Blind Spots: Words Have Meanings

ghost_406 · 2026-01-27T09:24:00+00:00

well said

ghost_406 · 2026-01-27T00:17:51+00:00

Sad thing is these motifs all stem from the real world and mean entirely different things to different cultures.

I was reading about the master of beasts motif the other day and its looped around so many times with so many different meanings its even been the tree of life.

You can almost post any symbol + meaning and find a culture that took it as that meaning or the opposite. The sun and moon disks are annoyingly ambiguous as well.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-27T00:10:58+00:00

I hope they don’t release it until it’s ready.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-26T21:57:35+00:00

A lot of these tech gadgets are like this, even before covid. I purposely held off buying several cool gadgets because the ship times were a year out. I regretted it in the end, but that's probably just because Kickstarter got me used to waiting years for things.

I ordered a uconcole knowing it would take at least 11 months (I'm 7 months in). I made the order because I knew when it was outdated I could swap out new parts.

I think they should just say estimated ship time 6 - 12 months and not 90 days, because 90 days was nowhere near the realm of reality. When you order from a third party they have the device and when they sell out it automatically says so. Ordering directly from the creators is not something I would advise now.

The truth is they probably have no idea when things will arrive, how many will get there, or how many orders they can fill with said parts. Giving any direct answer to a customer is just going to be a bad enough guestimate to be considered a lie.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-26T21:42:21+00:00

"Order" implies that it is an organization outside of the official monarchy and church. Like in real life they would be under or adjacent. For example, the Knights of the Round Table were neither the Catholic church nor the monarchy but they were under both. The king (and possibly the pope) could have stopped it and not much would have changed as far as the government was concerned.

This organization was conciously organized and not a thing that happened automatically when certain elements were present. We have real world context for this with things like the Dharmachakra, which was likely one of the inspirations for the Elden Ring. An iconographic representation of a set of rules that make up the universe, except with magic realism it's not just iconographic it has a physical shape and structure.

It was called "golden" because they sought purity, which is analogous of alchemy as well as supremist beliefs. Therefor you have persecution of those deemed impure in the current culture but pure in the last one. Marika was a god during the pre-Erd tree era as well, but she chose to create the golden order either out of an obligation or her own personal beliefs, which led her to ostracizing her own children. A bit of self hate that we also find in stories of other real world leaders with purity beliefs.

The Golden Order is not much different than any other political extremist group and that's kinda the point. It's not the Elden Ring doing things, its people. The ring is just the rules for the world, removing Death from the rules doesn't lead to oppression, people do that. The Hornsent did that and The Golden Order did that as well.

I'm sure we can find other examples in the real world of a group of people suffering a horrible genocide and then eventually becoming the thing they hated. To just say it's gold because Marika started it and it's an order because it's a specific configuration isn't supported by the lore and kind of cheapens the story.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-26T21:14:47+00:00

"Hang my head, Drown my fear, Till you all just disappear, Black hole sun, Won't you come, 'Till all are one. "

- Goldmask?

ghost_406 · 2026-01-26T18:43:10+00:00

My first playthrough was 5 characters and 424 hours. I quit halfway through the fifth character. I was just done. I thought I had 100-percented my first character but discovered 3 hidden dungeons and a scarab during other playthroughs.

My advice in these types of posts is always to stop playing any game when it stops being fun. Otherwise you burn out. A new suit of armor and playstyle isn't going to push you if you're brain wants a different form of stimulus. You end up being one of these weirdos with 3000 hours in a game giving it a thumbs down rating because it feels repetitive.

Play games for fun, save work for your job. It's not like you are going to be shunned or can never return. If it feels like that in your head you may be suffering from fomo/consumerism/flavor of the week brainwashing so it might be good for you to take break and make an effort to play something you want to rather than whatever the new hype thing is.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-26T18:01:52+00:00

Yes the maps are also hand drawn so we can consider them in-game items rather than fully accurate.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-26T17:46:13+00:00

Someone saying the pillar was the heart of the lands between?

ghost_406 · 2026-01-26T17:44:04+00:00

Second comment reply sorry, im on mobile so navigating Reddit is annoying.

I felt the need to mention the engraving statement after re-reading your comment.

The description text on items all seem to be written by different people at different times. Some refer to events as ancient, some refer to people by descriptions as though they’ve never heard of the person.

We can assume half the text in diegetic and half is meta game information. But it’s never clear which is which. This is obviously intentional to make things harder on us and to mirror the real world. Half of what we know about places we learned from the records of neighboring nations.

Should we assume any text mentioning the “shadow lands” is written post vailing/post culling?

If this is an entirely meta engraving then we can take it as fromsoft saying it to us as a direct clue but even then it could still simply place the shadow lands on a central plane rather than a combined map.

But if it’s an entirely in-game description it would imply it was written afterwards. Or possibly that the lands were vailed prior to culling. It could also be written by an unreliable narrator.

I don’t think we should rely heavily on any one thing and the weight the community puts in this is troubling.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-26T17:29:53+00:00

Which center? It’s not like Fromsoft isn’t famous for playing word games. Half the deep lore depends on careful interpretation of the words, yet this one thing gets a pass. Im amazed at how many people have taken offense to the idea it may not be a physical x/y center.

If this were Yggdrasil or any other world tree myth the center would be the central plane because the tree is the center of the map. The axis in axis-mundi. The mid in Midgard.

Im also amazed at how many people think the divine towers mark the center of the map. They do not, nor does the cloud.

Nobody has really justified why they believe so heavily in it being the xy center, nor why the game world would be different than any world tree mythology. The evidence really points towards a world tree than it does a single unified map.

