s name is also quite interesting in this exact way, the distance between English and Japanese has to be bridged in order for her name to make sense — and all names do make sense in Elden Ring once you’ve removed the generic element from them or added one — more on this soon.
Remember the rot lake? This isn’t just a ‘cool’ scene it’s literally the story of the entire game. It’s fractal. We are the lone ancestor walking through the rot but not realising that right beneath us is the truth — that the dragon and the giant are one — Melina is a dragon-giant — her hair is grey and red.
This is what I mean by literalism and the molecular vignette of the mise en scene in the game — you play through an area and tell yourself a story without any guesswork — after this you see if your literalist tale aligns to the narrative you’ve established already — here it’s quite clear that it’s difficult to start engaging in the chiral narrative but it’s not hard to carry on with it after you’ve started. This is what I’ve found — I more or less find it easy to read item descriptions now compared to when I first started — I had mostly assumed that a lot of items were aesthetically related to folklore I was unfamiliar with and called it a day.
It’s important to recognize here that the map being a kind of de-centred tool of discovery is key to telling the stories to each other — maps are stories in Elden Ring — and if you only think of the map as a simple generic RPG map then you will be limited in the stories that you tell yourself — and people are indeed quite limited — it’s unfortunate that Elden Ring did not get recognition yet for this incredibly deep narrative gameplay.
See you in part 2.
PART 2 The Mystery of Elden Ring Solved: The Map has Many Names
The map allows you to extend the story you can tell yourself when traversing an ‘area’, so to speak, because when the superimposed inverted map slots into place revealing two areas overlapping which have similar thematic content and upon investigating the two overlapping areas we see a linear story about the One splitting into the Two, one a beast of oneness, and the other a collective of clever Lion-hearted small beings we have stumbled upon the ‘truth’ of Elden Ring — so to speak — the truth is that it is a game about that which contains everything inside itself and that which has no container — this is what Miyazaki was talking about when he said there was ‘a lot that was difficult to imagine in the game’ — I imagine that ‘this is too hard to imagine’ was probably often said to him during his work on this game.
Miquella-Melania and Merika-Radagon together are dragon-giants which have split — The Erdtree holds the dragon and the Halgitree hold the giants– the one thing they need from us is to help kill them.
Both the Erdtree and the Halgitree are rotting but one is rotting conceptually and the other literally.
Look at this somewhat banal scene where an early Albinauric is staring at a crab. Not only does the Tarnished not recognize what’s going on but Malenia and Miquella do not recognize each other for a long time and when they do it kicks off the plot of the game. The white flesh of the crab, devoid of blood, and the silver-blood of tears of reflection, also is devoid of blood. What causes them to recognize each other when they didn’t before? Well its reflection — silver reflection, artificial reflection and it comes about from tears of lamentation. The song the mothers in the Lands Between sing has been translated as follows;
We, (betrothed) destined to be mothers, now become tarnished. (Nos, destinatae matribus, nunc fiunt turpes.) We have lamented and we have shed tears but no one consoles us. (Ploarvimus lacrimavimusque sed nemo nos consolatur.) Golden One, at whom you were angry? (Aureum, cui irascebaris?)
They are trapped in this game, chasing each other until they reflect the tarnished in a way which allows them to see themselves. The negative view of their scenario is best conveyed by;
SILVER TEAR HUSK
The Silver Tear makes mockery of life, reborn again and again into imitation. Perhaps, one day, it will be reborn a lord…
The silver tear — it is always easily tied back to Merika and therefore Radagon — and just like the Dragonlord, Godwyn’s corpse and Tower of Inversion — Marika’s reflection ability is a fact which applies everywhere.
MIMIC’S VEIL
Golden veil of intricate design. Uses FP to mimic nearby objects. When Godrick was hounded from Leyndell, the Royal Capital, this was one of a multitude of treasures he took with him. Also known as “Marika’s Mischief”.
If this is true it is a consistent rule — as consistent as any other Fromsoft game element — Marika reflects what she encounters — she takes it into herself — her hair turns red when she curses the giant, she takes into herself the masculine red-haired beasts of the world. This means that if Marika does something significant involving another she must’ve reflected them — this forms a paradox with the other paradox we know about Marika –she is Radagon — how? Well when she splits with Radagon she encounters him — she encounters herself — this is a logical contradiction on the face of it and this moment tracks well in the very spotty history we are given in dialogue — mostly be Melina — Marika was an Order follower or leader who changed her mind after searching the depths of the Order. She concludes that;
O Radagon, leal hound of the Golden Order. Thou’rt yet to become me. Thou’rt yet to become a god. Let us be shattered, both. Mine other self.
What was Radagon up to? Well he was also studying; he was studying what was going on with the Moon Queen and her blue magic.
If you track all the moving threads here it makes a pretty clear picture but everything is out of sync sequentially;
Marika splits with Radagon — they reflect each other and recognize that they must search the depths — Marika searches the depths of the Order while Radagon searches the depths of Raya Lucaria.
The problem is that in terms of Melina’s timeline for when Merika says what Marika says;
I declare mine intent, to search the depths of the Golden Order. Through understanding of the proper way, our faith, our grace, is increased. Those blissful early days of blind belief are long past. My comrades; why must ye falter?
After saying she will shatter herself and most likely shattering herself after saying that.
I’ll play Melina’s dialogue in the order is appears in the game;
My Lord, and thy warriors. I divest each of thee of thy grace.
With thine eyes dimmed, ye will be driven from the Lands Between. Ye will wage war in a land afar, where ye will live, and die.
Well? Perhaps that might serve you in lieu of a maiden’s guidance.
So my interpretation here is that essentially Marika plans to send the tarnished away so they lose the mind control that grace seems to incur in the beings of the lands between — their eyes even turn bright with grace — also, without a maiden to guide them they won’t be led by the whims of the two-fingers — twoness has too much power in the Order.
Then, after thy death, I will give back what I once claimed.
Return to the Lands Between, wage war, and brandish the Elden Ring.
Grow strong in the face of death. Warriors of my lord. Lord Godfrey.
Additionally, because they face death earnestly and not with the immorality of the Erdtree they will not be corrupted by the promise of eternal life.
The Erdtree governs all. The choice is thine. Become one with the Order. Or divest thyself of it. To wallow at the fringes; a powerless upstart.
With the Tarnished gone and battling somewhere else — she then commands whoever is remaining to be one with the Order, the Erdtree is sucking up all of the energy of the beings of the land into one place. She sends the kids out and vacuums up all the bugs in the house.
Hear me, Demigods. My children beloved. Make of thyselves that which ye desire. Be it a Lord. Be it a God. But should ye fail to become aught at all, ye will be forsaken. Amounting only to sacrifices…
Finally she tells her children, the Demigods, that they need to become something — which they desire — or else they will be sacrifices. Well — all of the primary demigods become sacrifices or at least potential sacrifices — sacrificed to the Tarnished — Ranni, however, is not sacrificed to us — she becomes more than a Lord or a God — more than Marika, I think, anticipated. Godwyn, as well, becomes more than a sacrifice, but that’s a subject for another time I think.
O Radagon, leal hound of the Golden Order. Thou’rt yet to become me. Thou’rt yet to become a god. Let us be shattered, both. Mine other self.
After telling her children this she shatters herself and initiates her plan, the Tarnished return to take what is theirs, the Elden Beast’s energy, the seat of power. Her demi-God children are all sacrifices to us apart from Ranni or Godwyn if we choose to help one of them.
Now here is the problem, she has shattered herself yet she speaks;
I declare mine intent, to search the depths of the Golden Order. Through understanding of the proper way, our faith, our grace, is increased. Those blissful early days of blind belief are long past. My comrades; why must ye falter?
Well it seems to me that the problem here is that actually where Melina says the above ‘occurs before’ where she says she will be shattered — the map is the story. This might just be a problem with the order that websites list her dialogue I can’t remember if we encounter her dialogue in this order as well or not, my apologies. But the game is non-linear, the dialogue should work backwards and forwards. I’ll get to that. I left out one piece of Marika’s words;
Hark, brave warriors. Hark, my lord Godfrey. We commend your deeds. Guidance has delivered ye through ordeal to the place ye stand. Put the giants to the sword and confine the flame atop the mount. Let a new epoch begin. An epoch glistening with life. Brandish the Elden Ring, for the Age of the Erdtree!
This is placed near the end of the game — it is a key. What makes it one? Well, she uses the word ‘confine the flame’ — confine it. Marika and Melina’s goals are different approaches to the same goal — Melina’s only enemy is the Frenzied Flame — seemingly the very same yellow flame which Marika sought to confine.
‘Confine’ is an interesting choice of word — Melina was confined — it’s a strangely ignored aspect of her character — she has a jail cell where we find her weapon.
Dagger given to one who set out on a journey to fulfill her duty long ago. The power of its former owner, the kindling maiden, is still apparent. The one who walks alongside flame, Shall one day meet the road of Destined Death.
Sellen was also confined — Sellen who is tied to the Primal Glintstone, which is tied to the red-blue Jellyfish, the firey-bellied golem with his magical weapon — ectera. Malenia and Miquella are both, in essence, confined. The most significant problem facing this iteration of the Lands Between is confinement — blame — guilt and revenge. All things which are contained in Marika’s proclaimation that we must confine the flame atop the mount — this is also a pun, most likely, the player is a flame as well and they are also atop a mount — torrent.
“You’ve taken an apprenticeship with Sellen? Well, that is something. Sellen was well known. The most promising sorceress in the history of the academy. I followed her at school, but there may as well have been an ocean between us. But Sellen was expelled from the academy. Accused of unthinkable treatment of certain sorcerers, under the name of the Graven Witch. I still don’t believe the accusations. The illustrious Sellen would never do such things…”
The tragedy of the game is about a separation — not just of Sellen and Thops and what felt like ‘an ocean between us’ but of Miquella and Malenia — Boc and his Mother — Marika Renneala, Marika and Horah — of Farum Azula and Learnia, of Farum Azuela and Leyndell. The separation of the reflective surface of sliver and its origin — the reflective surface of the ocean -
Mogh was confined for his ‘inherent sin’, guilt he was born unfairly into, this turned him into a selfish person who essentially causes the next cycle to continue to have problems. The ‘ever jails’ present everywhere in the game become much more important because they relate directly to Marika’s mistake in attempting to confine the flame.
Marika’s reflection logic, like the Dragonlord with time or Godwyn with inversion, occurs here — if she confines the flame she confines herself — the paradox is unveiled with Miquella and Malenia — Marika is a reflection of life — when mankind confine the flame they confine themselves, when they release it destructively they destroy themselves.
The previous phase of the Lands Between would have been a world which was burning, one which must be confined. Burning blood — the world of the formless mother, the released essence of Malenia. Until it comes out it will cause her to suffer and lose herself — just like the beings of the land. Marika made a mistake. Marika is much chattier than Radagon but Radagon was a man of secrecy.
When Radagon married Rennala, he ordered the Carian magic preceptors to don these masks. To make it clear that all of their matters were to be kept strictly private.
…
What does this all mean for the plot of the Nox and the goals of the Order? I’ll leave that as an open question, why did Marika’s Eternal City scion girlfriends try to kill Godwyn? It could be that Marika’s goal was to make sure that the night returned — that she realized she couldn’t confine the flame — but upon reflection she decided to do something else — ruin the whole project, shatter what she was collecting into the Erdtree and in doing so creating Melina who is a reflection of Marika and Radagon — she is the one who Marika sought to confine but like the giant when she tried to confine the flame she was cursed with blood, she became organic, represented by the red-hair. Yes, it brings to mind Pinocchio — Marika — a known liar — became a real boy. Melina cannot lie but like Ranni their honesty is such that they avoid having to say the truth — in her toy form Ranni has trouble keeping her mouth shut –
Let us speak of the past, a while. I was once an Empyrean. Of the demigods, only I, Miquella, and Malenia could claim that title. Each of us was chosen by our own Two Fingers, as a candidate to succeed Queen Marika, to become the new god of the coming age. Which is when I received Blaidd. In the form of a vassal tailored for an Empyrean. But I would not acquiesce to the Two Fingers. I stole the Rune of Death, slew mine own Empyrean flesh, casting it away. I would not be controlled by that thing. The Two Fingers and I have been cursing each other ever since… And the Baleful Shadows… are their assassins. I turned my back on the Two Fingers and we each have been cursing the other since. The Baleful Shadows… are their assassins.
Ranni is the natural Pinocchio-type character but Melina is tied to Ranni in her ending, for many reasons, Melina — who is Marika and Radagon — is also a Pinocchio type character.
If you recall that Zoraya’s story resembles Melina’s and Ranni is tied to Melina then how does Ranni’s story work with Melina’s?
Well Marika also slew her Empyrean flesh and she had Destined Death hidden away by Malkeith. But how is Marika being cursed and hunted by the Baleful Shadow? What is the Baleful Shadow? Blaidd uses a frost imbuement not destined death; the Baleful Shadow is weak to frost even.
It’s not Blaidd — it’s something else — a wolf-man whose weapon is imbued with destined death. I think at this point resemblances mean more than just coincidence, hopefully, the Baleful Shadow then is like Malkeith.
But not just Malkeith — we have Baleful Shadows as well — the little guys who also use destined death against us.
All of this in mind, Ranni’s betrayal by PRECEPTOR SELUVIS who wants to control her by filling her with AMBER DRAUGHT — A Small flask received from Preceptor Seluvis containing a gleaming amber draught for use in a scheme. “Give it to Ranni and ensure she drinks it. And we’ll be in a position to claim the very finest puppet ever crafted.”
Recall the Primal Glintstone and the red-glintstone in Lenne’s rise as well as Sellen’s discussion of amber;
Our powers draw upon the powers embedded in glintstone, but what is the nature of such power? Glintstone is the amber of the cosmos, golden amber contains the remnants of ancient life and houses its vitality, while Glintstone contains residual life. And thus, the vitality of the stars. It should not be forgotten that glintstone sorcery is the study of the stars and the life therin.
Golden amber — something which isn’t quite red — contains ancient life — recall that artificial life, those with white flesh from the sea who are associated with Miquella and the eye of time — the Azula in the ocean is devoid of blood. Recall that Marika, prior to what she did to the Fire Giant, was also devoid of the inking of red — she was pure.
All of this means that if Seluvis manages to imbue Ranni with amber he has succeeded in cursing her not unlike how Marika transformed into a red-haired real boy.
Procure it for me. The rather unique starlight shard that glistens with amber. With that, my special draught will gleam with nectar-sweetness. And even a demigod would be slave to its charms…
Glintstone is typically blue-tinted, red-tinted glintstone is rare, it is crystalized life not crystalized memory and mourning. And to what ends does Seluvis — a man tied to the knowledge-based magic school in Learnia want to do with Ranni? Well, use her to his own ends. Is this not perhaps the key to the question; what did the Nox wish to accomplish with the Order? I’ll save that for another time.
If you get the amber draught for him he says;
Well, well, you managed to lay your hands on it! The blessed day is finally upon us… Goodness gracious, the way it glistens…utterly enchanting. To think, this was once a demigod’s very fate… My oh my oh my…. Ah, are you still here? Oh yes, I should give you your reward. Please, it’s all yours. Splendid work. Just marvelous. [Gives Magic Scorpion Charm] Now, just you wait. The merriment is soon to begin. The scheme I promised is to be revealed very shortly… (Talk again without reloading the area) You’ll be flabbergasted, I can assure you. The secret* I promised is to be revealed very shortly… *He says “The secret” here, yet the subtitles repeat “The scheme” as in the previous line.
MAGIC SCORPION CHARM
A talisman carried by assassins who strike unseen. Patterned on a scorpion freshly shed of its exoskeleton, its claws seizing a heart that shimmers with magic.
This charm is like the one Gowry drops in terms of its importance and symbolism although it is an item with copies. It looks like a Ying and Yang but the story it tells is the story of the Lands Between — the scorpion below loses its heart of magic to the scorpion above — its different variations tell similar stories, the one above the other steals power for itself.
Good, I’ve been waiting for you. It’s finally complete. The perfection of my draught, gleaming nectar-sweet. Give it to Ranni and ensure she drinks it. [Gives Amber Draught] The dead-eyed doll lets down her guard in your presence, rather remarkably. Though she might dip her hands in the dirt, and feign that icy persona…she’s a frail, gentle girl at heart.
It doesn’t work on Ranni if you give it to her;
Well, this is a most unpleasant awakening. The depths of wickedness never fail to surprise me. I am saddened. That thou wouldst succumb to such depravity. Led astray by Seluvis, with devious tonic in hand. Didst thou think to have thy way with me? Be gone. Hapless scum.
This ties back to Marika and her plot — Marika did not avoid the injection of the red substance into her like Ranni does, suggesting that there is a potential origin to what her plan was prior to this event where she attempts to confine the great fire, fails, and ends up cursing herself with the redness — what is the suggestion? Well, she does what Seluvis tries to do to Ranni but to herself as a tragic consequence of trying to confine the flame — because she is a mirror of the lands between, she is part mimic tear. Ainsel river. Tilting at wind-mills. This is all something she did; it’s something the people of the land did. Marika suffers the same self-consuming curse that the Fire Giant does. However, he is mindless; he cannot choose for himself what to do. His mind, however, is set on being a willing sacrifice. This mind is Melina, our Serosh — they are both the same entity.
PRECEPTOR SELUVIS does represent something; he is the Moon which is selfish — a false Moon — while Gideon is the False Sun — the light — which is lost. A selfish moon is an oxymoron in a Fromsoft game — the Moon is tied to Motherhood, to care and love, and the lost Sun is also an oxymoron — the light is tied to knowledge and beauty.
