Graceless Exiles from Gold: Queer Themes in FromSoftware’s ‘Elden Ring’
The following essay provides a detailed analysis of Elden Ring and therefore contains ample spoilers. Turn back now if you wish to remain unspoiled.
To claim that FromSoftware’s 2022 title Elden Ring is, to any degree, a queer title may appear, on the face of it, a totally bizarre or perhaps even misguided claim. To be sure, the game displays no direct preoccupation with topics of sexuality, an absence that would, for many, render Elden Ring a queerless world.
Yet, despite sexuality itself forming little more than a background fragment of the Lands Between (a world replete with heterosexual couplings that thereby, at least on the surface, appears to constitute its own kind of heteronormative fantasy), queerness is baked into the heart of several of Elden Ring’s key plotlines.
In order to make sense of this claim, it is important to provide a tentative yet far more broad definition of queerness than that of sexuality. Queerness can be expressed as a rejection of normativity; it dwells within those that exist — in one way or another — beyond or outside of that which is perceived to be the norm. Though our contemporary use of the term, particularly politically, tends to focus on those who defy the norms of the unholy trinity of sex, gender, and sexuality (elements forcibly aligned by the power structure identified by Butler as the heterosexual matrix)[i] the figure of ‘the queer’ does not necessarily have to dwell within precisely this figure.
Though we should not be too quick to conflate queerness with a generalised anti-normativity, thereby rendering queerness simply a negative reflection of the normal — we can, for my purposes within, understand queerness as a form of exclusion or of being situated outside of something. That exclusionary mechanism is normativity, not simply in the sense of what is perceived or felt to be normal but specifically in terms of the consolidation of these norms into a structure (or structures) of power. Queerness also tends to orbit around a specifically ontological concern, meaning a concern about the nature of one’s being. For an individual be understood as queer, their very being must be perceived as a violation of the norm, even if one is only constituted as such by the very same norm that enacts this exclusion. Though queer studies and, more formally, queer theory rightly interrogate the ontology of sexual and gender categories (as well as those of sexuality) queerness in part relies upon a mechanism whereby certain subjects are socially designated (constituted) as the wrong kind of being, as aberrant or as abomination. This is to suggest that queer is a status bestowed upon subjects perceived to exist in deviation from social and political norms. As a fantasy that so centralises the question as to how the world is organised, and indeed how it should be organised, Elden Ring is, on this reading, unsurprisingly replete with queer narratives ripe for examination.
In the following, I shall briefly outline how this political power operates within Elden Ring and how its deification lies at the centre of the game’s many narrative threads, thereby placing the dialectic of power and resistance, of normativity and queerness at the heart of Elden Ring’s narrative. This, of course, shall require an examination of the Golden Order of the Erdtree, the tenants that shape its orthodoxy, and those points of resistance to its influence.
In order to fully explore those points of resistance, as well as to examine the Golden Order more fully, I shall proceed to examine three queer figures within Elden Ring (though this list is hardly exhaustive):[ii] Mohg Lord of Blood, Miquella the Unalloyed, and Queen Marika the Eternal herself. We shall see how, in turn, one occupies the theological position of Adversary, one assumes the role as a failed Messiah, and the other speaks to the internal contradictions of the Golden Order, standing as its internal limit.
The Golden Order
At its core, the Golden Order is most clearly understood as a religious organisation that venerates Queen Marika the Eternal as the sole deity, abiding by her will and, by extension, serving the desires of the Greater Will from which Marika’s divinity stems. This Greater Will is one among a wider cast of Outer Gods who exert influence on the Lands Between from the firmament, or some other realm beyond even Elden Ring’s Otherworld.[iii] Its name, the Greater Will, is telling for it defines this entity by its wants (what it wills) and by hierarchy (the imposition of this will over and upon others’). It is a will that is greater both in strength and in importance, a will that by its own constitution seeks to subordinate all other wills, wants, and desires to its own. According to its own logic, the Greater Will must operate either hegemonically — governing over others through the manufacture of consent — or in a totalitarian fashion: wherein power is eschewed in exchange for a condition of total violence. By its own nature, the Greater Will must dominate, for it cannot be Greater without those lesser wills it is compelled to subordinate. The Greater Will is, fundamentally, an impulse that desires and dominates. Unlike the religious factions within FromSoftware’s catalogue, the majority of which are at odds with or regarded as the antithesis to those factions resting upon intellect, the fundamentalism of the Golden Order is as much an intellectual project as it is one marked by religious fervour. Noting, for instance, descriptions of items such as the Golden Order Seal — which states “Fundamentalism is scholarship in all but name. Scales incantation using both intelligence and faith” — and the Golden Order Principia, a key text of the Order’s fundamentalism which is described as “A dense and complex academic treatise”, we must understand the Golden Order as a scholarly and intellectual pursuit.
In this sense, the Golden Order delivers on a thematic promise begun in Demon’s Souls, where the faith and intellect factions are presumed to be polarised opposites that, in truth, derive their power from the same source, by presenting us with a major religious faction that unites faith with reason. The fundamentalism of the Golden Order is therefore a rational, scholarly fundamentalism, and the naming of this fundamentalism’s central text the Principia seems to deliberately invoke Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, regarded as one of the most important scientific texts, foundational to the development and advancement of natural philosophy (from which modern science emerged).
Despite science’s (both historical and, on occasion contemporary) conflation with truth or claims to its subject-neutral objectivity — science’s constitution as a series of practices and institutions rooted within and produced by specific historical moments (not to mention its being practiced by individual human beings) prevents us from enacting any clear-cut distinction between science and historical context. This is to suggest that no matter how hard science may strive to transcendent the human condition, science cross pollinates with other ways of knowing. In particular, science cannot split itself from the political conditions in which its agents and institutions enact these practices. This is baked into natural philosophy of the Golden Order, which is not a disinterested or impartial attempt to present the world as it is, but as an institution of power that seeks to shape the world around it.
