Love makes you do crazy things. When you feel connected to another person, you feel compelled to go to the ends of the Earth for them. Maybe you’ll take a bullet for your significant other. Maybe you’ll do their taxes and handle their dirty laundry (figuratively and literally). Or maybe, as in the case of two contestants in a dating reality show on Netflix, you’ll take some inspiration for baby names from developer FromSoftware’s mega-popular Soulslike Elden Ring. Love knows no bounds.
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Running since February 2020, Netflix’s Love Is Blind is a dating reality show. Something of a social experiment to test the limits of the question (is love really blind?), Love Is Blind pits a bunch of single people together in the hopes of finding love, their goal to get engaged before actually meeting each other IRL. There are speed-dating segments, resorts where couples get to know each other on a deeper level, and copious beautiful locales that only the budget of Netflix could afford. While there are three seasons already released in full, it’s the currently airing fourth season—and one moment in particular—that has captured the internet’s attention, leaving folks confused, laughing, and smitten all at once.
Love is blind in The Lands Between
In Love Is Blind season four’s fourth episode, “Playing With Fire,” contestants Irina Solomonova and Zack Goytowski are newly engaged. They sit on a beach, finally face-to-face, eating some mouth-watering cheesecake after finishing a scrumptious-looking fish dinner. (I’m hungry, leave me alone.) Irina, an event-planning business owner, hit it off early in the season with the criminal defense attorney Zack. After chatting about what cartoon character Zack reminded Irina of and how Irina “kind of looked like Megan Fox” to Zack, he then broached the baby name conversation, which had briefly surfaced earlier in the season. It was at this point that Zack made his gamer tendencies known by talking about Elden Ring bosses.
“So, before we were talking about names,” Zack says.
“For our kids?” Irina asks.
“Yeah. What about Godfrey?” he questions.
“Eww!” she says, repulsed.
“Godrick?” he inquires.
“No,” she chuckles. “Like Zion or Gid—”
“Zion?”
“I do like Gideon. I like, um, like, really unique names.”
“Me too. You know what’s a really unique one? Goliath.”
For the uninitiated, or just folks who’d rather not remember getting clapped by them, Godfrey, First Elden Lord and Godrick the Grafted are two of Elden Ring’s more challenging boss encounters. While optional, the multi-armed Godrick drops lots of runes, making him a great early-game enemy to take down if you want to get a few quick levels. Meanwhile, the graying Godfrey is a late-game boss you must defeat in order to progress the story. Either way, both jerks play pivotal roles as you make your way toward becoming the Elden Lord. Also, whether she knew it or not, Irina mentioned an Elden Ring name as well: the bibliophile Gideon Ofnir, an NPC you find hanging out at the Roundtable Hold. Maybe Irina and Zack were a match made, um, in The Lands Between?
Imagine picking Godrick up from school
Since Zack revealed his gamer card to Irina, Twitter has been flooded with all kinds of memes about children named after video game characters. One user “always wished” they were named after Gears of War’s Uzil RAAM because “[RAAM] was a badass.” Another imagined their “eldest daughter” Lightseeker Hyetta introducing themselves to their classmates. Someone else thought of the conversation they might have when picking up Astel, Naturalborn of the Void from school. A fourth user joked about naming their kid after the flaming salamander (and the bane of my existence) Magma Wyrm. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg here, as there are a plethora of baby-name jokes going around.
Kotaku reached out to Goytowski and Solomonova for comment.
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A first name like “Gideon,” “Godfrey,” or “Godrick” does sound pretty badass if a bit fantasy author. However, something like “Astel, Naturalborn of the Void” certainly doesn’t roll off the tongue with any ease, especially when paired with multi-syllable last names such as Goytowski or Solomonova. Still, though, if Irina was looking for “unique” in terms of names for her children, I don’t think you could go wrong with picking from Elden Ring. It’s a tad nerdy, sure, but at least it’s unlikely their kid would share a name with a classmate.