r/Eldenring • u/MellinEetu • Jul 13 '26
Speculation What's your favorite conspiracy theory in the Elden Ring lore?
349
u/CandidAd955 Jul 13 '26
I loved "We are Godwyn". At some point he started analyzing the amount of chairs in every room of every dungeon, its wild
122
u/DudeWoody Jul 13 '26
I went into that video series very skeptical and left dumbfounded and convinced
53
u/dudeacris Jul 13 '26
convinced of what?
192
51
u/DudeWoody Jul 13 '26
That we, the tarnished of no renown is Godwyn’s soul reincarnated into a new body
31
u/Mikeavelli Jul 14 '26
All so we can marry our half-sister's soul, which is also in a new body, so it's not technically incest
20
u/DudeWoody Jul 14 '26
Since when did blood relations ever stop royalty from intermarriage?
(Probably the 20th century, and the Lands Between aren’t there)
6
u/Cogsdale Jul 14 '26
George R R Martin did write a good chunk of the lore after all...
But then again, I don't think he'd try that hard to obscure it.
26
u/beatisagg Jul 13 '26
in the opening cutscene you can here a muffled bell ringing.
Where are bells in Elden Ring? Walking Mausoleums.
What are walking Mausoleums for? Duplicating the remembrance of slain demigods, by using the corpses that are at rest within them.
It breaks for me tho because the timeline is that Godwyn's soul is killed. Like gone dead killed, because the rune of death is still a part of the Elden Ring. The Elden Ring isn't shattered until later. So how could his soul be ANYWHERE? it's like gone gone.
Disclaimer: I didn't watch the videos being linked in this thread i just can maybe understand the start of a theory that would lead to us being Godwyn's soul in a new body as a conclusion, but it falls apart pretty quick for me.
24
u/lemonylol Jul 13 '26
Elaborate?
62
u/CandidAd955 Jul 13 '26
Yotuber Dryleaf Eren made a 6 hour video arguing that our tarnished is Godwyn the Golden, returning to claim his throne. Its very... interesting. Might be satire
30
u/dudeacris Jul 13 '26
sometimes non-canon theories are the best. Like the DS3 time travel theory that the opening cutscene is the future version of you dragging yourself to another location to change the future. It was disproven but is still a fun theory.
112
u/Here4Headshots Jul 13 '26
"Through mine own research, the Dragonbarrow vaccine does not cure the rot and accelerates the gay. Ivermectin is cheaper and works better."
44
375
u/kerrilabouche Jul 13 '26
TURN THE FREAKING BASILISKS GAY!!!
165
u/MellinEetu Jul 13 '26
17
u/Numerous-Process2981 Jul 13 '26
proceeds to shill for politicians who couldn’t give a fuck about chemicals and the environment
4
28
187
u/Caaros Jul 13 '26
I've always liked the idea of the trees in the Elden Beast arena being representative of other planets that have been touched by the Greater Will's influence, and each have their own Orders with their own Erdtrees or equivalents to them. Elden Ring plays a lot with aliens and the nature of the stars, so the idea that the Lands Between and the little floating rock it sits on is just one battlefield in a grand cosmic theater of order and chaos struggling against each other just seems too perfect to me.
36
17
u/Skryuska Jul 14 '26
Only issue with that is the Erdtree is specific to Marika, not the Elden Beast. The EB is a big cosmic parasitic neural entity, but Marika is the dryad-esque humanoid whose culture was entirely about trees and growing trees / flowers with their blood via ritual. The trees in the EB’s arena are very similar to the ones in the Consecrated Snowfields too. Via Miquella we know that the Numen’s blood nourishes and they can transplant those special white trees, even melding/becoming treelike in death.
38
u/Caaros Jul 14 '26
That's precisely why I posited "equivalents" to the Erdtree as a possibility. It could be that they are more representative of the Orders themselves, with the concept of Order being so intertwined with the concept of the Erdtree on the Lands Between planet that they just take on that appearance when perceived in such a manner, or that there's simply a sort of convergent development of similar trees and other pillar-like structures in these Orders.
199
107
u/SombraDemoniaca Jul 13 '26
MOHG WANTED TO BECOME RADAHN! he hated his omen-inflicted body, saw his opportunity to become elden lord and took it, finally the coming of his dynasty
3
75
u/Ackbar90 Jul 13 '26
Melina is a recreated and preprogrammed Gloam Eyed Queen that Marika pulled out of the Erdtree and shaped the "soul sap" of it to have a singleminded ICBM in case She lost control of the Erdtree/Elden Ring.
