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Notes -
Elden Ring is basically a video game adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen, a German opera that takes 3 days to conduct and is centered around Norse mythology. Its primary themes are largely centered around European medieval alchemical concepts, it's fantasy aesthetic is western-style dragons, and its dominant architecture and clothing styles are so European that just about the only asian-aesthetic character in the setting is an obviously evil and subversive outsider.
It's like the least-Weeaboo game to point at as an example of Asian cultural dominance. Miyazaki is a Europhile if anything.
Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game developer known for Dark Souls / Blood Borne / Elden Ring, not Hayao Miyazaki, the movie director of Studio Ghibli fame.
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Elden Ring was literally written by G.R.R Martin. The Souls Games (which Elden Ring is the spiritual conclusion to) clearly take inspiration from Berserk, which itself is heavily inspired by western works.
It is the least Japanese game there is.
The only thing George wrote for Elden Ring is his name on the cover and incest in the dlc.
Kidding, not Kidding. From Software doesn't do plot, or narrative. The one game where they tried to consciously write was Sekiro and it can clearly be seen that they can't really pull it off. (I will await for inevitable arrival of people that will claim that I'm wrong and Miyadzaki is a genius). Currently playing through Wukong slowly and what I've seen from first 3 chapters is miles above what From Software released in last 10 years, combined.
George wrote the back story for the world, and there's clearly a lot of consistent world building. It's not a very detailed plot, but there are lots of fun small details about stuff like Rot and Madness that make the world feel real.
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That makes their dominance more impressive, if they can create an entertainment product that beats the West at its own culture (if we consider the Middle Ages to still be our culture).
What dominance? They are producing entertainment products in line with the paradigm of another culture- which is to say, they are emulating others, rather than the other way around. If there's any cultural dominance to be had, it would be of the influence of the customer's culture over their own, rather than the expression of their own.
They receive the money and they control the resources. This gives me a funny image in my head of an Italian Roman claiming the Goths aren’t dominant because they only control Rome with Italian norms… yes, but they are the ones who control it and reap wealth from it. Foreign entertainment is the worst trade in existence: Chinese get to grow economically and employ people and in exchange American young men waste their time on addicting entertainment. They get everything of value, cementing their dominance, and we get ephemeral thrills. That sounds pretty dominant to me.
Now, is a Middle Ages fantasy-scape really “our culture”? I’d say no. Americans aren’t very influenced by the culture of the Middle Ages. And the fantasy scene is really a gloss with nothing underneath. Okay, their fantasy architecture has spires of church, but there’s nothing deeper there. Rather than giving us “culture points” it probably reduces how much we ourselves care about our culture. (Imagine a young kid seeing a beautiful church: wow, this looks like Elden Ring!)
Then your concept of dominance is based on a peculiar non-general understanding of dominance, as is your characterization of culture. There's not much else to deal with, any more than anyone else who selectively defines words to make selection-bias arguments.
There are many errors here. (1) Making more money and having more resources is universally considered dominance, and it is a dominance most associated with objective measures of national health, so I don’t actually know why you want to focus on “cultural dominance”. (1a) To make a very mottey example, Jews were dominant in the early years of Hollywood and historians would say as much, yet all of their major products fell in line with plainly goyish and Christian / post-Christian sensibilities… this was still to their benefit, as they made lots of money this way and were able to influence things slightly over time. (2) You haven’t argued why cultural dominance is a fruitful lense to look at entertainment products. (2a) We have many examples in history of clearly dominant groups wholecloth appropriating the aesthetic sensibilities of other nations: the Romans to Greeks, the Muslims to the Byzantines (the star-and-crescent was a Byzantine symbol), Germanics to the Romans. (2b) Entertainment products appropriate the surface-level artifacts of culture but not necessarily anything deeper, with Disney the best example: it appropriates Western art, but that’s it, and visual culture is often appropriated from a different group. (3) Appropriating the aesthetic sense of a different culture does not change the substantive kernel of culture, things like an individual’s relationship to work, family, community, values. A deeper analysis of these games would show a thoroughly Asian obsession with skill mastery, objective grading and peer competition and meritocracy, values which are actually absent the European Middle Ages whose focus was emotional [piety, love]. (4) If Western culture were dominant, we should see it in its fruits: its ability to make compelling leisure experiences. Why didn’t a Western company make Wukong or the other products? The power which enables one group to make more money than another group is indeed a cultural power in its rawest sense, especially when that money is made meritocratically, eg a video game that people buy after looking at gameplay. (5) What does the modern West have to do with the Catholic Middle Ages? Even Catholics are very far away from that culture.
