Elden Ring: A FromSoftware and George RR Martin game

Ranni is also the only person in the game that acknowledges Melina, if indirectly (if we assume Melina is "Torrent's former master").

Also one thing that I found interesting is that at one point Melina says she's bodiless, which Ranni also is in the sense that she's forced to inhabit doll bodies to have a corporeal presence at all.

I'm of the opinion that Melina is a daughter of Marika in the same way that Milicent is a daughter to Malenia, ie born via alternative means, but with an instilled purpose of sorts guiding them(Milicent following Malenia's footsteps to bloom unbeknownst to her, Malenia to guide a tarnished to becoming Elden Lord and "free" Marika) . In Melina's case I think she was "born" from Ranni's discarded flesh since Melina also mentions being charred in one of her dialogues. It's why they share the same marking in opposite eyes and why Ranni knows her.

Melina has faith in the Elden Ring and rebuilding it. Which is the stark difference.

To her to be born and live in this world, even if it isn’t the best, is worth it for the beauty there is.

Which is why she is starkly against the Frenzied Flame which will melt everything into primordial goo leaving only ashes, as it condemns the idea of beauty in being born into a world but having to endure suffering or being born just to die.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on May 23rd 2022 at 6:13:34 AM

With that I think is that both Melina serves an independent purpose to Ranni in that if she CAN'T ursurp the Elden Ring, then she can at least play a hand in essentially freeing Marika with she seems to be on decent terms with.

That's why she won't object to Ranni's ending either. Because while the Age of the Stars means the end of the Elden Ring, it will still give people a chance to live.

Even the Fell Curse ending does that — the horrible stuff happens after people die and their souls are denied reincarnation.

Melina's basically fine with every ending except the one that grants nothing but oblivion.

Edited by M84 on May 23rd 2022 at 10:19:54 PM

I think if Rain’s interpretation of the ending is going to be added to the page there should at least be a shred of evidence in the game that the Golden Order does anything like they believe.

Yes, my interpretation that maybe opposition to foreign powers is part of the Golden Order based on the lack of evidence known as the Omens, giants, Crucible, merchants, Those Who Live in Death, Lake of Rot, and to a lesser extent albinaurics etc. based on the general attitude towards the grace of gold. Which does not suggest that it's something that's going to be fixed by the whopping amount of evidence of "Goldmask dislikes learned men becoming fanatics" and the vagueness of the second line in the Rune of Perfect Order.

Maybe it could prevent something like the Tarnished from being created again where the grace of gold is withdrawn, but that doesn't seem to apply to a huge number of things that never got it in the first place and the Erdtree (and by proxy the Greater Will and Golden Order) already gave nada for.

The Order Healing description basically has Goldmask questioning whether "absolute evil" is truly a thing in the fundamentals of the Golden Order. The very fact that he questioned it in the first place implies that he doesn't really approve of the idea nor sees any evidence that it's actually part of the core ideology of the Golden Order.

That depends on if you think its opposition to things that are outside it and a threat to its existence necessarily requires that they be an evil.

Like, the opposition does have some good points—multiple gods fighting over the Lands Between is manifestly a disaster, and the Lake of Rot is way better than having allowed Caelid to happen everywhere—but it's still fairly consistent in that a blob of things are outside of its protection and blessing.

So I got to the end.

My stats are:

• Godskin Duo: Two tries. I used a lot of Sleep Pots to put them under, and then spammed Taker's Flames until they died a bunch.
• Maliketh: One try. He focused on Mimic, dealing absurd damage to the poor dude, but that opened the way for a Comet Azur that ended him. Bye bye, Gurranq, you poor wolfman. You don't deserve what Marika put you through.
• Gideon: One try. Eternal Darkness trivializes him.
• Godfrey: Beat him down with Mimic, and Hoarah Loux just didn't handle the Swarm of Flies very well. Still gave me the most trouble out of all of them due to requiring me to jump.
• Radagon / Elden Beast: One try. Watching other people fight Radagon taught me to roll toward him rather than away, and that let me avoid his insane AOE attacks. Taker's Flames eviscerated him. I'd kitted out to handle the Elden Beast, equipping Lord's Divine Protection and Pest Threads, which turned his mighty Elden Stars into more or less "when players use Elden Stars". Pest Threads destroyed him and hilariously so.

I got the Sacred Relic Sword, and now I have a Haligtree to clear.

Despite lacking as much range as sorceries, it seems Incantations do their fair share of work.

x4 Exactly, where is your evidence? Those are all things that don't need some mystical MacGuffin to happen. When you hear hoofbeats, the first thing you think should be "horses," not "zebras."

And the topic of mind rape/brainwashing/removal of free will. Is there a single line of dialog in the game that implies the Golden Order does that? I certainly haven't seen one.

The merchants were shunned, and so were the albinaurics, because they didn't have the gold of grace. The giants were put down because they served the Fell God, and the trolls were enslaved because they supported the giants. The dragons, the followers of the Dragonlord, were initially shunned until Godwyn made peace with them.

Seriously, you've never encountered the concept of a religion or in-group that shuns the out-group before? Not ever in your life, to the point of finding it unrealistic?

My point is that either the rune is going to do basically nothing to change that or it has to intervene somehow to stop it. Messing around with philosophical changes to the nature of the order alone wouldn't change how people are treated.

And if it's baked in to the Golden Order that some things are opposition, "they're not an absolute evil" probably wouldn't help.

