Dark Souls, the hit videogame series celebrated for its complex narrative interplay between light and dark, grapples with the unexpected theme of gender representation. While the game thrives on disrupting conventional storytelling, its depiction of women remains tethered to a conventional binary. The very nature of Dark Souls' dichotomies makes it impossible to escape the gender binary writes Benjamin Carpenter.

Introduction
It is an uncontroversial point (in so far as there are any) to consider Dark Souls as premising much of its narrative drive on the polarity between light and dark. Though originally introduced to these metaphysical concepts as an antagonistic binary, there are many points throughout the fragmented narrative of the games that calls this binary into question. A staple of its distinct narrative style, Dark Souls is no stranger to the persistent disruption of the stories that it chooses to reveal — whether these disruptions are about questioning the fundamental nature of the world as we experience it, doubting that our character is truly the prophesied figure of divinely mandated destiny, or instilling a suspicion of the motives of other characters as they presented. Disruption as the motivation to question, to doubt, to regard with suspicion, is a pervasive and inextricable part of Souls’ storytelling, and the dualistic metaphysics of light and dark are no exception to this. And yet, when we consider the question(s) of gender with regard to the series, we are immediately met with a vision of gender that almost without exception repeats and reinforces the traditional binary of man and woman. As is to be expected, the work the series does to maintain this binary and thereby the salience of gender to its story is often done through stylistic moves that mobilise various kinds of norm that play into the conceptual structures of misogyny, sexism, and homophobia (though this is not an exhaustive list).

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Souls presents a vision of woman that ignores the sex/gender distinction so widely discussed within feminist theory.

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Given the numerous ways in which the series replays symbolic associations between darkness and evil, the figure of the woman within Souls is maintained in the position of the other — specifically the other as a threat. Just as the opening cutseen instils us with a fear that the dark might win out over the light — for “soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain. Even now there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights”— the game gives us a parade of female figures that are to be feared for the corruption with which they are so frequently equated. And we shall see the precise kinds of violation and violence that the fear of women is seen to justify within the narrative.

Corruption — Essentially Women, Essentially Dark
Dark Souls presents a binarist conception of sex and gender. Much like most other RPGs, we begin each game with character creation and are at once faced with the decision: male or female? This is such a common experience within videogames that the process of character creation passes us by without this binary being altogether conspicuous. A game is far more likely to be noteworthy for its inclusion of non-binary or non-cis* characters than it is for repeating gender binaries. Yet gender is far from the only binary within Souls (though it is arguable the most stable of them) for the foundational metaphysics of the world rest on the interplay between a binary of light and dark.