Destituent Power and Divine Economy in Elden Ring by Simon McNeil

With a single run-through playtime approaching 120 hours, there are few pieces of art I’ve spent as long with as Elden Ring. This 2022 computer game from the famous Japanese company FromSoftware is an expansive open-world fantasy whose story was authored by Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin and its setting is rife with the fingerprints of both.

Miyazaki’s series of games is renowned in equal measures for certain ludic hallmarks and very particular thematic concerns. His work as a director and a writer of games focuses on worlds in which a prior age of heroism has passed. The protagonists of his games arrive not to achieve great works or to construct empires but rather to clean up the mess, stack the chairs and push away the great works of past heroes. They have a fatalism toward matters of destiny and a cycle of history wherein people are cursed to live through Luo Guanzhong’s grand pronouncement, “The empire long united must divide, long divided must unite; this is how it has always been.” If there is hope to be found in Miyazaki’s oeuvre it is in the possibility that this cycle might be broken entirely through the extinguishing of empire.

In this context, the biggest surprise in the pairing and collaboration of Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin is that it didn’t happen sooner, given that the prolific novelist, screenwriter and television producer is best known for his dark fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, a story set in a world where the time of great empires and heroic deeds has come to a close and the question remains open whether it is the fate of the protagonists to reestablish the cycle of heroic dynastism or to bring about a dissolution of power.

One of Martin’s chief tools in A Song of Ice and Fire is the construction of intricate inter-familial drama in order to lend some historicity to the setting of his fantasy. This stood in contrast to much of the fantasy genre that preceded it. In the case of Tolkien, for instance, we get very little outside of the oedipal struggle between Faramir and Denethor to suggest that family is a source of tension at all. Martin uses family drama to ground the action and it is as much in the incestuous dalliances of the Lannister siblings and the arranged marriage drama of Sansa as it is in the back-burner position of magic in the first volume that led to the establishment of A Song of Ice and Fire as a “gritty,” “realistic” or even “problematic” work of fiction.

This has occasionally been to his detriment. It’s not an uncommon criticism of Martin (especially among those who have not actually read him) to suggest he writes with a hand down the front of his pants. And, of course, his willingness to engage with the topic of gendered violence and its relationship to sex has led to countless think-pieces, especially after the salacious framing of sex in the prestige TV show that was created from his work. Most of these complaints are unfounded. Rather, the reason for these family affairs in A Song of Ice and Fire appears to be about establishing a sense of authentic historicity to these characters; Westeros does not exist within a mythic age past, like Tolkien’s work, nor does it exist in a fantastical post-cataclysmic future like the fantasies of Terry Brooks. Instead, Westeros exists in historical time. It is trapped in the cycle of rising and falling dynasties – and the Song of Ice and Fire books constantly remind us that dynasties are composed of normal, flawed, human beings, not prophesied god-men.

Stormveil Castle in Elden Ring

As such, I think it’s a misread of Martin to consider his contribution to be the presence of family dynamics within the demi-gods of the Lands Between in Elden Ring. Certainly it’s easy to look at the incestuous relationship between Mohg and Miquella, the dynastic strife between Mohg and Morgott, or the deep bond of affection between Miquella and Malenia and say, “There’s Martin. That’s him.” But I think this forgets something important about the setting of A Song of Ice and Fire: consider the castle Harrenhal:

“Harrenhal was deceptive from afar, because it was so huge. Its colossal curtain walls rose beside the lake, sheer and sudden as mountain cliffs, while atop their battlements the rows of wood and iron scorpions looked as small as the bugs for which they were named… Harrenhal’s gatehouse, itself as large as Winterfell’s Great Keep, was as scarred as it was massive, its stones fissured and discolored. From outside, only the tops of five immense towers could be seen beyond the walls. The shortest of them was half again as tall as the highest tower in Winterfell, but they did not soar the way a proper tower did. Arya thought they looked like some old man’s gnarled, knuckly fingers groping after a passing cloud. She remembered Nan telling how the stones had melted and flowed like candlewax down the steps and in the windows, glowing a sullen scarlet red as it sought out Harren where he hid. Arya could believe every word; each tower was more grotesque and misshapen than the last, lumpy and runneled and cracked.”

