I was thinking about the power of music in FromSoft games.
While I never hit that point myself (getting stuck on Ornstein and Smough and thus only getting about halfway through the game,) one of the most famous shocks in gaming music history is the melancholy "plin plin plon" of Gwyn's battle music in the original Dark Souls. Here, a Zeus-like patriarchal deity, most powerful of all the Lords, is confronted not to the tune of an epic, soaring orchestra, but a tragic piano piece that tells the players more than any other cue that the Gwyn we face is a hollow shell of the god he once was - he has given his very soul to the Fire, and tragically, this was not enough to keep his Age of Fire going forever. Gwyn, misguided and guilty of many crimes with the noble goal of perpetuating his golden age, is set up to be someone we can hate, the oppressor and tyrant whom we can take down, but when we finally meet him, he's a figure of pity, and his defeat at our hands is more of a mercy than the vanquishing of a villain.
There's a trope common to a lot of games that come from Japan - also very prevalent in Final Fantasy - where the final boss of a game is celestial, angelic, deific in aesthetic. In FF, consider our confrontations with Kefka, Sephiroth, and most recently Ultima in FFXVI. Both Kefka and Sephiroth are mortals who have attained some kind of divinity, and now sport angelic wings (or just a single one in the latter's case) and are fought in a sky where sunlight is only kept from blinding us by fluffy clouds limned in gold.
Elden Ring, having its extensive Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, effectively has two final bosses (much as Dark Souls and Bloodborne did, and DSIII kind of had three thanks to having two DLCs, though the latter can only be accessed after finishing the former). Elden Ring's two "final bosses," though, are both not only aesthetically coded along these deific lines, but the victory-toast the game gives you when either boss is defeated is "God Slain."
In traditional mythological terms, the villains defeated and/or slain by heroes are monstrous - it is the gods themselves who, in Greek and Norse myth, defeat the monsters. Zeus reestablishes himself as the rightful king of the gods by burying Typhon, the ultimate monster, under Mount Etna. The Norse gods, being a bit more metal (and a bit more death-culty, to be frank) are destined to fall in battle against monstrous foes - Odin rides into the maw of Fenrir, Thor slays Jormungandr but dies to the world-serpent's final poisoned breath, and Heimdall and Loki fall to one another in battle, the latter having transgressed beyond mischief and into true chaos.
In Abrahamic tradition, Satan/Lucifer plays the role of the ultimate evil (especially in Christianity and Islam - Judaism believes in more of a monopolar cosmos) and his fall from grace comes with a monstrous transformation. Among the most powerful icons in Christianity is the archangel Michael casting Lucifer down from heaven, Michael a paragon of human-like beauty (albeit with immaculate white bird's wings) and Lucifer growing grotesque and monstrous in shape.
There is a whole other post to be written about the way that foreign deities were incorporated as demons in Abrahamic demonology, and how that's clearly paralleled in Elden Ring's literal demonization of the hornsent into the omens, but while traditional fantasy tends to buy into this dichotomy of the angelic/celestial as good and grotesque/infernal as evil, our heroes rarely find themselves in opposition to the light/heavenly-affiliated forces.
And yet, there is something deep in the tradition that suggests a degree of skepticism: Lucifer literally means light-bringer, and he's often given the epithet Morning Star (I believe that Lucifer is sometimes directly translated as that). For all the aesthetics of light being good, there's always been, baked into that, a certain skepticism.
I'll come out and say this: I don't really think I can give a comprehensive definition of Gnosticism. It's a religious/spiritual belief system that is sort of parallel to Christian thought but also in some cases incorporated into it. Gnosticism seeks "gnosis," or knowledge.
Gnosticism, as I understand it, is a diverse and complex set of beliefs, and I once again want to just place this caveat that I'm someone who has just browsed some wikipedia articles about it, so take everything with the message "this is more complex than I'm going to be able to phrase it here."
However, among the most fascinating ideas within Gnosticism is the notion of a Demiurge.
The demiurge is a being who created the physical world, but this act was not the true creation of the cosmos. Instead, it was at best misguided and at worst, an sin against the true creator. Here, the Manichean notion of dualism - of the pure, holy existence of the soul and the profane, imperfect existence of the body - means that as conscious beings, we're trapped in the physical world, and that only through spiritual purification can we escape and live as the luminous, eternal beings unbounded by the profane world and experience true life.
This is such a fascinating idea, and it's one that also underlies a lot of ideological territory I, personally, find repugnant. Like, for example, I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said "Forget global warming, worry about earthly burning," which I understood to mean that we should ignore the dangers of climate change and focus only on religious devotion - something I consider more of an ideological cover for irresponsibility and capitulation to a capitalist drive to extract resources heedless of the damage it does to the ecosystem we rely upon to survive.