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The fact that Japanese devs are able to create a Western culture inspired game more successfully than Western devs themselves seems to support the original comment's point. I suppose there's Skyrim and other games with similar inspirations made by Western devs, but there's plenty of examples of Japanese devs outdoing Western devs with Western culture inspired games. Obvious examples that come to mind include From Soft's Dark Souls games & Bloodborne, Capcom's Dragon's Dogma and even Devil May Cry games, and Square Enix with Final Fantasy games (notably, when they took a modern Western storytelling approach with a Western-culture inspired fantasy game in Forspoken, in bombed both in the West and East).
I seem to think about souls games as a mish-mash of stuff that looks cool. Giant castles with one super lift(with chasm below) that goes on forever is a choice the devs decided on. Kingdom Come Deliverance is western culture and souls games are not.
KCD is European culture, not a Western one.
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It's an interesting take but I think it's a combination of a particular Japanese insistence on quality, and also doing a novel take on something familiar - for all that Castlevania is obviously derivative of western tropes, it's really very different in practice to any existing version of the Dracula story.
There could be something to that. I recall being told by some Bloodborne lore hound that the blood communion religion of Yharnam in that game had all the imagery of Christianity, but the structure of the religion was based on Shintoism or some other East Asian religion, which is an extra twist on the "what if it turned out that the church was evil?" cliche.
I actually don't know the Castlevania game stories well, but that's certainly another Western-culture inspired game made by East Asians which has seemed to capture Western audiences. I did watch the Netflix cartoon, which was made by a Western studio, but in a style meant to emulate anime (itself a style meant to emulate Disney), adapting an Eastern dev-made video game that itself was an adaptation of a Western-made story. Which could have turned out interesting, for seeing all the twists and turns such layers of adaptation and copying styles introduced, but it ended up turning everything into slop designed for Modern Audiences, which is why I stopped watching it.
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If you argue a Culture X game's success is proves the superiority of Culture Y because someone from Culture Y made it in clear interest of Culture X, I'm not sure we have enough of an agreement on what culture is to have an interesting discussion. Are we talking cultural ideas, motifs, and themes, the sort of things that fiction invokes to convey common understandings and shared sets of expectations that is what culture even is, or are we deferring to ownership structure as our shortcut to what culture a game is?
If it's the later, I'm not convinced, any more than I am by many of your examples. Bloodborne is a gothic horror and cosmic horror game that is quintessentially European in cultural influence. Devil May Cry is so American-culturally influenced that it's unapologetically cringe about it, ranging from the gun culture flourishing to the main character archetype to the Christian normalism.
These Japanese companies aren't unable to do Asian-culture focus games if they want to, and when they do it's very, very obvious. When Fromsoft wants to do a Soulsborne-style Asian game, they make Sekiro. The Yakuza series is a thing. The entire Dynasty Warriors franchise and umpteen spinoff varients are distinct.
Nor is there a lack of successful culturally western games. Just last year Helldivers took the gaming world by storm, and it was a reboot of a European game parody of Iraq-War Americana. Red Dead Redemption is the same era as Dragon's Dogma, and it was (and still is) a classic American cowboy story. One of the top-selling strategy games of all time, XCOM, is basically American sci-fi with NATO-militaristic liberalism. Baldur's Gate 3, the Witcher, God of War reboot.
