#as if terfs are a high water mark for intent and analysis of art

[poly-val]

i've never felt the need to respond to a tumblr post Ever, but this was such a lazy gut-reaction analysis of an character arc I personally found very emotionally affecting so here I am I guess. tl;dr: I don't believe Ymir is a transmisogynist stereotype and most of the analysis above is lazy and refuses to engage with the text of the game on anything other than the most banal and literal levels, which end up missing interesting and worthwhile ideas by a country mile.

(cw discussion of sexual assault/rape, transmisogyny, body horror)

let's explore this in four points. first, let's talk about Ymir's style and presentation.

Count Ymir was one of the first characters we got to see in the teasers, and when folks spoke about him, it was always referring to him as a woman. And it's obvious why: he cuts a very matronly figure, with the long fitted and the ruff around the collar and the headpiece (itself reminiscent of the Nox's silk hoods and crowns). In this way, if we compare his style to other Carian styles, like the gowns of the Preceptors for instance, it's obvious that Ymir's High Priest outfit is meant to be way more feminine than not, especially if you take into account the wrap underneath the crown, the collar, the bloomers under the robe.

I'm starting here because like, this isn't a mistake! Neither is this treated as a joke, anymore than any of the other characters in the game, DLC or otherwise. Like, it's interesting that we have a character present very obviously as ritually/ceremonially feminine, while still using a masculine title. Compare Ymir to another DLC NPC, Thiollier, who also cuts a very feminine figure, with the flowing hair-like hood and mask, and with the very soft voice (and his actual obsession with St. Trina). Moreso than at any point in the base game, the DLC has gone to lengths to introduce characters who play with, subvert and question norms of sex and gender. Women wear armor modeled gloriously off men's chests, men wear dresses and nun's habits, and every one of them is following a figure who is famously (for lack of a better phrase) genderfucky: Miquella.

And having mentioned obsession, let's move to point two: Ymir's dead son, Yuri.

I'm going to gloss over the frankly bizarre leap in logic that is required to see a transfem-coded character have a connection to a child and instantly jumpto "oh it's some pedo shit", though I'm still pointing it out.

"Obsession" is a very strong word to describe what has only been shown to us to be sorrow and grief. It's obvious that Ymir lost a child, and his moments alone in the graveyard are nothing if not tender. More than the pain of losing a child, there's also the pain of failed motherhood, which hit home to me as a trans girl. I think hearing that was the first moment the gravity of Ymir's story really hit me. It's sad! It's meant to be sad! It's a moment where we see that motherhood is not a metaphor or an eldritch theme or whatever, it's literal. It's someone apologizing to his dead child that he wasn't able to be the mother he needed to be. The grief is palpable. If obsession is found in Ymir's story, it's not an obsession for Yuri, but for what came after. It grew out of that grief, and makes Ymir that much more tragic for it. Cradling a dead fingercrawler is unnerving, but if anything it shows us what grief can make of us. To touch on it again: it is very weird to see this character arc and immediately, without any supporting evidence, jump to the conclusion that Ymir is sexually obsessed with this dead child. It's weird and just a bad take.

Which leads to my third point: the fingers.

Fingers have been all over the game since launch. Two Fingers, Three Fingers, Finger Maidens, Finger Readers, Fingercrawlers, and the DLC makes good on this through Ymir and the Finger Ruins. Fingers are a very important symbol in Elden Ring, and they're fascinating because the symbol is also extremely literal. When you meet the Two Fingers for the first time, it's kind of a shock because that's literally actually what they are. They're literally just two giant fingers sticking out of the ground. The metaphor is broken a bit because it ceases to be a metaphor. The fingers are literal. Hell, the players are called Fingers too in multiplayer! We are Fingers ourselves.

Fingers are many things in Elden Ring, but what they have never, ever, ever been are penises. This is like, bargain-bin level analysis, barely psychosexual in nature, to see fingers and assume they symbolize penises just because they are "phallic". One reply to this post said this kind of analysis says more about the reader than the text and I have to agree, because it ignores so much context and theming that's been carefully built up in the base game.

