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fun hater posted:i got linked it bc someone knew it would make steam fly out of my ears lol
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Aug 21, 2021 23:02
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Raenir Salazar posted:I absolutely love these kinds of deep dive readings into games, especially for games like Dark Souls where the explicit story telling is a bit light on details and heavier more on atmosphere. Consider me subscribed. The Killing Post
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Sep 18, 2021 23:01
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Weren't there several posts after mine? I'm confused.
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Sep 19, 2021 01:45
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Metafiction quote:However rearranging the partially completed designs was extremely difficult. For example the character Lucatiel of Mirrah. Her name during development was Don Quixote and the Bell Keeper dwarf her Sancho Panza.  Don Quixote is often called the first “modern novel,” whatever that means. It’s also one of the first recorded works of metafiction, stories that deliberately question the boundary between fictional storytelling and reality. As Amber Lorenz describes the titular character: quote:Don Quixote, as reader, constructs (or longs to construct, as he never gets around to it) his own endings to the books he reads. He begins to confuse the line between reality and the stories he consumes: “His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books ... [and] for him no history in the world was truer.” Don Quixote’s fantasies become more real to him than anything else. He reads with such hunger that at a certain point, reading is no longer enough; he has to live out his favorite works of fiction and become the author and protagonist of his own story of chivalry. So when I read the Dark Souls 2 Design Works Interview and discovered that Lucatiel was internally referred to as Don Quixote… that set off alarm bells. Long before I even stumbled upon this quote, I suspected that the Dark Souls series had metafictional elements. That suspicion began with the Painted World of Ariandel at the very end of Dark Souls 3. The narrative of the zone had a disconnect from the rest of the series, but it still felt like it belonged. It was also quite plainly about the creation of worlds.  quote:My thanks, Ashen One. More directly, we have this line at the conclusion of the area’s storyline from the seemingly unremarkable Corvian Settler:  quote:When the world rots, we set it afire. We can compare it to Miyazaki’s own comments about the end of the series: quote:"It’s time to move away from the Dark Souls franchise," Miyazaki said. "As president of From Software, I’m not completely denying the possibility of bringing back the franchise in the future. There could be someone else in my company who wants to work on new installments. But we believe that the series will end after the two DLC." They’re essentially the same sentiment: an expression of finality for a franchise, and more importantly, the universe that franchise represents--albeit with the Corvian Settler being less diplomatic in describing the motivation. And when a fictional character is serving as a mouthpiece for the authors’ own intent to end that work of fiction, you have metafiction. Then there’s water: quote:Satake: Yes. From what I remember it was originally designed as a water temple. But as work on the game progressed, and the image of kindling and fire became more prominent, the water gradually dried up. Haha. It’s easy to miss, but there are countless areas in this series that are undergoing a drought. Essentially, the worldbuilding of the games became a reflection of the development conditions during their own creation. The water of the world literally dried up.  And this motif extends beyond Dark Souls. Sekiro begins with your character in the Ashina Reservoir, except it’s not much of a reservoir because part of the wall is destroyed and all the water is missing. It’s an architectural motif that also shows up in both the Undead Parish of Dark Souls 1 and the Undead Settlement of Dark Souls 3.  Our character’s climb up the world of Sekiro culminates in the Fountainhead Palace, which is essentially the water temple that Firelink Shrine was supposed to be, complete with a New Londo Ruins parallel of a flooded city directly below it. Even the worldbuilding of a game outside of the series released almost a decade later shows evidence of the influence of the Dark Souls 1 development process.  And finally, as I’ve already made the case, the authorial motivation behind many of these textual elements found in these games makes so much more sense if the central authorial source died during their creation.  quote:Soul of the ineffable Particularly so since the most eloquent reflection on death is from the one inspired by Don Quixote who “[became] the author and protagonist of his own story”: quote:Loss frightens me no end. Loss of memory, loss of self. The Heir of Fire Thus began the Age of Fire. But soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain. Putting all that aside for now, I want to focus on a theme that shows up constantly throughout this series: generational transfer of power. Titanite, the core upgrade material in the series, derives its name from the Titans of Greek mythology. I can say this with confidence because Dark Souls makes multiple references to the Titans throughout the series. For example, Reah of Thorolund from Dark Souls 1 is a reference to Rhea the Titaness and mother of the Olympians. The Harpe we find in the Undead Settlement of Dark Souls 3 is etymologically based on the sickle sword that Cronus, the consort of Rhea, used to castrate his father Uranus and establish the Titans as the new generation of gods, a scene we reenact in the boss fight of the Undead Settlement.   The stories of both the Titans and Olympians are allegories for the often contentious transfer of power between generations. This theme shows up in what Kaathe tells us about Gwyn and the Age of Fire: quote:Your ancestor claimed the Dark Soul and waited for Fire to subside. Once you start looking for it, this theme of replacing the current power structure shows up a lot. Like, in every single ending of every Soulsborne game. It’s most apparent in Bloodborne, where the ending in which we defeat Gehrman but haven’t eaten the three pieces of umbilical cord, we find our character being pushed around in Gehrman’s wheelchair by the doll, as though we have taken his role. And isn’t the Linking the Fire ending of Dark Souls 1 (and 3) the same thing? Once we defeat Gwyn, our character simply continues to serve his imprisonment.  Back in Bloodborne, if we eat the cords, then we can face the Moon Presence. Upon her defeat our character is reborn as an infant great one being cradled by the doll. The parallel to the Gehrman ending is now obvious: our character is replacing the Moon Presence.  Dark Souls 2 can conclude with us claiming the throne that Nashandra coveted. Yet another replacement. Or it can end with us walking away from the whole ritual, the equivalent of the Bloodborne ending where we surrender to Gehrman and wake up from the dream, as well as the End of Fire ending of Dark Souls 3.  And finally, we have Kaathe’s ending in Dark Souls 1, which is recreated in 3 as the Usurpation of Fire. These are clearly riffing off another Greek myth, that of Prometheus, and his stealing of the flame to give humanity civilization. This is a thematic continuance of the battle between the Titans and the Olympians as well as the inspiration behind Kaathe’s sentiments on Gwyn.  If the Soulsborne games were so obsessed with the theme of generational power transfer that they built every single core narrative around it, and these games also appear to be metatextual in a lot of ways, the obvious question is what is the metatextual interpretation for the generation being overthrown in Dark Souls and what was their flame? Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind For whatever reason, Dark Souls helped me understand the logic behind the Final Fantasy series, and one of the biggest keys to unlocking this puzzle was playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. I always discounted the influence of D&D on the Final Fantasy series because growing up, D&D was synonymous with PC RPGs like the Baldur’s Gate series and Planescape: Torment. Among the fans, there was almost a rivalry between these games, and from a gameplay perspective, the two genres felt worlds apart from one another. Turns out that it’s more like they’re distant evolutionary relatives, separated by a decade of computing power, an ocean, and a language barrier. Some of D&D’s influences on the first Final Fantasy are extremely obvious. The martial jobs get multiattack, and the casters have D&D style spell levels. However, both of these design choices quickly turned vestigial, and if you’re like me and only started playing RPGs in the Super Nintendo era, it’s easy to see them as ultimately irrelevant. One of the more long-lasting legacies of influence can be seen in the monster designs. For instance, the guard dogs used by Shinra in Final Fantasy 7 are inspired by D&D’s Displacer Beasts.   My personal favorite example is that the Whelk tutorial boss in Final Fantasy 6 is likely a riff off D&D’s Flail Snail enemy, complete with magic reflection properties. However, the most indisputable example of this is the Evil Eye enemy from Final Fantasy 1. This enemy was originally called Behoruda, and looked a lot more like a D&D Beholder. Fearing intellectual property disputes outside of Japan, the graphic was eventually changed for the North American release.   