“the primordial crucible, where all life was once blended together” — Aspects of the Crucible
We can see this in the tension between the Golden Order and the crucible of primordial life. The crucible, associated with bestial aspects (as reflected in the various animalistic crucible talismans and in the crucible incantations that allow the user to harness the aspects of various beasts) seems to represent a prehistoric state of nature. Within the crucible, which can seemingly be understood as a location, a time, and a metaphysical concept simultaneously, all life is blended together.[iv] Though the precise relationship between the crucible and the Golden Order remains a speculative matter, there is a clear antipathy on the Order’s behalf, which views communion with the crucible and the harnessing of its elements as a kind of sin. For example, the Winged Misbegotten Ashes tell us that the “misbegotten are held to be a punishment for making contact with the Crucible, and from birth they are treated as slaves, or worse” — with this both speaking to the sinful nature of the crucible and illustrating the normative hierarchy of the Order. A further example of this dichotomy is found in the Crucible Feather Talisman, which states: “the crucible of primordial life…was considered a signifier of the divine in ancient times, but is now increasingly disdained as an impurity as civilisation has advanced.”
If we read the crucible as a primordial and natural state wherein life was chaotically disorganised, we can understand the Golden Order as both a civilising impulse and as an intellectual project that seeks to insert what its orthodoxy determines as appropriate or rational divisions into nature. Whereas classically science may have viewed itself as carving nature at its joints, which is to say that it only seeks to elucidate conceptual distinctions implicit within nature itself, the Golden Order actively seeks to impose its intellectual project upon this primordial state. The Golden Order is thereby a ‘progressive’ force, seeking to impose appropriate distinctions upon a state of chaos, to use reason to deliver us from a disordered world. If the crucible is nature, the Golden Order does not wish to let nature speak, but to cover its voice over with its own. The Golden Order is theologically and intellectually led by a pair of principles or Laws: causality and regression. The former, described by Law of Causality as “the pull between meanings; that which links all things in a chain of relation” with the latter described by Law of Regression as “the pull of meaning; that all things yearn eternally to converge”. The Golden Order is thereby a grand unifying project wherein all finds appropriate definition, sorted into its appropriate category by its overarching intellectual system. The Golden Order represents a religious and philosophical unification achieved by everything being sorted into its proper place: unity through division. This is its fundamentalism.
This is to say that the ‘natural philosophy’ of the Golden Order proceeds with a strong ideological basis, that the Golden Order is both expressive of and constituted by political power. The Golden order is an ideological faction; one that seeks to promote and reproduce its own ideological strain.
Bound within the Golden Order as a structure of power is a normative sense of the ethical: an ethics that judges the appropriateness of practices and beings by their (in)ability to embody whatever its orthodoxy determines to be the norm. Through occupying the narrative role of the Lands Between’s traditionally most powerful faction (both de facto and de jure), the Golden Order’s dogma produces the standards by which what is normal (and therefore right) is to be judged. Given that our definition of queerness within this project concerns the ‘failure’ of the queer subject to embody or enact prevalent norms, queer figures within Elden Ring can be predominantly found within those figures that are excluded by the teachings of the Golden Order.
So, who are among the excluded?
There are three predominant groups, each of which represent the blurring of a boundary, with the violation of these boundaries itself a grave sin against the Golden Order’s orthodoxy. The first of these are the children of the crucible: the misbegotten and the omen, those who have been touched by the primordial crucible. The omen, much like the misbegotten, are seen as cursed and reviled due to their being an admixture of life: human only in part, with bestial horns marking their curse.[v] The second are those who live in death, entities who bridge the boundary between life and death. Thirdly, we have the albinaurics, constructed people that bridge the boundary between the natural and the artificial.
“Albinaurics are lifeforms made by human hands. Thus, many believe them to live impure lives, untouched by the Erdtree’s grace.” — Albinauric Bloodclot
The violation of these boundaries is itself a kind of queering, a queer existence that refuses the dichotomy those divisions represent, indicating the possibility another way of being that, through its own existence, demonstrates the shortcomings of the categories it defies. We can think of non-binary and trans identities as those that often exist as a violation of a perceived immutable boundary of sex or gender identification and performance; just as we can consider gay, lesbian, and bisexual identities as those that defy the boundaries erected by the heterosexual matrix between appropriate and inappropriate objects of sexual and romantic desire. This is to say that despite the lack of an overtly gendered or sexual component to Elden Ring’s example of boundary transgression, the liminality of these beings and their resultant exclusion from the norms established by the Golden Order is best read as a kind of queer existence.
But as a structure of power, the Golden Order is but one among many possible dogmas or systems of belief. It is what Michel Foucault might term a regime of truth: its perspective reproduced by the power of its institutions. We can see how, despite the Golden Order’s power allowing them a clearly metaphysical ability to manipulate reality (epitomised in Marika’s removal of the rune of death from the Elden Ring, an act that thereby removed death from the world), the Golden Order’s power required hegemonic control.[vi] The Golden Order rules over other factions, though it does not do this primarily through military means. Instead, the Order uses its military as one aspect of its hegemonic power, power which relies in no small part on the consent of the governed. (We can think here of Radagon’s marital alliance with the Carian royal family as a powerful illustration as to how this consent might be produced). This is to suggest that the Golden Order must sustain its own authority and that despite its deific figure head, its power is neither automatic nor assured.
“The role of the hunters is to stamp out defiled reason — all for the perfection of the Golden Order.” — Litany of Proper Death
Elden Ring thereby entices us with a provocation: if the order upon which the world rests is contingent, which is to suggest that it could be otherwise, should it be otherwise? To parse this question through the language used within the game: what kind of order should serve as the foundation of our world, if any?
As the Golden Order lies at the heart of Elden Ring’s central narrative, providing us with the game’s central philosophical provocation, we can thereby distil a central theme of Elden Ring (one among many) as the insurmountable tension between power and resistance. In his later conceptualisations of power, Michel Foucault would understand power and resistance as operating within a kind of dialectic whereby there could be no power without resistance, and no resistance without power.[vii] This is because power is itself distinguishable from violence — a distinction echoed in the work of Hannah Arendt[viii] — in that whereas violence acts upon the body of another directly, often to constrain that body’s possibilities for action and movement (with death being the most extreme and final way of achieving this arrest of possibility), power acts upon another as a subject, which is to say as an agent capable of choice. Power, in this sense, can constrain and it can direct or shape the conditions within which an individual acts, but it can never determine that individual entirely. Resistance, though it may often be difficult (sometimes even difficult in the extreme) remains ever possible.
