Pokemon isn’t OSR (but I wish it was)

Warren over at Prismatic Wasteland recently made a post titled: “Pokemon is OSR”, and in the storied tradition of bloggers everywhere I am writing a response to say “the fuck are you talking about, man?” 

(note: Warren actively encouraged this)

To start, I am going to open with the ways that I think Pokemon could fit into the broad and increasingly dissolved umbrella category of OSR:

1. The damage calculation formula is the work of a madman

Using an over-complicated rule for one of the core verbs of the game isn’t OSR directly, but it is in line with the source material the OSR was based on. Actually, now that I say it, this is actually evidence that it isn’t OSR, because that formula hasn’t gotten any less insane in 3 decades.

2. Thirty years without meaningful change

OSR, not NSR. Pokemon the series is a self-devouring Soroboruo, eternally retreading the same ground with either minimal nonstructural change or immediately abandoned mechanical additions. There was a new Pokemon game announced yesterday and once again it’s another fire-water-grass trio. Fighting-psychic-dark is still right there. 

There's also the matter of fangames and spiritual successors, which I say are more OSR than the mainline because they're all about hacking the weird old kludged-together spaghetti-code of an elder game series and seeing what can be done with it in novel ways.

There’s the reasons for, here’s the reasons against as I see them:

1. Screaming into the Void

Pokemon battles don’t exist in a place. I think this is easily the most damning argument against their OSR-ness; the battle screen is a featureless void (or may as well be) that only takes into account the broadest environmental factors (weather) and simply doesn’t contain anything like positioning, cover, or environmental objects. There are no lasting effects on the environment after a battle. Creatures do not exist before or after the fight. There are ambushes, but not mechanical ones; a trainer might jump out from behind a tree or a rock, but that doesn’t have any impact on the fight. Pokemon battles are incredibly fair - a good quality in a game for children, not so much in a genre where the approach to combat is “cheat like a motherfucker with every tool at your disposal.”

2. 1-v1 me IRL

Further reducing the tactical considerations is the 1v1 default of most combats. Benched Pokemon can’t do anything, they have no active effect on the battle. If this was a dungeon crawl, it would be as if you were playing as a doppelganger flipping between impersonated adventurers on the fly (this is cool idea, gonna make a note of that); 2v2 battles and the long-abandoned 3v3s add “some moves can hit both enemies, and some can also hit your partner”, but there’s nothing beyond that in terms of what choices you are making in a given moment. Roles do not change during battle, non-battle actions can’t occur during battle, and you can’t coordinate the different members of your team into a cohesive unit. 

3. A Sequence of Repetitive STABbing Motions

Last of the issues in the battle system is Pokemon’s default winning strategy: you spam a high-damage move with Same Type Attack Bonus at anything not resistant to it until the bar hits zero. Surf, Earthquake, Crunch, Flamethrower, Psychic, Icebeam, game, set, match. This only gets shaken up when variant rules are thrown in (Battle Frontier) or you’re playing against your local psychopaths I mean competitive Pokemon players. Maybe sometimes you’ll use a status effect, or end up using something off the wall, but for nearly every fight in the game it’s just a DPS race.

4. A World of Limited Applications

But what about outside of battle? There are, according to Bulbapedia, 19 field moves, which can then sort into the following categories:

• Obstacle removal: Cut, Rock Smash, Strength
• Movement: Fly, Surf, Dig, Dive, Teleport, Rock Climb, Whirlpool, Waterfall 
• Healing: Softboiled, Milk Drink 
• Encounter Triggers: Sweet Scent, Headbutt
• Environmental: Flash, Defog, Secret Power
• Teaching your Chatot curse words: Chatter

Two of these have appeared in only one generation, and two more have appeared in one generation and its remake. They are quite limited in terms of their effects, with each move being applicable in one specific scenario each. (Strength can only be used to move rocks, you cannot pick up a car and use it as an improvised weapon, for example) Several are essentially slightly-modified reskins of each other. 

Early generations required the use of the “HM slave”, the pokemon you dumped all the field moves onto so as not to waste slots on your A-team; later games have gotten rid of this with just allowing you to use it at any time so long as the HM is unlocked; neither system allows for any usage outside of the predetermined pacing and location. 

5. Random encounters are one cool thing and 99 stupid birds

It feels good to stumble on a rare Pokemon while out in the wild; every other encounter is nothing. A fight with a wild pokemon contains no meaningful interaction with the world - there are no factions who will take notice, no spoils to take home: unless you catch something useful, you get some XP and that’s it. The drain on your resources will be minimal, since a type advantage + level parity basically means you’ll be 1 and 2 shotting everything, and you likely have more than enough ethers to get to the next town (or you can just fly back to a Pokemon Center at no cost to you.) 

 

But What if it Was...

So, if you wanted to make Pokemon OSR-ish, how could it be done?  I’ve got some ideas.

Most of these are going to involve re-doing the movelist.

• Give every Pokemon an inherent basic attack that upgrades its damage die as they gain experience. All the flat upgrade moves (Scratch and Slash, for example) are now the same move, separated by type and physical/special as appropriate.
• Attacks that trade self-damage or lower accuracy for higher damage are now just mechanics that you can invoke whenever (Take Down is merged with the Tackle series, Fire Blast is merged with Ember-Flamethrower)
• Most status moves can be kept; most stat changing moves will probably be tossed 
• We now comb through the adjusted list and see which ones have a clear use-case outside of battle. If one isn’t obvious but we can make up something for it, still works.
• Merge and dump moves until satisfied; ideally, only a few of the most basic attacks will have no additional use-cases, and even then that’s what rulings are for.
• For funsies, start incorporating Pokedex entries

This will solve most of the issues I listed above - the environmental aspects are solved by moving it out of a video game and into the theater of the mind where you have multiple players and an environment to interact with.

One final note: if we’re doing OSR Pokemon, it's going to inevitably become OSR Shin Megami Tensei. We've got the Ars Goetia and the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō right there.

Also you don't need a dedicated class, these are just wizards and their spell weasels. 

Let’s Build a PIE Conlang 3: Hello Hubris My Old Friend

Part 1: Introduction and *h₁n̥gʷnís
Part 2: *wódr̥ and *péh₂wr̥

This is the extremely predictable post where I eat a little crow. The project as I had been building it up in the last two installments (and many, many pages of notes in between) became more stressful than fun and its time for a refresh.

In my infinite eyes-bigger-than-stomach wisdom, I got it into my head that I wanted to do this on doubleplus hard mode and try recreating an earlier stage of PIE that contained all the theories that I thought were interesting: it shouldn’t take a certified genius (which I am not) to point out that it’s really fucking difficult to reverse-engineer a coherent predecessor to a barely-functional theoretical model, and twice as hard to do that out of random parts that don't really fit together in the first place. With Frankenstein-like enthusiasm I created a shambling monstrosity that sparks no joy; time to put it out to pasture and chalk it up as a lesson learned.

So this post is going to be a step back and re-orientation, hopefully. Bear with me as I talk myself through the steps. Maybe writing it down for other people to read will make all the pieces fit together 

What Went Wrong

Scope creep! One slightly idiosyncratic choice (keeping consonantal laryngeals) invited friends (every other theory that made enough sense for me to go "yeah, that makes sense, I like it") and then they invited even more friends and suddenly this house party is out of control. I forced myself into greater and greater leaps of logic and wild justifications to keep all the plates spinning.

Rabbit-holing and what-if-ism took their cut as well; the issue with infinite fractal complexity is that it is, indeed, infinite - you can toggle and adjust forever and accomplish nothing, eternally trying to get it just right.

