Thinking about how Thiollier gets invited to the final battle against Miquella because his existence is fanfiction personified.
Like, St. Trina and Miquella being the same being was an intriguing part of their character. People theory crafted about this for 2 years. And then Miquella abandoned the sweet dream of St. Trina after Mohg's bloody nightmare was forced upon him, but Thiollier still believed. Thiollier's attachment to St. Trina is so strong that he rejects Miquella at her request. And if not for that request, Thiollier would linger forever in the velvety dream of lost potential - shut off from the rest of what the Shadowlands has to offer.
The mechanics of Elden Ring do not allow the character of Miquella to live up to the theorizing. The archetypical role of Miquella is the idealist whose dream is crushed by reality, which could already be seen by the ominous way that the bloody cocoon was staged in the base game. A game can only be coded to do so much, and with Elden Ring there is no such thing as a post-game utopia where you get to hang out with all of your NPC buddies and rebuild civilization. Your options are to either quit the game world or start another loop. Adding pacifism functionality is beyond the scope of the Lands Between, even as a DLC.
It's a game where you fight and kill enemies, which is why Ansbach is the other NPC invited to that last fight. They are two extremes of a spectrum. Thiollier embodies the point of view of rejecting the game version of Miquella and making your own "fix-it" alternative universe through imagined narrative content. Ansbach embodies the point of view of rejecting the mechanical content that FromSoftware has crafted and instead prolonging the experience of the game in other ways - such as finding the PVP of the Bloody Fingers more engaging and balanced than repeating the boss fights.
Altogether, a world for "not for gods, but for men" is to ignore the complex puzzle box story actually crafted by FromSoftware in favour of content generated by fellow players. Not bad in moderation, but also a "show don't tell" case study on how using emotion rather than logic in interpreting complex ideas is a magnet for outrage peddlers (Ansbach), and toxic infighting (Thiollier).
Bandai Namco: releases a Evanescence "Bring Me to Life" AMV trailer featuring the Revenant as promo for Elden Ring Nightreign.
...well I guess if you're going to give this away for free I'll take it.
Bring Me to Life is the second track on Evanescence's debut album titled "Fallen" which was released on March 4, 2003.
Fortuitously, this is the anniversary of FromSoftware's Eternal Ring, released on March 4, 2000.
I still need to finish writing some stuff about Armored Core to tie everything together, but basically this is consistent with the previous trend I've noticed. Which is that FromSoft seems to have been surreptitiously writing songfics for quite some time now. It's in Bloodborne. It's in Elden Ring. And the Round Table Hold itself is conveniently arranged as an Octavarium.
When the Revenant was first revealed there was a thread on Reddit taking an interest in the character for the fact that she plays a harp, and one of the few known facts about the creator god of King's Field is that they are associated with the harp also. So, even since the early days there has been an affinity for music with the developers.
What I mean is that I completely expect that it wasn't some visionary in the marketing department who decided to make an AMV trailer - there is a high chance that this character's backstory was literally designed from the ground up with inspiration from the lyrics of the song "Bring Me to Life" by Amy Lee and Evanescence.
For the question "What is the Blood Star?" I find that there is a simple answer and a complicated answer.
Simple answer: Mars, the red planet. Wandering stars = "outer" gods. In the sense of literal outer space.
Complicated answer: 2112. With its minimalist album cover featuring a red star emblem.
There's a subtext to Bloodborne and Elden Ring that "blood" is equated with "sound". Blood "echoes", blood sings sweetly, upcoming game Nightreign has that Recluse ability "Song of the Blood Soul". Bloody Fingers are thematically like an intrusive thought invading your world - like a song that you can't get out of your head.
It's frankly farcical to re-contextualize the blood faction as "fanatics dedicated to music and pop-rock references" and I expect it's a perspective that's not for everyone. But to further examine the concept I've written longer examinations of some of these musical references in Elden Ring and Bloodborne.
The purpose of this post is to layout a rationale for the exact point in real world history when FromSoftware first solidified their homage to the Rush album 2112: Armored Core 4 (2006)
Establishing the Meta-Narrative
In my opinion, FromSoftware has been curating a musical meta-narrative since at least 1997. They have been doing this in a very odd way: through the calendar dates on which their games release.
For most of their early games this doesn't pay off immediately - more like a seed planted to harvest later when FromSoft moved into an era of "eating it's own tail" and digging things up from this early history for design inspiration. I have lists of specific examples of places where the long-running musical meta-narrative is drawn upon to inspire parts of the actual narrative of Elden Ring, for bands including The Beatles, The Scorpions, Dream Theatre, Genesis, The Smashing Pumpkins, Heart, etc. For a non-music example, it's like in Dark Souls where black dragon Kalameet and Seath the Scaleless are loosely based on dragons Guyra and Seath from King's Field.
At the time of AC 4 Rush had released 17 studio albums with the most recent being Vapor Trails (2002). In my opinion, that was the Rush album that caught the interest of FromSoftware, with Test for Echo (1996) being a close second. Or else it was the juxtaposition of the two, as the lyrics from Test for Echo were inspired by pop psuedo-psychology and lyrics for Vapor Trails were from a place of experiencing true grief, introspection and psychological healing (I won't get into the history - read up on lyricist Neil Peart's biography from this time period to understand why).
It can be inferred that FromSoft was considering a new direction for their creative output around 2002-2004 - as seen by the way that they discontinued every pre-2005 game franchise that they owned, aside from the recently acquired Tenchu IP. Even AC 4 was a hard reboot of its franchise.
In hindsight from an examination of Elden Ring the later years of Rush circa 2002-2012 is very close to what FromSoft wanted to build towards: poetic introspection on humanity and finding the will to keep going after your worldview is shattered. The start point of Rush is where they are in 2004: best known for either dystopian sci-fi or high fantasy stories, with a scattering of entries on other topics. So my impression is that in a "rush" FromSoft laid the groundwork to start their pivot in direction by anchoring at 2112. And also hired a social scientist who showed up knocking on their door (that being Hidetaka Miyazaki).
I mention this in the Bloodborne post, but cross comparing calendar dates there are 3 matches for the anniversary of Rush albums within a 4 month period of time: Kings's Field Mobile on January 14, 2004 (7th album "Permanent Waves", 1980), Armored Core Nexus on March 18, 2004 (1st album "Rush", 1974), Kuon on April 1st, 2004 (4th album "2112"...allegedly, 1976). 2112 is in a odd place where its actual release date is not remembered but the band themselves acknowledge it as April 1st. Although another comment that I would add about Kuon is that it also has a blood theme - doors are unlocked with scraps of cloth that are named for the planets of the solar system and splattered with bloodstains that increase in quantity with the planet's distance from the sun.
Kuon Sacred Cloths for Earth and Mars
Examination of Armored Core 4
So with all of that background, the first point that ties AC4 to Rush is the release date. The album release date is uncertain, but the FromSoftware website is explicit that the first release of AC4 was on December 21, 2006 - a date that can be written as 2112.
Secondly, the setting of AC4. The background for the story is that a company based on Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada was responsible for developing a next-gen technology that powers the AC units - called "Kojima particles" - in the years before the current events of the game. Rush is a Canadian band, and the album artwork for Test for Echo was inspired by an inukshuk seen by Neil Peart on a trip to the Northwest Territories.
