u/Kathodin

I will be exploring the literary symbol of leglessness/lower body injury/inability to walk in Eldenring. This will serve as a prelude to more focused posts (on Miquella-Radahn, why Godwyn is never shown with legs, etc…) before branching out into different symbols. I will consider other Fromsoft games, but only to convincingly show that Miyazaki’s use of these symbols is intentional and consistent. 

Disclaimers

• Literary Symbol? What I mean by this is what certain features of the story are meant to invoke, based on the traditional employment of symbols. Miyazaki is a literary guy, and is not designing these stories in some vacuum away from the history of literary symbolism. Going hollow involves losing your soul - this makes symbolic sense, and is something we should suspect, even if we are never told. 
• I will be comparing the different Souls games, and occasionally making guesses about them based on others. But I want to be clear: I am not theorizing with a shared universe. Miyazaki, for whatever reason, uses symbols in similar ways across all his games (think of the sun being drained). My assumption is that, unless we have a reason to doubt it, he is using symbols in similar ways across games.
• I think Miyazaki is more than capable of a) using literary symbolism to give clues about the lore of particular games, beyond the text and b) using consistent literary symbolism in such a way to intentionally use later games to help us understand earlier ones. He is extremely skillful at using every tool at his disposal. Why would he not use this?

 

Let’s get into it!

How Lameness has been used as a Literary Symbol

One of the most common literary meanings of these in literature is sexual impotency. The most obvious reason is that overt reference to sexual impotency has been, until very recently, seen as too explicit. Two prominent examples would be in The Sun Also Rises (Jake Barnes) by Hemingway and in Lady Chatterly’s Lover (Sir Clifford) by D.H. Lawrence.

A slightly different but related symbol is the single injured leg of the Fisher King from Arthurian myth, most famously re-examined and continued in T.S. Eliot’s poetry. There are many versions of the story, but, in brief, the injury of the king is accepted in exchange for eternal life in service to an eternal task. The land around becomes a wasteland - the fertility of a whole region suffers. I’ll make a different post on prominent Fisher Kings later. For now, what suffices is the link between injury and sexual impotency. 
It tends to be a masculine symbol as well - but more on that in later posts. 

The Symbol’s Clearest Case: Albinaurics

Albinaurics have non-functioning legs, completely lose their legs at a certain point, and die. Now, the game doesn’t directly say they are impotent. But it suggests it with the birthing droplet, and does say they are artificial. Since they clearly are alive (they are not automatons who only appear to be alive, like golems), what does this artificiality entail?

I think the only obvious answer is that they were not the product of a natural birth, or really, a birth at all. They are the result of alchemy - something like a science, something non-organic. The obvious correlative would be that they could not reproduce on their own.

This, in conjunction with the birthing droplet quest, seems like a correct read.

This also gives us two other symbols to associate with impotency: colorlessness, and silver. These might be closer to artificiality (a similar, but not identical theme to impotency). These map onto the moon in general. Keep these in mind!

The Logic of Symbols

If this is the correct reading with the Albinaurics, and if we are safe to assume this is how Miyazaki uses the symbol, then we should see deviations from this symbol that makes sense.

For instance, the opposite of legnessness (many leggedness) should mean super-fecundity. In fact, that is precisely what we see. Rot is the thing most associated with super-fecundity in Eldenring. The Rot pests are many limbed - but that isn’t quite the same. Malenia is a mother figure to them, but she is seemingly rejecting that role. Who isn’t? Romina! Boy she has a lot of legs. She is also chimeric - part woman, part insect.

Part-women part-insect should make you think of Dark Souls 1 chimeras, namely what's become of the chaos witches. Their insect lower halves are spiders - lots of legs - and the Chaos flame itself generates chimeric life and is Dark Souls 1 closest analogue to super-fecundity.

So the opposite of the symbol makes sense. What about symbols that interact with legs? 

