#I did glance through the author's bio briefly before reaching certain conclusions but this is really about Elden Ring more than her

[miirshroom]

"Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure." - Cazaril, "Curse of Chalion" by Lois McMaster Bujold

"As the golden barbs inflicted eternal agony upon him, Midra held fast to Nanaya's entreaty: 'Endure.' The word was a curse." - Remembrance of the Lord of Frenzied Flame

Have been listening through "The Curse of Chalion" by Lois McMaster on audiobook. Early 2000's fantasy novel that I'd not encountered before, but has similar tone to Carol Berg's Rai-Kirah trilogy and Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy from around the same era. It was a slow burn on the fantastical elements but once they kicked off I'm finding some familiar themes around death magic in the way that it is applied in Elden Ring.

Like, I have a concept of the characteristics of a "ghost" from pop culture osmosis, and the prose here describes it well:

"Old lost souls…No god takes up a sundered soul. It is left to wander the world slowly losing its mindfulness of itself and fading into air. New ghosts first take the form they had in life, but in their despair and loneliness they cannot maintain it".

This recalls to me mostly the ways that "souls" are presented in Demon's Souls, actually, but it carries through to Elden Ring in the way that the most degraded form of the soul detaches and hovers in various places waiting to be collected. Or how the Spiritgraves in Shadow of the Erdtree are the fading ghosts of graves.

There's the titular curse of the Bastard god, which corrupts the royal family like the demi-gods are tainted by their great runes. Also bringing to mind that the Remembrance of Astel, the Naturalborn of the Void can be used to craft the "Bastard's Stars" flail. Another design feature of the Astel being the gold rings around its tail, suggesting a connection to the Golden Star that delivered the Elden Ring with all of its corrupting influence.

But the parallel that is hard to overlook is in the mechanics of the death magic. To cast a death curse always is to slay both victim and caster and have their souls carried away by a demon. Due to a conflict between two divine powers acting at the same time there is a half-finished assassination where a soul is prevented from leaving and manifests to all mundane appearances as a cancerous tumour in a person's body. Similarly, the double deaths of Ranni and Godwyn are half-completed and this is connected to the deathroot which spreads across the Lands Between like a cancer.

BUT, did I enjoy The Curse of Chalion? I liked about the first 3/4 of the book but have mixed feelings about the ending. On the one hand, it's interesting to see a protagonist who recognizes that being ignorant of the truth does not protect people from consequences and has a fairly quick turnaround on keeping his allies informed, even of the crazy supernatural stuff. And the curse is lifted in the end, which effectively amounts to lifting the influence of a god - cool.

On the other hand, there was a literal Deus Ex Machina required to accomplish this and the main character concludes that for at least the last 3 years of his life everything that he has suffered has been orchestrated by this god to fulfill a prophesy that will lift the curse. All he had to do was endure and keep devoted to the higher purpose and in the end he is miraculously cured of an ailment, gets the girl, and is advisor to a queen. It's the kind of contrived outcome that only makes sense where gods are real and take active interest - and the text makes a point that faith in the existence of gods is absolute (due to a guaranteed miracle that everyone gets at end of life that shows which of the 5 gods their soul has gone to). So it's instructive about how to imagine what theology would be like in a world where the gods and demons being debated are literally real and active. But the ending is a little less intuitively cathartic for observers living in a world that is not like that. So if intuition fails I try analysis.

"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?" "Perhaps heaven was not a place but merely an angle of view. A vantage. A perspective" - Cazaril

The pain of the character is indeed an illusion from the point of view of the author writing the story. I can see the thoughts (soul) of this character on the page and I know from those thoughts that he has gruesome and painful scars, but I can't see his body so if he didn't keep thinking about them I could forget that they exist. I wonder if there is an intent to partially deconstruct faith in this story. Some of the theological musings at the end dance around the idea that it is easy to read stories as validating religious belief, because 'faithful' characters will always be objectively correct that there is an omniscient divine being - the author - who deals out trials and rewards, and to whom people are puppets pulled along on strings. And once a character grasps this new perspective how could they not be struck by an obsession to describe the experience to other characters? Resulting in a sudden change of personality and detachment from former desires?

The only remaining point of contention would be on whether that author is a benevolent god for giving life to these souls or malevolent demon for causing suffering (an in-universe debate in the Curse of Chalion between the 5-gods religion and 4-gods religion - which honors the 4 gods of the 4 Seasons but insists that the Bastard god of Unseason is a demon!). And speculations on how the gods themselves are made and what happens if they die.

"Death ripped a hole between the worlds…If a god died what kind of hole would it rip between earth and heaven?"

If "god" is the author then what happens upon "death of the author"? There is no more mediator between the imagination of the reader (heaven) and the author's text (earth). In short: fanfiction. One may imagine that characters freed from the hand of the author can find happiness. Or, it can be imagined that their illusory struggles continue. Otherwise, they simply return to non-existence.