Many Souls fans liken the Maiden Astraea fight in Demon's Souls to Great Grey Wolf Sif in Dark Souls, describing both as tearjerkers that made them "feel like the bad guy."
The comparison always rubbed me the wrong way—not because it was misplaced or dishonest, but because it was shallow.
It centers how the player feels, and only that. To be fair, this is an understandable response, and definitely an overt part of the text. Against both Astraea and Sif, the player's success in combat, which has thus far been their primary means of progress, is now being scrutinized in a way that casts them unfavorably. They're being forced to reckon with the personhood of the enemy, with their enemy's good intentions and noble virtues.
Suddenly the assumption underpinning most video games—that your actions are good because they're yours—is overturned, and the mechanical rewards for combat are now complicated by emotional punishment. You're fighting a good person, and so you, the player, might just be a bad person.
This is very much in tune with the video gaming zeitgeist of the early 2010s. Dark Souls released just a year before Spec Ops: The Line, which does this same trick on an enormous scale, to well-deserved critical success. Players are placed in the mind of a paranoid American soldier in the Middle-East, and slowly slip into moral depravity as he goes from "fighting terrorists" to "suppressing insurgents" to dropping white phosphorous on a refugee camp.
"Are we the baddies?" was really quite a novel idea at the time. It was novel enough that it could be the driving thesis of an entire game.
Perhaps this is why it still stands as the prevailing sentiment around Maiden Astraea—especially when Great Grey Wolf Sif, whose boss fight falls pretty squarely in line with the trend, is such an immediate point of comparison.
But the fight with Maiden Astraea and Garl Vinland is saying something more than that, I feel. The comparison to Sif is what crystallized this vague feeling into a clear, certain thesis for me. It's not just that the player is set against someone "good" or "noble" in Astraea, in the way that Sif is a good dog.
Astraea sets the player against someone human, who is experiencing the height of human loss: the loss of faith.
On some level, all of Demon's Souls is about our human yearning for the sublime, be it supernal or infernal, and the horrible failure that comes when we reach too far.
King Allant reaches for sublime power. In so doing, he achieves a new perspective that shatters his previous understanding of the world—including the values of feudalism and nationalism that drove him to seek power in the first place.
Sage Freke reaches for sublime truth. He believes that with knowledge that is normally forbidden to mortals, he can achieve the just and equitable world that is normally denied to mortals. In the end, however, he fails to consider his own mortal limitations, and he succumbs to the influence of the demon souls.
So on and so forth. The pattern is a familiar one. As Arthur Machen says in his supernatural horror story, "The White People," true sin comes in the "attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner." This plays out with many key characters of Demon's Souls, each one exploring this cardinal sin from a new angle.
Saint Astraea does this too, yet she does it from an angle that I, as a former Catholic, find uniquely sympathetic. It begins when she reaches out for God, and catches only empty air.
"Dear Lord, you are too cruel... You have abandoned us. Is that not punishment enough?"
It's never stated what exactly causes this realization in Astraea—that the God of her world is a distant watchmaker at best, a cruel absent parent at worst. It could have been a direct revelation, such as King Allant received from the Old One, but this doesn't seem likely.
From what the text offers us, I think that Astraea's faith was broken by the Valley of the Defilement itself.
We hear from Biorr that King Allant "fought vigilantly against the vile and depraved," and we see through Yuria's torture that these labels were used for people on the fringes of society, to justify their persecution. Surely this extends also to the "lost and ill-fortuned souls" who were driven to the Valley of Defilement. The land was presumably called the "Valley of Defilement" well before the demon scourge broke out, and so it's the inhabitants themselves—the poor, the diseased, the unwanted—who are the "defilement." Them, and the rubbish and waste that are disposed of there.
The fact that we see aborted fetuses at various points throughout the Valley, mingled with the muck and the refuse and the remains of animals, speaks to the dire state of living there. As the filthy beggar woman says, it's "all the rot of the world, living or not," and it leaves no room for sanity or dignity.
Whatever can be said of the exact circumstances that produced this, or of the land itself, the fact remains that the misery of the Valley's inhabitants is of decidedly human origin.
Bear this in mind when you consider that the Church of Demon's Souls sends missionaries there—as if the Valley folk were suffering from some natural calamity, and not from the malice of the ruling class.
Perhaps that's all the Church could do. After all, the real-life Catholic Church has always been a powerful political entity, but never have they been able to erase poverty or prejudice, or directly stop a monarch from doing something. The same must apply to the definitely-not-Catholic Church of this fictional world, which is pretty committed to realism in that regard.
But even so, it should come as no surprise that every missionary who entered the Valley of Defilement was killed, either by the people or by the land itself.
