alfalldoot6715: One thing I noticed is how St Trina is coming out of a flower whilst all of Radagon's statues depict him coming out of tree roots. They are both the alter egos of Gods after all.
Xelatheshep: Something that disturbs me about St Trina is where she is located. She's at the bottom of a pit deep underground surrounded by massive Stone Coffin Ships. Miquella didn't merely remove all of his love in his body, he did so in such a manner as to make sure no one would ever be able to find it.
sentientrock7: the bit you had about love being a form of discrimination in Miquella's mind was so interesting!
PankoBreadcrumbs: It was Miyazaki's 9/11 when they modeled a female character with no feet
Scoliosistic: She got dat Elden Ring player posture
kamilmalach6383: His biggest mistake was discarding love for the sake of compassion, which makes no sense in long term because compassion cannot be purely logical.
archsteel7: "You must... Kill Miquella... Grant him forgiveness."

This is what assures me, more than anything, that we're doing the right thing by killing Miquella. It's not about revenge, or justice, or undoing the harm he's done. Killing him doesn't fix Caelid, it doesn't save St. Trina, but it does grant him mercy.
axllow3914: Miquella may have wanted a beautiful world filled with love. But what love could he bequeath to the world, if he could not even love himself?
doodlebop921: Miquellas story really is the epitome of “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
casketbase7750: "Let's go together."

- Miquella to everyone he meets except Trina
pilotmanpaul: >Wants to create an Era of Compassion
>Abandons all emotions, compassion included.

Lil bro really did not think this through lol
user-df2uz1qv3c: Had to tie miyazaki down to make st trina's feetless model
khajiitimanus7432: "I abandon here my love" was when I started quietly hating Miquella.
kingmoo: Here Miquella abandoned his eepy
Luminousreign: St Trina purple hair mimics the way people bleed when they drown. The connection between death and sleep is really unnerving.
professorxavier620: Seeing the "other halfs" aspect with Marika/Radagon and Miquella/St. Trina I finally understand why the D brothers, despite seen as a abomination by others, was welcomed into the golden order. Their existence mirrors that of divinity
Adam-zc3of: Legitimately one of the saddest yet magical encounters in Erdtree.

I’ve been deeply fascinated by St. Trina for a while and she’s finally an NPC. The interactions and lore implications are heartbreaking.
Sootheflame11: St. Trina’s probably one of the best NPC design I’ve ever seen in video game
SamFullbuster24: Also unrelated to St. Trina but related to Miquella as well, his curse of nascency can be interpreted differently. Like being a child forever doesn't seem like that big of a curse until u see that everything Miquella does is cursed to be in its nascent form and doesn't thrive beyond it. His needle for Malenia could only stop the rot but not cure it, his haligtree started great but slowly we can see that it wasn't sustainable, and even his path to godhood. He is cursed to have everything he does only be prosperous in its nascent form. I might've overcooked here so do correct me if I'm wrong
Nicky-mk1nv: Seems like it might have been part of the rite of the divine gate, which is sad. I think it feeds more into the "divinity is a trap" idea. Miquella felt it was so necessary to become a god to solve the problems that initially provoked him to do so, that he would do whatever it takes, falling right into that trap of being a "caged divinity."
maize3201: Really goes to show that in an attempt to right the wrongs of his mother, Miquella ended up becoming just like her. A tyrant who believes they’re in the right no matter what and sees the awful things that they do as a means to an end, while using everyone around them (even family members) as nothing more than pawns. He even has his Maliketh in the form of Malenia and his own radagon in the form of St. Trina.

That being said I do genuinely feel kinda bad for Miquella, I believe his curse to remain a child forever was much more detrimental then we first thought. Every single one of his plans fail, and upon divesting himself of everything and finally ascending to godhood the first thing he does is get murdered. He was always doomed to never reach his full potential.
rhysofsneezingdragon1758: Something i wanna mention, is that the description of her blossom mentions that Trina's life was as fleeting as the seasons.

Which makes me wonder if she'll eventually bloom again, as the seasons always eventually come back.
douchopotamus3755: St. Trina is my patron saint
Silyon487: I'm not convinced Miquella's discarding love had anything to do with their plans or goals. Consider what he had been doing in the base game. His sister's slowly dying of the Scarlet Rot and all his efforts searching for a cure have turned up only a way to slow it's progress. Godwyn suffered a horrific psudo-death and lives on in what's presumed to be endless torment. His faith and trust in the Golden Order has been uprooted because it can't deal with either of these problems, and his efforts to replace it with the Haliegtree were stillborne. All the while pain and suffering in the world has only been increasing with the Shattering.

Miquella Cares. His inability to help the people he cares about, let alone ease the suffering of people in general, would be a constant torment and burden. In discarding Love, he ceases to empathize and care. Thus ending his own tormented guilt over not being able to help.
jays.6843: I don't see abandoning his love as being impartial. I see it as abandoning his doubt.