Selvuis’ basement is full of puppets — we can ask — as always what does this resemble? Well beneath The Lands Between are also stationary beings, the giants which do not move in their stone chairs. The eyes of Selivus’ puppets track the camera — they are watching you.
Puppet of a warrior who was betrayed by her pure heart. Wields a Stormhawk Axe in both hands and uses the Thunderstorm skill.
Connects to the Warhawk which connects to the two-as-one concept.
Spirit of a handsome archer who dressed in the style of a man. Called the Silent Hunter by some, she fires St. Trina’s arrows from her shortbow. Dolores once belonged to the Roundtable Hold, where she was both a critic and a friend of Gideon the All-Knowing. It was because of her that he and Seluvis went their separate ways.
Cleary tied to Miquella, the Greater Will and the Blue Dancer. Who is a silent hunter, the water which can only reflect — trying to find Malenia — he interacts with the Lands Between through puppetry — I’ll get to this.
One of Seluvis’s puppets. Use to summon the spirit of the Dung Eater. Spirit of a man who murdered thousands and defiled their corpses with the Seedbed Curse. Wields a spine greatsword and hurls curses. The Dung Eater despaired at how he met his end. How hideous and sinister this puppet is, and yet, its utter despair invites one to care for it.
Says something about Dung Eater, perhaps he is best seen as being tragedy itself — this description insinuates that Elden Ring’s relationship to tragedy is not pessimistic.
One of Seluvis’ puppets. Use to summon the spirit of a jarwight. Spirit of a man who wished to become the innards of a livingjar. A jar-hurling specialist who throws all manner of pots and jars. The warrior jar once told the nameless man this: “You are not yet ready to join the warriors inside. No, you must apply yourself! Better yourself, and one day I will return for you.”
Marika says essentially the same thing — the nameless man being Horah Lourx.
One of Seluvis’s puppets. Use to summon the spirit of the Finger Maiden Therolina. Spirit of Finger Maiden who never met the Tarnished she was meant to guide. Uses healing incantations and Holy Water Pots, but she is not a fighter by nature and is ill-suited to battle. A Maiden without a Tarnished. A Tarnished without a Maiden. And yet no guide to bring them together.
Your maiden who never was.
An old puppet crafted in the Eternal City. Use to summon the spirits of a nightmaiden and a swordstress. These sisters, members of a cold-blooded race who wield flowing weapons, became puppets of their own volition.
The two-sisters idea is complicated — Miquella’s femininity adds a layer of complexity which is hard to track well — but it is important to see here that ‘becoming a puppet of their own volition’ describes what happened to the Nox well. Their desire for a night lord caused them to be puppets of their own will — which is paradoxical that would be like being a puppet with no strings — ah, well yes it would, it would be like being Ranni.
Prior to this event what did she want to do with the Order? I believe it most likely has something to do with what the mothers sing about — the Golden one abandoned them — Miquella abandoned Malenia — additionally the Great Flame’s watcher the Fire Giant is connected to Balor — a God who tries to avoid his natural end — and Si-Te-Cah — cannibalistic giants which when defeated turn their killers hair red — just like theirs, it’s notable his name is generic, its just ‘Fire Giant’ — his identity is an extreme mystery, as is the 9 circles in his eye — although I’m pretty sure its these locations which I’ve highlighted.
In either myth, Balor or Si-Te-Cah, the Fire Giant’s violence is turned back on himself — he eats’ himself for power — maybe he confines himself as well.
Sacrificing Maidens is a part of this worlds system — Enia even has a title for Melina ‘a kindling maiden’ — bones are being used to keep the fire going. Marika, being aligned to the mothers, makes sense because she is attempting to confine the flame which they are losing their children to.
Blood burns, bones burn, spirits burn, a person can be kindling. Blood which burns.. hmm where have we seen this before?
Trident of Mohg, Lord of Blood. A sacred spear that will come to symbolize his dynasty. As well as serving as a weapon, it is an instrument of communion with an outer god who bestows power upon accursed blood. The mother of truth desires a wound.
Which ‘outer God’ is this? Which one — out of probably actually one or two — bestows ‘power’ upon blood? Fire from blood? Hint: the trident has three points. It’s the Giant’s flame, the frenzied flame, the burning eye.
But I thought the eye was associated with Azuela, with water, with Miquella? Well just like the snails with their magic they can become molten.
Who is the mother of truth who desires a wound? Daedicar.
Disturbing likeness of a woman whose skin was flayed. She smiles with a serene tenderness. Increases damage taken. It is said that this woman, named Daedicar, indulged in every form of adultery and wicked pleasure imaginable, giving birth to a myriad of grotesque children.
Which makes Shabriri, naturally, the Father of Truth,
Disturbing likeness of a man whose eyes have been gouged out. The corners of his mouth are upturned in an almost flirtatious manner. Constantly attracts enemies’ aggression. It is said that the man, named Shabriri, had his eyes gouged out as punishment for the crime of slander, and, with time, the blight of the flame of frenzy came to dwell in the empty sockets.
A father who cannot see and a mother who cannot speak. The Greater Will and the Formless Mother.
They form pejoratives and accusations at each other, they lose themselves with time. But they are not singular entities, a part of them is uncorrupted, their reflection, their tears, their children.
This circles back to the problem with my first video, Miquella being Gowry is challenging because Gowry seems to lose his mind throughout the quest — he starts by condemning the rot pests as annoying, he speaks highly of Miquella — a bit too highly — he is surprised that he is finally aging — but by the end of the quest he is pretending to or has simply lost his mind — he acts as if he is a rot pest, he cries for no reason, he goes on about a non-existent God — the rot-God — he sounds like Shabriri –
On the other hand what becomes of Malenia if the cycle truly begins again? She loses her seal, her skin which holds back the red-tide; she gives birth to grotesque children — all of the beings of the land. Daedicar does not speak, she does not go mad like Shabriri, she is merely punished by his insanity — hence the mothers lamentation.
Dagger fashioned from a great scorpion’s tail, glistening with scarlet rot. A ceremonial tool used by heretics, crafted from the relic of a sealed outer god.
The scorpion is connected to scarlet rot, its stinger is using it and yet at the same time it is connected to the Frenzied Flame and the Giant’s Flame with the SCORPION KITE SHIELD
Emblazoned with a yellow scorpion, a warning of surprise attacks and sudden strikes. It has eight limbs and one stinger, 9 total points of significance, just like the 9 irises in the Fire Giant’s eye.
FAITHFUL’S CANVAS TALISMAN
A talisman bearing an icon that depicts a group of masked figures. Raises potency of incantations. The figures represent the flock at prayer, their firm belief in the intangible inspiring even the solitary founder of their religion. What is faith if not an affirmation?
This is similar to flocks talisman but the number of people in the icon is different. There are 8 people staring upwards at the intangible one — the supposed ‘outer God’- nothingness.
Selivus would bring ruin again, that much is clear — but what of Ranni’s other friends? Who are they? Iji and Blaidd. Iji says this after you unlock the path to the Fingerslayer blade by killing Rahdan.
Now the festival is over, and General Radahn is defeated… Jerren’s duties are finally fulfilled. Though we served different masters, I could see he was truly adept in his role. Now the time has come to remind him of an old promise made. With the starts of fate set into motion, a certain sorceress is dispossessed of her immortality… Finally, we can be rid of a longstanding Carian weed…
He’s talking about Sellen when he mentions a ‘certain sorceress’ — he’s suggesting that Jerren — who is basically a Gael reference and Rahdan’s solider — made a promise to kill her.
Like everything else in this game this is connected to Marika and Radagon, Malenia and Miquella, Mogh and the Blue Dancer.
Ah, well met. I hardly expected to see the champion of the festival here of all places. You didn’t … know Sellen did you? Well, whatever the case, she’s dead now. Just put it behind you. She was known as the graven witch Obsessed by the primeval current, countless sorcerers fell to her hands. The most dangerous mage in the entire history of Raya Lucaria’s Academy It is strange through. The woman, she was like a husk, her soul already fled. I suspect Sellen lives on, elsewhere. I’m sure she’ll turn up eventually, in another body. A sickening thought, but one that won’t stop gnawing at me.
Naturally Jerren, as a red-coded character, isn’t impressed with blue-coded magicians and, unsurprisingly blames them for the suffering of the world — this is essentially the Weeping Peninsulas mise en scene returning as dialogue.
“Sellen, Graven Witch, enemy of Caria. I vow this time to crush both your frame and your primal glintstone. I am Jerren, bringer of your death. Do not forget.”
Almost sounds Malenia-esque.
Jerren, bringer of my death. You have my gratitude. For freeing me from my shackles. But I am afraid your work is done. Join the school. To reflect on your mistake.
The closest resemblance here that I can think of is Radagon leaving Marika to study Carian magic. Radagon being the red-haired beast which sought to bring death to Marika as an individual and the kindling maidens, collectively -
Ahh, my apprentice. You’ve saved my skin once again. Do you see this? The Queen of Caria is no more. With the bodies of Masters Azur and Lusat returned, the academy can hone the primeval current. So that we, fallen children of the stars, shall beam with brilliance once again. My apprentice. Will you stay with us, here at the academy? Oh, I know it’s not possible. You have your own calling. To be the next Elden Lord. But do think of me. Of your teacher. On the eve of your crowning. You will always be my darling pupil. Rest assured that I… No, the entire academy, will swear allegiance to the new monarch. My apprentice.
Become Elden Lord. Hmm. Perhaps I’m jumping ahead, but here is a symbol of my allegiance, and the academy’s. (gives Glintstone Kris) Do you recall what I once told you? That glintstone is the amber of the cosmos, and sorcery is the study of the stars, and the life therein. When you become Elden Lord, please illuminate me. Lay bare the secrets of life which course the Elden Ring. Next time, I will be your student. Oh, one last thing. If you fail to claim your throne, you can always pay me a visit. Oh, don’t fret. Even my dullest pupils will always have a place here.
Iji is a very important character if you consider his appearance — he is a giant whose head is covered with mirrors which reflect. He sits near an anvil — which is tied to Mjolnir at later points in the games chiral narrative — and despite being a black-smith — which is stereotypically not a job which requires reading he is reading a book. All of these characteristics match Radagon well — so it makes sense that he is connected to Jerren — Radagon, the vessel we find anyway, is seen as a blacksmith — he is hammering away at something — but recall that he is Merika which means he wanted to create a God slaying weapon — perhaps in the trailer what we see isn’t Radagon attempting to restore the Elden Ring but Radagon attempting to forge a God-slaying weapon.
Radagon/Marika, like Iji, is also interested in learning more things — he studies the Order and the Carian royal family. And they both have red hair -
“Every giant is red of hair, and Radagon was said to have despised his own red locks. Perhaps that was a curse of their kind”
Of course, because Marika is tied to silver tears and mimicry the fact that Iji’s face covering is a collection of mirrors should be unsurprising but I bet some of you are still a bit surprised.
Helm fashioned from a crystal looking-glass, said to have never left War Counselor Iji’s head. Easily broken and weak against striking attacks. Worn by those committed to high treason, it wards off the intervention of the Greater Will and its vassal Fingers. Iji was afraid. Terrified of his own treachery.
This maps perfectly well to Marika who is strongly associated with treachery, additionally we find he is burned with destined death by the Black Knife assassins — while Marika was not assassinated by other Black Knife assassins she was killed by a scion of the Eternal city using destined death — herself.
It also potentially frames Marika’s shame about her red-hair as not just directly shame towards what redness represents — life, birth and death — but fear about her own treachery.
If Iji is Marika/Radagon, he is their representative — why he is antagonistic with Sellen? Sellen, by this point, is clearly representative of Marika/Radagon as well given her Primal Glintsone being both red and blue, her being trapped in the Weeping Peninsula just like Melina was confined.
Well, Iji, like Jerren, is tilting at windmills — they are attacking imaginary enemies.
Sellen, on the other hand, is like the little fairy in the story of Ainsel — the little boy calls himself ‘my own self’ so that when he hurts the fairy the fairy blames ‘my own self’- the mother of the fairy has to intervene which causes the little boy to become afraid — to learn a lesson.
The game isn’t based on Ainsel, it grafts it onto other stories such as the story of the cannibalistic red-haired giants the Se-te-cah — the story comes to have its own meaning from many overlapping elements.
Iji and Jerren aren’t just attacking imaginary enemies they are attacking themselves.
Iji being Marika/Radagon makes Blaidd’s connection to Malkeith stronger — meaning this quote;
Oh, it’s you… It’s me, Blaidd. Old Iji trapped me here. Told me I’d bring nought but bale to Lady Ranni. But there’s no chance that could happen. I’m part of her being. Her very shadow… I thought old Iji knew as much… Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on anymore… [Open the evergaol] My thanks, friend. I’m going to see mistress Ranni, now. I don’t know what came over old Iji, but even if the odds are slim, I need to check the mistress is safe. Now, Ranni can finally set in motion the fight against her fate she’s dreamt of for so long.
…
Blaidd, Selrius, Iji these three characters form the three moments of history captured in the map — it is the relationship with the other as it develops throughout history — Blaidd is the age of the beast, the dog and his master — he is loyal but can be driven to madness — he is the weeping peninsula and Caelid — Selrius is the age of Learnia and the Eternal Cities — the desire to puppet fate itself, to control the other — Iji is the age of the Leyndell and the Mountaintops of the giants — the tragedy being that his own fear stops him, his inability to see himself fully — he can only reflect others — his death is a question but it is one with mise en scene elements as clues.
The narrative in Elden Ring works like this; the literal portion of any game element usually comes with a more conceptual portion to it — (i.e. Radagon — remove ‘ra’ you get Dagon, a real deity from mythology) and what we do after this is we find out what pieces fit where by superimposing elements on top of each other under various transformations. This is consistent, it is not an open-ended ‘whatever you think it means, maybe, it’s your theory’ — we can only get to the open-ended element of the narrative if we understand the rudimentary parts of it — which most of us don’t.
Yes the game is open-ended but unless you see Iji represents Marika then you don’t see that the open-ended element of the game comes from the players relation to this character -
The point of the puzzle is not to find out boring information dumps, the point is we get to give life to the seemingly empty main characters — Radagon and Merika, Malkeith, are all given really interesting personalities through their respective resemblances instead of the basically lifeless monster-versions of them we encounter. Miquella, the Greater Will, is redeemed potentially as Gowry — unless we assume he has gone mad and perhaps he really has but we see his saddest fate confirmed in Shabriri, the same is true for Malenia and her fate as the Formless Mother.
..…
So where is the literal occurrence of the eternal return of the same where Miquella warps back in time leaving the Halgitree and moving beneath Caelid like Mario going underground? Well this is the mystery we have to unpack — also, we need to figure out who Melina is, properly.
Let’s start by asking the usual stuff — what seems to be similar to what?
The Halgitree is like the Erdtree, one died too soon and the other never dies — both are failures. Both are considered holy. Both have a blind dying vessel of an enormous amount of energy waiting around inside after being seemingly abandoned. The similarities will go on because they basically are the same thing.
Now just like the Weeping Peninsula and Ansel River we can ask well — what’s different? What’s being reflected? What is conceptual and what is literal?
Radagon’s vessel is containing spirits who have blind faith in the Order — who are a faceless spirit — and Melania is literally blind and full of their blood — Radagon’s vessel contains their spirits, their desires, where Melania — literally contains all of their organs inside of herself.
Whoa whoa whoa, hold on a minute (scholar) I don’t know about your fancy maps but I’m pretty sure Melania is suffering from the a serious case of scarlet rot not from having all of the beings of the land inside of her — and it’s not confirmed that the Elden Beast is the spirits of the land or if the people of the land are truly followers of the Order this is all speculation!
I don’t trust pejoratives in this game. If something is considered bad or negative I assume that this is a part of the entire self-consuming guilt and trauma tragedy coping mechanism of the Order or otherwise. Fromsoft have been playing the whole ‘what they say is a curse is not a curse, they are just controlling you’ since at least Evergrace.
For instance the ‘formless Mother’ just like ‘scarlet Rot’ or ‘cursed blood’ is only bad from the perspective of the Order. Which is, you know, not going so great since their trickster God killed her and broke the world into a conceptual place out of time which has crashed into a literal land — careful listeners will note that all of this pejoratives are to do with, well, blood, death, and fire, you know — the bad stuff that went down in the place called the Weeping Peninsula and Caelid? Almost like it was a kind of response maybe to these events?
After staring at maps and tracking down all sorts of wild goose chases I’ll tell you one thing; it’s hard enough to find one or two things in an area which are similar let alone like fifty different associations, Gods, Demi-Gods, monsters, and so on. What I mean is that it’s not that the game is simplistic with its connections but it has to be reasonable with the amount of different concepts or else it collapses into pure abstraction, which it doesn’t, its literally half abstraction — the lands between conceptual and literal.
Anyway point is get it out of your head that you can figure out this incredibly complicated immersive chiral Gestalt narrative about reaching Nirvana with your trans girlfriend Buddha-Christ who is actually both Luigi and Mario as Peach by thinking like a literal medieval priest reading Naruto and complaining about translation differences — just be a gamer not a hacker, solve the puzzles actually in the game, that’s what you are supposed to do.
[Spin Reverse time]
Well, some of you might be saying — can’t we just tell what happened by rotating the map?
Kind of.
I tried so hard to just get the map to tell me what was true, it is very difficult to approach it this way — it’s backwards. The map essentially is able to avoid any kind of accidental reveal because literally every part of the map can combine with every other part at any size and any rotation and start forming relatively sensible images.
