Dark Souls 3 is Thinking of Ending Things

[Music] it would be absurd to say that dark souls 3 is underrated the game has as high a meta score as the rest of the series it had a massive launch and long lasting player base it sold 10 million copies in the past five years there are plenty of other games other aaa games that would cut off a toe for those kind of numbers dark souls 3 is the furthest possible thing from an underappreciated gem however and you knew there was a however coming i don't feel that dark souls 3 holds quite the cultural cachet of the other titles in developer froms slash-em-ups you know like where the other games have super devoted followings people who will passionately argue that they're the absolute best or absolute worst dark souls 3 just kind of exists it's not at the top of many people's lists but it's not at the bottom either it is almost technically unassailable from a sheer craft standpoint pretty faultless and yet 2016 was the year that inside came out the last guardian doom titanfall 2 and yeah dark souls 3 also it's not unusual to get series fatigue lacking some huge reinvention of style or setting but dark souls 3 seems especially victim to this because the story itself feels kind of exhausted here we are another poor soul going to re-light the fire or let it go out again here's the castle here's the big dragon here are the gargoyles again it is more fun to play than it ever has been but personally the idea of learning a bunch of new lore and new proper nouns wasn't nearly as appealing as in past games why would i when it felt like we were just retreading old ground and most damning of all dark souls 3 seemingly couldn't help but pull in shadows of its former self bosses and names and locations in a greatest hits collection of souls glories from days past ann orlando is back baby the central hub is firelink shrine again you're fighting ornstein again and now he's got an axe i'm presenting these things as negatives because well because i'm setting up the points i'm going to rebut you've seen a video essay but also because when i talk to people about dark souls 3 this is what they bring up that it's just unfortunately derivative that it feels like it's out of ideas that the world doesn't have much to say compared to the boundless depths of the first two and this is where i disagree because while i understand the frustrations i think dark souls 3 knows exactly what it's doing dark souls 3 the echoes of its past the corruption of its characters the collapse of its themes is the entropic scream of a dying world dark souls 3 is thinking of ending things near the beginning of charlie kaufman's film i'm thinking of ending things based on ian reed's book of the same name jesse plemmon's character jake asks jesse buckley's character if he can hear a poem she wrote she protests says that she'd prefer for him to read it but he keeps asking and eventually she relents coming home is terrible whether the dogs lick your face or not the poem is long and tortured and raw although the movie hasn't exactly been warm up until this point the recitation of this poem is one of the first glimpses of how bleak i'm thinking of ending things really is the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older the thing is this poem isn't original to the film it's called bone dog and it was written by a poet named eva hd years before the movie came out this on its own isn't that unusual what makes the presence of this poem unsettling is that later on in the film jesse buckley's character finds eva hd's book in jake's childhood bedroom she realizes that the intimate part of herself she shared in the car part of her own world isn't hers it's a moment where the artifice of the film's narrative and her character's existence reveals itself from the perspective of say a friend who's looking at their phone for most of the movie i'm thinking of ending things is a story about a woman who goes on a car ride with her boyfriend to his parents house they eat dinner they start to drive home and then things go enough off the rails that even the friend would have to notice it ends in a high school with both jake and the girlfriend disappearing from the plot and being replaced with this old school janitor guy who we've been seeing flashes of throughout the movie [Music] the truth of i'm thinking of ending things is that very little of it is real the whole thing the car ride the dinner with parents the late night stop at the ice cream shop in the blizzard it's all an imagined reality playing out in jake's head jake is in that reality the young man visiting his parents with his girlfriend jake is really that old school janitor he is thinking of ending things and while he does during the final days and hours of his life he's mentally reaching around for anything to hold on to this is where the poem comes from something that he encountered years ago when he's incorporating into this fantasy this is also where the woman comes from in truth she was never his girlfriend she's just someone he briefly encountered during bar trivia we were celebrating our anniversary stopped in for a drink and then this guy kept looking at me just one of thousands of such non-interactions in my life jake the janitor is pulling all of these into a sort of end of days miasma their connections and context blurring in his mind in his room we also see a book from critic pauline kale and later on in the drive home his girlfriend both recites one of kale's reviews while adopting her whole affect his age beauty is deep and beyond ingenue roles roland's from the gold are young roland's externalizes schizophrenic dissolution mabel fragments towards the end jake does a speech that's basically ripped directly from a beautiful mind another dvd on his shelf these aren't easter eggs they draw attention to themselves their bizarre digressions they destabilize our idea of what we're watching details keep shifting around the woman's name is lucy or louisa or ames i know that ames is that short for amy that doesn't sound right time doesn't stay consistent trying to get a clear picture of what's actually reality feels almost pointless it's just not what the story is about [Music] dark souls is a series with a tremendous amount of lore but i have to come clean i've never been much of a lore guy i mean i dabble i watch body video i'm not a monster but for me knowing the specific land a character came