Thirdly, the themes. FromSoftware has a tendency not to copy directly, but to take bits and pieces. Armored Core 4 was going to be themed around the sun regardless of a music tie-in - that was non-negotiable because of a totally different pattern where all Armored Core games are themed around astrology in sequence (they show their hand on that with the "Zodiac" faction in AC 5). AC 4 happened to align with "Leo" which has the planet ruler of the sun.
The story of 2112 is about a future where the planets of the solar system have been colonized, the last war several years ago led to the rise of a faction of religious zealots who outlawed music and established The Solar Federation, and in the present a rediscovery of music leads to a rebellion with an ending ambiguous as to whether the rebels or the ruling faction won. The FromSoft twist on this concept is that they actually relocate their setting to a near-future Earth in contrast to previous games that took place on Mars or blasted post-apocalypses....but EVERY faction is themed around the sun. So the peoples of Earth are collectively a Solar (sun-themed) Federation (set of groups with individual autonomy).
As it goes in the lyrics of song "Entre Nous" from Permanent Waves (album previously mentioned): "We are planets to each other / Drifting in our orbits / To a brief eclipse / Each of us a world apart". In the more pessimistic context of AC4: who needs some fantasy space war when we already live on a single planet together where many nations/corporations act recklessly to tear each other apart as if they have a back-up planet on the sidelines to retreat to when this one gets trashed?
Perhaps also consider each faction as a planet who has a different and incompatible ideological position on "what is the sun to us?" A real life example: the Earth with its moon perfectly sized and located to produce total solar eclipses would experience the sun differently compared to Pluto from which the sun is 1/900th of the brightness and seems to be a very bright star, or compared to Mars which has two moons so small that a person standing on the planet's surface wouldn't even notice if they crossed the sun.
from sketchplanations
And that is altogether how I believe FromSoft to have been partly inspired by progressive rock band Rush starting with references in Armored Core 4.
What does it mean to be Lord of Blood?
There's something more to be said about what the Blood Star means to Mohg - a return to an idealized past. Similarly, while it's tempting to look to the past with rose-tinted glasses, there are some notable criticisms of 2112.
The album includes in its liner notes an acknowledgement of the writing of Ayn Rand - who developed the personal philosophy of Objectivism, which would go on to influence the right wing politics of Libertarianism in the United States. The issues here are multiple - firstly that the specific part of Rand's work that the band found attractive was her views on personal artistic expression - hence the themes of the song itself - but there is a tendency for people to mistake them as agreeing with ALL of Rand's controversial body of work. Secondly, that for the rest of their careers the members of Rush would end up explaining time and time again that they had moved on - they went through a Rand phase from about 1976-1980, and then continued to absorb other influences as happens with many young people.
With a wider view of context, the reason why Rush in 1976 would resonate so strongly with themes of artistic freedom becomes clearer. Their third album leaned into long narrative driven dark fantasy-themed songs and was a flop, with the prevailing mood on the following tour being that this might be the end. With the fourth album there was pressure to become more commercially appealing - write songs that would get radio play. Instead they doubled down on the kind of long-form compositions that they were passionate about and wrote 2112, of which the first half of the album is the eponymous 20-minute long song. The album was a commercial success, and the rest is history. It was later when they were well established with their 7th album Permanent Waves (1980) that Rush gravitated to writing shorter radio friendly songs more on their own terms.
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Consider how many of these same factors were repeated with the rise of videogames as a medium through the 1990's and 2000's. There's pressure from investors to make commercially successful games - it's a struggle between making good art and making art that delivers on time, under budget, and focus tested to capture as much of the market as possible. While thematic story elements can be drawn between Armored Core 4 and 2112, from a real world perspective it is the success story of Demon's Souls (2009) that more closely parallels evolution of Rush as a band. It doesn't get mentioned much, but Miyazaki's directorial debuts with Armored Core 4 and 4A weren't exactly considered stellar - with the games both receiving mixed or average reviews. Demon's Souls was during its development considered to be an unfocused and floundering project. So it was a pairing of a director who had yet to really distinguish himself and a dark fantasy setting that he was both passionate about developing and given the creative freedom to implement novel ideas.
In the mythology around Demon's Souls, one of the greatest reasons for its critical success was that it dared to be different in offering brutal difficulty during a time frame when games were trending towards low skill ceilings to chase higher completion rates for wider audiences. Dark Souls (2011) proved that the success of Demon's Souls wasn't a fluke, and once again the rest is history.
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In his 2023 auto-biography lead singer of Rush - Geddy Lee - makes it a point to address some controversy around the song "Freewill" from Permanent Waves:
"I sang it every night with confidence and pride, offering it to audiences as a contribution to the time-honoured discussion about existentialism, determinism and faith. It was, in fact, indeterminism that I believe was at the heart of it - the idea that our lives are not predetermined - and I hoped that would come across; but in the four decades since, I've seen people play fast and loose with the interpretation of the last lines of the chorus:
'I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will'
To my dismay, those words have been cited without regard for the song's overall message and used as a catch-all, a license for some to do whatever they want. It makes me want to scream. Taken out of context, if becomes an oversimplified idea of free will, narrow and naïve, not taking into consideration that even the strongest individual must, to some extent, bow to the needs of a responsible society.
During the Covid pandemic, I saw this first-hand. When I posted a picture on Instagram of myself wearing a mask, loudmouths were quick to throw 'Free will!' back at me, as if those two words alone constitute permission to act without regard for the well-being of others, to ignore science and to rid ourselves of the responsibility for the consequences of our actions."
I find that a similar phenomena of playing fast and loose with interpretation happens with Elden Ring. In support of Bloodborne in 2015, Miyazaki gave an interview that I often see people clinging to as support for the idea that the stories of the soulsborne games are unsolvable and ultimately up to the individual to imagine:
"When Hidetaka Miyazaki was a child, he was a keen reader, though not a talented one. Often he’d reach passages of text he couldn’t understand, and so would allow his imagination to fill in the blanks, using the accompanying illustrations. In this way, he felt he was co-writing the fiction alongside its original author." - The Guardian, 2015
There is of course a core truth in here: a work of art is not complete until the observer participates with the original author as co-creator. This was part of the philosophy of the anti-art artist Marcel Duchamp, as I discussed in relation to Elden Ring previously. However, the way that I see this quote misused is to assume that Miyazaki's games are to be interpreted as a child would interpret: heavily warped by imagination and wishful thinking. As I've demonstrated in this post, I don't believe that to be the case. Media literacy is something that goes beyond reading words and filling in the blanks with imagination, but also involves ability to identify patterns and themes, compare and contrast topics that are superficially similar, acknowledge when something can be researched to find more context, etc.
So there are a few levels on which to approach the concept that Mohg yearns for an idealized past:
Mohg is like a child or an amateur artist, inspired by the aesthetics that he encounters and using imagination to substitute for true understanding of the thing that he is emulating. For example: Miquella. There are 2 Miquella's in Elden Ring. One is Miquella, twin of Malenia. The God Miquella in the Shadowlands is Mohg's shallow impression of Miquella that has been carved down to a flattened characterization - the Shadowlands is best understood as a landscape formed of Mohg's psyche. It's a surreal dream.
Mohg was enchanted by the idea of regressing to childish simplicity, where the key to success is to "throw blood at everything". As it says in the description of the Cursed-Blood Pot: "Throw at enemies to douse them in accursed blood, causing summoned spirits to assail them with a rabid fervor. A childhood memory of the Lord of Blood." Mohg soaks the cocoon with blood because that's all that he knows how to do that gets results. Like I alluded to at the top of this post - I've barely scratched the surface of the musical references.
