Essay .5: In Defense of Sister Friede
Author’s Note: This essay is the prototype/beta version of an essay I am currently writing, which compares and combines the thematic parallels of Dark Souls III’s Ashes of Ariandel with Fallout: New Vegas’ Dead Money, Honest Hearts, and Lonesome Road DLCs. For now, please enjoy my emotionally-fueled ramblings about Sister Friede, and how much encountering her first moved me.
In Dark Souls III, I think that to be Embered is to mix the fire of the soul with blood–this creates life or, for an Ashen One, the semblance of life. That’s why Embers perform the function of Humanity and Human Effigies from the previous games: they make us stronger and give us more life (health). But the Ashen One–the Unkindled, the Champion of Ash–the protagonist of Dark Souls III is special. They are the ashes of a failed Chosen Undead. They are the memory of failure, brought back to life ostensibly to try over again, because the world is in just that kind of dire state that it needs a memory to make things right.
Most surprisingly, Friede is an Unkindled, too. I think she’s the only other character in the game who becomes Embered, barring the Lords of Cinder and our player character. That alone makes her significant in a way I don’t think many people consider when they go into her fight. Most talk I see about Friede is just how much people hate her boss fight (which I personally don’t get — that fight was fun, y’all).
Lore states that she did not become Unkindled by choice, which makes me wonder if the Sable Church tried to make her a Lord of Cinder, similar to how Aldrich was made one by force. Regardless of how she got there, she failed to link the fire, and as a result separated from the Church and withdrew into the Painted World, a place for the Forlorn, the outcast, the rejected.
But she wasn’t alone: Sir Vilhelm came with her, as he was so devoted to her. And it’s here in the painting she chose to become the very thing the residents needed, because she herself was so lonely, so miserable, and so dejected. She wanted to belong so badly that she purposefully imitated Priscilla, the previous maternal figurehead in the Painted World from Dark Souls I. More than just a desire to belong, she wanted a purpose for being–she wanted to feel like she could do something.
The painful thing here is that she was already cared for. She had sisters (although I imagine the relationship between them was strained after the failed linking of the fire). And again, she had Vilhelm, who chose to remain by her side even after she gave him a sword as a parting gift. She even had Ariandel, who I imagine had time to grow fond of her, considering his visceral reaction to her ‘death.’ Friede’s intense focus on clinging to the Painted World, even as it slowly began to rot away, only blinded her to the value of what she already possessed, as well as the necessary, albeit painful, lesson taught by healing. Sometimes we have to fall apart before we can become whole again.
Regardless of how you think about her, I think what really gets me about Friede is that she clung so tightly to the idea that she needed to belong, that when it came time to say goodbye to the Painted World–when the citizens all agreed to burn it down, to let a new world emerge in its place–she point blank refused to let that happen. She actively chose to rot instead of to let go, to heal, because she was so determined not to fail again. Because to her, the idea of letting go was akin to failure. And for me, that hurts. It hurts because… I fucking get it. As someone with a laundry list of traumas, culminating in the fine holy trinity of PTSD, GAD, and BPD, I completely and fully understand just how hard it is to let go of past pain, past failures, and all the fury that still burns inside you. You want to make it right. You want to make it better, but you don’t know how. The wretched truth is that you can’t fix it. You can only let go of it. And that’s something I’m still coming to terms with, nearly every damn day.
I imagine it’s the same for Friede. She had already failed to save the previous world, and now this new one, her only refuge, was at risk too? She was wrong to take it upon herself to deny the people what they wanted, but she only did so because she was so forlorn herself. And I’m not saying that makes her right, but it makes what she did make sense. And it makes sense in a way that’s more human and compassionate than, say, Gwyn wanting to keep the Age of Man from happening, and thus damning us all to our wretched state. The Dark Soul (Humanity) only exists because a god was too much of a fucking coward to know when to gracefully bow out and let go — and in the world of Dark Souls, the entire world is suffering because of that cowardice.
To go back to my first point, the Ashes of Ariandel DLC shows us just what it means for an Unkindled to be Embered when Ariandel resurrects and Embers Friede by beating the (not) Lordvessel on the ground to the tune of a heartbeat, spilling molten fire into her blood. I think this is also a thematic touch for his main mode of attack in the fight: he continues to beat the vessel on the ground rhythmically, similar to how you perform CPR (albeit with less violence). Not only that, he targets whoever last attacked Friede, as if her life at that point is so precious to him that it’s something he will defend to the point of violence. In the cutscene just before phase two, Ariandel is quite literally beating and pouring life back into her, and when his body falls it’s his words that bring her back to life once more in her true, final form: Blackflame Friede.
At some point in their lives, in their time inside the painting, Ariandel recognized the power inside her–she was Ash, yes, but ash was once fire. And she could be fire again. And perhaps the prophecy that Ariandel had heard about is what led him to cling so tightly to Friede. To him, she could be the Ash that would become Flame once more — a precious flame that the Painted World needed in order to be reborn. Over time this clearly changed into what we see in the DLC, but I’m not fully interested in unpacking that.
What I am interested in mentioning is both the description of Friede’s soul, and what her sister, Yuria, has to say if you speak with her after completing Ariandel.
Friede’s soul states that together, she and Ariandel “chose rot over fire.” It was a decision they came to as one, and clearly didn’t involve and coercion. This leads nicely into my earlier argument that Ariandel clearly cared about Friede, and was attached to her in a truly powerful way — how else to explain the raw, visceral horror and agony he feels at seeing her body collapse, seemingly dead?
What Yuria has to say about her sister is the cherry on top of this already thoroughly sad sundae: “ Twas the soul of my sister. Elfriede… A poor wench turned to Ash, who would abandon Londor… If thou wouldst, let it nourish they Lordship. And in return, do her one small kindness. Remember those who stayed by her to the end, in the shadows cast by fire…”
Yuria asks the player character to gain strength from her sister’s soul, but to be kind in return. This kindness? Remember those who were devoted to her, and remember their loyalty and devotion. Don’t let them fade away as just names in your mind, or obstacles that needed to be overcome. Remember them as people, and what moved them.
Souls veterans should now be thinking about Lucatiel, from Dark Souls II, who begged us to remember her even as her own mind started to fade away. Because it is memories alone that keep a person alive even long after they’re dead. It’s not the soul — the souls is something you can pick up off a corpse and transpose into something else. But memories? Memories are untouchable, incorruptible. Memories endure. And Yuria asks us to let her sister’s memory endure, letting her live on inside ourselves.
Perhaps this is lost on most players, but Yuria, the previously rather detached, almost mercenary NPC whose cooperation helps lead the way to a new ending, asking us to be kind and remember the people loyal to Friede shows a much needed softer side to her character. And that? Honestly, all that–Friede’s motivations, her misery; the elegance in which she fights, the violence and viciousness and agony Ariandel expresses after seeing her ‘death’; Yuria’s plea on her sister’s behalf–it just… it’s so fucking much, man. It means so much to me, and it’s so surprisingly powerful, transforming what could have just been a tricky boss fight into a truly emotional story that in and of itself surpasses most base game character arcs. And hopefully if you watch the fight you can get that sense yourself:
Sources:
