Curate, connect, and discover
Alright, so, first off, obviously, spoilers ahead.
I've been thoroughly enjoying and getting my ass kicked by SotE and what ive seen of the lore so i wanted to ramble about it.
I specifically wanted to talk about how Elden Ring explores power and godhood.
In the base game, godhood isnt seen as inherently bad. Marika's golden order is fucked up six ways to sunday, but the blame mainly rests on Marika's shoulders it seems. She's a genocidal homewrecking war-mongerer who threw two of her children in the sewers bc of racism, she's not a good god, but it doesnt portray the problem as her being a god, just her being a mess. The game provides several "solutions" to unfuck everything :
Ranni's ending has you completely throw the system in the trash. She says, fuck it, godhood's the problem, im out of here. She is kinda right, but the lands remain fractured and the power vacuum left behind is going to be immense. We're on the right track but could be better.
The frenzied flame ending is just pure concentrated nihilism so i think we can move past it for this one.
The bunch of other endings are fairly similar : you beat Marika/Radagon's ass and you impose yourself as Elden Lord to keep her in check and fix the issues you see as most important. This doesnt fix anything long-term, the god in power is still the exact same fucking mess but with a chaperone now i guess.
None of these endings are very satisfying, they all leave you with a sense of "it could be worse i guess" (except the frenzied flame one but you get the point). This is where Miquella comes in :
Everything we hear about Miquella sounds great. He's kind, compassionate, against racism, doesnt like violence, etc etc. Cherry on top, he's even one of the characters with a direct shot at godhood, brilliant ! Why cant we just put him in charge, he'll do much better than the absolute wreck we have right now.
And thats where the base game leaves us, Marika is a fucked up mess of a person, and the obvious solution is to put the much better Miquella in her place.
Shadow of the erdtree, on the other hands, aims to set the record straight. The problem wasnt just Marika, the problem is inherent to godhood in and of itself.
In SotE, we see the land of shadow, the realm where Marika came from and ascended to godhood, and the realm where Miquella intends to do the same. And the more we hear about who Marika was before in snippets of lore, and the more we watch Miquella tread the road to godhood, we realise something :
There is no such thing as a good god
It doesnt matter how kind and compassionate you were, what your morals were, who you loved, who you loathed, none of it matters because you cannot grasp the power to become a god without sacrificing who you were before.
In the dlc we see Miquella shed more and more of himself, his flesh, his arms, his eye, his heart, his doubts, his fears and even his love. Miquella has shorn so much of who he was that he formed an entire new person (St Trina) from it. Some of him remains, he still wishes for a kinder world, but he cant sacrifice anymore of himself for it. Now he has to start sacrificing others.
Miquella was always blessed with the ability to charm others, and he sees it as the least painful path to make others do as he wishes. And so he charms his sister, he charms Mohg, he charms Radahn, his followers, Leda, Moore, Thiollier, Freyja, the hornsent, Ansbach, and everyone he can convince to give themselves up for his dream of a kinder world, regardless of the pain they might cause or feel by being enthralled by him.
And oh boy do they feel pain. Mohg is used and discarded like a ragdoll, and his followers and dynasty slowly crumble to nothing as the last pureblood knight watches helplessly, himself entranced by the one responsible after he failed to kill him. Radahn's soul is shoved in a corpse so that he can play consort to a god that is his antithesis, depriving him of his glory and honour as lord of the battlefield. Malenia is left alone to rot after Miquella has no use or help for her, and she endlessly waits for her brother to return. Every one of Miquella's followers has to grapple with those feelings of betrayal, manipulation, and lost memories returning all at once. It is by no means painless.
And so we end up with a god that is not much better than Marika was. On his path to godhood, Miquella has caused as much pain to those along the way as his mother once did, in this very same land that still feels the scars of Marika's ascension.
The only way to gain power is to take it from everyone else, and that cannot be achieved without pain.