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also while she's locked up in there i like to think she can speak to shades of radagon and marika, the previous captives of the erdtree / gods under the greater will ( because merri is not elden lord, she's abolished the existence of the elden lord and separated marika and radagon and taken their place ). i am also a firm believer that like... while what marika did was misguided and evil, her insanity was also not. unprompted? basically if i were told i was god but there was another bigger god over me and i couldn't do anything i wanted to do because i had to check with bigger god and if i did step out of line he'd lock me in my room, i'd go nuts. being on the very cusp of ultimate power but not having ultimate power would be more maddening than either being all-powerful or being powerless. the lack of fulfilment would get me and i think it's what got marika. being a vessel for the greater will, made to be The golden goddess of the lands between, but also having to grapple with the potential of being replaced ( by another empyrean ), with not having absolute control over her own life or the lives of others ( despite being able to separate out unwanted bits of the ring ), and having to section of parts of herself for political and practical purposes ( i have a whole marigon concept that grew out of the fungus in my skull sorry ), drove her to the point of rebellion. i think it would do the same to merri, especially with her being trapped inside. merri is so social, so wild, so used to roaming that having to sit in the erdtree pocket dimension with no one to talk to but the other two gods would have her losing her mind pretty quick. anyways all this to say i really, really want development with merri and marika here. i was mad once and soon you will be mad too.

i would love to explore a story post-separation ending where, instead of being flat out killed by the elden beast, merri replaces marika on the rune arc, strung up in the erdtree to be punished for her sin of burning the tree, freeing marika and radagon, and robbing them of their divinity. the people that merri has met and influenced, knowing that she is missing and where she last was, resolve to free her from the tree together. i would probably use kelila for interactions there. but like. as much as i’m in love with my downer ending where success = death / disappearance and the poignancy of merri vanishing after accomplishing her task, i’m equally in love with a continuation of that in which one good turn inspires another, where yes she was permitted to sacrifice herself but everyone else is also permitted to then try to get her back, because she is their friend, and they’re not just going to leave her there alone.

#✢ headcanons.

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there are so many girls in the windmill village but none of them want to talk to me. well. there's other things.

#✢ miss merri crack crack crack. #|| hi. 🧍

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#✢ quite contrary ( merrimac. )

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*clang* *CLANGG* *clang clang KLINK* *CLANNNNNNNNG* oh sorry i didn't see you there i was just hitting my sword against things

#✢ quite contrary ( merrimac. )

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i need to do up a post with the moses comparison so soon.

#✢ out of flasks ( ooc. ) #|| disclaimer i am jewish. #|| and i love reading judaism into elden ring. #|| it's my fun meat pumpkin.

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here's a fresh starter call since i've lost track of the old one.

#✢ out of flasks ( ooc. )

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@yellowfingcr / back at it

"Heyseeel!" She hasn't shown up in a while, but her entrance hasn't changed. She leaps from her perch, nearly falling straight onto her friend. "Heysel, Heysel, hi! How did you get all the way over here?"

#yellowfingcr #✢ verse: emboldened by flame. #✢ thread. #|| her after being in a hole somewhere for months upon popping back out: #|| how'd everyone move so fast.

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@lrdvyke / cold

She and Melina have grown closer since leaving Leyndell for the north. She'd been so worried that she and her Maiden would no longer see eye-to-eye, but the opposite had turned out to be true; they speak more often than ever. At every Site of Grace she rests at, her companion comes to her, speaking softly of what they've seen and what she makes of it. Merri, a surprisingly good listener, will rest her head in the other woman's lap and drift off to the sound of her voice. Their journey is nearly at an end, she knows. Whatever Melina is searching for, it's here. She just hopes that, once it's over, they can remain friends.

Her boots crunch over the snow, though the prints are immediately hidden as more falls. She calls upon the wolves more and more to guide her, trusting their noses to lead the way. It's one of them that alerts her to the coming danger, a moment before a red bolt reduces it back to ash. "Huh?! HEY!" She draws both rapiers, leaping backwards and looking about frantically for the source of the strike.

