Dark souls 2 Theory (part 7, 8, & 9)

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7.   Vendricks Guilt and The Crowns

       In japan the concept of sacrifice is an important theme that resounds through many of their art forms. In films Hayao Miyazaki explores themes of sacrifice especially in his earlier work. You can see this in many Japanese games as well, such as journey, Shadow of the colossus, Chrono trigger, final fantasy 7, Okami, soul sacrifice, freedom wars and many others. Sacrifice is a selfless act. Selflessness is when you give up what you want to someone else.

Pharos is an example of selfless acts. He leaves random contraptions on walls or floors to help the undead and prevents them from losing hope. These contraptions also helped to send a message of unselfishness and compassion in a dying world. This is why his art is seen as perplexing to reasoned men. Pharos reminds me of activist graffiti artists who leave imagery on walls to spark some subconscious reaction or raise awareness or simply just lighten the mood with messages of peace and hope. I believe pharos feels for humanity, this I why his mask is endlessly weeping, I also believe that pharos was hollowing and in the process left traps in the contraptions as he was going mad.

“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing.
And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.”– Banksy (Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall)

     I believe Vendrick feels guilt for what he's done, the way his posture is when we enter his memory, his dialogue, the fact that he left one giant left, and the way he still holds fondness for Nashandra despite being a big part of the ruin of Drangleic. I don't believe Vendrick wanted the giants to go extinct. Nashandra sharing many allusions to Lady Macbeth, let her ambition, ruthlessness, and the single-minded pursuit of power, bring 2 races to ruin, one perhaps to extinction. I think Nashandra being an agent of darkness had humanities best interest in mind, and she knew that the giants’ kinship was the sole order to their hive like race. The giants held this great threat in her mind since they were the coming race that would eventually dethrone humans.
       Vendrick works on many esoteric and spiritual ways to alleviate the pain of those marked by the curse, we can see this in Shrine of Amana, another more ambitious experiments of his is creating 3 kingdoms where the crown he hands over to kings will capture the lessons and essence of the human condition, in an attempt to peer into the essence of the soul. When Vendrick crosses the seas to put an end to the threat Nashandra speaks of, he finds there's a difference between the giants and human souls, giants souls are able to harness both light and dark, a balance, when we go into Vendrick’s memory he says "Inherit fire and harness the dark”. Vendrick finds the strength in this, but his discovery is stunted, being pulled in 2 directions by Nashandra and his brother Aldia. Nashandra wants to enslave, subjugate, conquer the giants to make a kingdom through their enslavement, and then hit the reset button where she is able to guide humanity through a different era of corrupted darkness. Aldia wants Vendrick to force the giants into inhuman experiments were he'll be able to use their souls DNA to see if the curse can be tricked by mixing it with a human, but many abominations are born. Aldia is able to create dragons, which one is used by Vendrick in Shulva to see if a bond between dragon and human can exist, and if there is, what secrets would the dragon entrust to humanity. Aldia seeing as how once dragons were immortal, they mix both dragon and giants souls with a Human and emerald herald is born out of this, but fate could not be bested, this is not the first time that dragons mix with another race, in ds1 Priscilla is a spawn of god and dragon, and being seen as a dangerous abomination, gets locked away in the painted world. Vendrick appalled by both, escapes with his trusted knights into the undead crypt where he awaits to receive the 3 crowns and the lessons learned. He sends dragon mercenaries to Shulva hearing that his experiment didn't go as intended. What they find there is a complete failure since humans instead of co-existing with the dragon, end up turning him into a god. The dragon gets bored with the human worship and constantly slumbers, never being able to make that pact with humanity Vendrick expected. Behind all this an agent of dark is waiting for her turn to rule Shulva. When the mercenaries find the dragon, they puncture him, and his true nature comes to life, from the wound a poison leaks that destroys Shulva with the crown buried deep in the secret city. A sister of dark reclaims the ruin holding in contempt those that destroyed her chance at power. Vendrick sends his own soldiers to brume tower and Eleum Loyce after hearing of one’s hubris and potential demise and the others facing a natural disaster below their city. What they find in brume is another agent of dark that has taken over the castle. And in Eleum Loyce they find a city covered in snow with their king missing. Vendrick hollows in the wait for the crowns, but in this wait he is able to learn guilt and empathy. Guilt is a selfless emotion since remorse proves to us that we feel wrong for what's been done. This is what separates Vendrick from Gwyn.

"Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since then it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness. -Audre Lorde

     Guilt is a big part for us as players in dark souls. At first when we enter the games we kill without really knowing the backstories to the bosses and enemies and their mysteries. We defeat to achieve that feeling of accomplishment. But when you selflessly start to wander about the characters you are killing and put actual effort into it, reading item descriptions, looking up lore videos explaining what is going in the plot of the game, reading and hearing others speculations, your next play through with the knowledge acquired, is filled with guilt when you slay bosses and enemies, Artorias and Sif being great examples. This applies to real life. People are just obstacles to us in our everyday life, and we don't sympathize with each other since we assume the worse of one another. But if we had a way of seeing their everyday struggles, how they feel, what they've been through, what they've had to endure, we'd realize there is this great grey area that only warrants sympathy and compassion, instead of stepping on each other. The flip side to guilt is selfishly attempting to do well so a negative conscious can cease. Guilt is important because it's selfless and it allows change, selfish guilt can be seen a means to repress progress such as in Macbeth. Vendrick in this guilt offers us a solution instead of keeping this information selfishly for him. Once the crowns are reunited he blesses the crowns and cures hollowing but not the curse. This gives us time and opportunity to change a kingdom.

“Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection—or compassionate action.”-Daniel Goleman


8.  Benhart and Ishmael

    Benhart and Ishmael by Daniel Quinn share some similarities especially when it comes to the big lie being told through generations and why things came to be the destructive way they are. In Ishmael the narrator is looking for a way to change the world, he's always been waiting for a teacher to tell him what to do. He ponders on the movements in the 60s and the squandered potential of people going out and trying to change the world. He finds an ad on the newspaper that reads "teacher seeks pupil, must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person." At first he feels offended as he thinks it might be a self-righteous guru scamming people's genuine intentions, later he becomes curious to see the big fraud. He expects to find lines of people but to his surprise he finds an empty room with a gorilla. This gorilla is the teacher and he is able to communicate telepathically with the narrator. He starts of by telling his life story and how one man saved him from the circus and zoo life. This man was able to figure out that the gorilla had higher intelligence and therefore shares his knowledge with him, as they both study and contemplate on many ideologies and philosophies. The gorilla becomes very fascinated with the Nazi’s and World War 2 since the man being a Jew lost his wife and daughter. In the gorillas studies, he's able to find the problem with humans, something that sticks out to him being an outsider looking in, to him it sticks out since it's a lie all of humans have been conditioned since birth. He even compares this lie to how the Nazis came to be. He explains that Hitler gave the Germans a story to enact. This story is filled with promises, of redemption and supremacy. That they were the supreme race and everyone else is inferior and should be ruled by them. This story of course brought destruction and many deaths. He says that humans have a similar story that we never question because we have been hearing it all our lives and it's ingrained itself so deep in our culture that it operates like background noise. This story is that humans evolved above all species becoming the climax of evolution, and therefore since we are the dominant race this earth was made solely for us, its finest creation, to do with it whatever we want. This story began the moment a divide happened between the takers (civilized) and the leavers (primitive) and has been enacted ever since the takers ushered in a new age of industrialization over the leaver’s peaceful coexistence with nature. He believes all the problems today are due to takers thinking they are the universes central event and therefore earth is our life support system. This will eventually lead to collapse, because it disrupts the balance of nature, and the machine created cannot be easily destroyed since it feeds everyone. Also contrary to the German Nazi era, people were able to leave the country as oppose to the world the taker has created, where people must conform in order to survive; the only way out is through death. This story we enact could also be compared to the story humans enact in dark souls or the takers representing humans, and leavers as the giants. But none is more evident than in the story of Benhart.

