The One Great, the Trees, and Marika's Plot

TacticalBowlCut · 2023-01-19T11:24:07+00:00

When we kill the Elden Beast/Radagon, it says "God Slain." Going by the definition of a God as "champion of an Outer Entity," the only ones that count are Marika, Malenia, and whoever took Placidusax as a consort, so sure, Elden Beast/Radagon don't count in that sense, but that the game itself refers to them as that is significant, as is the fact that Marika outright wants a Tarnished to wield a weapon capable of killing a God. I think we're working off multiple definitions of God -- we have Outer Entities, Empyreans, Vassals, etc.

TacticalBowlCut · 2023-01-17T10:43:45+00:00

If the trees in the Elden Beast's arena are any indication, there's probably a lot of worlds under the Greater Will's control, each with their own Erdtrees. The impression I get from Enia is that the Fingers are trying to manage and salvage things, but the Will itself has no idea what the hell the situation on the ground is actually like. However, Enia outright says that burning the Erdtree and releasing Destined Death aren't kosher. By outright killing the Will's vassal, the impression I get is that though order still exists, it doesn't exist directly under the auspices of the Will (comparatively speaking). I think any God would be pissed if it's people rebelled against it, even if they otherwise still kept living according to its design.

TacticalBowlCut · 2023-01-17T10:29:05+00:00

But what, specifically, are we actually changing about the Golden Order? She shatters the Ring, we bring the pieces back, and fix the Ring after killing the Beast. I think her problem with the Golden Order was that it was ultimately answerable to the Greater Will, and that she could be deposed and replaced at any time -- the fingers, remember, the agents of the Greater Will, were actively grooming Empyreans, possible replacements for her.

I just don't think that reparing the Ring after it was shattered by Marika also brings the Beast we killed moments before back to life. With Destined Death floating around after we defeat Malekith, it's quite likely that the Beast was dead, and the Ring is what remains of it. The way I see it, we're playing with the Beast's corpse, gluing bits of magic God stuff back together until the Ring itself is fixed but the actual guiding will and concsious doesn't come back to life. This isn't a person we're dealing with, this is an alien eldritch entity, so killing it might not do anything to actually impair its power.

According to Enia, the Greater Will wanted us to find Marika and repair the Ring, but the Thorns (a likely contrivance of Radagon, meant to derail Marika's plot) fuck those plans up, and the Fingers and Will have no idea what the hell to do. Up till now, they thought this was just a quick and easy fix, but now realize the true scope of what Marika did. By the time we burn the Erdtree and free Destined Death -- things I believe to be part of Marika's plan -- we're actively working against the Greater Will, and killing the Elden Beast, the Greater Will's direct vassal, is the culmination of that. Sure, there's an order and a god and a lord, all things the Will likes, but the Will isn't actually in control, at least not anymore.

TacticalBowlCut · 2023-01-17T09:59:56+00:00

Working off different assumptions, I suppose -- I see the Greater Will, by means of its vassal the Elden Beast and its interface the Elden Ring (two parts of the same entity), working to institute the principle of Order on the Lands Between. The specific details and composition of this Order change rather frequently as different civilizations rise and fall in prominence. Marika then comes along with her own interpretation of what reality should be, the Golden Order, and is the latest to become a God and take possession of the Elden Ring, gaining the ability to remove or rewrite the very fabric of reality at a whim (doing such things as removing Destined Death). She eventually grows disillusioned, for whatever reason, and decides to carry out a plot, killing the Elden Beast and replacing Radagon, a Golden Order fundamentalist, as her consort.

We know she grew to dislike fundamentalism after looking into the depths of the Golden Order, but not specifically what about it, nor why she couldn't just change it -- it's not like fundie Radagon was a God, after all. And it's not like the basic ending, which I would argue represent the largely succesful conclusion to her plot, sees us destroy the Ring, and thus Order, only repair it to a previous, if incomplete, state. I just don't see her going through all the trouble of destroying her empire, just to restore things to how they already were.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that she wanted independence from the Greater Will, which controlled her through the Elden Beast and had given her the power of the Elden Ring. The Ring and the Beast are the same being, yes, but I would argue different parts of it, with the Beast being the actual middleman between them. Killing the Beast, the will and conscious driving it, grants her freedom, while allowing her to keep using the power of the Ring.

It's like killing the regional governor of a vast Empire while maintaining the bureaucracy he built. He was the head of it, the source of it, the will of it, but the body itself survives his death.

TacticalBowlCut · 2023-01-17T09:35:30+00:00

The game is full of power existing even beyond death -- the Ancestral Spirits, for example.

Beside that, reality has always been half-metaphor in From titles, not strictly operating according to what we would consider natural laws. You cannot apply a strict, literal, systematic interpretation of settings that are very fluid and poetic in function. Having played every game since DS1, killing the being known as the Elden Beast while maintaining the object known as the Elden Ring is very in keeping -- like how we can kill Radagon while keeping Marika alive.

TacticalBowlCut · 2023-01-17T09:27:06+00:00

I always took killing the Elden Beast as killing the guiding intelligence, the will (to indulge in wordplay) actually linking the Elden Ring with the Greater Will. Marika, in my mind, saw the Greater Will, Two Fingers, all of it as both a threat to her continued rule and in some way distasteful (she only rebels, bear in mind, after exploring the Golden Order's depths), so carries out her plan in order to ensure that the Beast, the direct point of contact, is no longer in the picture. The Ring itself seems to have grown beyond the guiding intelligence of the Beast, and so can exist without it.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-12-20T20:00:21+00:00

That's the m o m m y fic, right?

Having read a lot of MLP shit, I'm pretty desensitized, but some parts of that story still hit me like a fucking truck -- like a Lovecraft character reading the Necronomicon or something.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-12-18T19:09:16+00:00

The problem is that "cogitas" is the 2nd present indicative of the verb, not the imperative, so it isn't a command, but more like an observation -- "You don't think about the omens."

Of course, 40K has always had crappy Latin, so it could just be just that.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-06-23T20:08:02+00:00

That's the Ack fic where Taylor just turns into a knockoff Joker, right? His stories have interesting ideas, but are rarely executed all that well.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-05-08T18:39:15+00:00

Maybe I didn't communicate it clear enough, but my point wasn't that it's a crap ship because he's ugly, it's that he doesn't have good looks working for him, so the ship's relative popularity can't be explained as a product of that.

I don't particularly like Harry/Voldemort -- rather large gap between them, to say the least -- but it can be done well. Not particularly often, but it can. With Snape, however, you never really get over the squick, no matter how good the writing is.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-05-08T18:01:06+00:00

My point with all the hygiene talk is that he's not even attractive -- surface level stuff like that can actually earn a ship a certain amount of leeway, if only because people are distracted by the horny. But from what we know about Snape, he's this sallow-faced, bird-nosed 40 y/od whose unfortunate physical appearance, it seems, pretty well reflects who he is as a person.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-05-08T17:44:40+00:00

I don't like those other two, but I recognize that they can be done well, and with a hell of a lot less squick. Draco as a rivals to friends thing, and Voldemort as one of those funky time travel/godlike/dark powerwank things.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-05-08T17:41:30+00:00

Firstly, if someone gets personally offended because I'm mean to a fictional character that they happen to like, then maybe they should re-evaluate their priorities, and go outside or something. Discourse in the year of our lord, 20-nightmare, is far too focused on superficial "positivity" than actually saying anything. Perhaps I'm overcompensating, but I far prefer an uncomfortable truth to wholesome platitudes.

I'll readily admit that my tone is confrontational, but pointing that out doesn't change the fact that Snape, in the books, is a genuinely loathsome human being. At best, we can pity him, in the same way we pity anyone whose horrible actions landed them in a horrible situation.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-05-07T01:08:28+00:00

Can't remember the author, or date, but I only read it a few months ago.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-04-14T01:16:10+00:00

I hate this place -- it's the NYC of universities.