And then there’s mimics, or as the early Final Fantasy games express them, Monster-in-a-Box battles. The typical mimic gimmick only works as a gameplay element in video games if your treasure opening and monster fighting happens in the same abstraction plane, ala Dark Souls. Because early Final Fantasy games had separate gameplay screens for exploration and for combat, the logical way to reinterpret mimics would be to have treasure chests that generate an enemy encounter upon being opened. But someone in the monster design department owning a copy of the Monster Manual isn’t really that big of a deal. It doesn’t really inform the design process, as it’s just one creative influence among many. Is there more to the connection than just visual references? As I mentioned, during the pandemic, I had the chance to play some actual D&D campaigns for the first time, albeit in a mostly online setting. One of those campaigns was 2015’s Princes of the Apocalypse, an adventure where four different elemental cults are vying for power in the world. I was digging into lots of Dark Souls 1 at the time, and it struck me that the elemental setup reminded me of the four Lord Souls, Nito for Earth, Witch of Izalith for Fire, the Four Kings and New Londo Ruins for Water, and then there was Seath who felt like the odd one out. Dialing that comparative process back a few decades in video game history, I realized that the four elemental cults matched the Four Fiends of Final Fantasy 1 perfectly. This isn’t a coincidence. Princes of the Apocalypse is a 5th edition remake of the Temple of Elemental Evil, which featured the same elemental cults and was released in 1985, just two years before Final Fantasy 1. There’s no way that the designers of Final Fantasy 1 would have known enough about D&D to include enemies like Beholder and Marilith while being oblivious to the release of a major module just a year prior.  And what this almost certainly means is that D&D wasn’t merely a minor aesthetic inspiration for Final Fantasy 1--someone involved with the development was actively playing. Everything actually makes so much sense now that I look back at the game with this framework in mind. FF1 had an unusual dungeon design that was… unique within the series. I always assumed this was just due to inexperience designing an RPG, but in reality it was just a different type of experience. These weird floor plans with simple, repetitive geometry full of empty rooms are 100% just Pen and Paper maps converted to a digital format. I don’t believe that Final Fantasy 1 was merely inspired by D&D--I’m pretty sure it’s literally the stitched together pieces of someone’s homebrew campaign.  The Replay Dungeons and Dragons was a pretty niche interest in early 80’s Japan, but one of the biggest influences in broadening its popularity was the rise of the replay genre. Replays were essentially the session logs of campaigns that were then edited into a serialized format for publication. Pretty much the ancient ancestor to modern D&D campaign streams and podcasts like Critical Role.  The first and most famous of these replays was Record of Lodoss War, which began as a replay in the Comptiq magazine and eventually became an entire creative property with novels, anime, manga, and video game releases. Lodoss War has been a huge influence in Japanese fantasy, so much so that there’s even a bit of it in Dark Souls: quote:Nakamura: In the early stages I worked on the equipment for the warrior, the wanderer, the hunter and the bandit. But the thing is, D&D itself never really got that big in Japan. Record of Lodoss War’s creator, Ryo Mizuno, even eventually migrated Lodoss off of D&D and released his own system called Sword World RPG. Most Advanced D&D modules, including the Temple of Elemental Evil, never even received official Japanese translations. Given this pre-internet environment, it’s almost certain that the D&D playing community in Japan was tight-knit and likely passing around their own translations of recent releases. So if one group in that circle had the idea to start producing novels of their sessions, it’s not really much of a stretch that another group might have decided to convert a campaign into a video game. It would go a long way to explain how the original Final Fantasy became such a hit with only an official staff size of seven people (the other development team at Square at the time was nearly triple the size). After all, it is a much less complicated task to convert an existing world into a new medium than it is to invent an entirely new one from scratch. It would also explain why so many characters in the tradition start to feel like self-inserts, because that’s literally what tabletop roleplaying is. Given enough time, nearly every roleplaying group will veer towards telling stories that involve some degree of personal allegory. I suspect that for a lot of people that style of roleplaying is actually rather therapeutic. And finally, it would also explain a war over creative control over the series. Things change quite a bit when this thing you thought would be ‘final’ somehow becomes a massive, international success. Conducting a Jazz Session To bring things back to Dark Souls for a moment, let’s allow the most narrow of my claims -- that Dark Souls is a tomb. If that were the case, it would have to be dedicated to a pretty spectacular individual, someone like a teacher. Given the context of the game, it would almost certainly be someone who passed on the art of building a world, so it’s worth taking some time to look at what FromSoft has told us about how they go about making these games. One of the more revealing looks into the process comes from the preview interviews for the upcoming Elden Ring: quote:“Storytelling in video games – at least the way we do it at FromSoftware – comes with a lot of restrictions for the writer. I didn’t think it was a good idea to have Martin write within those restrictions. By having him write about a time the player isn’t directly involved in, he is free to unleash his creativity in the way he likes. Furthermore, as FromSoftware we didn’t want to create a more linear and storydriven experience for Elden Ring. Both issues could be solved by having Martin write about the world’s history instead.” We can derive a couple things from this paragraph. 1. FromSoft views their writing process as being unusual relative to the rest of the industry -- “at least the way we do it at FromSoftware” 2. The scenario writing at the gameplay level operates under some set of restrictive rules-- “Storytelling in video games...comes with a lot of restrictions for the writer.” 3. George R. R. Martin’s role is establishing the world-building that serves as the foundation on which that scenario writing is built -- “I didn’t think it was a good idea to have Martin write within those restrictions. By having him write about a time the player isn’t directly involved in, he is free to unleash his creativity in the way he likes.” It’s unlikely that this style of game design is unique to Elden Ring. Both Dark Souls and Bloodborne have a story that has already played out prior to the player’s arrival, and almost all of the item descriptions in these games refer to a historical context that the player never truly interacts with. Therefore, it’s likely that this system of writing has been in place since at least Demon’s Souls. With all of that in mind, there’s another revealing look into the design process of the games from the Dark Souls 2 Design Works Interview: quote:When I interviewed Mr Miyazaki about the first Dark Souls he mentioned a number of changes that occurred during development, for example the character Priscilla originally being designed as heroine but ending up as the boss of The Painted World and the original design for the Fire Link Shrine being partially filled with water. But you’re saying that this game had even more? Too often people discussing Dark Souls attribute everything to Miyazaki. Yeah, he’ll come into the development of Dark Souls 3 and move everything around, but using FromSoft’s own analogy it’s clear that he’s doing so as the conductor. It’s not about making the game fit his personal auteur vision so much as it is about making a collection of improvisations synchronize with one another in a satisfying way. For instance, when talking about the design process of the Gaping Dragon in Dark Souls 1, Miyazaki grants a great deal of creative ownership to the artist, Hiroshi Nakamura: quote:When we were initially discussing the design we came upon the theme of greed, once we arrived at that Mr Nakamura produced the design remarkably quickly. You would expect designs based around this theme to be either fat or have a huge mouth, but that's a little too predictable. When I saw the design I was genuinely surprised and absolutely delighted. Assuming what we know about Elden Ring’s design process is a continuation of sorts from the Souls games, what I suspect is that rather than having a strictly outlined design document, Dark Souls 1 had an elaborate world history combined with a general arc that the player was intended to progress through. Some portions of this arc were set in stone, but much of it was left open ended. This gave the designers and artists a considerable amount of room to imagine what sorts of things would inhabit the liminal spaces of the story, resulting in a world with a more vibrant ecosystem than is typically found in worlds designed by a single author or a small committee-- a much more non-hierarchical take on design and creative control than what we typically see in the industry. The jazz session metaphor works quite well. In Elden Ring’s case, George R.R. Martin is the composer, laying down the central melody. The artists and level designers are the session musicians, improvising over the melodic core. And the director is the conductor, responsible for assembling all the recordings into a final, cohesive album. But another