Elric is a 5e character
Consider:
- He is the definition of emo special snowflake OC 'Blorbo', with a detailed, tragic backstory, a nemesis, and a destiny. We are told from page 1 that his life is of cosmic significance. He's literally referred to as an 'eternal champion'.
- Most of the stories (that I've read so far) are basically linear quest narratives. The bits that resembled dungeon crawls (I'm thinking of the one where he first acquires Stormbringer, the one in Sailing to The Future, and the one in The Singing Citadel) all are brief and linear, Elric just breezes through them until the boss fight.
- Similarly, there's no sense that Moorcock did 'impartial campaign prep'. The 'multiverse' crutch allows Elric to flit from adventure to adventure with no burden of tracking an independent world except insofar as it relates to Elric's OC backstory.
- Elric regularly calls in deus-ex-machina magic effects to save the day.
- He's pretty much perfectly modeled by a 5e hexblade demon pact warlock.
As far as I can tell (after reading nine stories from three novellas), the only 'OSR' thing about Elric is that he lives in a cynical, amoral universe torn between law & chaos, and that aspects of his adventures taken in isolation have a pulpy aesthetic. I know I'm a hater, but neither of these (imo) justifies the outsize place the Elric stories have in the nebulous canon of OSR inspirational reading.