#or a literature undergrad

[troius]

Six Hearts vs. Fullbringers: Rukia vs. Tsukishima

Yeah I’m legit mad this isn’t what we got.

Tsukishima isn’t the main villain of the story, but he pretends to be for a good portion of it, and he’s got an absolutely terrifying power that drives directly at the heart of the arc, the relationships between Ichigo and his friends. Tsukishima slowly tears them apart, first by participating in the assault on Uryu, and then by brainwashing every single human in Ichigo’s life, until he’s in a murderous state and actually fighting Chad and Orihime.

And then, in the semi-main event of the arc, he fights...Byakuya. A person who Ichigo has barely spoken to, and could probably go very happily his entire life without speaking to again. The guy who has spent this whole arc winning by subverting interpersonal relationships winds up failing, ironically, because Byakuya doesn’t actually value those relationships as much as he values abstract ideals, and so blasts his chest out without hesitation. It makes sense, I guess, but it doesn’t really do anything in the context of the story.

To the extent the Byakuya-Tsukishima fight does have symbolic relevance, it’s in regards to Ichigo’s relationship with Soul Society. Soul Society (and Byakuya) were going to execute Rukia. Ichigo fought to stop that, and reminded Soul Society that principles are more important than process, that governing isn’t just a mandate to preserve one’s government, but also a responsibility to do right by others. Rukia being sacrificed at the altar of justice would have perverted the very concept itself.

Which, cool and all, but if Rukia is the central character in all that...why isn’t she the one in this fight? If we’re going to test Ichigo’s relationship with Soul Society, shouldn’t it be through his oldest and closest ally? It’s a subplot that’s present in the earlier parts of the arc, though it gets forgotten. Keigo specifically brings up Rukia not being in touch as a reason Ichigo’s being such a grouch. He remembers her when thinking on his past pride as a Soul Reaper. He hears her voice when generating his Fullbring.

And in this final battle, especially when Ginjo is revealing how Soul Society was less then trusting of Ichigo, this should all be paid off! After all, Rukia might not have known about the badge when Ukitake gave it to Ichigo...but she’s Ukitake’s lieutenant now! I’d find it hard to believe she wasn’t told at some point in the last 18 months. So this fight should thematically not just represent Ichigo’s trust and relationship with Soul Society writ large, but also his friendship with Rukia specifically.

So much work has already been done to set it up! Rukia has probably the most well-developed past out of all the characters in the story-- we’ve seen flashbacks to her childhood, her academy days, and her time with Squad 13, and she’s been in the story since the very first chapter. So unlike Byakuya, we’ll have a wide range of old scenes for Tsukishima to insert himself into, to really scare the reader with how essential he can make himself to her life. Imagine Tsukishima giving her Kaien’s speech on heart, or Ukitake’s speech on honor, or saving her from Aizen on Sokyoku Hill. We were already a little worried about Rukia’s feelings toward Ichigo given her lack of communication, and what Ginjo has revealed about Soul Society...now that Tsukishima’s the most important person in her life so far, how could she possibly win?

Well, because of the Heart, duh. Tsukishima pretty consistently shows that he doesn’t understand or practice two-way relationships-- he was dependent on (and used by) Ginjo, something he reproduces with Moe, but there isn’t a sense of mutual support for either of those relationships. It’s one-way fealty. And he does the same thing when he paints himself into the pasts of Ichigo’s friends: it’s always as the provider, the beloved mentor, the patron.

And so in rewriting Rukia’s past I don’t think he’d bother to change her relationship with Ichigo much. Sure, he’d make it so that he came to Soul Society and stopped the Sokyoku, but all that stuff that happened before? Where it was just Rukia giving her power to Ichigo, and teaching him how to use it, and guiding him through this new life he was completely ill-equipped for? Why bother?

Well, because that’s where the bond was formed. Because personal relationships aren’t a transactional, tit-for-tat exchange of goods and services. Rukia might have had the power vis-a-vis Ichigo in those early days, but by being that person for him she grew, taking on a responsibility that allowed her to feel for the first time in decades like she was a strong, independent person. And this, combined with Ichigo time after time proving himself worthy of her powers and guidance, created such a trust that no pilfered monologue can shake. We saw it when Aaroniero was cosplaying Kaien back in Soul Society-- yes, he meant something to Rukia, but Ichigo means something to her today. She trusts him implicitly, because he earned it. And this fight is where that becomes explicit.

