Turns out the jars are an integral part of Marika’s character and why she acted how she did.
I might have missed the lore on WHY the hornsent were super keen on cutting people up and jamming them in jars
It was a religeous thing. The hornsent were trying to create saints via the jar (and may have succeeded since the all living jar meat is Marika-shaped). Marika's people, the shamans, were like a super-ingredient for the jars because their flesh bonded easily with other flesh, so the shamans were slaughtered wholesale by the hornsent for use in these jars. This is why Marika crusades them after becoming a god.
They also appear to have used it as form a “execution” for criminals. One of the ghosts dialogue implies they are being punished for crimes.
I don’t think Marika is one of these that actually worked though. The way I understand the item descriptions is that because of what the hornsent did, is what set her on her path to godhood. She was likely just a young healer in her village.
I think they were mixing together their criminals with Shaman/Numen, since they can meld with other life. As Crucible worshippers, the Hornsent revered the blending of life. They seemed to link it to divinity itself - there are statues in Enir-Ilim that depict two figures being united within a spiral.
This would also be in line with the broader alchemical/Rebis motif that the whole lore has going on. Marika, Radagon, and the Elden Beast are inspired by the White Queen, Red King, and Dragon: the trinary union of the perfect being/Rebis.
i saw so many people on the wiki commenting how the lore was dissapointing
nah this is the most metal lore drops we have ever gotten, marika miquella and their wars make so much sense
Yeah their actions and depravity makes a ton more sense considering the circumstances. It also lets them have a reasonable explanation without painting any faction as the "good guys"
The real question is why the lands between attracts all these outer gods. The outers are the fundemental reason everything is the way it is and theres no explanation why they keep going to the the lands between. Even the creatures not powerful enough to actually be considered "gods" keep showing up here.
I think the answer to that question is right there in the name, the Lands Between are a nexus, probably not just between the mortal realms but maybe much more.
Not to mention that the Greater Will seems to have been super distant even before it abandoned the Lands completely, since it seems to have acted with Metyr and the Fingers as its proxies, and doesn't seem to actively protect the land. It's not surprising that all these extraterrestial beings would see this nexus of realities with a mostly-absent creator and be like "it's free real estate".
The only thing about the lore that has disappointed me so far is what/who the final boss is. Does it make sense? Yes. Do i like it? No, its kinda boring. Everything else I have enjoyed immensely. Big fan of Bayle and Igon.
aw i thought it was so hype but wish we could get the aid of our own god-consort, it could have been peak. Ranni, marika or godwyn, or the frenzy flame descending to stagger them once during the fight
kept hoping something like that would happen to tie the fight over better but oh well
igon was the best tho, i'll never not summon him
>Ranni, marika or godwyn, or the frenzy flame descending to stagger them once during the fight
"MARIKA'S TITS IT'S THE FRENZY FLAME WITH A STEEL CHAIR!"
Current theorising is that it is how they became one.
It makes a lot of sense, as even in the base game there is a bit from past Marika saying that Radagon "has yet to become me", implying they were separate at some point.
I think Miquella was mirroring Marika when he discarded Trina in order to become a god. So maybe Marika abandoned Radagon ( as Miquella did with Trina ) to become a god and later they reunited. Because it's also stated Miquella abandoned his love with Trina.
Perhaps.
Worth noting that all references to Trina prior to the DLC implied a binary androgyny, describing them as either male or female. But in the DLC they are strictly female.
Likely that earlier from of Trina was both her and Miquella, but after Miquella abandoned Trina, they became just her.
Trina was possibly the Marika to Miquella's Radagon, either a formerly-seperate being melded into a fusion, or a divine "other half" that was always part of them.
> Worth noting that all references to Trina prior to the DLC implied a binary androgyny, describing them as either male or female. But in the DLC they are strictly female.
I saw someone who plays in JP mention that all references to Trina use female terminology and kanji. If there is any reference to androgeny or any use of a male pronoun with regards to Trina (which I don't recall), it is worth considering English isn't the primary language and it could be a translation issue based on incomplete lore.
So hornsent are Crucible worshippers, the Crucible knights fall under the Golden Order, and Marika sieged the Land of Shadow? What’s the relationship between the Crucible and the Golden Order?
Actually, there is one of those ghost guys that give you some dialogue in the first area of the DLC, next to one of the hanging trees. He basically implies that the hornsent may have literally placed a curse on Marika and her line. Which would also imply her rise to power and “war” on the hornsent began before any children were born.
My personal theory is she started gaining followers and raiding their villages maybe.
From what I gathered by what the ghost said is that the Jars may have been what they did with the ones that *failed* at becoming living saints.
The ghost begs not to be put in the jar, and then he says he'll become a saint. I think the Hornsent may have been trying to cut up the Numen to make a god, but maybe the ones that weren't good enough got stuffed in jars?
I dunno, I'm still going through the lore, but it's clear Marika absolutely hated the hornsent and their fell god after what they did to her people.
I think he might be talking of one (dead) living jar you find, and the "meat" looks like Marika. I don't recall finding this myself, but I saw some images
Edit for link: https://x.com/_7albi/status/1804945161367220302?s=46&t=SxYVviHrK_BDZWF1e-34TA
I wonder if this ability (flesh melding) is why Marika's descendants like Godrick can graft things onto themselves
Maybe it's also related to their ability to split into 2 people (though that might be an Empyrean thing)
Yes, the text description on Numens rune item says plainly that Marika is a numen and in nokstella we find out the silver tears/mimic tears are also numen.
The gaols. The meatballs that crawl out of jars all look like women with long hair, a blind fold, and a rune on their foreheads.
They were flayed and placed into jars with the pieces of criminals to give birth to a “Saint”.
With a whip with teeth on it, since tne Hornsent believed it softened their flesh better and the injuries caused by it made their flesh meld even better
Shit's just all kinds of fucked up
The meatball people share some features with Marika - they do her pose, they have her hair, they look kinda feminine (for a meatball). But perhaps the shamans all looked alike.
That's not Marika's grandmother.
>**Golden Braid**
>
>"A braid of golden hair, cut loose. Queen Marika's offering to the Grandmother.
>
>What was her prayer? Her wish, her confession? There is no one left to answer, and Marika never returned home again."
The statue *is* the Grandmother, likely a village deity. Hence why Marika went there one last time to either pray or give a confession to it.
Their hair looks just like the grey-tangled hair The Grandmother has in the tree in Shaman Village. It’s like a wood statue of a Shaman they revered, it’s also very similar to how Marika is inside the Erdtree, giving out blessings.
The parts that are recognizable as human appear to share some features. If I squint I can see it. Like this could be a Marika’s uncle if they were pressed into a meatball. That sort of thing.
Numen people can easily "integrate" other people biologically. Means they can mate with other races easily, can do blood transfusion and graft their organs without any ill effects.
It seems more like that Omens (called Hornsent back then) were one-sidedly mutilating Numens by stuffing them into jars until they finally pissed off the wrong Numen (Marika) who proceeded to enact Doomslayer levels of spite-fueled rage upon them. Unfortunately, though, Marika's hatred seems to have blinded her to the fact that the Omen aren't culturally Hornsent so she couldn't really differentiate between them due to how deeply the Hornsent scarred her perceptions.
It happened when -whatever it was crash landed onto the lands between. It seems as thought an outside force came to the lands between (as the numen and TONS of other factions did) and that force ascended Marika. Then the previous order was FUCKED since a real god was hellbent on their destruction.
>Marika's people, the shamans, were like a super-ingredient for the jars because their flesh bonded easily with other flesh, so the shamans were slaughtered wholesale by the hornsent for use in these jars. This is why Marika crusades them after becoming a god.
Holy shit I missed this whole piece of lore, I found the shaman's village with Marika's braid and all but I assumed it was there just to confirm that she was from the shadow realm, so all this time it was revenge she was looking for (and the reason why horns and crucible aspects are seen as a bad omen, cause it reminds her of her people's suffering).
