Empyreans, Order, and the Universe Explained (Elden Ring Lore 1)

beginning disclaimer this video has spoilers for everything in Elden ring it assumes you are aware of every level a major boss and are aware of all three endings and their Associated quest lines this video is also not structured with a predisposition of being accessible to legit newcomers if you have beaten the game however you'll have the questions you need not to get lost although if you really don't want to watch this video then you can consider these following parts your summary in the Lance between that is to say in the fictional setting of this video game magic is the art of making what's imagined into what's real here any image you envision regardless of the method for that image's conception being it one made from studying the outside world the worshiping of something or an image that's been imagined by someone else then given to you can if the imagined phenomenon itself is complete enough be forced into an existence entirely of its own mind brought straight into matter without any of reality's material limitations holding back their potential and so the possible forms magic can take by its very nature as was taken from the mind and made real is without any limits and variety creating things from nothing through sorceries and incantations powers like teleportation through pools of blood the physical transformation of living things like what happens to the bodies of the archery Guardians Servants of rot and the growing of omen horns on the sanguine Nobles and even the creation of entirely new life forms like with the crystallians the actual performing of this magic however has two strict limitations to start this magically enabled realization of the initially unreal is solely able to be manifested from an individual's imaginary vision examples of these Visionaries would be like fellow Scholars studying a common subject thus establishing a vision made from their observations Believers of a shared Faith establishing their vision from their agreed beliefs and Trust in those beliefs and even individual people who managed to conceive entirely new forms of magic all by themselves through not but hard work and focus in essence this first limitation behind Magic's usage is exactly reflected by how sorceries and incantations require you to have a high enough amount of relevant knowledge in order to cast them it's representing whether or not your character is capable of properly conceiving the effect that they're trying to make into reality if a spell isn't able to be properly conceived the magic isn't able to happen and conversely the better something is conceived the more powerful that magic is able to be performed let's look at this principle in action it's actually quite intuitive you are someone who is about to use magic and cast a spell a spell you envision is a fireball appearing in your hand that after appearing you'll then throw to explode upon wherever it lands your conception of this image is powerful enough that you succeed in magically manifesting that image from your own mind into real life the exploding Fireball now materially exists it exists for you the rest of the universe and perhaps most relevantly the victim to whom your Fireball was created for and depending on how effectively you can see the spell that you want the more effectively you make the magic that you create the subjective fantasy of your spell which existed only in your mind has now been cast into objective reality existing now outside of your mind the likes of ordinary plants and animals and inanimate objects like the clouds lack the conscious capacity required to imagine something solidly enough as to use magic themselves and so remain Untouched by any sorts of magical effects unless some kind of outside influence induces those manifestations onto them but here has also reached the second principle in regards to the nature of magic its potential for variety is limited literally only to the imagination therefore Limitless but the scale by which that image can be made manifest is directly proportioned to the spending of a unique metaphysical resource that which The Souls of all living things are composed of the power of life itself the essence of life as Gary puts it souls or for a more unique name Immortal Essence as Rodrigo calls it to make this resources usage more clear however I'll be tending to refer to this subject as merely magical energy but names like life energy or life force would be most accurate overall as its in-game labels suggest this Immortal Essence is intrinsic to all forms of life and continues to exist even after the original creature where the energy came from has died as my made-up label suggests magical energy is what's used when performing Magic here's what I mean you will pretend the act of casting spell is in this case the act of using a flashlight the first limitation as discussed earlier is of the image itself that you aim to magically create this will be represented by the actual design of the device in this case since it's a flashlight it takes electricity and uses the light bulb to convert that energy into light now our second limitation magical energy will be represented by the flashlight's power source electricity as you probably guessed the analogy I'm building here is that for magic to be successfully performed or for the flashlight to actually work the design you use must be sound and you must be able to supply the energy that the design itself requires the reason it's worth explaining these fictional processes in the first place however is that these fictional Concepts exist as ordinary Natural Forces just like the other real-life object forces that exist in Elden ring setting like energy gravity entropy and so on the existence of Souls of an essence of life are fundamental factual parts of its universe light bulbs again for example did not exist before they were invented by human hands the fundamental forces however that exist behind a light bulbs function of electricity and radiation so on obviously had already been there they'd been already existing since the beginning of the universe their objective Facts of Life when we created the light bulb it wasn't the creation of something physically New Rather what we physically did was Envision the use of such objective forces in a specific way that they achieved a specific effect and in essence this concept is what the settings magic system is in Eldon ring the process of magic is the utilization of magical energy a unique ethereal resource innate to Life by those who are able to invent ways of doing so literally speaking the concept of magic is used as an allegory for the idea of deferring technological advancements amongst different groups some magic is more advanced some magic is more primitive some forms of magic end up accomplishing the exact same thing only with different methods that ended up converging and some forms of magic are just completely unique not found anywhere else you'll find all the logical implications that come from a premise like this acknowledged in the game itself over the course of its story both in its literal events and in its actual moral lessons and although the game doesn't spell it out since one of life's more notable aspects is that it well reproduces magical energy can also to an extent be considered renewable as well return to how this works in Universe though the power of life is shown to not exist in any kind of homogeneous volume amongst all of its forms some beings have relatively little energy and as such the magical effects able to be produced by them are comparatively small other beings have a lot more energy but the magical effect able to be produced by them being comparatively huge as consequence and just as electricity can be made as a more versatile form of energy than the raw power originally used to make it let's just imagine that the flashlight's batteries from earlier were powered by a hand crank or something the power of Life can also be converted into different forms such as the letters of a formless language of light imbued with life or magical Amber harboring the Vitality of residual life and I'll be explaining these both more detail later in the video finally it is worth acknowledging that the design of Elden Ring's match system is indeed very conventional dare I say cliche on account of us dealing with life force over here the only thing they don't do is give us a commonly accepted in the universe word for this energy like Mana or quintessence or whatever but George R Martin isn't famous for being avant-garde is he and from software isn't a company you'd call particularly experimental either that doesn't stop them from both being handled as the best though does it it just goes to confirm what's been tried still Reigns true the feudless factor by far in determining something's quality will always be its novelty we can wrap everything up as follows the second fundamental limitation of magic in Elden ring is that the more magical energy you have at your disposal the more magical stuff you're able to accomplish this principle can easily be seen by looking at the works of Moog Lord of blood moog's Mausoleum as we well observe is stuffed to the brim with his accursed flaming blood populated with blood zombies slime is made of blood sanguin Nobles and the red album oryx all with their fancy Lord of blood related abilities not to mention the mountains of this cancer-like Blood meat outside of the single bit of turf though the only places where moog's blood stuff manifests are places directly controlled by his followers for Faith whose magic is drawn from the life force of a mere demigod reality sucks Magic from the power of a god themselves however well we know that to be a different tale entirely such wide reach disease we'll find are the destined path for those born as those known as imperians more than just the child of God an empirion is someone uniquely capable of becoming a god themselves able to manifest a vision on scales so utterly massive as to span entire territories this power of a God can go on to convert the land itself all of its plants and animals and the Very clouds above all to a singular imagination's ideology or as the game would say unto a single order on our Gods New Leaf consecrated Turf the rules of their order are made to direct everything now subject to the ideology described by the vision that they now totally embody All Things become subject to our new God's order so crushing in its magnitude as to even reach past the Realms of reality and influence the outright metaphysical even the very passages of death and of souls will be directed down a singular path so all in all you can perhaps imagine that the plot of Elden ring revolves around the idea of if religion physically mattered imagine if in real life what happens to your soul after you die was literally different the turn by if you were a Muslim a Christian a Jew a Hindu a Buddhist or an atheist or whatever and that you are in some place where it was illegal to believe in anything but say Christianity where all knowledge of other faiths that disagreed with Christianity or any perceived threat to their totalitarian rule was violently put down put down through invasion through exile through Prejudice and slavery foreign ation and imprisonment those who live in death fall outside the principles of the golden order their mere existence solely is the guidance of gold tainting its truth and so it is the Vermin must be exterminated down to the very lust or you and everyone you've ever known and your entire society as a whole being completely wiped out we commend your Deeds put the Giants to the sword and confine the flame Atop The mount to make matters worse these Christians who've conquered their lands have even found a way to infuse their religion its ideals into the very Earth under your feet magically manifesting the vision of their ideology into material truth now the mere conception of a world before separate from its current rulers is impossible to Fathom and illegal to try all that preceded the current age is thrown away discarded under the label of a Savage chaotic Pagan pre-history now when the time comes that you eventually die your soul will have no other directions but to be sent into Christianity's afterlife whether you want to or not as enforced by your colonizers no matter what Fates existed before that you or your people might have followed before indeed even if your original fate was in fact the progenitor to the current one with your world so utterly subjugated under the heel of Christ nothing will ever await you but the gates of Saint Paul or the very depths of hell become one with the order or divest thyself of it to wallow at the fringes powerless upstart now let me stretch this image a little more imagine that in truth the Christian God wasn't as omnipotent as his worshipers preached that he was despite espousing infinite power and an eternal existence what if it turned out he was ultimately just as finite as you were what if despite all outward appearances you and God were in fact fundamentally the same kind of creature a Sapient life form different circumstance But ultimately congruent instead in tricking you into worshiping him each and every of your society's Souls get tossed according to this outer God's whims granting him a unique resource with boundless possible uses a magical power and Nate to life art draws upon the powers embedded in Glenstone but what is the nature of such power Glenstone is the Amber of the cosmos golden Amber contains the remnants of ancient life and houses its vitality while Glenstone contains residual life and thus the Vitality of the Stars this raw magical power through the order of your vassal Beast becomes converted into a form of the utmost East to use the letters of a magical language I can see how and why Immortal Essence exists a spirit under the golden order I see a remembrance of gold has found its way into your possession the creator of the champions are human by the Earth tree upon their end into remembrances they are valuable indeed remembrances yet house the power of their former Masters wish to wield that same power wow shall I turn your runes to strength by the subjugation of a world with intelligent life by making it follow your order Above All Else by making your worshipers live and die for you a steady stream and thus a stockpile of this omnipotent Immortal Essence is assured but being now of eternal life you are also aware of the long term you know that no planet can ever be eternally Fit for Life how long before just the human race dies out what about when the sun expands to squash the Earth dry and swallow it whole that's only like seven billion years away sure to a shitty short-lived wool-eyed mortal that's incomprehensibly distant but you you're not merely mortal you've lived for Millions maybe even billions of years already and for as long as you got something to say about it you'll live infinitely more so your Wellspring might as well be running out next week fortunately however the universe is a very very vast place out there there are more solar systems and there are singular grains of sand on earth so it goes without saying that the Earth itself isn't the only world with life intelligent enough to follow your faith so fire shooting stars out onto space's great expanse they may silently fly through the void for eons upon eons but for someone as old and Powerful as you already are a million years or two may feel as fast as the many millions more you've already passed and when they land on another civilized Planet birthing your vassal beasts upon their alien soil and assisted by your loyal envoys a pawn to spread your faith will be found thus is established another well from which to tap another world whose denizen's magical life force has now been pledged towards your endless expansion and your endless increase in strength one more Earth tree among dozens before it of which a hundred and more will Sprout afterwards the essence of trillions upon trillions of more pathetic creatures bowing at your feet just begging to be sacrifices to perpetuate your eternity so edit that Elden ring if you want how could I possibly care for the creative Endeavors a few fools do with that smidgenly taste of my unfathomable power it's a beast of my very invention The Immortal Essence sent through my vassal returns to its creator all the same for no matter what mending Rune you use or don't use when you repair the Eldon ring regardless of if you paint the sky's Brown gold or gray it's still the same single ending because at its core it remains my Eldon ring at the end of every age it stays an order made from a beast created by none other than yours truly heralded by my servants not in order to serve you but to make you serve me so thanks for staying upon Eldon Lord America's attempt at sovereignty was nearly an inconvenience but in the sorry State she's in now after you killed her just a piece her back together like a broken doll along with the Elden ring her empirion body sustained we can at least be sure we won't try anything again can you imagine if the Elden rank had actually been destroyed for good though oh well so have the Deep seductions of these Snake Eyes roped your attention or are you merely gawking at this simple sharpshooter's Band-Aid rat bravado I can line up a bunch of pieces into an i sounding story but if a nice sounding story was all I had then what would you call this other than a presentation of my creative writing skills right if I am it'll allow me to explain beginning with of course what this game actually means when it uses the word order to preface order itself is of course a mundane word from real life so it has a lot of different real life definitions with different connotations however within the bounds of this video game story the term order is solely used to refer to a single extremely specific meaning since the concept of order in this game is so heavily fictionalized given all the magical things attached to it I feel like it's worth explaining to Assurance details the concept of order can be accurately defined as the enforcement of an ideology with the assurance that the ideology itself is innately arbitrary a system of ideals they're necessarily made by someone and then decided upon as what should be done an example of the concept of order would be the names of fruits being listed by where their first letter occurs in the alphabet an equal example would be if the names were ordered to be written in Reverse instead here the ideology is the pattern that someone decided to fruits should be labeled in and the enforcement is the actual placing of our fruits to fit that pattern design and implementation in other words as you went over earlier regarding the process of magic imagination and manifestation you could describe an example of perfect order as that of a computer program its code enforces the order envisioned by its creator with no less than 100 Precision by the computer's very nature there is no misinterpretation and no compromises even if in this perfect subservience bugs and glitches in the program lead the computer to crashing the error was not due in any way by the computer getting something wrong but solely due to flaws in the order itself that it was given as it was envisioned by the program's creator a rune of transcendental ideology which will attempt to perfect the golden order the current imperfection of the golden order or instability of ideology can be claimed upon the fickleness of the Gods no better than men that is the fly in the ointment the perfect subservience by which a computer acts would indeed be an ideal the Scarlet wrought and the Eldon Beast can be said to strive for make everything yellow or make everything red no nuance and no compromises the use of vision in this context is merely the vision of order that is going to be enforced that is to say Vision refers to that ideology's actual like ideas forgive me if I sound really stupid I'm just trying to be thorough in describing the story's use of vision order outside of what those two completely ordinary words actually mean in real life just uh all right think of it like this a lawmaker envisions a bunch of laws for a new system of government and writes them down their vision of order has now been transcribed as it were and the transcription can then be given to a powerful person who will go on to enforce the ideology of that new system in this allegory the paper whose laws are written on is the vision of order as envisioned by the lawmaker that the enforcer acts as a vessel for in the exact same sense that the Elden ring is a vision of order that America serves as vessel 4 and the Scarlet wrought is a vision of order that Melania serves as vessel for these Visions are just where the rules envisioned by their creators the GW and the sealed outer God of rock respectively are transcribed and for them the empirion whose vessel to that Vision acts as the enforcer of that ideology as it's God thus the concept of order the magical enforcement of an ideology this metaphor can be stretched farther as well say the lawmaker is able to come up with their ideology but also has a power to be the enforcer of that order themselves that's what Ronnie does at the end of her questline envisioning an order solely of her own design and applying it herself when she ascends as the god to replace America with us as a night Lord I guess but we'll return to Ronnie later just like how Columbus acted under the sponsorship of like the king of Spain or whatever bringing the order of Spanish rule and Catholicism to the chaotic New World America acted as a mere puppet ruler for the two fingers and their Eldon ring themselves envoys to the greater will under that borrowed power magically granted by the Elder ring itself she brings her golden order to the lands between to enforce its ideology over its own native societies thematically speaking anyhow someone's ideology can of course be shared and transcribed in various ways the most obvious means perhaps would be through written words or if the intent was for the rules of an ideology being enacted to utmost Precision you can indeed allude to the nature of a computer program [Music] foreign ideology can be expressed through example as well a true work of art that by itself embodied to its utmost the red blossoming order as Creator envisioned since Millennia fought dedicated myself to him and to the resplendance of the order of rot the cycle of decay the ideology for an order can even be envisioned by someone on their own for instance through study of the natural world drawing from what is observed and writing a set of rules to match mine will be an order not of gold but the stars and moon of the chill night thank you it may be relevant to explain what literally speaking I'm actually doing I draw on the sand as it were the target I'm aiming is for in no uncertain terms I am aggregating all of the separate disjointed pieces of information that involve the various stories in this game rejoining an otherwise fragmented narrative then I put in my own words what the game's story literally is and recite it to you the audience the reason any of this Bears doing in the first place is due to Elden Ring's use of what's often called non-linear or disjointed storytelling where events are told to us for example out of chronological order and so for the goals of this specifically I'm restricted to dare I say chained to strangled by working only within the elements of the narrative itself since The Narrative of eldering is so shallow and cohesive plopping every piece into one place and looking at it is all I've got to do not that the detective work isn't a lot easier described than it is performed but still to reiterate the goal I have for this particular project is simply to recount The Narrative contained within the video game held in Ring released on February 25th 2022 for Playstation Xbox and PC with zero speculation involved in other words piecing together the story as it exists solely within the Canon of the game itself and nothing outside of that the reason I'm posing such limitation on myself is of course that if I were to use elements of my own imagination and was presented referred to as speculation in the soulsborne fandom sort of like we're in a bye-bye man situation where you aren't supposed to say what it actually is it's what's called a head Canon and obviously separate from the existing content in the video game that we all share because it's Canon the content of the work plus the content that came from an audience member's head various headcanons can be better than the actual Canon of a media itself in various ways but presenting my personal head canons for this game is anything along the lines of this is the true story it would be misleading you at best which is why I'm putting such a tight restraint onto myself in the first place because I am and sometimes unfortunately not seeking to make any kind of head cannons in the majority of this as close as I can get to zero imagination will be presented as such I may only reference elements that literally exist within the game information whose existence is not itself disputable also known as that which is canonical of absolute importance however dare I say of grave importance even the most important thing for your ears to hear is in this whole pile of disclaimers is that you must never forget the following the Canon story of this game is not inherently the best quote-unquote version of eldering story there is to be told quality in and of itself can only be held in the eyes of the beholder the only thing Canon inherently provides is the deferment that all of us consumers share by virtue of us buying downloading and playing the same video game for people who consume media without producing fan work of their own that is to say all of us most of the time concerning ourselves with only the Baseline that is Canon is all that's desired we buy the game we play it we watch videos about it and share pictures and that's the end of that but for those who aren't like that those people who become interested in producing content for the fandom I have an important message that I beseech you to consider if you are unsure of what a Canon element is regarding something you're making content for or you personally dislike what the Canon element of something is simply make up it's a lot more enjoyable than pretending to walk on eggshells and so for the times when I do bring up my own imagination for any which reason I will say so but all that out of the way then let's talk about imperience we require the setting of three basic facts in the stone to properly understand the concepts of appearance and how they're used within the story number one imperians are those born of a single God this is simply immutable melania's remembrance States it in extremely certain terms Nicola and Melania are both the children of a single God as such they are both imperians but suffered afflictions from birth some may say that this wording is actually ambiguous it is not just look at it we can be easily sure of this anyway since more than one person directly corroborates what melania's remembrance says the matter of this being literally the entire purpose behind Ronnie killing her flesh in the night of black knives the reason Nicola and Melania were born the way they were the reason why only Ronnie mikla and Melania were selected as potential successors to America the reason Mo kidnapped Nicola in the first place and the reason America herself was the one that had to be revived to bring back the Elden ring even so all that stuff might as well be background noise because of how explicitly the remembrance tells you what it means there is objectively and I'm using that word properly no ambiguity whatsoever in melania's remembrance there's no statement by the narrator to be recounting in Universe Legend such as when it uses variants of it said in order to purposely invite ambiguity to the situation from stating merely that a certain idea was believed by the fictional people of the story setting nor is it when the narrator is deliberately making an opinionated statement from an any Universe perspective for poetic reasons such as in melania's own great runes description her great Rune should have been the most sacred of all the description of The Blood Rose glory be to his inevitable Reign or in the one-eyed Shield this evil deity is believed to have been slain by Queen America 's remembrance is giving us this basic fact on a silver platter what explicitly defines the classification of someone as an empyrean is them being born of a single God that's why being born of a single God is what made mikola and Melania appearance and to be perfectly honest I do not understand why so many people seem to be twisting themselves as knots for the purpose of misunderstanding a sentence this utterly basic it's written in the complexity of a first grade reading comprehension test what need is there supposed to be to doubt this in the first place oh but what about this comma how do you explain this entire comma here attaching the separate Clause to the previous sentence is it really so unambiguous oh I see it's actually of a second grader's complexity instead that entire comma over there could mean well it could imply just about anything there are practically so many possible variations it could send a literary analyst collapsing to their knees well I ask that you sanction upon me a moment's turn allow me to with my Transcendent superhuman genius reveal unto us all the Deep fathomless secret hidden inside this comma my swollen glintstone ridden Rick and Morty intellect will light your way with a gleaming air Edition and unearth its literary purposes prepare to have your mind blown by the depth and complexity of the following revelation foreign foreign are number three that there is more than one way for someone to be born of a single God and number two that Ronnie came from the Amber egg allow me the dalliance of really laying out every detail so I can show what I mean straightforwardly speaking when I say I only refer to what exists within the game itself I have my money where my mouth is when I say this video only uses what is canonical to start some details regarding the Amber egg happen to be Lost in Translation it's not integral but it helps clear out some elements that are otherwise Ambiguously written a very special thank you to my friend sweet mini for helping me with translation biz great Rune of unborn demigods in the great room of the unborn's description the English line says great Rune of unborn demigods with demigods obviously being implural the original Japanese however does not specify if unborn demigod refers to a single demigod or multiple so the polarization stated in the English script for this item should be ignored Japanese relies on the context of the sentence for its reader to tell whether something is plural or as singular since this sentence is in itself written to be ambiguous it meant the translator had to guess and they just happened to get unlucky use of unborn the word unborn as it's used in great Rune of The Unborn can be considered as fairly accurate to the term used in Japanese simply using the verb umarero meaning to be born umaro itself derives from the noun umare which means birth and giving that verb the negative conjugation of Naki to convert it into being simply the verb for not being born and then adding mono meaning person to the end to indicate that the verb is in reference to an individual how the Japanese term is used translates essentially into anti-birthood person so as far as I'm concerned there's no meaning between the English use of unborn and the Japanese use of umare nakimono has been lost it is true that the prefix on compared to something like the prefix I came up with anti implies something more like a reversal rather than the more accurate implication of opposites but I don't actually believe that I mean can you imagine what prefix should they have used then negoborin anti-born contraborn and deborn well maybe that one is all right in any case it doesn't matter unborn is fine I don't think there's even nearly enough room to actually misinterpret what it means within the confines of the game this turn was translated into unborn is obviously used in the phrase great Rune of unborn demigods itself as well and there it appears in just the same way although with the addition of an explicit past tense from the verb's conjugation something that was actually lost in its conversion to English essentially and mind you I'm about to give an independent translation this is not automatically the most accurate a phrase is written literally as follows a demigod that was anti-birth this is their great root indeed as the official translation says great Rune of unborn demigods and as a final thing the word for born that's used consistently across all this stuff including the term born Anew is specifically the ordinary word for birth umare not the word for rebirth which is completely different Coursey to specify the use of birth in the Rune of The Unborn has no relation to rebirth like a caterpillars but it's only related to birth like birds anyhow with all that properly understood we can continue all demigods are the biological descendants of Queen America explicit Canon Enya of the demigods only Ronnie mikola and Melania were imperience explicit Canon Ronnie emperions are those born from a single God explicit Canon melania's remembrance therefore Rani mikola and Melania all share the parentage of America alone modus ponens automatically Canon and remember I am not allowed to insert my own imagination into the situation my sole concern is the information that is present in the media itself so since by its nature a work of fiction is a closed system the use of valid deduction is inherently reliable in figuring out what is still canonical but not explicitly said to reiterate for the purpose of this project I'm ultimately concerned about determining what when and where regarding the events of the story rather than just finding hows and whys that I personally find satisfying how and why are obviously of great importance one push comes to shove and we think something doesn't make sense or is dumb they are necessarily at the bottom of the ladder and superseded by the three W's in other words what is canonical is always canonical including if we think it sucks anyhow Ronnie mikula and Melania all have the same Heritage as we've just established great runes are shaped by their owners and direct siblings have great runes that are naturally similar in shape