By Karin Malady

This could be about Elden Ring since everyone is talking about it, but there’s something else more important on my mind. That’s right, EverymanHYBRID, the slenderman ARG YouTube horror series that is basically the plot of Kingdom Hearts. Alternate Reality Games want you to feel like you’re in on a little secret. That no one else is paying attention but you, and you need to do something about it. For this series, they had the player working for one of the monsters. As far as I remember, the last task given to the participants was “Keep your body breathing.” The length of challenge appears to be for the rest of your life. Right now, at my time of writing this, I am currently still winning. But, for how long? There are times in my life it felt like my organs were going to shut down. Overworked, not drinking enough water, eating all the wrong foods because they’re cheap and easy to access. It can feel like a black wave washing over you, like you’re about to slip into darkness. Or the excruciating feeling of a ball expanding under your skin as if you’re going to birth a xenomorph. “Keep your body breathing” is a fitting challenge because it IS a challenge. It’s just not really apparent until you get close to the fail state. It is in this sense that the body is a battlefield. A contested territory.

Being a “soulsborne” game confers certain expectations. Challenges you have to push yourself through just to see it to the other side. All you need to do to succeed is just learn what to expect and react accordingly. The mechanical elements that define this budding genre are so specific, the narrative justifications for them tend to take similar shapes. Some force keeps bringing you back to life to explain respawning, you drop souls or blood – your essence – as currency when you die, and the world has decayed so that history’s greatest figures can make sick boss fights. It’s all in the difference between a living thing and a dead thing. That a person, right before it is rendered into an object, will lose its memories, it will get sick, it will be cursed, and loathed, and humiliated, and tarnished. It comes for us all, no matter who you are. We trace the lineage of this from the manga Berserk to the film Hellraiser. The only goal of a character in a horror movie is to stay alive. It’s the immediate, looming threat that turns being alive into a game of survival.

The lore of a Souls game doesn’t matter, it all comes down to people desperately clinging to power. Whether you’re drawn in by the myth or not, you get to see all the lords brought low. To the point where only the impulse to inflict violence remains. Patterns emerged from Dark Souls that we follow into Hollow Knight as some sort of metaphor for this conflict: Light vs darkness. The game contains this anxiety about being a thinking creature, but also an animal that breeds and gets infected and hungers and dies. Bugs have been swayed into personhood by some unknowable light. They all parade around tiny castles and wear tiny clothes and put on tiny masks to hide their cute little bug faces. One day, that light fades and they all return to being bugs while the few left pretending remain horrified. When you die, you don’t leave a pool of blood. You leave your soul. It stays there, waiting for your return. This dark eidolon, your very essence, is waiting to cut you down.

In Hollow Knight, your soul hates you because it is a bug and you, riding in its body, are not. It is the nature of the soul to seek liberation. It tries to kill you because if it doesn’t stop you, you’re going to burn its body on a pyre. The subterranean kingdom of Hollownest is undergoing colony collapse syndrome. Its structures fall apart and render all the insects masquerading as humans back into bugs. In Destiny’s Book of Sorrow we see Aurash describe the place of the Hive on their homeworld, “The Timid Truth says that we are the smallest, most fragile things alive. The natural prey of the universe.” The heart of this sentiment transforms their empire into an engine of conquest. Human beings, soft, plump things, must justify their existence. They’re animals too. This is the Timid Truth. We fuck and shit and piss and hunger and get infected and die. We’re small.

Across the genre, we see towering gods terrified of mortal bodies. This same fear, in the real world, is a powerful, intoxicating political force. It’s something that will hold a brand to your tongue until you speak the words of a traitor against all life. Despite using the language of holy and mythic things, the various ‘crats and rulers always fall back on their fear of the human body. It is that fear that is constantly poisoned against citizenry. In order for a state to exist, division must exist. Disparity must exist. In order to divide things, you need things to divide, so first everything must be rendered from its natural state to having the nature of being a “thing”. Thinghood is important, because it’s the basis of personhood. Personhood must exist in order to be denied. To deny it creates the division a state requires to sustain its own identity. Division can be simple. It can be a dotted line on a piece of paper: a territory. It is from the map that we receive ownership. If the world only exists as a collection of things, there must then be a custodian of things. So a border doesn’t matter unless you can enforce it through violence. This comes in the form of ownership: to become a citizen of something is to be owned by it. A state is more important than a person through the hierarchies of thingness. The ownership of a person by a person gives us slavery, the ownership of a person by a state gives us law. The Lore™ of the empire we live within, if that helps grab your attention.

“Bear witness to the last and only civilization, the eternal Kingdom.