These missionaries come from the very society that drove the Valley's inhabitants to such inhumane lows. How would they, who live in relative comfort, know how to navigate this treacherous hellhole? And why would anyone accept charity from the hand that beats them down?
So when Saint Astraea enters the Valley of Defilement, full of genuine compassion and goodwill, what does she see?
She sees the sheer magnitude of human suffering, the depth of the squalor, the inhumanity that it represents... and no relief from anywhere. Not from the Church she serves, and not from God on high. Not even in this end-of-days scenario, when demons walk the earth and miracles are witnessed again, does God's supposed mercy reach the Valley.
Saint Urbain might be a deluded, bigoted fool, but he might not be entirely wrong when he calls the people of the Valley "those left behind by God." Perhaps all of mankind has been left behind, and only in the Valley of Defilement is that truth laid bare.
What can anyone do in the face of such a horrible truth?
If you don't run away from them, how do you answer people who are suffering and dying on this scale? If they need miracles, and God does not provide, what do you do?
These questions don't pertain solely to the fiction of Demon's Souls. These are questions that have echoed across human history, philosophy, theology, and myth. Reckoning with the impossible scale of human suffering—the inevitability of it, the ubiquity of it, the horrible depths of it—has been the preoccupation of our greatest thinkers for, well, pretty much all of our time on this planet.
Even when some of us arrive at an answer, it's never a wholly satisfactory answer, and it's usually contingent upon an existing framework of values and beliefs. The Pope says one thing, the Dalai Lama says another, so on and so forth, and the greater share of humanity continues to suffer all the while.
As for Astraea's answer, I'll once again quote the prologue to Machen's "The White People":
"[H]oliness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon."
She does this quite literally. She cannot access the power of God, so she accepts a demon's soul, and uses its power to bring relief to the Valley of Defilement.
Because this power is infernal, not supernal, she cannot purify the foul stagnant waters of the swamp, nor can she cure the diseases of the poor. Rather, she gives the Valley's inhabitants an affinity for filth and disease; it becomes their sustenance rather than their bane, their strength rather than their weakness. The natural order is inverted completely.
This is why Astraea is "the most impure demon of all." Her demonic power imitates the divine mercy that she longs for, yet the results couldn't be more different—perhaps, also, because she extends her mercy to those deemed impure themselves. The description of the spell Death Cloud, made from Astraea's demon soul, says as much.
And in a cruel twist of irony, Astraea's damnation does not ease the pain and misery of the Valley's inhabitants. The Archstone before Astraea's boss room reads, "The poor journey to this rotten place to offer their souls [to Astraea] so that they might be freed from their suffering." They might be sustained by the Valley's filth now, but they are still suffering from it.
They find lasting relief only in giving up their souls to feed Astraea's power, thus perpetuating the whole horrible system.
Astraea's wounds bleed perpetually, never closing, never healing. Her blood fills the grotto where she sits as an object of adoration, still performing the functions of a religion that failed her. All she can say, over and over, is that God has abandoned her, abandoned the world—she has no fewer than three separate voice lines saying this.
Notably, though others might call her a witch, she never turns to "witchcraft" in the archetypal sense. Her grief never turns to anger; she never rails against God. She never discards her clerical robes, she never dons a pointed hat, and she never casts curses or spells. She is stuck as Maiden Astraea, Saint Astraea, frozen in a state of loss.
The moment of her trauma, of her loss of faith, is extended into perpetuity. Even the boss music reflects this:
The melody loops and loops and loops, and any resolution feeds immediately into another loop. It's a textural piece more than anything, but you can't help getting lost in the endless repetition of that simple, incomplete melody.
Astraea's knightly bodyguard, Garl Vinland, also seems to be lost in unending grief. He rests in a pile of corpses, never removing the armor that is the sign of his holy vow. If you kill Astraea before him, he simply stands in shock, unable to move or speak or act. Unable to move on.
Anyway, uhh...
All of this? A wound that never heals, a grief that never ends?
Yeah, that's... that's how it feels to have lost your faith.
That's how I feel, anyway.
As you probably gathered already, this reading of Astraea is informed by my perspective as an ex-Catholic, now agnostic. My own loss of faith was very painful. It spanned the entire length of my adolescence, into young adulthood—as my rational mind was growing, my queerness was rising to the level of conscious feeling, and nearly every support system in my life was failing me.
My parish community was run by hypocritical bullies, and harbored an actual, real, pedophile priest, but still I reached out to God for answers. I looked to theology instead of community, to study and meditation and prayer. I looked for answers to my own suffering, and to the world's suffering. I looked for resolutions to all the insane contradictions. I looked for something to sustain the faith that was being asked of me. Surely God wouldn't abandon me, even if my parents and teachers and peers were all against me.
