Queen Marika - A Deconstruction of Villainy

In a single act, Marika destroyed both herself and the kingdom she had built, but why?
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
04:05 A Comparison to Gwyn, The Lord of Sunlight
09:28 Idealistic Beginnings
12:00 Becoming a Tyrant
14:08 Losing Faith
17:05 Marika's Secret Plan
24:45 Shattering the Elden Ring
26:20 Godhood is a Prison
30:25 Misery
32:35 Her Relationship with her Children
33:50 What is Radagon?
38:50 Her Origins
41:42 The Gate of Divinity
42:45 Conclusion

[VictorIV]

“What’s your favourite spell, Marika?”

“A spell to create a field of flowers.”

[nickytheanimal]

Marika was never in contact or even working for the greater will is my fave part. The fingers literally just made it up for her

[EmissaryOfStuff]

It was pretty crazy, beating Metyr, reading all the descriptions and realizing that Marika was probably lied to her whole life, especially while she was vulnerable due to the trauma inflicted by the Hornsent.

Goes to show what an important theme cycles of violence and abuse are in Elden Ring.

[inasilentway]

It's crazy how many people overlook that Marika's shattering of the Elden Ring was essentially a suicide attempt. I believe this is what returned Grace to the Tarnished as well, hoping for them to bring an answer to her sorrow.

[Walmbat]

The way I prefer to read Marika is as a deeply tragic villain, who fell into being an abominable tyrant due to the trauma she underwent in her past. Her initial actions were born of vengeance to lash out at the ones who victimized her and her people, and then at the ones she saw as cursing the family she managed to scrape together in the wake of it all. From there, she tried and failed to create what she considered a better world, due to how her trauma shaped her perceptions and reactions to those like the Omen and the Misbegotten. Finally, at the very end, with no idea how to change it, how to fix it, how to put the pieces back together… she sought to end it all, just to escape the pain – and we all know how that ended.

[devidrachan]

What if Radagon was truly in love with Renala. It caused him pain when Marika forced him to abandon his beloved family, but being her other half, didn't have a choice. Seeing how it tore her family apart grew Rannis resentment of the golden order and anything tied to it. Once Marika decided to destroy her order, Radagon was pissed, because he probably felt betrayed. He had abandoned everything for absolutely nothing, and in revenge, decided to force Marika to maintain the status quo, so as for his personal sacrifices not to be in vain.

[Esty]

I do think, she was the one success of the Hornsent’s melding-ritual. She first became their Saint. The one they were trying so desperatelly to create. Marika proceeded to be that Saint and made the Hornsent to show her the way to become a god. The moment she stood before the Gate of Divinity, she revealed her rage and killed the Hornsent as brutally as she could to avenge her people. “The Seduction and the Betrayal.”

[athelise]

Also, one more thing, Miquella's curse is that of nascence, not necessarily youth. He's cursed that all of his ambitions never reach their full potential: unalloyed gold, the haligtree, even his own epoch.

[apolonier]

St. Trina reminds me of how in dreams, in real life, you can't yell, say anything or make sounds. She tries to enunciate every part of her words and she'll never be any stronger or awake...

[innocuousalias]

I think her dialogue to her children was a prophecy, a warning to them that they were cursed (just like her) and if they didn't fight their way out of it they would fall to ruin (just like her). Becoming a lord or god is not the final step in avoiding Marika's fate but so long as people would seek divine power her children would be targets unless they had the strength of a god. Whether its the golden order, the hornsent or whomever came before the people were always seeking divine power and sacrificing others to get to that power.

[tristanneal]

I think it's quite clear what Marika found when she set aside blind faith and searched the depths of the Golden Order. Ymir spells it out for us:

"The conceits – the hypocrisy – of the world built upon the Erdtree. The follies of men. Their bitter suffering. Is there no hope for redemption? The answer, sadly, is clear. There never was any hope. They were each of them defective. Unhinged, from the start. Marika herself. And the fingers that guided her. And this is what troubles me. No matter our efforts, if the roots are rotten, …then we have little recourse."

Marika discovers Metyr had been abandoned by the Greater Will long ago, and her Godhood and order were not in fact guided by some omnipotent higher power. This discovery causes a crisis of faith for her.

[courier]

I find it so interesting how two Empyreans, Miquella and Marika, both have two souls in one body that can transform or split at will or by force, yet D has two bodies for his one soul.

[remygallardo]

I like to think, after the DLC shows us everything Miquella had to go through in order to follow in her footsteps and replicate her ascension we get a glimpse of what ascending actually means. The process involved shedding just about everything that makes you who you are and what comes out on the other side of the Gate of Divinity is only an echo of who you used to be and entirely up to chance if that echo is strong enough to actually do what you intended. We see Miquella shed all of his body and soul but the loss of Saint Trina was the turning point where what was left to ascend would fundamentally betray his original intent, as a god without compassion is incapable of delivering the gentler world he envisioned.