Appealing to Western-style games as proof of the superiority of non-western-culture is less proving the point and more like fish not having the word for water.
I don't have any opinions on cultural superiority, and as best as I can tell, the original comment didn't express any, either. Just that Eastern devs seem to be appealing to Western audiences better than Western devs. Again, I believe examples of Eastern devs using Western culture in their games even better than Western devs do only supports this notion more strongly, similarly to how an away team defeating the home team in a sport that has home field advantage is a stronger signal that the away team is better than if played on a neutral field.
Now, as you point out, there are plenty of Western made games that do Western culture well. I just think it's correct that Eastern devs have done it better, especially when considering within-genre - there's no Western-made game similar to Elden Ring or Devil May Cry that come anywhere close to those games in quality or stature.
And if the foreign team defeats the home team by adopting home team signature tactics, strategies, compositions, and paradigms, that indicates that the foreign team may be doing home-team tactics better, but it does not indicate that away-team tactics are a disproof of home-team tactics or premise, or that their approach is fundamentally different. The Japanese baseball team may out-play the American team, but the sheer fact that the teams are playing baseball and not shogi is indicting whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself.
This is especially ironic in the context of east-asian countries like Japan or Korea, in which Westernization was a deliberate national policy for generations and distancing themselves from their own cultural tethers to embrace western cultural aspects was a deliberate process, even as the comparison culture (the US in particular) is commonly understood melting pot assimilation of different cultural inputs. China has solidly established culture of mimicricy of outside forms as well. These are not divergent cultures, but in many real respects cultures that consciously try to get closer.
Sure there are. What constitutes quality is subjective (most players don't, in fact, enjoy fromsoft difficulty curves), but stature is not, and there are plenty of series that absolutely crush the likes of Elden Ring, let alone DMC. There's a reason that the Elden Ring peak concurrent steam players was a bit over 950,000, and Minecraft was over ten times that- the qualities may not be what you value, but stature doesn't care about what you value, it cares about what other people care about.
And this is just peak players- in terms of players over time for the last year, Elden Ring for most of the year before the DLC was around 50-60k. PUBG was often at or above 500k. Devil May Cry 5 was closer to 5k. That puts it on the same level as Warhammer 40K: Darktide. Change the metric, and we can probably find comparisons. Metacritic scores? Profitability? Impact / appearances in other cultural products?
This is the issue with semantic gerrymandering. 'Soulsborne' isn't a genre, it's a subgenre specifically defined around a single company. There's no shortage of successful fantasy, or dark fantasy, or adventure. Winnowing the basis of comparison to exclude all others isn't making a point about a much wider category (Eastern-devs), it's just structural cherry picking, just as selecting the highest-performing eastern success rather than the slop is selection bias in action.
Sure, but we're not talking about whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself. We're talking about which baseball team is better.
Sure stature is subjective. Popularity isn't, but stature isn't just popularity, it's reputation. In any case, the games you're talking about aren't the same genre, and one doesn't need to gerrymander a soulslike genre to do so. I was actually thinking of 3rd person action open world RPG for Elden Ring, and 3rd person crazy stylish action game for DMC. Again, for either, I can't think of any Western made games of the same genre that come even close.
No, the OP is talking about which cultural paradigm is better. Hence why it is Eastern vs Western media while trying to characterize the products as culturally eastern even when only their production or publishing is, and not Eastern-made Western media versus Western-made Western media.
Without knowing what sort of metrics you're using to make the claim of stature or genre, and with you dismissing popularity, I can't think of any way to disprove the position at all, or to prove it in the first place.
DMC is high-stature based on... what? Helping establish a niche sub-genre that most players don't care about? Elden Ring's stature water point, at least, was based on its immediate release popularity- but a non-trivial part of that just-release hype was popularity benefiting from the advertising emphasizing Game of Thrones as a bridge for the non-Soulsborne, and the player base dropped precipitously when most of those non-Soulsbourne dropped. Is Stature supposed to piggy back on the initial popularity, but not enduring popularity?
