Several years ago, I think either while 30 Rock was still on the air or shortly thereafter, I read a memoir by Tina Fey called Bossypants. The book was largely about how Fey came up in the world of comedy and the challenges of being in a leadership position as a woman in a field (like so many fields) that has a lot of historical and structural sexism. One weird thing that stood out to me was that she took a moment to complain about the primacy of blonde hair as a desired feature in our culture, one that tends to be associated with attractiveness. She pointed out that, with other hair colors, we simply call it the color that it is - brown hair, grey hair, red hair (though personally I've always felt that most red hair is closer to orange, maybe "copper" if we're being a little more granular, which again I think is closer to orange than it is to red). Blonde, though, has its own special word that, perhaps outside of non-chocolate brownies and I suppose milk-heavy coffees (I think? I don't drink coffee) is used pretty much just to refer to this hair color. And yes, it's a hair color that we place a high value on - consider movies like "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." One of the most common ways in which people (women in particular) are encouraged to change their appearances is by bleaching their hair. While blonde hair is certainly something that occurs naturally (I, arguably, have blonde hair, though I tend to refer to it instead as light brown, perhaps because my baseline for blondness was set by the kids who lived next door when I was little, who truly had very light blonde hair) it's funny to me that some of the most iconic blondes who really defined the modern "blonde look", like Marilyn Monroe, were not naturally blonde themselves.
Tina Fey argues we should just call it yellow hair.
In the world of Elden Ring, colors are important. And while red could give it a run for its money, I think that gold is really the crucial color in the whole story. The Grace of Gold is what those who are part of Marika's Golden Order are meant to possess, and this color manifests in hair color and eye color. Sir Kenneth Hight, one of the few NPCs who seems to have a relatively happy ending for his questline (though for all I know there's some detail I've missed that makes him actually totally evil,) despite reading as an older man who you'd think would have grey or white hair, instead has pretty brilliant blonde hair and golden eyes - a man fully possessed of Grace.
There are a lot of meaningful colors in the game. Blue is often associated with glintstone, sorcery, and the stars. Red's all over the place, associated with fire and fire giants, Radahn's Redmane forces, Malenia's Scarlet Rot (though it's quite specifically Scarlet, a pretty particular shade of red that is slightly oranger and slightly pinker, I think,) Rykard's magma-based magic, and Messmer's deep red flame.
Gold shows up a ton as well, naturally most often associated with the Golden Order, but arguably also with the lightning-focused Dragon Cult, as well as the faithful of Miquella (with him perhaps skewing a little more toward a kind of white-gold).
But what is gold if not just a metallic yellow? Is gold not just the more appealing, more valued version of yellow when we talk about shiny things? Much like blonde hair, we have this other word that, yes, corresponds to a specific mineral element that has some special properties (not rusting or tarnishing - the latter word of course being pretty important to this game) but also means more broadly just, you know, shiny yellow.
And there's one thing in Elden Ring that is very specifically referred to as being not gold, not blonde, but yellow: The Frenzied Flame.
This isn't FromSoft's first rodeo with Yellow - the Old Monk boss in Demon's Souls is draped in a massive yellow robe that wraps around his head, and seems to actually be the true monster puppeteering the monk. I believe there is an invader NPC in... possibly both Dark Souls and Dark Souls III (no idea about 2). Ironically, From's true cosmic horror game, Bloodborne, might be one of the few that doesn't have such a reference.
This figure is almost certainly a reference to The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, a series of short horror stories all revolving around a play of the same name that drives any who see it to madness. The King in Yellow was a massive influence on H. P. Lovecraft, who inducted the eponymous king into his pantheon of horrific false deities in his cosmic horror oeuvre known collectively as "The Cthulhu Mythos." In fact, Chambers borrowed names from the short story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" by Ambrose Bierce, which tells the story of a man searching for his titular home city, only to stumble upon his own grave and realize that he's dead and that his home long ago fell to ruin.
The color yellow can be associated with illness - liver failure can cause jaundice, and often fluids that come from sores and untreated wounds can be yellowish in coloration. I think, as such, it makes sense as a color that can really signify something being truly wrong.