Based on cross-referencing, this idea of childhood memories ties back to Kuon (2004). The setting of Kuon is a manor estate and central to the plot are two Mulberry trees which birth silkworms that weave cocoons around the dead and resurrect them. The dead are resurrected through merging with living beings and after this ritual is repeated enough times a special child is born. The protagonists include two women, one of whom is absorbed as part of the ritual and the other who manages to burn down one of the trees and escape with the ritual child. Traces of this plotline can be found in Elden Ring with the Haligtree where albinaurics are being cocooned in silk, in the nearby Consecrated Snowfields (edit: Mountaintops of the Giants) there is a setpiece about reuniting two sisters (the Jellyfishes), and then Miquella in his cocoon is made to absorb people via their blood.
This is reflected also in design elements. See below for the Neptune cloth from Kuon, compared to the Lord of Blood's Favor from Elden Ring - in both cases a piece of cloth thoroughly saturated with blood.
Added to this that Mohg carries a trident which is a symbol associated with Neptune, and that one of the myths featuring Neptune involves the time that he sexually assaulted the mortal woman Medusa at Athena's temple, after which Medusa was cursed by Athena to have snakes with petrifying gaze in place of her hair. One of the few depictions of St. Trina from before the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC can be found on St. Trina's torch where her hair twists like snakes.
Mohg wanted to possess Miquella not as a person, but as an ideal that he can project onto. Mohg is a caricature of a nihilist - thus the emphatic shout of "nihil!". When one follows the philosophy that nothing in the world has a real existence then it follows that anyone can be be miscast in any role. Irrational evaluation based on feelings rather than the learned criteria that rational people use to evaluate the soundness of their understandings. Mohg's childhood is a distant memory, and time has smoothed away distinctions and led to the delusion where he sees Miquella as a younger version of himself.
Mohg is the Lord of Blood, and thus that makes him the Lord of Song - and I would further guess that his worldview is constructed from anything and everything that would have been popular enough to achieve hit single status on the radio. Which turns out to be a LOT of facets of human existence. People sing about love, money, sex, war, peace, politics, pop culture philosophies, Jesus, etc. This ties into the nihilism theme - in many cases a single song removed from the context of its album lacks the full information needed to interpret the artistic intent. Mohg has no strategy for evaluating whether any given messaging that he fanatically latches onto is helpful or harmful for a responsible society.
Closing Thoughts
Some words of warning to aspiring artists from a third song off the previously mentioned 7th Rush album:
"One likes to believe in the freedom of music
But glittering prizes and endless compromises
Shatter the illusion of integrity, yeah...
For the words of the profits
Were written on the studio walls
And Concert halls
And echoes with the sound of salesmen"
- Spirit of Radio, hit single from Permanent Waves (1980) by Rush
All artists must be motivated by profits upon reaching the scale of it being a full-time job - it is simply necessary for survival. Throughout the 1900's there was the rise of the superstar in music as first radio and then recording media became more widely available and put voices in front of more people. But the mechanism for getting onto that mass physical media is controlled by people less interested in free thought and more interested in profit. Profit does not need to be mutually exclusive with making thoughtful art, but it is like a juggling act for artists to weigh what they can afford to compromise on in the race to establish a like-minded audience before start-up funding runs out.
"Integrity" is defined as "firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values". A pledge to maintain integrity is a sort of assurance that the way something is now is the way that it will continue to be. This goes two ways. On the one hand, integrity is understood as anti-corruption. Ability to reject tactics that improve marketability to a new group at the expense of the original loyal base. On the other hand, a failure to compromise leads to inflexibility or stagnation. What if your initial values perpetuate harm - do you continue to cater to the original fanbase or seek to reconcile with the groups being harmed? Society around you never stops changing and making scientific advancements - do you plug your ears to new information and retreat into personal power fantasies, or do you continue to actively learn and adapt with the change?
Elden Ring and Bloodborne - What do we Learn from the Dead
I have been thinking through a dilemma regarding Elden Ring interpretation. And it occurred to me that Bloodborne addresses and engages with similar concerns.
There is a scene in Bloodborne where the player approaches Lady Maria sitting still and unresponsive in front of a clock face. The player reaches out to touch her and instead she blocks them saying "a corpse should be left well alone". In Elden Ring the player stands in a palace of blood in front of a corpse next to a woman who if she were not wearing a helmet would have a certain amount of resemblance to Lady Maria. This time Leda says "touch the withered arm", inviting you to meddle with a corpse. And I find that an interesting symmetry.
I. Dissection
Two things to note about Bloodborne: 1) Lady Maria's advice to leave corpses alone is implied to come from her experience of finding a corpse and being cursed by the knowledge that came from that incident, 2) It's very late in the game to be receiving this advice considering how many corpses the player has already tampered with. The Chalice Dungeons are for grave-robbing and the different subregions are grouped by tombstones - memorializing corpses. In fact there is a very compelling set of videos by Charred Thermos about the medical metaphor of Bloodborne, including the role of dissection.
I would go a step further and say that Bloodborne weaves together the concepts of both physical and psychological dissection.
In Bloodborne the consumable item to gain material for levelling is called "coldblood", presumably because is much older than the fresh "warm blood" obtained from killing enemies. The highest tier of this is "Great One Coldblood". But "coldblood" can also have the association of murders done pre-meditated and dispassionately "in cold blood".
There is a book called "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote. I have read "In Cold Blood" for a book report a long time ago and I looked up some reviews to refresh my memory. It's a "whydunnit" story - the killers have already been caught and confessed. The point of the book is to interview them and to try and make sense of the why and how. It is also an example of how difficult it is to give an objective and unbiased account of motive. As this one review puts it (by Eden Gray on Google):
"I would not recommend this book to anyone. Capote claims that this book is non-fiction, however, he has changed so many facts throughout and knew one of the prisoners personally. He also had influence on the end of the book as he did have enough money and influence to prevent or prolong the hanging of the two killers, but he chooses not to as he needed them to hang in order for him to finish and publish his book. His bias comes through clearly with his anti-death beliefs and his favouritism towards Perry is blatant because Capote related to Perry. Capote manipulated his audience to feel sympathetic towards Perry even though he brutally killed the Clutters. His manipulation and deception, verisimilitude to the core, left me thinking what is true and what is false throughout the whole book, further making me disinterested as why read a book that claims to be non-fiction when it is clearly filled with false information."
I think this is the Catch-22 of non-fiction. Digging into the lives of real people is more true to life than simply inventing characters and their psychologies from old stock tropes in fiction. But if you want to tell the non-fiction story of these people then you need to be objective and factual all the way through - and this will strictly limit the ability to work in creative themes or a thesis. But being objective just becomes a boring lists of facts. Especially unlikely to be feasible if you are trying to do a story set in a historical time period with fragmentary primary sources - realism is not possible and there will be a subjective filter on everything.
As Charred Thermos describes it in this video, there is evidence that many characters in Bloodborne are inspired by prominent medical practitioners of the Victorian Era...but Bloodborne doesn't market itself as a true crime story, or even a historical fiction. They are framing themselves as "murdering" the Great Ones - the great people of the past - in cold blood and dissecting their life's work for narrative and thematic components, but they obfuscate this under layers of eldritch aesthetic.
