THE LEGEND NEVER DIES

The year is 2012. Social media remains scattered. Youtube exists, but with massive restrictions on file size, length, and quality. Information is not centralised, and crucial information takes days or weeks to disseminate to a wider audience.

Gaming culture is, as it always has been, utter dogshit. Hatemail on Xbox Live remains at near-peak levels, and off in the recesses of Dark Souls 1 PvP, Games for Windows Live hosts an absolute shitshow of a community. Much like everywhere else.

Dark Souls, in its initial guise and still after the first few patches, horrendously unbalanced. Even up to 1.05, you could wear the heaviest tankiest armour in the game (Havel's Set), yet still balance your stats to have a weight ratio of less than 50%, and therefore be able to ninjaflip (more invulnerability frames) with the Dark Wood Grain Ring. This resulted in nigh-invincible rock men backflipping around until they stabbed you in the back with Darkmoon daggers for absurd damage. Because of the unpatched Hornet Ring of course. Nightmare material.

Patch 1.06 annihilated this meta, and with good reason. What still remained was the flavour of tryhard MLG bullshit that came in the form of hilariously bad hatemail, kill montages on youtube complete with awful music, and brain-dead herd mentality to follow the "meta".

The setting was perfect for OnlyAfro to unleash a weapon of absolute destruction on the Dark Souls and wider community. This guy femboy thing uploaded a parody of that style of tryhard dudebro nonsense, only to unleash an even more titanic wave of MLG terror:



It feels ridiculous to describe the impact this 180 second shitpost had. Those kinds of MLG-style montages turned into parodies overnight. /r/montageparodies owes most of its existence to this movement. Homodexuality remained a meme until Elden Ring released in 2022. Giantdad, not even a canonical character, is one of the most recognisable faces of Souls games. Half of the stylised words of this video materialised itself into the Souls community for years.

The slurs being patched out of the above video is strangely unfortunate. They're there as a parody, but there's little room for that level of irony on any level of the popular internet. Until Big Tech fully stops pretending to care of course.

Far funnier is the way little facts got rewritten over time. Giantdad was perceived as a "meta", but had no such impact outside of memes. Reading the swing of a Zweihander was mandatory to survive pre-1.06 patch, and didn't become any more difficult here. If you did get stunlocked, you could just toggle escape^[1].

Being a filthy tryhard at the time, I utilised the Giantdad build to wreck havoc in lower-level areas. By tweaking the build to operate at Level 11 instead of Level 99, I could swing the Bass Cannon at full power in the beginner areas, with the only downside being that I couldn't mid-roll. Not that you needed to, going up against someone thirty minutes into the game wielding a toothpick. This exploit took waves of attempts to fix - first in Dark Souls 2 using the dire Soul Memory mechanic, and later in Dark Souls 3 with the contentious Weapon-Based Matchmaking.

PvP was never the same after Dark Souls 1. It couldn't survive staying that way, mind you. But the outrageously unbalanced setup gave the community the tools to build weapons of mass destruction that ruined gaming for years (affectionate).

This post is an elaborate reminder for me to set up my shrine to Giantdad. Your understanding is appreciated.