Picture this: you’ve just crawled out of the Elden Ring tutorial area. You’ve just taken down the first miniboss with your hide barely intact. Then out of absolutely nowhere, a stranger makes fun of you for not having a girlfriend. Or at least, that’s how many players have chosen to interpret one of the earliest NPC interactions in Elden Ring.
Here’s the full line: “You are maidenless. A bit player, fully divorced from the strength of runes.” What the NPC Varré actually means, though it’s not immediately clear to the player, is that you need a “Maiden” guide who will allow you to turn the runes you pick up into stat gains. But it’s a lot funnier to imagine that he was actually calling you out for playing Elden Ring on a Saturday night instead of meeting someone nice at a bar. This whole interaction is so much better if you started out playing as a Wretch, which is a class where you start out almost buck-naked. Forget maidens. Some of these Tarnished don’t even have any clothes.
Don’t worry; you’ll eventually meet the Maiden after finding three Sites of Grace aboveground. But it hasn’t stopped players from adopting “maidenless” as a community in-joke. While simply calling someone “Maidenless” gets the point across, some people have gone a step further with the memes. One of these meme formats involves Megamind due to a similar meme about not having any girlfriends.
At first, it doesn’t seem like Fia does a whole lot. She offers to hold you, a rare moment of warmth in the Souls genre, and provides you with Baldachin’s Blessing, a unique item that increases poise at the cost of some of your magical energy, before sending you back on your way. The whole scene, while touching, comes and goes without a second thought. But as it turns out, there’s a price to pay for proving to Varré once and for all that you’re not as maidenless as he thinks.
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Think back to the first time Fia asks to hold you. Remember the part about sharing some of your “lifely vigour” and “stout-hardedness” in exchange for her embrace? That wasn’t just a flowery bit of dialogue on her part: Her hug literally decreases your maximum HP by 5%, a debuff indicated by the mysterious red square icon I mentioned before. It may not seem like a lot, but believe me, you’ll be wishing you had that 5% back at the tail-end of a tough boss fight no matter how useful the blessing she gives you in return happens to be.