Elden Ring

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Video game fandom
NameElden Ring
Abbreviation(s)ER
Developer(s)FromSoftware
Ensemble fanart by casselloudvin77, featuring several characters.
Related articles on Fanlore.

Elden Ring is an action RPG produced by Japanese developer FromSoftware and released in 2022. The game's story and lore was created through a collaboration between Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin. It is considered a spiritual sequel to the Dark Souls trilogy and other "Soulsborne" games, carrying on the difficulty, game mechanics, and themes of these earlier titles while introducing a massive open world.

Canon

Many ages ago, the goddess Queen Marika banished her first husband, Godfrey, First Elden Lord, and all of his warriors from the Lands Between. Her plan was for these warriors – thereafter known as Tarnished as they were stripped of the grace of the Golden Order – to wage war and die in distant lands, growing stronger through trial so that they might one day be called back to the Lands Between through resurrection.

Sometime after Godfrey's banishment, Marika's son Godwyn the Golden was assassinated, leading her to shatter the Elden Ring. In punishment, she was imprisoned within the Erdtree by the Greater Will, inciting a struggle for power between her surviving demigod offspring. These included her other sons by Godfrey, the disowned Omen twins Morgott and Mohg; Malenia and Miquella, the twins by her second husband Radagon, Second Elden Lord; and Radahn, Rykard, and Ranni, her stepchildren via Radagon's prior marriage to Queen Rennala. The demigods fought to claim shards of the Elden Ring in a terrible war known as the Shattering. This war devastated the Lands Between. It also left them populated by undead, since, long ago, Marika had removed the Rune of Death from the Elden Ring, thereby allowing rebirth through ritual burial at the Erdtree's roots during its golden age. Godwyn's burial in such a manner has afflicted the Erdtree with a spreading blight due to the circumstances of his death.

The player assumes the role of a Tarnished of no reknown reborn into a ruined and desolate Lands Between. With the guidance of the mysterious figure Melina, the player must collect Great Runes by fighting demigods and journey to the Erdtree to claim the title of Elden Lord, becoming consort to the god of the next age (either Marika or a candidate successor) in the hope of bringing change to the Lands Between.

Cut Content

Information regarding Cut Content was data mined by fans.[1] Much of the information found is considered helpful in canon lore investigation, with some of the "lost content" being in line with many current in-game events or flavour text. The main cut content investigated by fans is:

  • Silver Tear Asimi;[2][3][4]
  • Dream Collecting and Sleep Mist;[5]
  • Merchant Kalé.[6]

Characters

Fandom

Elden Ring has been credited with introducing FromSoftware's games to a wider audience and substantially growing the fandom.[7] However, as with the once-niche Dark Souls fandom, most fannish activity centers on speculation, lore analysis, and general discussion. Popular Elden Ring lore videos from YouTube channels such as VaatiVidya, SmoughTown, The Tarnished Archaeologist and Zullie the Witch regularly receive tens of thousands to millions of views. In contrast, there have been under 3,500 fan fiction works posted in the "Elden Ring" category on AO3 as of 2023. Fanart remains another popular form of fannish expression.

It is expected that fans uncover, by themselves, much of the lore of the game, as it is not given in a straightforward way. This ties back to how much of the fannish activity centers purely around this. Miyazaki, the director of the game, has instigated this sort of fan behaviour several times, including when the first DLC trailer dropped.[8]

Shadow of the Erdtree DLC speculation and fan reactions

As the game's second anniversary approached, a series of happenings left fans in uproar, excited with the possibility of the DLC Shadow of the Erdtree dropping. After FromSoftware failed to even mention the DLC during The Game Awards, on December 7th 2023, fans began to speculate if the company was planning to quietly drop the game without any fanfare, or perhaps even a trailer.

Youtube channels, such as Ziostorm, began picking up on possible signs for DLC development and drop, with one of the first leaks to explode in popularity being that of a controller for the xbox, celebrating the game's anniversary. This was believed to be real and linked to the DLC due to the fact that the original page and many posts related to it were deleted.[9]

Almost one year after the DLC was announced, Elden Ring’s Steamdb page was updated, with the new entry recently linked to the DLC.[10] This left fans very excited, especially as Steam got more and more updates related to the DLC.[11] The Youtube playlists of the official Elden Ring channel were also updated without visible modification, which lead fans to believe a new, inaccessible video had been added. Fans speculated this video was the DLC trailer.

Due to their initial strong belief that the DLC trailer would be shown during The Game Awards, many fans began despairing and not wanting to believe any leak or suspicion might be true.[12][13] The fan reactions around the DLC speculation have been heavily memed, particularly with a small dog (or dogs) representing fans eagerly waiting for miyazaki to finishing "cooking" the DLC.[14][15]

On the 20th of February 2024, the official Elden Ring Twitter (X) account posted a warning with the following words: "The first trailer for #ELDENRING Shadow of the Erdtree will be revealed in 16 hours. Join us at 15:00 UTC."[16] This caused furore amongst fans, some of which started stream parties or trailer reaction streams in order to watch and share their speculation and excitement with others.[17][18][19]

Relationships

Relationships can be divided into NPC/NPC or Tarnished/NPC, with Tarnished being the game's Player Character. They can be technically categorised as an Original Character, similarly to Tav, from Baldur's Gate III or The Inquisitor from Dragon Age: Inquisition, although the Tarnished is a silent character without any personality traits.

The following list is of the most popular NPC/NPC ships:

The following list is of the most popular Tarnished/NPC ships:

Fanworks

Fanfiction

Fanart

Gallery

Resources and Links

References

  1. ^ https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/w5753i/i_am_genuinely_surprised_people_arent_talking/
  2. ^ https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/tzyf68/the_most_important_cut_content_questline_in_elden/
  3. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z9IG6Rnnac
  4. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edcNY29Bl3k
  5. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IT-DPhIxX8
  6. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK_8F_XwLaE
  7. ^ David Wildgoose, "Elden Ring is made more approachable by its community", GamesHub
  8. ^ Archived version of In IGN Interview Miyazaki says players still haven't discovered something "small" on r/Eldenring on Reddit
  9. ^ https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/19ew6wz/xbox_controller_for_anniversary/
  10. ^ https://x.com/Ziostorm1/status/1746895361942131036?s=20
  11. ^ https://x.com/Ziostorm1/status/1757851309271556463?s=20
  12. ^ https://x.com/Allan22810361/status/1746896002504675804?s=20
  13. ^ https://x.com/Annrt11/status/1746918704871252189?s=20
  14. ^ https://x.com/Havel9211/status/1747220872195117554?s=20
  15. ^ https://x.com/BoatPongpat/status/1746897039873720365?s=20
  16. ^ https://x.com/ELDENRING/status/1760076880764449173?s=20
  17. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2C8iUl8DBI
  18. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxWDRiWmJ1Y
  19. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfI21nEoW6U
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