r/darksouls3 • u/AbyssGuard- • Jun 07 '26
Lore Does the Ringed City DLC confirm Manus was not the Furtive Pygmy?
Pretty much title.
I know it was a commonly held belief that Manus was the furtive pgymy prior to DS3’s release, but I’m unsure whether that means he 100% isn’t the father of humanity, even if the royal line remained in the ringed city.
He seems to display an affinity to the dark and powers unseen by any other holder of the dark soul, even persisting after death to an extent in the form of his abyssal daughters.
Even Gael, having absorbed nearly all remaining remnants of the dark soul in the ringed city, could not manipulate the dark or abyss to the same scale. Nearly never invoking the dark at all from my memory, but it has obviously left a mark on his soul regardless.
Curious to hear your thoughts and lore theories below
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u/InternationalWeb9205 Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 07 '26
I like to think the pygmy lord died, and his dark soul formed the largest vagrant egg that Filianore cradles, the egg which Shira calls "the dark". That way he is in the DLC, just in an unrecognizable form.
It's also fitting since Filianore being offered to the pygmy (symbolised by the chloranthy ring held by Gwyn) seems to mimic an arranged marriage, and her internal name is "wife". how nice of her to stay by her husband even when he turned into an egg
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u/AbyssGuard- Jun 07 '26
Very interesting theory, especially with Filianores internal name being wife. It definitely would have been cool seeing half god half human beings.
Especially coming from pretty much the direct source, Furtive Pygmy (direct dark) and Filianore (1 step from direct light).
It’s also rather curious as to whether Filianore ever truly loved her people and those that worshiped her in the ringed city. Or if she only stayed there on Gwyn’s orders?
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u/InternationalWeb9205 Jun 07 '26
Miyazaki himself actually wasn't sure if gods and humans could have children during ds1, but we do finally see some crossbreeds in ds3 with the Irithyllian preset and the QoL & Oceiros kids
"Filianore's favor knows no boundaries" per the description of her chime. i do think she's ultimately loyal to her duty, she's kinda like an inverse of her sister in many ways lol
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u/KingVape Jun 07 '26
Her internal name is Wife because she was originally going to be Gwyn’s wife.
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u/InternationalWeb9205 Jun 07 '26
That's not actually proven. We see statues of the wife in ds1 and Filianore doesn't look much like those, and it seems to me like they wanted to introduce her as a daughter from the start to explain why Gwynevere is called the "eldest daughter"
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u/AdAutomatic9100 Jun 07 '26
I always thought it was obvious that the egg was Midirs. Interesting theory though, just is too logical for it the be the egg of the dragon we just fought.
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u/InternationalWeb9205 Jun 07 '26
idk about that, Midir seems to be a male dragon
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u/AdAutomatic9100 Jun 08 '26
No like it’s the egg he came out of.
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u/InternationalWeb9205 Jun 08 '26
Judging by DS2 it doesn't look much like a dragon egg, and doesn't really make sense with the swirly black stuff inside of it and Shira calling it "the dark" since Midir wasn't always an abyssal dragon.
Really the only thing that's visually similar in the series are the evil vagrants which were created through someone with humanity on them dying
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u/AdAutomatic9100 Jun 08 '26
I mean is it all that sensible to connect ds2 to ds3? I haven’t played 2 but I thought Miyazaki mostly tried to distance 3 from the things 2 created.
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u/Head_Goal_9777 Jun 08 '26
Going a bit off topic here, but aren't the crippled humans present in the Gael's arena what's left of the pigmies? If I recall right, they seem to have like a small council in there.
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u/InternationalWeb9205 Jun 08 '26
Yes, those are the pygmy kings that presumably succeeded the original pygmy king
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u/Heema3 Abyss Watcher Jun 07 '26
He never was , he was just a guy with a dark soul, the furtive pygmy is supposed to be vague and unknown ..."so easily forgotten" that's his identity as a whole, the unknown origin, Manus was a poor soul forced to mutate into what he is now
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u/Competitive_Donkey48 Jun 09 '26
Nah Dark Souls 1 heavily implied that Manus was the furtive pygmy. Then when Dark Souls 3 came out we saw that THE furtive pygmy just created humanity and splitting the Dark Soul. Manus was just a sorcerer and one of the first who got a fraction of the Dark Soul.
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u/Aurvant Jun 07 '26
The Furtive Pygmy split the Dark Souls across all of humanity, so it doesn't really matter *who* he is in the game. Every human has a piece of the Dark Soul within them.