This is the other half of the setting of A Song of Ice and Fire – the half the television show never quite grasped and never quite conveyed – the idea that this cycle of history that plays out in our story is something that lives in the ruins of a mythic age. Lann the Clever, Bran the Builder and all their ilk constructed or stole vast fortresses. Durran Godsgrief wooed a goddess and the Grey King slayed mighty dragons. And they’re gone. Not even part of history so much as what came before history. What’s left are people.

This sense of history as a cycle that takes place in the ruins of an heroic epoch is a shared concern of Miyazaki and Martin. I don’t think it’s productive to attempt to piece out which parts were Miyazaki and which were Martin. In their collaboration Martin and Miyazaki have shown that a game, like a book, has no ontological object and no subject it can be attributed to. “It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it. And the setting of Elden Ring is deeply skeptical of gods and their beneficence.

In fact, when our Tarnished protagonist first sets foot in the Lands Between, we quickly discover that the gods and demi-gods of the land are all shadows of their former selves. The first NPC we are likely to meet, White Mask Varre says, “Are you familiar with grace? The golden light that gives life to you Tarnished. You may also behold its golden rays pointing in a particular direction at times. That is the guidance of grace. The path that a Tarnished must travel. Mm, indeed. Grace’s guidance holds the answers. It will lead you Tarnished to the path you are meant to follow. Even if it leads you to your grave.

Grace’s guidance will reveal the path forward, most certainly. To Castle Stormveil, over on the cliff. The home of the decrepit demigod, Godrick the Grafted.”

Further conversation with Varre will reveal that he considers the Two Fingers – the vehicle of communion with the divine – to be senile and raving. While Varre is not a reliable expositor, the game supports such interpretations as the story continues. The goddess Marika is the one who broke the world and has been imprisoned ever since. The demigods have each subsequently fallen into sickness, madness and solipsism.

This fall into sickness is clearly depicted in the decrepit status of two significant settings of the game: the Erdtree and the Haligtree. These trees, as locations, are the homes of gods and they stand within the game as symbolic avatars of a divine order. The tree makes for a good symbol of order. As Deleuze and Guattari point out “the tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity.” This idea of a centered higher unity is further reinforced when the Erdtree, the central tree from which all others branch, contains a rebis at its heart. But, more to the point, these centralizing indicators of unity are withering. The Lands Between contain massive Ent-like creatures called Erdtree Avatars who, the game tells us, emerged “in the wake of the Elden Ring’s shattering, were determined to protect the withering Erdtree’s offspring.” The Two Fingers, rootlike appendages that spread across the Lands Between, providing communion with the divine are senile and raving. Meanwhile the alternate ordering-tree, Miquela’s Haligtree, is abandoned and rotting, its occupants clinging to the shell of order it provides in the desperate and ultimately unfulfilled hope that Miquela will return to ignite a new order. And so, just as the Lands Between offer us sickening and crumbling orders, they are represented by sickening and crumbling trees. And so our setting establishes, within only a few minutes of a game that can take more than a hundred hours to complete, that we are dealing with a world where there was a great order and that this great order is gone. But an interesting element of the obscure way Elden Ring introduces its story is that it slowly unfolds throughout the length of the game that replacing this order may not, in fact, be a good outcome.

There are six possible endings in Elden Ring. The easiest ending to achieve is to restore Marika, become her Elden Lord (replacing Radagon, who dies at the conclusion of the first phase of the end god fight) and reestablish the extant dynasty. A player, by this point in the story, will have to do that in the full knowledge that it was Marika who shattered the Elden Ring and will likely have encountered rumours that she had a hand in the Night of Black Knives, the incident in which the great rune of death was divided into two components, extinguishing Godwyn’s soul and leaving Ranni a spirit without a body. This assassination was the inciting incident upon which Marika established a reason for shattering the Elden Ring.

Morgott is an Omen, marked by horns and other growths.

