This article discusses plot details from throughout Shadow of the Erdtree, as well as the manga series Normality and Monsters.

when i near the steps to belurat, i find a golden cross driven obliquely into the earth like a wayward ballista bolt. underneath it, i meet a man squatting over a pot, clad in thick armor of an otherworldly color. he tells me he likes finding things, for “things bring joy to all.” later, hungover from a holy trance and despondent over his mother abandoning him, he asks me what to do with his hopelessness. 

i think back on everything i’ve seen thus far—broken meadows mottled with purple craters and pustules of festering rot; spider-scorpions and dragonflies engorged by ritualistic selective breeding and cosmic interferences; demented clergymen with daggers burning in their palms, eager to shrive or be shriven. warrior-jars feasting on the writhing remains of their heroes, saint-jars lined with mutilated flesh and sown like seeds. serpent-girls, centipede-girls, monster girls of every stripe.  

i think of every instance i was betrayed, and then every instance i wasn’t. red pill, blue pill; iris of occultation, iris of grace. putrefaction across countless deaths, riddles scrawled in corpse wax, dying wishes suspended in resin. victims of shakespearean deceit hollowed out by madness and converted into puppet-spirits. generations of mothers forsaking their children, banishing them to the dark chambers and fetid marshes that eventually become their tombs. 

i think of these things, then i give him my answer.

///

a few months ago, while getting drinks with a group of people from out of town, i found myself standing at the bar with my friend’s girlfriend, k., who i’d just met. at first, i was intimidated by her candor; earlier in the night, when someone had asked for her opinion on a recent “trans film,” she responded, without looking up from her phone: “i don’t do reddit shit.” 

even still, she was kind, and i found it easy to talk to her. she was dressed more casually than i was, and she spoke with a relaxed equanimity that told me she was probably older than me, or at least better at absorbing the kind of wisdom that keeps you alive. when i reached for my wallet to pay for my beer, she motioned for me to put it away. “i’ll get this one,” she said. 

i, on the other hand, was a bit on edge. the week prior, i’d met up with her partner—y., a cherished friend from college—and confided to them that i hadn’t been seeing very many people aside from my girlfriend, mostly because i’d been spending sleepless nights nursing a budding addiction to yuri (“girls’ love”) manga. the more i read, the more alienated i felt from other, non-2D people, though it was also liberating to give myself so completely to guilty pleasure.

when y. told me that, coincidentally, they’d just begun watching yuri anime with their own partner, i felt my heart leap, though i didn’t understand why. i wrote it off, figuring i was simply happy to talk about i’m in love with the villainness! with another fan for the first time since strapping myself into the yuri isolation chamber.  

at the bar, i asked k. to elaborate on the “reddit” comment, though i was fairly certain i knew what she’d meant by it. i learned that she’s been out as trans for several more years than i have, and that she’d long since grown a distaste for the cloying nature of trans memery online. she didn’t mention many specifics, but i had some guesses: blahaj, headcanons, fanatical usage of the word “egg.” 

even if the individual memes are harmless on a case-by-case basis, i’d also become wary of currents in online culture that are liable to flatten “transness” into a set of commodifiable qualities, leaving little room for the things in between—androgyny, fluidity, perversion. ironically, that was also why i was so nervous about asking her my next question.

i mustered up the courage to ask her about yuri, mentioning my conversation with y.—and, to my relief, she responded with enthusiasm. we talked for a while about the thrill of torrenting trash, shared our thoughts on the light novel-to-anime publishing pipeline, and agreed that bloom into you, one of the most popular yuri titles of the moment, is a bit too boring. i told her i’d become disillusioned with anime adaptations, preferring the aberrant pacing of manga; she admitted to reading even the light novels of series she barely respects. 

i asked if she’d had any recommendations, and she mentioned that she’d started reading watashi o tabetai, hitodenashi, which she described, aptly, as “monster girl yuri where they want to eat each other.” i thanked her and smiled; i was too anxious to admit that i’d already had it bookmarked for my backlog.      

the night continued. later, back at the table where our friends were gathered, a different acquaintance asked me what i did for work. i told them that i write mostly about videogames, and when i mentioned that i was preparing to write a piece about shadow of the erdtree, k.’s face lit up. she said that, by coincidence, she was in the middle of playing through dark souls for the first time. she added a caveat, however. “i mean,” she said, “i’m not, like, a dark souls trans girl or anything.” 