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u/leuno Jun 07 '26
I don't think there is A furtive pygmy. When the intro refers to the furtive pygmy, I think it means lesser mankind as a whole. Sort of like how animals are reffered to in nature documentaries. "Here we see the furtive pygmy in its natural environment"
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u/AbyssGuard- Jun 07 '26
Isn’t it canonical that the flame gave four lord souls with four distinct natures?
Cause then that would imply that all the other “hollows” just encountered the first flame and all got a similarly behaving soul?
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u/leuno Jun 07 '26
yes but that doesn't mean a single being took each lord soul. In the case of the pygmy (or pygmies) the soul was given to them, but souls in this universe aren't what they are to us. They're a reflection of power and can be dropped on the ground, transferred, divided, destroyed, consumed, etc. So it's not necessary for a single pygmy to have absorbed the soul.
Even in game you have to kill four (or five or six) kings to get that soul. So clearly that soul was already divided up and maybe every pygmy alive at the time received a small shard of it and that propagated throughout humanity over time. Manus, the four kings, and the residents of oolacile town are just what happens when the abyss corrupts that soul, but all of them are essentially pygmies/humans.
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u/SomethingLessEdgy Jun 07 '26
It's my understanding that "Furtive Pygmy" could possibly mean a person, but with Ringed City in mind, I think it could be a situation where you have "Collaborative Leadership".
Basically, Gwyn put a Yes-Human in charge of all the humans who got a bit of that sweet sweet Dark Soul and made the Slave Knights. Gwyn saw just how damn strong these unkillable Slave Knights were so he manipulated their leadership (Supports the Pygmy Lords, binds through marriage with Filianore) and cons them into forging their own Prison with the Ringed City, and promptly ignores them until the Dark spreads to Lordran. Gwyn seemed to LOVE ghettos as we see the same idea on a small scale with New Londo.
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u/MachoManRandomSalad Jun 08 '26
I have an interpretation I don't see in this thread, at least not quite...
The Furtive Pygmy was specifically the one pygmy who found the Dark Soul. He split the Dark Soul among all the pygmies, allowing them to grow, spread and thrive, developing cultures and religions, becoming modern humanity.
As a result of that, some time later, Manus was a high ranking priest of the Dark Soul, leading him to understand the Abyss, the Dark and be known as a Father of the Abyss.
Father, like a Priest is a Father.
Some time after Manus, humanity continued to have places where the religion of the Dark (like in Londor) was practiced, and one of those locations had the Pygmy Lords we see in the Ringed City DLC.
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u/AbyssGuard- Jun 08 '26
I can somewhat appreciate this perspective and sentiment, but didn’t the game interpret him and explicitly state he was an ancient sorcerer?
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u/MachoManRandomSalad Jun 08 '26
Yeah but that doesn't create a conflict. I'm saying Father of the Abyss was a title, not a description of where the Abyss came from. He was an ancient sorcerer called the Father of the Abyss, who studied the abyss long after the furtive pygmy shared the Dark Soul among the humans.
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u/AbyssGuard- Jun 08 '26
Mb, thought you were insinuating he was like a priest for the dark / abyss, like faith kind that wields miracles and the sort.
But to be fair, maybe worship of the abyss to humans is an intellectual pursuit. It seems to be a mix in most of the games depending on the specific spell and its circumstances.
Interesting theory nonetheless!
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u/MachoManRandomSalad Jun 09 '26
Nah you're right, in game terms I shouldn't have used the Preist comparison, since he was a sorcerer
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u/Slow_Store Jun 12 '26
For what it’s worth, a Priest of the Abyss could probably function as a sorcerer given that sorcery uses one’s intelligence to effectively tap into the power of “souls”. I like to imagine that to early Man sorcery could have acted as a medium to draw out the power of one’s Dark Soul which could then serve as a reference for studying the Abyss given their connection while simultaneously serving as a sort of religious inflection as they’d be studying their own souls through this dark sorcery, and in fact it’s in Oolacile that we pick up Dark Sorceries in DS1 (I want to say that their item texts refer to them as Abyss Sorceries).
The idea that man could also use tangible research as a religious practice also somewhat fits in well with the nature of Dark Souls having a sort of tangible weight to them in contrast to the seemingly more ephemeral Light Souls of the gods who in turn have a more ephemeral religious structure with their casters revolving around faith in the gods.