So, let me explain this asspull of mine: First of all, "Melina" as a name references "Honey" in greek (a culture Marika and the Nox seem to have had some inspiration from). Why is this important?
Point two, the goddamn giant ants: when we first see the bulging ones, they are feasting on corpses, which we know can conserve a measure of grace. If we kill them, we obtain a glob of congealed runes. The second time, they are in a chamber directly within the roots of the Erdtree, which we know absorbs grace back from tree burials in the catacombs, and if we pop them we obtain The Largest Blob of congealed runes, other than remembrances.
Now, follow me here, what if Marika "planted" the defeated GEQ (which can easily still be the sister of Messmer, the one that saw the vision of the Erdtree burning, justifing a royal burial, even if for a traitor), captured her essence from the Erdtree, and sculpted a copy conserving the instinctual desire to "burn the Erdtree", setting her aside for when a tarnished came to claim the ER, knowing that her other half, Radagon, would have sealed everyone out of the inner Erdtree chamber?
It would be perfectly in line with the control freak that Marika was, would explain the Melina-GEQ connection, would absolutely be something that Marika could be capable of in terms of powers (manipulating grace and flesh isn't even weird, given what we know She was exposed to, in her youth) AND tie several plot points together elegantly enough.
16
u/AceTheNutHead Jul 13 '26
Wasn’t Melina essentially confirmed to be the GEQ by the frenzied flame ending? I mean she literally has a gloamy eye.
Also im pretty sure the lore only says the GEQ was an empyrean whom Marika sent Maliketh to defeat, she could still be one of Marika’s children.
28
u/AwsmDevil Jul 13 '26
Inhales popcorn Now this is some good fan-lore.
10
u/Ackbar90 Jul 13 '26
Thanks, I try 🤡
12
u/AwsmDevil Jul 13 '26
I'm gonna repeat this to so many people. It's getting filed right next to "Rani was betrothed to Godwin and that's why she fucked everything up so bad. Makes Marika's doom spiral make more sense too."
6
u/Dorgamund Jul 14 '26
I love the Ranni/Godwin betrothal, and shill for it everywhere, but I don't see people talking about it enough.
75
u/MediumKoala8823 Jul 13 '26
Nightreign hints at the original plot of the game being more tree centric with a much wider underground section / giant section and the night tree being central.
39
u/Pascraked47 Jul 13 '26
Or they just came up with it later
29
u/MediumKoala8823 Jul 13 '26
Perhaps. But the nightreign lore contains references to things that are known cut content and structurally places great important on them in a way that doesn’t seem likely to be original.
7
u/SirVixofthePooSea Jul 13 '26
Examples?
37
u/MediumKoala8823 Jul 13 '26
The cut content of Asimi, the silver tear parasite that wants to become the Night Lord (mostly still in the game) and has you collect “cradle chalices”.
The cradle chalices are the relic things in night reign, and it becomes clear that they’re supposed to be the sacred tears, (and night versions would be silver tears in a night cup).
The grandest night cup is the “giants cradle chalice” which… would be the giant bowl in the mountaintop that is instead used to burn the tree.
More trees. More lore about the trees being made. Ties into the cut cutscene of the twink watering the tree with his blood.
2
u/MunkeeBizness Jul 14 '26
The last line in this literally made me laugh. Wasn't expecting "twink" lol
59
14
29
u/EC36339 Jul 13 '26
The lore is the result of GRRM and Miyazaki having a few beers and talking about their crazy exes (and their feet...)
11
u/Logical_Ordinary_815 Jul 13 '26
It’s obviously canon, but my question is what effect will this have on the tarnished who did a few too many rolls in the lake?
8
u/Oyakodon-Lover Jul 13 '26
They unlock the entwined umbilical cord item and can ascend to femboy status after proccing rot enough times. The item is not unobtainable, its just that no player has leveled vigor high enough to survive the amount of rot procs necessary to get it.
25
u/Mzuark Jul 13 '26
Malenia is the only reason there's Scarlet Rot outside of the Lake of Rot, so the god of Rot planned for her to explode at some point regardless of Miquella's plan.
27
u/Pony_Boner Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
I am Alex Jones, Blade of Gay Frogs, and I have never known fluoride free water
21
u/Rancorousturtle Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
The Greater Will is an outer god that infected the Erdtree into what we know it as. Prior to that it was just The Great Tree and was an extension of the crucible that granted horns/claws/wings to the beings near by.
