Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Grafting, Jars, Metal, and Trees

 Every villain is the hero of their own story. And sometimes, who the villain is versus who the hero is really depends on where you are in the story.

In Shadow of the Erdtree, we've learned a huge deal about Marika's pre-apotheosis life, even if, as is always the case in FromSoft lore, there are big gaps and a lot of circumstantial evidence.

Behind the Shadow Keep, hidden in a passage that requires the O Mother gesture found in the Bonny Village, you can discover the "Shaman Village," which is heavily implied to be the home village of Queen Marika. It seems that she was part of this "shaman" culture (evidently this is a translation that some lore-divers feel is misleading, and that a more direct translation might be "shrine-maiden.") What we know about this culture is that its people had a special skill: they could harmoniously meld their flesh with others.

Notably, this gives us the strongest evidence to date that Marika and Radagon were initially separate people. This has been an ongoing debate ever since the reveal in the base game that the current Elden Lord and the current deity are two people who share a shape-shifting body, but it seems likely now that, using these flesh-melding techniques, Radagon was absorbed into Marika at some point. This could also explain how it was that Radagon could lead troops in Liurnia as a Champion without anyone wondering where the hell the queen was.

It does also, though, raise some questions about how Rennala's children earned their demigod status - if Radagon were purely Radagon when he fathered Radahn, Rykard, and Ranni, had he carried a little bit of Marika with him when he was doing so? And if so, does that mean that Radagon and Marika had already merged prior to that (one wonders, for example, why Godfrey wouldn't be leading these campaigns if he were still Elden Lord, though given the ancient alliance between the Astrologers and the Fire Giants, I could imagine this happening simultaneously with the war against the giants as a kind of two-front engagement.)

But another thing to note here is that Marika and her peoples' special skill might also inform why there is such a metallic theme in her Golden Order. Metals, of course, are very easy to mix together, due to the way that their chemical bonds are made (non-metals bonding with each other are very particular about how they can bond and how many bonds they can make, while metals bonding with one another are basically just a big jumble of metal atoms held together by a kind of mortar of electrons that aren't specifically associated with any given atom). Thus, melding or melting metallic beings into one another would, thematically, be simple compared to normal humans.

Interestingly, this also ties into the Eternal Cities, where the Silver Tears act as kind of artificial life. The Silver Tears, and the ones that can transform into humanoid forms, the Mimic Tears, appear to be made of Mercury, or Quicksilver, one of the seven metals of classical alchemy. The Eternal Cities and their resident Nox people are likely other descendants of the Numen, along with Marika's shaman culture, though we don't know if one flowed into the other or if they were simply separate branches.

But let's talk Jars.

The Living Jars are some of the most endearing creature designs in Elden Ring... until you smash one open and find that they're filled with gory viscera. We meet a couple of Living Jars, including the heroic Great Jar Alexander and Jar Bairn in Jarburg. There's a questline involving the search for a Potentate in Jarburg that allows you to find a much better purpose for Diallos than his foray into being a Recusant of Volcano Manor (that ends tragically, because FromSoft, but he gets a heroic death).

The thing is, as we've learned in Shadow of the Erdtree, the history of the Living Jars and the role of the Potentate is far darker than we might have previously assumed.

The original Living Jars were essentially a torturous transformation forced upon the Shaman people by the Hornsent culture, attempting to transform them from sinners into saints. This really throws a lot of the commentary on how the Living Jars were better than the people they contained into a stark context - what do we mean by "better," hm? Unlike Diallos, the original Potentates were there to torture and mutilate the shamans they were stuffing into the jars, trying to force some kind of Crucible-like transformation upon them by forcibly melding their flesh with others. In other words, it was like a great perversion of some kind of sacred ritual to the Shamans.

What I find interesting about this flesh-melding capacity is how it actually relates to the first major villain of the game - Godrick. While Godrick is a distant relation of the queen, his ability to graft the flesh of the Tarnished onto him likely derives from his inherited Shaman ancestry.

And I find this pretty fascinating because it sort of links the blending of metals with grafting different plants together.

Hell, ever consider that a crucible is primarily used for melting down metal?

One last note, and this might not be entirely on topic:

Some of the mutilated jar shaman women have a rune on their forehead, which looks a bit like a horizontally-oriented oval with a line coming down from the top and a bit past the bottom. If you look at this rune, and compare it with Marika's rune and the Rune of Death, it appears that this one is those two superimposed upon one another (Marika's Rune and Destined Death aren't just flipped versions of each other - both have the vertical line trailing downward.)

This, frankly, makes me feel a little more confident in the notion that the Gloam-Eyed Queen was Marika's sister. I could even imagine that the GEQ and Marika rose up together against the Hornsent, only to fall to infighting afterward. Unfortunately, we don't really see much about the GEQ in Shadow of the Erdtree (though the Putrescent Knight was apparently originally called Knight of the Gloam-Eyed Queen).

Frankly, I think that if Elden Ring becomes a series like Dark Souls, we might need to wait for the grand finale to see the GEQ revealed, a bit like the Nameless King.

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