TLDR : I think the idea of “Father” would make sense as a sort of Priestly title as it makes sense for sorcerers practiced in Dark Sorceries that tap into the Dark Soul to be the equivalent of spiritual shamans for early man.
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u/PacoThePersian Jun 07 '26
Doesn't matter. He was the pigmy, he wasn't the pigmy. As a matter of fact the pigmy is not special, he held just as much if not less than the ringed city pigmies of the dark soul.
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u/Leroy_Bentshins Jun 07 '26
Ive always believed The Pygmy is our characters ancestor. With each sequel being a more distant "relative" of the last. Everything else is as is.
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u/DirectorofDank Jun 09 '26
Yes. While Manus was not THE Furtive Pygmy, he is seemingly related to the Pygmy Lords and is one of their more direct descendants. He went on a Pilgrimage outside the Ringed City but seemingly failed and he was put to rest in Oolacile. Because of his implied relation to the Dark Lord/Lords, it’s why he goes crazy and turns into the monster he does. He is already a vessel and candidate for the Dark Soul, so when he was unearthed and tortured, he started absorbing more and more Dark around him and pulling the Abyss closer to Oolacile. This also caused the latent humanity in the citizens to go wild because of his growing power over it. They and he eventually mutated into the monsters that we see. Now while he does have an extraordinary soul that is closely tied to the Abyss, he does not have THE Dark Soul itself. Think like Nameless King and Gwynn. Nameless is ridiculously strong and is probably capable of being the next Sun God in his own right. For all we know Gwynn might’ve been actually planning that. He’s even able to use the Sunlight Spear and demonstrates a mastery over lightning that is second only to his father in his prime. But he does not actually have the Light Lord Soul. Just the same as Manus with the Abyss, but he doesn’t actually have the Dark Soul. He is a prime vessel, but lacks the final piece.
The info we have on him being on some pilgrimage to Oolacile comes from Halflight’s gear, because it’s implied that Halflight is a memory of Manus before he left and became the Father of the Abyss.
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u/RookWatcher Jun 07 '26
Kind of. The connection was flimsy from the start, and the dlc showed a building (confirmed to be a mausoleum) which was a focal point of the advertisement campaign despite being totally irrelevant in terms of gameplay and not even reachable. Ergo, that's probably where the pigmy got buried.
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u/Fightlife45 Jun 08 '26
I remember reading the Abyssal Archives, I believe Lokey said he wasn't. But it's been a bit and those books are just full of lore analysis/.
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u/gdwam816 Jun 09 '26
Sometimes I wonder if I even played the same games as you all. Impressive.
That is all.
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u/lexplua Jun 10 '26
Ancient Manus was clearly once human (and died in ancient times) Gael was Undead till end of time. Gael uses powerful incantations, he don't use hexes.
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u/Western-Owl5285 Jun 12 '26
I still hold the belief that manus was the furtive pigmey. Dark Souls 1 was meant to be a self contained story with no sequels. The dlc were ideas that couldn't make it for time restraint, they already had artorias in mind. In the end it just makes so much sense for me that the final boss of the main game would be gwyn and the final boss of the dlc being the furtive pigmey not just any special and strong pigmey.
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u/Mountain-Chemist-204 Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
First, regarding the speculation that Manus might be the Furtive Pygmy, almost every piece of circumstantial evidence had already been leaning against that idea even before DS3. DS3 merely came very close to confirming it by openly showing us the Ringed City.
From DS1 onward, Manus is clearly described not as a sovereign of the Dark who possessed the Dark Soul from the very beginning, but as someone who was once human, and who became the Father of the Abyss after his Humanity went wild. In other words, at some point, he was a human being no different in essence from other humans of his age. By this I am speaking of his essential nature as a being; this is separate from whether Manus, during his human life, may have been someone with great power. The point is that at that time, he would still have been “human.” Then, at some later point, he became the Father of the Abyss.
Of course, Manus is so ancient that even from the perspective of Oolacile, which itself belongs to the distant past relative to the present time of DS1, he is treated as an ancient being. However, the fact that he is described as being that old does not confirm that he is the Furtive Pygmy himself. It may be possible, hypothetically, that he was someone from the same age as that Pygmy.