How do you know if you are wrong if you don’t even know what you’re looking for? — the map successfully, which is frankly astonishing, is capable of punishing players who do not know what they are looking for — for players just looking for the answers.
For instance let’s say you are one of the people who only watched up to this point and you are like ‘ Ah fooie I don’t need some kind of art lesson to learn the lore I get the picture I’ll go figure it out myself using the map thing’ — that’s fine but if you for instance think that its clever to just try to find the Elden Ring in the map by combining stuff that looks like it should be a picture you will get lost and quickly start to see Ganesh or Dogs or just very weird ink blot stuff. From experience those people could easily lose a few weeks of their lives staring at psychedelic elephant imagery like they are literally Dumbo.
But yes, you can spin the Azuela and see what has happened but you can also tell what will happen — because the future is the same as the past in the Lands Between — The Weeping Peninsula will be hit by tragedy and then start tilting at windmills. The imagery of an area matters as much as anything else in telling the story. And it’s important to see that things not only have to make sense conceptually and narratively but you have to visit the locations and see if it all checks out. This is a massive undertaking and what the map does is open the doors to a lot of new puzzles and narrative secrets in the game, that’s fine, happy to help, but I want to stress that the map is only one element of the game, getting lost in any one element like this guy with this item descriptions isn’t super helpful or interesting or fun.
What I’ve shown you is basically beginners Elden Ring narrative puzzle-solving, the real-stuff is when you start rotating the map along Godrick’s Tower while slowly increasing its size so you can figure out how the fabric of the universe works and also start being able to read the Matrix of Elden Ring symbolism properly. Like I don’t even need to think about it when I see a Grafted Scion I see a giant eye.
Anyway recall that inverting the map and superimposing it over itself can reveal a splitting of two interlocked hands — and that you can reveal history by rotating — take these two concepts together –
The interlocked hands overlap the isolated Divine tower with itself, this location is related to the maps conceptual image — if you then set this location, such as the isolated Divine Tower, as centre of rotation you can see history play out from the perspective of whatever the Divine Tower represents — watch;
Interesting right, two different times at the same time — that tracks with what the Divine Tower is, two as one. Two time-lines that are the same but overlap each other-
A world births itself again and grows over itself — a mother loses her child before birth and a child loses his mother during birth — They reflect on each other, one in the blood and the other in the water — one is conceptual, the other is bodily.
They look for each other everywhere — the boy doesn’t see his mother in the blood and the mother doesn’t see the boy in the reflection of her own tears –
Miquella is the boy; he was stolen by Mogh, Lord of Blood. Miquella is a miscarriage. He exists only in the minds of the people of the Lands Between as the Greater Will — the only one who would bring hope for a new tree of life.
The irony is, of course, that the people trap and jail the God they think they are worshipping.
Miquella, however, is not just this concept, he is a living character in the world that does certain things in order to help his mom out, so to speak… Miquella becoming Melania’s pregnancy and becoming God or being stolen and causing the lamentation-corruption world we are in isn’t desirable by anyone but it is the cycle of the Lands Between unless the Tarnished hero does something about it. Miquella is also tied with being the more charismatic half of the two — he’s not the Hewg of the duo, for certain.
“So Master Hewg won’t listen to you, either. You have my thanks, regardless.I’ll try and talk him round next time. I know he was given this great entreaty; to craft a weapon which could slay a god. Though I can’t help but think of it as a curse. A fearsome curse, put on him by Queen Marika. And if that’s the case, I’m not sure there’s anything we can do”
How does he help his mom out though? You ask curiously, but maybe a bit too soonly; well he literally aborts himself if you choose to not murder Milicent — I am speculating that he is only pretending to go mad as Gowry — the only other option is that he simply goes mad. Miquella is tied up with Roderika and Marika in characteristics — they are spirit tuners -
“I feel like I’m really coming to grips with spirit tuning of late. I can understand their yearnings, what they become drawn to… Master Hewg said it himself, actually, that I’m no mere prentice any longer Once again, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. Roderika the certified spirit tuner”.
Now the cycle starts to form before us — not just out of a collection of various references to myth, games, film, books but out of the various combinations of game elements we’ve considered so far –
Two faces a separation; they separate again and again, away from one another — like a cell dividing. It’s the origin of life.
They design and anticipate the other through reflection, becoming-like the other, like how an orchid begins to appear attractive to male wasps by mimicking the female wasps.
Sometimes they only utilize their relationship to the other to discover weaknesses to exploit — but in doing so they make the other stronger and more resistant.
However, if they were able to perfectly mirror each other — to recognize destiny in the other — the white and the blue could become one again — but only so that it could return to its place in the sky — however Ranni — and frankly the idea comes across in either translation unless you really think her ending is about bringing about a new Order which controls everyone — it absolutely is not — chooses to affirm difference and an evolution of the pathos of distance into the individual instead of the hierarchy of violence, blame and guilt we see in the world.
I don’t say this lightly — the confusion about her ending is unfortunate in both directions — it is not the extreme mistranslation that people think it is, but it is a misunderstanding to be sure.
There was a controversy where people realized that the Japanese translation pointed to a different take on the ending — Ranni, in the Japanese ending, says that she is abandoning the Order far away and holding off the chill night.
“Have the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch… All become impossibilities”
Has been a problematic sentence for many players — unfortunately the idea that the Japanese translation invalidates this sentence has led to avoidance of dealing with what this sentence implies — this entire controversy implies something a fair bit worse as well — laziness on Fromsoft’s part when it comes to their most important ending cut-scene, the one which affirms the meaning of their work the most fully — a work which is engaged on every level with the notion of translation — especially between the East and West — going as far as to hire a famous American author to work with them on the game –
Given the precision in the rest of this game I am doubtful that this ‘mistranslation’ was a ‘mistake’ — it certainly could be that the Japanese dialogue has a different meaning to the English one — but, and this is important, given how the game uses the notion of combining reflections with each other to form a narrative I think the most likely reason that the ending’s meaning is so tangibly different is because both translations are meant to convey an important point — the English one is conceptual whereas the Japanese one is more literal — more engaged with the plot.
This is unlikely to be the case for the entire game, although it could be, but it’s clearly the case here.
People should note, and have noted, that the Japanese ending with Ranni is unusual in how clear it is — it isn’t obscure like most dialogue in the game seems to be.
All of this to say that;
“Have the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch… All become impossibilities”
Is probably not a mistranslation, it’s intentional. Apart from what I just said — why does this make the most sense? Because certainty of sight, emotion, faith and touch is not the same as sight, emotion faith and touch — certainty of it is what Ranni is avoiding — and this cannot be understated — this is the entire point — if there is any in a game like Elden Ring –
Sir Gideon, our Lore Analysis File digging reference mentioning, clown desires the certainty of knowing what will happen and why -
The Nox, the Eternal Cities, desired to make their desire — to change the course of fate — happen — they craved the certainty –
The Frenzied Flame cultists, Hyetta, desire the certainty of sight IN BLINDNESS.
With that in mind this is the supposed ‘true’ translation (the objective truth, of course, being dutifully accepted by many people who just played a game about living in a post-truth world which must overcome the need for good and evil)
“If it was not possible to clearly see, feel, believe in, or touch the order… That would be better.”
This is, frankly, a lot less of an interesting thing for Ranni to say — cool, I guess she really owned the Order by hiding it from everyone else? Ranni, in both translations, is basically saying she’s going to own her own thing — given the pretty Nietzchean concepts we see in the game — even the Zarathursta references potentially — what she is doing is softly speaking that she’s becoming an individual — and given that she has the object of power — The Elden Ring — it means that, consequently, this will be true for the Lordless beings of the land.
When Zarathustra had left the ugliest man, he was chilled and felt lonesome: for much coldness and lonesomeness came over his spirit, so that even his limbs became colder thereby. When, however, he wandered on and on, uphill and down, at times past green meadows, though also sometimes over wild stony couches where formerly perhaps an impatient brook had made its bed, then he turned all at once warmer and heartier again.
“What hath happened unto me?” he asked himself, “something warm and living quickeneth me; it must be in the neighbourhood. Already am I less alone; unconscious companions and brethren rove around me; their warm breath toucheth my soul.”
…
The people of the land, Boc and Zoraya, think of themselves as ugly and it makes them ugly. Ranni, notes breath, she also is surrounded by unconscious companions.
All of this to say that a lot of the symbolism surrounding Ranni plunges into a kind of digestibility if we clip her wings and say that all she wants is the end of the Order and not the end of certainties. To affirm destiny, which she is, she must affirm difference and potential against sameness and certainty.
It’s probably more fruitful for the community of lore-fanatics to read Elden Ring through Thus Spake Zarathursta then it is to look for where Mario is and where Luigi is and to constantly and incessantly burn every attempt at opening the video game up as an artistic medium which is not reduced down to an arborescent need for representationalism or, to put it in gamer speak, the need for a ‘proper translation’ or ‘Boc’s entire backstory’ — this, to be frank, is the dark side of the growth of more nerds or otaku’s than ever anticipated -
THE THREE EVIL THINGS chapter in TSZ is full to the brim with Elden Ring imagery, for instance, shadows, dogs, slanted trees, the ocean, and more — additionally it is useful to look into something like ‘the concept of two eagles flying as one’ and what it might mean — for instance in heraldry and vexillology, the double-headed eagle (or double-eagle) is a charge associated with the concept of Empire. If you can recall far back in my series that the game uses eagles to provide direction for the map puzzles — two eagles are tied to prophecy but three eagles exist in the game as well, likely where the meaning of the nearby area is connected with the threeness concept in the game — a three-headed eagle is a heraldic bird as well but one which is connected to slightly more obscure people –
Ah, so what, at this point I’ve been tricked by you — you don’t know any secrets, not really, you don’t even see the clear mistranslation — you don’t even notice any of the references to all the games I like — for anyone who thinks this who has stuck around this long — kudos — but, like most of my analysis, a three-headed eagle as being connected to the three-fingers, threeness in general, is actually the most significant reveal allocated to me as a map-enjoyer.
This is because Reinmar von Zweter’s coat of arms was a three-headed eagle, according to Wikipedia;
Reinmar von Zweter (also spelled Reymar von Zwetel, Reymar von Zweten, Römer von Zwickau, Ehrenbote,[1] born around 1200 in Zeutern, today known as Ubstadt-Weiher, Germany; died after 1248) was a Middle High German poet of Spruchdichtung. The iconography in the Manesse Codex suggests that he may have been blind, since he is the only person represented in the manuscript with closed eyes and other people writing. The caption, not shown here, of that miniature refers to him as “Herr” (then spelled “Her”) Reinmar, implying that he was a knight and that he became blind (if he was blind) in adulthood.
What is Spruchdichtung? It’s a genre of German Sung Verse.
The Spruch treated predominantly of rational, didactic and pragmatic issues, including, for example, socio-political commentary, topics related to moral or religious teaching and philosophy, practical wisdom, biographical material, praise of patrons, begging and much else besides
Is Elden Ring itself a poem of the same style? Perhaps but this reference, and it is a reference, points to an era in German medieval culture where;
The polyphonic discovery of the theme of love as erotic love between man and woman not only influenced the relationship between the sexes. It also changed the self-image of the nobility and the manners within courtly society.
This discovery is captured, apparently, in these texts — now what does this mean? If you agree with me here that there is something to the Codex Manesse (the collection of written works alongside images which capture attributes of the poets work) which relates to Elden Ring — what is it?
There is something interesting about the fact that afaik there is no English or Japanese translation — so, in a similar way to the challenges invoked between Japanese and other translations — there is somewhat of a point here — already. At this point my esteem for Fromsoft’s masterpiece, my allowances for them to have a Kubrick-esque hold over details most consider accidental becomes a bit strained — did they really have time to investigate Medievel German texts?
But I’m not sure; I’ll leave that as an open question. What isn’t an open question is that the images in the Codex Manesse relate to Elden Ring. See you in part 3.
PART 3 The Mystery of Elden Ring Solved: Grafting History
Elden Ring grafts the history of video games with actual history (Mario land, Evangelion) — and we’ll see later the history of anime and film — it should be obvious but as one person it’s unlikely I’ll spot every reference but I think I’ve found most of them.
Anyway recall where I left you off last time — the Codex Manesse -
Through Reinmar Von Zweter’s connection to the three-headed eagle, the three fingers, to blindness, and also to the yellow color of the image a stronger association is made with yellowness and Germany — meaning, Godwyn the golden holding the place of Hitler in the night of long knives may make some poetic sense — far more than what many would allow in a ‘mere game’ –
Consider it like this, his spirit was killed but not his body — this’ll sound incredibly extreme — like using the word exterminate and whore in a game devoid of much sexuality or active engagement with genocide — but Nazi Germany lost it’s spirit when it lost the Nazis — Japan lost its spirit when it lost its authoritarian government — but the body, the people under the fascist regime, remained — so when Miquella says his task is to give Godwyn a spirit he is saying he wants to give them something like a guiding force –
I don’t know enough history at this point to talk with confidence but it’s notable that the Codex Manesse points to the Holy Roman Emperor — the yellow color and double headed bird stands out.
The first entry of the Codex is The Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich VI whose death led to, well, a game of thrones type situation — shocker. The German throne dispute is probably Elden Ring’s War of the Roses.
Why? Well it includes a game to do with trying to game the system of royal inheritance and their relationship with the pope — an emperor is engaged with a power struggle with a pope — the emperor, Otto, is using his new power to transfer estates belonging to the papacy and the pope has to find ways to stop this — the pope does what is called an ‘imperial ban’ on Otto — and Otto loses his power — the pope loses popularity.
Anyway, not to get lost in the sauce there — I think there are plenty more overlapping historical references which coagulate into the story but I do wonder if the german throne dispute is a key reference.
Hartmann von Aue
His other two narrative poems are Gregorius, also an adaptation of a French epic, and Der arme Heinrich, which tells the story of a leper cured by a young girl who is willing to sacrifice her life for him. The source of this tale evidently came from the lore of the noble family whom Hartmann served. Gregorius, Der arme Heinrich and Hartmann’s lyrics, which are all fervidly religious in tone, imply a tendency towards asceticism, but, on the whole, Hartmann’s striving seems rather to have been to reconcile the extremes of life; to establish a middle way of human conduct between the worldly pursuits of knighthood and the ascetic ideals of medieval religion.
One thing I noticed early on in my analysis was that while yes Malenia being like Mjolnir and connecting the story of Thor losing his hammer with Malenia and Miquella was that this story lacked much — emotional content — it also leaves open the question of what Malenia’s relationship with the swordsman was — well, look no further than the Codex, possibly.
HAWK CREST WOODEN SHIELD
A tall, medium-sized wooden shield. Light for its size,
and easy to handle.
Adorned with a long-forgotten crest of Stormveil,
ancient in design.
Another cute part of the Codex, which is probably just a part of history in general is that sometimes someone is depicted who is actually someone else, or two different people are actually just one person. Elden Ring’s seemingly strange mixed character narrative is just a facet of history — although as a work of art is it not comparable with something like The Waves by Virginia Wolf?
Also the Codex opens another interesting connection — The Tannhauser — which is most famously associated with the Wagnerian opera of the same name — the plot is as follows;
Act 1 In the early 13th century, in Thuringen, Germany, Tannhauser who is a knight and minstrel spends time with Venus who is the Goddess of lust. But, Tannhauser is tired of the life with Venus. He leaves the forbidden place, Venusberg. Tannhauser goes back to reality, which is a place near the castle of Wartburg. Some friends of Tannhauser asked him where he had been until then. Tannhauser refuses to answer their questions, and he attempts to leave. Then, one of his friends, Wolfram, reminds him that Elisabeth, who was Tannhauser’s lover, has been waiting for him for a long time.
Act 2 In Wartburg castle, Landgrave Hermann holds a song contest, and declares that the winner will be awarded the prize by his daughter, Elisabeth. Among a lot of nobles and knights, Hermann gives challengers the subject of their song. It is “Essence of Love.” Wolfram sings that Essence of Love is Platonic. But, Tannhauser sings that it is the pleasures of lust, and he praises Venus. The audience knows that Tannhauser visited Venus in the forbidden place, Venusberg. All people insist he be banished. However, Elisabeth appeals to them to stop. She asserts that she is the most deeply hurt. Landgrave Hermann orders Tannhauser to visit the Pope in order to pay for what he has done.
Act 3 Several months later, Elisabeth doesn’t find Tannhauser among pilgrims from Rome. So, she decides to go to heaven. Then, Tannhauser comes back from Rome, and he tells his friend, Wolfram, that Tannhauser’s penitence was refused. Tannhauser attempts to visit Venus again. Wolfram stops him. Then, the coffin, in which Elisabeth is laid, is carried passed them. Tannhauser takes his last breath, because he is shocked to see her. But, his soul is saved. That is to say, Elisabeth’s death brings about his salvation.
So, um, yeah, the cinematic to Elden Ring is actually referencing Blade Runner –
Like The Fire Giant being multiple myths and video game references bundled into one — being a grafted creation himself — then this applies to the narrative too — no Harmann von Aue’s story about the leper being saved by the girl is not the secret truth of Malenia’s story, but it is likely a part of the grafting.
Tannhauser and the Codex must be intersecting with other mythologies, in fact they are, there are clearly Hawaiian, Arabic, Greek and Japanese mythologies spread out through the land.
Ancient Greek myth ties in well with the nine-irises — a nine-headed dragon called a HYDRA LERNAIA — sounds a bit like Learnia –
This might seem a bit ridiculous, the amount of references in the game I mean, but it’s not when you consider the two world creators style. I don’t think I need to say more.
