#Rani Elden Ring | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

landoftheway · 2 years

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I posted 21,851 times in 2022

262 posts created (1%)

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Longest Tag: 139 characters

#for anyone not informed the scandal they're distracting from is a california official helping to tank the activision-blizzard investigation

My Top Posts in 2022:

The Moon in Elden Ring

As I kind of expected, a lot of people are making a lot of assumptions about what the moon is in the setting of Elden Ring and how it ties into the story and lore. So to clear things up, I’ve made a comprehensive list of every single item, spell, and line of dialogue that talks about the moon itself (note that I specifically mean descriptors of the moon and its properties, not just the presence of the word “moon” or “lunar” somewhere in the item’s name or description). Naturally this will involve a lot of spoilers for the game, so I’ll put the whole thing below the cut and I’ll add my conclusions on it at the bottom. Let me know if there’s anything I missed and I’ll edit this post as needed.

Item Descriptions

Dark Moon Greatsword: “Ranni's sigil is a full moon, cold and leaden, and this sword is but a beam of its light.”

Moon of Nokstella: “This talisman represents the lost black moon. The moon of Nokstella was the guide of countless stars.”

Remembrance of the Full Moon Queen: “In her youth, Rennala was prominent champion who charmed the academy with her lunar magic, becoming its master.”

Stargazer Heirloom: “The young astrologer gazed at the night sky as she walked. She had always chased the stars every step of her journey. Then she met the full moon — and, in time, the astrologer became a queen.”

Drawstring Freezing Grease: “The women of the Carian royal family look to the moon to guide their fates. Rani's is a moon dark and blanketed with rime.”

Spell Descriptions

Ranni’s Dark Moon: “The moon was encountered by a young Ranni, led by the hand of her mother, Rennala. What she beheld was cold, dark and veiled in occult mystery.”

Rennala’s Full Moon: “Queen Rennala encountered this enchanting moon when she was young, and later, it would bewitch the academy.”

Adula’s Moonblade: “Adula, a devourer of sorcerers, was bested by Ranni and subsequently swore a knightly oath to her Dark Moon.”

Freezing Mist / Glinstone Icerag / Frozen Armament: “The snowy crone taught the young Ranni to fear the dark moon as she imparted her cold sorcery.”

Carian Retaliation: “This was the Carian royal family's secret means to prepare against the disloyalty of the academy. The moon and stars would one day go their separate ways.”

Carian Greatsword: “Armed with this spell, sorcerers gain the strength of knights, their loyalty sworn to the moon.”

Dialogue

Note: All of the relevant dialogue mentioning the moon comes from Ranni, and as others have pointed out some of her dialogue appears to have been poorly translated from the original Japanese. While I personally think the intended meaning can still be inferred from the English text, here is a link to a direct translation to see what I’m talking about and where I’m getting my interpretation from.

Ranni, at the top of Ranni’s Rise after completing her quest: “I thought I might expound a little further... Upon the order I envision. Mine will be an order not of gold, but the stars and moon of the chill night. I would keep them far from the earth beneath our feet. As it is now, life, and souls, and order are bound tightly together, but would have them at great remove. And have the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch... All become impossibilities. Which is why I would abandon this soil, with mine order.”

Ranni, during the Age of Stars Ending: “To every living being, and every living soul. Now cometh the age of the stars. A thousand year voyage under the wisdom of the Moon. Here beginneth the chill night that encompasses all, reaching the great beyond. Into fear, doubt, and loneliness... As the path stretcheth into darkness.”

Conclusions

So, as with a lot of things in Elden Ring there’s a lot to put together here, but there are a few things that are immediately obvious:

The moon is associated with the Carian royalty, contrasting how the stars are associated with the Academy of Raya Lucaria. This tracks with how study of the primeval current was effectively banned by the royal family and why Sellen wants to bring it back by ousting Rennala as the academy’s leader, and it also tracks with how the royal family apparently predicted they’d eventually have to deal with the academy rebelling based on the Carian Retaliation spell.

