Previous posts: (Part 1, part 2, part 3).
We are nearing the end. The driving fire fades. Good thing, too, long posts like this nuke my productivity.
PART 8: DAN HAS A BREAKTHROUGH
Per Fire Knight Helm:
"Each
and every knight hailed from a renowned family of the Erdtree's upper
echelons, but were shunned and chased from their homes after pledging
allegiance to Messmer as their master."
This tells us up front that Messmer was known to and hated by the Leyndell nobility and that he recruited his elite forces from that same aristocracy. Those noble families disowned and
ostracized anyone who pledged allegiance to him (and so the people who
followed him were probably not the people who held authority in those
families. I get the feeling he attracted a lot of disaffected second and
third sons), but we don’t get specifics as to why. It seems that
the fire and serpents were known to his fire knights and very few
others, so my bet is on good old “this guy is clearly unhinged and is
putting together personal death squads, this is going to end with heads
on pikes.”
This leads to a couple of second-order questions:
- Did the general populace know about the Crusade? (I’m going to say yes, asterisk, hold on a tic)
- Did Messmer’s followers join him because of the Crusade, or did the Crusade come after he started gaining support? (Both? Both. Both is good)
- What drew Messmer’s followers to him, and why did they stay? (Charisma, ideology, and reward, probably.)
- Was
the Land of Shadow already separated at this point, or did Marika close
the door behind the crusaders? (The million dollar question)
That leaves us with Marika. We know she orders the crusade to genocide
the Hornsent, and we know she abandons Messmer and his forces in the
Land of Shadow. Marika is nothing if not a pragmatist, so my gut is
saying it might be a two birds with one stone scenario. She can get rid
of an old enemy by tossing the demigod who poses the greatest threat to
her continued rule at them, locking the door, and letting them kill each
other.
Aside: I love Marika as an
antagonist. She’s one of the rare examples of one of the ambitious
hypercompetent chessmaster that works for me; her fatal flaw is that she
overextends her plate-spinning abilities and burns through her
resources because she treats her allies as tools to be used and
discarded. Once things start breaking bad, she’s scrambling to keep it
all afloat and things breaking cause other things to break. I find it
extremely engaging.
Now, there has to be some reason why
Messmer keeps gathering support despite being hated so intensely by
Leyndell society at large. He must be offering something that his
followers aren’t getting anywhere else in the Golden Order.
Theory: I think that there was anticipation that Messmer could / would stage a coup
Natural
assumption for people to make, right? Let’s think about it from a
random civilian’s perspective. Here’s this elder son of Marika, a bastard
from some relationship prior to her marriage to Godfrey. He’s been
passed over for any sort of inheritance within the Golden Order in favor
of Godwyn. He’s got no real role in the administration of the state
besides showing up and committing some extreme violence (definitely
against the Giants, probably against Liurnia). He’s clearly a bit
unhinged in the head, and he is clearly not buying into the Golden
Order. He’s attracting all these sons of noble families to form his
personal cadre of knights through a combination of charisma and being
the guy whose existence is a challenge to the dominance of
the social order.
Or to stop beating around the bush; Messmer
gives me “captain of the Brownshirts” vibes so big you can see them from
fucking space.
From Marika’s perspective, he’s got both
Erdtree-killing fire and the abyssal serpent inside him, and he is not
safely contained in / on a mountain at the ass end of nowhere like the
Forge and Eiglay. Making matters worse, this is most likely the
period where Radagon is off fucking around in Liurnia and Godfrey is
fighting the last few brushfire wars on the Liurnian and Caelid
frontiers. If Messmer decides to cross the Rubicon, Marika’s entire
plate-spinning routine collapses.
Aside:
Now, I really like Tarnished Archaeologist’s “First Burning of the
Erdtree” Theory. I like it a whole lot better than most of what we got
in the DLC. But given what I’ve established so far with Messmer, I don’t
actually think he did it. I think there was the threat of him doing it,
but I don’t think he actually did. Melina, though? She absolutely
torched it.
But Marika has one very potent piece of
kompromat in her back pocket: Messmer suffers from a third curse, more
terrible than either the flame or the abyssal serpent.
Mommy Issues™.
Per
Messmer’s Armor:“On his mother’s wishes, Messmer made himself a symbol of fear, undertaking the cleansing crusade she desired.”
Messmer is fucking
desperate for
Marika’s approval and love. Dude sits brooding alone in his room in
front of a statue of Marika holding him as a baby. She holds that over
him like a carrot on a string, because Marika does not see anyone as a
person; They are a tool to be used and then discarded when they are no
longer of use.
So she gives him a task. Go over there to the
lands of the Hornsent and commit the genocide that she
didn’t do earlier in her reign. Maybe she promises him that he’ll get to
be regent of the new territory. The description is pretty clear that
Messmer didn’t exactly want this, but all his trailer and game lines about
barbecuing everyone without Grace contradict that. Best rationale I can think of is that he started as a “so long
as they know their place” fascist and then got further radicalized into
a “murder them all” fascist when the Hornsent fought back.
Which ties right into the description of
Shadow Realm Rune 4:“The soldiers who joined the crusade were rewarded with grace aplenty.”
Marika
is straight up offering enormous cash rewards to anyone willing to
follow Messmer in the Crusade, which is an excellent way of rounding up
all of his followers (and anyone who might have followed him but needed some extra incentive) and making
sure they go with him.
