supremeclamitas5053: "Built upon a broken foundation" never thought that the Golden Order and my parent's marriage would have so much in common! Elden Ring's so realistic
WanderedIn: It’s even worse than “Marika punished them for being born with horns” - the Omen are cursed by the Hornsent, their horns growing teratomically out of arms and legs, haunted by shadows in their dreams. The Hornsent are known to be masters of cursecraft, and a horned ghost near t he burnt ruins speaks of wielding the resentment of the dead against Marika. That’s why Omens are ogres - because the inheritance of horns has been spitefully rendered as a curse on them. They are the victims, more than anyone else, of all that history - including of the Hornsent vengeance. Marika’s abhorrence of them is thus doubly ironic.

A second interesting detail: this explains why the bloodfiends lack horns! They were slaves, and thus hornless, before the Formless Mother “blessed” them.
xan7292: Ironically, Marika's hypocrisy is, from a textual perspective, wonderfully humanizing imo. The entire persecution of the Omen (and Misbegotten, arguably) is like the cycle of abuse writ large over an entire society—Marika and her people were abused and suffered horrid cruelty, and so when Marika gained power, she continued that cycle herself, something sadly common in real life.

Before SotE, Marika was a very distant, vague figure we knew little about. After it, I feel like I understand her motivations and mindset (at least Pre-Shattering) a lot better.
kamilmalach6383: This one awakened a memory in me.

When I was a child I've read a story about siblings who have befriended kids from another nation, but were afraid to bring their friends home because they were afraid that their grandfather (a war veteran) would greet them with prejudice. But it turned out that grandpa was actually happy to see his grandkids making friends with the foreigners, even saying that "the children are not responsible for the actions of their ancestors".

The same lesson but with storyline reversed.
pockystyx4087: "hurt people, hurt people" being the motto of Elden Ring
IrvingIV: "They were never saints; they just hapened to be on the losing side of a war."


























Edit:
Let me be clear before more people get the wrong idea, I despise Marika.
aguy216: Shadow of the erdtree showed us that the darkness of light is equally as holy as the light itself. Fitting that the golden order is full gold with no shadow, because she shunned them
iammr24: "Under Marika's reign, those favored by the Edtree-"
"...by the Edtree-"
LIFE HAS MANY TREES, EDBOY
ScarletStarManor: Remember everyone: History doesn't typically repeat itself, but it sure as hell does rhyme.
VictorIV0310: Perhaps Marika removed the Rune of Death not just to replace death with reincarnation via Erdtree burial and to remove a threat to her reign but also to subject the Hornsent to an unending agony of hellish torment where they are hunted, butchered scorched and impaled by Messmer’s crusaders, horrifically transformed into sickly man-flies, stuffed into furnace golems like the shamans and criminals were in their jars, turn into Bloodfiends after sheer desperation and despair or be reduced to a sad existence as a shadowy shade, trapped in a strange in-between of life and death.
LordKelvinX2086: And the best irony is, you can turn this around yet again by helping the Dung Eater.
keatoncampbell820: The issue with a mortal who ascends to godhood is they dont have a therapist and they will hold onto trauma... Forever
doyourbest_uwu: She saw what the hornsent did as what the Omen did, despite the Omen having done nothing. These are consequences of attributing collective guilt.
rayh4an: It is honestly tragic that Marika could have created an age where she ended the suffering and prejudice, but instead chose vengeance and had the roles reversed.
CaptainBlack47: Here before thumbnail/title change
IsabelNoble-w4u: The horny and the non-horny will always be at odds, it seems.
daydreamer2257: I personally like to belived that the rule to only hide royal omen was created in responce to Marika having the omen twins, and that it at least was a sliver of kindness towards her children, even if just looking at them probplay gave her nightmares.
Liam-pi9vi: It would have been so beautiful if she triumphed over her trauma and embraced Mohg and Morgott.
Ostsol: The oppressed who achieve victory and go on to be oppressors is a common theme in history. A relatively recent and extreme example would be the Rwandan Genocide.
raviamodernepic: Marika trying to attain godhood to avenge her loved ones and protect her future lineage, before turning into a menace, sounds kinda like Anakin Skywalker's character arc.
killerkuerbis6845: I realized way too late marikas children have been cursed to be omen by the hornsent, it makes so much more sense now
ValtheJean: Marika is such a fascinating character, probably my favorite or at least high ranking in the cast. All the subtle context clues about her past in the DLC...god it was just such a great experience. I brushed off Leda's comments when she said "The hornsent were never saints" thinking it was just the Golden Order excusing Marika's crusade, but then that moment walking into the Shaman village, finally understanding what all the pot gaols were for, it hit me hard. I always struggled to understand why Marika was so hateful towards the Omen, especially her two sons, especially when Godwyn led the Crucible Knights (the Crucible being the source of the Omen's curse.) I couldn't understand why the Golden Order seemingly couldn't (or in reality's case WOULDN'T) conjoin the Omen.

