Being Trans is the ‘Dark Souls’ of Gender: An Exploration of Parallels
My turbulent history with gender and the video games of FromSoftware are well documented at Epilogue Gaming. In 2020, I decided to publicly come out as a transgender woman, after some revelatory experiences that gave me comfort and confidence that other people could love me as my true self. And on several occasions, I have opined about my aversion to difficult video games, my start-and-stop attempts to play through Dark Souls, and my eventual infatuation with Elden Ring. On the back of what became one of the best gaming experiences of my life in Elden Ring, I decided to install Dark Souls for the third time. After cheating my way to the final boss, I feel compelled to talk about how Dark Souls is like being transgender.
Before we take another step, plunging off an invisible precipice like we’re entering Dark Souls’ Crystal Cave, let’s address the drake in the room. Comparing anything to Dark Souls is so overwrought as to be borderline parodical, and I am not claiming to have definitively mastered or comprehensively understood Dark Souls. Furthermore, this comparison risks rendering an extended metaphor threadbare for the sake of a headline– the games journalist™ bit where I bring together two unrelated topics and suggest that, not only are these things causally connected, they are isomorphic. (A bizarre comparison recently published in the New York Times comes to mind.) Most importantly, I do not make this comparison to speak for the diverse range of trans and gender-nonconforming people whose experiences differ vastly from my own.
I want to explore these parallels because I played Dark Souls during a bombardment of incessant and escalating anti-transgender bills advancing against our already curtailed human rights in the United States. The trans experience was constantly on my mind when I took my first steps out of the cell at the beginning of Dark Souls, and thus the comparisons, for me, were inescapable.
Dark Souls is Like Being Trans
If you’ve spent time around trans women who play games, you may already be familiar with their seemingly magnetic obsession with the Dark Souls series – which, generally speaking, includes titles like Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Elden Ring. In explaining that obsession, I’d defer to expansive and insightful explorations of characters like Dark Sun Gwyndolin and the intersectional complexities of how the Souls series engages with gender at multiple symbolic levels. But aside from these exhaustive analyses of the specific lore elements, I have often been mystified – as if seeing this gaming affinity from the outside – as to why trans women are so captivated by the Souls games, especially when there are explicit portrayals of transmisogyny throughout. Furthermore, I was initially puzzled as to why anyone, regardless of gender, could sincerely claim to find solace within such a notoriously unforgiving and macabre series.
There are of course memetic elements from the Souls series that might satisfy my curiosity, like the ostensible “gender coffin” of Dark Souls II or the formulaic refrain that being trans is like the “Dark Souls” of queer experiences. As far as internet gaming culture is concerned, no wonder these ideas wandered into my sphere of awareness. Knowing about these gender affinities within the Souls series, however, didn’t prepare me for how obvious and ubiquitous I would find these parallels to be when I finally sank my teeth deeply into the game. Dark Souls, I kept thinking, is like being trans.
Embracing the Struggle
One of the fundamental decisions I had to make when deciding to finally come out publicly as transgender was that, in many relevant areas of my life, this decision would make my life more difficult. Of course, my mental calculus revealed, I was willing to face and fight against barriers to employment, healthcare, housing, and other vital aspects that I had previously taken for granted in my life until that point. Risking the cruel judgments and discriminatory acts of both everyday people, my family members, my coworkers, my closest friends – these suddenly became mundane worries as I learned about the rotten history of violence and hatred inflicted on trans people of all walks of life throughout history. As my depth of understanding increased about issues ranging from legal precedent to endocrinology, so too did my sense of empathy and urgency to protect trans people who are far more vulnerable than I am. This sense of expanded depth and complexity – seeing the inextricable interconnectedness of my own experience with the tangled thorns of reality in my country – is a precise metaphor for how I experienced my first successful playthrough of Dark Souls.
A question I could never properly answer when vicariously enjoying friends of mine running through the Souls games is why anyone would voluntarily adopt such a seemingly unpleasant experience. Dark Souls makes no bones about punishing you for even moderate slip-ups, poised to rap your knuckles at every corner. Like a strict disciplinarian, the game is off-putting at first; eventually, I found, I grew to become proud of the skill I had developed. Of course, I began this playthrough of Dark Souls with the confidence of having finished Elden Ring, wiping the map and Steam achievement list of all bosses. But I think back to the few times I had abandoned Dark Souls, even while playing with self-professed die-hard fans of the game, and I know I could have never made it all the way through without those accumulated lessons from Elden Ring.
In the same way that I looked at my friends whose gaming interests otherwise often overlapped with my own, and I wondered why on Earth they were voluntarily lacerating themselves with the Souls games, one might ask the same question of trans people. In a world where literally every time I open a major news network, naked hatred and ignorant bigotry about trans people (and queer people more generally) dominates the headlines, I might reasonably ask why anyone would choose to subject themselves to such dehumanizing vitriol. Whether it’s the countless states criminalizing the medical transition of young people, the ideological bans of discussions surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation from school environments, or explicit restrictions extending to adults inhabiting public spaces, there is no shortage of reasons why someone might choose to live in the closet. The answer, for me, is incredibly simple: the constant pain of corrupting myself in the closet is greater than the external pain that other people can inflict on me.
