There are a lot of new stories in Shadow of the Erdtree, but also most of the elements of the expansion are related to things we've already explored to an extent in the base game. It's not necessarily that we're getting "explanations" per se, given the ambiguous style of FromSoft's storytelling, but we're getting new pieces that we can fit into our ever-expanding conspiracy board.
And maybe it's my stealth goth sensibilities, but the figure who has fascinated me the most of anything I've seen is Midra.
The Frenzied Flame in the base game is really weird. It's subtle, creeping in at the edges. While the presence of something like the Scarlet Rot can usually be traced back to Malenia (though I think the Lake of Rot pre-dates her - and I haven't yet done the Rot-related stuff in the Lands of Shadow) and you can generally be sure that lightning always seems to tie in some way to the Ancient Dragons (notice how none of the Drakes whose breath weapons you can get via dragon communion have a lightning breath?).
But the Frenzied Flame seems to just kind of pop up. We likely first encounter it in the village on the highest hill in the Weeping Penninsula - an interesting place given the way that the Frenzied Flame and grief, anguish, and despair seem to be tied to it.
There's a lot in Elden Ring that feels secretly like Cosmic Horror. George R. R. Martin is, of course, has elements of that genre in his dark fantasy opus, A Song of Ice and Fire (the Lord of Light, R'hollor, seems less like an Abrahamic god than some kind of Great Old One, likewise the Ironborn Drowned God, the latter of whom sounds a lot like Dagon or Cthulhu). While I think this cosmic horror element is really present in all of FromSoft's games, I'd say that Elden Ring is probably closer to it than Dark Souls (though obviously Bloodborne is straight-up cosmic horror, so it wins in that category).
I'll probably make a whole post about Metyr and the Fingers and the cosmic horror elements of that branch of the story, but here I want to touch on the way that the Frenzied Flame feels aberrant and weird in a world that already has its fair share of supernatural terrors.
Truth be told, I think that Cosmic Horror as a genre exists on a spectrum - its most famous (and possibly most problematic) author, H. P. Lovecraft, was strongly influenced by the works of Gothic Horror icon Edgar Allan Poe. And so, often a cosmic horror story will bring with it the trappings of gothic horror - the spooky woods, the abandoned manor house, aged and decrepit families and institutions. The only difference is that rather than simply normal people going mad, or monsters out of medieval-and-earlier folklore like vampires and werewolves, being the cause of the terror, instead we get strange and alien forces acting upon the world.
But at the other edge of that spectrum, Cosmic Horror is arguably more of a subgenre of science fiction. Indeed, if you read some of Lovecraft's stories, such as At the Mountains of Madness, they read far more like the precedent for 1950s alien-invasion sci-fi. As that subgenre matured, we eventually got things like the movie Alien or The Thing (itself based on a short story that shares some elements with At the Mountains of Madness).
So, addressing Metyr, I think that in some ways, she and her whole story fit a little more into the "bizarre sci-fi" side of cosmic horror. But Midra feels very much Gothic in its sensibilities.
We're still early in the life of Shadow of the Erdtree, with most people still making their way through their first run of it. One of the great joys of FromSoft games is the way that the internet community can synthesize the thousands of snippets of lore to get a more complete picture. That process is starting, but there's a very good chance that there will be more things to say months or years from now.
Still, I thought it would be interesting to try to sum up what we know about Midra.
I'm going to set aside my pet theories that only have some extremely circumstantial evidence. The "Midra is Marika's father" theory could be very cool if I find any more solid evidence to support it, but we're not going to do that right now.
Instead, let's look at the facts. And we're going to start at the end here:
Midra, more or less alone in his Manse, has a giant barbed sword jutting through his body. It's an injury that would clearly be completely fatal if not in the weirdly deathless world of Elden Ring. And he seems to be in agony.
Most of the foes we encounter in Midra's Manse are Inquisitors - a faction that belongs to the Hornsent culture, and is there to punish heresies and impurities. (As Leda, dubious source though she is, says of the Hornsent: "They were never saints.")
