From (Hate to Love and Back Again) Software Retoss: Elden Ring and the Abandonment of the Father

Hello listener, This is a "retoss"  of a January 6th (no relation) episode, where we discussed 'From Software' games, particularly Elden Ring, particularly how  Sagi sucked at it, which led to his radicalization,  with him expressing Souls-phobic, extremist positions..It's not the first time.In the meantime Sagi went on a journey -- of self-discovery and community discovery -- through the 'Souls-Borne' gamer community, in its Twitch, YouTube and dedicated websites (stayed out of Reddit).He came back to talk about it with a gleam in his eye. The games received new meaning through their mediation with a community of other gamers, a new understanding of their purpose. Apparently his search for fellow disdainers of Elden Ring led him down a deep rabbit hole  of addiction (to YouTube Souls-Borne videos). He knew it. Elden Ring WAS bad.But  is was all a scam, a gateway drug; before long he was actively enjoying Dark Souls 1. Surely we have a powerful cult here.The ideas tossed here will take us through Monotheism's various versions of the Father: Dark Souls 1 features the father who is a present-yet-untouchable persona of death, conditioning the player/son through a survival-focused care/education, where the logic is as binary as life and death and the boy learns a value of overcoming adversity; an overcoming whose value can be shared with others (other Miyazaki "sons" - the Souls-borne community).Elden Ring, on the other hand, lets the player simmer in the vacuum of the father, where the height of achievement has been flattened for the sake of a freedom of possibility; an absent father since now success is idiosyncratic, it's not shared, it circulates (like money, whose value has no singularity by definition). Like in Protestant 'Predestination,' the only  thing you can share with others is that the meaning of your "works" in the world are, as far as the living are concerned, without spiritual consequence. The 'Elden Lord,' like the protestant "Salvation," is an empty signifier of a success that is indifferent to the manner of achieving it. Finding possibilities, like in Elden Ring, is lateral and disjointed; overcoming a challenge, like in Dark Souls, is more direct and cohesive. (Do we really  need to ask which is the better phallus?)When the community screams 'Git Gud,' more than a mere adolescent brag -- which Jake represented oh-so-well in this retoss -- they are referring back to the father that was still present in the Dark Souls games, in Bloodborne and Sekiro.This also brings up the angle of these games' relation to the father as rituals of masculinity, which  we use to make fair sense of the Souls-borne community, understanding them rather than judging them. Some gratitude is, in fact, in order.Ok ok no more rant.The stars here were: Beast & Sovereign; WWJD; Pervs R' Us (and maybe, begrudgingly, Marx).