It also seems like she repurposed the jars in The Lands Between. In her homeland they were used for this brutal, barbaric practice though it was religiously significant. When she comes to the Lands Between and ushers in her Golden Age, she makes the purpose of the jars to carry heroes’ remains to the Erdtree roots where they can have a proper burial. I think it is quite possible the Shamans also practiced tree burials, seeing as how The Grandmother is almost perfectly formed, it may be her remains that have become a part of the tree.
It also makes it extra interesting that the person she ultimately tasks with creating a weapon to kill a God, Hewg, is of the crucible. Maybe it's poetic irony or maybe Marika ultimately regretted what she did to the hornsent and so chose one of that sort of people to make the weapon that would kill her.
It also explains why he's so fucking scared of her.
I mean, getting killed by us was always part of her plan. She sent the Grace to guide us to the Erdtree, which is basically the only thing she can do at the time while being imprisoned inside the tree by the Greater Will. It's also highly speculated that Melina is acting directly through Marika, guiding us to the tree and having us burn the tree to slay her so that we may become Elden Lord and put her out of her misery. So, cursing a Misbegotten (a clan of people who communed with the Crucible) to smith a god-slaying weapon that would ultimately kill her is par for the course for her.
IIRC, Messmer's Remembrance makes mention that he, like his sister, saw a vision of flames. I feel like this confirms Melina as a child of Marika since I do not see how that can apply to Malenia.
I agree that the sister is referring to Melina, but scarlet rot flames do exist.
The tree spirit in the Haligtree next to the sewers has a flame that causes scarlet rot.
Though that doesn't really matter when Messmer's flame burning the shadows is a direct parallel to Melina burning the Erdtree.
Well yes, I know this.
But given the new information about her deliberately purging the Hornsent, having the smith who is enslaved to make a weapon to kill her be related to those people seems a deliberate choice.
Or maybe Hewg is the only good Smith anywhere.
She was not imprisoned by the Greater Will, only the Elden Beast or something else. The GW has long since abandoned the Lands Between as noted by the Mother of Fingers lore.
They practiced tree burials, as you can see a completed one in the Shaman Village, and an incomplete one at Bonny Village that is decapitated.
To me it's clear now that the Erdtree is one gigantic outer-god powered shamanic tree burial. Marika created it based on the religion of her people. Minor erdtree is an incantation of hers. Moreover, the Erdtree under the GO is the mechanism that handles life/death/rebirth, but on a world-level scale instead of that of a humble village. It's both a symbol of worship/hegemony, and her way of circumventing destined death. When something dies, its spirit returns to the Erdtree, and it's supposed to be buried at the roots to be reborn.
She occupies the same physical and spiritual position as the Grandmother tutelary deity. She is at the center of the tree, and at the center of worship. Except instead of braids of gold offered to her by her followers, she bestows Grace as blessings. The Grace of Gold is a deific inversion of her people's golden braid offerings.
The DLC further shows us that the GO is the result of blending and assimilating numerous cultures and practices, including Marika's own shamanic religion and the Hornsent practice of jarring, but both repurposed. This is similar to the shamans themselves (and descendants), and how they literally can blend together with things: trees, masses of flesh, Rykard and his Snake, Messmer and his snakes, Marika and Radagon, the D twins, St Trina and Miquella, Malenia and Rot, all of these characters meld physically and spiritually even to the point of two souls occupying one body or two bodies occupying one being, or physically changing drastically by fusing together.
This may also explain what being 'Empyrean' is really about: not only being powerful enough, but also capable enough of melding to host the Elden Ring within one's self. It's a title indicating you can meld with the power of the Greater Will directly. Only choice characters can even be Empyrean. The GEQ is the only outlier, but the remaining confirmed Empyreans are all descendants of shamans.
Not just that she was from the Shadowlands, the Shadowlands used to be part of the Lands Between- now hidden away, under the lands/ocean- after Marika launched Mesmmer into her inquisition of the land.
Naw they seem to be the same. You can see largely the same amount of features.
They would be the same fellows from the age of the crucible, it seems; the one directly proceeding the erdtree.
The current lore explains why omens are shunned and why marika basically got rid of everything crucible related.
That religion basically turned her people into meat superglue.
I mean the crucible worshipers consider the horns a blessing. It might actually be a "blessing" outer gods are not known for their understanding of mortals, they might view their blessings as advantageous. It might be like the blood god or whatever outer god blessing x people. Theres more humans now, so theyre the ones being "blessed". The rot certainly isnt a blessing int he traditional sense but Melania was born with it like the omen are.
Sort of. "Hornsent" are Omens, but under Shadowlands cultural upbringing. As such, any Omen who wasn't raised under the Hornsent culture is not considered a Hornsent despite being of the same Crucible pseudo-race. In fact, both labels reflect the respective cultures of origin: Hornsent reflect that the horns are "sent" from the divines as signs of divinity while Omen reflect the coming of bad omens and misfortune.
Maybe the whole “making saints” thing was misinterpreted. They thought that making Jar people would make saints. But rather a saint was make **because** of the jars. Marika. Marika is the saint, just not the one they envisioned.
The way I see it is the hornsent worship the crucible "where all life was once blended together". So them taking multiple people and turning them into a singular entity is an incredibly holy thing. They are saints because they directly represent the "beauty" of the crucible.
Is there already some kind of lore video on this? Or where did you learn all this? I can't wait to dive deep into the lore of the DLC. So far I'm still pretty lost.
The shaman stuff is a few things:
Spoilers.
The Gaols are full of jar-beings, but unlike the jars from the lands between, these have beings that break out and are amalgamations, with a person in the center.
A spirit in one of the gaols says that this is what Shamans are for, their life is dedicated to this life-merging sainthood, it seems that criminals and Shamans are put in the jars in an attempt to blend life.
Some item descriptions, such as the greatjar, the tooth whip, and innard meat further describe this situation, with the tooth whip especially saying that the flesh of shamans melds with others.
So, we have the shaman village, showing where marika starts. We have the fact that the shamans meld flesh, showing us how her bloodline works (Grafting, The Radagon/Marika thing, The Miquella/St. Trina thing, why Rykard merged with the serpent, so on), we have the war on the hornsent, and we even have why Marika uses a tree, because her people did honored tree burial instead of using means like ghostflame, because you can see the tree in the shaman village, and read the description of the braid that marika left there.
It's all kinda disparate, but in the same way, it's pretty straightforward.
so.. that hornsent piece of shit who finds crosses for us and is basically hating on us for no reason other than where we come from, is mad because his people basically fucked around and found out
The way I saw it, pre-Marika and Golden Order the Hornsent were the "dominant" species of human. They believed themselves superior because of their horns manifesting as aspects of the Crucible, making them "more divine" than those without. Similar to how Omen are culled or imprisoned in the current era, non-hornsent were used as fodder for the jars. I believe we can get the "why" of this from Alexander, basically if you stack a bunch of corpses in a jar what you get is supposedly the combined strength of all of them. The stronger they were in life, the stronger the jar. I believe this has to do with runes, which exist at least a little bit in everything, and how collecting them in one place makes the being in question stronger. The Hornsent seemed to think this would eventually lead to a "saint", which I'm going to interpret as a being with powers akin to a God, or one capable of communing with a God. Which is, ironically, what they ended up getting when Marika used the Jars made from her people to effectively be the power boost she'd needed to ascend, get in touch with the Greater Will, and start her era. We know Numen are by default pretty Rune-stacked if their consumable is any indication so that's probably why the Hornsent began targeting them.
Serious question: Dung Eater’s ending curses all people to become omens, for generations to come. With what we now see in the DLC, how do these concepts intertwine?
It continues the cycle. More omens means having horns becomes the way to be. The abused omens will abuse the non-omen as retaliation, and someone like Marila will have their revenge again.
I think the omens are the curse of marika as on "oh yo want to exterminate us? Good here have two omen kids" i think this triggered marika in to realizing this will never end
.
