If you’ve been roaming the Land of Shadow in Elden Ring’s recently released expansion, there’s a good chance that you’ve met the greatest hater to ever live. No, Kendrick Lamar is not suddenly in Shadow of the Erdtree, he’s too busy in Compton making Drake’s life a living hell. Instead, you would have met Igon, who’s both one of the most emphatically voiced characters ever in a From Software game, and the pettiest dude alive. We have no choice but to stan this Ahab insert in this storyline ripped straight from the pages of Moby Dick.
Spoilers for Igon’s questline in Shadow of the Erdtree follow.
Igon can be first encountered west of the site of grace at the Pillar Path Waypoint, but you won’t know him by his appearance as much as his voice. Here’s the content creator DansGaming bumping into an “NPC making some very weird sounds” that turns out to be none other than Igon, a drake warrior on his final mission.
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When you chance upon Igon, he’s been beaten down and scarred. He can’t really use his arms, and it seems like his legs have failed him too. For all intents and purposes, Igon is dragging himself across the Land of Shadow to kill Bayle the Dread, a traitorous dragon who wounded Placidusax—a name you might remember as the crazy dragon boss you fought in Farum Azula in Elden Ring—and struck Igon with a crippling fear that’s kept him from partaking in Dragon Communion, which gave his life worth.
Talking to him in this state provides a lot of anguished cries and repeated calls for “vile Bayle,” and kicks off a quest line following Igon’s journey. When he’s not growling every other line he utters, he’s deeply wounded and scared of Bayle, who’s inflicted a horror on Igon that literally still haunts him, and the way that voice actor Richard Lintern zips between these extremes is nothing short of impressive. He comes across like two distinct characters rather than dimensions of the same man, and people are already hailing Lintern’s full-throated performance as Igon.
Following up with Igon provides ample opportunity to continue hearing his rantings and ravings, but before long, he realizes that his body’s failing him, and he won’t physically make it to Bayle. At this point, he does the craziest thing yet and gives you his finger in order to summon his spirit to fuck Bayle up when you eventually get to the boss fight. And then the boss fight happens and Igon reaches hater levels previously thought unattainable.
The moment you summon him, Igon immediately shouts “Curse you, Bayle,” and launches into the mother of all tirades. He even gasses you up, saying “Behold, a true drake warrior! And I, Igon!” You’re the true drake warrior he’s talking up! My favorite line, though, is when he screams at Bayle that he will “riddle with holes your rotten hide,” and immediately follows it up by giddily delivering the line, “With a hail of harpoons!” Dude wants Bayle dead so badly, he doesn’t seem like he’ll ever shut up, but he eventually does. And so Igon takes up his bow made of dragon bone, and the harpoons he specifically fashioned to sink into Bayle’s “rotten hide,” and does exactly what he was put on this Earth to do, and kills that dragon.
Igon’s storyline is so batshit, and Lintern’s readings of every line are so unhinged, that the character has immediately become a standout of the expansion, as well as FromSoft’s evolving gallery of weird little guys. Many players have made memes about the dude and his clearly obsessive anger. Others are simply paying their respects to a performance that absolutely enraptured them. One person has sworn fealty to the guy for the insane rally he pulls at the end despite everything afflicting him, ultimately dubbing Igon a “gigachad.”
Interestingly enough, a few savvy folks have managed to piece together that both Bayle and Igon are tied to another work of literature besides Moby Dick. Considering that A Song of Ice and Fire’s author George R.R Martin worked on the lore of Elden Ring, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that both names take inspiration from his main body of work. Bayle is a reference to a literal dread dragon named Balerion in ASOIAF, who’s ridden by the phonetically similar Aegon Targaryen. And so it all comes full circle.