The Hauntology of Let Me Solo Her
Exiting the Stormveil Castle
I beat Elden Ring. Only took me like a year and a half (and over a hundred hours). I soaked in that world like a hot spring, though. I think I completed every single possible side quest, going so far as to progress all of the ending opportunities to their ultimatum point, so I had every option available to me.
I don’t think that’s normal, but it satisfied my weirdo brain, especially because by the time I was approaching the Elden Beast, enough patches had been implemented that I could finish the questlines for Gostoc and Nephili, and all the other buggy lads that were giving me hives.
By no means did I beat every boss or explore every nook, but I saw every major area and overcame some right nasty pricks, like Astel and Mohg. I’m stoked for the DLC, naturally, but you must be joking if you think I’m starting a New Game + and making it any harder than it already will be.
My build, if you’re interested, involved a frost and bleed-inducing Nightrider Flail, a Mimic Tear, and a bunch of sorceries, augmented by the bev that gives you unlimited FP. Yes, I did use Comet Azur to melt a bunch of bosses. I’m not one of those Berserk RP masochists. But before you tell me to Git Gud and stop playing the game wrong - first of all, that’s not what Elden Ring is about. Second, go to therapy. And third, I beat every boss (including the Demon of Hatred) in the review period for Sekiro, so by rights, you cannot revoke my From Software card. You’ve probably read one of my guides. I’m a pioneer!
Ok. Enough navel-gazing. I actually have something to say about Malenia. Here’s a quote from British cultural theorist Mark Fisher:
“The past keeps coming back because the present cannot be remembered.”
I’m not going to lie and call myself a scholar of Fisher, but I’ve read a good bit of his work and really like it (a good entry point is Exiting the Vampire Castle, a brilliant rallying cry to escape our ongoing discursive nightmare). One concept Fisher talks about that I connect with is Hauntology (borrowed from Derrida). It’s really difficult to define, but I guess I’d describe it as a choking persistence of the past that seems to dominate neoliberal culture.
Fisher talks about “the slow cancellation of the future” - and the idea that our inability to imagine new things is due to a defeated acceptance of the present and, by consequence, an obsessive nostalgia for the past, enabled by the forces of capital.
Culture is haunted by what was and what could have been - the lost futures that we dreamed of that have not come true. Our obsession with retrofuturist media is a good example of this. Self-aware hauntological media can be a good thing, but it’s more of a debilitating condition than a leg-up. And for me, this goes some way in explaining why we’ve had a dearth of successful New Video Game IPs but several top-selling remakes in recent years. Capital won’t really allow the former, but the latter is a safe and reliable business practice, and we’re all susceptible to it.
A hyper-specific Hauntology (absent of anything firm, let’s define it in this sense as a kind of cultural trap, a staining of the present by the past) can be found in Elden Ring, I think. Malenia, Blade of Miquella, is a boss battle notorious for its difficulty, widely regarded as one of From Software’s hardest.
An endearing player called ‘Let Me Solo Her’ went viral shortly after the game’s release for mastering the fight and helping hundreds of players beat it, armed with dual katanas and nothing but a pot lid on their heads. Players who summoned LMSH didn’t need to do anything but wait as the unlikely hero unravelled the Rot Goddess… alone.
This phenomenon quickly became an internet artefact and, by my estimates, is now the most significant meme associated with Elden Ring. By the time I got around to fighting Malenia, I wasn’t expecting to find LMSH in the lobby ahead of her chamber. They’re probably a bit bored of it by now, I imagine, and enjoying their newfound YouTube fame. But I was concerned by what I did find when I got there - oodles of copycats and pretenders.
If you fight Malenia circa 2023 and you need help (which I mean, come on, who doesn’t), you’re probably not going to encounter the patron saint of her suffering, but you are going to encounter hundreds of summon signs for players attempting to recreate LMSH’s viral load, complete with all manner of depraved builds and referential names.
And having pulled in 50 or so of these players before I beat Malenia, I can tell you that none of them had mastered the boss like LMSH, who goes so far as to pull the aggro with Shabriri’s Woe. Nice touch, that.
The sad thing is, I get the impression that the mimics want to create their own mythos rather than lead by example. So many copycat loadouts were glory-seeking rather than efficient, designed, I imagine, around the idea of posting a clip of their efforts to Reddit afterwards - I beat Malenia with this setup! - or whatever. One dude had a whip! A whip! And nothing else.
What makes this experience extra cruel is that Malenia’s offensive attacks vamp her health bar, so if one of your party bottles it, everyone suffers. This was particularly annoying when I was playing with one person (who was clearly here to help me) and another who was on some silly shit. Is it petty for me to find this frustrating?
Maybe! But I just wanted to finish the game, and I think the process would have been much quicker if people were there, context-adjacent, with the intention of helping another person complete an incredibly hard task… rather than approaching it in the riskiest fashion possible for ephemeral internet points.
So, as a result of one person’s selflessness, this area of Elden Ring is now permanently haunted by the past. I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, and I guess there’s a certain beauty to the new history of this virtual space, but when the only real dream we have left is 15 minutes of fame, why am I surprised when it trumps digital benevolence…
Where this gets most depressing is when we consider that, on an institutional level, it’s unlikely anyone could recreate the viral moment of Let Me Solo Her by just doing what they did a little bit differently. When news outlets picked up the LMSH story, it was during a period when Elden Ring was Traffic King, and while it does still command some sway, I’ve written enough 300-word articles to know that not every kind-hearted or enterprising player does a news hit make.
As Will Butler so eloquently put it on Twitter, “There's something perverse about the altruism of Let Me Solo Her being corrupted into something so self-serving. The Scarlet Rot was us the whole time!”
Reader, do you have any examples of an internet / video game space that has been irrevocably changed or haunted? Maybe a map, a class, or even a weapon that has been tarnished by some pandoran community knowledge? Let me know!
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