Initial Thesis

Elden Ring is Marcel DucChamps “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.”

Hidetaka Miyazaki, the creator of Elden Ring, announced that there was a final secret hidden within the game that no one had found. While there were initially several articles written claiming that the secret was a minor lore detail contained on an obscure shield, the general consensus was that this idea of a “final secret” was a hoax perpetrated by Miyazaki to fuel entertaining speculation about the game, something he had done in the first Dark Souls game. This was because despite the combined efforts of the army of data miners and lore hunters that make up the games fanbase digging through the very code of Elden Ring since its release, no one had been able to find anything notable enough to be considered THE final secret. Until now.

The final secret is that Elden Ring is the process captured within Marcel Duchamps “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”, referred to hereafter as “The Large Glass”. Whereas Duchamp created the Large Glass as to be a four dimensional process (the fourth dimension being time) represented two dimensionally, the game is the three dimensional interpretation of the events as they occur within the work of art itself. The entirety of The Large Glass is transcribed into the game, down to the smallest details.

The Large Glass tells a story of unrequited love within two planes of shattered glass, the lower Realm of the Bachelors and the higher Realm of the Bride. Duchamp described The Large Glass as "a delay in glass" in the same way one would say "a poem in prose", with the events happening in "a world of yellow" repeating themselves over and over in a never ending cycle. The nine Malic Molds i.e the Bachelors, are described as representing an infinite "cemetery" of "uniforms or liveries" which are animated by the Love Gasoline rained down on them by the Bride who is crucified beneath the cloud-like Milky Way. The Milky Way contains three "Nets" which the Bachelors, after having their desires shaped to fit the will of the Bride by traveling through the Capillary Tubes, the Sieves and the Chocolate Grinder, are then shot up to the Realm of the Bride to try to land in one of the three nets and consummate their relationship with the Bride. Alas, as evidenced by the nine matchsticks that Duchamp fired through a toy cannon at the upper glass, none of the bachelors manage to land in the nets (though notably one does get close) and so in Duchamps's words "the bachelors grind their chocolate alone." Unseen in the glass are the Juggler of Gravity and the Boxing match that it participates in. These are the least understood aspects of The Large Glass as Duchamp never had the chance to include them before the glass was accidently shattered during transportation in 1926 . Duchamp, after he had put all the pieces back together some 8 years later , was surprised with how much he liked the added feature of the now finished work, stating that there was a ready-made intention to the symmetrical cracking that he had never planned to include.

Elden Ring tells a story of ambition in a world of fracture and gold. Thousands of Years before the game began, Merika the Eternal, God-Queen of the Golden Order and Vessel of the Lovecraftian Outer-God known as The Greater Will, conquered the Lands Between and established an new order based on the worship of the Erdtree a massive golden tree the dominates the landscape of the in-game world. After her victory she stripped her warriors of the Grace of Gold they had used to fight in her name and sent them off to fight and die in foreign lands, with the promise that one day, after they had died, that Grace would be restored to them and they would return to their home, guided by rays of gold. Later, when Merika's son was assassinated, in her grief Merika would shatter the Elden Ring, a pataphysical construct that makes up both the world's physical laws such as gravity and life as well as metaphysical concepts like souls and fate. At the same time Merika was shattering the Elden Ring, her consort Radagon attempted to put the pieces back together, creating the fractured world the game takes place in. As punishment for her crime, The Greater Will crucified Merika within the Erdtree which led her various inbred demigod children to war amongst themselves to see who would fill the power vacuum left in her absence. No clear winner emerged, resulting in the abandonment of The Greater Will and the recalling of the Tarnished, those stripped of the Grace of Gold, to the Lands Between. The player embodies the role of one of "the Dead, who yet Live" brought back to life by Grace to slay the demigods, claim the title of Elden Lord, and become Merika's new consort.