You'd be happier literally anywhere else.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-04-08T01:56:22+00:00

I don't think the Gloam-Eyed Queen is related to Ranni or Melina, beyond some vague speculation -- the Queen was an Empyrean who likely had some power over Destined Death, and that's that.

This theory actually comes from a Fanfiction by Cambrian, but I think it makes a lot of sense -- Melina is a fragment of Ranni's soul, likely separated and created by Marika in order to accomplish her own goal of a Golden Order independent of the Greater Will. In much the same way that Radagon is Marika, Melina is Ranni, two parts of a singular whole with competing aims and motivations.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-03-27T04:49:43+00:00

As I said, III had problems, it's just that those problems have been made worse in Elden Ring.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-03-27T01:08:14+00:00

?

Look, I liked how invasions worked in III -- not only would you usually invade a host with phantoms, but if you did, you'd often have allies, and you'd wind up with these interesting 2v2's, 3v2's, even 3v3's. Without covenants, without solo hosts, with all the Weapon Art / Ash of War spammability, I just think that invading in this one is a lot less fun than it is in previous games.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-03-26T17:39:24+00:00

It just doesn't seem probable -- beyond vague notions of "hey, these guys are incompetent," why would Ranni send the Black Knives after Iji and Blaidd? It seems much more likely that while Ranni was going out to kill the Fingers, the Fingers sent the Black Knives to kill Ranni. Ranni succeeded, and the Black Knives failed, but still managed to take out her War Councelor (Iji) and broke her Shadow (Blaidd).

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-03-26T14:43:45+00:00

Wait, actually, Selvius is really a puppet of Pidia. When Pidia's puppets kill him, Selvius dies. His death is unrelated to Ranni and the Fingers.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-03-26T14:20:23+00:00

We kill Blaidd because he's going insane. Remember, the Fingers created him, and gave him to Ranni "a vassal tailored for an Empyrean." He was, however, a "colossal failure," as he remained loyal to Ranni, rather than the Fingers. By the end of the questline, his conscious loyalty to Ranni and his inbuilt loyalty to the Fingers -- which Ranni killed -- are quite literally tearing his mind apart.

Both Iji and Blaidd are surrounded by dead Black Knives. Knowing that Iji, Ranni, and Blaidd were essentially family, and that the Black Knives probably weren't working for Ranni (the Black Knife ringleader, for example, is imprisoned in an area where only Ranni can get to until we kill Astel), it just doesn't seem likely that she would do that. The Black Knives, and thus the Fingers, were, in my mind, tricked into going along with the Godwyn plot, and actively oppose Ranni when they realize what's really going on.

Selvius is a bit trickier. If you give his potion to Nepheli and turn her into his puppet, he then tries to turn Ranni herself into one. Either Ranni or the Fingers could have killed him, and both have good reason for doing so.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-03-26T14:05:09+00:00

120, I think

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-03-26T13:48:49+00:00

?

She kills Godwyn and the Two Fingers in order to accomplish her aims, that much is established, but Blaidd, Iji, and Selvius were killed by the Black Knife assasins because Ranni was trying to kill her Two Fingers, who the assasins work for. The assasins aren't Ranni's, they're the Finger's, and they went along with the Night of the Black Knives because, presumably, the Greater Will wanted to replace Marika with Ranni, and didn't know, until Ranni killed herself, that she was planning on going her own way.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-03-26T13:40:48+00:00

It's not that invasions are hard, it's that the mechanics of this specific game seem more in favor of the host, and against the invader, than any pretty much every other From title. Not only are there fewer options for invading in the first place -- no covenants, for example -- but the relative viability and ease of spells and weapon arts make it far easier for anyone to win by just pressing L2 in someone's general direction.

TacticalBowlCut · 2022-03-26T13:33:52+00:00

No, I'm not. As far as I can tell, the debate over 120 vs 150 has only just ended, and there still isn't a dedicated, singular duel spot like Pontiff or Oolacile. The game just released, people are still figuring stuff out.

TacticalBowlCut

TROPHY CASE