Are Souls Alive?

I ask this because I keep seeing comments in the internet about certain characters like "I killed this character, now I combined it with this weapon so we can be together forever." etc. As well as that sidequest to bring back Anastacia's Firekeeper soul to revive her. I pondered myself this thought provoking question: Even if you destroyed their physical bodies and acquired their soul, are they still technically alive up to a certain extent, or are there only certain souls/individuals that could do this?

Dibsville wrote:Of course, your soul is a manifestation of your body and spirit.
While souls are not "alive" per se, they are still the same being as before, just without a body to hold them.

Makes me wonder if the game were any larger we could do something with does special souls besides using them to craft weapons. Like say if you hold on to the soul for a long amount of time, they could "talk" to you in a sort of guilt-trip manner. You don't talk back though, and they could have certain looping dialogues. This would make killing firekeepers and Priscilla a whole lot painful.

Dibsville wrote:I don't want souls talking to me.
It would be Navi all over again.
They even look alike.

Not all the time, that could get annoying . Maybe in certain areas like getting one of the invading eye-orbs to work in Anor Londo to invade and kill Lautrec. Areas where dialouge may trigger depending an the character like Priscilla in the Painted World and Anor Londo,Lautrec in Anor Londo, and so on and so forth.

I like to think of the soul as not necessarily a living thing, but as something that keeps someone alive. Not in the same sense that organs do, but without the soul, an individual is just an empty shell (or Hollow, if you will ).

ResIsBestStat wrote:

Ahem...

The Empress' soul is in there, I believe. :b

Souls are the Source of all life, Undead or Not.

Desc. of most souls you find.

this is a fairly interesting topic. the "Soul" is probably similar to a piece of paper that gets larger as more is written on it. the more that is written, the larger the "Paper" gets. its a representation of our beings as a whole, without the guise of whatever mask's or persona we choose to wear. it is the being in its crystalized form, at least, thats how i view it.

in this same sense, i think the guilt trip would be an interesting idea. and not only that, depending on the role the person had, they're dialogue may not be a guilt trip, but a new force spurring you on. such as anastasia spurring you to retrieve her soul (i know this wouldn't work in the game as is, its just an example). and like with anastasia maybe we could even bring some of them back from the dead, if slightly altered. such as sif, as a loyal wolfy companion (though not nearly so large as he was when you fought him). or perhaps a weakened priscilla, no longer capable of harming gods, and so is allowed to roam free. it would be an interesting "Yin" to the "Yang" that is the eerily morbid game that is dark souls. for manus' soul, it could be a being of pure rage and hatred, constantly spurring you to commit atrocities, and further the spread of the abyss all the while. perhaps ornstein and smough's souls would work in unison, one informing you how best to beat dragons, the other going on about eating powdered human bones and ****(i believe it was mentioned smough had a habit of eating people). imagine the bed of chaos constantly trying to corrupt you into a demon, and those around you. nito's telling you to kill everything. whats left of gwyns always trying to turn you into a righteous crusader of the gods. the portion seath carries pounding magical knowledge into you making you steadily go just as crazy as the dragon himself, or logan. honestly i can see it working similarly to eternal darkness with some of em. you slowly start going crazy, everything seems different to your characters perspective. if you are turning into a demon, everyone is either with you or prey. if nito, everyone would look like just another wandering corpse, waiting for its time to die(perhaps brought by your hands) for gwyns, those that are against the gods are all enemies, regardless of alignment. for seaths, you view people as either potential fonts of knowledge, or test subjects.

quite honestly, this concept has a lot of potential. there are so many possibilities that its amazing. and all this from just one statement about a guilt trip caused by a soul.

I think souls are something like conduits of life, channeling it from nothing to their vessels. The souls grow stronger as the body they reside in do, but they seek more power where ever they reside. That´s why they change together with with their "owner". They are able to change owners because they are actual tangible things, usually absorbed directly when the owner fall but if they die by natural causes of not near someone with the ability to posses "Multiple" souls they do not.

The souls of firekeepers are unique in how they work, because humanity, the fragments of the dark soul, is attracted to them, showing that souls are probably innate to beings, rather then a product of the first flame, at least that is what i suspect.

When you kill someone you take their souls and add them to yours.

