Fake Elden Ring Lore

About

Fake Elden Ring Lore refers to the practice of FromSoftware fans eagerly anticipating the release of Elden Ring holding discussions about the game as if it was already released, including talks of bosses and locations in Elden Ring that they made up, in parody of discussion boards for other FromSoftware titles like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. This led to the birth of recurring made-up characters and locations in the unreleased game that themselves became memes in the community, such as "Glaive Master Hodir," an apparently very easy boss. The practice of building fake Elden Ring lore was popular on the /r/EldenRing subreddit between 2019 and 2021, during which time the game had been announced but very few concrete details about the game had been released.

Origin

On June 9th, 2019, FromSoftware announced a collaboration between director Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R.R. Martin called Elden Ring. The practice of inventing fake lore about the game started shortly after. On September 8th, Redditor TheHangedKing posted an Elden Ring meme from the future, gaining over 320 points (shown below).

Spread

Over the following months, others joined in on the trend, posting locations, bosses, and designs they had invented for the unreleased game and discussing them as if they were real. For example, user Trifecta000 posted about the "Serpent's Fjord," creating a fake screenshot celebrating the area that doesn't exist, gaining over 1,200 points (shown below, left). User Yukon_Wolf posted a meme about the game's "saddest moments," gaining over 500 points (shown below, right).

The prominence of the fake lore posts prompted the subreddit to create a "Fake Lore" tag,^[3] with which users could talk about and share their hypothetical thoughts and designs for the game as if the game was out. On November 7th, 2019, Polygon^[2] covered the spread of fake Elden Ring lore, writing, "I would argue that it, in fact, elevates it by acknowledging that shared themes across a body of work can impact a player more than just prizing a series of individual concepts. The fact that FromSoftware fans have a shared vocabulary means that these games matter on a deep level to players; it creates a dialect on certain corners of the Internet, dedicated to discussing these games."

On February 22nd, 2021, user imomushi8 posted the complete lore of the subreddit,^[6] tracking the development of "fake lore" posts.^[6]

Glaive Master Hodir

On September 22nd, 2019, Redditor master3786 posted their "boss ranking" for the unreleased game in /r/EldenRing,^[1] in which they made up nine bosses and offered their thoughts on each encounter. The post starts, "Hey all since Elden ring has been out for 8 months now Ive pretty much explored every nook and cranny in the game and have played NG+ a few times and since we got the announcement of Bloodborne 2 I figured ill put this list up like I do with all the other Soulsborne games," before giving their thoughts on the nine made-up bosses. This was the first appearance of the made-up character "Glaive Master Hodir," which master3786 described as a very easy boss encounter. They wrote:

Glaive Master Hodir- The most easiest pathetic boss of this game. I mean I dont really know if you wanna classify him as a real boss even though he had a big health pool. All you had to do was dodge or parry his easy telegraphed glaive sweeps and go in and do some heavy attacks. His back would be turned for a few seconds and some probably used a health flask because of some easy mistakes but this boss puts witches of hemwick to shame. I killed him in my first try.

The post generated tongue-in-cheek debate about master3786's boss ranking, in a parody of a typical FromSoftware boss ranking thread.

"Glaive Master Hodir" became a recurring meme in Elden Ring fake lore posts, with some users sharing memes sometimes describing him as difficult or very easy. The day after their first post, master3786 posted a meme about Hodir "one-shotting" the player, gaining over 450 points^[5] (shown below, left). On December 29th, 2020, Redditor Celest-Sama^[4] posted artwork of Hodir, gaining over 2,100 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References