The Greeks relation to the Hydra is interesting, especially if we consider how Elden Ring relates the one to the two to the three to the nine to the many — from Wikipedia;
The oldest extant Hydra narrative appears in Hesiod’s Theogony, while the oldest images of the monster are found on a pair of bronze fibulae dating to c. 700 BC. In both these sources, the main motifs of the Hydra myth are already present: a multi-headed serpent that is slain by Heracles and Iolaus. While these fibulae portray a six-headed Hydra, its number of heads was first fixed in writing by Alcaeus (c. 600 BC), who gave it nine heads. Simonides, writing a century later, increased the number to fifty, while Euripides, Virgil, and others did not give an exact figure. Heraclitus the Paradoxographer rationalized the myth by suggesting that the Hydra would have been a single-headed snake accompanied by its offspring.[7]
Hesiod’s Theogony is the War of the Roses of Elden Ring — yes it has multiple blank-is-the-war-of-the-roses in it — accept it. The Theogony is the story of the succession myth of the God’s — the in-game characters track well with the Theogony — Nyx for instance — of course referenced by the Nox — is the mother of the following God’s;
Meanwhile, Nyx (Night) alone produced children: Moros (Doom), Ker (Destiny), Thanatos (Death), Hypnos (Sleep), Oneiroi (Dreams), Momus (Blame), Oizys (Pain), Hesperides (Daughters of Night), Moirai (Fates),[35] Keres (Destinies), Nemesis (Retribution), Apate (Deceit), Philotes (Love), Geras (Old Age), and Eris (Discord).[36]
Similarly to the Codex it sounds far-fetched until you look at the detail it unravels — Momus, the God of Blame, must be important to my analysis of Elden Ring given that the central problem revolves around guilt and blame — Momus is depicted as someone who is mocking — like Shabriri, a kind of clown.
The Theogony, after listing the offspring of the Titan Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene, as Atlas, Menoitios, Prometheus, and Epimetheus, and telling briefly what happened to each, tells the story of Prometheus.[98] When the gods and men met at Mekone to decide how sacrifices should be distributed, Prometheus sought to trick Zeus. Slaughtering an ox, he took the valuable fat and meat, and covered it with the ox’s stomach. Prometheus then took the bones and hid them with a thin glistening layer of fat. Prometheus asked Zeus’ opinion on which offering pile he found more desirable, hoping to trick the god into selecting the less desirable portion. Though Zeus saw through the trick, he chose the fat covered bones, and so it was established that ever after men would burn the bones as sacrifice to the gods, keeping the choice meat and fat for themselves. But in punishment for this trick, an angry Zeus decided to deny mankind the use of fire. But Prometheus stole fire inside a fennel stalk, and gave it to humanity. Zeus then ordered the creation of the first woman Pandora as a new punishment for mankind. And Prometheus was chained to a cliff, where an eagle fed on his ever-regenerating liver every day, until eventually Zeus’ son Heracles came to free him.
Here a few things should stand out — one that well this aligns with Elden Ring’s story the best of any –
Pandora is Marika and Rodricka and Hephaestus, a disabled Blacksmith is Radagon, -
The Pandora myth first appeared in the Theogony
After humans received the stolen gift of fire from Prometheus, an angry Zeus decides to give humanity a punishing gift to compensate for the boon they had been given. He commands Hephaestus to mold from earth the first woman, a “beautiful evil” whose descendants would torment the human race. After Hephaestus does so, Athena dresses her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands and an ornate crown of silver.
When she first appears before gods and mortals, “wonder seized them” as they looked upon her. But she was “sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.” Hesiod elaborates (590–93): For from her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no help meets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.
He goes on to write some sexist cruel non-sense about how everything bad was all Pandora’s fault.
But notice a Silvery gown — sheer guile — pejoratives of evilness thrown against her — tribes of women — an association with chaos and paradox — blamed for everything — yep, sounds like Marika.
Again, sorry for repeating myself, but just because this is one of the myths grafted into the game does not mean it is the ‘secret truth’ — for instance Elden Ring has moreto Marika and her silver-association because silver is also something which reflects and causes reflection. Through Iji and the Mimic’s Veil, as well as her ability to reflect the curse she placed on the giant, Marka is a mirror — and the mirror is the only thing the two-fingers cannot stand — like Boc and Zoraya, Sellen and many others — they have a hard time dealing with their own ugliness. But the two-fingers, well, it cannot even deal with it at all.
NOX MIRRORHELM
Helm fashioned from a crystal looking-glass. One among the Eternal City’s ritual implements. Easily broken and weak against striking attacks. Worn by those committed to high treason, it wards off the intervention of the Greater Will and its vassal Fingers.
Now the irony of ironies is that the actual mistranslation which causes most people to miss this clear reference is not the fault of Elden Ring — it is not Ranni’s ending speech that people get wrong — actually — it’s our fault — Pandora’s Box is a medieval mistranslation — its Pandora’s JAR. Which, you know, is everywhere in Elden Ring.
And in a way this is itself the most intentional of all gestures on Fromsoft’s part — a kind of joke really — if people are interested in unpacking their narratives and are so concerned with translation (as lore fanatics have been since Dark Souls) then they should probably look into history itself rather than in cliché — this is true as well for Thor’s hammer Mjolnir in the game — Godrick’s weapon and Iji’s anvil as well as Malenia and Miquella’s plot easily connect back to Thor but because of the Marvel Thor have we perhaps lost something ? An actual referent ?
Now, apart from the game being a reflection itself in many ways this is perhaps the only reference which I am confident gives Marika a lot more significance — not just in the game — but as a narrative which cycles back in on itself as a game instead of a simple exposition of the worlds origin — from Wikipedia on the Difficulties of interpretation of Pandora’s Jar;
M. L. West writes that the story of Pandora and her jar is from a pre-Hesiodic myth, and that this explains the confusion and problems with Hesiod’s version and its inconclusiveness.
He writes that in earlier myths, Pandora was married to Prometheus, and cites the ancient Hesiodic Catalogue of Women as preserving this older tradition, and that the jar may have at one point contained only good things for humanity.
Here is perhaps the origin of the idea that is developed on in Elden Ring — the role of women was transformed into a negative one in a distinct and traceable manner when it comes to Pandora.
He also writes that it may have been that Epimetheus and Pandora and their roles were transposed in the pre-Hesiodic myths, a “mythic inversion”.
The idea of an inversion of a myth — Elden Ring forms a narrative puzzle using the idea of chiral mythic inversions.
He remarks that there is a curious correlation between Pandora being made out of earth in Hesiod’s story, to what is in the Bibliotheca that Prometheus created man from water and earth.
I haven’t gone into detail about it all yet; it may deserve its own video but the result of a lot of my map experiments where I didn’t go into the game to confirm anything put a lot of emphasis on water, the ocean, and the earth, red clay, mixing with each other — with the water coming from a cave — that’s not a lot to go on but I thought I’d mention it. Pandora’s Jar is intersecting with many, many other origin myths — Elden Ring is a grafted creation.
Anyway continuing with the article…
Hesiod’s myth of Pandora’s jar, then, could be an amalgam of many variant early myths. The meaning of Pandora’s name, according to the myth provided in Works and Days, is “all-gifted”. However, according to others, Pandora more properly means “all-giving”. Certain vase paintings dated to the 5th century BC likewise indicate that the pre-Hesiodic myth of the goddess Pandora endured for centuries after the time of Hesiod.
William E. Phipps has pointed out, “Classics scholars suggest that Hesiod reversed the meaning of the name of an earth goddess called Pandora (all-giving)
Over time this “all-giving” goddess somehow devolved into an “all-gifted” mortal woman. A.H. Smith,[25] however, noted that in Hesiod’s account Athena and the Seasons brought wreaths of grass and spring flowers to Pandora, indicating that Hesiod was conscious of Pandora’s original “all-giving” function. For Harrison, therefore, Hesiod’s story provides “evidence of a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in Greek culture. As the life-bringing goddess Pandora is eclipsed, the death-bringing human Pandora arises.”
Thus, Harrison concludes “in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and diminished. She is no longer Earth-Born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus.”
Robert Graves, quoting Harrison, asserts of the Hesiodic episode that “Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention.” H.J. Rose wrote that the myth of Pandora is decidedly more illiberal than that of epic in that it makes Pandora the origin of all of Man’s woes with her being the exemplification of the bad wife.
The Hesiodic myth did not, however, completely obliterate the memory of the all-giving goddess Pandora. A scholium to line 971 of Aristophanes’ The Birds mentions a cult “to Pandora, the earth, because she bestows all things necessary for life”.[29] And in fifth-century Athens, Pandora made a prominent appearance in what, at first, appears an unexpected context, in a marble relief or bronze appliqués as a frieze along the base of the Athena Parthenos, the culminating experience on the Acropolis. Jeffrey M. Hurwit has interpreted her presence there as an “anti-Athena.” Both were motherless, and reinforced via opposite means the civic ideologies of patriarchy and the “highly gendered social and political realities of fifth-century Athens” — Athena by rising above her sex to defend it, and Pandora by embodying the need for it.
This goes some way to unpack Elden Ring’s two dichotomous and gendered forces as well as the notion of the ‘crucible’, the jars containing all of the organic material of the world and it also goes some way to forming an internal justification for the use of many, many, different and distant references — when Marika shattered she opened Pandora’s jar — this means that Shabriri is the anti-feminist par excellence — he see’s first of all that women are merely meant to be protected from themselves, he is a reflection of the Order’s thirst for power and patriarchy — make no mistake — the matriarchy is buried not just in Elden Ring but in real history as well as Pandora’s myth seems to indicate.
The irony of course is that Pandora, Malenia and Marika and their jar are gift-giving not gift-having — scarlet rot, the inability to give-gifts is something inflicted on the body of women — it is not their choice — it is men’s choice to condemn them to the end of pregnancies.
They see her as a curse even though it is her who he uses as a sacrifice to keep the fire going. The Hawk soldiers used bones to keep their fires going. The term ‘kindling maiden’ is known.
He has to see her this way or else it would be too hard to burn her — Ainsel river isn’t just an idea which complicates the narrative it is a form of commentary on genocide — The Nazi’s had and the American’s have and, I’m sure, The Japanese have a form of psychological distance from their respective genocides –
As an American, well mostly American, person, I have heard more Americans defend the use of nuclear weapons on Japan on the basis that it was Japan’s own fault — naming Japanese people ‘my own self’ prior to doing unspeakable horrors to them then I’m comfortable with.
So is this the ‘secret sauce’ of Elden Ring? I found the bomb? Not really — because Ranni complicates this quote un quote solution — Ranni is the God of distance — but her distance is one which escapes the cycle of revenge and the need for certainty and the avoidance of self-reflection — the point is to not be like the two-fingers — to be able to look into the mirror and live. Nietzsche picture.
COMPANION JAR
A talisman given by the jars to their friends. Raises potency of thrown jars. Though the jars are brought to life by human flesh and blood, they are all rather kindly folk. Perhaps they were made to be better than their innards.
The misogyny of Heisod has been argued to have influenced the misogyny of Jewish and Christian interpretations of scripture — there is a connection, however distant, of this moment — and moments like it — of making the sacred a sin — of turning women into evil-doers — and there is no doubt that the previous connections to the Holy Roman Empire and the German struggle for power (word choice intentional) is connected to Christianity and, ultimately, empire itself –
Pandora is the strongest connecting myth in Elden Ring, I suggest if you want to unpack more of the game you look into it — she is sometimes written as given the fire by Prometheous to animate her and he fall in-love with her — making Prometheous a Pygmalion type figure.
Prometheus moulds a clay statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom to whom he is devoted, and gives it life from a stolen sunbeam.
This initiates a debate among the gods whether a creation outside their own work is justified; (Like Mario and Ico?) his devotion is in the end rewarded with permission to marry his statue.
In this work, Pandora, the statue in question, plays only a passive role in the competition between Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus (signifying the active life), and between the gods and men.
There too the creator of a statue animates it with stolen fire, but then the plot is complicated when Jupiter also falls in love with this new creation but is prevented by Destiny from consummating it.
This is referenced in Selvius’ basement, with the puppets, it’s implied vaguely that he wanted to consummate his love for his Sellen puppet given that she is near bedsheets — but destiny stops him — Destiny is Ranni.
Having been fashioned from clay and given the quality of “naïve grace combined with feeling”, she is set to wander through an enchanted landscape.
It isn’t quite endless, but Elden Ring’s connecting myths feel infinite — for instance threeness has been connected to so many things but it straightforwardly is also a story about three giants — the two underground and the one above –
Norse mythology has a myth about three giants — called Norns — they are responsible for shaping human destinies — which is not, as I hope we all understand by now, a coincidence. The three giants in Elden Ring are also shaping human destinies.
The curse mark does not mean something on it’s own (ico, evergrace, SoTC, Godzilla), it is not a curse or a secret — the curse mark tells a story, let’s think of it like the map, — what if we try to find out how the overlapping maps can tell a story about Merika’s eye tattoo — ?
“A little while ago someone started lurking in the wing on the opposite side of the roundtable. And I can hear, from all the way over there… The howling and wailing of spirits in fear of a curse. I can ever hear the repulsive, twisted malison itself… A plethora of spirits in an unceasing cacophony… I can’t even imagine. How much suffering, inflicted to who knows how many souls… You should keep your distance, I know you’re strong, but please.”
Her tattoo is the closed eye to the Erdtree’s open eye — underneath it is the one who spews expanding death blight — it kills the host but out of it life spontaneously arrives. It is self-sacrifice — it is the process of life. The map’s conceptual puzzles open the gates up to understanding the various symbols and concepts in the game.
I’ve not talked much about the tree but the tree is important now — it’s more than a reference to Evergrace or A Song of Ice and Fire –
Norse mythology has something called a Guardian Tree (Vörðr) — From Wikipedia:
Under the influence of Christianity, the belief in wardens changed. Some view the spirit as being more akin to the Christian concept of a good and a bad conscience, while others view them as guardian angels.
Now it may seem like this is GRRM’s input, no, many internet geniuses like to assume that Japanese game makers cannot be this invested in making a game about Western culture — I ask you, fellow nerds, to cut that non-sense out, okay? Because Evergrace, a very old Fromsoft game, is essentially a game about the Guardian Tree and the influence of Christianity on folk-religions. Back to the article;
The respect for the tree was so great that the family housing it could adopt a surname related to it, such as Linnæus, Lindelius and Almén. It was often believed that the wights (Swedish vättar) of the yard lived under the roots of the warden tree, and to them, one sacrificed treats to be freed from disease or bad luck. The Guardian trees were said to have been taken from sacred groves as saplings by pre Christian Germanic peoples, though today can be planted from anywhere.
I think the naming convention in Elden Ring is possibly to do with this — I think that removing the generic element from the names, or splitting them apart, is useful for interpreting their characteristics. But the removed generic element — such as ‘me’ from Melina or ‘Rod’ from Erika is probably important — if my approach to the names is correct at all.
My first thought is that the names are similar to the map — you can combine them to draw out potential meaning — for instance Enia in the game can be modified, or grafted, with Rod — Rodenia which sounds like Rodinia — meaning motherland or birthplace was a super contitent — I mention this because The Lands Between is effectively like a supercontinent as well and the story being about all becoming one thing matches this — Ranni, then, is the force of separation which forms distinct continents — this works well with Elden Ring’s globe and history spanning references — she is what separates cultures from each other — giving us the ability to appreciate others without becoming them.
Let’s combine Enia with Lina’s leftover generic name ‘Me’ — Menia — this mythological figure works with the game as well, Menia learns alchemy and turns base metals into gold. The entire legend is used to explain how the city of Taormina (Tauromenia) got its name — more importantly is the fact that Menia according to Wikipedia is probably a Germanic name, signifying collar, ring or necklace, and by extension treasure,
Which makes Elden Ring a truly God tier grafted pun — it means the old eternal return, moon, sun, as much as it means the old mirror but now it takes on a beautiful meaning bundled up with the central character, Melina or I prefer to say Erika — is she a collar or a necklace? A prison or a treasure?
She is a ring, and you, are a finger.
Hence why the Finger Readers are the way they are — they look like shrivelled up women because, like we see with Morgott or the ‘trolls’ once you lose your power — your grace — your shrivel up — The Finger Readers are old spirit tuners — like Erika.
This isn’t really that far-fetched, consider that the ‘true name’ of someone has been shown to be an extension of their ‘fake name’ — Rya is actually Zoraya. Zo is added to Rya.
Additionally the name combinations do not form certainties — just like most of the games puzzles. Zoraya is not a solution to a puzzle — it is a disguised one — if we follow the logic of Menia giving us a God which is related to the character we are looking into, in that case Enia and Melina being the same person then Zoraya should actually be Zorya.
Zorya, unlike Zoraya, is a real God from mythology just like Menia and she is related to Elden Ring’s story which makes this a better fit.
Menia together with Zorya start to paint a picture that clearly uncovers parts of Elden Ring’s grafting.
From wikipedia;
Zorya (lit. “Dawn”; also many variants: Zarya, Zara, Zaranitsa, Zoryushka, etc.) is a figure in Slavic folklore, a feminine personification of dawn, possibly goddess. Depending on tradition, she may appear as a singular entity, often called “The Red Maiden”, or two or three sisters at once.
So this is important because two-or-three is the question at the heart of the puzzle about who Melina is — Zoraya — if you remember way back in this series maps very well onto Melina in terms of her characteristics and drives as well as challenges — as does Milicient and as we see with Menia, Enia as well.
