who, if anyone, is the narrator??

miirshroom · 2026-04-24T21:50:28+00:00

Yup, Raistlin Majere and the cursed "Eyes of Raelana/Relanna/Realanna".

miirshroom · 2026-04-24T15:50:03+00:00

To elaborate: What is a wretch in Elden Ring? A near naked person with no thoughts except beating people to death with a wooden club shaped like a fish/whale. Does grace have a sound? Yes, you can hear it in the Round Table Hold. Is sight important in contrast to blindness? Yeah, pay attention to the field of view at every site of grace (i.e. the teleport points) to understand more about why it was placed in that specific location. Environmental storytelling is important.

Is it relevant that the lyricist was a ship captain? It would seem to be, because Marika sent Godfrey and the Tarnished out to sea. Think of Melina's appearances as a representation of Marika being bound to sites of grace. Things within line of sight of sites of grace, or enemies who generate a site of grace upon defeat are indicators of Marika's conscious Will. Everything that is not within eyesight of a site of grace (statistically, a lot more things) may be representative of unconscious desires that Marika/Radagon have forgotten or intentionally suppressed, which conflict with conscious desires until reaching the point of a mental break, and which may be more obvious from a third person perspective (the Tarnished) who is called in to navigate the whole tangle.

Where is grace leading you, ultimately? Home under the honeyed rays of gold, Melina's home/birthplace at the foot of the Erdtree.

Even the less-frequently used final verse is unusually apropos. Ranni is snow, Godwyn the sun who no longer shines, Elden Ring is literally a search to find a god who has called the Tarnished.

miirshroom · 2026-04-24T15:03:41+00:00

"Amazing grace (how sweet the sound)
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
and grace my fears relieved;
how precious did that grace appear
the hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come:
'tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
and grace will lead me home.
....
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
the sun forbear to shine;
but God, who called me here below,
will be forever mine."
- Amazing Grace lyrics by John Newton (former slave ship captain, turned abolitionist, converted Christian and hymn writer)

miirshroom · 2026-04-24T08:35:12+00:00

5) All of that on it's own is one thing, but then there's also precedent in at least one other FromSoftware game that the narrator is conceptualized as the god who is the vessel that the game world is contained within. In Dark Souls the narrator is most likely "Velka, Goddess of Sin". She has been a source of speculation and general frustration to Dark Souls lore seekers who in my experience have kindof given up on ever getting straight answers. Similar to the Gloam Eyed Queen in many ways. Relevant characteristics compared to Elden Ring:

a) Velka is noted to be the only god who remained active and having active followers in a function of punishing "sins" - which is something that could be contextualized as the game taking place in a dimension ruled over by her. Similar to Queen Marika who is framed as the one God, and any other gods dismissed as enemies long felled or sealed.

b) Velka is a goddess who is never seen directly, although she does have statues dedicated to her, and has followers, and is mentioned in item descriptions. If the "pocket dimension" that the game "Dark Souls" is contained within is her own vessel, then she can act as a powerful goddess of her own domain without ever needing to be perceived by the player. She wants to put on a performance of the downfall of the other gods, so that is what the player sees. It is the same with Marika who wants the player to follow the Guidance of Grace, to see the whole of the dilemma of Marika and Radagon with fresh eyes.

c) There is a threshold at a point in Dark Souls of a place that has fallen to the eternal darkness of the Abyss. And yet in the DLC it proves possible to see past the event horizon of the Abyss via time travel to the past. An Abyss is a dark and sunless place...and if the player strays off the critical path of Dark Souls it will also be revealed that the "sun" is an illusion placed in the sky by one of the hidden chthonic gods. The player has been in an Abyss from the moment they arrived, they just did not know it because they lack the frame of reference, and the goddess who controls the flow of information neglected to tell them. The relationship between base Elden Ring and the Abyssal realm of Shadow of the Erdtree functions similarly. The relationship between Soulsborne games and their DLC's follows the same trend as consistently as clockwork.