I even wonder if the Inquisitors' primary function was to root out any appearance of the Frenzied Flame. But much as it looks like the imprisonment of the Wandering Merchants below Leyndell on suspicion of being associated with the Frenzied Flame led to a concentration of Frenzy there and the presence of the Three Fingers (maybe?) it's possible that the hypervigilance of the Hornsent Inquisitors may have condemned the Abyssal Wood to become a hotbed of Frenzy.
We've talked about the weirdness of the Frenzied Flame. You know what's an interesting example of that? Other than Midra, I don't think there are any Frenzied Flame-associated bosses. Even Vyke, who uses the Frenzied Flame when he invades us in Liurnia, instead uses only Dragon Cult incantations and weapons when we actually find him trapped in the Evergaol in the Mountaintop of the Giants.
Off the top of my head, we find Frenzied Flame-associated monsters in that village in the Weeping Penninsula, in the village in northeastern Liurnia (with a big "Lord of Frenzied Flame" head being conjured at the top of that tower,) then among a few Leyndell soldiers as well as a big troll right outside of Volcano Manor, and then in the ruins in the southeastern part of the Consecrated Snowfield, and finally down in the depths beneath the Capital Shunning Grounds.
And now, the Abyssal Woods.
Given his massive mansion, which seems to largely serve as a library, Midra was presumably someone important. But it seems he must have pissed of the inquisition in some way, because the barbed sword embedded in his emaciated body matches the candletree weapons that the Inquisitors wield. The Abyssal Woods themselves are guarded by Inquisitor Jori, the final boss of the Darklight Catacombs.
So it seems like a fairly uncontroversial notion that his agonized state is the work of the Inquisitors.
But why? What did he do to draw their ire?
We find a torn diary page within the Manse that serves purely (as far as I can tell) to shed some light on the lore (and also give a hint at something you can do as a player). Getting to the Manse requires a number of stealth sections in which we have to creep past these figures I previously referred to as Winter Lanterns, but which I believe are called Aged Ones (thanks to this Reddit thread for synthesizing a lot of this stuff).
The note talks about how the writer touched "him" only once, after pushing "his" staff aside, but touched the "aging untouchable." This is, in part, a hint that you can parry the Aged Ones (something I have not yet even attempted to do) and, evidently, get a trinket called Aged One's Exultation, which works like the other Exultation trinkets, triggering when madness is procced.
Now, I wonder if this was a note written by Midra himself - and if this note may have even been the evidence used to condemn him.
See, the Hornsent culture has a different belief system from Marika's Golden Order. I don't want to say too much without evidence, but it seems that they have a greater tolerance for physical death in their world, so long as the spirit is able to continue on. We even see how with the Ancient Divine Beast up at the top of Belurat is, I think, a great celestial spirit inhabiting the lion-dancer costume (shared by two or three Hornsent) to animate it.
But the Frenzied Flame melts both bodies and spirits, and so was seen as anathema to their belief system.
Given how dangerous the Frenzied Flame is, I wouldn't be shocked if simply touching someone afflicted by it was grounds for persecution. Maybe this torn diary page was, in the eyes of the Inquisitors, a confession that justified their horrific punishment against Midra.
Of course, as we see, the Inquisitors in the Manse and nearby in the Abyssal Woods have all, themselves, become infected by the Frenzied Flame, which... you know, serves them right, but not great for the world in general.
Actually!
One of the challenges of the gameplay in the Abyssal Woods is that Torrent refuses to enter. If you try to call him while in the woods, you get a message that he refuses your call because he's too frightened. Torrent, who has ridden around dragons and Fire Giants and Erdtree Avatars.
But it makes sense: Torrent, like spirit ashes, is actually a spirit. And so, he never has anything to fear when facing down those relatively mundane threats. But the Frenzied Flame can melt away spirit, and thus poses a true threat to him.
I think it's also worth considering something about the two Frenzied Flame-associated NPCs we meet in the base game.
Shabriri and Hyetta are both new personalities inhabiting the bodies of dead people.
Shabriri seems to be fully cognizant of the power that he serves, but Hyetta at least appears pretty innocent when we encounter her in Liurnia (I'll confess that on my first playthrough I didn't even clock that she was in the same body as Irina).
