#maiden astraea/garl vinland

[patchesenthusiast]

the world would've been better if killing these two was purely optional tbh (i cant cope)

+ a silly

[valevod]

I have finally played Demon's Souls !!!! (Remake) and so ends my soulsborne collection......

The game was super easy eiwnnsn, maybe having all of the bosses except like, 2, being gimmicks... had a fun time nonetheless!! The Nexus is so cool and my new fave hub..... and hugh orh djjjj ejjjkk errrr i m... the music hasnt particularly struck except One who craves Souls and Maiden Astraea which will feed my ears for the next months on loop.

Time to plat it ig 🐓

[feartheoldblog]

@smoughenthusiast LOOOOOOOOOOOOKKKK

"How dare you persist in intruding our haven! You abandoned us long ago, what right do you have?!!"

---

Maiden Astraea and Garl Vinland from Demon's Soul

[soulsmusings]

Maiden Astraea and the Grief of Lost Faith

Many Souls fans liken the Maiden Astraea fight in Demon's Souls to Great Grey Wolf Sif in Dark Souls, describing both as tearjerkers that made them "feel like the bad guy."

The comparison always rubbed me the wrong way—not because it was misplaced or dishonest, but because it was shallow.

It centers how the player feels, and only that. To be fair, this is an understandable response, and definitely an overt part of the text. Against both Astraea and Sif, the player's success in combat, which has thus far been their primary means of progress, is now being scrutinized in a way that casts them unfavorably. They're being forced to reckon with the personhood of the enemy, with their enemy's good intentions and noble virtues.

Suddenly the assumption underpinning most video games—that your actions are good because they're yours—is overturned, and the mechanical rewards for combat are now complicated by emotional punishment. You're fighting a good person, and so you, the player, might just be a bad person.

This is very much in tune with the video gaming zeitgeist of the early 2010s. Dark Souls released just a year before Spec Ops: The Line, which does this same trick on an enormous scale, to well-deserved critical success. Players are placed in the mind of a paranoid American soldier in the Middle-East, and slowly slip into moral depravity as they go from "fighting terrorists" to "suppressing insurgents" to dropping white phosphorous on a refugee camp.

"Are we the baddies?" was really quite a novel idea at the time. It was novel enough that it could be the driving thesis of an entire game.

Perhaps this is why it still stands as the prevailing sentiment around Maiden Astraea—especially when Great Grey Wolf Sif, whose boss fight falls pretty squarely in line with the trend, is such an immediate point of comparison.

But the fight with Maiden Astraea and Garl Vinland is saying something more than that, I feel. The comparison to Sif is what crystallized this vague feeling into a clear, certain thesis for me. It's not just that the player is set against someone "good" or "noble" in Astraea, in the way that Sif is a good dog.

Astraea sets the player against someone human, who is experiencing the height of human loss: the loss of faith.

On some level, all of Demon's Souls is about our human yearning for the sublime, be it supernal or infernal, and the horrible failure that comes when we reach too far.

King Allant reaches for sublime power. In so doing, he achieves a new perspective that shatters his previous understanding of the world—including the values of feudalism and nationalism that drove him to seek power in the first place.

Sage Freke reaches for sublime truth. He believes that with knowledge that is normally forbidden to mortals, he can achieve the just and equitable world that is normally denied to mortals. In the end, however, he fails to consider his own mortal limitations, and he succumbs to the influence of the demon souls.

So on and so forth. The pattern is a familiar one. As Arthur Machen says in his supernatural horror story, "The White People," true sin comes in the "attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner." This plays out with many key characters of Demon's Souls, each one exploring this cardinal sin from a new angle.

Saint Astraea does this too, yet she does it from an angle that I, as a former Catholic, find uniquely sympathetic. It begins when she reaches out for God, and catches only empty air.

"Dear Lord, you are too cruel... You have abandoned us. Is that not punishment enough?"

It's never stated what exactly causes this realization in Astraea—that the God of her world is a distant watchmaker at best, a cruel absent parent at worst. It could have been a direct revelation, such as King Allant received from the Old One, but this doesn't seem likely.