In the end, it all fell out from under me. I found plenty to admire, but even more to doubt and disdain.
I couldn't stop loving God or Jesus, but now it felt like they were dead at my feet, and that rot and maggots were visibly eating the corpses—and that everyone around me was politely pretending that they weren't.
I remember crying to my mother when my dog died around this time, and she tried to comfort me with talk of heaven, and I was just inconsolable. All I could say, as I cried for this sweet little animal who had loved me, was that I was "scared for the world." That nothing could ever possibly be right, nothing in the whole wide world, if God weren't there. I could no longer imagine a good, just end to any human life or endeavor, because the only end was death.
I've since recovered from that very low point in my life, and grown into a much happier adult. The grief never left me entirely, though.
The loss of my faith is likely the single most impactful event in my life. Because I'm no longer Catholic, I was able to transition, and I was able to find friends and partners who mean everything to me...
...but because I was Catholic, and still feel that small aching hole inside, I've spent the greater part of my life immersed in art, literature, and philosophy that explores the space where God once lived in my heart. I've spent years studying apocalyptic religions and their various underpinnings—political, social, theological, and narratological. I've become a literary critic, and a scholar of Victorian religion. My first published article is about how Elizabeth Gaskell positions the Victorian working class as an "apocalyptic demographic."
My favorite musical is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. My favorite author is Arthur Machen. My favorite video game is Demon's Souls. The grief that I feel for my lost faith is hardly all of me, but it has touched every part of me.
So when people who have never experienced such grief compare Maiden Astraea to the big sad wolf from Dark Souls, I feel a little frustrated. As a character and a symbol, she's so much more than that.
I could go on, and resolve this rambling, messy, emotional essay in some kind of critical statement about Demon's Souls... but I think I'll just leave it at that. I suppose I just wanted other people to understand what I feel, to see what I see, and to know why this video game is special to me.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Umbasa.
Why is it everyone that sets out to rip off the Souls series fails to include any of the goofiness? Grim as the world of Dark Souls is, it can also at times be completely ridiculous. It's got mimic chests that attack you with fucking Street Fighter hurricane kicks and giant bulging bobble eyed basilisks and whatever the hell Frampt and Kaathe are supposed to be. There's a reason these games are such a rich goldmine of memes.
Even in a dead world devoid of hope there is silliness and whimsy.
I've spent the past six or so months putting together an extensive catalogue of inconsistent translations, and places where different Japanese words end up translated as the same word in English, in Elden Ring.
It's NOT a list of mistranslations or a critique - just parallels and associations that differ and could potentially lead Japanese and English-speaking players to make different conclusions about the worldbuilding.
You can find the catalogue here!
It includes:
Tables showing both Japanese and English descriptions and dialogue side by side
Analysis containing cultural context where neccesary, and links to Japanese lore theorists' videos and essays
And also:
Japanese poetry - haiku and tanka - which aren't possible to preserve in English
Wordplay and puns which aren't possible to preserve in English
A glossary of English translation terms which share kanji in Japanese
Words which have no English-language equivalent and the specific Japanese cultural concepts they refer to
... And more!
I hope you enjoy reading and find something interesting that you didn't know about Elden Ring's worldbuilding and characters in here! Please let me know if you see any mistakes.
i can't remember where specifically, but i've read that the original term used for Titanite before localization was Keystone. and also the Titanite Demon was called the Wedge Demon. or something.
ah. so titanite is actually a real mineral. it is also called 'sphene' (from Ancient Greek σφηνώ (sphēnṓ) 'wedge'), and in Japanese it is also called 'keystone'. and the definition of keystone is "The central wedge-shaped stone of an arch that locks its parts together."
elden ring + art history: pandemonium by john martin (1841)
"In the 1820s Martin produced a series of paintings depicting scenes of disaster, set in infinite, visionary spaces and full of theatrical, nightmarish lighting effects. Their basic mood largely derived from the artist's familiarity with John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost and with the biblical Apocalypse.
The Pandemonium of 1841 goes back to a passage in the first book of Milton's Paradise Lost. In a diagonal perspective characteristic of Martin, a gigantic building complex extends along the waterfront. This recalls fantastic reconstructions of cities of antiquity. Martin's Satan, whose invocatory figure stands on a rocky outcrop in the right foreground, has the look of an ancient Greek hero. Like Achilles outside Troy, he appears with shield and feathered helmet, but commanding an army not of besiegers but of demons and damned souls in their Cyclopean city."
