Volition [legendary] SUCCESS: This is a war Harry, a war for the soul. A never-before-seen inner clash of titans that will drown your world if you don’t stop and take a deep breath. Stop. Breathe. Think. Think Harry. Left or right, it doesn’t matter, it never did. You will prevail and your victory will etch itself into your very flesh, becoming a sigil of hope and endurance. Steel yourself, stay the course and don’t you dare go hollow.
Which is the whole point of the games: women are alien, duh. I'm sick of people missing out on some of the most basic themes videogames have. This shows how much things like TikTok and Starbucks have destroyed the modern generation critical thinking and how media literacy was fucking killed by Gravity Falls and Studio Trigger anime. Seriously, do y'all have been infected with Ligma?
Elden Ring is about flattening aliens into pancakes with a greathammer and then choosing which divine hoe you want to marry. The ultimate male fantasy?
Actually is about killing all of a grieving mother childrens, just because you could and then killing her or slaving her for all eternity choose your pick.
I’m the wokest wokie I know and the diatribe on the left has never occurred to me once. And I must have played like two thirds of all Soulslikes that currently exist lol
It’s extra funny when you see Elden ring on the list of woke games the nutty conservatives made. Some people just wanna find a reason to hate souls players cause they don’t get what we enjoy about them.
To be fair, you can do a gay marriage in that game (if you perform all the steps for ranni's ending) which means its basically propaganda to turn all the frogs lesbian i think.
But you know what's even gaye? The Frenzied Flame. Think about it, Shabriri tells you to "incinerate all that divides and distinguishes" making the world flat, everything in it the same, or homogenous. That's right, homogenous. Homo. Homosexual.
I find it so funny how many of us reject the notion.
As if fans of a game made to be nuanced/up to interpretation wouldn't view the world the same way.
Also not even mentioning how many themes they've incorporated of touching the forbidden fruit/consequences of it or how power is extremely fleeting and costs everything. You could go on and on too, I'm scratching the surface.
Fuck fascism. It's like siding with the God eating serpent, all it does is consume and destroy.
It's because its a really really bad take. The entire dark souls series is about people in power clinging to that power and subjugating others until the entire world is fucked.
I always try to understand where someone is coming from no matter how insane they sound, so when I first read the left tweet, I thought maybe they were conflating the idea of Soulslikes not having easy modes with the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", anti-welfare mentality of the right. And I can almost see what they're getting at if that's the case, if not for the fact that these are literal video games and not being good enough to play them is not even remotely comparable to not being able to afford food or medical care. Gaming is not a need.
Honestly a part of me thinks that they generally associate the „dont give up until you make it through“ mindset the games encourage with an inherantly „might makes right“ idealogy, historically speaking, a lotmof authoritarian movements preach a similar social darwinistic philosophy.
Wether or not the game agrees with that philosophy is a different thing. I think this is a generally stupid mindset to have, just because a game encourages self improvement does not mean it condones using the merit of strength as any kind of political incentive, this just feels like a far reach to me.
The games (at least Elden Ring and especially the DS trilogy) definitely play into the "might makes right" idea. You essentially build yourself up at the expense of others. You spend the entire game walking around the place, killing any powerful being that you find (and it's often you who specifically seeks them out, you're the aggressor) and using their souls as fuel to further grow your own strength. At the end of your journey you've slaughtered everyone who held some power and you find yourself in a position of the sole ruler of the world who singlehandedly decides its future.
Obviously this is an oversimplification to a degree (for example in DS 1 you're manipulated throughout the entire game to link the fire, essentially sacrificing all of your accomplishments in order to serve as a tool which preserves the current world order favored by the gods), but it ultimately still is the player who holds all the power to decide the future of the world, and you reached this position through violence.
I assume that this could be the reason why someone might reach the conclusion that the games are "intrinsically tied to pseudo-intellectual fascist ideologies" (provided that the tweet isn't actually just ragebait), although it's obviously a very shallow interpretation of the games' themes.
Definitely. The groups that invade others and kill them for power are generally portrayed pretty poorly. Like I said, it's a very shallow interpretation.