The decision to play Dark Souls is, thus, to me, like the decision to openly embrace my transness after hiding from it for so long – something I have been earnest but terrified to do. The privilege of this comparison dismisses the scope of one being a video game that I’ve been insecure about having never finished when I otherwise take explicit pride in being able to have cultured opinions about critically acclaimed ludonarratives, and the other being a series of multifaceted societal issues that directly threaten my ability, and the ability of countless other people like me, to peacefully exist with basic human rights protections. I would never attempt to say that playing Dark Souls is morally comparable, but the patterns of psychology, the decision to embrace something that intrinsically produces suffering, is the lens that let me appreciate Dark Souls for the work of art that it truly is. Furthermore, it allowed me to find symbolic objects and milestones with which to feel proud about how I’ve changed and who I’ve become since publicly coming out.
The Endless Cycle of Trepidation, Tension, and Triumph
Dark Souls is such an intimidating game for me. It’s brutal in the same ways that I infamously lamented about Hollow Knight, a game that pulls no punches either. Dark Souls limits what you can do to survive, producing a sort of alacrity as you alertly explore each treacherous environment. You are intensely aware of the thousand things that could go wrong, ruining everything and eliminating your progress, in a split second. Your meticulous plan, your eagerness to exhaust the resources in a new environment, exploring every nook and cranny, can vanish instantly. An enemy lurches out from behind you with a quick, killing blow; you run out of estus flasks and become surrounded by a swarm of ghosts; you become cursed, losing half your health semi-permanently; you evade an oncoming strike, dropping off a sheer cliff – all to witness your hard-earned souls disappear.
Soon, in my playthrough, I realized why Firelink Shrine is such an impactful location for Dark Souls veterans. The game is an endlessly expanding puzzle box of secret passages that, like Rome, seemingly all paths lead back to. In Dark Souls, you will spend several hours working through winding, cramped tunnels, only to find the surprising announcement on screen that this otherwise unknown area you’ve plumbed was connected to Firelink – to home, to safety, to comfort and familiarity – all along. You now know the way the world works in a more intimate fashion, and that knowledge makes you feel better prepared to venture back out into that threatening world once more. In the meantime, however, you cherish the calm safety of Firelink.
Firelink Shrine is my metaphor for what it’s like to venture out of my safe spaces – which is to say, leaving my familiar haunts while fully presenting as femme. Being visibly trans, or even confusingly androgynous, in public spaces is like being vulnerable in a new, unexplored and potentially threatening area in Dark Souls. “Elsewhere,” broadly construed, becomes a hyper-aware place of tension and danger where you not only have to remain constantly vigilant to any and all threats, but you have to internalize and anticipate them like the Dark Souls skeleton around the corner. Being trans is a way of becoming your own mental self-defense instructor, developing techniques that disarm, diminish, and defuse the slurs, the dog whistles, the cheap shots, the awkward invasiveness. Fifteen hours into Dark Souls, I wormed my way back through Undead Parish, an area that once gave me grief, and I noticed myself deflecting unthinkingly, one-shotting enemies. I had learned how to survive efficiently, saving my energy for the true battles ahead.
Even though I can summarize my interactions with strangers since coming out as largely positive, the worry never goes away. Mustering up the courage to leave my house is almost absurd, if I compare my present worries to that of my past, but it grips me every time because of how I’ve trained myself to pay attention to the world in a fundamentally different way than before coming out. I worry about every detail of my appearance, particularly in terms of preventing overeager and misogynistic men; I worry about every casual social interaction, and how factors from my body language to my speech pattern can influence how I am received. If just one stranger decides to make a scene of my presence, everything can go horribly wrong in the blink of an eye. This year has featured horrific threats to pride celebrations and marches around the country, enacting the news media’s rhetoric to an alarmingly deadly degree. Thus, by virtue of necessity, I cannot afford to turn this part of my brain off in public spaces.
Yet, with luck, you return home – or you find the bonfire of a trusted friend – restoring solace, where you can be yourself openly, without threat or judgment. You can lower your guard long enough to catch your breath, take your makeup off, and rest. Firelink Shrine, for me, is like that comforting return home, nesting within the serenity of safety. But I cannot stay here by the bonfire forever, nor would I want to. I yearn for a meaningful experience, and therefore the world outside is pressing. The game, and life, isn’t finished yet.
Horror, The Body, and Dysphoria
Specifically thinking through my experience as a trans woman, the expression of femininity in Dark Souls is provocatively contradictory in nature. I do not feel like the best person to critique Dark Souls’ character creator, but I am at least pleased to be able to play as a woman through this role-playing experience. That seemingly superficial element allows me a closer point of connection with the game, and therefore its world. I resultantly ran though Dark Souls with a “fashion souls” ethos, prioritizing my character’s attire based on aesthetics rather than stats.
