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A Walk Between the Paths in Autumn

A story told by fallen leaves in the style of a young Nietzsche

***

Note: To be clearer to those less familiar with the context, this is a discussion of various literary themes (or just personal points of interest) in Elden Ring. It’s meaty for a series of essay-fragments, but disconnected and certainly not a complete treatment of any of these topics, much less the game as a whole. The style might be something I return to–temporally, though, I had just been reading a collection of Nietzsche’s earlier aphoristic work (alongside, as I mention, Borges), and it seemed a decent way to expound upon the contents of my brain at the time.

Cross the fog to the Lands Between. In the tradition of Bloodborne (and in contrast to Dark Souls) Elden Ring is rather forthcoming with the metaphysical nature of its action. The Lands Between are ruled by a goddess who has banished the very concept of death, power is conferred by “runes” (including the Elden Ring itself) and “grace”, individuals physically accomplish insane, abstract tasks like “holding the constellations in place” or “literally being two people” (including the fecundity implied by a less abstract multiplicity)–no need for the subtlety of a bird ride that transcends substrates of reality, but that’s okay. I mean it genuinely. It is often okay to say what one means, especially with the cat so far out of the bag.

Familiar Miyazaki-isms return: The fog from without the Lands Between again symbolizes the shifting becoming of materiality giving way to the divine being of grace (the Christian through-line) and runes (the Norse through-line, perhaps to be taken as Viking geometry, linking the metaphysical language to the old Platonic stand-in).

Perhaps it’s the Borges I have on my brain at the moment, but it’s all rather evocative of a labyrinth. Lands of resolved solidity delineating (forming pathways amidst) the fog (or vice-versa–the negative of a labyrinth is also a labyrinth)–I sure don’t have any idea what it was meant to house (or I lack the energy to enunciate it–you guess which), but labyrinths are awesome and, definitionally, provide both a goal and at least one path to tread in one’s delving.

***

Long lost grace. Grace, the guidance of gold, a network of glittering signposts and rest stops left by the Greater Will (the Outer God from which the Golden Order and the Two Fingers arise; and against whom both Marika and Ranni rebel), a golden glow in the eyes of the blessed–beyond its utility as supportive game mechanics, it sounds kind of like “purpose” and even more like “commandment”.

For the player character it’s a rough constant, but it’s worth considering the others for whom it comes and goes. Back before the Shattering, Godfrey, First Elden Lord, was divested of grace and “hounded from the Lands Between”, as far as I can tell not for any indiscretion, but because he fulfilled his commandment. He was done conquering the Lands Between in the name of Marika and the Erdtree, so as is only just, she banished her champion and the father of (some of) her children and remarried…herself. Divinity certainly is a strange thing. No one would appreciate me extrapolating this logic to IRL religion, but it’s worth ruminating on this characterization of “divine love” and the rules it plays by.

Anyway, when Godfrey is banished, loses the guidance of gold, he becomes Tarnished. Because From Software spends approximately a bazillion dollars (or at least hours) on English translation, we should be careful with their words–and we should be very suspicious when it looks like they aren’t. To which end, pure gold doesn’t tarnish–silver/other stuff does. The implication, then, of calling the Erdtree’s discarded guardians “Tarnished” is subtle but important: The golden grace which they formerly held was not a transmutation of the soul but an alloying. They, at base, are not gold but silver.

Sound familiar?

“I said; ‘but all the same hear the rest of the story. While all of you in the city are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet the gods, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious–but in the [guardians, Samzdat’s words] silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen.’”

-Plato, Republic

TL;DR/#AllGreek2U, the rulers are gold, the soldiers are silver, everyone else is economically replaceable, and in the Lands Between, we sometimes stuff warriors into cabinets (or jars) until (or, more realistically: so that) they get corroded and gross. It’s worth considering as well that (Plato’s) Socrates presented the city based on the noble lie not as an ideal city (as he might have claimed for plausible deniability) but as a hellscape, a festering city, an absurd monument to the tendency of human complexities toward strife.

You can blame the genre or the philosophy, but either way the result is what you’d expect: Strife arrives, the gold-souled rulers are proven untrustworthy (or at least unworthy), so the conduits of grace on the ground begin unearthing their guardians. In other words, they not only followed Adeimantus’ bad example–they followed his bad example badly.

This is to say nothing of Miquella, child of Marika alone, who championed “unalloyed gold” as a countermeasure to the influence of the Outer Gods. Because philosopher kings are clearly the solution.

***

Game of rings. “Sonic or Gandalf?” Depends on how fast you are.

An obviously relevant point of discussion is that the development of Elden Ring’s pre-Shattering mythos was a collaboration between Miyazaki and the much vaunted (though perhaps tarnished in his own right) George R.R. Martin. Less obvious is exactly why this is relevant. We do know that the collaboration was not longitudinal: Martin’s involvement was at the beginning, in creating a “D&D sourcebook” for a setting that Miyazaki would then twist. What’s not clear is where the line is drawn–the degradation of the Lands Between was not by a single event, be it the Shattering (the war), the shattering (of the Elden Ring by Radagon), the Night of the Black Knives (which likely catalyzed both), or the banishment of Godfrey (which exposed–or even created–the cracks in the order that led to all the rest). Miyazaki has commented that some of the characters ended up unrecognizable from Martin’s original submission, but that raises more questions than it answers (like the degree to which that difference is editing versus the in-story corruption of the Shattering). All I can say now is that I would give not-zero appendages to see Martin’s original document.

In the same vein, I’ve long wondered about the particulars of Miyazaki’s collaborative strategy. The structure of this arrangement is particularly clear (in spite of the aforementioned ambiguities), in the sense that such arrangements must exist in most, if not all, collaborative works of long-form literature, and we, as onlookers, rarely get this degree of insight. Meanwhile, during the development of Elden Ring, Miyazaki was also directing Sekiro, on which he has stated he took a backseat on most of the object-level writing. Yet: Sekiro remains a beautifully-written work with the same hallmarks of style and attention to detail. I realize this observation is nothing especially profound, but I’m still curious about the nuts and bolts: Is Miyazaki himself especially good at directing his own style? Are From Software’s processes particularly conducive to that style? Do they simply maintain a staff of talented and faithful imitators? I have no idea, but I would love to understand how I could scale my own work in the same way.

***

Yass, King, I seen’t it! There’s something cowardly to me about getting too low-level in one’s critique/analysis, but there’s one piece of Elden Ring for which I’ll flirt with the lower bound of my standards.

Miyazaki has said before that his favorite boss in Demon’s Souls is the Old Monk, the proprietor of a tower in a swamp who was driven mad by a relic he acquired: a long, flowing, vibrant yellow robe. His reasons for liking this boss are likely multiple. There’s a lot to like, from the super creepy aesthetic (it’s instilled in me a lasting affinity for piles of discarded chairs), to the fact that the fight is not against the monk himself but an invading enemy player “possessed” by the robe (a mechanic which reprised its role in Dark Souls 3), to, of course, the literary reference. Hidetaka Miyazaki, too, has seen the Yellow Sign.

That The King in Yellow is so close to Miyazaki’s heart (or at least his portfolio) makes his use of the color yellow in Elden Ring nearly unignorable. To be fair, even not taking that into consideration, the precision (and deliberate obfuscation) of it is diabolical–or did we think that the representation of no fewer than four distinct (and bitterly-opposed) factions by nearly-identical yellow particle effects was merely sloppy art direction?

For accounting: The Golden Order, the “good guys” in the quest for a restored balance via the Elden Ring are, insofar as they are in any way a united front, represented by projections of pale yellow light and a predictably golden aura. Those Who Live in Death, worshippers of Godwyn the Golden (the first demigod to die) who would see the rune of death reintegrated with the Elden Ring, are characterized by a golden aura intermingled with black smoke, as if to connote some corruption of Godwyn’s original purpose. Similarly, the Omen, the curse of horns and filth that cuts its victims off from the Greater Will (see Margit/Morgott, Mohg, and the Dung Eater) is the same gold, interspersed with brown. And of course, the Frenzied Flame, ender of life and bringer of madness, is also yellow, this time more saffron–though it is scarcely distinguishable from the Golden Order’s particle effect when it is in an NPC’s eyes.

Far be it from me to offhandedly summarize the “point” of The King in Yellow without citation, but I think a respectable try looks like:

“A sort of madness, transient or not, of devotion to something larger than ourselves, even–especially–at the expense of the reality we would otherwise affirm, is endemic to the human condition.”

Shabriri and the Frenzied Flame thus stand at one end of the spectrum, wearing the same color but demonstrating, perhaps, just how deep the yellow/gold rabbit hole goes, while the remaining Erdtree derivatives reticently acknowledge that all that glitters, well, maybe it has something in common.

Less artistically but 100% also the point: The narcissism of small differences is often much more bitter than any rivalry with an alien Other.