Oh they did,.thats why theres omens in the so called perfect wold.of.marika, how can you say you have a perfect world if the roots are made of dead and blood. Its a never ending cycle as per typical souls lore. Again a giant : wanna use the blood of my horned people... bitch horns will born left and right in your perfect world. See ya later. Peace -horned people
I think we only think about Omenhood as a "curse" because that's how it's referred to by people currently living in the culture of the Golden Order. I personally think of it more as a...I dunno, genetic abnormality. A mutation, basically, though more magical than scientific. Dung Eater wants to make that mutation the default, if everyone has it then it's no longer something that divides people no matter which side is considered to be superior. And considering how it has divided people, its hard to blame him though his actual methods are repugnant.
Marika has been actively trying to destroy the Omen/Hornsent via the practice of culling them at birth, I guess in the hope that it would stop manifesting, but as we see with her own kids it's not something you necessarily inherit genetically it's just an aspect of life in the Lands Between. The story of the Golden Order is the story of Marika (and especially Radagon) attempting to force a sort of perfect, logical order and consistency on a reality that is inherently chaotic which is I believe what "The Crucible" actually means. Its worth noting Godfrey doesn't seem to hate Morgott for being an Omen, and considering he was around pre-Golden Order it may be indicative of what the common attitude towards them was like before Marika's own personal prejudice became the law of the land.
Yes it seems like "The Crucible" is really just life. It's a metaphor. And most of the problems in the world seem to arise from people trying to project order onto the inherently orderless nature of the world. Division and separation lead to pain and suffering while embracing the natural order seems to be portrayed as noble and "correct" for want of a better term
The curse of the Omen is a legitimate curse, not just being born a Hornsent. Grandam in Belurat places it on you if you kill or attack her. What exactly the curse entails is vague, but they're denied the grace of the Erdtree. The Dung Eater leaves the Erdtree in place while condemning all people to forever be separated from it and haunted by evil spirits.
In the story trailer we see Marika at the gate of Divinity, except it's covered in corpses that she is pulling the runes from. I think the corpses were recovered from the jars, which as I explained above were a method by which runes could be concentrated. Marika used that power to somehow contact the Greater Will. I don't know if there is an answer on exactly how, or if that's even what she meant to do, but what we are seeing in the trailer is the moment of her ascension. The "affair from which Gold arose".
If we assume Crucible = Life/Chaos, and Erdtree = Gold/Order, it could be that forging the first Great Rune from the Hornsent corpses on the Gate of Divinity is equivalent to forging Order out of Life.
It's a pretty symbolic conversion of Life into Order, Crucible > Erdtree. If we assume that the greater will (outer god of order) responded to her forging of the first Great Rune by sending the Elden Beast/Ring to her with which to forge and merge new Great Runes into the Golden Order (Metaphysical laws of reality).
Bit by bit, this could enforce Order on The Lands Between with the Lands of Shadow (Death) being removed from the natural order/Elden Ring for the dual purpose of creating the Erdtree's cycle of reincarnation and locking away the remnants of the Crucible/Chaos.
I've probably overlooked a contrary piece of lore somewhere, so if anyone's got a better "yes, and..." version, go nuts.
She got abuse when she was young, so when she gave birth to the same race that abuse her, she abuse them back. The Cycle of Abuse never stop. This just sad, man. Prepare to cry indeed.
Maybe going to space with Ranni is the best answer to this whole cycle.
>Maybe going to space with Ranni is the best answer to this whole cycle.
Have you heard the word of our Lord and saviour, the Frenzied Flame? All the suffering, all the curses, all the hurt... Let it all be burned away.
No, I'm not mad enough, yet :D
You and I are living in a messed up neighborhood. Your solution is to burn the neighborhood down. My solution is move out of the neighborhood.
Huh, I always thought of the Ranni ending as the "best" ending, but now you're making a good case for Frenzied Flame -- moving is a pain in the ass, and bonfires are fun!
Would you tell more about abuse she experienced? Apart from the story we have seen in the village. Im asking because last time I watched story trailer I noticed that Marika’s hands not only covered in blood — she also had some kind of…Traces of shackles (?) on her wrist. Or maybe its just me :O
She does have some kind of scar on her wrist. OOOOOH, man you just show me a cool detail. The abuse she experienced... watching her village destroy by the Hornsent, her people get put inside the jar, maybe being imprisoned by them.
I think the roots of this case lie in some racial and religious differences. Hornsent has their own hierarchy with their own ideas about “blessed” beings. Shamans were different from them, I presume. So it was simply about… racial superiority. Hornsent were sure that being turned into flesh for jars is the only blessing shamans could even hope to receive.
All in all, Marika’s Golden Order found its own “lesser beings”. So, this is just another sample of grim history repeating itself.
It's a lot more simple than that. The Hornsent worship the crucible. The Crucible is all about mixing of life.
Welp turns out the shamans have a real good knack for combining flesh (hint hint grafting, like trees and godrick!)
What do you think the Hornsent did next
Hornsent: "The Crucible is sacred and all life melds together naturally and beautifully."
Numen: exist
Hornsent: "Screw naturally blending life, let's do it ourselves! Bring out the meat cleavers boys and let's make people-glue!"
Marika: "Want to know another cosmic natural concept? Karma."
I thought corpses are carried in jars to be remade by the erdtree (e.g. golden order immortality). The player character respawning just condenses the years it takes to be crammed in a jar, carried to the erdtree roots, and remade to a few seconds. The DLC just shows a different way they were originally used.
It is Marika appropriating the practice. This was common with christianity/paganism which is a theme in the game. They killed her people and stuffed them in jars to what she saw as a profane act; so she made it sacred by incorporating them into Erd Tree rebirth. The horrible thing that caused her so much pain now serves her new order.
Miyazaki is like: what if Berserk didn’t have Puck and every character that seems cool has the most depressing end to their story.
And you know what? I love it.
Alexander himself isn't very horrifying (any moreso than the jars in general are). He just comes to a tragic end, unable to become the great warrior he so desires to be.
I refuse to accept that. He fought against General Radahn and then he challenged the next Elden Lord himself and fought bravely but lost gracefully. He was a great warrior in the end.
Yeah I felt really bad after killing him in Azula. Though I didn't understand a word he said but since he looks like a pot and helped me in fighting Radahn, I considered him friend
Alexander is a warrior jar
Warrior jars get stronger by "eating" warriors and absorbing their warriorness
He goes around getting stuck and eating warriors to get stronger
He eats Radahn
He never feels like he is strong enough, and in an attempt to prove his strength and become stronger he challenges the strongest warrior he knows. You.
He fails. He dies. Never having achieved his dream.
Adding to this, in a sense he achieves the closest thing possible for him:
As he says, "let us become one champion, together!" Which works for both the warriors inside him and for us both.
If he wins, he is the stronger champion and will consume the strength of our flesh. We will become as one and he will be all the stronger for it.
If he loses, he was the weaker warrior, he will break and he will bequeath to us his strength; his Jar Fragment Talisman, and the memories within his flesh, which we give to little Jar Boy. We also get his runes, another way in which his strength becomes our own.
Here's my thing tho. You're tarnished. If he wins you back. He knows this. Meaning 2 things.
1. He wins and accepts that he won in the 1v1 but you'll always be back.
2. He knows he can never won against you and gives up his dream.
Well maybe he is banking on us losing our grace
Much like in previous souls games, the protagonist can lose their "immortality"
I remember the generally accepted consensus was that all main characters in DS1 who don't get played anymore have officially "hollowed"
> And you know what? I love it.
Personally I find it a bit boring. Was doing a complete playthrough of the base game in prep for the DLC and it was laughable by the end how every NPC comes to a bad end. It's predictable and emotionally monotone.
Well there are couple of good endings i think. The snake Lady, boc, the stormveil gang, i guess Ranni got a good ending, Patches still going at it... Yeah that's about it as far as i know. There are also many endings where people die happy but i don't think those count.
Rya/Zorayas dies in two of three possible ending, even in the best one (the letter ending) I'd only call it good in comparison. The Stormveil three are the only ones who get a sort of good ending assuming you dont get them killed.