Fingers point, they guide, they embrace. Juxtaposing the Two/Three fingers as incomplete hands with the fingercrawlers in abandoned Caria Manor, grotesque severed hands adorned with jewelry with way too many fingers, gives us a fascinating idea: our reach exceeded our grasp. The fingercrawlers are emblematic of "an ancient act of blasphemy" (Ringed Finger desc.), so it's interesting that you find this ruined manor crawling with the things. It's a crystal clear sign: something terrible happened here. And when we arrive at the DLC, who do we find that's associated with Caria? Ymir, and so a question is answered, if obscurely. But the fingercrawlers in Caria have never been taken to mean "the castle is covered in penises". That's facile. It doesn't tell us anything about Caria, or the fingercrawlers, or the symbol of fingers in general. It's an easy leap to make but it's lazy and unmotivated.

Like, let's compare the Fingers as eldritch symbols of Outer Gods to another Fromsoft Outer God: Oeden in Bloodborne. The entire game he's talked about as formless, but when his coming down to earth is signalled to the player, how is that shown?

With a full too-bright moon (stereotypically feminine in myth, mind you). And it's formless Oeden who then goes around forcibly impregnating women in Yharnam. Like, if Fromsoft wants to write rape into their games, they'll do it. They did it in Elden Ring too: as an Outer God the Scarlet Rot forcibly makes Malenia into a mother! This is text! The Two Fingers help make Marika into a mother-goddess, sure, but that was pretty explicitly with Marika's consent. Same with Ymir: he seems pretty enthusiastically consenting to the whole "being made a mother" thing.

The reference to Gwyndolin is also very egregious. I won't sit here and say that Gwyndolin is perfect rep; it definitely strays into dubious areas of fetishization. However, once again, Gwyndolin's snakes are not a penis thing oh my god. Snakes are cunning, dangerous, alien; in Dark Souls in particular, snakes represent a failed ambition, the snake being unable to become a true dragon, stuck with its belly on the ground and always envious of its airborne cousins (Covetous Silver Serpent Ring). That extends to Gwyndolin: the son-daughter that was hidden away is envious of her bright and beautiful family, the ones who get to walk around and bask in the sun. The Moon aspires to be the Sun, but only manages to be an obscure Darksun. The snakes lend a monstrous, tragic quality to Gwyndolin, because even if he's the last spark of divinity left in deserted Anor Londo, even if he's the mastermind of the great plot to deceive humanity, he's still hidden away, left to watch over the empty tomb of a man who didn't think he was good enough. The snakes are not a haha penis thing. Again, Gwyndolin is far from perfect, but it's once again facile to assume that just because something is long and cylindrical that it must obviously mean it's a penis. It's along these lines that I reject an interpretation that the fingers under Ymir's robes are penises.

And if you want to talk psychosexual, taking a look at Berserk, which massively inspired the whole of Fromsoft's Soulsborne series, would be a good start. Phallic imagery is used to great and disturbing effect in that manga, because its use was thought through, intentional and highly explicit. in that case the penis means something: the violence of misogyny, the masculine dynamics of power, the trauma of rape survivors. If anything, when compared to the psychosexual hellscape in Berserk, Elden Ring comes off as a little sexless (though it's disingenuous to imply that Elden Ring isn't stuffed to the brim with weird sex stuff).

And this leads us to my fourth and final point: the dolls.

So I'll say something before I get to the meat of this point. Saying that the dolls in Elden Ring are a weird creepy sex thing that only represents rape ignores the few times that characters willingly choose to become dolls. One of these characters (Ranni) is also near-explicitly coded as trans (and a redux of Gwyndolin, in case we were wondering what Fromsoft thinks about her), and so her willingly becoming a disabled doll is fascinating and contextualizes what we come to know about dolls.

But, granted, yes. Most of what we know about dolls comes from Seluvis, who is a weird shitty sex pervert who is called an honest to god "dolly botherer" by Gideon at one point. His dolls are pretty straightforwardly acquired through deception; like, you have to trick/force people to drink a drug that turns them into dolls. It's violating, and the game makes no bones of that.