Three endings allow for the establishment of a new dynasty wherein the Elden Ring is restored but Marika is not. Instead, various player choices may allow the selection of Godwyn as a successor, ending immortality and reestablishing death within the Lands between; or one can follow Goldmasks’ plan and reestablish the order of the world but with greater constraint, forcing the surviving powers of the world to set down arms via supernatural compulsion. A player may side with the Loathsome Dung Eater to reestablish an order to the world where a foul curse will be inserted into the basis of being. This curse is likely the curse of the Omen that obliterates the division between person and animal and reconnects creation to a kind of primal font of being.

This leaves two endings in which the player does not reestablish the divine order. In one, the Tarnished protagonist will burn away all difference via the Frenzied Flame, collapsing the Lands Between into an undifferentiated dialectical unity. Finally, if a player sides with Ranni the Witch, they can bring about the Night of Stars, in which the throne of the Lands Between is vacated as Ranni, the new goddess and the Tarnished protagonist as her consort depart for a thousand year journey, leaving the people of the Lands Between in an uncertain period in which the great powers of the world have been vacated and replaced with nothing. This ending requires following a long and circuitous series of optional quests that make mandatory several otherwise optional boss fights in order to unlock it. Despite this, it is the most popular ending of the six among Elden Ring players and is generally regarded as “the good ending” to the extent there is such a thing in a FromSoftware game. Of course, ascertaining what constitutes a “good” ending is entirely metatextual. The game tells us that the easiest thing is to restart the cycle of the extant dynasty. The next most difficult task is to establish a new dynasty. Harder still to end the cycle of dynasties either by dialectical processes of unification or by a vacation of power. This may have affected the extent to which players treat certain endings as good or bad. After all, if there’s one thing that almost everybody knows about FromSoftware games, particularly the extended “souls” series of Miyazaki, it is that they are notoriously difficult. Long-term fans of the games often deliberately seek ways to handicap playthroughs and achieving a more difficult ending is often seen by the established fanbase as a good in and of itself, notwithstanding the content of the ending.

But before we use this discussion of difficulty to pivot to looking at key ludic elements of this game I think it’s important to reexamine whether the “Age of Stars” ending is seen as the “good” ending simply because it is one of the two hardest to achieve. After all, I did not have significant experience with the genre called soulslikes, having played perhaps a half an hour of Dark Souls in my life and effectively nothing else in the genre. But after getting into the thick of the story in this game I immediately circled the “Age of Stars” ending as my objective and followed this tortuous questline all the way through to the end.

I think this ending feels like the best one, not just because of its difficulty, but also because it provides the best counter-point to the themes of the story that unfold during gameplay.

During gameplay, each combat encounter awards a player not just with possible equipment, but also with runes, the central mechanic from which all others arboreally branch off. Runes are a manifestation of Grace. Grace appears with a very consistent visual motif across its various manifestations within Elden Ring: it is glowing gold. We see grace via the Sites of Grace, sparks of light that mark checkpoints. Accessing this checkpoint allows players to take certain actions, such as leveling up their characters, talking to their companion Melina, adjusting the allocations of HP and FP, restoring potions, swapping around spells and others. The Sites of Grace also provide directions, encouraging the Tarnished to explore in certain directions that will move them closer to achieving goals and advancing the game story. And Grace, in the form of runes, is used to increase the level of the protagonist, allowing increases to to the eight skills; is used in the leveling up of weapons and spirit ashes, collectable summons who can be called during boss fights and higher-risk encounters to assist the player; and is used for purchasing items from vendors.

The Erdtree provides a sacred basis for economy

When first leveling up, Melina will explicitly say that she will show the Tarnished protagonist how to, “turn your runes to strength,” indicating that there is an active process here. Diegetically, something is being done that exhausts these runes and internalizes their quality. There are two other things that glow gold in Elden Ring beside sites of grace and runes: the Erdtree and spells that deal the holy damage type. Game progression quickly makes it clear that the Erdtree is the source of Grace. It falls from the tree, like manna, and every creature within the Lands Between carries it with them as coinage. But it also reflects divine will by driving characters toward a specific destiny and it reflects divine power both to restore and strengthen but also to smite with some of the most remarkably flashy spells in the game being ones that harness the power of the divine.

