There's a concept in storytelling of a "foil." This more or less refers to any character who presents a strong contrast with a protagonist. The nature of this contrast is not necessarily one of antagonism - the classic buddy cop duo of a straight-laced by-the-book detective paired up with a loose cannon is a classic cliche, but one that works well because the dual protagonists of such stories work as foils to one another. Such stories usually involve solving some mystery, and as the joint protagonists work toward the goal of resolving it, we can see the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and attitude.
When there's a story with a singular protagonist, a foil will often be an invitation to reflect, based on how different they are, what really makes that character who they are. Han Solo is absolutely one of Luke Skywalker's most important friends, but his sarcastic, cynical worldview (one that he admittedly evolves into something a little more idealistic over the course of the series) contrasts with Luke's desire to become an honorable and honor-bound Jedi who fights for lofty ideals rather than personal gain.
However, Han's not the only foil to Luke in the Star Wars series - Darth Vader is introduced as a terrifying figure of death and totalitarian oppression, killing anyone in his path and even those officers below him who fail to succeed in accomplishing the goals he sets for them. Darth Vader is the great villain of the Star Wars series (at least the original trilogy) and represents the opposite path of Luke's - while Luke strives to be a hero who will save the Galaxy from tyranny and protect the innocent from the violence and fear the Empire uses to retain its power, Vader is that violence and terror - a walking weapon of oppression who is dressed in a big cybernetic suit with a mask that looks like a skull. He wields the power of the Force just like the Jedi, but does so for the sake of evil rather than good. (For D&D players, Darth Vader is basically the perfect Death Knight analogue, if we substitute "would be dead if not for powerful cybernetics" for "undead.") The revelation at the end of Empire Strikes Back, that Vader is, in fact, Luke's father Anakin (spoilers for a movie from 1980, I guess? One that the existence of the prequel trilogy is entirely focused on?) just hits home this idea: Luke, this could be you.
Literarily, this type of foil can be called a Shadow. In fact, in most stories that have a villain character, there's usually some element of that character that acts as a shadow to the protagonist, or at least one of them in a multi-protagonist story. Dracula, for instance, in his rapacious and insidious seduction of Mina Harker, is a shadow to the brave and noble Jonathan Harker, who deeply values and respects his wife as a human being (you know, by 1890s standards). Fascinatingly, Abraham Van Helsing, the Dutch mentor to one of the novel's other heroes, Doctor Seward (and who basically leads the campaign against Dracula) is often portrayed in adaptations as something of a shadow to Dracula himself, played as a similar kind of force of primordial nature but in this case one that stands for good.
As anyone reading this blog for the past several months will surely be aware, I've also looked at the idea of the Shadow from a Jungian perspective. Carl Jung believed that all people had an inner shadow - an archetype that represents the aspects of our personality that we are unaware of and perhaps in denial about. Most classically, this might be the existence of repressed desires. We might externalize this shadow - projecting these desires and tendencies onto others - in an effort to distance ourselves from the realization that that urge is within (that the "call is coming from inside the house" so to speak.) Jung believed that bringing that unconscious shadow into conscious awareness - confronting the things that one does not realize about oneself - is a key step toward better mental health. Note that these repressed desires are not strictly negative ones, but they are unconscious and denied. Luke's experience in the weird root cave in Empire Strikes Back, in which he fights a phantom Vader and defeats him, only to see his own face beneath the mask, coupled with the revelation of his parentage, forces him to confront the idea that there is the same rage, spite, hatred, and will to power that his father possesses. We see in Return of the Jedi how Vader provokes him by threatening Leia and he has to stop himself before he murders Vader and falls down that slippery slope of the Dark Side - pretending those negative feelings aren't there isn't helping him, but only in seeing what he was capable and choosing to stop does he truly become a Jedi proper (that's my interpretation at least).
This has been a lot of writing and we haven't actually touched on Elden Ring itself. Let's make one pit stop along the way, though, which I think is important.
Shadows have a specific meaning in the Lands Between. Each Empyrean is assigned a Shadow by the Two Fingers, or perhaps even the Greater Will. The Shadows we have seen are Maliketh/Gurranq and Blaidd. These Shadows, I think, are using a different meaning of the word. To "Shadow" someone is to cling closely to them, following them everywhere - much as we are followed by our own shadows. It implies a profoundly close connection, and with Maliketh and Blaidd, we see that these beings are referred to as siblings to the people they shadow. Maliketh is the brother to Marika and Blaidd was raised alongside Ranni.
These Shadows have lupine/canine features, and seem to be sort of wolf-men (Blaidd is just the Welsh word for wolf) but I think the primary symbolism here is that of the loyal companion - dogs are a classic symbol of loyalty, and as we see with the tragic end of Blaidd's storyline, he is torn between his unshakeable loyalty to Ranni and his unshakeable devotion to the Greater Will, and so when Ranni acts against the Two Fingers, he is mentally torn apart and loses his mind, forcing us to put him down if we return to Ranni's tower. (It's beside the purview of this post, but I also think there's a question to be asked about the beast-men of Farum Azula, who might be the same species of wolf-man as Maliketh and Blaidd).
Notably, we have not met the Shadows for Malenia and Miquella, despite the fact that, as empyreans, they ought to have them.