explicit Canon moog's great Rune as well as observably corroborated by radon and reichar's Rune so which great Rune is similar to millennials an induction sourced solely from Canon not automatically Canon by itself the Rune of The Unborn was Ronnie's great room here we have my induction in simpler terms my proposal for what the game's Canon could be of course the real question is verification how am I supposed to tell if this induction that by itself merely cooperates with what we've just gone over actually is the truth instead of some hypothetical other induction instead indeed to prove that our induction was legit we'd have to go over every single other element of the story that connects even indirectly with the induction in question and see if there are any contradictions despite what I said previously to discover the what to where and when we have no choice but to consult the house and wise and find what connects to everything else in the story while of course still only using what content is canonical by this principle of elimination furthermore the induction that ends up having zero contradictions will also end up corroborated by everything in the game as well but how could someone like me even begin with the expectation that all if not almost all details of the story both directly told and indirectly told would coherently align with a single idea and not incoherently disagree with each other at the same time surely the only way such an ambition could prove fruitful by the end would be if the creators of the story in question were perhaps experienced or something in creating larger scale complicated non-linearly presented stories such that a plot of such a size as this would turn out coherent when scrutinized in the first place Elder ring turns out to have a very coherent story how Ronnie came from the Amber egg as corroborated by literally everything without requiring the use of our imagination slashed the introduction of any story element not already present within the video game itself slash making stuff up that's why it's Ronnie that comes out of the Amber egg in the first place in Ronaldo's Phase 2 transition and to be honest did Ronnie randomly coming out of the Amber egg just not spark anybody's curiosity does this not by itself call for a further investigation into what connection she supposedly has with the Amber egg anyhow that's who ranala thinks she's talking to in her Phase 2 transition as well as reaches out to the egg Ronnie is her beloved who shall be countless born forever and ever born is used instead of reborn in this case because of course Ronnie's body is specifically anti-born because she died that's even why it's called roon of The Unborn in the first place because the events of the night of the black knives her body is dead her literal birth what brought her into the world of the living has figuratively been negated obviously dead bodies cannot inherit great runes and since Ronnie was dead her body didn't inherit any great Rune at the time of the Eldon Rings breaking either as such the great Rune passed on to instead the Amber egg where Ronnie's body came from literally the great Rune of the Amber egg is a great Rune of a demigod that had their birth undone the use of the word unborn is indeed meant to be that precise it also extends explaining why the Rune of The Unborn looks the way it does physically speaking it's accurate to say that we take the demigod's great runes from their physical bodies I know that is like duh obvious but it does matter I swear as shown by the create runes themselves only being inherited by those with direct genetic connection to America as stated by Enya and further shown by how Kenneth height never inherited a great Rune despite evidently being a member of the royal family due to being next in line as the ruler of lim grave yet morga and Moog do showing that great Rune inheritance was not something that was able to be controlled and was specifically determined by objective factors with all that understood we see that the appearance of the great runes are determined by the physical bodies of their Shard berries one as stated outride by mogues Rune and corroborated by radon and Roy cars Rune and two shown further Between the Lines by the appearances of the great runes themselves godric's great room is faded Reichard has a serpentine figure coiling around it where Dawn's great room is on fire somehow morgots gray Rune has his red accursed blood underneath the yellow gray Rune making it orange moogs is soaked in a cursed blood providing an effect completely different from the other great ruins when equipped and melania's is half rotted with ionian butterflies Ronnie's Amber egg inheriting the great Rune instead of her actual body holds a great room that is visually tiny because it's a reincarnation countless born and so on within the egg just without a soul since Ronnie's soul is still in the world of the living so the egg is never going to actually hatch this is why the creations of the Amber egg are also shitty and why you need to consume larval tears in the first place to conduct reincarnation as to substitute the Mason component and ultimately why the gray Rune itself is so small even further along it shows as well how logically Ronnie's slaying of her empirion flesh would be successful in achieving what she wanted as despite having been born with the right to inherit of a chunk of the Elden ring due to her physical body's genetic connection to the Elder Ring's vessel killing her flesh successfully severed it freeing her completely from that connection as Ronnie goes on to confirm for us herself and by how her corpse adopt the Divine Tower of laarnia has no signs of a gray oon either she was successful and perhaps most importantly this is how Ronnie was born in peering in the first place despite being known as a child of the mortal ranala and radagon in America she came from an egg made through the powers of the earth tree as such she counts as a child of America alone thus fulfilling the requirement of being born of a single God and explaining how she's empyreant this is also what the original purpose of the Amber egg was when radagon first gifted it to Ronaldo before she became trapped in the grand library of Raya lucaria and now began to use it for the Forbidden right of reincarnation as Muriel tells us the Amber egg was not only gifted by the Leal Hound of the golden order himself so obviously he didn't gift it to Ronaldo with the initial expectation of her using it as a heresy machine but it's also made of Amber and thus from some time around the beginning of the age of the archery as the archery itself only produced sap before the end of Godfrey's reign Ronnie coming from the Amber egg and thus being how she's Imperium also goes on to directly explain why mikola and Melania were born the way they were by the end of Godfrey's Reign the UR tree's blood had run dry meaning that by the time it was decided that Melania and mikola were able to be born there was no Amber with which more golden eggs could be produced leading to the twins having been conceived through natural sex between radagon and America instead thus still fulfilling the bloodline requirement of being born of a single God and resulting in them being born vulnerable and in the case of any doubts we can be sure that Melania and mikla were born through ordinary sex in the first place but the simple fact that Melania has a belly button the twin prodigies were born vulnerable due to the genetic defects brought by the self-sest between their mother and father while Ronnie was born asexually through the Immaculate Conception of the Amber egg and as such our lunar princess did not suffer from any defects due to her birth that's a requirement for being born and Imperium would otherwise imply this is all just the internal logic of eldering's magic of course we aren't given any explanation of how the Amber egg is actually supposed to work in this case the burning question of how is stamped aside by the presence of what and just like how the likes of Kenneth's family history don't make it into the game or that the entire continent of the Lance between apparently has only one Farm on it these irritations exist for the sake of narrative brevity in order to maintain the shallowness of Elder Ring's greater's plot all information irrelevant to its narrative is purposely left out as an aside I also imagine this whole situation might be a showing of how imperians are supposed to be born diegetically speaking to compensate for requirements of being born of a single God the only way to produce an empirion without any genetic defects is necessarily through asexual reproduction for Ronnie it was done through the magic of the archery but hence we have no other instances regarding the births of explicit imperians specifically we don't actually have anything else to go off of so for now you can ignore this idea unless the DLC comes out and reveals somehow that I was totally right in that case don't ignore this and send me confetti ball emojis to my Twitter at tlg tweetw instead last and perhaps most obvious of all this is also why what is otherwise a massive chunk of fossilized tree resin is referred to as of all things an egg in the first place rocks are not typically recognized as eggs of course and neither are there any other pieces of archery Amber so why is it the case for this one since this piece of Amber in particular is where Bonnie came from an object where a living thing had been born from that is why it's called an egg so now that we've established number two we can also establish number three that self-cest is not the only way with which empirians are able to be created just one possible method of fulfilling the born of a single God requirement and that is how I can in the first place adequately determine what is Canon rather some other hypothetical thing instead that is also why nobody in the right mind has ever made videos structured like what you just saw by the very nature of this game's non-linear storytelling everything feeds into each other and you'll find yourself dealing with a carpet-sized Sudoku board any which ways the purpose of me having shown all that was again just to communicate what my process behind the curtain actually looks like for the rest of this video the same kind of nonsense of what you've just seen has all still happened a considerable amount of repeating myself will end up being required as we go through the various stories of this game but I will do my best to stick only to what's strictly necessary so what's so special about being Imperium let's bite into it just for posterity let's all confirm the people who are actually impurities which to reiterate we know for a fact is determined by your genetics Ronnie Nicola Melania America and the glomide queen assuming of course that the glomide queen is an entirely separate person and not say a different character is alternate Alias and almost definitely Melina as well [Music] melna is herself one of the demigods already obviously but I believe that since she was born at the foot of the earth tree specifically and by the unique psychic connection she evidently has with America Melina is also an imperian as well that when she tells us how she was born what she's describing is her being born through the power of the herd tree directly just like Ronnie was in any case imperians obviously are special in some important way there wouldn't be such a Ruckus about them if they weren't fortunately for us there are a spry Trio of old fogies In This Very game who know all the details and they just happen to let us in on some select bits of the secret at least enough for us to figure things out ourselves let's hear what they all have to say and I'll write down beside them what's most pertinent root of the golden order carrier of its vision a God in truth even in shackles she remains a God and a vision's vessel with no other details in his definition and the diversity of entities given the title of God in this game showing a distinct lack of a pattern besides all the dusty labeled fellows being super powerful it is important to confirm in this setting that the term God is just a title given to any entity that has an adequate power level there are no other qualifiers behind a creature being named a god that is to say America Melania the fell God the outer God sealed within the lake of rot the god devouring serpent the greater will the formless mother and placitas ax's missing spouse it's also worth noting that observing from what we see firsthand with Millennia and guessing from what little we see of a pre-fractured America both being imperians who have ascended to godhood is that their bodies don't look any different from before their Ascension even after Reviving as a goddess of Rod Melania unmistakably remains human just a powerful one there's no biological distinction to be had between a human and a human empyreon who's ascended to godhood of course this also aligns with how the ascended to godhood human America successfully had children with the Mortal human Godfrey one of which went on to have his own children and so on without any complications all of this goes to show I say that the nature of being a God is solely in reference to achieving a certain level of power you'll also notice how the words God and outer God are both treated as mere common nouns in the English translation as opposed to something like how the great ones in bloodborne were capitalized as proper nouns this is because the only distinction between a God and an outer God in Elden ring is that normal Gods come from the Earth and outer Gods come from outer space outer is just descriptive this language is present in the original Japanese as well America is called the standard word for a God or deity Kami imperians is translated from the word for a god-like person shinjin and the outer God merely adds saturnaru meaning outer or external Takami saturnarukami it's true the term outer God is also used for the standard crafty and Pantheon in Japanese but for self-evident reasons such as the outer Gods having human-like goals such as the want and subjugation of territory being threatened Enough by the Ambitions of humans to take disciplinary action as shown against the Knox and being able to be straight up killed and defeated as shown by the outer God of raw being sealed Away by the Mortal blind Swordsmen we can tell that what's described as the outer gods in Eldon ring are not lovecraftian in any respect besides say being powerful and mysterious and simply put if that's what you'd call a lovecraftian entity then the mafia or the feds Arlo grafting entities too and that is certainly not accurate an emperion is no mere demigod Queen America and her King console Radigan were blessed with twin demigods and Millennia was one of them she was born an imperial carrying the Scarlet rod in the age of the Elden ring and queen Manuka the precious empyrion was born a new God the order since Melania fought her down I have dedicated myself to him and to the resplendance of the order of rot the cycle of Decay and rebirth foreign [Music] we Children of the Scarlet rot disowned hmm it's pertinent to see what Millicent can tell us to perhaps elaborate on what exactly Gary means by Melania having disowned the children of the Scarlet Rock there is something I must return to Millennia the will that was once her own the dignity a sense of self that allowed her to resist the call of the Scarlet rot Pride she abandoned measure Melania resisted the call of the Scarlet rot which he carried and the Order of Roth that had presented until as we see choosing the finally answer its call when she removed her unallowed gold needle that we find in the heart of Ionia and then killing herself on top of Rodan thus allowing the Scarlet rot to put the cycle of rebirth into practice she blooms into the goddess of rot and unleashes the rot onto the lands between itself for the first time after which she leaves the Scarlet Rock behind and returns to the hylac tree disowning as Gary puts it him in the Kindred abroad the Scarlet rot is what presents the vision of what Gary describes as the order of rot Millennia had been vessel for the Scarlet Rod itself from birth and yet there are no signs of this Rod anywhere within Lane Del the place where she was born she had the rot within her but it was never actually released onto Langdale anywhere despite being born with a Scarlet rot milania succeeds in preventing it from killing her as shown by her having only the non-functioning needle while at the base of the hylock tree he was able to successfully prevent the Scarlet rot from killing her even without mikola's direct assistance something that as we see with Millicent is not a given by the way this was the meaning of melania's dream that she recounts of the beginning of her boss fight she'd been dreaming of herself continuously holding back the Scarlet rot inside her body while still defending the base of the Hallock tree for as long as it would take for mikola to come back the unleashing of the Scarlet wrought was something Millennia while alive gets to choose unleashing the order of raw unto kalid or holding the Scarlet rot back was melania's choice wishing to raise Nicolette to full godhood Moog wished to become his consort taking the role of Monarch but now no matter how much of his bloody bed chamber he tried to share he received no response from The Young Imperium ascending to godhood at all is a choice an imperium's Ascension is ultimately chosen by the Imperium themselves in conclusion imperians are beings born with a capability to magically impose an order onto the land itself on a massive scale becoming Gods the order and ascended empyrion embodies is determined by the vision of an order that their vessel for this Vision can be something either created by someone else and then given to the empirion as we see with Melania with Scarlet rot and America with the Elden ring or it can be made by the Imperium themselves as we'll see later with Ronnie and her laws of the Moon the eldernering is in essence a magical edict and like any law or set of laws without a force to brandish the edict itself is powerless this is shown through the grave importance America's followers had for defending the archery even after it stopped producing its blessings and the necessity with which the forces of the archery subjugated the lands between physically though the eldering itself is very very weak not merely in that it was easy to physically damage as America nearly succeeded in destroying the Elden ring entirely with not but A Primitive stonehammer but also in the manner that it required the body of a God to continue living just like how a computer acquires electricity to remain active the Elder ring literally cannot exist without a vessel to sustain it if we allow America's body to crumble to Ash like songs in a melted CD it's just gone this might I say formless nature of the Elden ring is however important in another way too as I alluded to earlier the Elden ring is shown to be something that is able to be molded into supporting any ideology whatsoever the first instance we learn of the Elden ring being edited is of course of America and malachyth removing the Rune of death the act that creates what we now call The Golden order in the first place but this aspect of the Elden ring is shown most prominently by the numerous variations of the Elden Lord ending we're not one but three mortal tarnished completely separate from each other managed to compose their own mending runes with which we can patch new features into the Elden Ring's order if we decide to repair it in addition to of course already bringing death indiscriminate into the Elden Rings order since by this point we've returned the root of death to it as well the Elden Rings malleability correlates with how runes the characters of the two fingers formless language of light at the eldering itself is made of is not only something that's able to be taught to humans but even able to be performed by humans separately from the two fingers afterwards what with how Enya is able to use the power of the two fingers to dirt in remembrances into equipment even after the fingers themselves become inactive how we directly use the magic of the two finger is when we use our multiplayer items writing our own runes into the air and how Melina is able to teach us the power of turning runes into strength a skill known to be otherwise exclusive to the finger maintenance just like a computer program it's made of what's actually in game referred to as code by the way I am never going to get over that is literally called code the Elder ring is made of code it's a magic computer the two fingers are its alien I.T technicians but by inserting new code we're able to change what the program does the Elder ring is a tool versatile enough to support whatever order it's given up to it including really stupid ones like the dung eaters so it may be more accurate to describe the Elden ring as a platform of order rather than the root of a singular ideology itself as the two fingers described it now you don't need eyes like mine to tell that the golden order was very important but what we're actually told about the like tenants dictated in the golden order are minimal this is for the sake of narrative brevity again just as how every demigod beside the ones we actually fight in Game are left without names in order to deliberately keep the plot shallow all we learn about what the golden order itself is supposed to dictate is that which is directly relevant to the story The fundamentalists describe the golden order through the powers of aggression and causality note how this is how the fundamentalists choose to describe the golden order they are subjectively deciding to describe the golden order using the objective forces of regression on causality as analogies this conceit is presented more explicitly in the original Japanese as well reason this is important to point out is how these definitions used by the fundamentalists paint the golden order as an ideology that apparently includes literally everything and as Earnest practitioner is a fundamentalism like Cornish OS that the golden order was believed to be inherently legitimately perfect over the course of the game itself however we see that this premise is nothing but a farce first off recall how golden order fundamentalism is comparatively a new movement compared to what was originally singular worship of the archery itself as we hear from Melina's recounting America makes a speech at the minor archery Church a product of when the sap of the archery ran dry and the first generation of Earth tree Seas had fallen intent to search the depths of the golden order through understanding of the proper way our faith our Grace is increased those Blissful early days of blind belief are long past my comrades why must ye falter Frankly Speaking golden order fundamentalism is medieval's scholasticism this is a very direct thematic parallel explicitly it's the use of reason and logic to retroactively justify the state religion facing the Revelation that the archery was not as perfect as initially believed America's response is the establishing of a new Direction which would eventually be recognized as golden order fundamentalism she changes the goal posts as aware and puts a speed onto the observation of order itself losing the certain blessings of the archery sacred tears followers of the Elden ring will now work to justify the faith themselves through study of the golden order itself that the Elden ring describes a once blind worship of the Eritrea merely in response to the boons it provided is no longer enough that America's followers must not falter in their faith simply because their days of easy Grace with which the faith of the archery itself had been first spread across the lands between are over also just to confirm radagon is not implied in the game to be the creator of golden order fundamentalism indeed radagon's rings of light is in the golden order principia a tomb containing the order's fundamental principles but recall what the incantations a description actually says a gift of gratitude to the young mikola from his father radagon gratitude for what the discus of light incantation the mikola made as a gift for Aragon obviously radagon's ring of light was composed after nikola's discus apply and since discus of light is itself already a fundamentalist incantation it shows that radagon is not implied to be the inventor of fundamentalism to be clear that isn't integral to anything but I just thought it would be worth specifying maybe it would confuse the timeline in the future otherwise when new content is eventually released fundamentalism came out of the need to propagandize the golden order and somehow excuses otherwise equally observable shortcomings golden order fundamentalists sought to find in Science and Mathematics adequate justifications for what they'd already decided had to be correct this premise is confirmed Beyond doubt should we follow gold mask and Corin on his journey to compose The Mending Rune of perfect order during which we learn alongside gold mask and corn that the golden order in its entirety had been founded on a dare I say fundamental lie the golden order is founded on the principle that America is the one true God however the name of America's second husband King consort radican also appeared scholarship in all but name golden order fundamentalism was created solely to justify that no matter what and despite everything Square pegs did fit into round holes since the golden order itself is supposed to be perfect you could almost say they had no choice but to make it that way practically speaking though the order itself is one of complete authoritarian control as the fundamentalist described it the golden order is supposed to be an order that encompasses the destruction of things regression and the creating of things causality and by this we see how the fundamentalists justify their obsession with deciding what fit within the order and what should exist and what was heretically outside the order and therefore shouldn't anything that didn't fit in the golden orders preconceptions were determined to in simple terms be existing incorrectly and thus to be eradicated like those who live in death not only however is the golden order its entirety revealed to be predicated on a lie but over the course of the game multiple examples in Universe address how what the golden order proclaimed as heresy have only ever been completely arbitrary the lionians were heretical but now they're not The Crucible wasn't heretical but now it is the golden order has no mercy for those who trespass Beyond life's bounds you know except for us when Muriel tells us heresy is not native to this world it is merely a contrivance all things can be conjoined and all that he is in fact correct the story itself agrees with him and this observation is indeed one of the main morals espoused by the game itself that the concept of heresy is inherently fake we can even find Muriel's premise proven to its utmost if we follow fia's questline and upon repairing the Elden ring with The Mending Rune of the death Prince we embed the principle of life within death into the Elden Ring's order now unanimous is contrivance as an existence outside the bounds of the previous order becomes observably defunct just like that this ideology of the age of the duskborne is established and through the powers of the Elden ring magically made into reality the golden order was the vision of order that was written into the Eldon ring prior to destruction as I described earlier what I refer to as these visions of order are in other words physical transcriptions of an ideology that can be given by its envisioner to be magically enforced by an appearing in their Ascension to godhood Melania holds a Scarlet rot inside her and from her was established in order of rot Moog attempted to ascend mikola unto godhood by putting his recursive blood inside him and from him he aspired to establish his moguin dynasty and of course Queen America held a Elden ring inside her and from her was established the golden order so note that where we talk about imperians being vessels it's in physical terms the nature of this link however between an ascended and Perry and themselves and the vision of order that they're physically vessel for is shown to be a very magically powerful connection for America we of course see that the damaging of the Elder ring shattered her own body in return but we also see that America's body had become transmuted in a less destructive way as well as radagon bleeds golden sap when we strike him this magical link is also shown to run both ways for after we do kill America and her Elden ring in the final boss fight God slain and all that if we choose to repair the ring the way we do it is by repairing America's body bring her and subsequently the ring back to life this is also why the permanent removal of the Elden Ring's influence in the other two endings share a depiction of America's head being destroyed removing any chance of her being put back together again America's death and subsequently the Eldon Ring's death are now both made permanent this relationship between America and the Elden ring is a direct effect of how she became a God by ascending as the Elden Ring's vessel while the Elder ring has power over her she has a very direct power over it in turn with her death necessarily comes its death this ultimate power she retained over the Golden order was exactly what America refers to as well when she mocks radagon in the echoes melano recounts in America's bed chamber already erratic Lil Hound of the golden order that yet to become me without yet to become a God let us be shattered both mine other self to start with the end in regards to what America is talking about in the bed chamber dialogue and in regards to the red-haired hero himself radagon is America continuous present tense like the statue says and as Corn's questline explains radagon existed as a magical offshoot of Queen America the Eternal made through the powers of the golden order he was created at some point prior to the lyonian wars where the rest of his story is known up until the point of America shattering the Elden ring there are several disparate Parts in the game leading directly to the player discovering that radagon and Merica were in truth only one entity all along those being Muriel questioning why he was chosen as second Elden Lord despite being apparently just a mortal champion and rumors of the statue in Lane Dell melania's remembrance a great Rune and gold Mass quest line which requires you to unveil the secret of the statue and report it back to Corin radagon's true nature is most observably expressed however in the spoken Echoes of America's bed chamber and in the game's final boss itself where we actually fight him first of all it's worth pointing out that the bed chamber dialog directly precedes the event of the breaking of the Elder ring I know it's obvious but this is important to note because it shows Beyond a doubt that before the shattering batagan and America existed as two physically separate bodies they are spoken Echoes after all of America speaking to radagon so along with the dialogue itself we can tell that they haven't gotten to their Mephistopheles and Margaretta situation just yet but they both exist as separate bodies also corroborates with of chorus radagon's past as leader of the lionian wars and a husband to queen ronalda during which America still remained publicly active as shown by her speeches at the Grand lifted and the churches in Lim grave and the Weeping peninsula so we can put down for certain that prior to the shattering while the Elden ring was fully formed radagon and Merica were two separate people then as we see in the paintings of the game's opening movie and as explained by the description of America's Hammer the Elden ring is broken by America before radagon takes control over America's body and immediately attempts to repair it we see clearly that the fusion between America and radagon where they now share a single body becomes present at this point where the Elden ring has been partly destroyed America and radagon share a single body and then when we finally beat the final boss then stand in front of a dead America we see that radagon is nowhere initially he took form over his America's shared body to fight us but there's only one person here now even if we decide to repair the Eldon ring resurrecting America to do so radagon remains absent with our tarnished freely taking his spot as the new Elden lord of the golden order was putting it lightly as we see radagon's physicality was directly connected to the cohesion of the golden order itself and it was this fact that America refers to when she taunts radagon in her bed chamber that yet to become me not yet to become a god let us be shattered both mine other self in my opinion it hardly gets more explicit than mine Other Self but if you assume that this was America merely calling radagon by an affectionate term don't worry because this is only the second pet name she gives him the first one as we hear is loyal dog oh radican Lil Hound of the golden order in the original Japanese she doesn't even judge it up with fancy words she literally calls radagon in Inu dog of the golden order so it's safe to say that this is America being sarcastic a script making use of a double entender anyhow it was this aspect of the Elden Ring's destruction that America taunted radagon with at the end of the golden order necessitated radagon's end besides hers you might even say she was mocking him for being ultimately powerless to stop her indeed even as radagon would try to repair the Elden ring and block all entrants to the archery as we see from radagon seal being over the impenetrable Thorns this was exactly what America knew he would do besides simply accepting his death and giving America what she wanted at once it was radagon's only option this was also America hinged her entire plan on in her creation of the tarnish Quest as her spoken Echoes at the Capitol outskirts reveal America had always known that from her absence the lands between would be solid by conflict within the vacuum hear me demigods my children beloved make of thy selves that which he desire be it Lord be it a God and yet she also knew The Shard Bearer stalemate was inevitable for as morgot first discovered even after ostensibly winning the shattering by taking his place as lord of the royal Capital as the eldest of the golden lineage defending Landell so