A currently deleted post on the Elden Ring subreddit reads: "MARIKA made ERDTREE from a pile of corpses...The other half of the title is a ferocious spoiler, which is why the thread was removed, but Reddit user ILBOI_X is not alone in this theory. Everyone points to the body pillar of the new Elden Ring Shadow in the Erdtree Story trailer and calls it a tree.

Of course, there is lore to support this. Elden Ring fans always have item descriptions in their back pockets when they need to dissect something new.

A Reddit user, perhaps cris, believed that the stack of bodies "will be central to theory-making in the coming years," and made a post asking people what they thought. Some Elden Ring fans are convinced that Erdtree was Erdtree before it became Erdtree. The description of the in-game item has already revealed that something called "The Crucible" existed before, and "where all life once blended

" Some speculate that this is the Crucible, but this could definitely fit in," a Reddit user wrote. Skeletickles writes. "It is, after all, a place where all life once blended together, and those bodies certainly seem to be blended together.

The implication is that the trailer depicts the birth of the Eld Tree as we know in the game, and the character standing in the center of the body by towering over the land between as the object of the Golden Faith is confirmed by the bangles worn in the close-up shot by Marika. Marika, if you haven't thought about the Eldenling lore in the last three years, it's now clear that the "History of the Country of Shadows" in the trailer's description of the Crucified Woman in the intro cutscenes that started this mess is also Marika's history.

If you're not sure yet, Reddit user Western-Apple1610 pops MS Paint open to make it extra clear—no lore is required. 

The ferocious comparison is also there. I haven't read enough to understand them in Kentaro Miura's legendary Dark Fantasy manga series — I think I'll be a less FromSoft fan — but I can see what people are getting. Dark Souls is packed with blatant references to Miura's work, so it would be no coincidence that Berserk also has a scene with a mountain of bodies. The other half of ILBOI_X's original post title compared the body tree to the Berserk WORLD TREE.

As far as Eldenling Fan's theory is concerned, the fleshy origin of the Eld tree is not so stretched. It already has roots made of corpses and has the power to revive the gods. It all started as a betrayal at the hands of Marika, before coming to the land between the shadows of some Hin Erdtree we already have about her life, it turns out, becomes a kind of prequel.

The trailer has a lot to talk about, like a soldier with a helmet reflecting Erdtree's door design. That all has to do with that big evil tree, and that when Shadow of The Erdtree launches on 6/21, we'll get some answers as to where it came from.