Sometimes a fandom revelation needs nothing more than a glance at your own hands.
A simple Reddit comparison sparked the idea: on the left, the face buttons of a PlayStation gamepad — square, triangle, circle, and cross; on the right, Two Fingers, the grotesque divine figures in Elden Ring that look like two enormous, twisted digits. In the game’s mythology, the Two Fingers serve the Greater Will and relay its commands to the Tarnished via the readers at the Roundtable Hold, effectively imposing an external hand on the hero. The suggestion is obvious: when your own two fingers rest on the controller buttons, you are the external god guiding the Tarnished.
One player put it best:
It’s funny to think that we are the external god guiding the Tarnished with our fingers.
Players extended the idea further. The antagonistic Three Fingers, associated with madness and chaos, map neatly to a situation where three digits would be engaged — for example, when a player holds both a trigger and a bumper simultaneously and has no free finger left. FromSoftware has not confirmed any intentional link, but the studio has a history of playful misdirection with its audience.
A separate, more practical thread on the same post dealt with controller technique: the “claw” grip, where the index finger rests atop the face buttons so the thumb can remain on the stick while running and rotating the camera. Many players prefer controllers with rear paddles to avoid that awkward posture — options cited include the DualSense Edge, attachable paddles from third‑party manufacturers like ExtremeRate for thirty euros, PC equivalents for fifty dollars, and Nintendo’s Pro Controller for Switch 2, which includes back buttons out of the box.