So sad they made an entire covenant around two areas you could completely ignore.
well, you don’t know which areas you can ignore on your first playthrough, and rat summoning people is really at its best when people don’t know what’s going on, so i think that’s kind of okay? it does give the whole thing a kind of expiration date, but when i’m feeling charitable that seems sort of interesting, too. and maybe it’s even sort of thematically appropriate, in this case.
finally beat this. kiiiiinda underwhelmed by the last boss tbh. I was invaded by yuria of londor my first visit to the kiln of first flame and then also summoned her? I feel like that had to be a glitch. she killed me so I summoned her again anticipating to be invaded again, but then I accidentally triggered the last boss and beat him fairly easily with the npc summon. kind of anticlimactic. but this doesn’t really sour my overall opinion of the game. kinda spoilerly stuff:
I got the lord of hollows ending and I appreciate that despite it being the “true” ending it’s still highly morally ambiguous. there was a strong implication throughout that king lothric was obsessed with using the power of “dark” (aka humanity) to create dragons, amongst other things, as evidenced by the slimy manus like dragon tentacles growing out of various hollows, and then the dragons that attack you in lothric castle are found to really just be those same “hollow parasite” things. I’m not clear if there’s any allegiance between this research and the darkmoons who are planning to usurp the flame in the lord of hollows ending, but the implication regardless is that pure dark humanity is also a corrupt, diseased thing that might not be the best force to rule over the world. do we have a spoiler/lore thread yet? is sb into that kinda thing? anyone read any good lore breakdowns?
Woah you actually explained the black tentacle things.
idk I guess it seemed pretty obvious to me the whole time, what with the “consumed king” being overtly obssessed with becoming a dragon, and tons of the tentacle things wandering around his garden, and then they being the “big glowy hidden weak point” of the “dragons” you encounter in lothric.
and anyway pretty much all the dragons in dark souls 2 were born of human experimentation too.
I’m actually very curious as to what people’s thoughts are on what exactly dragons are in the Dark Souls universe. Are they a race? Are they gods? Are they thinking beings? Given how much “the gods” are talked about in Dark Souls, despite knowing they physically manifest in the game world, it’s still very unclear to me whether gods are something that manifest as a result of gathering souls, are something that, like in Christian religions, are just always there and manage everyone as they see fit, or are a result of the dragons doing experiments on humans. Given how much “the flame” is given influence and that it’s always something that is passed down, I feel like the game’s story makes more sense with the latter explanation. Effectively, dragons messing up the world by accidentally creating gods born from providing the first flame to humanity. And humans, subsequently, being obsessed with the power of dragons in a sort of root seeking its source manner.
the dragons were created by aldia in his experiments to find a way to end the curse, but he ended up getting obsessed with dragons to the exclusion of all other things. the only “real” dragon is the one in the sunken king dlc
I’m more wondering if this was always the case, as some items and such talk about hunting dragons for sport, implying they’re just big monsters to humans. Others talk about them in many different ways though, as gods, as beings capable of breeding with humans (half-breeds). None of it is very clear about what exactly a dragon “is” in the universe, sadly.
I assume much of the motivation behind all these different descriptions is culturally motivated, given all the artifacts in the game you can collect are presumably created by humans and thus biases are observed based on the culture in which the weapon or object is created.
Well go further than that what is even “The Flame” “Fire” “The Dark” “Humanity” “Souls”.
I know there are Youtube fan explainations but lord I do not want those. I tried explaining the plot of Dark Souls 1 to a friend and quickly realized I really didn’t know what happened or what the player was doing.
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I feel like there’s considerably more explanation for what all of these are. They’re based on the same human-cultural in-game world assumptions (i.e. items explaining stuff to you), sure, but dragons continue to be more peripheral. Dragons are anywhere along a spectrum from a force of nature to gods to monsters to be hunted. There’s less of that wavering in the explanation of what “The Dark” or “The First Flame” are. If anything, each game has made it more clear while I feel like what dragons are has become less clear throughout the series.
how crystal clear do you really need your dark fantasy to be
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Your avatar is so appropriate.
But also, eh, I dunno. I don’t really need it to be, but much like those who sought the age of man, curiosity is endemic to our race, in spite of the inherent folly of knowledge.
That was a royal you, to be clear.
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who can explain the weird tree things to me now
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You mean the couple that’re in the Darkroot Garden
Wait, in the entire Dark series? What about Seath/the stone dragon/Kalameet
no, just in 2. the stone dragon and kalameet are “real” too, I guess seath is debatable bc he was born without scales.
I’m not sure if it’s implied that the sunken dragon in 2 is supposed to be the stone dragon of 1. probably not but idk where it would have come from otherwise
no I mean all of the guy’s in dark souls 3 who are turning into weird petrified trees, I never got that
you mean the dudes in the undead settlement? I guess it’s connected to the cursed greatwood bc its roots seem to reach everywhere in that area, and the fire demon is even wooden. the description for the cursed tree soul says something about how the residents of the settlement “sealed away curses” into the tree but then things went tits up, so I guess that kinda explains the wooden undead
I like how frozen cloth looking stuff = abyss, crystals = moon, roots = demons
they’re also on the wall of lothric though, and in even in taller, more tree-like forms to boot