So yeah, this fight would have a whole lot of cutting Rukia without bleeding, and a whole lot of Tsukishima-insert flashbacks, and would maybe be intercut with Ginjo expositing to Ichigo about Soul Society’s nefarious spy device. And while Ginjo is trying to convince Ichigo that Soul Society (and by extension Rukia) are evil and out to get him, Tsukishima would be trying the reverse, avoiding Rukia’s established powers before trying to convince her that, considering Ichigo’s done nothing for her in her life, she should really be fighting him instead.

Rukia admits that Ichigo hasn’t done what Tsukishima has done for her. Then she blasts him through the chest with Soren Sokatsui, without the incantation. Something she admits to Tsukishima that she’d never even attempted before. But she believes in herself. Because she believed in Ichigo. And that’s why she still believes in him.

[chai-n-ivy]

"taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." - Dostoyevsky

[lost-estradiographer]

I

know that voting for the status quo sucks.

To say it "sucks" massively understates the exact amount of suffering that exists under the status quo, an amount that I acknowledge I am too privileged to ever fully grasp.

I cannot magically provide some viable third-party candidate just barely a month before the election. I cannot solve Israel/Palestine Conflict that has haunted the world for over 70 years. I am a 29-year old transgender woman working her way through her own mental illnesses, trauma, and an undergraduate degree. I was never going to be the one to solve anything here.

All I can tell you is that regardless of whether you vote or not, there will be a presidential election. It's going to be a shitshow, regardless. Whether you vote or not, there will be a different president in January. Voting for the status quo may not be directly in your interests.

We had four years of Trump and we are still trying to unfuck ourselves from that. The beginning of my antagonistic relationship with the government was protesting in the streets of DC under his administration. I've fled from the Metro PD. I've put on a change of clothes and slipped out the back door of a gay sports bar.

Fucking vote.

Fucking vote.

Fucking vote.

Honestly, I

I don't want to see this voter apathy shit anymore.

People are going to keep dying under any president. Any president can, and probably wil, be morally culpable for the deaths of innocent people, both in the country and abroad. Carter might be the last president we had that wasn't overtly a war criminal and we still had foreign civilians killed by U.S. military involvement under the Carter admin.

I'm torn between asking you to block me, or asking you to message me, if you're taking the route of voter apathy. I'll tell you right away, here and now, that I probably don't have a solution to whatever problem is keeping you from voting for Harris. I can't even solve my own problems right, tbh. The government isn't really here for me, either.

But there isn't going to be some sort of miraculous revolution that results in The Ending Where Everyone Lives. If there's a revolution, then supply chains will falter and children and the infirm will die of preventable diseases and infections and complications in hospitals that would have otherwise been able to easily deal with such things. That's what happens in a revolution. I'm after the long-term idea where Humanity as a species lives. I'm after the route where we don't have an ending, we keep going.

Fucking vote, because exactly one of the two leading presidential candidates believes climate change is real, and it is the single greatest threat to all life on earth. We have spent the past 250 years, not just playing God with the environment, but actively creating an ecological niche in which future generations of humanity must continue to play God with the environment, dragging it back to a healthy place drop by drop, inch by inch, a degree at a time.

Or, I mean, don't vote. Either way, we'll all die at some point. Perhaps some of us will be lucky enough to die standing by our principles.

Those lucky few will become soil one day, just like I will.

I am begging you on my hands and knees to fucking vote, though, because our options are The Status Quo vs. Worse. That's

That's it.

There is no door number three right now. Our system, our flawed and broken and imbalanced and unjust system, does not accommodate for a third door. Whether you vote or not, you will be dragged through either Door 1 or Door 2 with all of humanity, as we whirl through the cosmos upon our tiny little speck of dust. The only other legitimate option is to allow oneself to become trampled; to become soil early. I don't say legitimate to give this option legitimacy, but to make clear that again, there is no door three. Door three is a casket. A one-way bed.

