March 16, 2025

Struggling within the real and within the imagined.

One week ago from my beginning to write this, I beat the final boss of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, without ever having leveled up my character, and I did it without getting hit. Not to oversell my skill, but the fight was absolutely beautiful (look at that stance break right before he was about to turn himself into a living meteor!), and I felt like it was an indication of a genuine mastery that I’d managed to achieve after almost 5 days worth of being stuck on a fight where the margin of error was 0. This marked the end of a 161 hour journey I began in early December following the results of the election, and a visceral realization of just how hard the real world was about to make itself for me. I laughed, I cried, my heart rate spiked to heretofore unimaginable levels.

Playing through one of the more difficult action RPGs of all time while denying myself a core mechanic of the RPG genre (for my less game-inclined readers, leveling up can increase your health, stamina, influences your damage output and the very weapons you are able to wield and armor you can wear) was maybe not the most intuitive choice for an escape from the encroaching horrors of the real world. But the thing about Elden Ring is that while its world is basically always out to get you, with hundreds if not thousands of creative ways for your character to die to the enemies around them (my personal favorite being the one where a pro wrestler powerbombs you), that hostility is predictable and comprehensible. It is something that can be overcome, indeed, it’s something that I’ve overcome numerous times since the game’s release in 2022.

Level 1 is different, though. In an ordinary run, you can build your character to output massive amounts of damage using comically oversized weapons, you can make your health bar stretch all the way across the screen, you can cast spells and other chicanery from a distance to negate many of the game’s crueler challenges. At level 1, past around the mid-point of the game you will die in one hit from more or less every single enemy, and your damage output will begin to slack significantly (though it is possible to still “build” your character in a way without leveling that enables solid damage against the ever-increasing enemy health pools). This means that against the game’s toughest challenges, you have to strive for near perfection. The struggle of this requires substantial planning, routing your path through the game’s world, working out exactly what weapon you want to leverage against a boss or particularly tough stretch of enemies.

What I found compelling about this challenge was how it functioned as an expression of all my understanding of this beautiful and hostile world, a world that unlike our own, could be understood and prepared for even in the constraints of a challenge run. While my rights as a trans woman are under an impressively varied range of attacks that I feel wholly unequipped to brace against (what is one piece of paper that says “F” vs the “nuh-uh” approach being taken by the current administration), in Elden Ring I can grind out a Stone Club from the enemies that wield it and then bonk half the bosses in the game to death with it through a lot of kneecap breaking.

That’s one of the beautiful things about this game: while it is far from perfect, there are an overwhelming collection of solutions to its hostility even at the lowest level possible. And in the increased finesse required of me at level 1, I got to revel in the mechanical beauty of the game in a way that ordinary runs of the game somewhat denied me. In melting a boss’s health so quickly I skipped entire phases, I often denied myself the experience of beautiful movesets, sophisticated and sadistic patterns that animators and coders labored for god-knows-how-long to create. No such opportunity here, whether I liked it or not, I would have to learn the ins and outs of basically every single boss’s gallery of “die now” attacks.

This feels safer to me, for some reason, than the real world. Dying for hours upon hours to the demonic black dragon Bayle the Dread, a fight where literally getting sneezed on would instantly kill me? More comprehensible than the world at large. Bayle only has so many ways to kill me. And at the very least, Bayle is far more visually spectacular than any of the people who want to make it functionally illegal for me to exist in public.

Every day now, I pop onto social media or my various news feeds to see a litany of headlines, many of which have to do with ripping the wires out of a branch of the federal government that we really should not be doing that with. I see bills that seek to make the existence of LGBTQ+ people classified as pornography, I see a horribly passive front thrown up by the supposed “leadership” of the “opposition” party. Fascism is here, and I do not know how to do anything beyond let it drive me insane.

Every time I go to work and discuss the news with my coworkers, inevitably the sensation dawns on us that it’s kind of crazy to work right now. I work at an arts education nonprofit and a community college, both things that in some ways feel like they will not or cannot exist at the end of this year. That is insane and terrifying to me! The art I make and teach is its own substantial refuge from the death of a thousand cuts onslaught against everything that made life in America viable, but even that feels like it could be taken away at any moment.

So that is why, perhaps selfishly, I found myself seeking refuge in the virtual. Elden Ring’s “Lands Between” (a not-at-all-subtle homage to Tolkien) is in some ways a world where what we are currently experiencing has already gone wrong. An untold time ago, the authoritarian Golden Order of the godlike Queen Marika¹ collapsed, summoning back an underclass of “Tarnished” back to the Lands Between to seek the power of the titular Elden Ring, crafting an order of the world that meets their own vision. The world is burnt and hostile, Marika’s demigod children having all reached a stalemate war with one another in their own failed attempts to seize the Elden Ring.

This is such an incredibly and beautifully realized world — few fictional realms can boast this richness of worldbuilding, let alone art and world design so rich there exists an entire youtube channel devoted to parsing through the actual archeological/architectural strata that the game has provided for us, and just a few months prior the world had grown even grander with the massive “Shadow of the Erdtree” expansion. What a perfect place to set my roots in as I anxiously waited for Biden to do any sort of thing that may have been able to curtail the incoming administration’s power. This was of course, a disappointing wait, and so as Joe jovially sat with a man he had derided as a fascist less than a month prior and prepared to welcome him back to the Oval Office, I was extremely pleased when Mohg, Lord of Blood at last fell to the heavy swings of my Zweihander.

During the inauguration, I was ignoring everything that day. I would of course find out about many things after the fact, including the loathsome Tesla Dealer’s² Nazi salute. That didn’t matter though, as I was too busy frantically dodging the blades of Rellana, the Twin Moon Knight. This lady’s attacks were brutal, loaded to the brim with combo extensions and mixups that would kill me if I was unobservant for less than a second. There was something zen about this experience; while the real world’s onslaught of information and “takes” often rapidly overwhelms my brain to a degree where I cannot process it, learning these comprehensible movesets with the margin of error reduced to 0 was a genuinely meditative process.

I won’t recap the story of every boss, of every new moment I realized something clever and beautiful about the worldbuilding or level design (though these moments never stopped). What matters is that at level 1 I climbed to the Gate of Divinity and slew a newly born god. Miquella sought to create a world of peace and compassion, driven by the fact that he had charmed the mightiest of the demigods, his half brother Radahn, to help him enforce this world of peace and compassion via any means necessary. I, a lowly tarnished who in-narrative never realized that I could use all those experience points the bosses gave me for anything other than buying cool costumes, fought against the impending fascistic regime and annihilated it. And I did it outputting far more damage at level 1 than Elon Musk’s shitty ass Elden Ring build could ever have hoped to do.

It’s now been 3 weeks since I finished my challenge run. Despite the nebulous nature of these digital challenges, it’s something that helps me feel accomplished. While the world at large is overwhelming me with an onslaught of stories that suggest that America is about to experience its own collapse, its own Shattering War — as terrifying as that is, I also feel that like fighting gods without leveling up, I can process this, I will persist in this world.

Trump, Elon, RFK Jr., the litany of other nightmarish cabinet picks, the actual college aged neonazis currently ripping the wires out of Social Security at “DOGE.” Legion these people may be, but they are not gods. They are weak. They will fall, one way or another. And just as with my stubborn banging my head against brick wall after brick wall in all of Elden Ring and its DLC, through spite or determination, I will live to see these people die. I refuse to not live to see that world. And maybe, when all is said and done, we can begin to shape the world to something better and more hopeful than they want the world to be.