#darian speaks

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

this post got me to go find a recording of devin's voicelines and god. they truly go so hard. the best part of them to me isn't even the long speech to godwyn/fia but the part AFTER when you actually interact with him. the fucking. audible smile in his voice when he says "hello! the rotten witch is dead :) " the way it borders on an almost delirious giggle. the whole thing is like, the va did such a good job selling the simultaneous grief and rage and disgust and vindictive joy it's sooo delicious to me. they could never make me hate you devin you will always be iconic in my heart

[stormvanari]

favorite Titan’s Councilor gets redrawn a year and a couple months later (left is today, right dates back to June 2022)

[commissionsdarian]

Barbie princess dream palace

[irrepressible-miracle]

You know how people draw characters with their pokemon team? I wanna do that but it's instead of pokemon it's de skills instead

[honeyedraysofgold]

I'm alive, I still think about this game and my roommate has just started the game so now he can live through the questline

I was explaining Elden Ring lore to my roommate tonight and I-

I'm upset about the D twins again

Why would they just add that little nugget of interesting lore, why add the "two minds, two bodies, one spirit" thing that's "reviled" and just do nothing with it other than give the armor amd sword a reason to be like that.

They could have just been regular twins and the questline would have no different an impact on them, Fia, or the story of ER as a whole. Why not have at least one piece of dialog about at least?

[wraith-caller]

D, Beholder of Death, or Devin, is probably among one of the most hated NPCs in the game. Which is amazing because he has barely two minutes total of dialog which is easily missed if you don't do things a certain way. We know very, very little about him, and hell, some people don't even realize he's an entirely separate character from his brother Darian(D, Hunter of the Dead)! So what can we glean about him from his beyond-minor appearance in the game? A surprising amount! 🚨🚨SPOILERS AHEAD🚨🚨

I. A Recap Devin can be found at the Siofra Aqueduct in Nokron, just before the Valiant Gargoyle fight. If you find him before Darian has been killed, he'll be asleep and unresponsive. Once you return to him after Darian's murder, he will be disoriented and awake, and you can hand off the Twinned Set to him. This allows him to be summoned for the Gargoyle fight, and will move him to Deeproot Depths. There, he will show up after the Fortissax fight to deliver a monologue to Godwyn(and Fia's corpse) before disappearing, presumably having killed himself. II. The Silver Twin

The Twinned Set i a piece of armor made specifically for Devin and Darian rather than standard garb of the Hunters. While I've seen claims that the twins' soul is in some way bound to the armor, this assumption falls apart on closer inspection. There are pragmatic concerns about how such an arrangement worked out for a pair of shunned newborns. But there's also the far more straightforward fact that Devin can wake and speak to us before receiving the armor, so long as Darian is dead. He can also jump up and aggro us without having the armor if we killed Darian in Limgrave. So it's fairly clear that their soul is linked to their body rather than their armor, and it is their state of consciousness which allows for movement of the soul between their two bodies. Still, the armor is plenty specific to these twins, displaying two intertwined figures which are worn by one body. The armor is symbolic of their inseparable soul, each half representing one of the two twins. The golden one stands taller, carrying its own weight as well as that of the smaller, silver one which clutches it. While the golden half is modeled as fairly straightforward plate armor, the silver half is made to resemble an unarmored body, dressed in flowing robes instead, and thus, the more vulnerable of the two. Which half is which? A side by side comparison of the twins' skin and hair color may provide some insight.

<-- Darian's skin and hair RGB Devin's skin and hair RGB -->

Darian's is warmer, and just the tiniest bit more saturated. This results in Devin's tones looking cooler and grayer in comparison. Naturally, we can use that as a bit of a reference point to make the claim that Darian is represented by the gold half and Devin by the silver half. This can be supporte further by little tidbits about the characters - Darian is met above ground, beneath the golden light of the Erdtree, while Devin is met in the city of the Nox, who are associated with silver.

But perhaps most interesting are the implications provided by their character traits. As mentioned above, the gold half of the armor exudes strength and stability. It stands on its own two feet and is the main component which the silver half leans on for support. This is reflected in Darian's behavior when compared against Devin's. Darian is stalwart, steady, calm, ready to protect. Devin is, at least in the moment in which we encounter him, more emotionally fragile, broken, delicate, clinging tenaciously to life only long enough to have his revenge against his brother's murderer.

Could this give us any clues about the dynamic between the twins? It's hard to say, given that we don't exactly get to know Devin until after one of, if not the, worst day of his life. Maybe before Darian's death he was just as calm and amicable as Darian. There's reason to think, though, that much like the golden half of the armor, Darian was the one to primarily care for and protect his other half. For one, in spite of being twins, the game makes sure to specify to us that Devin is the younger. This automatically evokes a certain dynamic, the assumption being that the younger sibling may rely on the elder for guidance and protection. Then there is Darian's apparent choice to keep Devin's existence something of a secret, even to a long time traveling companion. Rogier's note tells us that "it seems" Darian has a brother, indicating Devin is someone Rogier hasn't known about until recently. He doesn't even mention him by name in the letter. Darian made a decision to keep Devin a secret, and it could have been to protect him. The protector/protected dynamic is further enhanced by Darian's idle stance which often shows him cradling the head of the silver twin, the bust serving as a reminder of his younger brother who he took it upon himself to care for in a world where no others would.

So where would that leave Devin? It's possible that a pattern of dependence could have emerged, given the nature of their curse. Only one can be awake at a time, and if Darian were to preside over the daytime hours as implied by their 'day/night' duality, this would have left Devin alone in the night. It'd be less likely that he is the one performing necessary daily tasks, as the rest of the world would be asleep at this time. He'd be left to his own devices, and free from obligations typically undertaken during the day which would risk interaction with a populace that was entirely hostile to them. Would Devin have come to see Darian as something of a barrier between himself and this world that hated him?

III. The Golden Order

I've gone over how monumental the acceptance of the Golden Order would've been for this pair of shunned twins in my post on Darian. As a refresher for anyone unaware, what little info we get of the D twins tells us that they were born cursed, sharing a single soul between themselves. As a consequence of this curse, they were rejected by all societies except the Golden Order. That should make it pretty clear as to why the D twins serve the Golden Order with such fervor. They haven't really got any other option. It's also bound to be pretty world-changing for them to be told that they are worthy of acceptance by the empire founded by the goddess of the world herself. Who could possibly be a higher authority on the matter than that? After a lifetime of shunning and rejection, these two pariahs have finally found a place that will let them call it home. But nothing in life is free, right? The pair are put to work, or perhaps volunteered themselves. We can't really know, though there would have been a pretty intriguing implication about this if the original 1.0 text had been preserved for the item description of Devin's clothes, which indicates the twins could have been slaves at some point. At any rate, Darian is specified to now be a Hunter of the Dead, while Devin's role is more ambiguous. It's commonly held that he takes on the same job, which is a fair enough assumption. It could also be possible that he is set to scholarly tasks, given that "fundamentalism is scholarship in all but name". This, in some ways may be corroborated by Devin's use of fundamentalist incantations not used by Darian, who primarily uses beast incantations, as well as the fact that Devin is equipped with the Golden Order seal, which demands a higher INT and FAI stat than the Clawmark seal used by Darian. Regardless of any of that, Devin appears to have been sent on a new mission, something related to but not altogether the same as Darian's weeding of the deathroot. Rogier's letter tells us of Devin's location within Nokron, mentioning, "And it's said he stood before the Prince of Death not far beyond that spot." So Devin has clearly been to the roots of the Erdtree. We know this isn't a place one can just wander into - it's highly sacred, so much so that not even the other demigods slain on the Night of the Black Knives were interred there. It was an honor reserved only for Godwyn. It's a tall order to rationalize a random Tarnished no one like Devin being permitted to go there without invitation, especially not under Morgott's watch. The path through Nokron is wholly inaccessible until Radahn's death, with the Fallen Hawks, who have wandered the city for god knows how long, being unable to find a way out, and Ranni being unable to find a way in. So it's fairly unreasonable to think Devin somehow managed to get into Nokron when no one else could. This leaves only one alternative path, which is taken via Leyndell, and it is certainly not one Devin chose to take on a hunch or a whim for his own interests. IV. Plumbing the Depths of the Order