equally useful metaphor is to think of it as a tabletop roleplaying session, with the director serving as the dungeon master, the artists filling the role of the players, and George R.R. Martin creating the adventure module. This explains why Elden Ring is described as having two different layers of writing. GRRM’s contributions set the foundation of the world, and he is given free reign as nothing he writes has to be expressed through gameplay due to it being historical context that the player is not intended to interact with. The design staff create a world out of this historical setting and are free to experiment in searching for the best way to make the exploration of this world also satisfying from a gameplay perspective. The final writing pass has the most “restrictions” because it is tasked with inventing a narrative justification for the now completed world. This improvisational design is a big departure from the more standard paradigm of laying down a preconceived story that the artists and game designers attempt to realize is completion. And it’s this tabletop RPG inspired design process that I suspect FromSoft inherited from early Squaresoft. Because if Final Fantasy 1 and 2 were both derived from D&D campaigns, there would come a time in the series’ evolution that the scale of future games would outpace what could be derived from only a tabletop session, but the creators still wished to preserve the energy that comes from improvisational roleplay, so they sought a synthesis between those kind of roleplay sessions and a more standard model of game development. And what they came up with sounds a lot like FromSoft’s process (from http://shmuplations.com/ff6/): quote:—How was FFVI made? One of the most intriguing details about how this went down comes from field graphics designer Kaori Tanaka: quote:Tanaka: This is my second Final Fantasy, so in addition to the graphics, I also got to work on the maps and the dialogue for Edgar and Sabin. Seeing the lines I’d written actually spoken by the characters in-game got me really anxious, though. (laughs) “All the characters are good, except Sabin and Edgar”… I was very afraid to hear those words. (laughs) The first thing that stood out about this for me was that it was a little odd that a graphics designer was doing writing. Tanaka would go on to do more scenario writing for games, including being the co-writer for Xenogears, so the interest was certainly there. But it was actually pretty cool to see someone get a chance to contribute beyond the limits of their title in the credits. The stranger detail is that she seems to be credited with writing the dialogue for onlythose two characters. This would mean that scenes where those characters interacted with other characters would have had to be written collaboratively. That didn’t make sense to me until I started thinking about this as an evolution from tabletop roleplaying. The pieces fit together perfectly if you assume that character interactions were written through a collaborative, improvisational exercise. This would explain why Final Fantasy 6 in particular feels like such a perfect ensemble cast. Someone was in charge of “playing” each of the characters, which made even the more ancillary cast feel like they had a genuine personality. But this creative spontaneity was something that diminished over time as the series moved into the Playstation era. From an interview about Final Fantasy 4: the After Years: quote:TT: All of that has to do with how the team is organized. For now, because the teams are so large, the teams creating the story, the teams creating the battle, and the teams doing the level design are completely separate; whereas, for Final Fantasy IV, I handled the story all by myself, and then there was someone who did the battles by himself, and someone who did the maps. It was very easy for them to communicate very clearly and to coordinate, whereas now just the sheer size of the teams makes that a little more difficult. But the glimpses this interview offers into the design processes of the older games show a continued emphasis on allowing individual people to “own” the design of particular portions of the world, akin to the way players at a D&D session have an ownership of their own character’s narrative: quote:I was wondering if you would talk about why. That didn't continue throughout the series; it's very specific to that game. This process is made more explicit later in the interview when talking about Chrono Trigger: quote:Especially when you're working with mobile or portable titles, it's not as complicated; but also you don't have as many resources, so trying to keep the team focused on contributing interesting ideas has got to be a real challenge, I think. And interestingly enough, this method of allowing each “world” to have its own creative director is explicitly how Dark Souls was designed: quote:Miyazaki: And as I mentioned previously, in contrast to most art teams, we didn't have our artists concentrating on a specific section, for example, this artist will work on environment, this one on characters and this one on equipment. Instead all the artists contributed to all of these areas. And just like what we saw previously in the Final Fantasy 6 interview, this section about Dark Souls’ area creation process rejects loyally following a “master planner doc[ument]”: quote:Miyazaki: This is actually how most of the areas were constructed. The map design was really what dictated everything else, once we determined what needed to happen in each area we would immediately draw up a rough map, then once the basic layout of the area was decided we'd work on the finer details. Through the rough map I was able to communicate the requirements, structure and appearance of an area to the artists, and have them develop those ideas through collaborating with one-another. I'm never satisfied with design work which simply follows the design brief, so I often requested that the artists and designers add some of their own ideas. I really believe that these ideas can enrich the area, if not the entire game. Although, this can lead to more work of course. Haha. So yeah, if I’m correct and Dark Souls is in part a story about the passing down of a video game design tradition, this D&D-inspired, jazz session design process is at the core of that story. The Four Fiends quote:Seek those whose names are unutterable, the four endowed with immense souls. Unlike every other single player game in the series, Final Fantasy 1 allows you to create your own party. If FF1 was derived from an actual D&D group, this creates the minor complication that you have no place to commemorate the adventuring party. The solution I suspect they went with was to turn the original four party members into the villains of the world, the Four Fiends. And this is the originating symbolism that provides us the four Lord Souls of Dark Souls 1. The development process never goes as planned though, so tracking the pattern can get a little convoluted.   Gravelord Nito as Lich, Fiend of Earth is the free space. He resides in an earthen area surrounded by tombs and skeletal undeath, and his model includes both the core skeleton design as well as Lich’s deathly aura. Well, on the aura at least an attempt was made: quote:Miyazaki: Yes, Nito is also in the pre-rendered intro, but it's a really intricate design so It was extremely difficult to communicate what I wanted to the animators making it. The character had to be cloaked in shadow, shrouded in a deathly aura, but that's not easy to get across and their first attempt wasn't what I wanted at all. And finally, both of them are associated with disease and decay in their respective introductions.  The Witch of Izalith as Marilith/Kari/Kali is a little more complicated. Obviously the fire connection is there, but the design of the Bed of Chaos went in a completely different direction. That’s pretty understandable given what we were told about its design process: quote:Miyazaki: Who gave me the most trouble…. Hmm Hypothetically, if they had originally tried to create Marilith more faithfully but had to abandon the design once it proved unworkable, one could easily imagine the model getting refurbished a game later as Mytha the Baneful Queen. Granted, this lacks the hex-wielding of the original Marilith, which likely would have been a nightmare to express within the Dark Souls 1 engine.  And in terms of environmental design, Izalith shares a distinct similarity with Marilith’s lair in Mount Gulg in that both have extensive sections where much of the floor is lava.  Kraken, the Fiend of Water is straight up just not there. To jump ahead a bit, octopuses are not depicted in a terribly flattering light in the SNES-era Final Fantasy games, so I’m inclined to believe “Kraken” had a bit of a falling out with the core storytellers. He might make an appearance in DS2, but if so, it's a rather unflattering one. That said, New Londo ruins is far and away the most water-logged area of the game, and the gimmick of the area matches Sunken Shrine’s underwater shtick to the extent that the Dark Souls 1 engine could handle.  And that leaves us with Tiamat, the Fiend of Water, and Seath.  At first glance, this is a hard sell. Seath doesn’t resemble Tiamat, and at best you could kinda say that the Anor Londo + Duke’s archives as a whole is kinda sorta like Tiamat’s Floating Continent, but that’s a stretch. But where it gets interesting is in the enemies of Seath’s lair, particularly the Crystal Golems and the Man-Eater Shells. They each show up in one location outside of Seath’s lair, Darkroot Basin for the Golems and Ash Lake for the Shells. In each of these areas we encounter a Hydra, and that corresponds quite nicely with Tiamat’s design.  And as a bonus, the NES/MSX versions of Final Fantasy 1 portray Tiamat’s lair as an artificial satellite orbiting the planet from space, which would make Tiamat the original Moon Presence. I have a strong suspicion that the Fiend of Wind plays a central role in this ritual of generational transference. But before I get to that, I have to address the more pressing question: just who was the original dungeon master? I don’t have an answer for that, but I do have a conception of the shape of the answer, which is incredibly informative about the design logic of both series. One last thing. You know that item description storytelling that’s become an iconic staple of the Soulsborne games? It’s an evolution of the Legend Lore spell that originated in second edition D&D: 
