The Scale of Power
Power is commanding. Power is stern. Power is freeing, but power is learned. The mighty hold power over the rest to put them into their place below. Others wields power to bring the supposed mighty down to earth.
The Mythology of Power
Dark Souls’ world is mostly empty. I don’t mean that in a literal capacity. The world is made up of various connected levels which have their own distinct themes at play. A wintry institution towers over serene crystal caves. Lava eats into a monstrously large fortress, with no care for its history or significance. A castle glistens in the sun resting high above the downtrodden slums below. In each of these places, there await formidable bosses. There’s countless items scattered about the world, that have their own history, lore, and current uses to the player. There’s different play styles that have their own history and intricacies. Yet I say it’s mostly empty.
Well, that’s one of the words that comes to mind when I consider the themes of power in the game. Your enemies stand still, awaiting your arrival. Those formidable and powerful bosses simply lie in wait. Waiting until the exact moment that you walk through the fog gate, to reanimate. Otherwise, they would continue their non-interaction with the world around them for the rest of eternity. They do not rest, sleep, or have lives to which they must tend. Any semblance of their natural state is one which exists only in the abstract and unknowable past. Simply, they are the vacant shells of the beings they are made out to be in the lore and the plot. Some of this is just due to the limitations of the art form which we call video games, but there’s also themes throughout the story which reinforce this idea of “emptiness”.
There’s a word which can be used to describe this feeling of empty interaction in Dark Souls; hollow. In Dark Souls, “hollowing” is described as a total loss of purpose, or from some other perspectives, it is a hyper-focusing on one particular purpose over any other. For most bosses, the object of their hyper-focus is simply in defeating the player. For the final boss Gwyn at the end of the game, his hyper-focus is on protecting the “first flame” at any and all costs. In the lore, the power of Gwyn came from finding a “lord soul” from when a period of time called the “age of fire” initially began. The first flame represents the continuation of his power from finding this lord soul, which he cannot let die lest the age of fire come to an end and the age of humanity begins. Throughout the game, the age of humanity is also referred to as the “age of dark”, carrying the connotations that the end of the age of fire (and thus the end of the lord’s rule) would spell disastrous consequences for the world of Dark Souls. There’s something that should be noted about this framing. The justification for the power of the lords comes from a mythologized past and the removal of the domination by the lords is framed as a type of cataclysm. But this is not a framing that is shared by everyone inside this world.
This idea of domination and the structures that form power itself works its way into the design of the game world.
Lording From Above
A great example of a design decision which reinforces the idea hierarchical power structure which Gwyn benefits from is the first path that most players take on their first playthrough. You start in the Asylum and get dropped off at Firelink Shrine by the Giant Crow. From here, the usual route is to go through Undead Burg, up to Undead Parish, platform all the way onto the near top of Sen’s fortress, to get lifted up to top of the massive wall which separates the city of Anor Londo from the rest of the world. You’ll notice a very interesting progression as you make your way up to Anor Londo. Undead Burg is much like a slum, everything from the walls to the floors are falling apart, building up a visible layer of dirt and grime. As you make your way up, Undead Parish is slightly more welcoming since it’s a bit more open to the sun. Further up, Sen’s fortress is described as a proving grounds built by the gods, housing the only route into the city of Anor Londo. But it is also falling apart, not free from the physical decay of the world around it.
However, Anor Londo is a much different place.The first thing you’ll notice when you are dropped in, is that the city is always bathed in the warm glow of the sun. With shiny marble floors and gargantuan monuments to the gods, there is no shortage of symbols of vanity. There’s only a few places in the palace inside Anor Londo which show even a hint of decay, but any comparison to Undead Burg, Undead Parish, or Sen’s Fortress wouldn’t even be remotely close. Anor Londo exists as the special place where the people that hold all the cards, live a lavish life above those who have nothing. Humans are relegated to living in a destitute state outside of Anor Londo, with no recourse to improve their condition due to the threat posed by Gwyn’s army of knights.
To me, this vertical superstructure is a physical manifestation of the hierarchical power structure in the game’s story. Lords and royalty rule over, which is why Anor Londo is so high up. It is physically inaccessible (by any sensible means) because humanity is made out to be inferior to the lords according to the mythological justification for the lord’s power. Supposedly, they are not fit to determine their own conditions because they are not worthy of doing so. This is why I think the age of humanity is referred to as the “age of dark”; humanity is seen as inferior, and thus the rulers expect the age of humanity to be inherently worse than the age of fire. The symbolism of the fire and the darkness is a strong one, but it’s not one which is independent of the characters and power structures in this world. Who gets to determine how this framing of the fire and darkness symbolism are the people that already hold all the power, making for an imbalanced understanding of power in an already imbalanced world. It is not a shared understanding, but a mindset that is imposed downwards by Gwyn onto everyone he rules under the threat of systematized violence.