Beneath Leyndell, we can find the Shunning Grounds of the Omen living within the sewers. Traveling deeper still, we can find the Cathedral of the Forsaken, guarded by an illusion of Mohg. Press on past this, and the way is blocked by a seal placed by Morgott himself. So long as he is alive, the seal remains. What's beyond it is a truly terrible sight, hundreds of anguished nomads crammed into catacombs, driven to utter despair in this inhumane prison beneath the earth. And at the farthest depths of this hell lay the altar of the Three Fingers, vassal of the Frenzied Flame and god of chaos, a threat so dire to existence that Melina all but begs us to reconsider multiple times before we even approach it. It's no walk in the park, that's for sure. But it's also the only other way into the Deeproot Depths prior to Radahn's death, and so it is the one Devin most likely took to reach the Prince of Death. This also means Devin must have had Morgott's express permission to do so. His seal prevents anyone from reaching the illusory wall which allows one passage into the Depths from the Frenzied Flame Proscription. While I won't claim Morgott is the one to have requested Devin to do this, the fact still remains that Morgott must at least be aware it is happening, otherwise, there's no reasonable explanation for Devin getting to Godwyn in the first place. This further strengthens the claim that Devin was not merely wandering or seeking something of his own accord - he was explicitly sent. And I think this assignment broke him.

Let's take a moment to backtrack to the outskirts of Leyndell, and the Minor Erdtree church. In it, we find 4 items, three of which are explicitly linked to Devin. There's a Golden Centipede, associated with hunters of the dead. There's a Golden Order seal, used by Devin. And there's a gesture, Outer Order, which directly mirrors the gesture received from Devin, Inner Order. We get the Outer Order gesture after listening to spoken echos of Marika, which are as follows:

I declare mine intent, to search the depths of the Golden Order. Through understanding of the proper way, our faith, our grace, is increased. Those blissful early days of blind belief are long past. My comrades; why must ye falter?

How is this relevant to Devin? For one, the twins are associated with the ranks of the Hunters, who Goldmasks laments have strayed from proper scholarly fundamentalism to blindly seeking out an absolute evil to oppose. This illustrates how they have strayed even from Marika's own vision of the Order with her call to examine the tenets of the Order and one's own faith in it. The word choice also, whether intentional or not, mirrors Devin's own literal searching of the depths of the Golden Order. To reach Godwyn, he descended beneath the Order's capital, going from this noble, golden city bathed in the warm rays of the Erdtree, down through the sewers where cursed children grew up and now eke out a miserable existence, through an internment camp full of suffering exiles, to finally confronting the greatest failure of Marika's Order and the source of the monstrosities which Devin and his brother are assigned to destroy. Marika says, "Those blissful early days of blind belief are long past," and this becomes true for Devin. He has confronted not one, not two, but three layers of deceit and depravity perpetrated by the Order he has agreed to serve. There is no lie to hide behind, no place for faith in the Order to do what is right, no way to any longer deny the imperfections and cruelty of the Golden Order. And that same Golden Order told you that you were not an abomination. That you were worthy of life, even if the entire rest of the world believes otherwise. The bliss of that acceptance is now stained with the horrific reality. Devin has reached the depths of the Order, and he has found only misery and abuse, decay and brutality. And at its very center, there lay the once golden and perfect son of that Order, the poster child of all its promises of glory, strength, and goodness, now twisted into the very thing the Order has instructed him is responsible for its ills. I do not think Devin merely shrugged his shoulders and got over it. In fact, his vicious diatribe against Godwyn makes it pretty clear how deeply this all impacted him. While he has plenty good reason to despise Fia for murdering his brother, Godwyn would have had no involvement in that, and Devin would know. Devin would have seen the lack of response and the lack of awareness in Godwyn as he removed the cursemark from his corpse. So why blame him for anything to do with Darian's death when it's Fia's plot that necessitated it? He's not condemning Godwyn for Darian's death. He's condemning him for sullying the purity of the Golden Order. In his mind, which has been broken by this one-two punch of witnessing the brutality of the Order followed up by Fia's murder of his brother, he's scrambling to hold on to meaning in a world where he is rapidly forced to face his meaninglessness.

So he rages against Godwyn, rages against Fia and her plans to enshrine the undead spawn of this blight on his faith. If he externalizes that rage, he can, for a time, escape his own miseries, and even justify continuing to believe in the virtuousness of the society which gave him and his brother place and meaning, and deemed them worthy of belonging.

[someone-will-remember-us]

Four years ago, Caroline Darian thought she had a normal life. She was in her early 40s, she had a home in the Paris area, a job as a communications manager, a husband who worked for a TV breakfast show and a six-year-old son. She got on well with her parents, who had retired to the picturesque village of Mazan in Provence in the south of France, to a house with pastel-blue shutters where they would all often spend long summers together in the garden under the mulberry tree and splashing in the pool – with barbecues and music, dinner and board games on the patio and country bike rides with her dad.

Darian remembers the exact moment that this all shattered. It was 8.25pm according to the clock on her kitchen cooker, on a Monday night in November 2020. She had been working from home all day on Zoom calls. She had just put down a bag of Japanese takeaway on the kitchen counter when her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, called and told her to sit down in a quiet spot; she had something difficult to say.

Darian thought of her father’s health – he was heavy, had breathing problems, and France had been in and out of Covid lockdowns. But instead she learned that police had arrested her father, Dominique Pelicot, for secretly filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket with a hidden camera in a bag. Officers investigating his phones, computer and hard drive had found thousands of images and videos stretching over almost 10 years showing that he had drugged his wife then filmed her, unconscious, being raped in her own bed by him and dozens of strangers. There had been at least 70 men, aged from 22 to 71, and police were still trying to identify them all.

Darian didn’t understand what was being said. She felt herself lose control: shaking, shouting, screaming insults about her father, hardly able to breathe. “It was like being hit by a wave,” she says, still struggling to comprehend it four years later. “It was a cataclysm. All my foundations collapsed.”

