Players think Two Fingers from Elden Ring reference the legendary way of positioning fingers on a gamepad for playing soulslikes

Sometimes the most convincing lore theory doesn't need a single line of item description text or an hour spent rereading dialogue. All it takes is looking down from the screen to your own hands resting on the controller, and suddenly understanding what the game has been hinting at all along.

The spark for this was an extremely simple comparison someone posted on Reddit: on the left, the face buttons of a PlayStation controller with square, triangle, circle, and cross; on the right, the Two Fingers, the grotesque divine entity from Elden Ring that looks like two massive, curled fingers.

According to the lore, the Two Fingers serve the Greater Will and pass its commands to the Tarnished through readers in the Roundtable Hold, essentially controlling the hero through someone else's hand. Who's controlling the Tarnished at that same moment with the two fingers resting on the buttons is a pretty rhetorical question at this point.

One player put it best:

It is fun to think about that we are an outer god guiding the Tarnish with our fingers.

From there the whole idea just builds itself. Three Fingers, the opposing entity, represents madness and chaos, and in real life a third finger gets pulled into action exactly when you need to hold down a trigger and a bumper at the same time and run out of free digits.

FromSoftware has never confirmed anything like this, but it wouldn't be the first time the studio trolled its own playerbase.

A separate thread of the discussion went in a much more practical direction – toward the claw grip itself, where the index finger rests on top of the face buttons so the thumb never has to leave the stick while running and turning the camera. People point to controllers with back buttons as the cure: the DualSense Edge, third-party paddle attachments like ExtremeRate for around thirty euros, PC equivalents for fifty dollars, and the Switch 2 Pro Controller, which comes with back buttons built in.