Bloodborne's Story • Translated (Lore w/ Lokey)

hello everyone and welcome to this very very special episode all of my episodes are special this is especially special because this is the first time i have a recording guest loki you're back yay i am crazy i didn't think i'd be doing this again yeah well after last time oof nah it's fun having you last time uh you have a new website since last we talked don't you yes we did i now have loki souls yes we did you did you have a website oh listen listen you you talk about the collectively okay okay okay i have this don't i don't need everyone to figure out that it's literally just me trying to figure out for months on end how i can get this thing set up because i've never done a website before yeah it's a real operation you've got going on there it's uh like a group full of people yeah all the little elves that work in the background oh i wish [Laughter] and uh you specify on the website you specialize i should say in translations of various souls or just from soft games yeah this at this point coming from soft games right now we have elton ring and secure and like so many right so um yes i i cover a lot of from software rpgs and stuff like that um last time we were on here for demon souls right so um i basically just cover what are the the major errors in the script from the localization side of issues because a lot a lot of times what happens is you have the japanese script you have the japanese community and they have their theories and you have the english community community and they're coming up with their theories and there's a huge disc huge disconnect um and this has sort of been mended over time as the localizations have gotten better but these errors still sort of persist and you can kind of see a demon souls i've always said demon souls and dark souls have the worst of it um and they've gotten collectively better we're hope i'm hoping that eldon ring is going to have the best script yet and that i'm not going to have to complain about too much there but bloodborne is somewhere sort of in the middle where we're not really at the ds3 levels of meh but we're not at dark souls one zero so yeah yeah you know if they ever get their [ __ ] together you'll be out of a job oh i would love that you won't hear me complain like [Laughter] i don't do this thing because i want to i do it because i am compelled to yeah that was definitely that was definitely the issue right so when i started when i started out doing this it was mostly just because i wanted to shed a light on this like i ultimately don't care if you agree with my opinion on some specific theory or something like that ultimately what matters is that there are problems with this translation and you need to be aware of this and if like if you want to like then plug your ears and ignore it i'm not listening that's fine but these are problems that are going to be addressed and it becomes it's because it's especially important to a lot of the lore into the lore community for a lot of people because this stuff affects how you understand events how how scenes play out how care how you interpret characters like tons of things can change into because of localization blunder so it's very important that we're very careful on what the original script says and what the possible intentions were going into writing it so yeah yeah with uh with no uh ill will towards the localization that we did get though right oh yeah no i have nothing against them like i i've always i did an entire post actually commenting on this oh my issue ultimately is purely on if you're going to if you're going to essentially pay at a localization company in order to translate your game and bring it over to the west i ask that you please make sure that it's of a certain level of quality like everyone makes mistakes right we can always accept there what a few a few blunders some of these are just inexcusable and oh and when they accumulate they start becoming a bit more um systematic as it were and it just it becomes this problem where it's like you have to do it and like i said the localizations have improved over the years i mean look at demon souls original compared to the demon souls remake which wasn't out when we were last chatting so now we have a huge point of comparison like half the errors in that were fixed i would have liked the other half to god and fix as well listen progress progress i love how uh the moonlight knight veto was also called bido and we had what rizziah and lazaya no yes yes yeah there wasn't even i i'm actually curious if there were even an editor there's actually an editor in the the localization teams um for demon souls and dark souls because it honestly doesn't feel like there was yeah control was definitely not there well you know i imagine because like especially with demon souls that's like what is this this is some niche fantasy rpg from japan uh just get the b team on it well yeah well a part of it i think is all is that um you don't exposure i like one of the things that i think is really driven because i'm like they're not listening to my criticism like like no one's like no one's like going oh this guy on the internet loki is complaining about us we have to get our act together no no one's listening to that what they listen to i think and i've always said this it's always been suspicious to me as soon as dark souls 1 got wild popularity you start seeing an increase in the localization quality so i think that a lot of times the more and bigger the games get the bigger more popular from soft titles get the more that everyone sort of feels like hey you know there's more eyes looking at this we should uh we should uh take extra care yeah you shouldn't uh settle yourself short though i noticed uh so here's a little i don't know if i've talked about this on the channel before i was well aware of demon souls being in production before they announced it like the demon souls remaster because after i released the demon souls videos including my talk with you the first one a lot of blue point staffers mysteriously started following me on twitter oh wow so yeah so you shouldn't sell yourself short logie oh that's that's cool to me if i played any small part about that that's cool to know anyway i i have no disrespect for all the people who work on that most of my criticisms are purely on professional level like i'm sure listen i don't know what's goes on in their personal lives not interested and i don't want anyone like harassing them over anything like that like just make sure like if there's problems there's problems they get addressed they get addressed yeah so uh without with this preamble out of the way now the stuff no one cares about uh the uh the segmenting of this video is going to be very similar to the segmenting i did when i did the uh original sort of story conversation with the sinclair lore podcast about bloodborne also on this channel where it goes from like the pre-history of this world to the sort of generally more recent history that being bergenworth and the healing church then the main narrative of the game and i imagine we'll bounce around a lot because a lot of characters and phenomena are relevant in multiple time periods especially when they overlap like history especially like the main history you suddenly have like all these factions and things they're kind of overlapping with each other at different points so yeah yeah i'm also going to be allowing you to take the reins more on this conversation than me because you know a lot more about the translations than i do so you better get control effing your way through your data that's gonna it's gonna be a long one okay just bear with me on the timings everyone well i'll i'll edit it it's just it's it's it's a it's an issue for me exclusively well getting the prep work for this done was definitely a a chore so thank you well that's true that's true okay so the pre-history of bloodborne uh from the english game uh let's just begin with like the great ones what we know about them is that these are sort of celestial creatures creatures that come from the dreamlands if i'm not mistaken not always that that's the thing that people need to i think gets overlooked a lot is that they were originally human that's sort of the idea with the great ones every every one of them yeah like they well yeah they were originally from is that's the idea is that and you see this um if i recall correctly um so like when we go to the chalices for the root chalices and things like that you can actually see that when it talks about the idea that is touches the cosmos and one of the things that um the english source has which allowed the great ones to function on transcendental planes of thought the japanese is much more clear and they say thus they say that it is where the higher ones had once acquired transcendent thinking so the idea is that the great ones are the the civilization of is that's where this all began is where the original experimenters who succeeded in creating um in reaching sort of enlightenment or they achieved insight um because that's another thing is the idea the concept of of insight um in english is supposed to reflect this idea of enlightenment in japanese and it's a concept that miyazaki has used before he's used in dark souls in relation to logan he's used it with frack and things like that and reference to freck is the visionary he's the one who opens the way he sort of opens the doors to enlightenment sort of concept so this isn't an uh a new idea for miyazaki to explore with this one where he has this concept that there were all these humans in is that were sort of exploring and trying to get in touch with the cosmos and this is how they acquired the ability they acquired this higher level thinking which made them higher beings higher ones so to speak and that's sort of the limit the idea of the great ones the japanese term is literally refers to a being which is in a higher place a higher status higher position and all of this sort of gets wrapped up into being both metaphorical and literal they're both like physically higher they're in the sky the cosmos is in the you know the cosmos is in the cosmos in the sky yeah so um you have this idea that they're physically above you they're intellectually above you they're emotionally and spiritually above you so there's just these these beings and this is why they get sort of um they get sort of grouped up and associate as gods for that reason because they have all this power and thinking and intelligence etc i had this uh theory i don't know if i i probably didn't create it i was probably told to me by someone and i quite liked it which was that human beings may even have originated as beasts and given human form by the great ones to better serve them that means if if if uh if all the great ones were originally human then that probably doesn't line up does it probably not because what if you actually look in is i think at least the story dungeon version you actually find a few uh uh scourge beasts as they're called in english in the in the dungeons if i recall correctly like there's only like three of them it's a very small mob but it gives you this idea that um despite all this can and all this stuff related to great ones and like sort of the choir and things like that um there's this small aspect which sort of gives you a sign that they went through a b scourge themselves at a point and that's that's sort of these like few little beasts you find are supposed to be a remnant of that because obviously they've gone past that far long ago they've already they reached a level where everything was about kin at a certain point and they were creating lots of kin and then eventually except for ebrietis they achieved um the ability to become great ones and that's the idea and this is the thing with the great ones this is why the fumarians had to be created as a result because um to become a great one most of them the idea is that they when you become a great one your your thoughts you quote unquote you go to you sleep forever you die right and the idea is that your mind gets transferred to the cosmos your consciousness your spirit etc what we would consider the soul and when that becomes when your spirit now is sort of in a waking dream in the dream world now you have sort of this this level of autonomy and control in that dimension and your physical body is just sort of left quote unquote sleeping and so the thumerians are there to let take care of your physical body while it sleeps that's also a a concept bloodborne it's still in the game but it was a much bigger deal like originally rather than touch the lanterns you would go to the hunter stream by like sitting in a chair and going to sleep uh you can see leftovers of this idea with like mikolash who is like he's sleeping in the real world well he's a mummy fight corpse yeah but the idea is that he's just like he's like a tsukaushinbatsu where he like sort of self mummifies and then he's still awake in the dream world yeah it's the same yes rahm is kind of oh oh yes that's right under the uh under the grand cathedral yeah yeah yeah rahm it's the same idea that wrong you have rom's corpse while rom's spirit is in in the in the lake um which there's a lot to talk about with that lake too but that'll be for later but like yeah so it's the same idea the the great ones the original great ones so flora and like sort of all these different ones we'll be talking about a lot of them existed um as like humans of is by all indications and then they became and then they became they sort of most of them except for a briefist every addis is the only one who who has reached this sort of status of a great one but only in the physical world her consciousness didn't transfer over um to the to these cosmos as a result she her body ends up physically transforming along with her thinking that's remained here on this plane and that's resulted her becoming the sort of cthulhu abomination we see and now she sort of just left behind like looking up at the sky being like ah cause this is another thing that people don't realize and this becomes obvious as you read through um some of the lore and things like that is that the great ones you can you see them in the sky all the time that they're the stars in the night sky overhead they are the stars so um and i'm sure playing hell dinnering this is going to sound very familiar but something is uh separate but the idea is that the great ones are elden ring is so elden ring is so big you're gonna have such a fun time going through that you beautiful beautiful boy sorry keep going it's a giant script but yeah the with uh the great ones are stars yeah yeah so like this idea with the great ones are in fact the stars and when you go to the um when you look at some of the stuff that they talk about in relation to the stars there's like the um the celestial emissary for example that is the enemy in the japanese version is much more accurately and known as a messenger from the star world so it's this idea of that so it's this idea that there's this entire the idea is that the cosmos the star world the world of this sort of dimension of the stars is where they're the ones sending down these these emissaries these quote unquote angels basically to sort of spread their message or talk or communicate things like that right so this idea that the the star send signs the stars send meteorites as we see like this idea um what is it with the uh the what's well i mean rom summons it the living failures summon them oh you know like a call beyond is a good example of this though right because the idea was that the choir were trying to communicate with a star and the star basically said no it said to me to your storm in response we can use this as a weapon and they're like okay failure's the mother of success i guess but yeah i guess he's older than lauren then ease is where everything sort of starts yeah because what happens is and you talked about this in your your um your commentary as well with bloodbornes that this idea of bloodborne is stacked as a as a setting so it's sort of like um it's sort of like archaeological stratigraphy taken to like its absolute um limit and that concept is that okay you have yardam then you have old yharnam then you have yar ghoul then you have the gods the underground ruins the labyrinth the chalice dungeons whatever you want to call them um and that's got you got like up the upper you got like upper thumer then like middle fumor then you got lower thumber then you get to lorraine then you get uh is and fumaro ill and all that and the idea is that ever there i think if i remember right they're split into five depths and like the idea is that the depths are supposed to increase your difficulty but it's also used to give you an idea of the history of these places so and it help and that helps you get it so one of the things that that is kind of impressive about the chalice dungeons is that because of the way they're designed you can't really get a lot of that sort of in-depth like okay we're gonna gonna create all these very specific like objects and items right so things have to be more general because of how it's all generated but yeah it's much it's just very modular with these these rooms and these assets and we just sort of shuffle them around yeah so things become a lot more general as a byproduct of that but one of the nice things about that is that when you're um when you're sort of looking at some of the more general history type of things they were actually able to pack a lot more in you see the same thing with the messenger baths they give you like lots of weapons and things that you can buy and each one um each like weapons you can get sort of at each depth sort of gives you an idea of okay so in this dungeon this is associated with these weapons and this dungeon is associated with that you can kind of get a fuller idea of the history of those places and again there's a lot more we can talk about as we get into like stuff like ludwig and things like that anyway but like so when we're talking about like is lauren and stuff like that the general history seems to go there was is and then we got into um after the great one after the humans of is became the great ones they had other humans which we can presume is probably like lower classes stuff like that from just basically like the the type of um cultures that we see emerge and you have these sort of they become sort of like their human servants become grave keepers and they become they is becomes a graveyard so they start turning into start entombing the bodies and taking care of them and all this stuff and then eventually they start um they start saying hey we want to have our own kingdom so that's where whomera ill comes in um and one thing that's worth pointing out about fumaro ill is that um it's the japanese is pronounced more tumeru um and or tumor and the idea is that um it's a play on both uh the japanese fan base is conclusion it's a play on the word tomb and sumer which or the the the super civilization like the idea of the earliest human civilization i thought you were gonna say tumor like a cancer no no no no no no no tomb as in tomb like the the actual like you know underground like a grave like sort of like tombing something so that's the idea with there and the idea seems to be because the idea is that it's like one of the oldest civilization known civilizations that sort of um become like a living graveyard and the idea with ill well that that's kind of obvious in this game right so like um yeah diaz like sort of this tomb of with the disease and things like that and we can see this that they start blood drinking and all these things and then you get to lauren and lauren becomes the second civilization that gets built on top of it because as time as like if if is and through ill are sort of like these graveyard civilizations that are sort of buried or dead then eventually a new civilization is going to be founded on top of it and then eventually that's going to get buried buried and everything that another civilization gets about on top of that and we see that the thumerians keep building and building and building for a bunch of history and then finally we get to yharnam and yharnam's built now on top of that and it's the current setting that um has become the site of all the craziness that started with his yeah in the chalice dungeons we have um the hinter tomb chalice dungeon does that have any significance or should we move on to the through miriam cainhurst war um it's interesting in so far as that it the idea with the hinter tombs is that they're known as like the the remote or the secluded graves in japanese and the idea is that they're basically the perimeter um part of the thumerian civilization so if yharnam is built if if the if the gods graves quote unquote but are the tomb of the gods is basically right under yharnam then we can think of the hinter tombs as right under the places around yharnam so like forbidden woods um hemwick uh cainhurst places like that these are places where you could expect a lot more of sort of hinter tombs like uh uh graves and culture to have uh risen up from memory hinter is german for behind but i don't quite i don't remember it's something like that it's like it's i'm pretty sure you're supposed to play on the word like hinterland so it's like the idea of like it's something yeah because the idea with the the um the idea with like uh say forbidden woods and henwick in places those are part of the the frontier grave if i remember right and when you're when you're warping around in bloodborne from the the tombstones in the hunter stream and the idea with the frontier graves is that those are supposed to be the remote region so these ideas that are outside of yharnam and sort of like in the remote territories yeah and it's the same idea the idea is that the basically thumerians have their own sort of frontier remote regions and that's the hinter tombs yeah yeah all right then the sumerian cainhurst war which we see remnants of in the chalice dungeons with the uh with the fluted armor sets which we also see illustrated in the cainhurst paintings uh so the the why does the war start is it just because the cainhurst sect decided to have a queen and the thumerian sect didn't like that or it seems like there was some sort of um there's some sort of political divide it might just be they weren't happy with how things were being run um there's also because what we have to see is that there were a lot of signs that um cainhurst seems to be a very much a reflection of thumerian society in general and that there's this higher class that they like to have the highest quality blood that they drink for example we see some of the same um lost child children of antiquity um in the thumerian ill and like deeper into the chalice dungeons um where all these sort of upper class people is right like it's the capital where all the the nobles and the royals are supposed to be concentrated so you get this idea with a lot of people with these this um more corrupted quote-unquote blood show up and the idea with cainhurst is that it's the civil it's this um it's this remnant of nobles who seem to have sort of that well it's in the name right with kane the idea is that they betrayed their brethren and they ended up going out oh yeah oh i always thought of like a walking stick like fancy people with top hats no no no no it's it's the hill of pain so no it's because they're on they're traitors on an island okay okay that makes way more sense yeah it might also do you think it has something to do with the um no surely not like the immortality of the royal bloodline because surely that comes after lawrence goes to cainhurst right well well the the idea with the immortality comes from the idea of the corrupted blood right it's the idea is you have these more wills more vitality and it eventually leads to this this sort of this corruption we see manifest in the in the in the thumerian and the uh and the cainhurst queens this idea of some sort of immortality that they possess um with with kate hurston when we look through like the translations of some of their their objects and items for example like off the top of my head i can think of well like the uh like those uh the missed stuff or well i'm trying to find the exact item i think miss is a good place to start though so let's see if i i should have it in my thing yeah okay yeah the so like for example when we talk about the uh the secret myths that are supposed to be handed down only in k in the castle but we also of course see it around yharnam and that relates to the healing church and around in the chalice dungeons because that's where they got it from and the idea is basically that the the k intersect were a bunch of these no bunch of the nobility who seemed to have wanted to be the ones in charge and and perhaps were coveting the blood for themselves but then they got kicked out and they basically had to form their own little kind of quote-unquote kingdom on the on they get to be their own little kings of the hill um up above and um over time this seems to have they had a fascination with um foreign culture so this may have also played a role into their they because again you have to keep in mind that you basically have these societies which basically make their living just drinking blood like blood drinking from their own underground for centuries upon centuries and they're basically just sort of um just sort of living outside of the sun's light and there may have been we see this again with same with yharnam is this idea of these these civilizations that kind of want to live up up under the sky instead of just sort of like digging forever building tombs and more tombs yeah and the when we get to sort of the the modern day cainhurst like up before the main events of the game with the healing church kaner seems to more or less degenerate into basically just this sort of they have some of their their thumerian traits but they become extremely muted over time um yes because they're uh they're no longer getting any of the old blood into them right right because well because because what's hap what needs to be understood though is that the sunlight plays a huge role in sort of the lore in a very indirect way like again this might sound this might sound familiar again for people who played dark souls and demon souls especially if you've read my theories on uh demon souls origins from software has three ideas and they just re-package them over and over again well yes they do in my bloodborne commentary i was like here's the thing here are like ideas they go back to and if these six things show up in elden ring i wouldn't be surprised these six very specific things and every single one of them i got right everyone exactly uh well yeah so i'm sorry please no it's the same thing you're right because what happens with sunlight is that once again we have this idea of the sun being a very huge part of the cosmology in this case you only see for example two ma tomb moss and things like uh the different flowers and stuff which are supposed to be like spawns of of dead blood right like the idea is that this stuff sort of generates out of the blood but it only seems to happen in the tombs or as we also see in caves so areas with extremely low to zero light so the lack of sunlight is a huge has a huge effect on allowing the arcane in blood to manifest and we see this again when when you put um when you put things under sunlight it becomes lost over time so there's this very clear idea that um cainhurst by being out in the sun and like no longer is it sort of in this cloistered area where it could have this high concentration of thumerian blood that it was able to leech off of from the lower classes or whatever or the dead it's become this sort of thing where they they they lose they just lose those traits it's still there it's still in their blood right like they're still having they're still drinking blood like the k nurse has a long history of blood drinking they're vampires basically right they're the for the setting but the idea is that they're because they've been sort of above ground living under the sunlight for so long it's helped mute things and this is again again something that um this is something unfortunately we don't have a lot of translation but it comes when you look at the environmental storytelling it becomes very clear just look at the patterns that you see with other items and and uh and characters that's very interesting about uh elevation playing a role in this because we have in like dark souls 2 we have the sunken kingdom and like the sunken king who's better translated as the king of those things which sink into the ground kind of uh we have like well the idea the sunken king is that he's the king of the deep bottom right like it's this idea of this the idea is that like sort of you have this very deep underground and like the idea of the poison that become that poison which is released because of the the events with the sunken king and hitler the death of his kingdom becomes sort of the basis for when um uh mitha creates her little point harvest valley in order to sort of harvest that poison using then she turns into a dragon snake monstrosity bathing in it so like like all yeah well it's i'm also just talking about the idea of like they they go back to this idea of things which rest in deep like deep places of the world and how like how you were saying the arcane is able to sort of mold itself and manifest itself better in bloodborne where sunlight isn't that's a very interesting take on this idea uh if it is a carryover idea from previous games where you have like the abyss where you fight the four kings uh or yeah misaki likes this idea especially and you see this with from software in general where they like to have the they like to go with very simple general symbols so this idea of you know like heavens are and above hell's down below right so you try to create this sort of gradient where the the more up you go the more brighter the more heavenly cleaner everything gets in the deeper dimensional gets more dirty ugly demonic vile like and then like you obviously get to like the lava infested area because again like you you associate deep ground with lava and things like that and um it's a very consistent theme it shows up in sakura even where you have like the top of the waterfall it's like the uh the sakura dragon this heavenly divine being but if you follow the flow of the water through the land and you reach like the lower ends of the water you have people who degenerate it by eating like the sediment of dirt and crap like that oh yeah yeah miyazaki loves to loves his uh he likes his sediment and uh uh stagnation doesn't he he has like a jenga tower of ten different ideas and he just restructures it differently well hey it works yeah it's also the idea of like the the uh the transient sort of nature of boundaries both sort of philosophical and physical where um for example um in dark souls this is very like you get fire and all of a sudden you have binaries and you you see like gwynch kids he has like the nameless king and he has gwynevere it's like super masculine super feminine then you get gwyndolin and it's like wait a minute the binary sort of breaking up here and you like all these all these very clear lines in the sand that the world sort of operates under it's even seen in elden ring with like the golden order it it things become sort of muted and transient over time and this sort this is the source of a lot of the conflicts in those games well the idea because the idea is that always that there has to be like there's this order there's this way of things of how things can or or or ought to be in the minds of the characters versus how they can or ought to be in the set in the larger setting right like gwen has absolutely gwen imposes his order over the order of the world and this creates a huge amount of conflict because gwyn's order is by its nature not as permanent or orderly as as he he would uh he would want it to be and it's crazy it exists only in so far as he's able to violently or like or manipulatively enforce it upon others to believe in it yeah exactly and it be and as we and as we see up until dark souls 3 it becomes this point of like it it's it's he's causing he's caused more damage in trying to force uh things to be the way he wants he selfishly wants it to be than how it should be naturally like regardless of what of what you the merits of the age of fire are in the in like sort of a grander philosophical discussion it is ultimately always going to be temporary in the grander scheme of things and no amount of haranguing and force by gwyn and his uh successors is ever going to change that absolutely bergenworth started digging around in the chalice dungeons and they discovered old blood we're now in the uh history chat history channel history segment of the uh conversation yeah burger of course and interesting very much an interesting one for various reasons but i imagine we'll stick on bergenworth for a little while because bergenworth is it's kind of like the nexus that connects the happenings of the game to like the the prior history of the game well it all began with willem right so willem is like your typical rich affluent socialite from like just like imagine him as like you're your typical rich english man right like he's got a lot of money in the victorian era well what's he going to do with that money well he wants to heat he's going to go and shoot a zebra or a giraffe the common thing in the in the in that period of time was to go out and do like amateur archaeology some people would go out in their backyards because they had their vacation home and there was this beach with lots of seashells and they could collect and hey look at all these cool like seashell collections got these ancient fossils among them or whatever right so like or you or you some people would go to egypt or yeah they're digging up these things they're like they find this ancient uh ancient dried mummified hand and they throw that out they're like oh yeah gross oh look at this though this this pretty like shiny little object thing in there and then out now modern day everyone's like no i've hold it with the hand we could dna test it oh my god i just realized like you look at the story of bloodborne and you're like oh bergenworth found some old blood in some dungeons and they decided to drink it that makes no sense but in reality when people found the mummies they had like unwrapping parties and they would eat mummies and they created paint from them and crap like that exactly so like it's the idea that you have this decadent rich society and br willem is is this person as a character we see he's got these two manservants with him and like one of them we see dresses very nicely so you can tell he has a serves a very well to do master and obviously he found an entire university you need some capital there but um but the idea is that willem basically he hears about these you know yharnam is supposed to be this place that's located in the far it's located in like the far east like a hinterland so you can kind of think of this as probably like it's got a lot of obviously like german influence and stuff so i i think a good parallel would be to think about it as like this like this remote far east german pro like little town um well not little but like the idea is that it's like this town in like the forest of like like east germany really far so it's kind of close to the to the orient so you have all this eastern influence coming from not japan because there's always japan in miyazaki's games oh of course yeah exactly and then so you have a lot of these influences coming into the the this little like uh uh town there and then you have all these um western influences obviously which are predominant here but they're all separated because it's this old like it's almost like its own secluded little village where it has its own little culture that's preserved for since ancient times right and but it's also sort of uh it's also sort of sorry it's also sort of a pre uh bismarck sort of unification of germany where you have like yharnam exists as its own sort of sovereign state even though it is just a city and some of the land around it right right like you see some other cities like yharnam in the background like around where forbidden woods is supposed to be and it's supposed to give you the idea that forbidden woods is sort of like a nexus point between um uh sort of the outside world and and that and you see influences of that in the village in forbidden woods but the idea with with bergenworth is that yharnam had all these this graveyard in the forbidden woods right like this graveyard and the one farthest from from yharnam it has all these giant graves right and these graves are supposed to be graves to the el they're elder gods you actually have concept art um in the japanese version they literally just say here's the grave to the elder god and you can see corpses bowing like they're sort of like prostrating over bowing like oh please and sometimes they have runes that they've received from answers from their gods that are sleeping there so the idea is that you have these these humans who have been buried here and because they're they became great ones they get these giant-ass graves and the idea is that these you can even see the back of the grave they're like being eaten away by phantasms like these tiny little slugs so like yeah if you look if you if you if you think of it like that you have williams like oh there's these these graves to gods or types of thing like i've heard about this quaint little story about yharnam right it's got this weird culture they got these kind of weird little like cultural habits and customs and things like that and like he's a little out of the way place but you know that's kind of a neat thing i could kind of like you know go expeditioning on right like that could be a fun little thing to do right and that seems to be what happened with with willem and then he investigates the graves and you can actually see this if you go from bur if you look at bergenworth like from the back of bergenworth which is basically just willem's residence that's the area we explore there um it's just like a big like observatory and like personal residence for willem if you go from the back of bergenworth and travel um through it you'll notice all these giant graves they're all kind of like crooked and they're they're broke right there at different elevations and stuff so it's like okay they haven't been well preserved after all these years but then you go a little farther back and you go down this little hallway right you find this little enclosure stone enclosure someone built stone walls and a little gate for you to go through and inside is this perfectly erected um gravestone right right up front i think there's like one like one villa local villager like standing there like staring at or whatever right and that's where you uh this is sorry this is where you summon those guys prior to the uh right it's around that area right like that yeah like around that area you find that enclosure with this grave and that's that seems to be the grave that willem first investigated like he found one of the gods graves he said oh this is good preserved i'm going to build an enclosure to keep animals and stuff from like getting involved and right all that so that way i can kind of have some control over keeping this little archaeological dig site secure and that's where they discovered the blood and then it's like okay now we've got to look more and he starts digging more and we see underneath bergenworth there's this um there's this this little uh lid right like this little uh what's it called a little like a basement uh like little like hatch that you can open well you can't open it but the