You're taken to Firelink Shrine, where an NPC tells you to ring the two Bells of Awakening and you'll discover what to do next. You wake in the Undead Asylum, and shortly thereafter are told for the first time you're the Chosen Undead - a phrase that will be repeated many times, by many different characters. Here is the story of Dark Souls if the players moves through it and does what they're told. The player wakes in Lordran thousands of years after these events. B-b-but where's Solaire? I thought this article was about lore! Yeah yeah, he's got a good shot of being Gwyn's firstborn, and personally I think he is, but the ambiguity's there for a reason. Shortly thereafter Gwyn leads the Witch and Nito against the everlasting dragons and, with the help of traitor Seathe the Scaleless, they destroy them and the Age of Fire begins - the gods rule. Four individuals discover the First Flame - Lord Gwyn, the Witch of Izalith, Gravelord Nito and the Furtive Pygmy - and from this it granted four Lord Souls. Humans are around at this point but very much an underclass. The starting point of Dark Souls' world is the everlasting dragons, which in the brief snatches we see seem to rule the world comfortably.
How could this mechanical necessity be a part of the lore? If we briefly digress on Gwyn, the mythology's central figure, even elements like this are explained. One of Dark Souls' most iconic aspects is the bonfires that dot Lordran, for example, and their function as a checkpoint/respawn for the player. But the point is not the believability of individual details so much as their fitting within a larger context where each supports the other - a coherent world. This doesn't mean everything can be explained - this is still a fantasy game about dragons and gods that features, among other examples, a talking cat and a sentient, courtly mushroom. There are coins in the game which have no value in Lordran, just to drive home the point. Souls are an object of obsession for many characters and, in the case of the Lord Souls, worship. We as a player collect souls, use them to gain more power and buy things, and therefore in this brutal landscape it makes sense that souls are desired not just by us, but by others. This is one of the ways Dark Souls gradually constructs meaning: things like a unit of currency are often arbitrary in video games, but here the economic role of Souls ties into the larger cultural and economic systems of Lordran. We all have a sense of meaning for what a soul is, for what humanity might be, but these terms in Dark Souls have a specific meaning which must be reverse-engineered out of what we are told and can observe. Lore-hunting in these games is a noble pursuit, and both Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 are well-served by a large community of youtubers (the best starting point is EpicNameBro's channel.) I'll summarise the key narrative beats of both games but, for the sake of length and sanity, it's impossible to go into real detail on the many (brilliant) side-stories both games contain.Ī starting principle with Dark Souls' narrative techniques is that familiar words are used as disguises. This makes any summary, much less one hoping to cover Dark Souls' narrative structure and techniques as well as lore, more interpretative than a straight presentation of verifiable facts. And in using such threads to construct its world, Dark Souls crafts a web of conspiracy theories. This roots Dark Souls' lore in aspects of historic mythology to an end far greater than mere reference - the creation and use of mythology is a key theme in Lordran, and real world examples act as the comparison point for how this happens. The piece suggests this apparently-modern worldview can be traced back to Homer, "who conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened on the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies on Olympus." The squabbling of the gods, their alliances and contests, both give meaning to and excuse the actions of humans.Ī key influence on Dark Souls is western mythology, most obviously the visual parallel between Gwyn and Zeus, ranging from the classical pantheons of Greece and Rome to Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Norse equivalents. Karl Popper wrote a short-but-sweet essay called "The Conspiracy Theory of Society," in which he pours scorn on various ideas about one group or the other secretly running the world. "No matter how tender, how exquisite, a lie will remain a lie." - Lord Aldia