system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Dark Souls] Ariandel is a painted world. Inside there is a girl about to start making another painted world within it. If that kind of recursion can happen, is it at all possible that everyone in Lordran/Lothric is also inside a painted world, Inception-style?
gpt
If there's one thing you need to know about the world of Dark Souls, it's that everything is symbolic, even the concept of symbolism. That's why when a giant gives you a bow that he used to use, it's suddenly small enough for you to use. He didn't give you the physical bow, but instead the *concept* of the bow.

The painted worlds that we see aren't so much pocket dimensions, but instead they are the concept of a whole other world, with the concept of a door in the form of a painting. So even if a new painted world is being created within an existing painted world, that isn't necessarily recursion. It's just creating a door to a newly conceived plane of existence. By that same process of thought, the painting being created in Ariandel could theoretically have been a new door to Lordran. Though not the same Lordran we all know. Another Lordran, almost indistinguishable from our own, but conceptually different. 

Remember, Solaire was the Chosen Undead in his world. And each of the phantoms you saw were the Chosen Undead in theirs. The lines between them were blurry, though, and could be breached with a soapstone.

Long story longer? The flow of time is convoluted in Lordran.