***

We’ve made some improvements to the chapel since 2015. Furthering the “thematic connection to Bloodborne angle”, the two games’ use of runic alphabets is worth interrogating, and Elden Ring in particular gives a useful starting point for the aspiring Lorax linguist: the tree. The Lands Between admittedly incorporate several linguistic traditions (Latinate, e.g. Raya Lucaria, Dectus; descriptive English, e.g. Volcano Manor, Redmane Castle; and of course Germanic, e.g. Leyndell, Fortissax, Placidusax), but since most of them are allocated to the names of specific people and places (which is about how you would expect culture to work), the question of the Erdtree (a more fundamental concept) stands out. It’s definitely a tree, that part makes sense, but per the name, it’s also an “Erd”, so what’s that?

My own leap of logic lands me on “œd”, short for œdal, the Elder Futhark rune for “heritage” or “estate”, a fitting symbol for the Golden Lineage (used also by the Nazis, a connection which I will not explore here). It also seems to be the nominative basis for Bloodborne’s Great One, Oedon (not to mention the Norse god Odin). Except, one problem–the œdal rune looks like this:

And the Oedon rune looks like this:

Actually, no, not a problem, just a connection. You see, the seal of Queen Marika is this:

…which bears reference to Odin’s infamous vigil, hanging from a tree, and closely resembles the Anglo-Saxon rune “ear”, meaning “earth”:

…implying a “heritage of the earth” (Biblically, “inheriting the earth”) or the less grand “earthly heritage”, or both. There are fruitful implications to either.

Note: While I did mention before that these explorations are largely incomplete, it’s worth mentioning the trail of breadcrumbs leading to the “elgaz” rune as well:

The literal meaning of this rune is “elk”, which is a less useful similarity to Marika and the Erdtree, but given its visual similarity to “ear”, it might indicate some connection to the moose/elk-themed Ancestors present in various locations throughout Elden Ring, whose culture is believed to predate the Erdtree.

If we’re going to grill the Erdtree, we ought to do the same with its disfavored progeny. Thankfully, the Haligtree is easy–”Halig” fairly clearly derives from the Anglo-Saxon “hægl” rune

(or “haglaz” in Elder Futhark–aside, I am continuing to reference Elder Futhark mainly because Wikipedia’s entry for it is way better, but evidence points to the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet being the most appropriate reference for Elden Ring’s runes), meaning “hail” or “precipitation”. Aesthetically, hail is appropriate–the Haligtree is located in the snow-covered northern mountains–but at a deeper level, the significance of the Haligtree is much better understood as precipitation, that which falls from the storm or, less meteorologically, from the heritage of the Erdtree. Miquella is an Empyrean, one of the three potential successors to Marika (Miquella, Malenia, and Ranni, for reference), and he intended the Haligtree to be a new symbol of a new order in the Lands Between. That it should be named for precipitation–or consequence–is entirely reasonable.

Lastly, just as we are shown the modified “ear” as the symbol of Marika, we are shown another rune as the seal of Radagon:

This is a superimposition of the epigraphical and manuscript variants of the Anglo-Saxon rune “gēr”:

“Gēr” signifies “year” or “harvest”, connoted as “year/season of plenty”, which in Radagon’s case might be taken ironically. In his role as champion of the Golden Order, he was “harvested” from his place at Raya Lucaria, ultimately leaving Liurnia in disarray (if not outright ruin), and the metaphor only gets darker in the sense of “harvest” as it applies to fertility.

Radagon and Marika had two children, Miquella and Malenia, both of whom wound up cursed, presumably by the particular degradation of the divine gene pool that occurs when one’s parents are not merely related but are, in fact, the same person. And if the problem of the harvest is a problem of one’s descendants, of succession, then it’s worth noting that the Shattering was literally a war of succession, preceded, of course, by the literal shattering of the Elden Ring–by Radagon.

***

A golden parasite for the golden lineage. Also returning in the Lands Between is one of Sekiro’s most potent symbols: the centipede. The one-armed wolf had a pretty good time with this one–literally, it is a creature that infests the corpses of the divine carp that swim in the Dragon-blessed waters of the Fountainhead Palace. It lines the corpses with its eggs, and as the flesh breaks down, the eggs bleed into the overall water supply, into the runoff that flows to Ashina. Then, when the mortals below drink the water, they find themselves “blessed” with an unpleasant and hollow brand of immortality.

The immortality, of course, is the result of the giant centipedes whose eggs they swallowed, now growing through and infesting their still-living body, though the “why” is definitely where the literality starts to blur. Is it because they are parasites to the divine? Is it coincident, in that the centipedes are themselves divine (which would allow them to devour the carp in the first place)? Sekiro isn’t especially clear on the biomechanics, but it all but bludgeons you with the notion that the immortality granted by the waters of the Fountainhead is only a crude imitation of that granted by the Dragon’s Heritage. A note, obvious within the Ashina province but worth clarifying for the Europhilic audience of Souls/Elden Ring: This is an Asian dragon we’re talking about here, no wings, serpentine, aquatic, celestial (a combination of adjectives worth dragging back to Bloodborne, by-the-by).

It should not be surprising that all of the supernatural creatures present in Sekiro (the carp, the centipedes, the giant snakes of the valley) all bear some morphological resemblance to the Dragon, to the divinity they emulate, but the implied ladder there also calls to mind a fable of a Buddhist monk and a centipede, where the centipede is expounded upon as a lesser creature which may yet regain its honor through rebirth.

Do you see it? Where the paradigm switches around? In traditional Buddhist teaching, the centipede is on the same continuum as man–in Sekiro, the ladder to divinity is snakeybois top-to-bottom, and that divinity (be it the literal gestation of centipedes in your gut or the more metaphorical “feeding” of the Heritage via Dragonrot) is a parasite to mankind. Yeah, religion. Someone call Bong Joon-ho and see if he can work that into the sequel or something.

Right, this is about Elden Ring, but all that is necessary context. So when Elden Ring’s Rune of Death is the Mark of the Centipede and golden centipedes begin to appear in places frequented by Those Who Live in Death, that is the lens we need to use to understand what it all ought to imply.

From the basics, the centipede, originally, is death, a threshold upon which the things that are become the things that were and then fade into the everything from which they were born. It is fitting that the true Cursemark of Death, broken into half-wheels during the Night of the Black Knives, is not one, but two centipedes in a circle. An ouroboros. Fitting for a conception of death meant to coexist with the rest of the Golden Order, but Marika dIdN’t LiKe ThAt PaRt. She cut it out of the Elden Ring, gave it to Maliketh, and what she got was a different death–not integrated cohesively with her Order but jammed askew into its cogs, birthing Those Who Live in Death. For all points and purposes, they’re undead, much the same as the Senpou monks who drank of the Fountainhead in Sekiro, but that is a slim overlap with Sekiro’s otherwise extremely well-developed mythology for the symbol.

With the exception of Rykard, Elden Ring’s pantheon is nowhere near so serpentine as Sekiro’s, but consider the position of the centipede in particular. Our myriapodal friend may be at the bottom of the spiritual totem pole (a turn of phrase made literal in Elden Ring: Godwyn, an unwilling recipient of the Half-Wheel Mark of the Centipede rests amidst the roots of the Erdtree), but the bottom of that hierarchy has more in common with the top than wherever mortal man hangs out (ie, not in the hierarchy at all). The theme of parasitism is not as eminent as in Sekiro, but the game is clear that adherents to the Golden Order are not stoked about the centipede stuff at all, reiterating that even the most reverent dogmatists tend to find some expression of the divine they would rather revile. And, of course, the parasite’s absence leaves an echo: Follow the Erdtree’s totem pole up to the very top to find the Greater Will, overwhelmingly interested in keeping the course of history in the Lands Between confined to its Golden parameters. For a being so immense, so abstract and multifarious, it is difficult to even formulate the question, but in the end, what can mankind be to such a creature? The answer: a pet, a pest–or a host.

Protected: The Firekeeper

Lords of Cinder

More prose poetry, this time on Dark Souls. The below is a lot of things, but among them, I intend it to be an extremely succinct (and therefore not very careful) explication of my argument from the Dark Noon series. You can fill in the gaps with the actual essays, excepting those gaps in the essays which you can fill in with this. Git gud, I suppose.

***

“When the Ashes are two, a flame alighteth. Thou’rt Ash, and fire befits thee, of course.”

-Father Ariandel, Dark Souls 3

In the beginning, there was mist, and in that mist were shapes of trees, of branches, of great, stone dragons that remained forever still, of vermin that writhed and crawled in the fog’s deepest whorls. Nothing seemed to move. Nothing seemed to cease moving. No creature in that mist looked out and recognized any other, but even if one had, it would have troubled at a quandary: “This Everything I see–is it one, or is it many?”

