Bonfireside Chat 296: Belurat, Tower Settlement (Part 2)
Added 2024-08-25 14:00:05 +0000 UTCThis week's episode takes us into the highest reaches of Belurat, to fight the Divine Beast Dancing Lion and learn the sad tale of Hornsent Grandam. She just wants to make you some awful soup, as long as you catfish her enough.
Comments
I think the ‘him’ that the prayer that you mention at the end of the episode refers to is indeed Miquella. The reason for this is this quote from Hornsent after the charm breaks: “Do you presume us allies, even now? Though Miquella’s spell is newly broken? I must profess, the spell mattered little. Uphold his covenant Miquella shall, and in godhood redeem our rueful clan. Then Marika, and vilest Erdtree both, will at last be from divinity wrench’d. And surely I ...contented I will be.” This along with the important fact that the Divine Beast Warriors guard the Enir-Ilim tower where Miquella and Radahn are waiting at the Divine Gate I think is evidence enough that the Hornsent have aligned with Miquella because of his rejection of the Erdtree and his promise to redeem them in Godhood.
dshamz_
2024-09-01 20:19:18 +0000 UTC* More Grandam stuff: I just talked to her on NG+1 wearing the lion's head (that I got on NG+0) *before* fighting the dancing lion. She didn't notice. Just delivered all the, "You're the progeny of a strumpet, you Messmer-follower, you!" lines. * Re higher spheres: I've been assuming that Belurat Tower is modeled after the Tower of Babel (which is usually pictured as a spiraling tower) whose purpose was to reach the gods in the heavens. So, I'm not surprised that the Hornsent would think of their Divine Beast spirits as coming from the heavens above. (Also, the Wikipedia article on the Tower of Babel informs me that ancient Akkadians thought the name, "Babylon" -- the city where the Tower of Babel was supposedly located -- meant "gate of God." So. You know.) The talk of "spheres" comes from ancient Greek "concentric spheres" astronomy, where they tried to model the movement of the planets and stars as if they were all attached to rotating, transparent spheres surrounding the earth. The first of those spheres is the "sphere of the moon," which marks the boundary between the "sub-lunar" region (where everything is made of the four elements and thus is always changing and decaying), and the "super-lunar" region (where everything is made of the fifth element, "ether," and therefore is perfect and permanent). Evidently there was some disagreement over whether the moon was perfect and unchanging, like everything in the region beyond it, or perhaps contained some imperfections since it was on the boundary.
Micah Tillman
2024-08-27 01:10:29 +0000 UTCThe trees throughout the settlement look like a bunch of bodies to me, strung together like to make trunks and limbs with cloth wrapped around the whole assemblage -- like the lion's costume covering the two dudes inside. (The texture of the bark also looks like the jar blob people's skin, but gone ashen.) So, my head canon is that they're fusing some people together to make trees.
Micah Tillman
2024-08-27 00:35:29 +0000 UTCMade me think of "black pudding" which evidently is blood sausage, not pudding. (Makes complete nonsense out of, "How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?!")
Micah Tillman
2024-08-26 18:58:32 +0000 UTCSame! But I'm playing the PS4 version on PS5. Second time through the DLC they seem to have fixed it
Micah Tillman
2024-08-26 18:53:57 +0000 UTCI play this game on my Xbox series S and despite its relatively lower power, I’ve never had any framrate issue even in crazy encounters like Rykard’s where I’d expect some stuttering. Despite all that, the divine beast fight made my console start chugging once it turned its elemental powers on and I don’t know why. What’s even weirder is that this didn’t happen to me against the one that you fight later that even has adds. That unfortunately hurt this boss fight in my eyes
Ethan Hudson
2024-08-26 16:55:13 +0000 UTCThank you so much, this is a boss I missed entirely
Jayveethree
2024-08-26 16:40:19 +0000 UTCI think those flymen are mourning their own cocoons. Each "body" looks intact from the front, lying on their sides with their hands over their faces, but if you go behind, they all have a huge split down their back.
Toshio42
2024-08-26 15:55:11 +0000 UTCThe Lamenter
Duckfeed.tv
2024-08-26 14:36:38 +0000 UTCApologies but I’m stumped on this one, who is the “him” you find down on the Cerulean Coast that Kole references in regard to ascending to godhood?
Jayveethree
2024-08-26 14:29:49 +0000 UTCI really like this idea and it ties together multiple questions I have in a satisfying way.
