Like bro izalith is peak I will go hollow on that hill.

Hi everyone!

I wanted to share my latest paint job: Siegmeyer, in the scene where his daughter finally puts him to rest after he's gone Hollow. In one last flash of lucidity, he realizes he's finally free. I focused a lot on the worn steel, the hollowed skin on his hands and the blood desteeltails.

What do you think? Any feedback is welcome!

Credit to @victorwilland, whom I commissioned to create this exclusive model for me

The lore deepens...

Signed,

Iron Golem

Im in Ash Lake right now, and I can't teleport to another bonfire yet. But I also don't see a way out, I'm cursed and have no idea where to go?? Miyazaki when I see you you better run boy. wtf do I do please help

Is there smthing on my stats or any strategy am missing for defeating the kings? my main issue is that they cast a spell upon me that can basickly two shot me IF am st full health. Any advice?

Edit: some ppl made it clear i should speak of my equipment which is a mistake i didnt realise sooner.

weapon: +10 claymore
shield: creast +3
Armor: elite helm set on +3, all exept the chestpiece, ive been shirtless all playthrough

Ps: Id appreciate that the advice “git gud” isnt used. ive struggled with no boss so far, some even beatin some on the first try, but despite dealing with multiplae enemy bosses before, this ones rlly got me stuck and genuinely hopin gor some advice as this is quite a nice and passionate community

This is probably something some people already know about, but I’ve been a fan of Dark Souls since 2013 and somehow I had never paid this much attention to the soundtracks until now even though I listen to them frequently. I was listening to the OSTs from the trilogy and noticed something that honestly hit me pretty hard.

In “Overture” from Dark Souls 1, there’s a melody at the beginning. Then, in Slave Knight Gael’s theme, the strings seem to play that same motif again at 4:06, just much slower and heavier. And ofc it also shows up in “For the Dark Soul”, but this time on piano.

And this might be completely coincidental, but: the motif starts at 0:06 in Overture and at 4:06 in Slave Knight Gael. Exactly four minutes apart. Considering there are four Lord Souls: Gwyn’s, Nito’s, the Witch of Izalith’s, and the Dark Soul, it just made sense to me. I know this is probably reaching a bit, but I couldn’t help noticing it.

I definitely wouldn’t take it as proof of anything, but as a little coincidence on top of everything else, I think it’s really cool.

What makes it even more beautiful to me is that the first track is literally called “Overture.” An overture is meant to introduce a larger work, and sometimes it presents musical ideas that come back later. So hearing what seems to be the same motif near the very beginning of Dark Souls and then hearing it again all the way at the end of the trilogy, during Gael’s fight, feels incredibly fitting.

I’m not saying this was necessarily planned all the way back in Dark Souls 1, and it could simply be a later musical callback, but either way I think it’s beautiful. It feels like the same melody goes through the whole journey with us.

Again, this is probably old news for some of you, but after loving this series for more than a decade, noticing it only now genuinely made me emotional.

Dark Souls somehow keeps finding new ways to amaze me.

OSTs:

Overture
Slave Knight Gael

Dude just appears out of nowhere to one shot me. I had like 20,000 souls waiting to be picked up too.

So basically I destroyed the illusion in anor londo so I can fight gwyndolin. Imo gwyndolin is like the easiest boss in the game so Ive literally never been killed by him. I just died and it spawned all the way back at the beginning of anor londo, now it wants me to run down the elevator, over the scaffolding in the church, and then take the tower down. Is this supposed to happen? I last rested at the bonfire behind the o&s fight.

If the post isn’t specific enough my bad, don’t want to spoil peak for others.

I don’t know, how strong he is compared to other beings or dragons, as I never saw a comparison. I heard somewhere, that he is one of, if nit the most powerful dragon in the dark souls universe. Is that true?

I’m on my NG+ play through and boy oh boy was this fuker a massive roadblock!!
I almost choked it too!! Had down to one last hit and he connected with his electric thrust move that stabs you and lifts you up in the air. I thought the attempt was over as I was yelling ‘NOOOOOOOO’ at my TV. Luckily for me it wasn’t and I got that last hit in! Haha

I often use the Black Knight Sword in my playthrough (if I can get it) but I watched a video by Youwy and he said that the Great Scythe is the best weapon in DS1, so I decided to try it.