The portrayals of femininity within characters throughout the world range from Quelaag to Gwynevere, from disturbing to objectifying. I felt strange comparisons between myself and some of these characters, almost like they were psychological caricatures that you’d find in Psychonauts. Quelaag, for instance, triggers my deeply entrenched arachnophobia, but that paralyzing and repulsive fear of spiders is immediately in contrast with the naked torso of the quasi-human woman elements of her design. The game presents bare breasts and a smirk in the same panning image that it embraces the ugliness of writhing insectoid appendages – of course, this imagery draws upon a historical trope associating femininity and the spider as deceptive, deadly traps – and, as a sapphic person, that inherent, aporetic tension reminded me inextricably of what it’s like when I experience the lows of gender dysphoria. What I would otherwise find attractive in the image is corrupted by the primal nauseating fear I feel when encountering spiders, and that strange conjoinment of antipodes feels like a useful shorthand for what it’s like when attempting to see myself positively but despising the very things I’m focusing on. The body horror elements are something that, as I did with Quelaag, I hope to conquer.
There are other, less direct comparisons that my brain absentmindedly made throughout my Dark Souls experience – many of which could be broadly applied to most RPGs – like how investing in the game’s stat systems is a way of reinventing yourself once you’ve accepted the fact that you are trans and then start acting upon that acceptance. I might start off my character thinking I wanted to become a mage when, in reality, I was actually more comfortable with a two-handed sword. In the same way, when I first started expressing my gender identity through my appearance, I had no idea what I was doing and what would actually work for the style I wanted to embody. Initially, I followed the general “recovering emo kid” color choices of my teenage years, only to realize that I felt better about myself when I leaned into more flamboyant patterns and previously unfamiliar cuts of clothing. And so you start over, building upon those dead-ends until you find what works best for you; eventually, you get back into the rhythm again, focusing on the bigger issues at hand than upgrading your sword.
Prescriptive Advice and Normativity
At the risk of wringing this comparison drier than a dish towel, one of the most lasting impressions that both Dark Souls and my experience being fully out as transgender have taught me is that there’s no “right way” to go about them. I am luckily in a position in my life where I do not feel beholden to the unsolicited advice of others, but somehow I have grown to care about the opinions of strangers on the internet – people I will never meet and therefore should not dedicate a sizable fraction of my emotional energy to – especially vocal Dark Souls identitarians. Such fans of From Software’s games have unfortunately garnered the reputation for being staunch gatekeepers of the “true” experience in playing these games. And the aforementioned curiosity I have always felt when observing the stereotypically obsessed trans woman eagerly explaining Dark Souls lore for five hours transformed into a kind of insecurity. I practically needed to see this experience through, not merely to know, but to truly understand, why Dark Souls has made such an impact on so many lives similar to my own.
Fans of Dark Souls tend to argue in long threads on internet forums, bickering about what the best weapon or ideal path through the game is. Luckily, I know many Souls fans like Epilogue’s Ben Vollmer who thankfully break this stereotype quite clearly, insisting that the true Souls experience – if that concept even matters – is the one you decide for yourself. And that attitude energizes me, taking pride in the things about this playthrough that I have chosen for myself, that often, due to the nature of the genius level design, feel like I have discovered for myself. Even when I am choosing to use a walkthrough to guide me through an area, that sense of inherent ownership is incredibly rare for me in games, and it might be my favorite aspect of the Souls-like experience thus far in my exposure to them.
In the same way that people feel entitled to proffer unsolicited advice about the “right” way to play the Souls games, so too do people backseat the trans experience. I cherish the trans people I know and thankfully feel a closeness with all of them that I cannot fully compare to other dearly loved people in my life. We support each other instead of cutting each other down, and I am grateful for that. But so often in public spaces, especially online, the discourse surrounding trans narratives – even coming from trans people themselves – is from people trying to apply their narrow view or outlook to everyone universally. You aren’t “trans enough,” so the accusational narrative goes, if you haven’t met cis beauty standards or started hormones or any number of otherwise exclusionary boundaries around what means to have a valid identity within your experience. It erases the beautiful possibilities and (even unintentionally) discounts the value of the experiences of people who have forged their own path through life – in this instance, in terms of gender identity and the decisions to embrace and even express it.
No one knows better than you how you should spend your life and time. And as cliche as it is to remind ourselves of the brevity, singularity, and finality of our lifespans, it bears repeating precisely because you can only do it once. Even if you do it badly, it’s worth doing the way that you will most enjoy instead of shielding yourself from potential discomfort. There are plenty of wrong ways to go about it – whether rolling off a cliff or neglecting to retain your humanity – but going through it is the point. Making it through to the other side creates a personal story, one that matters, no matter how you did it.
Video games and the trans experience are radically different things. But sometimes an almost literary connection like this is more effectively illustrative of an idea than a mere fact sheet. Trans people do not have it easy in any sense of the word. The increasingly hostile legislation explicitly targeting us in America and abroad is gaining momentum, and that rhetoric – whether legislatively ratified or not – is causing substantial, measurable harm to the lives and safety of too many people. Seeing the long view of FromSoftware’s uncompromised approach to game design, I am so happy to witness Elden Ring become ubiquitously celebrated within the cultural conversation; in the same way, I hope to see a world that one day can demonstrate that degree of enthusiasm to enshrining uncompromised protections for LGBTQIA+ people.
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