"Exactly. That's what's been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You've been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you." Daniel Quinn Ishmael

"Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidity, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness." Daniel Quinn Ishmael

"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world." Daniel Quinn Ishmael

"Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish" Daniel Quinn Ishmael

"Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive almost anything short of total global catastrophe. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.....one species exempting itself from this law has the same ultimate effect as all species exempting themselves. You end up with a community in which diversity is progressively destroyed in order to support the expansion of a single species." - Daniel Quinn Ishmael

"I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.” -Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

"The law you're looking for has been obeyed invariably in the living community for three billion years. He nodded to the world outside. And this is how things came to be this way. If this law had not been obeyed from the beginning and in each generation thereafter, the seas would be lifeless deserts and the land would still be dust blowing in the wind. All the countless forms of life that you see here came into being following this law, and following this law, man too came into being. And only once in all the history of this planet has any species tried to live in defiance of this law and it wasn't an entire species, it was only one people, those I've named Takers. Ten thousand years ago, this one people said, No more. Man was not meant to be bound by this law," and they began to live in a way that flouts the law at every point. Every single thing that is prohibited under the law they incorporated into their civilization as a fundamental policy. And now, after five hundred generations, they are about to pay the penalty that any other species would pay for living contrary to this law.” Ishmael Daniel Quinn

    "The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man. The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world.....In other words, the world doesn't need to belong to man but it does need man to belong to it." Ishmael Daniel Quinn

"And every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver culture, a wisdom ultimately tested since the birth of mankind disappears from the world beyond recall”. Daniel Quinn Ishmael

"The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison." Daniel Quinn Ishmael

   Benhart has a sword that he treasures and sees it as his destiny. It's been passed on by generations of his family. The sword is a tradition and has been a part of his culture. This weapon is the moonlight sword, but it's not the real one as we later find out. He's been led to believe that it is a real and magical sword by tradition. This false sword brings him to Drangleic to be put to good use. By tradition the false sword puts him on a journey of violence and despair repeating a false notion that predates back to his ancestors. This false story can be seen as the false story Ishmael talks about. That this world belongs to man to do with it what he wants, and this myth brings us to ruin. Now we have to look at what the sword symbolizes. Seath the scaless was an imperfect selfish dragon that betrayed his own and brought their ruin. Throughout his time he researches immortality, he uses the land and people for his own convenience to experiment on, no matter how many laws of nature he tries to revoke. He eventually goes mad with this knowledge or lack of. But what we know is that he and the gods don't want to die off. As the flame fades they desperately are looking for ways to artificially prolong their reign because they believe this world is for them to rule, they can't accept change or diversity otherwise. The moonlight sword comes from Seath, when we attack his tail. And in dark souls 2 we create the real Moonlight sword with the great soul that once belonged to Seath.


9. Gavlaan’s Wheel

Dark Souls 1 is about lore, Dark Souls 2 is about metaphor. None is more apparent than with Gavlaan. Gavlaan is one of the most mysterious characters in dark souls 2, and if you go by the lore of his description, there's not much there really to discuss. But if you analyze his famous line "Gavlaan wheel, Gavlaan deal" we can find something that tie well with dark souls 2. The two important words here, "wheel" and "deal". If you look at the word wheel, it can symbolize a sign of progress. If you look at the word "deal" it can mean something you are dealt with whether it be good or bad. But if you add the two words together, it's the wheel of fortune, now this term means something completely different in our time than what it meant back in medieval times. In medieval it was called Rota Fortuna and

according to Wikipedia “Though classically Fortune's Wheel could be favorable and disadvantageous, medieval writers preferred to concentrate on the tragic aspect, dwelling on downfall of the mighty - serving to remind people of the temporality of earthly things. In the morality play Everyman for instance, Death comes unexpectedly to claim the protagonist. Fortune's Wheel has spun Everyman low, and Good Deeds, which he previously neglected, are needed to secure his passage to heaven."

"....Now, now, Ensign Pistol. Fortune is depicted as blind, with a scarf over her eyes, to signify that she is blind. And she is depicted with a wheel to signify—this is the point—that she is turning and inconstant, and all about change and variation. And her foot, see, is planted on a spherical stone that rolls and rolls and rolls." Shakespeare, Caesar

"Shakespeare also made reference to this in "Macbeth" throughout the whole play. Macbeth starts off halfway up the wheel when a Thane, but moves higher and higher until he becomes king, but falls right down again towards the end as his wife dies, and he in turn dies." Wikipedia

      By this you can see the wheel of fortune relating to dark souls in how what was once on top of the wheel will soon be at the bottom with something new rising on top. When we visit Drangleic, humanity is at the bottom of the wheel, the giants where supposed to be at the top, as something new rises in the cyclical spinning wheel. What was once on top gets squashed when it reaches the bottom. This makes sense when it comes to dark souls 2 cyclical theme.

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