well that his walls never fell even once and maintaining the golden order's presence all the way up to the fringes of lim grave over the course of the entire shattering even after all of that he would be spurned by the Earth tree too he couldn't have done anything but be spurned by the retreat as we Face ourselves when we finally get there and as the two fingers in the round table hold learn radagon refused to let anybody inside forcing the two fingers who directly served under the greater will itself and self-evidently seeking only that the eldering be repaired to end up with no other choice but to call back us tarnish that America banished long ago as a last resort to break the stalemate that America specifically made preparations for the personal enslavement of Hugh to craft a weapon able to kill her melna's original purpose that she relearns upon are going to Lane Del of being kindling for the first cardinal sin in the Betrayal of malacath as mentioned in his remembrance of a tarnished eventually killing him in order to retrieve destined death and return it to the Eldon ring despite locking away Destin death having been his original singular purpose when we eventually see America for ourselves the return of the Rune of death takes the form of her being impaled by a fragment of it going through her torso with a matching wound in the belly of the Elden Beast the Rune of death undoes the ER tree's Grace given immortality just like she witnessed the black knives do for Godwin allowing the brambles to be burnt away and for her and the Eldon ring her body sustained to finally be killed in the first place thus was the end goal that the shattering itself and all of its Carnage had been designed to lead up to indeed such was the purpose behind America's creation of the tarnish from the very beginning ah I knew you'd come are you having second thoughts might I have a word then you're kind are meant to challenge them slay them the demigods and their God so slay her with the weapons he's missed slay the god America who cursed us all I commend your spirit but alas None Shall take the throne Queen America has high hopes for us that we continue to struggle onto eternity a man cannot kill oh God how did America and radagon know such a specific event would come to pass though that with the golden order's destruction radagon would himself be destroyed in as specific a way as refusing with America all with enough surety that America was comfortable taunting him with it taking a step back we're able to see precisely how from how the fundamentalists themselves chose to describe the powers of the golden order that one of the two incantations in the golden order principia you didn't forget that it's the law of regression in the first place that's used to reveal radagon's true nature did you if as has been the most common alternate Theory amongst the fandom that radagon was once a completely separate person and was instead magically incorporated into America just before the lionian wars then as the law of regression dictates with the destruction of the golden order that made him as he is he'd have returned to his original mortal form whoever he was prior to being known as radagon of the golden order instead he is eradicated completely reveals mimicry in all its forms now God slain the man has returned to whence he came radagon was that's why the sacred Relic sword which we see with our own eyes was made from radagon after we defeat him in the first phase is nonetheless described as a sword wrought from the body of America instead it's what the radagon icon description foreshadows when it tells us the hero aspired to be complete for despite being evidently an individual with his own free will radagon was never a complete person he was simply a separated piece of someone else it's why radagon's name was present in the golden order itself as well as gold mask was able to notice in a study of it and of course it's how radagon's children with arnala still also counted as the direct offspring of America inheriting great runes and justifying the presence of the golden sewing needle a tool for the tailoring of demigod attire specifically as one of radagon's initial wedding gifts well before his epic divorce and returned to Lane Del now you may recall the description of the Giant's red braid where it appears to potentially imply that radagon might have actually been one of the fire Giants this however is a misconception one that came from the word choice of the English translation the JP description spells it out more clearly we're told by the barrier of gold incantation that it was only during the first and second lion war is that radagon fought for the air tree and since a giant Crusher weapon confirms beyond the doubt that the war the Giants was the very first war fought by the golden order along with the complete absence of anything even related to radagon on the mountaintops we see that radagon had never even been present for the war of the Giants so after the item description itself wonders how could radagon have been cursed as we've just gone over it's because radagon is America's very literal Other Self some form of lesser manifestation of her that was eventually returned back to whence he came when the magic that facilitated his existence was destroyed the curse of his red hair had actually merely been cast onto America instead being the instigator of the fire giant genocide in the first place physically present to the battles themselves as her speech at the first church of America confirmed and personally marking a fire giant with the curse of her own The Originators of radagon's curse already had an ample opportunity to do so thus on radagon's creation he indirectly catches the red hair curse and it manifests on him the same way it appears in radagon's own children and in Melina that's why the narrator brings the topic up with so much ambiguity in the first place radagon was indeed the victim of a curse it's just not his curse as we observe the red hair has spread magically through their victims genetics and More Physical terms through their shared blood just like how most blood flame appears in morgot despite morgot himself obviously having no willing connection to the formless mother the magical power that moog's blood had become imbued with was spread to all who shared that blood meaning the followers of his dynasty who imbibed his blood and his twin brother with radagon and America counting genetically as the same being of course the curse is able to manifest on him just as well as it does on Ronnie and Melina and in the case of her permanent destruction when we choose the Lord of chaos ending we see that the red and Melina's own hair has faded just like the gold in her right eye indeed I go so far as to say that it's clear that the red hair curse had always been from Queen America however as for how America herself and mikola evidently lack red hair as we see by several depictions of America and the single painting of michalo we see in his opening cut scene well there isn't anything for it just yet for Michael at least note how besides the single frame there is literally nothing else in the game that shows mikla's hair color indeed I think he would even be very preemptive of us to assume he was born that way I would bet even that if anyone would know about banishing a curse it'd be him Time Will Tell Us in time after all so if it turns out I'm wrong and it's revealed that Nicola actually was born with blonde hair I'm on route to a massive egg on my face until then though keep a tab on this when the DLC comes out with radagon understood it of course Bears mentioning that he was merely one of America's later Creations the golden order and the Earth tree themselves are both accredited to have been made by Queen America after all her golden order and her archery that she's also able to magically control as shown by when radagon blocked the entrance leading into the archery with its unbreakable thorns and as we'll see later on America having the ability to just remove Grace from the tarnished now for the most part those statements are accurate it was America who entrusted malacheth to confine the Rune of death from the Eldon ring when the golden order was first composed but the actual Elden Rings creation which we know to be where the golden order actually comes from was by the greater will and the two fingers to reconfirm we can be assured of this due to the fact that the Elden ring itself is constructed from code the language of light that's spoken by the fingers prior to just America's Reign though the eldering itself had been present over the lands between as placidus axes remembrance reveals it was the ancient dragons who brandished the Eldon ring in their Prehistoric Age before the archery while we know nothing else about what the eldering was like during the age of the ancient dragons one place where it majorly differed from America's golden order was in the presence of destined death as Anya tells us the golden order was made by the removal of the red Runa death as exemplified by the red tint of primordial gold modern gold is merely primordial gold minus the red as an aside this is also's why when we see the powers of the Rune of death their colors are black and red while the god-sling black flame is only black and why black flame only deals damage over time while ruin of death attacks deal damage over time and reduce the opponent's maximum HP recall as well had the Black Blade itself is made from obsidian and how it once we get our hands on it along with what the godslayer Greatsword and the rest of the godskin Apostles equipment are decorated with is black of obsidian specifically wherein our Blasphemous claw The Medallion on malachite's hand and the actual Black Blade itself when it was wielded by malcath or a black obsidian imbued with the red of destined death so yeah am I a snake eyes or what anyhow just the same as the situation between the archery and the great tree more often referred to under the moniker of the primordial Crucible the game tells us that The Crucible is just a figurative name for the great tree Itself by the items that describe it in the first place Crucible just means Melting Pot both in English and in Japanese where the word for Crucible is also the word for Melting Pot the term Crucible sounds fancy sure but it's literally just a container where material is put in and melted down its use as a figurative expression in the first place comes from that being what a crucible actually is and used for the primordial form of the earth tree being a Melting Pot specifically also thematically reaches over to other parts of the game such as with the living jars they are themselves actual crucibles of Life explicitly stewing the remains of the various corpses inside them and being brought to life in the form of something different than their individual components regardless we see as well from solarius tree that what's called The Melting Pot of ancient life isn't physically a container itself as despite being explicitly modeled on The Crucible of life that the primordial form of the archery was close in nature to is most certainly not in the shape of a pot I might even say that it's in the shape of a tree using horn ornamentation observably identical to the Horn ornamentation of The Crucible tree Helm which The Crucible tree Helm explicitly named drops as being great tree ornamentation specifically we can confirm that expressions of the primordial form of the archery and The Crucible of light are both simply descriptors for the great Tree by the by that expression of being the Melting Pot of ancient life is in the first place a reference to the fact that since the great tree was the prior form of the earth tree it would have done the same thing the archery does Gathering the magical power of life from the lands between hence where all life was once Blended together the archery governs all after all and you won't need me showing you just how expansively the roots of the great tree reach and as a final note if you're concerned by how descriptions of The Crucible describe it as close in nature to life itself and all that and that's such a Fantastical phrase couldn't possibly be referring to something as physical as a tree don't worry third tree itself is also described independently from The Crucible as straight up being life itself already but while we may know what the gray tree was called you might think that we still don't know what it physically was that The Crucible is always referred to as the primordial form of the archery itself however tells it to us the great true is not merely a similar plant or a plant to the same species or whatever that the Earth trees only replacing in function but the name of the gray tree is the actual shape the Earth tree was in prior to how it currently exists under the golden order before we continue though for posterity's sake it's worth reconfirming that the archery specifically belongs to the Elden ring not linked America herself but the Elden ring which is linked America functionally the same outcome is indeed reached which is why I said accrediting that our treat America is still mostly true and as we can see by radagon covering the entrance into the archery with brambles completely unbeknownst to the two fingers themselves there is evidently some kind of connection between America and the archery itself but as we can see from the dozens of other arteries shown in the Eldon B Serena Alden Stars being the most ancient of incantations that derive from the archery the root-like growths on the eldenbeast tale and the fact that the color of the earth tree itself changes depending on which variant of the Elden Lord ending you choose we can confirm Beyond a doubt that the archery is ultimately from the Elden ring anyhow we're able to deduce that the great tree and the Earth tree are the same single organism through pretty much the process of elimination the most immediate discrepancy towards the idea that the archery in the gray tree might be two physically separate organisms would be that there's no evidence of the existence of a giant tree other than the earth tree being a tree a separate gray tree would have to have leaves a trunk branches and of course exist above ground but besides the Earth tree Nicholas Hallock tree which is obviously not a contender for being the gray tree none of the sword exists was a gray tree somehow cut down and cleared away it can't be that either because we also see nothing resembling would be the cut down trunk of a giant tree above the Deep roof deaths the deep root depths being important here as it's the explicit origin of the gray tree's root Network and while it isn't underneath any kind of giant tree trunk it is incidentally underneath Lane Del that is to say it's underneath the Earth tree their surgery Avatar hanging out here too since The Crucible incantations themselves are ancient archery incantations with the same logo as archery heel blessing of the earth tree and Elden Stars it's well corroborated at the archery and the gray tree are physically one organism now the gray true is literally the earlier form of the archery before America's Reign is also why its acknowledgment became heretical in the first place acknowledging The Crucible of Life begs one to also acknowledge how arbitrary the golden order's creation actually was it uniquely threatened the perceived Perfection of the golden order espoused something that to even question in the first place was an obvious heresy what was it that made the primordial gold red tinted that isn't present in the golden order now it's the golden order actually perfect if in the previous age it had something that's lacking in the current one and so on that's why the powers of The Crucible were made estranged from as time went on and America's Reign had fully established itself as the authority over the lands between recall how Godfrey and his army were only banished after Godfrey's campaign had ended and that The Crucible night specifically served Lord Godfrey there's no reason to be had behind censoring the gray tree just because it predated the archery when the golden order has a call literally worshiping the age of dragons a strategy along the lines of the golden order having tried to make some kind of false history where their rule had always been in place since forever would simply be asinine where there are people who were literally alive prior to the age of the archery who are still alive at the archery's primordial form was the gray tree is also corroborated by what little we do know regarding when the lands between were ruled by the ancient dragons that being since the ancient dragons worshiped the Elden ring during the Age prior to America they would subsequently be what the worshipers of the form the archery was in Pride America as well just to reconfirm we know in the first place that the ancient dragons were the previous Masters in the Elder ring by pacifics once having the title of Elden Lord and that it was this fact that provided The Logical basis behind the golden order's justification for the ancient dragon's cult's existence since the ancient dragons literally did serve the Elder ring itself and the archery itself adjusted their primordial forms worshiping the dragons couldn't count as following something other than the archery and so while there is still a lot of information yet unknown to us regarding the age before the retreat we at least know that whatever did happen when America said it to godhead it involved what was called the gray tree becoming the archery but I'm ignoring something very relevant aren't I something that really seems to stand in the way of this idea that the great tree and the urge are the same single organism as the root resin description says the roots of the great tree were once linked to those of the archery or so they say and it is for this reason catacombs are built around great tree roots what is the actual purpose supposed to be when phrases like it is said and so on are used just to establish ourselves these item descriptions do not exist diegetically this game's menus aren't being presented to our tarnished or anything like that it's instead presented directly to us the players ourselves an Alden Rings menu is obviously objective is reading us the game's data outside of real life errors like mistranslations and typos the menus purpose is to display to us correct information regarding the gameplay itself and never present anything untruthful of course we're intuitively aware of this from the start the reason this is worth noting is because this preconception is written to extend to the actual item descriptions themselves the narrator used in the item descriptions is an omniscient third person narrator so just like any other third person omniscient like in the Narnia books for example the narrator has no limitations in what it's able to tell us and yet like the rest of Alvin Ring's menu screens everything it says is intended to be read as true to illustrate our menu screen's narrative voice is able to apparently read characters minds and tell us what their thoughts and feelings were give us information about events that we never see tell us things that themselves don't exist in the game and even see into the future as well think about it despite all that otherwise impossible to verify information as it were not one of us have any doubt that all of it is still canonical to The Narrative of the game because we recognize that since these statements come from our menu and our menu never gives us incorrect information all the item descriptions are designed to be taken as truthful parts of eldering story so when rather than just saying things outright the narrator says in its Myriad ways variations of this is what is believed by the people of the setting instead the literary purpose behind it is to obfuscate some meaningful information while still remaining technically truthful it's a method of introducing narrative ambiguity without breaking the contract of communication between the author and the audience the particular contract in these item descriptions of course being that the narrator can't be wrong I've exemplified in the root resin description itself the game's menu remains as we know it's intended to be taken as a reliable source of information it's not as if this is supposed to not actually be what they say or anything like that but this is deliberately undefined conspicuously Anonymous they is not intended to be taken as a reliable source of information in writing the description this way we the audience are invited to consider what relevant details are purposely being left out in the case of what's mentioned here the most pertinent details that have been left out for us to ponder are why the roots of the great tree and the Earth tree are considered connected in the past and why they aren't considered connected anymore as we just gone over the reason the great tree and the Earth tree roots would be considered connected is because they'd be in truth the same organism the expansive root Network across the lands between a simply grown during the age of the great tree and thus are accredited to it as for why they aren't considered connected anymore it's due to the effects of the shattering as the Lord's Divine fortification tells us all was broken long ago with the archery itself being no exception as we already know the state of the archery is directly connected to the state of the Elden ring comparing in-universe paintings of the archery to how it currently is we see that indeed just like America herself was the earth tree too was physically Shattered by the breaking of the Eldon ring just look at that gash and not only is it fractured but it's leaning it's literally been broken and Twain and that is why the great trees Roots aren't considered connected to the arteries anymore their tree itself was physically broken off of its roots when the Elder ring was shattered the root resin also tells us that before the Earth tree was broken the catacombs were built around the gray tree's roots this act we know to be called a tree burial where the remains of the Dead are believed to be returned to the Earth tree now though since the Earth tree is broken their Ashen remains remain unreturned whereupon we can take those ashes ourselves and use a spirit calling Bell to summon their ghosts from them to fight with us this is also why all the Ashes underturned to the archery that we obtained throughout the game are we are specified from creatures who died after the Elden ring was destroyed although to be honest some of these Spirit summons really stretch one's personal tolerance for ambiguity maybe this island is just supposed to be like out of range of the earth tree or something wait no because there are catacombs on the weekend Peninsula too so it can't be that okay uh I guess uh America's breaking of the Elden ring itself was just like relatively really recently after the end of Godfrey's campaign well I guess there is a bit in the game supporting that wait wait oh my God foreign foreign foreign [Music] [Music] Because by the Battle of Ionia redana Melania were just the last of the still active demigods godric was busy Reichard was busy Moog was busy mikola was What mo was busy with morgot didn't have anything to do Bonnie was dead and also busy in the Battle of Ionia took both of them out with the Battle of Ionia the shattering had entirely ended so then after a from soft trademark and big William pretend years later after everything else only then does our player our character actually reach the lands between and begin the story of the game itself of course why would a single war with less than half of its participants even interested in fighting in the first place take more than a few years anyway this single detail of Verdon being specifically Young when he became the star Scourge something that I'm going to presume was originally from Martin's work and kept by from soft rather than them adding them in themselves eat me out if they did because keeping in mind from Sasa parent allergy to the concept accounting I hope they didn't deliberately put in such a plot point that pulls down the story's pants like this the single detail has to be the exact point in the storyline where grrm's development of it ended and from software took the reins I hope we get the kick out of that the other games never felt as contrived about this as Elder ring does long ago long ago said to have once dwelled I can't remember the last time as the story is told you wish to know more of Lord radical yeah Muriel he came to these lands at the head of a great golden host oh when was that what was that Muriel when he met lady Ronaldo in battle he soon repented his territorial aggressions there oh great it sure is a real relief to know that he soon repented after meeting ranala thank God it was only soon the mystery endures to this day to this day huh how long is that supposed to have been Muriel how many days has it been at the mystery still under his two huh what day is it what day is it today Muriel Glory Days the round table hold long ago before Godwin's assassination long ago the war against the dragons long ago before the Giants had even lived in the mountaintops long ago a million different long agos and don't even think about getting me going on it was said long ago this has to be it it just has to be I'm keeping all this in the script I can't believe this what was I talking about oh you know what this has been an elephant in my room since literally my first playthrough right and I have not seen anyone mention it I know I can't actually be alone in this stuff so for those of you who paid enough attention notice the two this is for us what I'm referring to is that the war against the dragons and the destruction of pharam Azula are both events that in fact very obviously happened right before the beginning of the shattering it is incredibly spelled out such that I'm legitimately confused that it isn't more commonly spoken of to start the Ancient Dragon Cult of Langdale it's established after God when the golden defeated Forte sacks and ended the war against the dragons that it was founded so the relevant timeline for us is this not exactly Revelations I know but only after all of this is when pharah Missoula is finally destroyed as the rune's Greatsword tells us pharamazula was struck by a big meteorite meteorites have gravity magic and this gravity effects time that's why for Missoula has lost some time all of us already know this obviously so I'll only go into the greater implications of all this and how it interacts with fate and stuff in the next video so stay with me until then anyhow all that matters for this is that firm as well as actual destruction takes place after everything else how might we know by the material evidence we find in Fair Missoula itself prayer book of the capital's Ancient Dragon Cult a Lost Tomb that never reached the lands between evidently members of the ancient dragon called were active in Fair Missoula prior to its destruction the destruction itself obviously being the reason why this book never made it to the mainland and at the end of the level the war against the dragons having been complete prior to Ferris wheel's disruption is explicitly confirmed after the great ancient dragon Grand sacks attacked the Sentinels had an epiphany the only way to truly protect the archery was to become dragons themselves yes it is legitimately this explicit the draconic tree Sentinel exists as literal walking proof of pharamazula's Destruction having only occurred after the war the dragon was over and the tree Sentinels chose to become like dragons like I said I don't know why this isn't commonly acknowledged there are also Crucible Knights and the banish nights The Crucible Knights being those who serve Godfrey and the banish Knights themselves being Knights of stormvale who only got banished after Lim grave was conquered the mere presence of these guys automatically disproves the in-universe legend of pharah Missoula having been slowly crumbling since prehistoric times by themselves but let's not get too distracted in any case for all these people to have been stranded in fear Missoula as they currently are they'd of course have to have been in Fair Missoula prior to its destruction to cover every base however let's look through any potentially alternative inductions I know nobody's actually suggesting these uh the existence of the ancient dragon prayer book by its nature already confirms that the Dragon Cult had been founded prior to Ferris wheel's destruction the building up of these Straw Men here is solely for the sake of posterity so would it in fact be possible for the draconic tree Sentinel the Knights of stormvale and The Crucible Knights to have all somehow made it to Fair Missoula after it was destroyed as we see for ourselves now that pharah Missoula is destroyed there are only two possible ways of getting there the first cardinal sin and a sealed way gate Atop A Mountain south of Cario Manor guarded by The Headless ghosts of three carrier Knights well we can safely conclude that those are not possibilities of course there also isn't any reason for these people to have purposely stranded themselves in Fair Missoula in the first place if they actually had come of their own volition at all despite that would it still perhaps be possible for the Ancient Dragon Cult 2 in some way or another still have been able to worship and cooperate with the ancient dragons after pharamazula's destruction or for the ancient dragons themselves to have fought Landell after their city of pharamazula had been destroyed while at the same time such a circumstance also not being mentioned anywhere in anything relating to the war against the dragons somehow I doubt it so all in all this is the relative timeline for Fair Missoula with Fair missoula's exact point of impact being Ambiguously either before or after the very beginning of the actual Civil War it's no authorial mistake that this instantly explains all the weirdness relating to the ruins of pharah Missoula and the ancient dragons that we've encountered since the beginning of the game itself it's why the extensive destruction caused by these pieces of pharaoh remain unrepaired by the time we get there countless years after shattering itself had been over it's as if they only landed right around the shattering itself where the Civil War would be what prevented them from being repaired and this is because they were actual Manpower is obviously not the issue these guys have Trolls but what with the war and all they just never had the opportunity or sufficient reason to actually do it imagine Civil Wars tend to make one busy and big road cleanup projects get put lower on the to-do list than per usual this also of course all applies to the course of ransacks as well his attack literally starts the war against the dragons and yet not only has his corpse not being cleaned up neither has any of the damage he's done to Lane Dell itself been rebuilt one more thing though when the Knox made the dragon soldiers they had intended for the dragonkin to be immortal as they use the allegedly immortality Grant and gravel Stone scale so the ancient dragons in their creation so why didn't it work reasonably I'm certain that there are exactly three possible explanations recall the appearance of most every other ancient dragon we encounter in game the gravel Stone ceiling forms us that the scales of the ancient dragons are imbued with gold but none of the actual ancient dragons we encounter exhibit this trait prominently but in their wings and for the corpses of ancient dragons like ransacks himself there's no gold whatsoever two ancient dragons however do exhibit gold prominently the lit Dragon Fortis ax who's Undead and the dragon lord we kill after traveling back in time placidus acts both of these guys give us an inkling as to what otherwise healthier ancient dragons are supposed to look like specifically they confirm for us that ancient dragons were actually imbued with gold it's apparent that the rest of the ancient dragons unprotected by the ravaging of age as these two happen to be one by being Undead and or trapped in some kind of dream realm and the other by being murdered before he could grow old as the others we Face have had the gold and their scales fade away and of course none of these ancient dragons at least in the precise states that we find them in prove to be any less mortal than anyone else we fight assuming they'll believe that gravel Stone scales being what provided the ancient dragons or immortalities legitimately true currently there exists the chance that such an idea as believed by the Knox was a misconception and this is the first possibility this would be why the gravel Stone scales used in the construction of the dragon can failed to grant them immortality they've all simply expired and their Immortal properties are no longer present either because the scales themselves are dead having been removed from the ancient dragons they came from or age has worn away what golden magic had previously been present and this is the second possible reason either that or simply the ancient dragons of mortality fell due to the fleeing of their God and like the loss of their blessedness by the Eldon ring or something this would be the third possible reason hopefully we'll actually find out why the dragon soldiers failed so hard more conclusively in the DLC it might also be worth noting that the gold we see on placidus acts and fortisacs appear to be distinctly yellow modern gold rather than red tinge primordial gold this doesn't conclusively tie into anything as of now but maybe it'll prove to be relevant at some point in the future it might not but you know before we go there's one more thing left to mention regarding Fair Missoula why the are there so many horse skeletons in here I'm dead serious there are so many entombed horses in this place there might actually be more horse skeletons and pharah Missoula than there are beast man skeletons why why have they been preserved with so much Pomp and Circumstance well beastmen are shoved into the architecture and hung from the trees how the hell did so many horses even get in here in the first place and furthermore why is nobody talking about this just like why right the urge and the gray tree being the same organism and the great tree also being the form that our tree took during the age of the ancient dragons this is exactly how worship of the ancient dragons was decided not to be a heresy the ancient dragons didn't serve the golden order but they did serve the