Intro
You sit by the campfire and suddenly a hooded figure appears, introducing herself as “Melina.” She pulls off her hood. You can see her left eye being closed, marked with a symbol on the eyelid, a tattoo. You don’t pay it much heed. Her right eye, however, burns with a yellow glow. She may be connected to Queen Marika’s lineage. But who is Marika? That isn’t important right now.
“I offer you an accord,” you hear amid the silence.
She’s the second person to call you maidenless, right after the lunatic in a white mask. She says she’ll turn runes into strength so that you can take the throne as the next Elden Lord. But you must take her to the foot of the Erdtree, the pact which you accept. You also receive a whistle to summon Torrent, the mount. The figure vanishes like a spirit. She is a spectral presence. After a moment, you realize you heard her voice while you were lying face-down in a puddle.
This way Melina becomes your maiden. Over the course of your journey and trials it turns out she is not a princess to be escorted to the highest room in the highest tower. At times, she brightens your rest at a site of grace with the words of Queen Marika. Upon reaching Leyndell she leaves us for the first time. She appears again after defeating Morgott and attempting to enter the Erdtree, which is sealed. Melina proposes another venture, this time to the mountain, to set the Erdtree to ash, which she will do so that we may gain access to the tree and because of the world’s cycle shift.
At the journey’s end, at the Forge of the Giants, she asks if we are ready to commit the cardinal sin. Of course we are. You grasp her hand, scarred by burns, and then you see the world ablaze and hear:
“The one who walks alongside flame, Shall one day meet the road of Destined Death.”
— Melina, “Elden Ring”
Her purpose was self-immolation, and you were the courier who delivered the fuel. Now you stand at the heart of a fundamental paradox: are you a hero following destiny or a priest leading an innocent soul to slaughter? Or perhaps not so innocent, for in the Frenzied Flame Ending we hear that as the Lord of Frenzied Flame we shall receive what is ours. According to the prophecy above, what awaits us is Destined Death.
Who, then, is Melina? Is she merely a gentle girl who offers you strength in exchange for a ride? Are we complicit in her death? Is there room here for an examination of conscience? Is Melina our guide, or rather the sacrifice the system requires in order to persist? Let us take a closer look.
Melina, or the anatomy of a victim
You stand at the Forge of the Giants to commit the ”cardinal sin,” yet the whole situation feels strangely weightless. It’s a solemn, almost liturgical moment. This happens because the system gives you no other choice. You’ve explored everything, defeated what had to be defeated, and all roads lead here. This is not your failure as a player; it’s a deliberately designed dead end. It unmasks the carefully hidden secret of every order: for a system to endure, it must, at some point, have a victim, whether real or symbolic.
Here we must turn to the philosophy of René Girard, who gave us tools to understand this dark mechanism and what is happening, and has happened, in the Lands Between. It all begins with mimetic desire (mimesis). Girard argued that we desire things not because they have inherent value, but because others desire them. That desire leads to rivalry. The Lands Between is a textbook case of a world in mimetic crisis. After the Shattering, Marika’s act of desperation following the Night of the Black Knives, all the demigods craved the same thing: absolute power. They became mirror rivals to one another, and their insoluble conflict spilled over the world, destroying all order and leading to total stagnation. Faced with such slow self-destruction, Girard claims, the community has only one unconscious recourse: the scapegoat mechanism. One must find a victim onto whom all guilt and accumulated violence can be displaced, and whose annihilation will “purify” the world and allow for a new beginning.
Within this logic, Melina is not a person but a function. She is the system’s answer to the mimetic crisis unleashed by the demigods - an ideal, meticulously prepared scapegoat. Her task is to gather all the world’s “sinfulness” into herself; its stagnation, its immortality, the corruption of the Golden Order and burn it away in a cleansing fire. And we, the Tarnished, are appointed as the priests of this rite. What about her own will? The fact that she herself desires it, that her will has been shaped to fit perfectly into the system’s need, is only proof of the perfection of this pitiless machine. The system wants a victim, and if the victim is willing, so much the better.
In this reading, Melina is neither a guide nor an innocent girl. She is the tragic figure of this story: a victim who believes to be a hero, and whose “free choice” is merely the ultimate proof of her enslavement.
The ideology of the victim
A sacrificial system becomes more effective when the victim walks to the altar out of their own free will. It legitimizes the entire system and the ritual itself. Melina’s consent is the final confirmation that the system and the world that demands her death are lawful and just. If the victim agrees with her fate, it must mean the verdict is right and the ritual necessary. In this way, Melina legitimizes her own sacrifice. But let’s go deeper into Melina’s mind and see what lies underneath.
