I’ve Touched Upon This In The Past, But There’s A Couple Reasons I Don’t Believe The Vow Was Mutually

Honestly when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense that the lands between and land of shadow don't connect perfectly when you try to overlay the maps, even though they were once part of the same landmass.

The two have been separated for many years by the time the game takes place, and have both developed independently through untold years of turmoil, war, natural disasters and weathering.

I'd be more surprised if they did connect properly after all of that.

Have some Madeline bc yes

One detail I really like about Shadow of the Erdtree's final boss is that you can tell he's not fully there... (lore analysis under the cut)

...because his horse isn't with him! What you learn in the base game is that Radahn would never willingly separate from his horse. This man mastered a new school of magic fully so he could keep his horse with him at all times. He's the prime horse girl of the lands between. And yet when we meet him he is on his own, no horse in sight.

For the people saying Radahn being the final boss is somehow a cop-out, i vehemently disagree. This part of the lore was always going to be present, and it was clearly planned out since the start. There's a lore reason Malenia and Radahn fought now. Miquella was always going to be an evil little shit. Long before the DLC came out people had already figured out that Miquella as a character is heavily inspired by Griffith from berserk. Griffith, the quintessential betrayer of hopes in modern Japanese fiction. The guy who murdered everyone he ever loved for a shot at godhood. Sorry Miquella simps, but Miquella is right: it was his very fate to betray you.

Speaking of which! I really like the contrast between Miquella and Ranni in that aspect. Someone else already discussed how they mirror each other in terms of love and how they treat those who love them, but fate is another really interesting contrast between the two. Where Ranni in the base game goes to absurd lengths to escape her fated godhood, to the point of killing the most beloved man in the lands between just to get a shot at killing herself too; Miquella goes to even more absurd lengths to achieve his. Ironically, this, too involves getting rid of his body.

And the narrative supports Ranni over Miquella. She's right to escape her fate, she's right to value the love of others as much as she does, she's right in her attempts to stop people from sacrificing themselves on her altar. But she also deserves to not be alone. She deserves to have trustworthy companions at her side. If you choose to stick with her, she ends the game victorious, with a trusted consort of any gender at her side*.

Miquella meanwhile uses those who love him as tools and sacrifices everyone who ever valued him in his bid to follow the path fate laid out for him. He gets rightfully stomped into the ground at the end of the DLC for his troubles. zombie spouse and all.

*=unless you got the frenzied flame ending, you naked maniac!

Everytime I see talk about silksong taking too long to come out I can't help but raise an eyebrow. It’s been what? Five or six years since hollow knight had its final DLC and was officially “finished”? That’s a perfectly normal amount of time for a game to be in development for.

Hollow knight itself allegedly took around 4 years to create, so silksong, which is clearly a significantly larger and more ambitious game compared to their first has only been in development for slightly longer than that was atm.

Now, I'm no 'hollow knight news master', so I totally could be missing something or be wrong about something here, but from my point of view it hasn't been in development that long at all.

Assuming this isn’t sarcasm here we go (also some spoilers)

There’s not really a lot of lore on torrent. All we really know is that he’s a spirit mount that we can summon with the golden whistle ring, much like we can summon normal spirit ash’s with the spirit calling bell. Both of these items seem to reanimate the dead in a sort of 'spirit state', with the whistle we summon a spirit to ride and with the bell we can summon spirits to fight with us. Both of these things are possible because death isn’t really a thing in the lands between anymore. This is because the 'rune of death' was removed from the elden ring, which essentially removed the concept of death from the world itself. (the elden ring seems to control the laws of reality and said laws can be messed with or altered by taking away or adding different things to the ring). Torrent just sort of poofs when he gets hurt and can be resummoned at will because he isn’t alive in the first place and thus cannot be permanently destroyed.

The Erdtree’s a little trickier to explain but if you’re interested I can go into it.

Elden Ring lore, huh?

I mean I can just say a bunch random words with 'the' in front of them, too.

A lot of games get accused of having world building that really doesn't matter to gameplay. Elden Ring feels like a dare to see how far you can take that.

