#and I don't even know if it's unactive or straight up gone

[katyspersonal]

Who is your favorite Elden Ring character?

Oh man.. This is a very hard question to answer because I love a LOT of characters for their own reasons, and it is really hard to pick one. You might as well send me this ask again every weak and there's a chance the answer would be different every time, too, because my thought process and personality are not stable either! (don't actually send it every week xD)

In general, I can learn to love every character after peering very deep within their being and discovering their potential (or nurturing it), but some characters still stand out and have been stable enough as favourites! That'd be Melina, Ranni, Goldmask, Sellen, Nepheli, Alberich, Yura, Eleonora, Ensha, Malenia (+Millicent), Godwyn and Vyke! I am sorta waiting on Miquella/Trina for DLC because I just don't know what to expect considering Martin's involvement!

I think Melina is the closest to what I could have as favourite character! My favs are more or less equally loved, but she left an emotional impact on me like no other character had before and that alone made her stand out already! Heck, I tag posts about her as 'wife' from time to time! You see..,

The full archive of EPIC AND VERY QUESTIONABLY SANE CONVERSATION is in this chain ( x ), but basically I've completely missed the point of Shabriri gaslighting us. The fact he was talking about burning Melina completely flew over my head, mostly because I didn't check right dialogues. The point about how there is no reason to fix the broken world and existence itself is a curse, however.....? (God I still fucking LOVE the "it is not my fault you jump into ‘hurr hurr but mass destruction bad’ instead of actually thinking" gem fdjhfhs). So, when my friends kept arguing with me I could not actually hear them!

And yet, everything changed when it was just Melina being sad with her voice even trembling a little bit if I remember correctly, convincing us to not inherit FF before the door to it, when everything clicked for me and I snapped out of it. There was something in her expressing her feelings on importance of life in spite of despair, pain, oppression and constant resistance that felt bigger and more important than any thoughtful conclusions on nature of life and world itself.

It is already very admirable that she makes a conscious choice to sacrifice herself for this world. It is not blindly following the purpose she was given, but she comprehends what she is doing and why, having a chance to live her own life now that Marika is absent but still choosing not to, so others could. There is no guarantee that Tarnished (or anyone) WILL make the future better, no way to tell what happens after she annihilates herself. She is motivated by hope for this world, and her trust. Hope is almost alien emotion for me, so I am impressed by the character that embodies it so much. And of course with the way she can kick ass, and how she asserts herself that her sacrifice is not OUR choice, I thought she was pretty badass.

All that is already hard qualities to compete with as they are, and they got strengthened by, without exaggeration, a bit of personal experience with the character! And then it gets MORE personal because, ironically, such an important character also dies in a unique way in Soulsborne context. Death is rarely a thing in Soulsborne worlds because of souls, planes of reality and timespace shenanigans, but Melina already had no body and thus burnt her soul. This is a complete annihilation without any loophole and backtrack, yet I don't even have the heart to meddle with this even in my imagination because this is what she decided.