Warning: Dark Souls spoilers. Just go play it, what are you waiting for, ugh.
N.B. I'll be talking about Dark Souls as a case study throughout, but everything here applies to all of the SoulsBorne games: Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1 and 2, and (especially in terms of epistemology) Bloodborne.
The postmodern aspects of Dark Souls haven’t gone unnoticed, but the only investigations I’ve found are class projects, excuses for students to talk about their favorite game in a vaguely academic context. But Dark Souls is a work of postmodern narrative, a groundbreaking exploration of the storytelling techniques of its medium. I’m going to try to do this discussion a bit more justice than it’s received elsewhere. In this first part I'll start by outlining the way the game undermines moral absolutism. In the second part I'll discuss the epistemological implications of its approach to storytelling.
Fire and Dark
The central thematic image of Dark Souls is the flame. The interplay between Fire and Dark represents the fundamental axis of its world. In the context of fantasy, it feels familiar: an epic struggle of light vs dark that plays out on a mythic scale, with heroic challenges to be overcome to sway the balance towards the light. This is the model laid out in fantasy landmarks like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, where there is a strong correspondence between factions and universal moral poles. These are mythic settings where the moral narrative of the universe is accessible, the dark side and moral corruption tangible threats.
Dark Souls Japanese cover art
Most fantasy seeking to subvert that tradition opts for an intensely realist, materialist presentation. Characters in Game of Thrones and The First Law trilogy relate to morality in the same way we do: through cultures, institutions, and personalities. They measure themselves against individual standards and goals, rather than universal ideals. More common is a lower grade of ambiguity, painting in shades of gray. Moral poles are agreed on, but heroes are flawed and villains have redeeming factors. Factions, likewise, aren't monolithically comprised of evildoers or heroes.
Dark Souls, on the other hand, retains the mythic scale of the fantasy landmarks. It presents clearly coded moral endpoints, broadly aligned with factions. But it questions the assumption that these poles, even when they exist, are absolute and trustworthy. It shows us that even when the existence of gods is confirmed, when we have direct and firsthand knowledge of the nature of our alternatives, there is no way to determine the right course other than through our own learning and character. Morality in Dark Souls is not simply complex or muddied, but fundamentally unknowable. Its ambiguity isn’t a mystery, but an epistemological thesis.
The History of the First Flame
Let’s follow how this plays out in Dark Souls (most of this section is better recapped in this video if you’d rather).
The opening cinematic of Dark Souls (and it would be helfpul to go watch it, if you haven't) lays out the history of the world in broad strokes. The ancient dragons, immortal but somehow lifeless, existed in a state of gray and interminable stasis. Then the First Flame brought disparity: Light, but also Dark; Life, but also Death. Out of the Dark came the beings who would become the Gods, and they took the Lord Souls that gave them power from the First Flame. Using the strength of their Souls, they destroyed the dragons and established a new order in the world, the Age of Fire. But the First Flame was a reaction, as its fuel was consumed and scattered, the world ebbed toward the Dark.
Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, was chief among the Gods. He led the fight against the dragons, and later against the chaos demons. His family ruled atop a mountain in the clouds. Under their reign grand tombs and castles were constructed, and scholarship explored the nature of the Flame and the Soul. Gwyn split his Lord Soul to reward his allies, the Four Kings of New Londo and the Scaleless dragon, Seath. He maintained good terms with the other keepers of Lord Souls, the Chaos Witch of Izalith and Nito, the First of the Dead.
But now, Gwyn is gone and the Flame is scattered to embers. The Dark is upon us, and with it the curse of undeath.
That's an expanded summary of the opening cinematic, contextualized with many replays and hours of lore videos. The game is very tight-lipped. You have to stumble through many areas, killing zombies and demons without really understanding why, before a quest-giver finally pops out of a hole in the ground. The charmingly named Frampt is a sleepy serpent with a goofy flesh mustache and enormous teeth. He tells the player that they are “Fated to succeed Great Lord Gwyn” and “link the Fire, cast away the Dark, and undo the curse of the Undead.” Casting away the Dark, perpetuating the Age of Light, lifting Curses--this is all standard hero fare. At this point, it’s easy to assume that Gwyn is the king of the Gods, and that you’re on their side, aligned against all those demons you've been killing.
Kingseeker Frampt (Made by PointPony on DeviantArt)
And you’d never have any reason to think otherwise, if you didn’t go looking for it. Since the Light and Dark coding, the heroic feats and the fate of the world in the balance feel so familiar, fit so well with the armor and the demons and the dragons, our imaginations populate the lack of context with assumptions informed by decades of fantasy tropes. But the usual reinforcements of the player’s role are conspicuously absent. There are no townspeople to rescue from monsters, no mayor to give you the key to the city, no love interest to reward your bravery. Everything is in ruins, so there are no functioning structures to defend. It’s a sparse game, a rarefied landscape of ghostly figures and half-mad vagrants. It's hard to see how your efforts matter.