She lives in the Palace of the Sun, opens the gate for him in the morning so that he can set off on a journey through the sky, guards his white horses,[a] she is also described as a virgin.[3] In the Eastern Slavic tradition of zagovory she represents the supreme power that a practitioner appeals to.
The Erdtree is not just the Guardian Tree, it is the Palace of the Sun as well — the white horses — a white lion — zagovory brings to mind spirit tuning and blacksmithing — Hewg and Rodericka are practitioners.
But the main question behind two-or-three is that Melina is Marika and Radagon but is she also Ranni? This is the question asked by Ranni’s ending cutscene, essentially.
Let’s dig further into Zorya;
1. She appears in the company of St. George and St. Nicholas (interpreted as divine twins)[7]
2. Red, gold, yellow, rose colors[3][8]
3. She lives overseas, on the island of Buyan[9][3]
4. Opens the door to the Sun[1][3]
5. She owned a golden boat and a silver oar
Well my ‘relevant to Elden Ring alarm’ is sounding a lot, like a lot a lot — the fact that ‘Elden Ring Zorya’ in Google turns up nothing is really quite sad, I could somewhat understand Pandora being missed because of its overloaded usage in pop culture but this being missed is strange to me.
Anyway, Pandora and Zorya are the two sisters. Who is the third?
Well Zorya’s page has a striking detail — while she has no direct connection to h₂éwsōs she shares many of hewsos’ characteristics — what stands out here is the ‘hew’ part of that name — Hewg.
Well, get this, Hewsos — being the God of the Dawn essentially — from Wikipedia;
A characteristic generally given to the dawn h₂éwsōs is her ‘brilliance’ and she is generally described as a ‘bringer of light’
(Quote brilliance from Elden Ring trailer)
h₂éwsōs is usually associated with the natural colours of the dawn: gold, saffron-yellow, red, or crimson. The Dawn is ‘gold-coloured’ (híraṇya-varṇā) in the Rigveda, ‘the golden-yellow one’ (flāua) in Ovid’s Amores, and ‘gold-throned’ (khrysóthronos; χρυσόθρονος) in a Homeric formula.[23] In Latvian folk songs, Saulė and her daughter(s) are dressed of shawls woven with gold thread, and Saulė wears shoes of gold, which parallels Sappho describing Ēṓs as ‘golden-sandalled’ (khrysopédillos; χρυσοπέδιλλος).[23]
Naturally what this means is that, no, Elden Ring is not doing anything new by connecting up all these myths back into Pandora’s box — all of these myths are already tangled up together. Different interpretations changed history — interpretation is Elden Ring’s core.
Hewsos was Proto-Indo-European’s most revered deity — that which gave the world it’s greatest brilliance — the dawn, it forgets itself and eternally returns, like Hewg.
Here is the poetic socio-political rhizome of Elden Ring — variations in its references are not tree like — a dichotomic depiction doesn’t work when numerous interdependent relations of varying strength are involved –
The story being told by Elden Ring then is one only capable of being made by serious history nerds — and I’ll leave that up to you if Fromsoft and GRRM qualify for that title. It is suggestive of an idea which is becoming more and more familiar — we should seek resonances instead of differences — essentially the problem for Elden Ring interpretation is the blockages people put up around this very idea — so many people think that the game means either nothing or it has some hidden singular truth.
But mainly Elden Ring’s narrative is not distangled from its own historical context as an aged mirror of the dawn — it affirms this — the narrative cannot be unpacked without work. The ‘crucible’ is the Indo-European collection which worshipped Hewsos and split into the various different myth-making groups which influenced the game — these myth-maker groups still exist today — they make different games, films and books from each other.
I’m one person so it’s time to quote some wikipedia — I’ll try to abridge it as best I can;
Although Zorya is etymologically unrelated to the Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn *H₂éwsōs, she shares most of her characteristics. She is often depicted as the sister of the Sun, the Moon, and Zvezda, the Morning Star with which she is sometimes identified.[1] She lives in the Palace of the Sun, opens the gate for him in the morning so that he can set off on a journey through the sky, guards his white horses,[a] she is also described as a virgin.[3] In the Eastern Slavic tradition of zagovory she represents the supreme power that a practitioner appeals to.
h₂éwsōs is frequently described as dancing: Uṣas throws on embroidered garments ‘like a dancer’ (nṛtūr iva),
(Show many different Dancers in Elden Ring)
The spread hand as the image of the sun’s rays in the morning may also be of Proto-Indo-European origin.[61]
(Show hand imagery)
The Homeric expressions ‘rose-armed’ (rhodópēkhus; ῥοδόπηχυς) and ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’ (rhododáktylos Ēṓs; ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς), as well as Bacchylides’ formula ‘gold-armed’ (khrysopakhús; χρυσοπαχύς), can be semantically compared with the Vedic formulas ‘golden-handed’ (híraṇyapāṇi-; हिरण्यपाणि) and ‘broad-handed’ (pṛthúpāṇi-; पृथुपाणि).[61]
(Malenia, Elephants in the map)
They are also similar with Latvian poetic songs where the Sun-god’s fingers are said to be ‘covered with golden rings’.
(Finger imagery, Melina)
In Indo-European myths, h₂éwsōs is frequently depicted as a reluctant bringer of light for which she is punished.
(Melina, jailed, burning)
This theme is widespread in the attested traditions: Ēṓs and Aurōra are sometimes unwilling to leave her bed, Uṣas is punished by Indra for attempting to forestall the day, and Auseklis did not always rise in the morning, as she was said to be locked up in a golden chamber or in Germany sewing velvet skirts.
(Indra the Fire Giant, Balor, Melina’s jail, Boc)
The Divine Twins are often said to rescue the Dawn from a watery peril, a theme that emerged from their role as the solar steeds
(Drowning map, undead tied to water, Ainsel river, crystals, Azula)
Back to Zorya for a moment — she has a twin — there are two Zorya’s — Zorya Utrennyaya (Morning Zorya, from útro “morning”) as the goddess of dawn, and Zorya Vechernyaya (Evening Aurora, from véčer “evening”) as the goddess of dusk. Each was to stand on a different side of the golden throne of the Sun. The Morning Zorya opened the gate of the heavenly palace when the Sun set out in the morning, and the Evening Zorya closed the gate when the Sun returned to his abode for the night — yep, so, the whole Melina is the Gloam-eyed queen thing, which I haven’t looked into much, is probably just one of the many connections the game forms with Indo-European mythology.
There are in the sky three little sisters, three little Zorya: she of the Evening, she of Midnight, and she of Morning. Their duty is to guard a dog which is tied by an iron chain to the constellation of the Little Bear. When the chain breaks it will be the end of the world.
These are the three sisters in the game, Ranni — whose name I have not yet uncovered — is of Midnight, Lina is of Evening and Erika is of the morning.
Croatian historian Natko Nodilo noted in his study The Ancient Faith of the Serbs and the Croats that the ancient Slavs saw Zora (aka Zorya) as a “shining maiden”, and Russian riddles described her as a maiden that lived in the sky.
Shining-Maiden — that’s Melina — which at this point is starting to sound crass really — oh look this ancient living world of culture is just like this video game character I like — I get it, but still, this is the ride we signed up for. Anyway this next part of the article is important;
Zarya was also invoked as protectress and to dispel nightmares and sleeplessness: Заря, In another incantation, Zarya-Zarnitsa is invoked along with a “morning Irina” and a “Midday Daria” to dispel a child’s sadness and take it away “beyond the blue ocean”
Beyond the blue ocean — the ocean which separates Farum Azula from Learnia — the sadness of what happened in Azula was sent away. To do what? To dispel a child’s sadness — their tears — Irina and her loss and suffering was unbearable. The violence and blood shed lead the people of Learnia to decide to reverse time, to send time — which is more like destiny — beyond the blue ocean.
This is a game about forgotten female deities –
https://web.archive.org/web/20120411041700/http://kirsoft.com.ru/freedom/KSNews_673.htm
Anyway, that’s just speculation — right, Sir Gideon the All-Knowing?
The ‘Triple deity’ thing is not a coincidence, I’m sure plenty viewers have screamed by now — where is the Japanese folklore in a game primarily made by Japanese people?
It’s there but in the same way that Norns and Zorya are — in equal part to other cultures view of the three.
Amaterasu is considered to be one of the “Three Precious Children” (三貴子, mihashira no uzu no miko / sankishi), the three most important offspring of the creator god Izanagi.
Izanagi — hm — make no mistake a lot of the names in Elden Ring sound distinctively European but Iji and Ranni do not — perhaps Izanagi is a key? He is a Divine Twin which is notable. Let’s focus a bit more on Amaterasu;
From Amaterasu’s wiki;
There was a legend circulating among the Ise Priests that essentially described an encounter of Amaterasu sleeping with the Saiō every night in the form of a snake or lizard, evidenced by fallen scales in the priestess’ bed.[107] This was recorded by a medieval monk in his diary, which stated that “in ancient times Amaterasu was regarded as a snake deity or as a sun deity.”[114] In the Ise kanjō, the god’s snake form is considered an embodiment of the “three poisons”, namely greed, anger, and ignorance.
One thing that stands out looking through all of this is threeness — there is a lot of it.
So the Japanese pathway very quickly begins to attach itself to the problem facing the characters in the lands between, apart from their guilt and self-hatred, they are associated with poison — recall the little guys hurting us with poison in the miniature vignette of the entire journey after Lenne’s rise. These little guys are greedy, angry and ignorant — the triple threat which allows things to get bad in the first place in the Lands Between.
Let’s continue on with this article — note that — I think the Japanese stem — so to speak- is leading us to the metaphysical aspects of Elden Ring –
In general, some of these Amaterasu–dragon associations have been in reference to Japanese plays. One example has been within the Chikubushima tradition in which the dragon goddess Benzaiten was the emanation of Amaterasu.[116] Following that, in the Japanese epic, Taiheki, one of the characters, Nitta Yoshisada (新田義貞), made comparisons with Amaterasu and a dragon with the quote: “I have heard that the Sun Goddess of Ise … conceals her true being in the august image of Vairocana, and that she has appeared in this world in the guise of a dragon god of the blue ocean.”[
A dragon god of the blue ocean — Farum Azula — blue — the ocean eye which contains many dragons.
I was digging around Japanese folklore Wikipedia pages (yeah I’m a bit attached to Wikipedia) and found this from the page Kotoamatsukami;
Though the Zōkasanshin (three deity of creation) are thought to be genderless, another theory stated Kamimusuhi was the woman and Takamimusubi the man, comparing them with water and fire or with yin and yang.
What jumped out to me here was Zoka — reminded me a bit of Zorya in terms of the threeness and the ‘Zo’ sound, anyway,
Ame-no-Uzume is the Japanese Hewsos — the Japanese Dawn Goddess. Here I think is an important piece of the puzzle — the cave as the origin story –
Amaterasu’s brother, the storm god Susano’o (Balor, The Fire Giant, the Chimeras), had vandalized her rice fields, threw a flayed horse at her loom, and brutally killed one of her maidens due to a quarrel between them.
In turn, Amaterasu became furious with him and retreated into the Heavenly Rock Cave, Amano-Iwato.
The world, without the illumination of the sun, became dark and the gods could not lure Amaterasu out of her hiding place. Uzume dancing to lure out Amaterasu. The clever Uzume overturned a tub near the cave entrance and began to dance on it, tearing off her clothing in front of the other deities. They considered this so comical that they laughed heartily at the sight.[4] This dance is said to have founded the Japanese ritual dance, Kagura.[5] Uzume had hung a bronze mirror and a beautiful jewel of polished jade. Amaterasu heard them, and peered out to see what the commotion was about. When she opened the cave, she saw the jewel and her glorious reflection in a mirror which Uzume had placed on a tree, and slowly came out from her clever hiding spot. At that moment, the god Ame-no-Tajikarawo-no-mikoto dashed forth and closed the cave behind her, refusing to budge so that she could no longer retreat. Another god tied a magic shimenawa across the entrance.[6] The deities Ame-no-Koyane-no-mikoto and Ame-no-Futodama-no-mikoto then asked Amaterasu to rejoin the divine. She agreed, and light was restored to the earth.
The one who closed the cave’s name means ‘heaven hand power’ — this is pointing to the closure of the Eternal Cities. The player character is probably someone like Ninigi-no-Mikoto — sent by Amaterasu to ‘pacify Japan’ — an interesting choice of words ‘pacify’ considering Miquella’s name. Amaterasu sends him alongside The Dawn, Melina, to sort things out.
He needs three items — a legendary mirror, a legendary sword and a legendary jewel.
Now in case you’re wondering why the spirit ashes, especially the Mimic tear, seem so necessary — this is it — that’s our use of the mirror. The legendary sword is the weapon Hewg empowers for us — but what is the jewel? I’ll speculate it’s the runes we are holding.
Well this is why I waited with discussing Japanese folklore — the mirror as the key which allows her to see herself — the dancer who lures out the frustrated matriarchal God, angry at the patriarchal God for his destruction and carelessness, — all of this is the jewel of Elden Ring’s myth grafting — the Elden Ring is a mirror above all else.
Maybe I stress this too often but as we go further into the cave so to speak I think it’s starting to make some sense how Fromsoft did this. The map, if you recall, as well as the world, connects back in on itself to tell its story — there is probably no part of the entire map which is meaningless in content apart from maybe the chalice-dungeon type zones although I’m unsure of that.
Well this is true for how they layered the mythology — if a myth connects with another they would ‘graft it’ so to speak onto their character or object. Because, as I hope your discovering, the myth’s which were hidden from us all by, let’s be blunt, authoritarian regimes are themselves already grafted creations — Fromsoft held a mirror up to it in the form of a game and I’ve never experienced anything like it before.
Now I can’t really cover everything but one last point, if I may, the German Dawn God which is apparently not well understood yet named Ēarendel — Morning Star — which in the game is said to be;
Ironic given its graceful name, this weapon often reeks of blood.
From Wikipedia:
The term ēarendel (≈ eorendel, earendil) appears only seven times in the Old English corpus, where it is used in certain contexts to interpret the Latin oriens (‘rising sun’), lucifer (‘light-bringer’), aurora (‘dawn’) or iubar (‘radiance’).[31] According to scholar J. E. Cross, textual evidence indicate that it originally meant ‘coming or rising light, beginning of light, bringer of light’, and that later innovations led to an extended meaning of ‘radiance, light’.[32] In the words of philologist Tiffany Beechy, the “Anglo-Saxons appear to have known earendel as a quasi-mythological figure who personified a natural phenomenon (sunrise) and an astrological/astronomical object (the morning star).”
Well, in the game the Morning Star item is considered ironic — blood is a curse in the Lands Between a curse not unlike how Christianity made the ‘bringer of light’ into a devil — literally satan — over a millennia.
But more the Morning Star — the RISING SUN — what does this have to do with Japan? I’m sure you are doubtlessly curious — I’m sure it has nothing to do with Japan’s own imperialism and destructive actions — you know a blood-covered rising Sun is really, well, not shy about its feelings towards Japanese Fascism.
There is nothing wrong with the Dawn, nothing wrong with the rising Sun, but to attempt to hold it in your head so you can be the Chosen One — to have it be what gives you power over others — to enforce its power on others — that is not good, to put it lightly.
— -
Let’s take a step back into the game, shake off all the real history, and work up to this. I’d like to talk about the second most important conceptual-tool to understanding the game; the molecular mise en scene.
Farum Azuela is an inverted Leyndell, Ashen Capital, and the map points to interesting connections and even specific sights of grace which tell a narrative. But we have to think about what is in the area to really understand how this makes sense.
The Eternal City is a reflection of Leyndell. Similarly we need to find how the Eternal City is like Leyndell which is like Farum Azuela — what happened that binds them all together?
Well the most striking mise en scene in the game is the area where you get the Finger Slaying blade, it’s underneath a giant dead tree-worshipping giant — one of the three Norns. Surrounding the giant are a bunch of mimic tears which very intentionally make sure to show you that they can turn into men, women, and giants. Right before you get the blade you fight a giant mimic tear and you get the blade, it’s description says it was ‘said to be born of a corpse’. Okay.
This is a bit on the nose actually, the Finger Slayer blade looks a lot like the blade inside Merika, the Sacred Relic Sword but it’s moving from the right hand to the left, it’s distorted. In the symbolic meaning of the left and right the blade is essentially held with the left hand but it also turns in on the left hand — back on itself.
The left hand is associated with the feminine and the Finger Slayer Blade isn’t a reference to the hidden origin story of the Order — it is the story of the Order. A plan to undo what happened at the start of this cycle backfired.
The Sacred Relic Sword is also ‘born of a corpse’, Merika’s corpse. Also Miquella’s needle looks like these weapons and it is also ‘born of a corpse’ we find it in Melania after we defeat her and stick her with the golden needle.
In order to get the Sacred Relic sword we also have to fight a giant, one with a different kind of hole in his belly — not an absence or void but a burning light, a giant eye. To get Miquella’s needle we fight living failures, not yet dragon-people who have long been lost to time.
In all of these cases the weapon is associated with a dualistic being, Merika is two in one, Miquella and Melania are two who were separated, and Ranni is two but she is very conceptual — I’ll get to it — but she’s basically difference, distance and destiny.
Importantly the Eternal City scene also lays the foundation for the more lore type question of ‘what happened?’ — Well two giants sacrificed themselves for some reason but to know why we have to know who Melina is.
Also what does it suggest that the Giant Tree Matriarch is surrounded by tears which reflect? Who actually led us to these special double-helix blades? Who opened up the pathway to the Fingerslayer blade?