from or a boss's history or whatever is never as important as the overarching themes of the plot and i guess the the vibes of the story and playing dark souls 3 especially a vibe fueled first playthrough often feels like fan fiction i mean in one of the fights from this game you kill a giant with a storm ruler a sword that's not even from this series havel is back and he appears to have used his dragon tooth to kill an actual dragon there's the sense that dark souls 3 is kind of like playing with all your action figures at once in the genuinely incredible abysswatchers fight you've got enemies styled like the legendary artorias from the first game fighting each other at the same time they're fighting you you got a bionicle fighting a power ranger over here but not dissimilarly to bone dog and i'm thinking of ending things these encounters start to feel not just self-referential but wrong in a more profound sense for instance no one who's played dark souls 1 will ever forget the ascension to anor londo golden sparkling city high above the first several hours of playtime and orlando is present in dark souls 3 as well another stop on its greatest hits tour but it's not the glimmering vista we encountered in dark souls 1 it's the shameful afterimage maybe your first time in anor londo maybe your fifth you get bored and rambunctious and you decide to throw something at gwynevere and as soon as you do she screams and disappears and takes the sun with her and the real city reveals itself dark and cold and dead and that's the anor londo that comes back in dark souls 3. it's not romantic it's not glorified in orlando's tricks the incredible endless hallway the magic painting are gone the giant blacksmith has slumped over in the corner and in the grand hall that originally housed the shining ornstein and smo now has a half-eaten corpse of gwyndolin another boss from the first game popped it around by some unknown horror there's a sort of unnerving dissonance at the heart of a lot of dark souls 3's call backs because it does feel like you're supposed to be excited about them you're supposed to get the fun light bulb moment the i'd recognize this place endorphins followed by the slow realization that what you remember has been decaying for all the time you let it slip from your mind and orlando is a ghost the ash lake is burning things can't go on much longer in i'm thinking of ending things jake's house has an off-limits basement there are plenty of unsettling things that aren't in the basement dead farm animals strangely familiar childhood photographs parents with an unorthodox tempo of conversation it means that the basement weighs even more heavily on our mind what worse things could be in there if this is what's out in the open what's still being hidden away don't look down in the basement the answer again is the artifice after dinner lucy slash lucia ames finds her way down into the basement and finds things that are to her completely inexplicable a bunch of janitor uniforms in the washing machine paintings that she could have sworn she painted but here they are and signed with jake's name there's really no way for her to make sense of these things to us though with a meta-textual knowledge of the story and tone there are ominous signs that nothing in this world should be taken literally in one of the last areas in dark souls 3 after following a path off the side of a garden there's a room that simply has a chest sitting against a wall but because this is a souls game if you go behind this chest and smack the wall it falls away to show darkness but as you walk into that darkness it reveals itself to be a perfect copy of the very first area graves and cliffs and even the whole of firelink shrine devoid of life and light there is as with everything a bunch of lore here stuff about failed quests and relinquishments of duty and even different timelines but for me it's more simple than that this is the game's basement hidden away down non-essential pads and behind illusory walls this is the spot where our understanding of the world falls apart and our idea of ourselves an important character with a quest and motivations starts to fracture who and what are we in the context of this dead mirror of what we thought we knew throughout i'm thinking of ending things lucy at all keeps getting phone calls from herself in the movie it's for the duration of the car trip in the book it's been happening for weeks the phone calls have a man's voice on the other end one she doesn't recognize what we ultimately come to understand is jake breaking the walls of his own imagined reality he keeps saying the same [Music] just one things one question to answer the question as is made explicit in the final pages of the book is simple continue or not go on or it is called i'm thinking of ending things after all the cleverness of the book and the film storytelling is that by making lucy the main character the threat and the horror of the situation are externalized she is trapped in a world that's thinking of ending things whether she wants to go with it or not the dark souls series has really always been obsessed with this question do you go on or not in the series parlance linking the fire means essentially continuing forward with the current world although paradoxically it also means throwing yourself into the flame so god this is more complicated than i thought the age of fire is the era that these games take place in it's an age where humans can build big castles and learn to sword fight and continue in an endless monarchical procession the age of fire is broadly speaking not good all these horrible monsters and corrupted humans you fought over the past three games that's the age of fire it is not a great time but it is known at the end of the first game the first of your two choices is to prolong the age of fire keeping the world at more or less its status quo your other choice is to leave to not rekindle the fire to walk into the dark this is treated as kind of the renegade option and in the following games it's clear that even if you didn't rekindle the fire someone did the age of fire is still happening in dark souls 2 even if the names and locations are different and the age of fire is still happening in dark souls 3 and god it's tired this is the age of fire after three games six dlc's countless cycles infinite lore videos by dark souls 3 the world is bringing itself