But what’s more, this divine aspect can be internalized in order to make the person who does so more akin to a god. After all, the one commonality of all six endings is that the player must kill God in order to achieve them. Who but a god could strike down God? And so Grace may be like manna but it is also like money and it is like qi or orgone in that it is a field of vital energy that suffuses and connects disparate beings.

Let’s quickly talk about I Corinthians 9:16-17. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates it as, “If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! 17 For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission.” But Giorgio Agamben digs into the etymology of this statement to reveal some interesting subtleties missed by many contemporary revisions, saying in The Kingdom and the Glory:

“Let us take I Corinthians 9:16-17: If I preach the Gospel [ euangelizomai], I have nothing to glory of; for necessity is laid upon me; for woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel. For if I do this of mine own will, I have a reward: but if not of mine own will, I have an oikonomia entrusted to me [oikonomian pepisteumai, literally: “I have been invested fiduciarily of an oikonomia”]. The sense of oikonomia is here perspicuous, and the construction with pisteuo does not leave any doubt: oikonomia is the task (as in Septuagint, Isaiah 22:2I) that God has assigned to Paul, who therefore does not act freely, as he would in a negotiorum gestio, but according to a bond of trust (pistis) as apostolos (“envoy”) and oikonomos (“nominated administrator”). Oikonomia is here something that is assigned; it is, therefore, an activity and a task, not a “plan of salvation” that concerns the divine mind or will.”

Agamben leads this idea of economics as being defined as activity or task by pointing to Xenophon‘s early explorations of economics, wherein Xenophon described the economic activity of a ship:

“Once I had an opportunity of looking over a great Phoenician ship [ . . . ] and I thought I had never seen tackle so excellently and accurately managed. For I never saw so many bits of stuff packed away separately in so small a receptacle [ . . . ] And I noticed that each kind of thing was so nearly stowed away that there was no confusion, no work for a searcher, nothing out of place, no troublesome untying to cause a delay when anything was wanted for immediate use. I found that the steersman’s servant [diakonon] [ . . . ] knows each particular section so exactly, that he can tell even when away where everything is kept and how much there is of it [ . . . ] I saw this man in his spare time inspecting all the stores that are wanted, as a matter of course, in the ship.” Agamben tells us that Xenophon is viewing economics as a process of administrative control – an ensuring that every thing is in its right place – and then points back to how Xenophon then associates the careful arrangement of shipboard equipment to a household, “All the utensils seem to give rise to a choir, and the space between them is beautiful to see, for each thing stands aside, just as a choir that dances in a circle is a beautiful spectacle in itself: and even the free space looks beautiful and unencumbered.”

This helps us to work back toward the idea of what a divine economy might look like. It’s not a grand plan for salvation but rather a set of administrative tasks that are entrusted to an administrator. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, and the anonymous dock worker of Xenophon’s account, have both been entrusted with the task of ensuring every thing is in its right place by their master, be that the harbour master or God. Grace, in the context of Elden Ring, doesn’t show the Tarnished protagonist a divine plan for salvation. The Tarnished will ultimately need to surpass any such plan for salvation and choose for themselves how to apply their accumulated Grace. But Grace does direct the player toward a trust – go this way, toward that castle. Within there is somebody who has hoarded Grace. Take it from them. This, of course, leads to an ordering of Grace. The Tarnished, converting runes to strength or strengthening the power of their arms and allies, is taking these scattered wells of Grace contained within enemies in general or within bosses in particular and is ordering it, controlling it. They assign this Grace to become stronger, more clever, more robust, more holy.