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Oct 6, 2021 22:43
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I'm glad you got the chance to play D&D and connect it to Final Fantasy! It's definitely the closest to old-school D&D rules, and, as you mentioned, the mechanics quickly diverge. FF2 does its own thing in a radically different way, 3 introduces jobs that you can slot your characters into in order to customize your own party on the fly, 4 is a structured narrative with static jobs and a rotating cast, 5 brings it back to customized jobs, 6&7 play with the idea of base "jobs" customized by stat growths and materia, respectively, etc. FFXIV is really interesting here because the vision of how classes and jobs interact with each other has changed radically over the expansions. You used to be able to slot cross-class skills into your jobs, much as you can in games like FF5. Nowadays, each job is self-contained, though you can see NPCs using some of the cross-class stuff when you fight them, or when you lead your squadron on a command mission. I would be really careful with trying to link things too closely when they use standard tropes. Elemental enemies are all over the place in virtually every RPG series, and Final Fantasy, which explicitly has elemental crystals, very much leans into this. That Dark Souls also leans into it isn't all that remarkable in the grand scheme of games which use elemental stuff. Off the top of my head, you have Secret of Mana, the entirety of the Tales series, the Dragon Quest series, the Might and Magic series, the Ys series, etc. etc. There's a lot of cross-pollination in video games and between series, and there are definitely homages here and there. A https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Marilith is literally a D&D monster, as is a Lich and a Kraken. Tiamat is explicitly a dragon deity in many D&D settings. These things get pollinated and cross-pollinated, and adapted left, right, and center. A lot of people have played D&D or its equivalents, or have read fantasy literature with these things, or have played RPGs on consoles. That Neato is a twist on a traditional Lich, or that there is a Naga who uses poison (https://dnd.arkalseif.info/races/monster-manual-v35--5/yuan-ti-pureblood--93/index.html), or a Hydra (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/hydra.htm) isn't exactly groundbreaking. Dark Souls uses a lot of that standard knights and sorcery stuff and then subverts it a bit with its setting. I think you would do well to try to limit your scope to staying within the Soulsborne series. Some of this stuff reads like trying to see a reference to Link in Dark Souls because you can use swords, shields, and bows, and you can even get a holy sword that banishes evil, as well as elemental arrows. Link is a very generic knight when you get right down to it, and what makes him stand out is his world and the setting (including the fancy dungeon items and small bits of magic). Hell, Ocarina of Time has a lot of undeath/earth crossover with the Shadow Temple being underground and the ReDeads being zombies that rise up from the ground at night. That no more makes it a reference to Final Fantasy Lich or FF4 Milon/Z, or Groovelord Neato; it's just a fairly common way to depict the undead. References to classical literature, artwork, and other themes like that are great though! But again, be careful when trying to link properties together because they reference the same thing. Just because both Final Fantasy and the Souls games make a reference to a famous piece of artwork, that doesn't mean the two are related, it just means that the designers like that piece of art enough to include it in their creative project.
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Oct 7, 2021 02:18
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Have you looked into any of the pre-release information on Elden Ring/have any thoughts about it so far?
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Nov 8, 2021 11:51
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I suspect I am in the wrong place, but whats surprising me after having read a bit of the intro is: you might want to look into Kings Field for the origin of some of the lore, almost definately Seath. I played KF on release in Japan, and oddly enough, applied for a job at From.
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Feb 2, 2022 07:49
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I return from my slumber in the land of the dead having played through Elden Ring three times (and being on 4-3 and 5-2 in a playthrough of you-know-what). The scope of the world design of Elden Ring wouldn't lend itself very well to an area-by-area breakdown in the format of this thread, and besides, dropping in a bunch of spoilers for a new game would be incredibly gauche. So instead I worked on this. A Ruin Which Fell From the Sky It's the first draft of the first part of my Elden Ring lore interpretation, ultimately focused on the narrative of Marika and the Erdtree. My planning for part two is appropriately centered on the Haligtree, and we'll see how long it takes me to finish that.
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Apr 8, 2022 22:57
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My interpretation of the Liurnia and its underground is more in the lines of erdtree imperialism. And of course the item descriptions are again written to reflect the biases of the golden order that drives us towards the default ending. We have the concentration of folks disliked by the erdtree in liurnia because liurnia resisted the conquest of the golden order the longest. The albinaurics/trolls/giants/mimics/alabaster are repugnant to the erdtree. And they live happily among civilisations who are not part of the golden order. Especially the trolls/giants in caria. I do believe that the carian's troll knights are their natural state, and the reduced "intelligence" of the trolls outside are the result and/or method of their enslavement. Interestingly, once we consider the item description biased, we are down to only one mention of trolls. "come forth oath sworn giant", suggesting the troll might be a slur or a newer creation.
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Apr 9, 2022 11:31
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Missed you, Sibyl. Glad to see you’re back! Unfortunately I guess I’m going to have to duck out of this thread for now, until I get a chance to play Elden Ring.
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Apr 9, 2022 11:59
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Um, not certain if you've mentioned this before but ala the poison, fire, ice: always found it striking how Aldia separates 'ice' from the others. '...one drowned in poison, another succumbed to flame. STILL another slumbers in a realm of ice.' Obviously, it, helps the sentence flow but it also feels as if it's purposefully sectioning ice off from the others. Frozen Eleum Loyce and Irithyll are specifically related to 'secret' area disturbance (the Shrine of Winter as an access portal, quite unlike the entrances to Shulva and Brume,, like a painting) or bleed (how the painted world of III blows through into Irrithyl or 'the main game' as if it's dragging your attention to it, rather than hiding, something which III does a lot in how it gnaws on it’s own meta-talel.) The Isz chalice is also linked to Ebrietas and the Upper Cathedral Ward, if I'm remembering correctly, something that's also 'hidden' away. (Of course, Old Yharnam also alludes to them..) Elden Ring Spoilers: Ranni the Witch is an overt example of this, especially when you compare her ‘ice boss/area/quest’ to both Radahn and Rykard, (both bosses at the end of an area, respectively obsessed with a ‘heroically/tragically sacrificial’ or ‘consumed control’ conception of death.) Even ignoring Ranni, Rennala ‘slumbers’… Slumbers' is a word choice distinct from 'drowned' and 'succumbed' in how it approaches death as 'stasis.' (Slumber-s- is also plural and present!). On a separate note, noticed that the four seasons of the year are represented through Limgrave, Liurnia, Atlus Plateau and Mountaintop of Giants respectively. We literally progress through them in the order that we would naturally in life (I guess, clockwise.) They have been literally separated out in time (and so in space) according to how the video game design progression works. This progression is also vertical, however, which might be like, a clue, into the deception of a linear or time-stable interpretation of these games. We move through the seasons of our life, chronologically - um, similar as to how the levels from other games move chronologically, as you've said - almost as if it's giving us another toolbox to analyze the games with, such as the Lady Maria rune clock. (Or um, even the Sword of Moonlight King's Field Making Tool…). Last thing I thought of, that you might find interesting, is that Elden Ring feels as if it takes overwhelmingly from Convergent Evolution! Both Trees and Crabs are thought to be distinctly unrelated to other trees and crabs within their own species - they evolved separately into the most effective form…..