On this reading it becomes rather telling that the solution to the Golden Order’s crises is rooted in a kind of mythical violence. The Mending Rune of Perfect Order tells us that in order to not only restore but perfect the Golden Order we must eliminate the “instability of ideology”, with the ending this Rune produces being an age of stability and the elimination of strife. If we understand this elimination of strife to be the impossibility of resisting the Golden Order, the result is to transform the Order from a structure of power properly speaking and into a machine of perfect violence where the possibility of political power is forever expunged by a metaphysical capacity for violent coercion.[ix]
Resistance to order and the possibility of another world is thereby at the heart of Elden Ring, and it is within this context that queerness as that which defies the norm (thereby calling those very norms into question) plays a pivotal narrative role. At this juncture, I turn to the first of my three queer figures within Elden Ring, the satanic figure of Mohg Lord of Blood.
Mohg — The Adversary
If the Golden Order is best understood as a rational religion, as a social order whose narrative is replete with distinct values that produce this civilising impulse, Mohg features as an antithesis to fundamentalism’s dogma. Just as Satan figures in a popular Christian mythos as the flaw in perfection, the fly in the ointment of creation, as the chaotic adversary of Heaven, Mohg can be read as the dark reflection of the Golden Order.
Mohg is an Omen, described by Mohg’s Shackle as an “accursed people”, with the shackle itself “made to keep a particular Omen under strictest confinement.” In appearance, the Omen are humanoids with ogre-like stature, clearly possessed of a furious strength as they wield their oversized cleavers. The majority of the Omen encountered are possessed of stubby growths across their bodies, these being the horns that, and as we learn from the Omen Bairn “Omen babies have their horns excised, causing most to perish.” From this we can discern that the Omen are born with a distinctive appearance, their traits read as a curse and an impurity the very existence of which defies the rational religion of the Golden Order. It is for this reason that I present the Omen as children of the crucible, much like the misbegotten, as despite no direct link between the Omen and the crucible itself, both groups are mistreated because of their distinctively bestial physiognomy.
The excision of the horns of Omen babies is a form of rudimentary surgery that seeks to ‘correct’ the child by bringing its body back into alignment with the designs of the Golden Order. A clear parallel to these practices in our own world are the ‘corrective surgeries’ performed on intersex children in order to align their bodies with the norms of biological sex, these better known as intersex genital mutilations.[x] In both instances, the body that does not fit is regarded as abnormal, and within Elden Ring this is explicitly wrapped in both a religious narrative of curses and punishment, and subjected to a rational logic that seeks to maintain a purity of categories. The perceived liminality of the intersex body (that it in some sense defies the boundary between sexes) much like the liminality of the omen body with its admixture of human and beast traits violate the conceptual divisions as these are upheld by systems of power, be this this heterosexual matrix and compulsory heterosexuality, or the Golden Order.
The primary fate of the Omen within Elden Ring is to die as children, bleeding out as their horns are cut from their flesh. Those who survive are hardly welcomed, but are discarded below the capital city of Leyndell, cast into the Subterranean Shunning Grounds. There, they join the ranks of others the Golden Order would rather leave forgotten, such as the Great Caravan.[xi] This fate is to be cast out of sight and mind, to be treated as an unsightly blemish to be hidden away. The Omen are a source of shame, better forgotten.
And this is, perhaps, the kinder fate. For the Lands Between also boast a faction of hunters known as the Omenkiller. We learn from the ashes of Omenkiller Rollo, the first Omenkiller that he was “Once a famous perfumer” and that “Rollo imbibed a physick to rid himself of emotion, thus enabling him to enact his nightmarish labour, hunting the Omen.” Indeed, the Great Omenkiller Cleaver is itself comprised of “a row of amputated Omen horns” and the Omenskirk Mask is “carved in the image of the evil spirits that haunt the Omen in their nightmares.” The less fortunate among the Omen are slaughtered. It is little wonder that a physick was needed to suppress Rollo’s emotions, given the nature of his labour being the slaughter of children.
But not all Omen are born the same. Mohg and his twin brother Morgott are the children of Queen Marika — the head of the Golden Order itself — and Godfrey, the First Elden Lord. Born as they are to the Goddess to which the Order is devoted, the Fell Omen Twins are afforded a modicum of special treatment. As we are told by the Regal Omen Bairn, “Omen babies born of royalty do not have their horns excised, but instead are kept underground, unbeknown to anyone, imprisoned for eternity.”
The Fell Omen Twins become the dirty little secret of the royal family.
But their responses to these could not be more polarised. Morgott’s treatment leaves him desperately seeking the approval of the Golden Order, of a structure that will never accept him, that views him as a mistake. He devotes himself to the protection of the Erdtree both during and after the Shattering, preventing would-be contenders from claiming the throne of the Elden Lord, becoming the Omen King. Though, as his Great Rune suggests, this service was enough to make him “indeed the Lord of Leyndell”, the Remembrance of the Omen King speaks of his love to the Erdtree and the Golden Order accordingly: “He loved not in return, for he was never loved, but nevertheless, love it he did.”
Morgott is the outcast that desperately seeks to be included. As a queer figure, exiled for the status thrust upon him by the Golden Order and their determination to read his very being as an accursed violation of its own dogma, Morgott constitutes an assimilationist figure. Assimilationist queer politics is a particular strand of political practice whereby queer individuals seek to be included within the social order without fundamentally changing it. It is an inclusionary politics that relies upon asserting that ‘we are just like you’. Within many contemporary queer circles, this is seen as a regressive political programme, given the exclusionary mechanisms so deeply embedded within societal structures. It furthermore relies upon perpetuating a hierarchy among the excluded, with assimilation far more possible for affluent, white, cisgender gays and lesbians than it is for other members of the LGBT+ community, particularly those who are trans, non-white, or poor. We can see how this operates similarly in the case of Morgott, who becomes a devout agent of the Golden Order, fighting to maintain the very doctrine and dogma that wanted him shackled beneath the earth.
Mohg, however, rejects this assimilationism. Refusing his brother’s apologism for the violence of the Golden Order, Mohg sets himself against it, seeking to overturn the Golden Order and to replace it with his own Moghwyn Dynasty. Mohg chooses violent opposition to the Golden Order, willingly embracing his status as abomination. He chooses to become the monster he was always feared to be.
Mohg has therefore lived his life as reviled, as outcast, and knowing that others like him without the fortune of his birth have been hunted, their very existence seen as a threat that needs to be contained. Mohg’s response to this, most unlike his brother, is to embrace the villainous status thrust upon his kind. If the Golden Order would cast him out, call him a sinner, and fear him as a threat, Mohg would embrace his status as outsider, he would sin, and he would make good on that threat.