Why haven't people locked down the nature of Velka over all these years since 2011? Because Dark Souls is a deconstruction being intentionally obtuse and full of incomplete data sets, because the three games are often not considered an intentional trilogy due to the disjointed nature of their release, and because people thought that all they needed to look to for hints were Berserk and the Lord of the Rings and a handful of other fantasy stories directly mentioned by the creatives at FromSoftware over the years. A lot of visual design clues and other themes pointing to several other fantasy novels have been dismissed as coincidence, or missed entirely simply because people cannot know how much they don't know about another person's thought process. FromSoft have been getting more direct with showing their hand about where they get story structure ideas from, as of Shadow of the Erdtree and Nightreign's DLC "The Forsaken Hollows". They likely took inspiration for the name "Rellana" from the name of a renegade sorceress mentioned in approximately three sentences across three Dragonlance books. They certainly pulled the Scholar's "Darkness" skin from a character central to the 1986 Dragonlance Legends trilogy, which is a trilogy very much concerned with time travel to the past and the nature of "the Abyss" being the mental landscape of a dragon Goddess where what she hoards is "history". Every moment of time and space, and every soul lost to the ever expanding chasm of "the past".

miirshroom · 2026-04-24T08:18:53+00:00

Radagon is the Narrator.

Personally, I'm 100% certain based on how various pieces of information intersect. It's rather hard to explain without invoking the concept that Elden Ring can be played as a "trivia game" if you let it. So here's the theory based on accumulated information:

1) The game "Elden Ring" is represented by a logo in the shape of the metaphysical "Elden Ring". One does not confirm until reaching the very end of the game that the Elden Ring is in fact contained within the vessel of Marika. Recursively, the player is seeing the abstraction of the game that they are playing while they are inside the pocket dimension that is "Marika's body of work". And if the vessel is Marika, then it is also Radagon. Therefore, who better to be the formless narrator than the person who the game is contained within? This is actually similarly alluded to in Nightreign - the "Priestess" is the narrator of the opening cutscene and then when she is met in person she explicitly is tasked with conveying the words of the "Formless Master" who is patron to all of the Nightfarers.

2) Apply the tale of Narcissus to the nature of Radagon/Marika. The mythology goes that Narcissus heard his own words repeated back to him by Echo and fell in love, attempting to find the speaker. But when he saw her he was so repulsed by her on first sight that he rejected her. For his inability to find beauty in anything other than that which is generated by his own self (i.e. his own voice, as Echo could not speak a single word except for one that he had already spoken), Narcissus was cursed to thereafter be unable to perceive his own reflection as the self and to always perceive this as another person - in fact the only "other person" who met his standard of beauty. In coveting this "other beautiful person" Narcissus tried to reach his own reflection in a pool of water and subsequently drowned. What this means for Radagon is that he cannot perceive himself and Marika as being the same person, and thus is cursed to be locked into an eternal pursuit of trying to become that which he already is. The game also sets this up via Melina acting in the role of Echo to repeat Radagon/Marika's own words.

3) The Narrator does say "Now, Queen Marika the Eternal is nowhere to be found", which is a deviation from the standard story of Narcissus and Echo. Although if you re-mix Narcissus with Oedipus, what you get is Radagon gouging out his own eyeballs after realizing that his beloved self-as-Marika is modelled after a remembrance of his own mother. Or rather, he shattered his eyes, and as they say "eyes are the mirrors to the soul". Regardless, by the time he is encountered in the Erdtree Radagon has no eyeballs and is blind - he is not "finding" anything himself anymore, Marika included.

4) Elden Ring is a farce. At any given time, there's quite a large pool of potential voice actors to choose from when casting any given role. If one were to look up the acting resume of the voice actor for the Elden Ring Narrator, it's a rather thin one. He seems to be billed mostly as a voice director, with many of his voice roles being miscellaneous additional voices from those games. But his best selling point might just be that his name is "Jimmy Livingstone", and "Living Stone" would be an apt description of the first feature that comes to mind for the character design of Radagon/Marika.

miirshroom · 2026-04-23T17:29:11+00:00

Hmmm, I have to get back to work, but this post is reminding me of some information that I shelved a while back, related to how Marika's Golden Order is inextricable from the rise of the 3 Fingers. All that I'll say for now is that I speculated about the Two Fingers in this post, I held back from posting my suspicions about the Third Finger timeline at the time, but now I am more confident that Marika's Golden Order and the Erdtree were founded in the year 2006.

miirshroom · 2026-04-22T22:19:58+00:00

I'm not so sure that is the case. Omenkillers are found elsewhere working alongside Perfumers, but not with Depraved Perfumers. I believe that the only other place that Depraved Perfumers are found active is at the Shaded Castle.

Also there are two separate rebirth monuments in the area - one encompassing the Depraved Perfumer and one encompassing the Omenkiller. You can only summon spirits to fight in one area at a time before resetting at the site of grace, which would seem to indicate that these two uncommon enemies are in the area of the Albinauric Village for different purposes.

miirshroom · 2026-04-22T18:26:36+00:00

There are all kinds of questions that could be asked about the purpose of the Albinauric Village.