If I had to give an example it's like this: it is known that Alan Moore's "In Hell" is a fictionalized version of the 'Jack the Ripper' murders, because he uses the names and faces of real people (which I know about from this Arcane Workshop video that explores the comic's themes alongside the game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs). This version propagates the conspiracy theory that a specific Crown physician committed the murders - hearsay speculation that arose 80 years after the man's death when there was no-one left alive to dispute it. Nobody talks about the specific ways that parts of Bloodborne take inspiration from the wild theories surrounding the Jack the Ripper murders. Because the game only takes hints and fragments of names and the theme of committing violence against women by men who may-or-may not have some level of anatomical knowledge. Doesn't rely on the name recognition to tell the story that they want to be telling about the darker sides of humanity in the Victorian Era.
II. Discovery
How should a person feel if they are confronted with the knowledge that the character who they idealized was created from story of a single, specific human being with the identifying name scrubbed off?
The character of Lady Maria toys with this idea - the doll was made in her image, but by what is shown of their personalities they are nothing alike. How did people in the Bloodborne fandom react to this? Seriously, how should this be treated? Is it believed that the doll was made by Gherman to have Lady Maria's looks but none of her personality? Is it believed that Lady Maria has a gentle and pious side when she is not in combat? Does it change your impression of Gherman that he gives you permission to "use the doll" after knowing that this is a simulacrum of a single specific person?
I know real person fiction fans exist, but for the rest of us I feel like it would seem weird and exploitative to learn such knowledge retroactively about a beloved character. On the one hand, if a person wanted to flesh out their fanon they could go read the biography of the original. On the other hand, if new characters are being made as fictional reincarnations of the people of the past then their stories carry all of the baggage from that past. Digging through a minefield of old prejudices and heroic fantasies that aren't compatible with navigating the complex global interdependencies and ethical dilemmas of the present day.
Elden Ring pulls back from the aesthetic of physical dissection and expands massively in the realm of psychological dissection. Like "In Cold Blood", it's a kind of "whydunnit" story - the stuff about becoming an Elden Lord is a red herring (perhaps even a "red HAIRing" looking at Radagon and Radahn for example). The purpose of the Tarnished is to understand why Marika shattered the Elden Ring. To understand and accept her decision as part of the process of mourning. This dissection is not done for the benefit of the dead but is for the living to learn from the mistakes of the past and do better in the future.
Marika-as-Leda invites you to the dissection of the corpse in the cocoon. This is a secret past that they were trying to leave well alone. It is generally dark and unpleasant and surreal because these are the inner fears and obsessions of a mind that struggles to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Stuck in the nightmares of a superstitious past. Recreating cycles of painful and nonsensical rituals supporting a mythology of individual exceptionalism born out of a fear of trusting that people can work together. Messmer "the Impaler" having connotations of being a vampire because an egotistical person in a leadership role is incapable of self-reflection (vampires traditionally cannot see their reflections in mirror of polished silver), and may conclude that their solution is always best despite evidence to the contrary - until suddenly everything is on fire.
In Elden Ring and the Shadowlands you can find references to the real and mythological people who served as inspiration for Marika. She's Marie Antoinette. Anne Bonny. Bloody Mary. Anna, sister of Arthur Pendragon (mother of Mordred). Mary Shelley. Marina "La Malinche". Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ. She's all of them and none of them and probably a few more that I've missed. Some of these may even have been the inspiration for Bloodborne's Lady Maria herself due to the way FromSoftware tells stories across a multiverse. But for her case - above all she is Lady Maria OF the Astral Clocktower. If you can understand the Clocktower and the FromSoftware meta-narrative, then you can understand Lady Maria far beyond what is available by the item descriptions alone. At least, now with the context of Elden Ring it's possible to understand it. Don't know if it could have been done back in 2015.
A lot of people were not ready for the revelations of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Not sure they'd be pleased to learn that there is a way to demystify the method below the madness of Bloodborne.
III. A Confession
So, it wasn't random chance that I connected the concept of "coldblood" to Capote's "In Cold Blood". Sometimes I do a "this day in history search" for each the dates that FromSoftware releases games and sometimes this yields interesting results. September 30 was the release date of Dark Souls 2 DLC: The Crown of the Ivory King. September 30 was also the birthday of Truman Capote. This isn't the first time an author birthday has popped up in a way that I find meaningful. Regarding themes of Elden Ring and Armored Core VI, respectively, there was John Wyndham - author of the Midwich Cuckoo, The Day of the Triffids, and the Chrysalids - on July 10, release day of Armored Core (1997). And Walter Michael Miller Jr. - author of A Canticle for Leibowitz - on January 23, 1923 which matches the release day of a game called Thousand Land (2003). And then Jack London (born John Griffith Chaney) who authored The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Iron Heel has a matching birthday with Enchanted Arms (2006) on January 12, 1876.
And September 30 wasn't a date that I selected randomly to scrutinize next. More than ever before the Shadowland area of Elden Ring gives me the impression of a rotting old theatre where literally "the curtains have fallen" on previous eras. There's a progressive rock band for that: Dream Theatre. Combing through Dream Theatre's discography not only are there several motifs that I can see echoed in Elden Ring, but several album release dates line up with FromSoftware's previous games including "Chaos in Motion", the live video album that was released September 30, 2007 - same calendar date as the Crown of the Ivory King DLC in 2014. This is an interesting alignment because in classic writing by Virgil the Gate of Ivory is the one through which false dreams pass through.
What I'm taking away from is this: FromSoftware will not "show their work" and explain in interviews or supplementary footnotes the full scope of media and real life influences on their games. Because boasting about all of the research they did would be morally wrong - a false dream. They are in the business of making fictional characters, not exploiting the dead and putting words in their mouths for sensational name recognition. They may take inspiration from scientific concepts such as medical and psychology and various political and philosophical movements, but they won't pretend to be an authority on these things. If the player wants to fully comprehend the story then, yes, grasping at the hints of references to real world phenomena and doing your own research into those topics is a way to get there with greater accuracy.
IV. Witnesses
And how can a person know if they are correct about identifying any given influence? You can't "know", but you can build a case for it. Like how the broad strokes of complexity theory are described in this video about the 5 layers of depth in 2016 game The Witness. When understanding the logic of the game universe you want to be collecting "Witnesses" of what the narrative does and does not support. I like this idea of calling witnesses as an extension of the dissection/murder mystery metaphor - after all murder trials make use of both eye-witnesses and expert witnesses.
If I can collect 25 items containing a helix or spiral pattern and sort them according to number of twists and this vaguely follows the agreed upon timeline of history from other sources, then that tells me that the game history supports being sorted into discrete units of time and this is reflected in the art direction. If 5 of those 25 give unexpected results, then either I didn't understand the rules of the helices as well as I thought, or there is a misinformation in the commonly believed timeline. If I can collect 20 instances of suspiciously meaningfully anagrams, then that's 20 Witnesses that the game supports anagram wordplay in certain situations. If I can look to the band "Rush" and collect 7 album release date matches in FromSoft's back catalogue + 13 sets of visuals or wording similarities to specific songs then that also would seem to be 20 Witnesses that these are intentional references rather than the random noise of the universe. Maybe there is grounds to think that FromSoftware saw something inspirational in the creative or intellectual philosophy of that specific group of musicians - drawing from contemporary sources rather than solely on an outdated catalogue of classical poetry. Though to be honest I'm starting to think sometimes it's the other way around - they started with the musicians and mined their lyrics for pop culture references.
Based on collecting Witnesses, there is evidence that Elden Ring contains an elaborate reference to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which is itself well known for making global musical pop culture references. In Bloodborne the Great Ones convey their messages through sound.