hours later, during the drive back home, i found myself in high spirits. it was energizing to see everyone again. i’d met this group of friends back in college, before i’d transitioned, and now we’re all some manner of trans or gender-fucked—i just happened to be the last person to realize it. 

but i kept mulling over what k. said about dark souls. once again, i had my suspicions about what she meant. over time, fromsoft’s souls games have developed a reputation online for appealing to trans players, particularly trans women. i’d seen the memes, the tweets, the litany of posts on reddit begging for someone, anyone, to explain the esoteric connection between gay people and bloodborne.     

applying occam’s razor only widened the wound. i considered the most plausible lines of reasoning: is it because souls games invoke gender fluidity in characters like dark sun gwyndolin or mechanics like the gender-swap coffin in dark souls 2? is it because they maintain an unassailable reputation amongst self-identified “hardcore gamers,” making them effective shields against the vitriol of bigots and gatekeepers? or—perhaps the most straightforward explanation—is it simply because they’re some of the best games ever made, making them automatic members of every critical canon, regardless of demographic? 

the next morning, i woke up to a text message from an unknown sender. it was k., who’d gotten my number from y. she’d sent something short and sweet, along with a link to the anilist entry for watashi o tabetai, hitodenashi.

i responded a month later with a word of thanks, along with a paragraph of text detailing my impressions of the series thus far. i followed up with a recommendation of my own—normality and monsters, another monster girl yuri manga that opens with one of them devouring a teacher who tried to molest her. i thought it’d be up her alley.

she hasn’t responded since.

///

in elden ring, the displaced settle into rubble like moss. it’s common for clusters of enemies to seem out of place with respect to their surroundings; they shelter in ancient churches like hermit crabs, wander in circles about the ashen remains of homes that were never theirs, lurk through the bones of cities toppled by time. 

like all games in the dark souls family, elden ring’s pacing is peculiar in this way. when you encounter them, characters appear frozen in the throes of agony, wanting, despair—any emotional state that might calcify over several lifetimes of suffering. some await you rapt with yawning madness, crouching over rotting carcasses; you catch others enjoying rare moments of tranquility, gazing forlornly across a horizon dappled with dancing embers. 

this is true of shadow of the erdtree’s cast of NPCs, as well. we find igon, for example, wrestling with his “exquisite pain” on the dirt path to the dragon’s pit, which is where he remains until we prove ourselves against the twin drakes of jagged peak. when we find the goddess st. trina hidden away within the depths of the stone coffin fissure, we also find thiollier, mired in a bitter frustration over his inability to commune with her. without the player, their suffering goes unanswered. only through conversation or battle do we free them from their stasis, reanimating characters who have otherwise resigned themselves to a stubborn inertia. 

of course, this is arguably a quality most games share. the pacing of videogame narratives are collaborative by default, the result of a constant dialogue between the player and the code. from visual novels to AAA RPGs, games typically depend on player input to set events in motion.  

but it takes on a special meaning in elden ring, which launches the story in medias res after centuries of violence have ravaged the lands between. the stories of both dark souls and elden ring are knotted with convolutions in time, and both are set in worlds stripped of death. as we bear witness to the fruits of a deathless golden order, uncovering the manifold secrets that the goddess marika has stowed in shadow, we find signs of recursive decay. 

near the forge, we see messmer’s soldiers engaging bloodfiends in a zoetrope massacre, a perpetual state of warfare enabled by the absence of destined death. beneath the settlement, we watch as jar innards—living amalgams of human flesh who have been processed for “sainthood”—crawl out of their overturned prisons, emerging as if from freshly hatched eggs. in a holy tower, we find man-flies gathered in worship around an altar, hunched in solemn prayer. 

flavor text tells us that messmer’s black knights have become pungent with the stench of “endless slaughter,” their armor caked with the blood shed by countless pyrrhic victories. i’m reminded of the japanese soldier who spent 30 years hiding on an island in the philippines, unaware that japan had announced its surrender during WWII. under self-imposed isolation, his paranoia and will to survive blossomed into fierce nationalistic loyalty, much like the black knights stranded in a fever dream crusade. life persists across the land of shadow, whether in spite or because of the blood spilled across its surface.  

