Bloodborne - Demon's Souls Spiritual Successor's Spiritual Successor

Oh, don’t apologize! This stuff is all so opaque, I’m not bothered by spoilers or potential spoilers.

I have not finished yet. I started playing all the souls games for the first time in March. I started BB around the time I was finishing DS2. And I’m starting DS3 while waiting for my pal so I can eventually finish BB.

That hasn’t stopped me from reading the lore though ; )

It’s a combination of things. I took a lot of notes while playing. I have a co-op game going with a friend and a solo game I’m playing at the same time, going back over the ground we’ve covered. Combine the note taking with reading lore theories and watching youtube videos, you can get a pretty full picture of what’s going on.

I do have a summary of the entire story of bloodborne that I’ve written out, but it’s like 1k words lol.

Nobody really knows exactly what the main story is. The main gist of it seems to be:

You as the player go for blood ministration (why is never established; perhaps you are suffering from some kind of disease, or maybe you’re just chasing a high) and presumably make an enquiry about “paleblood”. I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler-within-a-spoiler to say up front that exactly what paleblood is is also never established.

So you have a nightmarish vision and wake up in a world overrun with beasts and near beasts. Apparently the whole thing started with the college of Byrgenwerth somehow finding the Pthumerian labyrinth, which led to Laurence and pals discovering a “holy medium” within. Exactly what this holy medium is is never established (sensing a theme?), but opinions range from Ebrietas, which makes sense, to Queen Yarnham, which also makes a kind of sense, to one of the Pthumerian chalices, which makes less sense in context but has echoes of the grail. Anywho, it turns out that this blood does bad things in addition to good. My read on it, thematically, is that the blood, like Bill Cosby’s cocaine joke, intensifies one’s “true nature”. Most men are beasts at heart, so beasts they become. The church quietly employs hunters to clean up the beasts, until it all goes not so quiet with Old Yarnham. There’s quite a bit of convolution with the Church Hunters and the Old Hunters and the Executioners, but I don’t think a solid grasp of it is really necessary to the basic story. The hunters find themselves falling behind in the arms race, so they take blood and become mad with it themselves and so hunters of hunters are brought in and the snakes eat the lizards and the gorillas eat the snakes, etc.

So much for the early stages of the game. After you reach Byrgenwerth things get weird. Well, actually in the woods, I mean what’s up with those snake guys? Some obscure bit of lore having to do with the Madaras brothers, apparently, who were hunters with a giant pet snake. Anyway, unimportant. Byrgenwerth is where it all began. They found the labyrinth under Yarnham. In keeping with the game’s Lovecraftian themes, there was of course an Elder Race, the Pthumerians. The Pthumerians, apparently, worshipped the Great Ones, and this intrigues Byrgenwerth, especially provost Willem. He sees an opportunity for mankind to “advance,” apparently. So they plumb the depths of the labyrinth looking for things. This is where the aforementioned “holy medium” comes from. For reasons the exact nature of which are never established, perhaps experiments gone wrong, Willem distrusts this holy medium and the blood it provides. Laurence, Willem’s student, respectfully disagrees and takes off to form the Healing Church, using the blood to perform, one assumes, miracles of healing. And also make beasts, oops.

So Willem was right about that, but his own ascension plans go rather awry, too. He braindeads himself in the search for “more eyes” and ends up turning his students into Cronenbergian monsters (how exactly is, I should copy and paste this phrase, never established), including Rom, whose precise function in the world is rather fuzzy.

She “hides” all manner of rituals. After killing Rom, the blood moon is revealed. The same blood moon, we are told, which shined on Old Yarnham before it was burned to (imperfectly) hide the sins of the church. This is where things really get fuzzy. Suddenly we are introduced to some guys named the School of Mensis. They are also, I guess an offshoot of Byrgenwerth? But instead of blood use they more directly follow in Willem’s legacy and attempt through some kind of ritual whose precise nature is never really established to contact a great one directly. Which great one? Mergo.

