Beyond Fairy Tales: Post-Fairy-Tale Narrative Identity and Therapeutic Ambiguity in FromSoftware's Souls Games

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.