I still don't know why you can summon an antelope to ride on that can't die but just disappears if someone hits it, and then there is a cool-down period before you can bring it back. And what does that have to do with the giant LED tree?

Who made all of these barrels and boxes? Because this world seems to only have monsters and guys who kill monsters in it.

Please reblog this explaining everything to me. I'm sure it will suddenly be not a bunch of whatever nonsense when YOU type it.

It is weird. Zelda lore in general is just kinda a nightmare. For example Zelda is apparently the descendant of Sonia and Rauru but the game literally makes no reference to a child of the two existing up until and after the point where Sonia is killed.

Even as a stand alone BOTW/TOTK have a lot of little weird inconsistencies. Hell, there's really no way to know whether I'm actually right about this or not because the games seem to just pick and choose when they're pulling from previous lore and when they're doing something different.

Like, with the existence of Fi and Zelda's goddess power, I think It's safe to assume that an event similar to skyward sword happened in lore, meaning that ganon could have demise' curse. But at the same time, like you said the origin of hyrule has been rewritten and we're in an entirely different timeline so it's entirely impossible to tell just how much of the pre established stuff actually plays into it. (Though I do personally believe that Demise is cannon in BOTW/TOTK due to the immense amount of power the secret stone was able to grant Ganondorf despite them only being able to enhance someone's innate abilities and not grant them totally new ones)

It just hit me that this mass bewitchment ability we see in the trailer is almost definitely an incantation, judging by what looks to be a golden seal in the tarnished's hand.

Which has got me thinking. Miquella has ties to both the bewitching branches ability and incantations, which means this is very likely an incantation connected to Miquella in someway, even possibly being a reward for his remembrance.

I'm not sure I like the implications that Miquella has a bewitchment spell that works on summons/spirit ashes that he could use against us in a possible fight.

Elden ring endgame spoilers

You guys wanna know what I think the scariest thing about Radagon is? It’s the fact that in the bossfight against him he fights us using Marika’s hammer. He’s not even using his own weapon. There’s a very real possibility that he may have never even wielded that hammer before in his life (except when he was trying to fix the ring) and he is still a terrifying force with it.

From what I’ve come to understand Radagon seems to actually prefer greatswords when it comes to his choice in weapon since he has pretty substantial connections to multiple greatswords in the lore. For example there’s the moonlight greatsword that he got from Renalla and also the golden order greatsword which he reforged it into. On top of both of these there’s also the form he takes as the sacred relic sword that the elden beast wields. These may seem like rather superficial details but considering that all the major weapons he has connections too are greatswords I feel that it has some meaning to it.

Even after being sealed away for centuries, having his body crumble to pieces, not being able to use his sorcery knowledge and quite possibly not even using a weapon that he’s familiar with or fond of he still wrecks shit when the time comes down to it.

Thinking about how Kayaba and Kirito's character arcs mirror each other really well in SAOA.

Kayaba, despite trying his best to help the people he trapped in the game and to be a good person, eventually fell into nihilism and hatred for humanity, spiralling to the point where he’ll directly murder innocent people for no reason other than feeling like it.

While Kirito tries his absolute best to be a cold, nihilistic horrible person but eventually breaks when his genuinely good qualities get forced to the surface by the people around him. Despite his best efforts he is, deep down, a good person who wants to do the right thing.

They both start and end the series on opposite sides of the same spectrum.

Do they really have that of different goals? As far as I'm aware the only goals we know the GEQ had were to "raise apostles to slay the gods" and presumably to keep destined death unbound. This aligns pretty neatly with Melina's goals for us to take on the demi-gods and later to unbind destined death.

The similarities between them are even stronger in the FF route, where she threatens to come after us with the GEQ's own power (destined death). Following in her footsteps as a GEQ waring with a god. If she's not already the GEQ in some shape or form (either via the art of rebirth or her being created from what was left of the previous GEQ) then I do believe that she at least claims that title by the end of FF.

Out of curiosity, what are the major rebuttals to the "Melina = GEQ" theory?

Because honestly, the more I think about it the more it just makes perfect sense for her to be the GEQ, and I can't really think of any counter arguments that are all too convincing for me.