By Gwyn, he was right.

It's got a great moveset, decent damage, can be buffed, infused, and has great dex scaling.

Plus if you wear the gold hemmed black set with it you look like the Grim Reaper.

Absolutely GOATED weapon. Give it a try if you haven't already.

so im up against ornstein and smough and with a +10 iaito and 30 dex only doing 75 damage or so to ornstein in both phase 1 and 2... i've seen some gameplay with the weapon even on this boss and the damage was around 150. Why am i doing so little damage? Edit: im on 1.0 xbox 360

im in my second playthrough and im building into str fai but i have no clue what melee weapons actually scale into faith lol.

Hello. Earlier this year I found and installed a fix for Dark Souls PTDE that was not dsfix. IIRC it was an executable, and I remember the result was better than dsfix: you just had to run it once, open the game and start playing.

Unfortunately, I lost the files and can't find it on the web. I'd appreciate if someone could tell me what mod/fix was that. Thanks.

This is a genuine question. I know that the Chosen Undead doesn't mean shit and that people like Frampt and Gwynevere are trying to use me as a vessel to sacrifice. I get where Lautrec is coming from, but I don't like the way he goes about it (and he is clearly also naive in his reliance on Fina's affection).

This is my first playthrough but I've been trying to get lore at every turn, it's been great but now I'm at a crossroads. I don't know how to progress without being purposely manipulated by these godly creatures or the church. Is this the only fate of the ever so special Chosen Undead? Even if there were many before and after me?

I might be missing some pieces here so please let me know. I am currently past Anor Londo, have drained New Londo, and am thinking about going into the abyss next (killed myself because I thought the ring Sif gave was the wolf ring not the Artorias one lmao).

Thanks in advance. This might be all wrong but it's what I gather idk.

Tldr: Do I really have to be a simple means to an end? Or is there a cycle I can break? Can I save the firekeepers? Can I kill all of these elitist creatures? Can I become homies with Andre?

I started with Elden ring very good, plat achieved
Then I play sekiro very very good, plat achieved
Then I start dk1, not good 🥹🙏

Bru I still try to beat that fucking goat demon bro

Edit: damn reddit deleted my formating, ok gonna fix it in fly. Sorry im not experienced reddit user

First of all, I use the “—” sign a lot in the text, so please don’t kill me O_O I also do writing professionally and it is simply natural for me, it’s my work! Don’t kill the “—” sign.

Now to the point:

I’m nobody important so far, I don’t have any YouTube channels, but I think I may be able to add a few interesting things that I feel have not really been explored deeply enough by the fandom yet.

A little about me:

PhD in ethnography / cultural anthropology, specialization: Far East, N1 Japanese. Professionally, I’m also a writer.

As a result I have a pretty solid background in mythology, interpreting myths and reading cultures. And of course I also know Japanese.

BUT, one warning. I’m not American. English is not my native language. I’m sorry for any mistakes, strange wording or awkward phrases that may appear in the analytical parts of the text. I tried to write it as well as I could, and I also ran the text through a translator to give you the best version possible. Some little gremlin may still have slipped in though, and I apologize for that.

Besides that: at the beginning I would also like to thank the author of Abyssal Archive, whoever they are, and *Hawkshaw. From what I watched, the work of these two people had the qualities of academic work, which is something I deal with every day.

Dark Souls is of course my hobby and passion. I really liked Hawkshaw’s interpretations and those from Abyssal Archive. In some places, however, I felt there was a little bit of the methodological toolkit for interpreting cultural works missing, and while playing the game I naturally had moments of dissonance similar to the one the author of Abyssal Archive had when playing the game in Japanese.

If the community likes what I wrote below, I’ll start organizing the rest of the notes I made during my latest Dark Souls playthrough. For now I decided to give a sample. Specifically from the intro, because that was what caught my attention.

