Description
So, for a very long time, I had no ideas for serious Souls fanart, and then right the other night, this drawing came to me, fully formed in my head, down to the pattern on the curtain.
The Old Royalty in the Dark Souls trilogy make a very unique contrast to the Demigods in Elden Ring. Where the Shardbearers, due to Marika specifically directing them to never be mediocre or merely exist comfortably, often have debilitating monomanias, delusions of grandeur, obsessions with outward appearance, etc., the children of Gwyn each want nothing more than to find some place to hide, and wait there where they're nobody's problem anymore. I realized this after defeating the Nameless King in Dark Souls III, and seeing that all he'd done was run away from home to passively exist someplace else until the Apocalypse, hence the visual parallels between Archdragon Peak and the Northern Undead Asylum.
Gwynevere, having been canonically married with children, is the only child of Gwyn to significantly interact with the world of the Heterosexual and the Normative, and yet she is at heart no different than Nameless, Gwyndolin, or Filianore. There are popular theories about Gwynevere being the Queen of Lothric and Rosaria, and if we take these two to be part of a larger narrative, than Gwynevere's story becomes one of a person who conforms to her social role, and who keeps attempting to make that conformity into a happy position (hence the wandering around from marriage to marriage), until eventually finding that this is impossible for her, and leaving to hide away in the attic of an open sewer. That same furtive impulse, that same quiet resentment, and that same wandering hysteria leading nowhere at all are all present, but in such a person who is "loved by all", here meaning expected to perform maternal affection constantly, despite her own feelings.
Also, this DSIII playthrough, I realized that Oceiros is the one Dark Souls dad to be explicitly physically abusive (as we see in his violence towards Ocellote and Lothric), which has me concerned as well.
Dark Souls III does a great deal in it's story with cycles of violence and abuse, as well as a constant drive to repeat previous traumatic experiences (Thanatos), it's thesis seeming to be that the level of constant nostalgia and retrospection of modern culture is a necrotic Death Impulse on a mass societal level.
Long analysis short I'm concerned.