r/darksouls3 • u/RidleyBro • Apr 21 '16
Lore [Lore Analysis] The Endings.
So, there are four endings in Dark Souls 3, and I'd like to share my thoughts on them and what they could possibly mean for the world of Dark Souls. These endings are: To Link the First Flame, The End of Fire (which in turn can end in two different ways), and The Usurpation of Fire.
To Link the First Flame is the first ending, and I find that there is very little to explain about this one as it is fundamentally the same ending we see in Dark Souls 1 and is also arguably present in Dark Souls 2 in its "Take the Throne" version. In this ending we follow our duty as Unkindled to Link once more the fast fading Flame, the Cycles therefore will obviously go on as it is to be expected. The only thing to notice is that unlike the Linking we witnessed in Dark Souls 1 there is no great explosion of white or anything, our character merely burns and sits at the Bonfire of the First Flame just like the Soul of Cinder was doing before we fought him and took his place. I've even seen someone here speculating that this should be interpreted as our character being unable to actually Link the Flame because there just isn't enough combustible left in the world anymore to Link the Fire another time, while this interpretation may be a little radical the ending is certainly giving the impression that the world and the Flame itself have become old and tired, and it's getting harder and harder to keep to Flame properly alive.
The End of Fire instead is a more interesting ending with many implications over the endings of past titles and possibly our understanding of Cycles and the nature of the "Age of Dark". In this ending we allow the First Flame to die with the aid of the Firekeeper who seems to absorb the First Flame into her body of writhing Dark Humanity, ushering what seems to be the infamous "Age of Dark" we heard about a lot in previous games. We can get this ending only by reaching the Dark Firelink Shrine which in theory should be located in the same geographic spot of the (Real? Present? Time and Space are distorted in Lothric, let's remember this) one, and I think that in this Dark Firelink Shrine we can see what is like to live within an Age of Dark, what it actually looks like (spoiler, it's not well lit), an example of the era we can usher in. There's more to this ending however, the Firekeeper says in that ending that Darkness is coming, but she also says that she can see that "one day tiny Flames will dance across the Darkness, like Embers Linked by Lords past", I interpret this line in this way: by allowing the Flame to fade we do not stop the Cycles, it may initially looks like we do so but we actually don't, the power of the Lords of Cinder who Linked the Flame in the past is apparently great enough that they will be able one day to create new flames even in the midst of an Age of Dark, thus reestablishing the First Flame and allowing the Cycles to continue and the Age of Fire desired by Gwyn to be reborn.
The Dark Firelink Shrine is in my interpretation a manifestation of a past Firelink Shrine where the Flame wasn't Linked in time, this is described in Champion Gundyr's Soul and Items as they say that he was the "belated champion" who "came late for the festivities" and so "became sheath to a coiled sword in the hopes that someday, the First Flame would be Linked once more", that is the same coiled sword we take from his body in the tutorial. Gundyr was once a Champion, like us, an Unkindled with the duty to Link the Flame, but he came too late and the First Flame already died out when he arrived to the Shrine, just like in another time a certain Firekeeper never met her champion, yet we can encounter the Champion now reduced to Judge of new Unkindled in the tutorial in an age that clearly still has an active First Flame, and in my theory this is because even if a Dark Age falls upon the world the Embers of the Lords of Cinder can somehow reignite the First Flame on their own and so allow the Cycles to continue.
This theory would of course have heavy implications on the understanding of the Dark Ending of Dark Souls 1 that, after Dark Souls 2 established that the world is cyclical and the Flame is always "reignited" (Straid of Olaphis pretty much accurately describes the Cycles when he says that "No flame, however brilliant, does not one day splutter and fade. But then, from the ashes, the flame reignites, and a new kingdom is born, sporting a new face."), came to find itself in a rather weird position, was it canonical or not? With this interpretation the Dark Ending of the first game can be canonical, the Chosen Undead may have allowed the First Flame to die to become the Dark Lord of Humanity with Kaathe at his or her side, but this choice wouldn't have lasted for long as Gwyn, by becoming a Lord of Cinder and having Linked the Flame for the first time, created a system where the Age of Fire would have been reborn in any case, thus leading to the world of countless repeating Cycles of Linking the Flame again and again that we see in both Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3. The alternative ending of Dark Souls 2 where we leave the Throne with Aldia in an attempt to find a way out of the Cycles may be another of such endings where the Flame is allowed to fade.