Dark Souls 2 Intro Cinematic
By the end of the game you might have caught on to the fact that Frampt is asking you to light your body on fire, giving yourself as fuel to extend the life of the Fire. You can choose not to do it, but this ending is self-sacrificing, noble, and maintains the status quo a little longer. It’s not entirely clear what that means for the few humans you meet in the game. The Age of Fire is in ruins when you link the flames, and the game gives you no indication that you’ll be restoring civilization to any heights of glory by doing so. There’s no cutscene of villagers celebrating. You meet a lot of kind and quirky people in Dark Souls, but each of their stories ends before you link the Fire. Linking the Fire doesn't seem to benefit them or harm them. There’s just not much context to justify your sacrifice.
If you go looking, you can find a second serpent, Kaathe, who will tell you another story. He informs the player that humans are in fact not a product of the Fire, but of the Dark. He encourages you not to link the Flame but to instead become the Dark Lord and usher in an Age of Dark, which, you are told, is the natural inheritance of humanity. Linking the Fire, after all, doesn't seem to benefit anyone but Frampt and the Gods. Becoming the Dark Lord after a serpent lets you in on “the truth” might raise some red flags, since it reads as straightforwardly evil in the standard fantasy shorthand. But you are a human, and so is everyone you know. It's their interests you're looking out for, so maybe you should listen to what this abyssal serpent has to say.
Perhaps you feel unfulfilled and go back to try to understand things a bit better. If you continue to interrogate the lore, evidence arises that suggests Gwyn and the other Gods inflicted the curse of undeath on humans in order to extend their own regime. This complicates the narrative’s moral reading substantially. Further, the evidence Frampt uses to build his narrative is deceptively engineered in ways the player can discover with some sleuthing. He and the Gods orchestrated the grueling series of tests that winnow candidates and prepare the player to be strong enough to extend the Age of Fire. They clothed the city of the Gods in illusions of grandeur to maintain belief in the power and inevitability of their regime, to conceal the reality of the Dark and their waning influence.
Further exploration also turns up dirt on Kaathe. He invites you to join a cult dedicated to stealing the essence of peoples' humanity, and he probably instigated a catastrophe that brought down a previous civilization. The Age of Dark may be the inheritance of humanity, but it’s not clear that humans can live well with the Dark—it seems to cause madness and dehumanizing deformity.
Although Dark Fog is, in theory, relatively close to humanity, it also happens to be a terrible poison for humans. Perhaps it reflects man's cruelty against his own. – Dark Fog
Living in the Age of Man?
The Dark seems genuinely apocalyptic, and it's peddled by a manipulative serpent. But the Gods are represented by an identical serpent, who is just as manipulative, and they seem to have incurred a curse to extend their rule. You may still side with them, but you know too much now to believe they are right simply because they are Gods. What are Gods, after all, other than people who happened upon a fragment of the First Flame?
The Good Ending
Plenty of games offer alternate endings, and plenty offer moral factions and choice systems. But alternate endings are usually clearly aligned with a moral side, a faction, or a character. It’s clear what it means to take the Dark Side ending in KOTOR, or to end up with Yennefer in The Witcher 3. Dark Souls uses fantasy and biblical cues to code our alternate ending options, but in its execution systematically undermines the trustworthiness of those cues. By severely limiting our perspective and access to information, it forces us to investigate and think, and ultimately to make arbitrary decisions with contingent justifications. It shows us that even living on the plane of the Gods does not change our relationship with moral truth. There is no intrinsic value to any of the game's endings.
You might recognize this as nihilism. Much discussion of Dark Souls has focused on its nihilist philosophy. In nihilism, value is created by observers, not baked into the universe. While Dungeons and Dragons tell players they are Good, Neutral, or Evil, and Star Wars games tell them they are on the Light side or Dark side of the Force, Dark Souls presents two choices but undermines their external framework.
The player is less Job experiencing a test of moral fortitude and loyalty to Good than a voter, presented with two competing positions. Its narratives are elaborated by individuals who present evidence and offer bribes (you could even argue that the city of the Gods is something of a political advertisement). Each player has to construct their own truth, based on their judgment and predilections. If you’re a Progressive, it might rankle that Gwyn and the other Gods use human souls to power their life of luxury while humans live in sewers far below. Or if you're a conservative, you might find this an acceptable bargain, reasonably fearing the chaos the Dark brought to Oolacile. But you cannot simply do the right thing, because there is no right choice.
Nihilism is both a philosophical tenet and a tone. Dark Souls has plenty of both. No matter which ending you choose, and no matter what you think of the Fire, it is still going to die out eventually. Even if you burn yourself alive to link the fire, the Age of Dark is coming. The most we can do is postpone it and sit in the light of the fire a little longer. In Star Wars, it is the rule that the light side ending is always canon; sequels always assume the light side ending in building on the history in their predecessors. Dark Souls 2 makes it aggressively clear that the player’s choice in the first game had no consequences for the people in the second game.
Dark Souls 2 Intro Cinematic
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