***

Two. The first prime. A great, uncertain step forward, every bit as profound as the gulf between the mist and the void, even more important in its way. It answers a question, a question that truly must be asked: One or many? No one, after all, disputes that there is something. Even the most charred cynic claims not that there is nothing, merely that nothing matters. Nothing is different. It is all the same. A Son of God once claimed that where two gather in His name, He shall be among them. It makes sense. He claimed to be the Truth, and Truth is what separates the first from the second.

***

A moment came within the fog–timeless until this strange happenstance–when a fire, dim within the great stasis, flickered to life, deep within the earth that clung to the trees. Its heat drove back the mist, and the vermin, eyes at last open, could ignore it no longer.

For the Fire brought disparity: Heat and cold. Life and death. And, of course, light and dark. The vermin at last saw themselves amongst the trees. They saw the dragons looming above them. They saw difference, and, within the Fire, they found a means to address the inequity. From its burning depths, they drew forth the souls of Lords: Light, order, nobility; Chaos, change, flux; Death, decay, eternal rest. Together, the Lords rose up and overthrew the dragons, Lords in their own right of stone and Stasis. Upon what remained, they built a great kingdom for the Humanity they championed.

But were they truly champions? The Flame of Truth had made two of one, had separated humanity from the tree and the stone, but is Truth itself singular?

When the Lords departed for their war against the dragons, the pygmies of the vermin, the lowest of those that writhed, considered what remained within the Fire and found in its dregs one final soul, a Dark soul of ash and lies, a stain to be feared, buried, forgotten. Truth, after all prescribes what is true but also what is not. Is Humanity, then, above or below? Is it the second or the first?

***

A fire is not an object. It is a process. It devours the singular, separates its fuel into two: Goats and sheep, good and ill, heat and ash. To be fuel is to be exalted, momentarily brought forth from the mist, placed upon a hilltop to be, however briefly, a guiding light for those attempting to see. But the fate of cinder is grim. Heat dissipates. What once appeared lordly soon crumbles, charcoal to ember to ash. The Fire gave us God, but it is the fate of gods to die. To burn. To be separated into truth and lies, buried, leaving us to wonder whether there was ever truth in what we believed. But still deeper, quietly slithering beneath the denouement, a question remains. It is not the question–Fire presupposed to answer it. It is our question. Not: One or zero? But: One or two?

Ignition brought us new life, but the dying Fire offers a choice. Do we wish the Fire to survive? It needs fuel, that which we elevate, which guides us, which dies and is forgotten; but not just any fable from the mist might be a Lord of Cinder. The abyss within us is clever. It sees the dying light and asks:

“Don’t you see? Your Lord is dead. Why should the next be any different? Truth has shown its colors, revealed that Truth itself is a lie. Hew no more Lords, set no more lies ablaze. All are hollow, and I am their final Lord. Let us break the cycle, now and forever.”

The words of the abyss are like cold iron. They cut and slice the specters Humanity has brought forth, those unkindled that would be cinder. Some are defeated, others corrupted, persuaded. Some retreat to the cold land of stories, far from the Flame’s light, in search of a sweetly rotting bed where they might breathe their last. But some remain, steadfast, flickering like embers in the dark, stronger, more meaningful to us than the abyss’ creeping truth. More meaningful, for just a brief, shining moment, than Truth itself.

These few are fit for the pyre, fit to be fuel, to become two and be forgotten, but immolation cannot be their choice. They are mist, and mist cannot choose. No, the choice lies with us. Do we allow the flame to gutter and die, plunging us into a new era of dark and mist? Do we throw our Lords upon the Fire? Are we of lies or Truth? Dark or light? One or two?

And if we have abandoned our choice, retreated to our stories and our cold and our rot, do we yet pray to the shadows that remain of gods long dead? And what of the Fire that casts them? Perhaps it only flickers, but we are ash, and Fire befits us, of course.

Even Less Than Nothing

Note: My recounting of events from Dark Souls lore, particularly my chronology, is at odds with a number of resources on the internet. I am aware of this, and I am pretty sure those resources are incorrect.

An unfortunate number, aware of Friedrich Nietzsche but unfamiliar, accustomed to brand rather than particulars, associate him with “nihilism” which is correct insofar as he talked about it a lot, but the direction is wrong: Nietzsche did not sell nihilism–he reacted to it. The true Nihilists were Russian pseudo-revolutionaries, and their brief but cacophonous time on their country’s political stage was perceived by the Russian mainstream as one of the gravest cultural threats of the age. Samzdat’s summary is better than mine:

“Nietzsche took the term “nihilism” from a Russian movement that was kind-of-vaguely-left-wing-but-not-really-maybe. It’s hard to say with any precision, because their whole thing was not having set beliefs and terminal values. Assuming you aren’t Jonah Goldberg or a tankie, neither “violence” nor “caring about the people” is a left/right thing. In Nechayev’s words: “Our task is terrible, total, universal, and merciless destruction.” The nihilists were professional revolutionaries, not idealists, and they wanted tear it all down first, build up later. The Nihilists grew moderately popular, the liberal press freaked out, one of their ringleaders killed a member for defecting, the liberal press really freaked out, Dostoyevsky wrote a book based on it, Nietzsche liked a theater adaptation of the book. The end.”

Accordingly, the Nihilist’s conception of “nihilism” is only a fraction of Nietzsche’s, but it begins with two thoughts:

What authority do I respect? None.
What must I respect in my quest to dismantle the illegitimate (by thought 1) authority I see around me? Nothing.

Last essay, I remarked on the bleak long-term of the dying Fire, but it turns out there are alternatives on a substantially expedited timeline.

I.

The city of New Londo (after some time: Londor) is Dark Souls’ Russia. Parallel to Russia (from a certain historical point of view) it was a peak of civilization in a post-Gwyn world. This is indicated in its name (the “Old Londo” was Anor Londo, city of the gods) as well as its leadership (the four kings of New Londo were bequeathed a piece of Gwyn’s soul when he left to link the Fire, making them essentially divine). Also like Russia, New Londo had a bit of a problem with edgy, anti-establishment philosophy.

Nominally, this started with Kaathe. He showed up and taught some enthusiastic acolytes something called “Lifedrain,” in very literal terms: the art of draining Humanity. While you probably already see the metaphor coming together, I want to take a moment to savor that artistry. Like souls, Humanity is a currency in Dark Souls–but in a more abstract sense. You can’t really buy things with it. Rather, it allows you to reverse your own Hollowing, which in turn allows you to kindle (read: affirm) bonfires (representations of the Flame) and summon allies (read: bond to other ideals). In more philosophical terms, a hollow ideal can sway neither Truth nor other ideals. In order for an ideal to be un-hollowed, it must be affirmed, and the only thing that can do that is Humanity. I want to be clear that I’m not nerding out over game mechanics here: These terms are extremely precise, and I believe they were chosen carefully. To then interpret them within the metaphor: When Kaathe’s Darkwraiths drain the Humanity from their surroundings, they are hollowing, making small, making ugly, carrying out Nechayev’s “terrible, total, universal, and merciless destruction” upon everything they touch.

Looking at this as a generalized existential threat, you should notice right off the bat that this is much the same endgame as the Last Man, but its process is much quicker, more vicious. It’s fitting: Nietzsche distinguished between active and passive nihilism, why shouldn’t Dark Souls differentiate passive and active darkness? But there’s another dimension to the metaphor. Just as souls are fragments of the First Flame, Humanity, explicitly, is fragments of the Dark Soul. That has implications. If we rely on our Humanity to affirm our ideals, and our Humanity is a lie (because the Dark Soul is literally Platonic Untruth), doesn’t that present problems for the project of affirming anything?

The Darkwraiths’ answer seems to be “hell yeah!” They get the four kings in on their uprising, and in their vehement affirmation that there is nothing worth affirming, they spawn an Abyss in New Londo’s depths that grows rapidly, obliterating all remnants of the Flame there and everything it might have illuminated, leaving a metaphysical landscape that looks sort of like this:

Understandably, the powers that be (Gwyn’s children and knights) are concerned. The Abyss is rather dark and rather frightening, but it’s also extremely caustic to the rest of Lordran’s metaphysics. With a severity that somewhat mirrors the Russian elite’s response to its own nihilists, those powers have New Londo flooded, killing everyone inside and stopping the Darkwraiths and their Abyss from advancing any further.

Now, if that was the whole story, I could have squeezed it into last essay and moved on, but, historical comparisons notwithstanding, the Abyss is more than just a happenstance in Dark Souls’ collective setup. The creation of the Abyss in New Londo introduced a type of antagonism to the metaphysical status quo that had never really been conceived to that point, the real-world equivalent to, say, a revolutionary movement that has concluded that everything is wrong and must be destroyed. And though the flooding was essentially the end of the Abyss in New Londo, the problem didn’t just go away. Part of that was perceptual: Though the imminent threat was gone, its underlying cause–the Dark Soul, the thing Gwyn freaked about in the first place–was still around. The other part of it was that more Abysses started showing up.

II.

