Thread:Butter100fly/@comment-32773874-20180708221424/@comment-24411414-20180710050849

Ok, lemme go for parts according to your questions:

- The most plausible explanation I found while escavaging for clues in the community is that she doesn't drop a special soul for the same reason why Gough doesn't drop a giant's either: they're not treated as Bosses by the game, but as NPCs. This is where the gaming mechanics is prioritized over lore. The motives? No one is sure, but my bet is that, from a game developer's POV, giving a special soul as a reward from two characters who aren't supposed to be enemies from the get go would tempt people to always go for the killing because the reward would be far too greater than leaving them alone, making the odds severely unbalanced. It'd be like rewarding the player at the ending of the genocide run of Undertale with something which gaming value overweights the entire pacifist run.

- For the second question, that's a rather easy one to go by deduction through elimination: Again, watching from a game developer's POV, when acknowledging that Seath and the Four Kings are the only exceptions to the rule concerning the souls, it was probably of necessity that the lore on their item descriptions would state why they earned their shards in a much more explicit manner.

- As for Elizabeth, there's some evidence made through Cause and Effect in the environmental lore. Although she resembles a Mushroom Person, she "dies" if you kill Dusk at Darkroot Garden; she turns into a regular, giant wall mushroom. This phenomenom, summed with the principle that light sorceries can manipulate shape (Chameleon) and the concept of illusions being a thing wtihin their world, people deduced that Elizabeth was probably an illusion created by the princess. The reasons are pure theory, of course, some say she mightv'e been created after Dusk's own mother, or just a friend.

- Once again, deduction through elimination and connecting scattered lore pieces: only humans possess Humanity. The Bloated Head describes Bloatheads as residents of Oolacile whose Humanity went wild.

Not everything is set on stone where Dark Souls lore is concerned, that is much true, and we can only figure out things pertaining to it through evidence to validate our arguments and deductions. Which gets me thinking, you asked me why Ornstein would correlate to deduce Ciaran was a deity, and I can see why, the workaround to explain it hops through a dozen of other lore pieces scattered about... but there's still her dialogue, Gwyn's side of the lore, Gwyndolin's proportions, and her significantly bigger health pool to back up the idea that she was indeed part of Gwyn's kind, and unless there's evidence to counter that, all others point out in the most obvious direction.

On a sidenote, maybe I should have referred to her as a divine being instead. A God is a deity, but not all deities are gods, at least according to the dictionary's definition of the word. I simply forgot that the game also uses deity as synonym for gods, too (Darkmoon Blade Covenant Ring), but it seems they have a hierarchy within their own people.