It may just be me, but I really feel for Marika; feel sorry for her. Not specifically because of what happened to her and her people, but rather sorry that she has become so wholly consumed with revenge, it ruined any chance of having the utopian society she wanted to make. Flawed from the very beginning, because a wounded, flawed individual couldn't give up that spark of hatred that brought her to where she was. The worldbuilding of Fromsoft games is just...so far above most of what you see in gaming these days. I'm sad there won't be another DLC for Elden Ring, but I really hope there will be an Elden Ring 2 someday down the road. I'm not ready to give up this world quite yet.
IzekielSalt: “The Golden Order may not be perfect, but it’s the best system we have” -Marika probably
PunpunRen: The figures in the Omen's nightmares might be the Lamenters
RepublicOfTruth: What a title. Immediately caught my attention. Great work Zullie.
samuelriccio5337: Tbh i don't blame Marika for setting herself up on the wrong path.
The lesson of "the children are not responsible for the actions of their ancestors" is correct, but there was no one there to teach her because the hornsent fucking killed all of her people.
Someone who grows surrounded by injustice and despair will likely learn how to act in the same way. It's tragic, but i don't blame her for choosing this path.
Stuff like this only be changed over a long period of time, and in fact in the end she seemed to recognise the errors in her ways and tried to break the cycle by shattering the Elden Ring and setting us up to a path for a better future.
psychohuh: I remember the Official Gameplay Trailer had a line early on where Melia literally says the Golden Order is broken to its core. Who'd have thought that line extended so deep into the game?
Skulysoul: My heart sank with such ominous title in my notifs, before realizing it's just a Zullie upload.
aifos5171: It's interesting that the hornless have chains and are treated as servant, yet apparently Midra had a pretty important role in hornsent society despite his lack of horns. Perhaps this is because he was particularly wise and intelligent, until his research drove him to the Frenzied Flame
hobosorcerer: Something to note about the Omen: the Hornsent Grandam has dialog which implies the origin of the Omen births in Marika's kingdom to be a curse. She explicitly calls it "the Curse of the Omen."
boredmagala5701: The cycle of hatred and abuse is hard to break…. :(
maxwellsmith9988: ive always loved the politics of the souls games. its painfully reflective of the human world
jashin888: The Omens were the hornsent’s final attack against the Golden Order. They were defeated so they cursed the order to have to bear children that they would hate.
zigzaghyena: I've seen lots of jokes about how the Omen Twins were the most well adjusted children Marika ever had, and I'd personally say that's because they are the only children Marika refused to involve herself with.
xtrems2: There is no hypocrisy, that would imply Marika wanted or claimed to want a fair world free of oppression. The hornsent made her people suffer, and so she made them suffer. There is no hypocrisy in revenge.

