Freelancer Nico Deyo wrote for Polygon
“She lies there, deep in the belly of the Haligtree, as if she had merely dozed off in the shafts of lights that filter down. Malenia the Severed (defender of Miquella!) has fallen to pieces, her one good arm resting at the feet of the whorls and gnarls that held her childlike brother. This enigmatic warrior captured the audience from the moment she appeared, and she featured prominently in the rest of the game’s marketing materials. But instead of becoming an uncontested favorite, she frustrated fans and revealed the limitations of FromSoftware’s imagination.”
She didn’t even show her breasts or any indication she was female beyond her name and her hair. You sexist. But okay then.
“As you encounter her in Elphael, she is instantly imposing. Her presence is quietly scary. Her movements are honed and practiced. Her voice is calm and unemotional. Her face is impassive. Everything in the first phase of the fight is designed to thwart and emasculate; there’s a deep humor in the idea of a woman whose very attacks steal health from you to empower herself. And the ultimate joke: Just when you think you’ve knocked her down, she gets back up one last time.”
This is the biggest brainrot I’ve ever seen. Do you think that FromSoft devs added a second phase to a woman because it’s a woman? What about Radagon and Elden Beast? Are you a moron? 79 bosses in just the Soulsborne series (discluding Sekiro, Elden) alone have more than one phase. Also; when have female bosses ever used leech before? I can’t remember a single boss that utilises leech in FromSoftware’s entire catalogue of games in the way Malenia does, let alone leech as a whole. It is a unique mechanic and nothing more: one that makes her one of the hardest bosses in the entire retinue of Soulsborneringwhatever games FromSoft has produced.
I don’t know why this is here. Please ignore it.
“Malenia’s first death triggers her final transformation into the Goddess of Scarlet Rot, and she emerges triumphantly from her blossom to spread tragically beautiful wings of skin, rot, and butterflies. She is no longer clad in armor, and the camera does a long, slow reveal of her nakedness. Her body is crusted over with rot, and yet reveals her breasts and genitals being as smooth as a doll’s. It evokes a confusing mixture of fear and titillation, complicating the act of regarding her body. Her lack of protection does not feel like a vulnerability but a challenge.”
The camera in Elden Ring near-always does a cinematic-like reveal of bosses: including exactly the way Malenia is revealed. If this was done sparingly; or for only female bosses; perhaps the fan-service element might be clear. But it is not, and that is obviously not the intent. “Smooth as a doll’s”. I guess her vagina should have the rotting pustules replaced with a bush, that’d satisfy you I suppose? “Titillation”; I’ve personally never been turned on by Malenia being a female Nurgle, but whatever. Her breasts, too, are similarly not smooth; they are covered with buboes of rot.
“Malenia exemplifies the way FromSoft writes women in its games. Whether bosses or NPCs you meet in the wild, these women have a shared condition. They exist in tragically declined worlds, sharing a specific brokenness; disfigurement, abandonment, and loss. They are afflicted by gender, and the “cure” for when they are obstacles instead of mutely helpful is for the player to enact succinct violence. It is a particular kind of idealized femininity, as fantastical as the foreboding castles and giant trees — demure, quiet, void of needs or motivations — an echoed presence of dolls, mothers, and even help-meets who guide the player along. Their emotions are muted in their more docile counterparts, before erupting into a shrieking, horrifying hysteria when encountered in combat.”
Literally all Soulsborneringsekirowhatever games are on the precipice of destruction: In Sekiro, we see the fields burning. The nation is at war. In DS1, we have the undead amassing and a general collapse of society, like just about every other game. DS3 and Elden Ring share a similarity, too, in that the Age of Fire and the Golden Order are perceived to have lasted simply too long: or atleast, that is the message I carried from it. They engage in a slow decay. That affects men as much as women, no? Also, there’s like, four female bosses in the entire game.. Malenia is possessed by Rot, and so yes, she is void of needs or motivations. Ranni, however, is not: she is clear of mind. She has escaped Death itself to further her goal of upending the entire world order.
In addition, I would not say Malenia engages in ‘shrieking, horrifying hysteria’ whatsoever: or anyone else, for that matter.