Utilitarianism: The mathematics of salvation
One of Melina’s inner pillars is the cold, merciless mathematics behind utilitarianism or rather its instrumentalized and simplified version, which the Lands Between, in a mimetic crisis, uses to legitimize its actions. Utilitarianism judges the morality of an act by its consequences, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.
Thus Melina’s self-immolation becomes an investment and a reversal of the Golden Order’s cycle. One life is sacrificed to free millions from the curse of immortality and allow the world to move forward. Melina approaches this mission as a surgeon does to their patient on the operating table. With unshakable precision, she removes the excess tissue to save the patient’s life. That tissue is Melina herself, who has converted her single life into a shove that pushes the world ahead.
In doing so, she becomes a variable in an equation. Her story, persona, forgotten past, and forfeited future; everything has been reduced to a value that can be expended for the greater good. But what is “good”? Who defines it?
The system needs her death, and utilitarian philosophy becomes an ideological tool of both the system and Melina herself. It allows a cruel act of sacrifice to be presented as a logical and morally justified solution. It’s the perfect trap. The victim is convinced that her annihilation is necessary and, above all, noble. We are complicit in all of this and we ourselves are another element in the equation. By agreeing to Melina’s plan, we consent to this utilitarian transaction, affirming that the end justifies the means.
Stoicism: The armor of acceptance
Pure mathematics is sometimes not enough; it can lead to madness rather than help bear such a fate. A second possible pillar for Melina is her stoicism. In turn, it is not the liberating tradition of Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, but a simplified version perfectly suited to a victim of the Golden Order’s system. It’s an armour meant to shield against the despair of reality. Nevertheless, is that all? No. It also is a cage designed to suppress the individual’s revolt.
The Stoics’ basic rule - the distinction between what depends on us and what does not - here is twisted with malice. The system of the Lands Between convinces Melina that her fate, self-immolation, is a force of nature, absolutely beyond her control, and at the same time natural, like the sunrise. The only thing left to her is the inner aspect: her own attitude. Her only “free” choice becomes the manner in which she goes to the altar: in despair, or with stoic dignity. It’s a brilliant trap that diverts all energy from potential resistance into an internal struggle for the “proper attitude.” At this point, Melina practically cries out that she’s part of Byung-Chul Han’s achievement-society. No one coerces her by brute force; the system has persuaded her that self-immolation is her inner project, her duty, and the correct posture. She optimizes herself to be the perfect victim.
Thus her calm and composure are not signs of strength, but the system’s ultimate triumph. Melina treats her destiny not as a tragedy imposed from without, but as an inner obligation to be fulfilled. This stoic armour protects her from doubt and pain, but it is also an armour that imprisons her. It suppresses the natural rebellion, fear, and anger - emotions that might lead her to question the entire order. The system achieves a double victory: it not only obtains a victim, but ensures she goes to her death with a sense of virtue and duty fulfilled, legitimizing the ritual with her very serenity.
Existentialism: The illusion of freedom
The last element supporting Melina and her mind is existentialism in demonstration mode. In a world where the Golden Order fails and top-down meaning has evaporated, philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre declared that we are “condemned to be free.” It is we ourselves who, through our authentic choices, must create purpose and give value to our lives. Facing the total absurdity and stagnation of the Lands Between, Melina clings to this idea as to a final lifeline. She creates her own meaning: she will become a living torch to burn away the thorns blocking the path to the Erdtree. In her eyes, this is not a destiny she submits to, but a free, self-defining choice. Her personal act of rebellion against a senseless world.
At this moment the system performs a kind of gymnastics. It offers Melina a philosophy of freedom so that it becomes the most powerful tool of her subjugation. Her supposedly authentic, existential choice becomes the ideal fuel for the scapegoat mechanism we have already identified. The system doesn’t need to force her to do anything. It merely convinces her that the role of the victim in a ritual the world desperately needs to regain balance is her own sovereign project. Her freedom becomes the most effective lubricant for the sacrificial machine. Thus, Melina becomes a perfect cog: convinced of her uniqueness and agency, fitting precisely into the empty slot in the system’s mechanism.
Is it, then, her sovereign will? Or merely the internalized will of her mother, Queen Marika, herself a master of manipulation? From the system’s pitiless perspective, the question is utterly irrelevant. The system does not care about motivations; it craves a victim. And if the victim is willing, if she is convinced this is her authentic, existential choice, so much the better. The ritual becomes more beautiful, purer, and ultimately more legitimate. In this interpretation, Melina is neither a guide nor an innocent girl. She is the most tragic figure in this story: a victim convinced of her own heroism; a product that believes itself to be an author.
