Beasts and Sovereigns: The Zoopolitical Imagination of FromSoftware's Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring

Game development studio FromSoftware's work over the last thirteen years has been much concerned with kingship and rule—what it means to be a lord, and what happens to the land when lordship fails. Demon's Souls (2009), the Dark Souls trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), Bloodborne (2015), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), and now, Elden Ring (2022), each ask these questions in their own way, and each provide distinctly varied answers. But across all of these games—and especially across the 'un-trilogy' of Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring—the question of the sovereign is always tied to the question of the beast: that which rules over society and that which cannot live within it. This paper uses the discourse of the political animal inaugurated by Aristotle, and taken up by subsequent philosophers Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Derrida, to illuminate the work of deconstruction that FromSoftware's games perform. Through the constant shifting between the figures of the beast and the sovereign, and the torsion and ultimate destruction of this dialectical opposition, FromSoftware seeks to inaugurate a new ethico-political regime, one wherein the cyclical, consumptive violence of power is set aside in favour of a multiplicity of lines of flight beyond.