What to Do Now

First step is backburner the project (done) and re-assess (what I’m doing right here). I've got a decent shot at actually finishing something for Cursed Conlang Circus 4 this year, so whatever I choose to do with this particular project will be later on down the road.

Option A) Toss out everything and go back to basics with a nice, bog-standard post-Anatolian IE language with minimal hypotheticals. No going backwards in time, no major divergences from the standard reconstruction, play it by ear and see how is shakes out.

Option B) Take all the wacky theories I liked and apply them to an original conlang where they can co-exist in harmony, instead of forcing them to fit into the reconstruction.

Option C) Scuttle the entire thing and chalk it up as a wash. If I return to it, I return to it a good ways into the future.

All of these are viable. For Option A, it's basically a reset to where I was at the beginning of the year, tooling around with sound changes and going more on vibes than a concrete plan. For Option B I could easily just generate new roots for the wordlist I am already using and work from there. Option C is easiest, and the more I consider it probably the wisest. I've considered picking another protolanguage to evolve from, but I have a sinking suspicion that I will end up in a similar spot if I try that. It might just be that this particular methodology doesn't work with my brain, it might be that I am just under so much god-damn stress both external and self-inflicted that it just won't compute. 

 

What was I Trying to Do

Same as it was in the beginning: evolve a unique Indo-European branch with a signature language. The why is because it's a fascinating subject and I'm terrible at actually sitting down and actually churning out words, so having an already-extant word list & grammar as a starting point helps (this is called an a priori conlang, in the biz). It does lead to analysis paralysis via sound changes (boy does it ever), but it does dangle a nice big carrot labeled "you can transform Thing A into Thing B and it'll probably feel pretty satisfying when you do".

Exactly what this would look like has changed over time, which may very well be part of the problem; "do a thing" is not a particularly concrete goal. In its most recent form, I wanted to evoke the aesthetics and sounds of Ithkuil, Klingon, and the Caucasian languages - uvular consonants, lots of secondary articulations, few vowels, etc - for vibes reasons, because I find PIE as reconstructed to have a vibe-kinship with those. But I ended up kinda falling away from that - ditching the Klingon retroflexes and Ithkuil's ludicrous consonant clusters - so I don't know how useful it is as a goal anymore. I have a vague target phonology (see below) that I can achieve without keeping the laryngeals around (and, for the sake of my own sanity, should.

Damn it I forgot to put θ on there.

Vowels are 90% likely to just be a / i / u / ə. 

Theories I Want to Keep

• *e and *o were more like *ə~ɛ~æ and *ɑ
• The laryngeals were originally **ʔ/x~h, **χ, **ʁ, and later became *h, *x/ħ, *χ
• The plain velar series were back enough to turn into the uvulars *q, *ɢ and *ɢʰ

 

Dealing with the Laryngeals

Fuck 'em, too much trouble. The traces left behind are:

• Vowel-coloration and lengthening, as standard. Sometimes they will get nuked without lengthening, per a few varied sound laws.
• Proto-Balto-Slavic style "acute" glottalization of preceding vowels (which will later migrate to consonants to form the ejectives.)
• Will be deleted between consonants if it doesn't cause illegal clusters; will vocalize into *e *a *o if the result would otherwise be illegal.
• Will vocalize into *e *a *o when at beginning of words preceding a consonant, per Greek Triple Reflex.
• Cases where that's the unknown laryngeal *H will just be dropped, cause I can't be assed.   

 

Final Notes 

The advice is always step back and take a break when dealing with burnout, and that is something I have never, ever been good at. This shit doesn't turn off; it's why I still have over 300 pages of notes and drafts on gdocs alone. It just accumulates like pressure behind a damn. It certainly doesn't help that it's September 2025 and it's been a dogshit year even when you don't factor in The Everything.

Ah well. This project, at least, is going to get backburnered for now. Get it out of my drafts. 

Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 5

 Previous posts: (Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). 

Let's get this show back on the road.

Part 9: Last Call Before Nightreign 

Turns out the announcement of Nightreign stopped my positively unhinged theoryposting dead in its tracks. I had been drafting a Big Finale Post where I presented my Grand Unified Headcanon, but there’s not much fun in that knowing that in a short time I’m going to be hit with a series of curveballs from left field that throw everything into total chaos. (The inevitability of FromSoft DLC / sequels)

But with release nearly upon us, I’m going to round up the straggling theories and observations I’ve had that don’t fit into the Big Finale Post, just so I can clean out the draft dog a bit and stop having all these words sitting there menacingly.

**

Observation: The incantation sigils for Messmer & Frenzy look similar

I can’t believe I didn’t catch this until recently. Three pronged fire on both of them, with the Flame of Frenzy predictably looking more ragged and not having a boundary circle. Which would make Messmer’s flame the un-frenzied version of the Frenzied Flame, something chaotic but still controlled. The sigils for Giant and Two Finger incantations are just boundary circles (ie, “things you contain other things in”), with the Giant sigil being more solid (looks like the forge seen from above, as fitting for masters of the flame.) and the Two Fingers being in light-cipher script they use to communicate with humans.

Messmer’s sigil has a thick outside border like the Giants (with less decoration), with a double-helix or braid inside the ring (vs the Tengwar-like scribbles of Finger sigils). This feels like a combination of methods, and it looks like the Celtic knot pattern in the Erdtree sigil.

Of course, you know what also makes a nice circle? Mythologically potent serpents. The serpent that is currently inside Messmer and nibbling on his flame.

It also brings up a question of which came first: is Messmer’s sigil representative of Flame of Frenzy that has been bound, or is the Flame of Frenzy actually a variant of whatever Messmer inherited? Something that’s been supercharged by despair like oxygen fuels an ordinary fire? Is there really just the one Fire that has speciated into multiple forms?

**

Correction: Maybe Not A Brownshirt

In my last post, I did a lot of theorizing based on the idea that Messmer was basically leading his own brownshirt death squads and either threatened or was going to commit a coup. I still like this reading, though Kyana and several other commenters have pointed out that not only is there the line about him leading the crusade “on his mother’s wishes”, but a lot of his voicelines seem almost bored with it all. Like his heart really isn’t in it. He says “Those stripped of the Grace of Gold shall all meet death in Messmer’s Flame” like he’s reading off a script.

Which makes me think that maybe this was a punishment detail for him. He might still have been building his own personal death squads back in Leyndell and / or tried to burn down the Erdtree, but he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of hatred for the people he's fighting.

Which is seemingly countered immediately by the literal walking warcrimes he had as part of his forces and the whole “committing genocide and sticking heads on pikes” thing. So if he wasn’t “yeah let’s go kill hornsent” and was really doing it on Marika’s wishes, the game is drastically understating the extent of how psychologically broken this man is.

That item description indicates that he took the carrot. I think it’s safe to assume that Marika had a stick ready and waiting for her wayward red-headed step-son if he didn’t cooperate.

**

Observation: There’s something missing from the Beast incantation sigil

It’s an empty oval with claw marks, as if something inside was gouged out of it. Which is a bit odd, as it would imply that a beast was responsible for clawing out whatever they had at their spiritual center. The Ring is a likely candidate for what was lost.

That there are three claw marks there is probably nothing important at all and doesn’t mean anything.

**

Theory: The Scadutree is the real Erdtree

• Looks burnt? Check.
• In a location where the ash would fall on Leyndell? Probably check.
• A secret Marika would want hidden? Check.
• Oozing golden sap? Check.
• Sap which may or may not be the blood of the sun? Not checked but I believe it.
• Conveniently near the apparent physical location of the Crucible? Check.

I do not have a meaningful argument beyond vibes and implications but it feels right. Scadutree is real Erdtree, which was planted on top of the Crucible in order to control and regulate it, and it might have also eaten the sun and this probably established the Golden Order.