What does this category 'Stature' mean beyond 'I respect it, and I think a lot of other people do too' versus 'I don't respect it, and so it doesn't matter how many others do'?
Or, to put it another way- why, besides snobery, should I be more impressed by the DMC franchise (30 million sales worldwide) than the Civilization (40 million worldwide franchise sales) or Call of Duty (425 million copies, 100 million active monthly players in 2023)?
It's not like there's lack of established western franchises that meet your broad categories. Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Red Dead, and Grand Theft Auto are all open world action games of note, some with far more RPG credentials that Elden Ring which is JRPG in the mechanical build sense rather than story-changes-according-to-actions RPG. Depending on what you mean by 'stylish' action games, Helldivers, God of War, Fortnight, Gears of War, or even Doom. Call of Duty has been a spectacle shooter for over a decade at this point- is that not stylish because it relies on gunplay and grenades and setpieces rather than melee combos and stylized cutscenes?
Well, no. This is where we go back to rhetorical gerrymandering, and using winnowing language to remove comparisons. Elden Ring and SWTOR are both open world RPGs, but one is action with 'press X to act' parkour gameplay and a non-linear narrative delivery structure, and one is MMO with 'press hotkey to act' non-parkour to activate with at least 9 novel-scale storylines, ranging from hero's journey to revenge journey to a spy thriller. Both are open-world RPGs with considerable quality, but only one is dismissed by adding yet another qualifier.
And that's when the qualifier is clear. Helldivers and DMC are not the same sort of stylish action games, but they are both action games with an emphasis on style. However, the lack of a western equivalent to DMC specifically is evidence of failure, while the eastern equivalent to Helldivers 2's brand of dystopian-parody sci-fi team-killing we're-the-baddies co-op chaos is...?
If the argument just wants to be that certain sub-genres are dominated by non-western countries, sure. That's banaly true, and can even be narrowed down to 'certain sub-genres are dominated by specific non-western companies.' No one of note outside of Koei is making Dynasty Warrior successes. But it's equally true that there are sub-genres dominated by western companies, and arguing over the stature just turns into a 'my luxury playtime toy is higher class than your crass and low-class luxury playtime toy.'
I don't think your interpretation is correct. The fact that the OP also responded to your comment with essentially the exact same point I made, that the fact that Elden Ring is Western through and through despite the Japanese developers only reinforces his point, indicates that his point indeed was one of the devs, not about cultural paradigms.
Yes, obviously any talk about influence of fictional media is subjective. It's not infinitely subjective, but there's no avoiding subjectivity, and certainly objective numbers can't override it, though it can contribute to it.
I find this paragraph pretty ridiculous. That these games aren't in the same genre as Elden Ring or DMC isn't some result of gerrymandering, it's the result of people categorizing these games based on how gamers perceive them based on their interests and styles and such. Assassin's Creed and GTA could be said to fit into the same genre as Elden Ring, but the former has been shit on for over a decade already for being formulaic, while the latter's core combat and movement based around guns and cars places it ina different category. This isn't gerrymandered, this is the consequence of people noticing that these games differ in critical, important ways that directly affect the structure of the game and the way the players interact with them. Same goes for first person versus third person, which is a pretty major and meaningful differentiator, which is why DMC and Doom don't fit in the same genre (though I'd argue that Doom brought a lot of the feel of DMC from the third person format to third person), even before getting into the difference between shooter and melee combat.
I do think that the default presumption should be that any observation of differences here between East and West is an artifact of different countries being better at different genres. However, the fact that so many of the Eastern successes rely so heavily on Western culture - even the anime-style Genshin Impact is heavily influenced by Western medieval fantasy - only strengthens the point that the original comment was making.
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I've actually never heard this interpretation of the plot of Elden Ring. Can you please elaborate on this?
Adaptation should be understood to be very loose and oversimplified rather than direct, and mixing in some of those other influences, but sure.
