By Jonathan Wojcik and Rev Storm

ENTRY 16: BURIAL WATCHDOGS

Kitty cats!!! Call them "watchdogs" all you want, these are just big dumb silly bad kittens with pointy ears (wrong of them!) and wiggle tails (wronger of them!!!) and everything else that kitties can do. It's just a kind of even more wrong (if you can believe it!) kitten cat that also has three faces that also look like screaming mummified demon heads who are always horribly staring, and I just cannot believe they have decided such a thing to do. Who let them have that??? It wasn't me! (Or was it) Still only the one set of big pointy ears, though, like two of the faces are coming OUT of their ears. That's a far too silly thing for a kitty to do now, just outrageous. Very wrong and naughty and they don't get any treat for it (this is a lie, they get one anyway for every and each thing they do and it's just going to have to be our secret)

Here is one of the naughtiest and silliest of all the most things a kitty does sometimes when they are cross about having been wrong (which is always). People hate fighting the kitties so much they have made flowcharts to track the different kinds of wrong things that they decide and in what kind of order. They do these naughty wrong things to protect catacombs where people are trying to be dead without being bothered, so from some perspectives they're actually being good kitties (don't tell anyone!) but UNFORTUNATELY kitties do not know how to do things that aren't bothering so it's a vicious cycle.

The way they wear giant gold king crowns around their necks is extra funny as well. I think funniness very easily becomes coolness. I wonder if the crowns were even made for this purpose or they were made to be worn by big people and they were just given to the watchdogs as a symbol of the IMPORTANT little wrong jobs that they have. Who gave them a job! They don't know anything! They don't know anything but two things, sometimes! (What two things though? It's a mystery!)

Some watchdogs have swords instead of sticks and there are also "lesser watchdogs" who have only one face, but that's all being MUCH too bad now, sometimes wrong as well. Their silliness is just astronomical at this point, just flat-out over the silly line. I saw the kind with three faces and a stick first, so I'm afraid that was established immediately as our moral baseline and there's no backing out now.

Their official description says they're "battered and broken over their lengthy tenure," so they've been naughty good kitties for a very long time and probably deserve a cardboard box to enjoy, but nobody in Elden Ring has invented those yet, and maybe that's why they're so terribly cross. Or maybe like the wiggle rocks from before, it's just that they've been busy all on their own for so long they aren't working right anymore (even for a kitty, who is a kind of a little thing who definitively doesn't know how to work right EVER). Kind of haunting how much of the world in Elden Ring reflects something in a state of stagnation, a perpetual limbo, an attempt to make a deathless paradise only to make a corporeal hell of deterioration and madness where nothing has the right meaning or purpose anymore but everything keeps going through the motions, an empty shell of a world. The resemblance to a sort of decrepit sphinx makes these particular entities feel all too symbolic of a world so afraid to die that it has arguably already killed itself.

Why did you DO that, kitties! Stupid!!!!!!

The rest of the description only goes that they "rule the catacombs and are even said to command the imps," so they might be kind of like giant versions of what the imps are, and they do have similar stony texturing (again this is a silly thing for them to have done). Does that mean the imps are kitties actually? Even the ones who are bugs? I thought they were more like small men who are rocks but if so they are just the most wrongest kind of kitty of them all, and that is technically the most correct kind because a kitty can't be anything else but the wrongest. I hope you can extrapolate how I feel about these fascinating and really quite scary designs through the exact dialog Rev and I reflexively use to talk about cats (and in fact most animals) because in person it is much more convoluted but this is only because cats are so wrong that if you tell them they're wrong they open their dumb mouth and look surprised on their face because they decided not to even know how wrong they are and it's just self-evident at this point that they don't know how to know things.

Cats!

NAVIGATION: