Lorefags keep claiming that this red phantom who looks exactly like blaidd ACKSHUALLY isn't Blaidd at all

Why as an impostor hanging out at the exact spot the real Blaidd should have been?

I mean...the baleful shadow still has Blaidd's exact same moveset and weapon etc. I get that it could be just some random dude with a mask on but....why? This is just dumb, needlessly confusing for bizarre reasons.

>the exact spot the real Blaidd should have been?
Blaidd was locked up in the gaol

>and weapon
Small indie company, please, understand
On a more serious note, the shadow's sword is imbued with the Black Flame for some reason, contrary to Blaidd's frost

Iji was aware of that so the impostor trick wouldn't have worked. I assume the intent is to break Ranni's spirit so they use Blaidd or an impostor. It doesn't work if Iji keeps Blaidd away.

it's not exact, they share a lot of moves but they both have a couple the other doesn't do
And Blaidd's sword is cold and magic and the baleful shadow's is Destined Death

Maybe you're the retard, user?

t. ranni

Imagine being smaller than doll ranni.

>Doll Ranni towers over you
>She can bully you in retaliation of your teasing
>Is very smug while doing it

Why? Because Blaidd is a loyal servant to Ranni and stirring distrust causes Blaidd to freak out and try to kill you at the end of the questline (thinking your the imposter)

I just don't understand the point of doing it like this at all? The vast majority of players will assume it's Blaidd and then...what exactly? The player is supposed to feel bad like Iji for misjudging Blaidd? Ok? Who cares? This is such a stupid wrinkle that I don't even

>break Ranni's spirit

she seems completely unperturbed though. Like what? She doesn't make a comment about it, so the player is just left confused whether that was Blaidd or not?

I always assumed that the two fingers just sleeper agent'd Blaidd to become the Baleful Shadow and he wasn't aware of it all. Not sure how they would imbue his sword with death rune power but whatevs. the idea of him being mindbroken at the end after realizing he tried to attack Ranni is a lot more compelling than...it was actually 2 different wolf guys all along

fuck this game is stupid

>fuck this game is stupid
That's where I'm at at this point. I booted it up again last night to run around the windmill village to see if there's any lore I missed. Nope. No reason for the existence of the windmill village. No explanation for why a godskin is there, or why there's questionably human insane vampire ladies everywhere, or why the windmills are all boarded up, or why there's thornes everywhere. Some fucking retard at fromsoft probably just saw the thorny guy at shaded castle and thought "oh i guess we need to put thrones here too hurr hurr I'm a fucking retard".
Sorting out this games' lore was more fucking tedious than playing it, utter dogshit game through and through.

how can it be him when he's waiting for you at ranni's rise

It's not random, not needlessly confusing or bizarre. Empyreans get beastman companions that also act as sleeper agents for the Two Fingers in case the Empyrean goes rogue. Blaidd is Ranni's shadow, who renounced his allegiance to the Two Fingers and confirmed it with Ranni, which bestowed his Royal Greatsword with frost. However, the Two Fingers still had control in the end, because Blaidd was still a sleeper agent.

Maliketh is Marika's shadow. Same deal. Marika just gave him a different job after he beat the Gloam-Eyed Queen and sealed Destined Death within his sword. There are more Baleful Shadow agents of the Two Fingers than just them, and the Blaidd mask is from a human assassin who once tried disguising as Blaidd to try and assassinate Ranni. Obviously, he failed.

>The vast majority of players will assume it's Blaidd
Why would they assume that? If it was Blaidd why wouldn't the spirits name just be "Blaid"? I feel like the game was pretty clear that Blaidd is just one of many creatures sent by the Greater Will to serve the Empyreans or work as Assassins.

Pre Wrath WOW.

they should have at least given the baleful shadow a different model. Or at least a helmet or something.

>The vast majority of players will
The vast majority of players are tards that don't give a shit about the lore and will never read a single item description, 9/10 of the retard streamers never read the description of the serpent killer or never listened to the fucking ghost NPC saying you should use the spear he left in the room to slay the big serpent

Welcome to Fromsoft games. You'll get a lot of replies coping about why it's not retarded, but it is. There's an entire cottage industry on Youtube dedicated to making sense of each game's "story".

It's just laziness user. They didn't make a different asset, just swapped out what the weapon could do since Blaidd is frost and shadow has ouch black fire edge. I bet you didn't even notice that Godefroy isn't Godrick even though it's the same model without the dragon phase.
Spooky ghost god people get beast people to protect them, keep them in line, and kill them if shit goes wrong.
Iji locked Blaidd up in the evergaol at that point in time, and Ranni would've said it was Blaidd. Even in Japanese she doesn't call him Blaidd and still tells you to sent her regards to Iji and Blaidd after she leaves the doll.