idea is that you could open it like a trap door or something yeah especially this hatch that's kind of like the one you see in odin chapel where you use that to get into like the sewers for odin chapel and that takes you to their little it's little underground graveyard next door where you fight uh what's his face the father gascoigne so father gascoigne yeah right so it's the same idea right you there's a hatch you could open it could take you underground and we know from concept art and things that this was definitely supposed to be like a cave level but you can easily infer that it was going to be something similar where you would go underground and this is probably how they got access to the the uh the chalice dungeons originally right like the idea was that you were going to um they they were digging and they were trying to look in to investigate more into this oh this is kind of interesting this blood stuff kind of useful and then he goes and finds this entire tomb complex these underground ruins right and he's investigating and his uh his servants go mad as they do this expedition doing so william's like hey there's a lot of there's there's a lot of interesting stuff down here and then he basically found the university of bergenworth and bergenworth means um uh burial places something stone so the idea is that it's a burial place yeah so burial place worth or the value he's trying to show the value of the tombs of the graveyards that he's found in yharnam so that's the entire i thought it was just i thought it was like burke b-e-r-g like stone no no bergen means like a burial place a grave a tomb et cetera so the idea is that it's trying to show you the the worth the value of these yharnam graves that he's found so the ones both above ground and of course the ones below ground which are probably more relevant to him now especially after he finds is at the bottom so hmm so yeah so this is yeah this that that's where it all starts really uh he of course gets students fl does he like okay this is like a bit of a lawrence aside what is his backstory is he just like a kid who who meets up with willem is he also like an aristocrat do we know any of this we don't really get much on a lot of the students at bergenworth before they were students right um but obviously willem is someone who comes from a well to do family but it's a lot less clear like you could probably assume most of these guys are probably like decently well off considering they're sending their kids to some remote university so far away right um so they might all be people who might have been doing so but it doesn't ever become relevant enough to infer properly i think and we don't have anything in the translations that give us like good like instances on like are they like noble scions or something like that so unfortunately we don't have a lot on that front what we can say though is for sure is that pretty much like bur like willem as a as a character his big focus is trying to understand and use the blood because he sees its potential for humans well i i shouldn't say the blood he sees the potential of the arcane that the great ones uh access the power of the cosmos he sees that as something that could be very influential in advancing the human race right yeah so he's this this person who really sees um i i would comment again like compare again to like modern daily it's like you're you're elon musk's your jeff bezos your bill gates like these people who they have lots of money and they like spending on charity and they're like oh we're gonna build these these these new technologies they're gonna put a chip in your brain it's gonna help you advance like so sort of advance human potential in human society right it's the same idea with villain he just sees it through like this arcane magical stuff but it's like well how are you gonna get um how are you gonna get like so many people behind this weird arcane magical stuff well first you have to understand it so that way you can help like share it with people and understand it and then you also want to put it in a way that's going to make sense to this victorian era sort of everything now has to be about like science like everything has to be science-y right so we're gonna now make this into this academic sort of field that we're gonna be able to to translate and control and again this goes back to logan and um freck this idea of a man who tries to take art tries to take the powers of the gods it's like there are these divine mysteries that we have and we're going to turn them into arts of man with which man can control and we can disseminate across so willem is just seems to be the culmination of that concept that miyazaki finally gets to express yeah all right how long ago do you think uh the bergenworth excavation stuff like is that like what 20 years before the game begins a little bit more i would say i would say probably anywhere between like um as far as like at least half a century possibly like get like 40 50 maybe like 60 or 70 years i mean i would go no further back than a a century if i wanted to really push it but i would say it's probably closer to half a century because we have lots of characters like eileen talks about how she's get how she's starting to get how she's getting old um yeah um german's been german's been stuck aging in the nightmare for who knows how long like he's like oh lawrence well like the japanese script is especially sad because he's like oh i'm old and useless now i can't do it like he's like like he's just really like this guy who's just like listen just just stop like like i mean this isn't the immortality i was promised we also have mikolaj he miguel i think his slider indicates that he's like middle aged but he he's printed in a nightmare for some time too and it's like even if he fell asleep when he was an 80 year old man like we see in prador and we even see in german with a boss fight to that you're not really tied to your physical age in the dreamlands as much as you are in the physical gosh in general like one thing i've seen and what we talk about we'll talk about this more when we talk about the menses is that a lot of people seem to try to associate mikalash as like a student of menses i've never gotten that impression reading the script um no i it's indeed like he's the leader of menses right well he's the lead yeah he seems to be the leader of men's bio indications but not as far as he's a student of bergenworth before he became the leader of menses i should say oh he's not a student of burgundy not as far as i can see like it seems the idea with menses is they just larp as students like they take the uniform and they put it on but they aren't actually students themselves like one like for example maybe this is because it's called the school of menses in english but it's actually not the idea that they are it's not school in the sense of oh let's go to a little it's our little academy type of deal it's school as in like a faction or like a school of thought right so like so like uh like so it's something in terms of like they have this focus and we we've talked about this before the idea with bensis is that menses is supposed to be if i remember right it's latin for month and the idea with japanese is that the term for for month is the same kanji used for moon so it's the idea is that they are basically the school their school of thought focuses around the moon and we see that in their rituals and trying to get the blood moon and all that stuff so that's the idea behind them but the idea is that as a faction they they are they don't seem to like it doesn't seem like nikolas has any connection to um to the earth like only so far as the choir also has a connection to burger worth right like it's the same i think then do you think then that his sort of uh his disparaging comments about rom maybe are given to him by lawrence it well because here's well here's the thing a lot of what we see when it comes to like like the burger worth generation is they're the ones who experience a lot of stuff like they're the people who went to the fishing hamlet and were there when rom and stuff happened what happens though with say um later generations you have the choir who inherited their thinking straight like they they're a direct line to willem through the student through lawrence and the students etc so like the general let's just say the traitors right the traders who left bergenworth to continue doing blood um blood experiments and then you have um uh mika lashing company and mikalash and uh the mensa school seem to generally get their ideas they get some from lauren they borrow some of it from lawrence and his per like personal efforts and things like that they take a bit from um rom and uh costs and then you have like sort of all this sort of gets mixed together and sort of this is a strong anti-choir basis and and we've talked about this before in that uh the choir and uh the choir and mensis their big divide like both of them accept that blood is incredibly critical in order to reach transcendence right like they're both they're both in agreement on that the problem is the order of things they the idea is that um the choir thinks we need to do all this blood experimentation so we can and uh sort of rise ourselves to a certain level and then our gods will then communic get communication with our gods and once we get in contact with our gods and we have some sort of tell them hey look who look at us they'll drag us up and take us the rest of the way and the menses idea sort of the opposite they have this idea where it's like okay we need to communicate with our gods and they'll give us the secret so that way our blood we can make our blood experiments go the right direction but both of them agree that the blood experiments are are the the critical step needed in order to jump start into becoming great ones right because those are the that's the medium for metamorphosis and what happens with with bergenworth is that willem's like uh no we're not doing this anymore he he sees the first but he sees the first beast and he's like uh no this was a mistake a stop to this but it's also interesting because you have like uh lawrence becoming a beast and like that's like oh look at what happens when you just recklessly experiment with the blood you just become a dumb beast and then you have willem who's like well look at what happens when you just sit down and meditate all day you just sort of become a mushroom well yeah so it's this idea of like you you're both just sort of stick stiltifying none of you are really getting to where you want to go oh yeah well this is the idea this is sort of the tragedy of willem and this is something that again doesn't get picked up i think in part because of the localization if we go look at the um uh what's it called the uh the i-cords yeah if we look at let me draw drag it up as a man yeah here we go here we go so if we look at uh so like if we look at the i-chords for example you can actually see that um one of the things when you get from willem i think this is provided by the uh the fake yosefka right like you kill her and she provides you this i chord one of the things that the the english one kind of says is um the idea is that okay you get this i-cord willem wanted this so that way to elevate his being and thoughts to those of a great one by lining his brain brain with eyes the only choice he knew if man were to ever match their greatness well the nuance is a slightly different in japanese and that if the idea is that okay he sought this so he could get the thinking eyes yes it's for the sake of harboring eyes within the brain and acquire the great ones higher thinking or perhaps so again this is supposed to be a signal of okay let's try to specify and get a little bit more like be a little bit more precise and accurate in what we're saying here for the sake of competing with higher ones as man so the idea this is again one of the things that people don't realize is that william didn't want transformation at certain points oh he that was his thing he he he gave up on that line of thinking like if he ever had this idea that okay we should transform he gave up on it real quick because he saw what happens with um with beasts and all that thing he did not want this his idea is that he wants to compete with the great ones as man he wants all the powers but none of the downsides of transformation so that's why that's why stuff like say um carol is such an ideal this would if carol introduced something like the what's it called the little like the the cast iron thing but it's for runes if he introduced that invention to willem he would he it would have been his ideal right because the idea is that willem's like oh it doesn't involve blood no transformation no metamorph it's just putting that power straight into your brain so and it's also it's it's again this idea of taking the divine sort of arcane and codifying it within a scientific man understandable framework yeah it's to make them arts of man that's the idea willem does not want to be a great one he wants to have the power of a great one that's a very important difference because once you understand that all of his actions you see afterward makes sense he bans the blood he says no more we're not doing this blood experiments we saw what happens with the beast thing like this this isn't this is why he has this big adage like no okay blood you know we're born by blood makes us human and then we lose our humanity like always for your blood like blood is not something to be messed with and so he doesn't want to deal with any of that on that front and this is why he the same thing you see with him with the the phantasms he put some phantasms in himself and we see he turns himself into a seed bed we see this idea with how they're like growing these like little like mushroom things out of his back of his head and he's like he he he's been basically stuck like that for a while from biola indications his own desire his own force of will of saying no i'm not going to transform i'm not going to transform him i'm not going to transform but as we can see long term that causes his brain to stagnate as well because when you're trying to basically his body's turning into this thing that's inhuman but it's not letting him go all the way so it just sort of kind of leaves him in this weird limbo spade and eventually like his own brain starts losing control over his body at a certain point and so you can see the same like tragedy of willem and that he wants to try to he wants to try to have all the ups he's trying to discover the secret the secret like formula in order to get all the upsides of of being a great one without ever being an actual great one because he doesn't want to be a cthulhu monster he wants to be a man is there any indication in the game that you can um that you can cross the boundary into grade one sort of the mentality and the powers of a great one without crossing the physical boundary as well well so far we don't see that in the game as far as i can recall um and there's nothing in the descriptions that ever sort of make that like it may be theoretically possible like again but like whether that's practical is another matter entirely like willem definitely wasn't able to do it and he seems to be the only one that was able to do it like he was the person who was like okay we need more eyes with him we need to think like it's all about like this sort of mental enlightenment right like it's this idea of we will just sort of think our way into having this higher being in discovery but the problem is that we discover is that you can't sort of separate the blood from the person even if you don't drink blood and write right and all that like with the blood transformation stuff like your body is made your you are blood right like your body is 70 at least blood so um and depending on your interpretation of the cosmology probably more but the idea is basically is that blood is sort of part of you it makes you what you are it is you effectively um and so sort of this idea of like the physical transformation that comes with blood and the sort of mental transformation that comes with blood they go hand in hand because it all comes from the same source and this is what makes it so difficult is that willem is trying to separate those two out it's just it becomes too hard for him um and then one other thing that we i think this is probably a good point we could talk about with the rom and the fishing hamlet incident at this point is that um rom sort of becomes a a a a turning point where willem starts losing control and he never really gets it back um we see like we see like teetering around there but it never becomes this point where he's able to keep what like sort of like you open pandora's box like he's able to to ban blood and we see like it seems like this is how he gets in contact with german because it's like oh hey there's this this specialist over in yharnam who sort of deals with beasts like this maybe he can help us do that and then like graham's like oh this is some interesting stuff immortality almighty power you know i might be interested in you know i'm getting up there in years i might be interested in following this huh german specializes in uh hunting beasts doesn't he so we have beast in yharnam before the introduction of the blood oh yeah this is something that you have there's old beast legends so like one thing that doesn't get translated very well is what's it called the the church pick or whatever um it'd be more accurate to call it the church steak because the idea talks about old steaks and in the old beast hunting legends and things like this so it's again it's playing on that old deal you know you stick like a steak in the vampire heart or whatever right so same same concept here it's the idea of oh like there's these old legends of things that very much like are real life legends about like hunting vampires or werewolves you take this like wooden or silver steak and you have to put it jam it through the heart and you know like all this stuff like same idea and the idea was the church converted those legends into a practical item and that goes into like holy blades and things like that but it's the same idea that there's these these constant references in the script to like this time of of beast sometimes going for example we have the example with um uh the the league the league or an example of like these foreigners like they're chasing this beast back to yharnam right we have these like constables of like this neighboring again goes back to forbidden woods is is close by to like these these other human settlements that can travel to yharnam rather readily yeah these consoles are like chasing the beast back and then the beast ends up uh getting one back on them while they're in the forest and kills them and then like uh walter ends up uh killing and eating like he ends up eating the eating the beast as sort of like this sort of like revenge play and he ends up discovering his own runes and now he's a hunter in the league right so yeah saying sort of concept is that beast and like same thing with yamamura or uh in uh in uh in the dlc yeah in the nightmare same idea right like he's this guy who like a beast like killed his family or something like that right and he's got he's on the quest for vengeance against this beast um because the idea is that these beasts seem to be those who get it seems like beforehand yharnam basically just like drove out the beast right and he just let other people deal with them he's just like ah oh no it's like john became a monster again about like get the pitchforks and the torches and they're like oh chase out the monster and the monster goes running off and then you get like consoles are like no go back go back go back pack you well you foul monster then yellow mora's like oh it ran back home i'm gonna i'm gonna hunt it down and kill it like yeah you have this very it's a very clear like uh cultural history of like yharnam's always been drinking blood and they've always had a beast problem and so so eventually you have someone like um german show up and oh well the idea with german is this is something that's actually very interesting that people don't seem to pick up with german and the the first hunter of hunters um who was probably also one of german's first apprentice or at least like partner in crime then oh no before eileen we're talking about eileen's master type of deal oh oh okay yeah yeah yeah so like the the the blade of mercy and the burial blade right um they're supposed to go like they're both made of meteoric iron um or cytorite and the idea is that um the implication is of course is that basically they got access to a meteor which we've talked about this before is the idea is that like uh the the great ones are the stars and the stars when they get pissy they just send meteors in response like uh screw you hey hi hey ah you yeah now i have to censor that damn it no no fine keep cut no let me let me no it's fine i'll keep it in no no let me redo it i got this i was about to see i i warned myself i i was even careful i was like i i won't say no no screw stillboard doesn't work so you see this idea with the stars so you take the star you take the stars they're the great ones and the great ones basically whenever there's a pro problem that they don't like they just send they send a media response they're like ah go i'll go off with a habit and all that stuff so what happens with um what happens with uh with german or in the first hundred hundreds you can imagine like this person who's living um who's living in this town um who sort of sees all these this beast problem and that that seems to be german's prime motivator for for so much of his life is like he wants to hunt the beast he wants to get rid of the he wants to get rid of this beast problem that exists in yharnam and and part of that is for him is going through and being like okay well how am i gonna supposed to do that and like so you can imagine this man is like sort of like praying to the guts oh god send me a sign whatever and it seems like his prayers reached one of them and one of them sent me to your writing response and then uh but we and we see this rather consistently is that the gods whenever the the great ones basically send their response it always seems to somehow get interpreted in the most positive light for the people like oh god has answered he's telling me to take this iron forge into a weapon and go hunt the beast myself and that seems to be the idea with garmin and they create this these weapons out of meteoric iron and they start hunting beasts right and then well the suddenly the hunters we start seeing some of the hunters that he of his apprentices start having uh issues of their own um and they start becoming beasts or they start becoming drunk on the blood of the hunt right and then we see one of his partners um who also has the blade of mercy becomes the first hunter of hunters and he's a four he's a foreigner a german may be the same way but these are people who sort of come in here and they're like okay i'm going to i'm going to now basically hunt all the hunters who become drunk on the hunt so that way we can all sort of like preserve this little harmony so that way i check the hunters you ch you check the beast and like everything sort of works out yeah right and then then uh then german sort of gets on the train with willam and becomes interested in this sort of like this all powerful and as we see he eventually gets will willem doesn't go the way he kind of wants things to go so he ends up leaving along with lauren so he's like well it's like a listen sorry listen sorry this guy's i like this guy's ideas better listen listen i've killed a god i'm in it like in for a penny in for a pound well this okay so this is a good thing to talk about is actually that god we're talking about in question is cost so this is actually something the fishing habits massacre i want to ask you uh before we get too far on this the fishing hamlet massacre it ends or like maria throws away her weapons and uh it goes for sort of a simple life she doesn't like the uh the blood connotation of the weapon of uh the uh of the con conventional cainhurst weapons which is very atypical for her clan yeah so she assumably leaves then because like she what is it she sees german join lawrence in this sort of yeah we really need to use the blood which she isn't on board with or what we have to understand is how did maria meet german and how did a lot of this start in this school because this is another thing a lot of people seem to think that the fishing hamlet massacre happened like when the students were still part of bergenworth no no that wouldn't fly with willem that was all that was lawrence that was after they left and everything right so um like maria seems to have been picked up as one of german's apprentices because she's really into the the beast she likes the beast hunting aspect but she doesn't like the blood blades and sort of all this sort of use and over uh overwhelming reliance on blood and obviously uh german at least ostensibly seems to represent like everything she likes of this idol this man who just uses conventional normal weapons he's sort of like this old rogue who goes in and challenges the beasts of his town whatever right um and this seems to have been this seems to have been a apprenticeship forged in the wake of lawrence coming to cainhurst and uh making connections there so sort of before that the bergenworth had done a expedition type of thing to fishing handle which makes sense because the idea is the fishing hamlet is some fishing village out um nearby like we see north of yharnam is a ocean right so like there's this idea there could be any number of villages which are just dotting the coastline somewhere there right so yeah so the idea is that it came in the village was just a normal fishing village um seems to have done whaling and stuff um but it looks like they were they weren't just whaling normal animals they were also whaling um cryptid type of creatures and we see these same skeletons in the um the chalice dungeons again and specifically these are things you find in like the the remnants of like the sewer system in like the dungeons and stuff so like you see them in like these old these pits and like sewer grains and like all these things and there's like they're just like at the bottom of the muddy uh landscape and you see the same thing in the fishing village so it looks like they were wailing um these large like arcane creatures which were transformed by costs um just by influence of being like around the great one and stuff like that right so yeah eventually they come in contact with coss and this is something i i didn't realize until i was going through the script why people had this idea but this idea that coss was sort of this a corpse that washed up on the seashore one day and they all decided they would worship it right like this was an idea that i found had a lot of credence in the english community that isn't actually what it says in the japanese script it isn't said that cost washed up on the she shore which is i'm pretty sure what the um the parasite item you get from killing the orphan uh tells you it's actually that she was abandoned on the the shore and this is relates to her death right she was killed on those shores and her body was just left there on there so it's not like a beach whale scenario right like very important distinction yeah exactly so the idea is that it's a living cause who gets in contact with it and the idea seems to be that cost wants a kid well like all the other great ones getting a kid is very hard so one of the casa's idea seems to be she's going to uplift the villagers and try to create basically her perfect uh sperm donor let's say yeah well yeah and uh that obviously doesn't work because this catches the attention of the bergenworth defectors who decide to uh they have they have their own plans well this idea right like the idea with the with the the fishing hamlet and you can see this a lot in their their their they have their priests dedicated to costs and they have this like electricity arcane power that they manipulated as a result and all this stuff and they the cost gives them like food gives them food and things like this in order to subsist on and that transforms then and causes like okay it's all coming together we don't know how long cos has been planning this like she's been maybe been playing long games she's like okay it's all coming together and eventually she gets herself pregnant but as we see there's um there's the there's spies from the church uh amongst the villagers like you know that random beggar there like he's you know that harmless little bigger in the shadows of the village you know just waltzed into town one day seemingly you know constantly like just there like begging for for you know just a coin in order to get by for one day you know he's not suspicious whatsoever wait what are you talking about there the so if you if you actually recall in the nightmare there's a point where you find a fishing villager um and you see him he's brutally going down on a corpse there and when you actually kill him and get to the corpse you figure out it's a corpse wearing the church spy outfit the same one that simon and company wears so it's the idea to make him look like this unassuming raggedy old beggar that just you know he's on the street corners or whatever but this is the church's spot these are the church's spies and normally they're used in order to get a heads up on the beast scourge though as the description acknowledges how can you really tell if before the symptoms show up right so it's like it's sort it's sort of like well who whoever whoever they if they think it's if they think it's a person you're dead you better it doesn't matter that's actually how uh that also explains how simon knows about the face oh yes that's the idea right simon is from this early he's the idea that he is from the japan i think he's in english he said like one of the first hunt hurt hunters of the church or whatever um the japanese is something like he's he's a hunter of the earliest era in the treatment church right so he's from way back when so he's someone who was if he wasn't involved in this incident he's at the very least definitely heard about it by the nature of his work and his colleagues and associates right because he's one of these spies um and he's one of the ideas that yes you have these beggars that are just you know unsuspicious little unassuming little guys on the street corner you know like type of people that anyone in society overlooks right like they're below your notice they're below your eye line right yeah um but really they're they're reporting it and they're like uh they they report back to the church hey cos got pregnant and that's the idea that lawrence is like well german i have a job for you so uh the the umbilical cord from the fishing hamlet that's not the court that willems sought uh no no no no not that one that one seems to be developed in the fake uh the fake uh what's it called uh uh yosefka that one seems to be something that was created in her experiments okay so like she produces like she's the idea oh i can see i could like she produced that in herself and this is something that needs to be like this is something that's sort of worth talking about the choir actually is perhaps the most successful in getting their plans across at least um more well until the uh until the ritual destroys everything well to some extent like i don't know if they would have ever succeeded per se but they definitely see more success than menses as far as getting what they uh getting what their end goals are at the very least they for the most part the question is just if the great ones are ever going to actually respond because they seem to think of the great ones as these benevolent deities who really want to help when it's like no they just want babies you just you just exist to give them babies um but uh but like yes so the idea is that um it wasn't that the that umbilical cord was something that willem wanted he wants umbilical cords in general and we see in the um we see in bergenworth that there's a lot of experiments on trying to create great one babies artificially um and this again this seems to be actually something the dlc explains as being a response to what lawrence does because because the idea is that willem and company they already went to the fishing hamlet as far as their expedition right that's where rom gets in contact with costs and stuff goes down that causes rom to become a great one and this is where like i said william starts losing control because he can't really get his students to not want to be interested in studying the giant spider he's like hey hey you're our former colleague uh you're now a giant spider thing can we study you and they start having again more interest in transformation again and you can't really get around this and the more that willem sort of staunch about this this is where lawrence and company are like okay we're leaving we're we're going to go out on our own and stuff and and willem is basically and this is something that else people don't realize it wasn't like um lawrence and company betrayed them so now like they don't have anything to do with each other bergenworth and yarn and and the tr in the healing church were still um were still uh overlapping they were still in contact together that's the point of the gatekeeper right the idea is that the gatekeeper is burdenworth's watchman it's mentioned in a note and um when you have the when you have the gatekeeper coming in uh he's supposed to just sit there he's one of the old man servants right he went mad and whatever but he still he's still loyal to william so he's doing his job just sitting around basically listening for hey what's the password oh you know the you know the whole fear the fear the blood right okay so i can let you in and then you can go to bergenworth and you can sort of exchange notes basically right so the idea is that they're still in communique and that's the idea with the the church giant you see in the um in the uh what's it called the the classroom building the lecture hall or whatever it's called yeah it's like same ideas like you see him among the research tables and he has flaming fists so against this idea of hey um burger worth here's one of our church giants we captured and enslaved uh could you like study and maybe figure a way to give us like better beast hunting weapons so we don't waste all this silver making giant axes for them and they're like oh okay we study him and what if we give him like flaming fists and he could just like punch the beast to burn them i think his internal id is like franken knox they're all called frank and something yeah that well they're obvious like frankenstein like ripoff type like every every like it's very obvious like when you take the the what was it gothic horror and like uh which i'm amazed it hasn't been done if it's been done before amazing hasn't gotten as popular as bloodborne did this idea of merging gothic horror with like literally from like literally just the next era like a few decades later the uh the cosmic horror of like lovecraft yeah yeah it's a it's you you see a lot of it in like uh coc like call of cthulhu modules they have like era specific ones some take place i i love uh cosmic horror in the american west i think that's a really fun sort of idea oh well that's that's an interesting thing to think about yeah uh but um yeah i also like uh this is sort of an aside um the idea that bloodborne opens as like this gothic horror game then it transcends into the like this it unfurls and reveals itself to be like this cosmic horror story but at the end it it go it winds back down to being gothic horror again where it's just you need to sigh like you need to bring peace to this ghost that still exists right but another thing that's worth pointing out is that um and that's the idea with cause right cost is japanese name is ghost or go like yeah that's a ghost yeah so that's the idea um and one of the funny things about um when you go into the the the idea of the great ones is that they have the trappings of like cosmic horror but they're really not they're more like uh they're more like your traditional demon or or fey creature right like this sort of entity which could be mischievous or villainous it can be sometimes helpful for you but you really don't want to rely on them right like compared to like say the idea of cosmic cores these unknowable creatures of like beyond like of beyond our comprehension that they just drive you mad like a lot of like miyazaki seems to riff on like sort of like rips up a lot of this uh those like trappings for it but then like when you get down to it the great ones are more um a lot more uh mundane i guess i should say compared to like the cosmic portion monstrosities like you said earlier they are just human right like that's the idea right like that because that it goes to their origin they were just human and they have very human motivations they received the they they they received the enlightenment and the desire to become higher beings like that's the idea what it is right like it always goes back to this idea of of of sort of surpassing human evolution and becoming this grander being you see this in demon souls you see this as some extent in dark souls and you definitely see this in bloodborne this idea of trying to become beyond a man and what does that mean to become beyond man well the great ones figure it out and they realize it kind of sucks because now one of the main purposes for humanity to sort of procreate and create and be something a better generation of you it's kind of hard because now you've jumped to the almost to practically the end of the evolutionary line so yeah and this is the idea that now miyazaki compares this to the idea of how more advanced civilizations that has become the birth rate has seen a huge decline obviously in japan but in the west in general this idea that there's this huge just this idea that these uh the more we advances of civilization the less we're having babies or for whatever cultural or social or personal reasons go into that and miyazaki's just sort of applying that now to this idea that on an evolutionary scale they've now hit the end where it just becomes extremely difficult now to produce a true air this is the idea with phantasms too right like what what is the difference between say a phantasm uh like say uh a great one producing a phantasm versus say producing a actual like a great one child so to speak right well the idea is that the phantasms are self-produced they are a part of the actual great one they are aspects they're like they're like the vermin you find in the blood of beasts yes right exactly like this byproduct it's a self-creating byproduct right so like if a great one if a great one needs a service it could just pop out a piece of itself as a phantasm right and it becomes its own little thing but it's basically just a lesser aspect of it right and the same thing when we take the the remnant of ebrietus and we could summon a piece of embryotes from that even even after we killed her or whatever so it's like it's this idea that these these are sort of like just self-created little pieces you cut off of the great one essentially and like say with cos like all these parasites exist within her body or whatever and you can like take one of those and make them a weapon and combine them with other phantasms and all this stuff so yeah same concept and then um that that's where the idea is that it becomes this very human motivation for the great ones themselves is like okay well what are we going to well what are we going to do well we need we need now we need a lesser being to help come in but we have to