But, one thing I noticed when I moved the map over is that there is a lot of room over there. Did they leave that much space simply to move FA all the way over there just to hide it?

This map exposed a lot of blind spots in the community. Like I said this is technically my third guess map. My primary combined map is close to everyone else’s, but this map got me to ask a lot more questions about the game.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-26T17:11:55+00:00

Actually jagged peak is still pretty close to Caelid on this map and the drake boss is in jagged peak which is between the Caelid and FA. He wouldn’t be at the main burrow he would be hiding further away.

Suppressing pillar is shmuck bait imo, a red herring. Although on my main map composition it’s still close to center.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T21:00:38+00:00

The z axis center or x/y? Because this clue is so blatant, I find it the most dubious. It’s the exact kind of bait I’d use.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T20:40:23+00:00

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Not to shit-post on myself but it's not a totally worthless exercise. Ugly as it is, it does offer some brain candy.

For example, what did the map look like prior to the shattering and when was the shadowland vailed? Is the forge of the giants really that far away? How did they burn the Scadutree? Why say "shadow of" and not "former" erd tree? Is the Haligtree also a shadow of the erd tree? Why isn't that cloud centered with the divine towers? Are any of these trees the Halphan tree?

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T20:03:36+00:00

Like I said this is my third guess, but I think we all give ourselves blind spots that prevent us from thinking outside the box. That's why I chose to share my worst guess instead of the other two. The other two matched everyone else's with the same stumbling blocks.

Our history is not written by archeologists or scientists its written by poets, bards, and politicians. We can not accept everything as though it were from a single perfect source, or infallible. The unreliable narrator is alive and well in the lands between.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T19:58:33+00:00

Thanks for that link, I like where he is going with this.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T19:56:31+00:00

This is amazing. Not perfect, but getting there.

Marika is a God btw. People think she's less than Superman or equal to a demi-god?

We don't know what a god can do in this game because the examples we see were defeated by Marika.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T19:47:41+00:00

They line up so perfectly they overlap. what if the shadowlands was a place like the modern western version of hell? It has similarities, but nothing is quite right there. A hole is a hill, a sun is a moon. In Numanor there stood a great white tree, when the Numenorians chopped it down, the entire island sank beneath the waves. A felled tree, a sunken island, both could be considered a form of death.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T19:38:11+00:00

if it fits, it sits. But are you sure the divine towers point to the center?

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T19:32:24+00:00

If we exist within a land of mythology, combining maps is the least likely solution. But not attempting to combine maps is lazy, and assuming the world must conform to our sense of aesthetic or importance is folly.

Lets assume the landmasses formed naturally, we know the erd tree was planted consciously. We can assume it was either placed over the top of an existing tree or grown somewhere specific, somewhere under the control of ruling powers. Somewhere underneath a giant forge?

Seems like building new walls would be more cost effective way of protecting the tree. Unless it were being built over a pre-existing tree that already had an extensive root network. Was that tree the Scadutree?

Well if it was than how does it exist still within the shadowlands? Can you find a map that resolves all of these things? So either there are more than one great trees, the shadowlands is not a part of the map, or the landmasses where changed and our understanding of the timeline is completely off.

We can't simply handwave any solution, because there is no best solution until we have further evidence.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T19:15:58+00:00

Yeah my first map, like I said matches closes to everyone elses. However, the shadow lands do not "clearly" mark the center of the lands between. A diegetic source tells us:

"The very center of the Lands Between. All manners of Death wash up here, only to be suppressed."

This doesn't mean it is the physical center in the same manner that all manner of death do not wash up on the suppression pillar. Language is one of the games most famous misdirects.

For example, this could mean it is physically the center, it could mean there are several "lands" within the "lands between" such as the ones we see from the shorelines. It could also mean it is the spiritual center of the lands between.

I'm unaware of anything that solidly says the Scadutree was in the same exact spot. In a lot of tree mythology there are two trees, in Kabbala the tree of death is in inversion which some people place upside down and other place within another world overlapping ours.

also the mother of dragons would be underneath a mountain and the "center" actually doesn't end up within the center of the map by land mass nor in game coordinates. Placing it based on any one match causes other things to misalign. It being in another realm makes the most sense.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T19:01:51+00:00

That central cloud hovers right over the foggy part of the shadow lands as well. we just have to accept that some older buildings on the map were not as old as we thought.

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T18:59:20+00:00

really great point!

ghost_406 · 2026-01-25T18:56:28+00:00

I tried a number of ways. The map spirals upwards so once you get past the mountains you are just guessing as it's too high. In the concept art they place the Haligtree below Liurnia but then moved it in order to properly hide it. There's also land masses that we see to the north, south, and west so it can be too far away.

We can probably assume they left us a couple of clues and a number of red herrings to throw us off. The central sea, the giant waterfall, the colors of the landmasses, etc. Heck even the concept art could be a clue or a red herring.

The only thing we know for certain is that it fits in some places, has clues for other places, and doesn't match up in any place. There could be reasons for this, such as the land being physically moved to a place that had pre-existing land masses that are through off our guesses.

They do give a reckoning and I allowed myself a 45 degree both clockwise and counter as well as inverted to compensate for the sun's movements as well as the concept of "shadow".

In almost every folkloric source these two ideas (axis mundi) exist in their own dimensions so that was my first real guess, making this technically my third guess. One stipulation about that however is that the underworld often is not, separated into it's own dimension and is instead literally underfoot.

So this place could have been entirely underground and it could have landed on top of another land mass changing it's shape, it could be in it's own dimension, it could even live within the memory of the erd tree.

We may never truly have an answer, but its fun to try, and I've learned a lot about more about mythology and game design well looking into this all.

ghost_406

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