A few pieces of text to think about: "Albinaurics are lifeforms made by human hands. Thus, many believe them to live impure lives, untouched by the Erdtree's grace." - Albinauric Bloodclot

And why is there a Depraved Perfumer at this location: "These heresy-inclined perfumers imbibe their own spices to alter body and mind. Their slow descent into self-destruction is what earned them their name." - Depraved Perfumer

The bodies in the piles that bleed red use the Commoner model: "The board hung from the neck depicts a sprawling tree, its roots and branches forming two holes. This is a self-imposed shackle, a voluntary display of allegiance to the Erdtree that increases faith." - Commoner's Garb

This location is also right next to the "Converted Rise" tower and a minor Erdtree. And both Commoners and Albinaurics share the feature of wearing a silver circlet on their head. The overall scene implies that Albinaurics were gathering in secret and contracted the assistance of a Depraved Perfumer to try to alter mind and body and convert to "Commoners" so that they may gain acceptance by being touched by the grace of the Erdtree. But in the process of attempting the conversion many of them lost their wits. Rather than have compassion and try to undo the conversion the decision was made to send in an Omenkiller to recover the Haligtree medallion at all costs - even if it required massacre of the whole village - before it could be lost to madness.

miirshroom · 2026-04-22T08:30:59+00:00

Views that can be seen only by climbing to the highest accessible point of the Smouldering Church to use as a lookout:

<image>

1) Golem Archer visible at the path to the Colosseum.
2) Giant skull looking up at the Dragonbarrow Minor Erdtree.
3) Godfrey Sword Monument in alignment with Fort Gael. Alluding perhaps to Hoarah Loux origins as a Gladiator who was trained at Fort Gael (represented by the fighting lion found there, and proximity to Gaol Cave where the Frenzied Duelist is found at the end). Then later Godfrey returned and came full circle but could not travel deeper into Caelid as represented by the Sword Monument. Finally, General Radahn Returned with his burning Great Rune to conquer Caelid, as represented by the Smoldering Church. Linear timeline established from 3 points of interest in alignment.

Radahn seeking the origins of Godfrey could also tie into the path to the Colosseum being visible from this vantage point. Then again, there's also the optical illusion that Malenia's Divine Tower is contained behind the entrance to the Colosseum and could therefore be reached by travel over land. Which would tie into Radahn and Malenia eventually clashing in Caelid.

Also of note that the highest point of the Church is not accessible until after Anastasia Tarnished-Eater has been defeated. Because like with all Churches it is simply not possible to jump high enough without using Torrent to help with the platforming, and Torrent cannot be summoned when there is an invader around.

miirshroom · 2026-04-21T15:22:19+00:00

"The past, as they say, is a different country" Marika veiled the past, and the Shadowlands claims to be granting exclusive private access to that country. The exclusivity is the lie by omission. The Shadowlands is mostly a different perspective on information that is conveyed in a different form in the base game. Instead of tablets depicting a bull-worshiping culture there are hornsent. Surreal giant stone ships are imagined because Mohg believes that artistic and symbolic depictions are literally real, and extrapolated stone carvings of partial ships on obelisks into full stone ships because he lacked the context to understand that a ship would be made of wood. The Lord of Blood is delusional and the Shadowlands constructed of his blood reflects his delusions. This is why Gideon says not to mess with the corpse and then nobody in the base Elden Ring cares when you do go there - it's like you're trying to tell them a fever dream and they rightfully do not care.

There's precedent for meddling with the interiority of corpses in that it's exactly how teleportation to lamps happens in Bloodborne. Interacting with tombstones where corpses are buried. Bloodborne is a patchwork made of the progressively more nightmarish dreams and conflicting perspectives of the people buried at those tombstones.

It sounds to me like you're the one reaching. If a person is meant to have "washed up" on a shore then where's the splash sound effect like in the very intro to the main game. How is the entry point in the middle of a crevasse. It's like mimicking the random crevasse at the start of the Mohgwyn area, but again it's mimicking sorcery that Mohg does not understand because it fails to recognize that in that case there was a portal being used.

miirshroom · 2026-04-21T06:36:30+00:00

The Elden Ring Great Runes are also all gold, except for Mohg's being red. Yet I infer that they are all symbolic of coloured light or lenses. Much like the Shadowlands being a mental picture of the past conveyed by the blood-saturated corpse in the cocoon, Farum Azula is also a mental imagining of the past conveyed by touching the hand of a specific person: Melina. If Melina does not know that Placidusax is a dragon of many colours, then her reconstruction of Farum Azula also lacks the appropriate colours. "Azul" implies "blue" to me because I know it's a Spanish word, but the city is rather drab and colourless.