Stela’s Journey
Let’s look at the same ideas as it applies to a different game. A world is withering away in front of your eyes. Farmlands have their crops picked clean by aggressive pests. A war is being waged, with entire forests being razed to the ground almost as a throwaway tactic in a much larger conflict. The world is coming to an end, and you are only here to observe and collect information. As Stela, your role in this world and its story, is confined to mere passive observation. Although not unaffected by the hostile creatures and harsh conditions on this planet, you have no role in stopping or slowing the crumbling world you see around you. But as you climb further up this world to reach the very top, you see a very different state of affairs than at the bottom of the world.
You start the game by waking up at the very bottom of a well under a mysterious monolith, and climb up a ladder to find a barren farm with vast fields of dead crops. Aggressive insects have picked this part of the world clean, now roaming in groups to kill and eat larger game. After escaping into a dense forest, you roam until you encounter a peculiar species of tall humanoids; the Shadows. Sensitive to stimuli, they brutally murder anything that moves. Sneaking your way through the forest, the sky goes through warmer and warmer hues. Soon the sky turns orange, with ash and embers scattered over the forest floor, and the trees beginning to thin out due to a widespread fire. The source is an army in the distance launching fire arrows into the woods, leaving behind a barren wasteland as they carve their way through the forest. I interpreted this as a war between multiple groups, one of which is the Shadows. You can see that closer to the bottom of this world, the inhabitants are in a state of desperation and conflict.
You continue your journey through some underground ruins, and snowy plains. As you go progress closer to the end, the world takes on a different form. You run across a desolate town overrun by the Shadows you saw in the forest (among other hostile creatures). The town itself is not just a place for living, but geared towards the production of various resources. The power source of this town, is a distinctive type of crystal which comes up a bit later. At the edge of the town, there is a large ice cliff for which there is a lift used to carry resources in bulk to the top. Climbing the lift to the top of the cliff, you see the output of this production town; a monstrously large, high tech city that is gated off from the rest of the world. And in the city, the same power source which is used in the town, but geared towards powering the city itself rather than the processing of raw resources. Climbing your way to the very top of this city, you find a religious group worshipping the various monoliths which you seen through your whole journey. These monoliths store the important information about a world and its inhabitants right before its collapse, which was placed down on this planet by an alien species looking to expand their knowledge of life in the universe. While not explicitly stated, this religious group are implied through visual storytelling as being a sort of ruling class of this world, where they hold authoritative power over the other inhabitants of this planet.
There’s a theme of exploitation along this story which is explored. At the end of the game, you come to realize that the planet you are on is Earth. The Shadows are humans, who morphed under the presence of a monstrous entity. In those underground ruins earlier in the game, are references to this same creature and hints in its chamber that it was captured by the ruling class. The metaphor of the human-morphing entity becomes obvious when you consider how it acts on this exchange relationship between the Shadows and the ruling class. More Shadows means more workers to create more processed resources, being a benefit to the ruling class looking to expand their power even further. They’re held hostage under this system, without any way to bargain for anything greater than small concessions.
The overarching story of Stela rings hollow if you insist on reading it as a tale of motivation around what should be done. While the game does not place direct morals or justifications on the choices of this ruling class, it still implies the effects of the ruling class’ fixation with its power over people. The rest of the world is following apart while the ruling class hyper-focuses on their objective. Their current task of studying the monoliths in the game is an effort which is not an independent task of the rulers, but aligns with a general principle of pooling the resources of those that they rule as an excuse to hold their power. The task is not an end, but a means to continue the stay of their own power no matter the cost to those they supposedly rule. The people at the bottom are the ones that have to fight the wars, suffer at the low points while the ruling class is actively working on outsourcing even more of their ordered violence onto those they rule.
The Illusion of Order and Protection
I really talked up Anor Londo in my section in Dark Souls for a particular reason. If you were to travel to the top most part of Anor Londo and attempt to kill the goddess Gwynevere, it becomes clear that this city is nothing at all like what it first seems. Gwynevere simply disappears, and Anor Londo is suddenly plunged into darkness. Most of the enemies and guards were an illusion. The perpetual glow of the sun bathed city was an illusion. All orchestrated by Gwyn’s son Gwyndolin, to uphold the image of Anor Londo and maintain “order”. What little Anor Londo even superficially represented was a lie at its core, as it decayed exactly like the world around it. With nothing but the hollow principles that the rulers held onto, everything around them fell apart just the same. As much as Gwyn may have believed he was doing good by continuing the age of fire, he did it under his egotistical assumption that the people he ruled were lesser than him. He believed that they did not have the capability to rule themselves because he thought he was superior to all of them, justified by his own mythology of his power. It’s clear to see then, that his idea of “protection” was always going to view humans as the greatest threat to themselves, laying bare the notion that what he designed to “protect” humanity was about confining and controlling them.