“Welcome, honoured guest. To the birthplace of our dynasty!” — Mohg, Lord of Blood
Whereas the Golden Order serves Queen Marika as an agent of the Greater Will, the Moghywn Dynasty would establish Mohg at its head, serving another Outer God named the Formless Mother. We can immediately note how Mohg’s power is derived from his status as a queer figure, for the Formless Mother is associated with blood and the blood incantations, many of which are wielded by Mohg himself, share a common theme of embracing defilement. The incantation Bloodboon speaks of Mohg’s “accursed blood erupt[ing] with fire”, indicating that his power comes through embracing precisely that which made him an outsider.
In order to pursue his dynasty, Mohg begins to wage a campaign of bloody terror against the Golden Order and particularly against the tarnished who would seek to restore the power of the shattered Elden Ring. We are encouraged to follow this path by White Mask Varré, an acolyte of Mohg’s, who encourages us to reject the wisdom of the Two Fingers and instead attempts to wet our appetite for blood, particularly the blood of our fellow tarnished. Mohg’s followers let blood in order to honour the Formless Mother — who, we are told by the Mohgwyn’s Sacred Spear, “desires a wound” — and to undermine agents of the Golden Order, whether they serve it wittingly or otherwise. Indeed, in order to be invited to an audience with Mohg, we are required to soak the Lord of Blood’s Favour in the blood of a Finger Maiden, one who has dedicated her life to the service of the Two Fingers as agents of the Golden Order and the Greater Will.
Mohg’s pursuit of his dynasty is bound with his desire for bloody vengeance. He becomes a Satanic queer figure through his unashamed embrace of that which makes him an outsider, using this as a source of power through which he can punish those who have wronged him and those like him. It is also in his pursuit of this that we have perhaps a hint of explicitly sexual queerness within Elden Ring, this being Mohg’s desire to enable Miquella’s transformation from an Empyrean into a God and to become his consort. Within Elden Ring, the notion of consort is not always evocative of a sexual component. Though Marika mothers children with both her consorts, Godfrey and Radagon, should our own tarnished become Elden Lord (and therefore her consort) a sexual or reproductive link is not implied. Aside from our Tarnished, we do not encounter the term consort or marriage within Elden Ring outside of lineage and parentage, with all the sexuality this implies. However, let us turn to the Remembrance of the Blood Lord: “Wishing to raise Miquella to full Godhood, Mohg wished to become his consort, taking the role of monarch. But no matter how much of his bloody bedchamber he tried to share, he received no response from the young Empyrean.” It is unclear what connotation is here being evoked from the mention of “bedchamber” if not those of the marriage bed — with this description thereby drawing the sexual elements of the consort relationship to the front of our minds.
“Of the surgeons that were abducted by the Lord of Blood none were able to tame the accursed blood.” — War Surgeon Set
To be sure, Mohg does seek a better world for the Omen and other outcasts, proclaiming, upon defeat, that he can see “The coming of our dynasty!” (my emphasis). Indeed, Varré’s description of Mohg describes him possessing “strength, vision, and of course, love”. These indicate that vengeance and destruction are, for Mohg, means to an end but this does nothing to dampen his willingness to play into and embrace the role of the theological Adversary the Golden Order were all too willing to assign to his kind.[xii]
Therefore, through his embrace of this outsider status, Mohg comes to assume the role of the queer adversary.
Miquella — The Messiah
If Mohg is made a queer adversary by his embrace of those very elements for which he was reviled, we might position Miquella as a rather different face for a very similar figure. Miquella is too a child of Queen Marika, but is sired by her literal other half, Lord Radagon, along with his twin sister Malenia. Whether specifically because the pair are born from a single God or due to some other mechanism, both Miquella and his sister are Empyrean: beings capable of achieving full Godhood. Yet, both are cursed with Malenia’s body beset by the Scarlet Rot and Miquella trapped in an eternal youth.
Another ‘accursed’ figure, Miquella’s eternal childhood constitutes him as an outsider separated from a normative experience of his own body. Unlike the flesh of his kin, including his sister, Miquella is unable to age, his unique experience of the immortality that is otherwise shared by the Gods and (to a lesser degree) by all others in a world without death bars him from maturation and adulthood. Here again we find a distinctly queer aspect to Miquella’s experience, specifically if we read his life as a form of queer temporality. As explored by Jack Halberstam’s In a queer time and place, queer temporality as a consequence of a body marked by difference or disobedience to a norm.[xiii] Whilst Halberstam’s analysis focuses on transgender bodies, with a particular focus on the notion of a transgender gaze (echoing Mulvey’s female gaze as a form of scopophilia)[xiv] we can read Miquella’s non-normative experience of their own body as also contributing to the development of a distinctive point of view.
Miquella’s relationship with gender is a further way in which he is marked as a queer figure, specifically a genderqueer figure. This is most clearly hinted at in the figure of St. Trina. Confirmed in content cut from the game,[xv] St. Trina is an alias of Miquella, a feminine form that Miquella is thought to assume, a female incarnation. The closeness of Miquella and St. Trina is hinted through several points. For example, the flowers Miquella’s Lily and Trina’s Lily, are both described as starting “to fade and wilt” or being “on the verge of wilting”, not to mention their near-identical appearance. We further have the gender ambiguity of St. Trina as attested to by the Sword of St. Trina: “St. Trina is an enigmatic figure. Some say she is a comely young girl, others are sure he is a boy” and the strangeness of St. Trina’s adult form as attested to by St. Trina’s Torch: “The carvings depict St. Trina, but in adult form, somewhat unnervingly.” This latter point implies that St. Trina was most often depicted as a child, as an eternal youth like Miquella. We finally have St. Trina’s affinity for sleep, which, given Miquella’s slumber within the cocoon at the base of the Haligtree (with which Mohg absconds) cements a final thematic connection between the two figures.
So, Miquella takes after his mother (as we shall see below) in that he possesses another self, a self that is primarily referred to with the feminine pronoun but who is explicitly stated to be ambiguous. Given that we are told nothing about the connection between Miquella and St. Trina explicitly, we are left to conjecture as to what precise form the relationship between these two personae took. Was St. Trina an alias of Miquella, or a separate being like his parents being divided halves of the same entity? Either way, Miquella is himself a genderqueer figure, with the division of binary sex and gender forming yet another natural division he blurs and crosses.