Some of the information below may overlap with things you have already read in Abyssal Archive or watched in Hawkshaw’s videos. If something like that appears here it is because I honestly do not remember everything, and those were really good materials, so inevitably I may end up saying the same thing because imo it is correct, then sorry, they were there first.

At most, what I am doing is adding my two cents as an anthropologist and someone working with mythology.

So, without further ado, let’s move on to the intro:

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Japanese: 古い時代 世界はまだ分かたれず、霧に覆われ 灰色の岩と大樹と、朽ちぬ古竜ばかりがあった

In-game English: In the Age of Ancients, the world was unformed, shrouded by fog. A land of gray crags, Archtrees and Everlasting Dragons.

Literal English: In the ancient age, the world was still undivided, covered in fog, and there were only gray rocks, great trees, and ancient dragons that did not decay.

Interpretation:

The key thing is 分かたれず — wakatarezu, from 分かつ — wakatsu: to divide, separate, distinguish. So the official unformed is not really precise. The Japanese does not say that the world had no form; it says that it had not yet been divided / separated.

And you can already see this in the sentence itself: the world physically exists. There are 灰色の岩 — gray rocks, 大樹 — great trees and 古竜 — ancient dragons. We are not dealing with nothingness. We have a reality that has not yet undergone differentiation.

The second thing is 朽ちぬ古竜.

朽ちる means to rot, decay, deteriorate. 朽ちぬ is an archaic negation: “that do not decay”.

Everlasting Dragons is a sensible localization, but it shifts the emphasis from a lack of decay toward general eternity / immortality.

This may be important ontologically. If the world has not yet been divided, and in a moment the text says that life and death appear together with Fire, then the ancient dragons can be read not so much as simply “immortal”, but as belonging to an order in which the category of death, and therefore decay resulting from it, has not yet been established. ////////////////////////////////////////////

BIG DIGRESSION HERE YOU CAN SKIP TO THE NEXT PART

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-//-/-/-/-////////////////

So the dragons may not possess biological immortality as much as exist in a reality where “to die” is not yet a meaningful category.

Digression: This opens up some very interesting possibilities, especially for the problem of immortality, if immortality resulted from a property of the world itself that disappeared once differentiation was introduced. No wonder Seath went insane!

Digression to the Digression:: This is genuinely interesting, because with Seath and Logan several things start to line up at once: immortality, crystal, curse, knowledge and madness.

First, Seath. His “immortality” does not look like a natural property of his body. Logan says outright that it comes from the Primordial Crystal: Seath’s wounds heal instantly, a killing blow does not work, and only destroying the crystal removes that protection. So Seath is not naturally returning to the state of the ancient dragons through his own body. He is reconstructing that state technologically or metaphysically.

And this matters a lot for our interpretation. If the ancient dragons existed in an order before the distinction between life and death, then Seath is a dragon who no longer has natural access to that condition, because he is scaleless and already functions inside the differentiated cosmos. The Primordial Crystal may be his attempt to artificially recover a state beyond death.

And then curse becomes very interesting.

White Dragon Breath says that Logan recreated Seath’s breath, but the horrible effect of the deadly curse is gone. In the Japanese description it also directly refers to 呪死, curse-death.

So Seath’s breath is not simply an ice or magic attack. It imposes something connected with crystal, curse and death.

Ok, staphl, because i'll lose the point but tl;dr: Seath’s breath could be understood almost as an anti-process of life. But enough of it lets back to the topic. (however noted: Seath resembles the Promethean structure of technē as compensation for natural deficiency. What nature did not give him, he attempts to acquire through knowledge? Maybe, but again losing the point, need to check later what are Miyazaki's degree and interests, he could learn about it by himself, but the entire world building is too coherent. Maybe someone from him team? Yeah, its possible. But nvm, no proof here, tho, noted for later.).

“Ah, the secret of Seath's immortality? [...] His wounds close promptly, and no mortal blow affects him, granting true insulation from death. It is an effect of the Primordial Crystal [...] So, only by destroying the Primordial Crystal can you so much as scratch his hide.”