I’ve written a few hundred words now on the fairly close allegory to Russia, and perhaps you’re convinced it’s real. However, just in case you aren’t, I’m going to continue harping on the point. The aforementioned Samzdat summary is good. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have quoted it, but it’s misleading. The response to Nechayev’s murder of Ivan Ivanov ultimately landed him in prison, but it was certainly not the end of Russian nihilism. The real-world Darkwraiths that Nechayev inspired went on to bigger and worse things, like murdering Tsar Alexander II, attempting to murder his successor, and forming the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which contributed to the Russian revolutions of 1917 and, ultimately, the formation of the Soviet Union. That this process ended in communism, which, while perhaps not ideal, seems preferable to widespread terrorism and oblivion, is worth contemplating, but I won’t get into it here.

My point, rather, is that nihilism was an active political force for some time, and in that process, it drew a fair amount of philosophical interest from people who were, in the end, opposed to it. Nietzsche, of course, falls into this category, but Dostoyevsky flew even closer to that particular nihilist hell. By most accounts, he never was a nihilist himself (he was a devout Christian all his life), but his choice in book clubs got him gulaged like one, and he proceeded to spend the rest of his life writing arguments against their philosophy. Importantly, though beating on nihilism in the press was fashionable at the time (most anti-nihilist works were straight propaganda), he argued honestly, depicting his characters as traveling paths of good but flawed intention. In that sense, he fought nihilism on its own terms–though he opposed the Abyss, he still learned to walk it.

If you’ve played the game, you know where we’re at now. If you haven’t, well, Dark Souls has one of those too:

Artorias the Abysswalker was one of Gwyn’s four greatest knights, and though he was exceptional in a number of ways, his biggest claim to fame was that he could traverse the Abyss without dying, which he accomplished by some vaguely-described covenant with its “beasts”. Despite this covenant, he was still devoted to Gwyn and still hunted the Darkwraiths, which seems odd, given that they are the Abyss’ principal agents, until you consider that we’ve already explained what that looks like philosophically. He just used the fantasy-warfare equivalent of an asymmetric rhetorical strategy: He cut out the horrific fuckery of the Abyss’ metaphysical properties, so he could pursue a fight with the Darkwraiths in which the stronger warrior would win (and there weren’t a lot of warriors stronger than him–modeling it as a debate would be somewhat akin to pitting an average Russian nihilist against the angel Gabriel).

I’m going here partly because reading Artorias as Dostoyevsky is fun, though it’s kind of ridiculous and not really the point (reading him as Nietzsche has its own interesting parallels). The much more realistic conclusion to draw from juxtaposing their personal histories is that metaphorically, Artorias’ role is much like the one Dostoyevsky played in the political theater of Imperial Russia: He was an ideal, beholden to Light and Truth, nonetheless metaphysically resilient to an aggressive Untruth, able to engage it (and in many cases defeat it) on its own turf. But I also go here because the end of Artorias’ story has much more to say about the danger of the Abyss than the flooding of New Londo.

Artorias fights the Abyss, and he’s fairly successful, and that’s admirable and impressive, but if you check the score, God just threw himself on a bonfire to keep the Dark at bay. Presumably at some point, it’s going to spit out something that Artorias can’t handle.

Fast forward a few years to the kingdom of Oolacile, where a serpent shows up and convinces the people of the city to delve below and disturb the grave of a “primordial human” interred there. They do this, the creature (Manus, Father of the Abyss) wakes up, and its “humanity runs wild”, unleashing another Abyss and opening up a sinkhole under the kingdom. The architectural collapse is something to behold, but more importantly, Manus’ influence drives the citizens of the kingdom stark raving mad.

Artorias arrives on the scene to find the source of this new darkness and kill it. He does not. Instead, he gets his ass handed to him and goes mad too, but he goes down in history as the savior of Oolacile anyway because it’s at this moment that a stranger shows up, murders both him and Manus, and exits just as quickly, leaving everyone to believe that it was Artorias who saved the day.

III.

Some of the takeaways are obvious. Nietzsche said something about the abyss gazing into you–that certainly seems to be at play here–but it’s meaningless without the philosophical backing. Go back to the start of the metaphor, what does the Abyss mean? It’s a sudden, calamitous dearth of affirmation, an aggressive move to strip all values of importance, and metaphysically speaking, that’s really dangerous. Even if an ideal is strong enough to stand on its own in that type of memetic environment, it loses its connection to other values, which is why Manus does not kill Artorias. Instead, Artorias goes mad, becomes an argument against the Truth and Light he so ardently supported, because he’s now a symbol out of context, and we’ve all seen how that goes.

Those of you paying close attention to the precise sequence of events here might also conclude that (since he’s obliterated at least two cities now) Kaathe seems to be a bit of a dick. You shouldn’t; that’s a trap. Kaathe and Frampt are Glycon, and Glycon was a sock puppet, a lie, a transparent hoax, a metaphysical blip. This is why they never actually do anything, even on a metaphysical level (they just tell other people to do things), and more importantly, this is why, should you decide to extinguish the fire, they are the ones waiting to serve you. They’re lies. They’re all that’s left, and when everything is a lie, all lies are obvious.

At a higher level, though, the Abyss didn’t extinguish the Flame, and active nihilism didn’t take over the world (though you can argue that it did kill a shocking number of people), so what gives? How does this play into the great choice that Nietzsche frames for civilization?

Well, it turns out Nietzsche’s passive nihilism is pretty subtle. Most people haven’t read Nietzsche, his ideas aren’t terribly intuitive, thus, reaction to it tends to be subconscious, systemic, or both. But since we are, he argues, on the path to nihilism, all of our options are inherently reactions to nihilism. The importance, then, of active nihilism, of the Abyss, is that it’s giant, it’s unignorable, and it forces us to contend intellectually with the debasement of our values. We are not awesome at that, but I’ll be exploring Dark Souls’ portrayal of our attempts in the next few essays.

At this point, we’re starting to move beyond the setup, beyond the allegory to Nietzsche’s Great Noon, to reactions and implications that I do not think are entirely Nietzsche’s own. Perhaps Miyazaki had something to tell us in that respect. Perhaps that’s a lie, perhaps it’s coming from me. I do not believe it is, but in all this discussion of the Dark, wouldn’t that be appropriate?

Image 1: Literally a black screen
Image 2: From Pinterest, I do not own it
Image 3: MS Paint amalgamation of a screenshot from Dark Souls and the Wikipedia image for Glycon. I made it, but I claim no ownership of the component images

Git Gud

Since I’m riding the strugglebus with the latest chapter of Sevenfold Gyre, you get a shitpost today. This toes the line regarding how political I’d like my writing to be, but the subject matter is highly relevant to this blog.

“Git Gud”, for me, is as much life advice as it is meme. It’s a simple message, profound in its applications if not in its essence, but not everyone is a Dark Souls diehard. For the game, it’s a response to an often punishing difficulty (for the non-gamers in my audience, Dark Souls is a hard game). For life, it’s an assurance: Your situation is under your control. Life is difficult. Work sucks. Writing is a bitch. The solution is panacea: You gotta git gud.

For me this is extremely empowering. Is it true? Probably not. 50% at best, and sometimes it’s more comforting to hear the opposite, that it isn’t all your fault–keep that in mind before you sling this at someone struggling with their mental health. I open with this because it’s personal to me, and perhaps you might be able to make use of this dubious proverb. But it’s not why I’m writing this piece. I’m writing it because every asshole on the internet seems to have piped up on this exact subject, and, near as I can tell, they’re all wrong.

I.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has been a massive success in every way possible. That’s an absolute, I know the phrasing is uncomfortable, I’ll clarify: That isn’t hyperbole. It meets/exceeds expectations as a successor to the Dark Souls series, its critical reception has been stellar, and it’s on track to be From Software’s best selling game of all time. But, as I’ve said before, it’s essentially a Dark Souls game, with all of the fuzzy narrative depth I alluded to in that post and all of the aforementioned punishing difficulty, and now that it’s not just in the mainstream but dominating the mainstream, you have a chunk of folks paying attention that might never have played this game by choice five years ago.

Enter Asshole Number 1, a games journalist who patches his game in order to beat the final boss then crows about it in his review. Asshole Number 2, and a legion of fans blast him for it–probably deserved, if only for the profound misreading of his audience–and then every other asshole takes to their preferred outlet to yell about whether the game should have an Easy mode, and then a vocal faction starts saying that it’s not about an Easy mode, it’s about handicapped accessibility, so it’s a social justice issue.

There isn’t enough alcohol in the world for this.

II.

“Who’s in the right?” No one, they’re assholes, and all of the noise is the rough equivalent of going out at night and screaming at the moon. Yeah, I’m doing it too, but I told you right off the bat that this was a shitpost. But actually, the basis for my venom is that there are multiple dynamics at play here, and everyone seems to be getting tripped up thinking that they are all one thing. Since it’s the most charged, let’s start with the accessibility side and work backwards.

