just a heads-up for any elden ring people who keep up with my blog but don’t directly follow me, i’m likely planning to change my blog url at some point in the near future! i’ll try to have miquellas redirect to it, but if links break or anything that’s why o7
atraight up if a emperor penguin was behind a company desk like a CEO or something i wouldnt even question it especially if its just chilling looking around
taking advantage of story supports to torture oberon
im at lostbelt 3 now in my Quest For Asclepius. to say the fights are getting annoying is kind of an understatement; i feel like at a certain point you just sort of get Servant Diffed because now the story expects you to have lvl 90 built servants with a full roster (which i have, 6 servants, 3 of which are just support casters lol.) it doesn’t help that mat grinding in fate is so fucking tedious for no reason at all or that they force you to use npc servants at times.
which wouldn’t be a problem if not for like. lol. the surtr fight where they force you to take sigurd who has no class advantage or particularly useful skills at all. it’s definitely another form of arbitrary difficulty, especially combined with other gimmick mechanics later on like “sealed master skills”
though all this said the lostbelts feel shorter than london/camelot/babylonia which is such a fucking blessing
this game is not actually fun but it’s an interesting time waster !
i think ruina actually cops a lot from the innamorato / orlando in general due to roland more broadly (seriously the way he talks about angelica there sounds so similar to the way he talks about angelica in ruina, because he grieves for the loss of angelica before he even knows her)
but also like
it’s an epic about love and grief in the same way ruina is so much about love and grief. right. angelica’s love sealing argalia’s fate and her feverish hunt for rinaldo thereafter. orlando’s love for angelica and the story being so keenly about his loss of her. ferrau’s furious love for angelica driving him to grief over his murder of argalia and later argalia returning to haunt him and berate him for his lack of purpose because he lost his love of angelica.
so it’s only appropriate that ruina itself spends so much time meditating on love and the loss of it and having to learn how to move on…
arguably i think orlando innamorato/furioso are less applicable to ruina / charles’ office on a micro scale, compared to the way the sinner’s books are more applicable to them - because the sinners are more directly drawing from the plot of their source material, whereas ruina flips the script and is just sort of taking general inspiration
but
i do think the way argalia’s character is presented, in how he’s ostensibly this protector for angelica - being called by her to help detain her would-be assaulter and killer - but also how angelica only half-heartedly goes along with his scheme in france in the first place and decides to abandon him when she becomes frustrated with the knight’s genuine interests in her
is something that i think could be taken to be relevant to how they’re presented in ruina, how that moment where angelica abandons argalia seals the fate of both characters - in innamorato leading to argalia’s death in the ardennes and angelica’s madness, and in ruina leading to angelica’s death at the hands of the pianist and argalia’s madness….
I theorize that, due to the Two Fingers choosing Malenia as an Empryean close to the end of the Erdtree's age (in JPN) and the Golden Order being uninterested in healing her, that she was actually SUPPOSED to give in to the rot and "die" to prolong the Erdtree's rule - to become mycorrhizae. Increases the TP parallels too, with Malenia forsaking her "duty" as a sacrifice and trying to usher in a new age instead, with Lothric doing the same, and both being supported by protective older brothers.
well, the 1.0 text agrees with this by placing malenia as harboring the natural power of rot through her rune of decay (in the sense that “rot” wasn’t an “outer god” but rather a natural part of life under the elden ring & golden order) - opposite to miquella’s abundance / new growth, as a balanced cycle.
in this sense, it was definitely an intentional part of her character writing at one point, and is probably carried along in the narrative to some degree still. imo the problem with this is that the rot is explicitly characterized now as irrevocably destructive and malignant rather than natural decay.
malenia’s remembrance also specifies her status as an empyrean was granted based on the nature of her birth:
Miquella and Malenia are both the children of a single god. As such they are both Empyreans […]
which indicates that her recognition by the two fingers would’ve occurred regardless of her illness or not.
i don’t disagree that they simply expected her to die (or rot into a pile of mush), i just don’t think the idea of gaining anything from her factored into it.
i do agree it’s very lothric-esque, though, haha… it’s interesting to me how strongly the sets of twins draw parallels with each other, even taking into account how frequently fromsoftware writes the same character archetypes repeatedly throughout their games
if genital selection becomes the next big thing in RPGs we need to push beyond a binary application of “penis” and “vulva” (even if there are additional options past that binary gate) and make a single slider. x and y axis type of thing like chusing the depth and width of your chin.
This is Lumibranch, our third collaborative Fakemon from the “Create A Fake Pokemon With Me” Polls! The mysterious “???” option mentioned in the poll this time was Spikes.
this is a personal blog & mostly personal posts about whatever media i'm into right now. sometimes i write meta and lore posts for souls games, and i also datamine from time to time.
please tag anything to do with incest & flashing images.
Pinned Post