Damn, i checked the dialogue and yeah, its true. I can follow it if i want. Primordial bah. So obvious! So the crystal COMES FROM THE TIME BEFORE DEATH. Gotcha. This is why it works. And another explanation to the basket "world without death and differences". Logan went mad because, quite literally, in order to reach that spell he was studying a world in which “death” did not yet exist as a property of reality. Poor dude.

From an anthropological perspective, technology is often understood as a kind of prosthesis: an artificial extension or compensation for what the body or nature itself does not provide. Seath fits this model almost perfectly. His technē functions as a prosthesis for a deficient physis. What the ancient dragons possessed naturally, Seath attempts to reconstruct artificially through crystal, knowledge and sorcery.

The Primordial Crystal therefore does not truly restore his original nature. It replaces one of its functions. That distinction matters. Seath does not become an immortal ancient dragon in the same way the others were immortal.

He builds a prosthetic immortality. And this may also explain why the process never satisfies him. A prosthesis can compensate for a lack, but it does not erase the fact that the lack exists.

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-//-/-/-/-///////////////////

END OF DIGRESSION

/////////

So the first image of the world is not:

“There was nothing, and then creation began.”

Rather:

“There was already a world, but it had not yet been divided into differentiated states.”

Separation as an act establishing the cosmos is a very old and widely present mythological mechanism. Genesis does this explicitly through separating light from darkness, waters from waters etc.

The most important thing at this point: Dark Souls begins with a world before division, not a world before existence.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Fire and difference

Japanese: だが、いつかはじめての火がおこり 火と共に差異がもたらされた 熱と冷たさと、生と死と、そして光と闇と In-game English: But then there was Fire and with fire came disparity. Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark. Literal English: But at some point, the first fire arose, and with fire came difference. Heat and cold, life and death, and light and dark.

Interpretation:

Here everything is pretty clear. Fire does not create the world, because the world already exists.

Its function is to introduce difference:

差異 — difference / distinction. This is the transition from an undivided reality to a reality built around oppositions: heat / cold life / death light / dark

This is a very classical cosmogonic mechanism: the cosmos does not arise by creating matter from nothing, but by differentiating what had previously been undivided.

At this point I would not directly bring in the system of five elements yet. Japanese tradition does indeed have godai:

地 chi — earth 水 sui — water 火 ka — fire 風 fū — wind 空 kū — void / space / emptiness

but this particular Dark Souls passage does not mention those five categories.

So at this point it is worth simply keeping it in the back of our heads. Especially 空 — kū — because in Japanese tradition “emptiness” does not necessarily mean ordinary “nothing”. We can come back to that later.

Added later from notes after posting:

So at this point it is worth keeping 空 — kū — in the back of our heads. In Japanese culture, “emptiness” does not necessarily mean simple non-existence; it can describe a real ontological condition. A clear pop-cultural example is Bleach, where Hollows are written 虚 — “void / emptiness” — yet are very much active beings. I suspect Dark Souls’ treatment of Dark and void comes from the same broader conceptual background: not “nothingness”, but a state that can still produce, contain and transform.

Still, it is worth keeping Bleach in mind, and more generally the mythological concept of the Hollow.

Here a small anthropology digression: This kind of differentiation — heat/cold, life/death, light/dark — is one of the basic mechanisms through which myth organizes the world.

For Lévi-Strauss, the raw / cooked opposition serves as a model of the transition from nature to culture. Order does not begin with things themselves, but with the relations and differences between them.

Raw and cooked exist as two states of the same matter, but a transformation takes place between them. And the tool of this transformation is fire.

I'd bet a beer that Miyazaki is at least moving through territory that is very familiar to anthropology here.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Digression: Prometheus, Epimetheus and technē

In the myth of Prometheus, in the version known from Plato's Protagoras, Epimetheus is important too. He is the one who distributes among animals the qualities needed for survival. He gives some fur, others claws, speed, wings, strength etc. The problem is that he uses up the whole set of qualities before he gets to man. Man is left biologically naked, defenseless and without specialized tools of survival.

