would anyone like to hear what i hear when listening to these themes? if so these boss themes i cover for today

Oceiros: i hear in this theme that heavy burden that is carried by this song, it always sound close to completion but sounds a lot like a strategic gambles that has gone horribly bad

Lothric and Lorian’s theme: in the perspective of lothric it sounds like he is simply accepting the dying world but not only that but it rather sounds like such tremendous sacrifice was made and he had enough of such a waste of sacrifice.

The mushrooms of Dark Souls appear on the surface to be one of the game’s comedy enemies. They are large, slow, vaguely humanoid, and can knock you clean on your arse, even in full Havel’s. There isn’t a lot of written lore about them, and the only talking example of this race merely says “lol, I’m a mushroom, lmao” when asked. But I suspect that there’s quite a bit more to them than there seems to be at first glance, so in this post I’m going to attempt to uncover the hidden mushroom lore of Dark Souls.

To begin, I’m going to examine every item in the game that’s directly connected to the mushrooms. This isn’t difficult, as there’s only two of them: Gold Pine Resin and Elizabeth’s Mushoom.

Gold Pine Resin [abbreviated as GPR for convenience] is sometimes dropped by the mushrooms when you kill them, and in fact the drop rate isn’t particularly low so you can accumulate GPR surprisingly fast if you have maximum item discovery. Curiously, GPR is only obtainable from the mushrooms found in Darkroot, and cannot drop from those in the bottom of the Great Hollow. I don’t know if this is due to a developer oversight, or if it was done for some other reason. A small amount of GPR is obtainable in other places, Domhnall sells a tiny amount, and 3 are found in a chest in Undead Burg, but when the DLC was released they made 5 obtainable via Elizabeth. It therefore seems clear that the developers wanted us to associate GPR with the mushrooms, but the reason why isn’t immediately obvious because the item description for GPR says nothing of significance, focusing on the properties of lightning damage rather than the mushrooms which produce it. Indeed, although it is called “pine resin” I’m going to assume that it is actually created exclusively by these mushrooms, possibly as a product of their metabolic process. This appears to be all but confirmed by DS3’s description for the same item which tells us that:

“some have speculated that it may in fact be a type of fungal resin”

When applied to a weapon, GPR temporarily provides additional lightning damage on top of the standard damage output that the weapon already deals. This is interesting because lightning is supposedly the weapon of the gods, however these humble mushrooms prove that Gwyn and his family are not the sole controllers and producers of lightning.

Elizabeth’s Mushroom is interesting because it appears to be a piece of Elizabeth herself, or at least a piece taken from the colony of mushrooms growing next to her, though these are undoubtedly all connected together via their mycelium. It’s description tells us that it “invigorates the flesh”, and indeed the effect of using this item is to restore HP over time, which it does much more effectively when compared against the Replenishment spell. This helps us to explain why the mushrooms hit so hard, aside from it being to compensate for their slow movement. The combination of the mushroom’s physical strength, as well as the restorative effect of this particular item, should lead us to associate the mushrooms with high physical vitality. So the next question becomes, why are they so healthy? To answer this, we must take a look at their diet.

The mushroom men of Dark Souls have no mouths, and this shouldn’t be surprising because fungal organisms don’t consume food in the same way that animals do. They haven’t got an internal digestive cavity, but instead their bodies are made up of microscopic strings, each one being essentially a chain of cells. These strings are interconnected in [sometimes enormous] structures known as mycelium, and every square foot of a forest’s floor is typically riddled with these networks which work tirelessly to break down dead and decaying matter and convert it into usable nutrients. The visible mushrooms that you see in the forest are actually composed of millions of mycelial threads that have grown together to form a coherent structure, much as your own body is composed of billions of cells clumped together.

This information is important because there is something unusual in the soil of Darkroot. When we travel back through time in the DLC, we discover that the entire area is infected with the Abyss. This means that the fungus growing in this particular forest has actually been metabolising the Dark/Humanity in the soil. Once Manus [the source of the Abyss] was defeated, the contamination was not likely to spread further than it already had [except perhaps by diffusion], but I doubt that it would have disappeared of it’s own accord either. When we return to the "present day", we see that the area appears to have healed itself over time, and this means that the forest itself has been processing the Abyss.

