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).