Dark Souls 1 and Gender

September 2, 2024 • 1200 words (5 min)

Content warning: descriptions of misogyny and intersex discrimination

Dark Souls is a rare gem among dark fantasy media. Its worldbuilding is creative, subtle, and melancholic, focused around a strong central theme of cycles and decay. It doesn't take place at the beginning of some great adventure, but at the end of a long-decaying era. One thing that it seems to be missing compared to its peers in the genre, however, is a set of strict gender roles. Most fantasy stories have, along with their vaguely medieval European settings, a strict patriarchal society, either as commentary, a power fantasy, or a sense of obligation or familiarity. This seems to be missing from Dark Souls: the subject never comes up in dialogue, and the gender of most of the characters has no bearing on their storylines. There are only a few places where gender has any significance in the game: the firekeepers, and the family of Gwyn.

Firekeepers

While every bonfire in the game is implied to have its own firekeeper, we only meet three of them: Anastacia of Astora, The Fair Lady, and the Darkmoon Knightess, all of whom are women. (In fact, all firekeepers are implied to be women by the item descriptions on the firekeeper's soul and the Estus flask.) Two of them are suffering in some way: The Fair Lady seems unable to move due to illness or the merging of her body with a spider's, and Anastacia is locked in a cell in Firelink Shrine and unable to speak due to her tongue having been cut out. The item description on her blood-stained skirt also implies that she was injured to prevent her escape. If she's revived after being murdered, she says she's ashamed that her "impure" tongue has been restored.

The role of a firekeeper is necessary to keep a bonfire lit, and they carry valuable resources in the form of the firekeeper's soul and the "infinite humanity" that gnaws at it. The actions of character like Lautrec, who murders Anastacia about halfway through the game to steal her soul, implies that firekeepers are frequently the target of violence, and coupled with the value they provide both alive and dead, are seen more as objects than people.

The position of firekeepers, the way they're treated by the world around them, and the fact that they're all women lends itself to a patriarchal reading of the social structure of Lordran. The firekeepers take on the role of women under a patriarchal society: they are little more than objects that provide valuable resources to those around them. Anastacia is made into what might be seen as the "ideal" firekeeper (or "ideal woman"), unable to speak to protest or physically escape her duty. The Fair Lady is sick, possibly due to the large amount of egg sacs around her body. It isn't much of a stretch to connect the egg sacs to pregnancy, the main thing a patriarchal society values women (or people it sees as women) for. The only firekeeper we meet who isn't outright suffering in this society is the Darkmoon Knightess, but she plays into the other major instance of gender roles in Dark Souls: the city of Anor Londo and the family of Gwyn, particularly his son Gwyndolin.

Gwyndolin

Anor Londo is under an illusion of eternal sunlight, maintaining the idea that the royal family, the father Gwyn and his children, are alive and well. This illusion is kept by Gwyndolin, who the Darkmoon Knightess is loyal to. If the player breaks the illusion or kills Gwyndolin, she becomes hostile, retaliating against the destruction of the already decaying monarchy in Anor Londo. She could be read as a woman who, despite her oppression under a patriarchal society, fights to uphold it.

Gwyn's rule isn't explicitly patriarchal—all we have to go on is him, a man who became king, and his treatment of his children, who share his name in a typical patriarchal tradition. The relationship I'm most interested in is the one between Gwyn and Gwyndolin. The item description on Gwyndolin's robes gives us some important details about this, stating, "The power of the moon was strong in Gwyndolin, and thus he was raised as a daughter." This implies that Gwyndolin was raised as a girl due his connection to the moon, which doesn't make much sense (in the lore of the game; I know about the mythological associations of the moon with femininity and the sun with masculinity). After all, Gwyn had a daughter named Gwynevere, who had a connection to the sun like other members of her family, and she wasn't raised as a boy. The deeper implication, I think, is that Gwyndolin was raised as a girl so he, the only remaining son of Gwyn, couldn't inherit the throne, and his connection to the moon was just an excuse. If there was no chance for Gwynevere to inherit the throne, which this treatment of Gwyndolin implies, this would confirm that Lordran operates on a patriarchal social system.

Interpreting Gwyndolin as an intersex allegory also helps this reading. He was born "wrong," both with his connection to the moon and the snakes on his lower half, a detail that could reference differences in anatomy in the real world such as intersex conditions. Because of this, he was forced into a gender role that he doesn't necessarily identify with. He's not a "real" man, as our real-life patriarchal society often puts an emphasis on people's genitalia falling into strict categories that define their gender, so it's convenient for Gwyn to raise him as a girl. This would prevent him from gaining power as a man and potentially usurping the rule of sunlight.

It seems that only once his father has left Anor Londo and his patriarchal reign of fire is dying that Gwyndolin starts to come into his true identity. In the first Dark Souls, he still dresses in a feminine way and has a "deep adoration of the sun," according to the item description on his crown. He maintains the illusion of Anor Londo using the image of Gwynevere, who we don't learn much about, but she seems to be the "ideal" version of Gwyndolin—a passive woman with a connection to the sun, who requests that the player follow in Gwyn's footsteps to reignite the flame. Despite this, Gwyndolin has already begun to break away from Gwyn's rule by forming the Darkmoon Covenant, a group with a name centered on his connection to the moon, rather than his other title as the Dark Sun, which shows up when he's protecting his father's tomb in his boss battle. The formation of his identity would continue in later games in the series (which I haven't played yet), where he becomes the new ruler of Anor Londo and finds a new family in Yorshka, who is connected to the dragons, the ancient enemy of his father.

Gwyndolin's story in Dark Souls provides valuable context about Gwyn's rule at its peak and the patriarchal social system he created in Lordran. He, along with the firekeepers, hint at the gender roles present in their society. Later FromSoftware games like Elden Ring would go on to experiment more with characters and their relationships to gender, but Dark Souls keeps it limited to fascinating snippets that add extra depth to an already layered world.