like dark souls, elden ring takes after kentaro miura’s berserk in its depiction of a world scarred by divine acts of destruction. (guts’ enormous, unapologetically phallic greatsword looms large over the souls series, and the manga is frequently cited as one of fromsoft’s key inspirations.) hardened by loss or paralyzed by crisis, the characters of both elden ring and berserk often default to cynicism and hopelessness, their lives disfigured by inhuman acts of depravity. despite being works of dark fantasy, both elden ring and berserk feel timeless in their reflections of the brutality embedded into modern life. they tell the stories of people subjugated by power structures that tower over them like the gods themselves, casting an apocalyptic hue over the worlds they inhabit. 

it’s no wonder that elden ring, released on the heels of the pandemic's onset, felt prescient in its portrayal of a world characterized by continuous decay. the sight of caelid, once green but now splattered with scarlet rot, reminded me of the luxury condos that loomed, empty and riddled with graffiti, over my old neighborhood in LA. during quarantine, we’d watched social infrastructures buckle under the weight of COVID; in elden ring, we find a golden order on the brink of unraveling, leaving its subjects to be crushed in the cogwork of an unending civil war.  

as a landmass severed from the lands between and hidden behind a spectral veil, the land of shadow feels especially claustrophobic in its containment of cyclical violence. its characters—from the revenge-obsessed hornsent to the sagacious ansbach—cradle even more anger and distrust in their hearts than their counterparts in the lands between. collectively, the people of the land of shadow have watched as shamans were abducted from their homes and lacerated by whips of teeth; they witnessed the segregation of bloodfiends to cave systems, routinely slaughtered by both the hornsent and messmer’s army. 

both the poisoned hand found in belurat and the madding hand found in the abyssal woods—sister weapons in the “fist” class—characterize their creators as “the utterly downtrodden.” the former describes the hornsent, who were massacred and displaced by messmer’s army; the latter, however, describes followers of the lord of frenzied flame, who later faced banishment from their hornsent brethren.

in spite of their bleak backdrops, neither berserk nor elden ring advocate for nihilism, vying instead for complex moral frameworks that problematize common conceptions of “good.” but while berserk follows characters as they confront challenges to their ideals and mature in their worldviews—detailing their backstories through exposition along the way—elden ring’s characters are less likely to demonstrate growth. on the contrary, most bosses continue to tout their resolve even as they evaporate at the tip of your thrusting sword. any gradual character development happens in between visits to a site of grace; by the time NPCs display a change of heart or come to a grim revelation, it’s usually in the form of their final words. upon finishing a conversation with them, they repeat their last lines ad infinitum, as though they’re uttering a mantra. 

this is why, regardless of how a character might react upon your first encounter, it often feels as though they secretly long to be freed from their languor. they want you to pester them to action, hoping that new blood will bring color back to their world.  

///

i realize now that the real reason i’d felt my heart jump during that conversation with y. was pretty straightforward: i’d been feeling excruciatingly lonely. 

souls games and yuri manga appeal to me for similar reasons. i’ve turned to them when feeling despondent or anhedonic, seeking a means to retreat further inward. both concern characters that orbit each others’ expansive interiorities, culminating in moments of friction that reveal some modicum of emotional truth. 

this is an admittedly lofty way to describe yuri manga as a whole, especially when so much of it is presented as unapologetically trashy, trope-ridden, and bursting with horndog fanservice. but these are also the qualities that make it unique as a dowsing rod for girl souls, unearthing latent desires and yielding myriad self-discoveries. i’ve learned, for instance, that i prefer the stories that involve some element of murkiness or toxicity. incidentally, the manga i’d sent to k. is a perfect example. 

in normality and monsters, itou-san, a neurotic loner and obsessive horror movie fan who desperately wants to be “normal,” decides to ask model student takahashi-san for advice, only to catch her eating their lecherous teacher in her “true form” as a monster. this doesn’t faze itou-san, however, and she agrees to help dispose of the body with the hopes that takahashi-san will teach her how to live life as a functional human being.     