We can get a pretty clear picture of how Rennala and later Ranni became interested in the moon. Rennala was an astrologer in her youth, became particularly fascinated by the moon, developed moon-based sorceries based on that fascination, and later used those sorceries to become the head of the academy.

Ranni’s associated “dark moon” is distinct from Rennala’s “full moon”. While we don’t have a lot of insight into what Rennala saw in the moon that fascinated her so much, we know Ranni focused on the moon as “cold, dark, and veiled in occult mystery”.

Related to the prior point, it seems all women of the Carian royal family use the moon as a sort of divination for their personal fates, with Ranni deriving her fate from the moon she perceived as “dark and blanketed in rime” (I actually had to google what rime means, apparently it’s an old word for frost).

Nokstella the Eternal City apparently had a moon of its own, a “black moon” that was “the guide of countless stars”. There’s really no more info on this particular moon I can find, but I’ll add my personal interpretations on it below.

So that’s the stuff that seems pretty direct, but that still leaves a lot of room for interpretation when it comes to stuff like the Age of Stars Ending. That said, I think we can piece together some stuff based on the above, though I fully admit that the following is just my interpretation of the prior evidence:

If the moon is used as divination for all women of the Carian royal family, which obviously predates Rennala given the existence of an entire royal family and associated soldiers/spells/legacy/etc., we can reasonably assume based on what we see with Ranni and Rennala that the women of the royal family are shown the moon as children and what they see in it helps determine the path they’ll take in life.

Ranni’s interpretation of the moon certainly matches linguistically with her stated objective of pursuing “the dark path only [she] may tread”. We can get a relatively good understanding of what that path entails from her ending dialogue: namely, the establishment of a new order for the world that both does away with the old entirely and is itself distant from the world in such a way that the people of said world cannot directly observe or interact with it like they could the Golden Order.

Related to the previous point, given that Ranni’s intent effectively means plunging herself into a path of “fear, doubt, and loneliness” due to removing herself and her order from the world (albeit mitigated thanks to the player Tarnished accompanying her), I think it makes sense why her mentor the snow witch warned her to “fear the dark moon”: because the future that dark moon represented was one that would weigh heavily on Ranni.

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60 notes - Posted April 8, 2022

I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about how the new art style in Soul Hackers 2 reflects more modern perceptions of what “the future” will look like as compared to the original game and the broader cyberpunk genre of its timeframe, and how this in and of itself is maybe reflective of how the concept of what is and isn’t “cyberpunk” is inherently fluid and relative to the period of time in which a given piece of cyberpunk media is made, but honestly I don’t know enough about using fashion design to reflect narrative/genre themes so instead I’ll just mark out about the prospect of getting new Kuzunoha clan lore.

62 notes - Posted February 21, 2022

Elden Ring Build Idea: Edelgard

My second idea for and Elden Ring build, which I might like as a strength build even better than my last one. As before, stats and equipment going below the cut due to minor spoilers in the form of item names:

Name: Edelgard

Level: 120 (currently assuming this as the PVP standard, might increase later)

Class: Vagabond

Stats:

Vigor: 40

Mind: 13

Endurance: 40

Strength: 60

Dexterity: 15

Intelligence: 7

Faith: 15

Arcane: 11

Right Hand

Crescent Moon Axe, with Ashes of War: Hoarah Loux’s Earthshaker

Left Hand

Gilded Greatshield, with Ashes of War: Barricade Shield

Clawmark Seal

Armor

Head: Elden Lord Crown

Body: Radahn’s Lion Armor

Arms: Tree Sentinel Gauntlets

Legs: Tree Sentinel Greaves

Talismans

Green Turtle Talisman

Blessed Dew Talisman

Erdtree’s Favor +2

Crimson Amber Medallion

Incantations

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71 notes - Posted March 3, 2022

Marika’s Motivations

Big, big, massive Elden Ring spoilers below the cut. Like, talking about the whole plot of the game kinda spoilers:

Anyway, we know a few things for sure about Marika from scattered bits of lore:

From the description of Marika’s Hammer: “Queen Marika shattered the Elden Ring and Radagon attempted to repair it.”