somehow make this lesser being not only be able to give us a child either impregnate us or we impregnate them or whichever head we also have to make it somehow so that it creates that it has to be something way that it can create a something different but also in some ways better or new right like some something that's sort of like us or maybe even better than us and that becomes incred that's part of the reason why it seems the evolutionary angle is so difficult um because you can't yet you have to have it like you can't be too different from us but you can't be too close to us either yeah otherwise you just sort of get um a degenerate sort of evolution well well otherwise otherwise the great ones wouldn't deal with humans at all they would just be screwing each other so yeah yeah so don't look there yeah so uh lawrence leaves bergenworth takes all of his students wow probably some stay behind well yeah we see a fair number do like those are all the people that become the monsters we see in the the lecture building right so like we don't know how big it is if it's a majority or not like at the very least he took a sizable chunk right like carol seems to go with him like a bunch of a bunch of these students sort of kind of are in his same boat where they're like yeah we want to keep on using blood experiments we're sorry master um so they go they go off and as we as we know from alfred they go to uh cainhurst because cainhurst has cainhurst again much like much like the fishing hamlet scenario um there's this peaceful this idea of like a peaceful interactions with this other culture that's nearby that has a history with the great ones that we can take advantage of um and obviously these bergenworth is an archaeology and a history uh place so it makes sense that they understand and they've looked into researching the general history of these places if only so they get more legends that might help inform them about the the about the ruins under under their feet right so yeah and i want to talk a bit about that so originally uh i used to think that what happened is this is the chalice dungeon and then you the cain hersley and tribe or sex they sort of you know they dig up and they build the castle over this i no longer think that because like that that tunnel near the entrance to uh that sort of smack in the middle of the courtyard you wouldn't you wouldn't like that would be a courtyard so i i'm thinking surely the uh the lawrence and the and the gang they duck that whole thing up to get into the chalice dungeons well here's the thing we know there was a building there because we can actually see remnants of like staircases and stuff that led there so there definitely was something there and my thoughts and my conclusion is that it's a mausoleum and we see this stuff in relation to hemwick and some hemlock content with like um if you've seen some of lance mcdonald's content you've seen some of this this idea of seemingly we collect different items like uh coffins and things like that and we would assemble them in this sort of uh carriage and then we would see it probably with the idea and it seems like they only modeled the inside because probably the idea was that you would just go inside the carriage and like sort of like stow away and it would take you to gain hers so it's probably this idea of cane like how we enter like i would go to neato yeah yeah so it's probably this idea like and you've talked about this before the idea of probably starting in hemlock at a certain point it was probably some idea like um you would come back later on maybe and do that again this is a bit of speculation on my part but it seems to me the idea would have been something like there was a mausoleum there um where that would have like where you would bury a lot of the nobles of the cainhurst clan and by extension they would have access to the tombs where like their thumerian ancestors would have been bear it would have been right okay so it's probably something like there probably was something i think i think that's fair i think that's fair to say what i agree with you with with the idea of the the the courtyard is that you see a lift that's a shortcut to the library and that's very interesting because that seems it's very likely because it's like okay so you enter the courtyard right okay we can go through the main entrance there's like also this building that goes to the mausoleum but we don't know if there was an entrance to that it seems like it was just access from the roy the the building because all the the remnants are connected to the remnants of the the building where we find the queen so it's like the royal building basically the royal abodes let's say so like you have that it's like okay well there's also this lift you could take that takes you up to the their private library huh it's like that's kind of interesting for like if you're just a new visitor well it makes sense if you think about how lawrence comes in he's like hey i want to make friends with you we got this blood stuff hey you know you've got this great history maybe we want to kind of look through your library sometime okay we'll give you ready access we'll build this lift here yeah maybe maybe kill you one day and steal your child you know anyway hey lawrence ixnay on the child exactly but exactly but that's the idea right it's like they go to to uh k-nearest and they're like hey are you interested in having a blood baby and and uh and our cainhurst queen annelise seems to have been very enthusiastic about this idea yes and they were all they were like okay sure we'll help you with your research and all that so like while while the the while like the so like the japanese um for the blood ministers is more accurately blood treaters and the idea is the healing church is the treatment church this idea of like you're getting medical treatment with these people and the idea is that they were and you hear this in japanese dialogue with german german knows the the truth knows the healing church primarily as the blood ministers or the treaters right like his ideas like oh yeah the the tree the blood the treaters as the treatment church is now called or whatever like for him he's like okay like this is how i knew them because they didn't start out as a church they were just like they were like your resident uh snake oil says when he was like hey we've got this great new tummy that could totally be able to save you and cure all your illnesses it's called blood heals what else y'all exactly why are you you you good man i'll pick a random man from the crowd why are you sir and it's like a guy wearing the same clothes like he's also wearing the healing church scarp no it's the it's the spygarb just yeah you saw your random beggar but strangely handsome perfect come on be like hey has that guy been around i don't know so like yeah but like it's the exact ideas like they come in and they have this this new fancy new blood treatment that's totally going to make things revolutionize the medical field it's gonna be better than anything you've had in your culture that's all about healing and and med and treating yourselves and all that right with blood and things like that yeah so they they they come in and this is where things this is where like yharnam sort of falls under the spell because like hey we don't trust foreigners but you know they bring some good blood and then the idea with um do they distrust foreigners prior to lawrence though this this seems to be just a general yes it seems to be just a general um people don't like yharnam because yharnam has this vampiric blood drinking quality and yharnamites don't like them in turn so it's sort of this idea where bigotry for bigotry right there's a lot of there's a lot i mean i mean when people don't like yharnam yharnam keeps shoveling their beast problems into their neighbors well yeah fair enough yes fair enough right we don't like you drinking blood and we don't like that all these beats seem to strangely come from your neighborhood your direction there's also that weird red moon that sometimes just hangs over your your your city yeah you know what yarn is just a weird place just don't deal with it anyway but the the idea is that yeah the the idea is that they're coming in at the the students of bergen where they're coming in and they're these these these medical treaters right like they're these new doctors that are totally going to make things better for everyone in yharnam and they basically this is how they get the influence to start turning into the church and you can actually see this in old yharnam there's two churches there's the church of the i think that was the english called the good chalice or whatever the idea is that jealousy yeah the idea of the chalices by the way is they're supposed to be holy grails like that that's the japanese term like the holy cup the holy grail again yeah so it's a reference to that um and against this you know the whole like you know the cup of christ sort of idea right and the idea is that that's the church of the cup so there's no it's not like that doesn't seem to be the actual name of the place um it's just that's how people identify it because um because that's where the the old church where they had one of these sumerian chalices that seems to have been brought with them in their religious practices and things like that again this goes back to like again inheriting thumerian culture and things as the the layers keep rising right yeah so the idea is that there's two churches there's this one church which and we see ends up getting burned and then there's this other church that we go through where we hear like all the beasts like praying like oh like all this like weird like singing they've got over like the the crucified or whatever um yeah scourge piece yeah no that's curse but is it a scourge beast no no it's the bloodthirsty beast or yeah right or yeah yeah the blood starts yeah right right sorry i'm thinking of the japanese yeah the english is blood starved right blood start feast so um again that if you look at there you see the same coffins and same ritual blood on the altars and stuff so this seems to have been the original church where the healing church was operating out of um and they were you know taking the bodies and it's like hey look you know these beast problems we gotta you know we gotta kill the people you know we're gonna take these these court these corpses off your hand and you know we'll just dissect and research them real quick so hey what are you what are you guys doing with those corpses you're taking hey don't worry about it how about that huh hey you want another blood vial well if you insist so like yeah so like it's it's all a big scam right it's like it's a huge scam is that the the the blood ministers are basically cainhurst is trying to create a blood baby right so they're trying to get this blood and they're using some of the blood it's sort of like how we see with hemorrhage how hemlike sort of gets used as a way it's like hey chemical we give you bodies for you to cremate and get body parts and all this crap you know you give us some of those ashes you got there those are some those are some really useful things for our bullets so same idea here is that um cainhurst is getting a lot of that blood it's being used in order to help create the blood baby and all these things in exchange you have all these experiments that the blood the healing church is able to do out of doing so german in his mind he's always going to think of them oh yeah it's lawrence and the blood trees because he knows them personally before there was ever this church thing right and he knows it's a scam so he's like oh yeah they're now called the healing church or whatever but you know like whatever yeah so um that goes into what we're well um that goes then into the idea that old yharnam used there used to be old yharnam and then we see the the latest version of yharnam up above so there's new layer gets added of the there's the old city and now there's yharnam up top on top of the valley and you get the cathedral ward which is basically this little church town so it's sort of like its own little chinatown thing where it's part of yharnam but it's part not part of yharnam it's sort of like somewhat of its own like independent little like sort of state kind of thing yeah and we see that again the same idea where it connects to a lot of uh a lot of um it connects to a lot of different places they have again you see the the clock tower that's in the old church towers this celestial tower with the special little like face that's all for like communicating with the stars same thing gets built now up top with the grand cathedral and all this stuff so yeah yeah so all of this is now tying together as we're going through the history we're getting closer and closer now to the the big event which is of course uh cos is pregnant and then german comes in and just german and his hunters come in and start uh causing problems and yeah and they do it they do it in the name of bergenworth or the fishing hamlet because here's again this goes back to my point the fishing hamlet knows it as bergenworth because they don't know about this what they don't know about their they're their own little like isolated village so they don't know they don't know i assume or healing church or any of that stuff they have nothing assumably they they remember german and lawrence when they came with will no no there's yeah they're saying not even it may not even necessarily be german per se it could also be laura because we don't know because here's the thing um it's very likely that a lot of the the cause something you have to understand is a lot of these quote unquote doctors they're also hunters right because that's the idea with church hunters right they're also the doctors so to speak right like the one at least the the higher ranking ones in the white clothes these are people and even the lower ranked ones we see they also have like they wear these medical gloves for surgery and stuff because they got to get hands on so the idea is they hunt these beasts and then they start like dissecting them on the spot if they can right it's not just your tape but it's not just okay we'll take the coffins we'll take the coffins off your hand it's also oh hey you know before let's just you know get you know get it as fresh as possible right like oh it's still it's still a lot is that that liver still alive let's look into that and study that like like this is the type of idea is that they're really trying to you know cover all the stops right yeah and so it's very likely that you have lawrence and company we're probably present as well as german and his hunters and they're going through and so as far as the villages are concerned oh it's birkenworthies those damn bergenworthians they they came in and they're they're um they're now destroying our village right so in their mind it's all burger worth because that's how they identify it because they remember when willem and rom and and lawrence and company were probably coming in before during their initial expedition their original field trip to the i liked it i like the idea of the fishing handler being like ah the the burial werthers who could have ever predicted that the clan called the burial werthers would be bad bearing that well i mean to be fair oh german's weapon is the burial blade so that's a that's another thing we should talk about after we talk about um the after we finish up with k nurse is uh the transition from german hunters to luther hunter lutvik's hunters yes that's that's a very because that's actually that's worth talking about right now because this is where it becomes really relevant so okay so like one of the things that becomes very obvious is well one german and company um can't deal with the beast problem because as the blood experiments continue the beast problem expands it with a thunk yeah and it stops being about nimble weapons with like sharp edges so that you can dissect them and it just becomes hammers big swords just put these things down well not even that because like the idea with um like german and company like german has to get like creative because he has these like nimble like weapons made of meteoric iron right and that's supposed to be that's supposed to have power which helps with the beast hunting but then you get the normal weapons and they're like saws and these things that really can help dig and tear them apart it's sort of like a dead space scenario right where it's like okay well what do we do with these beasts they're immortal beasts which seem to constant like we see this right like when some people transform um even if you kill them early they might still be far enough along that they'll revive as like these like half beastified corpses on the ground right like we see this with the quote-unquote drowning actually i don't know if they're called that in english but the idea is that in japanese a lot of these are corpses which were drowned they drowned in the waters or they drowned themselves in the waters trying to be like oh no i'm not gonna transform it i've got transformers like too late you're already infected basically you're talking about the uh people in the sewers no yeah like you see them in the sewers you see them in the the villa like in the village there's this giant oil field thing right like where they have all these guys they put them in there and they're gonna like throw down molotovs to just burn them all well that doesn't actually happen with you you just get burned because you walk through the oil for whatever reason but yeah the idea is like we're just gonna sit all we're gonna dump them in this lake of oil and then set it all aflame right like is this idea of like and like even if you if you go further out in the forbidden woods you see even more of these corpses and you see that it's near a camp with a bunch of pigs and stuff so it looks like you have a bunch of these um there was a bunch of these people who escaped the mob so to speak in the village and they started camping out there but they were transforming anyway so they drowned themselves in the waters nearby there and now like this pig is coming through he's like oh i i smell human flesh to eat yeah and that must have been very useful for the uh for the healing church that you just have these pigs located all over the place to clean up after your missus well same thing with the crows right like the crows are the crows have gotten so fat eating so much corpse they can't even really fly anymore like there's just i think that's from a from a gameplay perspective i think it's kind of cooked that there's not a single flying enemy in all of bloodborne they have flying enemies in demon souls and dark souls and like but bloodborne is the only one of these games that you always have a long-range weapon like you are guaranteed to have it at the start of the game there's no flying enemy uh i i don't know if that's part of the designer they just didn't want to deal with it because um i think if you see the community's reaction to elden ring flying enemies i think you can understand why well okay i love the flying eagles people put your hate put your hate in the comment section i won't read it but yeah so uh so uh lutvik takes over when german is trapped in the hunter's dream uh no no cause what happened so the hunter's dream thing is is it's like a thing because the idea seems to be okay we gotta deal with the these uh these uh hunting problems one idea to do this is to have um is to have the hunter's dream be set up because it creates like it sort of prevents you from dying so to speak right like it creates a certain immortality buffer for hunters right like you die you just go back to the dream and then you'll manifest again now there's a huge question about what happens to your body but you know we're not going to answer them it's like it's like uh like is my body just sort of left behind there's like a million is there like a million of your hunter corpses just around yard and people are like god this guy's got a lot of twin brothers anyway but like the idea is basically you go to the hunter's dream and then you just manifest back into reality again after like your soul goes back to the dream right like you're it's sort of like a nexus situation except in the nexus um the next set yeah well nexus actually nexus had the same problem where you would uh your corpse gets left behind a lot but anyway that's either here nor there the idea basically is that um uh lawrence makes uh he he does a ritual using the umbilical cord of course his orphan right and the idea is that we're going to try to get uh we're going to try to get um what uh we're trying to get flora involved and the floor is like okay uh you give me a baby i will give you whatever you want and like lawrence is like okay i will get you that here is your insurance well german basically agrees to basically be put under house arrest in the dream forever um until the deal gets worked out right um well that never works out so german ends up just sitting there and that's another thing you have to understand is that aging still happens like in the dreams and stuff like that so uh like this is why german's like oh i'm too old i'm useless now it's like german as we see he reverts himself to the last time he felt he was able to hunt at least well enough right so he goes back to when he's still an old man but he's an old man who can still fight but the german we see now he's this guy who who can't who's not who if he was in the physical world he'd probably be dead because he's just too old he's too feeble he he he he's given immortal life but not immortal youth so he's just continually aging over time and this is like this is sort of his suffering that he's going through until originally i'm sorry originally i had thought that lawrence got the court from anneliese to give to the moon presence but what you're positing now then is that the the pr the court they gave to the moon presence is the court they got from the fishing hamlet and that lawrence then goes to k nurse to try to get analysis baby no no no no no because cain has never had a baby in the first place that's the idea no but but he's he's trying to he he may not know that or why then do they destroy so the cainhurst and everything they're all working together already right so they're already working together on making a baby and perhaps lawrence is betting at this time that you know i'll have you know okay so we want to experiment on the orphan considering that we're using the umbilical cord you know that doesn't really tell us much on whether or not the orphan ever even survive is even alive at this point or whatever but it's like okay i will give you a living baby and so you have um annelise here who's creating this blood baby so we're just gonna feed her this corruption from blood and stuff like that and eventually she's going to give a produce somehow that's going to eventually give us a blood baby right that's the idea okay and then okay so we're just going to keep on doing this with this this this old tumerian descendant and things will work out somehow so maybe at this point lawrence is still betting on uh cainhurst thing working out well this doesn't work out long term for various reasons but it seems like after um after the after the uh after the uh the actual fishing hamlet and everything acquire it seems that the healing church generally speaking basically ignore like ignores them starts ignoring them like they basically start ghosting cainhurst because they got their own baby that they're experimenting on maybe that something good will happen with caners in the future but they don't really help support or do so because they got what they wanted right they got the baby they want to experiment on burger worst now trying to catch up we see these are trying to create artificial babies to try to keep up with the demand so to speak because now everyone burns like oh well they got their baby and they got to study well we we've got to now find it and as we can see willem doesn't succeed um all the the babies fail they think they figure out the chord thing the three you need three thirds chord but the idea is that um uh bergenworth basically falls apart after this point because again it seems like the influence of yharnam was too great like it's like oh lawrence is catching up this blood thing really does work and they start going crazy with the blood and turning into kin monsters and all that stuff so um ron's out of the picture by this point too so like things just things just aren't looking things just aren't looking up for birkenworth at this point but yharnam yarn is like okay we've got all this research material we can have we had this orphan we were able to study and all this stuff so now we're able to at least get what we want german on the side is going to basically become like the sort of like administrator right like his job is basically to sit there teach and mentor the hunters who are coming in right and they're becoming sort of part of this immortality thing like we said earlier maria throws away her weapon because she's like her entire um her her her image of german as this like great heroic admirable figure is shattered because now she sees that he's willing to basically do anything um to get what he wants including like murder entire include genocide entire village so she like basically is like okay i can't do this anymore like if this is what it means to be to be working under him i can and she she doesn't seem to ever cut ties fully she still obviously helps uh the church as the um the administrator in the cathedral for the experiments at that point but she still um she's still got this um she's still got this sort of hope in her but like it's obvious that she's completely tattered and broken as a woman at this as a as a female hunter i should say at this point and she just like her hair yeah we also have to we also we're also sort of dancing around the idea that there's probably like a bit of a of a of a like a casual romance happening here between uh the two which uh sort of complicates things even further maria and german then yeah yes marie and germain i mean so like so yeah things are getting like obviously like a lot of personal feelings are clearly invested into this right okay yeah so you have sort of like maria sort of german is sort of like this person who she had a very personal admiration for and this is something that is worth discussing let me bring up the item mania bring it up bring it up bring it up yep uh yeah okay so the hunting hat so like maria is distantly relayed to the undead queen but had great admiration for german unaware of his curious mania now the word for mania here is um mad passion more literally and the idea is it refers to like stuff like okay like he had this incredible she didn't realize that he had this incredible fanatic enthusiasm for what he's doing he's like he's will he like he's like if lauren says hey we need to we need to go through kill this village and take their baby he's like i'm there behind you chief and maria's like uh uh uh we're we're murdering like innocence it is like no i'm there behind you chief find me find me that great one i will hunt it down and rip that child right out of her womb and like she's like oh no no and she she throws her weapon into the well right but she never ever so so there's a lot of personal feelings involved in this and like her entire image of who german was is shattered but and we can kind of see obviously german cares a lot for maria when we get to the doll and things like that so like there's this idea that they had this very close personal relationship that probably was romantic and uh that sort of gets extremely frayed after this incident and marie is never able to break relations but it clearly leaves her torn and possibly suicidal in the end so okay um so we're going it was my understanding though that the court we find in the workshop in the waking world does that court not reference annalise uh no no in content it did like i think um i think in like before the game got it's like day one patch or whatever yeah like that i think that was left in the english description well the japanese description was already correct at this point but the english description still had reference to this and this got cut out um in i think it was the day one patch or something like this someone someone might be able to in the comments i'd be able to correct the exact timetable but yeah there that was something that was um that's that's you could find in the files but was lost and this was probably a remnant of when this is where you're getting the idea of probably there was an actual blood baby right because there was probably an earlier draft of the script and then eventually they said no no we can shelve this it makes more sense if we have this for dlc ready this idea of cos as like this this sort of like this is where the baby came from right yeah yeah okay because it seems and that seems to have been something that wasn't caught probably because it was in the english description not the japanese description until they had to do the day one patch or whatever it's like oh wait a second we gotta fix this all right that makes sense yeah yeah that that that that that's uh that's something that really needs to be clarified so like annalise never gets her blood baby in the final game in the final iteration of the game that we get the idea is that the the the healing church basically abandons them at by that point like they got their baby maybe lawrence is betting on like getting one out of her still but they don't ever really support them and this comes back to bite them later but that's more just a plan he has sort of on the back burner possibly and again and like i said if if he had any plans for it it wasn't shared with him with the rest of the church because they basically cainhurst goes ignored and they they uh annalise uh has a bit of a bone to pick with the church as a result after this so we'll get to that so now we go into um like you say uh german is now has this a bunch of immortal hunters now right and as long as these hunters stay committed to their job of hunting beasts everything's gonna be gold now german exists as sort of like the he talks about himself as being like he's the guy who let me pull it up again what was it that line oh yeah so he's the he's the advisor right so he's his job as the advisor is to oversee and make sure everyone's staying committed and well as long as they stay on the path that's been set for them it's good but if you start having people like jira who are like or maria who are like oh well i can't really do this anymore or whatever and we don't again i'm not even saying maria necessarily got involved in this in any way just again just giving examples right if you have people who aren't really ready to commit anymore and you see this in the the final game right like he says oh dear what was it the hunt the blood or the horrible dream in in the japanese it's more clear he's saying i see so you were swallowed by something too was it the hunt the blood or maybe the nightmare and it's again the same idea was that if you become drunk on the hunt like again this goes into the hunter of hunters thing right like so the idea is that okay if you're if you're a mortal how are the hunter of hunters going to get rid of you then and you see this in the lore of the game right like the idea is that okay well the hunter of hunters dresses like a crow because the idea is that in his homeland they do sky burial where they basically leave your corpse out and the birds come flying down and pick and eat it up right that's the idea basically he's from the uh he's from the shrine of storms probably probably no no well the idea with him is that the um is that he seems to be from like a tibetan type of like a not tibet type of idea in the east right because he's he's clearly seems to be he's a foreigner he's uh sky barrel is very popular in places like tibet so like it seems to be like he's from the he's again another one of these easterners who seems to have come in and migrated to yharnam for whatever reason and he becomes his partner as a hunter but now as a hunter of hunters he now makes his whole shtick is okay i'm going to dress up as a bird and i'm going to crows are obviously very prevalent in yharnam so that seems to be why he chose to pick the crow specifically so it's like okay i will be the the local bird which will now um sort of set your burial and send you off to the next world whether that next world is heaven in his mind or the hunter's dream so this idea is that the hunter hunters he kills you and he's like let's say you're a blood drunk hunter you get killed by the hunter of hunters you get sent to the hunter's dream well your his blade of mercy has now done that to you now german's blade of burial a burial blade or the blade of funeral is supposed to be the one that gives you now your next send-off and that he says well you know what you were consumed by the the blood now you're you're no longer focused on hunting the beast anymore you're not like you're no longer a you're now a liability basically so then he kills you in the dream and by doing that he severs your connection to the dream and now you're stuck in the world then the hunter of hunters can now kill you for good okay and send you off to heaven or whatever in his religion right yeah so that's the idea basically is that you have this system where now german basically can now kill you and cut you off and you know what we respect the work you've put in so we're gonna leave a gravestone in your memory in the dream right and that's where you get the giant graveyard right of all these past hunters who were who were able to be immortal helpers but for one reason or another they ended up having to cut off german had to kill each and every single one of these comrades of his in order to sever them up and then like you can see why german's so messed up after all of this now yeah so like yeah at this point now you have this entire system set up just for dealing with the beasts but it's still not enough the beast because of all these blood experiments are getting bigger and stronger and scarier and more horrifying so it's like um well what are we supposed to do about this like this is too much even for german system like i said these are guys who are there um german is a type who created this really creative weapon out of cytorite but now you have um what's it called the uh the regular hunters who are using all these these saw blades and all these things that really grind in and they get in they kind of carve and saw off like parts and butt because there are more because there's these immortal beasts which are very tough they're very strong and they're very big and now they're getting bigger and stronger so how are we supposed to cut how are we supposed to saw through all this all this massive meat well the idea seems to be that this was left for ludwig to have to solve basically now ludwig well maybe you can give me the introduction here on how how i should frame this okay so ludwig as he's understood in the english community is he's the guy who comes in after german to lead the hunt german he dealt with a small beast he would the nimble hunters and the armors of uh well no no it doesn't maybe matter so much about the armors but the idea is you're nimble and you have a fast weapon whereas ludwig because his beasts are bigger he uses just gigantic weapons that are much more strength uh focused and yeah and uh he eventually becomes a blood drunk hunter as well he sort of succumbs to the blood drunkenness and in the nightmare um yeah that's we can see that just just a quick aside do you think that's an actual representation of what he looks like or do you think that's just uh his face somewhat um you can if you compare his face to the his real body and that's represented well i guess i guess talk about reality when it comes to the dream world is a bit complicated to discuss but basically the idea is that the quote-unquote real ludwig um if you compare him as the what's it called the uh the uh the madman something madman i think in english right something like that yeah but anyway the lost madman or something like that something like that so the idea is that like yeah the mat the madman character you meet in the hinter tombs that is ludwig um and he if you compare their faces with the ludwig we see as a beast in the night in the hunter's nightmare it's uncanny like you say nose bends saying like twisted thing like the horse choice was very very very accurate but like yeah well um so every yarn mites are described to have like asymmetrical bodies in general but this one specifically i actually find anything in the script actually that mentions this maybe it was like it's in the it's in the promotional material there was a yeah because i couldn't find anything in the actual game that talks about this um and my general impression was that he is just a um and again maybe this was something that was in promotional material because it changed over time i don't know but i i have i don't get any impression that he was a yharnamite himself he just has this uh okay yeah um again maybe that something changed or what or what have you but again i think i think this is just a carryover of um it might be a carryover because it's not anywhere in the actual script um and i don't see it being reflected very well with ludwig himself other than the fact that he likes recruiting yharnamites which again makes sense because they're the only locals really for them to work with in the first place because again you have all these academic types who are obviously like they're they're not really uh they're not really uh in in it for the the the hard hunting yeah right but anyway but the idea is like definitely like yeah you can see he has the same twisted face features for sure and so whether or not he he was originally yarn might he's definitely someone who has become um enamored in this um this religious thinking that's present in yharnam for sure um this idea of like there there's this holy mission that they're being part of and this is this is where the the the healing church becomes the healing church right okay so originally it's as far as we could tell it seems like they were just regular doctors and things like that and then ludwig was really the one who really made the church like them really into the church that we see them as today more militaristic more sort of uh central sort of political power then yeah so like you see so like this idea that so far as like you have like these doctors and we're not just doctors we're holy men right and this is the idea with ludwig is that literally goes into the again as a good burger student he knows what happens when we have a problem well you go inside the underground ruins so so it's like just fine find stuff there because you never know what you might find and he seems to go all the way down to is and he finds the holy moonlight sword and the idea now now fans of like jrpgs and stuff they know like holy swords and things like that they're just a common motif right like you have the demonic or cursed sword and then you have the holy sword right there's there's these two swords like soul calibur is a great example of this right same thing okay or like king's field where you have like the uh the dark slayer and the moonlight sword yeah like it's it's this very common like jrpg motif right it's like it's like killing god as the final boss like sorry spoil every jrpg on the planet it's like it's always the idea you kill a god or some godlike being at the end and it's the same thing here it's like there's always this holy sword and cursed sword this is the idea that sort of gets wrapped up into ludwig because obviously this is a victorian era type of setting it's like the