V. Verdict
Altogether I'm feeling more confident about the relevance of the 3 additional backlogged posts that I've been working on that delve into the musical scavenger hunt of Elden Ring. But the dilemma was about whether it is right to clinically dissect and present evidence that a video game has made characters out of sensitive topics as they relate to the personal histories of specific people who are living or have living family. I guess it depends on presentation - is due respect given to the topic? Are there cases where it would be better to recommend an auto-biography or other primary source than to paraphrase? Is there something of value to be learned, or is it all just entertainment?
So I decided to explore what it could mean that the Doll in Bloodborne references a "Flora" in connection to the moon. Essentially tracing several connective threads down lines of inquiry related to the Flower Moon.
In a way, this is a follow up to my previous post "Elden Ring and Bloodborne - What do we Learn from the Dead". For context: under certain conditions the doll may kneel in front of one of the gravestones in the Hunter's Dream and say the following prayer:
"O Flora, of the moon, of the dream. O little ones, O fleeting will of the ancients. Let the hunter be safe, let her find comfort. And let this dream her captor, foretell a pleasant awakening. Be one day, a fond, distant memory." - Peculiar Doll
Data mining has confirmed that there are 2 conditions that may trigger this, so long as the Hunter's Nightmare has not yet been accessed but the blood moon has been triggered: 1) At Hunter's Nightmare gravestone, or 2) In a New Game + cycle, directed at the Hunter's Gravestone that appears only if the "Yharnam Sunrise" ending was previously selected (in which the player is beheaded by Gherman). Further, there are indications that "Flora" was the name of the Moon Presence in earlier versions of the game.
Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon
It is traditional among native people of Turtle Island (more commonly known as North America) to assign names to the moons of the year based around notable benchmarks in the changing of the seasons. There is no codified system that spans all peoples - it varies by region. The Farmer's Almanac adopted the system of naming moons as inspired by this practice and similar European traditions that pre-dates the Julian calendar. But this is both generalized to apply to a wider area and includes the biases of Colonial America that do not always harmonize with the origins of the tradition.
'Killers of the Flower Moon' is a 2023 movie based on a 2017 book that got its title from a 2009 poem by Elise Paschen about the 1921 murder of Anna Kyle Brown in the first of what would be known as the Osage Reign of Terror. A conspiracy generally masterminded by rancher William Hale to secure land and oil rights. This was considered to be the first major murder case of the FBI. Actually, the title of the book and movie muddle the intent of the poem in a subtle way (though the explanation is provided in the first few pages of the book). In Osage it's "Killer of the Flowers" Moon because this is the time of year when a late frost may arrive and kill young flowers.
So now I intend to suspend disbelief and consider the metanarrative. Because in my experience, FromSoft has been extremely attentive to the dates when their games are released. Some hints of this are in the ways that the phases of the moon in real life at date of release match the moon phases observed in game for Sekiro and Elden Ring. Recently much emphasis was placed on the number "621" in Armored Core VI and release day of Shadow of the Erdtree, considering that the only time they have ever released a game on the exact day of a solar eclipse was Forever Kingdom in 2001 on the June 21 summer solstice. In fact, before Shadow of the Erdtree, the only Fromsoft game ever released on the day of a full moon that I could find - out of 80+ games - was also on the day of a blood moon. This will come up later.
There have been 4 games in the history of FromSoftware that have been released during part of a Flower moon/Flower Killing Moon cycle. That is, when the May moon is either waxing or waning:
Lost Kingdoms (Rune) 2 - May 22, 2003 (Last Quarter - Aquarius)
Dark Souls Remastered - May 24, 2018 (Waxing Gibbous - Libra)
One notable observation is that May 24th appears twice. Another is that Nanpure VOW and Iraroji VOW actually are for two different May moons - the second one is a Blue moon. And it is an outlier in the FromSoft catalogue to be making these sudoku and picross games to begin with - a puzzle game genre that had not been touched before or since. A similar outliner is seen in 2009 with FromSoft publishing 2 visual novels playing through the cases of famous Japanese fictional detective Kosuke Kindaichi - The Inugami Curse and The Village of 8 Graves.
So why emphasize May 24?
Q. How do you Solve a Problem like Maria?
A. With the Sound of Music
There could be multiple reasons. In Canada May 24 is Queen Victoria Day (French: Fête de la Reine, lit. 'Celebration of the Queen'), as it was Queen Victoria's birthday and she was the Mother of Confederation for Canada.
But there is an odd pull that I want to dig into because it ties in quite well with the musical themes of Bloodborne: On May 24, 1982 the funk/art band Blondie released their 6th album titled "The Hunter" under label Chrysalis and recorded at New York studio "The Hit Factory". The 11th song on this album is a cover song titled "The Hunter is Captured by the Game". Studio not to be confused with "The Hit House", which is the indie publisher who collaborated with Ruby Friedman to create the song "Cut You Down" that appears to have been commissioned for the Bloodborne trailer released March 19, 2015.
The two best known Blondie songs otherwise are "Heart of Glass" (from 3rd album Parallel Lines) and "Rapture" (from 5th album Autoamerican). Heart of Glass is about being in a fragile emotional state that is easily left broken hearted, and also I note that for all of the various organs represented in Bloodborne not one of them is a heart. Rapture is about, well, I don't think paraphrasing does it justice:
"And you drive all night and then you see a light
And it comes right down and lands on the ground
And out comes a man from Mars
And you try to run but he's got a gun
And he shoots you dead and he eats your head
Then you're in the man from Mars
You go out at night eatin' cars
You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too
Mercurys and Subarus
And you don't stop, you keep on eatin' cars
Then when there's no more cars
You go out at night and eat up bars
Where the people meet"
Which upon doing linguistics translates to a hit list for: the founder of Detroit in Michigan (Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac), a Village of Lake People (Lincolns), Quicksilver (Mercurys), and the 7 Sisters Pleiades Constellation (Subarus). Blondie's 7th album is called 'No Exit' inspired by the Sartre play of the same name ("L'enfer, c'est les autres") and was released in 1999, of which the hit single is titled 'Maria'.
The City of Detroit is itself on the traditional lands of the Potawatomi and Miami native peoples, among others. It was founded in the early 1700's and one of the first structures constructed was a chapel to St. Anne. The land upon which Fort Detroit was built was reluctantly ceded by the coalition of Native American tribes known as the Western Confederacy (led by Little Turtle) in 1795. Fort Detroit later burned to the ground on June 11 1805, with the fire rumored to be started by hot pipe ashes that a baker has dropped in his stable. On the other hand, the Treaty of Detroit later acquired more land rights for additional territory in the Michigan basin and on the US side was signed by a William Hull.
I'll address the "man from Mars" later but what stands out for me here is that Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac may be correlated to the founding of Yharnam (which would later burn down in a fire as a consequence of an ashen disease), Village of Lake People to the Fishing Village, Quicksilver to the creation of bullets that can repel the beasts. The 7 sisters is something I'm still picking over - I suspect that cross-referencing other FromSoft games may help with this one. And I've also noted that quite a lot of the female characters in the game share fragments of their names with each other and with Annalise.
For Annalise herself, I suspect that the connection to the brutal Osage killings might be relevant, partially because of the specific use of the term "Reign of Terror". This was previously used for the period of time when Queen Marie Antoinette was beheaded. According to this article, Cainhurst Castle may have been inspired by Bran Castle in modern day Romania, former Transylvania. Marie Antoinette's mother was Maria Theresa, who was sovereign of the Hapsburg domains for 40 years - including Transylvania - and the only woman to have held this title in her own right.