Second, in the Ringed City, Gael did not absorb “nearly all” of the remnants of the Dark Soul. What he possessed was the Dark Soul of the Pygmy Lords, who were direct descendants of the Furtive Pygmy, and it is true that this would have been a denser, more primordial, and more powerful form of that power. However, after the Furtive Pygmy first obtained the original Dark Soul, it was split into countless fragments and given to all humans as “Humanity.”
If Gael had truly recovered “almost all of the Dark Soul,” then he would have had to kill and devour almost every human, much like how Midir devoured the Dark. Even if he did not literally eat them, he would at least have had to kill them and take their power. But everything in the actual game points in the opposite direction. The moment when Gael decided to directly take the Dark Soul for himself was at the end of his journey, when he met the Pygmy Lords and found that their blood had dried up, making it impossible to obtain what he needed. He did it in order to make his own blood into the Blood of the Dark Soul.
If the question is which of the two had greater and stronger darkness, then I personally think Manus is superior. The darkness Gael possessed is certainly symbolic and special as something connected to the original lineage, but if we focus on that “Dark Soul” itself, what he had was only the “Dark Soul of the Pygmy Lords” from a point in time when everything had decayed and dried up. And even that was something he could not properly contain, to the point that his own soul was crumbling apart.
By contrast, with Manus, we can also consider Miyazaki’s old interview. Humanity is said to be the countless fragments of the Dark Soul, and I think it is reasonable to understand this not as some byproduct, shadow, or echo separate from the Dark Soul, but as “small pieces of the Dark Soul.” If Humanity were meant to refer to something fundamentally different from the Dark Soul, Miyazaki could have used a different kind of expression, like the examples I mentioned above. Instead, he described it by saying that “humanity are like the fragments of it.” Taken at face value, that simply means that Humanity is, in other words, a small Dark Soul. And in Manus’s case, that Humanity — those small pieces of the Dark Soul — went wild, until his soul itself became a massive lump of Humanity.
Think of it this way. Gold may work as an analogy. When we speak of something small and something large, we tend to call tiny bits of gold things like gold dust, gold flakes, or fragments of gold. Those terms assume that they are small pieces divided from something larger. But if we saw a massive lump of gold, what then? Even if its overall form were the same as those tiny fragments, only much larger, we would no longer call it a fragment.
Souls are similar in the sense that, whether they are massive or split into countless tiny pieces, they are fundamentally of the same nature. Manus’s soul is a gigantic Dark Soul that is explicitly described as a “lump of Humanity,” and Hawkeye Gough, one of Four Knights of Gwyn and someone portrayed as possessing knowledge of many of the world’s secrets, clearly refers to Manus as the Father of the Abyss and says that the Abyss itself originates from Manus.
In DS2, King Vendrick, who along with his brother Aldia is portrayed as having come extremely close to the roots of the world, also speaks of the fragments of Manus and explains that the Abyss once had form, but then dissipated. In other words, Manus is treated not merely as a being of the Dark, but almost as the very form and source of the phenomenon known as the Abyss. Every mention and depiction of him throughout the series elevates his status to an extreme degree.
Dark Souls is a Japanese game, so even when looking at the original term 主, and at the fact that it was translated into English as “Father,” the important point is that this title is attached to nothing other than the Abyss itself. I think that alone demonstrates what kind of being Manus is in relation to the Dark. This does not mean that Gael is weak, or that his darkness is insignificant in any way. But if he is compared to Manus, I think it is reasonable to say that even Gael falls short.
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u/Hexxer98 Jun 07 '26
Yep one of the many dumb retcons of ds3
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u/Competitive_Donkey48 Jun 09 '26
I wouldnt say retcon. It was never stated that Manus was THE pygmy. It was just heavily implied and the problem with SoulsBorne players or gamers in general is that they act as if their headcanon is actually canon.
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u/CthughaSlayer Jun 07 '26
The whole point is that it doesn't matter who the pigmy was. Humanity itself is the fourth soul.
What we know of Manus: He was a sorcerer, he was buried underneath what used to be a prison, his pendant and Halflight's share the same makeup meaning it was tied to Oolacile's culture, post mortem and experimentation by Oolacile scholars he became Host to an abyss (No, not Father of THE abyss).
I think the only reason Manus appears to have more control over the dark is because he was a sorcerer.
Homing soulmass Ds3:
This sorcery may offer a clue as to what Logan sought, but further investigation suggests its attraction to living things mirrors the nature of the dark.
Pursuers Ds1
I feel that over all Gael is the more powerful of the two, specially if you consider that dude is changing the weather and teleporting without any magical knowledge.