#Elden Ring captures the feeling of a person dropped in a fantasy world who simply doesn't get explained how the magic works

[miirshroom]

"If the gods saw peoples' souls but not their bodies in mirror to the way people saw bodies but not souls it might explain why the gods were so careless of such things as appearance or other bodily functions. Such as pain? Was pain an illusion from the gods' point of view?" - Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold

The design philosophy of FromSoft's souls games (and Elden Ring) is simple: adapt the above concept from book format to video game. The players are in the role of the omnipotent god who can play and replay the game and memorize all of the pieces of how it all fits together. With effort, a person can know the past, present, and future of every character. And the pain of the player avatar - and indeed all characters - is an illusion. They are distant abstract constructs. Not real.

Where the quote says "soul" what it means is "thoughts". Narratives written from the point of view of a specific character can give an unparalleled view into their thoughts about the situation they are in. Sneaky writers can use this to show that even the worst person in a story views themself as a hero who fully believes themselves justified, even as another character identifies them as careless or a dangerous tyrant.

So the characters in the videogame are conceptualized as more than just "people" - they are souls. They are bundles of thoughts. Their affect and quest lines and naming schemes and even the directions that they are facing in game are all highly structured to convey theme, cautionary tales, or to act as microcosms of the macro forces at play. And when they die, their animating thoughts become exposed as one or more pieces of equipment that the player can take for their own use.

Counterpart to the soul, the word "body" is used less often than you'd think in Elden Ring. More often the physical form is described as "flesh". "Cursemark carved into the discarded flesh of Ranni the Witch." "As for his flesh, he gave it to me, Shabriri."

What I mean by this is that when Ranni says "this doll's body is not without its hindrances" the body in question is not the doll. When Ansbach says "After Lord Mohg's slaying at his dynastic palace, it appears his body has been absconded with. And taken straight to Kind Miquella." he is not really talking about the physical appearance of Mohg Lord of Blood that we fight.

Think of the "body" of each demigod as a world. Thoughts occupy a body and so "Elden Ring" the videogame is the body of work that contains the characters. The Lands Between itself is the body that Ranni's doll form exists within. The "Shadow of the Erdtree" is a body nested within the greater body. A game world accessed within a game world.

Important is the extrapolation of this understanding. The Shadowlands in all its hostile glory is the "body" of Mohg that we are all trampling about in - the "inner world" that he stole from Miquella and made his own. Recall that Mohg appears from nothing - he forms from the formless blood that pools out of the corpse inside the cocoon in Mohgwyn Palace. He is possessing this corpse like a demon - like Shabriri - possesses the flesh of others. But Ansbach has no obligation to tell you the history of the flesh or the body. He only says the most recent true thing because it is most flattering to his cause - that Miquella has seized control of the body that was most recently under control of Mohg. He neglects to mention that Miquella's claim to the body pre-dates Mohg's.

And Mohg, Lord of Blood, claimed the body by soaking it in blood.

“Blood is memory...Blood is who we are...Blood recalls who we were. Blood is how we will be remembered. Work it well into the womb wood.” - Fool's Fate, Robin Hobb

It's a fantastical explanation that could have been pulled directly from the Realm of the Elderlings. Blood is memory, and blood worked into the Wombwood (the chrysalis of dead dragons) allows a person to superimpose their thoughts and memories over those of the never-metamorphosed dragon. And so, many souls who experience bloody violence are trapped in the Cocoon of the Empyrean in a living death.

And whether Miquella is a victim who suffers from being drowned in blood, or whether this bloody ascension was all according to plan becomes a topic of debate for us careless player-gods. The pain of characters in a story is an illusion. What you get out of it depends on the perspective you put in.