The game itself, as the player experiences it, is one cycle of the process shown within The Large Glass. Queen Merika (the Bride) originally forged the Elden Ring by using gossamer strands of hair (the Capillary Tubes, with Capillary deriving from the Latin capillus meaning to be like or resemble hair). The Elden Ring itself is a Chocolate Grinder with the individual runes that make it up, each claimed by one of Merika's demigod children after its shattering, perfectly corresponding to the named parts of Duchamp's Chocolate Grinder in the middle of The Large Glass. Godrick's (Louis XV Chassis) and Morgott's (Necktie) runes are explicitly said to be the "anchor runes" that hold the structure together from the top and bottom. Melina's, Rhadan's, and Rykard's runes are the Rollers within the Chocolate Grinder. Notably, Miquellas rune, which is the form of a cross and semi-circle and does not cleanly overlay onto the rest of the Elden Ring, bears a striking similarity to the Scissors and the Sieves connected to the Chocolate Grinder. In the same way that The Large Glass was shattered then later put back together by Duchamp, Merika shattered the Elden Ring which was then put back together by her consort Radagon, both events leading to the creation of the shattered world that the events of the game, and the glass, take place in. The shattering of the Elden Ring led to Merkia (the Bride) being crucified within the Erdtree by the Greater Will (Milky Way). Merika then rains down Grace (Love Gasoline) that animate the Tarnished (Malic Moulds) and give them life. The Tarnished like the Malic Moulds are, from an infinite cemetery of uniforms and liveries. While there are both only nine named Moulds as well as nine starting classes, the infinite number of potential players, and therefore infinite number of potential games, that Elden Ring can have due to its nature as a video game encapsulates the infinite nature of The Large Glass better than any other possible medium for its interpretation. The Tarnished are literally Bachelors setting out to become the consort of Merika (The Bride) and while none ever succeed until the player's arrival, just as one match stick got closer than all the other to hitting the nets, one Tarnished got closer than any of the others, Vyke, and he is on the cover of Elden Ring's box.

While the player character is a Tarnished (Malic Moulds) of no renown, there are several named Tarnished in the game that play important roles in the world's history and the game's endings. Notably, three of the five Tarnished mentioned by name in the game's opening scene each have quest lines that can determine the games ending. While all Tarnished (Bachelors) are called to The Lands Between to slay the Demigods, become Marika's (The Bride) new consort and Elden Ring, these three Tarnished forgo their purpose to create mending runes that allow for the shattered Elden Ring, and the shattered world, to be repaired. Each of these mending runes correspond to each of the three nets, and even serves the same purpose conceived by Duchamp for The Large Glass, which is for the Bride and the Milky Way to receive feedback from the world around them and to change accordingly. Unfortunately due to the shattering, both the one that happens in the game and the one that happens to The Large Glass, the cycle can not complete itself. One of the most impressive act of transubstantiation that Miyazaki pulls of in rendering The Large Glass into the format of a video game is that the base game of Elden Ring is a representation of shattered incompleted process of The Large Glass as we find it to be today, while the DLC (The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion pack) is the representation of what the now completed process would look like if Duchamp had been able to add all the intended parts to his work. In the DLC, the Tarnished who is now recognized as the lord of the Golden Order, follow in the footsteps of Miquella, the only of the demigods not seen in the base game, as he wanders the world "stripping himself of his flesh, his lineage, and of all things Golden, in anticipation of becoming the new Vessel of the Greater Will and replacing Merika as the new Bride in The Large Glass mechanism. Miquella, and his chosen Consort Radahn, the demigod of gravity serve as the final boss of the DLC. This explains why Radahn was chosen to be the final boss despite the confusion and mixed response from the fanbase, so that he could be the literal Juggler of Gravity that participates in The Boxing match that serves as the final challenge for the bachelor (the player) before completing the cycle.

The are many other clues and points of reference that point to Elden Ring being the three dimensional representation of Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even" but perhaps the most important clue of all lies in the practical joke that Miyazaki played all those years ago in the first Dark Souls game. He stated in an interview that The Pendant starting gift was the most important item to take at the beginning of the game, "to choose that or nothing", and players at the time of this writing are still trying to figure out what it does, even after he had admitted it was a practical joke and that The Pendant does nothing. Following that logic, that the item that does nothing is the most important in the game, there is one item in the game that does nothing. It can't be consumed, sold, or crafted with nor does it serve any purpose in the game's story, yet it can be found everywhere in The Lands Between.

Shards of Glass.