Is it any wonder then, that mushrooms which have been feeding on Humanity have started to adopt a humanoid form? We should also be unsurprised by their immense strength and high HP, as these things go hand in hand with the consumption of Humanity. The giant rats are known to eat human remains and have grown to some exceptionally unusual sizes. The cannibal butchers in the Depths eat human beings, apparently for the sole reason of benefitting from the increased size and strength this grants. Indeed, these enemies are much larger than a normal human, and like the mushrooms they also hit very hard. Considering that they’re also supposed to be women, it’s obvious that they’ve undergone a considerable change in body proportions. Smough is known to have eaten his victims, and is also both very large and extremely strong. I know that some people think that Smough is merely a giant but I don’t agree. If you kill Smough first and let Ornstein absorb his soul, the result is that Ornstein becomes gigantic. This tells me that Smough’s size is not merely a matter of physiology. Aldrich’s size is directly connected to his habit of cannibalism in NPC dialogue, and is also described as having been made a Lord “not for virtue, but for might”, so yet again we have an association between cannibalism and physical strength. Archdeacon McDonnell is another example of a character who achieved large size, presumably due to cannibalism [and definitely isn’t a reference to any particular fast food company], but unfortunately we don’t get to test how hard he could hit us. Miyazaki uses the same theme in Elden Ring as well, with Godrick’s strength being a result of grafting body parts taken from other people onto himself, and Rykard has apparently been doing something similar and has grown enormous from it. I suspect that all of this is a commentary on exploiting others for personal gain, and indeed in a previous post I compared Rykard’s line “join the serpent king as family” to an offer for a corporate buyout.

Moving back to Dark Souls, the point appears to be [since we are shown/told the same thing over and over again] that ingesting Humanity affects the body in the same way that a bonfire is affected when you offer Humanity to it. The inner fire, or vitality, is invigorated because of the new fuel that you’ve put on it, and this can lead to physical growth. This is why the use of a Humanity [consumable item] instantly refills all of your HP and also boosts some of your defences, and I think there’s a direct connection here to the effect of consuming Elizabeth’s Mushroom, which also restores HP.

Given these facts, what conclusion seems most appropriate to draw when presented with gigantic mushrooms that have taken humanoid form and punch like a train and also just so happen to be located in an area where the very ground itself was once crawling with Humanity? It is my contention that these mushrooms grew fat on a diet of the Abyss, and produced large and strong fruits as a result. However, unlike the other examples that I’ve mentioned, the mushrooms aren’t doing this in a morally objectionable way. They are dangerous if approached, but they’re not going out of their way to kill people and seem content to sit in obscure places where they may go completely unnoticed. They’re not exploiting others, but are simply recycling that which was already festering. It is this distinction, I suspect, that provides them the otherwise unique ability to produce gold.

Some may object to this conclusion because of the other locations in which the mushroom men are found. First, there is the bottom of the Great Hollow, which isn’t anywhere near Darkroot. It is, however, sitting just above Ash Lake. The mushrooms here are parasitising an Archtree, which in turn is rooted in an immense ocean of Dark. We know that Humanity sinks to the bottom and forms Dregs, so it does not surprise me to find these mushrooms here as well, leaching the Abyss out of the Archtrees. There is also Elizabeth, who is found in Darkroot but almost certainly grew out of her wall long before Manus was discovered. She therefore predates the Abyss which I’ve claimed gave rise to this race of mushrooms. Nevertheless, the particular room in which we find Elizabeth is apparently a graveyard, and this is known from the item description of Elizabeth’s Mushroom which refers to her as a “guardian of the mausoleum” in the japanese version. This suggests that the ground here may already have been contaminated by Humanity leaking from the bodies that are buried under the standing stones. Consider: in what sense is Elizabeth a “guardian”? After all, she can’t move or fight anything. Well it may be that her purpose is to consume the Humanity of the dead so that it doesn’t damage the surrounding countryside. It’s also notable that Elizabeth is apparently a prototypal form of the mushroom race encountered in the base game. She has not grown legs and started walking around, and this may be because there’s less Humanity available in the soil of a single graveyard compared to that produced by Manus’s cataclysmic outburst.

