The United Kingdom had a profoundly normal one last Saturday, when King Charles III, ol’ Chucky 3, became the 40th British monarch crowned at Westminster Abbey in a ceremony featuring all manner of storied orbs, gowns, gloves and knick-knacks. There was also a big rock that the suffragettes once bombed, so that’s all very exciting.
But here at PC Gamer, we only pay homage to one King, so the glitz and glamour of the coronation aren’t particularly interesting to us. What is interesting, though, is the sheer profusion of memes that the coronation’s incongruous and archaic rituals brought into being on social media. The last coronation happened in 1953, 58 years before the release of Dark Souls, which meant Twitter didn’t have much to say about it at the time. But now? I couldn’t even do my usual Sunday morning doomscrolling without encountering games-related gags about the event, which I’ve otherwise tried to avoid.
Given the coronation’s thumping orchestral soundtrack and its withered, velvet-clad guests, most of the jokes and memes were Soulsborne-related. Although Dark Souls’ vision of decaying kingdoms ruled over by increasingly insular and delusional cliques of rulers absolutely obsessed with guarding their power at the expense of everyone else bears no resemblance whatsoever to the modern United Kingdom, it just seemed to chime with the pomp and circumstance of the ceremony somehow.
Thus, many jibes about the aged attendees at the coronation regretting their Faith/INT builds, comments on the boss fight music that played throughout key moments, and speculation on the precise nature of the stat boosts conferred by items like the Sovereign’s Ring. Congratulations to King Charles, by the way, for the +0.3 monthly piety and +2 court grandeur granted by those splinters of the True Cross. That stuff adds up.
Here are a few of my favourite memes from the coronation. Shoutout in particular to Twitter user kindekuma, who managed to slip a Resident Evil 4 reference in among the endless Soulsborne jokes.