I didn't vote in 2016, and I'm hoping that you'll vote for the status quo this time, because that's the route that gives me the best odds of having a long and healthy life to regret my failure through inaction.

Just please

Fucking vote.

Or again, if you're taking the apathy route, probably just save me the time of blocking you, because you're not going to magically pull a viable third-party candidate out of your pocket less than six weeks before the election.

[thatstudyblrontea]

January 18, 2023

Library afternoons again. Finally. Looking forward to more productive days, studying Germanic Philology and Russian Literature, getting my student life up and running for the new year.

[muchadoaboutlearning]

Fleabag and Différance: A Spectacle of ‘Excess’

I made this ppt for my final paper presentation for an art philosophy and aesthetics course on contemporary art. I used the case study of a contemporary media show fleabag to uncover the aesthetic experience of her "excesses"

here's my main argument if anyone wants to know:

I analyze Fleabag’s scenes and shot compositions to examine the aesthetic experience of Fleabag’s ‘excesses' to argue how Fleabag’s character negotiates the tension between traditional and neoliberal feminist gender norms through her ‘excess’— her humor, emotionality and the act of breaking the fourth wall. The spectacle of her 'excess' reveals the working of différance as articulated by feminist art history theorist Griselda Pollock. Ultimately, the performance in her 'excess" serves as a counternarrative challenging the binary gender performativity of “being a woman” from both patriarchal and neoliberal feminist perspectives

[beaft]

october 18th

today's spooky poem is neil gaiman's "vampire sestina", featured in the collection "smoke and mirrors". as any poet will tell you, a sestina is a fiendishly tricky beast, so i'm always impressed when i find a good one - and this is, i think, a good one! you can read a little more about sestinas here, and if you've got some free time on your hands, you might try your hand at writing your own. (well, why not?)

VAMPIRE SESTINA

I wait here at the boundaries of dream, All shadow-wrapped.  The dark air tastes of night, So cold and crisp, and I wait for my love. The moon has bleached the color from her stone. She'll come, and then we'll stalk this pretty world Alive to darkness and the tang of blood.

It is a lonely game, the quest for blood. But still, a body's got the right to dream And I'd not give it up for all the world. The moon has leeched the darkness from the night. I stand in the shadows, staring at her stone: Undead, my lover... O, undead my love?

I dreamt you while I slept today and love Meant more to me than life - meant more than blood. The sunlight sought me, deep beneath my stone, More dead than my corpse but still a-dream Until I woke as vapor into the night And sunset forced me out into the world.

For many centuries I've walked the world Dispensing something that resembled love -  A stolen kiss, then back into the night Contented by the life and by the blood. And come the morning I was just a dream, Cold body chilling underneath a stone.

I said I would not hurt you. Am I stone To leave you prey to time and to the world? I offered you a truth beyond your dreams While all you had to offer was your love. I told you not to worry and that blood Tastes sweeter on the wing and late at night.

Sometimes my lovers rise to walk the night... Sometimes they lie, cold corpse beneath the stone, And never know the joys of bed and blood, Of walking through the shadows of the world; Instead they rot to maggots. O my love They whispered you had risen, in my dream.

I've waited by your stone for half the night But you won't leave your dream to hunt for blood. Good night, my love. I offered you the world.

—Neil Gaiman

[alexhwriting]

Pilgrimage and the Lands of Lothric: The Medieval Narrative in Dark Souls III

Here is the essay that got me started on my route of video game studies and digital media. I was taking a class with a medievalist professor that was talking about the ways that medieval themes and thoughts are still prevalent in the world today. She is a huge soulsborne fan so when I pitched this idea she was super into it, with this essay going on to become my grad school application essay. I hope you enjoy it!

Pilgrimage and the Lands of Lothric: The Medieval Narrative in Dark Souls III

I. Introduction

Dark Souls III is, although frequently lauded, a very opaque narrative. Little of the narrative is told to the player at any point during the thirty to forty hours of grindingly difficult roleplaying game action and adventure. What little bits of story are present, however, are delivered from sought out sources, such as non-player characters (NPCs), items descriptions, and flavor text throughout the game world, as well as inferences from the dilapidated kingdom of Lothric that the player gets to explore on their quest to “link the fire” on behalf of one of the few more friendly characters that they come across during their time in the game. In this paper I am going to summarize the general overview of the story of Dark Souls III and show that it is a modern analogue to the pilgrimage practices of the Middle Ages. In doing so, this paper strives to shed some light into the abyss that is the in-game lore plotted so masterfully by FromSoftware, the studio behind the Souls series.

