Solaire Should’ve been in Dark Souls 3(And Dark Souls 2, too)
Hey, you guys like………..
Dark Souls?
I like Dark Souls as much as the next gal. It’s got some cool moments to it, nice little bits of lore, and a lot of the bosses are engaging. I played through Dark Souls 3 on release day and did the DLC as soon as it came out, too. It was a ton of fun, and I’ll always enjoy the series for what it is.
I’ll also be disappointed for what I think it could have been. It very deliberately holds itself back on some core elements that could make it much more of a cohesive experience. The most obvious element of this is the storyline of the games, mainly that it doesn’t have one.
Yes, yes, I know that a ton of stuff has happened in the different worlds, and there’s a rich and complex history attended to with a crazy amount of detail. However, there’s a major difference between something that has happened in a place, and something that is happening in a place. The first is Lore, the second is Story.
The worlds of Dark Souls are stuck in limbo, nothing at all happens in them, no changes affect the world. Nothing you do in the entirety of the series actually matters, because nothing can happen in these worlds. Even in the endings, that very idea is repeated and made explicit. That idea is the sole constitutor of story in the entirety of the series.
But a story that can’t do anything is a story that cannot mean anything. That very fact is what truly held this series back over its duration. However, I think that there was incredible potential for a story, and you wouldn’t even need to change that much. The change I would make?
Swap Slave Knight Gael for Solaire.
So, major spoilers from here on out, and I’m not gonna take the 100 hours it would take to place all of this in the proper context it deserves so just bear with me here. I’m just gonna go over some basics to prove my point.
Who is Slave Knight Gael? Well, he’s a guy that shows up in the Dark Souls 3 DLC, an undead knight from the very beginning of the world, on a quest that will bring him to its final moments. He serves as the final boss of the series and has an incredibly visually fascinating and mechanically intense boss fight. He’s a cool idea, but there’s really not much of anything beyond just that.
Who is Solaire? Solaire is an NPC from Dark Souls 1, a man in love with the incandescence of the very sun itself, one obsessed with following the steps of the gods and prolonging the world. He gives you a White Sign Soapstone, a primary way to engage with the game’s multiplayer by helping other player’s out who are having some trouble with bosses. He’s a good guy, and he wants you to be one, too.
Oh, and he was the guy who first said Praise the Sun.
Yeah, that guy.
Solaire has a personal quest that could see him going insane over the loss of his personal sun, or finding his way to the Kiln of the First Flame to help Link the Fire. For this idea, we would need to tweak that a bit, though this could mostly stay intact. The main thing that would need to happen is that he doesn’t go insane but he also doesn’t Link the First Flame. Solaire needs to survive into the new generation of the world and see first hand how desolate it has remained. Solaire needs to see firsthand the grinding of the world’s gears to a halt, and know the true damage that is being done because of this.
Because, ultimately, Solaire needs to lose his faith.
See, the core story of Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 is that the very infrastructure of the world has broken it, and that there is nothing inside the system that anyone can do to fix it. The only way to do anything close to fixing the mistakes of generations and generations past is to let it all fall apart and start again with whatever tiny pieces remain.
Basically the story is about how there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Sorry, gamers.
However, the series only really introduces this idea in obtuse ways really far into the series, and a gigantic amount of players either ignore it because it’s too hard to get invested in, or they try to understand it and just get lost. The series needed something to make this concrete, and powerful. Enter, Solaire.
On your first playthrough of Dark Souls 1, you’re likely gonna be right there with Solaire, wanting to Link the Flame because it’s what the gods themselves want you to do! You’re even called the Chosen Undead! You gotta do it. It’s the right thing to do.
Then Dark Souls 2 happens. And things are the same. The “right thing to do” has happened so many times the written record of lordran is long gone. And yet, here we are. Shit still sucks, the world’s still stuck, and nothing’s changing. What else can we even do? Solaire can be there, on his quest because he knows things have to change, and not even knowing another path than the one he’s been on for untold generations. Maybe he’s even left the name Solaire behind, but he’s still there, trying to be the world’s last ray of hope.
Then Dark Souls 3 happens. The world is turning to dust, the elites have abandoned their duties, and even the commoners have lost faith in their gods. But the wheels keep turning. The path keeps going, and the will of the people don’t matter much anymore. Solaire doesn’t even have to be in the base game of Dark Souls 3, abandoning this farce to try to find something new.
And then he finds it in the Dreg Heap, and the start of the final DLC of the series. Finally, he’s found something that could cause actual, meaningful, change. He directs you to it, knowing that at the end of all of this he isn’t going to be able to stay sane. He has to continue, but he’s not putting all his chips on himself. He leads a breadcrumb trail down to the exact thing that could upset the foundations of the world and finally, FINALLY, fix things.
The Dark Soul.
Solaire spends so long searching for it that the entirety of the world has become actual, literal dust, and in the end the Dark Soul has overtaken him. But his plan was successful, you find him in a grotesque, horrifying state, having consumed the Dark Soul itself. And just like you have done with all the gods and men in this entire series, you put him out of his misery.
With his sacrifice, a new world can be made, and the remnants of this one can be saved. You may not even fully understand his plan, or how important it is, but even then you follow it and make his death mean something.
That is the story that Dark Souls so desperately tried to have, what every errant piece of lore and character interaction is pointing to, and they were so close to having something beautiful. But they held themselves back, and now all I can do is think about what could have been.