medieval era has now become anti-you know these those dark ages right like it's such a uh that period so awful and backwards and terrible or whatever well ludwig is very caught up in this idea of the chevalric era so to speak um yeah he finds goes back to what i was talking about but is when you actually go to the bath messengers in is you get weapons um you get the uh ludwig's holy blade and stuff like related to that so more sort of uh medieval knight fantasy yeah yeah so it seems like iz was very much a medieval type of culture originally and ludwig and going down there finds these medieval weapons and the one that's most notable of course is the holy moonlight sword it's this sword which again like the original seems to be a silver sword this this is something that actually seems rather consistent that weapons which incorporate silver have this righteous property um this this property that's that's holy and it has this power against the most corrupt beasts we see like the lost child children of antiquity and we see it you work against evil spirits um yes it has strength it is uni it is properties uh good properties against and uh the enemies related to cainhurst yeah specifically and again not just cainhurst it also works in the chalice dungeons with those same enemies plus other another evil spirit for specific to the labyrinth and the idea is that and also bloodlickers and things that basically things which gather are lots of corruption from having blood or they're malicious or things like that things with lots of evil intentions things with things with things with a lot of would you say cake array yes yes like i said when i say corruption i'm talking about god right here so definitely for sure so did you think you would get two hours into this conversation without me saying it did you think you were safe i thought i thought maybe but no no luck i've seen your vids you you really love you really fleshed on to this and i think rightly so yeah i like it and fromsoft likes it too yeah clearly clearly from definitely like well japan in general likes like you see whether it's whether it's name dropped or not it's definitely something that's very common there's a cave in elden ring called still water cave like this oh this is the cave of the stagnant water i i went there and i was like oh okay just find the poison swamp now just walk no but like um when you go to what's uh when you go to the sil when we go to the silver thing the idea seems to be that silver has these qualities and this seems to relate to the arcane for example quicksilver bullets are obviously mercury but the idea in japanese is mercury is water silver so when you have um so this is why you find in a lot of like a lot of besides range attackers you also have kin related enemies and this because again they have lots of water in their their beings and the idea seems to be that water silver seems to be this derivative from it's again this goes to this idea that um fish have trace amounts of mercury in their bodies like more higher than the average living being so it seems to be this idea that these like cthulhu watery fish monsters um have uh more because in in having more arcane like sort of power into them they also have now more trace amounts of this uh quicksilver to derive from blood and this is the same reason why blood billets bullets work right because we're deriving the quicksilver in our blood this arcane bullet power stuff and the idea seems to be that this carries over to actual silver and actual silver has similar properties and it works against malicious stuff specifically but it seems to also be the reason why you don't get necessarily get these very complicated weapons um with um again compared to like say you don't create a saw with silver right like you create just a regular sword yeah you make it a big sword because it's gotta have the extra force to deal with these giant monsters but it's the same concept base uh at the root of it is this idea is that this pro this is why like say for example the church giants have silver axes this is again like you say this isn't something that's mentioned in the game but it's mentioned in famitsu article way back when they confirm that yes these axes that the church giants wield those are also made of silver so the chilean church adopts silver because of ludwig and probably a little bit of influence because cainhurst also uses silver but purely on the defensive because well uh might get a little uh nasty if they start using silver against each other but um yeah so uh the same idea though the idea that it the silver wards away and exercises malicious blood and this is the idea being used against beasts for it um and this sort of idea of uh this this sort of holy crusade sort of that's the idea that is brought up into the yeah that gets folded into the church with ludwig yeah ludwig seems to be the one that real again like i said ludwig seems to be where the church really gets its start because he's the one that brings so much of this this sort of holy framework and mission with it we don't see any of this like we don't see anything earlier but then as soon as ludwig the first church hunter shows up we start really seeing this idea of the church being a thing yeah because lawrence german they were just in it for themselves that was just a scam exceeds like divine guidance and yeah yeah like like i said old yharnam is where we see the first church we but we can say that that might have only started setting up after they've been around for a while and ludwig comes in right so now it becomes okay no longer do we just have our little like the same medical outpost now it has to be a church and now when we build new york and we have to build a cathedral right is lawrence out of the picture at this point uh this this is this is someone this is probably not he's probably around when ludwig's still around but he definitely disappears later on because the idea is that lawrence is the first um the first uh cleric right so you need to have the church set up first probably and you also pro will most likely going to be needing um a little bit of time for lawrence to then move out to get out of the picture at this point because there's a lot of like events and stuff that has to get involved obviously we see the statue of him being made with the the experiments and things like that so he seems to be around for a while and he eventually basically kind of like goes off and um on a separate so uh we'll talk about that with the bloodletting he sort of swapped german out for ludwig where he's still doing all the research and all the experimentations and now he found this new guy who will just deal with the day-to-day of destroying the beast well yeah like so this again like i say like a typical bergenworthian um uh ludwig goes into the chalice dungeons he finds the holy moonlight sword in the sword it has this this ability this cosmic power to turn into this giant greatsword right like where it has this giant massive blade of the abyssal cosmos and like we said before this idea of like the great ones are the stars so when you're seeing all these little stars in the blackness of this like cosmic thing the idea is that that is space and when he has this sword ludwig closes his eyes but in the darkness again this goes back to the idea when like willem wears a blindfold and stuff and he like covers his eyes his idea of okay i need to stop focusing on the i don't need to stop seeing with my physical eyes i need to focus on the my mind's eye so the eyes within this eyes in my brain so i need to close i need to cover my physical eyes and now just see the i only see darkness now but that darkness is now going to give me an inner sight that's going to see into the the cosmos right and the idea with ludwig is he's not just seeing um when he comes to the moon when he comes to the moonlight sword he's not just seeing let's see what it has the he closed his eyes he saw darkness or perhaps nothingness the japanese is a little bit more important he's he in his shut-eye darkness or perhaps the void so the term for void here is literally means empty space um like an empty like an empty sky an empty an empty like uh empty like a void again a void sort of a sort of uh isn't the isn't it i think the term for it is mu like the sort of nothingness yeah well yeah that that that that's related to it but what we're talking about here is is it relates to buddhism things like this this idea of like sort of the the void which leads to sort of like um a nothingness which sort of encompasses all things so sort of idea and the idea here with ludwig is that he's sort of reaching he's he's reaching the realm of enlightenment so to speak the cosmos the the star world so he's going he's now connect in connecting to outer space basically he's now also connecting to the cosmic world when he's holding the moonlight sword because it has a connection to the spaces and now he's able to sort of um he's now able to sort of use that power to help give forge a connection when he closes his eyes now so he's not just seeing like say the back of his eyelids in darkness he's now seeing the actual void of space where the the stars of the great ones are and what he sees is uh he sees the english puts as a playfully dancing sprites it's more accurate to say he saw um he saw these things which mischievously twinkled and danced about so again twinkled is obviously very again twinkle twinkle little star type of idea so like again that's the same term the terminology we're seeing here and danced about again we think about like shooting stars and things like that um and has been given the meaning of guidance the idea is that ludwig is seeing all these stars in the empty void of space and one in particular is responding to him it has this again mischievous because again don't deal great what you don't want to you don't know what you're talking to don't know what your response is gonna get when you deal with great ones this one's like okay i'll play a little prank it twinkles and it dances about and ludwig interprets this as being oh this is guidance for the stars it's telling me that okay i gotta take this sword i'm gonna take these swords and we have to use it to fight the beast himself with something like this right like this is his answer again goes back to the idea with german is this idea of oh god please give me a response and like well god gave you a response but you you took it your own way yeah and you and you pointed this out in your commentary the idea is that um the star knew what it was doing it knew what it was going to end up though it just thought oh this is going to be a fun little prank and that's like the guidance rune is that's just an image of like a man sort of bowing to a star well you can think of it as a man-bound to a star you can also think of it again like you said like looks like almost like a hand reaching out and trying because again the idea with ludwig is ludwig wants to be a star and this is why you see this obsession with radiance in the holy blades everything about radiant they have this radiant badge they they their big thing is about again this is before the dlc so again no one tell me this wasn't planned you have these coins which are part of the you get as part of the the radiant hunters badge right the sword hunter's badge these coins are noted in the they say in the the english the particularly luminous in japanese it's more it's the same term used to mean they have emit a particular radiance again goes back to radians radiant hunter radiance with executioners which again connect to it so again this idea that um there's nothing for sale on the beast hunt night but they will serve as a guide post a guide a guidepost if you sprinkle them on your night journey so again same idea here ludwig is using coins as a representation of his idea they are hit the radiance of the stars is his guidance this is why the choir when you see you see in the church workshop where ludwig was operated obviously he basically helped found this at this institution the church workshop is where the choir are like oh the they they look into ludwig and they're like oh okay the cosmos is in the sky and that's why it's all connected there all right so that's radiance uh do we want to talk about the executioners right so like the executioners basically emerge out of the ashes of the holy blades because what we see is um we see like there's all these experiments that are being done in the grand cathedral and all that stuff you you showed in your commentary very well the idea that healing church has been basically um it's sort of like everyone's getting sick bigger and badder beasts are coming out and the church is like oh you know like well we'll help curious always we take you in you bring you your sick bed you know we're gonna bring you upstairs and we promise there's nothing bad hiding behind the curtain come with me grandma this isn't the way this is in the way to the hospital it's like no no it's a very special hospital and um as we see stuff like the living failures get produced because they're trying to create like all these like bloat-headed basically so like the the funny thing that dlc does and this is one of the hilarious things is that when i've been doing analyses for um bloodborne one of the things that i've been purposefully doing is i'm separating dlc and pre-dlc and post dlc so that way when i do these analyses i can kind of get an idea how much was it i've been finding surprisingly a lot of the stuff the dlc does isn't really necessarily new it's mostly fleshing out or trying to fill in some like tiny holes that were sort of left um in the base game tiny and huge holes let's put that right well i would disagree there but that that's where that that's a topic for another time but the idea is that when you go through with the the dlc on a lot of this stuff some of the uh some of the uh what's it called the uh the things that get uh shown off with the post dlc as the choir is that the choir becomes less and less original as you look into the the stuff that the dlc introduces because like um a bunch of things that they they seem it's like okay well it seems like they're the original no they're not really the originators of like the the the arcane haze stuff it's really more so you know there was like this prototype bay that was based on the flamethrower and then they kind of just like you know repackaged it into a nicer fancy hole it's like oh okay it's like choir kit apparently can't invent anything on its own except for call beyond which is a failure yeah but hey it's fun hey it's following their footsteps because as we see the term for failure actually used in a call beyond is the same used in the research hall experiments the living failures so it's the same idea a failed work failed creation or something okay so this idea is that um the research hall experience we're trying to create these bloat heads because the idea was you're gonna stuff them with water and this is again the explanation for why there's such a focus and association with bergenworth on water this goes back to the ram and cost thing as you pointed out and the idea is that um uh the lawrence and company are thinking okay um if we stuff their heads with water we can be able to sort of increase this sort of um uh sort of create this sort of signal connection to the cosmos with their brains and then that way they'll be able to communicate with the stars and we have the clock tower and all that which is all set up for that and things are going to work out and the idea with the grand cathedral is they're trying to do this on a mass scale and they're creating they're very all the all the people are getting buried and they become these seed beds for phantasms which create the star flowers that we see right um so and that becomes like that giant like star flower tree at the center of the the thing to the clock tower so same idea what happens with the uh the experiments though is it ends up creating the more that the blood administration is happening the more that the treatments are turning creating beasts and the beasts are getting bigger and more powerful so ludwig is supposed to answer that what happens when the hunters start becoming the beasts and as we can see the church hunters are becoming the worst and most ferocious and terrible beasts possible in part probably because they're so resistant to um this sort of uh de-evolution that's occurring and as as a result of this things seem to more or less go haywire at this point right so lor if lawrence hasn't left already this is definitely where we start seeing lawrence gone because he's the first as we understand he's the first cleric beast and he very likely is perhaps the huge reason why the experiments go off the rails because as you point out he is the um he's the bloodletting beast the original name is more so like the owner or master of the beast blood um the internal name is founder beast um yes so yeah every yeah obviously he's he's a beast that gets beheaded um and we didn't really touch on this but the idea with the chalice dungeon is that the chalice dungeons aren't the actual physical places they're more so dream recreations that we we conjure through the rituals um you sort of access the cosmic record um and you sort of re you create you basically in the same way that the game is simulating something you the player in universe are creating a magical simulation essentially it's a it has it has certain physical properties like you can buy stuff from it and you can like get the blood echoes you keep them well yeah well the idea is that it is reality this is why i say like reality gets complicated in that um it's as real as you are right it's as real as you are in the quote-unquote real world it's essentially creating a pocket dimension essentially but it's still a simulation it is a copy um so that's how you can see bosses you've killed in the chalice dungeons because the idea is you are going to a piece of time where that character is in that location so we see for example rom before we encounter the bloodletting beast we also encounter rom as the previous boss um preceding that in another layer right so the idea is that around the time that rom is going down to the chalice dungeons to meet ebrietus um uh we also have uh lawrence going down and becomes the bloodletting beast and assumably he's going down there to find queen yarnham yeah yeah or something like he may not know about her specifically but the idea is yes he's probably going down there for a baby because what we see in both this story dungeon the later one where he's headless his body is still going deeper i can't remember if you fight him anthumira ill or not but i think it is actually thrumera ill but like the idea is that um yes he's going purposefully deeper and if you look in the root dungeons he only spawns in those deeper dungeon areas so the idea seems to be he was basically searching all the lower levels uh frantically in order to try to find yharnam basically or sports basically a blood baby right because kate hurst wasn't producing a blood baby uh laura and lawrence wasn't uh and lawrence wasn't able to find one in time and he has the cleric beast someone cuts off his head um some people a lot of people i contribute this to ludwig possibly um and basically they take his head back and well now they have a new eucharist um i they i forget what they call it in the english version i think it might be like the it's not like the holy ah so the japanese the term is used as eucharist or the holy body um and this is used to refer to the uh yeah they usually just refer to it as communion so i don't know if the localization ever calls it properly but the idea is that like the idea is that this is the their eucharist right instead of it being the body and blood of christ the idea is that it's just the blood of the of the founder beast the lawrence says the bloodletting and so they they take his beast head and they get the blood from his head and they sort of put it in like the altars and stuff like that and obviously they leave the head on the altar there's like this holy relic type of deal so all that and they use his blood in the as it becomes the source of all of their treatments going forward right and okay from that yeah and from that point and what happens though is that this helps create more and more beasts which creates even more of a problem and then we start seeing the hunters themselves are becoming beasts in their obsession with blood again this goes back to blood drug goodness and things like that and ludwig is it's always brought back that ludwig always has these um he's crestfallen basically when he's not hunting because there's always this sort of lingering he it seems like ludwig sort of had this idea where he knew though he didn't want to accept it like he sort of like he's sort of in like this sort of intentional denial where like some part of you understands that you're being dipped but you want to really believe in something so you kind of let yourself be fooled so to speak yeah and you said he has this sort of idea that he you know he likes the idea of being this hero and all this stuff and like there's stuff about like and where i talk about the holy blaze the idea that they're this ancient line of heroes or whatever no no localization sort of goes way too far on that the series just it's literally just saying like oh you know there's this time when there was like the [ __ ] where there was this eight you know there's this time when you know it was an era where you could be like a cheval rick hero and it's like oh that was forever ago now like it's just being very vague on the timeline on things so like it lets miyazaki maneuver things around with the localization sort of ideas like ludwig's this ancient figures like no he's not like you said he comes right after kermit so yeah it's just like we're talking like decades ago at most it's flowery language which they sort of muckle and try to make it a bit too specific yeah this this happens all the time with the localization and it really screws them up here because like ludwig is supposed to be a relatively recent figure you know the grander scheme of things and with as far as um as ludwig is concerned things get um things obviously get out of hand when like he creates this organization about being these holy righteous things and they will find radiance and all this stuff and um even though he never shares his radiance he he's like you know this is my ratings you gotta find your own i got my start no no um but then um what happens is like ludwig ludwig starts like this is where it seems to really hit ludwig and that he he's been mocked he's been disparaged he's starting to really he kind of is afraid of it but you know while he's hunting he feels good right like the the guidance of the stars kind of been live in him you see like he you get back health with guidance because um as you attack back and things like that because ideas you have to go in the thick of it and really like push through and travel through it you will his ideas you will achieve radiance well only thing he's managed to achieve is having his entire organization collapse under him so yeah and uh this leads us into the executioners yeah yes he is swallowed into the nightmare like his mind and now he but his body still lives on in the chalice dungeons well no no like i said the child dungeons are simulations so it's very likely if now it's possible ludwig is still alive in the chalice dungeons but when we're like facing him in there um it's not an indicator of yes or no because this could be a period of time when he was alive he he's probably dead though because it seems like the the hunter's nightmare only takes you in when you're all dead um this is why hunter of hunters and stuff exist the idea with the the nightmare because what happens is is that cost after death and this is where like things start really going haywire for ludwig and everyone else is that all these people are becoming beasts right so they're all getting they're all getting hunted and they're all being killed that's not it for the hunters though because when they're killed as beasts or blood drunk hunters or whatever it is they end up in the hunter's nightmare cause coss is a bit resentful about being murdered her entire people genocided her baby stolen from her and her corpse just being left there on the doing so and like with her corpses her blood and there's a lot of resentment in that blood so um what happens is is that costs um we see this consistently in the syria in this innocent this goes to dark souls and to some extent demon souls too is this idea of strong emotions especially negative emotions like resentment and grudges these create curses which conjure um these cause curses which can conjure all sorts of effects such as making you a ghost so you have this a lot of evil ghosts and cainhurst are the product of a resent a bunch of curse of the gr of the of the dead who were have a grudge against the people who killed them wrongfully um and you see this a lot with a lot of the different um enemies in dark souls same idea so the point is that you have all these um you have a great one who is extremely resentful so she's got a really really powerful curse and her curse creates this own dream dimension the hunter's nightmare which basically the the fishing hamlet people they're brought back and it seems to bring the spies back with them because they're technically residents of the village though uh as we see the fishing hamlet people are uh very quick to uh to get back at them for uh what they what their spying did but um but it's the same idea that the fishing village they're they're allowed to live the hunters down below in the ocean a bottomless curse for a bottomless sea they're basically forced to relive their own personal hells um down below right and the idea is that uh ludwig's is tailor-made for him specifically he fears that he was perhaps being fooled and tricked into becoming a beast and so he becomes the most awful and terrible beast among them all in his obsession with trying to stop and end beasthood and he becomes so rav he's he's he's hunting other hunters um in the the river of blood right like so these these guys um are basically we see like the court bodies are like coming back up and so this seems to be another like part of the hell is that you don't really die um in the hunter's nightmare you're just gonna come back and you're gonna keep going and going so it's like this endless cycle type of deal yeah um so ludwig it sort of turns into this awful terrible beast he never became that in the quote-unquote real world but in this alternate reality that kos has created he she's made him this terrible awful horrible beast and he and the the sword is on his back as it was in life but he never even notices it because of the way they turn him and it's only when we start put the sword in front of him that he starts regaining some of his humanity he starts acting but he's still of course driven to fight and hunt and try to kill and defeat us and then obviously we see him regain some clarity at the end there and then obviously if you don't finish him off simon will and again before and before his potential revival becomes relevant we obviously stopped the nightmare so like yeah the executioners then yeah so while this is happening and we're now seeing okay the church is now discovering there's this terrible awful nightmare that blood drunk hunters and well basically anyone who is considered cost considers a hunter which as we could see can in turn um it can also include an amygdala and um the snakes that was being fed beasts by the uh by the the matters twins so like kos is not picky like anything that she might consider that you are hunting beasts that you could be considered a quote-unquote hunter she's gonna drag your soul into uh the nightmare so this is a now problem the holy blades are collapsing in the real world so that's another problem so it's like you're we're we're all dying and we're all going to hell if we die so things are not going well and then you have logarius now logarius and this is something hopefully i'll have an analysis out for this coming soon but logarius seems to have been a holy blade there's a huge controversy over his equipment because the the executioner garb talks about how you know it's supposed to be like the original outfit in attire and that all other church attire is based on but from all indications they are a later institution logarius finds a lost rune which happens to be the radiance rune and again it makes sense that radiance was lost because literally found guidance which was the source the stars yeah so like you see this exact same idea as that okay so they got rid of radiance basically and lu and logarius is like well you know what it seems we've lost we we somehow follow the path because you know isn't this like a pre-order like the entire idea with ludwig because this was like a divine mission like he was he was this man of god who was coming out of out of nowhere in order to save everyone and that if we all just followed this path we would all have like it would all be like sort of paved like this holy path to like a glory and like divine uh ascension right so this is again how ludwig sort of subsumes the religion and he starts recruiting yharnamites who would buy into this because this what goes into their religious narrative of the great ones are gods and like all of this is all this is all holy and like we want to get rid of the beasts and so now they have this holy framework around it and logarius seems to be one of these yharnamites which seems to be the explanation for why he has thumerian traits so obviously we know from content so it seems like he was an old like thumerian king concept um that kind of got recycled because we see him cut content um there's been several iterations of this idea of like a thumerian king in the labyrinth and it seems that logarius's model was the latest iteration they couldn't be bothered to keep changing it um so uh logarius seems like to be the idea that he was a yharnamite holy blade like so many others and he's like okay well clearly we went wrong somewhere okay so i found this old lost radiance that we have to go and we need to return to radians well radiance the the rune is all about um improving the qual the quality of blood vials and stuff like that so it's like okay so the quality of blood is what we need to do so so the problem with the blood is that the good and holy blood has been corrupted somehow well how has it been corrupted somehow well well this is the ideas the vile bloods but so logarius being a holy blade so he's a high-ranking member of the church would have knowledge and information about um you probably know a little bit about the history even if it's not the complete history he always seems to know enough that he would understand the history of the the bergenworth with the the traitors going to cainhurst right so he understands this and he knows how they brought the got blood from the tomb of the gods and that was given and that gave birth to the the vilebloods as as they're called localization um and the idea seems to be that okay this is where the corruption originated right and as we mentioned before um annelise is a little ticked off about the church basically ignoring her uh it's like it's like hello we had this big plan we like this was this great big evil plan and you've kind of just left me hanging lawrence well lawrence is gone now and in the interim assumably they've had their own sort of skirts of the beasts happen with their uh antiquity and uh well here's the thing the blessed children from antiquity are from antiquity these are so the idea with cainhurst is that cainhurst always had a beast problem much like yharnam they always had a beast problem because they've always had a blood drinking problem they can't get rid of their blood alcoholism so you can't get rid of the beast scourge okay right so they've always had the disease the pro the quote-unquote disease right so the problem is is that regular beasts they can hunt those no problems so their knights were able to hunt those but what happens if the beast can fly away well now we have an issue they're also smart enough to know to hide among all our statues that we keep on just lathering around the place so the idea is that the the lost children of antiquity are or the term lost child for those wondering the the it's a very lit it's a literal translation of the word that i translate as like spawn because the idea is that it's it's an old word that refers to like a like a noble's bastard child but colloquially it basically just refers to a monster it refers to anything that sort of has a it's it it came out wrong right like it's a ba it's a bad consequence to something okay so like for example um so the idea is like um in dark souls 2 the uh the the the different uh sister the the daughters of manus or whatever you want to call them right the children of manus those are also described as spawns of dark so the same idea there's like these these twisted monsters right so again it just seems to be another word that miyazaki likes to use in place of like demon or something that means like a monster of some sort okay right so the idea is that these are just beasts that have a um a uh a more bat-like form and they're like they're these ancient monsters that cainhurst has never been able to kill because they could just fly away or hide right um so that's been the idea they've been around and all the beasts we see in like the cainhurst crescent stuff those are regular furry hairy beasts because those are the normal beasts that got it but the specially corrupted beast they become the lost children of antiquity and that's why righteous weapons are especially effective against them right so that's the idea there so like caterers has always had this problem um but with all the cr like you said it may have gotten also worse with the corruption thing but they they've they've had a long history of hunting be so even longer than german like this is another thing you have to realize when souls when someone's when something in seoul says they are the first there's always like an asterisk there because there's always some there's a qualifier when there's something oh it's the first or the last or the blah blah like it's like oh it always happens in every from soft game you always have to be like okay well first it's like well yes from a certain point of view anyway so the uh the context for cainhurst though is like okay all this stuff is going on in yharnam uh annelise is very miffed so some cainhurst we see one wandering knight named leo he's in the chalice dungeon so we know that some like cainhurst knights are like going just into the ruins and they're looking for corruption there and well where else are they gonna get corruption if not from the ruins because as we see leo's been wandering for apparently forever but um the the other answer is okay well let's go to um let's go get it from the hunters because those hunters have tons of corruption they've been absorbing lots of blood echoes or left because echoes are um left wills they're the will they're they're the wills they're the they're the soul basically right like yeah the idea is that the echoes in blood are the actual the will of the of the living being so like when you have an evil will that be creates a curse right so like when you're like you have a grudge that grudge in your your wills of your in your blood uh creates this negative magical effect and when it's like positive stuff it has in liv and living effects etc isn't the isn't the term what is it the ishii of blood or something like that yes so here's the thing there's a double meaning there because ishii can be written um it can be written with both the meaning of just will and as well as a different kanji to mean la like dying wish last will left will as i like it because the idea is that this is the will left behind so when you absorb blood echoes you're just absorbing the wills of the blood your blood the physical blood is convert is being converted or extrapolating into um into a non-tangible like sort of soul-like energy force basically right it's essentially like that and the idea is that the two are one and the same blood and blood echoes are um they're basically two sides of the same coin is the idea i guess that may be why the localization want to go with the idea of an echo of something it also it fits then very thematically into this idea of um evolution that you have will which exists within the blood itself yes and that will has a direction it wants to go in and that becomes the basis for metamorphosis and things like that and the idea is that the corruption of the cainhurst clan is a result of these left will so fumerians have more corruption in general and the thumerian royalty have the most which is see um seeing queen yharnam um but the idea is that cainhurst has been essentially doing the same because they were old nobles of cainhurst and they've continued to do it now it became muted over time but lawrence by bringing them thumerian blood is now bringing it back into them and they were going supposed to be being fed by feeding more on blood and trying to get more high quality blood it was supposed to help get them more corruption that would have it turned annalise immortal and it helps make them get to the point where they can have a blood baby as it's called but instead of having this blood baby um what we're seeing instead is that annelise has been left out to dry so in place of corruption of blood left wills absorbed from a regular citizens or anything like that they're like okay we'll get it from the church's hunters because the churches have been killing lots of beasts lots of people lots of stuff with echoes that have been absorbed and those echoes don't obviously they're killing them so these are people who don't want to die so this creates at least little trace amounts of little grudges and corruption which now seeps into their blood right so now they're like okay we'll just get that's why um the church i mean the cainhurst is hunting um mainly other hunters and this is where like they sort the tr the aliens basically now wants to get back at the healing church for basically leaving her after dry so you know like it's basically two villains scrabbling over each other because their partnership tore apart like really [ __ ] a lot yeah well lauren's spoiler alert he's the bad guy in the game is this where we get uh the bloody crow of gay nurse yes so the bloody crow of cainhurst is eileen's old master the first hunter of hunters oh okay so yeah yeah so like when the hunter of hunters retires it seems like he he's been hunting hunters for a long time so he's he he's an old man now like german right um he seems to retire but it seems much like german he doesn't exactly want to die yet and one thing that's nice about cainhurst's corrupted blood especially the queens is that it gives you some you know it rejuvenates your life force a little right like when you get low on health you start you don't die you you start regenerating hp a little bit because it you're not allowed to die right that's the idea is like you're kind you're kind of getting some hints of immortality from the cainhurst blood um and this is something that manifests in the immortality of annalise but it also seems to affect those who drink from her blood and join the clan that way so you have someone like um the first hunter of hunters who seems to basically do that and that's why he still wears the crow outfit we see he just swaps out for some of the night armor on the the arms legs and head um he also wields um like the cainhurst weapons and stuff but that seems to be the idea and that's why eileen seems so fixated on no this is my fight like i need to do like this is her old master she's getting rid of right