The Elden Ring Community Is A Meme-Filled Mess

Just a few days ago, The Game Awards 2020 revealed a battery of trailers for highly-anticipated games, like a new Perfect Dark, the Left 4 Dead-like Back 4 Blood, and the dreamy Open Roads. However, for some, the most notable game barely made an appearance at all. Despite receiving the Most Anticipated Game award, From Software's latest project, Elden Ring, didn't receive any new details or trailers, which caused the game's community to explode in a memetic meltdown that still shows no signs of stopping. [Update: At long last, we have an Elden Ring trailer.]

To be clear, the Elden Ring subreddit is a surprisingly non-toxic environment compared to other video game spaces on the internet, and most of the memes and posts in the community are all in good fun. Still, there was definitely a sense of deflation in the subreddit when The Game Awards ended without an update on the game. One of the top posts all-time on the subreddit came just moments after the event ended, and it speaks for itself:

Another highly-rated post from the evening of the Game Awards shows a representation of the subreddit giving the game's director Hidetaka Miyazaki the Most Anticipated Game award, only for Miyazaki to casually toss it behind him, a template based on Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Yet another appears to be a summoning pentagram made of the 3 previous Dark Souls games, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. Vaati, a well-known figure in the Souls community, tweeted that he is "very happy" for the Elden Ring team winning the award, joking that he "looks forward to them winning it again in 2021."

Since The Game Awards non-reveal, the community has split itself into two major factions: Woopers and Hollows. Hollows are long-time users of the forum named after what the community calls "the Hollowing," the continuing 1.5 year period since From first revealed Elden Ring via a trailer at E3 2019. The subreddit's new obsession with the Water/Ground-type Pokemon appears to stem from a joke post, which proclaims that the Elden Ring community is now devoted to Woopers due to the lack of updates on Elden Ring. That joke was due to The Game Awards hosting an ongoing Pokemon GO event where Woopers appeared. In the interim, Wooper-themed memes have dominated the subreddit, leading the mods to create a Wooper user flair to compete with the Hollow flair.

Besides the continuing trickle of impressive fan art that the community calls "fake lore"--essentially fans imagining what might be in the actual game, based on FromSoft's previous work--some users have speculated that this a hypothetical new trailer will debut at the Taipei Game Show on January 28, 2021. Purported leaks from ResetEra and unverified hints from VentureBeat reporter Jeff Grubb seem to support this rumor, but it's far from concrete. Elden Ring subreddit users replied to the thread with "oooooh," a memetic sound from the original trailer that fans use to indicate their excitement. Other users are skeptical. An indicative reply reads: "Elden Ring will debut at the WWE Royal Rumble in January."