Because the sun is associated with death. The sun is barely mentioned in the game but nearly every damn time it crops up, it is associated with death.

• The eclipsed sun is described as protector of the “soulless demigods” in the mausoleums, where it (the eclipse) keeps Destined Death at Bay.
• But, importantly, the sun is not currently eclipsed, so the mausoleums are walking around to prevent them from being consumed by deathroot.
• An eclipse was part of Miquella’s plan to resurrect Godwyn so he could die a true death (and potentially return his soul to him?)
• Death becomes unstuck at night (crucified bodies re-animated and start screaming)

I’m going to stick a pin in this: “Sun seems affiliated with Destined Death  (and possibly the Gloam-Eyed Queen) and prevents spirits from being re-embodied (ie,  the dead remain soulless / cannot have spirits put back into them) - these might be one and the same. Does Destined Death destroy the spirit as well as the body? We know the Flame of Frenzy does that…

(Aside, Death Flare skill drops the phrase “lusterless sun”)

As for demihumans going mad at night, despite all their connections with the Carians and all their magic being sorcery… I think this calls for my Sun = Greater Will theory.

Greater Will gave intelligence to the beasts, intelligence that they have been steadily losing over time  with the loss of the sun’s radiance (ie, what was once given out by the sun directly is now Marika’s to pick and choose with) and which they fully lose when the sun is no longer visible. The sun has lost its luster, the beasts have lost their intelligence, it’s like poetry it fucking rhymes.

And if Scadutree = real Erdtree and Erdtree blessings / sap = golden tears / sun-blood…

Oh yeah, it’s all coming together.

**

Observation: Possible timing of the Gloam-Eyed Queen Dustup.

In a moment of brief coherence of the whole GEQ charade (damn you Miyazaki and Martin both), the description for the Mending Rune of the Death-Prince contains the following line:

“The Golden Order was created by confining Destined Death.”

Enya has dialogue that is basically that verbatim. Which on its own is not much, but it gives us a pin on the board:  

Golden Order founding = defeat of Godskins and GEQ by Maliketh.

Which means that the GEQ vs Maliketh fight could not happen any later than Radagon’s return to Leyndell, since you can’t have Golden Order Fundamentalism if there’s no Golden Order.

But if I am onto something with the previous section, there might be an addendum.

Golden Order founding = defeat of Godskins and GEQ by Maliketh as part of a greater plan to steal the Sun/Greater Will’s power via the Erdtree

Tree would likely have already been extant at this point, but I don’t know if it would have happened before, during, or after Marika’s ascension to godhood. We can say with reasonable confidence that she was doling out sap blessings prior to cutting away the Land of Shadow (the big collection bowl being the most direct sign)

**

Observation: Marika’s choice of exile for Maliketh

I don’t think that’s where the GEQ was located when she was defeated. I think his exile was a combination of practicality (“outside of time” is about as sealed away as you can possibly get) with some small measure of kindness. Maybe. As close as Marika at the height of her power would have. As one of the beastmen, Farum Azula would have been Maliketh’s home. Whether or not he took any comfort in being stuck in the perpetually-crumbling ruins of the city that was once his own, I couldn’t tell you.

**

Immediate Retraction: Was Maliketh actually exiled, or was he hiding?

Off the cuff on this one.

• Marika has a big spear of destined death through her body, indicating that she was attacked by either Maliketh or the GEQ
• Malieketh, like Blaidd, was assigned to an Empyrean by the Fingers to ensure compliance.
• Marika going rogue and breaking the Ring would be more than sufficient reason for the Fingers to give Maliketh a kill order. (Note: I think this would also apply to attempting to kill Metyr, or removing the Rune of Death from the Ring. Or attempting to devour the sun.)
• Maliketh was clearly not able to finish the job, since Marika-Radagon is still alive when we find them.

Putting it all together: I think that Maliketh had enough loyalty to Marika to prevent him from killing her. Gearing punishment from the Fingers/Will, he bolted from the scene and hid himself somewhere that his half-mad self still recognized as safe (his old home of Farum Azula)

No, I do not know how the outside of time thing works for this, nor do I have any meaningful insight into the nature of Marika’s betrayal or what Maliketh is referring to when he asks non-present Marika why she “relinquished” something.

**

Theory: Destined Death causes petrification

Building on the above, Marika’s body is basically entirely stonelike when we meet her, and she has a big ol’ red spear sticking out of her. Destined Death deals damage over time, its lesser deathblight form grows long pointy objects out of you, put together I’m feeling more confident in the previous theory. Given the extent of the damage, it’s certainly been a while since it happened, but who knows how long that would be.

Hold on… if this is true and Maliketh is the one who delivered the wound, it would mean that Maliketh had Destined Death already in his possession: the GEQ would already have been defeated and the Golden Order already established. That would cross out “Erdtree eating the sun” as a trigger, leaving us with attempted killing of Metyr or breaking the Ring (unless eating the sun and assassinating Metyr were happening simultaneously, which makes a whole lot of sense. If you’re trying to take out the Boss Man, you have to also take out the second in command before they can organize a counter)

If it was the GEQ who delivered the wound, that would necessitate that she and Marika were different people (at least at this stage), she had the Rune of Death in her possession, and Maliketh was acting to protect Marika. That would align more with Marika betraying him; he saves her life, and then she uses him as a disposable vessel for Destined Death.

Wait, wouldn’t removing the Rune of Death necessitate Marika having godhood (and thus possession of and control over the Ring)?

I’m at an impasse: there are two versions I can reconstruct, both of which seem equally likely but incompatible due to the ramifications.

Right at this moment, I am leaning towards

1. GEQ = Marika prior to removal of the Rune of Death; an Empyrean selected by the Fingers as the next candidate for godhood.
2. GEQ goes off-script and attempts to coup the Fingers by trying to assassinate Metyr and using the Erdtree to eat the sun.
3. Maliketh is activated; he wounds but does not kill GEQ
4. Option A) Maliketh does not have Destined Death at this time
5. Option B) Marika splitting off from the GEQ and removing the Rune of Death happens simultaneously with all of this. Like we’re talking a difference of minutes. Potentially even Maliketh straight up taking it out of her hands in a blind rage and stabbing her with it
• Actually that’s a banger of an image, I’m keeping that.
6. Marika betrays Maliketh’s loyalty / mercy by foisting the newly-separated Rune of Death onto him and exiling him to the ass-end of nowhere.

I do not know where the Gate of Divinity comes into play in this theory. I am presuming it would happen shortly or even immediately before, but there is nothing nada jack shit on the GEQ, godskins, or Maliketh in the DLC so who the fuck knows. I will use explicitly bad archaeological methodology and say that the absence of direct evidence can be filled with whatever I god damn feel like.

**

Headcanon: Godfrey’s Caelid campaign

I like the idea of Caelid being a patchwork of minor states that was never conquered by a single party. A new castle and a new warlord on every new hill. Technically they were loyal to Leyndell but Godfrey was probably running cleanup operations against rebellious lords for years afterwards. Definitely feels like a place where empires go to bleed out and die. A reading not really supported in the text, but it feels appropriate.

**

Observation: The Flame Gradient

I have once again only recently observed something potentially significant: The different kinds of fire have colors that can be arranged on a gradient, which I have listed here as primary-secondary color.

• Frenzied Flame - Bright yellow-orange
• Giant’s Flame - Bright red-orange
• Black Flame - Bright black-white
• Messmer’s Flame - Deep red-crimson
• Ghostflame - Washed-out light-dark
  

The outlier is St. Trina’s flame, which is a pale purple; off the top of the dome I think it’s Ghostflame that’s been imbued with Trina’s toxin / nectar, I don't know how it counts here.

