Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 4

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:

1. Did the general populace know about the Crusade? (I’m going to say yes, asterisk, hold on a tic)
2. 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)
3. What drew Messmer’s followers to him, and why did they stay? (Charisma, ideology, and reward, probably.)
4. 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.