“Malenia is made up of this same stuff and isn’t unanimously hated, either; there is passion for a giant, red-haired woman in armor. Still, she is a contentious character subject to social media posts, memes, and arguments. It’s obvious that there is a contingent of the audience antagonized by her presence as both a boss (even if optional) and a figure in the game’s story.”
Briefly examining the links provided demonstrates that Malenia is hated by virtue of her presence as an antagonist and the fact her boss mechanics are some of the toughest - or perhaps, most unique - FromSoft have ever introduced.
“Quite a few of these archetypal FromSoft women are beloved by the fans, such as the Emerald Herald (Dark Souls 2), the Fire Keeper (Dark Souls 3), or more recently Ranni the Witch (Elden Ring). [Ed. note: Nico is being quite generous here, not listing Demon’s Souls’ Maiden in Black, Dark Souls’ infamously heaving giantess Gwynevere, Sekiro’s Emma, and the quite-literally-named The Doll from Bloodborne.] The broader gaming community usually reacts harshly toward female characters, which makes the Soulsborne community’s embrace of them feel positive on the surface. When that affection feels based on that empty, emotionless state, or reduces them to infantilized “waifus,” you realize that hostility and that fondness spring from the same deep sexist roots, twins intertwined.”
Yes, but.. you’re largely talking about the women who serve as aide-de-camps. Maids; servants; or equals who, by virtue of mechanics, have a different connection to the player personally than Sorceress Sellen. To men, or to women, who play the game, this plays to a fantasy. The only exception to your commentary is Gwynevere, who is just a woman with big breasts. Of course there’s going to be jokes about ‘big chest ahead’; it’s merely a tongue-in-cheek joke amongst ADULTS. Jesus Christ. ‘Waifus’ are considered only by virtue of the interactions the player has with the character, often (in the examples cited) ones where the player is tied together with that character. Those women are required for the player to progress properly; or they require the player’s allegiance to further deepen the connection. I would also make the point that noble women, committed to a life more serious than those amongst them, would certainly be rather serious.
While not exclusive to Japanese anime, this sort of archetype is one of the most popular types of characters in the medium. Stranger still is that these characters are actively fetishized for their outer-worldliness. Their lack of a broad emotional spectrum is part of their appeal. Additionally, these characters are typically more resilient than everyone else in their story — perhaps, because they are unburdened by emotions. Yet one could also argue that their lack of “emotions”, used here as an unfortunate euphemism for men’s conception of female shortcomings, makes it easier to believe they are capable of such great strengths.
However, once engaged in combat, she reveals her true, monstrous form.
There are a great deal of people in the story of each world FromSoft creates that are resilient: regardless of whether they are women or not. Again, Malenia is unburdened because she has been consumed, much like Radahn. Her emotions are irrelevant, because she is not truly herself anymore. Ranni is ‘unburdened’, perhaps out of necessity, to upend the world order she so detests. Marika, too, is ‘unburdened’, because she prized above all else the Golden Order.
The author asks us to forget, for a moment, the moment in the mountains, where the Demon of Blindness urges us to not allow Melina to sacrifice herself, and protect her, to take her own emotions into account.
Malenia’s boss fight is punishingly difficult, and the audience’s hostile and competitive attitudes about it are often steeped in gendered toxicity. Numerous Reddit posts, YouTube videos, and tweets talk about players’ failures or successes, while littered with sexist slurs. People also fell back into the usual community discourse about which methods of beating her were more valid and which ones made you a “pussy,” and success over her took on a weird masculinized chest-beating at times. These reactions are distasteful but not surprising. This boss fight creates friction between the developer’s ideas about gender and its ideas about enabling a power fantasy. It creates a weird performance when the game encourages players to embrace failure. This is only heightened by Malenia’s character design.
This is just nonsense. Men will often call each other pussies, especially young men: because it is equivalent to a scaredy-cat. They aren’t calling each other vaginas, you braindead idiot. Also you’re talking about roguelikes like they’re new.
The bravado about beating Malenia makes sense; she evokes the idea of a virginal warrior like Joan of Arc or Brienne of Tarth, her purity and strength existing in a place beyond femininity. Her aesthetic references Athena or valkyries, but even when that is stripped away, her nakedness is terrifying rather than provocative. Everything about her is hostile and taunts the player. When faced with a difficult, defiant woman who has never been beaten, men cannot help but fantasize about being the one to take her down. (Or at least be in the room when it happens.)