in yuri manga, characters often articulate attraction through their differences—tall vs. short, otaku vs. gyaru, possessive vs. oblivious—while also experiencing moments of self-identification through their similarities. they often see, in their love interests, the women they wish they could be; yuri protagonists are frequently short-circuited by simultaneous feelings of insecurity and arousal, wisps of cartoon steam floating from their heads as they shyly avert their gazes and attempt to cover their bodies. the thrill comes from watching them advance across milestones in their intimacy, whether it ends with them holding hands during graduation or having uninhibited sex in a love hotel.  

normality and monsters inverts some of these dynamics to an ironic end. despite being a monster, takahashi-san has mastered the art of disguising herself as a “normal girl”: how to choose the right shampoo to wear, which photo apps to download, casual topics for small talk. her disdain for human nature, however, has also rendered her cynical, and she speaks bitterly of how her survival is tethered to shallow social rituals. meanwhile, itou-san struggles with processing her budding attraction to takahashi-san, acknowledging that her feelings are anything but “normal.”    

usually, yuri that concerns high school girls relies on a set of well-established narrative beats that represent new frontiers in intimacy between its protagonists—e.g., furtive lunch dates, their first sleepover, a happy accident that requires them to take a bath together. somehow, normality and monsters hits all of the aforementioned beats, but it reserves its most striking moments of vulnerability for other scenes entirely.  

when itou-san brings takahashi-san to her grandmother’s farmhouse to incinerate their teacher’s corpse, takahashi-san reveals yet another of her deceptions: she’s been planning on eating and replacing itou-san all along. now in her bestial form, she also admits to feeling resentful of itou-san, considering the latter’s pursuit of “normalcy” frivolous. humans age out of these insecurities, she explains, and itou-san will be no different. “you are not like me,” she says, streaks of jet-black rage obscuring her face. “if people find out i’m not normal, i will be exterminated.” 

it turns out, however, that itou-san also harbors a secret. in a panic, she reaches for a scrap of iron and slashes her own arm, reasoning that copious bloodshed would stain the scene of the crime, jeopardizing takahashi’s plan to commit a traceless murder. yet she exclaims, to takahashi-san’s surprise, that she doesn’t care if she dies; she just wants to be able to relate to “normal” people before takahashi-san eats her. stunned by this revelation, takahashi-san begrudgingly accepts this proposal. the chapter ends with the two holding hands as they walk back to the farmhouse, and takahashi-san boasts that she’ll definitely eat itou-san by the end of the year.

takahashi-san maintains an enigmatic distance from itou-san as a schoolgirl, but as a monster, her confessions possess the arrogant clarity of supervillain monologues; after all, she believes these to be the final conversations between a hunter and her prey. yet she also alludes to feelings she never expresses otherwise—namely, loneliness and self-hatred, feelings typical of human teenagers. she bares more than she realizes when stripping her human flesh. 

she also learns that itou-san’s lost the will to live, challenging takahashi-san’s assumptions about humanity’s universal desperation to survive at all cost. for a moment, the reader glimpses uncharted depths of itou-san’s interiority, an epiphany delivered through action rather than conversation. it doesn’t take much analysis to draw a parallel between self-harm and her spur-of-the-moment method of self-defense. 

despite voicing their thoughts in internal monologues and thought bubbles, both girls succumb to the intoxication of violence, liberating their repressed desires from the shackles of their subconscious. as in all yuri manga—not just the fatalistic murder-suicide monster girl ones—these collisions give shape to their sources of their quiet suffering, affording them a moment of mutual understanding, however fleeting it might be.   

///

despite their obstinance, the characters of souls games come to life in battle. this is where they voice their full-throated resentment, where they confirm their long-held suspicions aloud, where they drop the facades and uncover their “true” selves. i think of bloodborne’s iconic boss fight with father gascoine—how he succumbs to his bloodlust during the last third of his health bar, letting bestial urges take root in his frenzied mind. there’s also oceiros, the blind “dragon” king from dark souls 3. at first he speaks sweetly to an invisible child cradled in his arms; halfway through the fight, though, he appears to smash the baby on the ground out of frustration, putting his savagery on full display. 

shadow of the erdtree has the most talkative cast of NPCs out of any souls game, particularly in the midst of combat. while aiding leda in her righteous execution of the hornsent, he insults your “mongrel blood,” a cutting reminder of the source of his bitterness: the crusade against his people, which continues to shamble its way towards an eternity of putrid genocide. if you choose instead to thwart leda’s assassination of the hornsent, she’s also quick to express her disgust, muttering: “man is a compassionate animal, for better or worse.” she mirrors the hornsent’s use of dehumanizing language, but in a cold and calculated manner that complements her severity.     