The difference being that DS1 and DS2 had excellent lore and actually meaningful stories to tell, which makes the few unexplained things, like Velka, stand out particularly glaringly. Their newer games are such shovelware shit that there's no lore to even be discovered, and the "stories" which are really just extremely lazy references are self-contradictory.

Retard

Don't the women skin people for the Godskin at the top of the hill? I thought an NPC said that they were celebrating having skinned all the men in the village.

DS1 and DS2 had the exact same problem with asset reuse and bad translations.

>and DS2
>then complains about shovelware shit

yea dawg, why is there a godskin skinning people 20 feet from the capital of the Golden Order
why are there the same thorns all over the village that Elemer of the Briars has, when Elemer is one random dude from eochaid
why do all the women have extremely similar braided hair just like marika
the answer to all these questions is fromsoft has sold out and doesn't care anymore.

iirc it's one of the ghost dudes
most of the areas have ghost dudes that talk shit about the region, like the guy praising madness on the bridge after the mimic fight

DS2 had great lore. it clarified a ton of things about 1's world and it added a bunch of cool new stories to discover in some random age of fire where nothing ultimately matters.
DS3 tried and, I guess, succeeded in trying to appeal to brain rotted shonen fans who just want their JRPG where they kill god and become the new god and fuck a hot anime bimbo too because why not

>Wolfman created by a higher power for the specific purpose of guarding an important figure and enforcing the higher power's will turns out to be part of a race of similar wolfmen also created for the exact same purpose, and is not actually a unique special snowflake that god made for shits and giggles
>This causes the lorelet to shit and piss himself in confusion

DS2 is a masterpiece compared to the stitched together empty ubishit game that is ER.

What's next? Hyetta and Irina aren't the same body? Marika isn't Radagon after all?

Attached: what a twist.png (1280x720, 2.2M)

Hyetta and Irina are a weird case because Irina's body doesn't despawn after Hyetta appears, but Hyetta doesn't appear until Irina dies, and Edgar will ALWAYS drop a Shabriri Grape, even when he's alive and hopeful in Castle Morne and shouldn't have been taken by the Frenzied Flame yet.

I like that this was made to be some big revelation, a reveal that's supposed to mean literally anything at all, and it amounts to fuck-all and means nothing. It changes literally nothing about the game.

It's so you aren't surprised when marika turns into radagon for the fight I guess, and to make sense of Miriel's dialogue on Rennala and Radagon.
It's a shame because most likely miyazaki completely destroyed the setting/storyline with his storytelling because you can tell there's good stuff hidden there.

So each empyrian gets a shadow right? So who were Miquella's and Malenia's shadows? Is it ever said or even alluded to. Did they not receive them due to their afflictions? Whats up with that?

>causes Blaidd to freak out and try to kill you at the end of the questline
That's not why he does it, retard. That's the Two Finger's influence deciding that Ranni is getting too close to upsetting their order so they have Blaidd complete his duty and try to kill her but he does his best to fight off their influence which is why all those dead Black Knives are around.

>Hyetta and Irina are a weird case because Irina's body doesn't despawn after Hyetta appears
Just chalk it up to From being fucking incompetent and not actually testing their questlines since half of them were blatantly unfinished at launch.
>same voice
>same exact fucking outfit
>only appears after Irina dies

Probably dead, they both ran away to make the haligtree.

Because if your assassin is meant to replicate one of your target's closest allies then they should actually fit the bill.

Dung Eater too but you can meet him in at the Roundtable

Not every Demi-God is an Empyrean, I don't think it says anywhere that Malenia and Miquella were chosen.

Ranni literally says it

Ranni says so, but maybe being cursed and hosting different gods made the fingers rethink their need of a shadow, considering it's given later on and not from birth.
Ranni, as a matter of fact, was the perfect replacement for Marika, perfectly healthy and extremely powerful empyrean that isn't linked to an outer god since birth.

we find a mask that is a perfect replica of blaidd's head which suggests someone trying to disguise as him also his weapon has a different enchant, also also Iji later says he underestimated Blaidd and that he never was a threat to Ranni even while he's crazy but maybe that is a misinterpretation

It's shocking that so many retards actually believe this shit.

What happened then?

He literally has a speech about it before you fight him user, holy shit

>It's shocking that so many retards actually believe what the game explicitly tells you in detail

I think this whole discussion is just trolls, to be honest. I can't accept that people actually believe that Blaidd fought off the Two Fingers and never would have betrayed Ranni. It's such extreme retardation, I think it's just trolls baiting easy (you)s, as this thread digression shows.

>I can't accept that people actually believe that Blaidd fought off the Two Fingers and never would have betrayed Ranni
Iji says it
His armor says it
He says it

Provide even a single piece of valid evidence that suggests something else

So was there two assassination attempts using a Blaidd costume? Do fromdrones really not realize how retarded it to try that twice? And no one really bats an eyelash, "oh yeah the baleful shadows dress up as blaidd sometimes a try to kill us lol"
>BRAVO MIYAZAKI