I'd like to reiterate that Melania probably didn't evolve into a True God. That was still an incomplete form since she needs 3 transformations. We only have confirmations of 2. Radahn and our fight. The blooms you see outside her arena is done by a sister of Millicent.
one could argue that the pests do in fact make a (weak) attempt at diplomacy, albeit to further their own agenda. go and try to kill Gowry and you'll see what i mean (don't worry, this will have no impact on your playthrough, but i can't elaborate further without spoiling it for new players).
It seems to me that the inflexibility and injustice of the Golden Order is often a result of people confusing order with its mere aesthetic appearance. An Omen or Misbegotten seems disorderly because they don't fit in _optically._ But that's a subjective, arbitrary judgment, and arbitrariness itself is opposed to actual order. So the servants of the Golden Order are often undermining what they claim to stand for by enforcing its aesthetic appearance.
It's so weird. I enjoy cosmic horror and I adore BB and ER, but the one thing that I've never bought is the whole 'forbidden knowledge leads to insanity' aspect of cosmic horror. It's always handwaved away as some kind of mind-shattering truth that the human mind can't comprehend, and that always felt so cheap. It's the equivalent of saying 'this thing will make you insane because I say it will,' because, by its very nature, you (Lovecraft, Miyazaki or anyone) CAN'T come up with a truth that would make this whole refrain be believable. It's literally impossible. So instead of finding that aspect profound, I often just roll my eyes.
I would argue that Freyr has a decent amount of narrative presence before you meet him, especially if you explore Alfheim right away. Definitely an underdeveloped character, but the stuff you hear from fake Tyr during the mission and Mimir while exploring Alfheim was enough for me to feel like I knew him a little bit. Heart of gold, but not always following through, that sort of thing
FEDRA is contrived to me. I feel in reality if this were to happen individual quarantine zones would fall in regionalism and isolationism. I doubt settlements would bend to the will of FEDRA nor would FEDRA be something that’s capable of enforcing it’s laws across America. It would be more interesting if the government settlements would be hostile to outsiders but would have limited trade with friendly military remnants, for example the Boston qz is in north end in Boston so it has a port for trade. FEDRA makes the military always villainous when they could add variety to differing factions of the former American military. They could add a storyline about how the military settlements resort to revanchism and try to spread their influence and reform their idea of what post apocalypse America should look like.
Admittedly I never pieced together the cosmic horror aspects of the lore till I found this. Looks like it’s time to add a few notches to the old Bloodborne elder god kill count.
A degree of Gnosticism could be applied with the Cosmic Horror. Knowledge is the true battlefield and actively fought over. The ignorant hold to their beliefs and consider other interpretations as inferior. It can seem to be for the greater good but creates tyranny.
I hope people are not thinking that the outer gods are literal space aliens. We are talking more like the afterlife or another dimension, more religious than scientific.
Your videos are excellent! I'm going through a few of your videos right now and really enjoying myself. I'm deeply satisfied with the way you discuss the authorial intent of the developers in a really educated way. A lot of times when people try to criticize or simply analyze authorial intent (such as when you discuss the structure of Yharnam being essentially unlivable and perplexing, for example) they leave it as "this doesn't make sense" or "whaaat were they thinkiinnnggg?!", but you bring the additional perspective of someone who is familiar with actually analyzing authorial intent from an educated perspective. As someone who graduated with a literature and writing degree, it's very refreshing. I love creators who take their own educated perspective and apply that to the content they create. You continually highlight writing and development choices really well! Which I'm sure you're aware of, but for me it's really fun to see and hear (: Thanks so much for your work!
Just spitballing but what if the other pantheons maybe Egyptian or Chinese invade midguard to grasp at the power vacuum now that Odin is gone maybe the Egyptian gods or Chinese gods see an opportunity to expand and grab more power and it would make sense that Kratos will have to defend his new home. Could that maybe work cause now he’s fighting to protect his new home or maybe Athena is pulling strings to get all pantheons to kill eachother until there are no more gods left period and she subtly pushes them to kratos maybe?
Well, what can I say. Your videos are on the level of Vaati (which is really a big compliment). Also, I've just noticed two things: 1) When you showed albinaurics village I've noticed that the legs of crucified villagers are transparent which makes sense since their legs are disappearing when they get older; 2) The shoulder of Radagon literally cracks after he fails to repair the Elden Ring. Wow
My dad and I used to play this on our Wii when I was in like third/fourth grade. We used to play in the deathmatch mode against each other and always had a blast. I’ve been trying to find out what the name of game is because I knew it was farcry but it wasn’t predator and now I found vengeance. Thanks for the video and the nostalgia bro.
One thing to note is that despite what the description of the Elden Stars claims, the Elden Ring seems to have existed before Greater Will came around, as evidenced by the Remembrence of Dragonlord (let's remember that the Elden Stars' description says "It is said that long ago" implying that description only states a second-hand account). Of coruse it is theoretically possible that Dragonlord Placidusax seved under Greater Will, but it would then not make sense for there to have been a war between Marika's forces and Ancient Dragons and the description of the Remembrance says that Dragonlord's god "fled".
