A Google Doodle animator is my new favorite Elden Ring lore theorist thanks to this cartoon retelling of Shadow of the Erdtree set to a Taylor Swift song

Elden Ring lore videos should be more like Nate Sandhart's silly two-minute animation set to a Taylor Swift song. Much as I enjoy listening to VaatiVidya read item descriptions, we could be watching FromSoftware's messed up little guys try to ruin the world in the style of Adventure Time.

If you've finished Shadow of the Erdtree or don't care about spoilers, you need to watch Sandhart's goofy retelling of the story using the lyrics of Taylor Swift's oddly fitting song «Mastermind». In it, boy demigod Miquella skips around the Lands Between to set up a series of events leading up to the DLC while singing things like, «It was all my design / 'Cause I'm a mastermind.»

For two years, fans believed that Miquella, cursed with eternal adolescence at birth, was the only good egg in a family of traitorous gods. But then Shadow of the Erdtree proved them wrong. Sandhart's animation is the story of Miquella's carefully orchestrated deceit in the style of a Cartoon Network show with visual gags, like a Post-It note with «IDK, MAYBE JUST BE EVIL?» circled and «SOLID.» written underneath, tucked into every scene. 

«That world is so pitch black, you gotta cut it with humor,» says Sandhart, whose day job is creative lead on interactive Doodles for Google, in an interview with PC Gamer.

It's almost uncanny how accurately Swift's song describes Miquella's point of view. As Swift sings, «To make them love me and make it seem effortless» the young demigod charms a group of warriors into having an unyielding devotion to him, which ends up being the very group who recruits you in the DLC. The video ends as Miquella steps into the Divine Gate, an ancient structure made out of blended corpses, to rule the world with suffocating kindness. No wonder New York Times reviewer Jon Caramanica described «Mastermind» as Swift's «villain origin story» in his review—it's all right there in the text. 

Erdtree map fragments: Uncover the Land of Shadow
Scadutree fragments: How to level up in Erdtree
Erdtr