Beginning with the overt ways that gender plays into the very metaphysical assumptions of the Souls’ universe(s?), I shall explore how womanhood is essentialised within the narrative and how this essence is aligned with the metaphysical ‘dark’ in a way that is either absent or far less overt with male characters. My concern within this essay to make explicit the mechanisms with which gender is uncritically repeated within the Souls games.
GWYNDOLIN DARK SOULS SERIES
As is to be expected, the work the series does to maintain this binary and thereby the salience of gender to its story is often done through stylistic moves that mobilise various kinds of norm that play into the conceptual structures of misogyny, sexism, and homophobia (though this is not an exhaustive list). This is to say that despite its broader concern with structuring its narrative around a series of disruptions and shades of grey, gender is continually reasserted as a naturalised narrative site within Souls. And yet, when we consider the question(s) of gender with regard to the series, we are immediately met with a vision of gender that almost without exception repeats and reinforces the traditional binary of man and woman. Disruption as the motivation to question, to doubt, to regard with suspicion, is a pervasive and inextricable part of Souls’ storytelling, and the dualistic metaphysics of light and dark are no exception to this. A staple of its distinct narrative style, Dark Souls is no stranger to the persistent disruption of the stories that it chooses to reveal - whether these disruptions are about questioning the fundamental nature of the world as we experience it, doubting that our character is truly the prophesied figure of divinely mandated destiny, or instilling a suspicion of the motives of other characters as they presented. Though originally introduced to these metaphysical concepts as an antagonistic binary, there are many points throughout the fragmented narrative of the games that calls this binary into question. It is an uncontroversial point (in so far as there are any) to consider Dark Souls as premising much of its narrative drive on the polarity between light and dark.
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