The heresy of flame: When rescue is an act of aggression
The Frenzied Flame path isn’t just an alternate ending to the game and to Melina’s story. It’s a device that unmasks the truth about freedom, which is often terrifying, cruel and absolute. By choosing the Frenzied Flame, we reject the priest’s role in Girard’s ritual. Yet instead of becoming a hero - because at last someone survives in this game - we become the embodiment of radical freedom, which is condemnation.
The pact with the Frenzied Flame and “saving” Melina is an act of aggression against our companion-victim. Her persona, identity, and purpose are shattered. In the name of a subjective good, the foundations that underpinned Melina are taken from her. In this way, Melina undergoes psychological annihilation through a heretical act of mercy.
Here Melina tears off the garments of the pleasant, polite companion, the fellow traveller, the victim. In line with the prophecy quoted at the beginning, she promises that Destined Death will be delivered to us. This is pure, unrestrained will to power that has found its outlet in this way instead of in self-annihilation. By saving Melina, we usher the Gloam-Eyed Queen into a mad world. The only question is whether that figure isn’t worse than the Frenzied Flame.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We become curators of chaos and of the Frenzied Flame. The oppressive system is utterly destroyed but so too is the only meaning the individual had while imprisoned within that system. In the Lands Between there are no simple moral choices. There is only a choice among different forms of destruction.
Echoes of the real world: A fire that awakens consciences
Acts of self-immolation draw the attention of vast numbers of people. When the monk Thích Quảng Đức burned in Saigon in 1963, his fire was a political and spiritual manifesto; a symbol of protest meant to shake the conscience of the world. When Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague in 1969, his body became a torch of freedom against Soviet oppression. Their deaths were acts of ultimate, tragic communication and symbol. Melina’s sacrifice is a terrifying inversion of that symbol. Her fire is not a cry; it is a mechanism. This is a crucial difference, because Đức’s and Palach’s deaths were symbols aimed against the system attempting at shattering it through moral shock. Melina’s death is a function of the system. It is an indispensable element of its maintenance and restart. Her fire is not meant to awaken anyone; it is meant to oil the rusted gears of a cosmic machine. Here the game performs a macabre act of appropriation. It harnesses the visual and emotional power of one of humanity’s most radical forms of protest and transforms it into bureaucratic necessity. It takes from us the image of ultimate human agency and displays it as the image of ultimate systemic enslavement. That is why this moment in the game, though fantastical, carries such a horrifying, palpable weight. It resonates with our history, but in a way that reverses its meaning and shows how easily the noblest sacrifice can be instrumentalized.
Accomplice, enemy, or something worse?
The world of the Lands Between and Elden Ring offer no simple decisions and no easy escape. There is no pure, bloodless path. Every choice is a form of complicity.
Either we become the system’s priest, accepting its sacrificial logic and honouring Melina’s choice. Then we are obedient functionaries of a brutal order, cogs in a machine that runs on blood.
Or we become heretics of chaos, trampling her will in the name of our own. We annihilate her very meaning to affirm ours, becoming monsters of absolute, solipsistic freedom - one that ends with the burning of the entire world.
Melina’s tragedy is that she is trapped between these two options: a being defined by a divine plan, living under the illusion of her own freedom, while the player is merely an external force that decides the form of her annihilation: physical or existential. There was never an option to be her hero.
The game does not ask whether you will be one. It asks what kind of a monster you will choose to become. The true horror, however, is that this choice is made incessantly. Unlike in the setting of the majesty of flames and the whisper of divine prophecy, but in the quiet of offices, at the ballot box, and in everyday acts of conformity.
Bibliography
These particular books affected the overall shape of the article
- René Girard - The Scapegoat
This book provides the core key to the entire analysis. Girard’s “scapegoat mechanism” is the critical lens through which we deconstruct the Lands Between’s “deliberately designed dead end”. It reveals Melina not as a guide, but as a “function”.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Byung-Chul Han - The Burnout Society
Han’s work explains the internal, psychological machinery of Melina’s sacrifice. The essay uses his concept of the “achievement-society” to deconstruct her “armor of acceptance” It’s the tool that reveals how the system “persuaded her that self-immolation is her inner project”, compelling her to “optimize herself to be the perfect victim” and mistake the system’s triumph for her own “sense of virtue”.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism is a Humanism
Sartre’s philosophy provides the system’s final, most cynical tool. The essay uses his idea that we are “condemned to be free” to expose Melina’s existential choice as the ultimate “illusion of freedom”. This book is the key to understanding how a philosophy of liberation is “offer… as the most powerful tool of her subjugation”, turning her into “a product that believes itself to be an author.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link