the quest goes on

“Perhaps you’ve seen it, maybe in a dream.”
Those are the first words you hear when you start up Dark Souls II, and it has always been the dreamlike, archetypal simplicity of Dark Souls II’s narrative that has given this game the power it has to get into my head and to take on all kinds of symbolic meaning. I wrote about the game on a few occasions last year, but never finished it.
Returning to Dark Souls II today (I previously played it on PS3, now on PS4), I was worried that it would feel too much like Bloodborne to establish an identity of its own.

But immediately, the melancholy of Majula, entirely different from the madness of Bloodborne’s Yharnam, spoke to me. Bloodborne is perhaps a better game than Dark Souls II, but this is still the quest that feels like mine.


I definitely don’t seek misery in my real life, but I also don’t believe in denying suffering or short-circuiting despair.

I have spent long enough feeling nothing. Feeling something, even if it is grief or suffering or misery, is a place to set out from, something to work with. It can help you get where you need to go.


There is a sense in which time is running out for me. I’m underemployed, and can’t stay afloat forever in my current circumstances. This is not a time to lose hope. It is a time when I must keep hope alive more diligently than ever. In a way it would feel good, indulgent, to just throw the last shreds of hope away and let hopelessness carry me away. But losing hope is not a luxury I have right now.
I may lose things but I can’t be like Saulden here, despondent, utterly lost.



Part of what I love so much about Dark Souls II is its spiritual element. Where Bloodborne is concerned with religion, Dark Souls II is concerned with the soul.


To me, the curse in Dark Souls II is lovelessness. That is by far the most common soul sickness in our modern world: the lack of love. In one of my posts last year about the game, I wrote:
Sometimes I fall asleep…thinking that the effects of a lack of touch can seep into your soul like a sickness, or maybe a curse. But maybe they can also be healed, someday, if you survive the quest.

So I’ve heard. The trick is finding a person with a soul (a lot of people lost their souls long ago) who’s willing to let you see into their soul, and who wants to see into yours. That is how the curse is broken.

Notes
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