 

The question now becomes "what order do these go in, and what does that say about the relationship?"

 

Frenzied Flame is the most destructive, Ghostflame the least. All of them sans maybe Ghostflame are treated as an existential risk by the Order. Black Flame might be a combination of Giant's Flame or Ghost Flame with Destined Death. Ghostflame is cold, and is said to burn death. Messmer's sigil looks like the Flame of Frenzy contained by the methods of the Giants. Let's not forget Magma, Bloodflame, or Thorn sorceries (the first looks closer to Giant's flame, the latter to Messmer's.

 

If we're going alchemically, the ordering of the magnum opus is black > white > gold > red.

 

Will muse on this further.

 

**

 

Theory: The GEQ had her Grace rescinded

It’s all in the name, isn’t it? she’s the Gloam-Eyed Queen, not the Night-Eyed Queen. Gloam is twilight, when there’s no direct sunlight but it’s not fully dark yet. That sounds like an appropriate epithet for someone who had the Grace of the Greater Will taken away from them - the light is gone from her eyes, but not fully.

It’s unclear how much control the Fingers / Will have on who gets or loses grace. It’s always “Grace of Gold” or “grace of the Erdtree”, digging through the text doc I have reveals nothing as direct as “given Grace by the Two Fingers”. We know that they’re able to call the Tarnished back to the Lands, but that could just be re-activating or taking advantage of something that was once there: like having Grace and then losing it still leaves a backdoor. The GW abandons the demigods, but it doesn’t seem to strip them of Grace when it does so. On the other hand, Marika is wheeling and dealing Grace like a professional grifter, so it’s a safe bet to say that it’s something the bearer of the Elden Ring can just do.

Which would indicate that GEQ is a separate person and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

All right. Let’s reverse course and say that she was a separate person, and that she had Grace stripped from her by Marika. This would mean that:

1. She wasn’t originally called the Gloam-Eyed Queen (backed up, perhaps, by 1.00 calling her the Queen in Black.)
2.  Marika didn’t kill her when she presumably had the chance.

**

Observation: Marika & Radagon are blind

Considering that the shamans all seem to be blindfolded (and the Nox, for that matter), and their likely inspiration in an order of all-female blind mediums (check Zayf's video for details), I see no reason to believe that either of them could actually see.

 

You know who else was blind (at least in 1.00)? And who got their eyes removed (in both)? Shabriri.

 

Hyetta's blind, but she can see glimpses of the Flame of Frenzy all the same, just like like Shabriri.

 

Considering what I've said already about the sun, I think the Frenzied Flame and Greater Will might be less different than anyone might be letting on. Indeed, they might be the same thing. The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma (a gigantic nuclear furnace), but it is also the prime mover of all the interconnected systems of life on earth. Chaos and order.

 

Also worth nothing that the Briar Witches supposedly see the Blood Star in their blindness. Another facet from Frenzy, perhaps.

 

**

Theory: The Beast Eye = GEQ's eye (and probably Marika's)

It’s a stone eye with a purple aura, and the color alone would be enough for GEQ affiliation - the fact that Maliketh gives it to you it's described as “claw-marked” are a bonus. If Destined Death = petrification that’s yet another point in favor.

 

When we finally meet Marika, she's missing an eye and a large chunk of her head. And petrified. Almost as if someone violently gouged out her eye and attacked her with a weapon that can petrify people.

 

A problem emerges if we consider the scar- and sore-seal, though not an insurmountable one. Common belief is that these are Radagon / Marika's eyes, which were placed on their eyes by the Fingers / Greater will and removed for reasons. I don't know how much I believe that, no matter how appealing the core idea is, because why would the Fingers / Will use Marika / Radagon's runes? Not to mention that Messmer's sealed eye is clearly Marika's Rune, right there.

 

So with our two lonely lines of lore for the four items.

 

Scarseal: These seals represent the lifelong duty of those chosen by the gods.

 

Soreseal: Solemn duty weighs upon the one beholden; not unlike a gnawing curse from which there is no deliverance.

The vaguely defined gods in this place are probably Marika / Radagon, and the recipients of these seals are...probably not important. Randos who have been spared immediate execution and given a duty to fulfill. More useful is just the establishment that this is a thing Marika does regularly.

That the soreseals are yellow and oozing and only slightly less decayed than a Shabriri Grape is worth noting.

 

**

 

Theory: Serpent as agent of Law of Regression

Rykard / the Serpent are all about joining together into a singular whole – this is pinging strong on the Law of Regression sensor. Myth of the Serpent as world-devourer would indicate a cosmological role along the same lines, or at least a belief in said role. Perhaps something of a one-snake cosmic clean-up crew. The interacting systems of the world have become too unwieldy, they’ve fossilized, they’ve started breaking down: here comes the serpent to clean house and restart the process.

Specifically, though, what if its function is to roll in, kill the gods who have overstayed their welcome, and then prime the stage for a new cycle? It’s in line with Rykard’s devour the gods (togethaaaaaaaaah) thing. Rykard’s the one speaking, but the words might very well be the Serpent’s.

 

What if it offered the same deal to Marika? Join with me and we can devour the gods together and take their power. We’ve got a tree, we’ve got a Serpent, we’ve got offerings of divinity: that’s Eden, baby.

 Rykard feeds self to snake to facilitate devouring of the gods and starting a new lineage (since we know that the Serpent permits for a form of reproduction outside Erdtree rebirth (Or outside of what came before Erdtree rebirth, since we know that hasn't been around forever). And if Marika = GEQ, that's where we get the godskin nobles assimilating "inhuman physiology, not unlike the Crucible".

Nobles have a snake tail crucible-aspect, Apostles are stretchy longbois, it's like poetry it rhymes etc.
 

Also: Serpent shows up as part of the decoration Giants’ Forge and lives in a volcano. Both of these are places where things are known to (s)melt together into cohesive uniform masses.

**

Observation: A very important piece of cut dialog for Kale

[800054000] Ah, you, is it...
[800054010] Did you see? What they did to my ancestors?
[800054020] The whole clan, buried alive. Sick. Maddened. Husks of themselves.
[800054030] Have you heard their moans? They're hardly human anymore.
[800054040] They think we worship the Three Fingers? That we called the maddening sickness down upon them?
[800054050] Well. If that's what they expect from us, then that's what they shall get from us!
[800054060] The world of grace and its people should have been content to see us sink between the cracks.

Grain of salt for cut content, but this pretty firmly indicates:

• A) The Nomads did not worship the 3 Fingers 
• B) The Order believed the Nomads were responsible for the 3 Fingers’ subversion by Frenzy 
• C) That the Order believed it was worship of the 3 Fingers that brought the Frenzy (?????)

A & B are more support for my old theory back in Post 1 that that at some point the Three Fingers weren’t associated with the Flame of Frenzy at all. C is wholly speculative and is based entirely on syntax of cut dialogue.

 

This leads me to a secondary, and potentially larger point.

 

**

Theory: Shabriri's greatest crime isn't what we think

While lots of people claim that the genocide of the Nomads was brought around by Shabriri’s slander of them, I honestly don’t know if that would actually qualify him for the position of “most reviled man in all history” (per Howl of Shabriri); he’s repellent to us the audience because we have a better view of the big picture - we know that the Nomads were innocent - but the rest of Kale’s dialogue indicates that the Nomads were already held in generally low regard by the Golden Order. If the the Nomads were toting around a divergent set of Fingers and taking their messages directly (rather than relying on the Order-approved Finger-Readers for interpretation), it probably didn’t take much convincing for the Order to get behind a pogrom; even if Shabriri is the one responsible for starting the killing, the Golden Order would probably consider him a hero who uncovered a dangerous heresy in the nick of time.