characters are often their most emotionally vulnerable as summons during boss battles. upon dying to radahn during the final boss fight, ansbach directs his dying wish to us, revealing the true subject of his loyalty: “righteous tarnished. become our new lord. a lord not for gods, but for men.” while igon is barely of any help during the fight with bayle, it’s a joy to hear his raucous entrance into the battlefield, even if he struggles to land a single hit with his greatbow despite boasting of a “hail of harpoons.” 

it’s here, swallowed by the fog of war, that the depths of these characters' hearts are exposed to us. time moves at an urgent pace during combat, throwing the game’s stretches of open-world exploration into stark relief. in an instant, beyond the fog door, the game closes the distance between the player and their combatant. the way characters act in battle—their motives laid bare and their weapons, at long last, unsheathed—reminds me of the opening of treasure’s ikaruga, another game that rewards persistence:

“i will not die until i achieve something.

even though the ideal is high, i never give in.

therefore, i never die with regrets.”

elden ring’s pvp skirmishes reveal things about combatants in a similar way. by elden ring’s endgame, the lands between begin to feel like a collection of souls-themed sandboxes that beg to be scorched by some exotic incantation or ash of war. it invokes motifs from each of the previous souls games, often by embedding them into weapons and armor. most visits to raya lucaria’s grand library are surely players answering the siren call of sweeting-hood, depositing another wriggling globule of spirit-flesh into rennala’s piggy bank for another chance to respec.    

when comparing elden ring to previous souls entries, it remains distinct in the way it encourages players to treat combat systems as fluid tools for self-expression, contrasting heavily against the “narrower” systems in bloodborne and sekiro. shadow of the erdtree introduces even more variables to player builds in the form of new weapons, spells, and ashes of war: a crossbow that behaves like a sawed-off shotgun, bottomless bottles of weaponized powder, thrusting shields with the devious curvature of a sadist’s snowboard. 

in the absence of voice or text chat, violence becomes a much more sensual language of interaction. the promise of human volatility galvanizes every encounter, forcing combatants to attune themselves to each others’ rhythms. i’ve always loved the dramatic length of souls games’ critical hit animations, halting the action with a humiliating act of domination. to parry an opponent is to confirm, for both parties, that you can see right through them.  

more than any DOOM, call of duty, or postal, souls games exemplify the use of violence as a primary means of interacting with the world, progressing the narrative, and identifying with others. even so, on a ludological level, souls games treat combat as something sacred and intimate. in shadow of the erdtree, characters assert their ideals through such collisions with others, heightening the stakes of every encounter. they define themselves in the arena, catching brief glimpses of themselves in the shimmer of a blade or a ripple of the rot-stained water. this is perhaps why it always feels like they reach epiphanies much too late.  

///

when i revisited yuri manga earlier this year, it’d been over a decade since i’d stumbled upon it on the internet, and i decided i’d do my homework. first, i solicited some recommendations for girls’ love “classics” from friends—especially works published after the late 2000s, when i first discovered yuri—and developed a foundation of core texts. i was beginning to recognize more of the anime women internet lesbians kept posting to my twitter feed. soon, i’d learned firsthand about the curse of discovering an ongoing series you like: the pain of waiting, in tortured silence, for a translation that may never arrive, clutching the title in your heart the way a military wife might clutch a locket.

after finishing most of the officially translated work in my growing yuri library, i turned to mangadex and dynasty reader for the scanlated stuff (“scanlation” is a portmanteau of “scan” and “translation,” for the uninitiated). that night at the bar, i’d confessed to k. that there was something electrifying about the act of navigating arrays of tags and keywords; i often surprised myself with the preferences i seemed to exhibit. 

this is part of why it can get lonely traversing the vast, lily-white meadow of girls’ love. one of the main things i hadn’t anticipated is just how self-aware yuri manga has become. the landscape is replete with both genre hybridizations and meta-narratives, weaponizing tropes as absurdist, fourth wall-breaking punchlines. on platforms that host manga, site tags consist of genres (sci-fi, isekai, horror), plot devices (infidelity, gender-swapping, reincarnation), and character archetypes (kuudere, gyaru, tomboy). through tropes, different yuri manga can provoke clashing moods. you’ll see slapstick comedy at the lesbian brothel, or dark fantasy dykes sharing an “indirect kiss” by drinking from the same flask. your taste, as a result, becomes extremely specific. none of the above accounts for art style or quality of writing, either. 