#lrdvyke #✢ verse: emboldened by flame. #✢ thread. #|| merri submitting an apology like im sorry for trying to become elden lord. #|| in my defense i did not intend to.

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@starcaller-scholar / dream blunt rotation at coachella

"Oh, it's you!" She wonders if the other Tarnished saw her get completely obliterated on the bridge. She can still smell burning hair from here ( or is that from the battle behind them? ), and see the smoking hole where her corpse had just been. Damn! "Are you going to the festival, too? If we don't get there soon, I bet they'll start without us!" And she turns round as if to run right back into it, presumably with the same strategy, presumably to get flattened again.

#starcallerscholar #✢ verse: emboldened by flame. #✢ thread.

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“Maybe one life is enough.” ( c: )

She doesn't quite understand, but she's in the business of not understanding. Still, as she considers it, she feels her stomach begin to knot. One life. At first, she thinks literally, as she always does: she has lived far more than one life. Hardly a day goes by where she doesn't die, only to wake, no longer gasping, no longer afraid, at the last Site of Grace she rested at. It's become the norm. She treats her body so carelessly. Frost and poison and rot and more blood than anyone could begin to quantify, she lets it all take her with cheery recklessness. It's normal, for her. It's normal, because she does not remember the first time.

Not the first time after the tomb. That, she recalls clearly. She'd been so scared, hating that floating, slippery feeling that had come over her as the strength left her body. The mind-numbing terror that had gripped her at the very last minute still comes to her, sometimes. And never when she's in danger; it's when she's walking quietly in the woods or by the lake that she remembers, and panics, and swings her sword wildly to ward off anything that might come near, frothing and screaming until she burns out and gets her limbs back under control. A tantrum, Gideon called it. She doesn't know that she likes that word, tantrum.

Gideon doesn't know -- this stranger doesn't know -- that there is a fear deeper than that which drives her to lash and foam and writhe in the grass. The fear of Before the Tomb. Before Varré, Torrent, and Melina. Before Merrimac. A life she had presumably lived, and lost. It stalks her, clinging to her heels like a shadow, begging to be let in. To take her skin, like Godrick, or the Apostles. She hurls it as far from herself as she can, and it always lands at her feet. Challenging her. She is a wolf, and she is afraid, because the thing that hunts her relentlessly is not an animal, or a Lord she can fell, or even a god. It is a human. It is her other self. Her life, forgotten.

"This one is mine," she declares, more defensively than intended. "It's-- it's mine."

#lrdvyke #✢ verse: emboldened by flame.

[smouldring]

here's a fresh starter call since i've lost track of the old one.

#✢ out of flasks ( ooc. ) #|| i'M GONNA TRY. FOR MY GIRL.

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it's not wednesday... but it is howl at the moon monday.

#✢ miss merri crack crack crack.

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#✢ miss merri crack crack crack. #|| I'M STILL HERE I'M JUST WORKING.

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#✢ quite contrary ( merrimac. ) #|| merri when she sees kenneth.

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i have some different takes now on what's going on in the lands between by which i mean people kept making lore videos and i kept eating them and going 'yes agree' even when they contradicted each other. however irreversible fungal growth was started in me when melina said i can play the role of maiden and godrick said a lowly tarnished playing as a lord and now for merri it's performances and legitimacy and truer representation in the facsimile of the thing all the way down.

#✢ out of flasks ( ooc. ) #|| luke gets the 'the erdtree is dying' environmentalist reading.

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as i sit here i also want to highlight a difference between merri and the typical 'romantic knight', the green warrior who believes in all the stories about knighthood and often renders them true through that belief, providing an example to others, chastising those who don't live up to their standards. the thing about such stories is that, to me, they frame knighthood as a thing that could be good if it were only staffed by good people who kept their oaths. but knighthood is an institution, backed with land and assets, and does not and cannot boil down to the individuals that make it up, because its functions are legal. with merri i want to separate 'person with a sword who defends the weak and deposes the evil' from 'knighthood', like out and out avert conflation of the two. merri recognizes the institution of knighthood and rejects it. she is playing knight. putting on a show of what people think a knight is. but she understands intuitively after her time in limgrave that you can't have good knights as long as knights are a part of this system. you can't have a good elden lord because that's part of a setup that's bound to fail. and yet i don't want to craft a story about a wily girl who transcends the gears and cogs that run the world she lives in. merri is going to scrape and chafe against these because an individual cannot change it and even a single person living 'outside the rules', in this setting especially, will not be a liberal dream of forward-thinking modern moral clarity. merri thinks ill of knights; she does not have an alternative. she will end without fixing anything. her understanding of the world allows for a personal emotionally-charged recognition of how broken knighthood is, but does not offer her the tools to imagine or craft a solution. she moves the world a step forward and dies.

