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Elden Ring plays around quite a bit with the concept of grafting, especially when it comes to their enemy designs. Godrick, the Grafted, one of the shard bearers that players meet very early in the game, showcases just how perverse and profane the practice is.
In a recent video, Soulsborne modder and dataminer, who goes by the handle of Zullie the Witch, talked about the notion of grafting in Elden Ring and how it has diluted Marika’s Divinity.
Zullie suggests that although Godrick is a descendant of the first Elden Lord, Godfrey, he was always a weak and sad man who constantly tried to grasp power.
This is one reason he turned to the art of grafting, thereby stealing limbs from other humans, trolls, and giants alike. Godrick reaches such a state with all his grafted parts that he turns into something immensely grotesque who has trouble walking because of all the additional weight on his body.
Zullie suggests that despite all his attempts to attain power, Godrick is still considered the weakest sharbearer in Elden Ring and a failure of Godfrey’s lineage.
Zullie the Witch talks about the origins of Grafting in Elden Ring and real-life inspirations
Zullie suggests that Godrick was not the first person to introduce the art of grafting. In Lands Between, players encounter an enemy in an Evergoal jail called Godefroy, who has the same grotesque amalgamations on his body.
However, the dataminer charts its origins back to Godfrey himself, as the Elden Lord sought to suppress his lust for battle by taking the lion Serosh upon his back.
Zullie states that this was perhaps the first instance of grafting in the Lands Between and was seen as a nobler application of the art. However, the very process was perverted over time, and as seen in Godrick’s grotesque demeanor, the Divinity of Marika did indeed get diluted in their lineage.
When discussing the real-life inspirations for Elden Ring’s grafting, Zullie talks about horticulture and how it has a common practice of grafting branches from one tree to another.
The dataminer talks about how Hidetaka Miyazaki, in his previous interviews, demonstrated a fascination for trees and saw how important the role trees play in Elden Ring. It won’t be farfetched to consider that perhaps grafting in the RPG was inspired by horticulture.
Zullie talked about Van Aken’s experiment, an artist and professor who began work on creating a tree that would bear 40 different fruits. The tree he ultimately created was a product of grating, and the dataminer believes that perhaps that might have been one of the biggest inspirations behind the creation of Godrick, the Grafted.