great tree and since the gray tree was the retreat it was contrived that worshiping the ancient dragons couldn't count as worshiping something that went against the retreat remember that as shown several times by the rest of the game itself and then proven by us first hand if we use The Mending room to death for Elden Lord ending the concept of heresy is legitimately fake as we will see the creation of heresy is solely motivated by politics to be changed and churned as different needs Arise at the ancient dragon call it justifies its own existence with the technicality of all things is on purpose just like with every other instance of something being declared heresy you're intended to notice how stupid it is does not conflict with archery yeah well certainly conflicted with something didn't it the gray tree of being the form the archery had during the age of the ancient dragons is also expressed by the very aspects of The Crucible incantations themselves The Crucible incantations manifest only those natural features which are all found at once on a single creature the dragons Wings horns Tails feathers and fire breath and if we look outside of just the aspects of The Crucible spells we find other features unanimously shared in the dragons as well sharp teeth due to grade legs and even having two pairs of wings specifically rather than just one additionally the fire breath we bring out as an aspect of The Crucible is specifically non-magical fire breath produced from a physical organ unlike the lightning spells of the ancient dragons flame breath is still retained amongst the modern dragons indicating that it's natural rather than something you need to be taught as the Glenstone and rotting dragons show us as well the condition of the dragon's physical body can directly affect the nature of their breath attack and as an aspect of what the archery's primordial form did during the previous age absorbing the magical energy of its worshipers just like they are treated prior to the shattering it's a natural body part whose remembrance as a word can be magically summoned just like the rest of the Dragons his physical features can when we encant the aspects of The Crucible itself that the archery was physically the gray tree in the past also ends up explaining why the archery Sanctuary has of all things an elevator from Fair Missoula connected to it it also provide a decent reason I imagine for how the ancient dragons had enough beef with the golden order as to attack them first and why Grand sacks during his initial attack on Langdale observably didn't Target the archery or even come near it it's definitely not like he couldn't have simply landed here first if he wanted to and as to the popular theory of the great tree being like the origin of life in the ancient past that concept is not present in the game's Canon and to be honest I don't know where that idea even comes from nowhere is it implied that The Crucible of life was the origin of anything other than the Poetry itself on account of being its primordial form that is described as a Melting Pot would necessarily mean that the actual material being melted like came from elsewhere and was put into the pot a furnace doesn't just make out thin air it melts inserted material into a new form which is exactly what the archery already does with its imbuing of the power of life itself into runes through the Elden ring and if the names of ordavis and soluria being references to the real-like ordovician and silurian periods or any evocation then you think a supposed origin of life would at least have some sort of reference to Aquatic Life where life actually did originate from right and yet the aspects of The Crucible include nothing of the sort slight and Flame breath most certainly do not evoke primitive life forms this video goes to Fair detail and explains a lot of things that are otherwise easily forgotten for the story of Elden ring there remain some things however where a canonical explanation is simply not present questions to whom their answers don't exist I'm hopeful that such open threads will be addressed in the eventual DLC especially since many such questions I believe almost assuredly can be traced onto a man alone indeed the very last of the still living demigods a man whose Eternal Slumber in fact isn't even assured if Gideon's voice concerns foreshadow anything the reason I'm mentioning all this though is that right now the game in its current shape there is very little I can explain regarding mikola other than bringing up all the unanswered questions that end up tying directly to him or appear heavily involved in his motivations why exactly was radagon created in the first place Nikola however was involved in the development of the golden order fundamentalism along with having a canonically close relationship to radagon and of course having vested interest regarding his and his sister's afflictions mikla would I'd say absolutely have learned the true Natures of behind his father and mother and how it led to the twin prodigies being born the way they were And in regards to that we also don't know exactly why Michela and Melania were made to be born as in periods with the very politically messy situation of radagon's Epic divorce and second marriage to America being done in order to accomplish it ostensibly the Twins were born the way they were because additional imperians were desired as more potential successors to America but that premise alone sidesteps other obvious questions like why more potential successes would be wanted if Ronnie already existed if the need was political that they needed imperians who were recognized as being America's direct children then what would have been the point of creating Ronnie of course there are easy explanations that we can make up but the answers to these questions themselves are to actually present in the game mikola however would have such answers we also have no idea who precisely Saint trino was despite obviously having an important connection to mikola and cut content telling us the saint Trina was nikola's magical Alter Ego in the actual game we're never told this pretend you don't know about the cut content and only look at what exists in the game itself and Saint Trina could be just about anything maybe Nicholas teacher or student or some kind of descendant like millennia's Valkyries for instance by the way did you know that the six weird pedal goes to phase 2 Millennia can summon matches as six confirmed Daughters of Melania that we see in the game five for Millicent and her four sisters and the sixth one of course being the original owner of these clothes having successfully bloomed just before melania's Arena coincidence Maybe but you know probably not anyhow how the hell did Michael even craft the unalloyed needles what's up with this mention of Fate again right cheating fate does that mean we could have used it to pick the lock to the Finger Slayer and Acron and what the hell does a ghost and Castle soul mean when he refers to Godwin as mikola's comrade comrade and what what were they supposed to have in collaborating on that apparently got interrupted by the night of black knives that would motivate an attempt to bring him back second last of all what did Gideon mean when he says the Queen Sarah was justified after we confirmed for him that Michael had been stolen from the Highlight tree is he referring to how since elphale has a locked treasure room containing a seal of Queen America the mikola was given some kind of Duty or responsibility in regards to the halek tree project that America entrusted him with showing not only that America had been aware of and supportive of nikola's Endeavors prior to the shattering but that she was also aware that the resulting instability of the shattering also put Nicholas plans at risk which is why it's the confirmation specifically of the Alex Tree project going awry that justifies America's sorrow in Gideon's opinion as it proves her concerns to has been reasonable all along and that she was upset that indirectly forsaking mikla was a risk she'd have to accept in order to achieve her ultimate goal of killing the Elden ring like I said many questions but of course the most prominent question of all regarding these twins is what the hell was a battle of Ionia for considering the fact that this completely mysterious purpose which across the entirety of the game is completely unacknowledged proved to be of such Grand import that solely to accomplish it Melania forsook Nicholas needle and willingly Embraces Scarlet rot just to defeat radon and we know it isn't related to the scar Scourge event or Dawn's gravity Locker in the skies only ended with his death not only does rodan's actual death in game have zero connection to any of the events regarding Michael and Melania you can complete Mogan Palace kill Mogan complete Millicent's questline without even seeing red vein Castle but when we finally meet Melania herself she still introduces herself to have never known defeat she has no calms omitting her loss when we defeat her so evidently despite everything that happened in Khalid melania's mission was a success her goal was only so far as to disable radon so what the hell right what the hell was Melania supposed to be defeating radon over that she determined it would be worth nuking caled to do it again as this video is released a canonical reason behind the Battle of Ionia simply doesn't exist Nikola story just isn't over yet technically melania's story isn't over yet either but I reckon at this point it's mostly over what information stands to be revealed is I think most likely all pertaining to the backstory the Scarlet bot itself and what that implies for melania's ultimate future or whatever point is though that there's a lot more for me to talk about regarding her than regarding her brother so what's up with Melania as I mentioned earlier in the video by the end of Godfrey's rule the archery had stopped producing SAP with no sap no Amber like the egg from which Ronnie was made could be obtained still empirians happen to be needed so instead through natural sex between America and radagon the twin prodigies mikola and Melania were born this use of inbreeding succeeded in keeping pure America's very literal Divine bloodline the children of her and radagon were indeed imperians but are also directly resulted in the Twin prodigies disabilities nikola's physical growth was permanently stunted and Melania was afflicted with a chronic illness in some way or another the Scarlet Rod exists as the artificial creation of a now defeated outer God described in Legend as rot itself where it was worshiped at some point in the distant past of this figure itself the originator of the order of rot we get very little in the grand Cloister we get our hands on a weapon explicitly crafted from the relic of this outer God described as coming from a great Scorpion's tale since it's specifically identified as a relic we can tell that it's an actual piece of this outer God's original body so it would appear that they are some kind of great scorpion in any case I'll be referring to this enigmatic figure as Rock God whether the lake of raw before us is literally the dissolved remains of rock God's corpse still living only in its Immortal Essence as a Scarlet rot itself or instead the invention of rock God the only thing left after it was defeated is up for you to decide in any case all the rock God is now is old news today's god of the Scout rot is of course Melania and observing her interactions with the distinctive plague we're able to see exactly what people like Gary and the Servants of Rod actually mean when they describe the order of Rod that the Scarlet Rod embodies the cycle of rebirth put into practice as Gary recounts and as items like the prosthesis where heirloom corroborate Melania was born with the Scarlet raw Illness but as we can observe by the lack of any presence of the rot in Landell this was not when the Scarlet Rock was actually Unleashed Instead The Scarlet Rod appeared during the events of the battle of Ionia where a grown-up Millennia fought with General radon as we learned from the game itself and as shown in the game's E3 reveal trailer Melania abandoned the unalloid needle in Khalid the device that held back the spread of the rot within her body and impales herself through the heart upon Rodan and directly from her death the Scarlet Ionia blooms for the first time in our battle with Melania at the foot of the Hallock tree these events repeat we see her fall to the ground and our character believing her properly dead walks past her moments later however Melania rises again as a Scarlet flower blooms once more as both descriptions of the ideals of Rod espouse death begetting life Decay and rebirth the order of rot starts with some other living things end and so the Scarlet Rod requires death to begin its process in making that ideology real only from melania's Death was a rock capable of resurrecting her as a goddess of rock but why is this so why is it that the order of rot completely subjective as ideologies inherently are by their very nature was defined as requiring death as a starting point such that the Scarlet Rock requires an organism's death first before magically manifesting the order that it acts as vision for be it dying to the rod itself as it happens to Millicent suicide as it happens for the first bloom or at the hands of one's opponent as it happens against us before being reborn life but more specifically the magical energy innate to life is what the Scarlet Rock consumes like all other forms of magic it's this raw energy that's required for this ideology of rot that the scrot rotten bodies to actually be made manifest and as we see the rot is exclusively involved with the living infecting plants animals and even the crystallians Glenstone robots that while being a unique form of life formed from an organic Crystal are themselves explicitly living things this is injects to position to the Scarlet Rock's total ambivalence towards the actually inorganic as shown most prominently with a stone buildings we used across the lake abroad these things have been straight up submerged in these infested waters for who knows how long and yet whatever Mechanical Devices exist underneath the lake to make these structures rise up like they do they still function without issue simply put where there lack any living things to kill and make reborn in accordance to the ideology it embodies the Scarlet rot has nothing to do this is why the rod itself tries to kill the likes of Melania and Millicent to the first place you would imagine for an illness as trying to spread killing one's host would be unproductive but for the Scarlet rot an artificial creation that's only like a plague rather than actual natural illness killing their hosts is exactly what's desired because only from another being's death is the Scarlet rot able to obtain the raw magical energy it needs to magically put into practice and cycle of rebirth it's this principle in the order of Rock's design that makes a Scarlet Rock so supremely dangerous Melania isn't just someone who never knows defeat she's someone who can't know defeat because should she die her to her opponent well we see what happens and if there's one thing this game story teaches us is that in the end somewhere or another death will come for us all that said just like the Elden ring another magic creation made to enforce someone's ideology the Scarlet rot isn't as all-powerful as its worshipers describe it as at its fundamental precept realistically implies requiring the death of something else to function in isolation the Scarlet wrought is sterile first it must be distinguished that rock God was legit defeated whether you choose to describe Rock God as killed in prison sealed away or whatever or remains Above All That Rock God himself is no longer an active player observe how the rock fails to spread horizontally into Knox Stella sealed off by an ordinary Stone Dam not only that it fails to even spread directly down from the waterfall in the grand Cloister into Estelle's Arena without the magical support of a God the magic creation that is a Scarlet rock becomes in essence impotent the lake of rot also serves to confirm the apparent stagnation that we see in caled countless years have passed since the Battle of Ionia the tarnish were first called back to land between what the round hay will hold first being founded living through its Glory Days and subsequently falling and yet by by the time we finally make it to the land between Lim grave remains unmarred with nothing to eat the Scarlet rot is left to Simply sit and starve only able to spread so far as over creatures that physically enter their Waters and as for the future of our now once defeated appearance in particular there may be hope yet for her as well if we follow Millicent's quest line up to its good ending and she gives us the original fully functioning alloy needle that Melania first abandoned all those years ago we can return it to her she gives us the non-functioning unfinished needle it would appear she had previously during her own battle it is most likely why her unplanned death at our hands lead to the second bloom in the first place and takes back the metaphorical Pride she had left behind at the Battle of Ionia now with a tool capable of negating Fate issuing the influence of an outer God just as the unfinished needle was at dispelling our character of the frenzied flame time will tell if the eventual third bloom foreshadowing in the description of the Scarlet Ionia incantation Will Truly Come to pass without their goddess the Ionia flowers that grow over Caleb will be doomed to remain as they are abandoned and unblooming with melania's Own Story well covered at this point there's still a lot to talk about regarding the parallels between the works of our goddess of RA and the works of her mother Queen America the surface level differences between these two gods and their domains belly a shared thematic origin for even while the golden order is rather pretty and the Scarlet Rod is fugly as hell we're able to see that fundamentally they are the exact same thing lights upon the land choking out everything on their way like an urban sprawl as a reminder in the context of describing the orders that exist in this fictional setting we are defining the word order only as it's used in The Game's story order is the enforcement of an ideology now this graph is just something I've made up but I believe it is able to accurately classify the important details surrounding the store's use of order and their need for Imperium in essence you should be able to slot in any clear instance of an order from the game into this chart that's exactly what I'm going to do beginning with red and yellow perhaps the most prominent of similarities between the golden order and the order abroad is how they've changed the color of the Skies where their influence is strongest this yellow and red respectively by the fact that such striking aspects of the landscape are banished by the lack of daytime or by the presence of rainfall however distinctly indicate that these very effects are actually the direct result of air pollution as in the presence of actual red and yellow particles being physically in the atmosphere and by the nature of sunlight refracting through that atmosphere the skies themselves are dustly colored as well gold has it drowned the heavens this would be why the wrong colored Skies dissipate when it's nighttime where there isn't enough direct light and why the colors dissipate when it's raining where the rain physically disperses the particles responsible out of the way further analogies to pollution are also easily found in any case we see that both the order of raw and the golden order share this direct aspect in where their power is most apparent directly transforming the land around them both even have Associated plants from which their influence over the land is physically spread towering Ionia flowers serve to spread the Scarlet rotten self-evident ways literally producing the substance the archery however acts more so like a great Central Beacon from which the influence of golden order is directly transmitted even the minor arteries have an observable fiscal influence on the land directly surrounding them by the spawning of these golden aspen trees and golden sunflowers that appear even around the minor air trees in caled where the rot has exceeded on infecting the avatars the magic of the arteries themselves yet remain and they still use golden magic when fighting us the scale to which we see a god able to magically subjugate the land is what puts the prospect of an empirion ascending to godhood with your order onto such a high pedestal but it's still worth noting that physically speaking the direct influence of these fancy orders remain locally limited to the organisms that in essence dispense them as we see by the orders of Altus and Caleb themselves there is physically a limit to a single God's power but it's still the borders of Khalid and Altus themselves despite both the Earth trees and the Scarlet Ross territory being as large as they are off the backs of the appearance whose magical energy fueled their growth it is still acknowledged that the power present in an Imperium isn't literally infinite third tree compensates for this problem by the usage of its root Network by using its root Network to directly sap the raw magical energy of the Dead third tree was able to remain powered and continue its enforcement to the golden order over its direct territory which is how the Altus Plateau is forced into what is essentially its permanent season of harvest the Scarlet wrought however compensates for the same limitation in a different way by being a ceaseless infection instead of needing its influence to be fought for and protected like maricus archery the Scarlet rot fights for itself and sustains itself in perpetuity external support isn't as important for the Scarlet rocks mirror continued existence as much as it is required for the Scarlet rot to at all expand its influence because of their nature as magical Creations though that exists solely to bring the ideologies they serve into reality they do require external support to continue existing I feel this is exemplified very notably in how neither the archery none of its Offspring nor any other creations of scarlet rot feature any aspects of greenery symbolically and perhaps even physically both the ER tree and the Scarlet ionias lack chlorophyll they're unable to produce their own energy this is a reflection of how both Creations are in truth artificial devices these two ideological instruments flip the natural order upside down placing themselves at the top of the food web where every other organism feeds them instead subsisting entirely on The Taking of magical energy from other living creatures where the archery acts parasitically and the Scarlet Rod is more predatory both these creations share the aspect of being parodies of the natural entities they derive from instead of being like a real tree producing food and oxygen or like real rot breaking down matter that's died of natural causes and dispersing those materials the nutrients into the environment for other organisms to recycle and produce new growth from the earth tree and the Scarlet rot directly sat from the environments around them turning them Barren and requiring external support by their worshipers just so the very objects of their worship are able to continue their destructive existences blinded by their ideology they cannot realize that in continuing their current practices their single future is to perish with nothing but a wasteland left behind that's all to say in essence they're machines designed for a purpose and needing to be manned by the people responsible for their existence in order to actually achieve that purpose Beyond sharing an affinity with shitty plants however both orders also have congruently transfigured people acting as their servants from the earth tree came the archery Guardians humans who upon their natural deaths rose again with saplings sprouting from their backs to protect the archery in its Offspring with it being postulated by the narrator whether the Guardians should be considered part three themselves The Scarlet rot however spawns the Servants of Rod people covered in fungal growths and having worshiped the Scarlet itself in the distant past now serve Melania in turn in addition we have the archery avatars and the Kindred abroad creatures that were outright birthed from their respective life forms rather than being merely transformed humans both with uniquely Associated weapons and both with similar purposes single-mindedly serving that from which they were created consider as well the so-called blessings of the archery by spells like the Earth trees blessing incantation and the sacred flask of Tears were able to tell that the blessings imparted by the Earth tree are physically speaking the restoration of someone's Health in game this is obviously in the form of our HP merely refilling but diegetically it's this very literal replenishing of one's Vigor that made the sacred tears of the earth tree and the grace brought about by such certain blessings so effective at spreading the golden order's faith think about such a situation from the order of Rod's perspective however and the effects of its Divine gift were the grace of the golden order rejuvenates you and staves off death the Scarlet wrought hastens her death for the order of Roth's ideals however a faster death leads to a faster rebirth the earlier enforcement of the cycle to which the ideology of brought entirely revolves around are these two substances as produced by their respective magical plants not by the perspective of their own worshipers exactly the same these clear thematic similarities between the two orders seem to exist at first despite the core tenets and functions of their ideologies themselves being completely different the Elder Ring's fundamental purpose is to gather the magical energy of all life for its ultimate master the greater will but the eldering itself being designed to fit any role whatsoever in achieving this goal not just for the lands between on Earth but also for the dozens of other eritrees on other alien worlds we see in the arena of the Elder Beast the order of rot doesn't serve anything other than itself however its creator Rock God is gone but the Scarlet Rod itself lives on all magical energy that's obtained by the Scarlet rot in its destruction of life is recycled only aiming to perpetually enforce the cycle of rebirth 4. if gowri's awe is any indication solely a perceived intrinsic value in that process if we consider the actual outcome that both orders desire from the perspective of the land and its own native inhabitants these surface level differences become irrelevant it's made clear that to the subjugated the natural world to which both the golden order and the Order of rot come to project their wheels onto that their creators decided what best they become utterly the same the embodiment of another's ideals destroying all opposition like a vicious plague the only other successful empirion that is to say an empirion who ascends to godhood and Elden ring is currently Ronnie but only if you accomplish her age of stars ending the difference with Ronnie's Ascension however is that rather than ascending with the order of another being Rani attains godhood to force an order of her design in other words she becomes a God not for anyone else but for herself and it's important to specify here that this exactly is what her story is actually about a common conception regarding Ronnie's side quest and ending right now is along the lines of Ronnie like permanently freeing the Earth from the influence of all outer gods and outside Interlopers and the enforcement of singular orders over the lands between once and for all this however is incorrect and comes from the poorly translated English versions of her dialogue if we look at a better translation of Ronnie's dialogue in this case how she describes her order when we speak to her doll in Ronnie's rise things are made more clear foreign let's look at the actual criticisms Ronnie has for the current order ourselves or rather the singular criticism that Ronnie mentions in regards to the golden order again in order to maintain the shallowness of the plot only what's directly relevant to the greater story of the game itself is presented to us Ronnie brings up two things in describing her order the first is where Bonnie's order and the golden order are the same she considers the premise of a singular ideology governing life and death and so on to still indeed be necessary or at the very least she has no problems with this premise by itself where her order differs isn't that the golden order is worshiped the people are aware of it they're even able to study it everyone is aware of the great force that dictates their lives and Ronnie believes it would be better if the people under such an order were not aware recall how in all of Ronnie's dialogue the greater will itself is never brought up Ronnie only expresses contempt for the two fingers specifically for trying to control her and criticizes the golden order alone and since her eventual position in the age of stars is straight up identical to what the greater Wills position was hiding out in outer space Ronnie wouldn't even have anything to criticize the greater will for that she doesn't do herself other than specifically the having of your direct agents spread worship of you amongst the people under your control which by no coincidence she directly addresses and resolves like she literally replaces the greater will that's what she's doing the greater will is called thousands if not tens of thousands of moons Away by Enya if what she's referring to in regards to the two fingers in the greater Wills conversation taking so long is in regards to the light years and distance that their communication has to cross leading to such a massive delay that yet Enya is able to estimate confidently at the same time but exactly like how the greater will is already unable to be perceived Ronnie starts a Thousand-Year journey to remove herself from being perceived as well the real difference is that Ronnie is choosing to remain unknown as well when we side with Ronnie as her Eternal consort that's us agreeing with her opinion that one her ideology specifically is what should become the Eternal order over the lands between not the flaw in the golden order wasn't that the people were under the unopposable thumb of a god indeed of a greater will is that they are conscious of the owner of that thumb's existence and two that making the shattering happen was still worth that goal because newsflash and the age of stars ending the lands between does remain under the control of a god Ronnie she's an empirion remember a new God to forge a new order have you heard lady Irani has departed on her journey along the dark path of the Imperium embodying an order and ascending to godhood is what imperians do despite abandoning what's called her Imperium flesh Ronnie literally does succeed Queen America in her age of the Stars ending just as she was planned to do by the two fingers ascending to godhood remained her Destiny and since in that ending she physically flies off into space well we know what God's located in outer space are called don't we Ronnie's story isn't about the banishment of outer Gods it's about the creation of one and as an aside if at some point in the future it isn't revealed to be something else this is my guess as to what exactly Ronnie's Dark Moon is as well fulfilling the same roles as the Earth tree and the Scarlet wrought the moon acts to magically enforce the order she's envisioned for the lands between and its inhabitants the patterns we see inscribe on the face of the Moon itself fulfill the same role as Elden ring did that is to say being where the ideology is physically inscribed that the Appliance in question serves to enforce the Dark Moon Itself by the way that cold and lead and moon that is Ronnie sigil does not physically exist as an actual entire Moon there is only one physical moon in orbit of the earth as shown by the singular Moon globes in Korea the karian study hall and Raya lucaria and when we see the actual moon for ourselves the mountaintops and elsewhere it appears as Ronaldo's full moon and Ronnie's Dark Moon combined they're not actually separate things they're just different incarnations of the same singular object that is to say the full moon itself I mean can you imagine what the tides would look like if the Earth actually had two moons anyhow as Ronnie's hallow brand explains she killed herself at the precise moment of Godwin's demise making it so that she only lost her body but kept her soul alive whereupon Godwin lost his soul but his body would kept alive later on at some point after Godwin's living in death corpse gets stolen from Arisa Hero's grave and stashed in the now nameless to hurl City in deep root depths but that's a story for another time what's important for Ronnie is that she doesn't actually die as we ourselves are very player character describes to rajir that he then repeats back to us Ronnie's form is of a living doll a living Soul inhabiting a living body just an artificial one and by remaining properly alive in this fashion Ronnie retains that power of the empyrean the difference for her now is just that she's no longer genetically connected to the Elden ring and subsequently no longer able to be influenced by the two fingers Ronnie's story as an empyrean becoming a god of her own accord also serves to exemplify the creative freedom at hand of being an envisioner of an ideology ordinarily implies the Elder Ring's fundamental goal was harvesting the magical energy of the lands between his inhabitants taking the immortal Essence in other words the spirits from their astral remains and producing from it the magical letters of the two fingers is language of light personally I imagine that the archery's magical energy is sent directly to the greater will by means of its prominent sunbeams in the form of light that magic power might still take a long time to arrive but it still arrive right in any case the Elden Ring's base objective was that its archery obtained complete control over the souls of its subjects this is shown in how the Elden ring is so open to being edited whatever extra bells and whistles are added to its order its main purpose of producing code remains fulfilled as long as the Elden