Darian is sitting in a book-lined room, up a creaky wooden staircase in a publisher’s office on the Left Bank in Paris. The first time we speak, it is days before the verdict in what has become the biggest rape trial in French history, after her mother decided to waive her anonymity and hold the four months of hearing in public, saying “shame must change sides”. Gisèle was embraced by the world as a feminist hero for her bravery and refusal to be shamed, as the trial made global headlines and the family was thrown into the spotlight. Darian is poised and calm, although nervous about the verdict. Channelling her anger into a public campaign to raise awareness of drug-facilitated sexual violence has been a “question of survival”, she says. But on the inside, she describes herself as a “field of ruins”. The previous few nights, she began dreaming about Dominique Pelicot again.

The trial was an “ordeal”, Darian says, “really hard from a human perspective”. Dozens of accused men, now aged between 26 and 74, including a soldier, journalist and lorry drivers, had sat on benches in court, at close proximity to her and her mother. The men seemed so relaxed and “comfortable in their seats”, Darian observed. Video evidence was shown of many of them raping Gisèle in her bedroom when she was in a comatose state, lying limp and lifeless and snoring loudly, with family photos on the dresser and spotty pillowcases on the bed.

Dominique Pelicot hid prescription drugs in a tennis sock inside a hiking shoe in his garage. He crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into Gisèle’s mashed potato, coffee, or the raspberry ice-cream he served her in front of the TV. This would give him seven hours, he told the court, in which his wife was in a state akin to being under general anaesthetic. He would take off her pyjamas, dress her up in underwear he had bought. Then he and the other men would rape her while a camera filmed. Afterwards, Dominique Pelicot said he would wash her and dress her in her pyjamas before she would wake up, groggy but unaware, thinking the blackouts and memory lapses meant something was wrong with her brain. He contacted men online with messages such as “I’m looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my wife who’s been put to sleep” or “You’re like me, you like rape mode.”

Days after we meet, Dominique Pelicot is sentenced to 20 years in prison and all 50 other men are found guilty of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. At least 20 more could not be identified and are presumed to be still at large today. Most had denied the allegations, saying they had never “intended” to rape and thought it was a game by a couple of swingers in which “the wife” was pretending to be asleep. Some said that if the husband gave consent it was OK.

Darian has total admiration for her mother – “the true victim of this whole story” – for agreeing to hold the trial in public. Darian went public herself, in 2022, while the investigation was ongoing, publishing a book called I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, which has now been translated into English for a new edition. It was a kind of diary of the first year after the revelations, illustrating how “trauma expands outwards like a shock wave” through a family.

She had grown up happily with her parents and three brothers. Her father, an electrician who had also worked as an estate agent, and mother, a logistics manager, met when they were 19 and 20 and married soon after. The family lived in a house provided by her mother’s company with five bedrooms and a walled garden in a coveted neighbourhood on the banks of the river Marne just outside Paris. Dominique Pelicot encouraged Darian’s dance lessons and would drive her to school to avoid her getting the bus. She remembered him singing Barry White songs in his Renault 25 as he drove the kids on holiday. All that was sunk for ever by the revelations. She now doesn’t even keep old photographs. “I can’t keep hold of those memories,” she says. “Sometimes they pop up, but that was a previous life; this is now.”

Campaigning “is a way for me to recover some kind of dignity”, she says, having founded a movement called Don’t Put Me Under (#MendorsPas) to raise awareness and support victims of drug-facilitated rape, pushing a new expression into the mainstream in France: “chemical submission”. Drugging most often happens in the home, enacted by family members or people you know, she says, and victims can be adults or children. Before her father’s arrest, “I didn’t have a clue about drugging or drug-assisted rape. I knew about GHB, the date rape drug, in nightclubs and bars, but I didn’t know it was so much more widespread and mostly happened using the contents of the family medicine cabinet.” She wants better training for health professionals and police, and better access to toxicological testing for victims.

She would also like more respect for rape victims in court. She watched in horror when even her mother, a grandmother, who had been drugged into a coma with no recollection of the assaults, was questioned by defence lawyers about whether she might have led the men on.

“I’m really proud of my mum,” Darian says with determination. “She has opened the door. She has led the way for other victims of sexual violence. She’s told them they’re not alone any more. That is strength. So to me she’s a hero … And she did it brilliantly. She walked into this court every single day with hundreds of journalists, being scrutinised by everyone, being humiliated by all these [defence] lawyers. Frankly, you have be strong to do that … She’s an independent and strong woman. And she did it with dignity.”

She describes her mother as having the calm of a “medieval queen” presiding over ruins – a resilience she says Gisèle has had since losing her own mother to cancer aged nine.

Darian, 45, attended the trial with her brothers, David, 50, a sales manager, and Florian, 38, an actor. (She uses the pseudonym Darian because it is a composite of her brothers’ names, in honour of their support, but has taken her husband’s surname). She was a striking figure in the courtroom, head held high, arms folded, sitting metres away from the accused men – many of whom were around her own age – and visibly staring them all in the eye. What did she feel? “I felt anger. They’re cowards.” She said the men stared right back at her: “I was looked at like a sex object during this trial by many of them.” While reporting the trial, I saw Darian’s appearances shift the mood in the courtroom. She was unflinching about the unbearable emotional toll – “How are you supposed to rebuild yourself from the ruins when you know your father is the worst sexual predator of the past 20 years?” she asked the head judge. She was not afraid to regularly shout across the courtroom, “You’re lying!” to the man she no longer called her father, or get up and walk out. At one point, when her father was speaking about her, she retorted: “I want to throw up.”

Within the first days of the trial, it became clear that Dominique Pelicot was reserving perhaps his most twisted evasions for his daughter, refusing to explain what he had done to her and appearing to change his story several times.

What had emerged in the four-year investigation of Dominique Pelicot’s crimes was that no woman in his family was safe. He had hidden cameras in bathrooms and bedrooms at his home and in relatives’ homes, secretly photographing his sons’ wives naked and sharing the pictures and photomontages online, boasting that he was “surrounded by sluts”. He hid cameras in the guest bedroom in Mazan to secretly film his daughter naked and make photomontages of both her and Gisèle naked, comparing their bodies under the title “The slut’s daughter”, which he shared online alongside obscene commentary.

On his computer equipment, police had found a deleted folder called “my daughter naked” and recovered two pictures of Darian, then aged roughly in her 30s, taken at different times, asleep on her side in the foetal position, wearing beige underwear with the duvet pulled back. When police first showed her those pictures, she initially didn’t recognise herself. The lights were on, and she was a light sleeper who would have woken up. She never slept in that position, or went to bed dressed like that, and the underwear she was wearing definitely wasn’t her own. She said in court she was certain she had been drugged, and also probably raped and abused by Dominique Pelicot. “It’s not a hypothesis; it’s reality, I know it,” she told the judges. She said the difference between her and Gisèle Pelicot was that her mother – most unusually in a rape case – had the confirmation of thousands of files of video evidence. Darian, without video evidence, felt, she said, more like the remaining 99% of women who allege drugging, unable to ever know the truth, locked into “doubt and silence”.

In her final appearance in court, Darian said: “I’m a forgotten victim in this case.” Turning to her father, she added: “I know you abused me. You don’t have the courage to tell me.” She, her brothers, her lawyer and even Dominique Pelicot’s own lawyer beseeched him in court to speak honestly about what he had done. Despite the photos, he said he had never touched his daughter and didn’t know who had taken them. One court psychiatrist suggested that for a victim like Darian to go through life not knowing was “mental torture”.

