Nowadays we associate them with gold dust and eternally cute faces, but the fairy is a kind of monster. Southeast Asia “Yaksha“Nature spirits devour strays, the Germans”count‘ can kill a child with his bare hands. elden ring‘s Malenia, Blade of Miquella, emerged from a rotting blossom with entwined wings and is known as one of the most dangerous creatures FromSoftware has ever created. She fits right in.
When I was a kid, fairies were something to be lured into and if I just made enough commitment, one day I would become. I read children’s books with instructions on how to lure fairies into your garden with the zeal of a little scholar – I’d never thought about the magical properties of a sugar-dosed bottle cap before – and spun around in wings touched with iridescent cellophane a silver wand behind pearls.
In line with more neutral global fairy myths such as the african “aziza” the hunter blessed the Scottish Seelie Court who didn’t directly kill all humans, I saw fairies as logical extensions of the mercury nature of nature and thus of myself as a fickle five-year-old with arms too chubby and useless to hold back my emotions. Fairies weren’t heroes, certainly not, but they commanded their delicate, floral frames with dignity and a commendable dark bite.
I found the first video game fairy I met the big fairy in 2006 action-adventure game The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess– a game my friend’s brother played with sullen youthful awe – surprisingly docile. Or not docile, but… her eyes looked swollen and sad as she sat in that fountain, praising Link. Still, a neutered fairy is better than no fairy, and when I got a Nintendo DS in 2007, I decided to play The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.
I was pleased to see three more fairies, Ciela, Leaf, and Neri, acting as Link’s companions and the player’s mouse cursors in the game. But these colorful balls of light also surprised me. Ciela’s zest for life seemed to stem from her twinkling around Link, not from bubbling near streams or playing pranks. This was far from the behavior I expected from what I considered serious fairy fiction, illustrator Cicely Mary Barker’s 1923 book Flower Fairies of Spring and her truly life-changing “Journal” Fairyopolispublished posthumously in 2005.
But social expectations took their toll, and as I got older I began to see video games as just what most older brothers and male classmates did after school. These expectations convinced me that the role of the video game fairy could only be that of a mere companion. To me, that approval was based on facts.
Brentilda in the 1998s Banjo Kazooieband in the 2000s Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, Stella in 2010 Dragon Quest IXall confirmed this because fairy mythology is often coded female and because games are often marketed to men, fairy women in games were doomed to take on limited supporting roles like “informers” and “background healers”. They were designed to be unquestioningly loyal and irresistible choppers, plucked from woodland homes and rivers and bluebells just to clip their interesting wings. They do not soar or intentionally take what they want like their mythical predecessors did. Instead, they remain attached to their new, unnatural habitat: a male protagonist.
Into this heap of baggage step the golden toes elden ringis Malenia. but elden ring brilliantly deviates from expectations, making Malenia a striking antithesis to the fairies that came before her.
With a phase one character design more reminiscent of another female-coded myth – the spirit guiding valkyrieNorway’s leader of battle-hardened souls – Malenia looks like war. She plays like that too. Between her HP, which regenerates with each hit, and the infamous Waterbird Dance, a slam attack that was called upon “inevitableMalenia was unofficially crowned by FromSoftware toughest boss. Players would not put in countless hours of gameplay exclusively to to defeat them if she weren’t so impressive.
Unlike some nasty fairies from video games, Malenia is strong because of her fairy form, not in spite of it. This fairy doesn’t get stuck in the background. She appears to you naked and mutilated, deceptively delicate and feminine, reduced to her true, brutal nature. “But she whose hours of tenderness had passed / had neither hope nor fear,” writes William Butler Yeats in the epic poem about the fairy princess Niamh The wanderings of Oisin.
A rotten flower blooms and a butterfly Hordes come to her aid, pushing you, stabbing you, inflicting their nature on you, much like disfigured Europeans changeling traded for the purity of human childhood, or how the death of the 17th-century faery scholar Robert Kirk has been attributed be stolen by the creatures. Malenia is a boss who wants to inflict rot on your essence and eliminate the entirety of your personality with a quick, easy death. Fairydom is the horror story of the world to capture the capriciousness that men often dictate to womanhood. When women like Cicely Mary Barker turn this horror story into inspiration for girls like me, Malenia becomes the video game fairy I’ve always wanted.
There is a problem (there always is). Check out her name: “Malenia, Blade of Miquella”. Video games just can’t help it, can they? On paper, this fearsome fairy is just a companion, no more than a tool to her sleeping, twin brother Miquella.
But unlike Link or the protagonist of Dragon Quest IX, Miquella is absent from the game. In his absence Malenia is a champion – maybe his Champion, but still a winner in her own right – and her existence crunches open the window of opportunity for female video game characters. Had I had Malenia 15 years ago – her success, not just as a character elden ring, but also as a measure of game difficulty and design – I would have seen games being there for more than the red-faced boys in the class. I would understand that women in games don’t have to play between pretty pink princesses, total eye candyand muffled last girl, although angry internet commentators still insist they must be. No, women can be scary. They can be beautiful and scary and rotten to the core.