yeah and again like a lot of people have obviously speculated about the first hunter of hunters because they thought well maybe the idea was that this was german's apprentice old apprentice right and like stuff and then maria came out and people are so confused because like wait wait so german is the so it's like german the is german like the is german like having maria as the apprentice then so what is with the the the bloody crow using the acceptability and all that what are you gonna what are you gonna call me out like this well well it's not just you it's it's a lot of the community and that's because and this oh yeah this is not a theory i did not i just for the record and the commentary i the only things i really came up with on my own were the idea that the guidance rune was an incomplete beast rune uh and some other rune interpretations which most of them are probably wrong and maybe one other thing but like i this was all readily available information created by other people yeah but like the idea with um the the the the bone is that the bone doesn't mention gender in the japanese version and this is something that japanese community has really mocked the english community for like they really break the english community over the coals for this because it was something that that that's very like well i should say they break the english community so much as the english localization over the coals for this and that like this is something that was like anyone who read who anyone who approached it from the japanese perspective and looked at the scenario where you have this do you have the doll you have the the hairpin yeah it's at german's workshop in the dream but it's this is clearly the real world quote-unquote right like you have the chest with the spare doll parts you have the old hunter's bone with a single solitary grave that belongs to uh german's apprentice it's very obvious looking at the circumstances that the idea is that okay the doll is based on german's apprentice apprentice who appears to be based on physicality a cainhurst woman you know white thin thin thin uh facial bone structure um gray hair all that stuff right yeah and it looks so all that looks like it's very obvious so it's not really a surprise in the jp community as much when that turns out to be the case in the dlc but the english community they're left with this idea that oh the like girl one of german's first apprentice he and it's like okay it's we'll see a he so everyone goes to okay well maybe bloody crow of cainhurst because he uses the old hunter's bone so maybe the idea is like he's supposed to be the one who originally had the use of the quick step and all that stuff and he was buried there and then he dug himself up and he ducked up yeah you already looted it yeah like it becomes this really weird theory and again it's because it's not it right like i said like the idea is very clearly the idea is that he's one of the original hunters with german uh he became a hunter of hunters uh he eventually obviously he retires he gives it over to eileen who takes over in his place for that but he ends up clearly again this is a consistent thing we see with all the characters they don't want to die or they don't want to they want more power or something like that they always either want to live longer or have more power and authority to be able to manipulate reality in some respect so uh with that comes this idea that okay all um i'm going to now take some of this blood and he becomes enraptured with anneliese's blood so now longer is he just trying to live more now he's just he's fully into it like he's got experience hunting hunters so now he will hunt on her behalf and stuff like that and that's why he sort of this background threat that that eileen has has to now sort of contend with and why she's so focused on him okay and then so now you have kate so you have holy blades are falling apart they're all going to hell on top of that cainhurst has now come swooping in and hunting them all so all the rest of the surviving hunters are just getting hunted in their corruption taken so they can take blood corruption and logarius is seeing all this and being like oh okay i get it now this these cainhurst people who are taking advantage of this chaos they're the cause of all this they're their blood that was corrupted so this is where logarius gets in his head right because what you have to understand when you look at logarith's motto where they talk about like wisdom and foolery and all that stuff what he's basically saying is okay good and evil and being smart and dumb don't have anything to do with each other you could be smart and you could do something that's the smart thing to do but it's very evil right like that's the idea with lawrence lawrence did okay it was very smart to team up with cainhurst and work together and do all this like that was the smart thing he glolgarius is basically conceding that but he's like but it was wrong it was evil and should not have been done and we we have to be righteous and good and now we see how we have suffered divine punishment or whatever like the idea is like providence is now turned away from us right this is the whole idea with the uh the wheel of destiny right this idea that the wheel of fortune is going to um it's now turned against us because we are on the wrong path and it will turn right back once we get back on the right path and you think then that uh the wheel that they use the luxurious wheel do you think that's from the buddhist health scrolls as well then it's possible but it's the thing is is that um electrocutioners as a group are very steeped in mysticism and this again ties back to the victorian era in that there was a huge surge in the occult mysticism practices during victoria is that why they have the uh the pyramid with the eye as their symbol yeah yeah it's the same idea right like that sort of alistair sort of yeah yeah the i have the crowley eye of providence illuminati type of thing again same idea and the wheel of destiny again ties back to the arcana so okay so it's the same exact concept there and that's why um again this all seems to tie into the idea that they become this fanatic they basically become the they become the true believers in the church right like the healing church all of them are just a bunch of burden worth students they know it's all about this and like it's it's all it's it's a scam right like they're they're the they're like they're the small-time cult that like tries to get 100 followers to believe in them so they can keep paying them money so they can afford they're like they're giant ass jumbo jet or whatever it is right okay so you have all that happening um but the logarius he was like i said he was a yharnamite holy blade so for him this he bought into the he bought into the ludwig spiel like ludwig did and unlike ludwig he doesn't have the same doubts he thinks that it's all it's all legit like this is all supposed to be a preordained from the gods type of thing well the gods want us clearly to go back on the right path of radiance he's discovered this right path by looking and finding the lost rune of radiance um that the ludwig and company threw out because he had guidance um and then the idea is okay now cainhurst seems to be the problem that's a it's a huge misunderstanding obviously right like cainhurst is just taking advantage of the scenario but look you can see how logarith sort of sees all the little pieces and he sort of starts connecting dots right he just happens to connect them wrong the problem the problem is the church itself he doesn't want to blame the church though because that would go against his religious prerogative though i'm just wondering i'm just like in my in the back of my mind i'm being kind of quiet i'm just thinking where exactly i'm going to slot in an image of the church of scientology into this conversation but uh sorry i keep saying like just have it like creep up like in the corner of the screen like throughout like it just yeah it's like you have this guy who you ha like with lawrence he's like he just did this for to get blood and to buy jumbo jets and that's like l ron hubbard but then you have these crazy guys who actually believe it and that's like you know tom cruise or john travolta i don't know so yeah same idea though so all all the the executioner you executioners or the executioner unit because one thing that people have always been confused about is how does this relate to the executioner enemies that you sometimes see like you see one in yharnam towards the beginning area you see two and two or three and heimlich and you see like two in um forbidden woods those aren't the same executioners those are different those are completely unrelated those enemies in the japanese name are more accurate they're called executioners internally um but the actual covenant is called the execution unit so similar to how the choir is more literally the holy song unit they are the execution unit so they're the idea is that they're supposed to be like this sort of like this this part of the church military complex much like the holy blades right yes and this goes to the point that the the the holy the the executioner enemy is just like some of these experiments that became these big hulking monstrosities and they're like sealing them in armor and stuff like that and they happen to look like executioner so they recall that internally and then the the localization picked that up and made that the official english name but the japanese name is more accurately a dismantler or a dissector and you know the idea is you know you take these axes and you like you know like dismember them all right the execution the ex so the execution unit its job is to uh get rid of can't get rid of the corrupted blood right because their idea is in their fanatical thinking if we get rid of all the blood corruption then everything's gold and the everything will just fall into place naturally like well the the gods will will naturally through their invisible hand of divine providence will guide us to to ascension and all this stuff right like everything's going to come up roses so logarius and company basically form is like okay we're going to deal with the the vileplus he creates like the the wheels which he doesn't use himself because again they're using an old model and uh again the closer you get to the logarius boss fight the the the worse uh the executioner lore becomes the farther you get from it it's really amazing like the backstory and the origins there's a lot of really good stuff you get to the boss fight though and you're like he's not even using a trick weapon anyway i mean he turns it on fire okay sure why don't we use a trick weapon don't worry it'll be a trick weapon soon enough goes it murders a bunch of people to curse it burning blood is another one of these from soft phenomena which somebody has to make a video on because it they keep doing it well it ties back to my idea with the sunlight right like the sunlight has this power to like exercise arcane qualities and so you see the same it seems to be highly so it becomes highly effective against uh stuff that lives under the sun like like beasts and monsters and stuff like that and regular people obviously but i think i think he does doesn't i think logarius deals arcane damage though doesn't he uh with the uh with the the curse stuff yeah yeah okay yeah it's same thing with like ludwig when he turns on the the arcane cosmic blade it does our additional arcane damage too but the blade itself is what's doing the righteous damage because it's silver right so okay yeah so like that's the idea um logarius for his part um the idea is that basically they tried killing everyone well legarious then has a problem because they can't kill the queen it's like they stab her she comes back up they they they slash her she comes back up it's like why won't you die um so they're like okay well the corruption is basically always going to be around then well what are we gonna do about this because she can always blood drink and like she can keep doing what she's doing so their idea is okay well then prisoner will like put a helmet on her head which they repurpose a cainhurst helmet don't ask me how they find a caners helmet which can be specifically repurposed to be like a man in the iron mass scenario this has never made sense no matter what level of development you look at so but then again this has always been a problem with one of the the biggest problems with from soft world building has always been prisons because like why are you locking up this guy with all his armor and weapons why just why who does this why i i like an elden ring um um well i i like the idea that you just have prisoner attire that itself has defensive properties and then like yeah well then you have the ever jails yeah it's like okay it's like don't worry we'll sell you another dimension but you still gave him his weapons and armor yeah it's like why why do you keep doing this demon souls did it pretty well though well demon souls is the same thing though like like you could attack fracking there and he'll like fight back and stuff i'm pretty sure right so like it's still like you leaving them with all like you lose literally weapons like it's it's it's always been a problem with from soft world building they have never ever gotten pre they've ever never made prisons make sense maybe he just smuggled maybe he smuggled his weapons in they just like just smuggle up do you like carrying it like you have handle you have like at least be like smuggling that blood anyway but the idea is okay so annalise gets her head locked up so she can't drink blood presumably um but they don't seem to realize that she could just like absorb it into her being like directly but you know what listen listen like i said the whole thing is about we're not gonna be smart and evil so that means we'll be good and dumb that's isn't like that once you realize that that like the entire point of the execution is to be stupid a lot of their their stupidity makes sense well it's more so about not caring about intelligence and focusing more on being good but yeah yes but yeah that still doesn't change but like it's okay we don't we good um the so the in logarius his idea is okay i'm going to martyr myself by like sacrificing myself so i can hide away annalise she'll be this great secret that will seal away and she won't be able to access anybody so all her servants are doing so now and then like you know the bridge to cainhurst gets destroyed so like no one could get to cainhurst uh logarius is defending it as like the the saltwater defender he again this idea of like strong emotions he basically cursed himself into being like an undead type of scenario where he's like this undead like guy just sitting in his chair like i must defend against anyone who tries to like break in and stuff right so yeah same idea and then the church the church is like oh my thank god we have a pr win for once and they're like oh yeah logarius he's this great martyr he helped save all of this right like he he totally like we're totally still a legit church we promise they canonize him make him a martyr indoctrinate new newcomers like alfred to believe this stuff well the thing is the church basically the the executioners seem to basically run themselves like they're kind of like a monastic order almost like they're kind of kind of quasi independence cause like they have their own secret workshop and stuff that they operate out of and like alfred was a regular hunter but then he somehow got in he sort of somehow came to discover the logarius teachings and then he went down the rabbit hole and never came back so like the idea with like um the church is basically they said okay we are going to lift up the executioners for the good that they've done because they have done this wonderful service of giving us an out for all of our screw-ups we could just blame everything on the the cainhurst clan and call it a day and you kind of see it like the graves that are set up as like this monument to the executioners who fell it seems like there was like six or so executioners who died and were never obviously we loot their corpses at caners but like the idea being is that there was these executioners and little gary's gets this giant monument and there's this altar with like a little bit of blood on the cloth there yeah indicating that they're doing like a dark moon night scenario where like they're taking body parts and like offering it up to logarius it's kind of like this oh logarius like uh it's like because the idea seems to be that logarius is kind of like a almost like a messiah type figure like he's like a like a christian saint almost in that he it seems like the idea that oh he's still alive like he's like among the stars and he's like he has his is this the will of of the great master logarius like he is somehow like he's now like almost like a god now or he's like like sort of influencing things with like divine providence and all this stuff right this seems to be the idea from alfred's dialogue but in truth uh logarius is just like an undead guy over there um and uh alfred and company they're just like making offerings of all these hunters because again the idea is that okay they exterminated the cainhurst clan and they locked up annelise but there's still a bunch of those hunters it's kind of like the dark great scenario from dark souls where it's like okay but there's dark wraiths and there's these blood hunters which are you know out in the field you know doing the blood hunting you didn't get rid of them so the the executioner's mission continues they're still trying to hunt down the last of these hunters like say the bloody crow of cainhurst which eileen ultimately confronts because he tries to go after seemingly the lawrence blood because you know high quality blood i was never able to connect the dark reds to uh to cainhurst because like the ghosts operate exactly like the ghosts in uh in new londo operate but and i was talking about in the commentary how the lost children of antiquity like you can sort of connect them to the drakes in the valley of the drakes sort of function similarly as like these flying enemies that don't quite fly and i was like yeah did he just replay through this area and just reskin it as k nurse uh let's make that means like eldon ring literally redoes crystal sage so yeah like this happens in all this happens in all the games like there's always going to be references to past games at least in the loosest sense like yeah fair lady is a very obviously riff on uh uh strya so like like you'll find that you'll if we if we went down the rabbit hole of connecting from soft games to other from soft games we'll end up in the theories of oh they're all actually all in the same universe i don't know anyway so uh so executioner so executioners give the pl1 this seems to be around when the um the old yarn and burning incident happens as well right so uh we have uh we have the we have old yharnam the in order to access old yarn we have to go to a grave basically it's this giant mausoleum with a single giant grave which you open it creates the way to so it looks like they built on top of it this little like mausoleum monument to sort of like uh honor those who were abandoned and fallen and you know because old jordan was burned and was basically left for dead right juror obviously doesn't let anyone want to come in anymore and all that stuff but that's the basic idea um is that um they basically they went scorched earth trying to get rid of um all the beasts that they themselves created so yeah uh this is also where we start seeing the the um the the mensis ritual um and the choir um come into the picture now because by this point executioners have now basically um have now basically given the church the much needed pr when they need they needed they needed some excuse to somehow tell the residents this isn't our fault yeah uh now that they have that they've built the monument right next to the old yharnam thing celebrating the executioners the old yharnam's being respected quote unquote for all those who have fallen or lost even though they basically just said okay we're abandoning this site this is no good anymore uh and thanksgiving we're done well men's well the problem that becomes is that men's is that menses and choir create a split in the church and this becomes the thing that defines the church ever since the choir controlled the church mainly but the mensa seems to more or less act as like this dissident faction which hides out in yahara ghoul and is trying to um subvert and control the official church policy as run by the choir because the idea is that the choir is not a public they're not supposed to they're not supposed to be known as the leaders right they're the secret brains of the church right yeah the idea is supposed to be like as alfred says you know the the residents of the old councillors it means the old leaders of the of the healing church they live up in the upper cathedral ward in the upper stratum and again you again it goes back to this idea of like levels the idea is that they want to become the upper stratum with close to the cosmos or whatever so they live in the actual upper stratum of the church facilities whereas menses are located in the they have their uh ritual in the advent plaza yeah and they're more obviously they have the more they're more obviously depraved and rough like everybody's about like it's also it's also just on a lower elevation in the world yeah exactly same idea because that again it's the same idea of like the choir or this heavenly clean noble uh very refined and then like you get to menses and it's very crude and rough and depraved like you see some of the menses experiments with like the beasts and stuff like that and like everything's like not very nice so i think same idea here i think this then takes us very neatly into the story the main story of the game yeah uh and we'll talk more about menses and the choir in a bit but uh so we begin the game uh there is nothing in the japanese script which can give us more information about the blood minister we meet in the beginning is there nothing in the script we get some environmental storytelling but like all we know is that he is a again like i said ministers are blood treaters so we know he's a part of the tr of the healing church um he's because the idea is that joseph's clinic um i think sophie and sinclair lore has covered this before but it seems like yosefka's clinic was like an old like mayoral house or something like probably something like the like the old whoever like led yharnam before the church took over like it seems like this was like probably their like mansion or whatever um and like there's like a big mausoleum out in the graveyard because it's a small graveyard because one of the things you have to understand is that yharnam generally like yharnam used to bury people in the forbidden woods like before it became the forbidden woods and all that that was like their burial place that's why all the the the burial place for their gods and then eventually just becomes burial places for people the closer you get to yharnam because obviously as history progresses and the farther they get from the fumerian heritage there's less great ones being produced um and more just regular uh people and eventually they run out of space and eventually that they turn to hemwick and hamlet starts oh hey we'll take the bodies and we'll burn them and then we'll start doing some wacky experiments don't worry about it makes sense right because it's like you have this graveyard town and this graveyard town needs more bodies and yardam's like hey we're running out of space to bury our bodies so will you take our bodies so it's like okay sure and we'll take whatever body parts we want like the eyes or whatever we use for our rituals and our religious little cult thing and then like we'll burn the rest and then obviously the healing church starts doing this on mass and they say oh hey we could use these ashes have some really nice qualities we can take that off your hands in exchange and like you can see kind of see how it becomes this sort of barter trade but again this the beast blood pellets like so much contributes to the final collapse of the holy blade era of things because just and like i said the split in the church like there's just a lot of things that are happening at the same time it's just because this huge system is collapsed it seems like and then the choir tries to hold things together to keep their experiments running and the menses but menses are a huge problem that they're constantly having to deal with and this sort of continues and when we're like you say when the story begins in in the game we're just meeting this random blood minister because we're some guy some foreigner that lives out there i've been yeah there's cut dialogue about the idea that you are a sick person and that you came here to cure your disease this is nowhere hinted at anywhere in the final script so it's you just seem to be a foreigner you have a handmade note like this is something i see even a lot of people not too familiar with translation seem to know about is that the fact that this is a note that you yourself penned it is it is it is something that is self-written basically self-scribbled yeah it is a how do they put it it's a note written in a familiar handwriting or something like that in the local is there something like that um but like in in the japanese it's very straightforward this is like something that was written by yourself and it talks about uh pale blood yeah yeah the idea is that find the pale blood and like i think the english calls it like transcend the hunt it means like to complete to fulfill to basically like the idea seems to be to bring an end to all of this and when they're when they say pale blood they're talking about the moon presence yes so the moon presence the japanese name is uh the term presence is uh mamono and this is a term i talk about a lot when i talk about darkness oh yes i know that so yeah it means like um it means more literally a bad or an evil thing oh yeah so um so and so it tends to be translated as either demon or monster or so like a lot of jrpg monsters quote unquote are mamo no so for example if you're familiar with um uh if you're familiar with say the uh the near series in near re the new near replicate uh like little remaster thing uh that that game has the quote-unquote shades those are mama no and they are led by the shadow lord so that is the uh the mao or the demon king right so again it's the play on the fantasy of you have the jrpg monsters and he's led they're led by the demon king and so you have to have the hero goving and obviously nier does its own little thing to do a twist on the formula same thing here is the idea is that miyazaki likes using the term mamono generally seemingly to refer to general monsters or in some cases like deep demonic like beings it seems to be when he's not using the english word demon he's using the word that's interesting then uh because that that really reframes the game that you have this idea of the moon presence as a villainous enemy throughout the whole thing rather than being a monster or moon demon that yeah so whenever there's so when they talk about like how does the english put it like something like um lawrence and um lawrence in his the the the moon prisons beckoned by lawrence in his association oh no the pale blood no yeah it's the moon prisons beckoned by lawrence's associates the pale blood right yeah um in the japanese it's more it's lawrence and so the term tachi is a suffix used and what happens is it's a pluralizing suffix but when it refers to groups so when you say like say lawrence tachi what you're basically saying is um lawrence and uh and an unspecified uh at least one other person right so like it's an unspecified group so if i had a group of two people i identify the prime member of the group or at least who i think is the prime member and then when i say tachi i can refer to those two people as that right um it could be a whole group of people and the same thing would apply so it doesn't really tell us if it's more than if it's one associate or more you can at least infer that when it's saying the japanese is saying something like uh lawrence and gurman right because obviously german's one of the the big reveals that german's connected to all this is sort of something that the game tries to hint and sprinkle about um up until then right until the very end right so it's something that it seems like they are purposely being vague about and the idea seems to be like okay you have lawrence and gurman they are they're the one they're the ones who are associated with this uh moon monster and that is the pale blood okay um so we go out uh skirts beast we die is there anything about the hunter's dream uh specifically that we are missing in the localization anything about how it operates that we haven't gone over well one of the things that like i said i talked about the doll and the idea of she takes the idea with the doll is she takes the echoes the left wills of others that are killed that we kill and take their blood echoes quote unquote we take their left their wills that they've left behind and we and she helps us incorporate them into our will so they can strengthen our spirit our our our our essence to our blood etcetera right our truth the a stronger will by using the wills of others so and this operation cleanses you off blood drunkenness in in lore sort of uh we don't actually see that per se because obviously there's lots of hunters who have been in the dream but no longer do it for one reason or another some of whom clearly ended up blood drunk and then sort of again goes back to the first hunter of hunters needs hunters to hunt right yeah so it's this seems to like it it's possible that it may play a part but it doesn't seem to be it doesn't seem to be uh cons let's say it's not necessarily a reliable um it's not necessarily reliable if it helps in any way it's a it's a theory which makes sense but it we don't need that theory yeah well the thing is we're still screwed um because again the idea with the reason why i say coss gets blood drunk hunters is because pretty much you being a hunter guarantees you're going to be blood drunk like it's just like the moment you start shedding blood and getting and start immersing yourself in it you're sort of putting yourself on that path period so it's not really about you being blood drunk that someone cares about it's just that the blood drunk are the ones that are probably gonna die first at some point okay and like the idea is that like obviously if you're like a novice hunter you haven't even killed a beast yet are you really even a hunter like so like if you die on your first thing like cos is probably like not going to care but as soon as like as soon as a beast dies and he's like oh now suddenly cost is all like well i say cost but again her curse is all about okay now you now you count yeah it's a it's a very it's a very uh it's a very unfair curse like i said it includes a snake in an amigdala like can you just imagine the brain of awake doll just snatching up people happens to grab a beast that one time and now it's screwed when it dies um we probably should talk just a bit about this cause is dead but cause it like once you transcend to the dreamlands the idea of death becomes a very sort of mutable concept because cause still exercises will even in the nightmare where like the the orphan of cause will scream and the lightning will be summoned well okay so here here's where i stand on this cost is dead period like dead like okay because cost isn't cost doesn't say uh the reason why the great ones are able to exist in death is because they transfer their consciousness from their physical bodies in the real world to the cosmos and they are able to circumvent the normal thing because normally when you die your soul quote unquote you obviously have your soul in your blood in the real body but your soul your mind is now just existing and let's call it the cosmic ocean up up above right that's the idea mick i just got that oh well gas goes so but anyway the idea is that uh the idea is that you have um the idea with cost is that cost is has lived in our world right the real world like abreantis so when cost dies cost is dead much like anyone else that dies costs now joins the cosmic that cosmic ocean but costs his body and blood is still a great one so it has a lot of power and it can inflict a curse and as we can see curses can manifest things like ghosts and stuff like that in cossa's case even despite the name ghost and ghost it's not she doesn't actually produce a ghost of herself she creates this dream she creates her own little sort of dream dimension in death and what happens is when we see um so this is why i say cost never directly intervenes to stop us during all this because it's not really her consciously like she isn't like she's this puppet master who's like waiting in the wings and she's controlling things act like consciously it's her will her instinctive desires which are doing this and she has a huge instinctive grudge right now against hunters and that's why the curse is so and she's got all that power in the world to spend in her blood and her will so that powerful will with all that great one intellect and arcane power that goes with it is being spent focus solely on screwing over all the hunters who screwed her over all right what that translates to when you talk about say the orphan and stuff is that the orphan becomes um the orphan be well well yes but that that that's uh that's something for but the idea is that the orphan is when the orphan screams and you see the bolt of electricity coming down that's coming down from the sky up above so the idea is that the um it hits costs his body and then it emanates from there and it happens to become an attack for us so it's completely accidental it's just supposed to be the it's not like the orphan is trying necessarily it's just you know it's it's it's a monstrous baby thing so it just screams and that screen translates to an attack because game mechanics but the idea is that you have this bolt of lightning coming from the sky because the idea is that the bit it's cos existing as part of this consciousness in this the record of all of existence right because that's the idea with the cosmos the the while blood exists on the physical side being doing blood things it's creating plants and rocks and people and all and transforming you into monsters and then no longer monsters and all this stuff like while blood is doing all that on the physical side on the conscious side there is this mental aspect of blood which is recording all this stuff it's the stuff that gives us life and consciousness and mind and we sleep we go into these dream worlds which we can start manipulating and stuff when we die we no longer have control over these dream worlds our conscious mind just becomes all that's left is the record of us and all of our actions up until this point okay right so everything everything that we have consciously um done becomes part of this record so coss is now part of that record when she dies her curse has now created a dream dimension there and you can't even argue it's arguably from that consciousness that's just floating there with all the others in this cosmic record when that when but she she's no longer alive per se but when she when the hershey quote unquote hears her baby crying her her mind her conscious her her her feelings her thoughts her record senses that and that is what creates the bolt of electricity like that little joel like oh like my baby it's that instinctive connection between her and the body her curse created which again it's a simulation as we say it's as real as the real you in the real world quote-unquote so the idea is that her dead body in the the nightmare is sort of connecting to her consciousness which is lost in the cosmic record it's never going to like like maybe theoretically you could maybe drag it out of that ocean and have it repossess its body but like it's not like coss can just freely do that as she wills it because it's not really she willing to do it she's just it's just her body acting on instinct when she hears her child's baby cry there's this connection with her physical body okay just you we see it generate a electric bolt similar to how electricity gets generated between the synapses in your brain right like it's like the idea is that there's this feeling it creates this jolt of electricity between the the mental consciousness of cost that exists in the abstract dream worlds um cosmic record as i call it and then the physical body that the dream one of these dream worlds has created uh in this simulation of the beach where she died all right all right yeah i'm sorry that's a that's a very complicated concept but no but i think i think it's good because the extent to which entities are operating in the world it is left very vague for good reason it's like i think the story probably wouldn't work as well if we were just given a guy explaining this but um well it's just very boring to be told all this stuff yeah well it makes more sense when you could see how it operates and then sort of reverse engineer the rules this is what makes from soft storytelling so interesting if you got told all the lore for a lot of the games you would realize they're very simple very straightforward and in some extent to some extent a lot of times very basic when you're able to reverse engineer yourself it becomes much more intellectually rigorous and interesting even just hearing me say someone who's going through it explaining it because i can point to all the different evidence and the points and how it functions and how we see it operate visually it just it just becomes a more engaging experience yeah all right then um we were talking yeah we were talking about the uh well we we were finishing on the hunter's dream and i was thinking we could go on to the menses and choir sort of split dynamic uh because that sort of um the idea is that like you have um vermin phantasm east lauren you have bergenworth you have the healing church and now you have uh menses and the choir you have these very different ideas about how to how to reach this goal of transcendence uh and we talked a bit about the choir and menses do you want to uh expand a bit on firstly the choir because the idea there is you have the orphanage right where all the best sort of prospects for the choir are groomed and sort of educated into this role right well so what happens is is you have the you have the research hall experiments right like all that happens well that leaves a lot of or well you have lots of debt you have lots of dead beastified and then dead uh people right a bunch of people who were involved in these experiences a bunch of dead bodies that are um either beasts or they're you know living failures who were planted up there and nothing ever came of it um yeah so what are we gonna do with all the children now all these chilled all these orphans that are now left on the streets of yharnam because all their parents got taken into cathedral and nothing happened well this is going to become another pr disaster possibly well again this is the church being the church they're like well never let a terrible tragedy go to waste we will take in those children and we will start our own orphanage and so they basically just convert the old experiment all area into it and create its own little orphanage for all these children and they basically indoctrinate them to be their own little as research assistants yeah and so like and this is something again the farther you get from willem the more inhuman the the researchers of bergenworth's uh legacy becomes right