Elden Ring's DLC trailer already has players theorising about demigod children, butterflies, and curtains
If you ask me, I think the drapes are the key to everything.
The first trailer for Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC dropped yesterday, February 21, and unsurprisingly, it’s sent some FromSoft fans into bouts of manic theorising that’re already leading to some interesting ideas, some of which are related to curtains.
In case you missed it, we now know that Shadow of the Erdtree will be arriving on June 21, 2024, giving folks a nice few months to prepare themselves for the task of taking on the litany of strange and no doubt incredibly tough bosses the trailer showed off. It also leaves plenty of time for people to try and figure out what we’re in for story-wise, a process that’s already kicked off.
Naturally, one of those who’s been quick to start digging in and coming up with ideas is YouTuber Sekiro Dubi, whom you might be familiar with if you’ve ever been interested in Elden Ring’s cut content. Along with the likes of fellow ER YouTuber Ziostorm, they’ve been at the centre of a big brainstorming session on Twitter, attempting to uncover potential links between the DLC’s story and that of the main game.
There’s been lots of chatter about Messmer - that boss with the snake from the trailer who’s believed to possibly be “another demigod child of Marika”, which would potentially make them a sibling of some kind to Malenia and Miquella. In relation to this idea, there’s the butterfly theory, which is based on the actual butterflies you can find and use as crafting materials in the base game.
People had previously used it to suggest a possible connection between Malenia, Miquella, and Melina, but now they’re suggesting Messmer could well be what the smouldering butterfly represents, instead of the latter.
That said, my favorite bits of theorising, even more so than those surrounding mysterious bit of dialogue from spirits in the base game, are about curtains. Yes.
To be fair, they’re not just any old drapes, but those found in Queen Marika’s bedchamber. “I think the curtains here hint at a sort of liminal place between Marika’s resting place, the bedchamber curtains projecting through her unconscious into the Shadow Lands,” Sekiro Dubi has suggested in a tweet about them. “St. Trina/Miquella was the lord of dreams after all.”
So, this would potentially make the Land of Shadow some kind of dream realm or pocket dimension linked to its central characters. “Marika got impaled [by] Messmer. She’s suffering, but Miquella put her to sleep to avoid suffering. Marika sleeps and in her sleep she dreams the shadow lands [sic], thus those curtains,” the YouTuber added in a separate post.
So yes, maybe some curtains are the key to working out what Shadow of Erdtree’s about. Or maybe they aren’t. We’ll just have to wait until release or until someone unearths some groundbreaking connection to find out.