to an end crashing in on itself whether you like it or not this is why characters and locations from the earlier games keep showing up this is why more bosses in dark souls 3 seem to be in pain than any other game in the series this is why when you reach the drag heap everything is colliding with everything else and rolling into oblivion [Music] there are technically the most possible endings in dark souls 3 out of any souls game but there aren't really what are your choices you can try and rekindle the fire like you did in dark souls 1. it barely works the embers sputter and you sit below the cold sun choices 2 and 3 you summon the fire keeper she puts out the fire or you kill her the fire goes out choice four you take the fire you walk away the fire is out there's the facade of agency here but it all leads to the same conclusion because it's not really your decision to make anymore it's the countless cycles before this dragging the world to its breaking point it's the one question to answer to continue or not and again it's not our choice to make in my mind all of these choices aren't particularly important because they don't feel like the end of the story anyway that comes in the final dlc for the game the ringed city to be honest a lot of the ringed city is kind of nonsense for me i don't know what this place is or why it's important i don't know why it's escaped the gravity that everything else is being crushed under i know there are lore answers to this i told you i'm just running on vibes it's beautiful and thematically empty to me until you reach the very end of it walking up these stairs and finding this woman and touching her egg and it crumbles and then i'm just gonna let it play out here [Music] this is the real end of dark souls dust and ruin and fallen kingdoms and it's here whether you chose to prolong the fire or not dark souls 3 shows us a land stretched to its breaking point and forced to keep going until ultimate collapse there is more than a touch of grandiose absurdity at the end of both of these pieces your final fight is against a guy named gail who's lasted till the end of time killing either a whole lot of people or literally everyone depending on what theory you subscribe to i'm thinking of ending things the film ends with jake performing a full musical number to a packed audience gale holds more than a passing resemblance to maybe the series most famous boss artorias the song jake sings is from oklahoma they're both still made of the shadows of art that came before them but that doesn't make them not [Music] spectacular and then well this is where my parallels end because i'm thinking of ending things as much as it's a cerebral look at how our influences impact us and as beautiful as some of the sequences are it is unavoidably a story about one man deciding to end his own life and it's tragic it is profoundly sad the fact that we can guess at some of the aspects of his life that led him here doesn't make it any less of a tragedy the souls series however has never really been about individuals these are stories about eras of time and countless generations and while this is what i love to do personify abstract concepts draw lines between concretely human feelings and the imagined feelings of cities and lands and worlds it's very important in this case to define the limits of this analogy dark souls 3 is about the entropy of ending things about how scary and chaotic that process can be but it is not about suicide and this can be seen by the very last thing you do in the game taking the remains of your climactic fight with gail and giving them to a painter she sits in a burning building surrounded by flames but she's confident she'll be able to take this material and use it to paint a new world dark souls 3 is thinking of ending things but its end isn't ultimately represented by loss but new life the last message of this game is about our ability to take those losses and move on and really that can be read in whatever context you'd like move on from grief from fear from artistic tedium dark souls 3 is a firework an explosion an argument for why it should probably be the last dark souls game and a meditation on why that's okay it is the lump sum of all its influences crashing in on themselves in a ending finale and making room for whatever's next [Music] you know there are a lot of really interesting differences between the book and the film i'm thinking of ending things i didn't bring this up in the essay because because not every essay has to be about everything but i do find them really fascinating for instance the book is is much scarier than the movie in some really fascinating ways i i bring this up because i actually recorded a couple thoughts or i thought i was gonna record a couple thoughts i actually recorded seven minutes of thoughts on this topic and if you were watching this video on nebula instead of youtube you would be hearing those thoughts instead of this ad right now and she sees him and he kind of lays down on the floor and he puts his arms by his sides and and he kind of crawls down a hallway oh and it just oh my god nebula is a streaming platform made by and for smartypants video essayists i mean big joel just joined so you know it's good nebula routinely has bonus content like the stuff that i mentioned earlier it also pays creators fairly and doesn't have fair use problems and you can get it for an incredibly reasonable rate by going to curiositystream.com jacob geller you can get that and curiosity stream for a year for less than 15 bucks curiosity stream is of course the source for documentaries and all sorts of non-fiction shows it's also maybe the best way to decompress from an essay like this after spending many hours writing about the depths of the human psyche i went to curiosity stream and i watched a documentary on black holes and it was cool and it helped to take five billion steps back and then put things in perspective a little bit anyway you know the drill exclusive content from me and other cool people on nebula smart future black hole nature documentaries on curiosity stream both of those together for a year for less than 15 bucks that's 15 bucks like a like a bougie hamburger both of those for a year for less than a bougie hamburger by going to curiositystream.com jacob geller also yeah i have i have a mustache now it's been a long pandemic i have a [Music] mustache [Music] you