Who the heck is Mergo? Mergo is Yarnham’s child, perhaps with Oedon, whose chapel is the hub for Cathedral Ward. Mergo was stillborn, since “every great one loses its child,” which really makes you wonder how they keep going as a species (but are they a species? maybe not), but that didn’t stop Mensis, but their contact, tragically, goes awry. Most of them appear to be regurgitated from the nightmare lands as the One Reborn, but their brains, I think, all get glommed together as the Brain of Mensis. Except Micolash. Uh anyway, inside of the nightmare is Mergo, or what’s left of him/it. You fight his wet-nurse and put an end to Mergo’s tragic existence in the nightmare. Then one of three things happens:

  1. You choose to die one final time, in the Hunter’s Dream, and wake up in the real world (maybe? Probably?) the hunt over, the night ended, and you happy and healthy (uh maybe).

  2. You choose to stay, in which case Gehrman causes a ruckus and when you kill him suddenly the Moon Presence appears and makes you Gehrman Mark II: Bloodlectric Boogaloo, appointing you to look after the dream.

  3. You were incredibly inquisitive during the game and made some profound leaps of logic, or you followed a wiki, and you found and used three (of the four, whoops) special items scattered around the world and when the Moon Presence goes to embrace you it is repelled. A terrifically easy fight ensues, and then. You turn into a slug.

So what does it all mean? I am tempted to throw up my hands like JK Simmons in Burn After Reading and say, “Fuck. I don’t know.” However, it seems as though the Moon Presence was using the hunter to eliminate Mergo for some reason. Mercy? Rivalry? This is never established. To eliminate Mergo, it was necessary to eliminate Rom (to reveal the way to the nightmare). Who is the doll? Some say the incarnation of Formless Oedon, and in saying, “Ah, you’ve found yourself a hunter” she is speaking to the Moon Presence, possibly derisively. In walking the hunter’s path, the player’s character gains more and more insight and more and more power, eventually gaining the ability to challenge the MP and ascend to great one status him or herself. This only happens if those three items, which various other characters in the game tried and failed to use, are found and used. Oedon (if the doll, who knows) doesn’t seem to mind this. Perhaps it even welcomes it, making you a true surrogate for poor Mergo. The hunter’s fitness for this whole thing is established at the beginning, I take it, when something within him or her rejects the beast scourge, which prompts the MP to send the messengers to spirit away the hunter to the dream. What exactly the messengers are is never established, but there are, of course, many theories.

To sum up: you take some blood and have a hallucinatory adventure revolving around inscrutable cosmic monsters possibly having some kind of family feud, and if you play your cards exactly right become one of those inscrutable cosmic monsters yourself.

One of the overarching themes is, fittingly, inscrutability. Why do the great ones do what they do? Who knows. Where does Kos fit into this? She, uh, doesn’t, really, which is too bad. Where do the Vilebloods fit into it? They don’t really, either. The vilebloods I can understand as a kind of earlier draft of where they wanted the story to go, maybe. You can see hints of the Child of Blood being important to things, hints that eventually lead to nothing. Kos, on the other hand, being added 8 months after the game was released, I don’t understand. Maybe it’s a sign of where Miyazaki or someone else wanted the story to have stemmed from? The DLC has some great story beats in it, but ultimately in terms of understanding the overall story of BB I don’t think it matters.

Great, great game, by the way, although I wish the environments were just a little bit more differentiated the way they are in souls games. Much of the above I took from others’ analyses, some from my own play and thoughts both on that play and those others’ analyses.

Okay, and now I want to fire this up again for a replay.

Also, I’ll take the opportunity to plug the excellent Bonfireside Chat podcast, and its season on Bloodborne.

This is both hilarious and true and probably the best summary of a summary I’ve read. Bravo!

Thank you Sir. That’s quite interesting. And at the same time, it’s less interesting than I was hoping it would turn out to be.

Thinking back it’s funny how incredibly annoyed and over it I was with Logarius at the time, because man, that cutscene, that backdrop, that snowfall, that music! In retrospect it was definitely one of the Climax Moments of the game for me, maybe because I spent so much time bashing my head against it.

That’s an interesting opinion! How so, if you can articulate?

Well, like you said, there’s a lot of unknowns and wishy-washiness to the whole thing. It feels like an abstract painting when you’re playing through it, so you can only see your part of the painting and it’s opaque and blurry and you kind of muddle through it, and you imagine that if you could see the big picture, you imagine that what you could see were a few dots, and if you pulled back enough and put the pieces together in your head, you would see this giant impressionist painting.

But instead, it turns out the big picture is also an abstract picture too.