And yet, there is something compelling to the idea that this physical world we know is not the be-all and end-all, that even if we've lived a life of pain and misery, a better world awaits us on the other side of the veil of death.
Life is, after all, imperfect. Growing up, we struggle for freedom, unaware of what support we might lack, and our prime years of our physical peaks end far earlier than seems fair, only for us to decline and endure new, lasting pains. There are many things we can do to mitigate this, and spirituality is one of the most popular practices to do so. For the moments of joy we experience in life, it seems cruel and unfair that we might not simply extend those moments indefinitely.
The symbol of the Ying-Yang is sometimes depicted with a white circle in the black half and a black circle in the white half, making it almost look like two fish intertwined with one another. And I think that reflects, to some extent, an ambiguity of which impulse we are following.
The conflict between good and evil as a foundational idea in human psychology and culture, but it's also a difficult one to pin down - for example, on a political level, the very people who I consider to be our society's villains and enemies to the rightful order of the world, will often use "evil" to describe their opponents - their opponents being the proponents of something more closely approximating my beliefs of how our society should work.
But I think there's another kind of meta-conflict here that gets complicated when we put it through the filter of Gnosticism.
The deific antagonists of these games are often, or at least sometimes, not so much evil for the sake of evil as they are committed to an apocalyptic ideology. And I want to just quickly clarify that while modern parlance takes "apocalyptic" to mean "world-ending," the literal meaning is "revelation." Calypso was a Greek goddess of secrets, and so "apocalypse" was the revelation of that hidden truth. (Which is why the Christian book about the end of the world, likely actually written as an allegorical piece of political commentary about Emperor Nero, is the Book of Revelations).
Both Gwyn and Marika wind up turning benign or perhaps neutral forces into monstrous dangers out of a fear of their power - the Dark is sealed away by Gwyn and becomes this monstrous Abyss. Marika seals away the Outer Gods, and each goes from something natural and orderly, like Rot's protective verdigris and preservation as seen in Rauh into the Annihilation-like chaos of Caelid. Miquella's goal of perfect peace and compassion creates paranoid zealots like Leda who cannot tolerate anything but a lockstep hive-mind.
While I don't know if the Dark Souls games ever give a real origin to Gwyn's doubts, Elden Ring's demiurge allegory is more explicit - we find that the beings who orchestrate the succession of divinities are themselves receiving their marching orders from a being that has lost her connection to the Greater Will. The role of demiurge in Elden Ring's cosmos could arguably be played by Marika or Metyr, or even the Elden Beast, but in each case (Elden Beast maybe get back to me on that,) the instructions are garbled, and the intended order is broken.
Indeed, to the adherents of the Flame of Frenzy, even the Greater Will might, itself, be a false demiurge - the broken, split-off remnant of the true god, the One Great, whose error in leaving this state of singular wholeness was an mistake whose only remedy is the re-merging of all things into a singular state once again (as horrific as that might be).
However, I think that figures like Marika and Miquella might actually fit another trope:
Mysticism, broadly speaking, is spiritual practice that seeks to attain some higher state of being. In some readings, it's the attempt to achieve godhood. The practice of Alchemy, which ultimately gave rise to modern science, was one such practice, which sought to achieve spiritual aims through understanding the physical matter of the universe and how to manipulate it.
Modern, secular science, was kind of born out of the abandonment of this mystical aspect - seeking to understand physical law without any prejudicial notions about the moral or metaphysical implications.
Gnosticism is, arguably, a mystical practice - the belief that one could escape the false world of the demiurge through spiritual purification is itself that kind of ascension.
And yet, I think that mystics make for excellent villains in fantasy stories. Elden Ring is awash with alchemical imagery (consider how important the various metals are, especially gold, silver, quicksilver, and copper - the "red gold" of the crucible) and I think it's implied that the manner in which Marika ascended to godhood, as well as the steps that Miquella is taking to do the same, are some profound working of an alchemical Magnum Opus (Marika herself has become a Rebis, a being of female and male aspects, the white queen and the red(-haired) king).
In another stand-out of the Souls-like genre, Lies of P, while doing a very unique take on the story of Pinnochio, makes its primary villains Alchemists, a group of people who want to transcend humanity to become god-like immortals, and have used ancient, powerful magic to distill human memory and consciousness into physical material they can use as fuel for their ascension.
And I think this is all, strangely, in keeping with the Mystical practice - even as mystics try to attain secret, esoteric knowledge to ascend, there's an implied danger - that if you follow the wrong path, you'll wind up more like the demiurge. Even with the best intentions, you might wind up creating greater suffering and greater evil if you fail to get it right.