so like willem he was a guy who you know he had good intentions it just was terribly misplaced to a very obviously fool's errand right like you're just never able to separate um you're never able to separate transcendence from blood transformation like it's the blood your blood is too fundamental to you um when then you have lawrence who's like no no maybe we can use this and the transformation can't actually do a lot of good and we can actually make this work a lot of things so he's trying to think about how we can make trans how can we can like keep on this transformation into great ones and it could really kind of work i think this could actually work out like this is like lawrence's idea like he thinks that there's something there um then you get to the the choir and the choir basically being indoctrinated all this stuff but not the important parts like we say they just go they have to discover on their own oh the cosmos is in the sky even though ludwig against people real life even like bert like william knew this even like we see him with his observatories if he's already researching phantasms in their connection to the stars like anyone who's been to is would know this but the choir the choir as we see gets started when they are sent down as prospectors into the is tombs and they come back with like the is chalice as we see and like this is where things really get started because they get to start see oh okay there's this connection to the cosmos and they start seeing the church workshop and looking into little way because you have to see a lot of the choir people they love larping ludwig like one of the uh choirs church prospectors he's called gremia in english but in japanese he's known as serger mia like it's even written in english it's like so it's like like you have this it's it's the idea that he he's all bought into this whole ludwig night nonsense right so so like and like he uses the whole the ludwig's holy blade and all that so like yeah like the choir like these ludwig is a huge influence for them okay and they're kind of like uh they're sort of a true believer uh sec then just yeah to some extent they believe at least so far that like they buy into all the things like okay it's bogus and all these things but they still think of the great ones as gods right like this is the idea of the choir the holy song unit for those that don't know the term choir in japanese can also be if you change the kanji it can be read the same way as the star song unit in fact funny fun fact in the in the um so the whole least because again it goes back to the star so the idea in fact if you go into the um the design works for the concept art they someone actually left in that the uh left in the choir as the star song unit in the uh in the japanese version for design work so it's kind of funny that is pretty good yeah yeah so like that's the idea though that they're they understand that the stars are the great ones those are their gods and the idea of their singing the holy song so to speak is that they're trying to communicate with because that's the point of like of singing in choirs and stuff is like you want to sort of praise and glorify god that's the idea of you having all this extra song and music in the mass to sort of liven up this entire thing where we all come together in the house of god in order to kind of sing the lord's praises spread spread his message all these things right so this idea is that the choir is supposed to function the same way they're trying to glorify the gods above and try to get their attention so that they will answer and spread their message and they will help um lift them up into the the holy divine realm of the heavens the cosmos right yeah so the idea with the the the choir though is that okay they're the secret brains of the church well okay what happens to the the supposedly you know the not secret brains you know the actual leaders because they're nowhere to be found that's uh uh that's very uh so yeah the idea it seems to be very clear that the uh the choir realized that the their masters were not telling them everything and when they figured that they were like oh okay well you know fair is fair uh we understand like you know you're you're you've got your own ideas you know not everyone can always be uh can be like you know go to transcend into become a higher being and all that you know gotta share those secrets only those few but you know if you're gonna do it so are we so and the idea seems to be that they basically you can uh think of what you will whatever they did with them and then uh they're now like they're like oh you know master you know master he gave me this very important message so like i'm just gonna communicate to you oh don't worry you can't see them you know they're doing very important um very important church stuff right now so uh you'll just be uh just listen to us we'll make sure to transfer the message and well don't worry tell tell us whatever your concerns are we'll make sure to carry it over to them maybe maybe my protestant lapsed protestant operation operating is uh failing me here but wouldn't amelia have been like the leader of the healing church isn't that what a vikar is no she she is the official leader but this is the thing the idea is that um amelia is the the vicar right like she's this one of the successors to lawrence right but here's the thing the choir can that you just have to ha give lawrence's locket to anybody and they could do it and from what we could see amelia seems to be an old high-ranking church member and she seems to more or less she's like she's the public face right she's the public face of it but it's the choir who are really calling the shots they're the secret brains behind the operation in the church right now like that's the idea so um yeah so me you have to we have to think and as we can see emilia doesn't really able to do anything that effectuates any actual change like whatever the the choir has their idea they're doing they're only keeping the church and the whole organization and yharnam functioning as well as they can once they more or less get what they want they pretty much leave yharnam to its fate yeah and then uh amelia obviously amelia can't do any like she's basically just a puppet she can't do any all she could do is pray there and be like oh please like oh if you have to do the right and and we see in the nightmare we see who apparently seems to be her original incarnation like because again you can't get into the hunter's nightmare without killing emilia first if i recall correctly so um it seems like the woman we see praying the same prayer with the same voice lines in the the grand cathedral before the altar that seems to be emilia in the nightmare living her personal health i think you can i think you get the because you just have to go outside to the path that takes you to old yharnam the amygdala will take you there and i think the the eye of the blood drunk hunter doesn't it i think it spawns before you kill amelia right let me let me double check why the blood drug hunter if not we could just cut that out bit blood drunk hunter uh once you've acquired okay uh grants access to the once you've acquired okay okay appears in the once you once you've defeated vicar amelia and turn the world state tonight well that appears in the hunter's dream once you've defeated vicar emily entered the world state tonight players must have purchased the old hunter's dlc okay yeah so yeah you have to kill amelia i was right okay for her to spawn or for you to get the eye of the blood drunk hunter no no for the hunter the it appears in the hunter's dream once you've defeated vicar emilia and to turn the world state tonight so you have to kill her in order to acquire the items so that's why i'm saying i'm pretty sure that's her okay same voice line same location same praying before everything has a black church hunter in her wing has the same gray hair with white uniform that's interesting then because i think i've been people have asked me that before in the comments and i've like swatted them down like how what a ridiculous proposition couldn't be no no i no i i'm very i'm actually yeah i'm i'm fairly confident that is in fact the actual emilia and that's her living her personal hell which is going back to the early days where she was also useless [Laughter] yeah so congrats we when when you're getting like sniped in from uh the arcane eyeball of hers that's her now you know what her boss fight would have been in the modern world the black sky eye i love that thing when you have like when you get into 50 60 arcane that thing destroys it's really good all right well to be fair arcane i've seen i've seen some of the arcane stuff like against lawrence as a boss fight like just freaking like call beyond like 99 arcanes like oh my god like just like go right up to him and go okay hit you with all the missiles he's dead but like so like that's the idea though with um with like uh say like amelia and the choirs i was like amelia basically seems to more or less exist as a figurehead like the choir needs someone who can look legitimate sound legitimate so they have emilia do that but they're the ones really running the show behind the scenes they're the ones who are opera they're the ones who are operating all the thumerian guards like the all the like giant guards guys like we see them patrolling up for cathedral ward and lower and the regular cathedral ward because that's where they come from and then you have like the beast blood pellets obviously they're the ones that are doling them out then you have the uh like uh just all the different like various little items and things that stuff like like they're the ones with the like the blue elixirs because again they learn them from their masters and now they're carrying on the stuff like they're obviously wearing the bergenworth uh the uniforms they wear they have the special uh holy claw like this is another thing to talk about the reason why for oh we never we never talked about this with the executioners i completely got off track the the reason why the executioner uniform is um related the reason why the execution uniform has is um related it's the original uniform which was then used and carried over into all other church uniforms but it doesn't make sense because the executioners come later the holy blades clearly precede them and everything well this is because the those two statements aren't exclusive it is the original uniform it just wasn't always the garb of the executioners it was originally the holy blade uniform and you can even see this in the dlc the dlc shows um ludwig's uniform it's the same cloak and cape with the same holy cloth on the back the the dark blue and the uh under his skull right uh oh yeah also under lawrence's skull so yeah but ludwig if you see ludwig's back he wears the same executioner with that holy cloth yes so and again we see this like that's the reason why and it goes the choir carries this on they where they have the same fancy or holy cloth that you see with lawrence and you see with uh lawrence is called if i i think i said yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm talking yeah i'm talking about um yeah i'm talking about like ludwig with the executioners and the choir and lawrence's skull you see the same thing so like the choir basically just using and the same thing with their eye mask again the ims is connected to willem we see the statue of lawrence in the uh research hall has the same like blind eye mask again the choir basically are aping a lot of bergenworth's stuff because they were trained by the original bergenworth people but they they're the most um psychopathic of the bergenworth because again there's just a bunch of orphans who are basically brainwashed from child to basically view everyone as just a potential research uh a thing for research to use and then throw away like like that's literally the history of the healing church and so is it any surprise that they become the most like literally like heartless of any of them like like the the original like healing church leader generation like they got like lawrence definitely lawrence and all of them got what they what they deserved yeah bad people bad people bad people all around um and then uh then we get into uh the the choir now are running things and this is where we start seeing mensa show up right because men's is now like hey like they they're like they seem to understand that hey wait a second the church isn't actually being run by the original leaders it's being run by this by their apprentices like it's like hey why can't we ever see the original leaders uh no no they're doing very important it's like no way so you're like why is it only you like they never come out and you're like there's only amelia here how do we know that and like they seem to more or less get it and we know there's one defector from the choir um what's his name like damien of menses yeah he's a formal choir member who seems to have gone to the school of menses and now he's like i will kill ebrietis in everything that the choir stands for i love i love damian i think that they get so much storytelling done with this character just like for one uh his placement outside of rom's boss arena i love that yeah it's very great right because like he's after rome he's after ebrietas he's also in the nightmare you can see he's been going after every edit since before the choir brought her out of the ruins so like there's a lot of stuff going there it's also cool because i think you can summon damien but then you can't get the choir prospect or gramia so yeah well it's like they're exclusives too so like yeah there's a lot done with damian i like it plus he like he knows all the arcane stuff so you can kind of know like the choir was already like going all deep into the arcane even way back when and damien's like no longer i can see there's it's a dead end the problem is that he also picked the other dead end yeah a lot of rotten branches on this tree of trying to evolve here but um yeah nikolas and mendes yeah so like mika lasha menses so mika lush like i said mikulash doesn't seem to actually be a burglar they're just larping now here's a cool thing we find two notes in willem's study um one seems to belong to mensis the other seems to belong to the choir and was given to yuria as her orders so um mensis seems to be if i recall correctly this is this is them trying to summon the red moon and this is again another contributor to why old yharnam goes to hell because as we know a lot of this again another big factor here is that well okay so when the here we go when the red moon draws near the boundary for oh no no boundary for man becomes vague and then we bear our children yeah well here's the thing uh madman toil certification i'm trying to find that uh trying to find that very specific now this is the choir one no i think actually you were right this will let me double check because i need to make sure that i got the right note uh bergenworth notes because i don't want to get this one wrong okay yeah you're right so the men's so when you go to there's the two notes right and then the menses note reads um when the red moon hangs low the line between man and beast is blurred and when the great ones descend a womb will be blessed with child when the red moon draws near this is the jeff this is a more accurate translation from the japanese the boundary for man will blur okay and the great higher one will appear and then it will harbor our baby so the idea is this is their plan they go to bergenworth they're studying like again much like the choir they're trying to study birdworth but they don't have access to the old mentors to teach them like the choir did so they go straight to the source in bergenworth and that's why they put on the student uniforms and all that crap because they're all okay now we're going to now larp as them and because we're now students now burger's fallen already as we as we've talked about like at this point william completely lost control all his students are crazy about blood transformations and they're turning themselves into goopy goops and spidery abominations and all this crap rahm is out of the picture at this point um ron went down to after embryonis probably again because willem wasn't having success with synthetic great one children so it's like oh well you know maybe i'll go to embryos and maybe she can help us get an actual great one child the raw x embryon is the secret pairing we never knew existed anyway um so then uh menses comes in they're like okay we understand now this whole all this stuff that we can get from the choir what if we um try to do what lawrence did and bring in um flora the moon presence and then she can help us with this because we give her a child right because that's what lawrence did he got a umbilical cord he got flora to get involved and then flora maybe we can again goes back to men's idea that okay well the great ones need to first ascend us we need to do kind of like rom and the problem is that rom didn't do the proper blood transformation things right but once the great ones give us the proper knowledge we will then use that to have the proper blood transformation so that way we won't become these beasts that that's the idea yeah because because that's the that's the that's the issue so again it's taking the lawrence idea taking the wrong idea taking the loran idea because lauren was all about beast blood and thing and unlike the choir who obviously take a lot of their thinking like from bergenworth from is look the menses latch onto lauren and saying okay see lauren did this thing through beast blood so it's obviously the blood transformation itself is fundamental you just need to and there is some precedence there's cut content for a cut great one beast called um fauna um so there would have been flora and is and father and moran and there would have been a cool little parallel but yeah exactly right uh so like and finally you know animals so it works with um works with uh beasts and loran and then you have like is and is obviously has like the star flowers and stuff like that so like the little like flower monsters that like bergenworth brings up so like yeah there's just there's tons of stuff that just would work with that hey anyway it didn't happen maybe bloodborne too maybe you never know i'm just ready for the executioners to be in charge of the healing church in another town next to you oh you think they're just going to be like the following day well think about it if there's a bloodborne 2 who's going to how are they going to succeed the premise well get a new town that's nearby yharnam so that way you can have your return to anor londo moment like you go through like this terrible arcane swamp with all these monstrosities then you see this crooked building you're like hey that's weird then you walk in and you're like oh my god it says birgenworth and this is the the the classroom building from the nightmare in the first game see i think i think the way you do it you make an armored core game and then and then like halfway through you reveal you're like you're fighting a mac and then the mac sort of it you like you're attacking it and you break the shell where the uh where the host of the mech is and inside that there's just a great one that's sort of been hooked up and you do just like this big reveal of oh my god what is this armored core prequel no no you it's just this isn't actually an armored core game this is bloodborne oh my god you're going even deeper than me yeah uh sophie and i have talked a lot about this where you like you begin this just maybe you don't call it armored core it's just a mech game but then you meet like um you meet like a max deeper on which have like weird sort of biological arms and if you pay attention maybe it's an amygdala arm and then you have like a boss fight that is just like right the legs are named after bloodborne characters for some reason yeah yeah that's weird and then you have a boss which is uh which is the uh the the the one reborn you have that boss because that's the that's like big enough that it could fight a mac and it's like yeah or like amygdala like you have like a giant amygdala versus yes uh versus a mech yeah and it's just like yeah guess what it's the future now it's the future it's bloodborne in the future oh god no i i would say it would be like okay who's left well the executioners still have their secret workshop they were never touched in all this so they could just take over the healing church and turn into their own fanatical cult thing because they take it all really super seriously so you have a super you have a similar but very different premise because now you have the actual fanatics in charge yeah and then like it and then things go like in a completely different direction it's in a nearby town and all that and then they try to they try to have like this like the theocratic military stayed in charge and they're trying to keep things under control with the beasts and all like like you could definitely that that that's the best avenue i see for a bloodborne too but anyway onto the actual actual bloodborne so mensis menses planned they take all this stuff from lorann and from the from lawrence and from rom and all this and their big plan is okay so we're going to summon the red moon flora and then when flora the pale blood comes in uh she will uh she we will give her a child and that child will then be used as the bargaining chip with which we will get our what we want which is as wikilog says he thinks that rom roms a half with and that she did not um go the full extent that she needed to with the with bl with uh needing blood transformation things like that you need the blood transformation to do this properly um and so uh we'll just we just need to enlighten our thinking and we'll go the full mile with the blood yeah uh in order to do that we need the baby okay where are we gonna get the baby well we get our hands on mergo from queen yarnum and there's obviously there's the queen killer um enemy uh and a lot of stuff so that you can argue about how that connects with the executioners and things but the the main point is that they ultimately get their hands on murko and they get the they get a new uh they get mergo and they basically try to do the summoning ritual thing so uh euphoria comes in and that seems to obviously create a red moon which causes things to go haywire and agitates beasts and all that and uh but they they they don't seem to actually get in contact with flora in time um it's this is this has been a thing that even japanese community people have been talking about as possibly um a typo um okay so like when we go down to say mur the line with um with uh mergo for the i-chords it talks about sort of this chord granted men's audience with mergo but results in the stillbirth and the race this has always caused so much confusion for the english community i was talking yeah someone yeah because there are people in the italian community who are asking me questions about this and it's like this has caused so much confusion i was like okay i see what the problem is because what happens is that it says here um thus okay so the idea is that um all higher ones lose their babies and so seek them right so this is the idea that mince is like okay so all the all the higher ones want a baby so much like with the case we'll just give flora a baby and this will allow us to get what we want this is the idea thus this brought a chance encounter with mergo so there's been two ways to interpret this some people think this again like i said there's some in the japanese community who think this may be a typo and it's supposed to refer to mergo's wet nurse but the wetness doesn't have a name so me it just slipped miyazaki's mind when he's just writing it down he just left mergo in there okay and the other idea is that this just brings up this is just in reference to the fact that um they had to they needed mergo so they happened to find mergo in the chalice dungeons with obviously queen yarn and stuff and so they they got they they got her and they took her baby and then they were able to use her for all the the menses ritual stuff they're after either way the general idea seems to be from what we can see in the environmental storytelling is that when they were summoning flora flora didn't get there first so to speak right okay um the the wet nurse did and the wet nurse comes in and the wet nurse is another great one from all indications with like spider phantasm things and all that and uh the wet nurse is like okay i want the baby so they give them the baby and mickelash and company is like okay we want um uh we want eyes we want eyes on the ins on on our brains and with nurses like uh okay i can do that and so we get the nightmare right so like the idea is that mikalash is the host of the nightmare he's the owner or master of the nightmare the host localization seems to be a carryover from an older idea in the script where he would actually like kind of introduce himself as like your host so to speak yeah like he's kind of welcoming you and they sort of just stuck around when the the the dialogue with him changed but the idea seems to be that mikalash is again he's the one who's basically at the center of the nightmare he's not the root of the nightmare that's the wet nurse and mergo right so like though they're the ones with the actual power um and specifically the wetness because the whitener seems to be making the deal and the idea is that they want eyes on the en they want eyes on their brains so the wet nurse takes them quite at their word they want eyes on a brain uh so again this goes back to the idea it's not that they res it isn't that um they got an audience with merco but resulted in the still birth of their brains it's they had this chance encounter with mergo and that gave the defective brain tissue to menses so that giant brain tissue it's called such in another item description in the japanese version that thing that that uh caused all the spears and all this and all that that is in fact the brain that they received as part of their deal with handing over merco so they gave a they gave a great one um they gave the wet nurse mergo and the wet nurse is like okay here's your weird like brain tissue i don't know why you want this thing but here you go right and here we have our own little brain so i'll take care of mergo in my little dream dimension and you can like use it with your little brain thing for whatever research stuff you want right and then behind the two charts it just it just cobbled this thing together from the messengers yeah it looks like it's it looks yeah again and we see like we obviously see the uh menses is learning from this right because they try to create because here's the thing they realize oh god we made a mistake somehow this did not work out the way we planned because um yeah they have a so like the idea is that it's a defective brain tissue right because again you don't deal with great ones they're like fae you don't know what how this deal is going to work out the brit the tissue is defective it doesn't really work that well um it's but it's rotten the eyes are evil cursing things but like the me get credit to make the washing company they tried to make it work you see them take dogs and put they take they try to put dog heads on crow bodies and grow heads on dog bodies we see them take some of their own and start putting some of that brain tissue on them and they turn into those singing monstrosities winter lanterns yeah the winter lanterns that's the idea how do you uh how do you oh sorry i'm readjusting myself and i'm banging my desk sorry how do you how do you then uh account for the winter lanterns we find in the fishing hamlet if they're made by well they they fell from above that's right that's right because the uh the cause our orbit of cause boss fight is seen from the nightmare frontier right right so here's the idea koss creates the hunter's nightmare right so there's the hunter's nightmare where all the hunters are then there's the fishing hamlet aspect and then we see those same masts in the nightmare frontier which is just the remote regions of the um nightmares of mensis which is where the church is atop the mount at the top so you have these winter lanterns which obviously everyone's already pointed out they look like they're just like doll they're like they're doll models that's been stretched out and had the the monster head put on top of it i have no you can't i have no idea what the original concept was for this but it's very clearly they're supposed to just be members of the menses crew that basically had the monstrosity and once again they're just reusing a model that they repurpose this happens all the time in souls yeah it usually explains 90 times weird oddities with some of their their enemy models anyway um the point is is that with um again they do all these experiments trying to put heads on different things like you see a bunch of eyes on pigs again swapping out the bird the crow and dog heads on each other and they got them in cages and sometimes not in cages anymore they just annoy us even eventually taking crows heads on spiders and deciding let's put combine them yeah spider heads oh well well the spider heads yeah those go with like the transformation stuff they're doing like um transforming into great ones with the heads but that that seems to be more related to mergo's wet nurse than to the menses experiments but point is is that menses has been doing all these experiments trying to put heads and stuff and that results we see when they try to apply that research they end up with the winter lanterns and the idea is that um you have these giant monstrosities with like rotten flesh and eyeballs it doesn't work obviously they're still just as rotten there's no ascension happening there um so then the um the win some of the winter lanterns as we see um end up in the nightmare frontier and some of them have apparently fallen as far as into the fishing hamlet um and you also see for example some of the the stuff that's found in the nightmare frontier the what is it the despair uh the lead elixir i think it's called yeah you find some of those in the fishing hamlet as well and that also seems to come from the um the nightmare frontier obviously it has a meta reference to the fishing handle because there's lots of despair that was there but it seems to be something that was fell from the hunter's nightmare and that's the justification there okay yeah so you have all this happening so mikalash has a problem well they're in the nightmare and nothing's really working and obviously they've been in there for a long time so his body's basically mummified and dead at this point from their like weird jank rituals um and things aren't working out on their end right um on the outside the choir obviously has a big problem is there's a red moon um and the red moon causes a lot of the issues with the old yharnam and all the stuff that's falling apart and we talked about this already right well how are they going to solve this well as we've talked about before um they go to burger worth and willem seems to now okay well first i should bring up they at the same time the choir brings up ebrietis and rom with her so ebrietis is obviously in the chalice dungeons it is with rom and embryotis his whole shtick is uh oh everyone why are you abandoning me down here i want to join you up in the stars so she's constantly like just looking up being all mopey and sad and killing anyone that gets in her way that gets interrupts her being mopey and sad so like that's her that's entire state well she meets rom and ron is like oh my gosh another person like me i have i can have an actual friend so she's all happy right like her and rahm apparently become buds and then the under the grand cathedral they built this kind of pseudo church you can actually see like remnants of floor and columns and obviously all the statues have been put up and um you can see remnants of an altar behind rom's corpse back there at the very back yeah that has also described like well yeah the altar of despair so the alter of despair there's an actual altar behind rom's corpse um and you even see a similar tree like the one behind the altar in the grand cathedral like it's obviously a smaller tree because it's newer but the idea is like yeah they set up basically their own mini church back there and the idea seems to be they use the is chalice that embryonis now has and basically did some blood rituals to basically summon her over here like she basically like hey british we have your cup and everything is like ooh and she comes climbs all the way up to here and rom comes with her obviously because obviously she's now buds and they're following each other right so then those two are up there now now when the whole thing with menses happens there now is like this cooperation happening between rom the choir and willem and the idea basically is okay when menses did the ritual they took willem's school with him so like the reason we don't see the school in bergenworth is because it got like teleported into the dream dimensions like when we now see it drifting in the nightmare it is literally it's because the actual schoolhouse got like translocated into the nightmare dimension that was being created as part of the menses ritual when they did their deal with the wet nurse right so this is the idea and in its place rom creates the lake which serves as this sort of um entrance to her dream dimension that she's created so she transfers her consciousness to the stream world so her body is left there to rot and die um and she's now operating from this new dream dimension where she seems to affect the cosmos in a way that she creates a a actual barrier that keeps the menses any more menses rituals from connecting so it basically blocks all the great ones from having the same direct sight with um with uh the real world right and she seems to more or less act as a buffer zone yeah it's it's important to note here that the entrance you literally jump into the reflection of the moon and it's like that it is in a body of water is also significant because water bodies of water act as like bulwarks against uh what what's the yeah yeah the japanese is a divide so like yeah that there is a divide so again this goes back to the idea of the cosmic ocean as i call it in the idea is that the cosmos is divided by uh by a layer of water that like encapsulates the the world right like the idea is that up above there's this layer of water which divides the um the cosmos from our world and that's where we get rain and all this stuff right yeah and that would assumably be how uh how rom is able to hold back the uh the dropping down of the red moon yeah she creates this lake where the old school house used to be and she basically again maybe it's because there's residual arcane power from like the use of the ritual there to translocate it whatever the exact reasons for them doing here on a meta level it's because the plan was to have the schoolhouse there but then they changed the schoolhouse to connect to the nightmare instead of the uh to bergenworth so instead they turned it and then they put the lake there and then the classic miyazaki he creates an in-universe exploration which reflects the meta development so like yeah so it's it's very cl you see same thing with small same thing with so many things in in from soft history but the idea seems to be that okay so uh the rom is now going into this this dream dimension is going to now create this divide that's going to basically block out like uh signals from the great ones so that way flora doesn't know isn't able to exactly communicate directly in the same respects and um uh uh odin also gets it gets kind of uh gets kind of messed with because of this because now all the people he all the servants of his in his chapel that he was communicating with no or get cut off from communication and this causes them all to go crazy because they're like oh no oh god where is he uh we can't hear him anymore so like all that all doesn't work out so like this again another reason why odin benefits probably the most from um the choir uh getting uh the rom getting killed so yeah uh when uh when so all this is being done in order to counteract menses and this is where yuria gets uh stationed and her idea and she's left with the message um and the english sort of puts it in let me find this is it the one that goes uh the burgundy spider yeah i have no yeah yeah so yeah the burger but the spider is also okay so um so like yuria gets a message from from seemingly from her height from her fellows in the choir and it says uh spider hides all manners uh rituals certain to reveal nothing for true enlightenment need not be shared the japanese miraculously um spider hides all the ceremonies do not reveal them none need comprehend the enlightening truth so basically the idea is that they're saying listen whatever you do don't interrupt rom from doing her thing let her just do whatever she's doing no one needs to see the enlightening truth of the red moon like we have already so like yeah we just don't so basically she's just saying yuria do your guard duty and nothing more um and as we see she does it yeah like you're yuri's that guy with the meme with the pizza like he just kind of comes in after like he comes back like i always said like an alternate like a universe where yuri comes back from her guard duty like at the choir hey guys i did my job and like everything's on fire and everything like they're all like praying with like the celestial emissaries coming down like abraham this is still like all mopey over rom's corpse and she's just like what happened see this is one of those this is one of those places in the game where i think from kind of messed up design wise because you you have this story which cannot conclude unless you basically genocide the entire town whereas like ideally rom wouldn't have even been a boss fight that's just like rom exists there and you drop down and ron just looks at you kind of scared and you just need to hit rom once and rom dies and ron won't fight back but so like there's no way to fail once you've instigated the fight but have it set up that way that if you leave bergenworth damien will kill her for you so that the plot still happens but you don't need to take the initiative to kill her well that would have been a good idea and unfortunately i don't think damian as a character existed until the deal no he's added with the dlc yeah so like yeah unfortunately that's something where like retrospect it's like you could have probably had more options there yeah they thought about summoning and stuff before but um yeah that there could have been a lot more probably done there uh it seems like in the final game the idea is that rom is so focused on doing her like barrier creating job that like she's up keeping the barriers so she doesn't pay attention to us until we attack her because we're like hey hey listen to me giant spider thing what are you what and like obviously like at that point like the gloves are off it's like oh no i'm being attacked i have to defend myself and then obviously things just things just deteriorate from there and granted willem seems to be totally okay with this he's like okay listen i've been sitting here on this this uh balcony okay with it he seems to be completely out of his mind by the time we meet him well yes but his thing seems to be hey go over there in there like it seems to be the idea is that willem seems to understand that at this point like everything's like shot like he's been sitting here going crazy and like losing control of his like body functions like you can't even like like that's all he can do with his mouth now and so it seems like his ideas that uh uh look like you