Extremely late response but you were correct, Ymir essentially confirmed that the One Great was shattered by the Greater Will long before TLB was populated. I need to rewrite some of these lol

Yeah man, I appreciate it 🙏 been really busy recently, I want to get back into making videos soon

My thoughts are somewhat in line with this; I believe this is what the Elden ring looked like in its earliest form, before Marika (and perhaps others) altered it to align with her ideology. This is probably the earliest depiction of the ring, and how it looked when it first landed in the lands between

I think maybe the extra runes maybe not exactly great runes, if you look closely at these "runes" they don't complete a circle contrary to what seems to be the rule for all great runes, I believe they might just be an extension From the "root rune" you can even see two of the runes going down their lines and becoming roots The real runes are probably Just the four in The center

Just do not search lore about dung eater or horrors of leyndell they're disturbing asf

Maybe what caused the crucible was a star falling into the world? like the elden beast came to the world, could the crucible have come the same way? Maybe it's all the same thing and the crucible arrived in the lands between along with the elden beast in the golden star? Maybe the crucible was the golden star in which the elden beast arrived in the lands between?

@@davisiotta489 Last option, or both in and the creation of the wider universe. In short, the Crucible and the lifeforms that composed it couldn't have existed before the fracturing of the One Great. Even they display various forms of separate and independent existence. As such, they too are the Greater Will's creations. It's the simplest and most obvious conclusion. All life is defined by runes; the Elden Ring is a set of Runes which defines the world and all life together with a set of laws. It has existed since the Order Of The Ancient Dragons, and likely long before that; it can be found in Maliketh's arena in an older form, and Placidusax himself was Elden Lord. " ' Tis merely a cycle. Stand before the Elden Ring. Become the Elden Lord." This cycle doesn't mean our journey itself is canonically repeating; it means that this same story has happened over a dozen times across dozens of ages to dozens of people. Before us, it was Godfrey. Before Godfrey, it was Placidusax. Who knows who was before Placidusax? Well, only him, probably. If there was ever a specific action that denotes the Frenzied Flame's accusation of the Greater Will, it is this one. The Frenzied Flame accuses the Greater Will through the Three Fingers of creating " fractures, births and souls"; of creating life itself. It claims that, through this, the Greater Will has caused suffering as a consequence of each being's independent and limited existence, as opposed to the unity of primordial chaos. This is clearer in the Japanese dual, where it denotes this act as THE mistake it is describing, as opposed to simply saying " but the Greater Will made a mistake." Life IS the mistake. Existence IS the mistake. Everyone who truly follows Frenzy is joined by one wish; that they were never born in the first place. The Elden Beast is the primary culprit; in it, you see the template of several forms of life. The hands of a man. More wings than a dragon, and the firebreathing to match. The natural talent in both swimming and flight. It is, to us, the ultimate lifeform; the beginning and culmination of all life as we know it. And it is not special. In the distance, you see dozens of trees. Dozens of places you never visited. Dozens of worlds. It's never clearly stated how exactly the Greater Will " abandoned" the Lands Between, but this gives you the clear enough picture. This is the Greater Will's garden, and you are standing in a dead plant, about to be pruned to leave space for new life. The Elden Beast is or was carried by a golden star; it and beings like Astel are the same kind of being, only, it is higher. "If the stars command our fates, then amber-hued stars must command the fates of the gods." "This sword is imbued with an ancient holy essence. Its red tint exemplifies the nature of primordial gold, said to be close in nature to life itself." The Elden Beast is one; just one. One amber colored star. One star that defined absolutely everything we know. How small is it, compared to the one to sent it? How many others were sent? Where are they? How alike are they? Do you understand the scale of this? The proportions? No wonder, then, when one is claimed by Frenzy.

(especially since they're both faith based)

I think so, the greater will is totally in favor of order, the crucible is just a part of the process of the greater will to achieve order over living beings, the greater will understands that life must go through times of difficulty in the cycle of births and deaths so she needs empyreans, the existence of someone who can take the place of her current vassal is simply problematic because these candidates for godhood will almost certainly be the reason why her god will need to be replaced in the first place , but the greater will simply does not care because the interest of the greater will is the constant evolution of life through the process of changing the gods and the functionality of the world, it just wants the natural order of things to follow its path, even the " eternal age" by Marika is just another phase that living beings will go through, evolution is neither bad nor good, it is not the search for the strongest, most intelligent or even the fittest, it is simply the process of changing life through of the next generation, the next set, the next order

It's much simpler than that. Are you familiar with the concept of a demiurge? As in, the original Greek thought experiment? In it, a demiurge is a deity of perfect " Good" that wishes to impose order and perfection upon primordial Chaos. There's just one problem: It's chaos. This theorem posits that the imperfections of existence are inherent to it simply because if the world's " substance"; no matter how hard the demiurge tries, it will always fail to create a perfect world in the image of the one it originated from. It simply does not have the means.