Hallownest”

Laws divide the body like a chart outlining cuts of beef on a cow. Bodily autonomy disrupts this process. Now, we’re getting to the heart of the problem. The body is a battlefield. Yet, bodily autonomy does not exist. We are each individually owned by a state, a kingdom marking us with tiny masks. “Rights” are the conditions of personhood, as defined through law: As long as you meet certain conditions, you’re allowed to be a person. If not, then you are no different than a bug. From here, further division can form. The metaphors of light and darkness return now as Man and Woman, as White and Black. Commerce determines the weight of the personhood each individual thing is allowed. Thus a corporation counts as more of a person than you and when you buy a thing from them, it is with a piece of the humanity leased to you by the government. It is important for you to understand this. These are the mechanics of dehumanization. Colony collapse syndrome is relevant here too. “The fall of western civilization” Big words, often a fascist dog whistle. Yet, one we all can’t stop thinking about. Sure, we’ve moved away from the zombie apocalypse. But eschaton is always in the cultural consciousness. Even these Souls™ inspired games come down to this. We must ask, what will bring about this fabled end?

Harry beleaguers a homosexual crime scene witness about such things in Disco Elysium’s long-winded investigation. He answers, “Oh we’re ambitious, we want to destroy the last vestiges of meaning, the last things people in Revachol have to hold on to, the true symbols of security — the meaning of man and woman, mother and father, their marriage.” The thought of a person owning their own body destroys every single symbol that supports society as a concept. This is most strongly witnessed by the lines of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and all their intersections. Although all of these divisions are interrelated, the one most relevant to me as a person are the attacks on transness happening right now. It’s hard for me to write about anything else at this moment, in this anger, in this need for liberation. Recently, in the context of the Idaho anti-trans youth treatment bill passing, Rep. Julianne Young is quoted saying “I see this conversation as an extension of the pro-life argument. … We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation.” This is a very clear statement: bodily autonomy does not exist. It does not exist for trans people and it does not exist for you.

“Remain wary of the frailty of men. Their wills are weak, minds young,” prays Vicar Amelia of Bloodborne. It is a frailty that guides us away from the lines and shapes of which life is rendered. Insight into Yharnam highlights the paradox of the Reactionary mindset. “Men are weak, they are weak because they are animals, therefore seek the old blood, which will turn us into beasts.” Their idea of the natural human state is built on the lies of division and the bloodshed it affords. Yet, the Timid Truth remains true at heart. We are weak. We are scared. We are frail. But we are not alone. We can care for each other. But why don’t we? While all the poor and sick of Yharnam die in the streets, the wealthy spend the end of days partying. Comfort makes cowards of us all. Comfort affords you personhood and to lose that is to be rendered into a beast. I am not sure if there is anything I fear more than the idea of growing comfortable. It’s one of the two pillars that upholds this whole charade along with its twin, violence.

I scramble for a way to comprehend this world. To render it into myth, into narrative. To know what it is I should be lashing out at exactly. To give the things I am fighting a Name. I am at war. My body is a battlefield. Stating ”I am the owner of my body” is to shout that bodies cannot be owned at all. This is the first step. A good first step. A call to arms. There’s a joke: Queer Pride Month? What about the other deadly sins, like Queer Wrath Month? Rage isn’t only on my mind. It’s everywhere. To envision trans liberation – or liberation at all – I have to stop to ask myself what that looks like. The legal battle over additional rights leased to us by the government fails. They are like the tide on a shoreline – an ephemeral, receding moment. Each one affords us more breathing room, to catch our breath from the last battle just for a second before the next one begins. These freedoms are held over us like a carrot on a stick and removed nearly as quickly as they come, or otherwise transformed into new yet unspeakable forms of oppression. All while being placed by a chorus: “We hear you. We see you.” One must then attempt to imagine a world where we can survive.

Hollow Knight’s bug imagery is poignant, yet trips over its own lore to bring it to a conclusion. The original Dark Souls ends on a final elegant question: Do you foster this flame, or do you snuff it out? To walk away from the cinders is to become the Dark Lord – to align yourself with humanity in its weak nature, to become empowered by it. Fire brought disparity, it created division. So the true world of humanity must then be a world undivided. We are shown the World of Fire to its dying conclusion, yet never in the series are we to see the World of the Dark. The road there is so hard as to seem impossible. It takes only one soul to kindle the flame. Kaathe’s darkwraiths are at war with the wayward chosen undead seeking this path. To usher in the age of darkness is a collective choice. We must each walk away from the pyre.

Your body is the battlefield.