ring itself is kept intact to Saint the Myriad potential whims of whoever its current Masters on that particular Planet are is able to support just about any ideology including really stupid ones like the dung eaters the order of rot by comparison has no interest in harvesting magical energy and sending it someplace else or even serving anyone in particular in the first place even Melania is physically harmed by the rot losing her Limbs and eyes with the inevitable result if nothing was done of her being ultimately killed before being reborn again the order of rot Works only to spread its beauty of beginning death begetting life and so on unanimously and this is shown in how the Scarlet rot acts like an all-consuming plague unlike the Elden ring it has no greater goals you might even say it has no greater will as we've defined however order is just the enforcement of made up rules whether there are subjectively good rules or bad ones that Ronnie's order is specifically based around an ideology that she just comes up with on her own referenced from the inanimate forces of the moon and the stars and the chill night and so on confirms that there are no specific requirements Beyond I suppose General cohesiveness that an ideology otherwise requires in order for it to be magically made real it's only a case of whether there's enough power on hand to do it foreign keeping this framework in mind for lining up the narrative elements between the forms of order that we see in the game I believe the chaos represented by the flame of frenzy is made much easier to understand as well because as we'll see everything regarding the yellow chaos flame precisely inverts the nature of order the vision itself as it were the flame of frenzy unlike order which must be designed and transcribed into one form or another it's single tenet as we might call it is simply the end of the world melting everything back into the one great as hayata tells us translating the words of three fingers and who is the vessel for this vision of frenzy us well first it was bike but he ended up losing his mind and became unfit and got locked into this jail I guess but whatever after him it was us convinced by curiosity or shabrieri to go to the bottom of Langdale and get ourselves funneled by three fingers we inherit the flame of frenzy and Our Fate becomes that of collapsing in front of the fractured America and Awakening as the Lord of chaos assuming we don't use mikla's needle afterwards of course rather than needing the power of an empirion to force their chosen order onto the land the flame of frenzy only required someone powerful enough to get the Elden ring out of the way allowing the yellow chaos flame to spread unopposed our player character by the by obviously can't in Universe become so overcome with despair as to Harbor the flame of frenzy themselves we inherently retain our ambition to become Elden Lord no matter what never losing our guidance of Grace and always being able to respawn just like how in Dark Souls we never go fully Hollow and are always able to respawn at the bonfires that's why we need the three fingers themselves to physically and vessel us with the flame of frenzy if becoming the Lord of chaos is our goal frenzy itself is birthed from the despair of the land between the inhabitants the currently known first instance of the flame frenzy being summoned was by the great Caravan after they were buried alive but rather than spreading physically through the Earth tree like with the golden order or through infection like the order of rot the flame of frenzy can find itself in the eyes of anyone anywhere such are the endless possible sources of bottomless despair as to when exactly the three fingers and all this frenzy stuff truly enter the picture well I don't think we can say for certain at least right now currently all we know about the three fingers is that they're considered the lord of the frenzied that we find them in a hidden chamber at the very bottom of the Subterranean shutting ground and that hayata is the very first direct translator they've ever had whereupon they previously could only communicate through their likes of fingerprints along with strawberry being like a body jumper hayata seeming to be a body jumper but like annoyingly but also arena is still right there and other such things I don't want to say anything further about the actual stories surrounding the flame of frenzy until more information comes out but I will say this there is no chance in hell that the three fingers isn't lying out of his ass I guarantee him to you like are you listening to this guy all that there is came from the one great wow what next the Elden ring is the anchor of all lands Wellspring of all joy just think of how you got here or Hell how hayata got here she was planning on becoming a maiden for the two fingers but the eating of the shabri grapes essentially fooled her into becoming a reader for the three fingers instead you cannot take the stick at face value maybe even more so than these guys it has a lot to gain by persuading our characters specifically as the inherently Bar None strongest tarnished into getting fingered just once knowing what the act of magic is at a fundamental level we recognize that the various spells we collect over the course of the game are in essence records of precise magical phenomena be them incantations of fireballs and lightning bolts written in books sorceries of shooting stars and meteors written in Scrolls or whatever other indistinct mediums are used in universe but just not shown to the audience like when we buy spells for merchants when we actually cast these spells in game what happens in universe is that our character is successfully envisioning a specific magical phenomena with whatever equipped spell they have as reference and then bringing that to life but exactly what are these spells themselves what's the difference between a sorcery and incantation and what's supposed to be represented by a spell stat requirements along with the in-universe meaning of us having intelligence faith and Arcane in other words while we know where our magic comes from what really is it sorceries are about you recreating the powers of inanimate objects the intelligence attribute is about the understanding of those objective forces through study with which the subject of the sorceries themselves manipulate leading to the increasingly effective replication of That Power by the spellcaster that's why all the Glenstone sorceries are the products of sorcerers studying the stars and spells like Spiral Comet and stuff like the Graven Mages are the products of trying to create their own stars in essence it's emulation of the various laws and forces with which the universe works and utilizing them for your goals for such emulation to be done and understanding of the inanimate power that you're taking reference from needs to be attained as such it uses your insta and this is expressed through the various forms of magic that solely require intelligence to cast Kerala sorceries which are based on the power of comets olivinous sorceries which are based on the study of meteors carrying sorcery which is based on the powers of the Moon the sorceries of the crystallians who are inorganic robots and gravity sorceries which are based on general relativity and are obviously inanimate incantations however are replications of the power of another animate entity it's a recreation of power that the spellcaster literally believes in and believes in so utterly and legitimately in the strength of that entity they worship that their literal trust that is to say their faith is what determines the Magic's efficacy instead of like an actual understanding most important to this at dichotomy is that faith is an inherently subjective thing it's not objective like Natural Forces studied with intelligence it's based on the individual's belief in something else something that is subjectively trustworthy to the spellcaster in all of its ordinary definition incantations are literally powered by the strength of one's faith and what they are worshiping and this is expressed through the various forms of magic powered by faith as well and that they all specifically Channel another being's power the be still incantations taught by grank the Beast clergymen the Dragon Cult incantations worshiping the ancient dragons the archery and ancient archery incantations obviously worshiping the archery itself the fire Giant and fire monk incantations which worship the power of the flame of Ruin and the fell God the frenzied flame incantations which of course channeled a frenzied flame taught by the three fingers the incantations of the two fingers faithful the godslayer incantations which channeled the power of the glomide queen and served to most prominently in my opinion at least exemplified the subjectiveness present in faith the glomide queen herself is defeated her God Slayer is a great sword lying alone but if One Believes enough like her children still do and like we might if we have enough Faith ourselves the black flame can still be brought out and the Servants of raw incantations which worship the raw now starring Melania of course this distinction between faith and intelligence is also expressed in the golden Oregon incantations and the death sorceries which require both to be used golden order incantations are the worship of the Elden ring but is also a study of the Elder Ring's power itself the objective forces that are considered to be behind the eldering's functions scholarship in all but name intelligence and faith this is further shown in how golden order spells like regression and causality require purely int to cast these incantations requires solely the comprehension of these that are in Elden ring settings scientific laws we can tell by their names and descriptions that the causality being mentioned here is the same as the concept of causality in real life and that regression is just the fundamentalist's way of describing what we label as entropy entropy is indeed a scientific law and from both of these incantations being labeled as scientific laws we can tell that they're supposed to be actual objective Forces ones that are studied and don't require someone's subjective trust in order for the concepts themselves to be fully imagined thus they solely require a high enough intelligence to successfully Envision from these incantations as a note it's important to recognize that while entropy is a scientific law in real life causality is not the law of causality incantation requiring only int is in fact a narrative reveal causality itself the premise that every event is inherently the result of a past event is objectively true in Elder ring setting this information does directly lead into the topic of the next video though so I'll leave it at that for now the death sorceries channeled the power of the Rune of death which of course came from the eldering itself as indicated by their logo being the curse mark of death that we know is created by the use of the Runa death the faith comes from the Servants of death's worship of the Rune of death originating from the Eldon ring the intelligence comes from acquiring an understanding of what death was as the Rune of death itself was separated into Malachi's sword and stuff it needs to be recreated by the spellcaster and such it requires an understanding of the objective nature of death itself like how it worked and how it was produced sealed away the Rune of death and its powers now exist outside the Elden ring that it comes from and thus unable to be cast with just faith alone the magma sorceries of Mount gilmir just channeled the power of the serpent God bring in the faith and the natural power of like volcanoes and plate tectonics and stuff bring the intelligence if I were to Hazard a guess that's perhaps why it's called magma sorcery specifically and not like lava sorceries since lava is external the magma is internal and still part of the Earth itself it's the product of the natural forces that lead to the volcanoes creation not just what Jesus out of the volcano after all those internal forces finally reach their Breaking Point Faith's narrative usage also brings a wary eye to the aberrant sorceries which are purely powered by faith and were explicitly discovered alongside red Glenstone magical Amber not made from the earth tree or found from blue and blue green comets or from purple meteorites but explicitly made from the blood of humans An Origin of Earthly nature if I've ever seen one as such while we currently have no idea what exactly the Blood star is we do know that its power is somehow based on something inanimate but unobservable it's a sorcery that solely requires faith in summary sorceries are the replication of the magical power of an inanimate thing that through full understanding of the power that one is creating as represented by intelligence the spellcaster is able to emulate with greater efficacy incantations are the replication of the magical power of an animate being that through full trust in that power that one is borrowing from as represented by faith the spellcaster is able to Channel with greater efficacy it's this fundamental opposition between sorceries and incantations that's also why so far at least who knows what stuff the DLC will introduce after all there don't exist any bi-curious spell tools an Elden ring the distinction is a meaningful dichotomy expressing the difference between someone's belief and what's objective versus someone's belief in what's subjective and yet both are still just as effective at making magic so you can perhaps imagine the message behind this fictional concept as being that since the outcome for either or is the same it means that in this setting the art science of magic is powered by a sort of trust just inherently and that intelligence and Faith are just two paths that rather than run opposite to each other one parallel to one another both leading to the same destination that is the act of magic itself separate in principle but still identical in essence Arcane though regards that which does lie outside this dichotomy Arcane is used in this game to indicate that something is diegetically weird that is to say things that are in Universe not within the boundaries of what should be considered normal from the perspective of if not some Grand fourth wall decide a general perspective then merely our player character's perspective these are what go under the category of weird that's what the word Arcane actually means by the way it just means weird this relation to weirdness and weird slash esoteric knowledge and stuff is thrown in all the things that interact with our Arcane stat and is very particular it's not used as a throwaway category or anything like that at least in Universe it's not such power is used here are merely diegetically mysterious albinoric equipment that has albinoric staff explains scale with the Albin oryx's innate arcaneness the Pagan magic used by the serpent bow The Works of lost civilizations like aokades telekinesis whatever the hell the cling bone is supposed to be and the oracular bubbles used by the priests of the ancient Dynasty the civilization that flourished before the Earth tree mentioned in the chofran einsel maps Builders of the wool and ERD Palace ruins the two Hollow horn grounds what's now mokes Mausoleum and the rising structure in the lake arat as well as the grand Cloister itself the physical transformations of dragon communion which is able to uniquely change your body as shown most prominently by the Turning of those who OD on Dragon communion into worms the faith coming from believing in the powers of the Dragons themselves and the Ark being whatever weird goes down inside your body after you consume a dragon heart that makes you grow a big head or arm or whatever and then return to normal and finally the channeling of power from a being that's not terrestrial but rather extraterrestrial such as the formless mother that Moog communes with powering all the accursive blood stuff like all the Lord of blood weapons and the blood flame war god uses which crossed over to him due to his direct genetic connection to Moog the blood incantations themselves of course use both Arcane and Faith they use Arcane because the power came from most communion with the formless mother in the first place but also required Faith Because the actual spells themselves come from Moog and his accursed blood specifically is there anything magical I've missed oh oh yes it is not currently clear to us what exactly the Primeval current is just like with mikola and the glomide queen a canonical explanation does not currently exist but before that I believe there are a few confusions in terminology and how the Primeval current is treated by Raya lucaria that I believe could muddy the waters in regards to us figuring out what it actually is in the future so allow me to explain in Greater detail what exactly the term primeval current means as referred to in the game by the likes of selin and so forth I will admit however that this part will be at its core entirely about semantic the Primeval current is just the name for a conspectus the confusion around how the Primeval current is described in game comes from a misunderstanding as to what conspectances themselves actually are because the game uses the word conspicus in a way that appallingly at least for me does not match how the word is used in real life here the word conspicus is just a fancy fancy euphemism this game employs to replace what are literally just ologies Scholars of the ichthy conspectives pursue the mysteries of fish and so forth you know in Skyrim Yara fought those rats no there are rats they're skeevers this is the same thing still is worth going over what the Academy of Roy lucara's Orthodox is or maybe it isn't I don't know but I wrote down all these notes and to hell if I'm going to waste them you saw the title of this video so you agree to this too to start students at rileakaria don't get to study conspicus when they first sign up they got her in it by itself this is well known only those recognized as worthy of donning a stone Crown even get to study a conspectus but conspectuses themselves are not to be interpreted as the names of subjects that are themselves taught at by lucaria nor as some kind of club that Scholars dedicated to a subject to join to illustrate the first point the olivinous constructus meteors of course is not a subject all by itself because whatever classes actually appear on the syllabuses Raya lucaria there aren't going to be any subjects relevant to the study of meteors that would somehow not also be relevant to the study of say comets nobody's in rylicarya going like oh period four that's meteor's class I hope it did well on my meteors test just like if you go to a university to study Ornithology you don't simply attend a class called Ornithology every day until you graduate you attend actual classes that you end up sharing with students majoring in completely different topics to yours and then once you complete all your courses and submit your thesis or whatever you get your Ornithology degree now we are an ornithologist and that's exactly what earning a stone Crown is the stone crowns being graduates degrees their purpose being to Mark the recognition of a sorcerer by the academy as like fulfilling their education bestowed upon Rai Lucario Scholars whose Pursuits were deemed worthy but from here is where Ray Lucario diverges and function compared to school in real life Ryan Lucario's purpose behind teaching sorcery isn't for their students to finally leave the academy and find a job with their new certifications or whatever this further new sorcerer is to help Advance the study and practice of Glenstone sorcery as part of the academy and if you wonder why Rai lucaria would have any interest in teaching sorcery in the first place to people who don't already know the Arts themselves the game itself acknowledges why seclusion is no way to Foster discovery when a sorcerer at Ryan lucaria is deemed worthy of donning the stone Crown they finally become permitted to study a specific inspectus the conspectuses themselves being of course ologies in other words directions of research that are officially recognized by the academy itself the stone Mass Scholars of these conspectuses will proceed to now dedicate their time to forwarding the knowledge of sorcery along the path codified by their conspicus's Founders that's why the sorcerers who wear the stone crowns are called the studiers or Scholars of that conspectus they're researchers of that ology you'll recall how sorceries that originate from the same conspectives are all themed around the same thing that's precisely what they are a single theme to be pursued in the advancement of Glenstone sorcery the keralos conspectus pursue the mysteries of comets and their spells are all about the recreation of comets the olivinous conspectives is about the study of meteors and their spells all share the theme of shooting stars the lazuli conspectus is just about well learning sorceries from carrier it seems we don't get to see any spells attributed specifically to them so let's just pretend that any spells they did invent were just attributed to the carrions themselves the twin Sage conspectives is specifically for those that are granted research of multiple kinds of sorceries just like how a botanist would likely be denied a grant for research of something like theoretical physics a scholar of the careless conspectives would likely be denied support for the research something unrelated to comets those who are officially recognized as studiers of the twin Sage conspectives as shown off by the Glenstone crowds they be granted are free from this limitation like how you would perhaps describe someone who's earned more than one PhD Scholars of the twin Sage conspectives were the Academy's Elites none anything like money but in intelligence capable of mastering multiple Advanced sorceries from different disciplines it might also be important to put into perspective that these are ordinary humans who aren't able to level up like we tarnish can magically increasing our intelligence instead of studying the old-fashioned way like these guys did so perhaps being able to cast more than two spells is a meaningful achievement for them I'm sure they do their best finally the Hyma conspectives is about using the strength of Glenstone sorcery to act as peacekeepers during times of conflict and to this end they studied the sorceries of cannon fire and the gavel as we can see each conspicus is about a certain direction for Glenstone sorceries to progress and this is how whatever magical theory was behind the creation of thoughts's barrier was described as a discovery worthy of founding a new conspectus over the spell is figuratively his dissertation as we're able to confirm this force field producing sorcery is literally the first of its kind justifying why the theory behind this barrier was groundbreaking enough as to have deserved the creation of new Bloodstone conspicus or whatever it ends up being called perhaps one that will come to be described as dedicated to the pursuit of defensive glue Stone sorceries and this spell works too only 18 intelligence required and they can slap away the golden laser beams of the eldenbeast so while I don't know what tops exactly managed to figure out I would say that it passes field testing as a final note the hero disc with Glenstone Crown is specifically not related to any of the Academy's conspectuses it's still given to Sorcerers that prove themselves worthy of a stone crown of course they earn them after all but the graduates themselves who are awarded these crowns are merely those who choose to conduct their research abroad rather than affiliated with the academy itself and this is symbolized by the lack of a Glenstone cap on their helmets this is also why the Hyma Crown wears a hood over where its Glenstone cap would be it represents temporarily leaving the academy with all that understood how the Primeval current is referenced in game actually begins to make sense it's a name for an ology that's banned by the academy as is described by the game itself and as treated by selin it's a forbidden tradition of Glenstone sorcery note that it says it exists within Glenstone sorcery rather than as something separate to it of course this is Justified as the literal first primeval sorcery is what would go on to found the practice Glenstone sorcery and subsequently the Academy of Ray lucaria as a whole the current itself is also spoken of in the same kind of figurative physicality as a conspicus as well the gavel and Canon of Hyma drawn from the Hyma conspectus as if it was some kind of physical object and the Primeval Sorcerers who glimpsed into or made contact with the Primeval current the way a sorcerer would glimpse into the Primeval current is the same way a theoretical physicist would glimpse into like the atom through scientific inquiry the main mystery itself of course does remain as to what subject exactly that those who follow the Primeval current seek to understand the Primeval current is just the study of something well primeval is mysterious you'll recall that the Revelation described by each primeval sorcerer despite all being from glimpsing into the Primeval current have zero actual relation to one another common Azura is about the empty abyss of space stars of Ruin is about a star cluster very much not an empty abyss and founding reign of stars is about Glenstone comets falling onto the lands between itself all completely unrelated phenomena yet still all fall under the teachings of the Primeval currents Pursuit beyond that I don't think there's anything I can tell you while still remaining within the bounds of Canon perhaps we'll learn more from the DLC perhaps it will remain as it is mirror missed one thing at least we can say for certain since the Primeval current spells solely require into cast we can be assured that whatever it is that the Primeval current studies it is something that is objectively real foreign oh sorry I was just trying to figure out how to begin the next segment of this video you see now that I've gone over how forms of magic and stuff are all classified and what the mental requirements behind Source reason incantations represent I'm trying to figure out how to begin talking about how magical energy as a whole is treated within Elden ring setting and I am not having an easy time of it you see magical energy or well the power of life itself has two very important ties into two additional extremely broad elements of the game so I think it might be worth beginning somewhere around the end and then showing you retroactively it's examples in the game itself otherwise I'll be dealing with like three Ronnie in the egg situations at once and nobody wants that I'm sure so souls are made out of the power of Life Now that statement might not be 100 accurate but is accurate enough to account for the story as it currently exists I'll explain what I mean by that a little later on so just bear with me now souls and subsequently magical energy exist outside the physical world in other words Souls can be described as metaphysical this is our fundamental starting point Souls exist outside of the material world because of this is how people like Darian and Devin exist a physical exchange isn't involved when the two like share their soul it just happens Darian dies in the round table hold but the soul of d or whatever has no issues making its way to Devon in the show for aqueduct that's just one example that exhibits the immaterial nature of souls this is also why it's mental characteristics exclusively that determine our ability to actually cast magic we have to use our minds because only our non-physical imaginations are able to interact with our own equally non-physical Life Energy now do you remember what I said at the very start of this video the Magic is a process of bringing the unreal into reality this is exactly what's able to happen to souls as a whole as well Rodrigo tells us that under the control of the golden order Immortal Essence is made into Spirits in other words they're turned into ghosts just like how magic brings a fireball from a metaphysical Realm of the imagination into the Physical Realm of reality magic can bring the equally metaphysical Soul into reality as well that's why the term spirit is used since the souls of the Dead have been literally brought back into the world of the living hence spirits also since Spirits themselves Are self-evidently the souls of dead people we should treat the term soul and Immortal Essence as interchangeable and you know roderica is describing something that's continuing to exist Beyond a living thing's death so Immortal Essence is a pretty appropriate name too the reason this is enacted by the golden order is because as we know well enough you can't interact with something that doesn't physically exist and since souls are where magical energy is if you want to in any way harness the life force of a creature other than yourself you need to materialize their soul to get to it because otherwise an individual's essence of life is exactly as incorporeal as our own minds and while a creature can tap into their own magical energy with their own mind without much complication one person's thoughts can't directly interact with anyone else's thoughts so all in all consider these are extended bass lines addendum to the basics of magic I introduced at the beginning of this video One a living organism is composed of two elements a body that exists physically in a soul that exists metaphysically two magic is able to be used to bring that Soul into the physical world turning it into a spirit and three when a living organism dies the material body deteriorates but the still ethereal spirit continues to exist and from there it can be manipulated externally now as to why death specifically is required for magic to be able to pull a soul into reality in regards to an in-universe explanation we don't know there's no conclusive reasoning behind this apparent fact in the game itself and dancing too much with conjecture can lead you down a million miles to Nowhere what's Apparent at least is that the actual pattern of death specifically being required to perform any kind of magic mumbo jumbo with that creature's life force appears identically in several independent instances across the game so although we don't know physically why it's clear enough that it is a necessary part of the process at the very least the Thematic reason behind it is pretty obvious huh so now that I have gotten that Baseline out of the way as clumsy as it may have been I think we're ready to continue oh and by the way the term soulless is used in some places in the game that term just means dead there's nothing special behind the word it's just poetic to start off here is also what I meant earlier when I said that the statement souls are made out of magical energy might not exactly be accurate what do we see happen when an enemy dies indeed runes come out or ruin fragments if you want to be precise the individual letters of code that language of light taught by the two fingers that the Elden ring itself is also made out of runes are made from the power of life so it's clear that because of people's Souls existing as Spirits under the golden order upon those people's deaths their Spirit just gets turned straight into runes right well it's not exactly that clear see we also find in-game examples of people dying their life force getting converted into runes and in addition their Spirit dwelling upon their Corpses evidently not all of a creature's Spirit necessarily gets converted into ruins upon their death so what exactly is going on there are two equivalent explanations that what the game is current state at least we can treat as interchangeable the first explanation is that Immortal Essence and magical energy while both exist immaterially as an individual soul are not actually one thing and that it is in fact inaccurate to treat Immortal Essence and soul as the same and when a living thing dies only the magical energy itself is what gets turned into runes and the immortal Essence is where the actual ghost comes from the second explanation which I like more personally is that an individual soul is made up solely of magical energy and that normally the golden order does convert a living creature's entire soul into runes the reason ghosts are able to form is instead as a byproduct of the shattering due to the state of the partially broken Elden ring and its partially broken golden order while clearly still active to an extent we know it's not functioning as fully intended and because of this only a portion of a spirit's magical energy is able to be converted into runes with the rest of that individual soul stagnant potentially manifesting as a spirit instead to reconfirm however both of these explanations are functionally identical additional information released after the posting of this video notwithstanding it's your preference depending on which explanation you think is nicer with that out of the way let's finish our topic on the creation of runes Souls now called spirits of course since they're in the physical world exist physically rooted to their original bodies we end up holding an entire School Bus of ghosts by the end of the game that we're able to summon anywhere we want and that's solely through our carrying their physical remains as Rena explains to us when she gives us a spirit calling Bell and the Lone Wolf ashes what's special about these remains are that they're unreturned to the Earth tree from this and the whining of a certain Spirit under Storm from catacombs were able to see what the intended course of action was for the likes of corpses and their souls during the age of the golden order upon a living creature's death their corpse would decompose as corpses are want to do The Souls of these dead creatures made physically into Spirits by the golden order remain rooted to their corpses as this happens then through the use of the earth trees continent spanning root Network these physical remains are absorbed and brought to the Elden ring to be turned into runes whether you subscribe to explanation 1 or explanation 2 the clear reason why runes appear in front of us and then get absorbed by our character is due to the retreat's root network not being able to do so itself just barely hanging on the Elden ring is able to maintain its conversion of Soul into spirit and thus the continued production of runes so with nowhere else to go the