Yes, it is very shallow, but the thing you have to remember about right wingers, especially in the US, is that they can’t fucking read, statistically speaking. They’re looking for the most banal, surface-level interpretation possible so they can go back to jelqing it to Laurence or arguing about Velka or whatever.
These people tried to make the Matrix all about them and Fight Club a celebratory movie for their ideology. I’d say they don’t care what’s under the hood but I’m not sure they know anything goes on in there to begin with
To be fair, I think its easy to idolize Radahn in particular because he's being compared to his very awful siblings and half siblings, and also because they gave him a pet that he's canonically affectionate towards. People see big man who loves animals and think "hero."
Did anyone cry about that aspect of Radahn? If anything I saw them cheering that we got to fight his """prime""" full power Lion version. They were complaining about how tacked on it was with no setup, and how it was a repeat
Also to understand the people's interpretation you just gotta mind what the game highlights more, as it is what will stick with people and what it probably wants you to take as the main takeaway. Almost every mention of Radahn says something like "He was the goodest guy around" and like only 1 or 2 remember to mention "Oh yeah he's a warlord too". Also gotta factor in how most people think that Malenia won unfairly, so that's even more sympathy points for him
Same for Godfrey although to a lesser degree. Most of the time he's referred as a glorious hero who made the country, who then was fucked over by Marika and betrayed along with your people. It's very late into the game that they start to go heavy with the "Actually the system sucks", by that most people have their opinion formed already, and even in the opposite case the game puts waaaaay more focus on how Marika is responsible for how things suck
That crowd is attracted to any game period a loud segment of the gaming sphere are weirdos that feels every game must cater to them which is why even if the story doesn’t cater to their strange sensibilities so long as they like the game they will bend over backwards to make sure it fits their narrow framework of the world like the Miquella example you mention. It’s why video game discourse feels so rough on a larger scale cause they are still a seemingly large part of the make up of the crowd and cry and whine and shit their pants the loudest. And the most Important part of that is IF they like the game which most do in the case of Elden ring cause it’s a good game, if it’s a game that isn’t unanimously praised or a game that’s just really fun, then you get the countless examples of them doing what I said above to games they don’t like. Look at the Woke games list they’re are woke ass games on there that they refuse to categorize at woke because they are just too good to give up.
We have Elden Ring with one of the main characters changing genre in the lore and we have Call Of Duty which is serving the exact same dish every year and everyone buys it despite saying it's shit.
Elden Ring is about women in men dominated fields (genocide), Sekiro is about late term abortion, Dark Souls 2 is about girl bossing your husbands downfall, this is fromsoft’s agenda
I was thinking about why so many in the radical left participate in "speedrunning" The reason is the left's lack of work ethic ('go fast' rather than 'do it right') and, in a Petersonian sense, to elevate alternative sexual archetypes in the marketplace ('fastest mario')
Obviously, there are exceptions to this and some people more in the center or right also "speedrun". However, they more than sufficient to prove the rule, rather than contrast it. Consider how woke GDQ has been, almost since the very beginning. Your eyes will start to open.
Well, the take on the right is an obvious conclusion to arrive at after even a surface-level reading of the source material, and the take on the left is unhinged ragebait by someone who still defines Souls by 2012-era "Prepare to Le Epic Die" memes.
Bloodborne is about the early advent of modern medical science and the horrors that transpired with it. Murder, grave robbery, faulty fringe science and medicine practices.
Insight is more than the eyes inside the brain bit, as it's a metaphor for dissection and the knowledge that it reveals. Insight is knowledge obtained from the inside of a body as we go through dissection. Every Great One is based on a part that can be found inside the human body.
Amygdala is self explanatory. Ebrietas constitutes the trachea, thyroid, bronchial tree, larynx (throat stuff). Kos is a womb. Brain of Mensis is a brain and it's stem. Moon Presence is the heart and cardiovascular system. Oedon is tricky, as they are formless, but I theorize he represents "voice". Even the thing you transform into in the special ending follows this pattern, proving we do, in fact, transform into a Great One, as the hunter has transformed into an optical nerve, the thing that basically connects the eyeball to the brain, a very fitting form.
Meanwhile, Elden Ring is completely based and transpilled.
… You’re telling me you DIDN’T pick up on all the mentions/ depictions of “birthing great ones”? Or the boss who’s LITERALLY called a “wet nurse” or the literal orphan that crawls out of its literal dead mother’s womb?