Sekiro is a hard game, probably harder than Dark Souls, definitely faster, more reflex-oriented. There exist people that, due to a variety of maladies, are physically not capable of playing this game. “Should From Software make the game accessible to those people?” is a giant, angry vortex, so let’s start with something easier: Is it imperative that every game is accessible to everyone? I hope we can agree that the obvious answer is “No”, if only because it is literally impossible with today’s technology (e.g. you can’t make Sekiro playable for blind people). That’s a straw man, but its blazing corpse at least confirms that we are swimming in the middle of a blurry, grey line.

Next rung up, is it imperative that every game is accessible to everyone where possible? That depends on how you look at it. If you want to check legal precedent, a certain standard of handicapped accessibility is mandated for buildings open to the public (in the US, at least), but you wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that games and public spaces are not precise equivalents. This is also where you run into questions of responsibility. I’ll tell you right now: If Sekiro’s difficulty is preventing you from playing it, you are totally able to install the same damn mod that Asshole Number 1 used for free. And if the issue is that you have no arms, people have rigged up Darks Souls on DDR pads. You’re welcome to as well.

If you are actually handicapped, you probably think I’m being a complete jerk right now. You are correct. I am being a jerk, but as a side note, that’s the type of reaction any system is going to give when you vocalize a complaint that doesn’t line up with what exactly is wrong. The issue isn’t that Sekiro is truly gated, the issue is that as a society, we have decided that not being dicks to handicapped people is a good thing to do, and games like this are made, more or less, in ignorance of that cultural consensus.

III.

“So From Software should add accessibility options to their games?” Honestly, I don’t think so, but I’ll admit to some conflict of conscience. Isn’t it great that mod developers protect us from having to make difficult moral decisions like this? “But wait, what’s the argument against adding them?” Uh, orthogonal. “What?”

Whereas the Dark Noon series is devoted to Dark Souls’ literary elements, it should still be mentioned that From Software’s games are masterclasses of mechanical design. In particular, they have perfected the “hard game”, and I know that up until now, I have been building up how hard these games are. That was not totally honest of me. Dark Souls and Sekiro are not easy, to be sure. I find them difficult, but I’m also not that good at games. I’ve had to make double-digit attempts to kill many of the bosses throughout the series. Meanwhile, a close friend of mine beat Dark Souls 2 without stopping at a bonfire. If you’ve played the game, you know how absurd that is, but for those who haven’t, that means (with some nuance) that he never once refilled his health bar. And I don’t mean to belittle his accomplishment, but it’s not like he was the only person to ever do that either.

So yeah, Dark Souls/Sekiro is hard, but there are tons of harder games. What really sets the series apart is how rude it is to the player. The game world is inherently dangerous, the easiest enemies can still kill you if you’re sleepwalking, and should you screw up, you get sent back far, with heavy potential penalties to your accumulated experience. It’s frustrating, and that is crafted 100% intentionally. At some point, usually very early, you will make a mistake, you will fail, and you will encounter a wall of adversity–rather than difficulty–that you will need to overcome. And when the intended audience encounters that wall, they lean in.

I want to be abundantly clear: Almost everyone is physically capable of beating these games. Most will not, and there isn’t any particular shame in that. My wife is totally good enough at games to beat Dark Souls, but she likely never will. She doesn’t want to, crashing into a wall of pain over and over again isn’t her idea of a good time. So is there anything wrong with accessibility options? No not inherently. Using them to remove physical barriers is completely reasonable. It’s just that using them to remove the wall of adversity means you’re playing a different game, and From Software didn’t want to develop that different game. I won’t make strong claims about the value of one or the other, but I don’t think that’s a moral failing on their part.

The Dark Noon

It’s been a little while since we’ve been here. If you need, check out the previous posts in this series first. Also, because you can never sit down and read just one thing, I linked an article in my first essay on this topic. If you haven’t read it yet, you should now. It was always relevant, but it connects the philosophical parts of this to our reality better than I ever could.

A little under two months ago, I started this blog, and the first substantive thing I posted was about choices in video games. This will be about choices as well, in video games, in life, and, more deeply, in what we value. It will be a turning point–the previous essays have been getting at the metaphors underlying Dark Souls’ setup. Now, we get to ask the question: “Why?”

I.

I’ve talked a lot about “Truth” in the last two essays without really getting into what it means. This is meant to be respectful. The only sense in which I am the first to say any of the things I’m saying is the sense in which they relate to Dark Souls (which is still a little surprising, but I’ve beaten that horse enough already). Still, since this runs the risk of sounding completely insane without clarity on that concept, I want to be explicit: Truth is something that humans value–we all intrinsically want the things we believe to be true. This starts, obviously, with perceptions of reality, but then it goes and starts a bar fight with religion and science. For those interested in the hard sciences without a background in philosophy, it may be difficult to believe, but the advances in scientific thought that propelled us from the Middle Ages to modernity were based heavily on metaphysics. This starts with the question “If I can’t trust what I see, how can I know anything?” but the high-level ends up being this: We created/reinforced gods in service of Truth. We then ask whether we need gods and, unable to see their purpose, begin devaluing them. Then comes the best part: Some asshole asks whether we need Truth.

“Is this still about Dark Souls?” Sure, just replace “Truth” and “gods” with “Flame” and “Lords”, and we’re hunky dory. More pointedly, in Dark Souls, that asshole has a name: Kaathe.

Darkstalker Kaathe is a primordial serpent. He goes way back to when the world was mist and trees and dragons, and this means A) he has a complicated relationship with the Truth and gods metaphor that I don’t really want to get into here and B) his age grants him a view on the situation that doesn’t have a good real-world analog. Anyway, he starts a cult, they kill a lot of people, and the powers that be flood a city on top of them. This is the advent of nihilism in Dark Souls. The details actually are pretty interesting, but the Abyss is going to get its own essay. Kaathe is coming up here because he’s the one that offers you an alternative in your quest to save the world. Oh yes, you were on a quest–didn’t I mention that?

II.

That isn’t a gotcha at all if you actually played Dark Souls, but I know for a fact that some of you have not. Recall from the intro:

Thus began the Age of Fire. But soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain. Even now there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights. And amongst the living are seen, carriers of the accursed Darksign.

The plot of the game–which we’ve avoided discussing up to now–is you exploring Lordran in fulfillment of some vague prophecy that no one seems to have respect for, but then you complete the first piece, ring some bells, and a giant snake blasts out of the ground where you first showed up. His name is Frampt, and he tells you that your purpose is to succeed Lord Gwyn and link the Fire, prolonging this golden age. He’s not terribly specific about what “linking the Fire” means, but man, becoming the successor to God? That seems pretty neat, and so this becomes your quest: You must gather the souls of the gods and use them to open the way to the Kiln of the First Flame, that you may link the Fire.

That goes about as swimmingly as things can go in Lordran until you find Kaathe at the bottom of the Abyss. He has a counterproposal for you: Why don’t you just…not do that? Gwyn went and linked the Fire, sure, but he was a pussy, scared of the dark or something. It’s not like an Age of Dark would actually end the world or anything. This is when he lets you in on the piece of the creation myth that doesn’t get repeated:

If you remember the other gods from the second essay, you remember that they each represented something. Gwyn was light, the Witch was chaos, Nito was death, but there was another, “so easily forgotten”. The pygmy found a special soul within the Fire, the only one named without a possessive: the Dark Soul. Gwyn is not happy about this for reasons that aren’t really clear without the metaphor, and he goes to great lengths to ensure that the descendants of the pygmy don’t flourish and the dark does not overpower the light. On the first count, he clearly failed–you’re here after all, but you can’t say he wasn’t motivated. To stop the guttering of the Fire and the coming Age of Dark, he used his own body as fuel..

There are a number of metaphors here, let’s unpack them:

First, note the obvious parallel to Christianity, but also note the dramatically developed context. In this version, God still sacrifices himself, but there’s an added element: fear. That he fears the dark here means he fears its impact on the metaphysical–it is not simply love for another substrate of reality. So what danger does the Dark Soul pose?

The Fire is Truth, light emanates from fire, and that makes Gwyn a manifestation of true things. The Dark Soul, then, is what’s left. Not-true things. Lies. “Seems bad.” Oh, really? I’m sure it does, but can you make a case for it without appealing to Truth as a value? Lies are easy to detach from the types of harm we hold to be bad based on other values, but still, they feel wrong, it stings your character to lie to others, and for some reason, you can’t lie to yourself. Truth is king, we’ve put everything else in service to it, and, of course, why would the Fire embrace its own death?

And so, Kaathe offers us a choice: Immolate yourself, the successor to the gods, in service of Truth, or walk away, embrace the lies, and usher in an Age of Dark.

III.