Similarly in Stela, the ruling class held onto a dogmatic principle that their rule was superior to the self-rule of the greater population. They justified this through the study and worship of these monoliths, providing their own mythology for their power. A mythology where they stand to benefit while others are embroiled in meaningless conflicts and endless notions of productivity. But when the world itself started collapsing, their high tech city fell apart the same as the rest of the world. That order really meant nothing in the grand scheme of things, since the world comes to an ending which the rulers did nothing to stop. The ordered violence of the rulers was not a saving grace, it was a time sink designed to give them one last chance to consolidate power. The protection by the ruling class was always going to view humans as being the greatest threat to themselves, erasing any notions that their own chaotic and spontaneous organization have value.
The Visual Modes of Power
In both these games, visual storytelling had a lot to say about these themes. Showing Anor Londo as this beautiful sun bathed city untouched by the imminent collapse of the world and then shattering that illusion shows the hollow nature of following the principles of rulership dogmatically. Similarly with Stela, the crumbling high tech city overrun by hostile creatures shows that the principles of rulership had no effect in stopping the impending cataclysm, despite what value it might have even superficially provided. The vertical progression in both games is key to analyzing the hierarchical nature of the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. The respective cities in both games are nearly inaccessible to people that are further down, a visual form of the domination, subjugation, and gatekeeping which the rulerships in each game represent. The trade of labour and resources for “protection” and “order” by the ruler(s) is a wholly unequal one, since any challenge to this system can be suppressed by the rulers while those being ruled have no leverage. Something not just hinted at in the story and lore, but visually represented in the landscape of each of the worlds and the charged interactions between the worlds and the characters. The power of Gwyn’s army and the reliance of the Shadows on the rulers’ power source, both show this leverage which forms this unequal relationship between ruler and ruled.
This vertical story telling is about a particular type of power to be more specific; authoritative power. Or, the ability for individuals to exert their will over others through the use of systematized domination legitimized by a mythology of power. It fortifies the relationship between those that command and those that obey. There’s also another type of power; liberatory power. The ability to exert your own will to subvert or overturn a system of domination. It disturbs the relationship between those that command and those that obey. In both the games, the rulers hold authoritative power over the ruled. In Stela, the player takes on a passive role where the power to overturn this command-obey relationship is taken away from them. But in Dark Souls, the player is given the agency where they can wield their liberatory power to end the rule of Gwyn by killing him and letting the first flame die. There’s however another option, where the player’s liberatory power can transform into authorative power by killing Gwyn and taking his place as a ruler, showing that that liberatory power can transmute into authoritative power and vice versa. While a tale of authoritative power is told through visual factors like scale, the destructive and liberatory power of the player in Dark Souls is informed by direct action. You get to the end by persevering and beating the bosses. You personally fight the enemies, either by yourself or with people with which you share a common goal. The authoritative power is one that remains orderly and mechanical, but devoid in its own image by the hollow principles of rulership that it espouses. The players get to use their liberatory power through their own agency and will. It’s available to everyone, not a mandate devised by those above you.
Perhaps there’s a story to be told here about how power works in real life. Sometimes, our associations and bonds with other people can be chaotic. We do not ordinarily create authoritative institutions to force our friends to be our friends. We do not create authoritative institutions to force everyone to participate in creating and maintaining a community garden, or a drive-in movie theatre, or a festival, or an environmental group, or so on. Those are free associations, that can be broken at any time through the will of the people involved when their interests are no longer aligned. Maintaining order may be seen as a form of maintaining united interests, but is it necessary true that interests can always be united? If we cannot make our associations with other people work, then there’s surely value in resolving or leaving the conflict in some situations rather than trying to “maintain order”. When you require authority and domination to force everyone to accept a particular set of principles, the progress to push past those principles as the need arises is slowed to a deathly crawl. While people suffer, the “need” to maintain order works against them, making them wait for a liberation which may never come. The “order” of rulerships is not the absence of violence, it is act of instituting an ordered violence on those being ruled. An ordered violence that the ruled must justify using the ruler’s mythology power, under the threat of the ruler’s authoritative power. In the end, this creates a self-reinforcing hierarchical power structure unless people use their liberatory power to subvert the hierarchy. These are all elements we can find in the world around us today, and understanding these power types and power structures gives a new lens of analysis. It helps us to understand that we have our own power, which we can express through direct action. We can stand to defeat those bosses ourselves, without relying on oppressing others to gain our own liberation from those that dominate us.