know what everything shot may as well like just end this like why are we why are we doing this pointless charade anymore like obviously he's lost everything at this point and nothing has gone right for him and his attempt to try and obviously the choir has done nothing like they've just they've allowed like menses to be they they've sort of stopped menses quote-unquote from continuing their rituals so now menses is kind of like well nothing's working out so we have to kind of figure out what's going wrong here but like they haven't done it they haven't actually solved the problem or anything so willem's just kind of left out to dry again which again willem could like join kaners in the club of just being abandoned by the healing church it's just like just don't just don't deal with don't deal with anything related to lawrence it just doesn't work out he's a bad guy he's a bad guy he had bad people associated with him and they trained bad students who murdered them um but anyway so the idea with uh with uh mensis now is like obviously the forbidden woods becomes forbidden they basically try to prevent obviously the choir still infiltrates like the village in the forbidden woods through the the josephus clinic the back door they have there and they're still doing dealings and experiments and stuff there but like it's ostensibly forbidden from anyone else from going through obviously no one knows the no one alive knows the uh the adage except for probably emilia and obviously she's just doing whatever the choir wants her to do and the choir basically still doing their rituals i mean so they're doing their experiments and stuff trying to because their thing is like okay we don't have to worry about communicating with the great ones until like we're actually like up there yet so we're like we'll do this like on our own at some point and then uh in the meantime though the menses is basically like okay we gotta try to do more rituals try to do more experiments and they figure like mika lashing companies seem to have more or less well okay i'm not really saying mikalaj but men's school seems to more or less figure out that okay things are not working with the great one we made our dealings with um what if we like create our own great one and that's where we get like the one reborn like it's like an art it's it's their failed attempt at an artificial amygdala yeah and like stuff like that is like the type of things that they were experimenting and working towards and in the meantime like we see them they create like experimental like beasts like they strip them of skin and like like all this like crazy like stuff like they've just like they've experimented on children they've like tons of virtual sacrifices and things like things like obviously they're just doing like the kidnapping and human experimentation angle at this point um they're basically the healing church but like whatever little moral sort of constraints held back the healing church is gone this is just like peak desperation mode whatever acquirement yeah choir minces are just doing their own thing like choir's big like choir's big focus is just keeping things together until they get what they want and then they like they don't care what happens to the rest of the town like they're just guinea pigs to do what they will but like they need to keep the town together because you know it's their it's their if their research subjects they need to keep things running at least until that point menses menses don't get like again menses is the same it's sort of the same spiel but they don't really care about what happens to your because again they're just like using all this stuff now because once they get their artificial god that they can talk to and it can do the thing do the job for them they're fine yeah so like all all of this is like this this like you say complete desperation on diff on on different fronts and then when we enter the scene we're obviously just sort of um we're just sort of unknown to the happenings we're just sort of caught in the middle of this conflict um the the choir starts um it seems like the choir gets the point where they they they start experimenting on themselves um where they basically decide okay we're going to turn ourselves they turn those into the star children right so the celestial children or whatever they're called in english and then the idea is that um hopefully they they start obviously they they repeat the research hall experiments they start creating like these like uh bloat head type enemies and start planting them in the ground again and hey they have some success after the red moon appears and like a celestial emissary shows up right so like i mean something works out um they have uh they obviously have spies like um you talk about damien i really like edgar i like edgar a lot for what he contributes in terms of um the storytelling because he shows that there was a spy going as far back as when mikalash was first like creating this dimension and they're like getting people in here and stuff like that so edgar is like supposed to be like stationed out there and you can this is why we get the choir bell and a chest in the rafters near the entrance and stuff so like like obviously that can only like give away that he's part of the choir right now so he's sort of just um he's keeping that hidden store but it's near the entrance so like if any of his buddies come flying and you go oh grabs the bell and comes down he's like hey guys i'll help out i got my little healing belt with me yeah so like a lot of cool stuff happens there but uh but ultimately mikalash goes crazy we see from all the bodies left over that he revives during the boss fight like that's that's what happens with all the people that were with him in this dimension so um we see like uh some blood we see like the yosefka blood vial thing that's not really a yusefica blood vial it's supposed to be a mergo blood vial at that point um near the yeah yeah that's the idea it's like you're supposed to get like oh it's this like super special blood it's like okay usually get this from yosefka but at this point in the game in the context where we find it it's clearly supposed to be a mergo's blood that they've extracted and then like again they're still trying to do experiments and stuff with it as far as the wet nurse will let them um all right but obviously mikalash goes crazy and obviously he's like as you pointed out he's a mummy in the corpse so once he's dead uh there's there's no hope for him like there's no way he's like just gonna go back to his body or um even if he could like return to his body there's no way he will right i've talked about this before i would have wanted for when you've killed him in the nightmare i would have loved that if you go back to the advent plaza his corpse has like maybe crawled down the stairs and is just lying dead there so like he snapped back came back into his corpse body and was alive for maybe a minute before he came to uh to the ravages of age oh that'd be cool yeah that'd be cool but like yeah well unfortunately it's one of those things where you don't have an incentive to go back because then the game basically ends right like you're just brought back to the dream hunter's dream that's true that's true so again so it's one of those things where from stuff has to consider like one of the like we could do all these little small things but how many how many times are players are actually going to be going back and seeing that type of stuff yeah like you may go back and see gilbert that one time during the red moon or something right because you maybe have a quest line or something that involves you coming back there but how many times are you going to be able to go back to the uh diahar ghoul once you beat in menses so it's like no it is what it is anyway the i'm trying to think what other is there anything we're missing uh well i'd like to elaborate a bit on the wet nurse and um and uh the idea of um sort of resolution of the plot the idea of silencing the nightmare newborn oh okay but um about menses in the choir i think yeah so i think that that story sort of resolves itself when the uh when we kill rom the red moon hangs low that basically puts a stop to everything in the choir they're all gone at this point um transformed into people the choir were already experiment we see the corpse with uh a call beyond in the rafters like you could see the item thing and everything yeah um in the rafters of the grand cathedral when you're fighting emilia so the choir was already experimenting on themselves and like basically offing themselves at that point like they were already like going okay we gotta do transformation now it seems because they understood because obviously the mobs are at the gate like we see they've taken over the church workshop and they're like literal practically banging out the doors to the choirs area um you have uh what's it called the uh obviously yharnam's been going to hell obviously we see for a while now with the beast knights and things and obviously the the villagers had enough so it seems like the choir seems to have understood that they were running out of time it was now or never right yeah and they were but that basically but again their problem with their philosophy is this basically leaves them waiting on hand and foot hoping that the gods will notice them right that's the idea they may have had some success because as we see with the celestial emissary like that's some response from a fan that's some response from a phantasm of a great one um entering the one of their experiments and turning into like this super and like we can see he does like this prayer buff thing so like it's clear that they've had some success on this but obviously we kill it before anything happens so yeah okay maybe another thing bloodborne two could do they could do it like a gwenzel thing where you never kill this optional boss yeah something interesting happens because of it see i think uh i think bloodborne really sort of shot itself in the foot sequel wise by getting rid of all of its main cast like you have the doll that's it you have the doll and the executioners like i said yeah well i'm talking about like specific characters because because in terms of specific they they in terms of like specific people they're all dead yeah they they could they could have somehow kept lawrence they they could have figured out a way uh i i'm a big fan of the idea that rather than him being a boss in the dlc that you kind of meet him just like brador except he doesn't fight you he's just like this defeated and just distraught and crazy old man who's just like super crestfallen and you just have a choice of well do you leave him to his fate to wallow in the nightmare or are you just gonna put an end to him um but they wanted to uh they wanted to do a big boss fight i like that boss fight but um i think that's well yeah well there there's definitely something that you have like probably one of the biggest villains in the game and he's an uh he's an uh like he's a like obviously he's a strong optional look he's kind of it's one of these things where you like you have this big central character yeah he's just this optional boss fight which is technically a reskin of another possibility he's an optional boss fight twice and he's like yeah yeah twice he's he is the main character of the game like of the of this grand story he's like the guy who kicks everything off everything sort of rests on this guy being crazy and doing the things he does and he his comeuppance is just like a little footnote that maybe happens if you uh want to 100 the game yeah but uh it's it's definitely it's an interesting way to do the narrative thing same thing like but willem at least i think it works more thematically with willem because like willem's entire like the worst thing you can do from william is basically rob him of everything he's ever had and just leave him an empty shell yeah so there's something that i think there's something very poetic in sort of the understatedness of what you happen when you have this big range figure and like he's literally just nothing yeah laura's definitely a bit weirder though because lawrence is sort of a character that feels like like i said we don't really know too much about his backstory or who he is before he was a student of bergenworth except for the fact that he clearly has less scruples than willem when it come like he's like master i i i i get i get what you're saying about the fear of the blood thing but i think we could still use it look i i hear you i hear you i'ma try it anyway it's like hey he's like hey i promise i didn't forget the adage i didn't ever ever did he ever heed it but you know i didn't forget it he's just it's just like weaponized and confident he's like what but but i don't know how to how to meditate and you do it much better than me i'll just use the blood honestly everything in the healing church is weaponizing confidence they just don't they don't know what the hell they're doing yeah they're completely out of their depth hey but okay so you you want to talk about the newborn yes uh merkel exactly like uh because when we fight queen jarnam all of that power that she has that's all merco um that seems pretty clear from the way like the the boss fight behaves with like the cries and some of the attacks yeah i'll just clear that willems like uh yharnam without merco is basically powerless otherwise she could have just gone in with the wet nurse and mocked the floor with it easily yes yeah yeah like theoretically if she had all the power she shows in the boss fight then there were no need to thank us for anything she would have already done it all herself yeah so like it's merkel she's the one that clearly needs like she's the one who needs us to kill rom and needs us to uh kill the wet nurse and like put her baby to rest or whatever mirko is interesting to me in the same way that ariana's kid is interesting to me in that it seems like we have an actual infant great one yes and with yharnam it seems like that was a successful or at least the closest thing we can get to a success for an infinite great one what nurse is obviously all over having that baby and caring and then you have yeah um then you have uh ariana's kid where ariana obviously ariana doesn't didn't want this this is not what the prostitute signed up for this is what i thought the std she had in mind you know that's what erdogan wanted and um it is amazing to me that we got that in the game where you can just because like it doesn't look like a child but when you kill it and you get the umbilical cord like it is a kid we are killing a kid in a little in a video game it is amazing well it's like it's like it's like when it's like when we literally see ocelot get squashed between our eyes but don't worry he's invisible so yeah does it doesn't matter that you see the giant every time that osceros does his little stomp animation doesn't matter that you see an arcane magic uh fire effect every time he stomps that specific arm on that thing that totally wasn't crushed right there and you still hear the bait don't worry you still hear the baby crying up until the pained cries of a child up until like the boss fight ends don't worry it's still alive we promise censorship is so weird to me but um just quickly be fair like they keep in mind like the the dirty the filthy woman in demon souls it was the same idea right like like oh i have this child he's right here next to me like i promise you he's right here and i'm talking about him and he's totally here and we're having so much fun it's like we totally didn't have to cut the model because we didn't want to cr have to deal with the implications of you being able to kill this kid he's just totally here and i'm very like it's it's so weird with her too for the same reasons like it's just this thing where they have to they always have to find every time miyazaki wants to kill a child he has to find creative ways in order to get do doing it but he but he'll find them he'll find them well i'm amazed with what he was able to accomplish with kuro i'm like what with kuro yeah in the uh in second row yeah yeah i'm like i'm just like wow like wow yes i i was thinking like kuro was gonna have to turn into like some giant monster thing or something but no but um i think so you know he's just sleeping acer they never say it explicitly i'm gonna i'm gonna have to dig up a comment i got a couple hours ago i'm gonna have to see if that's your alt account because if somebody said the same thing where it's like well it's not explicitly stated that he's dead what what do you think the ending means then listen but they have plausible dynamia ability in court but uh ariana's kid i think that's an easier one to solve than merco because merkel sort of bounces off into a broader topic that's just a successful problem with the marco is that mergo is like basically the idea that mergo you are the game gets around you stuff showing you stuffing it out by basically just having you listen to the audio of you stuffing it out which you could argue is a byproduct of like the the wet nurse like gulping him down or whatever yeah like when she comes in like you hear the gulping sound with her and that's that's the reason why like that you don't see the baby or anything in the fight or whatever is because like the idea is that okay yeah wet nurse takes in and absorbs the power and and lance mcdonald's gone over this in better detail in earlier versions of the cutscenes it's a lot more explicit oh yeah they just kept on cutting it down and down like this is the thing you have to see with all from soft games it's basically it means like he looks at something and he's like hmm can i make this more subtle okay more subtle now more subtle and so every time he tries to do something more explicit he's like that just doesn't really work i'll give the guy credit he tries to really make it where stuff as best as he can usually he tries to make things where it makes sense in the setting for you to be told or shown something like this he doesn't he's one of the person where he understands most people won't understand um what he's trying to show what he's trying to convey to you but he still doesn't like going in the other direction where it's like well you know you know he's crying and he's whining so he's super sad yeah he's he wants to try to show you in other ways that are um more creative it's like when uh in the uh in the sure ending of sakura where owl walks in with the kunichiro's decapitated head and he plops it down and it's all animated but you never see kinichira's head right yeah like the idea like obviously there's always censorship concerns but there's always this idea of how can i be um it plays into miyazaki's toolkit of wanting to be more subtle about things it's also with us a lot it's also good marketing because lance mcdonald will get you a hundred thousand different views of him just moving the camera slightly to show you or like him showing you like earlier cut cut scenes that you left in the game files or something or like say for me i've shown obviously quail axe cut dialogue and how like the japanese version of that one makes it very explicit about a lot of lore concerning izalith which is it's all there by implication yeah but like it's stuff you it's again it's stuff that you kind of have to again you have to understand by knowing the scenario and doing some logic tests whereas if you look at the dialogue it just flat out tells you all this stuff it's like oh that's an easy shortcut but uh for mergo um first of all i just again a brief aside i really i i don't think bloodborne really really capitalizes on the insanely creepy premise that you've like you have this cult that is reaching out to gods and they manage to communicate with a god and they finally summon it but something else comes through i think that's such a creepy premise well like again this goes back to my point it's like you don't it's this idea like you're dealing with higher forces you don't understand you don't know what you're talking to on the other end yeah again this is sort of the idea oh i'm getting goosebumps like don't do it yeah like don't do it with a ouija board or whatever like you it's like like it's like when you're like you're all you get your old like like your older grandmother's like oh you don't know what this dude on the other it's the same concept right like you don't know what cosmic forces beyond our understanding of that other world are at the other end so just because you're like oh you know it's cute or it's fun or you know we're just going to talk to god and he's going to give us i think it's like listen you got to be careful here you don't know what you're messing with yeah it doesn't help it doesn't it's very understanding it doesn't help that it's nighttime right now and we had that mystery shadow in the uh in the coffee break earlier so what basically happened is i i have the curtains closed so there's no outside light coming in and i'm talking to logie and all of a sudden like a shadow whooshes across the room and we've decided that it was a fly that flew next to the light bulb but i keep like if you've if you if you hear me being like weirdly quiet after the after the uh around two hour mark or so that's because i keep looking over my shoulder to see through my hallway if there's some murderer waiting to kill me and now we're talking about evil demon gods don't worry acer you'll be safe you don't have any vermin on you do you i mean your avatar says otherwise well not my youtube avatar just my discord one okay so so okay but that means so you have vermin on the inside oh but um but uh yeah we have the wetness which is just we don't know anything about it other than it is a great one which is just it's it's not malicious so much as it is just it does not care about humanity it is just doing whatever it can to get to merco what's a little it's a little malicious it does give them a defective brain like it's like okay i'll give you exactly what you asked for yes sure sure but i mean malicious she's gonna work right i i i suppose malicious is um i i mean more so in the sense it's not like an actively malevolent no it's like it's not true it's it's basically again the idea seems to be that they're basically the they they're very immoral right yeah they're humans who've now reached like cosmic proportions so now like they're their concept and precepts of human morality is now so beyond it like they're so beyond humanity right yeah so this idea of like okay we're going to deal with you and we can make deals and we can reason we can understand what you try to want and all this stuff but like we don't communicate the same language per se anymore right yeah and we we have the power we have all the controller you know like yeah sure we'll give you this you want brain on the inside sure i'll give you literally what you want and it's going to be sort of the genies bargain where it's like it's not even going to necessarily work right it's like i gave you what you wanted you didn't say it had to be pristine yeah but but that that's another interesting point though is it seems like the great ones are bound to like when they sign a contract they are equally forced to uh operate through like they they don't you can loophole it and give them like a literal thing that they want but you do have to deliver you can't just promise it take the kid and then they want the baby well they want the baby yeah yeah yeah but i i mean like you need something yeah like it seems to be the idea that they they they have certain things that like they can't just freely create themselves a child right they need to have some interaction and relations with the humans on the other side in order to make it work yeah so that seems to be where it comes into the whole idea of okay we are going to be as generous as we want now you could be like ludwig's star and he's it's just like okay i'm gonna just like kind of like pull a little prank because i don't care what happens to you i get nothing in return for this right like so i'm just going to answer you most other great ones are like i don't want to deal with you i'm sending a meteor and tell you to shut up and then you get like and then you get like those like um like flora and like the wet nurse and stuff we're just like i just want a kid okay i just wanna i just want a kid give me a kid i'll give you that thing it's like okay i will give you what i want like i kept my word you give me what i want and like they don't and again i think the thing the reason why you don't see any more like them like them like like screwing over those that they uh that they uh that they make deals with is because they don't care at that point yeah it doesn't matter to them so i think there's a there's definitely a there's definitely a case to be made that the the great ones only honor their deal so far as their deals give them what they want anything beyond that is just not their concern anymore yeah and plus the idea is perhaps they maybe they can get more out of the deal in the future yeah like with a hunter stream yeah but like like the entire premise for like german is that german has basically been stuck there aging endlessly just like he's like okay like laura's you gotta come back here with some results or else i am literally just going to die yeah that's such a creepy thing too of like yep i'm just gonna be stuck here for decades with nobody to keep me company except for this doll and maybe this horrible moon presence monster just comes and visits me every now and then maybe that's sort of what happens with um the hunters right because ludwig because like with ludwig coming in as the first church hunter the church workshop basically like sets up next to ludwig's little workshop on the top of the valley right yeah i don't know if it's exactly the top but like you know it's near the top right like it's over old yarn yeah yeah and then the church workshop comes in and then we start seeing the cathedral and then the new yharnam and all that gets over and all that sort of overshadows german's old little workshop that used to just sort of sit on the hill above the rest of yharnam and he would use to go down and like you know do his beast hunting like he he's basically he was basically an exterminator right he was the local exterminator of the town and he just happened to specialize in exterminating beasts instead of bugs yeah so they just caught it's like oh hey german we've got this weird beast thing we've locked him up in the house could you help us do something before it breaks oh sure coming down and like you know he does the hunt there with him right like that seems to be like that was german's like daily life he gets old so he now he's like i don't want to die like i'm getting old i'm not able to do the same things i want to do like i want to keep living and you know doing things and maybe you know maybe he and he considering his obsession with beast hunting he may still want to keep continuing to help people of yharnam with a longer life span and more power right yeah and then like but now he's found himself in this terrible situation where he's just stuck like you say he can't do anything really about it because he's basically stuck there in the advisor role the moon presence is gonna let him leave and hunt anymore so he can't even do what he he's like his life's goal is i just so i just realized logie he's assuming he doesn't die of age he should be alive right after we kill him we just sever him from the dream like he would have done to us and then he should wake up under the morning sun like we would have right um possibly we don't know exactly how this works in the detail it could be we can we can use him in the sequel we can use him in the sequel put me back into the dream put me back into the dream like german's like this this ancient like monstrosity like hooked up to the thing they're keeping him alive with like both like archibald's like old bolt research or something crap like that like a frankenstein monstrosity well maybe he takes over the church with the executioners both well it's again that's again it's possible that they just find his body and they find him like half alive this old like decrepit corpse and again they just hook them up and they just keep them alive like again there's possibilities there but anyway we don't know exactly how it works with the the dream dimension with the hunter's dream because it seems like at least when he looks does dialogue stuff like he seems to feel like he gets rest because suicide doesn't work maria tried that german german knows that that's not gonna work you can't just like suicide yourself out of these hell dimension things like you're when you're bound here you're bound here until the great one says you can leave and that's never yeah so um it's possible that flora still again like when we kill him we do sever him from the dream but only so far as now he's part of the cosmic record and flora could theoretically just like drudge him up and bring him back into the dream simulation she has here but it seems like she'd rather just use us because you know we're there and like you know a little bit of a revenge for getting rid of her first guy he's like okay you're my new leverage yeah so this seems to be the the the there's definitely a lot of ways to look at this but my thing with like lawrence is that having started with german is that the only thing he has is he's waiting for lawrence and he his only company has been like you said the doll but also like the hunters who come through and he's had to kill every single one of these for one reason or another like all of them have not wanted to be part of the dream anymore or could or couldn't be because they became like going crazy right so like there's just all there's all these issues that german has had to um sort through on a personal level just between like he's been deprived of his life's work he's had to kill basically everyone that he's ever possibly had a bond with um in order to basically leave himself alone and he still feels selfless enough to be like listen flora is coming i'm gonna just like lay down your life let me kill you and you can be free of this and i will be suffering the hell so there's something very interestingly noble about our resident crazy genocidal maniac yeah well he out of all of the villains of the game and like all the bad people he seems to be like the most redeemable because it it does genuinely seem like with him and maria maria just tries to keep you out of like like just get out don't don't involve yourself further with like you don't need to know the secret and german is like with the cut with the cut content you're talking about here so just clarify for people no no i mean like when she went but she stops you so that you don't have to uh so that you don't see the fishing hamlet it doesn't seem oh oh you mean like after she's after after like when you like you the corpse should be left while yeah yeah it's it's like what's this yeah yeah it's extension of that cut dialogue but yeah yeah she she's not she's not evil to you she's like she did bad things but she's not stopping you because she's evil yeah yeah her personal hell is to basically be trapped in her hunter as being like the guardian for the the hunters for the the seed bed of the hunter's nightmare the fishing hamlet like her entire role is cos has her be the guard duty of this terrible thing that she obviously she obviously never wishes happened now she's the one that guards the secret at the same time this is also keeping her from being with the patients who she cared for in life so like it's sort of like she's she's literally caught between a rock and a hard place of the two terrible things she doesn't want to be uh be a part of she's now part of yeah and for german it's uh you know he did a lot of awful things but at the end he's just he's like dude you can be free you can just move on with your life i'll stick around yeah right so there's there's something interesting about that um there's also the fact that you get the choice on whether or not to free him of the grip of the hunter's nightmare because there's obviously it's heavily implied at least that part of german's restlessness where he has all these nightmares and stuff and you hear him talking in his sleep and things like that like sometimes he's like oh lawrence i see you like well you why were you taking so long and sometimes uh uh like i've turned old and useless and then sometimes he's like oh burger worth someone help me i can't be here anymore oh well you see because it works it's like if he's in a dream where is he going when he dreams oh so like that's an interesting question to ask yourself and one thing that i've seen the fan base come up with is the idea that he is the orphan of cost obviously people compared to the cries of the bait he obviously uses some of german's cry lines which could in itself not mean much but also the faces are very similar strikingly similar they both have like a cape dealy uh and it's like i keep bringing that up which like it sounds there's also there's also there's also content of an umbilical cord which makes sense if you realize the orphan isn't actually a true great one child it's just ger it's german as the surrogate orphan of cost thing and sort of like been mixed with the baby do we have an item description for it yeah there there's a there's an item model if i recall correct oh before and that got cut and that could be because the idea was well that wouldn't make sense because it's not a real great one baby it's german mixed with the actual great one baby right so yeah but like they sort of like they took like the cape i keep bringing up like oh they both have a similar sort of kp cape dealy and like that sounds so insignificant but it's like it's torn like it's such a no other cape in the game looks like this especially made up flesh right yeah well but yeah it makes the point there's also the there's also just the fact that the way the the like it's very it's very clear like looking at the way that it's obviously the orphan of cost never grew up that big obviously the idea and it's like why are you having this giant child baby which has this obviously the shadow form which obviously it's sort of the actual scene bed of like the representation of the child then if that's the case what's the boss that we're fighting then if that um if that like shadow form of the orphan of coss is the actual like that's her actual quote-unquote missing baby that she she wants to have there then what's the actual like the non-shadow version that we're fighting and it makes sense that that is when german's like asleep and stuff he is acting as the he's going through another personal hell as the orphan of costs where it's like okay you took my baby so you will now be the replacement for that baby you will live in my my dead corpse wound for all eternity i will say though um german does not obtain rest until you release the shadow baby exactly well yeah because that's the seed bed because again this goes back to my point of everything all of this will all of them will revive and this will all repeat until the nightmare is destroyed yeah so you could so theoretically you could just leave ludwig maria german all these people to suffer again and over and over like all the other hunters but then again there's a question of isn't that kind of screwing yourself over because you're you're now in this and there's no getting out of it yeah it's also it's also such a fun way of like you can do all the bosses but you don't have to you don't have to give these people rest if you don't want to yeah exactly like it's like do you really want do you really want the likes of ludwig lawrence german like maybe maria maybe maria you feel bad but even she like you have to acknowledge that even after giving up the hunting part she's still complicit in the healing church atrocities in the research all experiments yeah like it doesn't matter how much she wants to be on mother muriel like oh i'm here to comfort you and love you she's still being complicit in inhumane experiments yeah so like there's definitely a lot of blame to go around and say do you want any of these do any of these people really deserve the rest and that's a wonderful moral choice to lead to the player so i think i think that's great that like you have two big choices in the game on on both of them have to revolve around sort of german's morality and how much you um how much you want to respect uh um him as a character and a man yeah unlike lawrence lawrence lawrence he's just a mini boss you get to fight that one time he's just irredeemable trash yeah well twice but yeah put twice well listen he you have to kill him twice make him double the suffering all right then i uh i suppose it's just time for like i i threw out like a questionnaire for people like is there anything you want to bring up with uh when i want me to bring up with loki and we've talked about most of it so i'm just going to scroll through some questions here uh uh uh uh changed the moon presence name we talked about that tsuki no [Music] oh is there anything uh any issues with gascoigne clothing description i want to know if there's any issues having to do with foreign lands in japanese i found it's interesting that he said umbasa along with another npc in the beta uh uh so it looks like okay so this goes into okay so let's start with the first thing with gas going yeah the only thing that off the top of my head that i'm let me double check okay i don't have gas goings items in my notes here for for this so all right um yeah the only thing that's really worth noting is this idea of the holy shawl um there's this talk of holy shall in the localization very consistently the japanese only refers to a holy cloth and that's because it's not referring to the entire shawl it's usually referring to specifically that one rectangular cloth that hangs off the back that you see with the executioners the holy blade unit which is also the holy blade uniform which you also see in the um the tomb prospector set which you also see of course with the choir set and like you see with all the church uniforms it's this consistent idea of what marks you as a church hunter is this singular cloth with a specific design and as you get lower in the ranks in the church the design gets shorter and smaller and then what happens with gas going is he takes that hanging cloth and he turns into a scarf oh oh that's that's what happens when i talk about yes that's the idea when they're talking about oh it's his whole like they take the holy shawl and they use it as a scarf or whatever the idea is that it's not talking about the whole like cloak and garb and mantle and all that stuff let's talk about all that it's just talking about the holy cloth which seems to be that singular rectangular um like cloth wrapping thing they just let hang off the back yeah yeah so that that's the only thing that's worth talking about with gascoigne and obviously the idea of him wrapping using a scarf is sort of to signify how he's no longer really affiliated with the church he's kind of just doing his own thing at this point yeah because obviously he's like he's been like you know he's all about like peace ask for uh like all that as for him saying umbasa there is nothing to that line which has any significance on the final game bloodborne was a demon souls not like it wasn't demon souls 2 but it was like it wasn't it was in the world of demon souls centuries later well i see see i did i disagree with that actually i don't think that was ever a thing well again i think this is that we there are docu there are like folders in the uh in the in the in the uh so so the thing is uh it it existed as that at least to japan studios i don't know if from has that because there are there are some folders