About the most famous thing Nietzsche ever said was “God is dead”. Sounds about right. Death and Chaos are toast, you murdered them on your way here. Light is in the process of burning, soon to be spent. All of that may seem good or bad to you, but to Nietzsche, it was an inevitable result of that initial enshrinement of Truth as our highest value. It brought us through the Stone Ages, to antiquity, to modernity, to the point where we are capable of contending with the forces of Gaia on a nearly even playing field. Truth has brought us power even if we’ve had to sacrifice human meaning to get there, but that was a long-term decision. Now, finally, we have the opportunity to course-correct. Truth is going out, and the sun has reached its median in the course of human history. Nietzsche called it the Great Noon, but as you might guess, the Dark Souls take is a little different.

Interpreting Nietzsche’s options from Lou Keep’s essay, you can translate them to the Dark Souls metaphor like so: The last man is letting every value burn to nothing, ceasing our advance to power, and living on in the twilight until at last we die. Affirmation is embracing the Dark, learning how to lie, and adopting a new hierarchy of values in Truth’s place. Of course, affirmation could mean that we are affirming an ideal that does not exist (which isn’t ideal), or it could mean affirmation of the here and now. The problem is that it’s very hard to do either if we can’t lie to ourselves.

However, Dark Souls allows for two other options, one of which isn’t well explored by Nietzsche’s framework (which we’ll save for last), and one that…well, that he was reacting to in the first place. That one, we’ll discuss next.

Top Image: Screenshot from the launch trailer for Dark Souls 3, I do not own it

Next Steps and First Impressions

At this point, I am pretty much done with my backlog of material to post here. That means that my lead time per long post is probably going to be a little longer than the 2-3 day intervals I’ve been following to this point. Sevenfold Gyre part three is about a third done, but fuck, it’s update day, so while I continue grinding that out, today you get a shitpost of a game review.

Those who have been following my Dark Souls series are probably aware that today, From Software released Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s first game since Dark Souls 3 in a vaguely similar space (technically he also directed Déraciné, but that’s radically different enough that I’m going to ignore it for the purposes of this timeline). As the name might imply: This is not Dark Souls. You’re playing a named character, it’s a stealth game, you don’t do damage–you just need to break the enemy’s poise–the game has a non-historical story (which I’m disappointed about, but only because Dark Souls invented the genre, and I’ve never seen anyone do it as well), the reviews go on and on. Oh yeah, most of that isn’t true, I’m just parroting the takeaways I’ve read online, and it’s actually a double fake, because the big idea is wrong, too: This game is totally Dark Souls.

I can quantify that. Here are the actual differences between Sekiro and Dark Souls (taken broadly, in the “Soulsborne” sense):

The main character has backstory.
There is a jump button.
Enemies block attacks in a way that makes fighting crowds is noticeably more dangerous.
The advancement systems (equipment, stats) have been replaced with the type of thing you see in Devil May Cry (or equivalent action game).

Fits on one hand. I, for one, am thrilled. That said, it’s very polished, combat is intricate in spite of its very fast pace, and moving around is a joy. By far the most significant of those, though, is the first, and it’s a deceptively small change. At a very surface level, the setting is historical. The Ashina clan was a real clan during the Sengoku period, the named characters don’t appear to have been, but whatever. Below that surface, we’re back to–you guessed it–more Dark Souls, with all of the desolation, bleakness, and lovely, fuzzy vagueness that From Software does so well, which is why it’s so cool that simply adding a pre-existing drive to the player character alters the experience so radically. In a lot of ways, the Souls games were framed, defined by that void, and filling it changes the basis for analysis.

Mind, I have no idea at this point what that analysis is going to look like (I’m only 15 hours in), but man, am I stoked to find out.

Top Image: Gameplay/cutscene footage from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. I do not own it.

The Conceptual Economy

Part three of the Dark Souls series, on the Undead and Lordran. Part 1 here. Part 2 here.

Image result for dark souls firelink shrine art

Lots of words have been written at this point; here’s where we’re at: There’s a clear parallel between Nietzsche’s progression of nihilism and Dark Souls’ setup. We’ll flesh that out soon–the last essay only introduced it–but it’s better that we have most of our details down before we get into implications. After all, “the world of Dark Souls is nihilistic” is so vague as to be undisputable, and it’s not like it makes Dark Souls make sense by itself. If we want that, we’ll need to discuss the game’s minute-to-minute experience.

I.

I chopped this out of the transcription from last essay, but let’s discuss it now:

Yes, indeed. The Darksign brands the Undead. And in this land, the Undead are corralled and led to the north, where they are locked away, to await the end of the world… This is your fate.

Only, in the ancient legends it is stated, that one day an Undead shall be chosen to leave the Undead asylum, in pilgrimage, to the land of ancient lords, Lordran.

You probably have some internal definitions of what it means to be “undead”, and Dark Souls probably doesn’t meet very many of those. The denizens of Lordran are often articulate, intelligent, usually even “normal”-looking. They aren’t skeletons (though they’re around), they aren’t zombies (they’re around too, see Hollows), they’re just exactly the same as humans except for some little black scab that you wouldn’t even notice unless things were getting hot and steamy. One might point out their (inconsistent) tendency to revive around swords shoved into campfires or the fact that hollowing makes them more and more zombie-like, but that combination of traits seems so far away from a conventional understanding of the term that you wonder: Why call them that at all? Why not play up the “curse” aspects instead of reengineering a term with so much cultural cachet (1)?

This probably sounds like criticism, but I’m really just trying to discourage face-value readings of the situation. At face value, labelling people in Lordran as Undead seems confusing and stupid, so you can either ignore the apparent Japanese arcana of it and blow right past, or you can be a kind reader and work from the assumption that the stupid-looking decisions are deliberate. This is my essay, so I’m going to do that. Start from the basics: What does being Undead mean for the Undead?

Solaire of Astora: “Now that I am Undead, I have come to this great land, the birthplace of Lord Gwyn, to seek my very own sun!”

Laurentius of the Great Swamp: “In this land, pyromancers earn a certain respect. The Witch of Izalith, one of the legendary Lords, is the godmother of pyromancy. So, the day I became Undead, I was ecstatic. I felt as if I’d been chosen to attune myself to the ancient arts.”

Of course, it’s not all great–these people were still hunted by Allfather Lloyd, et al and corralled in asylums, but now zoom out to the world, Lordran. Solaire and Laurentius both are excited that their Undeath should grant them entry to this place, and you have to wonder why: A) It’s in ruins, steadily falling apart, hardly seems aspirational, and B) in what way, exactly, does Undeath get them in? Does the bird only carry people with the Darksign? Is the bird the only way to get there?

Let’s examine the ruins question first. Lordran certainly looks like a slowly degrading collection of fallen kingdoms, but only if you aren’t looking very closely. If you are, the juxtaposition is jarring: A semi-functioning city is stapled to a church guarded by knights of a random ancient kingdom. Go down a staircase, and you find a giant hydra in a lake, surrounded by crystalline golems, and just a jaunt away is lethal funhouse staffed by murderous snake-people. And Anor Londo, lost city of the gods themselves? Just over the hill past the fortress. If you look at it this way, you can see it: This isn’t a kingdom at all–it’s a museum. It may be trying to kill you, but don’t let that give you the wrong impression. We’re in the metaphysical layer, walking through a monument to what once was (or perhaps what once was mythologized), which brings us to question two: If becoming Undead qualifies you for entry into a place inhabited by gods, wherein reality itself is enshrined semi-eternally, where are you (bonus: Your alternative, pending one bird flight is a hellish prison guarded by literal demons)? I’m no theologian, but it seems like you might be in some kind of fucked up Heaven.

II.

While Lordran as the afterlife may be a good entry point into a particular way of looking at it, it’s best not to take that interpretation too far. An afterlife presupposes that Lordran’s denizens had a before-life, outside this place, and while there is evidence for that, it’s really not clear to what degree it’s relevant to the world dynamic (at least in Dark Souls 1). For example, it’s pretty easy to tell that Solaire of Astora isn’t from around here because it says right in his name: He’s from Astora. Astora, ostensibly at least, isn’t in Lordran (also dialogue, etc.), so Solaire almost certainly existed before he showed up there, but there isn’t much mention of anything he did in his past life or its bearing on the here and now (2).

To rephrase, the question is one of emphasis. Starting with the afterlife interpretation, consider the aforementioned inconsistency of characters’ resurrection. If you squint, you can see a conceptual pattern between the types of characters that respawn (random enemies, ie museum exhibits; phantom Undead) and those that don’t (bosses, other non-phantom Undead, legendary enemies like Black Knights or Havel). Excluding the player (this is also a thin reading, but hear me out), you can describe these same groups as [those enshrined/entangled in Lordran’s museum-reality] and [those vying to dominate it]. Since the player character is as inexterminable as a cockroach in spite of belonging clearly to the latter group, the resurrection angle may not be accurately descriptive, but the distinction between conquering agents and metaphysical background is still useful. It also brings us to two important questions: First, what is the significance of that struggle to conquer for the physical and metaphorical layers; and second, what exactly does domination of the metaphysical look like? The former is broad and has a broad answer–we’ll be exploring it through the entirety of this series. The latter is more specific, tied to a question so obvious it’s a wonder we’ve avoided it up to now: The game is called “Dark Souls”, right? Pray tell, what exactly are these “souls” (3)?

