#somehow it fits so well

[tigyrbrained]

Fandom meme redraw which is actually just an excuse to practice drawing them 😏

Original under the cut!

I believe this is the original, but I could be wrong!

[amarcia]

BARRISS BEING INTO ANCIENT HISTORICAL BATTLE REENACTMENT ??? HELLO??

[surreal-duck]

some business to take care of

[upathosarts]

After we've acted out starlight... what do I do?

[something-random18]

something about Az just calling Gwyn "Berdara" instead of her actual name (really affectionately)

[grey-viridian]

@cin3maa DTIYS! (ﾉ´ヮ`)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[drenched-in-sunlight]

the Light of Miquella incantation Eng description is so confusing to me, so i decided to look at the JP text, still confused (i asked both my native speaker friend and American friend working as a translator in JP, and even they are confused and i couldn't just give them a wall of text on Elden Ring lore so they could translate 1 paragraph), so i turn to the CN translation which follows the JP one... and it's so clear??????????? im shocked

(please note im not native CN speaker either, but my mother tongue is built based on their language and i double check with my friend who is fluent)

Miquella wishes to embrace everything, yet he understands that there is one exception: whether it be the absolute God or the Lord (King Consort): there could only be one (of them)

so us player, as Lord of the old Order, is the one he could not embrace. and we clearly see that for him to accept us, we already have to be charmed and relinquish our claim to Lordship (thus failing the boss fight).

i feel like this is the translation i could understand & line up well with how events in the game plays out. Miquella wants to accept all, but the rule of the world dictates that there could only be one God & one Consort (who the hell wrote that rule...), and so one of us has to give.

it presents a paradox of him wanting to become a God to save people & bring compassion, but to be a God he HAS to eliminate all other candidates for Godhood. he has to be the only one.

it sheds light on why Marika's age also started with conflicts. it's something demanded of the new God. and also us when we fight to become Elden Lord (+ line up with why Ansbach is not mad at us for killing Mogh, as he too understands that rule).

[sanzosin]

Lazy saturday morning ink sketching

[xnyu09]

i envy you.

[clownsuu]

HIIII I WANTED TO SAY I REALLY LOVE YOUR AU AND THE DESIGNS YOU HAVE FOR ALL THE NEIGHBORS ON IT,,, I also really like Frank so I thought it would be cool to draw him, so yeah!! I kind of forgot the context but it has something to do with Wally finding Frank searching for something where he shouldn't be.

also an extra !!

WAAAA FRANK MY MANSSSS

[impsandstars]

🎶 Give Me One Reason- Tracy Chapman🎶

[skeletalheartattack]

sure man

[illmoraineakoi]

Friendly Reminder that the Vessel Eggs are Freaking Huge.

Also Obligatory Birthplace Egg is the only Egg Asset with Void Vines attached to it remark.

It was always strange to me how large Vessel eggs really are, especially because there really seems to be little need for it. Vessel hatchlings/nymphs are Tiny. Why are the eggs so big in comparison?

There seems to be waaaay too much unnecessary/excess space in each egg if there's only one Vessel per egg. Usually with eggs, by the end of the gestation period, the spawn is cramped in there with very little excess room. Extra unused space is wasteful, and biology hates being wasteful.

This is why I've personally always subscribed to the headcanon of Vessels eggs actually being more like Egg Sacs/Egg Cases than typical eggs. Both are when, for irl bugs, multiple larva/nymphs hatch from the same "egg"-like gestational container. Egg sacs are common for spiders (they make the actual sac itself with silk; here's a great video showing how one is made.) while cockroaches are know for egg cases (Here's a video of some hatching.)

Ghost's egg clearly isn't that much bigger than the other egg assets, it's just less destroyed, so it's size is a good reference for how big all of them would have been. And it's big enough for at least a handful of Vessel nymphs to have fit inside at once.

^ Case in point.

(You could probably squeeze a few more in there if you treat it more like a the sphere it's supposed to be and also depending on the horns. The main limiter are the heads/shells, since those are the hard parts* of a Vessel; Vessel nymph bodies seem to be quite squishy and flexible.)

(*= This is assuming that Vessel shells were hard during their gestation period. There is a chance they might not have been, since newly hatched nymph insects tend to have flimsy bodies for a while. The Birthplace memory shows that Vessels had hard shells at that point, and that seems really close to the point of hatching, so it seems likely that they hatched with hard shells rather than needing to wait a bit for them to harden up. Also, Vessel biology is weirdly wonky, so irl stuff doesn't really matter.)

Also, curiously, it seems Vessel eggs have two layers:

There's the outer shell, but there's very clearly a second, inner thing that has been broken out of. The different in the breaking look from the outer shell suggests this inner layer is made of a different material. The Pale King's egg lacks this, to it's at the very least unlikely to be a Wyrm thing, or at least not a Wyrm thing on it's own. It might be something unique to the union of Wyrm and Root and thus unique to the Vessels.

It could be a Root Thing, but we know jack shit about the White Lady and exactly how much she contributed to the Vessels.