A religious minority is accused of practicing heretical rites that pose both a material and spiritual threat to the established religious / political status quo; this should be extremely fucking familiar, because it’s the god-damn Satanic Panic. Pick an out-group, make an accusation, destroy people’s lives and suffer no consequences even when the accusation is proven to be false.

Remember, the Golden Order is an authoritarian theocracy: using spurious accusations to justify atrocities against religious and cultural minorities is practically the national sport.

And, importantly, Shabriri gets us a double (technically triple) instance of the “it is said” weasel-words:

Shabriri’s Woe: "It is said that the man, named Shabriri, had his eyes gouged out as punishment for the crime of slander, and, with time, the blight of the flame of frenzy came to dwell in the empty sockets."

Howl of Shabriri: "It is said that the sickness of the flame of frenzy began with Shabriri, the most reviled man in all history."

Shabriri’s Woe 1.00: “The man, named Shabriri, was born without pupils. Known to be a great lover of the grape, a sickness in the form of a red colored chaos was said to have come to dwell beneath his eyes. Eventually, his pupil-less eyeballs were crushed by other men, and he was driven to the gloomy southern peninsula.”

The only actual contradiction here is timing. In 1.00 he made contact with the Flame of Frenzy before having his eyes removed, and in main game he made contact afterwards.

So then: who was he slandering, to justify the removal of his eyes and hounding him to the dismal fringe of the empire? Was it even actually slander? Did frenzy-sickness actually begin with him, or is it merely a folk belief since Midra was written out of reality? And what did he do to make him the "most reviled man in all history?

 

Slander against a mistrusted religious minority wouldn't even qualify as slander, so I can only presume that he had slandered Marika / the Erdtree, the Golden Order. And, since those three interconnected things are the axis mundi of a brutally violent authoritarian theocracy run by a living god with a skin so thin she would rather rewrite reality than look even slightly not in total control of everything at all times, I'm going to make the bold claim that Shabriri was spitting straight facts.

 

Accusing your critics of slander is right there in the petty tyrant DARVO manual, after all. 

My thinking is that Shabriri was able to see the truth. Maybe it was because he was blind - we do love a blind prophet. He was able to see through the sham. I couldn't tell you what exactly he saw, (though it might be the same thing that Gideon saw), but I presume it had to do with Marika's dirty laundry and how the system is entirely broken and rotten to the core. That part's a work in progress.

 

But a bit of quote-unquote slander isn't enough to become "the most reviled man in all history." Not even Marika is that sensitive to criticism. But I think I know what would qualify - considering, of course, that history is written by the Golden Order.

 

Burning the Erdtree.

 

Because what's the one sane man to do? What's the one man who realizes that the ordering of the world is irrevocably broken? That the Erdtree ate the sun? That the balancing force of Destined Death was removed from reality? If there was anyone else, maybe they could have joined forces. Maybe there could have been a resistance. Marika's martial prowess is not as great as she lets on, a significant enough revolt might actually work.

 

But Shabriri is alone. They took his eyes, and yet he's the only one who can see; they call him a madman and a drunkard for it, but they say it because they're all blind.

 

Except Melina. Perhaps. A fragment of Marika split off so the god-empress could sequester a part of herself far away, where it could no longer trouble and humiliate her. A contingency plan in her plotting to free herself from the influence of the Fingers. The vessel of what she used to be: the Gloam-Eyed Queen in Black, godslayer. The hatchet-man who comes around when the powers-that-be have overstayed their welcome.

(Yes, I admit that this theory touches on "Marika was in on the plan all along!" , which I generally don't like. Needs more workshopping.)

So there's a conspiracy to burn the Tree, to set things right. They succeed at the burning but not the repairing. Maybe fixing things was never on the table. Souls games have never been ones where the restorationist fantasy wins the day.

The Tree is burned, but remains intact. Melina is dead in body. Perhaps Messmer was a player here as well, and this was the straw that sent him on the Crusade.

 

Wouldn't that just be perfect justification? Blame the burning on a mad prophet and hornsent saboteurs. Make a show of the traitorous son, too brow-beaten to protest his innocence. Make a show of magnanimity by letting him lead the crusade as penance. Send him off with legions of prisoners, highwaymen, brigands and raiders. Shower them with Grace so they might destroy those wretched hornsent who burned the Erdtree.

 

And then close the door to the Shadow Lands behind him, wipe it all from reality, and rewrite history. Now there is only this perfect, eternal, golden tree growing out of an old stump, and there always has been.

 

Romanizing Cthulhu, Part 2

Part 1

In a surprising development that no one could have possibly predicted, the inspirational well (and the fun) for this idle thought experiment ran dry very quickly. The truth can’t really be avoided; in their attempts to make “alien names”, Mythos authors mostly just replicated the sounds and forms of English words. Even those ludicrous consonant clusters just get broken up with epenthetic schwas if you try saying them out loud.

Ah well. I went into this knowing it was unlikely to amount to much.

Anyway, this post will contain all the meaningful thoughts I wrote prior to giving up.  With that done I can free up the mental hard drive space for the next fixation.

**

Now, before we start, I have a couple significant observations that could use expounding on.

Yi romanization isn’t viable on the whole 

As much as I would like to include it for novelty’s sake, I must concede that we’re using English orthography for the stop consonants. Saner that way.

The rarity of <e>
Outside of <ee> digraphs, the only places I have found it in the core HPL namelist are Gnopkeh, Y’ha-nthlei, R’lyeh, Yhe, Yeb, Nyarlathotep, Rhan-Tegoth, the nonce word “l’geb” from an incantation in Charles Dexter Ward, and a few locations in the Dreamlands.

Going by our earlier guidelines and dropping Nyarly, that gives us three /ɛ/, two /e/, and one /ɛj/

(R’lyeh is called “Relex” in The Mound, but I don’t have anything useful to pull from that at the moment)

That is an exceptionally small selection considering how many nonsense names we are dealing with, to the point where I am reasonably convinced that the mid front vowels don’t exist at all. I haven’t found evidence of a minimal pair yet to make the call.

(A minimal pair is when you have two phonemes in the same environment that, when swapped, would change the meaning of a word. A simple example would be pen vs pan (/pɛn/ vs /pæn/), which has the minimal pair of ɛ and æ.

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled on this one, to see what I can cook up.

BACK TO THE LAB AGAIN

Picking up where we last left off, I’m going to focus on names that give us new rules or interesting new phonemes; the majority of Lovecraft’s names are actually quite tame and they don’t really have anything interesting to analyze

#3: Gyaa-yothn

A minor monster from The Mound, a story that will have outsize representation in this series (ed: It did not) for its higher-than-average percentage of weird names. This one can give us a couple of extra rules that are blessedly self-evident:

• HPL 7:  <aa> => /a:/
• Giving us a nice balanced triangle of long vowels.
• HPL 8:  CyV indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized
• In this case, this is a straightforward  /ɟ/
• HPL 9: Syllabic consonants can serve as syllable nuclei
• This is going to be a huge help later on with those really absurd clusters. While we only have /n̩/ for now, /l̩/, /r̩/, and /m̩/ are likely.
• /-n̩/ is explicitly a pluralization affix in the story (no sign if it has any other function), and Yoth is the name of a place, so we have a surprising amount of grammar to potentially work with.
• Specifically, compound constructs seem to be built as [root]--[modifier] + [ending]; “gyaa-yoth” in the singular is something like “a gyaa, from Yoth” or “a Yothic gyaa”

#4: Yhe and Y’ha-nthlei

We get a double minimal pair here (at least according to our common sense rule of “if it’s spelled differently, it’s pronounced differently”): <y’h> and <yh> are not the same, and <e> and <a> are not the same.