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Apr 14, 2022 02:16
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Vandar posted:Missed you, Sibyl. Glad to see you’re back! Thank you! I understand ducking out. I think Elden Ring comparisons are going to be somewhat inevitable at this point, but I will try to put everything but the most immediate of details behind spoilers for anyone still playing or who has yet to play. VictualSquid posted:My interpretation of the Liurnia and its underground is more in the lines of erdtree imperialism. And of course the item descriptions are again written to reflect the biases of the golden order that drives us towards the default ending. I'm not convinced that it's so cut and dry. [general world building spoilers]For starters, there's a lot of different factions in the game associated with the Erdtree, but there's no indication that they represent a unified front. In support of this, a huge portion of the "racism" we see in item descriptions are Erdtree on Erdtree. The Crucible Knights, Omen, and Misbegotten are all products of the Erdtree, but all are described as being discriminated against, and are shown in various states of disregard throughout Leyndell, and below. The discrimination most directly tied to the Golden Order is against Those Who Live in Death, which also appear to be tied to the roots of the Erdtree. Meanwhile, the discrimination of the "silver" races is often performed by third parties. For instance, the Albinaurics are either being attacked/subjugated by the Depraved Perfumers or the Serpent Men. Neither have Erdtree ties that I have found, and the Depraved Perfumer Robe explicitly states "The embroidery on the apron is itself a curse upon the Erdtree." Then we also have the Ancestral Followers which are described as worshipping a spirit " beyond the purview of the Erdtree," and the potential implication from the Winged Greathorn is that they are antagonistic towards the Silver Tear: "made to reap the lives of beings which experience no sprouting." Overall, my impression is that the Erdtree societies barely seem aware that the Silver societies exist most of the time? The Giants/Trolls are really the place where the two seem to intersect, but that intersection behaves oddly. I do agree with you that (at least in some history) the Trolls are a newer creation/evolutionary descendant of the Giants. ahbygale posted:Um, not certain if you've mentioned this before but ala the poison, fire, ice: always found it striking how Aldia separates 'ice' from the others. '...one drowned in poison, another succumbed to flame. STILL another slumbers in a realm of ice.' Obviously, it, helps the sentence flow but it also feels as if it's purposefully sectioning ice off from the others. Frozen Eleum Loyce and Irithyll are specifically related to 'secret' area disturbance (the Shrine of Winter as an access portal, quite unlike the entrances to Shulva and Brume,, like a painting) or bleed (how the painted world of III blows through into Irrithyl or 'the main game' as if it's dragging your attention to it, rather than hiding, something which III does a lot in how it gnaws on it’s own meta-talel.) The Isz chalice is also linked to Ebrietas and the Upper Cathedral Ward, if I'm remembering correctly, something that's also 'hidden' away. (Of course, Old Yharnam also alludes to them..) You are correct. That differentiation within the realm of ice is a very important bit for a lot of reasons. First, it allows "realm of ice" to not have to be taken literally. If you're mutating a monomyth, this kind of interpretive flexibility is really useful for creating variance between the renditions. For example, Micolash in Bloodborne can hypotethically function as the third monarch in an interpretation if we interpret Rom as sealing him away in Yahar'gul. Essentially, he would have been slumbering in a near-death state until we break the seal and end the stasis. We could be seeing a reinterpretation of this dynamic in Filianore/The Ringed City. But it's also a valid interpretation for "still slumbers" to imply a capability of being thawed and woken up. A really fascinating example of this is Queen Annalise in Cainhurst. It's both a icy area and a place where Annalise is being held in stasis behind Logarius. But the fun bit to this is that if what's being constructed is a looping monomyth then some of the nodes need to function as both the end of a cycle and a beginning of a new cycle. With this in mind, if you think of what our character does as being a reenactment of history then a representative of some civilization discovered Cainhurst, defeated Logarius, broke the seal, and then pledged to the Vilebloods in a pursuit of power, and eventually becoming one of the monarchs drowned in poison. Within the Astral Clocktower monomyth, this could be interpreted as an adventurer finding a castle in the middle of the lake and encountering an unformed impurity, which then becomes their odeon writhe, a.k.a. blood poisoning. quote:Elden Ring Spoilers: Ranni the Witch is an overt example of this, especially when you compare her ‘ice boss/area/quest’ to both Radahn and Rykard, (both bosses at the end of an area, respectively obsessed with a ‘heroically/tragically sacrificial’ or ‘consumed control’ conception of death.) Even ignoring Ranni, Rennala ‘slumbers’… Slumbers' is a word choice distinct from 'drowned' and 'succumbed' in how it approaches death as 'stasis.' (Slumber-s- is also plural and present!). Ranni spoilers Ranni super-extremely obviously is fulfilling the slumbers in ice given her explicitly talking about entering her slumber due to the doll's body, and because of Miniature Ranni, her stasis object, being described as pleasantly cool. What's important about this is that depending on the myth permutation, it's totally valid for "slumbers" to imply being capable of waking, of leaving stasis. Ranni almost certainly serves a nearly identical symbolic role to the Doll in Bloodborne, particularly in that Ranni's ending is the symbolic equivalent of Bloodborne's 3rd ending, and in both endings Ranni/Doll are in an explicit state of stasis at the beginning of the game but inherit the ability to shape a new world at the conclusion of their ending. The Painting Women of DS3 also fulfills this symbolic role, giving us the myth pattern of a transition of power from a rotting Moon Presence/Friede/Marika to the youthfully framed Doll/Painting Woman/Ranni some relatively late-game overworld spoilers quote:On a separate note, noticed that the four seasons of the year are represented through Limgrave, Liurnia, Atlus Plateau and Mountaintop of Giants respectively. We literally progress through them in the order that we would naturally in life (I guess, clockwise.) They have been literally separated out in time (and so in space) according to how the video game design progression works. This progression is also vertical, however, which might be like, a clue, into the deception of a linear or time-stable interpretation of these games. We move through the seasons of our life, chronologically - um, similar as to how the levels from other games move chronologically, as you've said - almost as if it's giving us another toolbox to analyze the games with, such as the Lady Maria rune clock. (Or um, even the Sword of Moonlight King's Field Making Tool…). I wouldn't have thought to see it that way, but I think you're right that Altus is visually coded as autumn and that does make a seasonal symbolism worth considering. An idea I've been playing around with for what feels like eternity without really getting anywhere is seeing the Bloodborne gem types as a code for when in the history of the world the hunter weapon was invented. Waning suggesting the fall of a civilization, and presumably Triangle suggesting a rising civilization and Radial being its height. Regardless, I do believe that the world building of these games is done as a history that we are passing through. An easy example in Elden Ring is that Liurnia shows us the fall of the Albinaurics Gen1 and a descent into necromantic arts, but it also shows us the rise of Albinaurics Gen2 who are coded as primitive upstarts reclaiming the sunken ruins of the city and likely warring against the remnants of Raya Lucaria (due to their shields saying that sorcerers were their most formidable foes. Liurnia also contains the Rose Church, which could be interpreted as the location where the Albinaurics encountered Mohg and joined up with his blood dynasty. But yeah, as you put it, the world-building of these games becomes so much richer once if we step out of our own perspectives and abandon a time-stable interpretation. I think there's a tendency to doubt that the creation