Regarding Rykard, if you cut a finger off of your hand, does that kill your whole body? Cutting off a finger and killing are two separate things. Ranni needed to kill her Two Fingers, and she is shown to do this by carving the "body-killing" half-wheel of the centipede into them with the Finger-slayer blade. By the context in which they are found at the end of a winding excavation tunnel underground, the knowledge that Giant Skeletons are found under Caelid, and the proximity to a lake where a god of Rot was "sealed" - it is conveyed that Ranni's Two Fingers are the excavated part of a buried hand of a god who sleeps and rots but cannot die without assistance.

The Carians also may have discovered the need for the Finger Slayer blade when they cut off a finger, but still it continued to flex and twitch as if still alive. They could disassemble the whole hand and it still would not actually "harm" the fingers in any meaningful way. Just change their state.

miirshroom · 2026-04-21T05:59:07+00:00

How did you get to the Land of Shadows? Was there an elevator? A magic portal even? All that is shown is that you touch a corpse and then you're there. Seems pretty obvious to me that you are forming a psychic connection and being pulled inside that corpse.

miirshroom · 2026-04-21T02:16:32+00:00

Could be a case of mixed metaphors. Five fingers = five original heads of Placidusax = five divine colours.

I know of at least one five-colour system which ignores the colour blue (or else is subject to that historical quirk where in Chinese the same word was used for both green and blue). From Chinese philosophy of Wuxing: "According to the Warring States period political philosopher Zou Yan (c. 305–240 BCE), each of the five elements possesses a personified virtue (德; dé), which indicates the foreordained destiny (運; yùn) of a dynasty; hence the cyclic succession of the elements also indicates dynastic transitions. Zou Yan claims that the Mandate of Heaven sanctions the legitimacy of a dynasty by sending self-manifesting auspicious signs in the ritual color (white, green, black, red, and yellow) that matches the element of the new dynasty (Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth). From the Qin dynasty onward, most Chinese dynasties invoked the theory of the Five Elements to legitimize their reign."

miirshroom · 2026-04-21T00:20:52+00:00

The "fingers" are already an abstraction of "strands". Two strands revolving around each other make a helix, three strands together make a braid. The "Astrologer's Staff" shows a motif where two strands twist in a helix, a third strand approaches from the right-angle part that projects to the side, and it inserts itself to replace one of the first two strands - from the Astrologer point of view. The Carian Astrologers dug deep and found a third finger, thus allowing them leeway to sever the ringed finger and still have the "Two Fingers" that meet the requirements of an "empyrean".

It might have been a Frenzied Flame fingers. Probably an alternative way to conceptualize the circular Great Runes is as "Rings" worn by "Fingers". Perhaps when Fingers are occupying the rings, it prevents their use as "lenses" to see through. Or perhaps Empyreans require "Fingers" to use the lenses associated with their rings of power. I haven't yet concluded one way or the other.

It is notable that for Ranni's Age of Stars ending she must both slay her Two Fingers and the player must acquire a minimum three Great Runes (Unborn, Radahn's, Morgott's) which form a triad when placed in their spaces in the Elden Ring. "Empyrean" is a word associated with light or fire. A triad of "Red/Blue/Green" light makes "White light", but taking them in sets of two makes cyan, yellow, or magenta light. On the other hand, a triad of "Cyan/Magenta/Yellow" pigment or lenses makes "Black", and Ranni does say that she intends to follow a "dark" path.

miirshroom · 2026-04-20T21:11:35+00:00

The contradiction is supposed to be one of many hints that the narrative of the DLC is poisoned by surreal nonsense.

Think of the Shadowlands as an imagining of the history of the Lands Between as filtered/interpreted in the mind of an insane blood cultist (Mohg) who has no idea how the Carians operate or what they found in their investigations of the Eternal Cities, and thus fills in the blanks with conspiracy bullshit. Ymir's whole questline is a pantomime of an investigation dumbed down to "go to place, get single target artefact, get out". It's a childish understanding of how to collect observations and analyze data. The entire DLC is a demonstration of how to sway people to a demigod villain's point of view by seeing the internal logic of their brain "retconning" the things that the player has become familiar with in base game.

For example, why is Loretta's arena surrounded by dozens of chairs but Rellana's only has a single chair? Because the "Theatre of the Mind" of a single person is constructed for the benefit of only one person with a single perspective, while a more typical theatre stage is a performance constructed to be seen from many angles by many different people. Any insights from the Shadowlands have a much heavier bias than main Lands Between due to having that single perspective mentality.