<yh> is going to be a fricative due to HPL 6, and since the consonant component is the palatal approximate /j/ that’ll leave us with the voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/. Nice and easy. <y’h> can wait until we try to tackle apostrophes.

<ei> and <e> are going to be a pain in the ass, because in English these are treated as the same thing: we stick a /j/ glide after /e/ because English doesn’t like vowels sitting next to each other, but we stick that glide in even when there isn’t a vowel after it. But if we are going by what we’ve been given, /ɛ/ /e/ and /ɛj/ probably form a minimal trio in Aklo because they all show up in word-final position.

We’ll set that one aside for now. However the vowel is pronounced, <nthl> is a pretty obvious /n̩.θl/

#5 The god-damn apostrophes

Ah, the apostrophe. The bane of spec-fic since time immemorial, yet somehow they endure to the present day (See: local space-fascist frog-person Lē Zel from some video game)

In real languages, apostrophes can be used for:

• A glottal stop (ex. Hawai’i)
• A sign that letters or sounds have been elided (ex. cannot => can’t)
• An unwritten schwa (this is how the SFF apostrophe is typically pronounced)
• An ejective stop (this is how ejectives are written in IPA)
• An aspirated stop (as in Wade-Giles romanization of Mandarin)
• A marker to clarify if two sounds do or don’t form a cluster
• A marker to differentiate between phonemes that would otherwise use the same letters (ex. Breton uses <ch> for /tʃ/, and <c’h> for /x/ and /ɣ/
• A glottalized consonant

Since none of these authors gave a shit about any of this and just threw them into their alien names willy-nilly,  I’ll be using a similarly eclectic approach and give the apostrophe different realizations depending on its environment. Let’s look at our proper noun list and see what patterns we can find (limiting the survey to HPL alone for now).

• Y’ha-nthlei
• K’n-yan
• Thuum’ha
• T’la-yub
• Y’m-bhi
• L’thaa
• N’Kai
• K’thun
• S’ngac
• R’lyeh

Nearly all of these are word-initial C’C clusters preceding a vowel. There’s more variety in the strings of speech we get in The Call of Cthulhu  and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

• Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
• Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth h'ee - l'geb f'ai throdog
• Ogthrod ai'f geb'l-ee'h Yog-Sothoth 'ngah'ng ai'y zhro

The CDW lines have more to them, stick a pin in that for now.

Our simplest apostrophe is found in “Thuum’ha”, where it’s conveniently placed between two consonants at an apparent syllable boundary. That’s a pretty clear indicator that it is meant to designate that the syllables are split <thuum> and <ha>, rather than <thuu> and <mha>. It’d be helpful if we can find an <mh> cluster to compare it against, but even if we can’t I feel this is an easy one to pencil in under rule HPL 5.

Type 0 Apostrophe: used to denote either a glottal stop (when between two vowels) or a short pause (when between two syllables at a syllable boundary.

We haven’t seen the intervocalic version yet, but it’s such a common usage of apostrophes that I feel confident in including it.

Next up, we have our most common apostrophe usage, a word-initial C’C cluster. This is a really uncommon cluster in real-world languages (which is probably why it is so common in sci-fi), and our only real clue is that <y’h> and <yh> are differentiated.

Seeing no better option, I pencilled these in as click consonants, for the following reasons:

• Weirdo racists like those employed at Miskatonic would definitely consider clicks to be unknowable and alien, despite the fact that human toddlers can make them perfectly fine when raised in a language that has them.
• Weirdo racists like those employed at Miskatonic would probably brew up some bonkers ways of representing them.
• Most of these consonant-apostrophe-consonant clusters are word initial, and real-life click languages nearly always limit clicks to initial positions (usually the word or root, sometimes the syllable)

I have in my notes a sketch of how to determine what cluster equals what click, but like I said up top, the well is dry and there ain’t much to go on.

Type 1 Apostrophe: Word-initial consonant-apostrophe-consonant clusters are trigraphs representing click consonants.

Now, the bit for CDW that I stuck a pin in has one thing that could be interesting - the incantation is described as being “syllabically reversed” in its second half. That is, the syllables, not the individual sounds, are placed in reversed order. We end up with a pair of 'ng'ngah and  'ngah'ng; splitting that up we end up with ‘ng and ‘ngah - normally this would be a sure-fire sign of something like preglottalization, but I am proven a fool immediately by the next-door pair of y'ai and ai’y, where the apostrophe is clearly not tied to the syllable itself.

It was at this point that I got bored admitted defeat.

SO WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED

1. Sometimes I have stupid ideas that I shouldn’t entertain, but end up putting too much thought into anyway.
2. Science-fiction authors should have their apostrophe keys removed until they can prove they can use them responsibly.
3. Reality will always be stranger than fiction in ways that most authors will never be able to match, especially with language: Nuxalk contains many, many words that have no vowels at all, the textbook example being the grammatically correct but unlikely to be regularly used clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’ (IPA: xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ), which translates to "he had had (in his possession) a bunchberry plant".

HPL would probably spontaneously combust (in a highly ironic fashion) if he ever heard any of the Caucasian languages (that is, languages from the Caucuses). Dude had a mental breakdown over the existence of the Welsh; Ubykh has (well, had. Last speaker died in 1992) 84 consonants and two vowels.

Cthulhu ain't shit, phonologically speaking.
 

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.

Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 3

Following up from my previous posts (Part 1, part 2) , I'm headed back into the realm of my own observations.

 

PART 5: GET THIS SHIT OUT OF MY DRAFT DOC

**

Observation: Wraiths, Vengeful Spirits, and Hexes

This is just one of those weird minor things where the pieces have fit together somewhat nicely (how about that for a change?)

“Wraith” is used only three times in the corpus, in the descriptions of the Omen Bairn, Regal Omen Bairn, and the Wraith Calling Bell. It’s the last of these that provides us with a definition:

Wraith Calling Bell: “Wraiths are said to be the vengeful spirits of those who died when cursed.”

Which tracks so far, with the other two items summoning the spirits of Omen infants.

If I search the corpus for “vengeful spirits”, we get a few additional hits:

• The Rancorcall and Ancient Death Rancor spells
• The Rancor Slash, Familial Rancor and Rancor Shot weapon arts
• The Rancor Pots
• The Horned Bairn

Extra note, the Braided Cord Rope item draws a comparison / contrast between “vengeful spirits” and “watchful spirits”. Watchful spirits are only elsewhere mentioned in the spell “Watchful Spirit”, which is also called a “guardian spirit”, a title shared with the Horned Warrior Ashes. 

“Rancor” shows up in two additional odd contexts, the spell Rykard’s Rancor, and the item Innard Meat.

Rykard’s Rancor: “These spirits manifest from the rancor of heroes who met a violent end. The lord granted them an audience, whereupon they were welcomed by the maw of the great serpent—and within the serpent's bowels, they became the lord's kin.”

Innard Meat: “Scraps of flesh for filling great jars. Rancorous spirits cling to the pinkish-red, twitching meat.”

These aren’t related to curses necessarily, but seem to just be people who have died in horrible ways.

An “ancient death hex” is mentioned a few times:

Rancorcall: “Once thought lost, this ancient death hex was rediscovered by the necromancer Garris.”

Ancient Death Rancor:  “They are cinders of the ancient death hex, raked from the fires of ghostflame by Deathbirds.”

So at least this hex originates with the followers of the Deathbirds. Which makes sense if we look at the Branchsword Talismans.

Red-feathered Branchsword: "The heart sings when one draws close to death, and a glorious end awaits those who cling so tenaciously to life."

Blue-feathered Branchsword: "The heart sings when one draws close to death, and thus does one cling so tenaciously to life—to render up a death worth offering."