From what the text offers us, I think that Astraea's faith was broken by the Valley of the Defilement itself.

We hear from Biorr that King Allant "fought vigilantly against the vile and depraved," and we see through Yuria's torture that these labels were used for people on the fringes of society, to justify their persecution. Surely this extends also to the "lost and ill-fortuned souls" who were driven to the Valley of Defilement. The land was presumably called the "Valley of Defilement" well before the demon scourge broke out, and so it's the inhabitants themselves—the poor, the diseased, the unwanted—who are the "defilement." Them, and the rubbish and waste that are disposed of there.

The fact that we see aborted fetuses at various points throughout the Valley, mingled with the muck and the refuse and the remains of animals, speaks to the dire state of living there. As the filthy beggar woman says, it's "all the rot of the world, living or not," and it leaves no room for sanity or dignity.

Whatever can be said of the exact circumstances that produced this, or of the land itself, the fact remains that the misery of the Valley's inhabitants is of decidedly human origin.

Bear this in mind when you consider that the Church of Demon's Souls sends missionaries there—as if the Valley folk were suffering from some natural calamity, and not from the malice of the ruling class.

Perhaps that's all the Church could do. After all, the real-life Catholic Church has always been a powerful political entity, but never have they been able to erase poverty or prejudice, or directly stop a monarch from doing something. The same must apply to the definitely-not-Catholic Church of this fictional world, which is pretty committed to realism in that regard.

But even so, it should come as no surprise that every missionary who entered the Valley of Defilement was killed, either by the people or by the land itself.

These missionaries come from the very society that drove the Valley's inhabitants to such inhumane lows. How would they, who live in relative comfort, know how to navigate this treacherous hellhole? And why would anyone accept charity from the hand that beats them down?

So when Saint Astraea enters the Valley of Defilement, full of genuine compassion and goodwill, what does she see?

She sees the sheer magnitude of human suffering, the depth of the squalor, the inhumanity that it represents... and no relief from anywhere. Not from the Church she serves, and not from God on high. Not even in this end-of-days scenario, when demons walk the earth and miracles are witnessed again, does God's supposed mercy reach the Valley.

Saint Urbain might be a deluded, bigoted fool, but he might not be entirely wrong when he calls the people of the Valley "those left behind by God." Perhaps all of mankind has been left behind, and only in the Valley of Defilement is that truth laid bare.

What can anyone do in the face of such a horrible truth?

If you don't run away from them, how do you answer people who are suffering and dying on this scale? If they need miracles, and God does not provide, what do you do?

These questions don't pertain solely to the fiction of Demon's Souls. These are questions that have echoed across human history, philosophy, theology, and myth. Reckoning with the impossible scale of human suffering—the inevitability of it, the ubiquity of it, the horrible depths of it—has been the preoccupation of our greatest thinkers for, well, pretty much all of our time on this planet.

Even when some of us arrive at an answer, it's never a wholly satisfactory answer, and it's usually contingent upon an existing framework of values and beliefs. The Pope says one thing, the Dalai Lama says another, so on and so forth, and the greater share of humanity continues to suffer all the while.

As for Astraea's answer, I'll once again quote the prologue to Machen's "The White People":

"[H]oliness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon."

She does this quite literally. She cannot access the power of God, so she accepts a demon's soul, and uses its power to bring relief to the Valley of Defilement.

Because this power is infernal, not supernal, she cannot purify the foul stagnant waters of the swamp, nor can she cure the diseases of the poor. Rather, she gives the Valley's inhabitants an affinity for filth and disease; it becomes their sustenance rather than their bane, their strength rather than their weakness. The natural order is inverted completely.

This is why Astraea is "the most impure demon of all." Her demonic power imitates the divine mercy that she longs for, yet the results couldn't be more different—perhaps, also, because she extends her mercy to those deemed impure themselves. The description of the spell Death Cloud, made from Astraea's demon soul, says as much.