Hewg and presumably the Round Table he’s chained to were tasked by Marika to “smith a weapon that can slay a god.”

Gideon says that Marika wants the Tarnished to “continue to struggle unto eternity”, and according to his armor he “shuddered in fear at the end that should not be.”

The secret statue in the capital and how the former transforms into the latter for their boss fight show that “Marika is Radagon”.

The real question to all of this is why, and I think the echoes recounted by Melina give us a pretty good understanding of that:

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Obviously a lot of this is pretty vague, but there’s a few things to note:

She clearly planned the creation of the Tarnished in advance, considering she laid all of this out to Godfrey explicitly before removing his grace.

She doesn’t have a high opinion of “blind belief”; she considers it a thing of the past and was interested in learning more about the intricacies of the Golden Order, even if her “comrades” (who she means here is very unclear, but I have an idea I’ll get into later) are hesitant.

She considered Radagon loyal to the Golden Order, but noted that he had “yet to become her”. There’s almost certainly a literal aspect of this, but what I think is most important is that the root of them not being able to unite- either literally or in terms of ideology- was due to differences over the Golden Order.

So, putting this all together I think I know why Marika shattered the Elden Ring. After making contact with the Elden Ring and becoming its vassal, Marika eventually decided to learn more about it instead of just blindly following it. Whatever answers she found, she decided that she wasn’t interested in playing by its rules and so created a plan to overthrow the power at its core, thus putting an end to her own eternal rule. Since she presumably wasn’t able to act directly against the Greater Will, or at the very least was extremely limited in her ability to do so, she planned to empower her consort, Godfrey, to do it in her stead. For this end, she planned to create the Tarnished, a group of people who would be able to fight endlessly and grow stronger in the process, the strongest of which would naturally be Godfrey. With armaments provided by the Round Table, they would be able to crush the Elden Beast- the embodiment of the Elden Ring and the true manifestation of the Greater Will on the planet- and usher in a new age. Her primary opposition was twofold: her other half Radagon was loyal to the Golden Order and so would oppose her goals, and the Elden Beast would naturally punish her for her actions (most evident when you compare the state you find her in with the command grab attack the Elden Beast can use on the player character during their boss fight). Hence the need to recall Radagon before attempting to shatter the two of them and the Elden Ring all at once: this would keep the strongest agent of the Golden Order out of the picture in terms of stopping the Tarnished.

One of the only remaining questions about all of this is how the Night of Black Knives played into her plan. There are multiple points to take into account here, many of which seem to contradict each other:

We learn through Ranni’s quest that the Black Knife Assassins are functionally servants of the Golden Order, considering they specifically target Ranni and her forces for opposing them, but we also learn through that same quest that Ranni is the one who stole the Rune of Death from Maliketh and imbued the blades of the Assassins with its power.

Blaidd was created to serve Ranni by the Two Fingers (servants of the Golden Order) in the specific way that Maliketh was chosen to serve Marika, presumably including killing her should she betray the Golden Order in the same way Ranni does.

Maliketh’s Remembrance states “Marika's sole need of her shadow was a vessel to lock away Destined Death. Even then, she betrayed him.”

The Black Knife Assassins’ armor set states “The assassins that carried out the deeds of the Night of the Black Knives were all women, and rumored to be Numen who had close ties with Marika herself.”

If we go off my previous assessment that Marika planned to betray the Golden Order specifically by creating the Tarnished, then most likely her betrayal of Maliketh was aiding the theft of the Rune of Death. If that’s true, then I can only see two possibly explanations for what Marika intended vis a vis Godwyn’s assassination:

Marika instructed the Assassins to kill Godwyn in order to kickstart The Shattering, thereby creating an ideal environment for the Tarnished to grow strong enough to eventually oppose the Greater Will. Since Marika had yet to openly oppose the Golden Order yet, the Assassins would have had no reason to disobey her.

The Assassins killing Godwyn was punishment for Marika’s betrayal. If this was true, it was likely another motivation for her to go through with shattering the Elden Ring.

87 notes - Posted March 15, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

My experience with SMT alignment discussions.

173 notes - Posted September 27, 2022

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