II. Background

Opening up with a cinematic, Dark Souls III lays out the four bosses that the player must fight, explaining that, “In venturing north, the pilgrims discover the truth of the old words. / ‘The fire fades, and the lords go without thrones,’” [1] as part of the sixteen lines that accompany the showcase of the world and bosses before the game actually starts (Dark Souls III). From here, the game does not volunteer much other information, aside from brief sections of dialogue when interacting with the NPCs that are necessary for game progression.

      As to set a baseline to draw from, then, here is a manual explanation of the main events of the game and its world: Dark Souls III cast the player as “the unkindled one,” an undead being who is awoken in response to the fading of the light of the world in order to restore, “link,” the flame and continue the current in-world epoch, the Age of Fire (Dark Souls III). Along the way, the player is tested in several environments that are central to the narrative, as FromSoftware relies heavily on the environment to form the majority of its storytelling, each of which is usually completed with the defeat of one of the games many bosses. Four of these such bosses, which the player must seek out, are called the Lords of Cinder, each of which has abandoned their duty to continue the light of the world, and therefore must be fought and their cinders brought back to rekindle the first flame. Once that is finished, the player is given a few choices based on their actions in the game in a kind of moral choice ultimately; do you link the fire, continuing the age limping along, extinguish the fire and let the next age of humanity begin, or do you usurp the fire and become a god yourself?

            The world of Lothric itself begins in a sort of high citadel, The High Wall of Lothric, before the player descends into the dilapidated lands of the Undead Settlement, Road of Sacrifices, and Farron Keep and its swamp, all of which have a sort of overgrown, crumbling aesthetic of a tightly packed and mountain-locked countryside. From there, however, the player wanders through the ruined underground of the Catacombs of Carthus, a winding tunnel that eventually leads to the societies of old and the mythic city of Irithyll of the Boreal Valley and Anor Londo, where the old gods once lived. Lastly, the player descends into the depths again in search of the Profaned Capital, before returning to Lothric Castle to face off against the rulers of the land themselves, the twin princes Lothric and Lorian. The entire movement of the game is based on looping back to places that are familiar and making shortcuts between places that are safe to get quickly through dangerous areas that would otherwise be tedious and difficult to pass through separately. This whole journey is punctuated by bonfires, checkpoints where the player gets the chance to rest and level up and do all the other things that are central to gameplay mechanics. One of the most vital being the recovery of what the game calls “Estus Flasks” but are essentially healing items that hopefully keep the player from getting killed and having to reset to the last bonfire they visited (Dark Souls III).

            More specifically, the world of Lothric is intentionally meant to be oppressive as the player makes their way through the course of the game. The landscape is made up of harsh cliffsides and thin pathways, ravines that lead down to bottomless pits, and overgrown roots that make almost every surface feel unstable. When there is architecture in the world, it takes on either a sort of ramshackle and dangerously leaning appearance in the case of the spaces like The Undead Settlement, where it is clear that the place may have once been a kind of pleasant village but was patched and repaired over and over again into barely standing structures. Otherwise, the architecture is grand, heavy, and old medieval styled. These are usually the places that have some additional historical importance to the game world, such as Lothric Castle, the home of the twin princes who rule the kingdom. Though even these structures are falling apart, tied to the themes of the game, and most of the locations that the player visits have long past their prime when they are visited. For example, the Cathedral of the Deep, an area once home to a legendary Lord of Cinder, is now nearly empty, with tattered cloth all over the floor and walls, as well as the central chambers all having been filled with a sort of black sludge (Dark Souls III). The pathways through these places are, in many cases, actual roads that have been left to the sands of time and have not been kept up, not dissimilar to the old Roman roads that were left behind after the collapse of the empire.

