Hidetaka Miyazaki, the FromSoftware director behind Dark Souls and Elden Ring, has spent years as the subject of a particular bit of community mythology. His games — across Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and beyond — feature a recurring cast of female characters who go barefoot. Fans noticed. The meme followed. And this week, Miyazaki addressed it directly in an interview with The Guardian, saying he genuinely has no idea where the rumour started.
How a Question About Hands Led to This
The context here is where the story gets funny. The Guardian wasn’t asking about feet at all. The interview was focused on imagery of hands in Miyazaki’s work — the close-up of intertwining hands in The Duskbloods’ opening cinematic, the giant hand-shaped enemies in Elden Ring, the recurring visual language of reaching, grasping, and connection across his games.
Miyazaki reflected on that honestly: “It’s not necessarily something I’m consistently aware of — maybe it’s something subconscious coming through.” And then, apparently unprompted, he pivoted directly to the foot meme — the one nobody had brought up.
“Take a look online and there’s a rumour that I have a bit of a thing for feet, but I’m not honestly sure where this comes from. I feel like I’m trying to depict some side of human nature or the human existence that is difficult to describe.”
To be clear: a journalist was asking about the symbolic weight of hands in his games, and Hidetaka Miyazaki brought up the feet thing himself. That tells you something about how much the community conversation has reached him, even if he appears genuinely baffled by its origins.
The Barefoot Characters That Started It All
The meme didn’t materialise from nothing. Fans cataloguing barefoot characters across FromSoftware games found a pretty consistent list: the Maiden in Black from Demon’s Souls, Sister Friede and the Dancer of the Boreal Valley in Dark Souls 3, Malenia and the Elden Ring Finger Maidens, and several characters in Elden Ring’s DLC. The Guardian noted that their own rough count put the number of barefoot female characters in Miyazaki’s games at no fewer than six.
It became one of those gaming community in-jokes that takes on a life of its own — repeated in forum threads, referenced in analysis videos, treated as established lore by fans who’d clearly spent more time thinking about it than Miyazaki ever had. Kotaku’s coverage of this week’s interview even noted that their own editor had written about the topic four years ago, well before Miyazaki ever acknowledged it in public.
What Miyazaki Was Actually Trying to Say
The more interesting part of his answer isn’t the denial — it’s what comes after it. Miyazaki says the recurring imagery in his games, whether hands, feet, or the broader visual language of ruin and decay, is his attempt to express something about human nature that he finds difficult to articulate through conventional means.
“Ruin and rebirth is an ongoing theme in a lot of my games, I realise,” he told The Guardian. It’s a theme you can trace clearly through his work: characters who are broken, degraded, stripped of what they once were, and who either find renewal or don’t. The visual choices — bare feet, reaching hands, exposed bodies in states of decay — serve that narrative language.
It’s also worth saying that Miyazaki’s reaction is unusually good-natured for a public figure addressing a running joke about their supposed fetishes. He didn’t dismiss it with PR language or seem embarrassed by it — he acknowledged the community conversation, tried to give it a thoughtful answer, and moved on. For a studio head doing a Guardian interview about philosophical symbolism in video games, that’s a pretty graceful pivot.
None of which means the meme is wrong, exactly. It just means the origin is probably less intentional than the internet decided it was. Miyazaki admits it could be something subconscious surfacing through his work, which is about as honest an answer as you’re likely to get from a game director responding to a foot fetish rumour in a broadsheet interview.
The Duskbloods — his current project at FromSoftware — is a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive built around online co-op and PvP. Whether the game continues the tradition of barefoot characters is something fans will scrutinise closely when it eventually releases. Knowing Miyazaki, the answer is probably yes, regardless of what any of us decide it means.