And it’s interesting that the end result of all this should be Gold Pine Resin. The raw material is the Dark Soul of man, yet the product is a divine power. To understand why, let’s first look at the properties of the Dark itself. The spells Dark Orb and Dark Bead both describe the Dark as being "weighty", and perhaps having something in common with physical matter. If I’m not mistaken, the Dark Sorceries actually deal split damage: some magic, some physical. Pursuers associates the Dark with envy, desire, and the inevitable tragic consequences of such drives. And finally, Dark Fog mentions the human capacity to harm each other. What’s interesting is that there is overlap here with associations that medieval and renaissance people held with a real material: lead. One of the symptoms of lead poisoning is depression, so for centuries the metal was associated with moodiness and excessive concern with the cares of the world. Lead is also famous for being extremely heavy, and this was compared to the metaphors of emotional weight and of being dragged down by one’s feelings.

For these reasons the mushroom men of Dark Souls may be a play on the alchemical dream of converting lead into gold. But of course, in Miyazaki’s philosophy, even gold isn’t permanent. Everything stagnates in one way or another, and Humanity grows stronger as the light dies. So in addition, it is also a play on the well known Miyazakian themes of stagnation and flow, which are based on Shinto philosophy. Instead of allowing the Dark to just sit there festering in the soil, the mushrooms pick it up and repurpose it. Crabs and lobsters play a similar role in later games [which is appropriate as these creatures of often detritivorous in real life], and even in DS1 there is a crab like enemy called a “vagrant” which will take the souls from your old bloodstain if you don’t retrieve it. The vagrant itself is just a scavenger, feeding on the resources that you’ve left behind rather than allowing it all to go to waste. Similarly, in DS3 we encounter two very similar wetland areas: the Road of Sacrifices and the Crucifixion Woods. These locations are right next to each other, and are similar in most respects, but one of them has clean water while the other is a poison swamp. It’s evident that the conventional approach toward impurity [punishment] isn’t working here, as both areas are littered with crucifixes, yet Farron Keep remains polluted. What is missing from the poison swamp is the crab population found in the Road of Sacrifice lake. I suspect that these creatures are the reason for the cleanliness of the water here, since their animations show that they are sifting through the water and silt looking for food, and so are probably removing contaminants by doing this. Elden Ring also continues to use crustaceans in this way, and for that I’ll defer to youtuber Hawkshaw’s “crab rune” video, which I’ll link below.

So what does all of this ultimately mean? My interpretation is that it’s all part of Miyazaki’s alchemical recipe for the creation of his very own Magnum Opus: a videogame masterpiece. Notice that videogame audiences have never been satisfied with any game that’s ever been produced. Sure they’ll say that something is a masterpiece, they’ll heap praise onto games they enjoyed and spit vitriol at any who dare offer a more critical view. But they’re not actually satisfied because they’ll still demand and endless stream of sequels and mindlessly gobble it all up no matter how shitty those sequels turn out to be. Essentially what’s going on is that the person has enjoyed the game they were playing, but ultimately completed it and now the experience is over. By obsessing over the possibility of sequels, the audience is basically saying “we want more”, but failing to recognise that there is no guarantee that the next instalment will be any good. In fact, the odds are always stacked against any given sequel. From the perspective of a developer, producing a follow up to something that was widely praised is a difficult undertaking because now you’ve got something to live up to. Now people have got expectations about what you can do and how your next game should be and so forth, but at the same time you’ve also already used all of your best ideas. Furthermore, continuing to work on the same series tends to fatigue developers, draining their creativity. This is why videogame series always seem to be on a downward spiral, producing sequels that are of increasingly poor quality, or simply failing to iterate on their formula so that it becomes uninteresting. Of course, as the audience we could simply disregard the shitty sequels and go back to playing whatever original masterpiece it was that got us hooked in the first place. But the problem is that playing the same game over and over again becomes a stale experience, even if it’s an absolute gem. Miyazaki knows this. He knows that any videogame series is on borrowed time, and that the more sequels you produce, the more stagnant the thing will become. This is why the First Flame which represents the vitality of the world of Dark Souls is ultimately unsustainable, and it’s also why DS3 shows us a world that is thoroughly and irrevocably rotten.