When she walked into that courtroom at the start of the trial, was she convinced he would tell her what happened? “There was a small part of me that was hoping,” she says. “I was really determined to make him recognise the facts. And I failed.”

She pauses and the word hangs in the air. Did she think it was her responsibility to make him speak? “You know I’m always reflecting on that, because I was tough and I asked him in a violent way. Maybe if I had been in a more emotional dimension, he would have told the truth. Anyway, it’s a fail for me.”

She says: “The only victim who knows – and not even the entire truth – is my mum. But even for my mum, he didn’t tell the whole truth or the full story. Even today, we don’t know how many men came to abuse my mother, and when it started. We still don’t know.”

Darian’s brothers, in court beside her, described the whole family’s “devastation”. Her husband, Pierre, a TV journalist, who she says has been a crucial support, also took the stand. He said the discovery on Pelicot’s computer of pictures of Darian apparently asleep in underwear that wasn’t her own “added horror to the horror”. He told the judges it wasn’t a question of “whether she was drugged, but why she was drugged”.

For Darian, the case has robbed her of one of the most basic necessities of life: sleep. How do you doze off at night when you fear you might have been abused in your sleep, when you are terrified you might lose control and become someone’s prey? When she first found out about the allegations, she didn’t sleep for five nights straight. She ended up needing medical help and was admitted to an emergency psychiatric ward where – terrifyingly for her – staff tried to sedate her. Yet the whole issue of sedation “was, you know the reason we were in this nightmare”. This hospital approach was “absolutely not what I needed”, she says. Her body and brain resisted drugs, “so they had to use this massive dose … it was really experimental”. This is now part of her campaign for better support of victims. She has tried to be honest in public about her vulnerability as a survivor, and not look like what she calls a “pseudo wonder woman”. She announced halfway through the trial that she would go into a clinic for a few days to try to recover after “weeks of repeated insomnia”.

Her view of herself has been shaken by the case. Her past has dissolved and weakened her foundations, she says. “I lost a part of me, I lost a part of my identity.” She carries what she calls the “crushing double burden” of being the child of the victim and the perpetrator. “You can’t imagine the sadness and the loneliness,” she says. “I’ve got a part of his DNA. And it’s difficult to be the daughter of the biggest sexual criminal for the past 10, 20, even 30 years, and at the same time be the daughter of an icon like my mum … I don’t know if it’s better to be the daughter of Gisèle or worse to be the daughter of Dominique Pelicot. I’ll have to live with that.”

Back in November 2020, the day after Gisèle broke the news to her children, Darian and her brothers took the train south to the house in Mazan, with its sunny back garden, synonymous with holidays. It was now quite terrifying and they feared all these men would come back at night. Dominique Pelicot had been taken into police custody and would await trial in prison. The children wanted to clear the house and get their mother out in a matter of days – they started selling furniture, emptying drawers, which they found full of debt notices incurred by their father. Darian smashed one of his amateur paintings (a nude). Gisèle left with two suitcases and her dog. Nearly 50 years of marriage had vanished, and she soon filed for divorce.

At that time, Darian was running over in her head odd things that had happened, signs she felt she had missed. She and her brothers, as well as Gisèle herself, had worried she had Alzheimer’s; they had booked neurologists and scans, but the tests always came back normal. Fearful, Gisèle had stopped driving; pinched herself when she took the train to Paris, worried she’d miss her stop; and was convinced she would be diagnosed with a brain tumour. “She was having a lot of blackouts,” Darian says. “She would sometimes seem incoherent on the phone.” Once, Darian’s son called his grandmother to tell her about his rugby tournament, and she started repeating herself nonsensically. Darian took the phone from him and asked: “Mum, what day is it?” Gisèle couldn’t reply.

Another time, Florian and his family had sat down to eat dinner in Mazan after Dominique Pelicot had served his wife a glass of rosé. Her elbow slid off the table and she nearly fell off her chair, seeming to collapse like a rag doll, glazing over, appearing hypnotised. Dominique Pelicot said her family were tiring her out.

Looking back, Darian says, these blackouts always happened in Mazan when Gisèle was with her husband, never when she was in the Paris area with her grandchildren. There were gynaecological problems, too – Gisèle was bleeding despite being post-menopause. A doctor diagnosed an inflammation of the uterus.

Does Darian still feel, as she wrote in her book, that “ignorance is culpable”; that she should somehow have noticed what was going on, despite the extent of her father’s manipulation? “No. Today, I think it wasn’t possible for me to have known. Because everything was premeditated, organised. We are all victims in this family – all collateral victims: my brothers and I, but also our children.”

Video evidence showed that Dominique Pelicot not only invited men to rape his wife in the couple’s marital bed in Mazan. He had also invited men to Darian’s home outside Paris. Just after Christmas in 2019, when Darian was away on a mini-break in Morocco and her parents were house-sitting, Dominique Pelicot invited a 34-year-old warehouse worker to rape his wife in Darian’s guest bedroom. In May of the same year, while alone with Gisèle at Darian’s holiday cottage on the Île de Ré off the Atlantic coast, Dominique Pelicot invited a man to rape her in Darian’s own bed. Video evidence showed the rapes went on for more than five hours that night. Asked in court why he had chosen to do this in his daughter’s holiday home, he said: “There was no symbolism. It could have happened anywhere.”

But Darian thinks the choice of location is meaningful. She also thinks it is significant, given her questions about her father’s potential abuse of her, that the retired nightclub worker who raped Gisèle at the holiday cottage had previously been sentenced to five years in prison for raping his own 17-year-old daughter. “That detail is so difficult to cope with,” she says. “Home is supposed to be a safe place, not that kind of crime scene.” That Dominique Pelicot had raped her mother in Darian’s homes “was like being abused a second time. I was betrayed by my father in different ways.”

With Dominique Pelicot deliberately leaving what she calls a “great fog” over the question of what he may have done to her, she is left with no foothold. She had a vaginal tear that would not heal and needed several surgeries (once, while she was recovering from surgery, her father called her, asking to borrow money). Of the injury she says: “I’ll never know if it’s linked or not. It’s part of an open question – unanswered.”

She believes her father used her as a guinea pig to test out his drug cocktails – his exchanges with men show him commenting on the different effects on a woman who did or didn’t smoke. She was an occasional smoker and her mother was not. It was clear from the police investigation that Dominique Pelicot only confessed to crimes when presented with irrefutable evidence, and often partly at the start. In 2022, while awaiting trial for the rapes of his wife, Dominique Pelicot was questioned about an attempted rape of a 19-year-old estate agent in 1999. She was the same age as Darian at the time, and he had attempted to anaesthetise her with ether. Dominique Pelicot denied it until confronted with DNA evidence on the woman’s shoe. But he offered up a comparison with his daughter, saying that when he undressed the woman and realised she was the same age as her he had felt “blocked”. Instead, the woman broke free and fought him off.

Darian is unsparing in her praise for her mother, with whom she appeared hand in hand in court. But she wrote in her book and says today that, as wife and daughter, they are “in a different place within the family” and have dealt with the bombshell of Dominique Pelicot’s abuse in different ways. She says not knowing if she was drugged or abused weighs heavily on the whole family. Darian feels that without clear evidence, her mother has sought to reassure her that it may not have happened.