The Greater "Will"?
And another thing: multiple significant "Williams" have been coming up in these historical dives tangentially connected to Bloodborne. I suspect that Master Willem in the nexus for these especially after considering this next one: Sir William Gull, a physician active between 1842 and 1887.
Sir William Gull was a court physician for the Prince of Wales and received his knighthood for curing the prince of typhoid fever (typically contracted by eating food contaminated by feces - sanitation was pretty rough in the 1800's). His best known work includes investigation into the spinal cord and causes of paraplegia, being the first to describe anorexia nervosa and identify it as a psychological condition, and investigation into the effects of atrophied thyroid gland in women (cessation of periods, roundness of face, sleepiness, and indifferent attitude).
The association with the spinal cord is of particular relevance to Bloodborne considering 3 factors: 1) the Yellow Backbone item that can be used to modify chalice dungeons and is also dropped by "The One Reborn" 2) the prevalence of wheelchair-bound enemies, and 3) collecting and consuming umbilical cords allows the player to become immune to the fate of being placed in a wheelchair bound state by the Moon Presence - umbilical cord blood is rich in stem cells and the use of stem cell therapy is proposed as a means of repairing spinal cord damage. Alongside the topic of human cloning (which was partially covered in this BobbyBroccoli video), the ethics of stem cell research was a topic of debate in the early 2000's. There's a 2002 Dream Theatre song about this zeitgeist.
Also here are some of my favourite quotes from Sir William Gull which seem topical:
"Fools and savages explain; wise men investigate." William Withey Gull – A Biographical Sketch (T. D. Acland), Memoir II.
"The foundation of the study of Medicine, as of all scientific inquiry, lies in the belief that every natural phenomenon, trifling as it may seem, has a fixed and invariable meaning" Published Writings, "Study of Medicine"
"Realize, if you can, what a paralyzing influence on all scientific inquiry the ancient belief must have had which attributed the operations of nature to the caprice not of one divinity, but of many. There still remains vestiges of this in most of our minds, and the more distinct in proportion to our weakness and ignorance." British Medical Journal, 1874, 2: 425.
The fictionalized (and unjustly defamatory) version of Sir William Gull is suspected of being Jack the Ripper based on a conspiracy theory. The most popular version of which is in the Alan Moore comic "From Hell". This is the 4th time the concept of "Hell" has come up in connection with Bloodborne. Another as previously mentioned was in the Sartre play No Exit through a Blondie album, where "Hell is other people". What I did not mention at the time is that this is the opening lyric to the song "Cut you Down" from the Bloodborne trailer:
Your blood's gone bad
I knew it would
The devil killed
And yet you're back for good
And fourthly, Bloodborne released in the year 2015. In tarot, the 15th major arcana is The Devil, and I have extensively deconstructed the way that Elden Ring exposes FromSoftware's use of tarot.
"If you show someone their future, they have no future. You take away the mystery, you take away hope." - Paycheck, 2003
And if this seems to be bouncing around a lot and grasping for barely connected straws, it gets more complicated. Because there is the astral clock-as-time machine to consider. On December 25, 2003 the movie 'Paycheck' released on the exact same day as a FromSoft game called Ootogi, Myth of Demons 2: Immortal Warriors. The movie was based on a Phillip K. Dick novel of the same name so from the perspective of intentional release date matching it would have been easy to guess the plot ahead of time.
Essentially what happens in the movie is that a programmer is contracted for a 2 year job after which his memory will be deleted to preserve confidentiality. But instead of payment or the personal effects he remembers submitting he receives a package of random objects that his more knowledgeable pre-memory-loss self had left for him, which he soon finds out are exactly what he needs to evade various situations that happen.
And now he needs to solve both the mystery of what exactly he has been doing for the past couple years and why people want him dead. Turns out he was building a machine that predicts the future and realized at about the end of the project that this was a pretty bad idea:
"The machine predicts a war - and we go to war to avert it. It predicts a plague - we herd all the sick together, create a plague. Whatever future this predicts, we make happen. We give over control of our lives completely. I did this… Seeing the future will destroy us."
On my FromSoftware timeline the release of Armored Core Nexus on March 18, 2004 is basically the last date before observations go non-linear and fragmented. The backbone of the whole thing remains consistent - Armored Core games follow astrology like clockwork. That's the problem I assume: one revolution of a clock lands you right back where you started. The tragedy at the end of the procession of stars (see: Shadow of the Erdtree) is that the future is the same as the past and there is no hope for change.
"Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation.
We have Assumed Control." - 2112, Part VII
March 18 is also the release date of the 1st album of progressive rock band "Rush", under the label Moon records. This is surrounded by two other instances in extremely tight timeframe that I find very difficult to believe a coincidence: 1) January 14, 2004 is the release of King's Field mobile and the anniversary of the 7th album Permanent Waves (some standout songs: Entre Nous "we are planets to each other", and Closer to the Heart), 2) April 1, 2004 is the release day of Kuon and the anniversary of the 4th album 2112 ("The Twin Moons, just two pale orbs as they trace their way across the steely sky....We have had peace since 2062, when the surviving planets were banded together under the Red Star of the Solar Federation. The less fortunate gave us a few new moons.").
Points to note: the cover for 2112 would establish a red star as the symbol of the Solar Federation - Mars is the "red star". Mars is also likely associated with Formless Oedon as described briefly in this previous post. This album also generated the "Starman" logo for Rush which features "the abstract man against the masses". Second, Rush's international label for their first 4 albums was Mercury Records - perhaps sufficing as the Mercurys eaten by the man from Mars. Which is setting up a conflict in which the band Rush is eaten by the Man from Mars but also fighting from within. And who else would they be fighting on behalf of but the Man Woman in the Iron Mask: Queen Annalise. Rush as a band is a trio, and sometimes talked of themselves as "The Three Musketeers" as said by Geddy Lee himself in his auto-biography "My Effin Life" (and it also is the headline of a 1984 interview).
This whole extended reference does get more complex, as these matches suggest a pattern. Albums 7, 1, and 4 are seen here, albums 3 and 6 will turn up matching the dates of other games, and two compilation albums will match other dates for 7 total. The calendar date match with the 3rd Rush album is Armored Core V Verdict Day on September 24, 2013 - it features the song "Bastille Day" about cutting off heads. And that's it. A heavy skew towards the 1st 7 of 19 Rush albums.
It is at this point in time that I find it necessary to address the Blood Moon. Because the next released FromSoft game is Armored Core Nine Breaker on October 28, 2004, which happens to be the day of a lunar eclipse, a.k.a. a Blood Moon. Which is made more significant by the way that FromSoft basically never releases games on the day of even normal full moons. I imagine there is a reason for this: You're not supposed to do bloodletting or surgery on the day of a full moon. Especially not for the body part associated with that moon according to a complicated system of arithmatic. This particular moon was in the phase of Taurus, which governs neck, throat, and vocal chords.
And I know a few other details about the release of Bloodborne on March 24, 2015. It falls 4 days after a solar eclipse which looked like this as seen from the UK (i.e. the general setting of Bloodborne).
And 11 days before a blood moon - which again was governed by Taurus. Not just any blood moon, but the third in a tetrad that some religious folks were very weird about according to the google image search.