Edited by RainehDaze on May 23rd 2022 at 4:19:29 PM

Denying the concept of absolute evil would tone down the fanaticism though. So even if they do keep fighting opposition to the Golden Order they're at least less likely to go full genocidal.

Edited by M84 on May 23rd 2022 at 11:20:55 PM

Of course I have! And those people don't have some magical artifact that somehow enforces that behavior, it's good old-fashioned Humans Are Bastards. So why would I think that the people in Elden Ring only do it because of some divine compulsion?

It seems like it's not a magical compulsion so much as it is gods pointing to certain peoples and telling their followers that they are an absolutely evil threat to be wiped out.

While there's certainly an argument to be made that Goldmask's idea of facts-and-logic-ing his way to a perfect society is naive, I think it's definitely a net improvement even if it's not a perfect solution.

Technically while the cursed Omen are denied the grace of gold and can't reincarnate via the Erdtree, they still reincarnate. After all, there would be no point to the seedbed curses if the people killed with them weren't reborn as Omen in their next life.

No one's saying the Golden Order is compelling it, except as one of its tenets. Just like any other in-group, the Golden Order teaches that those it blesses are the good ones; given Marika's history of conquest, it seems likely that "we have the Erdtree on our side, so we're good" was easily spun out into "they don't have the Erdtree on their side, so they're bad". All that fits in very easily with human nature and with the nature of in-group/out-group conflict, and it's clear that people took the tenets to mean that the giants, the dragons, the merchants, etc., should be treated as enemies. That suggests that the Order doesn't say that all creatures are equally blessed, or something like that. There's definitely a "chosen people" vibe to it.

The problem is with Goldmask's Mending Rune. It's not really clear what it will do, but it could be interpreted as making the Golden Order's rules absolute - which is to say, impossible for anyone to break, even the gods. It would be like taking the Ten Commandments and changing them from a list you should try to follow to be a good Christian, and making them physical laws. That's only a possibility, but it is possibly what could happen.

Really, the biggest problem is that two lines of an item description is way too little information to go off of when it comes to changing metaphysical laws, that's all.

Edited by RedSavant on May 23rd 2022 at 8:35:03 AM

The more Goldmask's change could do to stop the aggression, the more invasive it must be, and also the worse the consequences if there is any such opposition as part of the Golden Order's identity.

Goldmask seems to think that the Golden Order has strayed from its original fundamental principles due to gods trying to maintain their power via the fanaticism of their followers. He presumably considered this to go against the fundamentals of Order because "absolute evil" doesn't truly exist as a concept in said fundamentals.

Goldmask's Mending Rune thus prevents the gods from manipulating the ideology of the Golden Order for their own ends. At the very least it means they can't just frame a group as straight up evil anymore.

This could actually mean much more fair and reasonable treatment of outsider groups since the people would no longer have gods telling them that said groups are evil that needs to be wiped out.

Edited by M84 on May 23rd 2022 at 11:38:49 PM

Sure, but we don't really know what that looked like, despite knowing comparatively more about the "golden" (ha) age of the Lands Between than, say, Lordran. So it's hard to say if things like Marika's campaigns of conquest were using the Golden Order for her own ends, or if she was simply following the mandate of the Elden Beast - especially given that she's such a mysterious figure. We DO know that the Elden Beast required that the native gods of the Lands Between be subjugated and driven out, along with their worshipers, though.

It's important to remember that the Golden Order is a creed brought to the Lands Between by the Elden Beast, and is implied to not even really be that powerful - Marika was able to break it and permanently strip a full Rune out of it, and during the Shattering, it was entirely possible that other Outer Gods could have taken over and imposed their own Order on the land instead.

One thing the Perfect Order rune would do is prevent anything like Marika's Thanatos Gambit from succeeding again. The Tarnished, bound by a perfected Order, wouldn't be able to rebel the way Marika did and call the Tarnished to kill or replace her. Hopefully that would result in a more perfect, better age for everyone, but it's hard to say whether it would or not.

Really, I feel like Perfect Order is the ending most in opposition to Ranni's. It's an ending of pure trust in the Golden Order, and faith that following more closely would make things better, as opposed to Ranni's distrust of faith and desire for people to question.

Edited by RedSavant on May 23rd 2022 at 8:48:18 AM

Doubleposting to apologize for getting salty about this yesterday, and to express my amusement at the fact that this (as befits the name "forum") technically carries on the grand tradition of humanity to gather in public spaces and yell at each other.

Goldmask identifies the problem with the Golden Order as the gods; therefore, I wouldn’t expect his changes to directly affect anyone *but* the gods.

The Elden Beast is powerful but it's limited by the fact that it can't seem to actually leave the Erdtree. That's why it needs an Empyrean to be its vessel. Marika being its Empyrean is probably why she was able to Shatter it in the first place — though this took a toll on her as well since being the Empyrean also meant she was tied to the very Elden Ring she was breaking.

All of the Outer Gods seem to have a similar limitation. They all need an Empyrean vessel to cement their influence over the world.

Edited by M84 on May 23rd 2022 at 11:59:21 PM

Right, but it's a god with a localized sphere of influence that it has to grow by directly courting followers and adherents, rather than a Greek-style god where it embodies or is some kind of natural phenomenon that happens everywhere, sort of thing.

The Golden Order is a Cthulhu cult that's amassed a huge following rather than a god that is a metaphysical or natural principle, basically. Same as the Formless Mother or so on.

Edited by RedSavant on May 23rd 2022 at 9:05:32 AM

Edit: Got bottompaged, reposting.

Edited by RedSavant on May 23rd 2022 at 9:12:27 AM