Sekiro and the law of the father: obey, betray, and what remains

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (FromSoftware, 2019) is sold as the hard game with the sword and the parry. It is that, but its subject is something else. Sekiro is about obedience. The protagonist does not even have a name of his own at the start: he is Wolf, and he is defined entirely by a function, to protect the young lord. The whole conflict of the game is born when that function collides with itself.

A character made of duty

Notice how Wolf is built. He was picked up as a child from a battlefield by Owl, who raised him, trained him and gave him a code: the shinobi serves. He chose neither the profession nor the lord, he received both along with his life. That is where it gets interesting, because he owes his existence to precisely the person who handed him the rule. The gesture that saved him cannot be separated from the gesture that bound him. They are the same gesture.

Owl, or the father who demands the crime

The game then makes a cruel and precise move. Owl reappears and asks Wolf to abandon Kuro and hand the immortality over to him. The father who taught the code asks for the code to be broken for his own benefit. This dismantles an important illusion, the one in which the law handed down to us is disinterested. It is not. Those who taught us the rules had desires of their own, and those did not always coincide with our good.

At this point the game forces a choice with no clean exit: follow the father and betray the lord, or follow the code and kill the father. Both options are disobedience to something. It is exactly the corner many people find themselves in, the moment of discovering there is no longer a way to please everyone, and that holding a position of one's own will cost somebody's disappointment.

Freud and the father of the horde

Freud wrote about this in Totem and Taboo, from 1913, in a myth he himself presented as a hypothesis about the origin of culture. In the beginning there would have been a horde dominated by a father who monopolised everything. The sons, resentful, banded together, killed and devoured this father. And then came the turn that matters here: freed from the tyrant, they did not do as they pleased. They felt guilt, and out of that guilt the prohibitions were born. Freud writes that the dead father became stronger than the living one had been.

The dead father is stronger

That sentence is practically a description of what happens to Wolf. Over the course of the game he does not free himself from Owl by defeating Owl. Killing the father returns no freedom at all: the code keeps operating inside him, and that is precisely why he goes on making decisions in the name of duty. The law no longer needs anyone to enforce it from outside, it has become internal. Psychoanalysis calls this the superego, and it is the difference between obeying someone and carrying a rule in your head. The second is far harder to argue with.

Immortality as a refusal to end

There is also the layer of immortality, which the game handles with unusual clarity. The Dragon's Heritage is not a blessing, it is an illness. It produces Dragonrot in others, it creates the problem of Immortal Severance, it generates a cycle in which nobody finishes anything. Kuro, the young lord, spends the game asking to be allowed to die. He is the only character who genuinely wants to end. Refusing finitude, in the world of Sekiro, is what rots everything. And it takes little effort to read in this the cost of any arrangement that refuses to finish: the bond nobody closes, the mourning never done, the role still being occupied long after it stopped being useful.

The endings are ways of answering the father

Consistent with all this, the endings of Sekiro are positions towards obedience. There is the one in which Wolf obeys the order literally and kills himself to end the cycle, obedience taken to its limit. There is the one in which he breaks with Owl and upholds his own commitment to Kuro. And there is Return, the most laborious, in which he disobeys a direct order from Kuro in order to seek a path where nobody has to die, which is to say he stops being an executor of orders and starts answering for a decision of his own. Only in that last one does he stop being an instrument.

Perhaps that is why Sekiro unsettles in a different way from the studio's other games. It does not ask whether you can handle the boss. It asks in whose name you are fighting, and how long it has been since anyone revised that answer.