Agamben says that “the oikonomia makes possible a reconciliation in which a transcendent God, who is both one and triune at the same time, can – while remaining transcendent – take charge of the world and found an immanent praxis of government whose supermundane mystery coincides with the history of humanity.” We can certainly do the same for the ad-hoc trinity created within Elden Ring between the Goddess and her consort in their rebus and the Elden Beast – the avatar of the Golden Order who resides within them and see how an economy established via the exchange and conversion of the currency Grace creates an economic flow between and from these central characters. However, it is also important to note that Agamben expresses at length how this economic vision of the divine proliferates administrators – both within the Pauline community and within the hierarchy of angels. The economic sphere, where every thing is in its right place, is one of administration and this lends the Tarnished the position of an administrator: perhaps the janitor of the Divine, cleaning up after the conflicts off the remaining trinity and putting those administrators who are disloyal back into check.

But this view only works if we treat the easiest ending of the game as, if not the good one, then at least the right one. And that poses a problem, since both contextual thematic indicators and the opinions of the playing community greatly prefer the Age of Stars ending. But it isn’t anywhere near sufficient to crown the Age of Stars ending as “good” on the basis of its difficulty and the relative comfort of an ending that doesn’t explicitly cast the Tarnished as a figure of apocalypse (as the Frenzied Flame ending does). And so I think it’s necessary, at this juncture, to explore the storyline behind the Age of Stars and to examine how it meshes with the themes we have already identified: the reassertion or breaking of historic cycles, economies of power and the role of administrators, and the question of divine plan and agency.

In order to initiate the Age of Stars ending our characters have to find Ranni. This isn’t too difficult. You simply have to proceed north of the principal legacy dungeon of Liurnia of the Lakes (Raya Lucaria Academy), fight through a ruin of invisible enemies, punch an illusory wall, talk to a troll on the other side who emphatically tells you not to go to an entirely different dungeon, disregard the troll’s advice, and then succeed in traversing this second major dungeon which includes several unnerving enemy types and an admittedly simple boss fight. After this you need to scare away a dragon and then, finally, ascend Ranni’s tower.

At this point she’ll tell you to talk to her allies – the arrogant sorcerer Seluvis, the troll who previously dissuaded you from approaching (Master Iji) and her shadow, fan favourite NPC, Blaidd, a towering wolf-man who asks you to meet him at a ruin far away. Immediately we discover an entirely alternative set of administrators to an entirely different power from that of Marika and the Erdtree. Ranni delegates powers and responsibilities to each of these administrators who, in turn, make use of those powers out in the world in order to achieve her (at this time obscure) objectives. Interestingly this is somewhere Grace will lead the Tarnished. The sites of grace at four separate locations guide the player in the direction of Caria Manor, the dungeon which houses Ranni and her council. But how could this possibly be an assignment of the divine will? Ranni’s goals are antithetical to those of the Greater Will – the power behind Marika and Radagon. But all of the endings require the Tarnished to fight Radagon and the Elden Beast. The trinity within Elden Ring is as broken as the ring itself; Marika and Radagon share a body but not a will.

After securing Blaidd’s trust, the player will explore a hidden city deep underground which Ranni believes contains an object she requires to achieve her objectives. However, the path is blocked. Some busy-work will ensure the player encounters Sellen – an early game NPC tied to Raya Lucaria – and will indicate that Ranni cannot achieve her aims because another demigod, Radhan, is holding the stars in check and Ranni’s fate is tied to it.

This introduces an interesting thread, as fate in Elden Ring is not a static phenomenon. A person might have a fate forestalled by the actions of powerful beings. The divine Grace is furthermore established not to be the only source of power in the cosmos, as Ranni’s power is tied to the stars and is held in check so long as the stars are. This establishes that our divine economy occurs within an open system. Power flows from the Erdtree – but not all power. The administrators of the Erdtree’s might – the demigods – are situated not as inevitable servants of a divine plan, but rather as governmental administrators. Just as the power of a state can never be absolute so, too, is the power of the Golden Order never absolute even when it is overwhelming.