they had which list the game as demon souls 2 but i don't we don't know if that means that that was the pitch or whether that was just like the way they conceptualized it as like oh this is i think it was just i think it was just the code name because they were returning back to an old publisher and they were it was like okay you're the guys who gave us demon souls so just give us another demons yeah yeah that's what i mean that it was just it's another demon souls yeah when miyazaki well i think when miyazaki says this was never going to be demon souls 2 i believe i take him out yeah yeah me too i don't think it was ever i don't think it was ever planned to be a demon souls i think what happens when you see stuff like oh uh this character says zumbasa or something like that i think the idea was much like so many other from software games i think they were going to more heavily reference demon souls because again it's them returning to an old publisher which they did demon souls with after doing dark souls and they got super popular like oh hey we would like you to come back and do stuff for us and they're like okay miyazaki's like okay well i want to do like more references demon souls because you know i'm cheeky like i'm a cheeky boy well yeah and that just ends up getting cut over time like i know there's some people who are like well no it's actually secret was planned and there's like all this stuff i was like uh a lot of this stuff is like really flat and circumstantial and we have to just understand from software is incredibly self-referential and like we were talking about earlier in this podcast every game you can find so many connections and ways you can connect things to it but like when you get down to it and like when you get into the nitty-gritty these are ultimately very different games with different cosmologies different worlds and and uh ideas they're trying to explore with them and stuff like that and it's just like trying to trying to like connect them this way it just doesn't work yeah well i i'm willing to go as far with the theory as to say that it was a like it was a game that took place in that universe but it was never demon souls 2 because we have no i i i i don't think it was i don't think it was even taking place in the universe personally i i think on like i think when you get to like stuff like boston so that's just them again using carryover they've carried over lines in past games too but again i'm willing to agree to disagree yeah sure i'm just going off like we have the we have that fight on the uh on the beach with what is it called like the great beast or something like that which uh okay so there was a there was a there is a cut item which uses a beach which is um people have tried to compare that to the beach in demonstr again it goes back to from software is very self-referential yeah like maybe they were referencing that beach maybe like loosely because there's ruins and it's a beach but like or maybe maybe it was just a beach yeah again like you like like you say it could just be a beach but like again it's one of these things where it's like like because if you actually look at the area like the back path what it seems like it's part of the underground ruins but they're above ground because again they're constantly building up right yeah so the idea seems to be it's a part of the ruins that was in a mountain and it just so happens that because you can see like parts of the ruins sticking out on the mountain behind you besides just the entrance you leave out of and like there's a bunch of the surrounding ruins so it looks like there was an exterior like building thing and that collapsed and so there's just like the remnants of it now there's just this like i guess the water line rose and the beach is now like coming in and stuff like that so like it just seems like a bun it just seems like this was an idea they had that they they cut and people just knows the similarities because there's ruins and a beach yeah and i'm like and then they uh again maybe it was a maybe it was again it could be that it was planned to be there was a reference idea because again there's from software's very super actual but does that mean it's in this it's the same beaches and demons i'm like like and then they repurpose the beach idea for like oh the orphan of course fight yeah well well yeah well well yeah again like same thing but they like you say they repurposed it for that fight because that was an idea that i didn't get to go with in the original game and here's the thing again if you want to say it's the same thing for demon souls why is there a giant mountain in the way now like yeah you have to come out of a giant underground tomb complex in the mountains like are you telling me that after all this history with sumerians and stuff that beach is still there above ground after all these layers of hit like it's just there's so much there's so many hoops you have to go through that even if that was the idea it's very obvious why they cut it if it ever was because it wouldn't even work yeah either way so like i'm again i just i just don't think it i just don't think it holds water no i i absolutely agree that it is there is no i don't see bloodborne as a sequel to demon souls as it currently stands i think maybe it was like at some point it may have been like a sort of kinda took place in the world but i don't think there is any significance to the theory um again and to clarify my position i think at most it was just the the develop the publisher wanted a new they wanted a new demon souls like game yeah because dark souls was so popular and they they obviously now are now getting from software back for this title so they wanted something that was kind of like demon souls and let's be honest bloodborne is basically it's at its core it's just another souls game so it has a bunch of its own unique flares and stuff to it obviously compared to like say seki or sakura synchro i don't even consider it's like its own thing basically like the only thing that has in common with souls is they both have checkpoints get more differences than similarities at that point um but like again so my point is that like you look at bloodborne i think they were like okay we want something kind like whatever you did with demon souls and dark souls that made you so popular right now do that again and like okay and it doesn't have to be your demon souls 2 but they were probably referring to internally because they didn't have idea what they were going to call like what else are you going to call this project they were also calling it i think later on project beast or something right so again i think i think the idea was just that they knew it was going to supposed to be their kind of spiritual successor to demon souls in the same way that dark souls was with their their publisher right now and they had to figure it out and that's my position on there so again people can people can argue whichever they think is more like i also uh there's another name it used to be cult uh but i i can't tell you that because uh it's it was given to me through breached nda i'll tell you after we record okay um we better cut this section out before fans start asking okay no i want them to ask leave comments and feed the algorithm i'm never gonna tell you though it's a really it's a really boring name but uh yeah um another question here is um uh is there more to the chalice dungeons we kind of talked about this already uh i wouldn't mind a look at the translation errors versus localization attempts um i feel like we kind of went into this already uh same with the next question which is like uh what happens when you like themes which are lost in localization um well what happens a lot with localization because this is the this is the two-prong problem with the localization on the one hand is when they get stuff just flat out wrong like it's just like there's just no rectifying this then there's the stuff like say like one of the reasons i say dark souls 3 is localization i call me is because i can argue with them like there's there's a few things that are like serious like major like crazy like i can't believe you got this wrong errors but there's stuff it's like it's not too many like it's a handful at most and the rest is just like okay like i cannot see what you were going with but i think that's just extremely misleading right like the work like localization loves flowery language yeah from um when it comes to the from soft games like you see so much flowery language and dramatic tones and when you read it say in the original it tends to be very like straightforward simple and honestly pretty mundane and the localization is trying to pretty it up or dramaticize it or something yeah yeah like they'll come up with these like you especially like when you say like oh or or some say yharnam might be next or something like that like they try to come up with creative stuff and again i'm not intrinsically opposed to that i think localization should be free to say or whatever they do so my issue is that when you try to write all this poetry that you don't in think to incorporate accuracy along with it and that can cause huge problems especially in these types of games my issue this was something you raised uh my you you brought to my attention is the um is that uh it's a layers line that well the flow of time is stagnant versus the flow of time is convoluted because him saying the flow of time is stagnant like he's one of the first npcs you meet it's very early on in the game and like him saying that there like yes it just this clarifies exactly the sort of thematic issue that is occurring in the game and it reinforces it really well but when he says yeah like there's videos coming up now which are just discovering this theme now like they're like oh it's hinted in like dark souls or whatever yeah you know it's very obvious and elderly it's like no no it's always been obvious yeah yeah yeah but it's been it's been understated maybe like eldering is definitely where it's most out and out about it but it's always been present and stated and clarified like it's always been like a major thematic point absolutely but then like because because of this localization change you this this sort of gets missed and then in dark souls 3 they like okay you didn't get it the first time how much clearer can we make this right like the dark souls 3 is all about stagnation yeah this is stagnating this is that a stagnant like the entire game is like hey how long are we going to have to keep this stagnating for like a certain point right it's like dark souls 3 is just a recommend for dark souls it's just like let it die already yeah um but um but yeah but that's the exact point it also creates this huge problem that everyone frames the the time is convoluted issue is that worse is that it's created and it's created this in the collective consciousness of the english community this idea that um dark souls is just the series that you know it's supposed to be opaque and not to be understood and it's this hopelessly overcutly complex lore that um you'll never be able to understand you know let's just like throw out whatever theories we have it doesn't matter if they make sense or they're contradictory or whatever like you know it's just whatever well it's like no like there's miyazaki has a very put a lot of thought into these all these game the games and he's really thought through what he's trying to convey here what he wants to do not always done perfectly mind you like i said there's always possibilities for typos in the original script always possibly that things just don't work mechanically or because of budget constraints or something or what have you but like there's always a lot of thought into doing these stories and telling a hit and telling a a story which is very cohesive and pretty much simple i think sophie put it right it's like when you get down to it bloodborne is a very simple straightforward game with very simple straightforward themes it just could be very hard in order you have to do a lot of digging in order to figure that out and the localization just doesn't help on that front yeah but i i like the flowery language i think the vowels and then i i love that stuff well again that's always going to go down to personal preference i'm sure there's some people who don't like like i'm like one of my problems would say with dark souls and using some of its um old english languages it makes some characters who actually speak in archaic dialects and i was obviously going to speak like wimbledon supposed to speak in this very refined archaic god-like dialect to make him sound bigger than he because like even his illusion of gwynevere doesn't speak like this because he's trying to make himself more godly um and give this idea of legitimacy for obviously more reasons in that game but the idea is that um that doesn't come through as much when everyone is basically speaking with an old english tongue or something like that yeah so um so like like that get stuff like that gets muted but like generally speaking i don't probably like say um let's go back to solaire when he's saying stuff like uh uh like uh if only i could be so grossly incandescent or something like that and if i remember right the japanese line itself means something to the effect of like um like like if i could just like have this on like like warm light or warm heat or something to that effect um or like bright like brilliant warmth or something like that like the the grossly incandescent perfectly conveys all of those that stuff without using those same words and that's perfectly fine it's a it's a it's a line that i will always remember from the english from the english actor for yeah and it's it's just it's a real and i think that's a good line so like stuff like that are great stuff like say a lot of patches dialogue like there's tons of there's tons of things where the localization does good with their flower flowery language like i say the issue is not the poetry it's the accuracy that goes into it yeah all right um so what any other question uh a couple of more um translation issues on cut content is there anything significant you wanna bring up there oh well one thing with the doll is something worth it noting because it seems like some it seems like in the bloodborne localization there was a lot of cases where if there wasn't a if if the localization didn't deem the change in the script to be big enough they didn't change it themselves okay um because there's like for example there's this line from the doll which it talks about i think is something like nostalgia or something to that effect yeah uh it's uh when you isn't it when you kill maria or when you give her the no no okay no no it's when you give her the haircut okay and she says like wait what is this i can't remember it's not a thing only i feel a yearning something i've never felt before what's happening to me um like something like that uh it's she just actually say a urine and people always kind of interpret this oh she's like feeling some um she's feeling some connection to maria or something like that right or like it's a pinocchio thing where she's feeling uh sort of a human feeling right well well actually because the idea is that in a cut dialogue it was referring to nostalgia and this is where because the idea of like a yearning a nostalgia sort of this it's bringing memories back sort of idea right and that's what the localization line is supposed to be implying if you look at the japanese for the final game not the cut line with the old voice actor they use i think that was analysis va or something like that um whatever it was yeah it was uh yeah i think so no no no avatar used to voice uh avatar used to voice annalise and i think it was false yosefka who voiced the doll okay okay okay anyway but the idea was like her old va had on this line that was basically the same except it referenced nostalgia very directly and this seems to have carried over into the localization line from from that old version and that never got changed but the japanese script did change and i changed it to she doesn't feel a yearning she feels kindness so the idea is supposed to be you get you are the first person ever to give her a gift and that is something that moves her so much she actually a doll cries tears hmm like that's the idea she's so emotionally moved by your act of kindness because again she's going on about you know do you you know do you love me i love you because i've been made to love you isn't that what god like gods do they make their creations like isn't that what the creator does he makes his create uh his uh creations love him that way like isn't that just by design so i love you but do you love me i don't know if you all right so like you you give her like she has these sort of like she's sort of this thing where she just sort of has a role and she plays that role right and she'll happily play that role because you know she loves you she that that's just how she is that's how she was probably made right um but when you actually give her that hairpin and it's obviously something that used to belong to maria but it no longer has it no longer has a meaning like he did in the cut script of it connecting the doll to maria and now has this meaning of you're giving something that fits her it suits her it would suit her hair and by showing that you had so you put so much thought into your gift to her and that you are in fact giving her a gift with so much meaning she is moved by that personally and that kindness gives you and that's why when like she prays at the end she's like oh you know what else like she'll son if you do this to her she'll have an added prayer while i also hope like the hunter will be happy or whatever maybe remember me or something like that like yeah so there's so that that's like stuff like that seems to change again i talked about the thing with like the host of the nightmare with mikalash that seems to be a carryover from old cut scripts where he he seemed to introduce himself more as kind of like he was your host to the to this occasion or whatever so yeah same idea you talked like three hours ago uh we talked three hours ago about like the players starting in hemwick and you said you may you may go back there uh in an earlier draft of the script you you would meet me collage and he'd like talk to you throughout the game and then you would meet him again in hemwick he'd jump into the water and you jump into and that would be the entrance to the nightmare of menses or the nightmare frontier well well here's well here's here's something that's actually worth noting is um mikalash is actually the name for willem in the original draft but yeah so like willem's internal name is mikalash's husk so originally willow was mikalash and lawrence was going to be your in the alpha draft like way way way back when lawrence was going to be your best friend that you met i guess on your journey to yharnam and like when you take the blood or whatever you get knocked out for like two weeks or something and basically lauren's like after like a few days or something decides to go out and try to find stuff to help cure you from your coma and when you wake up you come out and you're just looking for him yeah you're basically looking for him and everything's about like chasing after him and stuff like that and like um uh i'm trying to remember exactly there was going to be like this uh this like bishop herbert or norbert i can't remember if it's like he's norbert in in english but in japanese he's herbert if i remember right i have to double check why change it why did they change that i have to double check but um well basically the idea was that um yeah you were like gonna go to him but he became the cleric beast and like different like they were clearly like they had a very like simple idea earlier on it's obvious that they were like okay like any like early draft of the script that obviously got completely changed as time went on like oh as always revision there's no good such thing as good writing only good rewriting you know now that you bring it up willem and mikalash like their vas they do sound kind of similar i have no idea if they're the same they're they're not the same i'm pretty sure they're not the same but they they do sound so similar like their voices we are born of the blood made men by the blood undone by the blood ah caused or some psychosome do you hear our prayers who knows but um yeah but that was definitely the idea that meek a lot i think that's also why you don't see any reference to willem in earlier cut in some of the earlier cut item descriptions too but like like there's a lot of things i moved around like if i remember right embryonis was the original cos if i remember yeah it's internal energy yeah yeah so like which is interesting again there's also of course like great this is interesting because like there's going to be a flora but there's going to be a great base uh fauna there's also a reference to a fl a destructive flame great one um which ends up in eldon ring in unexpected with the giants in there so uh yeah i i was very surprised i was like oh they brought this back no one's gonna pick up the reference except like it's always this thing like there's so many things in in from soft games where it's like unless you're like a dev or you're like really in the know for like dev of like the internal workings with these developers like there's no way you're gonna pick up half of these references like they it's very clear they do a lot of stuff for themselves are you talking about the uh the giant with the eye oh well yes those giants yeah yeah yeah ones well also like the flame also those giants in uh with the stomachs on with the stomachs they're from blood they're from demon souls right well it's like the the yeti thing from uh uh northern limit that they were yeah yeah similar i don't know if those were going to be giants but like for sure like it's definitely the same idea of having like a giant enemy with um with a a mouth first i thought of you when i first saw those enemies i was like ah i'm gonna talk to loki about this well oh boy we're gonna we're gonna have a long elton ring podcast i feel at some point oh boy this is a four-hour conversation so eldon ring is gonna be quite the quite the chat yeah maybe it won't be about localization we could just talk about the game anyway um i hope that answered your question jesus the commenter's name was jesus who asked this oh wow i'm so glad i'm so glad that jesus decided to stop by and ask me a question and that commenter that was jesus christ ladies and gentlemen all right so next uh uh oh uh pale blood is a big one for me so we talked about how pale blood is the moon presence the term pale blood do you have anything on this though it says what's on the tin pale blood all right then it's blood which is pale so uh it's a pale blue color so like there's nothing really like miyazaki's commented a bit on this this idea of like he's talked about different ways you can interpret the line stuff like for example when you talk about the message in the the hunter like the message in the middle of yahar ghoul where it's like look a pale blood sky or something like that you can read that several ways oh it's the sky of the pale blood it's a pale blood sky it's it's a pale blood sky in that it's a sky where it's it looks like it's pale blood because the blood's been all drenched into the the red of the moon and now the rest of the sky is like this this like pale blue color yeah it's just like like a corpse kind of yeah yeah like a like a corpses color um there's nothing really in the the name like again most of the translation things come with the moon present itself being a moon monster slash demon so yeah all right then uh maybe do you think it's possible that the original japanese was like pear blood no that's not how japanese works so no damn it you it's not it's not written it's written with it's written with regular um with regular script it's not using katakana in order to spell pale blood phonetically so okay no no that's just not gonna work again you can always make the argument i guess that maybe miyazaki had the translation already in mind or something like it's always possible he gave that as a key term like you have to translate this way but it's like again like that's that's where we're getting knee deep into speculation it's much simpler to just work with the the japanese script and then like sort of work from there i think this is one of those translation things which like the term pale blood it's so nebulous that i feel like people want the reveal of what it means to be like this big revelation that changes everything in the game even and not just that random boss you mean at the end yeah well i i the thing is though even if there is some meaning to it i don't think it's going to significantly change how you look at anything i think it's just going to be like oh pale blood because pale blood is like an old english terminology used to talk about uh like when uh when you know people are scared of the moon or something like just i'm making that up just like it's going to be something boring like that which and you're going to read it and you're going to be like oh oh yeah like is happening in the game oh yeah huh yeah oh yeah again i feel i feel like it was all supposed to just be a lead-up in order so you wouldn't know exactly that it was going to be a cthulhu monster you have to kill at the end yeah yeah that makes sense like that like that seems to be the the big shtick okay um another question is uh the difference in the naming of the bloodlanding beast you talked about that uh yeah it's yeah some people have asked me about like if blood like if it's possible like the localization may have if they chose bloodletting for any specific reason um i'll be honest i think it's just i'm going to be creative especially considering it's a victorian setting and obviously bloodletting is a very popular during this era and stuff like that i i really like the name i i think though that it creates a lot a lot more ambiguity than there should be yeah yeah well this again this is where the flowery language can shoot yourself on the foot because it's now creating lots it's trying to be very clever and creative and like fancy with a bunch of things that it doesn't really need to and this causes it again it's just it's just the master slash owner of the beat of the beast blood and things of the of the beast blood here and it's like it's very it again it's supposed to be very it's supposed to be this very clear straightforward reveal of oh so this is where all the beasts the holy because the idea is that that the beast blood is the whole is what's being given out from the skull in the church and that's the quote-unquote holy body the eucharist the the stuff that's being used for communion golden spell so all right uh why are there so many factions or groups called the executioners i guess one thing we didn't clarify there's also the executioner gauntlet in the chest in cainhurst yes that is again this is another this is this is again referring to an actual executioner he is part of a family line of executioners um that stain their hands with blood so much over the generations that all those resentful spirits um in the blood are like triggered whenever blood splatter like whenever like uh like blood uh is sort of like invoked with a catalyst through the the mercury bullets and like the and stuff like that so like again that's the same again same idea it's it's an executioner has no connection to the executioners the execution unit the covenant that legarius found yeah we have three executioners they're all very different yeah they're three different things and again this is again this is a lot on the localization they decided to just call the execution of the executioners i don't have any problems with that in and of itself it just can be very confusing it's obviously different from the executioner being talked about in the gauntlet and has nothing to do with the executioner enemies those that was an internal name that the developers in japan were throwing around for themselves um because obviously the design is very similar and then it got carried over to the um it got carried over into the english side for their official name when in the japanese they they're officially called the dismantlers or the dissectors however you want to train and again this ties into how they're helping in hemwick because they're helping in like the core where like all the bodies are getting dissected by the witches and stuff like that so they're like they're like on the church again part of this church thing and then you also see them in um forbidden woods because obviously um choir is doing some research there so they put them on the outskirts around the outside the village so they can do like they can clean up the beast they're creating in the forest so it doesn't become a problem for them later down the line obviously villagers still throw the choir out yeah but but anyway the same idea so like again it's this idea these they're just these agents and as we can see in the hunter's nightmare they seem to come they go back even they go way back to like the research holidays and stuff like that where they're like creating these like arcane obama and this is why we see them like wrapped up in the armor and like doing the stuff as we see them because like we see what happens when they're kind of quote unquote free yeah all right uh i wrote down uh this isn't really a real topic i wrote down cake alright just to remind myself to talk about it and i did so gold star to me uh and yeah so that's something to to clarify for people though like um blood drags in japanese when i talk about like their their at least is trying to feed on corruption those are what blood drinks are they're blood corruption okay and then um uh that's the same thing as the it's called the corruption ruin in english right for the yeah yeah it's the same thing and uh it's impurity for the leak which is like it's it's the same thing it's like vermin it's it's it's the same thing okay yeah but you see the thing is the impurity rune if i recall right is the stagnation yeah yeah so like uh finally um the this is one i wanted to ask you about uh amygdalas what what is this what are they do you know they seem to be lesser great ones as in so great so one thing that we need to know is that in the japanese version when it talks about great ones i think that they're called like various beings um in the uh in the english version let me double check yeah uh okay yeah fragments of the lot oh so when we're looking at like great one wisdom fragments of the lost wisdom of the great ones beings that might be described as gods so they're just called beings in the japanese they're described as all kinds of beings yeah so it's not the idea that there's this singular entity so this is actually very important to kind of clarify there isn't a singular entity to wait to define a great one it's just a general catch-all term for these beings which are somehow above us they're not human so they're referred to as great ones and there's these enemies which we call kin because they're related to great ones but they're kind of borderline we don't they're not really they're not strong as great ones but they're not as weak as us so like they're kind of in this nebulous idea so this idea it's a very nebulous term that's referring to it's a catch-all term for this very broad idea of just these beings which are above us and they can take the form of like spider-like beings fish like beings all these different cthulhu technical monster like beings like all these different various stuff see i had this uh i had this fun theory because i breathed this uh you have a breeders and you have rom both great ones and they seem to manifest smaller versions of themselves in those little slug children for a brietis and the little spiders around rom well the thing is rom spiders seem to be former they seem to be similar to the wet nurses thing with like patches and stuff is that yeah you have uh humans uh bergenworth students who decided they were going to become phantasms for rom one heart because they have mad man's knowledge and stuff like this so it's very clear that they're supposed to be like easy humans who turned into phantasm stuff right so uh oh and also uh sorry also cars and the crawlers you find in the nightmare frontier oh well yeah yeah it's unclear if those are supposed to be like related directly to cross or they're like less like their their other like it's very clear that cost came from lorraine again going back to like the connection with menses and all this stuff and just the timeline of things it just seems makes most sense especially considering she wants to spend all her time in water and she probably lived her entire life in a desert so yes but uh i i i wondered if uh the amygdalas are that for something else that we don't see and my thinking was oh is that urton because you can't see earthen ever and you have to have a really high inside threshold to see the amygdalas so maybe if you could get to like 10 000 inside you'd be able to see earthen is like this giant sort of amygdala thing hanging over the world and that was like well this is interesting because we know the amygdalas go back at least as far as uh lauren yeah because um and we don't know and odin's sort of vague and like i've i i've even theorized that odin might be the sun in the same way that flora is the moon um it's like yeah well yeah we'll get into that but um the the idea the so like that that's like a working theory i've worked on because it's just interesting this idea of this the great one who seems to he seems to be so grand so above it also evolved so to speak that he literally is nothing like he has no form so to speak he's blood itself yeah so like he's sort of like he's like the closest you can get to like perfection which also interestingly makes him so um especially vulnerable to all of them like wrong so like so but but like hey he's the one who most easily is able to get a child when he gets the right uh person under his purview so like yep so like okay but anyway but the the the idea with like odin and the amygdalas amygdalas are interesting because they're obviously very mass-produced there's something we've obviously we see them in relation to yharnam like the old like it seems like a lot of the the ones buried in the um the graveyard for uh yharnam's graveyard outside those seem to be some of those elder gods because we see lots of statues of them along with statues of celestial children so it seems to be the idea of you either became a star you either became a star child so you liked the choir you were something you were a kin that was pretty close to becoming a god or you came in to make the light seems like now that's also possible the idea seems yeah so it seems to be this idea that amygdala seems to be a fairly common type of great one and i've seen one theory in the japanese community which was which seems to be gaining a lot of traction is the idea that the amygdalas are um sort of like this mediator um entity like they're this mediator cast of great ones and their ideas to mediate between our world and the other world so like they're physically there so they aren't subject to the same limitations as obviously raw like rom so like there's like they're being held back or whatever they can go to the physical world and interact with it to some extent um because they're they're that quote-unquote close to it still um but they are um but they're they're still they're still like turn invisible because of rom's like um interference and stuff until the until like obviously the red moon is able to appear because ram is dead and all that and then there's also the idea that um because there's this um because they are just sort of mediators that's why they sort of snatch you up and they're like okay like do you have something that i can throw you into this okay you belong in this dimension you belong in that dimension except right like they're just sort of like the care the the courier so to speak yeah yeah that also makes sense did you you know they are they have the same terminology that alant had in demon souls where they're like failed to be right yes internally they're referred to as um a failed to be like wicked or evil god yeah and then um uh at the very least if i let me let me pull this up because i because i remember right they're referred to as wicked gods and the one reborn is the one that's referred to as the with the face yeah yeah he's the half-baked devil oh yeah that that's another translation oh boy okay so like okay yeah so what we have here is repo the the one reborn is the fail to be wicked god and then uh when you're looking at the yeah and then isn't it yeah and then though just then yeah this idea of an eat like this idea of an evil god with um the amygdalas is they are this lost paradise apostle evil god yeah so again this idea kind of this fallen angel um is evoking like fallen angel from paradise lost and um yeah it seems to be just this idea that they're like this kind of servant cast among the great ones yeah even as gods you have you have even when you're at the highest strata you're still stratified there's another thing to note though they have the same yellow googly eyes as the uh as alan did in in in the great one and that proves that this is demon souls 2. and with that said you just had to throw it yeah no i but uh but i looked it up i'm pretty sure these are the exact same eyes it has absolutely no significance don't read anything more into it but i think those are the same eyes or like i wouldn't be surprised they look very similar surprise i mean like uh the channelers in dark souls one use uh what's his name uh uh uh ridiel's uh yeah rydell's uh uh voice lines for hey please help me they just reverse the line when they're doing the they're doing the crazy frenzy things i'm like oh the prisoner became the imprisoner so like hey maybe you never know that's you never know what they're going to reuse in front with from ah i can't i can't wait for the alden ring dlc if we get one to just be like here's all the other stuff we never used now we're gonna stop doing these dark fantasy games and we're going to make armored core again leave us alone i can't wait for armored core to just play like dark souls i can't wait loki please stop i can't wait listen we know our record games have been hard for us to use so also do we stop recording uh yeah yeah it's uh did you stop recording no no okay good okay so loki where can people find you you can find me on twitter at loki underscore ds that's loki underscore ds you can also read my website i cover a lot on bloodborne on even some of the stuff that i haven't talked about here isn't being published you can read some of that over there you can also uh read my stuff on dark souls and demon souls and we'll see what happens with elden ring in the future yeah this was supposed to be like an hour to our conversation but we had a lot to talk about very important thank you so much for having me on i really appreciate it well it's it's always great we we always talk but we never do voice chats anymore we need to do that again it's always fun talking to you hello well yeah well to be fair i am i i to be fair we need to find the times yeah that's true thank you so much uh i'll leave links in the description people follow up on that i'll also leave links to my other stuff and you can follow up on that logi thank you so much for coming i'm very happy to be here thank you see you everybody bye-bye bye you

Channel: AesirAesthetics

Views: 12,276

Keywords: Aesir, Aesthetics, AesirAesthetics, video game, in, depth, analysis, explained

Id: 9-rlR-pEs-I

Length: 279min 57sec (16797 seconds)

Published: Mon May 30 2022