scanlations compound on this variability. the most obvious element is the accuracy of the translation—particularly, how elegantly japanese colloquialisms are swapped for western ones. then there’s the font, the typesetting, and the redrawn backgrounds. most scanlators operate in groups, but others are individual powerhouses. some include editorial notes in the margins between panels, while others even produce wildly inaccurate translations as pranks. 

it’s common practice for scanlators to append chapters with pages that credit the team, and these run the gamut as far as graphic design goes, from marketing deck-caliber cleanliness to modest paragraphs typed in calibri or comic sans. some include memes with inside jokes referencing other manga, while others manifest as collages of screenshots from the scanlation group’s discord server. my favorite scanlators are the ones who include brief, diaristic snippets of their life with successive releases, bemoaning their lack of sleep or the looming threat of upcoming exams.  

when i was still fresh, i also depended on both forum posts and comment sections to cultivate my literacy, turning to them whenever i found a series particularly salacious or moving or outright bizarre. i’d find users who shared my sensibilities—they seemed to exhibit the same taste in tropes, maybe, or they had similar criticisms when it came to character development—and i’d scour their post histories for more manga to devour. i paid special attention whenever i saw a trans flag in their username. 

the thing is, like fromsoft games, yuri manga also conjures up strong associations with trans people online—though the reasons for that are a bit clearer, at least to me. today, r/yurimemes is cluttered with shitposts about how gay romance between high schoolers is suspiciously effective at turning boys into girls; meanwhile, users across 4chan—/u/, /a/, /tttt/—have spent over a decade competing with one another to produce the most uncharitable and self-deprecating explanations for the connection between trans people and lesbian manga. 

when it comes to trans women, a lot of the discourse (regardless of forum) revolves around characterizing us as emotionally stunted, so starved for validation that they’re driven to live vicariously through cartoon girls. some argue that yuri addiction is natural for men, and that any male yuri enjoyer who decides to start injecting estrogen is the victim of a false flag operation. some argue that girls kissing is hot, no matter who’s watching, and that girls’ love transcends gender altogether.

these are ultimately arguments between apparitions, conversations from years ago that have become fossilized by digital impermanence. even when i find their reasoning arrogant or infantilizing or vicious, i can’t look away. i let the ghosts of these discussions continue to spar in my head as i wriggled my way deeper into the yuri rabbit hole. 

so much of what i’ve learned about myself, i’ve learned through the traces others left behind—and really, could it have been any other way? the internet itself is rife with specters guarding forks in the road, their serpentine riddles coiling at your feet like white streaks of soapstone. i “quoted” normality and monsters earlier, but it’s more accurate to say that i quoted a scanlation of the work, an unofficial interpretation of the text that exists without the knowledge or consent of the author. you receive a tattered piece of a map, only to realize that the landmass it describes has long been desiccated and disfigured by centuries of tectonic mischief. 

yet you continue, and the half-truths swell like well-fed parasites, engulfing your view of the clear skies overhead. the divine becomes cursed and vice versa; worshippers erect monuments to collective hallucinations. producing a scanlation of a scanlation—as some blasphemes are wont to do—is like trying to reverse-engineer incel terminology through the transmaxxing manifesto, or like trying to interpret the greater will by placing a hand on the corpse of a finger-reader: an act of desperate, imperfect prophecy. the pallbearers crane their necks skyward in search of new meaning.  

