Pot boys, pot friends, clay brothers, cauldron Cuzs, live jars...It doesn't matter what you call them: they look nice. They are one of the first memes to emerge from the Elden Ring, and it's hardly surprising because they are sensuous and occasionally violent pot seeds.1 It's like Hayao Miyazaki and Lewis Carroll collaborated, and it's like Eli Ross rushed in. Or, to put aside the painstaking references, it's like Miyazaki Hayataka has a normal one.

The brief appearance in the first Elden Ring gameplay video greatly underestimated how so many pot friends ended up in the base game. Even the pot friends who attack us in the Elden Ring are fascinating: their moveset is sawn and predictable, so if the pot friends hurt you, it's definitely the pot friends are hilarious, gorgeous, whimsical and stumbling treasure, right? 

No: Friends in the pot are nightmares. When I recently played Erdtree's shadow, I first encountered an underground gaol full of giant pots that brought great pleasure. After all, the prison was miserable. Somewhere in the distance there was an elderly man crying. Some light ceramic reliefs were definitely in order. Alas, the nostalgic encounter with a conscious clay ship was not in my water that day.

Because that's exactly what pots are: they are ships. A living jar, after all, is not a sensuous pot. Those living parts— the ones in the pot, not the pot itself - change Gore's unspeakable form of having learned to commandeer the pot towards their own funny end Oh, and they'll fuck you too, like these things that FromSoft loves to simply put all of their video games in.

Obviously this is not new knowledge. According to the Living Jar fandom page, they have always been "brought back to life by human flesh and blood." Another corroborating moment in the base game occurs when Radan interacts with Alexander, the warrior's jar, after he is defeated.1 I missed this moment myself, but obviously Alexander is all confirming (via VG24/7) that the pot is basically a dead human gelatinous gi "If you're lucky, here's a mountain of true warrior bodies." If I could just squeeze this bunch into me, I would be a mighty warrior again in no time."

If you wanted Warrior Jar's words to be wrapped in poetic allusions during that encounter, open to interpretation, and certainly not taken literally, I hate being the bearer of bad news. The pot is really full of resuscitated lumps of dead people. It may be better not to know, but it may be painful to know alone. So why I share this with you.