General Radahn / Starscourge Radahn

Editor's Note: This entry contains minor spoilers for Elden Ring; read at your own caution.

About

General Radahn or Starscourge Radahn is a boss in the action-adventure fantasy game Elden Ring, developed by FromSoftware and released on February 25th, 2022. In the game, Radahn is depicted as a massive armor-clad warrior wielding two large swords and is located in the region of Caelid. The boss became infamous online roughly a week after the game was released due to the overwhelming difficulty and uniqueness of the fight, leading to many reactions and memes made about him from players.

Origin

General Radahn, boss name Starscourge Radahn, is one of the Great Rune holding bosses that must be defeated in Elden Ring, often tackled as the third great boss. The fight starts off with the player character across the map from Radahn, who will begin shooting powerful arrows at the player, with summonable NPC signs in-between the player and Radahn (seen below). This is because of the fight's unique festival mechanic, which means that numerous NPCs can be summoned to the fight, and even after they are defeated, their signs can be found again to be summoned multiple times. As is typical in SoulsBorneShadowRing games, this boss fight has a unique mechanic, and as such, the fight is notably more difficult than earlier bosses. In this case, the extra summonable NPCs are because of the Radahn's extreme difficulty, with him having various different combo moves that can change their timing or him riding on a horse giving him variable movement, making spacing incredibly difficult.

One of the most viral moments of the boss encounter comes when Radahn enters phase three of the fight, in which he jumps straight up in the air, fully disappears, then crashes down to the fight like a meteor, which was part of a reference made by the Twitter user @TDS_Amadeus^[1] on March 4th, 2022, gaining 6,700 likes in three days (shown below, the caption reads phase two but this is actually Radahn's third phase, with his second phase often being skipped by a long combo during the wind-up).

Monster Hunter fans when they saw Radahn's phase 2 in Elden Ring pic.twitter.com/w6I8mLsHKj

— AmaDEUS_225 (@TDS_Amadeus) March 4, 2022

Spread

As more players began to encounter Radahn in early March, his online presence began increasing on social media. For example, on March 4th, 2022, another reaction to Radahn's meteor drop killing the player was posted by Twitter user @monke_become,^[2] who tweeted a GIF from YouTuber^[5] BloodMoonFT that was captioned "skill issue" in which the player unsuspectingly gets killed by Radahn's meteor crash. The caption "Skill Issue" comes from a phrase that is often said to other players when they call a boss mechanic unfair, as in "the boss isn't unfair it's just a skill issue" (shown below).

Radahn gives me nightmares pic.twitter.com/V6YFm9KcRk

— Vaetir Low (@monke_become) March 4, 2022

Due to Radahn having a rather large health pool of 15,000 when you first face him, many memes were made about how little damage is done to him and his reaction to the player trying to attack him with weak weapons, such as the Bloodtooth Hound curved greatsword. One such reaction, in a meme using Groot, was posted to Twitter by user BurgerLover827^[3] on March 5th, 2022, where it gained 1,000 likes in two days (shown below).

With the collective consciousness of the player base reaching Radahn around the 10-day mark, the collective groaning over him reached a peak, leading to the official BandaiNamco^[4] Twitter account to make a tweet calling out Radahn and his notoriety in early March 2022 (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References