///

fromsoft’s souls games have always mirrored the structure of the internet. the traces left by others—both diegetic and non-diegetic, by either NPCs or other players—don’t just inform your problem-solving logic; they also shape your worldview and moral compass. even outside the game, via reddit threads and lore videos and discord servers, wisdom obtains a folkloric quality, inviting divergent interpretations of both narrative themes and hidden math. knowing how to differentiate guidance from misdirection is tantamount to survival itself, as is understanding where to direct your compassion. 

elden ring inspires lyrical thinking through the dreamlike recursion of its motifs, refracting images like errant horns and deadened eyes through varied lenses. it imparts its themes through experience, leaving players to guess at the meanings behind its stark symbolic language. many of the narrative elements i describe could be considered speculation, something souls games encourage by forging provocative connections between the images they depict.   

bloodborne’s horrors stem from robbing mothers of their children, from the violation of their bodies and the callous exploitation of their reproductive capacities; shadow of the erdtree, on the other hand, depicts all of its characters as lost children turned wretched by willful abandonment. in elden ring, everyone is an orphan of kos, a symbol of lack.

i think of messmer, who was marooned in the shadow keep by his mother, marika; grandam hornsent, who we find locked away in a storeroom like a broken appliance, longing for the reanimation of a divine beast who vanished long ago; even metyr, the mother of fingers, who count ymir describes as “damaged and unhinged,” a symbol of the greater will’s neglect. the staff of the great beyond, forged from her tail-fingers, includes this in its flavor text: “despite being broken and abandoned, she kept waiting for another message to come.”

this last detail confirms that the golden order itself is defined by incompleteness and a yearning to be whole, to be accepted, to be loved. boc, the demi-human seamster, confides to us that he wants nothing more than to be like his “sweet mum”; if his self-loathing goes unattended, we find him rendered soulless by renalla—a maternal figure obsessed with achieving “perfection” through rebirth. morgott and mohg, afflicted with the fell omen “curse” from birth, were raised in the “shunning-grounds,” treated as unholy embarrassments. it’s no wonder that so many of the golden order’s rejects are swayed by the promise of fia’s warm embrace. each of marika’s children—from ranni to melina to miquella—grows resentful in her absence.

once miquella discards his rune, liberating characters from their collective trance, we learn that nearly every NPC in shadow of the erdtree is the victim of abandonment. while leda follows miquella, ansbach searches for traces of his lord, mohg; freyja wishes to honor her lineage as a redmane, hoping to follow in the footsteps of radahn; thiollier is driven to agony over his inability to commune with st. trina; and moore, as a member of the forager brood, despairs upon realizing that malenia has disowned him and his brethren, the children of rot. even igon regards bayle with simultaneous hatred and reverence.     

as a result, the penultimate battle against leda and her allies in enir-ilim is rich with both tension and heartbreak. it represents the culmination of most of shadow of the erdtree’s “sidequests”; prior choices (even the choice not to choose at all) determine whether someone appears amongst leda’s ranks, can be summoned as an ally, or is absent altogether (because they, well, died). 

structurally speaking, elden ring’s sidequests are similar to episodes of curb your enthusiasm. they introduce subtle motifs across disparate narrative threads, operating in the shadows, until they culminate in a feat of rube goldberg machine comedy, though elden ring quests are admittedly more liable to twist this acerbic irony into tragedy. from diallos’ defeat in jarburg to hyetta’s cannibalistic ascension to fingermaiden-hood, their endings play out much like punchlines to shaggy dog stories.  

yet this moment in enir-ilim—in which your companions, both former and current, hurl themselves into unbridled combat with one another—is the closest the game comes to feeling like dancing, though by that i mean in some club or warehouse or bar: the murky cocktail of emotions that comes with being thrust into physical closeness with other people, both friends and strangers, intoxicated by a dense alien heat.       

if ansbach appears as your ally, it’s primarily as an act of devotion to mohg, but also as a symbol of respect for you as a prospective elden lord. he’s one of the few NPCs to possess an emotional awareness of the others close to him, urging you to demonstrate empathy to moore and his rot-born ilk. later, after helping him deduce mohg’s role in miquella’s scheme—that miquella intends to puppet mohg’s corpse with the soul of radahn, a wholly violating and decidedly un-kind approach to seeking lordship—he shares his enlightenment with freyja as a token of compassion, knowing fully well that their reunion would be on opposite sides of the battlefield. 

freyja is also unique with respect to the other members of leda’s orbit, though for a different reason. when we inform ansbach that we’ve passed his message along to freyja, he speaks fondly of her bullheaded sense of honor, observing affectionately that “paralyzing fear” and “true despair” are foreign to her. her devotion to radahn acts as a foil to ansbach’s devotion to mohg, and the two are portrayed as staunch in their loyalty. for freyja, this means honoring radahn’s all-consuming desire for battle, and she joins leda as one of the final obstacles to facing radahn and miquella. 