In court, near the end of the trial, Gisèle did not want to answer questions from defence lawyers about what Dominique Pelicot may have done to her daughter, saying it was for him to answer that. One defence lawyer suggested there was a family rift. Gisèle replied: “This isn’t a trial of the family.”

Now, Darian speculates that maybe the prospect of a daughter’s abuse is just too much horror for her mother to contemplate all at once. “She is not able, from an emotional standpoint, I think, to face the truth. I think it’s too difficult for her. And it’s hard for me – it’s really hard for me.” But the family remains close and she thinks time will change things.

The trial never fully uncovered why Dominique Pelicot did what he did – if there even was a reason. He told the court: “You aren’t born a pervert, you become one,” citing his own abuse as a child. He said he had been raped aged nine by a nurse in hospital when he was being treated for a head injury. Aged 14, as an apprentice on a building site, he said he witnessed – and was forced to take part in – a group-rape of a woman whom he described as disabled. “It was too heavy to bear,” he told the court.

“To me, it was pure manipulation,” Darian says. “He was choosing his words to make us empathise with him. And he knows exactly how it works … where to press the button.” In the high-ceilinged courtroom, where Dominique Pelicot sat on one side in a glass-fronted dock, and Gisèle on the other, Darian felt there had been an invisible “arc between my mum and dad all through this trial”, in which he was trying to communicate with his ex-wife to let himself off the hook of responsibility. “In life, you decide who you want to be,” Darian says, brushing aside any excuses about childhood. This echoes her mother’s view, expressed in court, that, regardless of their past, a person “chooses” who they become.

Darian says she won’t let Dominique Pelicot’s perversity become “this family’s curse”, that she must stop what she calls the “deviance” infecting generation after generation. (The court heard an investigation is ongoing into whether Dominique Pelicot may have abused any of his grandchildren. He denies any abuse). Darian says her father’s family line was mired in abuse – part of a “dysfunctional family system”. Denis, Dominique Pelicot’s father, whom she remembers in jeans and a biker jacket, with a single earring, had been a violent tyrant. He was a caretaker at a rehabilitation centre for convicts. The court heard that Denis was suspected of grooming and abusing a young girl with learning difficulties who was fostered by the family; Darian calls her Lucille in her book. After his wife’s death, Denis made Lucille his partner. In court, questions were raised over whether Denis also ever brought in men to abuse Lucille. Darian now questions why her parents would later send her and her brother to stay with her grandfather and his partner over the summer, until she said she no longer wanted to go.

Her own son, whom she calls Tom in the book, at first didn’t believe his grandfather could have done harm to his grandmother. “We’ve done a lot of things to protect him,” she says. “When it happened he was six. Now he’s 10. He’s had two and a half years of support from a psychologist. And today he’s in good shape. We really wanted to preserve him. But he’s known the truth right from the start. We told him with simple words that his grandfather was in jail.”

Darian, who works as a senior communications manager at a large company in Paris, says the trial has inspired her to campaign even harder in support of victims of sexual violence. Returning to normal life is key. “My son and my husband are my two pillars in life,” she says. “I’m a mum, I’m married, I’ve got a social life, friends.”

A few days later, at the verdict in the packed Avignon courthouse, she watches with quiet anger as most of the men, some silently weeping, are led away to the cells. Dominique Pelicot will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, and all the other men are convicted. As Darian leaves the court with her mother, hundreds of supporters who have travelled from across France and Europe chant, “Thank you Gisèle” and then begin shouting, “Thank you Caroline!”

We speak again the next morning. She is still feeling shaken. The prison sentences, which ranged from three to 15 years, some of which were suspended, were lower than the state prosecutor had recommended. It is a disappointment. “It’s the wrong message,” she says. “It’s not the message we wanted to send to all the other victims in France.”

This means that for her “the fight is only just beginning”. She has decided to write another book, the behind-the-scenes story of the trial. “Because it’s not what you see from watching TV. And while this trial was happening, there were so many other trials going on where the victims were all alone.”

Gisèle Pelicot, her lawyers say, now hopes to resume “as normal a life as possible”. Darian herself will rest and spend time with her son, husband and brothers, before resuming campaigning.

In the final moments in the courtroom, Darian looked only briefly at Dominique Pelicot before he was led away. “It was the very last time I’ll see him,” she says. “It’s an end point. It’s the very last chapter in what was my life before.”

It will take a while to work through.

“There’s a kind of grief,” she says. “It’s a long process, mourning someone who is still alive.”

(archive)

[bloodlegacies]

Wait! So Serah was the half-sister of Cecilia and Caio? Did that happen before the Great Duchess married Cecilia's dad?

We know that Cecilia's mom doesn't like/trusts even kid!MC, are there other reasons, beside the old story of Northon's betrayal?

Spoilers spoilers

Yes, it happened before, so much so that they had to hide that case, and yes, it was discovered by the queen, Hayden's mother, but not by all the rest of the court. And yes, Serah technically speaking is Caio and Cecilia's half-sister.

Well, neither the king (Martell) nor Erianne (Grand Duchess) are very fond of the Darians, but concerning Erianne, this is also due to the fact that she was jealous of Alexandra. Even though Martell ended up with her later, he still had a crush on Alexandra.

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

honestly i think the duskborn rune is really burying the lead narratively. like, "death restored" just seems so... patently false as a descriptor? fia & co are kind of trying to do the Opposite of that.

like, ok, those who live in death came about because of ranni's two-time fracturing of the rune of death—once to unleash a tiny piece of it, and a second time to split the death between her and godwyn. explicitly, because of that second fracture, godwyn exists trapped in an in-between state, simultaneously dead and unable to die. he is dead but his corpse is also a living thing, growing blindly without consciousness. TWLID are similarly afflicted. their bodies are reborn over and over without release, and do not seem to... uh, retain a consciousness.

presumably, putting the rune of death back into the elden ring would stop the cycle of rebirth for everyone, not just them. if death were permanently unleashed onto the lands between, i think even godwyn would probably find release. b/c it's not just that ranni split their deaths—she also did it using a tiny stolen fragment of the rune, with maliketh still holding onto most of it. and you need The Whole Thing to end the game. so these... tiny traces are not really doing it.

crucially, fia could, but does not, ask you to restore that rune. instead, she gives you a new one. the one that she created by merging ranni's half-wheel with godwyn's. that will embed "life within death" into the order. if fia isn't trying to spread undeath to everyone in the lands between, wtf is she trying to do?? why does the rune seem to want to imply that she's restoring the natural order, when she herself seems to be so strongly against that possibility??

[katyspersonal]

I had a weird dream tonight about D fdhfdhsd

Well, as usual, my dreams are a mess of many things, but this one stood out the most. I kind of got to know him a little better and before long, I learned from him how to apply holy light to my sword to kill Those who Live in Death! He basically became my mentor figure somewhat

There was also this whole spiel about how the undeads are themselves not quite happy living like this; they lacked souls as much as the cause of their existence, but without his drive to exist. Basically, disturbed from their rightful rebirth or eternal rest, aimless. However, one undead stood out, being quite sentient and having nefarious purpose, and we were fighting him with a whole team of others! A team that'd all die if it was not for the skills D taught me earlier! And I after that searched D again to apologise to him. I clearly recall saying something like "Sorry, we were all thinking of you as just another fanatical psycho (?) revelling in "righteous" murder, and laughed at you behind your back, but I can see Those Who Live in Death are unhappy too and what you do is akin to mercy-killing". And he was actually confused because not even he quite realised until I spelled it out, but also was a bit bitter that I was speaking so lowly of him despite learning from him. He has forgiven me though but the feeling of shame was intense in the dream and I still remember it.