In fact, it is around the time that a player kills Radhan that it starts to become clear that Ranni is explicitly plotting against the Golden Order and that this plot has existed for quite some time. Within the Eternal City of Nokron lies the treasure Ranni seeks, the Fingerslayer Blade, whose item description reads, “The hidden treasure of the Eternal City of Nokron; a blade said to have been born of a corpse. This blood-drenched fetish is proof of the high treason committed by the Eternal City and symbolizes its downfall. Cannot be wielded by those without a fate, but is said to be able to harm the Greater Will and its vassals.” And we should note that the step immediately before gaining access to Nokron and the Fingerslayer Blade is to reestablish Ranni’s fate, forestalled with the halting of the stars. This assignment of fate to forces other than the game’s trinity is a fascinating one because of the implication that there are rival powers. And yet we also know that the Elden Beast was sent in the form of a star. One of the spells used by the Elden Beast contains the following in its item description, “It is said that long ago, the Greater Will sent a golden star bearing a beast into the Lands Between, which would later become the Elden Ring.”

This deepens the question of why Grace would lead the Tarnished to Ranni. If Ranni is plotting against the Greater Will, why would it entrust the Tarnished with finding her? But, recall that Marika is the one who shattered the Elden Ring while Radagon attempted to repair it. The Elden Beast is the Elden Ring. As such it would appear that it is Marika’s guidance which leads a player to Ranni.

No such waypoints guide a player to find the Three Fingers of the Frenzied flame, nor does Grace guide a character to finding the Loathsome Dung Eater, Goldmask or the corpse of Godfrey. Ranni’s quest seems to be unique among possible endings, aside from the base ending, being one the Tarnished is guided to by the direction of Grace. So Marika, who shattered the Elden Ring and, in doing so, struck a blow against the Greater Will and its order, seems to want the Tarnished to find Ranni and her conspiracy.

At the conclusion to There Is No Unhappy Revolution Tari talks about the work of Furio Jesi, saying of the interaction between revolt and revolution that revolt creates “monsters {and} demons that represent the enemy,” and allows the revolutionary class to make use of “the symbols of power which emanate horror and thus deserve to be destroyed by the revolt – even at the cost of the revolt itself being destroyed in turn.” This, perhaps, gives us an ethical basis from which to examine why the Goddess Marika might make efforts to guide a Tarnished to a conspiracy that seeks to bring about her forestalled doom. The Elden Beast, an aspect of the trinity of this game which we are told is an avatar of pure order, is certainly a monstrous symbol of power, after all, so perhaps it is the thing which revolt must strike down even if doing so destroys the one who revolts. God, divided amongst their aspects, has one third of the trinity who is not in harmony and who diverts Grace specifically to conspire for her own destruction so that this order can be put down.

Ranni goes through several transformations throughout the later stages of the quest. She guides the player herself to a second underground city, where the player acquires a doll in her likeness, which can be used to communicate with her; she also tasks the player with killing her shadow. This “Baleful Shadow” is the reason Ranni has disguised herself as a doll; she tells the player, “I turned my back on the Two Fingers and we each have been cursing the other since. The Baleful Shadows… are their assassins.” The Two Fingers are the emissaries of the Greater Will, the force that underpins the Erdtree trinity and that sent the Elden Beast to the Lands Between. This then removes any doubt that Ranni is antagonistic to the powers of the world.

A fight ensues with the assassin, a shadowy doppelganger of Blaidd, granting the player access to a key to a locked chest in Renalla’s chambers that contains a ring. Putting her mother’s ring on Ranni’s finger, whilst on one knee, grants the player completion of this questline and access to the Dark Moon ending after completing the game. Throughout, the player slowly moves from being a servant of Ranni to her open collaborator. It ends with a marriage and an exchange of gifts. You give her a ring and she gives you a very special sword.

Of course this relationship of goddess and consort is an established pattern via Marika and Radagon, and so Ranni’s questline echoes the default ending to the extent that the player chooses to become an Elden Lord as consort to a goddess, albeit a different one who is antagonistic to the Greater Will.