Which we can combine with

Rancor Pot: “In times of old, the dead were burned with ghostflame, and from those cinders arose vengeful spirits.”

And that says to me that these ancient hexes utilize the angry spirits of those killed in some sort of ritual sacrifice (to the Deathbirds?) during the Ghostflame Era.

This then overlaps with what we know of red glintstone sorcery, which is described as "similar to hex magic" in the Staff of the Guilty description and dependent on human sacrifices. Same with Rykard rediscovering Gelmir hex magic (human sacrifice to the Serpent).

A couple other hex mentions of note.

Hefty Furnace Pot:  “Imbued with a hex of the furnace[...]The furnace's flame burns away both body and soul. When impurity is thus expunged, one calls it cleansing.”

Bloodfiend Hexer’s Ashes: “This spirit conducts bloodboon rituals with a sacred spear, casts bloodflame hexes, and takes a singular pleasure in letting the blood of foes. Long ago, a subjugated tribe discovered a twisted deity amongst the ravages of war, and they were transformed into bloodfiends. The mother of truth was their savior.”

Inquisitor Ashes: "One of the inquisitors casts a tower hex to heal HP, while the hex of the other boosts her own attack power."

Bone Bow: "A medium for spirit-calling, and a product of the ancient hexing arts of the tower."

Not much on their own, but considering how frequent this sort of thing crops up across cultural and magical regimes it's looking like "magical power from death" is a universal of the setting.

 

**

 

Observation: Two Anchor Rings

Godrick and Morgott’s Great Runes are described as the central and lower anchor runes of the Elden Ring. Which would imply the existence of an upper anchor. Marika would be the natural assumption, as head of the entire thing, the Keter of our Great Rune sefirot.

**

Theory: Capital-N Night is the whole unity of the celestial bodies prior to development of glintstone sorcery

We know that a big part of the Caria-Academy rivalry is over whether the moon or the stars is more important to sorcery. The few references we get to capital-N Night, and the lightless void of the Greater Will, feel like older versions of the religion. The Carians and Academics are the people arguing over if Jesus is one substance or two, and to get to that stage of bullshit you have to have at least a little time to develop things away from first principles. Naturally, those principles began with the Astrologers, prior to calling down glintstone.

**

Observation: So Many Types of Fire

• Ghostflame: "burns death", whatever that means; generates spirit ashes
  
• Giantsflame: Capable of burning down the Erdtree
  
• Blackflame: Probably Giantsflame + Destined Death
  
• Flame of Frenzy: Can burn away everything, including spirits.
  
• Messmer’s Flame: Properties questionable, can definitely fuck up magical trees.
  

**

Speculation: The Stone Lords are connected to Rauh

• We know Alabaster and Onyx Lords were created from members of an ancient civilization that were transformed by close contact with a meteorite impact.
• The Meteoric Ore Blade is supposedly designed for use against “lifeforms born of falling stars” - which would be either Stone Lords, Fallingstar Beasts, or Astels.
• The priests of the Ancient Dynasty had meteorite-shard spears
• Ancient Meteoric Ore Greatsword was apparently an arrowhead in the “old gods’ arsenal”, and explains jack shit else what the fuck. Gotta be those Giant-Giants.
  
• “Starcallers” are those who search for and harvest meteor fragments
• Astel fell as a meteorite in Operation Fuck This Eternal City In Particular and hit Farum Azula on the way down.
• Stone-Sheathed Sword can turn into Sword of Light/Darkness at altars in the Ruins of Rauh. Black and white, alabaster and onyx.
• Demi-humans are more easily affected by lures and aggro pull items when humans are immune
• The Lords of Stone are the ones who know gravity and meteor magic specifically, so I have seen it theorized that they are responsible for calling down Astel to destroy the Eternal City.
• TA and his heavy impact theory: some manner of meteor impact liquified a large chunk of the surface and buried the “builder stratum” (probably rauh) and the Old Giants (titans, old gods)
• TA, cont.: Elden John as a noah+moses figure, knowing that the Flood was coming, building the stone coffin-ships (TA suggests only 3 survived, the rest died and rotted, became putrescense. But those 3 might be just artistic license)
• Probably Metyr what did it as the “first star to fall”, maybe the elden beast?

**

Observation: Passive Effect Associations

• Rune of Life / Erdtree / Golden Order / Marika: Passive HP regen 
• Destined Death / Rune of Death / GEQ: HP drain
  
• Dominula villagers : Extra rune gain
  
• Godrick's Great Rune: Increases all stats
• Radahn's Great Rune: Increases HP, FP, Stamina
• Rykard's Great Rune: Recover health on killing enemies
• Ranni's Great Rune: ????
  
• Malenia's Great Rune: Bloodborne-style health recovery
• Miquella's Great Rune: Resists influence of mental influence 
• Rune of the Unborn: ????
  
• Morgott's Great Rune:  Greatly increased HP
• Mohg's Great Rune: Recover health when a summon or enemy makes a kill

Using the power of PATTERN SEEKING BRAIN, I end up with this (asterisks mark reconstruction)

Nothing substantial enough to say "I think this is aligned with what they were aiming for", but an interesting series of coincidences all the same.

**

Observation: "Death of the Demigods"

Maliketh’s epithet “death of the demigods” is weird because he didn't kill any of them, and all of them presumably died after he was locked in Farum Azula. I am presuming it is a “if any of them are going to die, Maliketh is going to be the one to do it,” sort of thing, which makes sense and adds a fun bit of "even the ordinary people know that if shit pops off he's going to come out on top." Which would imply that he had the Rune of Death for a bit before he got sealed away. The other option would be that there were demigods before the current crop and he killed those ones and the title carried over.

But that's if it's an epithet. If it is a literal meaning of his name, then I can only assume that he was given it by the Fingers as a direct threat to Marika, which is definitely in line with the one other Shadowbound Beast we know of. Toe the party line, or Blaidd / Maliketh will kill you and all of your associates.

 

PART 6: TOTAL BULLSHIT

Everything below is extra true. No theories here, just straight facts. The basics were written prior to the Nightreign announcement, which as you will see later is evidence of some minor gift of prophecy.

**

Interpretive Lens: Principle of Transposition

FromSoft’s love of returning to the well is so strong that material - concepts, characters, places, events, connections and so on - may be transposed between games as one sees fit for purposes of theorizing, fanfiction, and all-around silliness. We might also call this the Patches Principle.

Interpretive Lens: The Adaptation Corollary

Elements transposed from one game to another will be adapted to fit the content of the host game; Transposition is one-way, and does not provide support for Grand Unified Theories.

Interpretive Lens: The Principle of Inaccuracy

The contents of the game are representative, not exact. Details not necessary to the story will be elided for it to function as a game.

**

Godfrey = Gwyn

Not literally, of course, but as they both fulfill the role of father of a godly dynasty they are our prime centerpiece for this rabbithole of Transposition. Any traits, qualities, and connections of Gwyn that would be interesting to port to Godfrey shall hereby be ported over to Godfrey.

**

The Golden Lineage demigods killed during the Night of the Black Knives and currently entombed in the wandering mausoleums are in fact Gwyn’s children, children-in-law, and grandchildren.

Specifically, this entails Gwynevere, Filianore, Oceiros, Lorian, Lothric, Ocelotte, and Rosaria.

Don't worry about the Nameless King and Gwyndolin, we'll get to them later.

**

Godfrey maintained the Roundtable Hold separate from the Crucible Knights, both because he preferred it as a model for an army, and as an insurance policy in case things went south. 

Their numbers included:

• Knight Artorius -Tried to fight the Lord of the Abyss. It did not go well for him.
  
