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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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