There was also more 'wholesome' time, closer to waking up, where we went to his "home" to have dinner and I've met his brother! The thing is, I was never able to tell them apart fdshhd I can only assume the one training me was Darian all things considered, but... you have no idea how identical they were. xD Absolutely the same. They were even pranking me using my inability to say who was who ;-; The 'one person, two bodies' effect was absurd and I basically reached the level of tossing a pillow at them in that 'stop already you guys!!!' as they were giggling at my confusion fhsdds

[commissionsdarian]

You understand some of the risks of both, but not too deeply it seems. If you did, you'd have made this decision already. It's better to appease the Commission. You can't pull the wool over their eyes as you can attempt with the others.

Making backup plans is still a good bet, but yes, take the chance the Commission gives you.

I do get the risks. I just can't tell whether or not things would work out well enough. Plus who am I to decide shit that has those risks? But at the same time it's best to just get things over with, do things myself, only involve others if and when needed or necessary

I mean I might be able to gaslight my way through the ranks if I try, you never know 👀

[troglodytepixieeater]

Tarnished Blood: Part 1

Disclaimer: want everyone to know that the future is not the canon of the series! This is my own personal headcanon of what I imagine my MC to have in the Blood Legacies (creator: @bloodlegacies). While I have read probably every piece of lore for the blog, there might be some things that are not canon in my story. If there are, then you can message me and correct me for future fanfics; however, it might not change said fanfic where I got the lore, magical properties, or anything else wrong.

Paring: Hayden x OC!Bianca

Warning: none?

-------------------------------------------------------

The sound of tapping brought Bianca out of her thoughts; however, she did not look at the source and instead stared at the key points that she would have to cover in the next meeting with the court about the trade routes written on a piece of parchment.

Maybe I should ask my father about this?

Bianca sighed. She missed her father dearly, and although she knew he would drop what he was doing to help her, she felt guilty bothering him with simple trade routes just for an excuse to check up on him.

He was still in Darian; however, it was really Bianca who kept her house in power and her people happy as she had come of age to rule. However, that did not mean her father just sat on his ass. No. If anything, he helped take most of the stress off her shoulders, making sure everything went smoothly. He wasn't just her commander anymore; he was her commander if the crown on her head was any indication.

It was odd having her father follow her orders and not the other way around; however, Bianca knew deep down that she would never be the one in charge when it came to the relationship with her father. She respected him too much. Maybe she should try not to rely on him too much and let him enjoy his time in his older years with that new lover of his.

What would I do without him?

That thought came with an aching feeling of grief at the thought of losing another parent; however, she scowled at herself for having such a morbid thought. Bianca knew that one day it would come when her father wouldn't be around, but she would get through it; it would be full circle as it would now be her turn to teach her own children to slowly let her go as they grew into adulthood.

Speaking of children, the tapping became so excessive that Bianca finally looked up from her notes to see her middle child tapping away at the table with her right hand, her index finger having just a hint of ice on her tip as she mulled over her notes. In her left hand sat a quill as her daughter wrote something down and then frowned before roughly scratching through the paper again.

Bianca couldn't help but have a small hidden smile as she stared at the twelve-year-old. At only twelve, her daughter, the second heir and princess of Petrus, was probably one of the smartest scholars that their kingdom has ever seen.

The way that she consumed knowledge was amazing; unlike her siblings, who saw their studies as chores or a responsibility, it seemed that her middle child enjoyed her studies. Now only if Bianca could get her daughter to pick up a sword like her oldest than would she be unstoppable.

Bianca just stared at her daughter, watching as her nose wrinkled when she got frustrated, and the tapping got louder and louder. Unable to sit still, just like her father, getting him to sit through a whole meeting, people would think you were sending him off to war at how he moped and pouted, but with a few threatening comforting words, he seemed to make it through the "torture."

Although Hayden wasn't nearly as focused as their middle child, when mentioned to him once when they were alone, Bianca remembered him saying that her nose wrinkle reminded him of his sister when she would get annoyed at him.

Bianca smiled at the thought, and she remembered thinking than that the name of her daughter was even more fitting.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Bianca finally pressed her lips together before speaking.

"Serah."

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Serah did not look up from her paper, and the tapping only seemed to increase, which put Bianca on edge.

"Serah." Bianca said again, a little more bite in her tone, and she noticed that her daughter's whole finger was covered in frost.

 Tap. Tap. Tap.

"Serah Gloryann Elkar!"

The princess looked at her mother, letting Bianca get a more full view of her daughter. Serah's light blonde curls were even more messy than usual, and Hayden's eyes stared back at her in a wide-eyed state.

"What is wrong?" Bianca spoke with a calmer voice, her expression remaining cold as usual.

Serah bit her lip as she looked down at the paper again and looked back at her mother, nervousness clear on her face as she shrank back.

"N-nothing." Serah spoke quietly, in her usual timid tone.

Bianca wished now more than ever that her daughter had not gotten her quiet nature from her; however, maybe that trait would stop the rumors that Serah was not her daugher. If she heard those whispers herself she would gladly show the stretch marks along her stomach. No one questioned if Serah was Hayden's child. Everyone could see she had Elkar blood through her veins just by looking at her eyes.

"I do not like being lied to by Serah." Bianca said this with a raised eyebrow and looked at the parchment in front of her daughter. "Does it have something to do with whatever you are writing?"

Serah's cheeks turned pink. "What? No!"

Bianca's eyes narrowed, which made the girl in front of her squirm in her seat. She needed to teach her daughter to have a better poker face if she wanted to survive in court.

I will make sure to give her a lesson some time next week.

The Queen made a mental note in her head as she studied her daughter's flushed expression and dilated pupils, and it all clicked into place. There was only one person who had any kind of effect on her daughter in such a way.

"You are writing to Zemislav." It was not a question but a statement as Bianca leaned back to get an even more perfect view of Serah's wide-eyed expression once again.

"He was just asking about something." Serah fiddled with the corner of her paper.

The...infatuation was clear on Serah's face, and Bianca held herself back from killing the young preteen that seemed to wiggle his way into her daughter's heart.

The queen side of her knew it would be a great match. Zemislav...while he was nothing like his mother, Sofia, who only wanted a sweet release of sleep, it seemed that Zemislav, from what Bianca had seen, never slept and was always a ball of energy ready to go off at any moment. Poor Sofia. But still, it was a good match for both families.

The mother side of Bianca wanted to strangle the young man; her daughter was only twelve, and now Bianca had to worry about crushes. She didn't even think that her eldest had become smitten with anybody as of late; however, that wasn't surprising since her eldest would rather be left alone with a training dummy than any kind of person if it didn't have to do with achieving progress in their kingdom.

Bianca shook her head and tried not to let a scoff slip. This Zemislav was fourteen and already in the academy; what in the gods names was he doing writing to her daughter when he should be focusing on his studies? Maybe she should write to Sofia.

