games

I don't really know what to think of Elden Ring tbh. I don't think it's a very good game, but I think the relationship between society and cosmology in it is actually really cool (at least sometimes) and way more than I can remember seeing from basically any other game.* I also really like the cult that seems to be based on idealizing achieving immortality by reversing death, where normally the body is destroyed and the soul persists, by having the soul destroyed and the body persisting, turning the subject into kind of vegetative post-human (and maybe sort of a god?)

idk, it has a lot of stuff in it that is baffling but makes just enough sense to be interesting, which is just what I like compared to the common fantasy route of, if not being hopelessly paint-by-numbers, doing imaginary particle physics for no reason, like the cosmological equivalent of GoT politics where there is a lot of information but very little of it means anything at all in terms of themes or expressing ideas external to the text.

Elden Ring is way higher fantasy than the previous games (following the trend of escalation), which makes it harder to categorize as grimdark fantasy is usually very deliberately low fantasy for obvious reasons, but idk.

*There are interesting text-dumps in Elder Scrolls books, but that stuff almost never appears anywhere in the actual game, whereas it actually does factor into Elden Ring at least a bit (especially the endings)