And in a cruel twist of irony, Astraea's damnation does not ease the pain and misery of the Valley's inhabitants. The Archstone before Astraea's boss room reads, "The poor journey to this rotten place to offer their souls [to Astraea] so that they might be freed from their suffering." They might be sustained by the Valley's filth now, but they are still suffering from it.

They find lasting relief only in giving up their souls to feed Astraea's power, thus perpetuating the whole horrible system.

Astraea's wounds bleed perpetually, never closing, never healing. Her blood fills the grotto where she sits as an object of adoration, still performing the functions of a religion that failed her. All she can say, over and over, is that God has abandoned her, abandoned the world—she has no fewer than three separate voice lines saying this.

Notably, though others might call her a witch, she never turns to "witchcraft" in the archetypal sense. Her grief never turns to anger; she never rails against God. She never discards her clerical robes, she never dons a pointed hat, and she never casts curses or spells. She is stuck as Maiden Astraea, Saint Astraea, frozen in a state of loss.

The moment of her trauma, of her loss of faith, is extended into perpetuity. Even the boss music reflects this:

The melody loops and loops and loops, and any resolution feeds immediately into another loop. It's a textural piece more than anything, but you can't help getting lost in the endless repetition of that simple, incomplete melody.

Astraea's knightly bodyguard, Garl Vinland, also seems to be lost in unending grief. He rests in a pile of corpses, never removing the armor that is the sign of his holy vow. If you kill Astraea before him, he simply stands in shock, unable to move or speak or act. Unable to move on.

Anyway, uhh...

All of this? A wound that never heals, a grief that never ends?

Yeah, that's... that's how it feels to have lost your faith.

That's how I feel, anyway.

As you probably gathered already, this reading of Astraea is informed by my perspective as an ex-Catholic, now agnostic. My own loss of faith was very painful. It spanned the entire length of my adolescence, into young adulthood—as my rational mind was growing, my queerness was rising to the level of conscious feeling, and nearly every support system in my life was failing me.

My parish community was run by hypocritical bullies, and harbored an actual, real, pedophile priest, but still I reached out to God for answers. I looked to theology instead of community, to study and meditation and prayer. I looked for answers to my own suffering, and to the world's suffering. I looked for resolutions to all the insane contradictions. I looked for something to sustain the faith that was being asked of me. Surely God wouldn't abandon me, even if my parents and teachers and peers were all against me.

In the end, it all fell out from under me. I found plenty to admire, but even more to doubt and disdain.

I couldn't stop loving God or Jesus, but now it felt like they were dead at my feet, and that rot and maggots were visibly eating the corpses—and that everyone around me was politely pretending that they weren't.

I remember crying to my mother when my dog died around this time, and she tried to comfort me with talk of heaven, and I was just inconsolable. All I could say, as I cried for this sweet little animal who had loved me, was that I was "scared for the world." That nothing could ever possibly be right, nothing in the whole wide world, if God weren't there. I could no longer imagine a good, just end to any human life or endeavor, because the only end was death.

I've since recovered from that very low point in my life, and grown into a much happier adult. The grief never left me entirely, though.

The loss of my faith is likely the single most impactful event in my life. Because I'm no longer Catholic, I was able to transition, and I was able to find friends and partners who mean everything to me...

...but because I was Catholic, and still feel that small aching hole inside, I've spent the greater part of my life immersed in art, literature, and philosophy that explores the space where God once lived in my heart. I've spent years studying apocalyptic religions and their various underpinnings—political, social, theological, and narratological. I've become a literary critic, and a scholar of Victorian religion. My first published article is about how Elizabeth Gaskell positions the Victorian working class as an "apocalyptic demographic."

My favorite musical is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. My favorite author is Arthur Machen. My favorite video game is Demon's Souls. The grief that I feel for my lost faith is hardly all of me, but it has touched every part of me.

So when people who have never experienced such grief compare Maiden Astraea to the big sad wolf from Dark Souls, I feel a little frustrated. As a character and a symbol, she's so much more than that.