Yes, I think BB is much more of a thematically-organized game than a plot-organized game. In that respect it resembles, say, Dahlgren more than it does the Amber Chronicles (maybe I’m reaching for an analogy, here). Lovecraftian (and dare I say Lem-ian) unknowability and cosmic bafflement is one of those themes, along with the gothic horror theme of man’s (specifically, man’s science’s) overreach, which of course was a preoccupation of Lovecraft’s as well. Motherhood (and through it menstruation and pregnancy) forms another very strong theme. This is where Kos and the vilebloods really come into their own, which is why I can’t resent them too much, even if they don’t fit “puzzle like” into the plot-organization. Blood (and its many mythic/folkloric resonances), fear of contamination, of the “other,” that excellent breakdown I linked above of Bloodborne as a parable of immune response…sin (especially incurred in the pursuit of ostensibly “good” ends) and its consequences. All present, all important, all potentially providing a new lens through which to view all of the “happenings” in the game.

Really, whatever happens…you may think it all a mere bad dream.

The whole game, thinking about it a bit further, is a litany of catastrophic births, both literal and figurative. Yarnham attempts to birth Mergo and fails (more or less), Willem attempts to birth his own ascended form (and that of his students) and fails, Laurence attempts to birth a “healing” church and fails, that church attempts to birth its own saints and great ones and fails (over and over again), the School of Mensis attempts to birth a great one in the form of the Brain of Mensis and fails, Arianna’s birth is an apparent failure (and at least to her, a catastrophe), Gehrman’s “birth” of the doll in apparent memory of Maria is a failure, since it results in a creation that he appears to be afraid of (“even the doll…should it please you”), Annalise’s attempt to birth the Child of Blood is a failure, Kos’s birth is a failure, even the Moon Presence’s attempt at your adoption is a failure, should you have obtained and used the cords. I am sure there is an essay to be written on these various failures of birth as an allegory for the perils of the creative process.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that another place the Vilebloods may come into play is revealing again the action of the “old blood” on humankind. Whereas the normal people of Yarnham turn into virile-looking beasts (and the clerics of the church into quite deformed ones), the nobles of Cainhurst become spindly, gross-looking bloodsuckers…also what’s the deal with blood dregs and vermin…

I think, like most Souls games, BB is more interested in themes than plot, for sure, but that said I do think there is a pretty interesting plot going on. One that’s a bit easier to follow than any of the other games (save Sekiro). A plot that has me waaay more invested in this world than any of the Dark Souls games.

The way I’ve come to approach the goings-on is to focus on the main characters (the original scholars of Byrgenwerth) and their divergent paths.

The mission of the scholars was to further human understanding of the “truth” in order to push humanity to its next evolution.

Willem feared the blood of the great ones, and chose the path of insight “lining his brain with eyes,” instead.

Laurence broke with Willem over the use of blood, and founded the Healing Church, breaking it up into three branches: The Choir, The Workshop, and The School of Mensis.

By all accounts, Laurence was the head of The Choir (the highest ranking church officials) and spread the use of blood healing, or blood ministration, to both grow the power of the church (which worked) and to use the spread of the old blood, as well as experiments on willing parties, as a method of contacting the great ones.

The Workshop, founded by Gehrman, acted as a clandestine force charged with eliminating, and covering up, the existence of the scourge of the beast.

The School of Mensis, lead by Micolash, was the Byrgenwerth alternative, a place of study and experimentation working along a parallel path to The Choir, but hidden from public view, operating out of the unseen village, increasingly relying on kidnappings and forced experimentation.

After the burning of Old Yharnam, an operation undertaken by The Workshop Hunters, the scourge became public knowledge, and both the Healing Church and the Workshop became discredited institutions. To maintain the power of the Healing Church, Laurence appears to have disbanded the workshop hunters, enlisting Ludwig in the establishment of the Church Hunters: a more forthright organization that armed the populace of Yharman, organized mass hunts, and operated in the open to both eliminate beasts and anyone suspected of being a beast.

At some point Laurence himself succumbed to the scourge, his beastly skull can be seen on an altar in the grand cathedral.

Gehrman became trapped in the Hunter’s Dream.

Micolash unsuccessfully summoned a great one in the form of the one reborn and then somehow had the entire school of mensis ripped into the nightmare realm.

And poor old Willem sits in his rocking chair overlooking the moonlit lake, all of his former students having long since abandoned him, his head filled with eyes, while Rom (not quite a great one) hides the existence of the blood moon, the rituals of the school of mensis, and the true nature of wtf is going on in Yharnam.