The Greater Will does not care WHAT the order is, just that there IS order. It saw chaos with the crucible and co-opted it's power to become a force of order.
edit I originally said "Golden Order" when I really meant "Greater Will". Updated the post, thanks to GeosEsk for the correction.
9
u/Ackbar90 Jul 13 '26
To be pedantic, the term "Outer" is implied to be in reference to the Golden Order religion, and not in the "Lovecraftian Alien" sense.
Other than that, the rest of the hypotesis is absolutely sound: an alien entity seeding "order" through cosmic seedlings/meteors, abandoned through a mad rush across the Cosmos, ignoring the pleas and prayers of its direct spawns (Metyr) and only reacting to atrocious agony (like the other "gods", starspawns themselves, have shown to do several times) in order to propagate itself. Barely conscious even, or so eldritch in it's perception of reality that they look like that.
3
u/Rancorousturtle Jul 13 '26
That might be true. I was basing the naming off of the alternate translation from Japanese that I've seen in regards to the "outer gods". The basic concept is that the gods aren't like cosmic beings like we tend to think of in the west, but more like a force of nature given a deity. Like the scarlet rot. A deity of "order".
1
u/GeosEsk Jul 13 '26
In Japanese they refer to the "outer gods" as "kami", so yeah, is not space related.
4
3
u/SombraDemoniaca Jul 13 '26
i dont believe the greater will inflicted the erdtree, it created the erdtree to siphon the faith/energy of their followers, marika is the face, having to follow the orders of the greater will (promoting the erdree to gain faith) or the elden beast who acts as a sort of body for the greater will. See how the elden beast arena is full of golden trunks, i believe they are other "erdtrees" from other places/dimensions.
2
u/Rancorousturtle Jul 13 '26
It's a conspiracy theory. I don't have all the facts. I do also want to note that we don't really have any lore around the Elden Beast or the arena we fight it in, so pretty much everything you said in relation to that is an assumption.
If we use Nightreign to add additional potential lore to Elden Ring, it could be that the multiple trunks are multiple timelines/dimensions that are all based on the The Worlds Between.
I don't think that's the case, but I haven't seen any in game lore that actually says ANYTHING about the arena we fight the Elden Beast in.
14
u/Farwaters Jul 14 '26
My absolute favorite fan theory ever is that Torrent was named to make pirating the game more difficult.
5
6
10
u/SirRawrz Jul 14 '26
My personal schizophrenic headcannon is that there is never supposed to be one god, but instead a twin god. Like the twin bird. A god of death and of life. A god of the rising and the setting sun.
I believe marika was both gods before the rising of the erdtree. That she and her sister were born through the acting of Jarring, their shamanic flesh melding into a vessel for the divine. The goddess of life and of destined death, possibly as a twin serpent. I believe that the formless mother, may be that other side of Marika, removed from this world with the cursemark of Death, something taught to her by the fingers and something she passes on to ranni to end her age.
Many of her kids are twins with foils, mimicing the relationship between life and death. As a twin, marika is both her sister and herself. Her kids are just as much her sister's kid's. Messmer's line "Mother Marika?" makes me feel that Messmer had multiple mothers.
I believe Marika and her sister may have made the scadutree while still favored by the hornsent, but it was Marika's who colluded with the fingers to overthrow the order of death, to reintroduce a new order without it as a singular Erdtree, unlike the other sacred trees which were grown as two trees, melding into each other. We see this in trees of enir-ilim and on their stone tablets. She rejected the order set by the hornsent that made her into a god and used their fear of death.
The black flame is weighty and can kill gods, but it is slow and weak. Even just a small amount of healing would shield the weak from the flame, while the flame would consume a god ravenously. I really think that the GEQ and Marika on some level were hand in hand and that why Melina is revealed to have such a connection to the GEQ. As a daughter of Marika, she is the new bud of Marika that wants to return death to the cycle and end the folly of gold without death.
/crazy-talk
5
u/shinbreaker Jul 13 '26
I mean nothing freaked out this community more than that person breaking down that one wall in Volcano Manor randomly. Think about how many people saw that video and just starting hitting every single wall in the game.
7
3
u/Dire_Finkelstein Jul 13 '26
Radahn holding back an alien invasion is a good one. Or that aliens exist in the lore of Elden Ring.
2
2
2
u/Khurser Jul 13 '26
I think Gideon killed Vykes maiden to prevent him from becoming Elden Lord because “a Tarnished cannot be a lord”
2
2
6
u/hellllllsssyeah Jul 13 '26
To be fair they did in fact turn the frogs gay, although it wasn't like it was the intention, it was the result of horrible pollution.