The wheels of a wheelchair that allow the lame to move.  I would say a man in a wheelchair is someone who has accepted their impotency. But being impotent does not prevent someone from caring or helping to rear children. I call this the Professor X trope: impotent wheelchair person who handles an orphanage. Do we see this in Miyazaki’s games? Yes!

The headmaster of the orphanage in Deracine is wheelchair bound, specifically from a magic leg injury (double whammy). Gerhman in the Hunter’s dreams is raising the player to be a potential child of a Great One. He also has one leg - but that is the Fisher King trope. More on that later. The Orphanage area in Bloodborne is filled with wheelchair enemies, especially at its entrance. 

A final, legless case of impotence: The Virgin Abductor.
She is a virgin; she doesn’t have legs. But she steals kids. She also has snakes in her womb. Snakes are greedy - more on that later. Her case will help us with Gwydolin, eventually. 

I could keep going, but I think this establishes the trope pretty well. Let’s apply it to a situation in Eldenring. 

The Case of the Carians

The Albinaurics and the Carians are explicitly linked. Albinaurics serve the Carian family. Carians are tied to the moon; the Albinaurics wield crescent shaped weapons alluding to the moon. Both specialize in frost magic. Carians are also connected to silver through the urumi, and everything having to do with the Nox. The precise manner of their connection is hard to figure out and irrelevant to what I’m saying here. What matters is that the connection is present. Now, let’s see how well the symbol applies.

Rennala can’t walk; her legs, when we find her, don’t work. She also can’t give birth. She uses an exterior, artificial magical-magcuffin to produce ‘children’, and the result are the scholar children we fight in her boss battle - themselves with non-functional legs. The symbol applies! Rennala is also an example of the ‘reclining woman’, a Miyazaki trope that I think means: A woman who has given up her normal reproductive abilities in order to use them to serve a particular cause. The Albinauric birthing sister is an instance of this. Her legs don’t work, and without the birthing droplet, she can’t have kids. But I’ll get into that one later.

Ranni gave up her body, and curiously, her corpse is missing its legs. They might have been burnt off - it doesn’t matter how or why she is missing them, what matters from the perspective of symbolism is why we can’t see them. Ranni is currently impotent; she obviously cannot reproduce as a doll. But the lack of legs on her body is an extra emphasis on the meaning of her self-chosen infertility. Many connect Empyreanhood to womb-having. If so, the rejection of her body is most importantly a rejection of her capacity to give birth. The symbol holds, and helps enhance our understanding of just why she needed to give up her body (“I will not be controlled by that thing”). 

Does she mean the Fingers? It's ironic, if so, because Fingers can only control a puppet. However, Miyazaki has an odd habit of making dolls that move without strings - another one of his symbols.

Rykard is an even more interesting case. Was he impotent? Did he have leg problems? I don’t know, and for this post, I don’t care. Rykard gives his body to a snake.

What’s the deal with snakes in Souls games? A whole lot. By our symbol, we would guess snakes are infertile: no legs. But snakes are greedy, they consume and consume. We get rings shaped like them that help us consume more. And Rykard, by becoming a snake, becomes super-fertile!

Rykard-as-snake has legs, many legs and many limbs coming out of him. And he is super-fertile to the point of making chimeras, armies of snakes who walk like men. 

I think we are seeing a Faustian bargain of fertility. Rykard gives up his life and ability to be fertile in the normal sense in order to become super-fertile in a specific way. Of course, he can only do so by consuming… The snake’s fertility is problematic, since it transmutes what it takes in into more of itself. Perhaps the snake needed a Rykard, or a Gloam-Eyed Queen, to truly reproduce… I dunno.

What about Radahn? Radahn is most certainly footless, and we never see him stand unassisted before the DLC, so the symbolic pattern of the siblings holds. He is lame for our purposes.
But, I think that’s gonna take a post of its own. So, until next time, I hope you enjoyed reading.