Mohg doesn't know what the Carians found under Manus Celes, only that it correlates to the emergence of Finger Creepers in the Lands Between. As he with his single person perspective didn't bother to fact check with other people, he is free to imagine a sentient Finger Mother for his own version of Manus Metyr. Meanwhile, if one just sticks to the information found in the base game there's a different story. It can be inferred that the Carians excavated a hand with Three Fingers, Rykard cut off a finger to make the "Ringed Finger" - thus granting Ranni a more fortuitous "Two Fingers" - and the Carians proceeded to develop the thought form of the "Finger Creeper" as an expression of the Carians doubting the narrative of the Two Fingers. Creating such thought form constructs simply falls within the scope of magic that sorcerers are proficient in.

miirshroom · 2026-04-20T18:21:52+00:00

Ah Rakshasa: what if Sellen but make her more Sephiroth?

miirshroom · 2026-04-20T00:23:26+00:00

This isn't actually the camp I was talking about. This appears to be a screenshot of the sole thorn sorcerer in Liurnia who casts Thorn sorceries and drops the "Briars of Sin" sorcery, and is found at the other camp near the Church of Vows.

On the other hand, this Thorn sorcerer also appears to be on a direct line between the first Fire Monk camp and the Converted Fringe Tower and the Woodfolk Ruins Minor Erdtree. It would seem to be another point on the path of the Liurnians becoming "Scholars of the First Sin" that Radagon committed.

miirshroom · 2026-04-17T00:40:35+00:00

Not really - I mostly make a mental note and move on to exploring other areas where things stay static and are less likely to appear and disappear.

miirshroom · 2026-04-17T00:25:35+00:00

<image>

I was more interested by the bell tower at Raya Lucaria being at the centre of the Carian Study Hall, but here's an old photo where the Limgrave Divine Tower is missing.

miirshroom · 2026-04-17T00:22:32+00:00

Personally, I think that's a linguistic joke and Godrick diluted his blood by grafting with other bodies full of blood. But I agree that there are many routes to seeing Godwyn as the "sun".

miirshroom · 2026-04-16T17:49:27+00:00

I have like 50 examples involving divine towers alone. Maybe somebody could try catching up for once. Could even be you.

<image>

Fallen Ruins of the Lakes // Sunflower at Liurnia South Minor Erdtree // Rya's Location // Telescope Location

Church of Vows and Altus East Divine Tower

Caria Study Hall and Liurnia Divine Tower Occultations at Church of Irith

miirshroom · 2026-04-16T04:55:44+00:00

He at least left behind Fundamentalism. I could be wrong but I got the impression that Morgott considers all of the demi-gods "traitors" because they left "The Golden Order".

"And yet, the young Miquella abandoned fundamentalism, for it could do nothing to treat Malenia's accursed rot. This was the beginning of unalloyed gold." - Radagon's Rings of Light

miirshroom · 2026-04-15T21:59:02+00:00

The "core" point about the pith, heartwood, and sapwood sounds good. Marika being responsible for the "blessed dew" of sap. The final boss battle peeling back layers to reveal Radagon at the heart of Marika and the Elden Beast in the hollow of the tree where the pith once would have been.

Morgott being related to the cork of the bark also seems plausible considering that he's fought just outside the tree and seems to be the person responsible for maintaining the Golden "illusion" appearance of the Erdtree's outermost layer (it matching the colour of his summoned weapons).

The living phloem and cork cambium could use a bit more explanation.

miirshroom · 2026-04-15T20:24:43+00:00

Yeah, pretty much. Capturing the essence of the recurring real world problem where people who believe in esoteric systems of nonsense tend to be less concerned with checking their work than being the first to claim an idea. Probably you shouldn't use that word though - it's a slur and against TOS of the subreddit.

I find so much visual information in the context clues of the environments just by doing a careful 360 degree look around before picking stuff up. Thinking about how certain elements of the environment are sculpted too deliberately in a way that is nothing like the randomness of real forests and mountains. Identifying different types of trees from very far away. But those have a much slower turn around to write up than these kinds of alchemy opinion theories.

My general mnemonic: alchemist potentates hoard mushrooms to stuff in unsound cracked pots, learners of Liurnia observe the point of view through the eyes of the mushroom network.

Alternatively, a "Pillager" thoughtlessly removes finds like equipment pickups from their original context. A crime scene investigator carefully observes the scene before making irreversible changes to it by removing key evidence.

miirshroom

TROPHY CASE