The story is the struggle of gods, heroes, and several mythical creatures over the eponymous magic ring that was made from stolen gold, that grants domination over the entire world. The drama and intrigue continue through three generations of narrative protagonists, until the final cataclysm of the twilight of the gods, which ends with the death of all the gods but also the birth of a new world without them and free of their influence.
The majority of the narrative- but not the final act in which reflects generational change- is a result of the actions of the head of the pantheon of the doomed gods in three main parts. In the first part, the head of the pantheon steals the golden ring by force, and with it is able to establish a mighty fortress, but with the seeds of future ruin hinted at from the start. In the second phase, the pantheon head has spawned a dynasty of godlings, and is known as a manipulator of them and is involved in the death of the golden child, who both does and does not die, even as they set forth a plan for a maiden daughter that will have world-ending ramifications for the era of the gods.
In the third phase, the head of the pantheon has gone from an active figure driving the plot to a manipulator from behind the scenes while the rest of the cast fights and kills eachother over the ring. By the end of their plot, the pantheon head goes from fearing the end of the gods to willing it to be so, advancing the destruction of what they have built, utilizing a plot set in motion an age before. The home of the gods and the world tree surrounding will be burned in the fires of death at the direction of the pantheon-head's maiden daughter, who willingly dies in the same flames, which are themselves of the domain/act of a fire god bound to the head-god's will long ago.
The head of the pantheon in both cases is based on Odin, head of a dynastic pantheon of doomed gods, and who is a shapeshifting trickster god with a penchant for cross dreassing and yet also a war-god who was obsessed with death and the future. Odin sacrificed an eye and was speared to the world tree in a sort of ritualistic suicide in pursuit of the knowledge of runes, in an effort to influence the future. Odin's god-magic allowed them to cure the sick, calm storms, turn weapons against the attackers, make women fall in love, and render dangerous troll women harmless. It even allowed them to take the form of another person, which is just a wee-bit important to the plot of Elden Ring.
Re-emphasizing that this is a very loose reusage of tropes and themes, including adapting Odin beyond the play's presentation of Wotan, Elden Ring borrows from Der Ring Des Nibelungen in terms of-
-The titular magical gold ring, which has world-dominating powers
-The role of the magical gold ring, which is for everyone to fight over
-The nature of the Wotan's taking of the ring by force as a sort of 'original sin'
-The role of Wotan as a dynasty-founding manipulator
-The death of the golden-child of Wotan dynasty, who both does and does not die
-The role of Wotan's children in leading the next world
-The transition of Wotan from advancing the world order to working against it
-The role of Wotan in helping sett claimants against each other even after stepping out of the direct story
-The role of Wotan's daughter in invoking the god-killing/world-tree burning flames of a bound fire-god
-The role of Wotan's daughter in choosing to die through this act
Marika, the god-queen of elden ring, is in turn a derivative of Odin in terms of being-
-A ambitious war god who established a dynasty dominant in their realm by right of conquest, rather than as a creator-god
-A trickster god with transformation powers (the item to transform into other things, Mimic Veil, is also known in-setting as Marika's mischief)
-A manipulator god known to lie / deceive / sacrifice others for their own interest, including their own family
-Magical power sets, including identity projection, gender shenanigans, and the ability to make women fall in love (Marika's rival-queen-turned-wife-by-cross-gender-proxy)
-An obsession with death and the future (Marika's actions to seal away destined death to create an artificial immortality, but also preparing the mechanisms to destroy said system via the fire giant plot)
-An interest in learning more on runes as a means to other things (Odin's goal in sacrificing the eye; Marika's only late-reign motivations is to plumb the depths of the golden order, and the metaphysical research of the late golden-order scholars into the metaphysics which run on runes)
-The imagery and execution of an elaborate ritual suicide scheme that involves losing an eye and being pierced in the side with a spear while being pinned to the world-tree (Marika's end-position in the end-game, which is a result of her scheming and duality-nature not only between herself and Radagon, but themselves and the Elden Ring)
-The role of the suicide-ritual as a means to an end of larger ambitions (Odin's sacrifice was to gain the power of runes and knowledge of other worlds; Marika's purpose is part of an extensive scheme to wound and kill the Elden Beast, which is the Elden Ring, which is also her/Radagon (the alchemic theming playing heavier here), and which ends with Marika functionally replacing the Elden Beast on the deific hierarchy in 'her' endings)
-Said larger ambitions being an effort to defy fate / overcome the inevitable end of the world (Odin fails / arguably only succeeds via progeny who survive ragnerok; Marika's plan in 'her' endings involves her functionally displacing the Elden Beast in the divine hierarchy, by becoming synonymous with the elden ring as the mending rune is applied to her and remaining part of the new world even after her dynasty passes)
Are there differences to this? Sure. It's not a direct adaptation, and not trying to be, and oversimplification and all that.
