It is said, Jacob Geller did it better.
A common theme in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls and Elden Ring games is a world past its prime. Something that was great, and you can still see glimpses of what once was, but it’s gone now. Sound familiar to any particular slogans?
Longing for a golden age now past seems to be something built into humans. Even ignoring prophecies of impending doom, we have written about our own decay for a long time.
But FromSoftware puts a nice twist on this theme. Because often the desire for the infinite golden age is what makes the collapse worse. “The fire fades” as Dark Souls 1 put it, but the powers of the age were desperate to keep it going without thinking of the consequences. Dark Souls 2 talks about this prolonging of the age as a sin that doomed the world to the same pattern of plenty to decay over and over again. And by Dark Souls 3 the fabric of the world itself is barely hanging on after having forced itself to put off entropy for so long. Jacob Geller did an excellent video comparing Dark Souls 3 to I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
Elden Ring is a different world with a different backstory but the theme is still there. The Elden Ring is shattered and age of abundance is past, the war to chose a successor is over, no one won, no one can properly die, we all march on until someone can force some kind of resolution. The player characters are a group of people resurrected from the dead as a last resort to fix the state of the world but most of them have been at it so long they have lost the vision of the guiding light to their purpose to the march of time. If they are supposed to save the age it isn’t working well.
O Erdtree! Grant me succour!
The lore is so vague and hidden in pieces in these games that on an initial play through you might not realize the choice your character is making. There’s a a cosmic horror element to the theology which is a completely different point of interest. Shout out to Bloodborne for the full Lovecraft experience, in all it’s scary and goofy glory.
But the backstory implies the world never never considered it coming, at least not in their telling of history. The age of the Erdtree and Marika had a beginning, history predates it, but I think there’s something inherently human to assume that all of history leads up to where we are. And in an age of decay, it leads to a tendency to cry end times.
What I like about Elden Ring that it’s predecessors didn’t have much of, is people arguing for a different vision for the future. The most basic ending requires committing a sin against the established order because it is so messed up it can’t manage to follow it’s own prophecy anymore. Even the loathsome Dung Eater sees a different world, though he doesn’t do a great job pitching it in human terms. If someone tells you one vision, someone else might counter it with their own, and others might have a crisis of faith in the differences they see from the world they know. Because there’s a value in fighting for what you believe in, even in a dying world. After all, this collapsing world might be the start of something else.
So as a reminder to myself and others; be safe friend. Don’t you dare go hollow.
NS Politics 