• Lord’s Blade CIaran - Personal bodyguard to Godwyn in his youth.
• Dragonslayer Ornstein - A veteran of the First Defense of Leyndell and champion of the Ancient Dragon Cult.
• Hawkeye Gough - A troll who turned against the giants during the War. 
• Gehrman and Maria - Hunters of starfallen beasts from a distant land.
• Havel the Rock - One of Godfrey's original band. Dragon War veteran. Went rogue after the Liurnian Wars because he was wanted nothing to do with a state that incorporated sorcery.
  
• Sir Alonne - A warrior from the Land of Reeds.
  

**

Unsorted Bullshit

• Horah Loux’s uncle Lloyd was part of his original warband, and settled down as a prominent cleric of the Golden Order after the War with the Giants.
• Irithyll was a city of the ancient astrologers, though was barely inhabited by the time it was incorporated into the empire of the Eternal Cities. 
• Executioner Smough  was Marika’s chief executioner after the establishment of the Golden Order. Eventually joined the Fire Monks and became a Prelate, leaving the role of imperial carnifex to the lord of House Marais.
• High Lord Wolnir was the last of the primordial giants, and the only one to survive until Marika’s war.
• Nito ruled, though not as Elden Lord, in the days of the Deathbird rites.
• Seath the Scaleless was an advisor to Marika and Godfrey during the War with the Ancient Dragons. Godwyn acted against his council by extending friendship to Fortissax and ending the war peacefully.
• Seath later grew bored of Leyndell and commissioned a keep in Liurnia, devoting himself to study of the Crystalians.
• Storm Lord = Storm King, so Godfrey fought the Nameless King as his final enemy. (I FUCKING CALLED IT)
• Nameless King and Godwyn were twins
• Sen’s Fortress blocks the main way in to Gelmir from Leyndell: the siege was one of the bloodiest in the war. Snekmen!
• Gwyndolyn and Ranni have a complicated relationship - both devotees of the dark moon. Cooperation? Competition? Dual halves of an empyrean? A fosterage situation gone bad, which causes the Liurnian Wars?
• Gwyndolin survives the Night of Black Knives by either being conveniently outside Leyndell, in on the plot, or explicitly spared by Ranni.
• But then he gets eaten by Aldritch, a Golden Order Fundamentalist among Rykard's attendants who apostasized after reaching Gelmir and embraced the Black Flame cult, even managing to become a Godskin.
  
• The demihumans, long suffering under the oppression of Rauh, sought to make their own lord with the power of the Abyss: Manus was the result.
  
• Fillianore was married off to the Demihumans, rather than the pygmies.
•  All of the vague distant lands ever mentioned in the non-Sekiro souls games exist outside the Lands Between.
• The events of Sekiro, or events very similar to them, are occurring in the Land of Reeds
• Firekeepers are the old priestesses of the ghostflame, or perhaps the giantsflame, or maybe just the tree. TA's theory of Marika as emerging from an existing tree-worshiping priestess class obviously is connected here.
• The Noxians were in contact with the Moon Presence and had been used as hunters against its rivals. The Carians continued this agreement up through at least the Liurnian Wars.
• The Noxians created Rom the Vacuous Spider in a failed attempt to create the Lord of Night.
  
• Three great stars fell upon the earth: Metyr the Mother of Fingers, Ebrietas the Daughter of the Cosmos, and Kos called Kosm.  
• I don't actually need to do anything with the Blacksmith God and titanite demons, you could just throw those in a Rauh forge as-is.
• The Witch of Izalith was a priestess of the Old Dynasty who lived among and learned pyromancy from the fire giants. As the War neared its end, she fell into a despair great enough to call on the Flame of Frenzy, which created yet another fucking type of fire, and also a shit-ton of demons.
• Either that or demons are hornsent tutelary deities that have gone bad.
  
• Quelaag's nest is down at the bottom of the Leyndell catacombs, where she does exactly what she does in Dark Souls. Quelaana's there too.
• Micolash is everyone's least favorite faculty member at the Academy of Raya Lucaria but the bastard got tenure somehow and then tried to commune with Outer Gods.
  

 

PART 8: FANFICTION TIME

Scholar’s Letter

A thick envelope, sealed with stamped wax and a green ribbon. The documents stuffed within are all composed by the same hand.

Gurlos -

Bad news and more bad news, I’m afraid. Marika is laughing at us from the grave.

The team sent to Castle Marais returned yesterday, and it seems they've found another dead end. The central keep collapsed years ago thanks to the sinking foundation, and all we are left with is a pile of rubble in the middle of a poisonous swamp overgrown with squirts and miranda flowers. If House Marais kept any of their records at home, they're lost, and I’m not going to risk any of our colleagues for a handful of sodden parchment.

Our excavation in the capital seems similarly futile. We’ve had to relocate the main camp three times now due to instability of the dunes. The ash is a merciless invader; It gets on everything, it gets into everything, we can only spare a few hours each day excavating before we’re all crippled by coughing fits.

As we expected, the majority of the documents we have found are barely better than lumps of charcoal. Despite this, we have managed to find a few surviving caches in the manors of the upper city, where by accidents of positioning and storage the texts were spared from the pyroclastic flow. Unfortunately, these scrolls and books are predominantly personal writings, business records, religious texts, and the entertainments of the idle rich. Our colleagues will have a wonderful time analyzing the cultural significance of it all, but it's not particularly helpful to us in the here and now.

We gravely underestimated both the enthusiasm of Marika’s ministry of propaganda and the scope of their influence over the rest of the Lands. Every single non-private text we have found has been stamped with the approval of House Marais and the Office of Publications, marking them as parrots of the official imperial history and useful primarily as kindling and toilet paper. The private texts rarely delve into matters of history or statecraft, and we can assume a chilling effect from the censor's passing shadow. I won't entirely rule out the truth from emerging, but that will require miraculous luck that we thus far have not had in our possession.

The site that we have been assuming (with caution) to be Marika's private residence has offered up a few curiosities: we have pulled five stone tablets from the ash, but the text is unfamiliar. The most reasonable hypothesis would be that they belong to a pre-Order civilization, but until we find matching inscriptions we can't begin to identify them. I've included a rubbing of one of the tablets with this letter; perhaps you've found something similar in the Tower settlement.

To round out the failures of this expedition, the teams we've sent into Liurnia and Limgrave have started reporting back to us as well.

The libraries of Raya Lucaria and the Carian manor still contain thousands of books in good condition, but we have no means of reading or understanding the sorcerer's ciphers used to write them. The best and brightest minds of that last generation were reduced to mindless infantilism under the care of Rennala, and while Rennala herself was closest to the events in question she is in no state to answer them and likely never will be.

Nephali Loux, now an old woman, arrived with the remnants of Godfrey’s army at the end of the age. She has been helpful in establishing the timeline since the Tarnished returned, but knows very little of anything that came before. But she is a gracious host to our Limgrave teams and so we have little room to complain.

Bishop Miriel appears to be our best lead so far: he is cooperative, an excellent interview subject, and has assisted us in the interpretation of the more obtuse religious texts. While part of the religious hierarchy of the Golden Order, he was unofficially assigned in perpetuity to the Church of Vows in Liurnia (as an enormous tortoise is extremely difficult to transport to and from the capital) and so received all his news of Leyndell second-hand. But this allowed him to serve as a direct eyewitness to the Liurnian Wars, and it will be in comparing his story to the official record that we will find any clues as to the truth if we are going to find any at all.

Lady Tanith of Ranah is not a viable interview subject.

This is the situation as it stands on our end of the inner sea, and I will keep you informed of any developments. I hope that your own team's investigations have borne more fruit than ours.

- Máelruba

**

I think I have two more of these in the tank. For now anyways.

.