But compared to the fandom's propensity before the recent DLC to try and shove Elden Ring into a pseudo-christian mythos (because clearly the only parallel to an organized religious institition is the Catholic Church), Elden Ring is positively dripping with north germanic vibes and tropes both in and out of the Ring Cycle.
Isn't that what Ranni's ending is? Someone has to pick up the ring so she does, free from the elder will and takes the power away from the world, to the stars, so that it can no longer influence the world and it can be free.
Kinda / no / not really what I was alluding to.
All of the endings reflect the generational change, death of the gods influence, and the birth of the new world without the old gods influence, but one shaped by the influence of the free hero who serves as the transition. In Gotterdammerung, it's the power of Siegfried and Brunnhilde's redemptive love that breaks the curse and gives the new world a redemptive motif to end the play, but in Elden Ring the nature of the next world is left to the various ending themes / focuses, none of which are love.
As for the characterization of Ranni, disagreement on multiple fronts. Ranni is not a freedom-and-rebellion protagonist.
-Fundamentally, Elden Ring's player-experienced plot is a mystery plot (what happened / why did Marika break the ring), not a rebellion plot. The belief that Marika / Ranni are in some form of rebellion and trying to free the world from the greater will is broader fan theory deriving from failing to recognize the mystery plot, which deliberately structures the internal acts of the games (guided primarily by the accessible lore in difficulty eras) to encourage a belief that Marika (and Ranni's) motivations are in opposition to the Outer Gods, which are introduced as mid-game concepts as part of the forces tearing apart the world. They aren't- Marika's intent to destroy the Elden Ring is later revealed to have been long-premeditated even before her conquests were complete (the exiling of the Tarnished, the fire giant plot to destroy the tree), while Ranni never actually acknowledges any outer god or the Greater Will (who is never categorized as an elder god either, but which players tried to impose due to thinking the 'outer' meant 'from outer space').
-The reason the plot is not a rebellion plot against the Greater Will is that there's fundamentally nothing to rebel against- the Greater Will has no presence or political role / influence, and there is no enforcement scheme on how the Elden Ring is used. The fan theory that Marika and Ranni were in rebellion against it was a fan/cultural dynamic of trying to fill the mystery of the mystery plot, by projecting a western-expectation of a rebellion-against-god plot when there's no indications in game the rebels and god ever interacted or even coexisted.
The Greater Will being an absent god, and having not been present for longer than any of the even deific character cast have been alive, is part of the plot twists to the early game's narrative encouraging the players to doubt the Two Fingers, who claim to be prophets of the Greater Will, and encouraging a conflict-driven understanding of the various gods of the setting. The early game narration/guiding characters implies/claims that the Greater Will wants things to be a certain way, and presents the Two Fingers as beings of influence and insight, but this is a lie. Not only does critical-path lore reveal the Fingers are not and have not been in contact with the Greater Will for who knows how long, to the degree that they attribute multiple actions of Marika to the Greater Will, but the plot twist at the end of Farum Azula is that not only was Marika not the first 'god' of the Ring, but that there is no set order from the ring- Marika meddled with the composition from the start, but the nature of the Ring and Order has evolved considerably from the era of Dragons of pre-history. There is no 'Greater Will approved' order, or pressure to comply with a specific form of the Elden Ring, there is simply a metaphysical order responding to those who press their will.