I could go on, and resolve this rambling, messy, emotional essay in some kind of critical statement about Demon's Souls... but I think I'll just leave it at that. I suppose I just wanted other people to understand what I feel, to see what I see, and to know why this video game is special to me.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Umbasa.

[wintrsss]

.ೃ࿐ INTRODUCTION

this is a redo my rules/ intro, so if this seems similar, that's why. lots has changed so feel free to reread. ^^

Helloo, I’m wintrsss, and welcome to my blog! I’ll be writing my own little ideas/scenarios for the character’s below, but if you’d like to personally request something, go ahead and request it through my ask box! (Requests are also really appreciated.)

Constructive criticism is much obliged! Let me know if there’s anything I can improve on and I’ll try my hardest to do so!

If at any time something I make contains spoilers, I will try to mark it as such.

I tend to get busy for random periods of time, so please understand.

.ೃ࿐ REQUEST GUIDELINES

what's stated below can be subject to change. if you have any questions, let me know!

(TMTL: too many to list. I'll probably accept most characters requested, if it's not an absurd amount, but don't be surprised if I don't write for someone!)

(Inc. dlc: includes characters in the DLC(s) of the game. Npc's, bosses, etc)

(+: this means that the person mentioned before and after this sign go hand in hand; character x reader x character)

I CURRENTLY WRITE FOR— death stranding (sam p. bridges, higgs monaghan, cliff unger), dark souls 1-3 (TMTL, Inc. dlc), elden ring (TMTL, Inc. dlc), bloodborne (TMTL, Inc. dlc), lies of p (pinocchio, alidoro, romeo), demons souls (ostrava, yurt, garl vinland + maiden astraea), sekiro: shadows die twice (wolf, genichiro, isshin, emma, owl), witch hat atelier (qifrey, olruggio, easthies, beldaruit, utowin, hieheart)

I WILL ACCEPT— headcanons, fluff, yandere, poly.

I WONT ACCEPT— character x character, character x oc, minor x adult, full-on fics, mental illnesses/ disorders towards the reader (I don’t have much knowledge on this topic and don’t want to write them wrong and offend anyone!), any vague requests like (can you do [character] x reader hcs?) so please be specific on what you want!

.ೃ࿐ MASTERLISTS

—death stranding

[girlvinland]

Every day sad bc Mudae doesn’t have any of my Fromsoft hammer boys. How are you gonna have Demon of Song and Royal Rat Authority and the twenty DS2 NPCs no one cares about but not Velstadt. You have Raime! How are you gonna have Maiden Astraea with no Garl Vinland at her side. Eygon ok, I get it. BUT CMON 😠.

[luminaryofblood]

Got Miquella playing the role of the maiden Astraea, with the role of Garl Vinland being either Malenia - or Mohg.

[feartheoldblog]

maiden astraea and garl vinland deserved better ‼️‼️‼️‼️

[smoughenthusiast]

10,18 and 30! :D

10. Who is your favorite Demigod?

Soooo uhhh if i said Marika would I get punted for not being lore accurate? (yes)

Since I cant choose Marika, I choose Radahn. He's simply too gender with that whole outfit and the tragedy of being a cannibalistic warlord...wish we could travel back in time and fight him in his prime...as broken and dead that would make us afterwards...

I was also going to say Godwyn, but his interp was ruined so bad for me that i cant really recover 😭 used to find him my favorite as an annoying pretentious "deserve to be dead" fuck.

18. What are you top 3 favorite ost tracks?

Well I'm not really one to listen to the music during a hype fight, but some tracks do stand out a lot compared to the others. I'll try getting 3 of them, but I couldn't say they'll consistently be my top 3.

3. Ludwig the Accursed, not to be like everyone else ever in the Fromsoft cesspool

2. Gascoigne's theme, the hunt emphasis is very much there

1. Maiden Astraea and Garl Vinland, the perfect mix of empathy and hard defensive magic, nearly made me cry from the beauty of it. And I don't cry much.

30. Rank the games you've played!

I would include other souls games like salt and sanctuary or hollow knight or mortal shell, but I'm pretty sure this is a fromsoftware-based question 💀. I find it difficult to really rank them for certain, I like them all...