#✢ headcanons. #|| MY WIWI!!!!

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i should actually talk about merri's ideals/morals, because i think her constantly playing with the idea of 'heroism' or 'chivalry' is misleading. i cannot emphasize enough that she's playing. to be a hero, to her, is entirely surface level. it's a performance. and that performance can include performing very real deeds - normally violent actions against a perceived foe - but she is not thinking about the consequences beyond 'this is what a hero does', in an extremely removed sense. she's larping. she's playing pretend. and to a degree, so is everyone else, if we want to get into the performative aspects of any culture. that's part of where her decisions stem from: faced with a culture that is foreign to her, she sees the performances for what they are, fabrications, and shrugs and jumps into playing along, without understanding that it is not a game.

but merri's 'pretending' is having an impact on the world around her. in fact, it's the source of some major political shifts in the lands between. and it isn't going to be until she reaches leyndell that she starts to reflect on what she's done and realize that while she was having fun filling the role of hero for the people she met, she bears responsibility for what she set in motion. that the enemies she faced were not consenting participants in her fantasy and took what she was doing at face value. what to her was a costume was to others a statement of intent and character.

so when she talks about 'becoming someone's sword' or 'winning fair maidens' or any number of tropes, they're just that: tropes. cliches. this is, of course, complicated by the fact that she thinks the lords of the lands between are shit, and actively questions the existence of such a position if it's going so badly ( from her perspective ). but she hasn't questioned knights. she hasn't questioned ladies. and she thinks anyone who can say the lines and sell the act can hold these titles, because what else do they have to them? and yes that's an open-ended question.

but there are things merri does care about that form her actual moral framework. communal responsibility is central to her character, along with all the pros and cons of it. establishing connections and then acting in the group's best interest is essential to her. punching down or picking on someone weaker than you offends her, as she all but worships the idea of A Good Fight. not honorable combat, mind you - honor comes from doing your damnedest to beat the shit out of your opponent. she doesn't care what you need to do to accomplish that, as long as the other person knows you're fighting ( so seluvis and gideons' methods are right out ). there is nothing to be shown or gained in a fight against someone who can't hit back. you're not proving yourself or achieving victory despite the odds. it's meaningless to her. so her 'defender of the weak' pov isn't even 'it's wrong to kill people', but 'you're lame if you can only kill people who don't stand a chance of killing you.'

promises are also important to her. breaking a promise is a horrible thing. not lying, mind you, though the two can overlap. a promise is a vow you make openly to another person or people, and to speak the words has a latent power. magical, spiritual, or just believed in so hard that it becomes a social contract, it doesn't matter. merri doesn't codify it, she simply defaults to thinking that a promise is sacred and binding. a promise would not be 'roderika i'll be a hero for you', that's, again, an act. it's playground shit. a promise would be 'roderika, i swear that i'll stop godrick from hurting anyone else'. it's something she means sincerely. and if she picks up sincerity in another person, even if that sincerity is false on their end, she will treat a broken promise like the highest of crimes.

i'm sure i'll discover more as i continue to write her, but i just wanted to establish the difference between 'i want to be a hero with all the conceptions of morality that that entails' and 'i want to play the hero, and these are my morals over here'. melina is playing the role of maiden and not giving a shit about what most maidens believe, merri is doing the same with heroism, and they both get tangled up in it and end up Being That Thing but it's hard to tell if that's growth or if they trapped themselves.

#✢ headcanons. #|| my wiwi... #|| a tarnished playing as a lord...