runes go into US instead now the reasons behind absorbing runes and subsequently big runes and why only the tarnish and the demigods were considered capable of repairing the Elder in the first place tie into our memory of Grace but I'll talk about that part when we get to it what's important here is to see how runes are used and how it allows for the formation of ghosts now after a living thing's death their Spirits are by default rude to their original bodies and are only capable of manifesting near those remains clear exceptions to this pattern like the Headless soldiers all have some kind of magical thing going on that were explained allows them specifically to break that pattern most Spirits exist formlessly without any defined shape such as the ones on the Chrysalis Memento and all the summonable ashes we find when we're not making use of them the spirits of the Dead are physically bare they just aren't doing much it is possible however for our spirits to manifest largely as well taking shapes that are fully corporeal and solid reflecting now how the spirit was like from back when they were still alive and it'll be the likes of these specifically that I'll be referring to as ghosts in particular the term Phantom would perhaps be better but and just to confirm the use of the word ghost here is something I'm just making up for explanatory purposes there's no substantive difference between banished Oleg as he appears in his box and banish Knight Oleg as he appears on the field it's just that when Oleg is small and in general I'll be calling him a spirit and only when Oleg is Big specifically I'll be calling him a ghost now as stated previously it's due to the golden order's materialization of souls in order to extract the power of life from them as Spirits are able to exist at all this process itself the materialization of souls is not exclusive or originating from the golden order itself as a remembrance of the Regal ancestral Spirit informs us their phenomenon of spirits and of Life sprouting from Death exists outside of the archery's influence a civilization that uses no advanced technology not even writing and yet these Fallen Kings create ghosts and extract the energy within them like it's no big deal it's also why Ronnie specifically mentions life and souls existing as one when referring to things she'd still consider keeping under her new order she's describing the bring of souls into the material world so that both the body and the Soul exist in the same place the using of magic to materialize the soul is a process that keeps convergently being made because it solves such a common problem for most ideologies as goals by the way did you notice that the ancestor Spirits are in fact horses don't let their horns which are not antlers just horns that are antler-like in shape fool you into first glances if we compare the skulls of an ancestor Spirit to horses and a deers we see that the spirit shares with the horse skull a long straight jaw and deeply recessed upper teeth as opposed to a deer skull which has an up curve jaw and prominent upper teeth ancestor Spirits also have uncloven hooves like horses do as opposed to Deer who due to their difference in habitat have cloven Hooves instead now you may be wondering is ancestral Spirits actually being horses actually important to anything at all no I mean I guess you could say that it further leads us to the realization that torrent is an ancestral Spirit himself but uh you know it's a little Superfluous compared to the other much more obvious things showing that Tori does an ancestral spirit foreign unique aspect of the way ghosts appear in Elder ring as an extension of the magical process we know allows them to exist is that they're legitimately physical in nature they can be touched of course and from there fought killed and even smelled most notably however is that we can take their stuff the physical possessions of a fully formed ghosts are all shown to physically exist the equipment they wear can be dropped and objects that are personally held by a ghost like Latina's birthing droplet for philia and the somber Dragon smithing Stone she rewards us with and the stuff we get from finding the painter ghosts can evidently just be given to an ordinary living person without any complications in other words fully formed ghosts just exist fully physically the same way as normal people do yet some ghosts don't manifest like this some ghosts are visible and able to be heard talking but aren't fully corporeal some ghosts are able to move around and even give Chase while other ghosts appear to just stay in one spot many ghosts we meet are those whose Spirits have been embigened through external means Spirit calling wraith calling the bells of the walking mausoleums and torrent obviously some ghosts however appear to manifest without any such Aid maintaining their corporeal form independently some ghosts act fully consciously retaining all their memories and even their Free Will atena as a prominent example is able to speak to us freely with no issues and is clearly in full control of her actions over the course of her story and yet some ghosts who we summoned from their ashes will fight by our side and assist us when they really like should not be willing and yet some ghosts actually don't fight on our side despite us having their ashes because they're unwilling some ghosts don't even appear to have realized they're dead or even be able to notice their surroundings so where is all this variation supposed to be coming from or in other words what effectively is a living thing's soul we know well enough that Spirits Are the souls of the deceased but since Souls themselves aren't exactly well real it's hard to be sure what a statement like ghosts come from The Souls of the Dead actually means without defining how the concept of souls exist in eldering setting first so from figuring out what souls are we'll also be able to find the factors that distinguish spirits that hang around versus spirits that don't as well as what the difference is supposed to be between a formless spirit and an ambiguant one along with all the clear variation we see in ghosts as well so let's get into some ghosts for start we see from the mausoleum Circle and the Headless soldiers as a whole that ghosts can reflect the image of their bodies at their very moment of death not merely excluding their head but including the blood stain on their clothes that came from their head being chopped off along with other Ghost characters like Latina battle mage Hughes and performer Trisha evidently keeping all their possessions that they had upon their demise it's clear that up to our Spirits specifically are concerned a soul exists like a snapshot of that creature including their physical equipment the reason such import should be given to this preserved memory-like property we see in all these ghosts is that the deciding factor regarding whether or not someone's spirit will yet cling onto their remains after they've died proves to be in fact memory itself or effectively a creature's mind where the capacity for memory comes from observe every collectible Spirit Ash in the game what do we see first of all the vast majority of spirits we find are from people humans and intelligent non-humans second of all for Spirit ashes that don't summon people we see they're either individual creatures of relatively High Intelligence or the combined ashes of multiple otherwise less intelligent creatures now you might recall Miranda Sprouse here in gawk am I claiming a plant to be intelligent intelligent as say wolves dogs rats and Storm Hawks indeed I am for recall what we see in The perfumer's Grotto Miranda flowers and clear cooperation with the human perfumers just the same as the likes of wolves or dogs along with the fact that Miranda flowers are capable of casting their very own spells which we already know requires a Consciousness they're having an appropriate mental capacity for the formation of spirit ashes is assured and third of all observe the descriptions themselves of all these Spirit ashes what characteristics does everyone share well obviously they all describe the person or people or creatures that the Ashen remains belong to and that right there is our confirmation how can I say so once more it traces at how Eldon ring is actually written it's self-evident that in every item description the narrator is describing events related to or the creation of or the physical features or just rumors that are always directly related to the item themselves why is this significant because Elder ring exclusively uses its narrator to refer to information or knowledge that does itself literally exist in Universe pertaining to that item think about it the giant crusher's description is information that an in-universe person familiar with the weapon would know the Duelist Helm's description is giving us information that an in-universe person familiar with that helmet knows the dragon great Clause description is giving us information that the draconic Sentinels themselves know same with giza's wheel and the Golem grapo and the Newman runes all information that an in-universe person familiar with giza's wheel and its historical significance the golems and their origin and the Newman and their shared connection to America knows this pattern is maintained up to the most extreme cases too where the person in the know is either one single person or people from the future the wing of Estelle the great runes Mogan sacred spear the sacred Relic sword every single item is deliberately written to match the style of taking existing information from an in-universe perspective no matter how specific that perspective in question is that a metafictional narrator then repeats to the player it's a stylistic decision the game always follows for outside of literal gameplay information the narrator never zooms out even so far as restricting what story info is given to the player by using it sticking to this pattern as the excuse and for an example of an alternative stylistic Choice by the by you can compare this game to the likes of the detailed parable-like item descriptions and blasphemous in any case the reason pointing this pattern out is relevant to the likes of our summons is that the perspectives the narrator draws from in the descriptions for these Spirit ashes includes the actual Spirits themselves a direct quote from the soul jars of Fortune the original name and personal wands of the spirit jellyfish the apparent fondness shared by the fanged imps the final moments of this individual Warhawk and so on the information relating to the spirit ashes is from the spirits themselves or in other words from the spirit's own memories that this fictional concept of a spirit cling to their body after death is determined by the inherently subjective Factor what's essentially the life forms most prominent memories of themselves all at once instantly justifies every single point of variance we see in the Myriad ghost that populate Elden Ring's world it's why when something dies sometimes their Spirit clings to their ashes but most of the time they don't the final memories in question have to Simply Be powerful or emotional enough to preserve the snapshot of who that person was that with the art of spirit calling one can then tease out and amplify that's why some ghosts fight and other ghosts don't fight the spirits who fight are those whose memories are just of themselves fighting like they did in life some ghosts stay still in one spot repeating a single line over and over as their bodies expired those were their very last thoughts it's why Latina the albinooric one of few who deliberately aimed to become a spirit evidently has all her memories she knew she was going to die and be resurrected and because of that she had the opportunity to Simply prepare her mind ahead of time it's also why the mausoleum soldiers appear without their heads while other ghosts appear as if unharmed like litena the Headless ghosts were aware beforehand since our brains do in fact retain Consciousness for a few moments after being beheaded and the people themselves knew exactly what was going on just like Latina did the ghosts of the mausoleums perceived and remembered their headless appearances thus preserving those headless bodies as the shapes of their ghosts and it's why the likes of perfumer Trisha and battle mage huge don't end up choosing to refuse their summons like the storm Hawk King does their final memories or whatever simply don't include us killing them for perfume or Trisha her memories are of her history as a Healer of the poor for battlemage huge his memories are of his love of warfare and indeed as Rena herself offhandedly acknowledges when she gives us a spirit calling Bell it's gonna be thine command but briefly recall battles past it's honestly really elegantly designed I just realized although it's not related to ghosts sullen's Primal Glenstone is also an example of souls being composed of that individual's memories selin gives us her soul like the whole thing without any Rune business getting in the way and we put it into a new body and afterwards she's just 100 back this is actually a really explicit reveal of the two components that make up a living thing I should have used this at the start of this segment hmm would you believe it if I told you I figured out the physical body and metaphysical Soul Thing solely through observation and only remember these two items literal months afterwards now that we know what makes a soul cling to their original body what's going on between a spirit that's formless and wimpy and a spirit that's corporeal and buff it's essentially the amount of life force that they have the situation can be equated to a deflated balloon where the rubber of the balloon is the spiritual snapshot that clings to their remains and the air inside the balloon is the power of life even in a deflated balloon there's a tiny bit of air still in there this is equivalent to the Wimpy states of our spear dashes as well as the likes of the spirits we see dancing about in the Chrysalis Memento now let's partially inflate the balloon it's not all the way full but its shape is very much more balloon-like than it was before this is equivalent to the likes of stationary NPC ghosts the painter ghosts and these walking guys that we find sometimes now our balloon is fully inflated good is new almost like nothing had ever happened in the first place and this is precisely equivalent to the likes of fully corporeal ghosts like the Headless Knights the ghostly soldiers and Castle soul and every kind of ghost we see that got summoned artificially in a very apt sense the act of summoning Spirits is like pumping a deflated that it is to say formless spirit with enough magical energy as to make the them effectively just fully alive again at least until they get killed by the next thing and as a final note before we go into all the other stuff pertaining to Souls Bell bearings and remembrances and the like we must now address the unique properties of Puppets we go through the creation process of puppets with syllabus and it's relatively easy to explain by using star-like chards one is able to brew a special potion that when drunk by an individual through magical mumbo-jumbo takes complete control over that individual's future in other words it takes away the drinker's Free Will and for selvis's potion specifically makes the Drinker travel to and enter his basement after this is done and through additional magical mumbo jumbo an actual puppet item is thusly created so what are these exactly as unintuitive as it first appears puppets are literally identical to Spirit ashes they're little boxes with ghosts in them in fact they're so identical to Spirit ashes that not only are they summoned with a spirit calling Bell they're upgraded in exactly the same way as Spirit ashes are as well so what the hell is supposed to be the point of such a fancy fancy procedure if the end result is the same thing you'd get just by killing someone right well that exactly is the point of this fancy fancy procedure observe the descriptions of a spirit Ash and a puppet Spirit ashes are the original remains of the spirit in question puppets are not okay the difference is that the ghost of spirit ashes comes from the ghost corpse right puppets however don't they're ghosts that are contained artificially in a little box instead of in their corpse so it means they're still alive the difference between a spirit Ash and a puppet is a spirit ashes are used to summon ghosts from the dead and puppets by using some of ghosts from the living the reason puppets are different despite looking and functioning exactly the same as Spirit ashes is because they allow us the functions of spirit ashes without actually involving the debts of anything because as we'll see these original bodies of the puppets are still alive cell and storyline confirms it for us though after obtaining sound's Primal Glenstone we have to find a compatible new body to transplant it the only compatible host of this type that exists however was one of celibus's puppet bodies after transplanting her soul Ellen's dialogue tells us why you've helped me fill a new body once again and it's truly a gem young and full of vigor a snug fit for my Primal Glenstone evidently vacant a soul yet explicitly alive you might even call selvis's puppet bodies precisely half alive allowing the also half-alive soul of Selen to be transplanted and resulting in giving us a person that is indeed Fully Alive recall also how the bodies of people who've become puppets don't decompose where if we otherwise kill that person ourselves their remains obviously do and that's Elvis's basement and pitius balcony are both under the effects of a pact of non-aggression pitia could at least justify such an effect being present by a motive of self-preservation but what's the purpose of a non-aggression pack being over selvis's basement where selvis himself isn't it's to ensure the safety of his puppet's bodies and while puppets also exist without a free will it's clear by the fact that the Knox Knight maiden and swordstress spirits of one of the knox's highest clerical ranks and their bodyguard chose to became puppets that the motivation behind the nox's original invention isn't the same motivation as behind celibus's continued production of them that puppets are made from bodies of the living rather than the bodies of the Dead is what justifies their invention by The Knocks The Invention of Puppets allows the creation of ghosts without the involvement of anybody dying to release their souls circumventing a limitation that every other form of magical Soul in the game is boldened to what the nox succeeded in inventing was a one-of-a-kind method of separating Souls from bodies that is completely closed off from outside interference because nobody actually dies in the process no matter what order or magical effects someone finds themselves in their spirits will remain fully intact not turned into runes not recycled by the Scarlet rot not eaten by The ancestral Spirit or anything no it does not I have no idea because in all other aspects they literally are the exact same as every other ghost in the game this is the only thing where puppets are different so like I hope this comes up somewhere if not in the game as it is now then it's DLC because otherwise I just wasted all our time didn't I so you better you better hope all this actually matters because if it don't now that we've gone over everything having to do with the byproducts of Ruin production let's really go over runes themselves to describe runes in the most functional of terms we already know how they're made so runes or more specifically Rune fragments are the singular letters of a magical language referred to in its entirety as code with the language itself belonging to or being an invention of the greater will as we see the Elden ring sent by the greater will is made of code and the two fingers also sent by the greater will are the ones who taught the language of code to humans now as you'll recall for any kind of magic to be performed it requires a vision for the magic to bring into reality this principle results in the fact that magic is only able to be performed by individual creatures whose conscious minds are capable of producing a solid enough mental image this premise is reflected across literally every instance of magic being performed in the game except for with code as we observe throughout the game code is able to perform any variety of magical acts without any sort of mental requirement by the actual individuals involved beyond having the language itself code is used to strengthen the body to manipulate Natural Forces like gravity to create matter from nothing and so on again through the story's deliberate shallowness we are told only the two characteristics about code that are relevant to the game story in this case it's how code is able to accomplish magic so uniquely the first thing is that it's holographic code is able to exist independently of any extraneous physical Medium as opposed to written language which requires something physical for the text to be written on or spoken language which requires something physical for the sound to travel through code appears to just hang in the air it's able to just Exist by itself the second thing is that code is imbued with the power of life the second thing explains itself being imbued with the power of life itself is how the acts of magic accomplished with runes are provided the required magical energy fulfilling the second principle of magic in this world's magic system so what is existing formlessly supposed to accomplish by ways of elimination it would seem code's ability to exist non-physically somehow fulfills the first requirement of Magic the need for something that exists outside of reality for magic itself to actually bring into reality and as code itself is explicitly non-physical just like how magic is able to interact with Souls turning them into Spirits magic is able to interact with code turning it into its various forms of magic due to how code is made to exist formlessly in the same way someone's imagination is made to exist formlessly the language of code is able to fulfill the first principle of magic all that's happening is instead of being made from aforeless image in a creature's mind code is used to make magic from a formless image the words themselves describe where the gravity well sorcery involves a spellcaster in question imagining these rocks flying into the air and requires the intelligence needed to understand how exactly the forces of gravity need to be manipulated in such a task these words we see with a show for hyperloop just describe the same kind of thing you may be wondering however where the hell is the sense in that how nice the completely made up rules of a completely made up system are made up to turn out to indeed be followed by something that is also completely made up it's literally coherent but hey if Elder Ring's magic system was designed by its authors to also include like the unique independent effect of generating a cup of coffee when you do a somersault and someone does a somersault and generates a cup of coffee that'd be just as literally coherent here's the burning question though one that's burning a lot brighter than questions for otherwise narratively purposes trivia like who were these guys names were why the lands between so crazy small how Kenneth hike counts as royalty despite not actually being a demigod and other narrative holes that while not having in-universe reasons easily justify themselves with their real life reason reasons like in a story where certain characters names indicate relevant information to the plot not convoluting that list of names with irrelevant characters and making the game actually fun to play and because the plot of Kenneth hide side quest is because whatever Royal connections he does have he comes to consider them too weak to actually justify his taking Throne of lim Graves and as such his goal becomes to find someone who would be a more direct heir to the throne now that the last of the golden lineage is dead the Quest itself ending with of course nepheli Liu descending from the stormlord that Godfrey initially killed in his invasion of lim grave and thus the legitimate princess of stormvale as well as the one to whom the storm Hawk King originally belonged to hence nephili recognizing the smell of his remains as of her first talks and that smell bring back her memory of who she actually is something she had evidently forgot upon her being adopted by Gideon after losing her guidance of Grace all of which facilitated by it would seem the apparent canonical fact that nepheli is actually legitimately explicitly gullible anyhow it all concludes with her lineage being recognized by Kenneth height of being worthy of ascending as a queen of lim grave even despite her being a tarnished so that should tell you how confident he really is and by the way if you're confused by hanafeli is given the title of Lady despite obviously becoming the ruler of lim grave as a whole it's because in Japanese the term for Lord Monarch and king or whatever is all the same single word and this word is also gender-neutral so have no doubt by the end of her and Kenneth's side quest nepheli is Queen of stormvale what the hell was I doing oh I got so sidetracked explaining the side quest of my best friend nepheli Lou I forgot I was pretending to be angry about how little sense code appears to make what the hell is supposed to be the logic behind a spell written down on something still requiring the spellcaster to use their own imaginations and casting it but code which is despite being all fancy fancy formless whatever literally just also spells written down doesn't require that well here's actually why and to be honest you might have already just figured it out while I was yelling but consider how ordinary language actually like Works what's literally happening is someone is thinking something right then wanting to communicate those thoughts to other people they emit certain sounds or perform certain movements or make certain markings that by themselves have no actual connection to the speaker's actual thoughts but are in essence simply agreed upon by the other person to represent the specific Concepts that the speaker's thoughts align with and that upon receiving our speaker's audience is able to recognize and judging by the agreed upon meanings of the language used generate an equivalent thought in their own mind of course it's unnatural to explain the concept of language in this exact of a fashion communication is something we all intuitively understand but this is what the use of language literally speaking is you will notice then that with how language actually works there is a fundamental limitation there isn't actually any direct transfer of thoughts between the speaker and Their audience both parties involved agree that one thing corresponds to a specific meaning but that's just agreement the actual meanings themselves that each party has agreed to assign to that specific thing are literally completely different and there is no way to tell if both parties thoughts actually match or if the speaker has actually communicated the exact meaning to Their audience that they intended you can describe a billion different details or Draw the most fidelica drawings or do the most elaborate anything and still you have no way of actually telling If the message you have in your head has actually gotten across and brother our imaginations have a lot of potential variations I know I've noticed it I mean I noticed his so hard I wrote a poem about it while I was in high school and just look at what I'm trying to do now in Sunken Valley High School even so on their legit own languages are meaningless they're merely objects without an audience to apply their own internal meanings to that external medium a language is just well it's just nothing you know no different from the rest of our universe than the materials it's made from the only reason that a concept like meaning exists because evidently it does exist you can't imagine a color you can't see is because we with our conscious brains created it we created the concept of meaning so hard that we even created the concept of no meaning the number zero you'll recall had to be invented and that thematically is what magic and Elden ring is actually all about order think about what that actually is it's our brains looking at something and deciding not just that there's this completely invisible Biz going on but also inventing the concept of value and deciding that this completely invisible Biz is not just meaningly different from this but that making this is good at the otherwise completely coincidental process of it returning to this completely invisible Biz is bad Dare I ask what even is the actual process of creating order of doing things purposefully of deciding that your will was what's greater great enough more so as to force the world around you to match other than literally bringing your imagination into reality right who did that oh oh yeah I did that X Ackley oh ah the forces of entropy are taking what I had away from me and so the reason code is designed to be special in the way that it is is because of how it as a language relates to that fundamental subjective barrier that all real languages share with any kind of prayer book or a spell scroll or whatever you can read the book yourself you can have someone describe to you what that book says but unless you actually use your thoughts unless you paint within your imagination and bring out the actual image described unless you actually successfully transfer from the physical into the metaphysical the actual meaning of the spell you're taking reference from unless you personally subjectively understand what's actually going on the spell you're referencing has tried so hard to bridge that gap for you unless you are individually capable of reaching over that Chasm the span between speaker and audience unless you are able to create the meaning required with your brain for your essence of life to then take hold of and manifest straight into the real world then all you're looking at are marks on a piece of parchment your mind is the only thing that can make it matter unless you're dealing with code the golden order fundamentalists use the power of causality and regression to describe the golden order but they didn't just pull those Concepts out of their ass they chose those Concepts because they also can be considered to apply the golden order produces code and code is a language that magically exists as something that actually contains within its words intrinsic objective meanings the letters literally have a life of their own and as such as a form of meaning that is nonetheless objective in its existence without any kind of extraneous medium code can be used by anyone with the know-how to make you anything you want indeed all you've got to do is find the words to describe it with shall I turn your runes to strength let my hand rest upon you for but a moment share them with me your thoughts your ambitions principles you would follow how's that for Universe explained huh by the way you know how rooms are described as yet still being imbued with the power of life do we ever get to see an example of a rune that isn't imbued with such power as a matter of fact we do the inactive great rooms that we receive upon first defeating The Shard bearers devoid of benediction the runes are held by us yet literally powerless but by scaling the appropriate Divine Tower and approaching the two fingers resting above we're able to have our great runes recharged imbued with magical energy again the powers within the great runes get restored and are now able to actually be used by US now our last Topic at hand regarding the usages of runes is perchance their most prominent one the replication of Boss items from remembrances and the buying of dead people's inventories through Bell bearings is shown clearly enough by how we interact with the twin Maiden husks and the bell bearings literally using these strange items that somehow form from the spirits of dead NPCs and in essence summoning the ghost of their inventories through the twin Maiden husks where a spirit calling Bell is to summon an ally from the dead and the humongous bells of the walking Mausoleum summon an army from the dead the Jingle Bells with these finger readers are enough to summon the possessions of the Dead as we well know the shape of someone's Soul includes their physical stuff from there with the magical energy code is imbued with by making use of enough runes we can reshape the items of those who perished sorceries from Sorcerers incantations from clerics smoothing stones from smithing Stone Miners and so on this exact process is also what's going on when Enya creates replicas of certain boss equipment from their remembrances for us the same way we replicate say the acts of godric from his remembrance we also replicate infinite me from the meat Peddler's Bell bearing and just like how the legendary figures of the remembrances only had one of each item when they died so you can only make one replica from that remembrance which to confirm by the by are indeed duplications as one of the fingers is eternal voices Enya has the necessary expertise with code as to where the twin Maiden husks summon lost items for Bell bearings summons similarly lost items from the remembrances formed from the spirits of exceptionally powerful figures or is it rather hewn into the archery or hewn by like made by the Earth tree personally I'm sure there's some kind of error between these two statements but functionally their meaning is the same due to the nature of how runes are produced from the individual Souls of the Dead it can thus be used to essentially gauge how much magical energy a creature had once contained on account of how literal the term power of life actually is it's no surprise that creatures who are more lively contain magnitudes more magical energy than the likes of averager creatures and since we've seen how Souls naturally take the shape of or reflect in one way or another the memories and identities of the original owners we can see how the most exceedingly Lively of individuals dare I say demigods and even the greater of the Champions have Hefty enough Souls as to over the course of the go Spirit to ruin conversion process produce more than just the mere single letters we call roon fragments the sheer density of their power results in the