Despite the fact that she is our traveling companion for the first two thirds or so of Elden Ring, we don't really know much about Melina.
Or, rather, there's not much of a record of her. Let's be honest, I'm not sitting here with a giant comprehensive list of all the flavor text in the game, so there's a real chance I've missed some things, but I think we can conclude a couple things:
First is that Melina is probably Marika's daughter, and thus a demigod in her own right. She plays the role that our Finger Maiden was meant to, but is not one herself. She gifts us the whistle to summon Torrent, implying she has some connection to Miquella, who likely was Torrent's previous master. In her state as of the start of the game, Melina is an incorporeal spirit, "burned and bodiless," and bears scars of this burning. Melina has the red hair of a child of Radagon, which, coupled with her M name suggests that she's a member of the third demigod generation along with Miquella and Malenia.
Melina's most distinctive feature is her closed left eye, which appears to be sealed with a tattoo. Notably, if we get the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending to the game (and do so before Melina burns with the Erdtree, using ourselves and the Frenzied Flame to burn it instead) Melina appears at the end of that cutscene vowing to kill us and opening her occluded eye, which is a dusky shade of blue.
This has long inspired speculation that Melina may actually be the Gloam-Eyed Queen, a rival to Marika who was an empyrean and is associated with the Godskin Apostles. Tarnished Archaeologist goes as far as to suggest that The Gloam-Eyed Queen was fully the previous god before Marika, with Farum Azula as her seat and Placidusax as her Elden Lord. Even the Deathbirds might be affiliated with her reign as well. Naturally, the blue eye that Melina displays would seem to fit the description of "gloam-eyed."
But there's an alternate interpretation that relates to the Beast Eye, the first item we get for trading in Deathroot to Gurranq. The color of this eye is about identical to Melina's occluded eye (and given how important golden eyes are in Marika's reign, the fact that this eye is pure blue is notable). As Marika's champion, it would make sense that Maliketh might have been the one to defeat the Gloam-Eyed Queen personally, and her eyes might have been taken as objects of power (haha, sneaking in a little Control terminology here). With the GEQ's connection to the power of death, then, it would make sense that the Beast Eye would help trace Deathroot, and on top of that, the bestial connection, if Farum Azula is the seat of the GEQ, would further tie things together given the place is a city of beast-men in addition to dragons.
To go a step further - the current Empyreans are all children of Marika, so it would stand to reason that Marika was probably related to the Gloam Eyed Queen as well. If Maliketh is Marika's "brother," he might have been well-established in Farum Azula and its population of beast-men before the conflict arose. I think it's reasonable to assume the Gloam-Eyed Queen was either Marika's mother, sister, or cousin. (And again, given that we're dealing with gods here, it might even be that by becoming a god, Marika retroactively became the GEQ's relative).
Now, I've postulated before that Melina could be the Gloam-Eyed Queen and was somehow reconstituted as Marika's daughter - given that Marika's victory saw the removal of the rune of death from the Elden Ring and that her Erdtree serves as a kind of soul-recycler that allows people to be born anew (mind you, I wonder if that stopped working when the Erdtree became an incorporeal spirit-tree) perhaps it's not even that hard to imagine that Marika's ultimate conquest of the Gloam-Eyed Queen was to make her into her loyal daughter through rebirth.
Still, it's also possible that the eyes were removed and in Melina's case inserted into her head to make use of the GEQ's power (and these two aren't strictly incompatible scenarios).
We know the Erdtree burned a previous time before we burn it at the end of the game - Leyndell is filled with ashes, and this likely also explains why most of the tree is this golden spirit-tree and only a little shard of it remains dark, wood-colored and physical. Melina is "burned and bodiless," and I think it's not unreasonable to imagine that the first time she burned it was with the burning of the original Erdtree.
Indeed, Melina is insistent that you not pursue the path of the Frenzied Flame, and reiterates that she knows what it will mean to burn the Erdtree, and that you should not try some dangerous alternate method of burning it for her sake. In part, this is surely because she knows how horrifying the Frenzied Flame is and what it will do to the world. But I've also often wondered if Melina is truly dead if we allow her to kindle the Erdtree. When she burns, she doesn't seem to be in pain.
In fact, one of the pieces of evidence to suggest Melina is a contemporary sibling of Miquella and Malenia is that there's a butterfly that corresponds to her - Miquella has the nascent butterflies, Malenia the aeonian butterflies, and Melina, thus, could have the smoldering butterflies (which are actually the most common in the game, found near almost any source of flame).
But the introduction of Messmer adds some ambiguity here - Messmer is almost certainly a demigod of the same generation as the twins, and he's clearly associated with fire, meaning that he might instead be the demigod associated with the smoldering butterflies.
Messmer looks like serious bad news - he appears to hate the Tarnished and views them as unworthy of ascending as Elden Lord ("Wouldst thou truly lordship sanction..." is trochaic tetrameter, which is actually the meter of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, though the rest of the sentence doesn't follow this - still, this speaking in verse is a wonderfully Shakespearean way to introduce this guy). And despite the fact that the guy is dripping with symbols of heresy - between his snakes and his clear signs of Dragon Communion (note that the Leyndell dragon cult was not the same as the dragon communion folks) it appears that he may have been a monstrous enforcer of Marika's order upon other cultures that did not conform to her orthodoxies.