            On another note, though also necessary for the background of this paper, is the term “narrative” in reference to videogames has been a subject of some debate, due to the non-linear nature that many games take in their storytelling (Ryan-Thon, 173). Dark Souls III, however, sticks to a relatively linear structure in its plot and keeps the important information in sequence. Therefore, in this instance “narrative” will serve as a good term to examine the story being experienced by the player and make it easily relatable in the context of literary pilgrimage narratives. In his chapter on game abstraction in Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, Jesper Juul also suggests an alternative phrase, “fictional world” (Ryan-Thon, 173), following in the footsteps of a similar phrase used by Jan-Noël, “Storyworld” (Thon 289). While both of these are good alternatives, they will be employed here more specifically to refer to the world of Lothric that Dark Souls III is set in, as the world space itself is a core part of what makes the game a game and allows it to communicate its message.

Finally, in terms of background, there is the more formal games language that is used to describe Dark Souls III on a kind of meta level. The game is considered to be a roleplaying game (RPG) due to its elements of levelling up and encouragement of the player to approach problems in-game with a variety of different strategies. The setting invokes the traditional hallmarks of the medieval fantasy genre as well, as the player encounters knights, dragons, giants, castles, kings, and princes. With this established, invoking the Middle Ages as pretext for the storyworld (Eco, 68), a baseline understanding of the game and its tone has been established.

III. Foreground

Religious pilgrimage is almost synonymous with the Middle Ages and was an important part of the travel culture at the time. Roads themselves were recognized as being extremely valuable and were supported often by those who could afford it, especially those main thoroughfares that would take merchants, pilgrims, and general travelers across medieval European landscapes (Allen, 27). Pilgrims in particular made a core part of the necessity of roads as the quest they undertook was both holy (Osterrieth, 146) and economically beneficial for pilgrimage sites (Osterrieth, 153-4; Salonia, 3). What makes a pilgrimage distinct from other travel through the medieval landscape, however, is that they often focused on the relics and holy places of Christianity (Salonia, 3). Matteo Salonia suggests, in his article, “[The] reverence and physical journeys towards relics and saints were less theologically controversial than reverence and pilgrimages towards holy sites because of the new place assigned to the human body within Christian cosmology,” a sentiment that is mirrored in the bodily nature of the travel that would take place to visit such a relic (Salonia, 5). This is tied into a sort of Medieval Christian interest in the body, specifically the body as a means to channel spiritual energy into miracles and shows of faith (Salonia, 5). This differed from the Platonic view that had dominated before the Christian tradition, which placed the body as adversarial to the mental and spiritual pursuits of an individual (Salonia, 6).

Anne Osterrieth, in her article on pilgrimage as a personal quest, comments on the body-centric nature of the pilgrim’s movement, saying, “The pilgrim also drew pride from his capacity to undertake his task. He was becoming a seasoned traveler and derived pleasure from this new competence” (Osterrieth, 152). In popular media, which depicts pilgrims in a much more dower light, this attribution and celebration of prowess seems almost antithetical. However, Osterrieth emphasizes the pilgrim’s journey as one of death and rebirth, from the person they were who needed divinity into the person who has come in contact with divinity and is ready to advise the next on their journey (Osterrieth, 152). This shows that the person on a pilgrimage was, of course, seeking out a relic or holy place to venerate and receive blessings from, but also that along the way there is an unintended but necessary physical growth as they become a competent traveler and learn to deal with the challenges of long road travel.

This travel was far from unguided otherwise, as people consulted other travelers, maps, or guides to get them to their shrines of destination (Allen, 28). In the minds of the pilgrims, explored by Valerie Allen, the road was not always present, “we might call this [instrumental] representation of the road as means to end the default understanding of roads, in which they function as connectors between settled communities” (Allen, 33). Allen is looking at the pilgrimage narrative in the Book of Margery Kempe, which describes the travels of 15th century titular businesswoman, Margery Kempe (Allen, 27). This narrative, however, is where Allan draws the almost complete disregard of the road from, as it seems that Kempe herself did not find that part of the experience worth keeping track of in the same detail as the rest of her visits and exploits (Allan, 29).