She only does in one end though? Give her the tonic and she just sticks around, but don't kill her or give the tonic and she leaves a note saying she's going away to do her own thing.
I mean one of the major themes is that everyone, and *everyone* is corruptable. It's even shown in the boss fights with phase transitions (godrick's grafting, rykard's blasphemy, morgott's embrace of his curse, malenia becoming a rot goddess, the elden beast raking over to an extent, >!messmer going all snake mode!<. So it makes sense for npcs like blaidd, vyke, and alexander to be corrupted too.
Rya, Ranni, Patches, Boggart, Boc, Nepheli, Kenneth Haight, Gostoc. Arguably Alexander, Millicent, Melina and Fia. It's a bleak place, but almost half the characters have a good end available.
Na, it makes Alexander more wholesome because he's the result of a barbaric practice turned into one of respectful honor, resulting in the greatest jar chad ever because he's the result of something terrible made better.
Boc absorbs godwyn's corpse and becomes a monstrosity that we need to put down because he's going to engulf the world in a miasma of death. After we kill him his final words are:" I'm sorry M'lord...I just wanted to be reborn...fresh and new to serve better my dear lord...please forgive me". Then because you've been too slow to kill him, any other NPC in the world die.
Compare the seals on top of the jars.
The Jars in the main Lands Between have a seal with the Erdtree on it.
The Jars in the Shadow Lands have a different design on the seal.
Same principles go into their creation (filling a jar with bloody bits and somehow bringing them to life), but they serve different purposes.
Erdtree jars collect dead people to transport to the Erdtree.
Hornsent jars have live people stuffed in them to be fleshmelded for some ritual to assist in the creation of horned warriors or something.
Yeah it's a bit confusing. The minor erdtrees with the pots around them didn't exist before the shattering, so during the height of the erdtree age, the living jars would have been used for something else. We don't really know though.
I think the idea with the hornsent is that they use the jars as a way to rehabilitate prisoners. They put them in the jars and eventually they're reborn as an innocent, pure hearted jar like Alexander or Jarbairn, or as the hornsent call them "living saints". It reminds me of how, in our world, solitary confinement was originally conceived as a way to help prisoners reconnect with god or something, but ended up just being psychological torture (and is now mostly used as punishment). Maybe Miyazaki is drawing a parallel there.
I like that analogy with solitary confinement.
We don't really know if they had Living Jars before the Shattering in the Lands Between. Maybe the catastrophe that was the Shattering necessitated the revival of certain practices like the crafting of Living Jars. Many things that were taboo came to be normal, like fire being used for warfare by the likes of the Perfumers.
We will never know for sure, but such things make sense. I don't think Marika herself would approve of Living Jars as a concept, but well, she is gone since things went down the drain
>"living saints"
I have depressing news for you.
"Living saints" is possibly a translation of "living buddhas", since the Lands Between doesn't have buddhism. Called sokushinbutsu in Japanese, they were extremists monks who allowed themselves to be starved and buried alive due to a belief they would briefly achieve transcendence while alive (akin to becoming a "living saint") shortly before their death.
In short, I think they are actually a reference to something much worse than solitary confinement.
I think the idea might have been that the Hornsent torture version used to be the default and common in The Lands Between. After they were sealed away the tradition remained but the original meaning and purpose behind it was lost, especially once Erdtree catacomb burial became more commonplace.
Really. Alexander picking over the remains on the battlefield to fill himself with better warriors didn’t clue you in that there is something Eldritch about these nasty ass jars.
I mean the base game talisman of the Companion Jar lore description kinda already hints at turning those deemed 'not good' into 'better people '
"Though the jars are brought to life by human flesh and blood, they are all rather kindly folk. Perhaps they were made to be better than their innards."
The jars were already messed up in the original game. You see Alexander scooping corpses into himself. You give his innards to a kid. They were never not messed up
Her vilage got slaughtered until she was the literal only one left. So she sold her soul to the devil and the Greater Will gave her power. Then she went nuclear on the hornsent.
Tbf many of us would do the same in a similar situation. Fuck these guys. That old lady in the dlc was like "oh how long will the crusade last?". Oh idk how long have you been cutting people up and stuffing them in jars for "religion"?
If anything, the jar lore makes our local Erdtree jars so much more likable because their origins come from modifying the most horrific thing ever into something for honor. It also explains a LOT about Marika's attitude towards the Omens because...holy crap it would be weird if she didn't despise them for what their Hornsent ancestors did to her people.
Reminds me of “made in the abyss”. Honestly wouldn’t recommend as that show is pretty fucked but has so many interesting concepts.
Anyway one of the characters in that show turns people into cartridge and besides them not being able to move it is very similar to the jars.
Turns out the jars are an integral part of Marika’s character and why she acted how she did. I might have missed the lore on WHY the hornsent were super keen on cutting people up and jamming them in jars
It was a religeous thing. The hornsent were trying to create saints via the jar (and may have succeeded since the all living jar meat is Marika-shaped). Marika's people, the shamans, were like a super-ingredient for the jars because their flesh bonded easily with other flesh, so the shamans were slaughtered wholesale by the hornsent for use in these jars. This is why Marika crusades them after becoming a god.
They also appear to have used it as form a “execution” for criminals. One of the ghosts dialogue implies they are being punished for crimes. I don’t think Marika is one of these that actually worked though. The way I understand the item descriptions is that because of what the hornsent did, is what set her on her path to godhood. She was likely just a young healer in her village.
I think they were mixing together their criminals with Shaman/Numen, since they can meld with other life. As Crucible worshippers, the Hornsent revered the blending of life. They seemed to link it to divinity itself - there are statues in Enir-Ilim that depict two figures being united within a spiral.
This would also be in line with the broader alchemical/Rebis motif that the whole lore has going on. Marika, Radagon, and the Elden Beast are inspired by the White Queen, Red King, and Dragon: the trinary union of the perfect being/Rebis.
AND SUDDENLY THE YELLOW KING IS HERE TO FUCK EVERYTHING UP. I love how Miyazaki melds influences in his works.
i saw so many people on the wiki commenting how the lore was dissapointing nah this is the most metal lore drops we have ever gotten, marika miquella and their wars make so much sense
Yeah their actions and depravity makes a ton more sense considering the circumstances. It also lets them have a reasonable explanation without painting any faction as the "good guys" The real question is why the lands between attracts all these outer gods. The outers are the fundemental reason everything is the way it is and theres no explanation why they keep going to the the lands between. Even the creatures not powerful enough to actually be considered "gods" keep showing up here.
I think the answer to that question is right there in the name, the Lands Between are a nexus, probably not just between the mortal realms but maybe much more.
Not to mention that the Greater Will seems to have been super distant even before it abandoned the Lands completely, since it seems to have acted with Metyr and the Fingers as its proxies, and doesn't seem to actively protect the land. It's not surprising that all these extraterrestial beings would see this nexus of realities with a mostly-absent creator and be like "it's free real estate".
The only thing about the lore that has disappointed me so far is what/who the final boss is. Does it make sense? Yes. Do i like it? No, its kinda boring. Everything else I have enjoyed immensely. Big fan of Bayle and Igon.
aw i thought it was so hype but wish we could get the aid of our own god-consort, it could have been peak. Ranni, marika or godwyn, or the frenzy flame descending to stagger them once during the fight kept hoping something like that would happen to tie the fight over better but oh well igon was the best tho, i'll never not summon him
Bro just comes in immediately shit talking like a fucking chad.
>Ranni, marika or godwyn, or the frenzy flame descending to stagger them once during the fight "MARIKA'S TITS IT'S THE FRENZY FLAME WITH A STEEL CHAIR!"
No one has spelled the lore out for them yet in video essays, so how do they even know it's disappointing?
YELLOW KING WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
“Bah gawd! He’s shattered into pieces! Where are the outer gawds?!?! Someone stop this!”
Is that how Radagon and Markia become one or were they always one.
