The Dark Souls series is set in a bleak world inspired by western fantasy, but made by Japanese game studio From Software by director Hidetaka Miyazaki. At the core of the series is the problem of sustainability. When the first game begins, you get an epic cinematic in which the history of the world is told - once, the world was grey and unchanging, with only grey trees and stone dragons who looked over the static expanse. Then, some entities, deep within the earth, discovered the First Flame, and with it, the Lord Souls. These beings would become god-like lords and bring about a new age, slaying the dragons, burning the arch trees, and introducing disparity - between life and death, and between light and dark - to create a new age of Fire.
During this age, Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, ruled as a divine king, and civilizations grew - both Gwyn's glorious kingdom of Anor Londo, and a number of human realms.
But, over time, the Fire began to fade - and as it did, disparity itself began to break down. The Curse of Undeath began to infect humanity, causing the dead to rise once again, but suffer from the effects of "hollowing." Each time they rose, a little of their individuality, intelligence, and personal will would fade. By the time of the first Dark Souls game, the undead are being shuffled off to remote asylums to wait out until the end of the world. However, as your character hears, there may be a way to solve this problem - a "Chosen Undead" can journey to Lordran - the realm of the lords - and ring the bells of awakening to address the issue. Once the player does so, they are informed that they can "Link the Fire" and thus reignite the Age of Fire, restoring true life to the people and allowing the world to escape its decline into stagnation and dread.
The "good" ending of the first game has the player discover that Gwyn sacrificed himself, burning away his own soul to fuel the First Flame - which was how they solved this problem the first time it happened - and in it, the player sacrifices themself in the same way.
By the time Dark Souls III comes around (and I'll confess I don't really know much DSII lore, but I'm given to understand that III follows much more from I) this cycle has repeated itself several times, such that there are numerous "Lords of Cinder" who had taken Gwyn's place. In III, when the prince who was literally bred and raised to be the next Lord of Cinder refuses to do so, a contingency plan goes into effect, where several former Lords of Cinder gather to collectively give up what they have left to keep the flame going - though even that fails, as the re-awakened undead Cinder Lords don't actually show up, for various reasons (except Ludleth, good old Ludleth.)
One never gets to see the lands of Dark Souls at their height - the game is all about visitng these places after they have fallen - either to decadence or to post-apocalyptic ruin. While the player's actions are, in theory, a source of hope for the people of this world, that hope is generally a very bleak and desperate one.
Dark Souls' world seems to just want to fall apart. The almost gravitational pull to this stagnant, static nature is so persistent - even though the first game might suggest that the Age of Fire could be preserved with just a little maintenance, the implications of the third game suggest that it's getting harder and harder to achieve with diminishing returns.
And that got me thinking: that's kind of like the Shadowfell, isn't it?
In D&D, the Shadowfell is a realm parallel to our own, but it's darker and bleaker and filled with the undead. Sort of the opposite number to the Feywild, it's a weirdly parallel world, where the geography is similar, but different (a great video game example would be the Dark World from Link to the Past.)
But while the normal world is filled with a mixture of life and death, energy and entropy, the Shadowfell saps vitality from those within it. Color is drained from things, and if a player character spends too much time there, they'll slowly lose their motivation and fall into a kind of depressive stupor.
A bit like Hollowing, don't you think?
The Shadowfell is associated strongly with the undead, as well as monstrosities that are based on negative emotions - the Sorrowsworn. Undeath is a kind of stagnation - it has none of the energy or drive of life, and even the more charismatic and motivated undead, like vampires, tend to be kind of empty inside, ever searching for something that will give them meaning beyond the monstrous tedium of their existence. But it's also not really death, which, in D&D terms, means going on to the Outer Planes, where the higher concepts of good, evil, law, and chaos give its inhabitants the kind of eternal purpose that doesn't lose meaning over time. Depression, to use my personal definition, is a kind of transcendent boredom, and undeath seems to require this kind of mental disconnect as the body withers away and the individuals are stuck in meaningless patterns.
As I see it, the Feywild is manic - with its capricious and whimsical-yet-deadly fey creatures always jumping from one passion to another - while the Shadowfell is depressive, stuck in stagnation without any real hope of getting out of the rut.
To my mind, then, you could interpret the Dark Souls universe as some corner of the Shadowfell in which a fragment of another plane of existence - the Feywild, or the outer planes, the positive energy plane, or even the material plane - somehow got in, and some undead beings found it, giving them purpose and meaning and motivation. They created a whole new world around this powerful source of magic, and made something resembling the material plane. But over time, the true nature of the Shadowfell began to work its way into this new world, and the bleakness began to sap and diminish the First Flame.
Thus, the dying of the First Flame and the coming of darkness is just the Shadowfell finally reasserting itself.
Of course, what this would then imply is that the hope for the people of that universe would be to somehow escape to the material plane. But that is probably easier said than done.
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