With Marika I feel like, guided as she was by the Greater Will, it led her to ascension knowing and intending to use Radagon and she was just the vessel it needed to get the champion it needed to seize control of the Lands Between. It was too late for her to question the Greater Will by the time things started going wrong, and the fact that she removed the rune of Death from the Elden Ring did indeed trap her as Saint Trina suggests will happen to Miquella.. She was outplayed by the outer god and in her other half she was going to be usurped leaving her one desperate way out; shatter the ring.

[texasshiva]

I think Marika's comment about wallowing at the fringes is directed at Miquella. The Haligtree is literally at the fringes. And his ambitions are of a fundamentally powerless upstart. He took advantage of the existing family feud to further his ambitions and charmed powerful people to balance his powerlessness. I think she saw how her Order was flawed and abusable and decided to destroy it. And she saw that Miquella was terrifying.

[mysticbear]

Marika is easily my favourite videogame's "villain". She seems to do things just to destroy everything, yet it's just a reflection of her desires regarding herself. She's so extreme in her ideas an choices and yet everything she does makes sense, even if it's clearly not the right choice. She's condemned to eternal torment by her own desire to make a better world and finding herself not be ready for what the reality of it turned out to be. I love this character to damn much

[TrueDiox]

I mean, I think we know fairly well why Marika wouldn't have been able to get the Rune of Death from Maliketh. For the same reason we had to put down Blaidd. Because empyrean shadow beasts are servants of the Two Fingers and would be forced to stop anyone plotting against them, even their masters.

[MarcellusMaize]

Godhood being a prison is one of my favorite tropes in media. No matter how powerful a human character may become (they may even become powerful enough to be considered a god) their human flaws and temperaments always end up being their downfall.

Marika went from being a powerless and abused shaman girl to being the uncontested ruler of the entire land, she started an entire new order, literally rewrote the laws of reality to her will, and she wiped out anyone who could’ve posed a threat to her (even one of her own children if we assume that Melina is the gloam eyed queen). However despite all of this, she was still unable to escape the plights of her past life.

In a cruel yet fitting sense of irony, 2 of her children were born with the exact same features of the people who see despised, and despite literally removing the concept of death in order to prevent anyone close to her dying ever again, her one perfect golden son was brutally murdered.

The order she created was rife with suffering, death, and discrimination. Pretty much all of her children were born afflicted, and overall being a god seemed pretty damn miserable, which is why In the end she decided to literally shatter it.

It reminds me of Eren and Ymir from Attack on Titan. Ymir was also an abused and powerless slave girl who stumbled across godly power. Her misuse of this power resulted in thousands of years of suffering and tyranny, and in the end not even “death” could free her from the hell of her own creation. That is until Eren comes along and he essentially takes the burden away from her onto himself. Eren essentially becoming a god allows him to achieve his goals but it also forces him to confront the worst aspects of his nature before he does it. He is torn apart by the fact that he will inflict the same awful trauma that he faced on the entire world (even people who had nothing to do with his conflict) only on a much larger scale, he also must confront the fact that despite living his entire life in the pursuit of freedom, he couldn’t have been further from free in the end. Because he sees through time and realizes that everything was always going to happen a certain way and he had no choice but to essentially follow a script.

Moral of the story, don’t play god folks.

[philbuttler]

That last echo is brutal when you think about Morgott. Like he was always going be a tool via not claiming the brithrite he won because of the mental blocks marika's horrble parenting inflicted on him. Duty won over the selfishness of his family, the only demigod with any sense of responsibility attached to weilding power and it just got him misery. Its really sad.

[valentai_]

Shadowbound beast like Maliketh are tailored by the Two Fingers for their Empyrean.

However, their loyalty to that Empyrean can be compromised, and their will can be overwritten by that of the Two Fingers at any moment.

We see this with Blaidd, who was the most loyal to Ranni, desperately trying to fight off the control they had over him.

It’s likely this was the case with Maliketh. Whom was directed to guard Death because the Two Fingers wanted to eliminate the possibility of her dying.

So even if he wanted to, Maliketh would not be able to just hand over Death to Marika. Simply because it would go against his programming.

[nERVEcenter]

By the way there's a VERY subtle transition at the very end of the announcement trailer. As Marika is falling against the anvil, head bowed, you can see her shoulder very subtly bulking up, becoming masculine. And if I'm not crazy, it's difficult to see but her hair is beginning to very slightly shift to red. The act is done and Radagon is in the process of taking over.