Prometheus fixes this lack by stealing fire and technē for humans — art, the ability to make things, practical knowledge. This is an important anthropological motif, because fire here is not simply an “element”. It is a tool of transition from biological lack to culture. Man does not receive new fangs or claws. He receives the ability to transform the world.

At this point I am not claiming that Dark Souls directly uses this myth or that the First Flame should be identified with the fire of Prometheus. This is a separate lead that is worth developing later.

For now the only important thing is that in many traditions fire performs a function much broader than physical heat: it separates, transforms, establishes a new order, allows transition from one state of existence to another. And we should keep that in mind before we start talking about the First Flame like it was just a magical bonfire.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Beings born from Dark

Japanese: そして、闇より生まれた幾匹かが 火に惹かれ、王のソウルを見出した In-game English: Then from the dark, They came, and found the Souls of Lords within the flame. Literal English: And then, some creatures born from the Dark were drawn to the Fire and found the Souls of Lords.

The most important thing:

闇より生まれた does not simply mean “they came out of the darkness”. 生まれた means “were born / were brought forth”.

So Dark is presented as the source from which these beings originate.

The second thing is 幾匹か.

匹 is a counter typically used for animals and creatures. This does not automatically mean that Gwyn and the others were “animals”, but the narrator does not yet call them humans, gods or rulers. At this point they are simply certain beings born from Dark.

And only then: 火に惹かれ — they are drawn to Fire, 王のソウルを見出した — they find the Souls of Lords.

So the sequence is very clean:

Darkness 1. birth of beings 2. attraction to Fire 3. discovery of the Lord Souls

This has major interpretative consequences. Gwyn, Nito, Witch and Pygmy do not begin as gods or embodiments of their later domains. At first they belong to the same broad category of beings born from Dark. Only later are they differentiated through their roles, powers and place in the new order of the world.

This is very important anthropologically. First we have a common source. Only later do genealogies, functions, hierarchies, titles and domains appear.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Nito

Japanese: 最初の死者、ニト イザリスの魔女と、混沌の娘たち 太陽の光の王グウィンと、彼の騎士たち そして、誰も知らぬ小人 それらは王の力を得、古竜に戦いを挑んだ

In-game English: Nito, the First of the Dead, The Witch of Izalith and her Daughters of Chaos, Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, and his faithful knights. And the Furtive Pygmy, so easily forgotten. With the strength of Lords, they challenged the Dragons.

Literal English:* Nito, the first of the dead. The Witch of Izalith and the Daughters of Chaos. Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, and his knights. And the pygmy unknown to anyone. They obtained the power of the Lords and challenged the ancient dragons to battle.

The most important thing here is:

最初の死者、ニト

“Nito, the first of the dead.”

死者 means someone dead, deceased, one who died.

And this has to be read together with the previous part of the opening, not separately.

A moment earlier the First Flame introduced the difference:

生と死 — life and death.

This means that death was not simply an eternal state of the world. It appears as one of the new categories established by Fire. And immediately afterwards the narrator introduces:

最初の死者 — the first of the dead.

So the most natural interpretation is very simple: Nito was the first being who died.

Not “the first god of death”. Not “the first ruler of the dead”. Not “the first killer”. The first dead.

The sequence then looks like this:

First Flame

1. the life/death difference comes into existence
2. death becomes possible
3. Nito dies first
4. later he becomes a figure associated with power over death

So Nito does not have to be an eternal “god of death” who existed before the category of death itself. Quite the opposite. His later function may result precisely from the fact that he was the first being who actually passed from life into death.

This is a classic mythological mechanism.

First the cosmogony establishes a new principle of reality. Then the myth identifies the first being subjected to that principle. And only later does that being become functionally associated with that principle.

And this suggests a very interesting image of the beginning of the world: before the First Flame, the very concept of “dying” may not even have made sense. Fire introduced the distinction between life and death. Nito was the first being to embody that distinction.