This queering of temporality and gender shapes Miquella’s political project within Elden Ring.
Miquella begins his life as a follower of the Golden Order’s fundamentalism, contributing to its doctrine through producing the Discus of Light and Triple Rings of Light incantations, both of which are described as “A gift from the young Miquella to his father, Radagon.” He is further attributed with the creation of the Radagon’s Rings of Light incantation (this being among those incantations contained within the Golden Order Principia, the description or which outlines Miquella’s eventual departure from fundamentalism, claiming that he “abandoned fundamentalism, for it could do nothing to treat Malenia’s accursed rot”. Because of the inability of fundamentalism to account for the experiences of both himself and his sister, because of its inability to heal the Scarlet Rot, due, therefore, to its limitations, Miquella chafes at fundamentalism and branches outward.[xvi]
This departure from fundamentalism leads to Miquella’s attempt to create an alternative to the Erdtree: the Haligtree. As we are told by the Haligtree Knight Armour, this tree is “watered with Miquella’s own blood since it was a sapling” though it “ultimately failed to grow into an Erdtree”. This tree, kept hidden and secret (requiring a complete Haligtree Secret Medallion in order to be reached), is a utopian project that seeks to found a world that welcomes those who are outcast. As its progenitor and figurehead, as the name most associated with this project, we can read Miquella as a kind of queer messiah: promising to deliver those forgotten by the Erdtree’s grace into salvation.
Indeed, like many messiah figures, Miquella is bound with apocalyptic imagery. In a reading of Elden Ring’s visual language and symbolism (available in both written and video forms),[xvii] Theomeny provides a sustained analysis of the many ways that Elden Ring draws specifically from the Book of Revelation. From this, we can see how the narrative of Elden Ring is, unsurprisingly perhaps given FromSoftware’s penchant for the apocalyptic, an apocalyptic narrative and such tales of the end of days frequently walk hand in hand with messianic figures of deliverance. Miquella is one such figure, wielding charismatic authority[xviii] to unite so many outcasts faced with cataclysm, drawing them to him with a promise of salvation.
“The Empyrean Miquella is loved by many people. Indeed, he has learned very well how to compel such affection.” — Bewitching Branch
Among those gathered to Miquella’s Haligtree are the misbegotten, those whose existence is seen as a punishment for defying the Golden Order and contacting the primordial crucible of life, and the Albinaurics. The former can be found gathered around the branches of this rotting tree, praying with reverence to statues of Miquella, having found a place where at last they are welcome. The latter’s intermingling with the Haligtree is indicated through two primary sources: the events that take place at the Albinauric village in southern Liurnia, and through the story of Knight Loretta.
The village of the Albinaurics is the site of a terrible slaughter, the deaths of its people ordered by Sir Gideon Ofnir who seems to be seeking the Haligtree and Miquella’s secrets along with it. The murder of these Albinaurics — seemingly enacted by the hand of an Omenkiller — speaks to their lesser status, to the refusal of the Golden Order (of which Gideon is a tentative representative) to extend unto them a fully human status. For whatever human status truly matters. But it is within this village that we are first introduced to the notion of the Haligtree as an offer of salvation for the Albinaurics, for Albus gives us half of the Secret Medallion required to find the tree, as well as saying: “A chosen land awaits us Albinaurics. The medallion is the key that leads to the city.” As a people persecuted by the Golden Order, seen to violate one of their holy boundaries (that between the natural and the artificial), the Albinaurics regard the Haligtree as a chosen land, as something meant for them. As the one responsible for both the creation of that land, and for shepherding the Albinaurics to it, Miquella assumes the role of a prophet, or, to use a distinctly Christian metaphor, a shepherd. The promise of the Haligtree becomes a prophecy, and Miquella is its prophet, its messiah.
As for the story of Knight Loretta, she appears as a figure who defects from serving the Carian royal family (being encountered as a projection within their manor) to the service of the Haligtree. According to Loretta’s Mastery, she is motivated to so “to seek out a place where the Albinaurics could live in peace.” Loretta is encountered guarding the passage from the upper Haligtree to Elphael, the Brace of the tree and the city so-promised to the Albinaurics. Possibly Albinauric herself, Loretta abandons her original loyalty to aristocracy, guided by the promise of Miquella’ vision.
Miquella’s vision is rooted in a rejection of the Golden Order, somewhat like Mohg’s, but where our queer messiah departs from our queer adversary is in the degree to which Miquella breaks from the Order. As we touched upon in our discussion of the Golden Order, the Order itself serves Marika as a Goddess, but Marika was chosen to as the earthly avatar of the Greater Will. The Greater Will itself is an Outer God, an entity that exists beyond the physical world of the Lands Between, beyond the planet upon which Elden Ring unfolds. Elden Ring presents us with several of the Outer Gods, one of these being Mohg’s patron: the Formless Mother or the Mother of Truth. It is upon the power granted to him by this being that the Mohgwyn Dynasty is founded. Miquella’s order, such as it is, finds its foundation not within a being but within a philosophical principle: that of Unalloyed Gold.
An alloy is a metal created by combining two other metals. It is a form of admixture or assemblage, a product of combination. Bronze, for example, is an alloy of tin and copper. To suggest that Miquella’s doctrine is one of Unalloyed Gold is to suggest that it is founded upon unmixed, pure gold. At first, this might appear that Miquella is improving upon the foundations of fundamentalism, a kind of return to the gold in the Golden Order, as if he is purifying the order in some sense. But if it is a purification of the Order that Miquella seeks, it is a purification that would result in the excision of Greater Will and, by extension, the Two Fingers.
Miquella’s opposition to the Outer Gods is presented most clearly in Miquella’s Needle, which is described: “One of the unalloyed gold needles that Miquella crafted to ward away the meddling of outer gods.” Within the game, our tarnished is able to use perfect this instrument in order to expunge the influence of the Frenzied Flame — should they accept a gift they later regret. Others are able to use similar needles to oppose the influence of other Outer Gods. One major example of this is the Unalloyed Gold Needle, described as “A ritual implement crafted to ward away the meddling of outer gods, it is thought capable of forestalling the incurable rotting sickness.” If gifted to Millicent, the insertion of this needle into her flesh can contain the Scarlet Rot and restore enough of her strength to allow her to fight by your side.