For the undead, souls are power; without souls, one cannot improve. Their body will not strengthen with exercise, and their mind will not sharpen with study.

With humans it may be different, but the souls of the undead do not shine brighter because their owners got stronger, their owners get stronger because their soul shines brighter. It isn't the act of fighting enemies that improves one's combat prowess, it's the taking of their souls.

This power enhancing seems to have a limit however. At a certain point, one ceases to be able to improve themselves with souls. This is shown in the increasing amount of souls required to level (it becomes harder and harder to force any more of an increase) and the maximum level; nobody would be able to achieve the several billion souls when even the gods have less than a 100,000.

That theory can go a long way to explaining the invasion practices of the covenants. The Darkmoons invade down because they are not concerned with increasing their strength; they only seek to punish the guilty, and so go after targets they are reasonably sure they can handle. The Darkwraiths invade up because Kaathe does not care for his minions, only caring about the results they bring; as such, the Darkwraiths set their eyes on high-risk high-reward targets. The rest strike a balance, seeking the power from strong foes but not wanting the risk to their life.

Now, obviously some combat strategies are better than others; this can be easily seen by the ability to clear through the game at low levels and the variances in player skill in PvP. Yet the difference in power is clear; a stronger soul equals a stronger being.

So are souls alive? Not really; they are more of an energy source. A light bulb with less energy glows dimmer, and a person with more souls stands stronger. The souls provide life, but they aren't life.

I think souls are an enegry souls until they are absorbed better known as leveling up. After that the souls now become one with the entity and cannot be removed in any way at all.
We see this in soul form in other peoples worlds. It is a reflection of our actual power

Ah, I do love the metaphysical posts...I believe dibsville has it backwards though, imho it should be: The body and spirit are the physical manifestation of the soul.

^ The above statement is, I believe, true to real life. However in DkS we see that he may be spot on. We see in the opening cinematic that the order of existence is as follows:

Undead > Soul > Spirit > Humanity {if human}

The fact that the undead exist BEFORE the Flame seems to lead one to believe that the "Gods" were, in fact, GODS before the flame existed and they created the undead to be followers, but the arrival of the Flame brought on Free Will and the power of the Lord Souls.

So from this we can see that even though Gods and Undead existed they had no soul, no Free Will, they were simply living out a circular existence. We could probably assume that the Gods and Giants were created by the Everlasting Dragons, otherwise we must assume a higher form of being that decided the Everlasting had to go, a "One True God" if you will.

And naturally, as even today's religion has found, Free Will is really the source of everything it considers evil or unnatural. With the disparity and newly acquired souls, the undead become human and can choose to not obey or follow their creators, the Gods. And vice versa.

I bring the intro up for this question; "And with Fire, came disparity: heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark."

This brings up the question then, that the dragons (twilight/shadow) are not alive, and, presumably, neither were the beings that found souls in the First Flame. What, then, were they, as by the same logic were not dead, either? It may be that they were 'just existing, not living,' or some such without souls.

^the gods did not create humans in dark souls, nor do we know that undead existed before the flame. Humans are the descendants of the Furtive Pygmy and the Dark Soul, who existed around the same time that the gods found the first souls, and that the beings who found the first souls were undead is an uncomfirmed theory, not fact.

I also point out that while the player loses the excess souls they have collected upon dying, there is nothing to say that they ever lose their own soul. Every major enemy and character in the game, once they lose their own soul, never respawn, such as npcs and bosses. Theoretically, the other monsters may not be respawning at all; they may be being replaced by others exactly like them in 'a land brimming with hollows.' Or that may just be a game mechanic without that much thought put into it.

With this all taken into account, I think that a person's will and identity is bound to their soul. (in Dark) When it is absorbed into another soul, it is essentially 'broken' (as using a soul item suggests) and becomes just energy that is fed into the recipient's soul and adding to it.

Hm, yeah, youre probably right.....it does state that "with the flame came disparity, life and death, heat and cold, light and dark."

So, the undead could only hold a semblance of life when the flame came, and could only come hence when there was a light opposite the darkness. But also Seath could only come into existence when the Flame was ignited because he represents disparity amonst the everlasting.

The biggest problem though is that there'd have to be some sort of catalyst for the Flame. I still believe that it represents a "One God."