Aside: I have seen it asserted in reddit and youtube
comments that Marika pulled grace from Godfrey and his warriors to give
to Messmer and the Crusade, Maybe. That still doesn’t feel satisfying
for reasons I can’t quite place. Grace being a limited / non-fungible
resource like that doesn’t sit right with me. Still might be the case, though.
Then she cuts
off the Land of Shadow (if it hadn’t already been split - more of that
bullshit, sigh) and locks the door behind him. Two problems solved. The
last of the Hornsent are dead, and her biggest threat is gone.
And
in splitting the land of shadow away, she does her little CK Reality
Restructuring Event and creates her more perfect iteration of the Golden
Order. There is a new history, with no hornsent, no Messmer, no
crusading army, no potential coup. She's successfully written the biggest threat to her
rule (at the moment) out of reality.
Whatever else this triggers, I can't say. But certainly it would be a very convenient place for...wait.
Wait wait wait HOLD UP
HOLD THE FUCK UP
What if Marika orders the crusade specifically with the aim of sacking Enir-Ilim and entering the Gate of Divinity.
What
if she's got the Tree and its blessings, she's got Grace to hand out
via the Fingers, she's got Godfrey, but she doesn't have the Ring? What if she's in a much more precarious situation than the
official history tells us?
What if she was going through
all the things we know she's done - fighting the giants, fighting the
Liurnians, splitting off Radagon and courting Renalla and siring the
Heretical 3 - but without the Golden Order? All the events we know, but
worse. Higher cost. More losses to attrition. More instability.
The kind of instability that would provide a brownshirt with mommy issues all the underlings he could possibly want.
BUT ALSO: a society that's building private death squads has already entered a death spiral. What if the people also hate Marika.
It
just makes sense, doesn't it? Leyndell's history is mostly just a
successive string of wars of decreasing effectiveness. The war against
the fire giants goes well enough (as far as we can tell), but the war
against the ancient dragons goes worse - Leyndell is attacked directly
and things are bad enough that the Order sues for peace (A bit of
reading between the lines here, but I feel pretty confident that if
Granssax has broken through your defenses you are not negotiating from a
position of power. Godwyn brokering peace is definitely the only thing that kept them from total annihilation)
And then, we get the Liurnian Wars. Plural. Two wars.
The Golden Order lost.
They definitely lost the first war, and the second war they either won
and forced the alliance or ended up stalemating and cutting a deal. Pre-Crusade, they
would have been fighting both Rellana and Rennala at their peak, so Option 2
is definitely on the table
Aside: One of the lodestone
theories that I have not even mentioned in all this rambling is "Marika
split off Radagon from herself to oversee the Liurnian Wars, and Radagon gradually went further rogue after the unplanned but permitted marriage to Rennala"
So the Golden Order, which is not the Golden Order yet
but I am calling the Golden Order for convenience's sake, has been in a
state of constant war since its founding and we know how those shake out
on the wheel of history. They rot, and then they die. The people are
exhausted. The empire can no longer sustain its core imbalance of power
and wealth. Disenfranchised bourgeoisie are flocking to Messmer .
And Marika starts another fucking war.
It's
no wonder they disown everyone who follows Messmer! It's no wonder that
Marika has to hand out enormous Grace payments to get people on board
with her personal vendetta. Her empire is in shambles and crumbling around her, her regime has no legitimacy, her bastard son is threatening a coup, she's exiled Godfrey and his armies and started another fucking war...
Aside: The attitude of "if Godfrey came back he would fix all this" was probably endemic during this period. Marika / Radagon definitely did a lot of time squashing that out.
With the powers of a god - with
possession of the Elden Ring - all of those problems can just go away.
Marika can remake the world as she sees fit. So she betrays the Hornsent, puts all the
resources of her dying empire into the crusade, seizes Enir-Ilim,
opens the Gate of Divinity, and rewrites history so that the course of
history goes more according to her liking and all those embarrassing
failures get swept under the rug or tossed into the Land of Shadow.
She
establishes a new golden order for the world, reigning as its god. In
violation of the Greater Will, Marika plucks the Rune of Death out from
the Ring and grants it to a splinter of herself, who is actually her old
self. The GEQ is all the stuff left over and abandoned after she
remakes herself.
Aside: I agree fully with Kyana's observation that Miquella's path to godhood plotline is a thematic mirror of Marika's, and that the casting aside of St. Trina parallels the casting aside of the GEQ.
Aside:
I am not sure yet how this lines up with the Eternal Cities and whatever Marika's connection is with them, or what connection it has with the attempted killing of Metyr and the arrival of Astel.
Maliketh,
under his standing orders from the Greater Will, tries to take her out.
Marika is wounded (a wound that, appropriate to the mechanical effects
of destined death weapons, grows over time) and her
Gloam-Eyed-Fragment is "defeated", whatever that means. Paralleling
Blaidd, Maliketh's loyalty will prove his undoing, as he tries his
damnedest to resist the Will and Marika survives the attack. She also
gets what she wants anyway by shackling him with the Rune of Death and
sequestering him outside of time in Farum Azula.
I
like where this is going, which is the signal for me to throw up the
giant neon CANON IS FAKE sign specifically to remind myself that future
developments are not reason for disappointment, and frankly I might be
taking this all too seriously.
Next time, get ready for the big finale.