From a certain point of view, both of these individuals are possessed by a celestial being - if Shabriri and Hyetta are sort of possessing spirits from beyond. (Maybe Daedicar is one as well?)
Fun Jewish folklore sidenote: Shabriri is the name of a demon in Jewish folklore that causes blindness. Another evil spirit in Jewish lore is the Dybbuk, which is sometimes a ghost and sometimes a demon that possesses people. In D&D, dybbuks specifically possess corpses, meaning that both Shabriri and Hyetta might be something akin to a dybbuk.
One element of Midra's Manse I haven't yet developed a theory about are the several headless corpses arrayed out in front of it. Each corpse has a yellow crystal or spire emerging from the neck, so that from a distance you can easily mistake them as golden-beaked ravens.
Headlessness has, I think, two major meanings in Elden Ring. The likely more pertinent meaning is its association with the Lord of Frenzied Flame. If we get this ending in the base game, our head is replaced with the dark-centered corona of frenzied flame. But this also happens to Midra when we get into his boss fight proper - he pries the barbed sword from his body, taking his head off with it. What fills the place left by his head is that same "Visage of the Lord of Frenzied Flame."
There is another association, though, which is the many ghostly spirits who safeguard the Wandering Mausoleums. Again, I think this is less likely to directly relate to these bodies, but worth noting.
Overall, here's what I think I can confidently state about Midra: He's clearly a man of some importance given his palatial manse. The Frenzied Flame is seen as particularly anathema to the Hornsent culture because of its capacity to melt not only flesh but spirit. The Hornsent are much more comfortable with the idea of death likely because they see a clear distinction between spirits (which can move from body to body) and the physical form, but the Frenzed Flame is worse than death, and must be contained at all costs.
Midra encountered the Aged Ones, and while he did not fully fall to their madness-inducing attack, he did touch them. To the powers that be in the Hornsent culture, this was enough to warrant extreme, torturous punishment, because Midra had become spiritually unclean.
They embedded a barbed sword into his body, but he did not die.
Nanaya, either a caretaker, relative, or his wife, was somehow an adherent or cultist of the Frenzied Flame, and encouraged Midra to endure his torment, perhaps aware that the longer he suffered, the more potent his chance to become the Lord of Frenzy.
Ultimately, Nanaya died, possibly killed by the Inquistors, but Midra did his best to stave off his descent/ascension. When we come along, we push him over the edge - he can't bear the torment any longer. The Frenzied Flame seems to grant a sense of relief to those who embrace it, even if it means their own destruction. Midra's pain leaves him, but so does his humanity and perhaps even his identity as an individual.
Two things occur to me:
First is that, while the Nomadic Merchants beneath Leyndell are sealed away possibly because of accusations that they were touched by Frenzy (an accusation that isn't baseless, as I think many of the merchants will use such magic if attacked, though of course generalizing to an entire population is textbook bigotry) there isn't any specific task force within the Golden Order whose purpose is to root it out. To be honest, I think that the Frenzied Flame and the concept of Order might be two sides of the same coin - if Frenzy would ultimately result in the reunification of all things into a single undifferentiated mass, it actually fits in with the Golden Order's concept of Regression. On top of that, I could imagine that Marika, as someone who, before her apotheosis, seems to have suffered under the oppressive zealotry of the Hornsent culture, may view the Flame of Frenzy as a kind of "enemy of my enemy" force.
The second is something to consider regarding player agency in these games - oftentimes, it feels like we're forced into situations where we are fighting against figures we might not actually want to fight. Shadow of the Erdtree makes an argument that Miquella's goals and methods have lost any moral standing, and that he must be killed, but you might not totally agree - maybe you value peace and cooperation over free will. But in a certain way, you do have a choice: you can not pursue certain leads. One could argue that, while not in great shape thanks to Miquella's absence, the Haligtree is still a sanctuary for many of the Lands Between's dispossessed. Malenia isn't really bothering anyone at the base of the Haligtree, so why do we go kill her?
And maybe Midra could have continued to endure, in pain, yes, but not threatening the world with the Frenzied Flame. But we had to know, we had to prod and explore.
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