Elden Ring (opens in new tab) is not what I could call a sexy videogame, but it does contain one very sexy NPC: Blaidd, the stylish half-man, half-wolf warrior with the big, big sword. He’s the guardian of Ranni the Witch and, with some small bit of effort, quite friendly with players as well. He’s also made a major impression on an awful lot of very thirsty gamers.
One of Blaidd’s most appealing characteristics is his voice, a soft, smoky aural caress delivered by voice actor Scott Arthur. To mark the character’s impact on the gaming world, Arthur recently sat down with Buzzfeed to read and react to thirst tweets, and it goes about as you’d expect.
(First things first: If you are not aware of what a “thirst tweet” is, as I was not until fairly recently, it’s quite simply a tweet expressing sexual attraction—sometimes subtle, sometimes very much not—toward a celebrity. I’m unaware of the etymology of the term and frankly I’m okay with that.)
The video starts off with an informative tidbit about Blaidd’s name, which is actually pronounced Blithe. “Not Blide, not Blythe,” Arthur says with the rehearsed ease of someone who’s explained this more than twice before. “Blithe.”
“He’s upright like a man, and he has the head of a wolf,” Arthur says. “I know that he’s caused quite a stir in the furry world, which I didn’t know anything about until I looked on the internet.”
From there, it’s straight on into the hot talk, and there are some bangers, so to speak.
🐺”Tom, playing Elden Ring: ‘Let me go talk to my wolf boyfriend!! Because honest to god, with that voice, even I would fuck him. (He’s so right though, Blaidd is dreamy)”
🐺”Blaidd is so thicc and hot”
🐺”I want Blaidd to kiss me on the lips and tell me that we make a great team then I want him to pick me up and carry me to his little wolf hovel”
🐺”What’s the point of Elden Ring if I can’t ever have my Tarnished kiss Blaidd with tongue”
🐺”Elden Ring is actually 0/10 bc you can’t fuck Blaidd” (Sorry, minor spoiler there.)
🐺”Elden Ring makes me feel normal. I want to kiss Blaidd the half-wolf under the full moon. Normal feelings”
Arthur takes it all in good humor, although he does flat-out refuse to read one tweet, and even learns what a dating sim is midway through the reading courtesy of a suggestion that an Elden Ring dating sim would probably do gangbusters business. (And wouldn’t even be the weirdest dating sim (opens in new tab) we’ve ever run across.)
He seems to appreciate the sentiment behind the tweets too, saying that reading the tweets made him feel “warm, aroused, comforted, and very loved. Thank you to everyone who has shown the love, and the horniness, for Blaidd.”
Elden Ring is Arthur’s first videogame role, by the way, although he has numerous television and movie credits (opens in new tab) going back more than a decade. He’s from the village of Llangennech in Wales—Blaidd is Welsh for “wolf.”