Elden Ring, more than Dark Souls did, really cranks up the cosmic aspect of its fantasy background. If Bloodborne gives us a gothic horror world underpinned by cosmic horror, Elden Ring gives us high fantasy underpinned with an almost science-fiction-like cosmic element. (I'll even mention that the spiral shapes associated with the Crucible and Enir-Elim point to a weird sort of awareness of the structure of DNA).
In Shadow of the Erdtree, we get some surprising revelations about the nature of the Two Fingers - we find out that they were created (along with the Fingercreepers) by a being known as Metyr, herself a bizarre mishmash of limbs that look very much like giant human fingers. Metyr is said to be a daughter of the Greater Will (creating a weird parallel with Ebrietas from Bloodborne, but we'll have to save that for another post). Notably, Metyr's tail, itself a kind of double-helix that recalls both the spiral pattern affiliated with the Crucible and also the Two Fingers, carries in its crux a spherical void, and it is said that this void is (at least meant to be) a conduit through which she can receive the word of the Greater Will, which she can then convey to the Two Fingers, who in turn convey this to the Finger Readers and thus the rest of humanity.
I think we can pause here a second and think about the imagery here: glintstone is associated with the stars, and we have other elements of the story that take the moon(s) as their affiliated symbol. But Metyr's void and the Dark Knights that guard Ymir, and indeed, the hole in Ymir's miter-like cap, all seem to represent the pure dark void of space... or a black hole.
We can discover, while dealing with Metyr, that the crucial role she plays in the world's order - not just the Golden Order, but all conveyed messages from the Greater Will, including the ability for the Two Fingers to pronounce certain individuals as empyreans and thus worthy of ascending to godhood - is all just... wrong. Metyr has not heard from the Greater Will is ages, likely since long before Marika ever achieved her apotheosis. Ymir diagnoses the problem with the world as the fact that the whole thing has been built on what are either Metyr's lies or her delusions.
Ymir laments that any attempt to build anything resembling a functional order for the world is inherently going to be flawed and irredeemable so long as it's built on the words of the Fingers, which includes both the reign of Marika and the prospective reign of Miquella. Of course, Ymir also goes kind of nuts, trying to take over Metyr's role as "Mother of Fingers," so even his word is somewhat suspect. (Honestly, I feel like I need to really examine more about Ymir to figure out what his whole deal is).
Throughout the world of Elden Ring, we come across various locations affected by the Frenzied Flame - some soldiers up on Mt. Gelmir, a village on the Weeping Penninsula, a ruin in the Consecrated Snowfield, and of course most notably the deepest depths of the sewers under Leyndell.
Oddly, the Frenzied Flame is one of multiple spreading infections in the Lands Between, though unlike the Scarlet Rot and Deathroot, the Flame seems to infect only people, and not places. (The one exception here being the Abyssal Woods in the Lands of Shadow). The Flame of Frenzy has its adherents - usually people who have suffered tremendously. Ironically, it seems that the mistreatment of those suspected of being infected with Frenzy can lead to the development of that frenzy in a population - my personal interpretation of what happened to the Great Caravan (of which the wandering merchants we meet in the Lands Between are the few survivors) is that, as pariahs and scapegoats, they were accused of bringing the Frenzied Flame with them, and were locked away in that horrific tomb beneath the capital, and the starvation and horror of being sealed away to die slowly (and maybe not even die, because this is Marika's Golden Order after all) was actually what brought the Frenzied Flame into them in the first place.
Why does the Frenzied Flame feel so different than other powers at work in Elden Ring? Why does it seem to be able to just appear not because of any physical transference to its locations, but seems to just emerge naturally where conditions are right for it?
Could it be because it's actually a form of Grace?
If Ymir is correct to say that all guidance from the Two Fingers is ultimately just the maddened ramblings of an eldritch being cut off from the source of genuine divine truth, then holiness itself in Elden Ring is just a kind of weird eldritch madness. While it clothes itself in a ritualized orderliness, I think that grace might just be one half of the same coin as the Frenzied Flame.
