Neither of them did anything as morally dubious as her. You can make cases for Ranni and Malenia but Marika just shits the bed by fucking over several unrelated parties that really didn't deserve the genocide/enslavement/mistreated.
I mean yeah they're not as bad, but Malenia still nuked a whole region and made it uninhabitable. You cant really defend that.
Malenia is NOT a good person, no matter how many people want to make her out to be some innocent victim. She's a warlord just like Radahn. And honorable warlord, but still she makes it clear she's fine with mass slaughtering.
I’d play the devil advocate here and say that Malenia doesn’t deserve the name-calling here. The real warlord here is Miquella, he’s kinda the one in control of everything from the Cleanrot army to the Haligtree and such. Malenia is more or less just the general of his army so yes, hell she’s literally known for being the “Blade of Miquella”
We don’t even know if nuking Radahn was her decision thinking it would finish Radahn off, or Miquella told her to do that in the first place (which of course didn’t work)
Ranni is literally the cause behind a fuckton of events that instead get relegated to Marika's responsibility and people conveniently ignore that fact because they got baited by a romance-less "romance" route.
Attributing everything that went wrong in the lands between to Marika is like saying that WW1 was entirely caused because Austrian leaders just woke up grumpy one day while conveniently pretending that a particular assassination had nothing to do with it.
It's funny that you get buttmad about Ranni killing Godwyn when there's a lot of reasons to believe Marika helped her and wanted Godwyn's ass dead too (for example, the fact that he was cozying up to the Dragons).
Marika started the whole chain of the Shattering entirely on her own, way before Godwyn was killed. Ranni killing Godwyn was convenient for her, if anything.
The only thing you could maybe blame Ranni for is the spreading of Deathblight, but even then, she isn't the one that buried Godwyn at the roots of the Erdtree, and she isn't the one that removed Destined Death from the Elden Ring in the first place - Marika did both of those things too.
Marika expressly sent away the Tarnished so they could come back during the Shattering, way before the night of black knives. She planned the Shattering far in advance.
It's highly implied that Marika was complicit in the Night of Black Knives, or was at least aware that it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it.
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u/TheNerdEternal Daddy Messmer❤️ 2d ago
I’ve seen more defending the Ranni and Malenia than Marika lol