As a game that is fundamentally interested by the concept of the state, even more so than its spiritual predecessor Dark Souls, I find Elden Ring is hit the hardest with the expectation that the player character is a man just by virtue of their role in the story.

Like, the worldbuilding does a very good job of gendering the structure of the Order's leadership: a God, powerful by her nature as the target of the desire of violent men, but lacking in agency, and a Lord*, powerful because of the great violence he is capable of, including towards his God.

This gendering isn't just symbolic. Of the 3 possible Gods in the game, two of them, Ranni and Marika, are directly referred to as women, and the other, Miquella, is constantly feminised and all but stated to be a repressed trans woman, whereas the rest of the Shardbearers (besides Malenia, who has abandoned the Throne to serve Miquella's goals) and the two previous Elden Lords are all men.

Even among the Tarnished, besides you, who has expressed the wish to become Lord ? Gideon, the patriarch of the Roundtable Hold, and Vyke, the gallant knight in love with his maiden.

To be clear: I find this very cool ! This inherently masculine positioning in the game's world makes for a more thoughtful exploration of the game's political thesis, including the emergent narrative exploration of the degendering that a woman must put herself through when seeking power inside of a patriarchal structure, and the fact that this experience is not due to a blatant male gaze makes it more palatable to me.

I do have some criticisms related to this, though, and that's how Ranni's questline plays into it. A questline where an aspiring goddess chooses to rebel and pry back her agency from the system by overturning it and leaving the people to decide their own fate, and where the Tarnished of no Renown becomes her Blade** and kind of lose their masculine role, is a necessary addition to the game's exploration of gender and state IMO, but I wish the game went further with it, either by Ranni being more gender non-conforming besides her assertiveness and ambition, or by stripping the more heterosexual aspects of the questline, overtly feminising the Tarnished of no Renown, and making it into a story that assumes they are a lesbian rather than a straight man (yes, this would alienate a large part of the male userbase, which is why they never would've done it, but I don't think those men should be allowed to play video games, so it's whatever).

Conclusion: The best version of Elden Ring is the one where Ranni is a full-blown lesbian communist

* Notice how "Lady" is never used to refer to whomever holds the Elden Throne. No, that's not a liberty taken for dubbing the game in English: the original Japanese script never uses the term "女王", "Queen", where we would see "Lord" as far as I could find, only "王", "King"

** It would have been interesting to explore the parallel between a Tarnished of No Renown who swore themselves to Ranni and Malenia, who also turned herself into the Blade of an aspiring goddess, but y'know ... I can't let every Elden Ring post be a complaint about Malenia's wasted potential or else I'm gonna need some type of prescription