{"id":29208,"date":"2022-08-18T22:37:44","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T21:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pley2win.com\/pc\/elden-rings-malenia-is-the-fairytale-i-always-wanted-to-hear\/"},"modified":"2022-08-18T22:37:44","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T21:37:44","slug":"elden-rings-malenia-is-the-fairytale-i-always-wanted-to-hear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pley2win.com\/?p=29208","title":{"rendered":"Elden Ring\u2019s Malenia Is The Fairytale I Always Wanted To Hear"},"content":{"rendered":"
Nowadays we associate them with gold dust and eternally sweet faces, but the fairy is a sort of monster. Southeast Asia\u2019s \u201cyaksha<\/span>\u201d nature spirits gobble up stray travelers, the Germanic \u201cerlking<\/span>\u201d can kill a kid with its bare hands. Elden Ring<\/em>\u2019s Malenia, Blade of Miquella, emerged from a rotting blossom with tangled wings, and is renowned as one of the most dangerous creatures FromSoftware\u2019s ever created. She fits right in. <\/p>\n
When I was a child, fairies were something to lure and, if I was dedicated enough, one day become. I read children\u2019s books with instructions on how to attract fairies to your backyard with the dedication of a small scholar\u2014I had never considered the magical properties of a bottle cap dosed with sugar before\u2014and spun around in wings touched with iridescent cellophane, swinging around a silver wand trailing beads.<\/p>\n
In line with more neutral global fairy myths like the African \u201caziza\u201d<\/span> who blessed hunters, or the Scottish Seelie Court<\/span> who didn\u2019t outright kill all humans, I saw fairies as logical extensions of nature\u2019s mercuriality, and thus, of myself as a fickle five-year-old with arms too chubby and useless to hold back my emotions. Fairies were not heroes, certainly not, but they commanded their delicate, flowery frames with dignity and a commendable, dark bite.<\/p>\n\n
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Every knight needs his fairy.<\/figcaption>Image: Nintendo<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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I found the first video game fairy I encountered, the Great Fairy<\/span> in 2006 action-adventure game The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess<\/em>\u2014a game my friend\u2019s brother played with sullen teenage reverence\u2014surprisingly docile. Or, not docile, but\u2026her eyes looked puffy and sad when she sat in that fountain and praised Link. Still, a spayed fairy is better than no fairy, so when I got a Nintendo DS in 2007, I decided to play The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass<\/em>.<\/p>\n
I was pleased to see three more fairies, Ciela, Leaf, and Neri, act as Link\u2019s companions and the player\u2019s in-game cursors. But these colorful orbs of light were also surprising to me. Ciela\u2019s joie de vivre seemed to originate in her twinkling around Link, not in bubbling near brooks or playing practical jokes. That was a far cry from the behaviors I had come to expect from what I considered to be serious fairy literature, illustrator Cicely Mary Barker\u2019s 1923 Flower Fairies of the Spring<\/em><\/span> <\/em>and her truly life-changing \u201cjournal\u201d Fairyopolis<\/em><\/span>, published posthumously in 2005.<\/p>\n
But social expectations took their toll, and as I got older I began to see video games as just that thing most older brothers and male classmates did after school. These expectations convinced me that that the video game fairy\u2019s role could only be that of a mere companion. To me, this acquiescence was based on fact.<\/p>\n
Brentilda in 1998\u2019s Banjo-Kazooie<\/em>, Ribbon in 2000\u2019s Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards,<\/em> Stella in 2010\u2019s Dragon Quest IX<\/em>, all confirmed that, because fairy mythology is often female-coded and because games are often marketed to men<\/span>, fairy women in games were doomed to occupy limited auxiliary roles like \u201cinformant\u201d and \u201cbackground healer.\u201d They were designed as unquestioningly loyal and terminally chipper, plucked from woodland homes and rivers and bluebells only to have their interesting wings clipped. They don\u2019t soar or willfully take what they want the way their mythic predecessors did. They, instead, stay pinned to their new, unnatural habitat: a male protagonist.<\/p>\n
Into this pool of baggage steps the golden toes of Elden Ring<\/em>\u2019s Malenia. But Elden Ring<\/em> brilliantly diverges from expectations, making Malenia a striking antithesis to the fairies who came before her.<\/p>\n
With a first-phase character design more reminiscent of another female-coded myth\u2014the spirit-guiding valkyrie<\/span>, Norway\u2019s leader of battle-tattered souls\u2014Malenia looks<\/em> like war. She plays like it, too. Between her HP regenerating every time she hits and the infamous Waterfowl Dance, a slashing attack that has been called \u201cundodgeable<\/span>,\u201d Malenia has been unofficially coronated FromSoftware\u2019s hardest boss<\/span>. Players wouldn\u2019t dedicate countless hours of game-time solely to<\/span> defeating her<\/span> if she wasn\u2019t so formidable.<\/p>\n\n
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Video games are a type of modern fairytale. <\/figcaption>Image: Level-5<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Unlike some shrimpy video game fairies, Malenia is made strong because of, not despite, her fairy-like form. This fairy does not remain stuck in the background. Appearing to you naked and maimed, deceptively tender and feminine, she\u2019s reduced to her true, brutal nature. \u201cBut she whose hours of tenderness were gone \/ had neither hope nor fear,\u201d William Butler Yeats writes about the fairy princess Niamh in the epic poem The Wanderings of Oisin<\/em>.<\/p>\n
A rotted flower blooms and butterfly hordes come to her aid, poking you, stabbing you, inflicting you with her nature, much like how disfigured European changelings<\/span> swapped themselves out for the purity of human childhood, or how 17th century fairy scholar Robert Kirk\u2019s death was attributed to being stolen by the creatures<\/span>. Malenia is a boss who wants to inflict your essence with rot, eliminate the totality of your personhood with quick, simple death. Fairydom is the world\u2019s horror story for capturing the capriciousness men often prescribe to womanhood<\/span>. When women like Cicely Mary Barker flip this horror story into inspiration for girls like me, Malenia becomes the video game fairy I always wanted.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s one problem (there always is). Look at her name, \u201cMalenia, Blade of Miquella.\u201d Video games just can\u2019t help themselves, can they? On paper, this fearsome fairy is but a companion, no more than a tool for her sleeping, twin brother Miquella<\/span>.<\/p>\n
But unlike Link or the protagonist of Dragon Quest IX<\/em>, Miquella is absent from gameplay. In his absence, Malenia is a champion\u2014perhaps his<\/em> champion, but still a winner in her own right\u2014and her existence creaks open the window of possibility for female video game characters. If I had Malenia 15 years ago\u2014her success, not only as a character in Elden Ring<\/em>, but also as a benchmark of game difficulty and design\u2014I\u2019d have seen that games were for more than the red-faced boys in class. I would understand that women in games don\u2019t need to volley between pretty pink princess, total eye candy<\/span>, and subdued final girl<\/span>, though disgruntled internet commenters still insist they must be. No, women can be terrifying. They can be beautiful, and terrifying, and rotten to the core.<\/p>\n
![\"Elden](\"https:\/\/i.kinja-img.com\/gawker-media\/image\/upload\/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_80,pg_1,q_80,w_80\/a13e1625667f7b7f6c575322e1c34f27.jpg)
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"Legend](\"https:\/\/i.kinja-img.com\/gawker-media\/image\/upload\/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_80,pg_1,q_80,w_80\/c5a5020d83e1e0c3f9bd684f9bafc567.jpg)
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