Dark Souls has always been queer

metro.co.uk:

GameCentral continues its celebration of Pride Month with a look at how games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring foster a queer attitude towards reality.

Dark Souls and the rest of FromSoftware’s Soulsborne series doesn’t look particularly queer at first glance. In most of the games you have to choose between a female or male body for your protagonist, and the representation of the only main character who could be identified as trans in the Dark Souls trilogy, Gwyndolin, is controversial at best. Gwyndolin is the result of a forced feminisation and yet they are always referred to using male pronouns (in the English translation) and, in Dark Souls 3, as ‘brother’.

But, except for Demon’s Souls, the gendered body doesn’t limit what you can do and wear in the Soulsborne series. A slider allows you to modify facial features on a spectrum from traditionally feminine to traditionally masculine. In Dark Souls 2 you can change your body just by stepping into a gender-swapping coffin.

In Dark Souls 3, a ring related to Gwyndolin makes your character use the animations of the opposite gender. In the latest games you can have a traditionally feminine body and a beard. And in Elden Ring bodies are not defined by gender at all: you have either a ‘Body Type A’ or a ‘Body Type B’ and you can change it whenever you like by using a mirror. These games actually try to allow you to create gender nonconforming characters.

However, if we want to find queerness in FromSoftware’s works, we should look beyond mere representation, beyond the idea that every game is ‘straight’ when it’s not explicitly marked (and marketed) as ‘gay’ and it doesn’t feature explicitly queer characters.

Between 2012 and 2013, scholars began investigating video games through