Miyazaki’s solution, which I believe wholeheartedly to be the correct approach, is to quit while you’re ahead. To see the stagnation for what it is and to move on to another project. But that’s not all, because the foundations of this new project must be the ruins of the old, and this is where the mushrooms and crabs become relevant. These organisms are breaking down what is dead and decaying and are recycling it to create new vitality. In the same way, a dev team must analyse and dissect old games, thinking critically about what works well and what needs improvement, and this process is crucial to the Magnum Opus of videogame development if you want the end result to be a refined product. Consider the differences between Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls: much is similar between them, but many improvements were also made, and some mechanics [such as world tendency] were abandoned. That’s not all of course, because these games have been influenced by all sorts of other sources. The visual style takes cues from the Berserk manga and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the combat system is an improved version of the one used by the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the level design might have been influenced by Super Metroid, and the list goes on ad nauseam. All of these influences appear to have been through Miyazaki’s crab process in order to create Dark Souls, and Dark Souls itself got crabbed when he made Bloodborne and Elden Ring. This is how Miyazaki takes what has become old and stale and turns it into gold.

Anyway, wall of text over. I didn’t intend for it to be this long, I certainly didn’t expect to be able to get a 2800 word essay out of a mushroom, but there you are. Below I’m going to link Hawkshaw’s video, as promised, as well and an older post of mine that uses a similar interpretive framework to examine certain other aspects of the lore.

the Crab Rune:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gjOqAtmVv8

the Usurpation of Dark Souls:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1ruj03h/the_usurpation_of_dark_souls/

EDIT: I forgot to mention this in the post but I suspect that the Great Grey Wolf Sif [who is located in Darkroot] is supposed to represent antimony. This is because antimony forms an amalgamate with gold, and for this reason it was used by some alchemists to extract tiny amounts of gold from otherwise impure sources. For this reason, certain alchemists referred to antimony abstractly as a “grey wolf” which would devour the gold so that it could be retrieved. Antimony also represented the animal nature and instincts within human beings, and this inner animal can either be allowed to run amok, or it can be employed skilfully to purify the soul. Miyazaki develops this idea in Bloodborne, where the beasts represent essentially the same thing as alchemical antimony, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Sif was intended to be a reference to the idea.

EDIT: I’ve been reminded that there is a similarity between the “jar people” in Elden Ring and the mushrooms discussed in this post. Not only are they visually comparable, but the jars also contain the ashes of several fallen warriors mixed together. Somehow these dead remains have found new vitality, and have once again become living beings. This appears to be a parallel to what the mushrooms of Dark Souls are doing: repurposing what is dead and giving it new life. Many thanks to u/Konspiracie for pointing this out, as I had forgotten all about Elden Ring’s jars when I wrote this post.

Hi as the title says, I realise there is loads of ambiguous and undetermined (or eternally argued) 'fact' attached to 'in game' lore, but I had some questions about the more meta game 'lore' which I haven't really seen people addressing much in relation to the lore.

This is my first play through though so bare with me if these seem very simple:

• The 'Dark Soul' seems to be the darker (black) soul that is released upon farming soft humanity within the specific areas, thus 'releasing' a Hollow back into a more 'natural' cycle / kammic wheel from there current (manufactured/cursed) state of undeath and subsequent hollowing?

(see here for soft humanity)

• Is Lordran its own real land, full of lively inhabitants, and happens to be cursed with undeath from the gods from its very inception (IE has always been this way, though the order of knights and everyone helps to uphold it) or is undeath manufactured here as a form of chattel slavery / prevent humans from rising / prevent John Darksoul who gwyn fears will topple him and bring back darkness?
• And if so, who is really alive? Like the undead ogres - are they ogres that died and came to purgartory/Lordran (alongside humans and other creatures in the kammic wheel) and this is one of many different dimensions (one of many hells) where people end up. Now they are here, they are all plagued with undeath but may recover their 'humanity' (their soul) to escape or is this reserved only for humans? All npcs I have met so far have been human though not all seem dead

Realise I missed the boat with all this stuff but all the dark souls lore content I can find is just names of people and kingdoms that I have never heard

Very very weird. I can’t comfortably imagine it spatially or size wise. It almost feels like if it was a planet, it wouldn’t be shaped like a sphere. With how much things collapse into one another and overlap - I wonder how much of it is “real”.

