dark souls 1 as an allegory for life

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i completed dark souls last summer; the summer of 2024, because i was bored. it was my first year : second year break, and i wasn’t really too technical. all i did over the summer was complete Dark Souls, learn driving and form a really good basis for DSA (that i’m still grateful and proud of, thank you 2024 bhushan).

it’s not rare to come across those really good YouTube videos that highlight how gorgeous (for lack of a better word; forgive me—i’ll do this a lot. i’ll describe anything that i cannot describe with such a pretty word) the game is. how gruelling and how valuable a lesson the life is. and i’ve never gotten myself to watch them, beacuse, well, eh.

this summer, however, hasn’t been the happiest. no established reason; it just hasn’t. i came across a reel one day, that spread a bunch of motivational quotes over iconic moments of the game. “do it scared, do it sad, etc.”.

there was a main comment, that talked about the point shared by a majority of those videos, of how Dark Souls 1, is an allegory to depression. i believe he wrote it pretty beautifully, so much so that it prompted a reply out of me. but oh well, i was in a rather gloomy general climate-mood.

after writing that reply, i immediately got to drafting this up.

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could life really be that deterministic? all of life is just a wiring framework inside your head.
everything one has picked up on, like weights in a neural network model (funny, the analogy is supposed to work backwards). Learned Helplessness.

one can push through, but for what? what is the end goal. happiness?
what if one has no route to happiness. what if one has been so disconnected from everything life has to offer—disconnected with all worldly ties, and by worldly ties of course, the people he deems close to them. is that the definition of what sociopathic behavior is? is it inherently bad? is it a flaw? what constitutes a flaw, what governs a flaw.
what personality is bad. aren’t some personalities bad? who governs the goodness of personalities. and how can one guarantee it is the immaculate truth.

drawing a parallel to the legality of things—who really governs the legality and illegality of things? how can someone guarantee it is the immaculate truth that we all have to follow? i mean cannabis was legal and everywhere at some point. a lot of things were legal at some point.

around a while ago someone asked me to take a personality test and i just really resented the fact the world seems to think personalities can be governed and classified by four quantifiers. everything you’ve ever lived through—merely through four quantifiers? no, it’s certainly bigger than that.

i felt the need to really get help. but then, being as overthinking as i am, i combat the decision in my own head. i’ve looked through resources. what helps people. how people get help.
i came across two books that i was willing to read, one more popular than the other.

1. Surrounded by Idiots, Thomas Erikson
now i’m pretty sure i saw this book because of my dive into “what to read to get a better outlook at whatever the fuck is happening” or i just happened to stumble across it one too many times for me not to have the curiosity for it.

i did read it a bunch, but even that started to make me feel hollow. i read the red section, it seemed so idealistic to me. the idea of me is a red. i am not, the idea of me is a red. it was fine. until i got to the other parts. they hollowed me out. i didn’t want to get influenced by this book. in a way i wanted to live my fantasy of being the idealistic version of me. i didn’t want to look through the lens, or rather, the analysis of what the other kinds of people are. it just hollowed me out and i didn’t want to complete it.

2. Brain That Changes Itself, Doidge
this, i’m pretty sure i saw on a reddit thread about getting over issues. this book’s entirety is about this concept of “neuroplasticity”. about cases that make the brain rewire itself. basically an answer to the Learned Helplessness i mentioned earler. this was to help people get out of the state of demeaning themselves, getting out of bad mental states, getting out of anxieties and such. in a way, this book is supposed to give you an idea of the cases where people seemingly just grew out of their problems, with mere faith and time. of course, that’s not all. “neuroplasticity,” they say. i haven’t read much of it either. a few pages on my trip, and after that i could never bring myself to open it again.

also, i’ve come to realize fiction is what literature has always been. i cannot grasp how people tend to read “self-help” books and deem themselves literary connoisseurs. of course, that is merely me projecting; i haven’t read all that many books either. i digress, my point is, fictional literature forms parallels and teaches you way more than any voluntarily written self-help book does.

the past few months have had me romanticizing the whole idea of being something in your life. of not making something of your life. people die poor. notable people die poor. i wonder what it’s like for them.
some other notable people live poor through the majority of their lives and then make it big. make it successful, make a name out of themselves, and i would not mean entrepreneurial or business-y. i mean it in the sense of the arts. composers, writers—the arts. i have grown an intense passion for the appreciation of arts.

now art, in specific, i have always wanted to get myself into. turns out i never acquired that. that artistic skill. discipline, so to say. i never picked up the habit of painting, or listening with intent, or dissecting a poem line by line. the arts felt like a luxury my younger self didn’t deserve—or maybe just didn’t prioritize. and now, looking back, the hunger for it has grown so sharp it aches. i wonder if it’s too late, or if the brain, like Doidge says, can still rewire itself for this obsession.

i find myself questioning the whole scaffolding of life again. why do we measure success the way we do? why do we fetishize productivity over exploration, over the pursuit of something ineffable like beauty? people die without ever realizing what they were capable of feeling, imagining, creating. does that make their life less valid? less meaningful? or is it just a lens we impose after the fact?

Imagine — John Lennon

and yet, there is this strange comfort in imagining. imagining a version of oneself who is completely unbound by societal metrics. who doesn’t need to quantify happiness, or success, or even moral alignment. a version who simply exists, observes, creates, consumes beauty, and reflects. it is not a plan, nor a guide, but a form of resistance. resistance to the deterministic framework my mind has been wrestling with. resistance to the notion that personalities can be boxed, experiences can be ranked, or the self can be fully known.

i think this is what draws me to literature and art: the refusal to be constrained. they are proofs that the human experience is not a simple function of inputs and weights. that unpredictability, chaos, and passion still matter. that one can be hollow (this started off with dark souls, after all) at times, but also full of wonder in the same breath. fiction, in its subtle rebellion, becomes more instructive than any guidebook on “how to live.”

so maybe the point isn’t to fix the self, or classify it, or achieve some immaculate, pre-defined ideal. maybe the point is simply to exist with curiosity, to push against the edges of understanding, to feel, to create, and to recognize that even hollow moments are part of the architecture of consciousness. even in isolation, even in disconnection, there is the capacity to become something. not necessarily ‘successful’ in any worldly sense, but alive in the sense that matters: aware, intentional, capable of experiencing the vast spectrum of life.

and that, perhaps, is enough.

or not, you never know. i’m only 19 in an unpredictable gloomy state of mind. who knows when i’ll fetishize the idea of being a Red again.