#lost sinner

Draw her.

Draw the Lost Sinner (pretty please?)

Had a big-brained concept of what the Weavers within the Burial Spires around Pharloom looked like when they were alive in the kingdom's glory days (plus FS, bc I love the theory that she's Atla)

I'd like to think they all have unique appearances depending on the region they were worshipped/buried in.

The Weaver in Greymoor that gives the Thread Storm doesn't have a name, so I just figured out one for her on the spot.

Close-ups under the cut!

.....

Family tree of Izalith! (Well, in a certain timeframe, she actually has like 50000 more babies and you know it) EDIT: Nightreign actually gave Nameless King a name lol

Explanations for design choices and names under cut:

The answer is, quite literally stealing Gwyn's aura, and hear me out:

Our Bearer of the Curse first arrives in the Thing Betwix as a 'male' character- ask literally any dataminer! It is just how it is! However, "he" is very Hollowed, and is able to regain appearance and name by clutching a Human Effigy. But the thing is, Bearer of the Curse can come back from Hollowing as any race or any gender! Recollecting something else entirely can give them new body. It correlates very nicely with how first created humans were shown as genderless, raceless, featureless "ideas" of human beings ever since Dark Souls 1 and with that darn Trans Coffin in the Thing Betwix itself hghgjvn. Fromsoft proposes that, since Flame gave humans races and genders, one could come all the way back to "blank state" and return from it something else! It is in plain sight! Genesis and all that.

So, as for Queen of Venn? She gained spiritual kinship with Izalith, who was envious of Gwyn's First Flame and unleashed the Chaos in an attempt to imitate it! And Iron King, her once-sweetheart, got spiritual kinship with Gwyn, to complete the parallel. Notice how similar she appears to Gwyn in both looks and fighting style! As much as I am attached to my headcanons, I believe the "canon" implication here is that through (vicariously) experiencing yearning for having what Gwyn has, she came back from her Hollowing as someone very similar to Gwyn.

Personally, I just really love the idea that she used to flip-flop between two biological genders, since Venn was connected to Moon, and moonlight IS gender-fuckery force of Dark Souls. After all, she has breasts too, not just beard. xD But yeah... It is fair to assume that there are little to no "true" trans characters canonically in Soulsborne; they all have very solid lore reason for why they are like this. Recent example: Executor not being "true" nonbinary character since they are quite literally a man and a woman fused together. I think From is more than deserving of having their own ideas being heard and analyzed even if they are not always what we want them to be, but also we can really just write what we resonate with better.

P.S.: Some retranslators are very adamant on misgendering her because Japanese script fully omits her pronouns (Japanese language can do that), but there is an important note. Every single time pronouns is omitted in Japanese, localisation translates as 'he'... except, for this time. We know for a fact that localisation of Dark Souls trilogy and Elden Ring got reviewed by the devs beyond just approving of voice acting itself, so they would sure not sleep on changing the gender of one of THE main characters of Dark Souls 2!

A lot of people are dead set on claiming that the Lost Sinner can't be a woman for a variety of reasons.

In their opinion, she is far too masculine-looking to be a woman; she sounds like a man, she has a beard, and most damning of all, her pronouns are gender neutral in Japanese. However, all of these points don't seem to hold much water.

The pronouns

The use of gender neutral terminology is suddenly damning evidence that the character has to be a man, but that's simply not how Japanese works at all. These types of pronouns are used very often in these games, meaning it wasn't specifically made to keep the ambiguity of the Lost Sinner as some sort of Izalith/Sinner hybrid entity. After all, the same is never done for the Duke's Dear Freja, a giant spider broodmother who is being controlled by the soul of Seath the Scaleless, who is separately identified as the Writhing Ruin with no room for speculation.

In fact, more often than not, these neutral pronouns were defaulted to be masculine. It happened with Pharis in Dark Souls, leading many people to disregard the obvious fact that the Forest Hunter Archer was Pharis, simply because she was a woman, despite the Japanese manuals explicitly calling her "Pharis the Heroic Archer". (弓の英雄ファリス, can be seen on this page [x], but there are many more)

It even happened within Dark Souls 2 itself, with the Throne Defender being called a "he" in-game only to then be corrected as "she" in the Design Works for DS2, as the design literally implies.

The same probably happened to Blue-Eyed Durgo, a character seemingly present in the original game but removed in Scholar of the First Sin. Two phantoms would be present on the way to the Throne of Want, a knight and an archer, and the archer was the only way to obtain Durgo's Hat, which mentioned a skilled archer from Lanafir who fought alongside "his" brother-in-law... adding two and two together paints a different picture lol.