That’s the world we’re thrown into. What starts as a simple directive to “go hunt some beasts,” morphs into a full on drama between these competing characters, the horrors they have created/become, and the true nature of what lurks behind the waking world, prowling about in the cosmos.

Finally got Logarius down. Both in my game and in my friend’s. After we learned what to expect, it turned into a pretty fun fight. Got him first attempt in my friend’s game, second in mine.

We’ve been getting a lot of vermin, since we both pledged the oath to the confederates, and I when I went back to check in with BucketHead, he gave me a pretty solid emote, and then later, I got his bucket!

I wish I could get that whole outfit, but i’ll settle for the bucket.

We spent most of the night doing chalice dungeons. I can see how maybe they’d be boring solo, but in co-op they’re cool. Kinda feels like diablo. We fought some cool bosses. Unlocked some cooler armor. And we looted an uncanny saw blade and hunter axe.

Good stuff. I hope (fingers crossed) that we finish up this weekend. This play through has been too disjointed. Going to have to sit down and play through it later after Demon’s Souls to get more of a unified experience.

Oh, ho ho.

Finally got Ebrietas down. It felt very slow and plodding after Logarius. Still quite savage. It didn’t hurt that I gained a dozen or so levels since last we fought. I loved this whole set up: a cosmic horror just hanging out underneath the Grand Cathedral in a place called the ALTAR OF DESPAIR. I wonder where the church has been getting all that good healing blood from……hmmmmm.

Fresh off destroying this monstrosity, it was off to the Nightmare Frontier. Fun place. Side mouth werewolves. Corrupted dolphin-octopus monsters. Rock tossing giants (that can one shot you). Poison, cuz why not. An oh, down there in the muck surrounded by little flashes of light, what could that……FUCKING PATCHES you POS. I have no love for Patches, ever since he pulled this same trick on me in the Tomb of Giants. Fucker.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to discover that the blue lanterns were leading the way through this maze of a level. Once I got the feel for it, it didn’t seem quite so big and intimidating. And just when I thought I’d seen all the nightmares I could handle for one day……OH MY GOD WTF IS THAT THING AND WHY IS IT SINGING AND NOW IM DEAD AND YEAH OF COURSE FRENZY HOLY SHIT IS IT WEARING THE DOLLS CLOTHES?

Amy was a relief after seeing (and dying) to that thing a few times.

The Amy C’thulu temple/arena was awesome. Just everything about that fight (including the batshit second phase) was great. What was also great was how easy it was. Whew. Two cosmic horrors down, lord knows how many more to go. Gonna swing by a few NPCs and do some farming before heading into the Hunters Nightmare. I’ve been spending all my souls on fashion. Need to earn a few levels.

I hear good things about this DLC (despite the difficulty), so I’m greatly looking forward to it.

This DLC is pretty great, ain’t it?

Hard, but very cool. I like how FROM keeps coming up with inventive ways for us to revisit the past through the DLC. The whole concept of the Hunter’s Nightmare is fantastic.

My gosh, they do rain down the new weapons on you don’t they? I’m torn between which one I want to mess around with and upgrade. It’ll probably be whirliwig…as I’m cosplaying Valtr now anyway…

Ludwig was ROUGH. Holy hell. One of those fights where you’re not only battling the beast, but the sound as well. It was so frantic!

Slowly climbing the creepy stairs of the Research Hall now. Place feels like a silent hill level. I love it.

I loved Ludwig’s goofy as hell face when he sees the Moonlight great sword, transforming him from crazed beast to bi-pedal? beast-man…which is probably the most significant use of From’s trademark re-appearing signature weapon.

Yup yup. When he was full beast I noticed a sword on his back, and thought, well hell, phase two he’ll definitely use that. But when I saw what sword it was I was both shocked and delighted.

Too bad I don’t have to stats to use it : (

So many of these cool DLC weapons would require a full respec! I guess they’re for NG+.

Plip Plop–

My pal and I mopped up the rest of the Research Hall and took down the Living Failures. I didn’t think there was much to that fight besides the wild hit box on those swinging arms…that was until the sky turned into the cosmos and meteors started raining down!

Very cool.

I was a bit letdown that the Astral Clocktower wasn’t another level, just a boss arena, but that Maria fight was great.

We’ve taken our first tentative steps into the Fishing Hamlet…let’s see what drove Maria to suicide.