formations of what are perhaps even literally Memoirs physically a dense pack of code describing that powerful individual and the stuff that most Define them in concrete detail coded memorials that only Enya proves to be capable of reading due to her knowing the same things that the two fingers themselves do thus how she is able to recreate for us the signature stuff that belong to the individual described in the remembrance itself and in the case we don't want to do that we can just break them too back into their singular characters and by the way unless some new information comes to light this is also my guess as to what exactly the second phase of the ranola boss fight is is the equivalent of Ronnie's memories of ranala preserved from her now anti-born body's brain or whatever being made manifest by all that magical energy contained within the Amber of the egg and that beating the second phase is just us defeating the egg itself resultian of course getting the eggs great ruin and being why no more of Ronaldo sweding survive because the egg doesn't have the Rune anymore to like help them along they all just instantly perish rather than survive for a little while and then get reborn again like they did before although I will admit the topic isn't something that interests me that much so I haven't really thought about it so I don't know anyhow what happens when we Crush our remembrance reveals most precisely the difference between them and runes Rune fragments are just individual letters remembrances are like full essays where an essay has a specific complex meaning that individual letters obviously lack single letters themselves can with effort be rearranged and potentially used in a much greater variety of ways with runes themselves though we're able to level up barter with Ordinary People Spirit tune up upgrade weapons and so on with remembrances only Enya knows how to make use of them and even then your only options are to use them in a single specific way or break them back into their constituent pieces and for some Creations deriving from romances we need additional runes for those as well the nature of how remembrances form also serves to justify why only the remains of powerful figures those entuned within the walking mausoleums are able to be used to duplicate remembrances when we duplicate our remembrance is us taking that great density of magical energy within the spirit of the Dead Guy and tomb there and using the resulting magical bandwidth as it were to produce a copy of equal measure to a remembrance we previously had and by extension this is why only the belled walking mausoleums distinct in that they hold the remains of dead demigods exclusively are able to duplicate the remembrances of other demigods recall how Rani had to use Godwin's assassination in order to split her own death in half as opposed to just some Rando we see that the lay life of one demigod is only equal in some mumbo jumbo sense to the life of another demigod as such only the soul of a dead demigod has enough magical juice as to recreate the transcribed soul of another's from this process is congruent with how lost ashes of War are used to make duplicates of other ashes of War devoid of any memories but still the remains of like a guy who died swinging that force of life also present in every other Ash of war is still there it's just that unlike every other Ash of War The Immortal Essence belonged to these lost ashes have no kind of surviving Identity or meaning with which that magical energy has anything to do like a chalkboard whose writings are worn off thus we have the opportunity to just write something in in this case using one of our ashes of War whose Soul does have memories as a reference remember magical energy by itself is an objective Universal Force like physics or math take two of the same model of calculator and write the same equation from one onto the other both calculators will give you the exact same answer despite literally being two different objects in function they're legitimately identical indeed how could we expect anything else thus does the copy pass into becoming the genuine article now as to whether we should actually consider all this as evidence of hidetaka miyazakis and Georgia RR Martin's itinerant genius or instead no more than a number of fortunate coincidences stacked on top of each other out from just a few coherent parallels between what are otherwise completely basic game mechanics I'll have to leave that up to you blood exists as the natural physical medium for the power of life this is how Glenstone magical amber made from petrified blood is as Celine explains embedded with the powers of life and thus capable of serving its purpose as an external magical conduit in the first place it's also how different varieties of Glenstone are able to exist in the first place the different colors and magical affinities we see come from the original life forms whose blood the glenstones in question were made from starting with Helen's examples golden Amber what we may call Yellow Glenstone came from the sap of the air tree and is associated with the archery's magic if you can believe it blue glenstones comes from the blood of aliens the life there in the stars and is associated with the Orthodox of Glenstone sorceries as a whole right to Glenstone we learn is made from the blood of humans and is associated with the also human blood involved aberrant sorceries channeling the power of the mysterious Blood star and finally purple glintstone comes from the blood of the falling star beasts or maybe whatever the blood equivalent is for their species because I'm pretty sure these guys are made of rocks regardless we see such stones on their very bodies and of course the crystal themselves resonate with gravity sorceries now for the likes of blue and blue green glenstones sadly we don't get to actually meet the original life forms ourselves unless you counted like Estelle but that'd be like if you met Frankenstein Junior and he said that count as you meeting all the original owners of his body parts too I know what you're thinking though where does the gilmir Glenstone staff fit into all this and I will tell you the truth I don't know red Glenstone are these supposed to be the same red glint stones made from human blood by the staff of the guilty it isn't a translation error either the Japanese versions also just use the word red for both of them so it seemed like it yet Albert's equipment doesn't work with Magma sorceries and the gilmir staff doesn't work with the baron sorceries so there is evidently some kind of meaningful difference between these two magical rocks despite both being the same color so I'm going to be honest all I can give in regards to this stick is conjecture again my goal for this project isn't to explain the best possible story of this game just the canonical one presented by the game itself or in this case as close to canonical as can be achieved as such take my basically imaginary explanation with appropriate doubt now the staff of the guilty tells us that it's turning of the blood of sacrifices pierced by it into Glenstone is similar to hex Magic and as we know Reichard invented the magma sorceries at the Gale mirror staff enhances by adapting the ancient hexes of gilmir into the modern system of sorcery the hexes themselves came from the society that inhabited Mount gilmir Prior to America's Invasion who practiced the same sacrifice involving for God and religion referred to in the serpent God curved sword description the serpent God in question is obviously the snake that reichardt feeds himself to and all that and the immortal Great Serpent that the serpent Hunter was originally crafted to destroy I would suppose considering the similar to hex magic specified in the staff the guilty description that it's producing of glint stones out of human blood just happens to be convergent with whatever off-screen process is used to produce the galmere glitzstones smoldering right volcanoes do that and since the guilty staff is similar to hex magic and the magma sorceries are specifically adapted from hex magic maybe there's a bit of a a common ancestorship thing going on plus we find the smoldering staff at Mount gilmir so there perhaps what physically produces the variety in Glenstone is indeed the color or rather physical components that the blood used to make it was composed of providing why these two glintstones despite looking the same have different affinities at a finer level just like between a cold-blooded animal and a warm-blooded one they're made from different stuff and if you'd allow me to make up what this difference was it'd just be that the gelmere glenstones are made from the blood of snakes where heretical glenstones are instead made from the blood of humans it should be affirmed that this interaction between blood and Life Energy exists as a natural phenomenon with an eldering setting and is present universally in naturally born living things by observing the more unique creatures in Elder ring we can see how the magical characteristics of blood affect the World At Large and how the biologies of some life forms take this principle into account I speak of of course of the man-eating Miranda flowers and the Intrepid land octopi this mention of human blood being a requirement for the land octopi to produce Offspring is an obvious reference to the likes of other blood of War mammals like mosquitoes whose females require the protein and blood to produce their eggs but these octopi ovaries specify that it's human blood in particular that they require so what is supposed to be present in the blood of humans that isn't present in the blood of say any other mammal a sufficient amount of magical energy for one reason or another female land occupy lacked the required Life Force to Bear young all by themselves as such they consume the energy-packed blood of humans in order to compensate does this imply anything about the land octopi as a whole does it connect to their clear Affinity with Nicholas faction including the fact that some land octopi are even able to drop sacramental buds well you tell me because because I legit don't know tell me what you think in the comments or something because just looking at an octopi make me queasy has a lingering warmth reminiscent of human skin why did they say that why does it say that is the game just being a dick trying to be gross or is that actually supposed to imply something ugh anyway Miranda flowers full name man-eating Miranda flowers as a titular Miranda powder they produce is evidently magical in nature being necessary ingredients in magical perfumes is clear these unique plants incorporate the magic present in human blood as well especially unique about these plants however is that they're eating of humans is only one aspect of the species as being extremely adaptable to Magic Miranda flowers exist in a number of varieties based on adapting to the magical Natures of their surroundings ordinary Miranda flowers make use of a magical spell unique to them blue mirandas however found in Larina use a unique form of Glenstone sorcery instead mirandas also show their startling adaptability to Magic in achieving a symbiotic existence with not just a Scarlet rot but the flame of frenzy as well incorporating the rot and frenzy statuses into their pollen blood acting as a natural conduit for Magical energy the channel by which the otherwise Untouchable essence of life is able to directly interface with the material world is also how the game's story literalizes Concepts like Imperial families who've descended from Divine figures or curses that spread amongst family trees the way it does so is by the nature of the power of Life existing outside the bounds of the physical world appearing only as channeled Naturally by the blood of living things Certain Magical enchantments upon one's flesh whether they're considered curses by one Blessings by another appear across individuals not connected physically or even ideologically but biologically these unique enchantments of the blood are bound not to any single idea or physical thing but in essence to a physical pattern in this case the pattern of one's genes vary literally by their lineages a clear example that we're already familiar with is radagon in his red hair despite not having fought in the war against the Giants he was nonetheless marked by a curse from them in reality Merica was the one who is marked by this curse due to radagon's genetic connection to America existing as some kind of magical offshoot from her and being the same reason why the lion demigod still counted as a direct offspring of America herself the red hair curse spread to him just as it would go on to affect his children with ranala Ronnie radon and reichardt the second example as I also mentioned is Mogan morgo's blood flame we know for a fact that blood flame is exclusive to moog's blood in particular none of the other Royal Omen in the Subterranean shunning grounds have access to it and by the growing of omen horns on the blood Nobles and red Alvin oryx we see that it's moog's own recursive blood that they've taken into themselves and yet morgot has access to blood flame too the reason this is so is because they're twins literally they have the same blood that more got to tests and mogadores flows through the veins of both and where moog's blood became enchanted with blood flame more Goths being the same pattern became Enchanted as well what's expressed most importantly here is the lack of any kind of physical or mental connection that these like enchantments of the body require reichardt and radon didn't even exist during the war against the Giants when the curse had actually been cast but due to the functions of blood as a portal between the physical and the metaphysical the matching pattern of their biologies makes a singular effect manifest across otherwise completely disconnected individuals understanding the importance of this interaction between blood and Magic we are thus brought to the final subject of this long long video one that incorporates all the knowledge we've so far covered and perhaps the one topic that singularly acts as the most vital to eldering story as a whole I speak of of course Grace indeed back in the good old days before all of that if you were someone who had Grace that meant you were Immortal and I gave you golden eyes and if you didn't have Grace that meant you were normal and you had ordinary eyes however as the two fingers tell us Grace just seems to no longer work the way it used to as we see well enough the demigods themselves eyes still shining gold have no evident trouble in eating not to mention the several already dead demigods to which the game leaves unnamed while perhaps more important to her vital functions of the Elden Ring's order such as the production of runes remain at least partially intact other seemingly more extraneous functions like the granting of immortality to America's descendants have clearly been lost yet again as the two fingers tell us this is in fact a direct result of the greater will renouncing the demigods with their immortality forsaken a path is laid bare for us tarnished to whom the greater will itself called into action to kill them demigods and take their great runes but after the events of Langdale we learn that the fingers only fed us lies the greater Wills abandonment of the lands between his proven plain as day by Enya when she reveals to us that merely for the two fingers to speak to the greater will centuries if not multiple Millennia would have to be passed and as a result everything the two fingers previously tell us is recontextualized every action they accredit to the greater will in turn proves to have been the actions of the fingers themselves the gw's own envoys and the Bringers of code the language of Light by which the eldering itself is constructed of to the lands between there being rumored as the purported masters of Grace and circles less loyal is proven well-founded it wasn't the greater Will's decision but theirs who only after seeing the shattering Peter into an undeniable stalemate after the battle of Ionia chose only then to finally Resurrect The tarnished and of the demigods losing the powers of their Grace just as the two fingers held control over the grace of the tarnished they held control over the grace of The Shard bearers severed from their immortality no longer confined from Death their great runes are now able to be collected so what exactly even is Grace is a result of a living thing being imbued directly with the power of Life by The Magic of the golden order or in other words Grace is the name used to describe the magical effect produced by the Elden Rings some viewing of blood with magical energy providing the immortality described by the death indiscriminate excluding golden order now to be transparent the word immortality itself isn't used anywhere in the game but to be frank it's patently obvious that that's what Grace does and that that was what made it a big deal in the story so I will take it for granted that you and I are both already aware that Grace's whole deal is not a made you immortal or I guess invulnerable would be a better word to start it's important to confirm that Grace exists as a direct product of the Elden ring if the intentional result of America removing the Rune of deaths for when the golden order was first composed thus showing how the two fingers have such remote control over Grace while returning the Rune of death to the Elder Reigns what turns off the Golden shell the Earth tree why only the legit descendants of America intended those big pieces of the Elden ring after it was broken and why the tarnished because of their memories of Grace were the only available backups for Gathering the great runes after the demigods themselves failed as you might have already guessed by its nature as a result of Enchanted blood just like with the red hair curse and blood flame Grace also spreads genetically as we know us tarnished are the descendants of Godfrey's Army who were made Mortal again Long Ago by The Taking of their Grace by Queen America by this plus the genetic Vector of Grace's spreading We inherited our ancestors Grace or rather their memory of it and our having of this magical memory etched into our minds as it were is what leads to us being resurrected by the two fingers allowing us uniquely amongst Mortals to be capable of collecting the great runes and repairing the Elder ring after the also capable demigods all appeared to refuse just as well the non-demi part of the demigods comes by their descendants from America herself looking upon their eyes we see gold still shines and while in the present day their Grace has been deactivated we know as much from the death of Godwin the first of the demigods to die that they had just as much the benefits of immortality at their Grace gave them as their own mother did oh also another Point by which we see that the grace America has been deactivated is through how we don't get any ruin items from killing the demigods as well indicated by their great runes being bereft of power when we first obtained them despite their Grace being visibly there in their eyes due to the Enchantment of America's own blood being shut off there's no magical energy in that blood as is shared amongst demigods as opposed to the way it still clearly exists in the blood of the archery as such the demigods is vestiges of gold and so forth aren't meaningful for us to pick up we just aren't able to use them now despite Grace having two different vectors of contagion I guess the effect produced is exactly the same across the board the only difference there might be between one person with Grace and another would simply be an amount the concentration of Grace you could say within one's actual body so before we continue let's go over how exactly Grace's feat of immortality was actually done foreign first one very basic fact must be established the term blessings of the earth tree is just another name for Grace it's the Earth tree's blood or well sap since it's a plant because drinking the sap of the earth tree was a singular method by which anyone not a direct member of America's royal family where they inherited their Grace directly through their genetic connection could receive the benefits of Grace in any measure this is why Grace is so often referred to as the blessing of the earth tree and so on as the description of the Sacred tear says for theirs was once a certain blessing this is why all the cultural iconography depicting Grace depicts it in the form of a golden liquid including in the runarch's description where the Elden Ring's lower Arc is considered to be like a basin where its blessings pooled it's because for the common people that was what Grace physically was and it's why of course when the archery stopped producing sap it was such a big deal altogether by looking at how the blessings of the archery are described will be able to figure out what Grace actually did literally speaking that was considered as the giving of immortality the blessings Boon incantation along with I'm pretty sure everything in the game that name drops the blessing of the archery or golden order or whatever all work towards the specific effect of restoring your HP showing us implicitly how Grace actually made the golden orders promise of immortality manifest but wait how can I even say in the first place that the gameplay effect of restoring our character's HP is able to signify anything within the narrative itself recall how in this game your character's attributes are direct representations of their in-universe state the act of leveling up is explained as an in-universe magical technique and increasing attributes like your int makes your character a diegetically more intelligent person NPCs are able to take notice of your character's stats selin will remark differently upon your character depending on how high their instat is and the term Vigor the attribute we level up to increase our character's HP will even be name dropped by certain NPCs with them using those terms accurately as to how they pertain to gameplay what this shows is that along with how literal all the magic related attributes are the other stats of our tarnished actually exist diegetically as well and by this we're able to see how Grace in Universe gave people immortality it restored their HB or rather It produced an effect that came to be considered immortality in popular culture as we know firsthand labels like Eternal are just that arbitrary labels to die is explicitly a fundamental inevitable course for all living things in eldering's universe and you don't need me to prove that America's Empire had the capacity to lie about things as such it'd probably be more accurate to say that Grace provided the illusion of immortality as its effects are ultimately inherently a forestalling of the inevitable to be fair however from the perspective of a legitimately ordinary person what could Grace be other than immortality if that's what you were told it was sickness physical damage and so on using the game's stats as representative of the setting itself as a story allows us to do such things reduce our HP they reduce our vitality Grace steps in and brings that HP back it restores our Vitality for those with enough Grace such as the people referenced in the description of the heroes runes and of course the members of the royal family themselves back when their Grace worked the HP restoring effect of the eldering's power is Extreme enough as to make those blessed by it functionally invincible like basically this is what the story and the heroes or a description is describing like I said earlier invulnerable might be a more accurate word as a whole in describing Grace's effects but hey if you saw this you'd call it immortality too plus I think the word immortality is cooler so there in any case having Grace was why no demigod had ever died before the events of Godwin's murder itself only having been achieved by special means through the use of the Rune of death as well as the reason why Omen babi's born royalty meaning those born with Grace didn't have their horns excised or instead thrown down the drain intent on being imprisoned for eternity their bodies couldn't be damaged and it was understood just like with every other demigod that the Royal Omen were still going to live forever too the effects of Grace simply made it so that being meaningfully hurt just wasn't something that could happen the gameplay effects of the archery's blessing also amusingly enough indirectly allows to see why the roon of death worked as well and its unique ability to evidently just negate an individual's Grace as it did for Godwin where having Grace is a constant replenishing of your HP to Max the Rune of death reduces your max HP literally the Rune of death imposes the logic of can't regenerate HP if your maximum HP is zero oh and the last thing this is what's going on with gold tinge excrement Beast bled and subsequently why the forces of the two fingers appear to have access to so much corpse wax corpse wax is the common name for adipocier in essence normal decomposition requires moisture and oxygen for the microorganisms actually responsible for rot to do their work Parts with low moisture but still with exposure to oxygen decompose relatively slowly if a dead body has no moisture and no oxygen then it hardly decomposes at all but if the dead body has moisture but no oxygen then instead of undergoing decomposition the body undergoes a process called saponification instead of rotting the fat of the body gets converted into soaps the reason this is relevant is because as we are explicitly shown by the descriptions of the gold tinge excrement and the Beast blood items Grace makes it so that things both retain their moisture and avoid decomposition gold tinge excrement and Beast blood containing Grace in the first place explains themselves a carnivorous animal like a rune bear eats a guy who happened to have race in them as that guy's remains are digested some of that Grace enters the roon Bear's bloodstream with the rest of the grace coming out the other end with everything else as a result of Grace's inherent nature of magically keeping up something's Vitality so to speak this is why golden to excrement and Beast blood never dry or undergo actual putrefaction they are unable to be damaged as it were by the likes of the bacteria who'd normally break these remains down into the soil this exact same effect exists over actual corpses as well the dead bodies of those who had Grace don't undergo decomposition because of it since the cadavers remain moist and don't rot the fat in them is converted into adipocere and evidently I guess that is just magically able to be used to make guys and it would seem shoot laser beams release the power of corpse wax what the well in real life the development of adipacia results in basically a cast of the original body's fat content kind of like the mineralization process that makes fossils very accurately preserving it so maybe this power of ancient Heroes being held within corpse wax is like reflective of that like uh some kind of magical preservation like with Glenstone and blood just with fat instead Patchwork of Champions in any cases obviously referring to the same kind of blessed Warrior as mentioned in the description of the hero runes so upon their own deaths the Oedipus here that foreign from their non-decomposing bodies somehow uh preserve their warrior-ness I guess the same as we see from the likes of Ashes of war and with a bit of Ingenuity the forces of the golden order were able to make some brand new Fighters by jamming them together what a strange detail though right maybe it's Why Us tarnish or godric's favorite thing to collect maybe our bodies don't decompose I I don't know foreign by drinking the grace infused blood of the earth tree your body incorporates that magic into itself exactly like what happens with smarag and all those Wizards we're told as much that having Grace is indicated by one's eyes being the color of gold but we're able to see material evidence of this as well confirming it to be true by their descriptions we know explicitly that the Rune items we collect over the course of the game are instances of Grace and as we can see from their icons they are literally the golden colorings those blessed by Grace were all characterized with as it would appear that effect upon the eyes came from the earth tree sap taking root in one's irises for some reason well we don't get to learn why the blessing of the archery appear in this way the Thematic reason again is obvious enough anyhow that's what all the root items actually physically are they're just chunks of the earth trees of mortal sat when the person themselves got killed and their body got digested or decomposed the still a mortal substance itself is all that remained the lingering residue of gold and all that these simple properties the archery's grace also show us why it was used the way it was historically instead of using like code itself and advertising the golden order through what would be otherwise equally miraculous Feats depending on the earth trees sap gave way for the golden order to easily seize control over the common people while code has more applications as a whole it requires a trained professional to actually make use of not only that but upon being learned that individual is able to both use code independently and teach others to use it too that's not secure on the other hand receiving the benefits of the archery sap is simply from weld drinking that physical substance the benefits are as plain as day both for the recipient and for the benefactor without doubt the impartation of Grace makes a display of both supreme power but also benevolence it's simple enough in its appearance as to not be confusing to the plebeian and able to be completely controlled in its dispensation you can say it has to be earned it's like the difference between cash and script one potentially allows for Independence the other guarantees a dependency instead and you won't find something easier to inspire worship with than that and as we see by the so-called acts of the greater will Grace is also something that's just able to be shut down whenever you wish as to how the Enchantment of Grace is actually made in Universe the method behind it is anticlimactically simple you just take some blood and you pump a ton of magical energy straight into it the same power of life that the Eldon ring imbius runes with right imbue it into blood instead and there we go that really is as deep in an explanation as that exists life is evidently life the more of it you get the more of it you have as to the particulars behind how exactly the Elden ring like puts that juice in there there are two explanations to choose from what do we see happen when we use an instance of Grace obviously we physically break that Grace in our hands and runes instantaneously fly out and into our character your explanation behind this can be either one the Eldon Beast does what it's told and it takes the magical energy it has access to that it would normally turn into runes and instead just throws it into some blood in which case our breaking of maroon item is US literally breaking like that hardened golden sap into dust and releasing that raw magical energy which is instantly converted into runes the same way The Souls of the people we kill get converted the instant they die or two the Eldon Beast does what it's told and takes the runes it has lying around and describes a spell in which the magical energy within those runes is used to empower some blood like with how the runes in the show for hyperloop Empower it to float in the air in which case our breaking of a rune item is just breaking the written spell itself physically infused into that hardened set and that spells code is released as individual letters like with remembrances both give us the exact same outcome and while there is a chance that the DLC will introduce some new information regarding this topic I don't think those chances are very high considering how well irrelevant the question of how does the Elder ring put the power of life into the blood in the first place actually is so it's up to you whichever you feel is nicer personally I like the second explanation more I said as much earlier but I want to reiterate how extremely fundamental it is to eldering's plot that magical effects being put on blood results in those effects spreading genetically outside of the politics and morals espoused by the plot itself this fact is directly responsible for basically the entirety of the actual game's events to start it's this mechanic of blood that actually makes the difference between the grace of those descending from America and the grace of those blessed by the Earth tree despite Grace itself not providing any different effects instead of something else's blood that they had consumed and incorporated into themselves of which there is necessarily a finite amount the grace of America is intrinsic to the demigods bodies they are her descendants partial copies of her chromosomes and thus physically sharing her blood in a very literal fashion the demigod's grace comes from their very bones exactly like how blood flame manifested in morgot after moog's communion with a formless mother and the Enchantment of his blood with blood flame and thus why it wasn't something able to just be removed it'd be like trying to take the flower out of a cake where I guess taking the grace of the tarnished was like taking cherries off the top of a cake because their Grace was like added on after the cake had already been finished as an addition it's worth noting that while Godfrey is referred to as a demigod in the English version of godric's great Rune as we see Merica was able to just take his grace away from him making him an ordinary mortal human again despite being considered publicly as part of the golden lineage as godric's great Rune describes we know in reality that he's just one of the progenitors of the golden lineage where America was obviously the God and the non-magical Godfrey was the Demi thus being why their children are of course demigods Godfrey's Grace was simply the same kind of Grace as every other Mortal had from the sap of the ear tree to reiterate The Shard bearers are all defined explicitly as being the direct descendants of Queen America it was that intrinsic magical connection to America the Elder Ring's vessel that went on to allow for their existence when the Elder ring God exploded and the pieces all flew out