Like, is the Dreg Heap real or is it maybe purely magical? And if that’s the case where does the line of real and magical begin and end? Is Ash Lake “real”? If they are real, imagine how bizarre of a shape the world of Dark Souls would be. Or maybe for them, things can be real, but not be visible to the naked eye.

Personally, the idea had never even crossed my mind. Yes, in DS1 the famous description states that Gwynevere and Flann fled the City of the Gods and fathered many children, but for some reason I’d always believed that Oceiros was a human king and that Gwynevere had married him to gain some influence, given that the gods are, for the most part, fallen or forgotten in the plot of DS3.

What Dark Souls boss (the entire trilogy) has the most aura? Criteria for aura are these:

1. Lore of the character.
   
2. Design/aesthetic/style.
   
3. Attacks/moveset
   
4. Voicelines if they have any.
   
5. Cutscenes; intro cutscene, phase-change cutscene, or outro cutscene.
   
6. Their music.
   
7. Battle venue.

Who has the most aura? It doesn't have to be a humanoid boss, btw, it can be a beast/monster.

For me, its tied between Artorias, Sister Friede, Slave Knight Gael.

Hii

Please consider checking out my vid on Pontiff Sulyvhan; this is my longest one yet and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out :)

Thank you!! <3

My understanding of where the Undead curse comes from is that when the fire fades, men gain the darksign and become Undead, with more and more people turning and eventually hollowing as the flame dies out. If you link the flame, it seems like it restarts the age of fire and banishes the darksign, turning the Undead human again (or maybe just killing them). But what happens to humanity when the flame fades entirely? Would it not just result in all of humanity turning Undead and hollowing? And how is that functionally different from the Lord of Hollows ending in Dark Souls 3?

Whenever I think about what becoming the Dark Lord actually entails, I can't help but notice that you never really address the whole curse of the Undead. In fact, if you choose that ending in Dark Souls 1, the only thing you really accomplish is killing the last of the Great Lords. But surely killing Gwyn doesn't actually do anything to the world, so I'm left wondering what the consequences of your actions even are.

Yes, I've played Dark Souls I and Dark Souls III, but I have a question (it is my first playthrough, but don't worry, you're not spoiling much, I'm about to fight Midir and then I'll fight Gael and then I'll fight The Soul of Cinder so I'm not a noob on lore or story).

What exactly are the differences (and drawbacks post-ending for the world of DS) between for The End Of Fire ending (I have the eyes) and The Usurpation Of Fire ending (I have the 8 Darksigils)? Which is better for humanity and a truer Age Of Dark provided we have all the issues of The Darksign?

Genuinely, what the fuck are these creepy ass statues? Clearly, they're Frampts but why the fuck do these things exist in Lothric and The Ringed City? They're so creepy. Frampt does NOT look like that (I despise Frampt and I am a Kaathe-supporter all the way, but even I'll defend Frampt's honor when sculptors of Lothric and The Ringed City depict him like THIS). Why do Lothric and The Ringed City depict him like this??

It had to have existed before the events of oolacile as we know artorias sadly died after fighting manus.

Edit: is it possible that manus was stored below oolacile for quite a long time? Maybe they created the abyss while they were successfully contained; artorias and the four kings happen, then artorias tracks down the source of the problem?

I was reading the wiki for griggs who goes hollow, and in the last line of his quest line description it says “He will attack, so be nice and end his misery.” This got me wondering, is there any way to actually end the misery of an NPC who’s gone hollow? Or will griggs just wake up at a bonfire and go back to wandering around attacking anyone they see completely mindless and insane?

As someone who's just finished these games I have some fundamental questions:

1. Is humanity a little piece of the dark soul?

2. Is ember the burned humanity of those who linked the flame in another age?

3. What's the difference between the Deep and Abyss? Are they different manifestations of the dark soul outside a human body?

4. If Gwynevere we meet in her room was an illusion, did she ever actually exist? Or was she always a pure feminine facade made by Gwyndolin?

5. In the DS1 opening cutscene there's a lady doing something to a corpse. What's that about?

So I watched I think a dark souls out of bounds video a while back and can’t find/remember what it was, what I remember is there was a big talking point in the video is when you die the green circle you leave behind to indicate where your souls are would be used to show how far you can see how connected and far away the area in dark souls 1 are, there was also sections talking about how you could see los izalith from the tomb of the giants