As a part of our ongoing quest to search out out what precisely George RR Martin did for Elden Ring, the person himself has now denied strapping his own initials onto the sport’s demigod characters. Main characters like Godrick, Ranni, Radahn, and Melina all have starting letters that coincidentally or not, align along with his personal. However this wasn’t a call he made, Martin insisted in his newest blog post.
“I’ve been writing and publishing tales since 1971, and I think that I’ve been giving characters names starting with R and G and M for the reason that begin,” Martin wrote. “Developing with names is difficult, particularly since A Track of Ice & Fireplace makes use of so lots of them, and I’m keen on giving members of the family and shut kin names which have one thing in frequent… however actually, why would I’ve to cover my identify inside the sport?”
Martin’s proper, there are a whole lot of characters that share his initials in his personal work, but it surely looks like greater than a coincidence that a few of Elden Ring’s most outstanding draw on these three letters. FromSoftware tales are normally inscrutable due to how they’re conveyed through transient dialogue and merchandise descriptions, however in Elden Ring it is onerous sufficient to only preserve observe of the distinction between Godfrey, Godwyn, and Godrick. It is so complicated that it feels intentional.
It is also nonetheless unclear what precisely Martin did for the sport. Elden Ring’s inventive director Hidetaka Miyazaki informed Edge final month that Martin wrote a bunch of textual content in regards to the setting and the “move of historical past and the figures who seem all through it.” From there, Miyazaki and the workforce translated all of that into the fiction within the sport. It’s totally attainable that the names of the world’s most essential characters got here from Martin, but it surely’s additionally very attainable that Miyazaki named them himself—he’s primarily the one who names characters within the Souls sequence, in spite of everything.
However positive, I will take Martin at his phrase. He did not personally identify each character after himself, but it surely’s onerous to imagine that no person at FromSoftware (together with Miyazaki himself) did not identify the characters after probably the most essential writers in fantasy fiction. It was a enjoyable conspiracy whereas it lasted.