7. Dark Souls II

6. Elden ring

5. Dark Souls III

4. Bloodborne

3. Sekiro

2. Demon's Souls

1. Dark souls I

again, this list is HEAVILY influenced by aesthetic, aka my personal love. If you told me anything about elden ring or ds3 or ds2, i would also go insane to hear about it. I love all the games dearly. Ranking them is a crime as they all go on my top shelf for gaming preference

...except for ds2. It was ok, lore carried.

[death-rebirth-senshi]

I mean Friede doesn't abhor violence but she's dressed as a nun and barefoot and a walking homage to Priscilla, definitely has a delicate holy pure maiden aesthetic.

Slash really it all goes back to Maiden Astraea in demon's souls

Malenia is more Garl Vinland

[blood-darkened-moon]

Demon’s Souls

NPCs Slayer of Demons | Maiden in Black | Ostrava of Boletaria | Biorr of the Twin Fangs | Yurt the Silent Chief | Yuria the Witch | Mephistopheles

Bosses Flamelurker | Penetrator | Garl Vinland | Maiden Astraea | Old King Allant | Dragon God | The Old One

Enemies Phosphorescent Slug | Plague Baby

[fannishcodex]

#Demons Souls #garl vinland #maiden astraea #soulsborne #blood #plainandgeneric draws

My favourite maiden/knight pair in the souls series. 

[8bitsupervillain]

Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree

Spoilers for an area I found.

I think St. Trina likes me. The whole area leading down to this arena with the Putrescent Knight reminded me a whole lot of the area in the Ringed City from Dark Souls 3 where the city seems to be crumbling down a hole before you fight the prince of lasers. Also I dig the subtle callback to Maiden Astraea and Garl Vinland from Demon's Souls.

[asleepinawell]

more random soulsborne rambling

i've been noting all the revisited themes that show up across multiple games as I've been bouncing around replaying the series. most people who have played them know that from soft loves reusing concepts over and over, from characters to those poison swamps we all love so much

one that struck me this time was the character pairing that pops up several times that could be roughly classified as a version of the 'lady and knight' trope (though they're all more interesting than most manifestations of it)

in demon's souls you have maiden astaea and garl vinland at the end of valley of defilement. astraea has abandoned her faith and taken in a powerful demon soul to attempt to protect the inhabitants of the valley. while she is supposedly quite powerful, she isn't formidable in combat, leaving the fighting to her loyal protector garl vinland

the most obvious parallel to them is malenia and miquella in elden ring. the haligtree serves much the same function as valley of defilement and was created by miquella, the eternal child who is watched over by his sister, malenia. miquella, like astraea, has also rejected his former beliefs and left with his one loyal protector. also similar is the fact that both astraea and miquella have some doubt hanging around them as to the true purpose of their ambitions

dark souls 3 has another one in lothric and lorian, the cursed princes. while they aren't protecting a cast out people like the other two pairs, they do have a lot of parallels to malenia and miquella especially (cursed siblings, children of royalty who fucked off from their duty, older melee fighter sibling with a disability). the ds3 dlc also had the painter and gael who have a similar vibe

ds1 didn't have a notable version of this but it does have priscilla who is presiding over a world of the wretched and unwanted and whose dialogue echoes astraea's

ds2 i don't remember well enough and i can't think of one from bloodborne, so it may just be those three (i have not played most of sekiro)

the three examples above were also all fights that felt like they were meant to make you question your own motivations and morality in the game. astraea especially. the idea that your character is actually kinda shitty and whatever they're fighting for is maybe not great is pervasive in the games (this is a bit more complicated in demon's souls)

this whole post is more an observation than trying to prove a point. i just really enjoyed the way this theme was used and how each implementation had parallels but remained unique

[lavi1avi]

Going have this be one of a few posts I make about Demon's Souls, Soul Series, and Other Stuff related that I wanted to make a post about. This post mainly talking about what I think was the draw of Demon's Souls for me, and what eventually made me stop caring for the soul's series.