Like many oppressed people, she didn't dislike oppression itself, just that it was done to her.
themaniae4803: Fun fact: The japanese description of the Arcane Talisman talks about a clan of slaves who, after the fire, became the Bloodfiends. Fire of course is about Messmer, so very probably they were slaves of Hornsents and the Mother saved them in the end.
P.s: Also, if i remember well, the shadow people inside the Shadow Keep are hornless, so maybe slaves Messmer saved?
diegocantu9853: The Noble Goldmask has always seemed like the best ending
ArcRay20: the one thing i find interesting about the whole thing of the horns meaning cursed blood
is that Morgot seems to have expelled it when defeated.
he is reduced in size, but absolutely all of his horns are *naturally gone.
no cut horns, no shriveled horns, just outright gone. this specific thing
is what made me think the whole thing of having horns was
indeed a curse.
Soluswithyou: Violence begets violence. The broken seek to break others. The moral of Elden Ring is that cycles are insidious and ever-present. Only the truly great and virtuous can break these cycles, and even then it may come at great cost.
TheJmoreno126: At the end of her story, Marika was no better than the Hornsent she despised.
theformation3781: Thankfully people seem to have their wits about them; elden ring is (when it comes to interpersonal relationships) about parental abuse and abandonment, and subsequent effects, all the way from the greater will and metyr (somehow, which is insane) to marika and her three cursed sons (one became a mass murderer, one turned to the formless mother who seems to prey upon pretty much everyone who gets spurned by society, and morgott died in service of an order that despised him). Marika's actions were so despised by everyone that they had an effect on pretty much everyone in her family, from Ranni rejecting the golden order outright and being driven to extremes, ro Rykard being used as the GO's torturer-in-charge leading him to abandoning it and basically going insane, and even Radahn opposed the destruction of Selia and Miquella did all he did partly so he wouldn't repeat Marika's mistakes.

Not to mention the Omen aren't all who were targeted by her, because the nox, ancestral followers (who don't seem to be related culturally to the hornsent even if they both worship the crucible as they despise metalwork while hornsent use metal implements a lot), tarnished, great caravan, albinaurics, those who live in death (who only exist because of her btw), demihumans, misbegotten, fire giants (?) etc. who had nothing to do with her past were still oppressed by the GO for pretty much the same reason shamans were (no grace/horns).

The reason I laid down all this groundwork, just as an addendum to the lore in the video, is simply because a bunch of people somehow defend marika/get very weird about it, just because of her backstory? I find that a fairly insane position to hold, because within the context of all that has happened in elden ring's world, the golden order and marika herself is indefensible, from a moral standpoint. A very layered character who's the victim of the grander theme of elden ring along with omen/hornsent, that is interference from outer gods completely ruining the lands between, sure, but indefensible all the same.
ThyBigCheddar: Bold title to see in my notifications
twoshieldsandsomemilk: The fact that even Leda, who proves and openly admits to being a zealot for Miquella, can see the truth of it, that "they were never saints, just on the losing side of a war" really puts into perspective just how broken a being Marika must really have been
Harl3inger: I don't really know if we can call her a hypocrite as I never saw her trying to push for peace and solidarity in the lore. She ran a police state after having conquered the world for what she thought was the greater will, with discriminated groups and inquisitors for the goal of protecting her own and rooting out heresy. And it makes sense, because her lessons are from the Hornsent. Hurt people hurt people, and the DLC shows us she's one of the most damaged people around.
Themaster4969: I wish there was some greater interactions with Marika besides lore hints. It would've been interesting to have met with some npcs that had genuine first-hand accounts with Marika to share in the dlc. I do like her being more obscured in the base game, but I wish the curtain was pulled back just a bit more in the dlc.
anonisnoone6125: "Marika is a hypocrite". In other words, the sky is blue.
1thevm1: >did they deserve this?
>memories of hornsworn dudes with infinite stamina, crit immunity, no stagger and no chill
Yes they did, and they still got off easy.
lexmortis5722: Obviously, since we didn't get any lore on the badlands or Radagon, there is still much left to speculation, especially about the irregular creatures in the lands between ,like Omens
TakotsuboTime: I wonder if Ranni succeeded in escaping the shackles of Godhood, or if she's cursed in another way.
UnwishingAura: This won't stop me from giving every wandering hornsent I encounter a swirly in the nearest furnace golem.
dexslag: the omen should definitely not have to suffer for this, but also, it's not as if each individual hornsent was responsible for the crimes you mention in this video. i find it disturbing how willing people are to paint their entire race in that way, and seem to revel in the purge marika ordered on them.
arthurdossantos6826: "When education is not freeing, the dream of the oppressed is to become oppressors themselves"
- Paulo Freire

Sep 10 2024

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