Games and Culture· 2026Q1
Beyond Fairy Tales: Post-Fairy-Tale Narrative Identity and Therapeutic Ambiguity in FromSoftware's Souls Games
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- 2026year
Short summary
FromSoftware's Souls games employ a 'post-fairy-tale' narrative system that withdraws moral clarity and closure, shifting meaning from outcome to endurance and embodied learning.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Souls games utilize a 'post-fairy-tale' narrative structure, distinct from classic Western fairy tales.
- This structure withdraws the guarantee of moral clarity, closure, and restoration.
- Meaning is derived from endurance, repetition, and embodied learning, not narrative outcome.
- The concept of 'therapeutic ambiguity' describes the sustained confrontation with fear and loss.
- The analysis treats Souls games as Japanese works, offering a culturally situated framework.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Scholarship on FromSoftware's Souls games has read them largely as tests of skill, leaving open how they function as meaning-making narrative systems. This article introduces the post-fairy-tale narrative system as an analytic category: a structure that retains the symbolic apparatus of the fairy tale while withdrawing its guarantee structure, the assurance of moral clarity, closure, and restoration that folklore scholarship treats as the consoling core of the classic Western form. Its conceptual contribution is therapeutic ambiguity, a mode in which confrontation with fear, loss, and uncertainty is sustained without containment, so that meaning shifts from narrative outcome to endurance, repetition, and embodied learning. Examining titles from Demon's Souls (2009) to Elden Ring: Nightreign (2025) as Japanese works rather than against a universal Western template, the article offers a culturally situated, narratologically grounded framework for game studies.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Games and Culture, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Literature and Literary Theory
Literature and Literary TheoryArts and Humanities