Heads are Rolling............ I Guess?

I noticed something a little bit ago when I was facing the chained mini boss in near the Chasm of the Abyss. The statues that are lining the hall where you fight him are all headless. These are not the only ones either. Some other statues around Oolacile are headless as well.

Why are they headless? Does it have something to do with the residents having bloat heads?

noticed this too... and its not most of them, all of them that i've found have had their heads removed, also most seem to be carrying ivory catalysts

Maybe there was a revolt and the peasants or resistance lopped off the heads. In history, statues of leaders would be defaced after they were dethroned.

StockpileThomas wrote:Maybe there was a revolt and the peasants or resistance lopped off the heads. In history, statues of leaders would be defaced after they were dethroned.

Interesting thought, but that would mean that all of those statues were rulers of Oolacile. That doesnt seem to fit. Plus, I would imagine that all of them were not mages, even though Oolacile has a history of Dark Magic.

TheBigLebowski wrote:The head of an Oolacile resident whose
humanity went wild after being devoured
by the Dark of manus, father of the Abyss.
The bloated head is fissured, the cracks
lined with innumerable tiny red eyeballs
with a hard outside and mucous-filled
inside, no sane person could ever wear it.It has something to do with insanity.

Hmmmmmm......... This sounds like it could answer my questions. But then that means the other statues that are not near the Abyss would of had to be residents that were attacked by Manus. Does that mean that Manus ruled Oolacile before?

You also have to consider that they might not necessarily have had their heads removed, but may have been intentionally sculpted without heads. A lot of sculpture, especially ancient symbolic sculpture, was done without heads. The Greek Winged Nike for example, were universal symbols of victory all the way through the Roman Empire and they never had heads. A lot of ancient Roman statuaries don't have a single head in sight. It could just be that the Oolicile sculptors were symbolically articulating something unrelated. Or maybe one of From's designers researched ancient sculpture to try to decide how to decorate Oolicile and came across a bunch of Greco/Roman stuff.

There's actually a lot of design in Dark Souls that pretty accurately shows influences of Greco/Roman art. I was actually just noticing last night that the interior of the cathedral in Anor Londo, where you fight O&S, is almost a flawless representation of early Christian Basilica's in the Roman era. All the architecture is almost exactly the way it would have been. At least in the front of the cathedral. All the back hallways and stuff were usually different with each different cathedral, but there are a lot of defining elements in the main chapel room that are the same.

many Roman statues are headless because they made the statues that way deliberately, so when a person lost their fame or honor they could detach it and put on a new head. No joke.

That's actually true also. Not necessarily just for that reason either. The emperors all liked to include themselves in the religious artworks, thus including themselves in theology, so they'd remove the heads of the depictions of the previous emperors and have their own heads attached to replace them.

They also did it with gods statues. Hadrian once removed Apollo's head and replaced it. Haha.

Art History student Lebowski? Me too

Only the history part ;-)

Well you see back in...Damnit, I like it better when I'm the only one who knows about history!

And a student of it? Now you probably know more than me, this sucks.

Well uh, perhaps in reference to artwork that depicted early saint like beings as having a glowing light instead of their head, it...

Damn you people, I'm so angry I should give you each a +1 for this discovery! But I can't anymore today.

haha. I knew when I was writing out my first comment that I'd probably be racing a couple other people to point that out.

It's actually been a pretty cool thing to be aware of while playing Dark Souls. It's got me convinced that at least somebody on From's design team was an art history student. A lot of the references I've noticed have been really obscure things that I never would have noticed otherwise. The complexity of this game is pretty mind blowing.

Don't get me started on the numerology present in Anor Londo. Sometimes noticing these things drives me a bit insane.

Such as how my game stopped working just as I was finishing up my album containing every single piece of artwork found inside of Dark Souls. I only got to like 500 images.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some numerological allegory in AL. I'm actually studying some of that this semester, well just medieval architecture in general, but it's packed with stuff like that, and some of it so subtle and complex it's just baffling for me as a relatively right brained person.

Well if you want your head to explode. Go to the room with the painting of Airamis. Look at the glass windows and counter what symbols appear in fours, and threes. Then looked at the architecture around Anor Londo. Then go insane.

So as not to completely hijack this thread I'm creating another one to continue talking about this.

I have been hijacked.........



Lol, just kidding...... I dont really care. Feel free to continue this. Atleast my idea sparked a series of new ideas.

If you're interested check out what Tolvo's talking about. It's in the process of blowing my mind as we speak

Tolvo wrote:
And a student of it? Now you probably know more than me, this sucks.

Student? I am 32, I graduated from university a long time ago lol. Major in history. It comes in handy with games like this, ahum.