Such tools are effective against the Scarlet Rot due to the rot itself being caused by its own Outer God, the one described by Pest Threads as having “abandoned children” in “the lands afflicted”, and likely the one described by the Map (Lake of Rot), which states: “It is said that the divine essence of an outer god is sealed away in this land.” The divine origins of this rot may dwell within this Goddess, but the rot’s medium within the Lands Between is, of course, Malenia. She is the Scarlet Flower whose blooming transformed Caelid into a blighted wasteland.
Here we see Miquella’s personal motivations made clear: the inability of the Golden Order to cure Malenia of her curse pushes Miquella away from fundamentalism, and onto a path that seeks to liberate the people of the Lands Between from the influence of the Outer Gods. Miquella is a messianic figure seeking to nurture the growth of a new world through the Haligtree, a world with its arms open to those cast out by the Golden Order. But unlike Mohg, whose path of bloody vengeance is not only marked by destruction and continued servitude to another Outer God, Miquella’s way is fundamentally creative, forging a bold new world in which there is no place for the meddling influences of these extra-terrestrial forces. His is a project of freedom, agency, and self-determination, of liberation from the notion of Order itself.
“My brother will keep his promise. He possesses the wisdom, the allure, of a god — he is the most fearsome Empyrean of all.” — Malenia’s Winged Helm
Miquella is thereby a queer figure for his ‘deviant’ way of being, his eternal childhood a mark of difference powerful enough to render him unable to remain satisfied within the stifling orthodoxy of the Golden Order. Instead, he applies his considerable intellect and charisma to the generation of a new world, one that shatters the limits of the Order’s dogma, and that liberates demigods and mortals alike from the manipulative forces of the divine. Miquella is a queer messiah, whose life is lived as a project of salvation for those unable to save themselves.
It is for this reason that the Haligtree as we encounter it in Elden Ring, burdened to the brink of death by his sister’s Scarlet Rot, produces true pathos. It stands as a memorial to Miquella’s unfulfilled dream of a utopian world. As a hope that shall never flourish or come to bloom.
Marika — Division Within Unity
Thus far we have explored the normativity of the Golden Order with respect to two major figures of resistance, with both Mohg and Miquella contributing queer projects of resistance due to their respective deviances from the Order’s norms. As we have discussed, the conceptual purity sought by the Golden Order is, predominantly, a political project, something that must be supported by structures of power and actively pursued, rather than a natural state that issues from natural law. Both Mohg and Miquella thereby represent the limits of this ideology, excesses that fall outside of the Order. But despite the claims we’ve previously examined that suggest the contradictions against which the Order stands are best understood as products of ignorance or a lack of enlightenment, there remains a contradiction at the very heart of the Golden Order, it’s leader: Queen Marika the Eternal.
“In Marika’s own words. I declare mine intent, to search the depths of the Golden Order.” — Melina
Queen Marika is a Numen woman, originally hailing from beyond the Lands Between. Though the exact circumstances of her apotheosis are unknown, she is selected by the Greater Will to serve as its vessel on earth and seemingly in accordance with its desires, founds the Golden Order and wages campaigns against those who defy it. The Giants of Mountaintops, the Carian Royal Family, and the people of the Eternal Cities of Nokron and Nokstella each serve as potential threats against the Order and the designs of the Greater Will, becoming foes to be defeated, subjugated, or brought into alliance — provided that the result was the dominion of Gold. The Golden Order situates itself as the hegemon that leads whatever aspects of these alternative factions are permitted to remain.
Instrumental within these campaigns is the figure of Radagon, who seems to have appeared as if from nowhere. It is implied that he was present when the Golden Order clashed with the Giants, led by Godfrey, for the Giant’s Red Braid muses that “Every giant is red of hair, and Radagon was said to have despised his own red locks. Perhaps that was a curse of their kind.” What is made more explicit is Radagon’s involvement in the hostilities between the Golden Order and the Carian royalty. Miriel, Pastor of Vows and the Church of Atonement, tells us this of Radagon’s story: “He came to these lands at the head of a great golden host, when he met Lady Rennala in battle. He soon repented his territorial aggressions though, and became husband to the Carian Queen.”
But there is a great twist at the heart of the Golden Order, hinted at by the Brilliant Goldmask’s doubts and is confirmed upon solving a puzzle within Leyndell: Radagon is Marika. Queen Marika and King Consort Radagon are the same person, though the precise mechanism of this is unclear. It remains an open question as to whether Radagon was originally another being that became somehow unified with Marika,[xix] or whether both were originally joined only to be sundered. True enough, when we encounter the body of Marika — golden haired and crucified — a change comes over her, the gold become red as Radagon emerges from the very same body to fight against us. Yet, the story of Radagon speaks of his returning to Marika from Rennala, implying that Marika remains at the capital while Radagon is in Liurnia.[xx] Given that Marika is not mentioned to have disappeared at this time, and given that Marika’s disappearance is stated as a cause of concern in Elden Ring’s opening monologue, it seems to be that Marika and Radagon were once a single being, divided in two, only to be reunited again.
Marika thereby blurs another of these fundamental boundaries or natural divisions upheld by the Golden Order: the division between self and other. Indeed, some lengths are gone to conceal this truth and, once it is revealed, the reactions of Brother Corhyn and his master, the Brilliant Goldmask, speak to this not only being a shocking revelation. As Corhyn states: “I’ve been gripped by a terrifying thought. The rhythms and calculus of the master’s finger… betray a suspicion of the holism of the Golden Order. A conceit, I am afraid, that cannot be overlooked.” Whereas Corhyn sees the flaw as within Goldmask himself — saying that “The master was nothing more than a madman. Enchanted by a vain and ruinous delusion, he rejected the perfection of the Golden Order, seeking to supplant our glorious faith with his own!” — the division within the Order is, truly, something for which Marika herself is responsible.
There is a clearly gendered reading to Marika’s self-division, mirroring that of her child Miquella and his alias/other half St. Trina. Marika divides her masculine half from herself, creating a distinct being in the form of Radagon. This notion of male and female being split from an originary state of unity has its roots within intellectual traditions, both philosophical and alchemical.