I think the obsession of future souls games to focus more on combat was a massive misstep that fromsoft doesn't want to take back. The combat in DeS was simple, slow, and did it's job well enough for a hack n slash dungeon crawler.

Slow is said here in positive sense. To me it being slow makes it easier for me to play since I can more easily understand what's going on. As I'm getting older I feel that my taste in action games are veering away from high octane quick reflexes type deals.

The main focus of the game isn't to master the combat system, the real focus is trying to navigate and outsmart a world that is actively hostile to you. The simple combat is just one of your main tools to do so. Every level and boss had gimmicks to throw at you to see if you can figure it out.

These gimmicks are what made the game so memorable to me. I can still remember almost every boss, their name, how they fight, how to beat them. False King Allant being the only enemy in any of the souls games that can level you down will live rent free in my head. As well as his massive charge magic attack that takes up 90% of the arena. Seeing Storm King emerge from the clouds and wondering how you can fight against it. Only to come across Storm Ruler in the boss arena which you use to rend the boss out of the sky. Using the Cat's Ring in order to more easily sneak by the Old Hero. Figuring out the Adjudicator isn't the big yellow meat cleaver wielding blob, but the golden crow perched on it's head. Everything about Maiden Astraea and Garl Vinland. The Old Monk making use of the multiplayer aspect of the game to summon another player to be your boss fight. The True Final Boss being a sad mutated blob of a man that can barely fight back.

And I feel that's why I ended up becoming so disillusioned with the souls series as it went on. The more it went it, the gimmicks just went away. Getting replaced with more straight forward and faster combat. Everyone oohs and aahs as their character rolls in the mud 10 times in a row to avoid a regular enemy or boss that does 10 billion hit combos back to back. To the point that I can't even touch Dark Souls 3 without being falling into a malaise, and seeing Elden Ring finally made me realize I was left behind.

[depvotee]

I know this is post is from like months ago, but I disagree:

There's a lot of GRRM all over the game, the Demigod ARE indeed a massive part of his input we can see it on the relationships they have with one another either strained or still pretty much loyal and loving claming this isnt downplaying FromSoftware involvement whatsoever they brough GRRM to write and the devs brough them to life, just like well: a collaboration work. Miyazaki's games has ALWAYS shared same themes as GRRM's works because he's a fan of ASOIAF of course they're going to match but the specific themes is: symbols of power.

Despite all the cosmic powers of the demigods, despite all their abilities and divine right they failed. Miserably too, they're as pathetic and petty as the ASOIAF characters: Malenia and Radahn whole battle begin a good example of this with both begin the most likely candidates to the Elden Ring but failing miserably due to fighting with each other which ended on neither winning and both losing themselves. Radahn is a huge, hulking monster still adamant on riding his tiny febble horse, Malenia on the prospect of losing for the first time in her life she releases the Scarlet rot. I also notice the parallel of Morgott and Stannis Baratheon both are bitter with their families, specially their brothers/siblings due to their unruly behavior and both are staunchly defendants of Status Quo. GRRM and Miyazaki re-use previous tropes of their own works to give a spin to them in a new setting. Wanting to separate GRRM from Elden ring is wanting to separate Miyazaki from it too, both worked in collaboration and did an amazing world together.

Also the first gay (Specifically mlm) character from soulsborn game isn't Mogh. It's Velstadt the Royal Aegis from Dark Souls 2 its implied he was in love with Vendrick due to: 1. He retrieved to the Death crypt along side his king which he remained there and you have to kill him to get to "fight" Vendrick. 2. The usage of old tropes from previous games which Velstadt armor and role are from the character Garl Vinland who was protecting his love the Maiden Astraea.

so sick of seeing elden ring fans saying stuff like “blaming george rr martin for this part of the game I don’t like because we all know he loves violence and misogyny and incest and being edgy and the game would’ve been better off without him 🙄🙄” first of all you people actually have no idea what grrm’s work is actually about and second of all the demigods in elden ring are so wonderfully complex and interesting because grrm writes incredible characters. i’ll not hear any more of this slander