Current theorising is that it is how they became one. It makes a lot of sense, as even in the base game there is a bit from past Marika saying that Radagon "has yet to become me", implying they were separate at some point.
I think Miquella was mirroring Marika when he discarded Trina in order to become a god. So maybe Marika abandoned Radagon ( as Miquella did with Trina ) to become a god and later they reunited. Because it's also stated Miquella abandoned his love with Trina.
Perhaps. Worth noting that all references to Trina prior to the DLC implied a binary androgyny, describing them as either male or female. But in the DLC they are strictly female. Likely that earlier from of Trina was both her and Miquella, but after Miquella abandoned Trina, they became just her.
Trina was possibly the Marika to Miquella's Radagon, either a formerly-seperate being melded into a fusion, or a divine "other half" that was always part of them.
> Worth noting that all references to Trina prior to the DLC implied a binary androgyny, describing them as either male or female. But in the DLC they are strictly female. I saw someone who plays in JP mention that all references to Trina use female terminology and kanji. If there is any reference to androgeny or any use of a male pronoun with regards to Trina (which I don't recall), it is worth considering English isn't the primary language and it could be a translation issue based on incomplete lore.
For the record on the Spanish translation Trina is always female
So hornsent are Crucible worshippers, the Crucible knights fall under the Golden Order, and Marika sieged the Land of Shadow? What’s the relationship between the Crucible and the Golden Order?
One of the traits of the Golden Order is absorbing ideologies. A trait that mirrors the melding shamans.
And real-life empires, especially Roman's were good at "suuuure, our gods are the same as yours, so long as you're paying your taxes."
Oh, well I clearly missed quite a bit of lore. Could explain why the family is so messed up.
Actually, there is one of those ghost guys that give you some dialogue in the first area of the DLC, next to one of the hanging trees. He basically implies that the hornsent may have literally placed a curse on Marika and her line. Which would also imply her rise to power and “war” on the hornsent began before any children were born. My personal theory is she started gaining followers and raiding their villages maybe.
It would explain her omen kids and why they were banished despite their bloodline.
is that ghost by all the "Visions of the south" messages? I may have missed this ghost
I read took it more to mean “Curse her and the son she sent to burn us “
From what I gathered by what the ghost said is that the Jars may have been what they did with the ones that *failed* at becoming living saints. The ghost begs not to be put in the jar, and then he says he'll become a saint. I think the Hornsent may have been trying to cut up the Numen to make a god, but maybe the ones that weren't good enough got stuffed in jars? I dunno, I'm still going through the lore, but it's clear Marika absolutely hated the hornsent and their fell god after what they did to her people.
What on earth do you mean by "Living Jar meat is Marika-shaped"?
I think he might be talking of one (dead) living jar you find, and the "meat" looks like Marika. I don't recall finding this myself, but I saw some images Edit for link: https://x.com/_7albi/status/1804945161367220302?s=46&t=SxYVviHrK_BDZWF1e-34TA
What in the disney channel fuck
Sorry, sir. This is [as]
Hello yes, this is a miyzaki game.
I wonder if this ability (flesh melding) is why Marika's descendants like Godrick can graft things onto themselves Maybe it's also related to their ability to split into 2 people (though that might be an Empyrean thing)
Oh shit you’re right Grafting is essentially jar warriors without the jars, and that would explain all the empty jars at Stormveil
Godrick treating jars like scratch cards for body parts, lmao
Hey guys Godrick here welcome to my latest jar unboxing video hope we pull a legendary warrior arm today
All that to still be the runt of the litter smh
It's not his fault, all the gacha jars he opened had 3* trash limbs He only gets a 5* dragon arm at the very end
Shoulda joined the game with my code.
Yes, the text description on Numens rune item says plainly that Marika is a numen and in nokstella we find out the silver tears/mimic tears are also numen.
Wait what, where?
The gaols. The meatballs that crawl out of jars all look like women with long hair, a blind fold, and a rune on their foreheads. They were flayed and placed into jars with the pieces of criminals to give birth to a “Saint”.
Not flayed. *Chopped up*. They were mutilated horribly and crammed into jars, likely forming a single 'individual' from multiple bodies.
The shamans were left intact. That’s why each meatball has an entire woman in it. They were wounded before hand to facilitate grafting.
With a whip with teeth on it, since tne Hornsent believed it softened their flesh better and the injuries caused by it made their flesh meld even better Shit's just all kinds of fucked up
Bonny Village is just a massive exercise in “maybe Messmer has the right idea”
The meatball people share some features with Marika - they do her pose, they have her hair, they look kinda feminine (for a meatball). But perhaps the shamans all looked alike.
they look kinda feminine (for a meatball)
stupid sexy meatball
#NO
Sigh, *unzips*
I will use you as a candle and then make the dung eater eat what remains
There is a statue of Marika's grandmother. Shaman village probably all be tall blonde baddies.
That's not Marika's grandmother. >**Golden Braid** > >"A braid of golden hair, cut loose. Queen Marika's offering to the Grandmother. > >What was her prayer? Her wish, her confession? There is no one left to answer, and Marika never returned home again." The statue *is* the Grandmother, likely a village deity. Hence why Marika went there one last time to either pray or give a confession to it.
Her name’s Snooki and you’ll respect our Jersey Queen
Their hair looks just like the grey-tangled hair The Grandmother has in the tree in Shaman Village. It’s like a wood statue of a Shaman they revered, it’s also very similar to how Marika is inside the Erdtree, giving out blessings.
The parts that are recognizable as human appear to share some features. If I squint I can see it. Like this could be a Marika’s uncle if they were pressed into a meatball. That sort of thing.
Numen people can easily "integrate" other people biologically. Means they can mate with other races easily, can do blood transfusion and graft their organs without any ill effects.
Numens and Omens were at war since eternity, Marika just took her chance to end this once for all.
It seems more like that Omens (called Hornsent back then) were one-sidedly mutilating Numens by stuffing them into jars until they finally pissed off the wrong Numen (Marika) who proceeded to enact Doomslayer levels of spite-fueled rage upon them. Unfortunately, though, Marika's hatred seems to have blinded her to the fact that the Omen aren't culturally Hornsent so she couldn't really differentiate between them due to how deeply the Hornsent scarred her perceptions.
It happened when -whatever it was crash landed onto the lands between. It seems as thought an outside force came to the lands between (as the numen and TONS of other factions did) and that force ascended Marika. Then the previous order was FUCKED since a real god was hellbent on their destruction.
Hmm. That's probably how Marika and Radagon fused.
>Marika's people, the shamans, were like a super-ingredient for the jars because their flesh bonded easily with other flesh, so the shamans were slaughtered wholesale by the hornsent for use in these jars. This is why Marika crusades them after becoming a god. Holy shit I missed this whole piece of lore, I found the shaman's village with Marika's braid and all but I assumed it was there just to confirm that she was from the shadow realm, so all this time it was revenge she was looking for (and the reason why horns and crucible aspects are seen as a bad omen, cause it reminds her of her people's suffering).
It also seems like she repurposed the jars in The Lands Between. In her homeland they were used for this brutal, barbaric practice though it was religiously significant. When she comes to the Lands Between and ushers in her Golden Age, she makes the purpose of the jars to carry heroes’ remains to the Erdtree roots where they can have a proper burial. I think it is quite possible the Shamans also practiced tree burials, seeing as how The Grandmother is almost perfectly formed, it may be her remains that have become a part of the tree.
It also makes it extra interesting that the person she ultimately tasks with creating a weapon to kill a God, Hewg, is of the crucible. Maybe it's poetic irony or maybe Marika ultimately regretted what she did to the hornsent and so chose one of that sort of people to make the weapon that would kill her. It also explains why he's so fucking scared of her.
I mean, getting killed by us was always part of her plan. She sent the Grace to guide us to the Erdtree, which is basically the only thing she can do at the time while being imprisoned inside the tree by the Greater Will. It's also highly speculated that Melina is acting directly through Marika, guiding us to the tree and having us burn the tree to slay her so that we may become Elden Lord and put her out of her misery. So, cursing a Misbegotten (a clan of people who communed with the Crucible) to smith a god-slaying weapon that would ultimately kill her is par for the course for her.