Who led us to Miquella’s needle and the Sacred Relic Sword? If the Halgitree is like Leyndell then how is the Red-haired giant like a Magma Wyrm or a Godskin Apostle? How is Malkieth like Malenia who is like Radagon?
I think I have answers to these puzzles, but it’ll take some time to lay it out.
If Farum Azulua’s mise en scene has a similar level of reflectivity that the Eternal City scene does with the Erdtree well where are the three dragon’s heads — so to speak? Let’s unpack this a bit, with a chiral narrative approach;
The final boss of the area is actually Malkieth who is pretending to be the Death Eater, a hooded figure, keep the hoodedness in mind, he reveals himself and we have to kill him to take destined death back. The death-eater, if you recall from awhile back, is tied to destined death through the map and a multitude of other game elements — however — he is not at all unlike the guilt-ridden beings of the lands between –
I won’t forget… again… mine appetite… My sin…
But more specifically, as the eater of death, just like the Worm-faced creatures and death blight — this is a portrayal of life in a pessimistic way — and it strongly brings to mind Schopenhauer and other philosophies of pessimism — and from a Nietzchean perspective — at least when it comes to Western society — sin is a tool that Christianity employs to spread itself and weaken the various warrior cultures it interacts with to put it simply.
The death-eaters quest mirrors the stages of enlightenment the game ties with the number 9 — most obviously through the 9 irises of the Fire giant’s Eye.
“It is… it is all… consumed. Still., I am not sated… Not nearly sated…” (screams) “Marika… Is this… what it is… to sin?” “Will things… never be the same… again?” “…” (panting) “Tarnished… my thanks… for thy… long labor. But I have done… all I can… in this land. Henceforth, mine appetite shall be my sole companion. Farewell.”
“…I smell it… Death… Feed it me…” “Tarnished… bring more… Death. I shall grant thee… eye… and claw. Feed me… more.”
“Strange, there’s something else. But the death, yet quenches. Bring more.”
“My thanks Tarnished…. Death… My sin… Should not be touched by the hand of man… I shall grant thee… my claws… Feed me… more…”
“I won’t forget… again…. mine appetite… My sin… I must have more… I must consume more…”
“It is… it is all… consumed. Still., I am not sated… Not nearly sated…” (screams) “Marika… Is this… what it is… to sin?” “Will things… never be the same… again?” “…” (panting) “Tarnished… my thanks… for thy… long labor. But I have done… all I can… in this land. Henceforth, mine appetite shall be my sole companion. Farewell.”
This sounds strange and obscure on the first pass — but with the number 9 in hand and an understanding of how guilt is processed in the Lands Between the death-eater becomes the Fire Giant and Melina or Okina — so to speak — they cannot consume anymore and their appetite is their sole companion — the only thing left to do is consume yourself — but how this is done depends on which character we are looking at –
Let’s try to superimpose this journey in Farum Azuela onto the main journey’s path into Leyndell — Malekieth is the final boss akin to the Elden Beast and the Death Eater is Radagon, a kind of disguise. Okay what stands out?
Well that lines up, somewhat, but it’s a little inverted — Radagon is dog-like, gets called a dog and associated with dogs, and reveals a beast with no face after his first phase and Malkieth reveals himself as a dog-man after pretending to be a beast with an unseen face — the death-eater is consuming deathroot and Malkieth is gaining power — but wait, of course, the undead are inverted, the body of the world, Godwyn is shaped like The Lands Between but he’s inverted — the chiral puzzle is solvable, but also we now know what it means to do an horizontal inversion when doing map story-telling, it’s the inverse of the Lands Between — it is undeath.
So what this tells us isn’t much actually, the death-eater, like the Elden Beast is feeding on death — a pretty common reading of what the Elden Beast represents — the accumulated souls trapped in the Erdtree.
But it does link Radagon to the shadow — to the dog — and Radagon is the body, the masculine Father will, the form, — this is interesting and it fits well, there is plenty of connections of Radagon to dogs and Malkieth is a black dog, black essentially representing death and red representing life. Malenia’s name means black and Malekith is a made up name which sounds like Male Friend but it sounds evil like how Farum sounds ancient and distant even though it really just sounds like Forum.
Radagon is a bit of Male Kith. And the puzzling thing about Malenia- If Malkieth’s name has something to do with maleness well Malenia’s name literally has the word Male in it — but where is the male in her? Miquella is becoming or just is quite feminine what is happening to Malenia? Well, this is pretty out there but I’ll just say it Nia means bright just like Miquella means bright — Male brightness — Male purpose. Weird name for a badass samurai lady and I’ll get to that.
Also this is just me probably straying into free association but Malenia sounds almost like Male-emia or Millennia — the millennium of male presence in blood.
Heed my words. I am Malenia. Blade of Miquella. And I have never known defeat.
I am Male-bright weapon of Feminine-brightness and I am blind to my own defeat. She is not being figurative about being Miquella’s blade — she is a living weapon akin to Tetsuo from Akira. And Akira maps well onto Miquella as a character — in terms of his presence he is only there as a void — he is missing — the people want him back. Tetuso, on the other hand, is present everywhere — he is the angry, greed and arrogance of the slowly disintegrating culture of Neo-Tokyo. Akira sounds like Miquella (Mikera) in Japanese — with all of the references this game packs into itself — being Pandora’s Jar the Game — do we really think that it wouldn’t touch upon Akira? Or Evangelion? No, of course not — Evangelion is probably as present as Mario and Zorya.
Think about it — Evangelion the Father is present and boy is he chatty — he sure wants to bring about the undifferentiated world of pure becoming and make himself a body without organs with his wife but the Mother is not present — she is well, to avoid spoilers, right under our noses (Ancestor Spirit, Dragonkin solider) the whole time.
Additionally Evangelion’s usage of Jewish myth intersecting with a politically relevant investigation into Japan at the time — the question of cults desiring apocalypse and the rise of Otaku culture — a new youth culture — it is the post-Akira world which has not yet come to terms with the Third impact — the Japanese economic boom and its results. Two (Akira and Tetsuo) and the Three (Shinji, Asuka, Rei) — does this have anything to do with Elden Ring?
Possibly, I think the Bolt of Gransax looks like the Spear of Longinus — and ‘Gransax’ sounds like ‘Gainax’ — plus the underground Dragon-Giant Solider looks like Shinji’s mecha — and it’s not just about the appearance here either — the Dragon-Giant inherits the dual-aspects of power in Evangelion in the form of the Lilian and the Angels –
Plus given what we know about Marika — that she desires to give the lands between to the beings of the land instead of turn them all into mush well that matches quiet well with Evangelion’s silent-yet-present mother figure.
Shinji’s colour palette is blue-white just like the shield which says this;
Small wooden roundshield that has been reinforced with metal. It is light and easy to handle, but cannot offer the damage negation of a true metal shield. The design is said to represent the stars of the night sky, portending fate.
This is, of course, a joke — Shinji cannot handle ‘damage negation’ he is a vulnerable person — he requires a metal shield — a mecha –
And in Elden Ring, like Evangelion, we slowly realize that the fate of the world is in our hands and we are being guided in two different directions — by our own internal projection of the mother and father — our reflection.
Elden Ring is also deeply interested in how the recognition by the other functions and how to portray that in its own medium.
DRAGONKIN SOLDIER — I like reading people react to the Evangelion reference — even at this point many people refuse to form a connection — the lore community is cruel and full of people who like to stomp down on any interpretation despite apparently the game being so ‘open to interpretation’ — ironically this is similar to Evangelion’s problem — by tackling Otaku subjectivity from the Otaku medium of the anime it has to wrestle with it’s own audience –
I hope at this point this Evangelion connection doesn’t sound like a reach — considering how deep the references go in Elden Ring — in a way to me it strikes me as on the nose if anything. Rei also comes across as Melina-esque — a lot of the Melina connections like Zoraya and Millicient seem to be stuck in a position similar to Rei — not knowing who you are despite being the one who essentially enables Shinji or the Tarnished to do something with the world — either annihilate it or affirm it, as it is. Additionally, like Evangelion Elden Ring makes Melina unaware of the fact that she is, in essence, a clone of Marika-Radagon.
Evangelion is as trigger-happy with references as Elden Ring — both centre their world on a pivot-point Yggdrasil. From wikipedia;
In stanza 138 of the poem Hávamál, Odin describes how he once sacrificed himself to himself by hanging on a tree. The stanza reads: I know that I hung on a windy tree nine long nights, wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself, on that tree of which no man knows from where its roots run.
9 nights, again the 9 creeps up — and a spear — Evangelion and Elden Ring — another grafted creation. The solid-form bodies of stone we see — the dragons — are mechas for spirits — the bear slowly transforms into one by consuming enough energy. A mecha of pure energy — the Elden Beast — looks like a Dragon but is more than that — it’s Adam.
What this is isn’t surprising considering Evergrace and it’s development occurring during Evangelion’s successful run-time. But maybe I’ll leave that to someone else to look into.
Anyway, you get the point — there’s more to figure out — I wouldn’t be surprised if there is literally nothing in this game which is ‘incidental’ which is funny considering how many people who comment on the game think it’s a bundle of half-finished scraps.
See you in part 4, the End of Ruby’s Elden Ring Analysis.
PART 4 The Mystery of Elden Ring Solved: Old Venus
Unexpectedly transported from Earth to Venus, Jack helps a prince and princess fight to prevent a race of birdmen from enslaving the world by getting both halves of a magic talisman.
That’s from the ‘The Wizard of the Trees’ which is part of an anthology edited by GRRM called ‘Old Venus’ — that’s notable considering what Venus represents — the twin of the Sun — the charmer — the feminine — Miquella. It’s written by Joe R. Lansdale. Two-halves of a magic talisman. (DEATH RITE BIRD)
Old — Elden — Venus — Ring. The pinkish Belt of Venus which is an atmospheric phenomenon visible shortly before sunrise or after sunset, during civil twilight. It is a pinkish glow that surrounds the observer, extending roughly 10–20° above the horizon. It appears opposite to the afterglow, which it also reflects — this is the golden hour. Hello, Melina.
That’s Gloaming Peak there. You won’t see it until the cloud clears. Every Great Evening, every Great Dawn, for a few Earth-days at a time, the cloud breaks. It goes up, oh so much farther than you could ever imagine. You look up, and up, and up — and beyond it, you see the stars. That’s why the pelerines came here. Such a sensible religion. The stars are gods. One star, one god. Simple. No faith, no heaven, no punishment, no sin. Just look up and wonder. The Blue Pearl: that’s what they call our Earth. I wonder if that’s why they care for us. Because we’re descended from divinity? If only they knew! They really are very kind.
From BOTANICA VENERIS: THIRTEEN PAPERCUTS BY IDA COUNTESS RATHANGAN which is also from Old Venus.
Old Venus contains everything you want; really, the aesthetic of various characters is present inside it — the imagery is glowing hot with nearness –
MIQUELLA:
His pale skin grew even paler and flecks of spittle appeared on his lower lip. I experienced a sudden memory of the only time Baldie Spotts-Binkle, in our long-ago school days, had lost his rag while being bullied by Roderick Bass-Humptingdon, a thug in an Eton collar who reigned over the junior form in much the same way Tiglath-Pileser, if that’s the bloke I want, had lorded it over the Ten Lost Tribes. I remembered piercing shrieks and a flailing of stickthin limbs, like a stringed puppet whose master is overcome by a fit of apoplexy. All ending, of course, in tears, Bass-Humptingdon’s schoolyard sobriquet of Basher being well earned. But, here in Baldie’s breakfast room, the anticipated frenzy did not occur. Instead, he burst into tears, then buried his snuffles in his cold, long-fingered hands. It was a good thing I had already breakfasted since here was a sight to quell the appetite of a Cyclops.
Greeves and the Evening Star MATTHEW HUGHES
TARNISHED JOURNEY:
“He is of no further use to us,” she continued.
“Stop the vehicle.” Scorpio came to a stop, and she opened a door and shoved Quintaro’s body out into the mud. “Is he dead or alive?” asked Scorpio.
“One or the other,” said Sapphire. “Now proceed.” “To where?”
“Do you see that tall skeleton of a dead tree ahead of us?” “Hard to miss. First dead tree I’ve seen since we started.”
“That is our destination.”
“We’ve come all this way for a barren tree?” said Scorpio. “Do not appear a bigger fool than I think you to be,” replied Sapphire.
“Are we trying to beat the other party to it?” “It makes no difference, for they are the same.”
Scorpio frowned. Does that make any sense to you? None.
Scorpio drove to within fifty feet on the tree and came to a stop. He and Sapphire got out immediately, and he walked around the back, unlatched it, and helped Merlin to the ground.
The Venusian was still unsteady on his feet, but he walked by his partner’s side, trying his best to ignore his pain. The two other vehicles had stopped also, and Scorpio observed them closely, waiting to see just how much this other blue-skinned woman resembled Sapphire — but when she emerged from the second vehicle, he stared, blinked, rubbed his eyes, and stared again. They could be twins! he thought. Or somehow even closer, answered Merlin. “There will be protections, of course,” said Sapphire.
The woman Scorpio now thought of as The Other Sapphire uttered a terse command, and two men who had been driving the vehicles walked cautiously toward the tree, weapons in hand.
When they got within five feet of it there was a sound of static and both men collapsed, one screaming, one unconscious or dead. “Now it is our turn,” said Sapphire. “I’m not going to walk right up to it,” answered Scorpio. “I just saw what happens to men who do that.” “Nevertheless.” “It might help if you tell me what I’m looking for.” “You already know,” she said. “Is the tree the godstone?” “Of course not.”
“Then what is it, where is it, and what does it look like?” “The stone is irregularly shaped, perhaps a foot in width. Do you see that hole at the base of the tree?” “Yeah. Looks like some animal has burrowed in.”
I’ll prove it to you,” he said. He reached into the vehicle, pulled out Quintaro’s pulse gun from where it had fallen, bent over, and hurled it sidearm at the hole. It was never more than eighteen inches above the ground — and it burst into flame when it was within three feet of the tree. Scorpio straightened up. “Like I said, suicide.” “It must be retrieved,” she said, and for the first time he detected a trace — more than a trace — of emotion in her voice. “Oh, Merlin and I can get it for you,” said Scorpio. “I’m just trying to come up with a price.” “You’ve been paid.” “I’ve been paid for taking you here. Risking our lives to retrieve a protected treasure wasn’t part of the bargain.” “You will get it now!” she demanded, her face suddenly a mask of fury. “I’m thinking,” he said. “I’d ask for this vehicle, which would certainly bring a healthy price once we clean it up, but we both know it’s stolen property.
And something tells me that you’re not going to share the godstone with me, no matter what you promise.
You’re really not in a very good bargaining position, Blue Lady.
“I can kill you right now,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?” “I’m a little harder to kill than you think,” said Scorpio.
“But even if you can, you’d better be sure you know how to get the stone without me.” She glared hatefully at him but said nothing. “Okay,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “There’s got to be a black-market dealer who’s not too fussy and has a market for a VZ4. I’ll take the vehicle once we’re done here. Do we have an agreement?” She nodded. “All right.”
He pulled out his laser pistol and aimed a beam right at the tree trunk, about ten feet above the ground. “What are you doing?” demanded Sapphire.
“It’ll take a lot more than this to melt a stone,” said Scorpio. As the trunk began smoldering, then burst into flame, he trained his beam on a low-hanging branch.
“Damned good thing it’s not raining here. No way I could set it on fire if it were.” He turned to Sapphire.
“Somebody on your side has a hell of a lot of powers but very little brain.” In seconds, the branch was aflame, and Scorpio trained his weapon on another branch. As he did so he leaned down, picked up a heavy stick, and hurled it at the opening.
Nothing happened, except that the stick bounced off the trunk. “Okay, Merlin,” he said. “In and out quick. I don’t know when this damned tree might collapse.” The Venusian limped ahead, reached the tree, inserted his head and neck into the opening, and emerged a moment later with an irregularly shaped crystal in his mouth. “The stone!” breathed Sapphire.
And suddenly Scorpio became aware of the other blue woman racing forward, an ecstatic expression on her face, the mirror image of Sapphire’s. At first he thought she was intending to stop at Sapphire’s side. Then he realized that she was heading straight at Sapphire, probably to give her a hug of shared triumph.
But finally he saw that she wasn’t slowing down, and that Sapphire had turned to face her and was making no effort to avoid the collision — except that there wasn’t a collision at all. He couldn’t tell which of them absorbed the other, or if both had somehow formed halves of a totally new body, but suddenly there was just one female — he hesitated to think of her as a woman — standing before him.
She took the stone from Merlin and held it up.
Scorpio noticed that there was an irregularly shaped hole in it, maybe two inches across, very near the center. Sapphire began uttering a chant, not quite singing it but more than merely reciting it. You recognize the language? asked Scorpio.
I know every tongue in current use on Venus, but I’ve never heard this one before.
Suddenly, the stone became brighter, then brighter still, and finally blindingly bright. Scorpio had to close his eyes, and though he was standing right next to it, he couldn’t feel any additional heat. Then a powerful masculine voice broke the silence.
“At last!” it bellowed. “At last I live again!” Scorpio opened one eye, expecting to be blinded again. Instead he saw a huge blue man, twelve feet tall, burly and heavily muscled, sporting a thick beard, and clad in a glittering robe that seemed to be a softer, pliable version of the stone. “A thousand times a thousand years I have waited for the day I always knew would come!”