Heck, this has been so recurring that it happened in Demon's Souls as well, where Ostrava would mention Oolan as a man while she appeared as a bow-wielding woman in the game proper.

So you mean to tell me the international localization would have taken a look at the design of the Lost Sinner by itself and concluded she was most definitely a woman based on neutral pronouns alone? And why wasn't such a big mistake fixed in the Design Works the way the Throne Defender was, especially since she is a rather important character in comparison? It's almost as if the translators might have been given some pointers from the developers themselves, and that it must have been a direct request on their part to not mess this up. After all, the Lost Sinner is identified as a woman in all other international releases that use gendered language and is one of the game's main bosses. This WOULD be important to get right.

The beard

This is probably the one point people will use to discredit the idea entirely. After all, why would the Lost Sinner, as a woman, have a pretty sizable beard?

Granted, some women do grow beards due to hormonal imbalance, the condition is called Hirsutism. It is likely what bearded women across human history were dealing with. Many of them found their way into circuses due to being ""freakish"" and ""exotic"" sights. Honestly, the amount of dehumanizing things people born unlucky had to deal with in the past is sickening...

Two examples from two completely different times would be these ladies: Helena Antonia, a "court dwarf" (a dwarf, or unusual person, who got traded around by nobility like some sort of oddity) from the 16th century. Many have painted her, and she was a lady-in-waiting of Constance of Austria, queen of Poland. She started growing her beard at the age of 9 (which is sadly around the time when she was sold off), and by 18, it was long enough to reach her chest.

The other one is Annie Jones Elliot, from the 19th century. She found work as a circus attraction, as one might have expected. However, as an adult, she started to advocate for her circus' fellow ""freaks"", and even intended to have the word be abolished from the business, which is something I respect greatly.

All this to say, the concept isn't as unnatural or outlandish as people will have you believe. However, I know well that if I simply said "the Lost Sinner suffers from a hormonal imbalance", the average Soulsborne fan will spit or laugh in my face. Clearly, stuff like this would not be enough to convince them it's not outside the realm of possibility, but perhaps darling DS3 might...

Recently, while looking into the models of enemies and bosses from Dark Souls 3, I came across the Evangelists, and to my surprise, they featured a detail no one had ever pointed out. On their chin grows an undeniable stubble!

And it's not possible to make the argument that, "actually, the Evangelists aren't confirmed to be women", because not only are they voiced by a woman with completely understandable dialogue, but the in-game text reinforces that NONE of them are men.

聖堂からやってきた教導師たちの帽子 教導師は全員が女性である 彼女たちは、不死街の住人を教え導き 「運び手」に生贄の道を往かせるという

Here's the Japanese text too, for any skeptics out there, the highlighted part is the bit that specifies that they are, indeed, all women. You can find my source for it in this document here [x]. The Japanese text is the one in the middle.

So if they can have a beard and be women, why can't the Lost Sinner? The precedent was set by her and followed up by the Evangelists. It doesn't even matter if there's a lore reason for it or not; the fact of the matter is that having a beard is not definitive proof that the Lost Sinner cannot be a woman in any way.

The voice

I've also seen a lot of talk about her voice being too masculine to belong to a woman, which made me realize that I had never really paid attention to how the Lost Sinner sounds. I had only taken these words at face value without being able to confirm or deny... so I went and looked for references on how she sounds, and quickly realized that she didn't actually grunt at all while fighting...

Then, I found this video.

Now, epic skills aside, her voice doesn't really give me the impression that it's... gendered? It's obviously modified and warped, and it's not just because she is being muffled by her mask. More often than not, she is also making growls that aren't exactly human-like to begin with. For all we know, she didn't sound like this before she was afflicted by the Chaos Bug. Maybe her face has even been changed by the effects of chaos. It's hard to say!

But really now, this doesn't strike me as definitive proof of anything, only that she sounds unlike other normal humans. She doesn't even sound like most Hollows, who just sound zombie-like.

The body

This is the last point worth addressing, and it's about her physical appearance not matching a woman but matching a man, and to that I say: she literally has breasts lmao.

I'll be charitable and admit they are hard to spot, since her model is in the dark, and when looked at from the front, they can maybe appear as a muscular body. However, as you can see from this angle, this just doesn't seem to be the case at all, unless we want to imply the Lost Sinner's proportions are beyond comical. These just aren't the shape of pecs, and the way the cloth folds around the body due to the straightjacket further emphasizes this. Like, the amount of space between them truly does feel like that between breasts.