Jayveethree
2024-08-26 13:20:48 +0000 UTCI don't know how recently you guys have watched the SOTE story trailer, but the narration at the beginning refers to "the seduction and the betrayal, an affair from which gold arose" as we see Marika performing some kind of gruesome ritual at what we now know to be (ENDGAME SPOILERS) the divine gate, the arena for the final boss. I have yet to see or hear any conclusive answers as to what event this is referring to, but it certainly seems to line up with the Grandam's dialogue (particularly about Marika being a "strumpet"). My working theory is that Marika was intended to be someone's consort at one point, persumably a Hornsent leader who was promised godhood, and that she used the opportunity to access the divine gate and become a god herself. But that's based on a few lines of dialogue and nothing else. I'll be curious as the season goes on to see if you guys are able to find a more comprehensive answer, because I would really like to know what the hell is going on at the beginning of that trailer!
Mike Suskie
2024-08-26 07:18:42 +0000 UTCI fell in love with the music of Shadow of the Erdtree. Without spoilers, the fact that the divine beast dancing lion has no "counterpart" in the lands between speaks in my mind so much to not just the isolation of the shadowlands, but the history of tower culture pre Erdtree/Marika's reign and how it was never subsumed (deliberate wording here) into her empire. If there is a musical counterpart and I just missed it, I'd love to know, truly. Personally I think the nebulous "betrayal" is more than one thing but in terms of the hornsent, there's a possibility Marika may have held some sort of high status. Perhaps as a successful & elevated (SPOILERS) saint. For what it's worth (STILL SPOILERS) I think she betrayed her fellows too. They're still rotting down there in those jars. Really can't wait to discuss her more in the coming months Very fond of the grandam. My own grandmother veers back and forth between good days and bad- she's been slowly downhill for the better part of ten years now. The earnest sympathy for that sort of loss, and loss in general, is something I'll always appreciate about these games.
Goldie
2024-08-26 00:59:29 +0000 UTCSo in the previous episode, you mentioned some bundled up bodies piled in the sewers. In my first go through, my immediate thought when i saw those was "Oh my god, chrysalids!" They look like just the limbless bodybags from Stormveil! As such, I originally took the divine lion to be a product of grafting, using this unholy (and ill-defined) art to recreate this divine figure. Data miners have sort of ruined the interpretation but I still hold it as a headcanon, if only because I'd love to see more about grafting.
Nat Isnice
2024-08-25 22:12:05 +0000 UTCI thought of that after we recorded. Didn’t come up in the moment because in my head black bean soup is very dark purple. - K
Duckfeed.tv
2024-08-25 20:28:22 +0000 UTCThis feels weird to be my first comment, but re soups: black bean soup 😊🥣
elizabeth p.
2024-08-25 20:26:43 +0000 UTCWhen I met the Grandam I actually sided against her and was surprised when I found that attacking her caused her to use a special skull spell against you, but she’s immortal and can’t die…until I discovered something when I came back with the Lion Mask. If you continuously attack her with the mask on, she’ll eventually accept that she is a ritual sacrifice for the Lion Dancer and kills herself to offer her flesh to you. It was pretty wild and actually fit the RP decisions I was making with that character. :O
JackelZXA
2024-08-25 19:21:33 +0000 UTCThats the Avatar! You put RESPECK on their name!
Joe Binson
2024-08-25 16:58:07 +0000 UTCwhen I first met Grandam, I got very excited because it gave me a flashback to playing Shadow Tower years ago and reading the “Story” section of the manual. I don’t know if the story in the US Manual was a direct translation from From Software, or if it was a part of the strange localization of that era where localizers were just adding their own flavor with little source material…but according to the US Manual, the playable character Ruus Hardy was raised by the “gentle granny who tended the inn.” after the cataclysm that sets up the events of the game, Ruus returns there as a mercenary looking for work only to find the whole town and Tower has sunken into the earth. after being given his mission to save the souls trapped in the tower and a sword to do the job, they added this flavor text. “But then in his mind he saw Granny’s smile and he could taste her good, simple cooking. Ruus sighed softly and descended down into the hole beneath the tower.” I’ve had “good, simple cooking” stuck in my head like an ear worm ever since reading it the first time. Playing a From Software game in 2024 and finding a Granny in a forsaken town at the base of a tower who offers you terrible food made me extremely happy
Karl Germ
2024-08-25 15:58:13 +0000 UTC
