No Seriously, I'm Still Rambling About Dark Souls

Ive had an odd feeling watching this the whole way through and i think I finally know what it is. Dark Souls has this feeling that we’re playing the aftermath of a video game. That its already been completed and now we’re going through a world that has to deal with whats happened.

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This is an especially apt way of putting that because Dark Souls 2 and 3 really are exactly this to 1 and then both 1 and 2, and, well, it only gets worse

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Stephen King’s Dark Tower series describes the world it takes place in as having “moved on”. That phrase captures how the world of Dark Souls (1 in particular) always makes me feel.

(It’s entirely possible that I stole that from something like Bonfireside Chat and don’t remember.)

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I’ve been watching and enjoying these LPs. I will never play a Souls game, but I do like appreciating them through LPs. I think DS1 is my favorite because the mythic feeling is strongest, and I feel like it has more of a structure with the aspects of fire divided up among the lords.

In the latest episode you point out a moment when you open doors out of the archive and it looks like you’re seeing the sun, but it turns out to be a tower of crystal. I totally got a lore shiver… I have never been sure how to reconcile Seath and the archives, and why he’s hanging out in Anor Londo, but now it makes sense. The crystal is kind of like light-without-heat, light-without-life. It’s Seath’s attempt to gain immortality by hacking fire. Crystal magic is opposed to pyromancy, which is about chaos. It’s about too much life, life running amok, it is heat and Izalith and the fake sunlight of lava reflected off a dome. Seath’s crystal magic is about a cold light, extensive knowledge that is ultimately fruitless and sterile, which totally fits in with Anor Londo.

I enjoy this kind of lore wankery obvs. The thing with the crystal being fake sunlight really made a big chunk click into place, so thank you.

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Seath was given Dukedom by Gwyn (and a part of Gwyn’s soul) for betraying the Everlasting Dragons. As we explore Seath’s Archive we discover that Seath was, well, a pretty fucked up dude, but clearly he was able to get away with all of it due to his pivotal role in Gwyn’s war

The crystal standing in for the sun is a very interesting symbol, with a lot of meaning. For one thing, from a purely gameplay perspective, it’s the false end of the level, where you believe you’re made to believe that you got through the hard part and are coming up on the end. You’re meant to think you’ve escaped the prison, but it turns out even that’s a fakeout, because if you die before finding another bonfire it’s right back to the tower

In the bigger picture, the sun is a symbol of Gwyn’s power, and ultimately of fire itself. Seath betrayed the dragons to get that which he lacked, but ultimately what he found proved wanting, and pushed him further into the research of sorcery and crystals. Once we complete the area we’ll have a clearer view of his motivations, but it suffices to say that crystals and sorcery, as they go further are always portrayed as an unnatural, corrupting extension of the soul, twisted for dark and ultimately selfish purposes

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I’d also like to hear your thoughts about what Humanity is, how it relates to the fire. And like, what the hell is Frampt and what is his deal. If you get time to type/talk about that?

(I can’t remember if you have talked about these in a previous video, sorry, it’s been a long LP.)

He hasn’t talked about either, but since I’m PRETTY sure Vicas is gonna be doing the DLC we’ll be getting a good ole talk about what it means to be a human, re the wriggling black darkness you can squish into luck juice.

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Both of those are big picture questions that I’ll definitely talk about as we learn more. At some point soon I’m planning on spinning up a second character to take a road less traveled, which will give a bit more insight into both of them

There’s a ton of story and blank-filling left in the relatively few sections of the game we have coming up, but if we don’t end up touching on everything we can always talk about it more in the thread. Even if often times the answer is probably “who knows” or “it doesn’t really matter” (coughsolairefirstborncough)

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Here we go, last episode of this session. Luckily, I recorded another one today, so we should be able to just roll on


54 - Big Fash Logan

I feel like given Logan’s eventual fate (which we haven’t gotten to yet) and the fact that he’s so… pleasant about being so reprehensible, a lot of people don’t harp on what an awful person Logan actually is. You’re kind of meant to take him as the poster child for the Vinheim Dragon School, which we’ve already discovered is corrupted to the core and has done many awful things in the name of their “science,” just like Seath

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…good lord you’re right Big Hat is so affable that no one notices that he’s actually kind of super evil. Wow. I guess havin’ a goofy big hat does that for you.

I think if there is a poster child for Vinheim in Dark Souls 1, it is Griggs. Vinheim dragon school isn’t like Logan, who will drop his morals in the pursuit of knowledge*, or Seath, who it seems had no morals to drop.
The dragon school is, from every description we get, pursuing knowledge of sorcery to maintain the monopoly on sorcery and sorcerers that gives it “effective sovereignty” over Vinheim as a nation. It’s unsavoury in a political, assassin-having way that Logan isn’t, and Seath only touches on.

Logan’s willingness to work with the school is an early warning that he will accept knowledge from awful sources, and that people come to the dragon school for the love of learning and leave corrupted by it does seem to be a bit of a thing, but Logan’s casual sharing of knowledge, quaintness in contrast to the school’s rigid discipline and mandatory dresscode-for-life, and seeing sorcery as a science more than a weapon (contrast Griggs on the subject of “blasting away”) puts him at odds with the school, and some item descriptions seem to reinforce this schism in thinking.
Griggs, by contrast, is a proper Vinheim sorcerer, outside of his connection to Logan, and all his equipment talks about exactly how he fits in their heirarchy.