Within philosophy, we have a mythological parable presented by a characterisation of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium that understands the original state of human kind as a kind of double body.[xxi] These beings were divided into three sexes: males descended from the sun, females from the earth, and the androgynous descendants of the moon.[xxii] Aristophanes proceeds to tell us of the power of these conjoined beings, and their assault on Mount Olympus, prompting Zeus to slice them asunder, weakening them and leaving them divided. Here we have a potential origin for the persistent romantic metaphor of seeking one’s other half.
Alchemically, Marika’s division likens her to a divine Rebis: the end product of the alchemical magnum opus, the great work.[xxiii] The Rebis is achieved through alchemical purification. The elements of the self are divided into their purest components. This purification allows these qualities of the self to be reintegrated through a process of reconciliation that allows transcendence through the unity of opposites.[xxiv] There are several fundamental opposites at work within this project of unification, notably matter and spirit, but for our purposes the division and reunification of gender is most central.
Though explicitly elevated to a metaphysical status (a status we may not wish to infer on gender outside of fictive mythology),[xxv] Marika is foundationally a genderqueer character, a character who lives as an active acknowledgement of her feminine and masculine aspects, with both aspects given distinctive life through the process of division. Uniquely within Elden Ring, the twinned figures of Marika and Radagon each stand on either side of the division between the sexes, though they are ever reaching across this boundary, effacing its legitimacy as a natural division.So, Marika heads an Order centred around unity yet divides herself. The Order is driven to unify through purifying distinct elements according to ‘natural divisions’, but she is a figure of division who, through this very act of splitting, nihilates those very boundaries. The Order unifies through division, Marika divides through unity.
Her act embodies Artur Rimbaud’s ‘Je est un autre’ — that the ‘I’, the self, is an other, that is it alien. There is no other self posited in Rimbaud’s phrasing, no sense that ‘I’ is different from ‘me’ or from a more authentic self. Instead, the very notion of a self is presented as alien. Rimbaud’s formulation has become an evocative phrase within psychoanalysis, specifically concerning questions of identity and identification.[xxvi] Indeed, psychoanalysis is replete with images of the divided self, in particular Lacan’s notion of refente or Spaltung, which refers to a general characteristic of subjectivity as split. According to Lacan, the individual subject can never be anything other than split in the sense of divided or alienated from itself — refente is an irreducible split which admits no possibility of synthesis.[xxvii] It is this very psychological division that Marika enacts through sundering Radagon from herself.
In this sense, Marika is an aporia within the very heart of the Golden Order. She is an irreducible contradiction, manifesting the very thing the Golden Order must cover over in order to preserve its ideological purity: that its desired unity is not possible.
And this philosophical, psychoanalytic drama plays out politically in Elden Ring. For Marika purposely brought about the Shattering. It is in the description of Marika’s Hammer that the division, discord, and duality of Marika is most clearly presented to us when it is described as: “The tool with which Queen Marika shattered the Elden Ring and Radagon attempted to repair it.” Two halves of a whole, now divided into distinct entities, each pulling in different directions, each embodying the core principles of the Golden Order: causality and regression. These two principles that seemingly overturn the Order from within.[xxviii]
“In Marika’s own words. Hear me, Demigods. My children beloved. Make of thyselves that which ye desire. Be it a Lord. Be it a God. But should ye fail to become aught at all, ye will be forsaken. Amounting only to sacrifices…” — Melina
If Miquella is a queer figure who becomes a messiah for other queer figures, then Marika can be tentatively understood as one who queers the notion of the messiah, queering the notions of salvation and the divine along with it. She is the divinity at the head of an order she then seeks to undermine. This is reinforced by the Christian imagery used with Marika, particularly as we encounter her within the heart of the Erdtree, and in the way such images are subverted. Here she is crucified upon a fragment of the shattered Elden Ring, a shard of the rune of death piercing her abdomen just as the spear of Longinus pierced the body of Christ as he hung upon the Cross. Both are punished in accordance with divine will, though Christ’s sacrifice within the Christian tradition is one of atonement, of drawing man and God together whereas Marika is punished for attempting to shatter the very order she heads. We further have Marika’s status as three-in-one (Marika/Radagon/Greater Will) echoing the trinity of Christianity (Father/Son/Holy Spirit), with the discord of Elden Ring’s trinity constituting a theological subversion of the unity to which it attests within the Christian faith. If Christ’s crucifixion is understood as a drawing together of mortal and divine, Marika is crucified for attempting to sunder them, attempting to undermine the power of the Greater Will.
Marika’s queerness, then, relies less upon her designation as other — as do the status of Mohg and Miquella — but hers is an otherness within the bounds her deific status. It is through her deification into a living idol of the Order that she is able to so completely embody its ideals. Through this embodiment she pushes these ideals to their limit, revealing their incompleteness and thereby constituting herself as the contradiction within the heart of the Golden Order, revealing it as a project doomed to fail. In this sense, we can suggest Marika’s thematic proximity to Mohg and Miquella — with both of these aforementioned figures attesting to the failure of the Golden Order. What Marika really hammers home as she brings her own hammer down to shatter the Elden Ring, is that there is no aspect of the Golden Order that can escape its own contradiction. Its unity is a fantasy.
Conclusion
Over the course of this essay, I have presented an outline of the Golden Order as a fundamentalism preoccupied with a philosophical, intellectual project that uses its power to reshape society in accordance with this project. At its core, this is a project that perpetuates itself on exclusion, through the designation of particular demographics as impure, corrupt, and in need of correction (if it is willing to look at them at all).
Though the Mohgwyn Dynasty never manifests, and the Haligtree never blooms with Unalloyed Gold, the Golden Order cannot lay claim to any unambiguous victory of its own. Perhaps at the core of Elden Ring is this unavowed claim that no Order is perfect, and no Order can ever be total — Orders must be sustained, reproduced, perpetuated, that these are artefacts and instruments of power more than they are expressions of a greater truth.
Unlike Bloodborne, which deals with an otherworldly otherness — a cosmological difference that tests the boundaries of being and existence — Elden Ring’s queerness remains within a distinctly human world, despite the fantastical elements that call into question the boundaries of human and nonhuman. This is to bridge the queerness at play within Elden Ring to the kind of queerness we often encounter within our own lives and within our own world: it is a queerness shaped far more fundamentally by structures of power and the systems, laws, and customs that these produce than it is by fixed rules of nature or metaphysical constraint. Queerness is thereby political and social; it is contingent in the sense that it could be otherwise — most unlike the seemingly necessary otherness evoked by the Great Ones of Bloodborne.