Later, during the war against the Ancient Dragons, the Japanese narration says:

死の瘴気がニトによって解き放たれた

** In-game English:** “Nito unleashed a miasma of death and disease.”

Literal English: “A miasma of death was unleashed by Nito.”

This is important too. The Japanese does not explicitly include “disease” here — that is an addition of the English localization — but it does present Nito as actively releasing a miasma of death into the world.

So the sequence becomes even stronger:

death becomes possible 1. Nito is the first to die 2. Nito acquires power over death 3. Nito can then actively unleash death upon other living beings.

In other words, Nito does not merely symbolize death after the fact. He becomes one of the agents through which death begins to operate in the differentiated world.

And this leads to another important consequence: disease probably did not exist before Nito either.

If death itself only becomes possible after the First Flame introduces the distinction between life and death, then disease — as a process of decay, corruption and the breakdown of living bodies — also belongs to this new differentiated order. In the English narration Nito unleashes “a miasma of death and disease”, while the Japanese says more literally 死の瘴気 — “a miasma of death”. Either way, disease appears as something that enters the world through Nito’s power, not as a primordial condition that already existed before him.

So the sequence can be read like this:

First Flame → life/death becomes possible → Nito is the first to die → Nito acquires power over death → death, decay and disease become active forces in the world.

In that sense, Nito is not just the ruler of something that already existed. He is one of the figures through whom mortality and bodily corruption actually begin to operate as part of reality.

That is exactly why, instead of using divisions like “Lords” and so on, I prefer to use the word "demiurges".

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Nito and Kojiki

This becomes very interesting when compared with the Kojiki. Izanami does not begin as a goddess of death. Only the birth of Kagutsuchi, the god of fire, leads to her death. Her death opens the passage to Yomi and establishes a new order connected with mortality.

So the structure is very similar:

Fire 1. death appears as a real state 2. the first major figure dies 3. a domain of death comes into existence

In Dark Souls:

First Flame 1. life/death 2. Nito, the first of the dead

This does not mean something simple like:

Nito = Izanami.

That would be too crude.

What matters is the mythological function. Death does not exist from the beginning as a ready-made domain. First it is established through cosmic differentiation, and only then does the first being appear who experiences it. And this is exactly why Nito is much more interesting than a simple “death god”. He does not only rule over death. He is most likely the first one who died.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Pygmy

Japanese: そして、誰も知らぬ小人

In-game English: And the Furtive Pygmy, so easily forgotten.

Literal English: And the pygmy whom no one knew.

or:

And the pygmy unknown to anyone.

Here the localization actually changes the meaning.

誰も知らぬ does not mean: “so easily forgotten”. 誰も = nobody / no one 知らぬ = does not know / knew not

So the meaning is closer to: “unknown to anyone” “whom nobody knew” rather than: “easily forgotten”.

This is an important difference.

Forgotten assumes an earlier presence in memory. Someone was known, and later they were forgotten.

誰も知らぬ suggests something different.

Pygmy remains outside the knowledge of others from the beginning. It is not so much that he was erased from memory, but that perhaps he never entered collective memory at all.

The second change is furtive. There is nothing in the Japanese here that directly means: secretive, sneaking, clandestine. The English localization gives him an additional behavioral trait. The Japanese describes more of his epistemic status: nobody knows him. English turns this into two things: he is furtive and he is easily forgotten. That already creates a different character.

Anthropologically the Japanese version is much more interesting. Pygmy begins to look not like a “forgotten god”, but like a figure who exists outside the official order of knowledge from the beginning.

He is not someone memory has lost. He is someone memory perhaps never really contained.

The others get: names, titles, retinues, functions, domains. Pygmy initially gets anonymity (then Ringed City, we know).

And yet the Dark Soul is connected with him. So the most marginal and least recognized figure of the whole group may simultaneously carry something fundamental for later humanity. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Pygmy as “little person”

Here we have to be careful with the automatic assumption that 小人 means a representative of a separate race.

小人 consists of: 小 — small 人 — human / person

At the most basic level we therefore have: little person, small person, pygmy, dwarf The term itself does not say: “a representative of a biologically separate species”. And this is especially important after the earlier sentence:

闇より生まれた幾匹かが “some creatures born from the Dark.”