I'm reminded, actually, of the story of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings. While his predecessor, the first Dark Lord Morgoth, was basically just someone who sought to usurp god and ruin creation in favor of whatever he wanted to do, Sauron genuinely repented his affiliation with Morgoth, but it was in this repentance that he found his second fall - Morgoth's corruption had left the world irrevocably damaged and tainted, and Sauron wanted to fix it. But his project to fix it ultimately led him to convince himself that he needed to become an absolute tyrant so that others couldn't interfere with his plans, and when people wouldn't just stand aside, his frustration turned into cruelty and, you know, basically the Dark Lord we all know from the story.
But, even if by the point he's showing up as Annatar, the Gift-Giver, and distributing rings of power, he's probably become pretty cynical and deceitful, he's still got this angelic visage that he uses to appear as a benign heavenly messenger, and perhaps he does, still, genuinely, believe that that's his true form.
What, then, is the remedy? What is the opposing force to these demiurges?
Well, ironically, it's the anti-mystic. It's the humanist.
Now, the way my dad describes it, my sister and I were raised as secular humanists. He's both an atheist and a scientist, raised in an irreligious but culturally Jewish family (there are distant cousins on that side who are quite orthodox, but my dad and grandparents were not believers. My mom was a kind of agnostic cultural Catholic, and while she had big problems with the Church (especially after the sex abuse scandals) she never fully renounced a belief that there might be some truth to the supernatural, spiritual message.
Humanist has often been conflated with atheism, often by humanists themselves, but I think my stance is a little more agnostic (Carl Sagan, a famous humanist, also considered himself an agnostic, but I think leaned farther toward the atheist end of that spectrum).
But what I think is that the philosophical stance of humanism is not as concerned with determining whether there is some supernatural element to the universe or whether god exists, as much as it is the stance that those questions, however compelling, don't need to be the basis for moral and ethical philosophy. It is a belief (as I see it) that the answer to what is moral and right is not some esoteric mystery to be coded in secret symbols, but is something that we humans are equipped to understand on a basic level: that the simple act of treating others with respect and empathy is a better guide to living a moral life than some thousands-of-years-old book of mythology.
Ironically, opponents of humanism might view it as an arrogant position, usurping the wisdom of the divine with the beliefs of mere mortals, but I think one of the core values of humanism is humility - the readiness to adjust one's view when new ideas are presented to you.
Humanism also embraces this humility with a fundamental, underlying belief that the classic social hierarchies are man-made, and should not be viewed as inherent. A person's poverty is not necessarily a sign of divine disfavor, but might simply be the product of one's circumstances.
Humanism also focuses in on the real and tangible - rather than seeking to ascend past one's nature through some kind of mystical ascension, the humanist instead tries to embrace the experience of being human and embrace it with all of its imperfections.
And there's an irony - part of why I mentioned the Ying-Yang earlier - because on one level, you could see humanism as the very opposite of Gnosticism. Here, humanism embraces the world as it is, the flawed world of the demiurge, and dismisses the fabled spiritual world beyond as either a fantasy or at least an irrelevancy.
But it's also possible that this is the very spiritual enlightenment that such mystical practices seek to find.
Among the two most popular religious traditions in the world, Christianity and Buddhism, espouse the abandonment of desires for worldly gains - Buddha was a prince who experimented with asceticism, but found that a middle path was the true route to enlightenment. Jesus sought to model a moral way of living, but did so by fraternizing with lepers, thieves and prostitutes, showing them empathy and kindness when the society as a whole saw them as impure and wicked.
My humanist reading on these spiritual traditions is that both model an embrace of humanism - and essentially that the dogged obsession with spiritual purification is itself an obstacle toward true spiritual growth.
Boy, we got really deep on philosophy. What does this have to do with video games?
Well, these games present us with grand, sweeping, epic narratives of those who would remake and reshape the world, and it places us frail mortals, as mortal combatants against gods. We are humans - flawed, corrupted, profane, magnificent.
The games tend to give us multiple endings, and at least FromSoft's games tend to make the morality of these endings very ambiguous. Is it better to Link the Fire, and extend Gwyn's age into a third, likely diminished phase, or is it better to see the rise of the Dark? Shall we restore the Elden Ring and Marika's reign, and if so, adjust the order to better fit the world in some way? Or shall we see some new age of stars, with as-yet-unknown wonders and terrors to come?
The thing is, I don't know that the ending is the point. I think that whatever new reality results from our actions, it's more important that we deal with the reality as it is.
If this feels unsatisfying, that the conclusion is simply "well, whatever happens happens," then yeah, that's the frustration of having this kind of worldview. But that very frustration is also part of the human experience. It's one of the imperfections that makes us who we are. Our heroes are not just about preserving a static status quo, but neither are we going to go along with anyone with a plan to change things up. We will take all things on their own terms.
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