(In the non-critical path, further lore reveals the Two Fingers weren't even that important. Rather than being important and influential figures in Marika's Religion, with Marika being some intermediary-pope subservient to the Greater Will, it's discoverable that the Two Finger lore is literal heresy, that Marika came to power by beating up their previously recognized Empyrean the Gloam-Eyed Queen (which is to say she was not appointed, she seized by conquest against their previous interests), and that the Greater Will's last action in the setting was in the pre-history. While the early-game Two Fingers try to present Marika as an errant intermediary, Marika's Golden Order was a god-queen cult which treated her as the only relevant god, not a subordinate. The fan theory that the Golden Order made Marika do things she didn't want at the behest of the Greater Will was always a fan theory- she was a genocidal warlord whose character trait was ambition.)
-Ranni is also not in a rebellion quest or reluctantly picking up the ring because she is purposefully advancing her predestined potential as an Empyrean in what amounts to a greek irony of running into the prophesy she seeks to avoid. Ranni's claimed rebellion is both a case of the irony of exact words- her Two Fingers said she was an Empyrean who could succeed Marika, not that she would (just as there were two other candidates of the same generation who could)- but also a dramatic irony that most of the player base missed despite the majority of Ranni's plotline being the unblocking and fulfillment of her fated destiny.
Ranni is initially presented as a youth-novel protagonist fighting for her free will, but her entire supporting cast are subversions of belief in free will. Her mage advisor wants to turn her into a literal puppet, and is part of a court/class conspiracy to seize power from the royal family via mind-control magic. The royal family in question- her mother Rennala- not only came to power via implicit use of mind-control magic, but may have been under the effects herself at Ranni's conception, as Rannala goes from meeting a cosmic entity to a meteoric rise to scholar-queen, to warrior-queen, to suddenly and madly (but explainable via the same sort of betwitching and enchanting effects associated with her rise to power) falling in love with the masculine-form of the god of the Golden Order for a marriage union that produces a prophesy child (Ranni) and other children who play key roles in subverting the golden order. Well before then, though, Ranni's childhood caretaker is a conspiracy theorist who wears the equivalent of tin foil to prevent the absent-god from reading his thoughts while advancing a multi-generational moleman conspiracy initiated by a dead civilization to put Ranni in place for her destiny to usurp the Elden Ring. Ranni's foster-brother/champion, a being of unbreakable loyalty, is falsely accused of being a mind-controlled tool/assassin despite untold thousands of years of Ranni being in a murder-feud with the alleged controller), and is put down in the midst of him stopping an assassination attempt on Ranni's life. Ranni herself is a literal prophesy child of a star-prophesy civilization who advances at the indirect aid of the ambiguous-god-thing of the Moons, which in Elden Ring are actual entities who manipulate fates and who actually intervene in mortal affairs.
Ranni is the culmination of a underground celestial-worshipping dead civilization's plot to seize control of the Elden Ring... a plot she is an active (if maybe not aware) participant of, from her murder of her half-brother and helping instigate the civil war to her character plot's requirement to re-start her destiny by freeing the stars that were unable to advance her destiny.
Ranni isn't a parody or a deconstruction of free will, but she certainly isn't an agent of it either.
-Ranni's era doesn't remove the influence or the problems of the elden ring, she masks it's still-present effect.