Back to the flower moons and/or killing flower moons. I don't know what's up with April 26th. After searching the discographies of a dozen or so bands based on vibes, nothing has come up yet for that date. Some potentials came up in a "this day in history" search but that's not something I want to work through right now. I do have an opinion about May 23, 2003. In my searches for the origin of the phrase "Judy's Comet" as used in the first Armored Core game, I encountered a lullaby song written by Paul Simon named "St. Judy's Comet" and it occurred to me to associate it with Lost Kingdoms II. For sheer coincidence in the small window of time that I was looking at both game and song they had initial release dates listed as May 22, which on reviewing various corrections is the incorrect date for both, but on the other hand I'm more open now to considering indirect references (similar to what was followed through with Blondie above). In this case, the most likely link would be that Armored Core IV: Fires of Rubicon released on August 25, which was the same calendar day as Paul Simon's "Graceland" album released in 1986 - his 7th and most successful solo album. Also the song Scarborough Fair was used in Déraciné, of which a very well-known version was recorded by the duo Simon and Garfunkel.
But regardless of nebulous date matching, what I find appealing about St. Judy's Comet is that 1) It's a lullaby released under the dominion of a Flower Moon. 2) It's about a saint. 3) Mergo = "Me ergo" = I think, therefore I am the 3rd tone of a musical scale. 4) It's ultimately an incorrect retcon of the original Armored Core emblem - most likely the "Judy's Comet" that was actually referenced in that game was the Japanese WWII plane named "Comet" that was reported as "Judy" on the Allied side (edit: or maybe not incorrect! Armored Core released closely after the mecha anime Gundam Wing, which features a faction called "OZ" or "Organization of the Zodiac" which has a secondary Wizard of Oz theme). Which sums up to an impression that Mergo has some themes of "St. TRIna", who is similarly representing a retcon to an idealized past that never existed. Mergo is a maddening auditory hallucination that doesn't exist.
The "Third Umbilical Cord" is itself a musical reference. In one musical theory the circle of thirds helps to organize pitches. However, "umbilical" is a word that can also be applied to the end caps of a scroll, which are rolled up in a spiral. A more complex musical theory follows the spiral array model as an algorithmic process for using ascending spirals to select musical chords made of 3 notes.
So why single out these three musical acts in relation to Bloodborne - Blondie, Rush, and Paul Simon? Is there a common connection between them? Yes, actually. All three performed at the Hammersmith Odeon in England. Oedon = scrambled Odeon = scrambled "singing place". With "hammersmith' showing that even in a game without a blacksmith somehow there is a blacksmith after all.
And on the topic of hammers, Oscar Hammerstein II - son of theatre owner William Hammerstein - was the lyricist for the Sound of Music musical referenced briefly above. Something to put a pin in for future reference is that this was his last major work - he was afflicted with stomach cancer and died less than a year after the premier.
So is the Moon Presence Really Named Flora?
Yes and No.
"O Flora, of the moon, of the dream. O little ones, O fleeting will of the ancients. Let the hunter be safe, let her find comfort. And let this dream her captor, foretell a pleasant awakening. Be one day, a fond, distant memory." - Peculiar Doll
I would imagine that the moon that the doll is referencing is either the May "Flower Moon" of the Farmer's Almanac or the August "Yellow Flowers Blossom Moon" of the Osage. Or both is possible. Lumenflowers in Bloodborne have the form of the typically-yellow sunflower, but their colour is instead a pale blue. One of the other blue moon matches occurs in August, with the release of Dark Souls Prepare to Die edition in 2012. So that would make it another blue moon: "Blue-Yellow Flowers Blossom Moon".
"Flora" is mentioned by the Doll, Lumenflowers (pale blue sunflowers) are placed in front of the astral clock, Nanpure VOW and Iraroji VOW are twin games with different moons, Lady Maria and the Doll are twins. That would seem to make the Doll a proxy of the "Blue Killer of Flowers Moon", and that Lady Maria has a link with the Killer of Flowers moon as frost is what kills the flowers and she is distantly related to the frost-covered Castle Cainhurst. But the doll will only say the prayer after the blood moon rises, as if it was that occurrence that caused the Moon Presence to shed a former identity and adopt a new one.
For the antagonistic Moon Presence the answer may be deceptively simple: The Hunter's Moon. That one time in the history of FromSoftware that a game was released on the day of a blood moon on October 28, 2004 it would have been a Hunter's Moon according to the Farmer's Almanac. The day that a bloodletting operation gone wrong resulted in damage to vocal chords, and the ensuing discordant noise led to confusion among the Hunters as to what they were even seeking to hunt for. And the only Flower moon before this would have been attached to Lost Kingdoms 2 on May 23, 2003.
There is no Great One in Bloodborne which resembles a heart, but the Moon Presence has the appearance of a circulatory system forming a lion's mane, gaping open ribcage, and prominent exposed spine. The Hunter Moon is likely seeking the same thing that the Hunters have lost: a "heart". And the player acts to fill the void of that missing heart for as long as they continue to play the game through new cycles - which is what is conveyed in the ending where the Moon presence presses the player to its face and then they take the place of Gherman. The dream is the game is the captor. "The Hunter is Captured by the Game".
Where to Go Next?
I have seen speculation that the stories of Yharnam, Kos, and Annalise are connected. I suspect that this is correct but the mechanics of "how" probably involve digging even deeper into the stacked layers of history/chalice dungeons/umbilical chords which is too big of a task for now. At a guess it builds on the concept of "Hell is other people" in such a way that a lot of the monsters have a specific human elsewhere in the game who is an alternate version of them (or are there multiple versions of some, with the chalice levels being the key?). Ultimately, within the conceit of the game the act of becoming an infant Great One is to not simply collect the four "third umbilical cords" but to understand what they mean.
One thing I find baffling about people in the FromSoftware fandoms is the contradiction of these three adjacent thoughts:
Repeated elements are found in Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, Deracine, etc, even with commonalities as far back as "King's Field" (Moonlight Greatsword)
None of these games are written to make sense.
Sometimes a big skeleton sticking out of a cliff wall is there because it is badass. a.k.a. The repeated elements are there because Miyazaki thinks it is cool.
I dunno, have you tried making sense of things by assuming that the repeated elements are a form of internally consistent Symbolism? That repetition is the point? That maybe you're supposed to consider Dark Souls 3 High Lord Wolnir and the Giant Skeletons in Elden Ring and think about how these have a similar meaning?
In other words, I've been trying to identify why people keep confusing Absurdism with Surrealism and Nihilism. Which led to the most thorough investigation of Dadaism and Anti-art that I've done since high school.
And I think I get it now: the repeated elements are embracing the concept of the "rectified readymade". In the real world, the artefacts of any given time period that have survived to the present - the selection process of which thoughts/souls are elevated as art and dragged forwards from past to present - is significant. So why should it not be significant when enemy designs, names, attack animations, weapons, etc that already exist as made digital objects are put through a selection process and some survive to be reused?
"If the gods saw peoples' souls but not their bodies in mirror to the way people saw bodies but not souls it might explain why the gods were so careless of such things as appearance or other bodily functions. Such as pain? Was pain an illusion from the gods' point of view?" - Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
The design philosophy of FromSoft's souls games (and Elden Ring) is simple: adapt the above concept from book format to video game. The players are in the role of the omnipotent god who can play and replay the game and memorize all of the pieces of how it all fits together. With effort, a person can know the past, present, and future of every character. And the pain of the player avatar - and indeed all characters - is an illusion. They are distant abstract constructs. Not real.
