The Dark Souls franchise is home to a wide array of grotesque, lumpen creatures. Regular mobs can be an absolute nightmare to look at, never mind to do battle with. When you’ve made it through one of the deathtrap-laden areas and are ready to move on to the next, what’s waiting for you? An even more hideous, difficult, and absurdly difficult boss, that’s what.
Every player will find some bosses more difficult than others, and everyone’s experience will be different, but, where the Gaping Dragon of Dark Souls is concerned, there’s one thing everyone can agree on: it’s one of the ghastliest creations in the series. What’s the story behind this great beast? Let’s try to unravel a little of the enigma.
10 It’s Eternally Hungry
Now, everybody’s familiar with the great temptation of knowing that you’re more than satiated, but just needing to eat that dessert too. A bit of soul searching would probably lead us to the conclusion that this is simply greed in its purest form, but nobody wants to dwell on that thought.
Instead, let’s spare a thought for the poor Gaping Dragon, a creature that was seemingly corrupted by its own greed. It adopted horrifying physical characteristics to reflect this, resulting in the beautiful specimen it is now.
9 Its Extra Legs Are Necessary To Support Its Stomach
When it comes to dragons, Gaping Dragon is far from the conventional Spyro-esque figures—not that Spyro can be underestimated—that tend to be presented in games, movies, and TV shows. Instead, it decided to stand out from the crowd by… well, becoming a huge, disgusting mouth on legs with wings. That’s what they call boldly forging your own path in life.
Even so, this unfortunate creature wasn’t designed this way purely for the sake of being revolting. There’s still some logic to its biology, though this may not be remotely clear at first glance. As the Dark Souls Wiki reports, its extra legs serve to support its gargantuan stomach, while its wings aren’t strong enough to allow it to fly but can still aid in leaping.
8 It’s Distantly Descended From The Everlasting Dragons
An unconventional beast the Gaping Dragon may be, but it isn’t as much of an anomaly as players might think. In fact, it’s related to an ancient and magnificent group known as the Everlasting Dragons, albeit distantly.
These noble immortal beasts reigned over all during the Age of Ancients, relinquishing their power only when they were defeated by the Lords in a devastating war.
7 It’s Not A Dragon In The Traditional Sense
Fans tend to regard dragons as great reptilian creatures, as traditional dictates. The image of an Everlasting Dragon as depicted in the series may seem to support this, but these creatures are actually very different.
One defining characteristic of an Everlasting Dragon is its unique, mineral-based body. Its scales are formed of stone rather than a thick flesh, making it—and the Gaping Dragon, by extension—both very similar and very different to the various other dragons encountered in the series (and the many in other titles, such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim). This one is the leader of the Path of the Dragon Covenant, which muddies the water even more.
6 This Member Of An Ancient Race Is Now Alone
As mentioned previously, the Everlasting Dragons’ dominion over all was challenged by the Lords: Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, Nito, the Furtive Pygmy, and the Witch of Izalith. The resulting conflict did not end well for the not-so-everlasting-after-all dragons, which were all but wiped out.
The Gaping Dragon, then, is one of few remaining descendants of these noble, powerful creatures. It has slowly withered away and become increasingly corrupted in appearance, partly due to this isolation.
5 The Appearance Of Other Forms Of Life Also Contributed To Its Change
With the Dark Souls series, the lore tends to be complex and mystifying to sift through. Many intriguing fan theories have been offered up, in an attempt to shed light on certain aspects of the story.
With regards to the Gaping Dragon, though, director Miyazaki has made one thing very clear: it was the introduction of other life forms that triggered the beginning of the creature’s corruption to its awful current form. As he stated in a Design Works interview about the original Dark Souls, “as to what triggered this change… well, the emergence of life corrupted it, it was warped by emotion and desire…” It’s unclear whether the Gaping Dragon was envious of these new life forms and their community or whether this desire was simply to consume them or a dash of both, but this is how it came to be as the player encounters it in Dark Souls.
4 Its Tail Has A Great Mystical Power (And Can Be Used As A Devastating Weapon)
While the Gaping Dragon doesn’t tend to be regarded as one of the franchise’s hardest bosses, it’s an enormous, powerful creature that is absolutely not to be taken lightly. Some, then, will rely on simply dispatching it by any means necessary, without troubling to do any Monster Hunter-esque targeting of certain parts.
This is a shame, because only by severing the great beast’s tail will the player acquire the exclusive Dragon King Greataxe. The in-game description of this weapon provides a hint to the Gaping Dragon’s former glory: “this axe, one of the rare dragon weapons, is formed by the tail of the Gaping Dragon, a distant, deformed descendant of the everlasting dragons… The axe is imbued with a mystical power, to be released when held with both hands.” It’s impractical and unwieldy to use, not scaling with any stat and requiring a high Strength of 34 to wield in two hands, but it can be very strong and a lot of fun in the right situations.
3 Its Lonely Backstory Gets Even More Tragic
While the Gaping Dragon is certainly repulsive from a design point of view, FromSoftware took care to ensure that players feel a certain degree of sympathy for it, too. The creature has a real sense of melancholy about it, which becomes clearer as fans dig deeper into its mysterious backstory.
“Its time has passed, and it finds itself alone in the world, the last of its race forced to survive in any way it can,” Miyazaki went on, referencing the keyword “greed,” which was incorporated into the creature’s design. It’s ravenous not through choice, but through desperation.
2 Seath The Scaleless May Have A Connection To It
Speaking of the Lords that defeated the Everlasting Dragons, they had a lot of help in the conflict: Seath the Scaleless, who fought against his own kind and contributed to their destruction.
The treacherous Seath barricaded himself in the Duke’s Archives, which were given to him by Gwyn, and continued to work to achieve immortality, though he became dangerously unstable in the process. He continued to send Channelers out into the world to steal away new ‘research subjects,’ but here’s the interesting thing: a Channeler appears with the Gaping Dragon and will use its magic to aid the boss if the player doesn’t prevent the Channeler from doing so. The question is, then, why is Seath seemingly helping the dragon, and is there a connection between the pair? Dark Souls provides no real answer to this question.
1 Humanity May Have (Literally) Corrupted It
This creature is one great horrible enigma all around, but there’s yet another interesting aspect that players continue to question: it drops a Twin Humanities on defeat.
Generally speaking, Twin Humanities are given by foes that… well, come in twos (Quelaag, for instance). It may have been Humanity, literally and figuratively, that corrupted the Gaping Dragon, affected as it was by the emergence of new forms of life. Perhaps, in its hunger, it consumed something more, the greed of something other than itself? Humanity has been known to ‘pass’ to beings such as those this lonely creature preys on, after all.
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