There’s that word again, “mother.” I’m playing Shadow of the Erdtree, the new Elden Ring expansion, and it feels like every cutscene, every conversation, every metaphor I dig into points, like a compass, back to motherhood. When the eccentric priest Count Ymir starts effusing about children to me, a total stranger, it finally sinks in: Shadow of the Erdtree reveres mothers. When was the last time we had a game about the glory of motherhood? Cooking Mama in 2006?
There are innumerable video games about fatherhood. Hades, The Last of Us, God of War, Silent Hill — these holy classics revolve around the father figure, who tends to be impressively stoic and, hopefully, a little buff. These men are complicated people, with rich internal worlds their sons and daughters can only pray they’ll one day access.
These games are also full of mothers, but many of them don’t get to exist beyond their supposed maternal instinct. They either act like black holes of nurturing or they’re dead. Or both. The gorgeous platformer Gris, for example, is about hugging your dead mom in heaven. The recent God of War games features several mother-goddesses; Faye, the God of War’s beautiful wife, is dead when the games start, though she occasionally appears in dreams to deliver pious aphorisms. On the other end, the fertility goddess Freya is obsessed with her son to the point where it makes her homicidal. It’s always something like that with mothers in video games — they’re either reduced to bodies or simple emotions. Tender. Fawning. Eager to hold you close, too close. But Shadow of the Erdtree treats motherhood like a classical power, like bloodlust in the Colosseum. In doing so, it helps set a new standard for mothers’ stories.
“What we lack is a reflection on maternal passion,” the Bulgarian French philosopher Julia Kristeva said in a 2005 lecture. “By turning all our attention on the biological and social aspects of motherhood […], we have become the first civilization which lacks a discourse on the complexity of motherhood.” Shadow of the Erdtree makes a formidable attempt at packing this passion — as Kristeva describes it, “a reconquest that lasts a lifetime and beyond” — into its ethics.
Elden Ring is an egalitarian game in the sense that you can reasonably expect that everyone will die, not only the young moms with blowouts. This cycle of death lends itself naturally to a culture of self-creation, the backbone of Elden Ring’s approach to motherhood. No one demonstrates this better than the demigod Miquella, who orchestrates the events of the DLC and undergoes a few botched attempts at rebirth. Cursed with eternal childhood, he first attempts to grow his body in a papery egg. His half-brother, Mohg, steals the egg and proudly displays it on an oversize pelvic bone, making an organic monument that looks squeamishly similar to a torn, swollen uterus.
But Miquella isn’t easily disturbed. In another attempt at becoming his own mother, he sheds all of his flesh before descending into the DLC’s Land of Shadow, where he memorializes hunks of his skin, eyes, and heart — not unlike the way some people preserve their placentas after giving birth. For Miquella, motherhood is a little gross. It has to be, since it’s a carnal strength.
He isn’t the only one who treats it that way. Throughout the Land of Shadow, men and androgynous creatures all yearn for motherhood. The sorcerer Count Ymir aches the most, telling you that he hopes to become “the only mother,” “the true mother.” He begs for “a mother’s strength” and eventually manages to pop out a few wriggling monsters during his boss fight. In Shadow of the Erdtree, guys aren’t sucking on beef liver and looking up “how-to-be-entrepreneur” to feel indestructible. They’re trying to become perfect mothers.
But they fail. Beating Shadow of the Erdtree requires you squelch the golden boy Miquella, like Mohg cleaved him from his self-made womb. Count Ymir, too, dies to your sword, lamenting that he couldn’t “be [his child’s] mother” as his last words. While Elden Ring presents motherhood as a genderless superhero cape, it also takes traditionally masculine and feminine traits seriously. Miquella and Ymir, who present as masculine, fail because they misunderstand a typically feminine aspect of motherhood.
Being a mother isn’t only a creative pursuit; it also requires sacrifice and stillness. Miquella and Ymir come close to understanding this, and they ritualistically offer their bones and bodies to their cause. But they do it out of the selfish desire to become shatterproof, and they never allow themselves to experience real loss. Because of this, these mama wannabes are nothing like the game’s canonical mothers, Marika and Metyr, Mother of Fingers. These gender-ambiguous goddesses are practically untouchable, in part, because they destroy their bodies for the sake of their many, growing children. Their resulting influence is too vast to emulate — it would be as futile as imitating the sun, which turns for the sake of the planets.
Usually, when a video game allows a mother to be this inconceivably strong, it defiles her nurturing as penance. Resident Evil 7 does this with Mother Miranda and her black, seeping fixation on your daughter. Shadow of the Erdtree isn’t completely immune to that approach. The poised Curseblade enemies bear non-zero resemblance to infected reproductive tracts, and their persistent attacks make them pretty overbearing. But, even at its most perverted, Shadow of the Erdtree handles motherhood like nuclear energy. It demands respect, unlike Mother Miranda’s obsession, which ultimately comes across as pathetic. If you play with it, prepare to die.
It’s about time. Video games are often caught in superficial conversations about what a woman should be. Big boobs? A soft jaw? A swan’s neck? Shadow of the Erdtree doesn’t bother with the boring bounds of physicality; it makes traditionally feminine emotional qualities — nurturing, submitting to nature — universally aspirational. For a game like Elden Ring, so invested in the rhythm of civilization, it just makes sense. It isn’t prudent to leave mothers in the background, not when they’re responsible for all creation.
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