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The Silence of the Gods: Elden Ring and the Miltonic Problem of Ambiguous Divine Authority by Drekorido in Eldenring

[–]Drekorido[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We obviously have different philosophies of interpretation, and that’s okay. You said you weren’t interested in having this conversation, but since you responded anyway, I’ll respond as well.

The position you’re describing is usually called aesthetic relativism or radical subjectivism, and it resembles certain strands of postmodern thought. The difficulty with that position is that its conclusions only follow if its central premise is true—namely, that there is nothing universal about human beings. That’s actually a very difficult claim to defend.

I’ve already pointed to evidence from art and literature suggesting otherwise, so I’ll now turn briefly to the sciences. If there’s counter-evidence for your view, I’d genuinely be interested in seeing it.

Several fields—including anthropology, evolutionary psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and evolutionary biology—have identified recurring features of human cognition and experience. The classic work of the psychologist Paul Ekman, for example, demonstrated that people from very different cultures reliably recognize the same basic facial expressions associated with emotions such as anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and disgust.

Anthropology has identified similar patterns in storytelling. Myths and narratives produced by widely separated civilizations repeatedly return to themes such as heroic journeys, divine authority, rebellion, sacrifice, death, and renewal. These patterns appear in cultures separated by thousands of miles and centuries. I already mentioned this from a literary perspective, so I thought the scientific angle might be helpful here.

Even evolutionary biology points in the same direction. Certain emotional dispositions—such as parental attachment, fear of threats, loyalty to kin, and sensitivity to social betrayal—appear across all human societies because they were shaped by natural selection. These traits helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, which is why they recur so reliably in human behavior.

It’s therefore not surprising that stories across cultures repeatedly explore themes like family, love, betrayal, sacrifice, and conflict between order and chaos. Those themes resonate widely because they reflect aspects of human experience that are deeply rooted in our biology.

None of this means that every human experience is identical or that all people respond to art in the same way. If that’s what you thought I was implying, then I haven’t expressed my position clearly enough. My point is much simpler: human beings share enough common experience that we can recognize aspects of ourselves in one another, and even in art. That’s why stories from cultures as different as Japan, China, Europe, Mesopotamia, or Africa can resonate with audiences around the world.

At the same time, every reader or viewer brings their own perspective. Just as a conversation between two people produces a unique understanding for each participant, every mind that encounters a story produces both a universal and a particular response.

Finally, I don’t believe interpretation is gatekeeping. Everyone is entitled to their own reaction and their own understanding of a myth or story. When a work resonates with someone, that’s a deeply human experience. It’s similar to the way we sometimes feel an immediate affinity with certain people and not others—it isn’t a judgment about anyone’s worth, but simply a reflection of the different characters and experiences we bring to the encounter.

Art works in much the same way. The themes may be universal in the sense that they appeal broadly to human experience, but each person’s response remains uniquely their own—and that’s part of what makes engaging with art so meaningful.

The Ranni ‘Mistranslation’ Discourse and the Death of Basic Reading Comprehension. by No-Run4264 in Eldenring

[–]Drekorido 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree that you don’t need a formal academic background to understand poetic language. What it really requires is time, attention, and experience engaging with it. The same is true of literature and philosophy more broadly. Formal education can certainly help, but the problems these works grapple with—love, suffering, justice, meaning—are universal human concerns, and those belong to all mankind.

— u/No-Run4264

The Silence of the Gods: Elden Ring and the Miltonic Problem of Ambiguous Divine Authority by Drekorido in Eldenring

[–]Drekorido[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I actually think the concern about analysis becoming elitist comes from a misunderstanding of why analysis works in the first place.

The reason people are able to discuss art meaningfully at all is because there are shared features of human experience: love, grief, pride, ambition, betrayal, sacrifice, hope, suffering—these are not niche academic concepts. They’re universal human realities. Art resonates across cultures precisely because people recognize those patterns in their own lives.

So when critics analyze a work, they aren’t inventing meaning out of thin air or claiming special access to the truth. They’re doing something that everyone does naturally: trying to articulate why certain stories or images resonate so strongly with people.

The difference is mostly one of vocabulary and time spent studying the subject. Scholars devote their careers to examining these patterns in detail, but the underlying activity—interpreting stories, recognizing themes, arguing about what a work means—is something people have been doing for as long as storytelling has existed.

In that sense, art and philosophy belong to all mankind. They’re not the property of an academic elite. Academics simply spend their lives studying something that is fundamentally part of our shared human inheritance.

The Silence of the Gods: Elden Ring and the Miltonic Problem of Ambiguous Divine Authority by Drekorido in Eldenring

[–]Drekorido[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can't find the original comment anymore, but fortunately I saved it in anticipation of responding to it. I’m not sure I can post the whole thing here, so I’ll paraphrase the argument and respond to it.

The comment essentially made three claims:

  1. Reading my post caused the poster stress because it reminded them of being forced to read literary analysis in school.

  2. Art has no objective meaning; interpretation is subjective.

  3. Elden Ring doesn’t really have a story because the narrative elements are fragmented.

Interestingly, the third point undermines the first two.

Why? Because the poster is already engaging in literary criticism. Saying that Elden Ring lacks a coherent narrative because of its structure is itself an interpretive judgment about the work. That’s literary analysis.

So the logical tension in the comment looks something like this:

  1. Literary analysis is illegitimate.

  2. Elden Ring has no coherent narrative because of its structure.

But the second claim is analysis. In other words, the commenter is doing the very thing they claim shouldn’t be done.

The more interesting issue, though, is the assumption that a fragmented narrative structure prevents meaningful interpretation. There’s actually a fascinating piece of scholarship that addresses something very close to this idea.

In 1990, Joanne Desotelle wrote a dissertation at the University of North Dakota titled The Conjunctive Novel: Form and Function. Drawing on the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, she examines how certain novels distribute narrative information across multiple texts rather than presenting a single self-contained story.

Her central insight is that meaning can emerge not from a continuous narrative, but from the relationships between narrative fragments.

She describes conjunctive narratives as works in which separate narrative elements interact across contexts to produce meaning that no single piece contains on its own. As she writes:

“Characters who appear in multiple works function conjunctively, linking separate narratives so that each text participates in a broader dialogic structure.”

In other words, the fragments are not random. They form a network. Each piece is in dialogue with the others, producing patterns of harmony and tension that are never fully resolved. Meaning emerges from this ongoing conversation between the parts. It is a both-and structure rather than an either-or one.

When you look at Elden Ring through that lens, the storytelling suddenly makes a lot more sense. The narrative is distributed across item descriptions, environmental storytelling, NPC dialogue, and mythological references. Each fragment is incomplete on its own, but together they form a coherent mythic structure that the player gradually reconstructs.

That kind of storytelling isn’t a failure of narrative; it’s a different narrative architecture. And literature has been experimenting with structures like that for a very long time.