No. It’s nothing to do with her femininity. It’s to do with her imposing demeanour - not her aesthetic - and the challenge. You said that her nakedness is tittilating, so, I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say it isn’t provocative. They do not care about her as a ‘person’, because she’s not one. They seek the victory over the challenge. It’s called a game for a reason..
I’m beginning to wonder why I’m writing this.
FromSoft’s style of hiding the world and story behind item descriptions and esoteric NPC dialogue both make the world unreliable and mysterious, but also reinforces fans’ biases toward Malenia. She’s a receding figure in the narrative, whether by choice or omission (there is some evidence of cut content that could have expanded her actual story). Her story is told largely in fragments, prior to encountering her in the Haligtree — the largest is her fight against Radahn. Shown in a story trailer released ahead of the game, the two demigods face off to claim the title of Elden Lord. Radahn cuts off her arm and in a desperate move, she takes her sword and leaps onto him, plunging the blade into herself and exploding into a giant rot blossom. The aftermath of this is clearly shown when the player steps into Caelid, blighted from edge to edge.
There are no “fan’s biases towards Malenia”. Pretty much the entire story is told in fragments, cry about it, it’s the way it’s always been done.
If a fan missed that trailer, their first encounter with Malenia’s influence is felt when going to fight Radahn. Witch-Hunter Jerren, a herald of Radahn, narrates about the general’s decline due to the Scarlet Rot. He’s a shadow of his former self, enfeebled and crazed, eating compatriots like an animal. It’s not hard to imagine how this would influence the audience into seeing her as an aggressor. It spurred fan discussion about how her transformation was “cheating” an otherwise fair fight. (The fact that Radahn was a master of gravity magic and also cut off her arm is not important.)
Yes. She is an aggressor. She is literally simply a powerful, semi-sentient zombie, consumed by the Rot. Releasing one of the most vicious, evil forces in the world is definitely an aggressive tactic. What are you talking about? Getting your arm cut off means you get to imperil the world? If I’m delimbed I get to nuke Africa and no one can complain about it?
In order to shed light on Malenia’s journey, players must pursue a quest to save a young woman who is afflicted by rot, one who eerily looks like Malenia. The story reveals that the demigod dropped spore clones of herself, which blossomed in Caelid. All roads in FromSoft’s games lead back to women being mothers, even terrifying sword maidens.
Most women in FromSoft aren’t mothers. A long history requires some to be, yes, because that is how human reproduction works, you fucking clown. I’m really glad this article is almost over.
These narrative choices swiftly undercut her initially provocative design, cheapening their impact. What’s the scariest thing a team of designers could dream up? A distant warrior woman who doesn’t care about them, slowly succumbing to a rot that infected her from birth. While Malenia’s character writing had grown slightly beyond the way women were written in earlier FromSoft games, her arc is still confined by the same laws. What could have been a place for mechanical and narrative evolution backslides into being merely a means to an end within a video game. Women continue to populate the path as either passive help-meets or predictable obstacles, which the fan base is all too happy to step over.
No, they don’t undercut them at all. She is not a distant warrior woman; and if she is, we have certainly travelled far to her. I didn’t even intend to find her in the first place; I thought she was the final boss. “Step over”? She’s literally one of the hardest bosses in the game, and this is why there is so much interest in her; besides the fact she was featured so prominently in the early material published years before any of us could play the damn game.
While FromSoft’s games are often intriguing meditations on the corrupting influence of power, the inevitability of death, and the lurking dread of cosmic horror, the women in them feel stunted. Malenia is a half-grown idea clipped back too short. What could have been is left on the floor of the Haligtree, cocooned in petals, and deeply dreaming of revenge.
So you want more story? Instead of calling all FromSoft devs misogynistic sexists, perhaps you could’ve said that instead: that is not the way they do story. So simply writing and expanding upon that point would’ve been a far more insightful critique (even if I disagree) than saying Malenia is not embellished enough because she’s a woman and FromSoft employees hate women. There is more lore littered about the world on Malenia than many other characters, including the men.
Overall, the guy’s a fucking idiot, and I’m not surprised he didn’t post his social media.