Ritual, here, becomes a big part of the discussion of pilgrimage, which is itself inseparable from conceptions of rituals. “Ritual as a type of functional or structural mechanism to reintegrate the thoughtaction dichotomy, which may appear in the guise of a distinction between belief and behavior or any number of other homologous pairs,” is a definition of ritual put forward by Catherine M. Bell, in her work, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (20). She goes on to summarize that ritual is always tied to opposing forces in a culture or system of practice (Bell, 23). This provides a kind of structure that creates something of a cultural habit, something that fascinated scholar Pierre Bourdieu, is part of a kind of societal generative principal (Bourdieu, 78). Bourdieu takes this idea into a kind of forgetting of history and being left with only practice (Bourdieu, 79), which in some ways can be seen in some of the later ideas of pilgrimage to non-religious places or referring to the colonial settlers in America as “Pilgrims.” These tie into the discussion of pilgrimage as it establishes that pilgrimage as a ritual is always opposed to something else. In the case of historical pilgrimage this tension is between the safety of the village and staying in one place and the fulfillment of the journey at the end of a long and dangerous road.

IV. The Ground

Pilgrimage and Dark Souls III already share one thing in common, though debate has ensued about what role this takes in the narrative sphere (Bierger, 11), and that is the central necessity of space. It is space and travel that characterize a Pilgrim wandering medieval England, as well as the player character in Dark Souls III, embarking on their journey into the world of Lothric to link the fire. While the literal space is different, as there is the space that it takes to physically walk from place to place, there is a kind of abstracted sense of space that is present in Dark Souls III that is necessary for the nature of the story world (Ryan-Thon, 183). In this space between destination and starting point is where the pilgrim acquires their expertise and endures the hardships that will form them into the person worthy of accepting the blessings at the relic when they arrive (Osterrieth, 152). While in the game, the path works on a very similar level, having the player face challenges and gain experience to level-up their character so that they have the necessary competence when they come to face a boss like the first Lord of Cinder, the Abyss Watchers. Both the pilgrim and the player come across these various challenges, twists in the road, wild animals, other people threatening them, they also come across various moral encounters as well, such as to give aid or do favors for those they meet. In the reality of the past, this was much more literal, while in Lothric these moral actions take the form of side quests more often than not. In one example of a moral action that can be taken in the game early on in the Undead Settlement area, the player finds a woman, named Irina of Carim, trapped with a knight nearby. The player is told by the knight, “taken an interest in her, have you? Well, she's a lost cause. Couldn't even become a Fire Keeper. After I brought her all this way and got her all ready. She's beyond repair, I tell you" (Dark Souls III). To actually save her, if the player wants to, the process is pretty involved and includes gathering a whole other trail of items to get the door to Irina open. Alternatively, there is no real punishment for the player avoiding this action, much like in real life, and all further interactions and possible benefits of the NPCs are lost. 

The main idea linking these two actions is the concept of The Quest, which is incredibly broad. But more specifically, the quest for contact with divinity, during which the central actor develops their own abilities in order to be ready to receive the divinity when the time comes. While this is plainly evident in the nature of the pilgrimage, in Dark Souls III the same concept applies. This is due, in-part, to the transmedial principal of minimal departure that was developed by Marie-Laure Ryan and adapted by Thon. The principal is “at work during narrative meaning-making that allows the recipients to ‘project upon these worlds everything [they] know about reality, [making] only the adjustments dictated by the text’ (Possible Worlds 51). It is worth stressing, though, that recipients do not ‘fill in the gaps’ from the actual world itself but from their actual world knowledge” according to Thon as he cites the original principal by Marie-Laure Ryan (Thon, 292). This principal allows for the game world of Dark Souls use the quest form much more naturalistically, allowing the player to take on the grand quest of their own pilgrimage through the Lands of Lothric in a mentally analogous process.