Channel: Jacob Geller

Views: 492,660

Keywords: I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Game, essay, analysis, jacob geller, dark souls

Id: lnAWQz34PJs

Length: 26min 52sec (1612 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/vandel23]

The ending of the ring city was truly one of the most beautiful moments in video games and a calling to humanity as a whole. At the end of the world, the last two humans will kill each other for the last of the resources.

[u/headin2sound]

I always interpreted Dark Souls 3 as a beautiful meta-narrative about moving on from a creative project before it loses its magic in endless repetition. And From Software was ballsy enough to directly show us what "losing its magic" looks like with the repeated characters, locations and themes present in Dark Souls 3. The ending of The Ringed City where you give the Dark Soul to the painter then hits really hard, as it is basically a message to the players to move on from Dark Souls.

It can even be read as Miyazaki setting us up for Elden Ring, which he called the spiritual successor to the Dark Souls series in interviews. This new painting of his is created with the literal DNA of Dark Souls, the Dark Soul itself, yet it will be entirely fresh and free from the constraints of the Dark Souls series.

[u/AigisAegis]

Fantastic video. I think a lot of the conversation around Dark Souls' narrative tends to be more of the quantifiable "what happened in-universe?" type of lore discussion, so it's really cool to see someone tackle it from a more abstract "what does this mean?" perspective. Not that the former is bad, especially when Dark Souls' in-universe lore is so interesting, but its thematic meaning is also super interesting while getting a lot less discussion.

A lot of these themes aren't exactly super subtle in Dark Souls III itself, mind you. For all of its obscure lore and obfuscated, half-presented storylines, Dark Souls is not a particularly subtle series thematically speaking (that's not a knock against it; personally, I'm of the opinion that subtlety in fiction is overrated). But Geller packages those clear themes in a way that I think is valuable. I like the focus on the fundamental wrongness of a lot of DS3's callbacks and references to the rest of the series, and how that plays into this idea of the world being stretched to its breaking point.

[u/BigfootsBestBud]

With it starting to feel like NakeyJakey is moving away from gaming focused stuff, Geller is hands down my favorite gaming essayist right now.

He just puts so much thought into the tiniest of details or games that no one else would scrutinize. He's really doing gaming a service with how much maturity he approaches it with.

[u/LyadhkhorStrategist]

Dark Souls 1 is my favourite in the series but I would not call Dark Souls 3 any worse especially with the story of the Ringed City DLC.
The story of Patches and Gael and the final between 2 humans in a devastated world is forever etched into my mind.

The game's story is really good it's a bit more complex that Dark Souls 1's story but equal parts well told.

The gasps of a dying world is at it's most harrowing right here

[u/Potatoslayer2]

Never expected to see a video essay with these two pieces of media. Really thought-engaging and enjoyable video!

[u/carlucio8]

Dark Souls is a series about powerful people trying to perpetuate themselves in power and failing explosively.

[u/dowaller66]

Dark Souls 3 was always my favourite of the trilogy and Jacob Geller explains in words better than I ever could.

[u/arions]

if you enjoy this type of content please check out r/GamingEssays . it's a subreddit dedicated to sharing video game analysis and critique.