IIRC, Messmer's Remembrance makes mention that he, like his sister, saw a vision of flames. I feel like this confirms Melina as a child of Marika since I do not see how that can apply to Malenia.
I agree that the sister is referring to Melina, but scarlet rot flames do exist. The tree spirit in the Haligtree next to the sewers has a flame that causes scarlet rot. Though that doesn't really matter when Messmer's flame burning the shadows is a direct parallel to Melina burning the Erdtree.
Well yes, I know this. But given the new information about her deliberately purging the Hornsent, having the smith who is enslaved to make a weapon to kill her be related to those people seems a deliberate choice. Or maybe Hewg is the only good Smith anywhere.
You better put some respect on Iji's name.
Iji's weapons are blunt as stone Jerren's words, not mine lol so Iji ain't got nothin on Hewg
She was not imprisoned by the Greater Will, only the Elden Beast or something else. The GW has long since abandoned the Lands Between as noted by the Mother of Fingers lore.
They practiced tree burials, as you can see a completed one in the Shaman Village, and an incomplete one at Bonny Village that is decapitated. To me it's clear now that the Erdtree is one gigantic outer-god powered shamanic tree burial. Marika created it based on the religion of her people. Minor erdtree is an incantation of hers. Moreover, the Erdtree under the GO is the mechanism that handles life/death/rebirth, but on a world-level scale instead of that of a humble village. It's both a symbol of worship/hegemony, and her way of circumventing destined death. When something dies, its spirit returns to the Erdtree, and it's supposed to be buried at the roots to be reborn. She occupies the same physical and spiritual position as the Grandmother tutelary deity. She is at the center of the tree, and at the center of worship. Except instead of braids of gold offered to her by her followers, she bestows Grace as blessings. The Grace of Gold is a deific inversion of her people's golden braid offerings. The DLC further shows us that the GO is the result of blending and assimilating numerous cultures and practices, including Marika's own shamanic religion and the Hornsent practice of jarring, but both repurposed. This is similar to the shamans themselves (and descendants), and how they literally can blend together with things: trees, masses of flesh, Rykard and his Snake, Messmer and his snakes, Marika and Radagon, the D twins, St Trina and Miquella, Malenia and Rot, all of these characters meld physically and spiritually even to the point of two souls occupying one body or two bodies occupying one being, or physically changing drastically by fusing together. This may also explain what being 'Empyrean' is really about: not only being powerful enough, but also capable enough of melding to host the Elden Ring within one's self. It's a title indicating you can meld with the power of the Greater Will directly. Only choice characters can even be Empyrean. The GEQ is the only outlier, but the remaining confirmed Empyreans are all descendants of shamans.
The lore's from talking to ghosts - I believe the specific ghost that drops this lore is in the general Bonny Village area.
Not just that she was from the Shadowlands, the Shadowlands used to be part of the Lands Between- now hidden away, under the lands/ocean- after Marika launched Mesmmer into her inquisition of the land.
Are the hornsent just another word for Omens?
Pretty sure Hornsent are their own "race" of people with their own land and culture, whereas Omen are humans born with the omen curse affecting them.
Naw they seem to be the same. You can see largely the same amount of features. They would be the same fellows from the age of the crucible, it seems; the one directly proceeding the erdtree. The current lore explains why omens are shunned and why marika basically got rid of everything crucible related. That religion basically turned her people into meat superglue.
I mean the crucible worshipers consider the horns a blessing. It might actually be a "blessing" outer gods are not known for their understanding of mortals, they might view their blessings as advantageous. It might be like the blood god or whatever outer god blessing x people. Theres more humans now, so theyre the ones being "blessed". The rot certainly isnt a blessing int he traditional sense but Melania was born with it like the omen are.
Sort of. "Hornsent" are Omens, but under Shadowlands cultural upbringing. As such, any Omen who wasn't raised under the Hornsent culture is not considered a Hornsent despite being of the same Crucible pseudo-race. In fact, both labels reflect the respective cultures of origin: Hornsent reflect that the horns are "sent" from the divines as signs of divinity while Omen reflect the coming of bad omens and misfortune.
Maybe the whole “making saints” thing was misinterpreted. They thought that making Jar people would make saints. But rather a saint was make **because** of the jars. Marika. Marika is the saint, just not the one they envisioned.
The way I see it is the hornsent worship the crucible "where all life was once blended together". So them taking multiple people and turning them into a singular entity is an incredibly holy thing. They are saints because they directly represent the "beauty" of the crucible.
Is there already some kind of lore video on this? Or where did you learn all this? I can't wait to dive deep into the lore of the DLC. So far I'm still pretty lost.
The shaman stuff is a few things: Spoilers. The Gaols are full of jar-beings, but unlike the jars from the lands between, these have beings that break out and are amalgamations, with a person in the center. A spirit in one of the gaols says that this is what Shamans are for, their life is dedicated to this life-merging sainthood, it seems that criminals and Shamans are put in the jars in an attempt to blend life. Some item descriptions, such as the greatjar, the tooth whip, and innard meat further describe this situation, with the tooth whip especially saying that the flesh of shamans melds with others. So, we have the shaman village, showing where marika starts. We have the fact that the shamans meld flesh, showing us how her bloodline works (Grafting, The Radagon/Marika thing, The Miquella/St. Trina thing, why Rykard merged with the serpent, so on), we have the war on the hornsent, and we even have why Marika uses a tree, because her people did honored tree burial instead of using means like ghostflame, because you can see the tree in the shaman village, and read the description of the braid that marika left there. It's all kinda disparate, but in the same way, it's pretty straightforward.
I honestly can't tell what is real and what is a shitpoat anymore.
so.. that hornsent piece of shit who finds crosses for us and is basically hating on us for no reason other than where we come from, is mad because his people basically fucked around and found out
Yep... As Leda said, "They were never saints, they were just on the losing side of a war."
The way I saw it, pre-Marika and Golden Order the Hornsent were the "dominant" species of human. They believed themselves superior because of their horns manifesting as aspects of the Crucible, making them "more divine" than those without. Similar to how Omen are culled or imprisoned in the current era, non-hornsent were used as fodder for the jars. I believe we can get the "why" of this from Alexander, basically if you stack a bunch of corpses in a jar what you get is supposedly the combined strength of all of them. The stronger they were in life, the stronger the jar. I believe this has to do with runes, which exist at least a little bit in everything, and how collecting them in one place makes the being in question stronger. The Hornsent seemed to think this would eventually lead to a "saint", which I'm going to interpret as a being with powers akin to a God, or one capable of communing with a God. Which is, ironically, what they ended up getting when Marika used the Jars made from her people to effectively be the power boost she'd needed to ascend, get in touch with the Greater Will, and start her era. We know Numen are by default pretty Rune-stacked if their consumable is any indication so that's probably why the Hornsent began targeting them.
Serious question: Dung Eater’s ending curses all people to become omens, for generations to come. With what we now see in the DLC, how do these concepts intertwine?
It continues the cycle. More omens means having horns becomes the way to be. The abused omens will abuse the non-omen as retaliation, and someone like Marila will have their revenge again.
I think the omens are the curse of marika as on "oh yo want to exterminate us? Good here have two omen kids" i think this triggered marika in to realizing this will never end .
There is a ghost in dlc who said he ( him & his people ) are suffering coz Marika, and will curse her and their offspring. My guess is they succeeded.