My point here is: Ymir's association with Anna's doll is suspect. The story of what exactly happened to Anna is ambiguous, as is the history of both Jolan and Anna and how they came to be in Ymir's service, but it's weird. But like, that's interesting? It's interesting and complicates Ymir's character even further. It lets us know that maybe he's not just a kooky sorcerer who has a weird finger thing going on, that his relationship with these two women is not as simple as knights and their lord. Additionally, it runs back into the base game too, because now the doll's presence implicates Caria as well. Rather than Seluvis being a standalone creep, there's an implication that dolls are a systemic part of Carian history, one that fits neatly with the game's thoughts on nobility as consuming and corruptive.

But this isn't like, anything new. Some of the game's most trans-coded characters are also its most complicated and morally dubious. The whole game is focused on how Marika's selfishness breaks the world and ruins the quasi-immortal lives of all her children, Ranni orchestrates a murder-suicide and actively conspires against her closest confidants, Malenia unleashes the Scarlet Rot, Miquella's grave misdeeds and wrongdoings are littered across the DLC, literally! It's flavor, it's intrigue, it's complicating the lives and stories of the characters we meet. No one is all good or all bad, and just as they are larger-than-life mythical figures, they are also people.

So why does Ymir have a doll of Anna? Maybe it is a weird sex thing, maybe it's an extension of his fixation on motherhood. Maybe from his perspective the two knights aren't just servants, but children. I don't know, and it's left ambiguous for us to decide.

And like, to that end I'll clarify something. A lot of hay is made about Souls games being "up to interpretation" or open to a whole lot of conclusions, how Fromsoft gives us the pieces and we're expected to put together an incomplete puzzle. I don't think is correct at all. I think these games often show us stories that are clear and unambiguous, and while some of the little details are left open-ended, the big picture resolves clearly once you apply a little critical thinking. The only thing you need to do is trust the story that they're telling you. That's why I think "Ymir is transmisogynist garbage" is a bad-faith read of a really fascinating character. It's not that I don't think the point should or could be made, I just think "the fingers are penises and also he's a pedophile" is flimsy and unimaginative grounding for such a point to be made. The game does have a lot to say about motherhood, but none of those things include "mommies can't have penises". You can find Ymir uncomfortable, unnerving, upsetting - in fact I guarantee that was a large part of his design from the get-go, but I don't think that is grounded in a read of him as a transmisogynist stereotype of a "man in a dress", anymore than any of the other transgressive designs in the game are secretly anti-tranny jokes.

No One Else Is Saying It So I'm Going To: Elden Ring DLC Is Transphobic As Fuck

The entire character of Count Ymir feels like Fromsoft was upset people weren't as disgusted by Gwyndolin as they were supposed to be, so they turned the transmisogyny up to 11 and made it absolutely unmissable how much hatred they have towards trans people. And most people on the internet are still fucking missing it somehow, so let's break it down, I guess.

Count Ymir is an NPC in the Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, and is the main character of his own questline in the DLC. He's an old man who sits on a throne and is only ever referred to with he/him pronouns, and he wears a 'priest's outfit' that involves a habit-like crown and a long, purple robe.

One of the first things you learn about Count Ymir is that he's somehow attached to a deceased child named Yuri, to the point where he starts calling tiny fingercreepers by his name. You can find Ymir at night sobbing over the gravestone, while during the day he cradles a tiny, dead hand and calls it Yuri. While giving him an obsession with an underaged boy who may or may not have even been his son is definitely sus, it's literally the least weird part of this quest. It's mostly there to set up unease and distrust with Ymir, because they player doesn't know how Yuri died, and suddenly this old man is treating creepy monsters as children and calling them by this dead child's name. Again, nothing incriminating on its own, but that's just the set-up.

Ymir gives you a "bell," which is a long, cylindrical object with a bunch of holes in it, one of those holes on the elongated tip, that the player takes to places called 'Finger Ruins' to unlock treasure. Finger ruins are large, grey deserts with giant stone fingers jutting out of the sand. These ruins are inhabited by fingercreepers, enemies from the base game that are spider-like severed hands, and these new enemies that are long, lamprey-like finger men that can grab the player and suck on their face. To use the bell Ymir gave you, you go up to a giant version of the bell and blow into it, the hole on the tip the size of the player's entire face.

