Welcome and prepare for a wild ride. We’re going to be engaging in complex and possibly annoying discussion about how time works in Lordran. There may be pain, there may be confusion; heck, there may even be some pants-wetting, but we’re already halfway there, so there’s no turning back.
I’m going to sum everything up at the very start; forget everything you know about the linear flow of time. The Dark Souls Universe does not follow a law stating that the future is undecided. Lordran does indeed exist based on the concept known as FATE. That just means that every time you died on your way to Gwyn, was actually out of your control and you shouldn’t be angry about it. Just ashamed.
This whole point revolves around one key aspect; the upcoming expansion. As we all know, in it we travel back in time and end up fighting Artorias himself as a boss. Now, here is where it gets a bit strange. Artorias has a grave in the main time. This, of course, means that he is dead. This can be backed up by the observation that in order to live, Artorias would have to become the only boss that you don’t actually kill to defeat. This would make it so you couldn’t obtain his armor and weapons, which would piss off the player base, so yes, we will in all probability be killing Artorias.
But you may be asking, “Why does that prove the existence of fate”? Well, if you think about it, it is really quite simple. You have already killed Artorias by the time your character gets trapped in the Asylum. Now, don’t take that to mean that you should start with the souls for killing him. That is obviously the “future” you. However, we aren’t talking about the death of some random peasant. We are talking about the assassination of Artorias, one of the four knights of Gwyn, the most powerful beings, both literally and politically, in the world. His death would literally cause enough chain reactions for the entire “present” to have changed because of that one event. The issue is that the world has already changed before you go back in time.
There are only a few possible solutions for you still time-traveling to kill Artorias. One possibility is that by doing so, it puts your “future” in an alternate dimension, and From has to go through and re-tweak the entire game world. I’ll say right now that this is not the path they took. The other is that the universe is already “set in stone”. You already killed Artorias in the past, so in order for the universe to stay stable, you have to travel back in time to kill him in the present we have all played through a dozen times over. This in turn requires the entire situation to be close to exactly the same, which requires all the details leading up to those details to be the same, which goes all the way back to you killing Artorias!
For those of you who are unaware, they have a term for this. It’s called Fate. There are rather convincing arguments for using it in the real world, but that’s not why we are here. Instead, we have just used it to describe why every last event in Lordran was destined to happen. It also explains WHY we are going back in time for no readily available reason!
Copied from the thread I made where we just talked about random parts of Dark Souls lore. Like the Lordranian food chain.
by Frostacar Sun Aug 12, 2012 10:47 pm
