The race is on to snatch up popular video game properties and make shows out of them, like with Resident Evil, Castlevania, and The Witcher. It makes sense, it’s a still relatively untapped market when it comes to adapting existing stories for film. Since Game of Thrones has left a medieval-styled dark fantasy-sized hole in everybody’s life since it wrapped up, people have been eager for their next fix. This is why HBO seems so intent on bringing it back in some fashion. The Witcher seemed to satisfy that for a bit but once everybody finished binging they found that there are another 364 days left in the year. So, in the quest for other stories to bring to the small screen, what about Dark Souls?
While there are no plans for an adaptation, and it feels like a type of game that would make the least amount of sense to do so, Dark Souls approach to fantasy storytelling could be just what the genre needs.
One of the most fascinating aspects about Dark Souls is its deconstructionist approach to fantasy stories. Stalwarts of the genre like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones give those who want to engage meaningfully with the story lists of names, places, where they came from, and, in the case of the former, songs about glades and villages in the languages of the residents of those places.
Dark Souls gives players the bare minimum of knowledge about the history of its world with a 4-minute opening cutscene. There’s a war full of dragon betrayal, lightning bolt-throwing kings, chaos fire-witches, and a plague-dispensing hairy mass of bones. People branded with a mark called the Darksign are destined to reanimate after death in perpetuity until they eventually lose their minds. Following that brief introductory video, it is then the player’s duty to tear it all down.
The game follows The Chosen Undead, a tiny person in a land of giants, as they travel from location-to-location slaughtering creatures in their path as they set in motion sequences of events that lead to them personally killing literally everybody around them, including the very gods of the world. They are entropy made manifest, and by the end of the game they make the choice of whether this new blank slate of a world they’ve made will be one filled with light or darkness.
Whereas most stories of the fantasy genre are about building up a rich, storied history, Dark Souls takes lore once full of an encyclopedia’s worth of names and significant events and sets about undoing it like Robert Rauschenberg with “Erased de Kooning Drawing”. The player tears it all down, unraveling and destroying it piece-by-piece as a walking one-person apocalypse.
That the lore is mostly told through tweet-sized snippets found on items the player collects throughout the game is brilliant. First, it’s exactly as engaging as the player wants it to be as they progress. Second, the years of history ultimately don’t matter. The lore of Dark Souls is interesting, but it still boils down to being about the history of a place that doesn’t actually exist.
Large-scale, there were dragons and wars, just as there were/are in Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Witcher, The Elder Scrolls, Dungeons and Dragons, Eragon, The Chronicles of Narnia, and countless others. Sure, the player picked up the armor of a fabled hero who faithfully protected the king, but they got that armor by killing said fabled hero. That the lore is mostly consigned to the flavor text is indicative of the nature of lore itself: it’s just added flavor.
As with any adaptation, a Dark Souls TV series would have to be able to evoke the feelings of the game: mystery, despair, and loneliness. However, the way story is handled in Dark Souls and TV as a genre’s necessity to focus on story, gives it an opportunity to subvert the standard tropes of the fantasy genre. In the 2012 movie Looper, Joseph Gordon-Levitt sits down at a table with his future-self, played by Bruce Willis, and the characters agree not to get hung up on the logistics of time travel, allowing the movie to have its fun without being bogged down by logical inconsistencies that come with writing a story involving an impossible phenomenon.
At the beginning of Doom (2016), the Doom Slayer wakes up and is told what’s happening by a robot on a television monitor, but rather than listen to them blather on about the obvious situation of demons invading a space facility, the Doom Slayer throws the monitor and gets right to the action. What’s important isn’t all the sci-fi business about Argent energy, it’s that there are demons that need to be stopped right now.
Just as these scenes in Looper and Doom serve to say that the unnecessary backstory is more of a burden to the story than anything, Dark Souls as a TVseries can do with the fantasy genre. The series can be full of quiet lulls, somber reminiscing, and personal moments between The Chosen Undead and those they come across who have still managed to retain their life and humanity, punctuated by moments of harrowing action and bloody conflict. Characters summoned via soapstones can serve as a helpful deus ex machina or can supply the series with much-needed sun-praising levity.
Game of Thrones’ pivotal scenes work best because of the conversations between the characters, not because of the exposition but because it allowed them to be human and to share their desires, fears, and the moments that shaped who they are and the decisions they make. These allow people to connect with these characters in between the Battle of the Bastards and Red Wedding moments, and are the reason those big moments work. As an added bonus, these are the most effective scenes for revealing the history of the world since it’s now connected to a face and tangible consequences rather than feeling like a floating bullet-point in a PowerPoint presentation.
In Dark Souls, the war is over. The Chosen Undead is a janitor sweeping up what’s left of a dying world, encountering people along the way who are struggling just to eke out an existence. Sometimes the environment tells a story of its own, showcasing the remnants of a world that once was. What is relevant becomes pared down, shrinking in scale a world of giants with each conquered boss.
The fantasy genre has a lore problem, in that it’s too married to the idea that there needs to be a whole separate book of lore for the story to work. Writers have thought that the only thing missing from the dense compendiums of lore for their world is even more information. Dark Souls as a series could prove that this is not the case, and all that matters is what’s happening to the characters at that moment and the events that brought them to this point.
The type of story is the perfect antidote, being about killing the actual concept of overly-detailed lore on the journey to forge a new world. Coupled with some fantastic fight scenes, solid writing, and nice visuals, it could be just what the genre has needed all along.
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