*I think that his reputation even beyond Vinheim as a hero, even to characters who don’t care about sorcery, and his general kindness, indicate that he isn’t a man of no morals whatsoever, he seems to believe in doing right by people whenever anything other than sorcery is at stake. But that is just my own opinion.

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But I feel like that’s exactly the thing about Logan, he’s a nice enough guy who’d prefer not to get his hands dirty, but when it comes to magic and knowledge he’s perfectly happy to accept that the terrible actions taken by both the school and Seath were “necessary” in the name of “progress.” If anything he’s quite happy that Seath did all this dirty work for him, despite the plainly disastrous results

The point about Griggs being more typical of the Vinheim school is certain true, but if Logan’s wish is only to see the spread of magic at all costs, it certainly doesn’t paint him in a very positive light, especially given what we’ve seen it do to Seath

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The difference is that Griggs is on a job to stab Logan, and Logan’s just kinda fuckin’ around. The casual “ooh this crystal stuff is neat. Horrible, but neat” mentality the Big Hat has what makes him worse, I think?

Logan seems like a Trump cabinet pick, though I think Seath might already be Peter Thiel.

I like how Logan is totally oblivious that the world is actually spent, the light’s going out, that he’s talking to the representative of the coming darkness. He’s like imagining his next paper for Sorcery Journal.

I personally disagree with the theory Griggs is outright 100% out to kill Logan. Grigg’s “Have you tried using one of Logan’s sorceries yet?” line both calls Logan a hero, and, when the voice acting is heard, makes his passion for sorcery incredibly obvious (it also mentions awful rumours surrounding logan, and says “the annals of history will prove dispassionate”, so you get another, pretty blunt early hint about Logan’s ability to bend his morals in pursuit of progress).
Griggs, I believe, is following Logan because he genuinely loves sorcery, but is politically able to follow Logan because he was apprenticed to him to act as a spy for the college, and perhaps to quitely remove the eccentric old man if he became an embarrassment or shared sorceries the college didn’t want shared. And Griggs himself will share Logan’s sorceries with you once Logan takes you under his wing, which is part of why I personally think his loyalties are genuinely divided. But I respect that my ideas are a little speculative, so if you don’t find them convincing I respect that.

You mention that we’re completely intrusive on most of these areas. And it’s hard to tell what’s “canon” when this is technically a video game. But most of our genocidal runnings do just end up respawning. Now, whether that actually happens in reality or not is what I mean by “canon.” Do these being just get reborn constantly, or is that just a video game aspect and isn’t actually happening?

Of course. The ones that do matter in this case are the bosses, and those don’t respawn. So whether or not the quest is just is in the air on our actions of killing. If it comes down to the hundreds of beings that we slaughter and come back, we could just be an inconvenience for them.

The other thing you mention is that as we get further into our quest it seems more and more questionable. And it reminds me of the tumblr post that goes around saying that it’d be really cool if there was a game that has you setting out on an honorable quest, but as you go further and further you make more and more questionable decision. All until you finally realize that you were actually the villain the whole time. And that is what this is starting to feel like.

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I tend to see it like the god-LARPing hero quests from RuneQuest / King of Dragon Pass. In Dark Soul’s case it’s the big god-LARP at the end of the universe. When you kill Nito in your timeline, that doesn’t destroy Nito but it diminishes him or something.

I love how Dark Souls takes video game player behavior and weaves it into the game. The average gamer is, well, kinda an anonymous trash person murdering everything and not caring about it, cynical but not knowledgable. If you play like that, that’s the actual story that happens. Dark Souls is like, “Yep that’s you, an unthinking ruiner of things, a nobody carried along by larger forces you don’t understand to become a ‘hero’/sucker, a violent tool.”

The Duke’s Archives are a little less ambiguous though. Seath seems like a pretty big jerk who deserves a good zweihänderin’.

I think an important thing about Dark Souls is that while the main quest is very much meant to play on the players’ ignorance, it doesn’t actually try to rub your nose in it. You really aren’t meant to figure out that the main actors of the game are playing a trick on you in the first runthrough of the game. It draws a line directly between the player’s ignorance and their character’s ignorance, because in truth your character is most useful to the powers that be when they aren’t asking questions, just playing through all of this and doing what they’re told, up to and including this final quest to “take Gwyn’s place”

Also, in terms of the game universe and the overall story, when you kill Nito you are absolutely killing the primal being in charge of the administration of life and death, and we are absolutely planning on burning up what little power is left in his soul to extend the Age of Fire. It’s important to realize that in Dark Souls 2 the power that’s been left from these Great Lords’ souls is infinitesimal compared to what we see in Dark Souls 1, and in 3 it is literally running out.

The way I see it, the meta-narrative of multiple timelines is mostly to allow for multiplayer, and we can generally assume the timelines of other players are largely disconnected from our own, and the Lords themselves aren’t multi-dimensional beings whose power extends across these timelines so much as separate instances that each player encounters. The story just fits together better if you don’t really worry exactly how some of the gamey-er aspects plug into it, but that’s just my interpretation

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Another video, another session, another trip to Darkroot Basin. At least it shows up this time


55 - Dawn to Dusk

I swear actual progress will happen next video… sort of

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I admire Dusk’s ability to pop out of a crystal prison/golem and hit the ground looking flawless.

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