However, despite the fact that she definitely has breasts and doesn't even have this phantomatic "male build" anyway, I want to also say that it didn't even matter to BEGIN WITH whether she did or not! The Souls series isn't as strict about these things as people would like you to believe, especially when it comes to their enemy roster. The Lost Sinner could have been a beefed-up super-muscular woman without anything changing, because FromSoftware had already done a similar design in the past. In Dark Souls itself!

I am talking about the Undead Butchers found in the Depths, which Miyazaki himself has confirmed to be women.

(You can click here [x] for the full interview; it's a good read.)

Which, if I need to remind you how they are built, look like this:

So, forgive me if I find it silly that people go "ooooh but she doesn't have a feminine frame!" as a gotcha against the Lost Sinner being female when these women were allowed to exist just fine in the previous game. It goes without mention that they ALSO don't sound like women, which is why so many people assumed they were men, even the people in the interview!

The Lost Sinner didn't have to abide by any conventional tells of gender if the developers and artists didn't want her to. The fact that she does to an extent, and that she was given a gender in international releases that stuck around and wasn't fixed later, suggests intentionality.

Identity options

And after all of this arguing about the Lost Sinner's gender, you'd think most people who argue against her being a woman would have a solid reason why. Like a potential candidate that is hinted at in the text. Someone who would complete this story in some way. Someone who can do all that and be explicitly MALE.

And yet, more often than not, this discussion doesn't go past the "this character is not a woman" part, with her identity being left as an afterthought or even being relegated to an unmentioned character whose presence is never hinted at or talked about in the text; an incredibly jarring contrast compared to the other Old Ones who have more or less complete storylines and origins we can trace.

If we have to be completely honest, there are only two candidates for this character's identity that are even worth considering with all we have discussed: Magus Eygil and the Princess/Queen of Venn.

The first one is a pyromancer who served the Old Iron King and wished to give fire a life of its own.

It's easy to build a connection between Eygil and the Lost Sinner, as they are both connected to pyromancy, one through their ambitious aims, the other through the Chaos Bug and Izalith's Soul. The Lost Sinner's cuffs even increase pyromancy, despite her not using it.

Funnily enough, some of these people DO think Eygil is the Lost Sinner, but they just HAVE to tack on the fact that it's because both of them are men, when... no pronoun is ever used to identify the Magus. But of course, ambiguity can only mean someone is a guy, never mind that being a woman would even make sense with Dark Souls' lore, as it is subtly implied they are inherently better than men in this art. See Carmina evolving pyromancy more than her master Salaman did, or Quelana's pyromancies being impossible for men to decipher, or even Rosabeth being inherently good at pyromantic arts despite wishing to be a sorcerer.

The second one is the ruler of Venn, tied to one of the game's covenants and intimately tied to the Old Iron King's past. Two lovers who could not be, due to their two kingdoms being at war with one another. A very Romeo and Juliet-coded plot point, but one of the more important ones in this game nonetheless, reinforced in two of the four areas inhabited by an Old One.

While the connection with the Iron King is all but confirmed, seeing as Belfry Sol is built atop the sinking Iron Keep, there is a connection with the Lost Sinner as well, as Belfry Luna is built in the Lost Bastille, the structure where she is imprisoned, meaning that it once belonged to the kingdom of Venn.

So we have a king whose kingdom fell and whose palace is sinking into the magma, and a queen whose kingdom fell and was later conquered by Vendrick's army. Both dwellings of an Old One.

It's hard to think that this Venn subplot would exist only to prop up the Old Iron King, who already has so much going on for himself without adding this story about a childhood lover from a rival kingdom that we coincidentally visit to slay an Old One.

An Old One who is a woman, just like that princess. One whose soul uses the same image as the soul of great lords, like the Old Iron King himself, Vendrick, the Giant Lord, and the Ivory King. And while the Rotten might make you think it's just because she is an Old One, Freja's Soul doesn't share this design, as seen at the very start! (Besides, at some point in time, they wanted to tie the Rotten to the deceased Sunken King, so it's likely they thought about making it a king too. It means the only outlier would have been the true Ancient Dragon in the past, a creature of incredible power, and that it's otherwise exclusive for those fit to wear a crown.)

In that case, it's hard to deny that the Lost Sinner was likely a ruler with a powerful soul of her own, and the Queen of Venn would be the only one who fits the bill in location, gender, and relevance.

But regardless of who you believe the Lost Sinner to be, there just isn't a single mention of a 100% confirmed male character who could ever fit the bill as well as these two.