Late in There Is No Unhappy Revolution Tari discusses Subcommandate Marcos. “Reflecting not so much on the famous faceless silhouette that everyone has known over the years, but on his final dissolution as a character, leader, and a global icon from uprisings against neoliberalism which – for a moment – the Zapatista insurrection embodied as if it were a “puppet” to deceive the means of communication. In his farewell communique he wrote: ‘Those who love and hate the SupMarcos now know that they have loved and hated a hologram. Their love and hatred has been, useless, sterile, empty.'” Tari argues that Marcos demonstrates how there is not an incarnated global revolutionary subject. “Once the moment had arrived, Marcos did not wait to be hated and abandoned by the people, as keeps happening to the leaders of the left. Instead, in a unique gesture, he abandoned himself to a self-destituting process and was reabsorbed into the body of the Zapatista community.” Tari argues that a true communism cannot arrive via the constitution of a new institution. Engels opened this can of worms, saying of anti-authoritarians, “When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that’s true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.” But the response from Tari is to agree that you cannot bring about communism by renaming an old institution such as the prison as “the people’s jail.” Changing the name of a thing is not, in fact, changing the thing itself.

And so Tari argues that it is insufficient to constitute a new law. But rather, following Benjamin, you must strike down the law, even revolutionary law, altogether. Constitution must be balanced with destitution. A revolution must, in order to be ultimately effective at breaking the bonds of power, establish methods whereby it can be destroyed and every institution must become contingent, subject to elimination. This radical embrace of the contingent within the political is challenging because many revolutionaries have come to recognize that the institution of the revolution requires protection around which a new state coalesces with institutions as rigid and commanding as those of the state overthrown.

The enemy of Elden Ring is ultimately this very idea of order, of law. The economy of grace is one of entrusted subordinates given power and a duty to execute the commission of law. The Greater Will empowers the trinity of Marika, Radagon and the Elden Beast. Marika is imprisoned for her betrayal of the Greater Will and she delegates power to the Tarnished protagonist to resolve the conflict internal to the trinity. Even Ranni delegates power to the Tarnished right up until the moment they have effectively become her equal through the act of killing God.

Because, of course, the killing of God is an essential part of the storyline of Elden Ring regardless of the ending. The player, to instantiate any of the six possible endings, must kill Radagon and the Elden Beast. What fate this entails for Marika, who shares a body with Radagon, is, at best, ambiguous but it’s likely not good.

If Ranni, as an Empyrian, is to become a god, well, her consort is a being capable of answering and bringing down that specific power. It’s important to note that, while there are other Outer Gods than the Greater Will, and while some endings may involve establishing the emissaries of this or that Outer God as the new order of the Lands Between, Ranni’s does not. The age of the Dark Moon is not the age of a new Outer God but of the absence of one’s ascendancy. So we strike down God and replace it with nothing.

Instead, after killing the Elden Beast and summoning Ranni into the hallow in the center of the Erdtree, she takes the Tarnished and together the new god and the being who killed God set down temporal power and depart to explore the cosmos.

And so Elden Ring’s Dark Moon ending establishes the best thing to do with power is to set it down and walk away from it. A player creates of the Tarnished a revolutionary subject, somebody who goes beyond the Promethean and says it is insufficient just to steal from God but rather one must unseat it. Elden Ring is a game that exists within and in dialog with economies. Economy of Grace, economy of action, economies of effort all play mechanical roles in the playing of the game and throughout the player is encouraged to accumulate ever greater stockpiles of power in order to take on ever greater threats. But, in one of the most difficult to achieve endings, the character then sets all that power aside. Afterall, what use is Grace when God is dead? Instead of instituting a new God and a new Order, they simply leave. FromSoftware wants to encourage players to think positively of difficulty, and so making this one of the more difficult endings is a clue that it is a preferred one, but the game shows us via its landscape and lore how the institutions of power have led to war, ruin and a history which is ultimately one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage at all our feet. And so it becomes even clearer that the best thing to do with power is to disperse it. The gothic sensibilities of Miyazaki and Martin demonstrate an order that should be destituted. But we have the choice to do the easy thing and constitute a new order, to treat changing the name of the thing as changing the thing itself, or to do the hard thing and set down those symbols of power which emanate horror that the player has collected upon their quest to become a God killer. And so, in the end, what is Elden Ring saying?

In the end a true revolutionary must strike down the new institution as it formed. A world of absolute contingency might be frightening and even dark, like a night of the new moon, but this fear of the unknown is preferable to repeating dead cycles.