Indeed, Midra's remembrance (I think - either that or from one of his remembrance items) suggests that the appeal to submitting to Frenzy is that it's actually a huge relief - letting go, letting chaos consume you, removes the agony of one's suffering. When we fight Midra, the first part of the fight has him utterly delirious from the horrifying weapon embedded in his body, in a manner that should by all rights have long ago killed him (given that it's even sticking right through his brain). This first half of the fight is awkward and kind of pathetic. Yet, after the utter horror of seeing Midra pull his own head off (and I am so grateful to FromSoft for cutting to black before we actually see the head detach - I'm not here for Mortal Kombat-level gore) the decapitated body of Midra, with the head replaced by the orb of Frenzied Flame, moves with surprising grace (ahem, grace). There's a confidence, a fluidity to his movements. One gets the impression that either the pain has left him, or that pain no longer means anything to him.
But what about that head, though?
The face of the Lord of Frenzied Flame is a kind of circle of chaotic yellow flame surrounding a dark spot in the middle. We see this in the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending of the game, as well as when Midra shifts into his true boss fight. We also see it projected at the top of a tower in northeastern Liurnia, near where we fight the Vyke as an invader to get the Fingerprint Grape (which, as we all know, is not a grape at all).
Now, is it just me, or does the visage of the Lord of Frenzied Flame look at least a little like Metyr's tail void orb? The orb is, of course, pretty perfectly spherical, whereas what I'll call the Visage here is more roiling and irregular.
In keeping with the cosmic themes - both in terms of cosmic horror and also using actual objects in space - might we interpret the Visage as being something like a Black Hole?
As a side note, growing up, I was pretty curious about science. I don't think I ever wanted to pursue science as a career, but I liked knowing how things worked. My dad is a scientist, and even (if I recall correctly) majored in Physics as an undergraduate before moving on to the then-very-new field of computer science (this was like the early 70s). So, I learned about a lot of space things when I was pretty young.
And Black Holes scared the absolute shit out of me.
I'm fairly prone to anxiety, and the fact that it was extremely unlikely that I'd ever encounter a black hole didn't really assuage the fear of it on a conceptual level. I mean, it's an object that will consume you, utterly inescapable (ok, yes, there's Hawking Radiation, but I don't think you'd be very recognizable after the billions of years your mass takes to leak out one photon at a time).
Black Holes are surrounded by an accretion disk - essentially, all the matter that gets drawn into a tight orbit around the event horizon but not quite passing through it, and that stuff gets so squashed together that it smashes together and burns as an utter inferno, giving black holes a kind of halo-like ring around them.
One theory (which might have been debunked recently, but don't look to me to have the latest on astrophysics) about black holes is that they have what is called a Firewall - that the stuff that is just outside of the event horizon (the radius from the black hole's center at which even the speed of light is too slow to be escape velocity, meaning light cannot escape and hence the "black" part of black holes) is so crushed by the gravity and the other matter being pulled in that this kind of all-destroying barrier of enormous energy will obliterate anything on its way into the black hole, burning it to some fundamental level of physical matter.
Indeed, there's a weird paradox where it's not clear how something could pass through the Firewall to even make it past the event horizon, even though it must be able to. Things get really freaky, where the actual physical location of something passing into a black hole depends on your perspective.
However, the point is that this Firewall burns and melts everything into a mass of glowing fiery stuff. Not unlike the Frenzied Flame.
And is it really that distinct from the Golden Order? One of the key principles of the Golden Order is the Law of Regression - that things yearn to return. When Hyetta is touched by the Flame of Frenzy and acts as a Finger Reader for the Three Fingers, she says that all was once part of the One Great, before the Greater Will split off the Frenzied Flame.
I almost wonder if this is referring to an event like the Big Bang (something Ymir also seems to allude to). Is the Frenzied Flame a manner in which things might return to that singularity that birthed the cosmos - but in reversing creation, utterly destroying all that now exists?
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