Worry gripped Bianca like a viper, and she had to force herself to remain stoic. Serah could make the most successful battle plans and strategies; however, it was no secret that her middle child was naive about the setting of the court and the wicked ways that would try to use a young princess for their own personal gain, especially a marriage alliance.

Serah got Bianca's own quiet nature. Yes. But instead of the cold expression that Bianca was blessed with that sent people on their way or even Hayden's mischievous smirk that kept people on their toes, it seemed her daughter was blessed with an open, friendly smile, which made Bianca often question which side of the family she got it from.

Not Serah's grandfather...that was for sure.

Bianca let go of the chair arms that she didn't even realize she had gripped, which were now covered in a thick frost. Hopefully her daughter didn't see, and from her daughter's open expression, she did not.

"What did your friend want?" Bianca said the word "friend" with distaste that Serah didn't seem to catch.

"He was asking if you were going to be announcing that Martella was going to the academy soon......everyone is curious." Serah whispered, her voice cracking a little; however, her eyes were trained on Bianca, studying her.

Smart girl.

Bianca kept the fear off her face, and her hands shook under the table. "Tell Zemislav that there will be an announcement soon."

Serah bit her lip. "Mother, rumors are spreading of Martella's elemen-."

"That. Is. Enough." Serah shivered at her mother's cold tone.

Bianca continued. "I don't want to hear another word about this." Grayish blue eyes met light teal, and a look of understanding crossed over the table.

Serah nodded, looking back down at her quill before uttering a quiet. "Yes, mother."

The sound of the doors slamming open made the two royals turn in their seats.

Masterpost | NEXT

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Note: Blood Legacies is such an amazing story, and I can't wait for another update. While we have only touched the surface of what the author has planned for the series, I just appreciate the lore and the world that the author has created.

[goldhunt]

i do think the theory that only one D twin can be awake at a time and that's why devin is asleep-ish while darian is still alive, does hold water (and is also just fun to think about, especially with "not once do they stand together; not one word do they speak to one another."). it's actually grown on me quite a bit for its implications. but it has plot holes i can't ignore. most of all the fact that devin is still comatose after darian dies until you give him the armour after fia kills darian, while he wakes up by himself and attacks you in his pyjamas if you killed darian yourself. so darian's death by itself, or even had he gone to sleep, is not enough to wake devin and give back his strength, nor does he need the armour. that's why i still prefer the idea of devin being in that state because of the horrors he saw when he found godwyn. and learning of darian's death rattling him so much that he almost jump starts himself out of that slumber.

[wraith-caller]

@li-binauje-artisse left this as part of their response to me dissecting Darian's dialog about Rogier, and it encapsulates everything that frustrates me about the way this pair are often interpreted. Not just as a couple/friends, but as individuals. It's indicative of how large chunks of the fandom, in spite of apparently desperately clamoring for complex characters and nuanced storytelling, tend to often ignore those complexities when they discuss anything.

Let's start with Rogier. "Innocent martyr fighting for social justice". It hits the nail right on the head. I see him characterized as any of the following: hating the Golden Order, a rebel, defiant, a revolutionary, 'the good guy', a progressive. But does his story actually bear that out?

No, it doesn't. Here he is, talking about the Golden Order:

The battle art you've learned is of the glintstone family. They were conceived at the great Academy of Raya Lucaria, to the north of this castle. In the past, they obeyed laws which contravened the Golden Order, or so I'm told. Fascinating, isn't it? That the Golden Order was pliable enough to absorb practices that contradicted itself in the past. With the Order broken, twisted, and in need of repair, such adaptability is more important now than ever.

Nowhere in Rogier's dialog does he speak ill of the Golden Order itself. Nowhere does he say he's intent on tearing it down, that it needs to be stopped, that it needs to be erased. He admits it is FLAWED and that it needs REPAIRED. He's not a champion of human rights looking to topple a cruel and violent regime. He admires the Golden Order's pliability, knows it has issues, and seeks to fix it, NOT destroy it. He's an academic with a single-minded obsession, and that obsession is repairing this error. Even his interest in the undead seems less about the undead themselves being oppressed and more about the fact they are a consequence of a broken system(see his lines about the undead committing no offences, that they have simply touched on a flaw and now exist, as opposed to Fia's more blatantly sympathetic perspective that the undead are 'unfairly persecuted' by 'dogmatic brutes'). From his perspective, if we were to simply fix that bug, then everything would be fine again! Nevermind that the Order is founded on violence and genocides, that it is built on a brutal caste system which denies those who don't fit within it their basic rights. His perspective on it has narrowed down to this one issue - which, don't get me wrong, it definitely is an issue needing fixed. But it's like putting a band aid on a paper cut while ignoring all the stab wounds. There are a lot of terrible things at work here, and it's going to take more than one thing to fix any of it.

I'm not saying Rogier is a fervent acolyte, or that it's totally unreasonable to think he may care about some of these other issues, but we don't see any of that, so it gets into headcanon territory to speculate about what he thinks of the GOs other problems. What's LESS up to headcanon is the fact that he is not a defiant person. He's not a rebel. His behavior often displays the OPPOSITE, that he is quite the people pleaser, that he is someone who is not keen on 'rocking the boat' and drawing potentially negative attention to himself. His repeated apologizing to us for things like being paralyzed or getting injured, his willingness to lie to others to avoid upsetting them, his pleasant demeanor in spite of his inner turmoil, and his about face in his cut dreambrew dialog where he switches from resentful to gracious at the drop of a hat are all evidence of this. He is not some free-spirited revolutionary who will proudly defy an oppressive system. Even with the issue of TWLID, he's cautious about sharing his perspective on it, knowing it is an uncommon one that would raise someone's ire. He says we "may find this peculiar" when he tells us he wants to save the dead, not just because of one bad conversation with Darian, but because this is likely an unusual perspective period, among the majority of people, not just the hunters. Otherwise, why would he think WE find it peculiar when we have nothing to do with D, and have said nothing to indicate we hold a similar perspective?

What frustrates me about people taking these traits away from him and making him into some self-assured and confident trailblazer is that it erases a story about someone finally being able to find their spine after a potential lifetime of setting himself aside to please others. He expresses nothing of himself, none of his miseries and griefs, except this one belief that has become so important to him that he's willing to lose someone he once cared about over it. Rogier is not someone who was always bravely defiant. He is someone learning, at the last minute, how to stand up for himself and have the courage to put his foot down. Making him out to be some rebel hero of the underdogs robs him of that, and kind of minimizes a lot of his emotional issues. It also often overlooks his own participation in this oppressive system - not just that he used to likely hunt the dead alongside Darian, but that he encourages us to become Elden Lord and perpetuate the existence of the Golden Order. Maybe we fix this one problem he's invested in solving, but what about all the others that will continue to exist? It's the classic tendency to see morally grey characters in a black and white light because you like them. Rogier is a fan favorite, so he must agree with all of the 'good' perspectives on things, isnt it obvious? Well, no, it isn't, and it'd be cool if people kept insisting otherwise outside the realm of their own headcanon or fanfiction.

