Elden Ring Dad: A Love Letter
Share
It's 11:47pm on a Tuesday. The kid finally went down. The dishes are stacked but technically rinsed. He sits on the couch, picks up the controller, and presses start.
He dies in thirty seconds.
He gets up and walks back to the fog wall. He dies again, slightly faster.
He whispers a curse word a four-year-old will absolutely repeat tomorrow morning, takes a sip of room-temperature seltzer, and walks back in. This is the Elden Ring dad. This is your guy. This is who we're talking about.
Who is the Elden Ring dad
The Elden Ring dad doesn't have time. He has, at most, ninety minutes between bedtime and his own bedtime, and he is going to spend most of that ninety minutes dying to the same boss. He's not casual. He's not hardcore. He's determined, which is a whole different category.
He plays FromSoftware games — Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro — because they're the only games left that feel like they want something from him. Other games hand him a participation trophy at level 3. Elden Ring asks him for blood. He respects that.
He doesn't watch boss guides. (Sometimes he watches boss guides.) He doesn't grind levels. (He grinds levels.) He swears he's going to beat Malenia at his current level. He will not beat Malenia at his current level. He will go back, get the right Ash of War, summon the Mimic Tear, and beat Malenia at his current level. And he will text his one friend who also plays at 1am to say "got her."
Why the Souls genre is, somehow, the perfect dad genre
The thing about Souls games is they were designed for people who like difficulty as a love language. Which is the dad genre's love language too.
Think about what a Souls game actually offers a parent:
- Discrete, bite-sized failures. You die. You walk back. You learn. You die again. The loop is small. It fits in ninety minutes.
- No save scumming. You can't reload your way out. You have to actually get better. Some part of him needs this.
- Atmospheric loneliness. The world is quiet, sad, gorgeous. He's been managing chaos all day. Now he gets to be alone with a horse on a misty plain.
- A long-form project that's HIS. The kid has hobbies. The partner has hobbies. The dad has Elden Ring. It is his.
That's the whole appeal. A small, controllable hard thing in a life that contains many large, uncontrollable hard things.
"Oh death, become my blade once more"
This is the line that broke the Souls community. It's a player phrase, half meme, half philosophy. The Tarnished — the protagonist of Elden Ring — dies a lot, and dying is part of how you learn the boss, the area, the timing. Eventually, instead of fearing it, you start to use it. Death becomes a tool. The blade becomes sharper because you've fallen on it so many times.
There is no better metaphor for parenthood. We say this with full sincerity.
Every parent dies a thousand small deaths. The dinner you spent forty minutes making gets refused. The schedule you carefully optimized falls apart. The bedtime routine that worked yesterday doesn't work today. You die. You walk back to the fog wall. You try a different approach. Eventually, you beat the boss. Eventually, you survive Malenia.
This is what the Oh Death Tee is. It's a line from Elden Ring, on a soft cotton tee, for the dad who has internalized the Tarnished's philosophy and applied it to his actual life. The Oh Death Hoodie is the cold-weather version, soft fleece, for late-night sessions when the rest of the house is asleep.
A short list of things the Elden Ring dad has done this week
- Apologized to the dog for accidentally yelling at the TV
- Forgotten to charge his controller, again
- Lost half his runes to a tree sentinel he didn't see coming
- Said the words "just one more try" eleven times before going to bed at 1:30am
- Quietly purchased a new Paused My Game to Be Here tee because his current one is in the wash and he needs to be wearing it when he picks the kid up from daycare
- Considered explaining the Lands Between to his three-year-old. Decided against it. Will try again next year.
To the Elden Ring dads
We see you. We see the late nights. We see the patient, careful learning of attack patterns. We see the way you celebrate quietly when a boss falls because everyone else in the house is asleep. We see you carrying the Tarnished's quiet, persistent refusal to give up around with you, every day, into rooms that have absolutely nothing to do with the Lands Between.
You're doing great. You will, eventually, become the Elden Lord. You will also, eventually, get the kid to eat broccoli. Both of these are achievable. Neither of them are quick. We respect the grind on both fronts.
The whole Gamer Collection is built for people exactly like you. Soft, honest, designed by people who also stay up too late dying to bosses. Wear it to the next family dinner. Watch the one other Tarnished in the room clock it from across the table.
Oh death, become my blade once more.