Elden Ring and the Shock of the Picturesque
Roger Whitson, Managing Editor
The boss room for Elden Ring’s Malenia, Blade of Miquella, appears like a decomposing picturesque painting. The knarred roots of the Haligtree (from the Old English hāliġ, meaning “holy”) spiral down into Malenia’s room, tracing the obscure contours of her brother Miquella, who fed the tree with his god-like blood. Malenia herself looks exhausted. In her rot-induced delirium, Malenia cannot recognize that her brother has been gone for quite some time. Her hair thins while she stretches her arm and caresses one of the tree’s roots. Malenia’s prosthesis and helmet lie on the ground, grim reminders of the damage inflicted upon her body from the scarlet rot circulating in her veins.
Malenia has struggled for years to control the rot and become a fearsome warrior. She bests some of the most powerful champions in The Lands Between and ascends to godhood — “blossoming” into the Rot God during her battle with the Tarnished. The wings she acquires as the Rot God are brilliantly streaked with hues of the scarlett poison keeping her alive. The Prosthesis-Wearer Heirloom description reads: “Though born into the accursed rot, when the young girl encountered her mentor and his flowing blade, she gained wings of unparalleled strength.”
The roots of the Haligtree in Malenia’s boss room.
Malenia’s story compliments the ruined and rotten yet expansive landscape of Miquella’s Haligtree, exemplifying the picturesque style found in many Soulsborne games. Defining the picturesque in 1782, William Gilpin calls it “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture.” Yet Ron Broglio has shown that it is impossible to understand the picturesque without also considering visual technologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like the moving panorama, which overwhelmed audiences by technologically manipulating their senses and immersing them into paintings and scenes. William Dunlap’s 1828 Trip to Niagra was a typical panorama of the period, accompanied by a three-act comedy that transported viewers to the largest waterfall in the world. Multistory paintings like Dunlap’s would be affixed to moving pullies, giving spectators a 360-degree view of historical battles or natural wonders. The panorama contributed to a shocking experience of visual realism and immersion that was central to the picturesque idea of nature as spectacle.
Typical machine setup for a moving panorama, from an 1848 issue of Scientific American
Elden Ring’s open world environment, with its promises of an unparalleled immersive experience, inherits the picturesque philosophy of the moving panorama. The game rejects the approach of earlier Soulsborne games, where shortcuts treat landscape exclusively as giant interlocking puzzles and where broad vistas appear suddenly after underground, sewer, or dungeon levels. While Miquella’s Haligtree retains some of the puzzle and vista elements, for instance it is impossible to visit the area without finding two halves of the Haligtree medallion. The knarred tendrils of the first section of the level recall the multistory and interactive elements of Dunlap’s moving panorama. Players are surrounded by branches twisting in every direction, and the only limitation on movement comesin the form of their narrow branches and the gravity underneath them that signals certain death. Miquella’s Haligtree is a giant, dangerous, interactive painting.
Statue of Malenia and Miquella near the Brace of the Haligtree site of grace
The Haligtree increasingly reveals itself to be a twisted, hollow husk of its former self. Later portions of the Haligtree illustrate the ruined hopes of Malenia and Miquella by highlighting the tree’s ruins and crumbling edifice. Miquella cultivated the Haligtree to rebel against the Golden Order after he learned they could not cure his sister of her scarlett rot curse. Miquella used his own blood to help the Haligtree grow. While he sacrificed everything to keep the rot at bay, Malenia desperately unleashed her scarlet rot on Caelid at the climax of her battle with General Radahn. This contradiction between Malenia’s clear heroism and the rot that takes over her body is reflected in the architecture of Elphael, the so-called Brace of the Haligtree. The Brace helps to reinforce rotten roots of the Haligtree, but its flying buttresses and ribbed vaults are either overgrown with weeds or falling apart. The Brace swarms with the diseased Kindred of Rot, as well as crestfallen Cleanrot Knights.
According to Cleanrot Knight Finlay’s Ashes, the knight “carried the slumbering [Malenia] all the way back to the Haligtree” after her battle with Radahn in Caelid, “fending off all manner of foes along the way.” Many of the Cleanrot Knights had to accept that they would become infected with rot when defending Malenia; and yet as the scarlet rot accumulates in the Haligtree, it starts to hollow out the knights with its fungal noxiousness, causing them to become more aggressive and less rational. Sacrifice and rot intermingle in the Haligtree until one becomes indistinguishable from the other.
The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge found simulations of nature, like those found in the moving panorama and open-world games, “loathsome” and “disgusting,” because they deceive the viewer to mistake a simulacrum for reality. Still, as Alenda Y. Chang has shown, video game environments can also recalibrate our relationship with nature and the environment by showing us different ways of experiencing them. The picturesque ruins of Miquella’s Haligtree immerse the player with interactive details and stunning landscapes, conjuring a spectacle of a peculiarly rotten beauty. While Elden Ring is certainly not unlike many open world games in this respect, its use of the picturesque to shock its players complicates its presumed commitment to realism and reminds us that, as William Blake says, “we become what we behold.”