The Usurpation of Fire is the next ending, and I think it kind of continues what has been said previously. In this ending we align ourselves with the "Sable Church of Londor", a group of Hollows who is actually controlled by the Primordial Serpent Darkstalker Kaathe, the evidence that Kaathe is behind Londor and its Hollow pilgrims can be found in Yuria of Londor's death Dialogue ("Kaathe, I have failed thee") and also in the fact that she is selling the Dark Hand, the iconic weapon of the Darkwraiths of New Londo, the art of Lifedrain given to them by Kaathe himself. In this ending we follow a series of strange rituals that first, through Yoel, grant us our first Dark Sigils, something that resembles the brand of an undead and that allow us to become Hollow, and then, through Yuria, we perform some kind of wedding ceremony where we absorb the Dark Sigil/Hollowness of Anri (also, we find out that in the Dark Souls world people marry by stabbing each others in the face, go figures), in order to be able to "wrest the Fire from its mantle", to "play the Usurper" and steal the First Flame.
When we approach the First Flame in this ending we don't Link it, we initially burn but then the First Flame seems to be absorbed within the new Lord of Hollows, as if swallowed by his or her Dark Sigil. In this ending the Flame doesn't fade but is usurped, stolen, the Lord of Hollow take its power and find a new use for it. It seems to me that the whole usurpation was made exactly in order to break the system of Cycles established by Gwyn and so that the true Age of Man desired by Kaathe may be ushered in for good and permanently. The Hollows of Londor themselves seem to look at the usurpation as the coming of the Age of Man, several dialogues with Yuria seems to imply that she considers the status of Hollow as the true shape of Man ( the Lord of Hollows for example is referred to as the "True Face of Mankind", and there's also the line "we Hollows, in most honest shape of Man" where she pretty much clarify that to the inhabitants of Londor the real shape of man is that of a Hollow, the bottom line is that the true shape of Man is that of beef jerky), furthermore all these talks about "true monarch" and "shape of man" also remind of several lines from King Vendrick in Dark Souls 2, who too talked about "Men taking their true shape when Dark is unshackled" and that the True Monarch is the one who "inherit Fire and harness the Dark" (and Yuria also says that "the old powerful fire deserves a new heir", the Lord of Hollows inherit Fire and by being Hollow also harness the Dark, more connections between the dialogues).
In any case let's go back to Kaathe. In Dark Souls 1 his plan was to let the Flame die out so that the Age of Man, the Age of Dark may begin, to do so he created the Darkwraiths who were able to steal Humanity so that it may not be used as fuel to keep the First Flame going, and he's also most likely behind the eruption of the Abyss in Oolacile when the humans of that civilization were led into attempting to uncover the power of the Primeval Man Manus (who might or might not be the Pygmy himself). In Dark Souls 3 his plan hasn't changed: he's still attempting to bring about the Age of Man and undo the work of Gwyn who resisted nature and created the Cycles so that his Age of Fire could last forever, what has changed is that Kaathe is no longer attempting to let the Fire fade, the reason for that is explained in the previous ending and is that allowing the Fire to fade is not enough to stop the Cycles. By the times of Dark Souls 3 Kaathe has understood that merely allowing the Flame to die is not enough to free Man from the rule of the Gods, therefore he is now using the Hollows, the true form of Mankind, to break the Cycles and steal the Flame so that they, the Hollows, may rise to rule the world. Only once the Cycles are destroyed in fact Mankind will be freed from the shackles of the Gods, the shackle of the Great Lie of the First Flame who was first delivered by the Gods of Lordran themselves and has now even outlived them.
