CD Community: Dark Souls 3 Discussion

[Not Batman]

As you all know, Dark Souls 3 has released.

As you all also must know, I am a massive Dark Souls fan.

(Minor spoilers for DS 3 ahead)

I completed the game a few days ago with the aid of much Sunny D, monster, and Papa Johns. The game was nothing short of spectacular, FromSoft really brought the A-game with this one. That all said, there were a few things about the lore in Dark Souls that never sat right with me...until I had a bit of a eureka moment. Dark Souls is known for mingling the OOC and the IC, Souls series director and creator Hidetaka Miyazaki stated in early Dark Souls 1 interviews that our own drive to play the game reflects on how the Undead Curse influences our character. Have you given up on the character of the game? Well, the character has gone hollow! The Souls series has always been known for staggering visuals, brutal difficulty and its ever expanding hunt for lore. This lore is sometimes missing massive chunks, based on interpretation and so on, but from a game that is so detail focused, why would holes remain in such a world and game where "the devil is in the detail" is the core philosophy? The holes were stated to be intentional, as when Miyazaki was growing up, he loved to read English folklore and mythology, but his grasp on the language was rather poor and it left him with having holes in the story, so he filled those parts in himself. Where the hell am I going with this?

THE FLOW OF TIME IN LORDRAN IS CONVOLUTED.

Now, we've all known this from the start with our good buddy Solaire pointing this all out to us with his offers of jolly cooperation and the White Sign Soapstone. The mechanics of Dark Souls themselves are very well integrated with the lore, but there was always one that was never explained in any real capacity. This is the bloodstains left behind be a player upon their death. Why would such an important mechanic go unexplained? That is what I sought to figure out. As the Dark Souls games have progressed, we have witnessed the flow of time becoming more and more disturbed. In Dark Souls 3, we finally see a world where the fire has faded almost entirely and the world begins to seemingly collapse in upon itself in the "Fireless Shrine" where we find the "Eyes of the Firekeeper". Ludeleth confirms that this world was so completely devoid of flame that it was an all consuming darkness, in the areas following the shrine, we see the effects of the world collapsing, becoming compacted. This is when it hit me. The world is tired, every time we see the flames start to fade and darkness grow, we must link the fires to PRESERVE THE WORLD, not to preserve just the Age of Fire. If the fire fades entirely, the world dies. Here comes the spooky part. In Demon Ruins, we find Knightslayer Tsorig who has ran about killing famous knights of his world including Raime and Tarkus. Wait a minute, we kill Raime, and see where Tarkus fell to his death. Each players world varies greatly, but the events of our games are the ones that indeed happen and are chronological in our world. Tarkus' death is an absolute, in all worlds he dies in Anor Londo. Tarkus' armor is also a set unique to itself, no other knight of his land had armor forged of black iron. The other point I must make is the death of fellow undead. We as the main character can die again and again and again, and must return to our bloodstain to gather our souls, but other undead characters die and remain dead, mostly (Examples: Lautrec, Solaire, Oscar, Patches, Havel, Pate, Creighton). It is referenced time and again that in Dark Souls, there is more than one world, it is a multiverse where we all coexist. Dark Souls is a multiverse. With Multiverse Theory taken into consideration, deaths could be the element that forges a new universe. When we die, we are not simply resurrecting at a bonfire, but what if instead we are moving to another world where we did not die and must collect our former power from our old world? Makes a bit more sense why we see the stains left by other players deaths. These worlds all overlap with one another, we just only see the phantoms of other ages and worlds when we are closest to them, giving us a sense of unease when we see something we should not, when a shadow of what we -could- be passes by us. We glimpse other possibilities for our own lives. The bloodstains are not then just a marker left to give us some insight into how someone died, but also mark where one world began and another ended due to that worlds key figure's death. Ever stain is a point where a world fractures and becomes two worlds, effectively, a physical representation of the scars left on the multiverse by these new worlds being created. Our attachment to the world becomes something so much more fickle when the past experiences are all a lie, that this world is a fresh construct. The hollow beings around us have no real connection to us and our experiences, they just have false memories of them, not genuine ones forged from the actual blood they must shed, it's all just bound by these ripples of our previous world. Could this be why Dark Souls has so much left to interpretation? It's not because the gaps are SUPPOSED to be filled in by us by lack of knowledge, but maybe because the knowledge doesn't exist. The worlds bend and split to accommodate for this shattered time, things can understandably be lost, people who would perform important deeds to connect to other events are lost in time struggling to correct itself. It isn't that the lore just isn't included in the game, it doesn't exist in that world.

Lordran never had this issue before the events of the first game, before the creation of the Undead Curse. What was it then that set all of this in motion? I might have an answer. In the Age of Lords, Gwyn and his allies set out to do war with the Everlasting Dragons. That is the key "Everlasting". The Four Lords destroyed something that was to be eternal, immortal, EVERLASTING. In our own mythologies, serpents are looked at as a representation of time, dragons themselves are akin to serpentine creatures with with their long, flexible bodies. The dragons were not just giant beasts keeping men down, but also the only things that kept time in one piece. When Gwyn and the other lords destroyed these supposed-to-be-eternal beings, they started the road that led to not only the First Sin, but also destroying time itself.

Let me know what you think, and post your own headcanon below.