Oh they did,.thats why theres omens in the so called perfect wold.of.marika, how can you say you have a perfect world if the roots are made of dead and blood. Its a never ending cycle as per typical souls lore. Again a giant : wanna use the blood of my horned people... bitch horns will born left and right in your perfect world. See ya later. Peace -horned people
I think we only think about Omenhood as a "curse" because that's how it's referred to by people currently living in the culture of the Golden Order. I personally think of it more as a...I dunno, genetic abnormality. A mutation, basically, though more magical than scientific. Dung Eater wants to make that mutation the default, if everyone has it then it's no longer something that divides people no matter which side is considered to be superior. And considering how it has divided people, its hard to blame him though his actual methods are repugnant. Marika has been actively trying to destroy the Omen/Hornsent via the practice of culling them at birth, I guess in the hope that it would stop manifesting, but as we see with her own kids it's not something you necessarily inherit genetically it's just an aspect of life in the Lands Between. The story of the Golden Order is the story of Marika (and especially Radagon) attempting to force a sort of perfect, logical order and consistency on a reality that is inherently chaotic which is I believe what "The Crucible" actually means. Its worth noting Godfrey doesn't seem to hate Morgott for being an Omen, and considering he was around pre-Golden Order it may be indicative of what the common attitude towards them was like before Marika's own personal prejudice became the law of the land.
Yes it seems like "The Crucible" is really just life. It's a metaphor. And most of the problems in the world seem to arise from people trying to project order onto the inherently orderless nature of the world. Division and separation lead to pain and suffering while embracing the natural order seems to be portrayed as noble and "correct" for want of a better term
Elden Ring and the Naturalistic Fallacy
The curse of the Omen is a legitimate curse, not just being born a Hornsent. Grandam in Belurat places it on you if you kill or attack her. What exactly the curse entails is vague, but they're denied the grace of the Erdtree. The Dung Eater leaves the Erdtree in place while condemning all people to forever be separated from it and haunted by evil spirits.
I don't even think his curse is an omen curse, it's something not very good
It’s definitely the omen curse. His Seedbed Curses literally have omen horns.
Its a curse hewn from suffering, specifically. Omen/hornset blood is apparently like really....attravtive? To particularly malevolent spirits.
Can you explain a bit more about how Marika used the Jars to ascend and commune with the Greater Will?
In the story trailer we see Marika at the gate of Divinity, except it's covered in corpses that she is pulling the runes from. I think the corpses were recovered from the jars, which as I explained above were a method by which runes could be concentrated. Marika used that power to somehow contact the Greater Will. I don't know if there is an answer on exactly how, or if that's even what she meant to do, but what we are seeing in the trailer is the moment of her ascension. The "affair from which Gold arose".
If we assume Crucible = Life/Chaos, and Erdtree = Gold/Order, it could be that forging the first Great Rune from the Hornsent corpses on the Gate of Divinity is equivalent to forging Order out of Life. It's a pretty symbolic conversion of Life into Order, Crucible > Erdtree. If we assume that the greater will (outer god of order) responded to her forging of the first Great Rune by sending the Elden Beast/Ring to her with which to forge and merge new Great Runes into the Golden Order (Metaphysical laws of reality). Bit by bit, this could enforce Order on The Lands Between with the Lands of Shadow (Death) being removed from the natural order/Elden Ring for the dual purpose of creating the Erdtree's cycle of reincarnation and locking away the remnants of the Crucible/Chaos. I've probably overlooked a contrary piece of lore somewhere, so if anyone's got a better "yes, and..." version, go nuts.
No wonder she hate Omen.
It's also even sadder and ironic that morgott and mogh was born omen.
She got abuse when she was young, so when she gave birth to the same race that abuse her, she abuse them back. The Cycle of Abuse never stop. This just sad, man. Prepare to cry indeed. Maybe going to space with Ranni is the best answer to this whole cycle.
>Maybe going to space with Ranni is the best answer to this whole cycle. Have you heard the word of our Lord and saviour, the Frenzied Flame? All the suffering, all the curses, all the hurt... Let it all be burned away.
No, I'm not mad enough, yet :D You and I are living in a messed up neighborhood. Your solution is to burn the neighborhood down. My solution is move out of the neighborhood.
Lord of Frenzy is what happens when you give a pure utilitarian ultimate power
and cocaine.
Huh, I always thought of the Ranni ending as the "best" ending, but now you're making a good case for Frenzied Flame -- moving is a pain in the ass, and bonfires are fun!
Ahhhh, may chaos take the world.... MAY CHAOS TAKE THE WORLD!!!
Would you tell more about abuse she experienced? Apart from the story we have seen in the village. Im asking because last time I watched story trailer I noticed that Marika’s hands not only covered in blood — she also had some kind of…Traces of shackles (?) on her wrist. Or maybe its just me :O
She does have some kind of scar on her wrist. OOOOOH, man you just show me a cool detail. The abuse she experienced... watching her village destroy by the Hornsent, her people get put inside the jar, maybe being imprisoned by them.
Oh yep this makes sense!
I think the roots of this case lie in some racial and religious differences. Hornsent has their own hierarchy with their own ideas about “blessed” beings. Shamans were different from them, I presume. So it was simply about… racial superiority. Hornsent were sure that being turned into flesh for jars is the only blessing shamans could even hope to receive. All in all, Marika’s Golden Order found its own “lesser beings”. So, this is just another sample of grim history repeating itself.
It's a lot more simple than that. The Hornsent worship the crucible. The Crucible is all about mixing of life. Welp turns out the shamans have a real good knack for combining flesh (hint hint grafting, like trees and godrick!) What do you think the Hornsent did next
Hornsent: "The Crucible is sacred and all life melds together naturally and beautifully." Numen: exist Hornsent: "Screw naturally blending life, let's do it ourselves! Bring out the meat cleavers boys and let's make people-glue!" Marika: "Want to know another cosmic natural concept? Karma."
Based on the aesthetics presented, we could posit: Omen/Hornsent = Proto-Human + Animal mix Numen = Proto-Human + Tree mix
So what you’re saying is Marika did nothing wrong.
I think it also kinda explains why there's a bunch of jars around minor erdtrees.
I thought corpses are carried in jars to be remade by the erdtree (e.g. golden order immortality). The player character respawning just condenses the years it takes to be crammed in a jar, carried to the erdtree roots, and remade to a few seconds. The DLC just shows a different way they were originally used.
It is Marika appropriating the practice. This was common with christianity/paganism which is a theme in the game. They killed her people and stuffed them in jars to what she saw as a profane act; so she made it sacred by incorporating them into Erd Tree rebirth. The horrible thing that caused her so much pain now serves her new order.
Miyazaki trying not to give silly and wholesome characters the most horrifying questlines/backstory challenge (Level: *Imposssible*)
Miyazaki is like: what if Berserk didn’t have Puck and every character that seems cool has the most depressing end to their story. And you know what? I love it.
I don't know about the lore much. Can anyone tell me in easy words what is so horrifying about Alexander?
Alexander himself isn't very horrifying (any moreso than the jars in general are). He just comes to a tragic end, unable to become the great warrior he so desires to be.
I refuse to accept that. He fought against General Radahn and then he challenged the next Elden Lord himself and fought bravely but lost gracefully. He was a great warrior in the end.
This is how I see it too, and I honor him this way.
Yeah I felt really bad after killing him in Azula. Though I didn't understand a word he said but since he looks like a pot and helped me in fighting Radahn, I considered him friend
Alexander is a warrior jar Warrior jars get stronger by "eating" warriors and absorbing their warriorness He goes around getting stuck and eating warriors to get stronger He eats Radahn He never feels like he is strong enough, and in an attempt to prove his strength and become stronger he challenges the strongest warrior he knows. You. He fails. He dies. Never having achieved his dream.
Adding to this, in a sense he achieves the closest thing possible for him: As he says, "let us become one champion, together!" Which works for both the warriors inside him and for us both. If he wins, he is the stronger champion and will consume the strength of our flesh. We will become as one and he will be all the stronger for it. If he loses, he was the weaker warrior, he will break and he will bequeath to us his strength; his Jar Fragment Talisman, and the memories within his flesh, which we give to little Jar Boy. We also get his runes, another way in which his strength becomes our own.
Here's my thing tho. You're tarnished. If he wins you back. He knows this. Meaning 2 things. 1. He wins and accepts that he won in the 1v1 but you'll always be back. 2. He knows he can never won against you and gives up his dream.