of Soulsborne being a non-linear, historically-driven world design would be too complex, but what people miss is that once you invent a methodology for scrambling history, designing areas in this fashion is actually extremely liberating from a design perspective. One of the toughest things in design is maintaining chronological and geographical consistency. Say you're making an old school 8-bit platformer. In the story, area 2 is supposed to come before area 5. But when you sit down and plot out the levels, the features of area 2 lend themselves to being a fun challenge that's way too difficult for being the second area of the game. Area 5 on the other hand is visually impressive but a total pushover for a late-game area. And meanwhile, area 3 is essential in story for linking the two, but is total crap from a gameplay perspective and should be cut. Meanwhile in Souls, Miyazaki can come in 3/4 of the way through development, re-arrange huge portions, and the implied story and world-building could remain almost entirely unchanged because it's all expressed through the implications of textual history and symbolic interpretation. The 6th Archstone can be cut entirely without damaging the story in the least, because the fragmentary nature of the world lends itself to perfect modularity. Thinking it up in the first place is a complete act of madness, but once you have the formula it's honestly a brilliant way to approach world-building within the unpredictable limitations of game design. quote:Last thing I thought of, that you might find interesting, is that Elden Ring feels as if it takes overwhelmingly from Convergent Evolution! Both Trees and Crabs are thought to be distinctly unrelated to other trees and crabs within their own species - they evolved separately into the most effective form….. I think that was I'm identifying as Elden Ring's theme of mimicry has a large but fuzzy overlap with convergent evolution. The fuzzy bit is that in Elden Ring the actors are fiddling with their own evolution, making the line between intentional and unintentional convergence difficult to establish with any certainty. I do see a value in sometimes reframing things a bit more impersonally as convergent evolution, so thank you for bringing this up.
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Apr 14, 2022 05:46
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Sibyl Disobedience posted:I'm not convinced that it's so cut and dry. [general world building spoilers]For starters, there's a lot of different factions in the game associated with the Erdtree, but there's no indication that they represent a unified front. In support of this, a huge portion of the "racism" we see in item descriptions are Erdtree on Erdtree. It is not intended to be cut and dry. I previous games this interpretation would be a strange, but still interesting view that has to ignore a lot. See for example jim sterlin's video about anti-monarchism in ds1. But in elden ring the interpretation of direct oppression as a mechanism for the cycles becomes a reasonable primary viewpoint. In older game the ancient empire falls and then the new empire gets build on vague memories of what came before. Then the circle repeats. In ER the new empire destroyed the old empire and actively buries the memory. Then the circle repeats. I don't remember the crucible folk(misbegotten,omen,knights) lore that clearly, but they are mostly interpreted as throwback to the primitive pre-golden order civilisation even if they aren't pre-erdtree. The depraved perfumers and Rykard's snake folk are all splinter groups of the Erdtree. Rykard is a Blasphemer and heretic, not a pagan. The depraved perfumer gear also speaks of heresy against the erdtree. They are rebels not foreigners. There are layers and layers of old civilisation, enough that you can't really find the exact ordering. .But it is clearly meant to be a cycle of erasure and oppression. So, with probably some mistakes in the exact order: Golden order destroyed Crucible destroyed Giants destroyed Dragons destroyed Ancestrals destroyed silvers. and so on forevermore. The destruction is never complete, because it is conducted by people instead of cosmic destiny. And if the remains of the old are integrated it is as underclass: Misbegotten and Troll slaves, omens locked in dungeons. The small parts of the ancient remains that touch the surface are only active because of the current chaos. And if the golden order fundamentalists weren't so weakened by the shattering they would hunt them down just like they do with the undead. And they probably would hunt down the recent drops from the stars, like the fallingstar beasts and the alabaster dudes. If someone becomes elden lord they will reunite the Erdtree civilisation. Or rather build unified Erdtree civ v3 after Crucible and Marika.
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Apr 14, 2022 11:39
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Ok, great. I mean that sincerely. We can quibble about the exact interpretation of how the cycle of erasure and oppression flows, but it's absolutely there and an essential part of the story. It's also something I'd argue has been there in previous games, and Elden Ring is just more direct in its presentation. [broad, overall setting/story spoilers] What I disagree with is describing it as "erdtree imperialism." This implies these takes that this cycle of oppression is at the behest of the erdtree, the Greater Will, and the Golden Order, who are definitely all completely in agreement with one another about just being assholes to anyone they don't like. Humanitydoesn't need an alien influence in order to be bigoted assholes to one another. And the Greater Will? All we hear are interpretations of the Greater Will wants, and humanity is real loving good at interpreting the voice of god to be a justification for whatever violence they fancy at the given time. When Enia tells us: quote:The Fingers would never permit it. Nor would the Greater Will. I'm taking this as evidence that any claim of what the Greater Will does and doesn't want is extremely sus. I see people constantly talking about the Erdtree in imperialistic or colonial terms, and this isn't really a useful framework for what we're dealing with. Whatever sentience you want to apply to the Erdtree, whether it be the Elden Beast, Marika, Greater Will, or whoever, I'd argue that all of those are inhuman and alien in nature, so the morality of human international relations to its intentions isn't really applicable. I prefer to analyze it in biological terms. Along that line, I've run into the take describing the Erdtree as parasitic, which is just profoundly ignorant of the most obvious symbolic connections. Unless the game is being absolutely, massively deceptive in its symbolism, the Erdtree is the sun of the world. Parasites extracts energy from its host, whereas the Erdtree, like the sun, provides energy to the world. So, when we're thinking in terms of an alien organism embedded into an environment where it achieves symbiosis with its host and provides it energy, it's pretty clear that the Erdtree is a metaphor for mitochondria. The story in Protection of the Erdtree quote:In the beginning, everything was in opposition to the Erdtree. But through countless victories in war, it became the embodiment of Order. is figuratively the endosymbiotic theory of the origin of mitochondria: quote:The endosymbiotic hypothesis suggests that mitochondria were originally prokaryotic cells, capable of implementing oxidative mechanisms that were not possible for eukaryotic cells; they became endosymbionts living inside the eukaryote. Hence, the Erdtree genuinely jumpstarted the evolution of the biosphere. Regardless of how you feel about whether this is a good thing, it's certainly not a parasitic relationship. Marika has one extremely clear desire: she wants to die. And just like Gwyn and the First Flame, "humanity" is pretty determined not to let that happen. Maliketh seals away Destined Death, and in every Elden Lord ending your first act is to prop Marika's head back on her torso and get her back to work. So in a cellular sense, what do you get when you seal Destined Death, a.k.a. apoptosis? You get cancer. It always comes back to cancer. And hence, the Erdtree only becomes an uncontrolled parasitic growth because humanity won't let Marika die. They could totally start fostering one of the many minor erdtree out in the world, which is the same sentiment as what's shown in the End of Fire ending of DS3, but to do that would require a longterm goal of doing what's good for the world by relinquishing a personal hold on immediate power and lmao is Soulsborne not that kind of fantasy.