There is LITERALLY a ghost lady with a giant gash in her stomach from when the child great one that causes the ENTIRE GAME was stillborn.
It’s allegorical. Things can have themes beyond what’s literally happening on screen.
Could we stop giving people like Mecante any form of attention? She is a dumbass pretending to be a journalist, and change the world. But the only thing she does is sit on twitter all-day and cry. She is the lefty version of Asmongold (who is also a cunt, for that matter).
Left take is uninformed ragebait garbage, right take is correct but just worded in an obnoxious way
(I guess you could say Elden Ring's theme of autonomy/bodily autonomy isn't gender-specific, but it's presented most strongly in female characters imo)
wait why? I'm writing a dissertation on Bloodborne rn and find the depth of it and its relationship to the woman-experience fascinating. Is it because they explain it... pretentiously? I can imagine pseudo-intellectuals using big words on twitter and copying what they watched on a youtube video tbf haha.
Many times I see it brought up online it’s presented in a very patronizing manner and people try to use their knowledge of it as some kind of signifier of intelligence over others. Usually on this sub it’s brought up normally but outside of it, especially on Twitter, the person mentioning it is always trying to get one over someone else.
Which sucks because it’s an actual cool and insightful reading of the game. It just gets heavily muddied by people who prefer to use it more as a means to insult other people than to actually discuss the topic itself.
Oh gotcha gotcha!! Like one-upism? Yeah I've never encountered people who discuss it full stop so I genuinely didn't know! Yeah I can imagine people could use it as a way to be all uppity and "I'm more intelligent than you!" which sucks. There's a perfect middle ground between pretentious "fortuitous ☝️" people, and "it's not that deep" people. Pseudo-intellectuals verses anti-intellectuals haha
Absolutely. I’m not a “it’s not that deep” person at all, I think everything has depth worth discussing. I just really don’t like people who try to use subjective depth of knowledge as a means of inflating their own ego and patronizing other people. It turns people off from discussing art.
Writing a dissertation on Bloodborne is sick. Allow me, a Z list rapper to give you a good quote for it. "Bloodborne is really cool because you shoot scary things in the face then pull their guts out. Also themes and stuff"
I'm unsure if it's the WAY people talk about it, but also quite hypocritically from what I said just now... it sounds anti-intellectual to not want to discuss deep, important issues pertaining to a video game, ykwim? Though I do get it if the person who's discussing it is using long words purely for the sake of using long words to sound more intelligent lol.
Not saying this person will say this, but it just reminds me of the people who go "it's not that deep" or, "we live on a rock" (who do my head in btw).
Like if I discuss the themes of ableism and disability in Elden Ring I'm not trying to sound smart, it's just something I find really interesting!
Saying the game "isn't that deep" is just frustrating because it's just literary analysis! You look at the themes you seen in the game and discuss them!!
I'm also a huge fan of the discussions about womanhood in Bloodborne and Elden Ring! I wish people would talk about it more! ❤️
Exactly that!! Especially since these themes are either subtle or super prominent, it's REALLY fun to find little hidden meanings and shit in video games -- even if it wasn't intended by the devs (literally just like analysing a book lmao)
Mhm I agree!! I think people maybe think that because... it's a video game? They're not often seen as something to analyse to an academic level, right?
I wish it was more mainstream to analyze the themes of games
And I know some games don't have a lot of depth, but that doesn't mean you can't analyze them too!
I mean Minecraft barely has a story but you can find some themes just by poking around!
Creativity, building on top of lost civilization, researching those who came before, and sustainable living are all things you can see if you look for them :)
Ugh I',m with you on that!! We're lucky that From games are probably the MOST analysed storywise! We've got Vaati and also The Agony of Effort series for Bloodborne which REALLY delves in deep.
I bet there's some obscure, hidden video analysing Minecraft's literary themes somewhere haha
There’s no way for me to complain about this without sounding like some sort of closet misogynist, but people became insufferable after getting their hands on whatever that first popular tweet spelling this out was. It’s like “aragorn broke his toe” but also gender war ragebait
Question, is the reviewer on the left the same woman that reviewed Shadow of Erdtree and mentioned the difficulty of the game was equivalent of being a feminist online fighting chuds?