or whatever just before the start of the shattering the biggest pieces of it landed in other instances of America's blood those biggest pieces being what we call the great roads which were told granted the demigods in question who obtained them masses of increases in power leading to the Civil War but being born a demigod didn't automatically result in that someone bearing A Shard when the eldering was destroyed as opposed to other people of royalty like Kenneth height lawyer whatever genetic connection he has well evidently enough to have given him the grace of America as we see by his golden eyes was not enough to have actually granted him a great rune what determined which demigods became Shard bearers versus which demigods didn't was whether or not the demigod in question had a close enough connection to their matriarch pretty much just by them having enough Grace in them Enya tells us that the reason godric was the weakest of The Shard bears in particular was due to being so relatively distant genetically from his great-grandmother this is corroborated by godric's own great rune's appearance as it's the faintest by far compared to those of his uncles and aunts the same is why the vast majority of the omen in the shunning grounds despite explicitly being royalty like Kenneth height was also never obtained great runes except of course for the two Omen descending directly from America herself it would seem that despite being part of the so-called graceless Omen Moog and morgot had enough Grace in them anyway the importance of genetics mentioned in moog's great Rune is also why reichardt and rodan's great runes appear slightly similar to Melania and Ronnie's great Roots it represents them sharing radagon as their father this mechanic of inheritance is also how imperians actually are what they are as we see by the sharing of a death between Rana and Godwin and the ability to recreate melania's remembrance at any of the build mausoleums imperians are still indeed demigods too additionally while we know well enough that the importance of an imperian is that they're uniquely able to become Gods we also see that the classification of a God is itself an arbitrary one rather than dependent on some kind of fundamental property the reason behind these seemingly conflicting conceits however draws down to the empirion's inheritance as America's Grace is linked to her genetics and Grace itself is just the result of jamming a ton of magical energy or runes into someone's blood empyrians sharing literally 100 of their genetic material with America herself inherit basically 100 of the magical energy that she has their bodies inherit magnitudes to magnitudes more Vitality than basically any other living thing and with that greater amount of magical energy imperians are thus able to accomplish greater goals observe mikola and italic tree not even labeled as a god mikolet described to have water that halogue with its own blood the blood in question evidently proving to be quite nourishing as its size is already comparable to the archery when we reach it what's notable is that this act itself of feeding an organism magical energy through human blood is completely mundane with an eldering setting as we've discussed before otherwise natural creatures like land octopi and Miranda flowers seem to depend on the consumption of magical energy for their growth the difference here is just that mikola's blood has so much more magical energy than Immortal humans that instead of making something like say this or even this it made something like this well this proceeds to reflect is the fundamental equality that's actually present between an empyrean and any other person and ultimately an eldering story as a whole the same Universal mechanics are still at play for everyone involved the same rules all still have to be followed the difference is merely in scale and yet with as humongous differences and scales as these how can you not miss the forest for the trees and conclude that there actually is some kind of objective difference some kind of something that just fundamentally universally will prevent the likes of you from ever matching the likes of them there just has to be right oh and just to cover all the bases while the daughters of Ionia are indeed demigods as we see from their eyes they're all inherited as a Grace they were born after the Smashing of the Elgin ring so it's not possible for us to tell whether or not they would have been illegible for bearing great roots and while Melina almost certainly would be eligible for being a Shard Bearer she's already dead if her body had picked up a great Rune it's long gone now oh well anyway instead of us getting a great room from our ancestor like the demigods did all us chromy tarnish get is our memory of Grace instead or in other words the memories of actually first having Grace that our ancestors experienced that we've finally come to inherit not merely having Grace at all either but having First Grace as we're well told by the strongest of the golden Rune items the grace of gold blessed those who are first to serve it with the most Vivid coloration so these are the memories of big Grace too since we descend from Godfrey's own Army generational baggage indeed but the actual reason as to why our memory of Grace is important is because it solely is all that connects us to the grace of the archery and subsequently the Elden ring itself despite the physical bodily connection being gone as we obviously don't physically have Grace in our bodies anymore thanks America this metaphysical imaginary connection evidently remains what does the sustaining of this direct mental connection to the Elder ring do for us tarnished well three things precisely to start with the first and I suppose we could say for most of our memory of Grace's features it's how we came back from the dead as we see by using the item invoking our memory of Grace sends us back to our last use checkpoint in other words it literally transports us to the grace of the earth tree as an aside this is how while we know for a fact that the tarnish left the lands between my boat by the lack of any kind of large landed boats it evidently wasn't how he came back as the game so daintily acknowledges calling the lands between across the fog and Melina referring to us as traveler from Beyond the fog we got here by being teleported the same way we crossed the fog into the final Boss Arena as well as probably the way we teleport to every other site of Grace on our map or hell even the few ways we got teleported against our will like the spell that takes us to the location of the Rune of death whatever it was exactly though the very first place our character gets teleported to is the chapel of anticipation how nice for the Chapel to have been built on an island outside the reach of any of the Myriad threats awaiting us tarnished on the mainland where our finger Maiden who would surely have given us the invitation needed to go straight to the Roundtable hold have been waiting for us although as I recall where mine was concerned it seemed she was distracted by something hmm in any case the rest of the memory of Grace's description is in reference to how tarnished or revived by it the same way our first deaths were negated at the start of this Grand Adventure our memories of First Grace continue to negate our deaths allowing our body to continually be reconstructed in effect for We Dead who yet live falling in battle will be no big deal for as we see it is indeed that metaphysical connection to the archery's grace that's responsible for a tarnish getting reconstructed after their various debts it's also incidentally what our runes actually get lost for when a tarnish who still has their memories of First Grace dies their soul returns to and is subsequently refueled with life force by the grace of the archery reconstructing their body and bringing them back into the action the way by which this is accomplished is what the runes We Leave Behind are used for by the creation of a tiny golden sapling just like the kinds produced by the golden seeds our business is able to be beaconed back to the nearest checkpoint when we retrieve our runes that's just us reabsorbing all the runes that the illusory sapling was made out of that's why such saplings are described as illusory in the first place despite evidently being like there they're just made out of code this is how using the sacrificial Twigs allow us to revive after death without spending our runes as well The Twig being a piece pruned from the archery itself is what's used to Beacon us to the nearest side of the archery's grace instead of using our runes to sprout an entirely new plant it's also why the dung eater's curse is considered so foul and dangerous to us tarnished as well it's very literally our soul returning to the Earth tree that allows us to recover from dying returning to the archery is exactly what a seed bed curse prevents that so much magical stuff is dependent on essentially an individual tarnish remembering something is also why it's possible for tarnish to lose their ability to see the guidance of Grace for that is precisely with a second feature our memory of Grace gives us and subsequently it's why the game treats us as a tarnish who is still able to see the guidance of Grace as something of a rarity now by the already established importance of the mind and of memories you may have already on your own figured out that an individual's conscious feelings are capable of interacting directly with magic as well I said as much when we went over ghosts but if you had any doubts we can safely set them aside the premise of emotions interacting directly with magic is introduced to us explicitly if we follow Millicent's questline thus we're able to take note of the clear pattern behind tarnish to maintain their memory of Grace allowing them to still see the guidance of Grace and tarnish to forget their memory marked as those who've lost their ability to see guidance more specifically we're able to take note of how retaining one's memory of Grace is shown to be directly dependent on one's own ambition of regaining that Grace our own character obviously retains their memory of Grace it's in our very inventory representing our ambition to become Elden Lord and we're pointed out in game as being one of a few tarnished who are still able to see the Grace's guidance Gideon is another one of these few tarnished who retains an ambition as well telling us that he aims to become Eldon Lord just like us and as we learn from Enya as the only tarnish before us to have obtained two great runes he's not bluffing either and as we know personally from our thrilling conversations with morgot his specific goal is as he repeatedly states to destroy our ambition indisputably a professional in dealing with tarnished aiming to become Eldon Lord the Fel Omen most certainly knows what he's talking about in regards to taking us out but solely wanting to become an Elden Lord isn't the only thing that allows someone to maintain their guidance Quran tells us himself that his goal isn't to become Elden Lord but to be advisor to whoever the tarnish is that does become Elden Lord yet corin's robe explicitly informs us that by pure determination alone it would seem he maintained his guidance of Grace regardless knowing that such an otherwise cliched concept as your feelings directly interact with magic is canonically on the table is what allows us to more confidently take note of how the game states that a tarnish's own emotions are legitimately what determines whether they keep their guidance of Grace rather than such descriptions as we find in Corinth robes being figurative instead having this pattern in our hand we're thus able to see what's going on behind the Myriad instances of those who lost their memory of Grace and how it's solely a determination to regain that Grace at all that allows you to be guided by one's memories of it roderica aimless and cowardly as she is explicitly never had it rajier once had it but has since lost it and as revealed by his armor the man was violently depressed nephili also loses her guidance but she loses it so hard that besides losing her memory of Grace she loses her memory of a load of other things too and becomes completely emotionally dependent on Gideon until she manages to remember and of every voice tarnished NPC whose death were able to witness we also see the unanimous pattern of them literally giving up their hopes dialos both of the D Brothers patches even but most prominently in Gideon we are explicitly told by Gideon that he aims to become Elden Lord like we do but that's what makes you both fellows and so on it's no authorial mistake that during this time where this ambition is maintained he's only found in the round table hold it's discard around the fact that since he evidently still has his memory of Grace just like we do to him any death is merely a cycle just like it is for us only at the end of the game where when we meet him he tells us the entire quest of the tarnished is a farce as our ultimate goal of killing America is simply and utterly impossible where he's most indubitably lost his ambition to become Elden Lord that we actually kill him and he stays down with his final words repeating with no remorse that he's simply given up tarnish lose the guidance of Grace when they lose their memory of it in other words when they discard what they're here for if they forget and lose that imaginary metaphysical link if they lose their ambition to get their Grace back then their connection to the Elden Ring's power as a whole is lost and while according to coron at least it's apparently possible for a tarnish who loses their ability to see the guidance of Grace to regain it such An Occurrence isn't anything we witness ourselves with all this in mind we also come to an understanding as to why basically everything about the Roundtable hold appears as if it was designed to help motivate the tarnished because that's exactly the case the round table hold gives the tarnish to home base for them to rest and make friends all they're given by the awe-inspired two fingers is praise and encouragement and even incantations created especially for them to help in keeping them healthy and the first thing every tarnish even meets upon their reaching the lands between their finger Maiden providing strength through leveling up companionship and travel and advice on behalf of the two fingers to whom they belong in addition to the facilities of the Roundtable hold the finger maidens serve to further enforce a feeling of dependence and gratitude upon the two fingers they'd also serve as a direct method by which each individual tarnish can be monitored although no one needs to worry about that it's not like they have a secret plate of Assassins on the ready or anything and since we know that Grace as a whole as a product of the Alden ring is controlled by the two fingers it shows how the guidance of Grace used to be what led a finger maiden and their paired tarnish to me as well as why what instances of guidance that we find are described as the Elden ring itself apparently telling you to do it's because that's literally supposed to be what the two fingers are making it do although I must append an important provision with that explanation the actual like in-game places the guidances of Grace Point us to do not align with what we're told about them narratively if the Elden ring itself is supposed to be beckoning us then surely the Rays would just point us directly to the locations of all the great runes so we can get all the pieces back together but as we see we have Rays pointing to places like the southernmost point of the Weeping Peninsula no raise of guidance pointing towards Melania or mikola and Moog underground and even rays of guidance pointing us towards the forge of the Giants which is obviously nobody's intentions other than Americas from this you might presume that the Rays of Grace are product of America herself instead Malena says our checkpoints are from the grace of the archery After All America has at least some kind of unbeatable control over the oratory itself but that idea comes with the same discrepancies why weeping Peninsula why caled why Mount gilmir and so on so for these reasons just like with the precise positions of the checkpoints themselves the actual placements and directions of the guidance of Grace are not narratively meaningful only that they exist as a concept and what we're told directly about them by in-universe sources will be what I'll take into account at the very least the single thing we are actually told regarding the various directions guidance points us to also appears to suggest we don't really think about it outside of direct communication to the player it will lead you tarnished to the path you are meant to follow even if it leads you to your grave getting my hands on your homo Hammer is the only reason you're alive right now Vare oh also this is what's going on behind all the wandering Nobles the reason is pointed out explicitly that these people are both Nobles and Undead is for us to realize that they're in the same situation as us like the tarnished they or their ancestors had imbived the blood of the archery while they were still alive only society's elite were allowed to take the archery's blessings and benefit from immortality therein especially once the archery stop producing it entirely hence why there is the belief that those living at the base of their tree or in other words the rich nobility who lived in the gold Metropolis of Landell were all Born Blessed the belief came from witnessing the biological inheritance by which Grace spreads a misconception only being that the grace came from a proximity to the archery itself rather than from your ancestors being blessed by it instead what happened to the wandering nobles was that the same thing the two fingers did to shunt the tarnish Back to Life by their memories of largery's Grace all across the world affected those who happened to match the same criteria as the tarnished on the lands between itself as well this is why it's pointed out that all the undead Nobles are Wanderers who've traveled far from their homelands but now have lost what they're looking for exactly like us tarnished their memory of First Grace once guided them too until over the countless years since they woke up they've lost it indeed forgetting what they'd once been searching for whatever exactly that may have been for the Noble in question and as an extra before we finally continue on all this memory of gray stuff gets completely negated for those who die from Death blight specifically as represented by us as players permanently losing all our runes death blight's whole deal is that it completely over the Elden ring and all his coming from the paradoxical half dead half-alife existence of Godwin it's a state that was completely unanticipated in the Elden Rings programming literally it makes the Elder ring glitch although by installing a patch we do have the option to turn that bug into a feature this is subsequently why the debt sorceries that belong to the Servants of the Rune of death and the powers of the Rune of death itself most notably don't inflict deathblade death blight is exclusively a product of Godwin being non-binary as a word as such it's why the use of death blight was able to ignore the pact of non-aggression over the Roundtable hold and why the Finger Slayer blade is capable of harming the two fingers in the greater will where the Rune of death evidently can obviously the greater will and its direct servants aren't going to be vulnerable to a tool of their own creation but the state of living in death was something they just never anticipated and thus never prepared a defense against and I suppose to reiterate what began this digression it'd be why all the runes that would have been left behind as a golden sapling for you to pick up just get deleted instead but to be honest I'm considerably certain that death by a death blade is intended to be of the same caliber as like getting eaten by right card whereas being able to retry at a checkpoint after dying in that fashion isn't actually a part of the story but rather just a concession for the gameplay about Midway into writing the script I came to decide that it might be worth specifying how just like in every other soulsborne game the actual video game system of our character respawning after we die is not the actual same thing as what's brought up in universe as the group our character belongs to the tarnished having the ability to come back after they die this is most apparent of course and how nothing ever diegetically mentions the likes of enemies respawning the lack of mini bosses respawning the enemies only respawn when you rest at a checkpoint at the bosses we Face are apparently willing to just fight us over and over and over again infinitely or that we're somehow able to respawn from this have no doubts it is all contrived but there is a good reason for it behind this weirdly specific conceit which you'll notice repeats itself in every soulsborne game is the Thematic connection between us the player and our main character where our character has threatened to fail in their Quest by like giving up we are threatened as it were to fail in beating the video game if we give up our player character will in Universe respawn if they die that's a canonical part of the game story and this is something that's acknowledged and sometimes talked about by the rest of the game's characters and in universe that which stops our character from respawning is if we as Margaret puts it at least lose our flame of ambition and Dark Souls this concept was going Hollow in bloodborne it was like becoming blood drunk or something and here it's losing our guidance of Grace in real life of course the only way our character stops respawning as it were but more succinctly fails their Quest as if we choose to stop playing where we give up is represented by our character doing so as well and that there exists other people belong to our characters group who also exist in the same circumstance of knowing that they'll Return To Life over over and over again until they relinquish their goals is the theme this recurring narrative conceit actually works to serve and all the soulsborne games and stories so all in all I guess all that's really worth getting is this our player character is part of a group of people that are going to come back to life after they die but only if they have the emotional determination to get up and keep on fighting in spite of having just lost and that this narrative concept is not literally connected to how we're able to retry after getting a game over the connection is solely a thematic one all the video game cinnamon sins that happens when we game over and retry are simply not part of the story's equation in the exact same way that like the changing of the appearance of the world that comes from US changing our graphic settings isn't part of the narrative's equation either anyhow as I was deathblite's entire deal is that it just utterly up the golden order so I have to doubt tarnished even being capable of arriving from it in the first place is actually supposed to be a thing deathblade is specified as something that only works against the tarnish after all and belindering with deathru and joining those who live in death means precisely that our soul doesn't get returned to the archery you don't get more death Rudy than this so while the jury may be out I do feel confident enough to say that us coming back from Death blade is not canon now you may be wondering why is maintaining one's guidance of Grace such a big deal why is maintaining this magical connection to the Elder ring such an important factor that the two fingers established A League of Assassins just to take out those that lost the ability to meet it indeed what is supposed to even be so special about the tarnished in the first place that makes them the only people other than the demigods who are apparently capable of collecting the great runes in order to repair the Elden ring rather than say any other person who doesn't happen to be tarnished the answer lies in our memory of Grace's third and final feature is what makes us tarnished uniquely capable of repairing the Elden ring our memory of Grace is what allows us to hold the great runes while the tarnish are obviously not the only Mortals able to interact with code since Rune fragments are observably used as the common currency over the lands between only the tarnish who've retained their guidance of grace and the demigods are shown to be capable of dealing with great roots foreign this is the precise reason why it was only the tarnish who are capable of repairing the Elden ring at all where other Mortals simply aren't keeping our memory of Grace is what allows for the magical connection that subsequently allows for us to collect the formless chunks of the Elder Ring's code this is all finally reflected in our fight with Gideon he used to have the ambition to become Eldon Lord and we know he had two great runes as well but after he's given up and we kill him his great ruins have evidently disappeared with that mental link to the Elden ring gone so have gone those pieces of the Elden ring itself in some meaningful way the remembered Grace of the tarnished and the shard-bearing grace of the demigods closest biologically to Queen America match making us tarnish the only feasible alternative for repairing the Elden ring you know maybe what's going on is some kind of like magical bandwidth situation only those with enough Enchanted blood in them whether by inheriting America's blood or by being abundantly blessed by the archery have enough hemo storage space available as it contain large enough pockets of code like the great runes where everyone else only has enough space as to hold ruined fragments instead as the highest level golden runes tell us the first to serve the golden order were blessed with the most Grace and we know explicitly that our memories of Grace are indeed of the first so perhaps look how inheriting a large enough amount of America's Grace was required for a demigod to inherit a great Rune inheriting a large enough amount of the ER tree's Grace was required for the latest of the tarnish to be capable of just being able to hold any great runes at all Maybe my explanation does check out but I can't consider it conclusive as of now take this as just what it is conjecture anywho such are the three properties granted by a tarnish retaining their memory of Grace keeping us alive ordering us around and allowing us to repair the Elgin ring but there's one more important Point remaining as I said before only the demigods who happen to have it close enough genetic connection to America ended up with great Roots you might have already noticed however that that statement has an obvious discrepancy godric receives a great Rune okay but God of Roy doesn't nor does the still living body of Godwin receive a great Rune either despite both obviously being members of the golden lineage as well Gideon makes no mention of God of Roy or Godwin speaking of the gray runes that the Roundtable hold seeks to collect so what did they just not get one precisely so for in addition to having a close enough relation to America for a demigod to have become a Shard Bearer we see that they are additionally required to have been the latest member of their family line the reason godafroy didn't receive a great Rune is simply because he's an older gen demigod than godric is this is also why there's no mention of any of The Shard berries we fight having children prior to the events of the shattering they just didn't have any this exact phenomenon is present within the tarnish as well only instead of with the great runes it's our memories of First Grace check for yourself if you can't believe me every single tarnish in Elder ring is the latest member of their bloodline across the entirety of the game there are not just zero family reunions between Generations but of the strict few instances we do see of parent and child relationships they're all exclusively the products of adoption while by the hoslow brothers we're shown that Grace is able to descend horizontally just like it does for the omen twins the twin prodigies and the carrion Royals Grace's relation to Great runes in the memory of Grace only descends down generationally as an aside this does also confirm that nepheli is not the daughter of horalu but was merely a part of his tribe by which Hora was just achieved it if nepheli actually was a descendant of horror then Hora would never have been resurrected just like everyone else's parents as both Hora and nepheli state by labeling themselves simply as Warriors they don't actually have titles or last names nafali wouldn't have any legitimate claim to the throne of stormvale if she was a child of horrorlu anyway that isn't being the child of Godfrey patriarch or the golden lineage as being the child of some Rando foreign barbarian from across the sea not even have any familial connection to lands between themselves how would the stucca Kenneth height recognize that as a right and proper lineage anyhow as for why this extremely specific phenomenon is the case I actually have no idea there isn't anything in the game that directly acknowledges this bizarre premise it just is what's being unilaterally depicted for some reason in a way it is consistent with other things we hear about Grace like that it drips down in pools and stuff and thematically that Grace and the powers and responsibilities attached get inherited by the newest member of that bloodline literally like it's a political title speaks for itself but in terms of an in-universe reason I'm unable to find anything that lead to a coherent explanation what is supposed to be like magically distinct between old blood versus a new blood because clearly not age by itself the likes of Godfrey and Gideon who knew America personally were evidently among those of the tarnish who never bore any children before they died and yet as we can see grace had no trouble in bringing them back to life the same way it brought back everyone else but it really leaves you wondering don't it is this transfer of Destiny thing something that happens instantly when a new member of the bloodline is added if like godric had been born only a few months before America broke the Elden ring would that baby have been The Shard Bearer what if a tarnish had a child after returning to those lands between would it be like with the daughters of Ionia and they'd just be normal or would the memory of Grace instantly carry over were there any tarnished children that got teleported to the Chapel of anticipation did the Roundtable hold have a daycare okay surely there must have been there must have been right like some teenage kid all pumped up with pride like yeah I'm gonna be Elden Lord like that fit all the criteria they got the ambition they got the lineage they'd return they'd retain their memories of Grace so they'd be they'd be warped with everyone else right what what would the Roundtable hold even do with them okay there's there's no way they'd just be killed the Roundtable hold had like tons of different people there's no way the likes a Corin or nephelia or Lionel a lineart or whatever would just stand down if kids were being thrown off the chaplain it's a page out of the game right so they must have put them somewhere but just where foreign what a video huh well I won't pull your legs there's more where this came from just nowhere near as long so you can expect it to take a lot less time than this one did too so did you like it all this I said as much earlier but when your goal is just piecing together a single work of fiction you're at least dealing with a closed system it's a story itself is coherent in the first place which Elder ring fortunately is there is an end point where you've collected everything and you piece it together without any mistakes and you're finally right but more so it means that there are a million imaginary endpoints where you're actually wrong back in like June I thought Godwin's assassination was pre-god freeze banishing I even thought the star Scourge event was pre-shattering messed up right by the time I saw the truth I had already become emotionally invested in entirely alternate timeline that existed only in my head and since from the start my goal had been to just read what's canonical to this game out I ended up having to scrap a lot of notes that's just one example of my hidden Journey over the course of the Scripps production I've tried my best in making sure I didn't get anything wrong or miss anything in this video but with the nature of this game it is very easy to do that so if you think you've spotted something I've stayed in this video that conflicts with some other information present in the game that I failed to take into account I beseech you to post it in the comments I'll either put the correction into the video description or create a pinned comment mentioning them and if possible the implications the Revelation in question it would have towards what I've said in the video itself such as the price of Freedom if the goal for this video is doubling down I could easily run with that idea as I said consider such a prospect yourself why snake eyes are only here to explain what the story is what it should be is on you this game ain't no less fictional than anything else so now that you do know what is and isn't maybe you can make up with your whole chest as it were it's a lot more fun in my experience to destroy on purpose rather than rope around in the dark and Destroy on accident in any case the next video will be focused on explaining precisely what fate is an eldering's world and it should be released not too far off from now and then after that I'll be going through the full history of the Eternal cities and the actual story behind Godwin's assassination the conspiracy as a whole is a lot simpler than you'd first expect the first NPC you mean deep root literally tells you who ordered the hit but that's just because the murder itself is actually the tip of the iceberg so tell me if there's anything else you want me to talk about or explain from this game those videos will be a lot shorter than this one was so I'll have room to add stuff in until then though I'll see you around cheers boss

Channel: T-L-G-T-W

Views: 73,735

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Id: CKIPh9H0DKk

Length: 279min 0sec (16740 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022