He reached out and enclosed Sapphire’s extended hand in his powerful fingers. As he made physical contact with her, as their hands touched, both of them became as bright as the stone had been a moment ago, and they began growing until they soon were taller than the tallest of the surrounding trees. He spoke once more, his voice as loud as a thunderclap: “I am complete again!”
The Godstone of Venus MIKE RESNICK
This is the final stop folks for me folks — Ranni is Sapphire and Melina is The Other Sapphire — I’d probably have to read the rest of Old Venus to see everything else. I think I will. But for now let’s finish this. The whole book is clearly the inspiration for Elden Ring — it is multiple stories told from different perspectives using different terminology for the same blue God on the same planet, Venus.
Every story in the anthology is important to Elden Ring — for instance the colour theory which makes Miquella White and Malenia Black as well as the peak of the mixture being Yellow at the mountaintop of the giants is taken right from Old Venus;
Dad said that back home they called him “high yellow,” which meant he was mixed race but looked more white than black. Folk up North were more uneasy about the idea of mixed-race people. In some ways, that made it harder for Dad. He was a living, walking example of miscegenation. A child of a white father and a black mother.
Pale Blue Memories TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
Wondering who the tall blue guy is and the Other Sapphire? Me too — probably something that requires reading all of Old Venus. But to me this is enough to show that Old Venus is a key — one which doesn’t just make sense of Ranni’s ending but also shows definitively that the grafting of history includes the creators previous works — Evergrace, therefore, is as present as Old Venus but again I’ll leave that for another time.
By Frogsled and Lizardback to Outcast Venusian Lepers in Old Venus by the way includes cloned sisters and something like scarlet rot conceptually — the sky is even said to be ‘scarlet’ in this particular story.
The alburnatics — well — they are here too –
“As we Americans say, I’m all ears.” “Talk to a froghead.” “A what?” “Frogheads. The native aborigines. No one calls them Venusians … sounds like a bad movie. Anyway, they’re intelligent” — another smirk — “although I wouldn’t call them good company. And they see a lot of what goes on here.”
Surprise — surprise — people are being racist towards the frog people in a sci-fi story — but someone is here to defend them — someone familiar -
Mikhail’s eyes narrowed. “They are not frogheads. They are the Water Folk, the Masters of the World Ocean. You do not respect them, you do not talk to them.”
Milkhail — Micheal — Miquella — yep. Milkhail can summon the water folk with … chocolate.
Anyway that story ends like this, note the colours;
The two men stood on the aft deck, feeling the warm rain against their faces. In the far distance, lightning flashes briefly delineated the horizon, painting the clouds with shades of purple and silver, silver the color of the Water Folk’s eyes. A soft rumble of thunder. A storm was approaching. “I really hate this fucking planet,” Angelo whispered. “Yeah,” Ronson said. “Me too.” Frogheads ALLEN M. STEELE
HIMSELF: The Grangegorman Hydes. My father used to knock around with your elder brother — what was he called? MYSELF: Richard. HIMSELF: The younger brother — wasn’t he a bit of a black sheep? I remember there was this tremendous scandal. Some jewel — a sapphire as big as a thrush’s egg. Yes — that was the expression they used in the papers. A thrush’s egg. What was it called? MYSELF: The Blue Empress. HIMSELF: Yes! That was it. Your grandfather was presented it by some Martian princess. Services rendered. MYSELF: He helped her escape across the Tharsis steppe in the revolution of ’11, then organized the White Brigades to help her regain the Jasper Throne. HIMSELF: Your brother, not the old boy. You woke up one morning to find the stone gone and him vanished. Stolen.
“He’s back. The Dung Eater. Again. I can hear them; the spirits as they howl and lament in fear of the curse. And worse than ever, the reverberation of the twisted malison itself. But after all this time, I’ve started to grasp it now. I can hear, in the malison, another fearsome Order.”
Ansil River — Farum Azuela — Stormveil Castle — this concept, as you’ve seen, of literal and then conceptual applies to everything in the game ranging from the map as a utilitarian fact of open world games to the colours of the UI elements; health redness, manna blueness and stamina greenness being tied to the games milleu. It seems, from skim reading anyway, that Old Venus is similar — the different stories interact with each other in interesting ways — they intersect with the same ideas and iterate upon them.
The Blue Empress in Old Venus connects up with Sapphire and the tall Blue guy — I think.
It applies to names as well, probably just like in Old Venus, as we’ve seen. Malenia and Miquella — Milkhail, Merlin, Melina, are reflections of Merika and Radagon recognizing each other. Radagon learns the ways of crying-magic –i.e. empathy — (yes I realize the gender essentialism here is a bit uncomfortable but it’s in the game) while Merika already has it and she learns about the Order — the guilt and shame of humanity — and they see each other, finally. We can split the names to figure out what is general and what is specific –
Male-enia, we’ve covered that. Mi-quella, I quell, I put an end to something, I stomp out something, I destroy, I pacify. Every character and element just like Melina and Gowry with their hoods pretending to be someone else is hiding something, if this is true, just like lining up with the map with ocean eyes it must apply everywhere, just like colour theory, if it doesn’t Fromsoft can’t assume we will trust them to piece together the narrative in this chiral fashion.
Melina, like I said at the start goes from being ‘honey’ to me lina, ‘light’, ‘brightness’.
Ranni becomes ‘ni’ which isn’t an English name but it sounds like the Japanese word ‘ni’に — must be a coincidence that the character for ‘ni’ is made using three strokes, just a coincidence in a game where literally every part of the map can be superimposed onto itself and tell a story that actually makes sense yeah you know coincidences.
Apparently に has a fundamental meaning that unites all its uses. In short, に shows you where something is, was, or will be in the future.
Anyway, at risk of making a serious linguistic mistake — well, if this applies in English does it apply in Japanese? Surely if it does, then I’m onto something, no? Oh well look at that, The katakana syllable ニ (ni)’s equivalent in hiragana is に (ni) –
ミケラ is Miquella’s Japanese name and, I’m guessing this makes as much sense to do as Miquella’s English name but removing ケ you get ミラ which means mirror. Now if this were the basis for my idea that Miquella is a reflection of Merika and Radagon who are reflections of the beings of the lands Between which are reflections of Miquella and Melania I’d understand your hesitation to take my literal butchering of names as evidence but its not evidence, its just more layers that support my story.
マレニアMalenia’s Japanese name also slots very nicely with her story — if you remove the middle you get Maa — the void, basically. Her name is pretty much fully covered by the mise en scene and story no matter how you slice it up. For instance the first two characters together mean ‘male’ it’s important that this be conveyed, naturally, as its key to who she is. She internalizes the male-beings of the world and the final two characters mean ‘near’. Male-near — just like Malenia it’s got the double meaning of Male Purpose or Male Age. Male-near sounds like Mjölnir — you might be saying, yeah so what, it’s just a coincidence, ectera — well have you heard the story of how Thor got his hammer back?
Spoiler alert it involved Thors pretending to be another gender in a plot to get his hammer back. Plus it’s not a far reaching association given that there are references to Mjölnir in the game, but the actual Mjölnir not the dumb movie one. But mostly it’s not far reaching because the story of Thor’s hammer, like the tale of Aisnel or the Red-haired cannibal giants, relates directly to Elden Ring’s narrative. Melania is tied to Mjolnir because the idea of a powerful living weapon being forged by someone with secretive plans is what happens with her and Merika and us in the game as well as in miniature with Rodricka and Hewg.
Hewg is like Melania or the Red-haired Giant, forced to do something by others and very literally tasked with creating a God-slaying weapon — whereas Rodricka is not clearly forced to do anything, she is more fated to do it and she is also not literally tasked with creating a God-slaying weapon but she effectively creates one — the mimic tear, the most powerful tool in the game.
This makes the Jellyfish mini-quest perhaps the most important one in the game, lore-wise.
Just like the maps and the mise en scene the characters are also reflections of each other — Roderika is clearly like Merika, Miquella and like Ranni whereas Hewg is like Melania and Radagon.
We can apply our literalist reading and our conceptual one to Roderika’s dialouge — for instance;
Everyone who came with me. They crossed the sea for me. They fought, for me. Heh… Only to have their arms taken. Their legs taken. Even their heads…taken. Taken and stuck to the spider.
While the Tarnished left the Lands Between with their Lord, one boat alone was said to have been left behind.
Her dialogue makes, frankly, zero sense unless she is more important than she seems. Which she is — she is at least as important as Marika — they are sisters if not reflections of each other. Marika is silver-based reflection whereas Roderika is water-based reflection or something similar.
As we saw with the Farum and the Weeping Peninsula as well as Ainsel River — what happened was a tragedy and not one we are unfamiliar with — it’s the tragedy the befell the followers of the Halgitree, befell Melania and Miquella, it’s the eternally returning trauma of these events. Displayed in the map as people drowning from whirlpools — someone was left behind — the sacrifice was the beings of the land we encounter.
Apart from the colour wheel, from the maps, names, characteristics, clothing and otherwise the body parts of characters have a very precise and consistent meaning — the Godslaying Noble for instance is associated with Merika and Radagon through all of the various reflections — one has the legs and the other is the container, with the Godslaying nobles the stretchy one describes Merika-Radagon as Melina’s ability to extend beyond themselves while remaining rooted and the larger noble describes the containment of powerful organic beings — ones without voices.
Legs are tied to the ability to cross distances and be unstuck from a situation — In Ordina, for instance, the lower halves of the Albernautics defending the Halgitree or searching for it are immobilized — Miquella is also immobilized and frozen and he is the roots of the land.
Heads being taken — well heedlessness is associated with undeath but also losing your head means getting lost, becoming insane. Headless warriors are associated with Cuckoo birds — Cuckoo birds knock another bird’s egg out of the nest and leave its own egg in its place, this is what the Nox wanted to accomplish — the removal of the current head of power — the Sun — with a new one — the Moon.
Armlessness is tied to rot. How does this all tie back to the rest of the games motifs? Well the colour wheel lines up perfectly with it — the ‘head’ of Elden Ring’s colour logic is yellow which is tied to spirituality and thought — to the insanity of nihilism — whereas red is tied to Malenia and the masculine violence in the lower lands, Malenia’s right hand is what is decaying — the right hand which we the player use to battle with –
Okay so where were their hands, heads and legs taken? What is the spider? Well, just like elephants in the map, despite being a part of the game conceptually through various connections there are no actual spiders — we assume she means Godrick — but it really applies to the spider-like things in the game — these weird hand things have ten fingers and look like spiders. In Elden Ring — we the player are a finger — every being is — and we are all being taken and grafted onto God or we were supposed to be until the shattering.
Also it’s interesting that the rings on the spider, just like most of the spell icons point to the transformations necessary to understand the games narrative — there’s rotation, horizontal or vertical flipping and overlapping. The text on the rings looks like an attempt at overlapping two words and the hand is made of ten fingers.
Like colour, character, clothing, names, places, the number of things as well as their handedness and size is very important. Miquella’s lily has three outgrowths the first two do not bud but the last one does — this isn’t just a reference to Malenia’s blossoming, the entire game’s map has three outgrowths, the Black Knife has two on the left-hand side — the feminine side and one on the right side the male side. The Finger Slayer blade looks like a smaller, less ‘perfect’ Sacred Relic Sword and Miquella’s needle looks like one as well. The hatred for three is of course a pejorative — in a way avoidance of this number really ties back to Mommy-Daddy me and the trauma of parenting which seems to be quite essential to the games framing of the tragedy of life.
A fragment of patterned textile, wrapped around three small flat sticks: what was. A shiny feather or fish scale, set in silver wire: what might have been. Or, better: the conditional, the always possible. A shriveled coil of brown, veiny material, probably a root fragment: what is. A black stone, glossy as obsidian, was The Truth. Old Venus A Planet Called Desire GWYNETH JONES
You can also form the word mania out of both the Japanese and English name for Malenia — although I think the most important fact is that splitting the name into two produces ‘male’ ‘nia’. Mania describes a kind of pejorative of what Malenia and the red-haired creatures of the land went through.
This makes complete sense because Malenia contains the Male Age — she conceptually contains the resentment the mothers have for the age of literal fire and blood, of literal tears and violence but is literally housing all of the world inside of herself, she was probably the original point of the Dark Moon plot but with the loss of Miquella and the Order going haywire plans went south. Well we can test this theory, what does the map think happened? This is a tough mystery, I think its fine to leave it as an open question. I don’t really know what happened when it comes to what the plot was — in fact — I think it might be plausible that the loss of Miquella really started everything off — if this is not the case there is one other plausible idea which I’ll get to;
Okay so either the Erdtree was designed to distract and absorb all of the spirits of the lands between and the Halgitree was designed to distract and absorb all of the body of the lands between — together they could make it so that Miquella replaces the God which the mothers blamed for abandoning them and ending birth, while Malenia becomes the body of the land. Somewhat plausible but a bit too neat really, their plan didn’t work out because an evil demon man stole their God-baby? Not really that interesting.
My other theory is that the plan was to replace God with a spiritual feminine intelligence — Ranni and make the masculine spiritual intelligence — Godwyn become the land. Their plan was to invert or flip the world. Malenia and Miquella coming into existence was a pure fluke because Merika, being made partially from a mimic tear — which I mean, come on guys can we just accept this by now it’s practically on the nose (mimic tear, mimics veil), being herself artificial water capable of reflection must follow the divine God logic in Elden Ring, she is a being of reflection if she splits into two beings she reflects herself and this is the event that triggers the whole plot. But it’s not given to us in lore text straightforwardly, but in riddles and poems and concepts and aesthetics. Essentially there are three moments — the age of war, the age of learning and the age of self-recognition –
Only … what happens when so many bubbles fail that the others can’t take refugees anymore? Already there was talk of sealing Tairee against outsiders, even evacuees, and concentrating on total self-reliance. Some spoke of arming the colony’s subs for war. “These older hull bubbles were thicker and heavier,” Panalina commented, patting the nearest bulkhead, the first of three ancient, translucent spheres that had been fused together into a short chain, like a trio of pearls on a string. “They fell out of favor, maybe four or five mother generations ago. You’ll need to pay six big fellows in order to crank a full load of trade goods. That won’t leave you much profit on cargo.”
But the important thing is that most ways of approaching the games puzzles resolve towards this ocean-tears-consciousness concept.
For instance the names can also lead there not just the folk-lore references and iconography — Azuela, the blue eye of the ocean, the one which cries in the Weeping Peninsula, well ‘blue’ in Japanese sounds almost like ‘augen’ — augenblick, the blink of an eye in German. What could that have to do with the game? Well Augen are mineral grains which look like eyes that are formed by — wait for — quartz, garnet, ecterea, — that’s an interesting quote un quote coincidence considering the association that tears, crying, lamentation as a magical power has to beings obsessed with blue crystals — it’s not a coincidence guys, it’s just clever like ‘grafted scion’ is clever, I think people forget that this game is a work of art — it’s not some kind of random rock formation its very intentional. Not all art is like this but it’s like this in Elden Ring because the narrative is a puzzle, it’s not relativistic it’s challenging and not in a way that requires digging behind the scenes or assuming that the intent is for people to ‘form their own stories’ — the game is open to various types of stories and only actively condemns one — the Frenzied Flame ending — but it still maintains the possibility of it — it is the fail state for not realizing anything about the narrative. For erroneously thinking that Melina is just some maiden who needs your help and not more than that, for not thinking about what she’s hiding beyond ‘waiting for the DLC’ or assuming, completely wrongly, that she is the result of ‘cut content’ or that we can learn who she is via the games file names — it’s quite sad really because the sheer amount of detail and careful balance of various game elements including very small map details and name meanings suggests an extreme intentionality behind the major puzzle and mystery in the game.
Malenia makes no literal or conceptual sense if she is just the normal child of a somewhat magical duo of straightforward hero Gods — she makes no sense unless she is not just inheriting mere traits from her father — no, she is in some sense her father, she is his fate, she is his curse and Miquella is his mother — this makes sense because the only reason they exist is because Merika reflected Radagon and Radagon reflected Merika when they split, bracket that for now, but let it simmer in your ashen mind for a bit.
Also let it simmer that Finger Reader Enia’s name is tied to Malenia — she, and all the people of the land, are the spoiled blood — the emia of Malenia and she is also the ruined fire of the eternal flame which is corrupting the lands.
Let’s take Leyndell, Ashen Capital being a reflection of Farum Azuela and the Eternal City and the Halgitree to its limit, lets first treat it literally as an identical event, well — the cut scene shows the Death Eater stab his seal with destined death to unlock and release Malkieth who can weaponize destined death — whereas in the battle with Radagon Melina essentially breaks the seal with her sacrifice and uses us to break Radagon and then the Elden Beast fights us using the same weapon which was inside Merika’s shell. Attacking us with a weapon born of a corpse.
The Elden Beast uses light magic which looks similar to grace — it is fighting us with the same magic which broke its seal –
So all of this achieves something important which is that there are some signs which say yes Farum Azuela is like Leyndell from matching up characteristics — now here comes the domino effect- this is true for everything in the game — you become what you fight against. The red-haired giants curse, the curse of little guys wearing big hats, the joke of weak enemies rolling around like the player.
This is essentially the challenge of the chiral narrative — knowing what to superimpose where and the reward is not an item but symmetries, asymmetries, things fitting into place be it conceptual or literal.
Here I superimpose the Farum, inverted, onto Leyndell and it slots in very well. As you can see it tells a story; the Erdtree and the clouds are similar, they are full of yellow light — lightning — also it connects the bridge from Calid to the Mountaintops and the map waves slot in perfectly I’ve highlighted where it does in blue.