Now that I'm revisiting that comment, could this old man be the same one we see in the DLC trailer? if he has a direct influence on the crucible's transformation into the erdthree I kind of find the speculation that he could be Marika's father somewhat likely I can't wait for the DLC... I NEED ANSWERS!!!

I've always found myself thinking about this, runes are the essence of the life of the creatures in the lands between, they are the representation of the meaning of that life, I think that's why we don't normally get smaller runes from more animalistic beings and instead we get large amounts of rune fragments, these creatures are full of life and vitality but they are not able to give a meaning to it, that is why I believe that the lesser runes are the representations of the meanings of the lives of these beings that they themselves have arrived at, that is why I think the hero and lord runes are the meanings that these people gave to their lives as being heroes and lords, and that is the meaning they gave to their lives and by extension their runes, the great runes for me are the representations of the very concepts of life created by the greater will, although we do not have an idea exactly what each rune does, they all seem to be at least linked to the concept of life as they are all linked to increasing the character's statistics or providing healing, the rune of Godrick is possibly the origin of the grafting power as it is the central rune of the Elden ring and all other runes seem to have to be "grafted" onto this rune to form the ring, the rune of miquella and Malenia are linked with the concepts of abundance and decay and seem like they are the runes that should be on the left part of the Ring, the Rykard and Radahn runes can thematically be linked to the concept of consuming and growing since apparently when Radahn was at the beginning of the shattering he was about the size of Morgot as seen in the opening cinematic, which leads me to believe that he only started to get so big when he received his great rune, and Rykard is another assumption that it is related to consuming because he is a serpent that wants to devour everything and his great rune seems stay on the right side of the ring next to the Radahn rune and to grow you need to consume it, so they seem to be two linked concepts, as for the Mohg and Morgot runes, I believe that because they give you more life and regenerate your life when attacking an enemy, they can be linked to the concept of vitality/health and regeneration

@@davisiotta489 Indeed. Remember; the simplest way to understand any and all Runes, great or small, is to know this: Runes are words. Plain and simple. Everything is pre-written. Written into our very souls. To take on a Great Rune is to take on a word of power that defines the world. In this, the demigods become the words, the words we must gather to form the sentence, the sentence that defines the world. The Elden Ring is but a group of words. A sentence; a spoken and written command. The question, of course, is: Are we all written, or may we write words of our own? Were the Runes of Goldmask and the Dung Eater written by them? Or were they found by them? What was it that " guided" them to these words of power?

I don't believe that, the greater will in reality doesn't seem any different from the other outer gods, I believe that this termology is only used because the greater will is the outer god currently in charge of the world and can very well be dethroned and replaced, the outer gods are only called that because they are outside the current order

@@davisiotta489 The Greater Will has never been directly called or referred to as an Outer God in the game, whereas the Formless Mother, Frenzied Flame, Scarlet Rot, and Twinbird creator have all been specifically referred to as Outer Gods. The only entities in-game that have not been directly called Outer Gods besides the Greater Will are the Fell God and the Blood Star, but the Fell God can easily be inferred to be an Outer God, as it was defeated/imprisoned in the same way as the Outer God of Rot, and the Japanese translations/methods of contact the Blood Star use are much different compared to the Formless Mother (and plus the Blood Star is just that, a star). Think about it. If the Greater Will really is an Outer God, then if we use Miquella’s Needle, specifically designed to ward off the influence of Outer Gods, wouldn’t that mean that we would have lost our Grace and the power to use Runes as a consequence of it? The game makes it pretty clear who is an Outer God or not, both in English and in Japanese. And just look at the sheer power difference between the Greater Will and the other Outer Gods. The Elden Ring alone can completely change the Order of the world, can control the stars, death (something that the Outer God of the Deathbirds originally had dominion over), and much more. The Greater Will is clearly very much differentiated from other Outer Gods in the game. SmoughTown did a fantastic video explaining the differences between the Greater Will and the Outer Gods, with evidence from direct Japanese translations pointing out the symbology and the specific nouns and Kanji used to describe both. I highly recommend giving it a watch, as it also describes how the Outer Gods are called ‘Outer Gods’ in the first place.

​@@agopessimist1335obviously the needle would not work to take away our grace, the needle is made of unalloyed gold, it is basically pure influence of the greater will, why would it take away our grace if it is made basically of the same power as our grace? For me it was always obvious that the needle drives away outer gods specifically because it is the power of another outer god opposing them. And it's obvious that the greater will has more power than the other outer gods, she is the one who has control of the world through the elden ring, erdthree and Marika, if she weren't more powerful in this situation it would be strange

100%, there’s countless proof that the ancient dragons served the greater will and the previous wielder of the Elden ring. I plan to include it in the third episode, in which I’ll discuss all of the major ancient civilizations.