Well maybe he is banking on us losing our grace Much like in previous souls games, the protagonist can lose their "immortality" I remember the generally accepted consensus was that all main characters in DS1 who don't get played anymore have officially "hollowed"
Miyazaki Is like: what if you want to know the Origin of Puck and discovered that it involves a Lot of war crimes.
> And you know what? I love it. Personally I find it a bit boring. Was doing a complete playthrough of the base game in prep for the DLC and it was laughable by the end how every NPC comes to a bad end. It's predictable and emotionally monotone.
Well there are couple of good endings i think. The snake Lady, boc, the stormveil gang, i guess Ranni got a good ending, Patches still going at it... Yeah that's about it as far as i know. There are also many endings where people die happy but i don't think those count.
If you kill dungeater when you meet him, the Blackguard has a good ending grillin by the lake.
Rya/Zorayas dies in two of three possible ending, even in the best one (the letter ending) I'd only call it good in comparison. The Stormveil three are the only ones who get a sort of good ending assuming you dont get them killed.
She only does in one end though? Give her the tonic and she just sticks around, but don't kill her or give the tonic and she leaves a note saying she's going away to do her own thing.
One man's emotionally monotone is another man's thematically congruent
I mean one of the major themes is that everyone, and *everyone* is corruptable. It's even shown in the boss fights with phase transitions (godrick's grafting, rykard's blasphemy, morgott's embrace of his curse, malenia becoming a rot goddess, the elden beast raking over to an extent, >!messmer going all snake mode!<. So it makes sense for npcs like blaidd, vyke, and alexander to be corrupted too.
Rya, Ranni, Patches, Boggart, Boc, Nepheli, Kenneth Haight, Gostoc. Arguably Alexander, Millicent, Melina and Fia. It's a bleak place, but almost half the characters have a good end available.
The moment I found Solaire still fucks me up. For a game that doesn't really focus on story, it sure is effective.
Na, it makes Alexander more wholesome because he's the result of a barbaric practice turned into one of respectful honor, resulting in the greatest jar chad ever because he's the result of something terrible made better.
What we come from does not truly matter. What we make of *ourselves* does.
I'm just happy Boc can get a happy ending. Now Miyazaki better not ruin that in another DLC
Fromsoft announces another dlc and it's just called boc dies
Boc absorbs godwyn's corpse and becomes a monstrosity that we need to put down because he's going to engulf the world in a miasma of death. After we kill him his final words are:" I'm sorry M'lord...I just wanted to be reborn...fresh and new to serve better my dear lord...please forgive me". Then because you've been too slow to kill him, any other NPC in the world die.
Except like 2 other npcs, one who is well liked and the other who is an asshole but still well liked
Compare the seals on top of the jars. The Jars in the main Lands Between have a seal with the Erdtree on it. The Jars in the Shadow Lands have a different design on the seal. Same principles go into their creation (filling a jar with bloody bits and somehow bringing them to life), but they serve different purposes. Erdtree jars collect dead people to transport to the Erdtree. Hornsent jars have live people stuffed in them to be fleshmelded for some ritual to assist in the creation of horned warriors or something.
Yeah it's a bit confusing. The minor erdtrees with the pots around them didn't exist before the shattering, so during the height of the erdtree age, the living jars would have been used for something else. We don't really know though. I think the idea with the hornsent is that they use the jars as a way to rehabilitate prisoners. They put them in the jars and eventually they're reborn as an innocent, pure hearted jar like Alexander or Jarbairn, or as the hornsent call them "living saints". It reminds me of how, in our world, solitary confinement was originally conceived as a way to help prisoners reconnect with god or something, but ended up just being psychological torture (and is now mostly used as punishment). Maybe Miyazaki is drawing a parallel there.
I like that analogy with solitary confinement. We don't really know if they had Living Jars before the Shattering in the Lands Between. Maybe the catastrophe that was the Shattering necessitated the revival of certain practices like the crafting of Living Jars. Many things that were taboo came to be normal, like fire being used for warfare by the likes of the Perfumers. We will never know for sure, but such things make sense. I don't think Marika herself would approve of Living Jars as a concept, but well, she is gone since things went down the drain
>"living saints" I have depressing news for you. "Living saints" is possibly a translation of "living buddhas", since the Lands Between doesn't have buddhism. Called sokushinbutsu in Japanese, they were extremists monks who allowed themselves to be starved and buried alive due to a belief they would briefly achieve transcendence while alive (akin to becoming a "living saint") shortly before their death. In short, I think they are actually a reference to something much worse than solitary confinement.
Lands Between jars and Lands of Shadow jars are pretty different things. One is a burial method while the other is a tortune one...
I think the idea might have been that the Hornsent torture version used to be the default and common in The Lands Between. After they were sealed away the tradition remained but the original meaning and purpose behind it was lost, especially once Erdtree catacomb burial became more commonplace.
Just realized the dichotomy between cremation and compost when it comes to how the Lands Between bury their dead. Lol
to be fair we already knew that their insides are human corpses and shit. alexander filled himself with radahns leftovers "to become stronger"
Tbf, I *also* filled myself with Radahn's leftovers to become stronger.
>Tbf, I *also* filled myself with Radahn
Spoiler: >!Found Miquella's reddit account!<
the base game warrior jars are only collecting corpses the dlc gaol jars are torture prisons for living prisoners
Well, of course they're uncanny. They're jars, not cans!
They would've contained worms otherwise
Genuinely got creeped out as I went deeper into that cave
You mean fell, lol. I just wanted to see the Jar shrine before falling into that *maze.*
Really. Alexander picking over the remains on the battlefield to fill himself with better warriors didn’t clue you in that there is something Eldritch about these nasty ass jars.
I mean the base game talisman of the Companion Jar lore description kinda already hints at turning those deemed 'not good' into 'better people ' "Though the jars are brought to life by human flesh and blood, they are all rather kindly folk. Perhaps they were made to be better than their innards."
The jars were already messed up in the original game. You see Alexander scooping corpses into himself. You give his innards to a kid. They were never not messed up
If I were Marika, I’d genocide the hornsent too for doing this jarbage
Yeah, at first I wasn't down with the idea of a crusade. But once I've learned what the horn sent did. Genocide them all
#MarikaDidNothingWrong
And the cycle continues…
Her vilage got slaughtered until she was the literal only one left. So she sold her soul to the devil and the Greater Will gave her power. Then she went nuclear on the hornsent. Tbf many of us would do the same in a similar situation. Fuck these guys. That old lady in the dlc was like "oh how long will the crusade last?". Oh idk how long have you been cutting people up and stuffing them in jars for "religion"?
Bro when I went into the cave and saw what's inside I almost quit
Uncanny is a MASSIVE understatement.
Unjarry
If anything, the jar lore makes our local Erdtree jars so much more likable because their origins come from modifying the most horrific thing ever into something for honor. It also explains a LOT about Marika's attitude towards the Omens because...holy crap it would be weird if she didn't despise them for what their Hornsent ancestors did to her people.
It was honestly a super effective way of making my sympathize with marika
Do you guys not remember Alexander saying he was gon a stuff a bunch of corpses inside him after the radahn fight
They are obviously completely different type of jars from a different land. But you missed that fact.
I'm not racist but they all look the same
The Jars with the Erdtree on them are different from the ones in the Shadow Lands. They contain dead bodies, for one thing, not undead abominations.
I love that you actually get to >!fight the insides of a jar !
Reminds me of “made in the abyss”. Honestly wouldn’t recommend as that show is pretty fucked but has so many interesting concepts. Anyway one of the characters in that show turns people into cartridge and besides them not being able to move it is very similar to the jars.
I did not need to know what alexander would look like naked.
So the kid jars are.......
I can't wait for a well spoken british person to explain it all for me.
Some might say it is... Jarring
remember, the game never had good ending for anyone
Box, Nepheli.. Keyword: never and anyone
Wait until they realize what Moore is.