Given that Messmer was part of George R. R. Martin's original worldbuilding, my guess is that this is a Ramsay Bolton-level psychopath, and we're going to find out worse and worse thing about him over time.
Still, something sticks out - or rather doesn't stick out. Like Melina, Messmer's left eye is occluded. It's easy to miss as that eye is somewhat shaded by the shape of his helmet, but his wide-open and draconically-slitted right eyes stands in stark contrast with the closed left eye.
What does it mean?
So, I've been running with the theory that Messmer is some kind of dark version - a shadow - of Miquella. But what if he's actually Melina?
Gender-bending in Elden Ring seems easy and commonplace among the demigods. Obviously, the grand reveal of the main game is that Marika's consort Radagon is actually the same person as her (though whether Radagon was always Marika or if two separate individuals were merged remains up for debate - I tended toward the latter for a long time but I might be more inclined toward the former if we interpret Radagon's red hair as a sign of the Fire Giants cursing him rather than having direct lineage from them,) but we've also seen in with Miquella and St. Trina. You could imagine that Miquella, cursed to look ever-youthful, was able to disguise himself as a woman thanks to his prepubescent appearance, but I think it seems possible that he's also just capable of changing his appearance (admittedly, his youthful curse might feel like less of a burden if he can just appear however as he likes).
Or, of course, there's the much more straightforward idea that he's just gender-fluid and sometimes identifies as female. There's absolutely room for a queer reading of all of this but I am not the one to give it.
But, if Miquella can appear as St. Trina, might Messmer and Melina be two sides of the same identity?
It's tough: the closed eye and the association with fire are clear parallels. Likewise, Melina is, as I interpret it, on a secret mission on Marika's behalf. Likewise, Messmer may have been doing off-the-books work for Marika in his purging of the Land of Shadows.
On the other hand, Melina is clearly eager and happy to aid us in our quest to become Elden Lord, and only ever turns against us if we decide that the safe and proper thing to do is to incorporate some horrifying Lovecraftian flame into our bodies. We clearly fight Messmer, but beyond that it also seems his attitude toward the Tarnished is a negative one.
On the other other hand, though, we have plenty of precedent for the male and female halves of an entity being at odds with one another - Radagon and Marika seem to have very different visions for the Golden Order, and I've tended to interpret it that Radagon's rise as the dominant personality between the two of them is a big part of why the Lands Between are suffering under such chaos. Marika smashes the Elden Ring, Radagon tries to repair it. Radagon bars the way to the inside of the Erdtree while Marika guides us toward entering it. I mean, she charges Hewg with creating a weapon that can kill a god... in a world where she is the only acknowledged deity.
But then...
If Melina and Messmer are one and the same, why is she burned and bodiless and he's seemingly very corporeal? Granted, we can summon Melina to fight Morgott (just had a thought - see below,) but then again, she's a kind of spirit summon, implied not to necessarily be physically there.
The fact of the matter is that we just don't have enough to go on. There's evidently a ghost near the Impaler's Catacombs, which are likely related to Messmer the Impaler, who talks about an unwanted child. But Melina, barely referenced anywhere in the game, might also be considered an unwanted child.
Ok, here's that bonus thought - unrelated to the rest of this post.
In general, the naming conventions of the demigods refer to their generations - the children of Godfrey and Marika have G names, those of Radagon and Renalla have R names, and the children of Radagon and Marika have M names.
Except for the Omen Twins (tangent to a tangent, interesting that there are two pairs of twins birthed by Marika). Morgott and Mohg both have M-names, which you'd think associates them with the third generation, but instead, I think they're meant to be Marika's firstborn sons. But they were born as Omens, while Godwyn was not, despite having the same two parents. Godwyn was, I think, part of the "Golden Lineage," the last of which is our (likely) first shardbearer boss, Godrick, who appears to be many generations removed. I suspect that the Golden Lineage might actually just be a singular line - that perhaps only the most beloved son of each most beloved son was counted amongst them, tracing back to Godfrey and Marika. But clearly this line didn't work out so well given that its end result was the weak and pathetic Godrick (along with Godefroy somewhere in there). Still, they're all given "God" names which might have implied some kind of intent to create a perfect empyrean? Or to control the destiny of divinity in the Lands Between?
Morgott and Mohg, who would have been honored in a previous age for being Omens, were instead cast away in Marika's Golden Order as cursed (though Godfrey seems to still bear some love for Morgott, as he holds his body when he returns to Leyndell and seems to speak lovingly to him).
Given that George R. R. Martin wrote this, it's hard not to see some parallels with the plot of his Song of Ice and Fire, particularly the way that the anointed heir to the throne is revealed not to actually be the son of the king at all, and instead a bastard born of incest. I doubt he'd do precisely the same thing over again, but I could imagine a world in which Marika self-impregnated to create the Golden lineage, but perhaps this was prior to her war against the Fire Giants and thus Radagon was not yet cursed with his red hair? Alternatively, maybe Morgott and Mohg were born this way, and their curse was a curse of an earlier age compared with that of Malenia and Miquella. But it would explain why they also have M names.
Man, the lore in this game. It goes ocean-trench deep.
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