Where the quote says "soul" what it means is "thoughts". Narratives written from the point of view of a specific character can give an unparalleled view into their thoughts about the situation they are in. Sneaky writers can use this to show that even the worst person in a story views themself as a hero who fully believes themselves justified, even as another character identifies them as careless or a dangerous tyrant.
So the characters in the videogame are conceptualized as more than just "people" - they are souls. They are bundles of thoughts. Their affect and quest lines and naming schemes and even the directions that they are facing in game are all highly structured to convey theme, cautionary tales, or to act as microcosms of the macro forces at play. And when they die, their animating thoughts become exposed as one or more pieces of equipment that the player can take for their own use.
Counterpart to the soul, the word "body" is used less often than you'd think in Elden Ring. More often the physical form is described as "flesh". "Cursemark carved into the discarded flesh of Ranni the Witch." "As for his flesh, he gave it to me, Shabriri."
What I mean by this is that when Ranni says "this doll's body is not without its hindrances" the body in question is not the doll. When Ansbach says "After Lord Mohg's slaying at his dynastic palace, it appears his body has been absconded with. And taken straight to Kind Miquella." he is not really talking about the physical appearance of Mohg Lord of Blood that we fight.
Think of the "body" of each demigod as a world. Thoughts occupy a body and so "Elden Ring" the videogame is the body of work that contains the characters. The Lands Between itself is the body that Ranni's doll form exists within. The "Shadow of the Erdtree" is a body nested within the greater body. A game world accessed within a game world.
Important is the extrapolation of this understanding. The Shadowlands in all its hostile glory is the "body" of Mohg that we are all trampling about in - the "inner world" that he stole from Miquella and made his own. Recall that Mohg appears from nothing - he forms from the formless blood that pools out of the corpse inside the cocoon in Mohgwyn Palace. He is possessing this corpse like a demon - like Shabriri - possesses the flesh of others. But Ansbach has no obligation to tell you the history of the flesh or the body. He only says the most recent true thing because it is most flattering to his cause - that Miquella has seized control of the body that was most recently under control of Mohg. He neglects to mention that Miquella's claim to the body pre-dates Mohg's.
And Mohg, Lord of Blood, claimed the body by soaking it in blood.
“Blood is memory...Blood is who we are...Blood recalls who we were. Blood is how we will be remembered. Work it well into the womb wood.” - Fool's Fate, Robin Hobb
It's a fantastical explanation that could have been pulled directly from the Realm of the Elderlings. Blood is memory, and blood worked into the Wombwood (the chrysalis of dead dragons) allows a person to superimpose their thoughts and memories over those of the never-metamorphosed dragon. And so, many souls who experience bloody violence are trapped in the Cocoon of the Empyrean in a living death.
And whether Miquella is a victim who suffers from being drowned in blood, or whether this bloody ascension was all according to plan becomes a topic of debate for us careless player-gods. The pain of characters in a story is an illusion. What you get out of it depends on the perspective you put in.
Have been discussing great runes in the discord chat recently, and we got around again to the debate about where to place Morgott and Mohg's Runes in the Elden Ring: top slot or middle? In my opinion they are intended to stack based on shape fitting. And in terms of symmetry the top makes sense - otherwise this leaves the top arc of the top rune incomplete because Godrick's Rune only has fragments of circles. Also, the centre ring has a larger diameter than the others, and it would thematically work well if this was the centre master rune of the Elden Ring (That is - Miquella's Broken/Shattered Rune).
The main counter to this is that in the text both Godrick's and Morgott's runes are called "the" anchor ring. The Japanese text uses identical kanji for anchor ring (要の輪) so translation of this single component doesn't help distinguish them. However this translation is a bit of an anomaly in that there is minimal relationship between the English text and the selected kanji. The kanji for nautical anchor or fixed point of a grapple (as used in the "Rusted Anchor" weapon item) is entirely different (錨). So to illuminate this discrepancy I decided to do an expanded review into the text of both languages.
Morgott's Great Rune
A Great Rune of the shardbearer Morgott.
Its blessing greatly raises maximum HP.
This Great Rune is the anchor ring that houses the base, and proves two things:
That the Omen King was born of the golden lineage, and that he was indeed the Lord of Leyndell.
Godrick's Great Rune
A Great Rune of the shardbearer Godrick.
Its blessing raises all attributes
This Great Rune is known as the anchor ring, found in the center of the Elden Ring.
The first demigods were The Elden Lord Godfrey and his offspring, the golden lineage.
It seems odd that both claim to be "THE" anchor ring, so there is the possibility that two different definitions can apply between the English and Japanese (which probably won't hold up if other languages are examined, but until I get access to those, let's try this).
The kanji for anchor (要) when pronounced "kaname" generally means "pivot point" or "rivet" especially when related to the pinhead of a folding fan that resembles a crab's eye "kani no me". This makes me think of Godrick's Rune since he has the crab theme. So that would be "anchor" in the nautical sense of device that holds in place and resists motion in one plane, but allows rotation in another. Which I suspect could contribute to the modern English use of "anchor points" in rotating digital objects:
The original meaning of 要 when pronounced "yo" is the one that means "key", "important point", or "essential piece". Technically Morgott's rune is an important piece because it is the only mandatory rune to beat the game. The kanji was originally a pictogram for "waist" adapted from the kanji for "woman". I guess in a sense the waist is the point that ties the top and bottom together. Focus on "woman". An "anchor" is the gender neutral term for "anchorman/anchorwoman" - a person who is the host of a TV program. Marika's rune sits far above this cluster of runes, so perhaps it can be conceptualized that the top ring rune is the "waist" of the entire symbol.
Regarding the word "base" it has some vague connotations - it can be the "bottom" or the "primordial template from which other things are constructed on top of". Another prominent use of the word "base" in Elden Ring is in the "Base Serpent" in the DLC. But an important point is that the part about "housing the base" doesn't seem to translate directly from Japanese which is instead "[anchor] ring with a trunk" (kanji for "trunk" is 幹 and pronounced "kan"). So it's an important rune with a tree trunk - which in the original Chinese can also be a "body torso" or "heavenly stem" with regards to one of the ten suns to appear through a traditional 10-day week.
On the other hand: combine the two meanings and it is the rune at the base of a tree trunk - the point where the trunk connects to the roots. In the primordial Farum Azula Elden Ring the ring structure appears to be embedded near the top of a branching root system, but the stalk of the "tree" that Marika hangs on has not yet grown so high. This also works with the understanding of the "base" serpent as the dragon and/or serpent Nidhogg (Níðhöggr/"malice striker") which is trapped by and gnaws at one of the three roots of the world tree, Yggdrasil.
At this point I'm somewhat biased as it's already been my pet theory that Morgott's rune is an abstraction of the story of Elden Ring. So as I interpret it, Morgott's rune is the one that "hosts" the "heavenly stem" of the Erdtree. Paralleled in Marika being the body or anchorwoman that "hosts" the Elden Ring symbol.
In conclusion: Morgott's ring can be located somewhere other than the centre of Godrick's rune, if you want it to be. There is enough ambiguity in the terms "anchor (要)" and "base" and "幹". Also, that would be somewhat appropriate in the sense of having a second anchor point offset from the first: this would lock a mechanism in place and stop it from spinning around either point. Suits the idea in Elden Ring of stagnation or stopped motion.