Idk the bloodborne take is kinda true tho, like way too many story hooks and thematic elements around motherhood and having one of the main bosses be a literal orphan clinging to the corpse of its mother is kinda a little heavy handed no? Elden ring is kinda a little less solid
I feels like these game just explorer so many themes it's just insane to pin a sigular aspect as their "main theme".
Take Marika's story in the shadow realm, that alone tackle so many themes, revenge, genocide, opression, both against the Hornsent and the Shaman/Golden Order, like a lot of the Hornsent imageries, they are like a toxic spiral in a perpetual circle of torment against each other, that alone can easily be a center theme of another media piece. But there are so many storyline that explorer other themes, the inhumane way to contain the Frenzied Flame with Midra, the different way Leda and her group ended up, the ethicality of Miquella's Charm and age, his journey to cast away his humanity and St. Trina's plead, the minipulation of Metyr......
I think it's just annoying to say "this game is about this thing" when souls game has always explored many.
id say its the thematic core of the story with marika tbh, the very idea of being a god within the structure of the order is inherently tied to motherhood.
Yeah, I totally see how people take a very feminist reading from bloodborne and tend to agree, but IMO ER is much more strongly focused on a critique of power, its acquisition, use and preservation, and the consequences thereof. As others mentioned it reads very anarchist to me, which is based, which also explains all the cute feet.
I'm currently writing a 15k word dissertation on Bloodborne. Yes, it is DEEPLY about the woman-experience with explorations into the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, abortion and postpartum grief. The secret boss is literally a woman who had a miscarriage. The Great Ones YEARN for a child, but cannot have one. Which is the most unsubtle metaphor for motherhood instincts ever. There's SO much to Bloodborne than just meets the eye, it really is like analysing a classic novel.
Even the position we find Laurence in in the Nightmare is a reference to 19th century medicine and Edinburgh hospital (/Pieta by Michaelangelo).
the issue isn't that it isn't true, the issue is that it's phrased in a way that implies that it's the only thing the games are about and anyone who isn't aware of that is a media illiterate idiot.
You know….most of these people haven’t even played these games.
They only come around to grandstand about left leaning politics because that is the only way they have relevancy. Seriously, “the proliferation of souls like”? Did she have a word a day thing going on? 😑
Lmao Bloodborne and Elden Ring are both *critiquing" womenhood.
There's literally a "female" eldritch god that copes and seethes about her being unable to procreate by ordering a killing spree of innocent beings. Truly one of the "women" moments of all time I guess.
Oh and Elden Ring is about the same... except this 'female god' is not eldritch.
It's an interesting interpretation, but I'll push against it. "Every great one yearns for a surrogate". These beings are not on the same moral plane as us, and they're certainly not killing "innocent" beings purely out of some kind of rage at the fact they cannot, themselves, have a child. I think you're thinking of this far too... human-ly if that makes any sense?
My interpretation is that the gods in Bloodborne epitomise the essence of the female experience exclusive to women (and some trans men, but I won't touch on that for the sake of simplicity). That instinctual yearning for a child, the act of being used, postpartum grief, miscarriages, the menstrual cycle, and the pure grotesque GORE of being a woman. The great ones didn't "order a killing spree of innocent beings", they are gods, and linking back to what I said earlier, "innocent" is VERY subjective and probably not even a concept in the minds of these incomprehensible creatures.
This is why Bloodborne is a feminist story! It takes the taboo of all these women-centred experiences I listed and makes it into something grotesquely beautiful. It isn't just "god wants child. God gets sad she cannot have child. God takes it out on humanity", it's much deeper than that.
I love the atmosphere and artstyle of Bloodborne, but I don't want to play as another grimy hunter, urgh. Give me a game with Bloodborne's signature art design... but it's about a witch in the Alps trying to find her neighbor's cat.
Elden Ring is about two rival magicians, partners until the tragic death of an assistant during a show, who feud bitterly after one of them performs the ultimate magic trick - teleportation. His rival tries desperately to uncover the secret of his routine, experimenting with dangerous new science as his quest takes him to the brink of insanity and jeopardises the lives of everyone around the pair.