III.

For those following along who have not played the game, Dark Souls’ souls are a catch-all currency and experience system. When you kill an enemy, you are given a number of souls (usually hundreds or thousands–the guy was carrying them or something). You can use these souls to improve your attributes, but the interesting thing is that everyone around you seems to be doing the same. This isn’t entirely literal–individual characters don’t generally get any stronger throughout the game; that’s just you–but they certainly do try to get all the souls they can, and if they aren’t inclined to do it through murder, they’ll do it through trade. Characters throughout Lordran will sell you items or teach you skills for souls, and the game lampshades their status as currency with juxtaposition to actual currency. See the Gold Coin. Description:

“Coin made of gold, with Allfather Lloyd and his white halo shown on its face. Even coins of great value in the world of men have little value in Lordran, where the accepted currency is souls.”

Our metaphysical realm, then, has an economy of souls. The prose is appropriate to the genre, but in real terms, what does this mean? What is a soul? Conventionally, of course, it’s paired with a possessive, the soul is someone’s. It’s someone’s identity, agency, lifeforce, whatever. The three-digit numbers you reap from each fallen foe might discourage that interpretation, but a certain class of item muddies the water. Throughout Lordran, you will find items called something of the form: “Large Souls of a Lost Undead”. These, along with “Soul of [Boss Name]” (guess how you get those), can be consumed for a reward of some number of souls, suggesting that characters in Lordran are not just fueled by souls, but comprised of them. Reasonable, but the plurality is perplexing.

One resolution might be the American Gods route: The metaphysical is the realm of the gods, and gods have metaphysical strength proportional to the strength of their believers in the physical world. Might a single soul then represent a believer? There may be something to this line of thought (4), but A) it doesn’t really have any explicative power as the nihilism metaphor is concerned, and B) petty, perhaps, but the metaphorical mechanism can be improved: Ideological battles aren’t exactly amoebic as followers are concerned–sometimes people convert when they clash, but more often they just die. In Dark Souls, by contrast, the nature of conflict is straightforward: You kill a guy, you get his stuff.

Consider a close alternative. Among believers, a clash of ideologies is inherently political, and politics is, well, difficult to model, especially in a way that makes sense at this level of abstraction. So, for now, take out the believers. Without them, the ideological clash is just an argument without an audience, reason applied to determine truth rather than realize a political goal. Not all such arguments have a victor, but when they do, there is no death of the evidence–it all merely supports a new conclusion, a victor in the battle.

What, then, are souls? They are concepts, memes, evidence, tiny fragments of truth. Which is appropriate: If the Lords found their souls within the Flame, and the Flame is Truth, then why should their progeny be built of anything but its component parts? Why should the above be unlike the below?

Footnotes:

(1): Worth noting that Dark Souls 2 does this, but that Dark Souls does not feels deliberate. Consider also that Miyazaki did not direct Dark Souls 2.

(2): There are exceptions, the most nuanced of which is probably Siegmeyer of Catarina, whose sins ultimately pursue him to his end at Ash Lake. But even then, it’s not like you ever find out what they are, which is a good indicator that his case is one of brand rather than particulars. Specifically, his daughter’s mention of his relationship with her mother seems to more to serve as development of his persona in Lordran as a paragon of wanderlust.

(3): This question rightfully begins with Demon’s Souls, from which the experience system was more or less transplanted wholesale. For what it’s worth, I’ve never attempted a literary reading of Demon’s Souls, but it may be on the docket for the future, alongside Bloodborne.

(4): If you like conspiracy theories, here’s one: The maximum amount of souls you can spend leveling up in Dark Souls is 1,692,438,971, suggesting by the believers metaphor that this is the maximum number of a followers a metaphysical ideal can have. The largest religion in the world is Sunni Islam, with a very close 1.5 billion followers. Probably a coincidence, but that’s a weirdly precise match of orders of magnitude.

Top Image: By DRAGONizm, found via Google

To Build a Pantheon

On the Dragons and the Fire. Part two in the Dark Souls series.

Throughout history, the gods we’ve worshipped (or created fictional societies to worship) have borne a number of different faces, but similarities are easy to spot between the pantheons. There is always a sun god (or god of Light). There is always a god of the dead (or at least an underworld). There’s always a struggle between [], etc. Dark Souls shares these similarities, of course, but I don’t want to start with the similarities. Let’s start with humanity instead.

I.

Certain cultures (notably Greek and Norse religions) are known today for gods that behave in a particularly human manner: They squabble, they screw around, they father illegitimate children with mortals, and, generally, they are fallible. This probably doesn’t strike you as odd. After all, why shouldn’t mankind want to link their gods to themselves in some way (see also: Christian God creating man in his own image)? It is odd, though. To posit a link between ourselves and the divine is one thing, but to shrink that gap to merely a difference in physical capability betrays a narcissistic fantasy: “Were I [man] to ascend to godhood, I would still remain me.” Ah, yes. I’m sure you wouldn’t change at all if you won the lottery either.

That the limits of our influence in turn influence who we are should be obvious, but taken to its extreme, it has some weird implications that, for one reason or another, tend to get explored only rarely in fantasy/sci-fi literature (which, weird on its own, is probably the only branch of literature that would ever touch the subject). To that end, in the process of designing a world for a game I worked on once, I walked through the following thought experiment:

Say you’re a wizard. You can shoot fireballs out of your hands. That doesn’t much alter the way you relate to people, though you might have a more relaxed view of the morality surrounding assault and arson. Still, nothing out of the ordinary. Now suppose you find an artifact that grants you the ability to persuade anyone around you of anything. If you can describe it, you can make them believe it: the sky is green, the British are attacking, they are in love with you, whatever. Putting aside the fact that you’ve just encountered an entire encyclopedia of ethical dilemmas, even the way you relate to people is seriously fucked. Maybe you are still tied to a semblance of humanity by the human needs you experience, but the way you operate in society will certainly no longer look human. Perspective check, now: All you’ve found is the Tablet of Splendid Oratory–why the hell would earthshaking nigh-omnipotence look more human?

For the purposes of that game world, my co-designer and I ultimately settled on a history where four wizards had become so powerful (orders of magnitude beyond the above example) that they ceased to interact with the world as individual identities. Rather, they ascended to the point where they were concepts, influencing the nature of reality and the thoughts of those that observed it. The four were known as Love, Hate, Change, and Stasis. A minor detail: As part of the game world’s origin story, the former three collaborated to murder the fourth. Wait…that sounds kind of familiar.

II.

Keep the notion of ascension to godhood in mind–we’ll come back to it. For now, let’s talk about how Dark Souls’ gods fit in. Since it’s super short, I’ll just go ahead and include the entire transcription of Dark Souls’ opening cinematic here (1):

In the Age of Ancients the world was unformed, shrouded by fog. A land of gray crags, Archtrees, and Everlasting Dragons. But then there was Fire and with fire came disparity. Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, Light and Dark. Then from the dark, They came, and found the Souls of Lords within the flame. Nito, the First of the Dead, The Witch of Izalith and her Daughters of Chaos, Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, and his faithful knights. And the Furtive Pygmy, so easily forgotten.

With the strength of Lords, they challenged the Dragons. Gwyn’s mighty bolts peeled apart their stone scales. The Witches weaved great firestorms. Nito unleashed a miasma of death and disease. And Seath the Scaleless betrayed his own, and the Dragons were no more.

Thus began the Age of Fire. But soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain. Even now there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights. And amongst the living are seen, carriers of the accursed Darksign.

First, because I just abhor subtlety: Good god, Bad god, and Chaotic god team up to murder Static god(s). I’m apparently so fucking clever.

Second, recall the three layers of reality from the previous essay. This is an origin story, essentially mythology, so there is probably nothing happening on the literal level (or at least we can safely conflate it with the metaphorical). The metaphysical is fairly straightforward: In the beginning, the world is just mist, rocks, trees, and dragons, along with whatever unenlightened vermin scuttle below them in the dark. Then fire shows up, the vermin find it and become gods. The greatest of them do battle with the dragons, they get one of the dragons to defect (2), and, one of the gods mysteriously does not participate. Victorious, they begin the age of fire, but since fire, by its very nature, tends to burn out, they have a problem. Begin game.

There are things worth calling out about the pantheon, many of which I already have. God of light, check. God of death, check (though death has a very different meaning when one is Undead and one’s entire experience is constrained to the metaphysical). The Pandora-esque role of the Witch of Izalith in birthing the demon race is also an interesting spin, though my choice of adjective ought to tell you that it, also, is referential. The novel twist is the inclusion of mankind (the pygmy) within the pantheon, on par with the gods. Neat worldview on the metaphysical level, but it has deep implications for the underlying metaphor.