Okay, so how about Darian? "The Hater." "Fascist zealot," as @irithylldancer (and let's be real, anyone who has looked at any discussion about Darian at all) has seen him called before. After all, how could anyone hate zombies cursed to live without a soul who enact violence on people without apparent cause? A lot of folks point out that any enemy is like that, and will just attack on sight, but that's just plain not true. Variants of wandering nobles will actually flee from you and beg you to spare them, so it's not like the devs couldn't have thrown a few TWLID with these behaviors in if we were really supposed to think it's just a matter of us terrorizing them.

But that's besides the point anyway. This is about lost nuance in characters. The nuance with Darian is often lost at this: people see the game use the word 'Fundamentalist' and think instantly of the real world group that is referred to with the same term. That is, Christian conservatives who are often quite regressive, with racist/bigoted biases. Sorry folks, but that's not what a Golden Order Fundamentalist is. So what are they?

Law of Regression: The fundamentalists describe the Golden Order through the powers of regression and causality. Regression is the pull of meaning; that all things yearn eternally to converge.

Law of Causality: The fundamentalists describe the Golden Order through the powers of regression and causality. Causality is the pull between meanings; it is the connections that form the relationships of all things.

Golden Order Principia: Prayerbook of the Golden Order fundamentalists. A dense and complex academic treatise that contains the Order's fundamental principles.

Golden Order seal: Fundamentalism is scholarship in all but name.

Is that clear enough? GO Fundamentalists are not "the racist part". They are not "the bigoted part". They are the SCHOLARS. They are devoted to understanding the fundamentals of the Golden Order. This is NOT the same as real world Christian Fundamentalism. The hunters aren't trying to destroy a culture that's foreign to them, or eliminate a racial group, or put down the disabled(though obviously the GO is still horrible and does things like that with their treatment of omen and misbegotten), or 'hunting the dead for sport' like it's just a fun game for them. They're fighting a literal plague, a dangerous curse that undoes death and leaves soulless corpses shambling across the lands, inflicting violence on others. It's not bigotry to think deathroot is a problem. It's not fascism to want to stop an illness from spreading. It's not cruel to want to prevent corpses - who inherently can't consent to anything - from being plucked out of the ground like daisies and forced to shamble around soullessly and suffer existence whether they want to or not. Even Goldmask, in his criticism of the hunters, is not upset with their treatment of TWLID. He's disappointed in their desire to have an evil to defeat, which he doubts is even a possibility. Order Healing says:

The noble Goldmask lamented what had become of the hunters. How easy it is for learning and learnedness to be reduced to the ravings of fanatics; all the good and the great wanted, in their foolishness, was an absolute evil to contend with. Does such a notion exist in the fundamentals of Order?

Goldmask isn't mourning the undead, and he isn't condemning the hunters for their treatment of them. He is saying what the game itself repeatedly says to us through these nuanced stories told with every single character: there is no absolute evil to be found. You can quash this problem of deathroot and its consequences, and there are still a thousand more flaws in this Order because the very nature of rule by man, even when elevated to godhood, is itself flawed, because humans are imperfect creatures. Rogier tells us the undead aren't evil, they simply exist whether they want to or not. The problem is the hunters like Darian are looking for an outside evil to defeat when there isn't one, the call is coming from inside the house, only Darian is too devoted to the Order to admit it. The undead may be violent, they may kill, they may be cursed, but this doesn't make them inherently evil. They only exist through a loophole in the Order, and the hunters deny that such a loophole could exist because the Order must be perfect.

Even with his flawed beliefs, Darian is far from hateful or a fascist. He laments the death of a criminal when we meet him. He tries to deter us from harm. He offers us help by showing us the waygate to Caelid, and asks - not demands - that we take his place in serving Gurranq. He never asks us if we're allied with the Golden Order, never asks us to prove we're ideologically pure or even aligned with him. He eagerly calls us a comrade, and in spite of his disagreement with Rogier, continues helping him with his research. What kind of 'hateful fascist' behavior is that? The only thing he despises are TWLID, and yes, his hatred of them is intense, and it is probably irrational to some degree - it's very unlikely they're as aware and conscious as a normal, non-undead human being would be, and we know they didn't spring up out of the ground because they felt like defying Marika's will. But his hatred is also not baseless. It's not him hearing from the Order that these are his enemies and he must hate them because they are Different. His hatred is a result of witnessing their violence firsthand. The game didn't go out of its way to introduce him mourning a victim of the undead for no reason.

And beyond this, there's a far more personal reason he must preserve the Order, why he must fervently believe they are right about who is accursed and who isn't. He and Devin were completely shunned from every society except the Golden Order. Of course he's attached, of course he's invested. If his options are "Golden Order or nothing", he's going to take the Golden Order, and it's really difficult to blame someone for making a choice like that. If you are rejected from birth by every society except one, you're going to be desperate enough for that acceptance that you'll do anything to keep your place in it. So when met with Rogier's revelation that the Golden Order is wrong about who is cursed and who isn't, doesn't it make perfect sense that Darian doesn't handle it so well?

No this isn't the first time I've ranted about this and it probably won't be the last. I just love these characters too much and hate seeing their rich potential for interesting storytelling reduced to a black-and-white narrative for easy consumption. No aspect of this game includes a simple, straightforward progressive vs regressive, hero vs villain, good guy vs bad guy story, even down to characters as minor as Rogier and Darian.

[hunter-beholder]

Verses —

Traveling Companion;

Before D's time of retirement in the Rountable, far more active in his pursuit of weeding Deathroot, and for some time, accompanied by Spellblade Rogier, beneath the wing of the Beast Clergyman, Gurranq. Excursions through catacombs and the stagnant waters where Mariners lurk.

Tarnished;

Whether the twins are Tarnished or not is unclear, so this could be an exploration of that possibility; perhaps Devin having a maiden or other who guides him to the Roundtable, as Darian follows in his twin's footsteps with an intent of killing Fia. Darian remains unscathed from the grasp of death whereas Devin is less fortunate, Darian has seen his brother die time and time again. In order to prevent such from occurring, he retains possession of the soul while Devin remains dormant.

Those Who Live in Death;

Post-questline, following the failure of their purpose, the twins are recycled through the tainted roots of the Erdtree, rising from the dead as the very thing they swore to destroy. They are entirely cast from their Order, while being utterly disgusted by what they have become. With no soul to share, both twins are conscious, finally standing together, speaking to one another, and it is then they realize they are practically strangers to one another.

Yesterday;

Before the Shattering, when the twins bathed in the golden rays of Leyndell. Young Darian is a knight's squire, training to one day take their place. A seedling of jealousy is planted within Devin, who was not nearly as qualified for squireship as his brother. Perhaps Darian bumps into Rogier, a potential prisoner of war?

AUs—

Bloodborne;

Part of the fanatical partition of the Healing Church's Executioners. Their unwavering loyalty to Logarius could be entirely real or parasocial depending on the timeline organized. There could also potentially be themes of beasthood and general blood-drunkenness to explore.

[bloodlegacies]

Is it safe to assume that Eleazar cares less about whether or not the Mc has wooed someone than how King Elkar is with Hayden?

As long as there are no children, right?

As long as there are no children involved, Eleazar doesn't care much about who the mc sleeps with, unless it's Caio, Hayden or Nix, then he does care, a lot. The others he doesn't care, as long as they don't bring problems like bastards or speak bad nonsense about the mc to the rest of the people in Darian.