Elden Ring’s Malenia embodies FromSoftware’s problems with women

It is as though she has slept in the Haligtree’s stomach, like a doze off. Malenia The SeveredMiquella Defender!() is now broken to pieces with her only arm still attached at her little brother’s feet. 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.

Malenia, a tough-as-nails encounter in the endgame, is an optional choice. However, it is often a problem for many players. This is similar to Lady Maria’s difficult encounter. Bloodborne, it’s a two-phase fight full of fast, lethal strikes as Malenia heals from damage she’s dealt to the player.

She is intimidating as soon as you see her in Elphael. It is quite scary to be around her. She is skilled in her movements and has a lot of practice. Her voice is clear and calm. Her expression is passive. 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.

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. Her nakedness is revealed slowly by the camera, as she no longer wears armor. Her body is crusted over with rot, and yet reveals her breasts and genitals being as smooth as a doll’s. The rot creates fear mixed with titillation that complicates the act of looking at her body. It is not a sign of vulnerability; it’s a challenge.

Finale part of fight ends in a wild flurry of aerial dive bombs and rot explosions. Multiple copies of her are running around your neck. She slowly dies and disappears into the safety of the rot bloom, silently threatening to come back in the future for more retribution than a normal life cycle.

Image from Software/Bandai Namco

Malenia is an example of how FromSoft creates women for its games. They share the same condition no matter who they work for or how many NPCs they meet out in nature. These women live in a tragically decrepit world, with a common brokenness, disfigurement and abandonment. 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. When they are confronted in combat, their emotions can be muted by more gentle counterparts.

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. However, Malenia is an unpopular character who has been subject to a lot of social media memes, posts and even 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.

Fans love quite a few archetypal FromSoft ladies, like the Emerald Herald.Dark Souls II), the Fire Keeper (Dark Souls 3Ranni (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.

To quote Matt Kim, in his piece “Why Are Female Characters in ‘Dark Souls’ Games Quiet and Alien?”:

Although not exclusive to Japanese anime this archetype is a popular type of character. It is even more bizarre that these characters have been actively idolized because of their outer-worldliness. This is why they are so appealing. 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.

She reveals her monstrous, true form when engaged in combat.

FromSoft’s female characters who deviate from this quiet, doll-like appearance are still written with a lack of emotionality, which feels close to masculine stoicism. It’s a strange emptiness that informs every permutation of character that women embody in these games.

Soulsborne games have a reputation for challenging players. Over the years, they’ve attracted men to their boss-killing role. For some the problem is not so difficult. This is the main pointThese experiences. This attitude has long kept many away from the studio’s games, but Elden Ring’s popularity attracted a wider audience ready to have bosses grind them into dust.

Image: FromSoftware/Bandai Namco via Nico Deyo

Malenia’s boss fight is punishingly difficult, and the audience’s hostile and competitive attitudes about it are often steeped in gendered toxicity. Reddit and YouTube posts are numerous. tweets talk about players’ failures or successes, while littered with sexist slurs. The usual discourse of the community about how to beat her was also reintroduced. more valid and which ones made you a “pussy,” and success over her took on a weird masculinized chest-beating at times. This is not surprising, although it’s distasteful. This boss fight creates friction between the developer’s ideas about gender and its ideas about enabling a power fantasy. This creates an environment of uncertainty. weird performanceThe game encourages you to accept failure. This is only heightened by Malenia’s character design.

This bravado over beating Malenia is understandable. It evokes the idea of an innocent warrior such as Joan of Arc, or Brienne of Tarth. Although she has a strong aesthetic that refers to Athena or the valkyries in her appearance, even when it’s stripped away, her nakedness seems more frightening than provocative. Every aspect of her character is hostile and ridicules the player. Faced with an indomitable, stubborn woman, who has not been defeated before, male fantasies can only be fueled by the desire to defeat her. Men should at the very least see it happen.

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. The story trailer shows the battle between the demigods for the Elden Lord title. Radahn cut off her arm. In a desperate act, Radahn grabs her sword, leaping onto him. The blade plunges into her and then explodes into an enormous rot blossom. This is evident when Caelid falls into the hands of Radahn, which has been blighted by every edge.

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. Radahn had mastered gravity magic, and she also took her arm out.

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. This story shows that the demigod created spore-clones from herself and they grew in Caelid. All roads in FromSoft’s games lead back to women being mothers, even terrifying sword maidens.

This change in narrative quickly subverted her original design. It also reduced their effectiveness. 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. The place that could have allowed for narrative and mechanical evolution has become a way to get an end in a videogame. The path is populated by women who act as passive help-meets and predictable obstacles. This fan base loves to ignore.

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 seems like a half-grown concept that was cut too short. The Haligtree has left what could have been, wrapped in flowers and dreaming about revenge.