As you go on these treasure hunts, you meet Jolan, Ymir's bodyguard, a woman who is protective of the old man for some reason. Ymir mentions that Jolan has a sister named Anna, and both of them are purehearted. Here's the thing, though. During the 2nd treasure hunt, you can find a secret room in a tower nearby Ymir's church, and in that room is Anna's corpse, turned into a puppet somehow. Puppet summons in the base game are heavily, heavily implied to be victims of sexual violence, as the man who makes them, Seluvis, exclusively makes puppets out of women and naked men, keeping some of them in his bedroom behind a magic door, and getting very personal with you the instant you find out about this. These are dead bodies that are meant to be read as the objects of sexual gratification to the one who made them that way.

Anna's puppet is in a secret room near Ymir's church. It is explicitly stated later that Anna is Ymir's "doll," further cementing the implications from the base game. Before even getting to the end of the questline, we have confirmation Ymir is a sexual predator who has murdered at least one adult woman, which puts his obsession with a deceased young boy further into question.

After the 2nd treasure hunt, you return to find Ymir crying at Yuri's grave. He tells you that Marika, the queen of the lands between, final boss of the main game, and mother of DLC antagonist Miquella, is a failure because she is a bad mother, and that Miquella is doomed because of a "rotten root." This brings up his other obsession, that of motherhood, and how Yuri would still be alive if he'd had a better mother. You can probably see where this is going.

Ymir gives you a third map, which tells you the church is already in a finger ruin desert, which is obviously untrue, as you can see it's not. So you look around and find a secret tunnel underneath Ymir's throne while he's at Yuri's grave. Underneath the church is a hidden finger ruin, with fingers jutting out of the sky and one more giant bell at the end.

Anna invades you here, though it's clear from before that she's been long dead and this is her reanimated corpse being used for Ymir's bidding. After defeating Anna, you get to the last bell, and instead of treasure, you're teleported to a sea of fingers and fight Metyr, Mother of Fingers. This is a fromsoft game, so you can use your imagination on what a boss who is themed around maternity and has a body made up solely of long, plump fingers looks like. Hint: phallic and unpleasant.

After beating Metyr, Jolan tries to kill you for ruining Ymir's plan, somehow? You just followed his maps and did what he asked, and this ruined his plan. He told you where to go, gave you the key item you needed to use, and asked you to do it for him. He drew you a MAP. But this ruined his plans? None of this quest was thought through beyond the cruelty it applies to real world groups, the writing makes literally no sense. Hate crime aside, the writing is just bad.

After fighting Jolan is when the other shoe drops and Ymir is summoned as the final boss of this sidequest. His title is Count Ymir, Mother of Fingers, and his purple priestess robe is now bursting at the seems with wriggling fingers. He says he will be "A true mother. The only mother." He fights by literally giving birth to fingercreepers, spewing them out of his robes as a projectile. Let me remind you of the phallic nature of this enemy, and of Gwyndolin, the other transfem-coded hate crime character Fromsoft made, who had snakes wriggling out from under her dress. This is a repeated theme in these games, of transfem-coded characters having dangerous, cylindrical objects under their clothes.

To be blunt, because I know not everyone is seeing this, having Ymir call himself a mother and then immediately be shown to be covered in penis-like fingers that were hidden under his robe this whole time, is an anti-tranny joke the devs are making. They made it with Gwyndolin, who we actually liked, so they went more explicit and made it again with an old man who kills women and children, sexually assaults them, and then tries to take sole ownership of the word "mother" because of his hatred towards women. The key item he gives you is designed to make the player feel violated. The entire quest is choked in phallic imagery, with Fromsoft practically screaming at the top of their lungs "PENIS ITS PENISES, HE HAS PENISES HE CAN'T BE A MOM BECAUSE OF THE PENIS!!! ISN'T HE GROSS, ISN'T HE SCARY??? PENIS!!!!"

It's fucking disgusting. It's detestable that they went through all of this trouble to show us how un-fucking-welcome we are in this game's community. This is some of the worst transphobia I've seen from a mainstream title in decades. This is Silence of the Lambs, Sleepaway Camp type shit. I would not be surprised if JK Rowling had a writing credit for this DLC. This isn't even getting into all the poorly thought-out incest they added into the main questline, either.

Fuck Fromsoft. I hope all the people who wrote this quest choke on air. It's fucking pathetic, I'm mad as hell, and any trans person who plays Elden Ring, or any other Fromsoft game, should be mad as hell, too.