There is a pilgrimage here is part of the very core of the gameplay of Dark Souls III, as well as the narrative proper. Throughout the game, the player is told that it is their job to gather the necessary relics in order to link the flame, a process that proves an arduous journey and a game experience that FromSoftware has come to be known for. On the level of environment alone, there is a similarity here to the kind of landscape that a pilgrim might move through in medieval Europe, with its crumbling, ancient, ruins and overgrown roads. The oppressive and dark game atmosphere with the bonfires as checkpoints give a sense that would be not too dissimilar to that of a real-world pilgrim, going on an arduous journey only to find rest at a campfire by the side of the road. It is significant as well, that, in the very last segment of the game, the place that the player finally arrives at is a religious site, the city of Irithyll, where the most prominent buildings are those of churches. In this game area the player visits three, one called The Church of Yorshka, one that is unnamed but is home to the boss Pontiff Sulyvahn, and finally the grand cathedral of Anor Londo, where the gods once made their homes and is now home to Aldritch, a kind of heretical saint (Dark Souls III). It is after this point that the player must return to the starting citadel of Lothric to continue their journey.

 It is also at this point of the game, as the player has made their way all around the kingdom of Lothric and even to places from the first couple of games in the Souls series, that this quest has been done before by others in the storyworld as well as by scores of other players before them. Combining this with the lack of direct story throughout the game, makes the player an agent in the meaning-making activity that the game has you go through, creating a kind of “intentionless action” (Bourdieu, 79). That is to say, with how little the game tells the player before their pilgrimage begins, the player is left to follow the game path and explore the story for themselves without fully clear intentions for what it is the in-game character is actually participating in. This is, in action, the kind of ritual repetition that leads to the unconscious repetition of the history of the players actions in the Bourdieusian sense (Bourdieu, 78).

Where the pilgrimage metaphor really comes full circle, however, is in the difficulty. It’s ironic to compare a medieval pilgrimage’s difficulty a videogame, but in its own space the Souls series stand as monoliths of difficulty. This difficulty, which is formed from a balance of timing-based combat and harsh punishments for failure, creates a kind of demand for focus. Whether the player wants to or not, the nature of the game demands that they pay full attention or risk losing hard-earned progress. This leads to, a kind of phenomenon where the player becomes more focused on the skill-based challenges and tunes out (or abstracts) for themselves the more complex elements of the game during the challenge (Ryan-Thon, 185-6). In a way not dissimilar from what Allen noticed with the Pilgrimage of Margery Kempe, where the repetitive action of travel was not as memorable as the destinations, the challenges and skill building (leveling up) being secondary to the large experiences of destinations (boss fights). Both walking for days and grinding through difficult game areas build patience in those who partake in each activity as well, becoming something of a meditative activity (Unknown, “Dark Souls is More than Just a Game”).

The moral component, while hard to measure, is an example of some micro-moral game morality throughout most of the game, much like in real life (Ryan et al, 57). However, much like the pilgrim’s ultimate quest being tied to the much more cosmically important goal of the afterlife of their soul, so is the ultimate morality of the quest in Dark Souls III, a large macro-moral choice to determine the fate of the storyworld (Ryan et al. 57). However, this is the area where Dark Souls III, much like other remakes and updated retellings of the stories of the past, adds in its own twist. The three endings of the game, usurping, letting die, or carrying on the flame, constitute a moral ending that does not present itself in the traditional stories of pilgrimage. Instead, the game asks its player at the very end of the game what they believe the best course of action is for the storyworld, one that has been limping along since the very first game in the series. This macro-moral decision is almost jarringly major in comparison to what minor interactions that the player has had up until that point and brings a sense of ultimate closure no matter what ending is taken. The game of course has additional content and gameplay to enjoy after the credits roll, but the narrative itself concludes finally in one of three ways. Each option, however, recolors the actions that the player took to get to that point, either as a would be king of humanity, a savior sacrificing themselves to keep the world going for another cycle, or as a savior in another sense, finally letting the limp and broken world fade into darkness.