in an inversion of ansbach’s decision to be your ally, she also appears as a sign of respect to you, taking after radahn’s veneration of combat. when you relay ansbach’s missive to her, freyja asks you to deliver him the following message: “should we meet in battle, to face your bow would be fine enough. to face your blade would be an honor.” 

fromsoft’s souls games rarely depict NPCs in conversation with one another. in dark souls 3, patches frequently voices his concern for greirat, a fellow thief and a next-door neighbor at the firelink shrine, but we never see the two talk. miscommunication and missed connections account for many of the series’ tragedies, whether between two fellow tarnished or between prophets and their gods. yet, through the traces they leave for one another, ansbach and freyja are given the chance to express mutual feelings of respect and understanding.

this is what made the climax feel so heartbreaking in retrospect. in true elden ring fashion, shadow of the erdtree tethers the fates of its characters to one another, such that they can only escape each other through death. but at least ansbach and freyja are given the chance to die without regret, facing one another as both former comrades and worthy rivals.    

if the irony is in the fact that you wind up facing the majority of shadow of the erdtree’s cast in a single battle, then the tragedy is that some do so as devotees of gods who pursue their goals with a monomaniacal intensity, indifferent to the lives of the lesser pawns that worship them from afar. “the greater will” is one that imposes itself on the subjects of the lands between, a will so great that it subsumes one’s own.

so i was moved by these gestures of compassion, this instance of identification between footsoldiers on either end of an apocalyptic holy war. in a world defined by infinite deaths, in which every casualty is the byproduct of some cosmic wargame, there’s little more meaningful than dying with your honor intact.    

///

when bullet points published my first essay for them last year, it was the first byline to feature my current, non-dead name. i created a twitter account for the occasion, and i input the first username that came to mind: b0realdancer, a reference to dark souls 3’s dancer of the boreal valley, one of the most gorgeous bosses in souls history.  

when i fell into the yuri ditch earlier this year—and refused to ask for help in getting out of it—i launched what will likely become a lifelong practice of taking screenshots of manga. i read kiss and white lily for my dearest girl, was struck by a single panel of a girl floating in the darkness, enwombed by lovesickness, and made it my header image on twitter.  

when i near the steps to belurat, i find a golden cross driven obliquely into the earth like a wayward ballista bolt. underneath it, i meet a man squatting over a pot, clad in thick armor of an otherworldly color. he tells me he likes finding things, for “things bring joy to all.” later, hungover from a holy trance and despondent over his mother abandoning him, he asks me what to do with his hopelessness.  

when i tell moore to “remain in sadness forever” instead of “putting it behind him,” it isn’t out of cruelty. nor is it a result of some bleak impulse towards nihilism or a nudge towards self-righteous martyrdom. when i tell him this, i know barely anything about his history, and i know even less about the scale of miquella’s manipulation or the machinations that direct his schemes. i only know that “remaining in sadness forever” is simply what the characters of souls games do—the truth comes later, through violence, once godhood itself has been unraveled by the edge of your blade.    

maybe i really am just another fromsoft trans girl, another sunlight-starved himejoshi with an old whiskey bottle full of syringes next to her keyboard. maybe, through the traces i leave online, i really do recapitulate the same fannish tendencies that make my skin crawl. 

but why, then, do i see myself in so many of the messages other trans people have left behind? why have monster girls, whether drawn in ink or equipped with HP bars, coaxed a sizable amount of us to start taking hormones? why is this all i can think about, seven years after coming out as non-binary and two years after starting HRT? why do i choose to remain in sadness forever, asking questions that are impossible to answer?  

it’s tempting to identify with the player character in games like elden ring, which, as RPGs, supposedly engage you in “roleplay.” but looking back, i can also relate just as much to its NPCs: the false prophets, the sniveling peons, the whimpering spirits. like them, i have a propensity for reading a bit too much into things, for heeding the call of frenzy. 

i can easily see myself in them: frozen in time, spinning their wheels, waiting like sleeping princesses to be reanimated through contact. 

*** 

Pao Yumol writes about games, music, and the internet. More writing is available at her personal blog, goose pimple activated. She also co-runs EX Research, a newsletter covering contemporary online culture, and tweets under @b0realdancer. She thanks you for taking the time to read her work.