Also, while it’s cool that The Lands Between looks like a Ying Yang notice also that the cyclical history is mirrored in the map itself, we start from a red-crucible type area into a limitless grave into magic and occultism into literally tilting at windmills and starting the Order by destroying the Farum and then all of the Giants, apart from a few, are killed, finally leaving a God to watch over their own guilt.
It seems clear that what stands out is that all paths from purple lead to yellow — yellow is the colour of the Giants flame, the colour of the spiritual world — this means that ‘tarnished’ essentially means corrupted yellow — gold is earthy yellow. Spirit which is too organic — This ‘tarnished’ is a pejorative not unlike ‘formless’.
If this is true and the opposite of the yellow spirit is purple — its notable that purple is very rare in Elden Ring, the game is very careful with its colour choices so that the narrative can be told through colours. Playing with colour with the map in photoshop has made for interesting results that make sense but I haven’t found super useful yet. Also the colour wheel idea is pretty important to the narrative –
The map follows this logic conceptually as well, it is a spiral upwards from small to big with yellow and white on the top and red and darkness on the bottom — Calied is red transitioning to amber and the weeping peninsula is conceptually blue — it is raining, it is weeping, it is the land of sadness and moans.
When they combine they sprout out from Leyndell into Liurnia of the Lakes which is essentially learning-on-the-lake, consciousness forms an intellectual capacity upon reflection. Now it’s important to point out that this is tied to the lore through Melania’s origins as well, the Blue Dancer seals the Blossoming life into a body — water forms the red land into a green land and a tarnished populace, between orange, green and yellow.
Because the map is the history we can form a linear-story from it not just think about the colour wheel, for instance, we can see that Merika-Radagon formed Miquella and Melaneia after the Order came and before the current situation with Radagon and the Fire Giant watching over the yellow spirit.
This is true for characters as well; Boc the Seamster is pretending to be a tree, he misses his mother — the beings of the land are inside of the Erdtree and they miss their mother, Merika, a reflection of her — she is the Erdtree. For example.
Anyway, Farum Azulea being like Leyndell — right — so there is an inverted match with Malkeith and Radagon — what other boss is in Leyndell ? Well there has been a few bosses waiting in front of the entrance to the Erdtree and in the Farum it’s represented by the tree-knight-guy riding the horse in front of the entrance to Malkeith’s room.
What about bosses associated with the past and who are beneath Malkeith? Well the Dragonlord is beneath, he is literally stuck in the past, basically waiting around — okay so there’s some unanswered questions about this boss;
Why is he here? What did he want to do? Why do you have to lie down to initiate the fight? Why can you only use Miquella’s needle here?
Well if Leyndell is like the Farum well what is the equivalent to this odd scenario? Well there’s Mogh and the Three Fingers underground, Mogh isn’t actually there it’s an illusion but he was there before –
Huh, so the three fingers requires you to take your armour off — that’s a kind of show of vulnerability like lying down and if this is connected to the Dragonlord well it makes sense that you can only undo the Frenzied Flame curse in the inverted realm of this area, oh — also the Dragon has two-heads but the three-fingers has — well three fingers.
You can describe it like this; well I went venturing down below before fighting the shadow of God and the death-eater and I found a being out-of-time and place and the remaining fingers of the hand — I was presented with a choice –
The difference is that in one case the show of vulnerability is detangled from the actual boss fight — Mogh is not willing to watch over the Three Fingers, he abandons the project, so to speak –bracket that.
By now it’s clear that while the world is in a cycle the reason it is that people forget who they are, they are not simply deceptive even if they act as if they are –
Who are you? Oh, I must be a blacksmith. Now, let’s get smithing… Could you tell me what happened? Why is the Roundtable burning, in ruins? Why does that girl weep for me? Have I forgotten something of dire importance?
This brings to mind what small amount of Zen Buddhism I’ve read about — it sounds like Buddha-mind and the problem of rebirths, forgetting you are the Buddha, basically.
Additionally this is an inversion, not a mirroring, it’s achiral in the normal dimension we mirror things so it must be flipped to be seen and it reveals opposites — taking on the Frenzied Flame in Leyndell and losing the Frenzied Flame in the Farum — I’ll say it again, losing the Frenzied Flame in the Farum — losing three fingers — losing three heads — the dragonlord has two heads, everything mysterious about these two locations is unravelled.
Mogh is associated with the Formless Mother, he worships the body of the Mother without her consent or will, his Great Rune is open on both sides with a dot in the middle, it’s feminine compared to Morgott’s Phallic Great Rune. The Great Runes are all gendered actually — effects on the right are feminine and effects on the left are masculine — even the Fel Curse Mark is feminine because it is a curse on child-birth so effects the right side predominately.
Mogh is seemingly not aligned to the Merika or the Mothers, he is someone who halts the birth of a new God, Miquella, he has in some sense aborted a birth — which other does this? Well the Fire Giant, the Golden One, the Father, The Greater Will, all do this — it is why the mothers are rebelling against the form-giving Father who is acting in the pursuit of immortality and dynasties, he is Balor the Sun which will not set into winter — yes you can kind of see what’s going on here now, the snake is eating itself and chasing itself and blaming itself after all it was ‘just my own self’, ainsel, who did it!
Why? Because Merika also does this, she stops a planned tree God birthing event from happening just not for selfish evil fascist demon monster reasons.
Mogh is supposed to watch over the Three Fingers, the yellow flame, just like The Fire Giant also is supposed to watch over the yellow flame, it is a punishment — it was supposed to be Mogh’s punishment but he escaped and used an illusion in his place. Mogh learned the ole’ get out of town but not really get of town thing from his mom.
Mogh avoiding his task of overviewing the yellow flame-tinted three fingers isn’t just similar to the Fire Giant, it is virtually the same event — but Mogh has avoided his punishment — the Fire Giant is also a way for Marika to avoid her punishment — she is somewhere else as well.
Who set him this task? Well his brother Morgott — the Order, the same Order which Merika used to force the Fire Giant to watch the flame — the twin brothers are repeating history — now does Merika go on to steal a God for her dynasty after making the giant do this like Mogh? Does she try to defend the Erdtree like Morgott? .
Let’s conceptualize the Giants Flame as the spirit, the highest point — great well that connects a lot of things together through the colour yellow or close-to-yellow, the Elden Beast, the Dragonlord, the Giants Flame — this has many benefits in reading the narrative in their aesthetics and positions — but does it do anything with the map? Yes, yes it does. It tells a story.
If you centre the rotation on the giants flame and rotate it until the point in the story I’m curious about which is when the Halglitree becomes the Erdtree look what happens;
The water-whirlpool lines up Gowry with Farum Azuelua, which it’s conceptually related to time. Notice also that the overlapping Lands Between’s only cover the Mountaintops of the giants, Calied, and Leyndell — this point in history is before Lingrave or the Weeping Pennsula — came together and formed Liurena.
So this means essentially that Liurena — learning — isn’t just something the beings do it’s something which Miquella will do when he learns what? Well, when he learns that the Weeping Pennsesula has sealed away Sellen — when the Blue Dancer Seals away Malenia into herself — he knows what to do now — be the Greater Will for the people of the lands to guide them to reunification — a naïve choice, one which at this point in this chiral map he has realized hence he communicates backwards in time as Gowry — pretty crazy right? Well if this is where his communication is then it’s interesting where it ends up which is, naturally, in the void as well — time, the Faurum, lines up with the void at the same time as Gowry’s area lines up with another void, and Miquella’s cocoon is underneath him — he’s repeating through time but also — perhaps most insanely — Sellia mirrors the Farum not just in the events that occur but conceptually, it is a place out of time.
Which means, yes, in a crazy, crazy level of detail Gowry’s shack is essentially like Malkeith’s arena but inverted — a black dog guarding a hooded destined death, Miquella is supposed to be long dead — below Malkieth is a being out of time, below Gowry is also a being out of time — Miquella.
So why are there two Nox mucking about in Sellia? What do they mirror in the Faraum? The Godslayer duo? What do these Nox mirror in Leyndell or the Halgitree? Well, they mirror Miquella and Melaneia — the greater will and the formless mother — Merika and Radagon, when they have yet to become one but they fight as one — the swordstress moves a bit like Melaneia and the priest — well — we don’t see Miquella fight but we can connect Miquella to form, to clay, to being, through his connections to the Greater Will and the masculine — the priest uses two shields — the dragons represent unbreakable stone. Miquella is tied to the dragons even more closely if you consider that his reflection in Melina is in her blonde and greying hair — bracket that. I’m saying that a lot I realize.
The fight drops this item;
A grim weapon wielded by swordsmen of the Eternal City, this shotel has a blade as fine as a needle. Forged from the liquid metal of a Silver Tear, it is thoroughly tempered until hardened
Both Gods literally are hitting you over the head with tears of reflection — it is literally on the nose literally being smacked across your face.
Speaking of weapons which say a lot check out Morgott’s sword;
Warped blade of shifting hue used by Morgott, the Omen King. The accused blood that Morgott recanted and sealed away reformed into this blade.
Remember the colour theory? Well Morgott is ashamed and desires to hide away from a weapon which represents the full spectrum of colour –
Hell it starts to get easy, really, to read the weapon descriptions with a little bit of chiral narrative pre-empting;
Great iron wheel lined with flesh-flaying blades. Device of torture used by Inquisitor Ghiza. As the wheel spins it causes severe pain and blood loss. The design was adopted for use as the iconic weapon wielded by Iron Virgins.
The Lands Between is literally trapped in a time loop akin to the cycle of rebirths in Buddhism — the wheel causes pain and blood loss because the cycle is a cycle of suffering.
Remember the ‘most sacred Great Rune’? What happens when it is ‘half’ rotted?
And yet, due to the infusion of Malenia’s spirit of resistance. attacks made immediately after receiving damage will partially recover HP.
Wounding, inflicting pain, causing suffering restores Malenia — it brings back the cycle.
This is kind of the reward of the chiral puzzles and this cyclical, maybe dialectical, immanence fractal narrative — you do not have to read the description to know what it means — I’ll try this now (you’re gonna have to just trust me that I didn’t read the description);
Devourers Sceptre — well, it’s a snake eating a giant orb that is being held up by a bunch of hands of people who seem captured by the snake. I mean, does it even need a description? That’s what the whole game is about in the appearance of an item — the beings of the land between are feeding a snake their world — what would happen next would be that from the tail of the snake the world would arrive again, form animals, and then form conscious beings like humans who would push their world into the snakes mouth, again.
So what does the description say?
Scepter in the shape of a serpent devouring the world. This weapon will one day become the very symbol of the Lord of Blasphemy. One of the legendary armaments. A vision of the future briefly seen by Rykard in his final moments before being devoured by the great serpent
Rykard sees the truth of what is happening.
Let’s do this again but this time I’ll read the description –
GRAFTED BLADE GREATSWORD
The storied sword of Castle Morne. A revenger’s weapon, it is burdened with oceans of anger and regret. One of the legendary armaments. A lone surviving champion from a country now vanished was so determined to continue fighting that he claimed the swords of an entire clan of warriors.
This is clearly a Song of Ice and Fire Reference but apart from that it’s also essentially the concept of revenge and loss in a weapon — it’s dropped by LEONINE MISBEGOTTEN at the origin point of the Weeping Peninsula. Using the chiral map puzzle we can see that the void close to destined death touches the origin of the Weeping Peninsula — tragic.
So the lion motif is interesting, the lion is tied to the bravery of the astrologers through Lenne’s Rise but here the Lion is misbegotten — a misbegotten lion looks like a red-haired dog. The spirit of the lion in both senses, as what allows for intelligence and for strength is merged into one as the lion on Horah’s back — it holds him back from his animality but at the same time is the locus of guilt — it minds over him.
I could literally do this all day, the DARK MOON GREATSWORD mentions a long-standing tradition — the cycle of rebirths — this is from the same time and people that are the birth of consciousness, Rennela’s people, who realize there’s been a mistake and we must return to the beginning — she also gave Radagon a sword, the GOLDEN ORDER GREATSWORD — a weapon that contains a circle within it — a line from the top of the circle to the end, light back to darkness, the cycle repeats — the SACRED RELIC SWORD, however, it’s a double-helix which appears to be closing into itself — it embodies who Merika is, this sword is Melina.
Why is her eye sealed? Well because opening it brings the night, the purple origin which splinters into green and orange before becoming yellow. Her right eye is open and is on the lighter side of the colour wheel. It’s been tied to the BEAST EYE, which is fitting, but the BEAST EYE portrays a pejorative of the night world, it says;
Claw-marked stone eye received from Gurranq, Beast Clergyman. It is said to tremble when near Deathroot. The murky violet iris writhes as if alive. “I am not sated… Feed me more…Death…”
[Go back… to the beginning]
[Show eye tattoos]
So it’s important to ignore pejoratives — as in ew Melina is some kind of evil death eater person — but not what they might imply — so her tattoos are not an omen, nor is three-ness really — this is game about one God thinking its two Gods calling the other out for being really bad and then a third party comes and helps itself break out of the loop or kills everyone — that third party is us and the beings of the land — but mostly us. The Lands Between is shaped like the finger. The Halgitree has four statues of people which the chiral map puzzle points to — you are a finger — and you are the Lands Between.
Well what do we learn about chirality and rotation? We can apply it to discover what’s going on — Ranni is a mirror image of Melina, who is a reflection of the becoming Buddha-mind, basically, of the Lands Between.
Ranni is the real deal she is actually the form and void merged together, not a reflection of it, she saw the Snow Witch with two sets of arms — she saw destiny — that which puppets itself, it does not mirror itself.
“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”
Notice that Melina’s eye tattoo is yes the third finger, us, intersecting Merika and Radagon, Miquella and Melaneia, which is what happens in the game but also the third finger seems to be splitting off, like it’s just about to become another finger as well. That’s because it is, her tattoo is a snap-shot moment of an infinite regress –
That part of her Tattoo which looks like two fingers which haven’t yet separated looks like Liuernia — it’s the centre piece of this tragic tale — they made the wrong decision but they also may have discovered the right one — I’m not sure on that.
The two fingers will move downward and become the femur-looking-bone which is light over darkness and the ‘one’ finger which intersected them becomes the two fingers — between the two fingers, those lines, are the potential third finger — the next set of Tarnished.
This is basically what Elden Ring is ‘about’. You’re welcome.
[Mind blow etc]
Miquella is tied to intelligence and stargazing but he is beneath a false sky and his history through the rotating map centred on the Giants flame shows a path to self-recognition, it touches various points to do with the pursuit of knowledge before landing back on Sellia, where Gowry is.
He has realized the truth but it’s too late; the beings of the red-lands, his children who harm others and consume everyone into one giant being, combine with the weeping lands, those who blame others, who lost their mothers and bottle their tears — the age of mankind begins — consciousness, in the form of magical intelligence and reflection, realises there has been a mistake and the plots to bring about the age of the Dark Moon begins. Miquella and Melania work together side by side to raise their children but they don’t recognize each other.
Okay so a lot of people are going to say, well, sounds like Bloodborne or Dark Souls or whatever, and no, these are not just mere references but they aren’t not references. In fact the game really references Evergrace the most if anything.
The game is about reflection, the Elden Ring forms a mirror, an aging mirror. Of who? Well the players, role-playing games, but particularly Fromsoft. It’s a self-portrait.
So I bracketed a lot of stuff and it’s not that I don’t want to get into it but it’s more that I am just exhausted, I’ve spent hours and hours pouring of this stuff, I’ve written at least 40,000 words and had to cut down a lot.
I’ve got hours of script which includes ludicrous amounts of detail, comparing Elden Ring to the Shining and to Thus Spake Zarathursta, going into all the details about Dragons and Giants, how the supposed ‘misrecognition’ of the other as the One leads to becoming the other — like becoming-wasp in Deleuze and Guatarri’s work and how it all works together but I am so tired. I must rest but also I must put this video out –
But one more thing, about the cutscenes, hopefully by now you see how I think that there is a essentially negative image of a reference to Thor’s hammer Mjolnir in the game — how Malenia is tied to being a living weapon — which in turn goes into some explanation of what her existence is given that Marika wants to create a God-killing weapon — underneath this could very well be a story which we’ve heard before — the mother, the female, is holy — Evangelion all to the way to Dancer in the Dark — which I hate, Cache which I love and frankly a significant chunk of cinema and literature — the mother suffers as a consequence of the males mistake, his failure to recognize or affirm life in desiring to rule over his child.
My journey into the cutscenes isn’t complete, I could use your help actually. I believe the final gesture of recognition of this element of the game that I’ve outlined is within the use of superimposing Melina’s sacrifice with Ranni’s ending — I’ve come quite far with some combinations that I think work — I suspect that the motif of a character who looks like an anvil or axe — such as how Melina looks here with Ranni’s hat acting as the axe or anvil is the fundamental motif at the heart of the narrative and by in large is also very hidden.
Before I go, I want to add that I most definitely missed a lot — I didn’t play through the game multiple times and confirm many different map combinations, I didn’t read every item description or check the colour of every game element — this is, if I’m correct, an amount of work which befits an entire community to unpack — it’s really up to you now.
If you’re interested in more from me, however, maybe even to the point of feeling hurt that I didn’t get into all the stuff I bracketed, well let me know! I’ll make more videos. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve apart from the map thing,
Thanks for watching. I’m gonna go do something else now.
Oh? My friend, it’s been far too long. I have to say you caught me at a rather low point. But… as you can see, I’ve put all that behind me. Left the Volcano Manor. Forging my own path now. Making my own choices. Even a fool like me can look after some simply jars. Do you pity me? Well don’t. I feel like for the first time in my life I’m on the straight and narrow.