And the arrangement of these three queer figures at both the heart and the periphery of Elden Ring’s central faction constitutes the game’s fundamental provocation as a pair of existential and ethical questions: how should the world be organised and who matters?
Though Elden Ring does not cheapen this provocation with a definitive answer, that it provides us with so many outcasts and outsiders — each presented with sympathy and expressive of a desire to simply live and live freely — makes Elden Ring, at least to my mind, among the most explicitly queer contributions of FromSoftware to date.
[i] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).
[ii] Other figures within Elden Ring open to a queer reading could include: Ranni, Fia, and D.
[iii] As others have noted, Elden Ring’s Lands Between bear a resemblance to the Land of the Young or the ‘Otherworld’ of Celtic Mythology, known as Tír na nÓg in Irish, see: Bahinchut, ‘Elden Ring and Irish Mythology’, Reddit: R/Eldenring, 2021 <https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/o1m8uz/elden_ring_and_irish_mythology/> [accessed 15 May 2022]; Cian Maher, ‘ELDEN RING’S BEST BOSSES AND LOCATIONS DREW INSPIRATION FROM AN UNLIKELY SOURCE’, Inverse, 4 December 2022 <https://www.inverse.com/gaming/elden-ring-irish-mythology> [accessed 15 May 2022]; Ziostorm, ‘Elden Ring’s Celtic MYTHOLOGY Influence, NEW DISCOVERIES!’, YouTube, 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqspkjJ2Q_0> [accessed 15 May 2022]. [Mythological sources have been discussed with and confirmed by a native speaker of Irish (my boyfriend)].
[iv] For more information on the alchemical references within the crucible, see: Max Derrat, ‘Elden Ring Mythology — The Ancient Dragons and the Crucible’, YouTube, 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlBfLHQYfb0> [accessed 16 May 2022].
[v] The precise relationship between the Omen and the Crucible is unclear, but they are reviled for reasons akin to the misbegotten, so this link does not impact this particular point.
[vi] In the sense conceptualised by Gramsci, see: A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni Del Carcere, ed. by Valentino Gerratana, Secondo (Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1977), ii; Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (London: Verso, 2017); Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2017).
[vii] Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry, 8.4 (1982), 777–95.
[viii] Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (USA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1972).
[ix] I am here using power in the Arendtian sense, see: Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
[x] See: Human Rights Watch, Sugee Tamar-Mattis, and Kyle Knight, ‘“I Want to Be Like Nature Made Me”: Medically Unnecessary Surgeries on Intersex Children in the US’, Human Rights Watch, 25 July 2017 <https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/07/25/i-want-be-nature-made-me/medically-unnecessary-surgeries-intersex-children-us> [accessed 12 May 2022].
[xi] See: Blood Ronin Gaming, The Sad Fate of the Great Caravan Merchants, 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SSDKcqjiDQ> [accessed 12 May 2022].
[xii] Further examination of the Moghwyn Dynasty can be found here: SmoughTown, Elden Ring Lore | Mohg Lord of Blood, 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoA2BSdLeFY> [accessed 12 May 2022].
[xiii] Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
[xiv] See: Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (2009), 14–30.
[xv] This is not to place undue emphasis on content that did not make it into the final cut of Elden Ring, but it is to pick up on this narrative thread, which the final content of the game in no way repudiates or undermines.
[xvi] For a more detailed examination of Miquella, see: SmoughTown, ‘Elden Ring Lore | Miquella the Unalloyed’, YouTube, 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGX4bLt3jbs> [accessed 16 May 2022].
[xvii] Casitive, Come and See: The Apocalypse of FromSoftware (Elden Ring Analysis), 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keiXCogmd8o> [accessed 12 May 2022]; Dianna, ‘Come and See: The Apocalypse of FromSoftware’, Medium, 2022 <https://theomeny.medium.com/come-and-see-the-apocalypse-of-fromsoftware-19b655c8de8e> [accessed 12 May 2022].
[xviii] In the sense used by Weber, see: Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, trans. by A. R. Anderson and Talcott Parsons, 1947, chap. The Nature of Charismatic Authority and its Routinization.
[xix] Though I find this unlikely given that Marika, speaking through Melina says “O Radagon, leal hound of the Golden Order. Thou’rt yet to become me, thou’rt yet to become a god. Let us both be shattered, mine other half” implying an originary division.
[xx] Further support to suggest that Marika and Radagon occupied separate bodies, at least at one time, is that they produced children together: Miquella and Malenia. We are not led to believe that this
[xxi] Plato, Symposium, trans. by Benjamin Jowett (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999).
[xxii] FromSoftware have previously linked gender ambiguity with the moon, see: Benjamin Carpenter, ‘Corruption and Bondage — Gender within Dark Souls’, Medium, 2018 <https://benjaminjjcarpenter.medium.com/corruption-and-bondage-gender-within-dark-souls-7ff38fc1be3d> [accessed 13 May 2018].
[xxiii] Elden Ring is replete with references to alchemy, see: Max Derrat, ‘Alchemy Explains So Much About Elden Ring’s Story (MARIKA SECRET REVEALED)’, YouTube, 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI_aqDgtW1w> [accessed 16 May 2022]; Ziostorm, ‘Elden Ring Is an Allegory for Alchemy’, YouTube, 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oilS07zu3JY> [accessed 16 May 2022].
[xxiv] A primary source of the Rebis is the work of Basil Valeninte, see: Basilius Valentinus, Chymische Schrifften (Hamburg: Samuel Heyle, 1717).
[xxv] I speak more about this here: Benjamin Carpenter, ‘Gender Precarity: Gender Identity and the Economy of Authenticity’, Excursions Journal, 9.1 (2019), 71–88.
[xxvi] See: Sol Aparicio, ‘“Je Est Un Autre.” A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Question of Identity.’, Tel-Aviv Forum of the International Forums of the Lacanian Field, 2015 <http://www.forumlacan.com/en/2015/09/16/je-est-un-autre-a-psychoanalytic-approach-to-the-question-of-identity/> [accessed 13 May 2022].
[xxvii] See: Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966); Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
[xxviii] Furthermore, she is hinted to have had a hand in the Night of the Black Knives, the night where death was first visited upon a demigod, resulting in the slaughter of Godwyn the Golden and turning the demigods against one another.
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