One thing unique about Elden Ring and how it does this, is that it empowers the humans in the story far far more than any other property in cosmic horror. It showcases incredible ineffable gods who control the very laws of physics and life and death in the world you reside in, however, Miyazaki through this game, states that if you as any random person with no control at the start can overcome the entirety of the horrors through enough hard work. Elden ring says that even a warrior of no renown can eventually become Elden Lord, which fundamentally changes the laws and rule of the universe depending on what you choose to do. Even if you cannot understand what or why everything is happening, if you try hard enough and don't give up, you eventually can defeat them regardless. YOU can choose the outcome, YOU can decide your own fate, by lashing out against those in charge with relentless vigor. It's a sign to not forget your power and your humanity under such extenuating circumstances.
One thing that you reminded me of when talking about the Fingers is the attempts by lore speculators in the community to join the hands, though they never look quite right. That is, until you realize that the three fingers doesn't resemble the thumb, pointer and middle fingers, but rather the thumb, middle, and pinky fingers. If divinity between the Fingers was shared at some point, then the Two Fingers actually represents the pointer and ring fingers. It fits better as well since we see three clearly different lengths on the Three Fingers while the Two Fingers has similar length digits, much closer to how the pointer and middle fingers would normally look like on a hand. You can even recreate the look of the individual fingers by curling the appropriate digits while extending the others. And if you are able to do so successfully, you'll see that in the middle of your palm there's an indent much like that found on the Two Fingers, but that which the Three Fingers lack.
One of my favorite works of cosmic horror is Gantz. It starts with weird stuff like characters being brought back to life by some ball and teleported into a town to fight aliens. But it only gets weirder and crazier as the series goes on, with the aliens fittingly becoming less and less comprehensible with each arc. But the main theme of Gantz is survival. In the face of these cosmic beings you have no hope of defeating, this game you can never truly escape, the characters continuing to push on in spite of all of it is really inspiring and speaks to the human will. Even when the characters meet a godlike alien who they can’t even lay their eyes on without their eyes bleeding, who shows they can resurrect and kill human beings and especially their loved ones without a second thought, who straight up tells them their souls are merely data and that God does not exist, they continue to push forward and survive because they have a purpose that drives them to live, no matter how insignificant they’re told that purpose is.
Something I’d point out, which I also noticed you may have missed in the Heimdall video, is that Heimdall’s reasoning for being in both Helheim and Vanaheim is established in non-cutscene dialogue. Atreus realizes that he was in Helheim to retrieve the moon box, and presumably, he was in Vanaheim to deliver or use it. It’s certainly still possible that Odin saw Freya and Kratos separating as a good opportunity to make that move, but I think it’s made clear that he’s not there on his own, and that it has something to do with the moon box.
Baldur thinks kratos is the giant he was sent to kill thats why he says "I thought you'd be bigger" and "I thought your kind were all supposed to be enlightened"
Idk, having a rogues' gallery of outer gods don't exactly strike me as "masterpiece" material, devalued even more if we account for the gameplay: ER, like BB, narratively suffers imo from being soulslikes because the genre necessitates that an extremely simple system around timing your dodges is all it takes to kill these entities, which I think is the worst thing you can do to something that's supposed to be godlike in nature. The Nietzschean inspirations from Berserk can play into this if we say this vulnerability is intentional as a metaphor for the human spirit but... isn't it kinda cheap to hype up the human spirit when the gameplay doesn't require insane skills or sacrifices from the player and instead just nerfs the hell out of the gods? With all these slow, telegraphed attacks the enemies never feel in any way scary or divine to me, honestly - they're the same brutes and mages of classic fantasy just wearing fancy costumes.
32:30 that delivery of it "and I was f***ing excellent at it" is perfect. I burst out laughing the first time, but the sharp balance of pride and resentment can be heard. A part of him as pride in his previous roll and his ability to do it perfectly.. but the resentment is there too. He WAS "f***ing excellent" at it and it lead to all the pain he caused others. So subtle a line, but packed with emotion. 💯
Something that bugs me...why does Ganon's secret stone give him triple the life bar and a power boost but the other secret stones seemingly don't do anything except grant avatars? The other sages had powers before they got the stones and I'm hard-pressed to notice any difference before and afterwards. and Mineru's is really confusing, she sealed he consciousness in tablet or something, you awaken her, build her mech then get her stone. Which makes me wonder what does her even does?
You can tell how much Kratos liked Brok from his reaction to his death. Dude wasn’t fuming, he wasn’t with Freya ready to go straight to war, he simply grabbed Atreus and said “We are done.” He was broken by it.
I completely disagree about Freyr's death being random... it felt to me like the moment Freya learned to respect the choices of the people she loves most, even when those choices will endanger them or take them away from her. She honored his choice to die despite just being reunited with him again, despite him being the only family she had left. She made a completely different kind of decision than she had with Baldur. I really think his function in the story was to drive Freya's character development and show us clearly how she had grown and taken those lessons to heart more than it ever had anything to do with Freyr's character.
There us actually a piece of dialogue shortly after thrud and atreus release garm and are brought back befire odin where heimdall mentions to odin that he successfully retrieved an item for him. This dialogue makes me think when odin meant heimdall would join them it wasnt literally hes joining in the mask hunt, but more hes just tagging among for the trip to helheim for his own mission
