But wouldn't the fact that it's a title give it poetic license to omit the article? Similarly to how you wouldn't use "Bloodborne" by its own anywhere, it's always "a bloodborne disease", for example, which is exactly what the title refers to, but they simply went with "Bloodborne". I don't think the missing article is what causes the confusion, when the thread I've mentioned literally had people saying "there's no such a thing as one demon in posession of many souls in the game". They understand what it means, but the multiple S sounds make it sound awkward, making them second guess it.
Conversely, Dark Souls, plural, are never mentioned in Dark Souls. There is one Dark Soul, and the meaning of the title has to be interpreted by the player based on the story, but nobody questions it because it sounds natural, and doesn't lead people to pay any more attention to it than seeing it as a representation of that game.
You're not wrong that "A Demon's Souls" would remove any doubt, though. "The Demon's Souls" I still think would have people saying it's actually referring to The Demon Souls you collect throughout the game. I suppose saying it's "proper english" is indeed incorrect. Thanks for the information, by the way!
Okay, so disclosure, I haven't played most of these games, just a bit of Dark Souls, so I'm talking strictly grammar, not whether they make any sense in-universe. 😅
The problem is the possessive case. "Demon Souls" would
also be correct. Because it's not possessive.
The distinction between
a and
the is required in every possessive case because otherwise it's unclear who or what is doing the possessing. Proper nouns don't need this because they are by nature making it clear who the possessor is. The entire point of a proper noun is that you're identifying something specific. When talking about common nouns, the key is whether the possessor is something measured in
units or in
volume.
If I say "Demon's Souls" you expect that there should be a distinction for whether it's a specific demon or a generic one. But if I say "Water's Souls," you don't. You assume that I'm talking about the entire concept of water. And that's because water is
never an "a"; it's always a "the", therefore the article is assumed and you can drop it. The reason it's always a "the" is because there's no such thing as "a water" (the only exceptions being when we force it to become a unit, such as in bottles of water. And then it's no longer volumetric and we can't assume the "the"). Anything like water, flour, sand, etc that is an assumed "the" is something where the units are too small to talk about in day-to-day life, so it's just measured in volume. Therefore using "a" would make no sense because there is no single item to point to within the volume in normal usage. Note how even the actual units are called water
molecules, sand
grains, etc, because those are distinct from the typical way we talk about these items. Those are when we actually want to talk about these things in units, which is uncommon.
Essentially, "Demon's Souls" is grammatically broken because it's placed a common unitary noun into a possessive grammatical structure that is reserved for proper nouns and common volumetric nouns. Proper nouns and volumetric nouns are assumed specifics, but demons are common discrete units, and anything measured in units in English always distinguishes between specifics ("the") and generics ("a") when using the possessive form because otherwise who the possessive case refers to becomes a source of confusion.