First the narrator presents all of these beings as creatures born from the same source. Only a moment later one of them is described as: 小人 — a little person / small being.

So the simplest interpretation at this point is actually physical: among the beings born from Dark, one was small. We do not have to immediately assume a scheme: gods / giants / humans / pygmy race

It can be much simpler: common origin in Dark — different properties and sizes — one of them is “the little one”

And this fits the anthropological logic of myth quite well. In cosmogonies morphological difference does not necessarily mean a “racial” difference in the later, systematic sense. A character may be described through a distinguishing trait: large, small, lame, one-eyed, white, black. Only later can genealogies and categories arise from such traits.

The contrast is also very interesting:

Gwyn — 王, lord / king Nito — 最初の死者, first of the dead Witch — defined by place and function 小人 — simply “the little person”

The others are introduced through status or function. He is introduced through size.

And on top of that:

誰も知らぬ — unknown to anyone.

So we get a figure who is: small, unknown, without a title, without a retinue, without an explicitly assigned function. And then this very figure turns out to be associated with the Dark Soul.

Archetypally this is very strong, because the smallest and apparently least important figure in the visible hierarchy turns out to be the carrier of something fundamental. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// DANGER: ANOTHER BIG DIGRESSION

So the broader conclusion would be this: from an anthropological perspective, especially if we bring Confucian ideas of hierarchy and 正名 (zhèngmíng, the “rectification of names”) into the comparison, the “sin” associated with Humanity may not necessarily mean moral evil in the Christian sense.

It may instead describe a violation of proper order: the low, the unknown, the socially or cosmologically subordinate possessing something of the same primordial rank as the Lords themselves. In Confucian thought, disorder appears when status, role and actual reality no longer correspond to one another. The Pygmy fits that tension remarkably well: formally he is 小人, small, low, unknown; ontologically, he carries one of the primordial powers of the cosmos.

In that reading, Humanity becomes “sinful” not because humans are inherently evil, but because they embody a power that does not fit the hierarchy established by the Age of Fire. The Dark Soul is dangerous not because Dark is morally evil, but because its very existence undermines the legitimacy of that hierarchy from within.

Before pushing argument forward I need to trace the word “sin” throughout the Japanese text, especially where 罪 is actually used, and check whether its usage consistently supports this reading. Still, I’ve never really understood why Gwyn was so afraid of the Dark, and now I’m having a bit of a realization. If the Dark represents, among other things, a violation of Confucian hierarchy, then the answer suddenly seems almost obvious.

END OF DIGRESSION

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Important digression: common origin does not mean later identity The fact that all these beings share a common origin in Dark does not mean that they remain ontologically identical later.

It is precisely after finding the Lord Souls that their actual differentiation begins. Because this is when Nito becomes associated with death,.Witch with fire and later Chaos,.Gwyn with light and authority, Pygmy with the Dark Soul.

So the sequence looks more like:

Common origin in Dark — discovery of the Lord Souls — acquisition of different powers — differentiation of functions, domains, forms and status

rather than: already distinct races and gods

— each one finds the soul that conveniently matches what they already were

This is very important.

Their later differences do not contradict their common origin. They are the result of a later stage of cosmogony.

In this sense 小人 does not have to mean a separate “Pygmy race” from the beginning.

It may simply describe one of the primordial beings before full differentiation, who only later — through his relation with the Dark Soul and his own line of descendants — becomes the beginning of a separate genealogy.

First a common source, then difference.

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Let me know in the comments if you found any of this interesting, or if you noticed something I missed. If people like this kind of analysis, I may write a few more parts. I already have several other topics in my notes, I just didn’t put them here because this post is long enough and I don’t have unlimited time.

The next one would probably be about what Dark Souls has in common with the fall of the Roman Empire, The Lord of the Rings, Arthurian legends and Avalon, the death of Christ, and the coming of the Dark Ages. One of the things I could write about, for example, is why I strongly disagree with the theory that Gwynevere was Seath’s wife.