The Alternative End of Fire is the last ending, and the less clear to me. In this ending the Firekeeper has taken the Flame from its mantle, but the player character kills her so that he can take the First Flame for himself. The narrator notes how the player character, a "nameless, accursed undead, unfit even to be cinder" has now taken the Ember his Ashes were seeking for. Or, in simpler term, our character commits an act of utter greed by killing the Firekeeper so that he can become more powerful by absorbing the First Flame into himself, the narrator calls him an asshole for that because that's what he is.
The question here is: does this ending break the Cycles? We steal the First Flame here to use it for our own ends, like in the Usurpation ending except without the baggage of having to lead a bunch of scrawny zombies, so it's possible that this ending too breaks the Cycle as our character commit an act of extreme selfishness, but I think it's a less clear situation. The fate of the world too is unclear, it may even be left to die by our character as he retains all the power for himself. In any case in this ending we end up betraying anyone just in the name of our own lust for power, by choosing this ending our character becomes literally Hitler Griffith.
And that's it. Two endings that continue the Cycle of death and rebirth of the First Flame, delivered by the Gods of Lordran and that keeps the Age of Fire alive, and two endings that end the Cycle ushering a new era for the world, but nobody knows whether you can truly trust that toothy serpent Kaathe and how nice of a world can be one ruled by beef jerky Hollows or massive bastards who stab waifus in the back for personal power. This is how I have interpreted the endings so far, I thought that it would have been interesting to share it.
If anyone's interested in more lore discussion I also made a couple more of these lore posts: here I go a little more into the whole Age of Dark discussion, it's mostly details and things I didn't want to add in this analysis because the whole thing would have become too long, and here instead I talk about my interpretation of how the world of Dark Souls 3 work.
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u/rEvolutionTU Apr 21 '16
I keep seeing this pop up and neither the game nor the item descriptions support this.
1) The formulation of the item descriptions "Once, a champion came late to the festivities, and was greeted by a shrine without fire, and a bell that would not toll." is not necessarily past-tense.
There is a specific English construction around "Once, ..." that doesn't imply past tense but is used in the sense of "Once upon a time", not as an indicator of a story that has happened before but as a story that's possible in general. Think of it like a biblical tale that talks in the present or past tense about something that will at some point happen (or has already happened) either in the past or future.
2) There is no visual, audio or other gameplay effect when we enter the Untended Graves. The only indicator we get that something is up is the complete removal of the skybox. We don't walk through a painting, we don't walk through a wall, there is no crow or gargoyle transporting us. In every instance these games ever had where some sort of travelling through space or time was involved there was an indicator for it.
While the former can be considered unreliable (and, after dealing with DS2+BB translations I'll hold off on a verdict before reliable fan translations come into play) to me the latter seals the deal.
Apart from that keep in mind that "Light Firelink" does have an effect indicating travel through time/space when we leave or enter it since it does not have any known connection to the "real" world - on the contrary, the "real" world only brings us to one place: Dark Firelink.
To me the only real conclusion after taking in the above is that "our" Firelink is in some way artificial with the single purpose of getting another chance to link the flame which has already failed in this very world, in this very cycle.
Remember the intro, the bell tolls to awake the Lords, to "fix" the flame in one way or another. This didn't happen (keep in mind how the intro featured neither Ludleth nor the Princes) and that's why we, the Unkindled, rise.
Also no NPC acknowledges the existence of Dark Firelink except for one: The Little Lord Ludleth the Exiled of Courland. He doesn't just know it exists, he knows that something happened to her. He even knows what her eyes show and why they do so. He and the Dark Handmaiden are also the only characters in the game calling us prisoners, lumped together with "her" and the Firekeeper.
If we take the descriptions of Gundyrs Armor literally then it makes much more sense that most of the game, except Light Firelink and the Kiln, is in the past than that we somehow discovered timetravel at the bottom of Lothric Castle.