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Apr 15, 2022 04:08
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Ok. I see what you mean. I use "erdtree imperialism" because the current (or last) phase of imperialism is conducted in the name of the Erdtree by a civilisation built around the Erdtree. And more specifically the last circle was the modern Golden Order replacing the previous Erdtree order. Leading people like Goldmask to complain that such intolerance is not in line with the actual commandments from high up. And he and you are correct that all this interpreting is suss. And leading people like Edgar to oppress, exploit and describe the Misbegotten in very histrionically bigoted way. As people do. Now I interpret the line "In the beginning, everything was in opposition to the Erdtree. But through countless victories in war, it became the embodiment of Order.". As implying that there was functioning ecosystem and probably even civilisation before the erdtree. Especially, I believe that the silver folk at least were around before the erdtree. And the Darkmoon ending assumes that we can replace the Erdtree and the Greater Will, without causing terrible catastrophes. Unless you follow the interpretation that we destroy all live on the planet to power our space honeymoon trip. And like I said. The "imperialism" interpretation seem very useful when looking at the differences to previous games. But, I think it is especially useful when looking at the differences between Liurnia and the rest of the world. And of course real world imperialism is often metaphorically described as parasitic, symbiotic or cancerous depending on the speaker's morals.
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Apr 15, 2022 11:12
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So, what I also wanted to say is that there is of course a personal connection to my interpretation. For me it is encountering the Dung Eater right after reading something unrelated, that he still reminded me off. Now, have an utterly exaggerated and reductive interpretation of the ER endings in RL political terms: The "throne" endings are various variants of gradualism who only consider minor modifications to the existing order. Darkmoon is a categorical change of the world order, aka your preferred flavour of world revolution. Flame of Frenzy is primitivism. In sub categories: Goldmask is a rationalist. Do the same, but better. Fia is an inclusivist. Do the same, but don't be a bigot. Dung Eater is a cosmic racist. Do the same,
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Apr 15, 2022 11:34
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(yeah, this is going to be too large to just spoiler everything. It's basically implausible to make this a spoiler-free zone so read at your own risk) Ok, first of all, I'm really glad you also noticed that pattern with the non-basic endings. I think a political read to them is, for the most part, a legitimate way to go, but I'd also point out that more simply all of these endings have the intention of creating a new or reworked order on behalf of an oppressed people. That's one of the biggest, overarching themes in Elden Ring (and also, not strictly new for Soulborne--"merciful goddess, mother of the Forlorn, who have no place to call their own...") But I find myself actually really disliking the idea of framing Elden Rings in terms of imperialism, because largely I don't think that's what is going on. To offer a working definition of "imperialism," you're welcome to offer your own if this isn't where you were intending on taking things, imperialism tends to imply one state actor placing another state actor in a position of indefinite dependency/subjugation/inferiority, and typically done so for extractive economic reasons. And a typically unexamined assumption that becomes really relevant for talking about Elden Ring is that this framework for imperialism involves human actors. But one of the central question of Soulsborne is "what is humanity?" and Elden Ring pushes that even further. ---------------------------------------------------------- So first, a totally original hypothetical question that's definitely not a reference to any existing story: Suppose we live in a world dominated by dinosaurs. A meteorite lands, causing a shift in the planetary environment that results in them going extinct. Meanwhile, a primitive version of humanity (kinda like the demihumans in Elden Ring) survives the climate change. They also encounter the meteor which happened to carry a viral organism that supercharged the evolution of demihuman intelligence, resulting in a world that comes to be dominated by something akin to what we think of as humanity. We've had a major shift in the dominant power within the ecosystem. Is this viral imperialism? Should we actively try to exterminate humanity to restore things back to a state of nature? Because due to the symbiosis, humanity is now the most alien thing in the environment. Realistically, our standard notions of ethics just don't work here. We have no reason to believe that either the virus or the meteorite have any intentionality in what happened, and they're not really capable of doing it again even if they did. In an ecosystem poo poo like that just sometimes happens between two organisms. So did the Erdtree arriving in the Lands Between displace some of the native flora and fauna? Yeah, probably. But that's not necessarily imperialism, and certainly not evidence that the Erdtree itself is this malicious, corruptive force. Whatever the case of the past, it's now part of the ecosystem and trying to forcibly remove all traces of it would be far more disruptive to the inhabitants of the world. ---------------------------------------------------------- So anyway, we're in this world full of violence and discrimination, but I don't really see it as having the kind of economic dimension that I'd usually expect from imperialism. Instead, it seems to be driven by purity. For example, for the Albinaurics: quote:Albinauric Bloodclot So much of the violent discrimination in the Lands Between is done for the purposes of ensuring purity. And it's also often left a little vague what the faction is that is doing it. For instance, in this item description we have "many believe." Are those many part of the core Leyndell pro-Erdtree faction? I have my doubts. In Liurnia we have the Village of the Albinaurics, where they're being slaughtered. The two non-Albinauric enemies we see here are a Depraved Perfumer and an Omenkiller. As we've already discussed, Depraved Perfumers wear aprons that bear curses on the Erdtree. It's not 100% clear that the Depraved Perfumer here is antagonistic, but we do have the description of the Omenkiller Rollo spirit ash: quote:Ashen remains in which spirits yet dwell. Which by proximity association might imply that Rollo was a Depraved Perfumer, rather than the standard Perfumer's we find with Erdtree associations in the capital. We also, by comparison, have the Perfumer Tricia spirit ash, who has shades of Iosefka in her narrative: quote:Ashen remains in which spirits yet dwell. So within these two Perfumer traditions, the Erdtree-associated Perfumers are painted as less discriminatory than the Erdtree-cursing Depraved Perfumers. But let's look at things the opposite way, who is getting discriminated against and where do they come from? First, let's start with the Crucible Knights. From their Aspect of the Crucible: Horns incantation: quote:One of the ancient Erdtree incantations. This seems to suggest to me that the primordial crucible is a function of the Erdtree. I cannot rule out that there may have been a similar crucible prior to the Erdtree, I suppose, but it seems really definitive that Erdtree now fulfills this function. So following from that we also have the Crucible Gauntlets: quote:Gauntlets of the Crucible Knights who served Godfrey, the first Elden Lord. I was in a really inexplicable and rather rude argument with someone claiming this meant there was a previous tree that the Erdtree was replacing, and for the life of me I cannot figure what the gently caress they were on about. I guess they read "primordial form of the Erdtree" as being indicative of something the Erdtree replaced, but it seems the far simpler read is that it was an earlier version of this Erdtree, presumably what it was like prior to the point where Godfrey became the first Elden Lord. Either way, these knights were servants of the first Elden Lord and products of the crucible, yet became seen as being "deserving of scorn." This suggests that the civilization built around the Erdtree over time began discriminating against the Erdtree's own creations. For example, all the extra wing and horn growths we see are tied to the operations of the crucible in a number of descriptions. The Winged Misbegotten are a big example of this, but we have to reflect on a fact that they aren't mistreated because of imperialistic concerns (they don't really possess anything worth imperializing, and their status when integrated might be closer to a servant caste). Looking at their item descriptions, we again run into accusations of impurity: quote:Crucible Feather Talisman And then we of course have the Omen, shoved into the Subterranean Shunning Grounds. They're clearly discriminated against by Leyndell, made obvious by Morgott having to serve as a veiled king with item descriptions like: quote:Remembrance of Morgott, the Omen King, hewn into the Erdtree. quote:Regal Omen Bairn This isn't imperialism. This is old-fashioned bigotry. And with the case of Morgott and Mogh they're pretty clearly in some way products of Marika herself. So we have a pattern of Crucible Knights, Misbegotten, and Omen all treated like poo poo but also all being really strongly associated with the Erdtree itself, which suggests discrimination built off of internal purity beliefs moreso than any kind of imperialistic structure. And with that, can we really say that Marika's war against the Fire Giants was clearly an act of imperialism, or were the Giants unreasonably xenophobic. After all, Fire Giant has a rather flame of chaos moment when it goes into phase two, and the philosophy of the Three Fingers is pretty clearly spelled out: quote:All that there is came from the One Great. Then came fractures, and births, and souls. But the Greater Will made a mistake. Torment, despair, affliction... every sin, every curse. Every one, born of the mistake. And so, what was borrowed must be returned. Melt it all away, with the yellow chaos flame. Until all is One again. From an imperialism perspective, none of this makes much sense. But from a biological perspective with an emphasis on purity, what's going on here is a lot more clear. Marika and the Erdtree are both aliens who have reached a symbiotic relationship with Leyndell. The Fire Giants and their association with the Chaos Flame and the Three Fingers are equivalent to an ecological immune system that has to be subjugated so they don't destroy the outsider. But the more the world goes to poo poo, the more pull the Three Fingers has to advocate for a world where all is one again, again a (rather extreme) call for purity. ---------------------------------------------------------- I think my biggest problem with the imperialistic framework is that it ignores the positive half of Elden Ring's storyline: the importance of symbiosis. Of being able to ignore purity concerns and work with an entirely different species for a common good and a develop a greater complexity in civilization. Both the Golden Erdtree and the Silver Carian storylines center around cross-species integration in a really positive way, and there's this reflexive need from a lot of people to paint the Erdtree as this alien force of imperialistic corruption when it's just kinda not? The state of the The Lands Between is horrible right now, but there's a reason that every ending but the chaos ending seeks to replace the order, not abolish it, and that means learning to work together with the alien rather than blaming the alien for the sins of humanity.