Regarding the metaphor: I’ve mentioned it multiple times now–let’s talk specifics.

III.

Start from first principles: Gwyn is God–capital “G” Christian God–as much for his role as God of light as for his Sistine-Chapel, Statue Edition appearance in the Ringed City (3). But Gwyn didn’t come from nothing. Neither did light. The story explicitly states that light was the result of the bifurcation inflicted by the Fire, and Gwyn himself simply found his Lordly role within the flame.

This all sounds about right, because God didn’t come from nothing either. Historically speaking, the first written record we have of the Christian God (or Hebrew God, technically) dates to around 12,000 years ago. Fire, long considered to be the poetic beginning of man’s ascension above nature came long before (archaeological consensus estimates it around 1 million years back). However, it is not at all clear that fire was the first tool we used. At an estimated age of 3.3 million years, stone tools predate fire by far. I’ll preempt the archaeological blowback: Stone tools preserve incredibly well, evidence of fire, not so much, so it’s entirely possible this chronology does not accurately describe our own world, but we’re not really talking about reality here–we’re talking about a story, and there are enough specifics here to claim that the story Miyazaki is telling is meant to reflect a certain history of mankind, that the triumph of the Lords over the dragons is meant to represent a shift in man’s perspective on itself: It is the moment where, rather than being ruled by nature (stone, stasis, what is), it begins to rule over nature, and the trappings of the Fire (religion, mythos, the pursuit of knowledge) begin to shape its perspective on the world.

Of course, the Fire is not literally fire. Though, historically and poetically, fire is a turning point, it isn’t really a motive force–it’s more just another notch on humanity’s collective tech tree. Moreover, don’t forget what exactly it is that’s turning. Per Nietzsche:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.

(On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)

More bluntly, it’s highly doubtful that mankind actually rules over nature now, much less that it did a million years ago when it first built a campfire. What shifted wasn’t mankind or nature, but mankind’s perspective. Thus, what Fire represents is not a physical force but a conceptual one, one with the power to reorient everything we see without leaving so much as a charred stain on reality itself. What I’m describing is a value, both in the general sense that this is what values do and in that the Fire represents a very specific value. It has gone by a number of names throughout the ages, among them Virtue or the Form of the Good, but in my opinion, the most useful is Truth, and the whole metaphor–from the nature of the Dark Soul to why Gwyn had to die–weaves itself from there.

Footnotes:

(1): I know two paragraphs are missing. They’re mostly off-topic here–we’ll get to them next essay.

(2): I am taking this very much at face value. Lots of details about Seath, most particularly that he is scaleless, suggest he may not truly be a dragon, but for now, I’m ignoring them. As his place in the pantheon is concerned, he seems to represent an ideal of scholarship, and the piece of Gwyn’s soul that is bequeathed to him may be a commentary on the privileged position academia has held throughout history as a subsidiary of religious institutions.

(3): It’s worth mentioning that my second reaction upon seeing this depiction was to ask what it meant that Gwyn feared the pygmy: “What would it mean if God feared man?” Except God is dead–who do you think killed him?

Introduction: On Reality

This is the first post in what will be a much longer series on philosophy and Dark Souls.

In March of 2015, From Software released Bloodborne, and I, a neophyte neither to games nor quality, pronounced it quite possibly the best game ever created. There are implicit qualifiers to that statement, as well as biases and all of the divisiveness that comes along with a discussion of this genre, but, knowing full well the proportion of the gaming “kingdom” that would dismiss it out of hand, I still hold a portion of the thought to be valid: Bloodborne is a fantastic exemplar of “Souls” genre, one of the best fantasy RPGs ever created, and a non-trivial literary exploration of the ways that humans interact with belief.

I’ll clarify that it was this last point that fueled my assessment. Games as high art is something of a hobby horse for me, and for a medium passing sixty years of age, there are surprisingly few games that can so unambiguously boast the distinction. Bloodborne, of course, came from somewhere, and even at the time, it was not my intent to denigrate its origins. Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls were groundbreaking, and I was singing their praises right along with the other multitudes that had caught the “Souls” bug. Bloodborne was different, though. It was both a fully consummate game–a gamer’s game, in contrast to a more purely (and blatantly) artistic piece like Journey–and a world whose details, precisely, lovingly placed, had something profound to say about the way we live life.

The literary reading of Bloodborne is fascinating, and perhaps I’ll write about it one day, but that is not the purpose of this essay. Rather, this is about what I didn’t realize in 2015: Dark Souls had already gone there too, and the scope of its literary aspirations dwarfs anything the games medium has ever attempted besides.

Returning to my story, after Bloodborne, director Hidetaka Miyazaki returned to Dark Souls, releasing Dark Souls 3 just over a year later. I played it, I loved it, but even then I didn’t see it. Two DLCs came out. I played them as well, but it wasn’t until I neared the end of the second that I walked into an in-game room and nearly dropped my controller. The room in question was a small chapel in the Ringed City, decorated at its center by a statue of Lord Gwyn, tall and regal, placing a crown atop the head of the pygmy pathetically kneeling at his feet.

Well. That isn’t subtle. From then on, I resolved to pay better attention, because there was almost certainly something still to notice.

Ultimately, my attention rewarded me last year, as I replayed the original Dark Souls, having read Lou Keep’s excellent essay Everything is Going According to Plan (very long, not at all about Dark Souls, but practically a prerequisite for everything I am about to say) around the same time. Abruptly, one day, I realized that the two were telling the same story to a remarkable degree of specificity.

Now this was something new, something deep, interesting: Dark Souls as an allegory for Nietzsche, awe-inspiring and soul-crushing, like some abyssal incarnation of Tolkien. I set about exploring the metaphor and found it surprisingly robust, going so far as to imply specific arguments within Nietzsche’s framework. Still, several attempted essays later, I come to you with concerns: If I am to explicate what Miyazaki seems to be saying, then we must be clear about some problems with reality.

The first is that Dark Souls (I will continue to use the unitalicized term to refer to the series as a whole, where I will italicize specific titles), as a primary source, is extremely unclear, to the extent that almost all of the information it tells you plainly (and, it should go without saying, all of the information it doesn’t) is debatable. Part of this is because Dark Souls is presented as scraps of history from a wild variety of sources, over a massive amount of time. From these scraps, it’s difficult to get a complete picture of the world, and the fact that different viewpoints, biases, and even mistakes tend to make the scraps incommensurable only adds to the difficulty. Aside, this is why you should take any lore details you hear on the internet, from any source short of Miyazaki himself, with a grain of salt. The game very deliberately leaves its details open to interpretation, and you should be wary of certainty (including mine, for reasons I’ll get into in a moment).

The second problem only adds to the murkiness. It turns out the “undisputable” details that the game directly provides (ie, what literally happens on screen) don’t make a ton of sense. You find kingdoms practically stapled to each other, immense geographical distances collapsed into runnable tracks, and, in reference to the medium itself, denizens of these truncated locales sitting there, waiting for you. I will explore the nuts and bolts of this argument in later pieces in this series, but to resolve this problem, I will be subdividing all of Dark Souls lore into three substrates of reality:

The physical/literal reality of the world the game is describing.
The metaphysical reality layered atop the history of the literal.
The metaphorical reality that the literal reality is grounding and the metaphysical is representing.

Based on this framework, you would assume that we are starting from the physical and building up. You would be wrong. The actual action of the games takes place in the second layer, which helps to explain some of the whacky disparities between what the game shows you is going on and what it textually tells you. Of course, things are never easy. The layers often blur together, which may seem like sloppy writing (be it on my part or Miyazaki’s) until you realize that real life works much the same way.

This brings us to the third problem, which may be with me. A few online forum-goers have brought up the connection with Nietzsche in a shallow, “this seems to be inspired by” sort of way. Miyazaki has not. This is not trivial. Much ink has been spilled on Dark Souls as a gaming phenomenon, and Miyazaki has not been stingy with his interviews, and throughout everything I’ve been able to find on the record, I’ve found no reference to the nihilistic metaphor I see, nor even so much as a reference to Nietzsche as an inspiration. I’ll claim death of the author if necessary, though I won’t do so lazily. While I am confident of the artistic validity of the interpretation that I present here, I truly cannot say whether Miyazaki intended any of it. My apologies to him if this should obscure any of his actual intent.

That said, let’s press on. No matter the reality that all of this is drawn from, our reality has been on a particular philosophical course for some time, and Dark Souls may have something to say about that.

To make this argument (as well as the source material I’m drawing from) sane, I will be zooming subsequent essays in on much more specific pieces of the overall Dark Souls codex. It is likely there will be detours in the format, but right now, the basic road map looks like this:

The Dragons and the Fire
The Undead and Lordran
The Linking of the Fire
The Abyss
Reactions to the Abyss (likely multiple essays)
The Lords of Cinder

These are high-level areas for exploration. It’s entirely possible I will need to delve more granularly, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Regardless, welcome. Let’s see what’s waiting in the dark.