Like he KNEW his plan was insane and wrong, but rather than abandon it, he chose to totally lose his ability to care instead. Trina was his moral compass, and he chose to abandon her because he knew he couldn't live with the horrible things he felt he had to do.
glasgowblackchigowski6117: The most emotionally challenging part of the dlc, the moment i realized st. Trina is there and can be interacted with, my mind went insane and my fan passion started to rekindle.
Khann_2102: Poor St. Trina
melchiordelaunay2539: Ranni's quest for freedom makes even more sense now. Being an Empyrean is definitely more a curse than a blessing.
bohba13: This DLC really proves that Ranni is really the only Empyrean with her head on straight. She realizes no God can be trusted, even herself. (Hell, she doesn't even try to hide that she is as much of a monster as any of her peers.)
MrTrancelator: Miquella was sadly misguided. To create a gentler world, you need empathy - the ability to experience, even if only in your imagination, what other people go through in their lives. Without love, one of the components is missing.
KissedByFire16: I'm annoyed that a give up on drinking after like 2 times. I didn't realise that would go anywhere and i presumed i was missing an item to not die to the nectar
jacquiecotillard9699: There’s the idea in Theravada Buddhism that grief for the world (a phrase Miquella uses) is an impediment that we ought to distance ourselves from. It is an attachment. This doesn’t mean the result should be detached compassionless coldness, an anti-grief, but the emptiness between either pole— simply the non-attaching to the arising of grief, as a way of seeing matters clearly. (At least as I understand the idea)
Godseeker-Yharim: Tarnished: Imbibes Trina’s nectar and dies.
VictorIV0310: A caged divinity…
m.ubaidaadam: I wish we could have learned more from St Trina or at least had a few more convos with her she’s an interesting character. Perhaps we could have learned a bit more of her and Miquella’s past
Era-Core: Compassion without Love is nothing but a curse, and St. Trina knew this, and wished someone to put Miquella out of his misery as a loveless god. It's a shame we never got to see Miquella's fears in physical form, since it would have made into a very interesting, if not a super secret and very difficult boss fight for us to fight against.

I don't know what Miquella's fears truly were, but I would have loved to witness it, but it's also possible his fears were utterly insignificant, or worse, unknown even to him, but it's most likely cut content. if the Convergence modders ever try to expand on the Shadow of the Erdtree, I would really like it if they made a possible boss fight that depicted Miquella's fears in physical form, and a Remembrance Weapon to be used as a weapon against Miquella.
aSingularJame: Excellent work as always, Zullie. One thing I wonder about Miquella is whether or not his love ties into his worldview of Original Sin (i.e. the view that humanity is innately evil and has been since the evil in the beginning, written as "Causality" in the original JP text to mean largely the same thing).

Perhaps he thinks love is a flaw that is part of that Original Sin, since it was love that caused Marika to experience the grief over what happened to her Shaman village family, which led her to to betray and genocide the Hornsent. And since so many of his actions are explicitly done to distance himself from Marika as much as possible, I feel like abandoning his love ties into that in a lot of satisfying ways.
MitridatedCarbon: I interpreted Miquella casting away his love as a result of his plans failing. Miquella was initially pushed by kindness and love, but it made him extremely naive. The problems with the haligtree, the unalloyed gold, and giving Godwyn a true death were that all those plans were too good intentioned and all failed because Miquella was too kind for the lands between. Brought by desperation he started his last plan, which involved casting away everything that made him Miquella, all to fix his world. I bet his original fate was to turn into saint trina within the haligtree and bring peace to the nomad merchants and godwyn, but after the battle of aeonia he was so distraught he abandoned his fate. His fated "future self" took form within the true characteristic of Miquella: his love.
LuckyLiarK: "How can you save those had been forsaken if you cant even save your other self."
Epsonea_482: The eepy meepy Saint
cipherstormwolf14: Shedding himself of his love marked his failure. How can you make a better world without love?
ThatRipOff: Descending down that Fissure was one of the highlights of the DLC for me. You know what's coming when you see the purple coastline, you read the tragic message at the cross above the cavern, and then you finally find her. The whole experience was so heavy and melencoly. Grade A environmental and direct storytelling.

I was just following along the path until then, but once I saw that Miquella cast away such a sad, sleepy waifu ... I knew it was time to go kick his ass.
captaintryhard5891: I love how they explored themes of identity in elden ring. Characters split into fractured selves, identical people sharing a soul, a lot of bodies fused while their minds are left behind, many beings who arent human yet feel human, and humans who feel like or become monsters. Feels like theyre asking where is the edge of one's self? What makes something a person?
gonk1529: Trina speaks, and I listen
vgman94: Fascinating interpretation of the meaning of Miquella discarding his love. If love is defined as being partial, having the ability to prioritize some over others, then what Miquella was doing was ridding himself of any ability to connect with his followers or anyone he’d rule over.