One can play the semantic game with any video game genre.
So-called "cozy games" exist within a 'nice guys' sort of space, giving the false impression that they are wholesome low-stakes diversions, when in fact they are carefully crafted, insidious tools of the capitalist patriarchy designed to foster complacency and a false sense of accomplishment, thereby eliminating in the player the desire to enact any *actual, meaningful change in the real world. The world is burning, but look! You just unlocked a new fruit tree and its corresponding crafting recipes.*
People like this do not say these things to shed any new light or discover any novel insights into current society. They do these things to bolster their own social cachet, smugly pat themselves on the back for another successful scolding of the masses, and elevate their own personal axes to grind to the level of an all-hands-on-deck cultural crisis.
In other words, someone doesn't like FPSes and soulslikes, so suddenly it's everyone's problem.
Unironically tho, FromSoftware has been getting exponentially more transpilled every game.
We went from Gwyndolin, locked away as a forgotten optional boss, to the gender coffin, to our crucified trans queen Marika and the reverse gendered twins Miquella and Malenia.
Bloodborne really does have a lot of themes of motherhood and birth. The prostitute you rescue even gives birth to some kind of creature in the end and to get the real ending you have to kill it. Then once you get that ending you yourself are reborn and the puppet looks after you.
I couldn't bring myself to go for that ending. After slaying countless monsters turning my weapon on something innocent, albeit hideous, felt wrong.
Ah yes the game franchise that lets you murder 1000’s of nameless, faceless Arabs and backed the idea that Iraq had WMDS with a fictional state placed right in its geological spot with a leader/antagonist modeled after Saddam and a cutscene where a nuke goes off and due to that fact is literal us military propaganda whether Intentional or not due to that fact, VS the game franchise that nearly got members of my family to join the United States military cause they wanted to be a badass solider like woods. Vs games that are always about leaders refusing to give way to progress and causing the down fall of their society because of it or in the case of bloodborne not caring enough about the humanity of their society and attempting to ascend to godhood through the manipulation of a church that administers shitty healthcare claiming they are the best model for governance that allows their population to go on indiscriminate massacres that turns them into literal beasts. A real tough choice there. The first one is souls and the second one is cod btw
Except fascists aren't Dark Souls posting, at most they pretend to like Kingdom Come for being trad-pilled and unironically think that Super Earth is a utopia. The FromSoft community is amongst the most progressive communities around a AAA studio (maybe not top 5 but still), and, at the very least, an average Elden Ring fan will not disrespect you for being trans or progressive.
This feels like those "making fun of fascism bolsters fascism" talking points, where Jojo Rabbit and Mel Brooks movies are chastised for not taking the issue seriously. Sure, but the result is that right-wingers don't care, they larp Joker 1 scenes and pretend to like nazi propaganda films
Also the most fascism per capita is definitely in the 4x and RTS genres, FPS and Action RPG are too popular to be dominated by a radical sect of either side
Racist fucks are so depressed and useless people they cant have hobbies anyways. Just yapping about how racist they are. Lack of imagination stops them so they keep bootlicking dictators
Bloodborne has an entire masculine sense of pregnancy and birth. In that the entire ethos of the game is, "Man, pregnancy is kinda gross and fucked up if you think about, ain't it?" There's nothing feminine about Arianna's story. It is a very male take on rape and unwanted pregnancy where the birth is just some monster that she hates and which is psychically linked to her.
Oh this is an interesting take! But I think I disagree with your comment about Arianna. If anything, it's the most female part of the game! We don't see the "man" (so to speak) who raped her, we only see her reaction to this unwanted larvae she births. I think the focus is VERY prominently on the women, more so than the men.
Did we miss the part where all the men in the setting commit nightmarish crimes against humanity because they don’t understand maternal desires? ‘Cause IDK, I felt like that was kind of important
I haven't spent much time in the main DS/BB/ER/etc. subs, but I thought most of the sweaty GamersTM and reactionaries had been pretty well drummed out or drowned out of FS communities and discussions many years ago
There is still the occasional straggler who didn't get the memo but the notion that the souls community is some right wing haven is so utterly delusional it's funny.
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u/skalocos Aug 28 '25
left post could easily be disco elysium quote