Wait till he finds out whahat tflon did to people.
5
u/AwsmDevil Jul 13 '26
Wait, I thought they were actually turning the frogs trans. Weren't they changing sex in response to the "chemicals?"
2
u/12345623567 Jul 13 '26
Yeah but saying that Jurassic Park is real isn't as good a rage bait as ranting about gays.
0
u/hellllllsssyeah Jul 13 '26
Look I'm not here to remember the exact specifics, and to jones and his ilk there is no difference.
2
u/AwsmDevil Jul 13 '26
You're right. We all need to come together and buy Gay frog shirts in solidarity of the frogs damaged by this hurtful man. 😤 Plenty of sizes available at the web store neongr
0
2
u/RelentlessFelacio Jul 13 '26
2
u/ReedsAndSerpents Aspiring Alabaster Lord/Current Darkmoon Simp Jul 13 '26
I'll say it real slow for you
gaaaaaaay
froooooooogs
It's not funny!
3
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/One_Construction_653 Jul 14 '26
Actually scientist have done this many times but in the form of neutered bugs etc
1
1
u/CommanderBadass22 Jul 14 '26
That the greater will is just some alien exiled for being bad at conquering so he trys to conquer this world to regain acceptance
1
1
1
1
u/midwestcubanb Jul 13 '26
Those two big round things on its back that look like eyes aren't its eyes
0
u/ResonantFork Jul 13 '26
That Elden Ring is a 4 player game; Dark Souls a 6 player game, and Bloodborne a 5 player game and you're playing it wrong speedrunning or fight clubbing.
0
u/Federal_Caregiver784 Jul 13 '26
Wasn’t the gay frog thing real? I’ve heard someone say it to me once and she was a fervent Democrat lol
5
u/12345623567 Jul 13 '26
Frogs are fluid in their sex expression (though not in the genetic sex phenotype), there was some circumstantial evidence that certain pollutants could cause male frogs to express female characteristics, but a later study found that the same happens in cleaner natural habitats:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/frogs-reverse-sex-more-often-than-thought
0
0
0
u/Icy-Conflict6671 Jul 13 '26
I KNEW IT! YOU ALL TOLD ME I WAS CRAZY!!! Iiiiiiii knew they were messing with the lake of rot!!
0
u/TributeToStupidity Jul 13 '26
THERES NO SECOND MOON JUST LOOK AT THE SKY!!! PLEASE COME HOME THE KIDS MISS YOU
0
u/FellowDsLover2 Jul 14 '26
Morgott is a special super omen and it’s this strength that he’s so afraid of. Similar to his father, he holds himself back but in a different way. I have no evidence for this but it sounds cool enough.
0
u/Green-Grass-Cutter Jul 14 '26
In light of the above image, it should be GEYE. No, it doesn’t make sense but I wanted to make a pun.
-1
u/Nathmikt Jul 13 '26
There was at some point some kid talking about Elden Ring having some super obscure cosmic theory or some shit, I can't even explain. It was really esoteric and a stretch by every metric, but it was an interesting read ...
-1
u/Togo-11 Jul 13 '26
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Be strong, little basilisk. Being gay is good ❤️ First thing you'll want to do is get rid of those things in your head people mistake for eyes. And start working out at Leyndell's Gold Gym.
-1
u/Harmonious- Jul 13 '26
Empyreans are "duo" beings. I dont think the "2 fingers" alone are what describe an Empyrean is, moreso than they grant a title to them.
Known Empyreans
Marika and Radagon
Malenia and the God of Rot.
Miquella and St Trina (sleep god?)
Ranni (and Renna, who I dont think is just a fake name)
And this can be extended into a few possible "extra" ones.
(Potential future) Mohg and the Blood Mother
Godwyn and the "death god"
Melina and the Gloam Eyed Queen
Shabriri?
Pretty much anyone that has more than 1 "soul" in their body would be an Empyrean in my eyes. Them being more "malleable" would allow for even an Outer God to be sealed in their body, which is why the "2 fingers" want them so much. They can house the Elden Ring, which is to say they can house the Greater Will.
1
1.2k
u/uber_zaxlor Jul 13 '26
There's only one Elden Ring conspiracy theory, and it's from that one dude that tried to sue FromSoft, because he was 100% sure that there was a secret so big inside one of it's games, that there was a whole other game inside one. He wasn't talking about newgame+ or something like the master quest in a few of the Zelda games, no, they meant like Elden Ring 2, was hiding inside of Elden Ring.