The Corruption of Life in Dark Souls 1

September 3, 2024 • 800 words (3 min)

The Gaping Dragon is one of my favorite bosses in Dark Souls. The fight itself is pretty underwhelming, but it's the dragon's design that really stands out. It has four wings, a trait that's only seen in the primordial dragons from the game's introduction. These dragons are nearly extinct by the time the game starts, save for a single, diminished Stone Dragon hidden away at the bottom of Ash Lake, and Seath the Scaleless. All of the dragon descendant like the hydras, small lightning drakes, Hellkite wyvern, or Kalameet have two or no wings, setting them apart from their ancestors. The Gaping Dragon is the closest we get to seeing another primordial dragon, but something has gone horrifically wrong.

Along with the wings, another small but important detail about the Gaping Dragon's design is that it has six non-wing legs, while every other dragon has four or two, or the hydra's aquatic tentacles (and there's Seath, but he's a freak and doesn't count). This, along with the odd shape of the Gaping Dragon's body, implies that it's not one dragon, but two merged together. It even drops a twin humanity like other bosses that are made of two creatures, such as Chaos Witch Quelaag, while most normal bosses drop a single humanity.

The Gaping Dragon's ribcage-mouth is the most grotesque sign of its merged, warped form. It's part of the theme of greed and hunger in the Depths, which isn't fully realized outside of a few item descriptions and the butchers and their piles of meat. This imagery implies that the dragon's mouth might have developed in such a way to eat as much as it could. If it is made of two creatures rather than one, then it would struggle to feed itself on the runoff of civilization with a normal dragon's mouth. Maybe its lower half contained the organs necessary for life, so its upper half was free to develop a mouth from its ribcage, from which it sprays what looks like stomach acid.

So how did the Gaping Dragon come into being? Some people have theorized that it's an experiment of Seath's, like many other creatures in the game. The item description on its tail weapon describes it as a "distant, deformed descendant of the everlasting dragons."" However, I don't think it's a literal descendant, a product of reproduction and genetic mutation like the other dragon descendants. I think it was a primordial dragon (or rather, two of them), which became corrupted by life itself.

The introductory cutscene to Dark Souls tells us that Gwyn's reign of fire introduced the concepts of life and death to the primordial world. Before Gwyn, the dragons were everlasting, made of unchanging materials like stone, as seen with the Stone Dragon. With the introduction of life came the corruption of their physical bodies. Seath is the only ancient dragon without inorganic scales, and his body is warped, with three tentacles beneath an upright torso, although it's debatable whether this is the result of his closeness to Gwyn, experiments on himself, or both. The Stone Dragon's body isn't perfect, with asymmetrical horns that could just be a minor detail or could hint that its body has been corrupted despite it hiding away in Ash Lake. More solid proof of the concept of life corrupting inorganic material can be seen in another area of the game: Lost Izalith.

Some of the most numerous enemies in Lost Izalith are the Stone Demons, small gargoyle-like creatures that breathe fire. Along with the living ones are unmoving statue duplicates, with the implication that these statues somehow came to life. There are also the Titanite Demons, which are found all over the world, and the item description on their drops states that "from [titanite] slabs, great beasts arose." Finally, there's the Centipede Demon, one of the bosses in Lost Izalith. It was born from the Orange Charred Ring, according to the ring's description, another example of life arising from stone. Like the Gaping Dragon, the Centipede Demon appears to be several creatures joined together, although the centipedes likely grew out of places on its body rather than being merged together. Still, there is a distinct visual connection between the two.

With the introduction of life and death to the world of Dark Souls, everlasting materials became corrupted with life. This is most evident in Lost Izalith, where statues and rings gave birth to living beings. As one of the few remaining primordial dragons, the Gaping Dragon shows the horrific effects of this corruption. Its material body was fused with another, warped by organic matter and a newfound need to eat, becoming the monstrous thing it is in the game.