Ranni's order is still a metaphysical order of the elden ring, complete with elden lord consort to the ring-vessel-god, and even in it's setup it is explicitly a transitionary (thousand-year) experience, as fitting the elden mythic cycle of gods. While Ranni presents it as preferable- that it would be better if people couldn't see / feel / touch / believe in the order- that's just a different narrative justification to Miquella's pitch for an era of compassion, and it doesn't change that the order is still there. Ranni's order isn't distant as in proximally far away from other people, it's distant in the sense that it's out of touch, invisible and out of reach, until one day it will be again (the 'return' of the voyage, the inevitable metaphysical turning of the eras that is Miyazaki-worldbuilding and Elden Ring backstory). While this is a great thematic parallel to the Greater Will- another absent entity, and a fulfillment of the Elden Ring/golden order's metaphysical mechanics of regression and causality as Ranni aligns / retunrs closer to the state of the Greater Will (regression)- it's just the turning of the cycle.
Ranni's absence also doesn't 'free' the Lands Between either, since the controlling (and malevolent) factors burdening the Lands Between aren't the applied influence of the Ring, but the actors that exist regardless. This is the explicitly controlling entities now elevated by Ranni (the fate-controlling stars and moons), but also the outer gods like the Scarlett Rot and Formless Mother, and also the ambitious sorts of genocidal warlords and would-be tyrants who would try to conquer and dominate and enforce their will. There is no reformation of the human condition by hiding the Elden Ring, because the Elden Ring was not the cause of the human condition. It is still a cycle where a murderous woman claims the power of god and does what she wants, never really indicating an awareness or interest in resolving problems.
Unsurprisingly, the authors of Game of Thrones and Dark Souls did not write a young adult novel protagonist whose love-interest plot would save the setting.
This is all amazing, shame that the game for me was a murderhobo simulator and nothing else. In a way I can see myself and a few friends getting a few beers and discuss after a playthrough (entirely like I did when the Game of Thrones tv show was coming out), but the game seems to not care about delivering it's themes, so I ended up not bothering at all.
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You can see it if you sort of squint at it, since the loss of the titular ring and the fall of the gods of Valhalla have loose parallels in the Shattering and the subsequent destructive wars waged by Marika's children against each other. But that's stretching things. It is true, though, that Elden Ring has hardly any Japanese or Asian influences in it and is in its core sensibilities a thoroughly Western game. This is not really anything new since FromSoft has done this before and to even greater extents; they also did Bloodborne, which as a Gothic Victorian game with a Lovecraftian story could not be less Asian if they'd tried.
This sentiment I'm seeing is such a weird one. What even is "Asian" or "Japanese" here? The way people are speaking it's as if it has geisha women walking in woden sandals and gongs then it's "Japanesey" and if not then it's Western. Culture and the world did not end in 1800. This entire sentiment belies a denial and ignorance of the much more interconnected nature of modernity. People in Japan take influence from things outside of Japan now. What else can they, or anyone else, do but grow in such a way or choose to be an ossified cultural taliban? They were blue jeans. They eat hamburgers, and listen to rock music. And it's all 100% Japanese. Japan makes "western" fantasy and has done so for generations since the early days of D&D being translated over and the game Wizardry getting popular (in Japan).
I'm reminded of when I read a short story by Haruki Murakami about a couple robbing a McDonald's. And the author made an amusing account of the cashier being so shocked and confused by being held up at gunpoint in Tokyo at 1 am under charge to give up dozens of burgers that she didn't know whether to keep "that McDonald's smile." Which doesn't exist in, say, America. It hit me that here is this very American seeming thing but it's very much by and for the Japanese here, and of course McDonald's is just a much a fixture of modern Japanese life as the subway is. The same as childhood karate might be for an American. That's modernity for you.
Also what's a asian vs western game here for that matter? Japan in particular has been a mover and shaker of video games since pretty much the beginning. Arguably Japan more or less made the console a thing. Video games and computers are, again, one of those things made after 1800s. There's cross pollination here. If video games made in Japan by Japanese people are not asian game then what is? Touhou coded exclusively in Ruby?
I'd quibble and say that us Americans made the console (Atari and Fairchild), the Japanese just figured out how to make them a sustainable business by learning from our mistakes.
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Thank you. I was circling the comments in this conversation preparing to write something similar.
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