I’m not dead as it turns out. To be clear, the below is written in-character. This is practice for a weird piece I’m working on that may or may not ever see the light of day.
In Dark Souls 3, Sir Vilhelm, loyal knight and right hand of Lady Elfriede of Londor, finally having had enough of your shit, declares to you:
“I’ve seen your kind, time and time again. Every fleeing man must be caught. Every secret must be unearthed. Such is the conceit of the self-proclaimed seeker of truth. But in the end, you lack the stomach for the agony you’ll bring upon yourself.”
Hardcore, truly, especially as he proceeds to embody that agony by lighting his sword on fire and introducing it to your (lack of) stomach. It’s very tempting to take it as a pat on the back: This is Dark Souls! This bastard thinks you can’t take it, and true–his sword is scary (though hardly as scary as his liegelady’s eyeless stare and akimbo scythes)–but press on! Through persistence, you will prevail! But try taking it at face value first, and you can’t help but stumble. To start, want to tell me who he’s talking to?
These words, directed at the Unkindled (the player character), make deceptively little sense. Technically, the Unkindled has the choice to fuck off entirely, but beyond that, he is simply proceeding linearly to the castle’s backdoor. And insofar as he doesn’t fuck off, he is here for two things, neither of which is the truth. First, same as anywhere else on the journey to the Kiln of the First Flame, he’s here to take souls (=power) from the inhabitants of the painted world, the fragile order of Elfriede’s frozen, rotting kingdom be damned. Second, he has a task from Slave Knight Gael: someone must show his lady flame. Assuming the Unkindled cares about that, he’s going to show (=give) some lady somewhere in this awful place some fire, said fragile order be thrice-damned.
Neither of these even remotely resembles truth-seeking unless you accept, pretty much wholesale, the Nietzschean allegory of the Fire as Truth, meaning the souls you’re harvesting are fragments of Truth and that Vilhelm knows that if you have your way, you’re about to slurp the Truth right out of his armor and wear what’s left as a cape (he has a cool cape). So okay, that makes sense, but why “self-proclaimed”?
Again, the Unkindled isn’t proclaiming anything to anyone. He’s showing up, mostly taking things, sometimes giving them. It’s certainly a nuisance if you’re trying to maintain a status quo (or a slow degradation into rot, same difference), but there’s no proclamation, no fanfare–for those in his warpath, these interactions are coincidental. Consider the circumstances of the Unkindled’s confrontations with the other Lords of Cinder: The Watchers are killing each other, Aldrich is munching on Gwyndolin, Yhorm is just chilling deep underground where no one in their right mind would bother to bother him. To them, the Unkindled showing up is completely unexplained–they don’t even know who this guy is. To you, the narrative, what it all means, is constructed after the fact by the Fire Maden, by Ludleth and Yuria and the Painter Girl, by others. Sort of like the Peloponnesian War. Or Jesus Christ.
On the topic of both, Edward Teach M.D. throws out a particularly hot theological take in Sadly, Porn:
“Your God must be omnipotent so he won’t be omniscient, open your Bibles to the Gospel of the Television Christian, Mark 13:6, and let’s see what today’s reader wants out of a translation:
‘Many will come in my name, saying ‘I am he!’ and many will be lead astray’
You can read it again and again, it’s obviously a clear warning about being fooled by imposters and false Christs, which, curiously, there are no examples of anywhere in the New Testament or indeed in the history of Christianity. Huh. So much for omniscience.
A couple of things about this sentence. First, in the original Greek(s) there are no punctuation marks. Second, the word ‘he’, the predicate nominative of ‘I am’, is not there; the translator, whom they executed for being a translator and then plagiarized his work, just added it, along with all the thees, thys, hasts, and forsakens that effectively inform us that Jesus was a Stewart, all this being especially ironic as King James knew Greek even better than the translators, and probably Mark. Third, I guess to balance the ledger, the translator then omits the Greek word that comes after ‘saying’, and that word is ‘what’. So the actual line, translated using no psychoanalysis or literary deconstruction or collapsing the wave function–simply copying down the words–is:
‘many will come in my name saying what I am and many will be led astray’”
I will both echo and paraphrase Teach’s following sentiment: Your worldview is built on writhing mist and shadow, best acclimate. I know, quotes within quotes, metaphors within metaphors, it’s easy to get lost. You can pretend you’re Theseus, if only to pretend you’re not Orpheus, but either way you’re stuck in a maze. Better pay attention if you want out.
Anyway, to balance his heterodoxy against the millennia of interpretation disagreeing with it, Teach provides a buttress:
“...the most contextually appropriate reading here is the literal one: that people will claim Jesus is something else. Do you know why? Because that is what the Gospel of Mark is. That’s what happens over and over in the Gospel of Mark, no one else claims to be Christ, and almost no one doubts he is Christ; but everyone, Pharisees, Romans, disciples, Tusken raiders, everyone wants him to be something else.”
Take inventory of the pieces: You have Jesus, an actor, you have the clear desire(s) to (re)interpret his action, all repressed, distorted into the desire to imitate, to impersonate him. Recall that by Fire as Truth, Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, is an allegory for…Jesus. This would make the Unkindled, following in Gwyn’s footsteps, attempting–according to the Fire Maiden, et al–to link the Fire, a copycat.
That would imply, then, that many are deceived, not by the meaning of the Unkindled’s quest for Truth, but by the notion that the Unkindled is seeking Truth, is attempting to link the Fire at all. Do not misunderstand: He may in fact link the Fire, but the notion that his action is compelled by this question, that you know what this force wants is the distortion which hides what you’ve repressed.
Except the repressed always returns. When Sir Vilhelm rebukes the Unkindled, he is of course not speaking to the Unkindled, not even literally. He is only speaking to you. But it isn’t a commendation. The Unkindled seeks Truth for its power. You seek truth to defend against your powerlessness, and you will self-proclaim your quest to anyone who can’t get out of listening as long as it makes you think they think you aren’t doing what you’re really doing, which is nothing. Seeking truth, after all, means you aren’t finding it.
Sir Vilhelm sees you, just like I see you, but unlike me, he is easy to misinterpret, and in case he isn’t, he’s omniscient, which means he isn’t omnipotent, so you can always kill him to shut him up. But if you want out of here, don’t misinterpret him, don’t you dare think that “the agony you’ll bring upon yourself” means “Dark Souls is hard”, spare me your incompetent lies. Dark Souls is a work of entertainment, and anyway, anyone unsuited to its “agony” would never have reached Sir Vilhelm in the first place. Your agony is the never ending hunger, the seeking of truth you will never find because it will never satisfy, at the expense of anything and everything that might. “Lack[ing] the stomach” is intentional, you see. It keeps us hungry down here in the dark.
Top Image: Screenshot from Dark Souls 3
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