So, with that in mind, let's think about Shadow of the Erdtree.
The first big puzzler here is that, as it exists in the game, the Erdtree casts no shadow because it's a source of light. For a long time I thought that there was no sun in the world (making the whole Eclipse thing at Castle Sol curious) but it turns out that there are places on the map where you can see a pale little sun up in the sky. Still, the Erdtree glows a bright golden light similar to sunlight and is visible nearly everywhere on the map. Tarnished Archaeologist has a really interesting theory about this, suggesting that the original Erdtree was a physical tree, but that it was burned down at some point and that the one we see is a manifestation of faith - and one that not everyone actually sees there.
But the point is, how could the Erdtree cast a shadow?
There are numerous ways to think about this. One is to suggest that it's a metaphorical shadow - the faith in the Erdtree, after all, conquered the Lands Between and left many cultures and faiths buried beneath the enforcement of Erdtree orthodoxy, just as the spread of Christianity across Europe saw the dismantling of older religious traditions. And given the imagery we see in the Shadow of the Erdtree trailer, along with interviews with Hidetaka Miyazaki, it seems that the Land of Shadow will be one where the remnants of lost cultures and civilizations exist in a kind of exile. The lion-dancer featured in the trailer that is probably going to be some very tough boss, for example, has the big lion-mask surrounded by omen horns, which we know was once considered a sign of divine favor but is, in Marika's age, considered a cursed affliction.
On a very literal level, of course, a shadow is an area of darkness obscured by something blocking the light that would otherwise touch it. The Lands of Shadow could, thus, paradoxically, be hidden by a light that illuminates it.
One last idea, though, is if the Erdtree has a physical, manifested thing that is its shadow in some sense - perhaps the literary, or the Jungian, or even the companion sense. Indeed, the gnarled tree we see in the key art and which looks like it will loom overhead in the DLC much as the Erdtree does in the base game is, upon close examination, probably two separate trees - one standing somewhat straight up (though at a slight tilt, similar to the Erdtree) and the other with a trunk wrapped around it and going at a far more pronounced tilted angle. Perhaps this Shadow Tree is quite literally the Erdtree's Shadow.
The DLC certainly appears to center heavily on Miquella as a figure. Miquella, of all the demigods, seems to be the most "good aligned" so to speak. At least his public persona is one that welcomes in those rejected by the world, and which promises a better future for all.
We are said to be following Miquella, who appears to have traveled to The Land of Shadow in a purely spiritual form - he has divested his flesh and his lineage and all that is golden about him. The "why" of it is a big question.
But the other central figure to this expansion is Messmer, whom we will clearly fight and who may even be the DLC's final boss (though given FromSoft, I'm not going to bet on it - they freaking love having some really unexpected thing show up, whether it be the Moon Presence, the Elden Beast, or Slave Knight Gael pop up with a subversion). Messmer is drenched in imagery that we can speculate about - between his signs of partaking in dragon communion, his association with snakes, his weird shadowy fire he wields, the big polearm, and the fact that he's got an occluded eye similar to Melina.
While the evidence is far from comprehensive, it seems a possibility that Messmer might actually be Miquella in some other form. My initial speculation was that Messmer is that dark shadow of Miquella - that all of the hidden ambition and disdain that Miquella represses might emerge as Messmer. Notably, we get a nice shot of Messmer's lanky arm, which looks very similar to the shriveled arm hanging out of Miquella's cocoon.
The simplest interpretation, of course, would be simply that Messmer is a shadow to Miquella in a more literary way - here is a previously-unknown demigod from the third generation (the Radagon/Marika one) who is cruel and hateful in every way that Miquella is kind and loving. And I'm not ruling that out.
But that really then raises the question of what, precisely, the Land of Shadow is. I saw one take (I think Tarnished Archaeologist) who claimed that the field of ghostly gravestones was a pre-Aeonian Caelid, though I don't know if the evidence is there to confirm that (this was his off-the-cuff reaction video, so no shade to him if he guessed wrong - I still think TA's the most convincingly detailed lore speculation channel I've come across). It could, of course, simply be another land mass. But on the other hand, I've often thought of The Lands Between as being something like D&D's Outer Planes - a realm of the gods that doesn't really follow the same physical laws of our own (which is in keeping with my D&D-ification of FromSoft titles, where Dark Souls is set in the Shadowfell and Bloodborne is a Domain of Dread in Ravenloft).
We access the Lands of Shadow via Miquella's lifeless (but not strictly dead?) body, suggesting that maybe it's something of a mental journey. Does this realm exist on another level of reality? Could the existence of lost cultures there suggest that, perhaps, these are not the literal forgotten and exiled worshippers of older religious traditions, but instead the repressed desires to retain those traditions within the collective unconscious of the people in the world of Elden Ring?
It might be strange to think that Messmer prosecuted a military campaign against repressed desires of the collective unconscious, but remember that we're dealing with gods and demigods here - surely such domains are the potential battlegrounds for the divine.
And, in a certain way, that means that the question of whether Miquella and Messmer are truly separate individuals or different versions of the same one might not actually have much meaning as a distinction (by the way, this is what it actually means to "beg the question.")
Now, there's one last bit that will probably spawn its own entire post:
Are Melina and Messmer the same person?
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