The Most Tragic Characters In Elden Ring: Part 1

“The most tragic character in Elden Ring? How can you only pick one? The game is full of them,” you are probably thinking after reading the title. And you would be right. I could honestly make a case that everyone in the Elden Ring universe is a tragic, sad character that deserves the top spot on my list. That is why I had to make this into a 5-part series (which is in no particular order).

Okay, so who is one of the Top-5 most tragic characters? Why, it could only be one the hardest bosses in the entire game: Malenia, Blade of Miquella.

Now, Malenia may just seem like an absurdly hard boss that deserves none of our remorse or sympathy…but that couldn’t be further from the truth. When reading more into the lore of this game, you truly see how lost and broken Melaina had become by the time we, the Tarnished, met her.

Malenia and her twin, Miquella, were the only children born to Queen Marika and the second Elden Lord Radagon. Like her parents, Malenia and her twin brother were both born as Empyreans (the purest form of gods, in a sense, in this world; or something like that), and both were destined to replace their mother as God-Queen of the Lands Between.

Unfortunately for Malenia and her twin, her parents were each one half of the same person. So, as is everyone else born from one parent, they both were born with a birth defect.

Clearly, her story has started out rough. Though, it only gets worse from here.

Miquella, her twin, was gifted with a genius mind, but cursed with never being able to grow up. So, essentially, he was the reverse of Benjamin Button.

Malenia, on the other hand, was gifted with being a great swordswoman, but was cursed with being the literal embodiment of the disease called the Scarlet Rot. Thus, her whole body had started rotting from within even before she was born and continued to rot until she would transform into the Rot Goddess.

Now, there are a lot of terrible things in the Lands Between but being cursed with a non-curable disease that rots away at your body and your mind is horrible. Not only that, but she also had to care for her brother as he was never going to be able to defend himself against the other demi-gods.

After her mother shattered the Elden Rings, both Malenia and Miquella grabbed their own shards and fled to their “fortress”, the Haligtree. While at the Haligtree, Miquella devised a plan to cure them of their birth defects while Malenia warred against the other demi-gods for their shards.

First, Miquella “subdued” the Scarlett Rot in Malenia’s body with an Unalloyed Golden Needle, though it did not cure her. That was to be the second part of the plan.

When the war was over, Malenia would guard over her beloved brother as he “cocooned” himself inside the Haligtree to cure him of his curse and help him figure out a way to cure her too. (How that was going to work is beyond me. Elden Ring lore is slightly strange. But that is why we love it!)

Malenia displayed her leadership and courage in battle, despite the rot, and defeated every other demi-god, gaining swarms of loyal followers in the process. It really should be admired how devoted and loyal Malenia remained to her brother, even when his plan seems absolutely bonkers crazy.

However, Malenia’s luck ran out when she faced the last demi-god of note, General Radahn. The both of them fought to a close duel, though Malenia unintendedly “blossomed” her dormant Scarlett Rot in the mists of battle, causing the battlefield, General Radahn, her loyal followers, and herself to get infected with the Rot.

The “blossoming” may have saved her life, but it killed her followers and put her into a coma. Thus, she was unable to defend her brother when he was kidnapped from the Haligtree and had his body drained and deformed by Mohg, the Lord of Blood.

So, not only had Malenia failed her task of defeating General Radhan and winning the war, but also was unable to protect the only person she cared for when he needed her most. It doesn’t get more tragic than that.

Eventually, the Tarnished finds Malenia still asleep in her coma. And, like only the Tarnished can do, wakes up the most powerful boss to fight a duel to the death. We defeat Malenia, causing her to blossom one last time into the Goddess of Rot, which shed any last bit of humanity she had left.

But it does not matter as the Tarnished is able to defeat her again and finally kill her….after about 100 attempts.

So, the story of the heroic Malenia ends unheroically.

She is slain at the bottom of the Haligtree, the home she shared with her brother. Not to mention that she was unable to help her brother from getting kidnapped, drained, deformed, and her loyal followers were destroyed by her curse.

Then she died as the monstrous Goddess of Rot, which was what she and her beloved brother tried so hard to prevent.

She may be widely known as the hardest (and one of the most frustrating) bosses in Elden Ring, yet there is a very tragic backstory to the Blade of Miquella.

If you want to read more about Malenia, I recommend you check out the Elden Ring Wiki page. It has great info and backstory on all the characters in Elden Ring, and it is where I got the information that I didn’t already know about Malenia, Miquella, and the Haligtree. I linked it below:

Images Source: Featured Image: (BANDI NAMCO/FromSoftware) (ELDEN RING – Official Gameplay Reveal – YouTube)

In Text Image 1: (BANDI NAMCO/FromSoftware) (ELDEN RING – Official Gameplay Reveal – YouTube)

In Text Image 2: (Bandi NAMCO/FromSoftware) (ELDEN RING – Story Trailer – YouTube)

Other Sources: (Elden Ring Wiki) (Malenia the Severed | Elden Ring Wiki | Fandom)