I mean, we know literally nothing about how the Vessels were made besides Pale Babies Get Thrown Into The Liquid Shadow Pit To Get Stuffed With Black Goop, but that's besides the point.

There's also two alternative theories for why the eggs are so big that I'd like to touch upon: Void Swelling, and Stunted Development.

Let's go with Void Swelling first.

In snake eggs, the eggs tend to get a bit bigger by the time they hatch. Normally, it's not too much. Sometimes, however, the eggs really seem to swell up. Most people I've heard/seen talking about this think that the eggs are absorbing and retaining water from the humid incubation environment. Sometimes it's indicative of a problem; sometimes those swollen eggs start to rot, making it clear that that gestation has failed. Other times, the snake just hatches with a lot of egg goop.

It's possible that the Vessel eggs are so large because they've just been swollen up from the Void infusing into them.

Two problems with this theory: Vessels eggs are clearly hard-shelled, and hard-shelled eggs don't swell. At least, I've never heard of them doing that, but I'll admit I'm not a bird person. Perhaps some eggs got stuffed with way too much void and popped open before it was ready to hatch.

The second issue is that the Abyss is not what I would call a humid place (or, at least, it doesn't LOOK humid), and we don't see any liquid Void anywhere near where the eggs are in the Abyss. All the liquid Void we see is to the left of Vessel Corpses, and we see no egg assets anywhere on the way to and around the Lighthouse.. This makes it rather ambiguous how the Void even infused into the eggs at all, let alone if liquid Void was involved. Given how deep the Birthplace goes, it's impossible to tell what was at the bottom of that shaft before all of the corpses stuffed it up.

Unless ambient smoky environmental Void could have stuffed into the eggs enough to engorge them, which is also a possibility. Void is weird and we know little about how it works/behaves. Still unlikely due to the hard shells, but it's a theory.

The second theory is less about too much Void in the eggs and more about not enough Vessel.

It's possible that, at the time of Void infusion (and thus, death for the gestating Pale Children nymphs) the influence/corruption of the Void caused the Vessels to just stop developing. Dead things don't grow or develop after all.

Perhaps the eggs are so large because the original offspring that was supposed to hatch from those eggs were really supposed to be that large. They were supposed to be the spawn of a Wyrm and a Root combined. Even if the White Lady hadn't of been so big at the time of the Vessel Plan, she's shown she was always capable of eventually growing large. And if the offspring took aspects from PK's original Wyrm form over his dinky bugsona, which I would assume to be possible bc DNA and Genetics, then a larger size would also potentially be expected.

Or maybe some Pale Children would have gotten the Wyrm gene while others got the Bugsona gene, which is what Hornet got, and is absolutely hilarious to think about. Imagine getting riffed on by a twelve foot high sibling bc you got dad's Short Gene.

There's one issue with this theory, and that is of course, Broken Fucking Vessel. Broken Vessel always throws wrenches into Vessel theories, it's like their favorite past time.

Broken Vessel has aged. And, Hollow, more obviously, but BV is the main confusing one. Broken Vessel proves that Vessel can age on their own, without the potential influence/assistance of the King. BV proves that Vessel development isn't permanently stunted.

The most logical solution to this issue I've seen is exposure to the Void. Vessels, on a fundamental level, are made up of Void. It is intrinsically entwined with their very physiology. They're not just walking corpses stuffed full of Void and a Shade, their very flesh IS Void and that Shade.

Case in point:

BV, out of any other Vessel outside of Hollow, is the one who could have potentially come into contact with Void after leaving the Abyss. They're found in the Ancient Basin, which at the time of the game is heavily Void tainted (likely due to the Lighthouse being off and PK fucking off to Buzzsaw Land. That light had likely been the only thing keeping the Void suppressed underneath the Basin.)

PK could have used Void to supplement Hollow's growth into adulthood because Vessels probably literally cannot grow or age without it. Hence why Ghost and all the other escapee Vessels are stuck as nymphs while BV grew a tiny bit.

Of course, the solution to the BV issue also ruins the stunted embryonic development theory too. It's a rather poor and weak theory that I've included only because I though it was a bit interesting. Thinking about what the original Pale Spawn would have been like is always interesting to me.

With that, I have just one more thing to point out.

Ma'am, how the FU--

[witch-supermarket]

Prequel to my last post

[vaguely-concerned]

playing through where the dead must go with an ingellvar rook and......... oh. rook LOVES loves the grand necropolis actually huh. you can hear it in every line they say. I'm. so full of feelings I didn't expect this to hit so hard but between the voice lines, banger music and astounding visuals (TELL ME this game is ugly and that the visual style sucks while you meet me in these halls of grieving I fucking dare you) I feel second hand drenched with grief and melancholy on the inside what the fuck

(feat. lucanis coming along unwittingly meeting future in-laws and realizing that rook has been clenching their teeth with the effort of only seeming about 5% of the freak they actually are the entire time he's known them fhsadkjfsa. local man learns that the one thing future spouse is deadly fucking serious about is their role as a watcher. it's a little hot)

[smoshmonker]

“so these are for white depressed people? perfect! we’re the target audience!” x