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Apr 16, 2022 01:05
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Yeah I am using the world imperialist a bit too wide. Mostly because I still can't think of a better word. In old souls games the eternal cycle buries fallen civilisations naturally. In Elden Ring the burying is actively being conducted by people, which leads mostly to imperfections. And back to what started this: In Liurnia specifically we have much more living remnants of the past then anywhere else, and I still say that this is because they fought the Erdtree to a draw (and then alliance) instead of losing like the storm king and everybody else did. And with the Crucible (Knight, Misbegotten, Omen) we have the previous Erdtree order. And they are being displaced and oppressed by the current order which is the Golden Order. The Perfumers are all originally from the capital, depraved or not. There are 3 modes of anti-erdtree sentiment, even if is is sometimes just a anti-Golden Order sentiment extended into general anti-erdtreeness: Those that predate the Erdtree: Carians, the undergroud civs. Those that rebelled against the Erdtree/GO: Depraved Perfumers, Rykard Those that were shunned by the Erdtree/GO: Crucible, Omen, Misbegotten, Undead, Tarnished used to go here until the great call went out. The other reasonable origin for the depraved Perfumers is that they were like Sellen, in that their ambitions and experiments grew too far to be acceptable. The idea that the pre-Erdtree "outer god" was also tree shaped was popularized by Vati, so you will hear it a lot. I don't agree with him there. I do believe there was a pre-Erdtree live and civilisation, but I don't think it was based on another tree. And neither do i think that the Darkmoon rule will involve a big tree.
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Apr 16, 2022 10:24
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So, I'm on my bullshit again re: cross fictional references. Specifically that the Radahn Festival is one big FF14 reference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ds95ahxHCo In other news, I actually watched Vaati's videos last night. A couple weeks ago I had a pretty big argument that started when I disagreed with them that the Erdtree was a parasite. The only source they would cite was Vaati's lore video, and the conversation went downhill pretty quickly. So I found the bit where he called the Erdtree a parasite, and wow, there was basically no citation or anything. Just one big, unsupported assumption. I'm certainly not one to complain about people making assumptions in their lore theories--I don't think you can actually get anywhere analyzing these games without making assumptions--but you need to make the effort of actually identifying the assumptions that you're making and providing the reasoning for making those assumptions. But to Vaati's credit, his latest video admitted that he made a mistake. quote:First off, there's a small part in the previous video where I called the Erdtree a parasite. So first - parasite was the wrong word to use. In the words of Quelaag, another lore creator - the Erdtree is more symbiotic, if anything So legitimately good on him for correcting that. And in other other news, I've beaten Demon's Souls. It was an...interesting experience. I think it's hard to read too much into it lorewise because of how rushed and unfinished it feels from a narrative perspective, but it's definitely a reminder of how far From has come in developing the genre. Also pretty fun to compare Lake of Rot to loving 5-2.
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May 2, 2022 18:21
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Sibyl Disobedience posted:So, I'm on my bullshit again re: cross fictional references. Specifically that the Radahn Festival is one big FF14 reference. This comparison really doesn't work. Almost everything here is just common to many RPGs, and Radahn and Raubahn aren't that similar outside of the most basic dual wielding curved sword aesthetic. Raubahn has nothing to do with rocks falling from the sky. He doesn't use a bow. He doesn't use magic. He isn't on a horse. He isn't a demigod. Radahn is a vastly different character who uses magic for just about everything, including moving around, famously uses his bow, uses gravity magic in almost all of his attacks, and is so powerful that despite being rotted from the inside and fighting you and all your summons, is still holding back the heavens. And, it should be noted, animal motifs for fighters and livery and all that stuff are incredibly common in fantasy and reality. Radahn is explicitly symbolized by a lion, not a bull. The rocks in FFXIV have a completely different meaning to the rocks falling in Elden Ring. Other than being rocks in the sky, they are vastly, vastly different from one another in virtually every conceivable way. And yes, it's common in games to have a boss that you need some sort of big external help for. Sometimes you fight a boss with the full cast, sometimes you get a mech or vehicle to help out, and sometimes, as in the Radahn fight, you get an army behind you. Or, well, as much of an army as you can realistically have in the Souls games. It's a neat spectacle, but just because you have a fight with NPCs helping you out, that doesn't make it a reference to something else. The root issue with your comparison here that makes it not a good reference is that while the Radahn fight has three elements that are present in FFXIV, those three elements are not related to one another in FFXIV (Raubahn doesn't have anything to do with meteors, and is not fought in a Trial or Alliance setting), and each individual element also isn't related in their counterpart in Elden Ring (Raubahn is a poor comparison to Radahn on the bow/magic/horse front, the meteors are completely different in every way, trials and PC/NPC summons are not used in the same way) And this kind of gets to the same criticism I leveled previously. What you're analyzing and your analytical style works well for analyzing games within the same series. Callbacks between games in the same series don't need nearly as much support. This is doubly true in a series like the Souls games where there are explicitly some vague continuities from game to game, and many of the same themes are explored within each game. But when you're talking about a reference from one game to a completely different game, the bar gets a lot higher.
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May 3, 2022 07:16
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| # ? May 19, 2024 03:39 |
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I figured you'd be interested in hearing about this: https://kotaku.com/dark-souls-lore-story-books-maps-guide-miyazaki-1849181099
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Jul 16, 2022 01:40
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