By this logic, the more he rid himself of his humanity, the more evil he became, all without knowing it.

A completely blind love is no genuine love at all.
Tigercomplex: The idea of love being a form of discrimination is interesting, because it can be used for unequal treatment or hurting others, by showing too much love or depriving others of it... Personally I thought through the whole DLC that every emotion Miquella abandoned, love, fear, doubt, were things he had to abandon to even get himself to go through the process of ascension in the first place. I think he knew exactly how badly this could turn out - but we already saw in the basegame he had tried everything to build a haven for the outcast, and to treat his sister's curse. Yet the world outside the haligtree was still cruel, and the scarlet rot refused to be cured. I felt as if he was at the end of his rope, here. Maybe he had doubt and fear because he would become an entirely different version of himself. Maybe he abandoned his love because he loved others too much to become as detached from them as only a god could be.

Any way you spin it, he's still my #1 problematic fav now. Thanks Miyazaki for the bishonen demigod with a misguided plan to save the world.
shadowcookie4512: i don't know how often it is said, but i love the screen you put in the background, must take a lot of work to get the npc's there and into the right poses
maize3201: “To Miquella, love May have been seen as discrimination” Canute is that you?
strawbs.: Peak upload as always you gotta love miquella lore
quillquickcard8824: Miquella post-Trina likely understood compassion and tolerance as a cerebral rather than an emotional topic. This is not unheard of. Mentally ill individuals genuinely incapable of certain emotions are still fully capable of coming to understand things like empathy in purely intellectual terms. They can still value these things and comprehend them as positives simply for their practical and utilitarian benefits. It is likely this very realization that allowed Miquella to abandon St. Trina, believing that the bias of emotion would limit the potential of universal compassion. And this is where Miquella made the greatest of his many, many mistakes. Lacking the capacity to love or feel empathy is a disability. One that can, through effort, education, and practice, be overcome. But it is not the natural state of humanity, nor one that is healthy to pursue. Miquella did not leave the fissure an ascended being. He left it crippled.
nerfer200: Miquella and St. Trina are meant to be together. One cannot exist without the other. Miquella and Trina were supposed to be like Marika and Radagon, so strong was Trina's poison that a single sip could kill even a demigod. Thus was she meant to take the title of Elden Lord for Miquella, but Miquella instead chose Radahn to be his King Consort and Saint Trina was but a ln obstacle. So he divested his love, not of the world, but his love of her.
KraakenTowers: St Trina's power turning a darker purple when it contacted the putrescence from the coffins brings to mind another even darker purple attributed to the Gloam-Eyed Queen. The transition between sleep and death even follows the shift in tone from lavender purple to deep twilight purple, with eternal sleep and its velvety purple somewhere in between. This makes me wonder if St. Trina is somehow becoming a new incarnation of the former goddess of death, or even if she always was one, clinging to one of Marika's children the way the mark of the Omen and the sealed Rot God have.
highwaytoheaven99: It makes me think if Marika also divested herself of "love" when ascending to godhood, and that explains why she treated her consort Godfrey and her demigod children like tools. Who knows, maybe the "love" she discarded was her other half, Radagon, just like St. Trina was the "love" of Miquella.
tobisagoschu: The first time I read "I abandon here my love" it sent shivers down my spine, such an impactful moment. A little sad that it wasn't a St. Trina bossfight
user-uh7cb3vy4v: the thing that makes me wake at night, sweat induced and in a near delirious state, is that he abandoned is fate aswell. What does the game imply by this? Fate is a real tangible concept in the lands between, the very fates are stopped by Radahn, for example and forbids you to open the chest in nokron. He is empyrean, he elevates himself as a god by the end, as his fate and his vow dictates, yet that is the exact thing he abandoned. Was he always destined to become St.Trina? Or, is it that he abandoned the fate of St.Trina and himself being together?

Or did he abandon his fate to grant him the very thing St.Trina wants for miquella? He is killed and his fate is destroyed by the Tarnished in the end. After all, Miquella gave Ranni and then the Tarnished the spirit calling bell, even could be argued that he gave Torrent aswell, since he was the last owner of torrent and gave him to melina, and torrent chose us before melina did. He doesn't charm the Tarnished like he does with every other character right up until he becomes a god, you could say he even guides the Tarnished in the very first steps of the game; if you remember if you kill the grafted scion the butterflies that guide you to your first death are the nascent butterflies.

Why did Fromsoft refuse us a Miquella-esque ending, when they clearly tried to multiple times in development? Maybe the actual true promised king consort was the tarnished Miquella made along the way, to make him stronger, to destroy the order that came before riddled with madness and made anew in moonlight.

Aug 20 2024

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