V. Conclusion

From the content on the story itself, a lone character looking to keep the fire of the world burning and trekking across the land of Lothric, to the player’s experience of the game play, Dark Souls III sets itself in the same style of narrative as that of the experience of pilgrims. Both game and historic action culminating in a building of skills and triumph over adversity that many others may not be willing to undertake. Even with little motivation in a bleak and harsh world that appears stacked against almost every move that the player and their character work towards. While Dark Souls III may only be channeling this kind of mentality for the benefit of the player’s experience, it casts its spell regardless and has left a lasting impression on both individuals as well as the games industry as a whole (resulting in the Soulsborne game genre). However, more than just affecting the entertainment industry as a whole, Dark Souls III gives a mediated experience of one of the time-honored traditions that was once a massive undertaking across Christendom, calling up the past as it seeks to tell its own story about a medieval-like fantasy world, and also the unidyllic descent into ruin that every age face, both in the world of the game and outside of it. From a narratological perspective, it gives an interesting challenge to where the border between game world and narrative actually divides two different experiences. While from a medieval perspective, it gives a unique look into the kind of crumbling and uncertain side of what history used to be through player experience. And all of that is without delving into the rich optional or expanded content that was added after the original release of the game.

Bibliography

Allen, Valerie. “As the Crow Flies: Roads and Pilgrimage.” Essays in Medieval Studies 25 (2008): 27–37.

Bell, Catherine M. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Bieger, Laura. “Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling.” De Gruyter      64 (2016): 11-26.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Eco, Umberto. "Dreaming of the Middle Ages." Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. Transl. William Weaver. 1973. London. (1998) 61-72.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka. Dark Souls 3. Bandai Namco (2016).

Osterrieth, Anne. “Medieval Pilgrimage: Society and Individual Quest.” Social Compass 36    (1989): 145-157.

Ryan, Malcolm et al, “Measuring Morality in Videogames Research.” Ethics and Information     Technology 22 (2020): 55-68.

Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Thon, Jan-Noël, eds. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Salonia, Matteo. “The Body in Medieval Spirituality: A Rationale for Pilgrimage and the       Veneration of Relics.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 14 (2018): 1-10.

Thon, Jan-Noël, “Transmedial Narratology Revisited: On the Intersubjective Construction of           Storyworlds and the Problem of Representational Correspondence in Films, Comics, and          Video Games” Narrative 25 (2017): 286-320. Unknown, “Dark Souls is More than Just a Game” GameFAQs (August 30th, 2014)     https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/606312-dark-souls/69969309

[1] Quotes from in-game dialogue are sourced from https://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com, a website that has transcribed the text of Dark Souls III’s dialogue and other in-game text in its entirety.

[essektheylyss]

guess who wrote one single scene for the first time in months? this bitch.

guess what that scene primarily consisted of? wizard spell mechanics.

guess what the scene prior to this one primarily consisted of? also wizard spell mechanics.

guess what the scene I'm scheduling myself to write tomorrow consists of? to no one's surprise, it's ALSO wizard spell mechanics!

[aydascomprehendsubtext]

Western queens community land trust ex machina. not for any of the very good things they're doing but for lifting me specifically from application hell of my own creation

[emmebearpaw]

i'm going to explode im going to explode im going to explode

[cinnamortentia]

Please remember to speak to your teachers or professors when you don’t understand something- if it’s the content or a grade. I did not do this in my undergraduate studies but I have twice now with my Victorian Literature professor in graduate school. She has been the sweetest professor and she is very helpful and understanding.

Talk. To. Your. Professors.

[theuniversals]

changing my name to horatio bc im a SCHOLAR bitcH i finished my last ever paper!1! im graduating!!

[sukimas]

i do think that incuriosity is a death knell for someone becoming an interesting, well-rounded, and worth-talking-to person, but the major you specialize in in undergrad- and indeed whether you go to undergrad at all- has jack shit to do with this.

[muchadoaboutlearning]

writing response papers for the literary canon course for finals

it is on macbeths cinematic adaptations, akira kurosawa's throne of blood and vishal bhardwaj's maqbool and on modern retellings of antigone using kamila shamsie's home fire and judith butler's antigone's claim. I actually loved both my arguments, they were so so fun to write even if it killed me. please ahhhhhhh I want someone to read them cause ik my prof won't he's a bit eh

~ week 39 2023

[oooohno]

I’m almost finished with my degree so this semester I’m taking classes just for fun and I have a children’s literature lecture and I forgot how fun it is to just talk about books non-stop for 90 minutes 🥺

[cappurrccino]

biggest downside to wanting to do academic librarianship is the research requirement for tenure track positions, and mostly its bc I have no idea how to craft my own research projects or what I'd want to do research on