Visceral Femininity: A Bloodborne Video Essay

bloodborne has quite the reputation for its frenetic action-packed grizzly eldritch horror the rhythm of the hunt the thrill of the chase and taking down mutated abominations born of corrupted blood but there's one aspect of this i rarely see explored motherhood this is going to be an icky one and as a certified tocophobe that's all part of the experience this is a horror game after all and it focuses in on those bits of feminine biology that a target audience of male gamers don't really feel comfortable talking about menstruation pregnancy childbirth and female sexuality itself all wrapped up in a neat little bow of eldritch madness hysteria lunacy pick your poison i'm going to split this into four parts but i think we should start with what all stories are about sooner or later part one blood jhanam is the home of blood administration that's one of the first things we hear when we wake up strapped to a gurney ready for treatment we're scheduled for a blood transfusion and are told that we can consider all of this a mere bad dream before hallucinating a werewolf rising out of a puddle of blood ah yes the beast within rising to the surface at the full moon we've all been there sickly people flock to yharnam for its special blood so special in fact that there's an entire healing church based around it blood is life after all the whole city is structured like a beautiful capital g gothic horror there are towering spires gorgeously detailed stone churches and winding streets made of cold and feeling stone the gothic genre usually uses these kinds of set pieces as a vessel for horror with ghosts wandering abandoned ancestral halls crypts and backstreets places that are cold and filled with a sterile decay places long forgotten where the living are in intrusion at the core of the genre there's a sense of desolation of bleakness and impotence life is no longer natural here we see this in works like pose the fall of the house of usher where the mansion the ushers live in has long fallen out of favor with other noble houses the family fading into obscurity with their fortune long depleted and the dilapidated house becoming a presence in its own right or in dracula's uninviting castle the eponymous vampire himself having to pretend to be all of his servants and drivers now that his home is open only to the undead or victims that won't be leaving alive there's even a section of bloodborne that mirrors his castle called cainhurst castle with an invisible coach driver picking you up from a crossroads which i'm certain is a reference all the nobility there have been executed god knows how long ago and are still wandering around as wailing ghosts blindfolded with slit throats the only supposedly living creatures that are still solid are the servants and parasitic mosquitoes bloated with blood sucking every last drop they can find until they burst like blisters it definitely feels like the mutant equivalent to the concept of a vampire gorging themselves on the blood of the peasants greedily feeding on other humans turns you into a monster same idea eldritch lens but bloodborne's gothic city definitely isn't sterile it's absolutely soaked in blood and gall if you play for more than a couple of minutes and remove any hats or masks your character's been wearing you'll see a line of blood splatter where their skin was exposed your clothes are slick with it the entire city though slowly dying is not dying quietly or gleanly it's currently still got enough life to be squirming with new breeds of creatures from the werewolves under the blood moon to the creatures groaning in the sewers vomiting rot there's quite the menagerie on yharnam streets and as more and more people partake in the communion of the healing church's blood that beast population grows as you may have guessed this isn't human blood of course it isn't it would be unethical to farm human blood to sell as a cure-all no no no the church is being far more reasonable they're just taking it forcibly from some ancient eldritch great ones that were too weak to leave this world with their peers in a trap below the earth in a network of catacombs god blood delicious [Laughter] imbibing some of that special blood will cure whatever ails you and as a testament to this you carry around little vials of it as a healing item for the entire game injecting yourself whenever you've lost too much blood from being attacked as you might expect this is causing some problems for the people using it humans weren't really designed for this kind of goop to be in our systems for healing or otherwise and over time it mutates the user into something beastly and decidedly inhuman running on violent base instinct as i've talked about in my other videos violence isn't the only primal instinct of humans we're social cooperative creatures at our core and these beasts are decidedly not all they have is anger hunger fear rage perhaps the feelings of those old ones being bled day after day as payment for treatment outsiders coming to seek this healing blood enter a contract to become hunters hunting down the mutant beasts at night and keeping the streets free of the infected you can probably see the problem with this too considering that the hunters are also using copious amounts of blood as the primary healing item in the game but at least they're removing more beasts than their own singular addition to the fray right by absorbing the blood echoes of greater beasts the hunters seem to delay their own terrifying transformation but they're no longer fully human not anymore there seems to be several stages of transformation shown through the game the people that are still recognizably people stay inside for the duration of the nightly hunt burning incense in the hope that this will ward off the beasts the first npc you can meet gilbert is also an outsider but his condition worsens throughout the night time is tangible in the game as the night gets darker and a blood-red moon rises in a bruising sky people behind the doors get sicker and quieter as the night passes but once that red moon peeks barely anyone can form words anymore only whimpers howls and guttural sounds can be heard through the town's windows the transformation is complete [Music] if you pass by gilbert's house one of the few people is actively friendly to you as most yonomites don't exactly love strangers and scapegoat them for the beast plague for their impurity you'll find the bars on his window bent and broken this is definitely a memorable moment for me because there's a lamp leading to the hunter's dream just by his house and no beasts spawn in close enough to notice you the first time i played i put the controller down on my lap as the game loaded me in at the lamp knowing for sure that i'd be safe until i moved my character and i was answering a text the drop in my gut is the controller vibrated and i heard a beastly shriek has never left me gilbert didn't survive the night after all poor guy [Music] the church isn't the only way you can access this special blood either there's two women who you can guide to a safe chapel ariana and adela one is a sex worker the latter a holy woman both will offer you their blood as thanks for saving them but the catch is you can only take one at a time and adela gets very upset if you favor a lady of the night over her if you take ariana's blood three times adela will straight up murder her whilst you're gone to punish her for her generous impurity perceived impurity anyway the purity of blood is important in yharnam tainted blood warps you into a monster as we can see from the streets but the source of the church's worship of the great ones and their blood the aspiration to be close to them drives the most about the ones most concerned with purity who take too much and turn into something neither beast nor god adella hates you favoring a common [ __ ] blood over her own strictly enforced purity and this doctrine puts ariana's life in serious danger however something very interesting happens to ariana if you keep her alive until the blood moon rises she gives birth to a great one i don't exactly know what this celestial little goo baby is but ariana definitely wasn't pregnant at the start of the game something in her blood has determined her a suitable vessel for the great ones to have a child with her though something not quite human in her line that castle i mentioned earlier used to be filled with vile bloods creatures that look human enough but are basically the game's equivalent to vampires their queen anneliese last of her kind is still hanging out there and you can join her covenant by drinking her blood exchanging bodily fluids that's got some sexual implications there doesn't it annelise wants you to hunt down blood drugs for her which you can get by killing other hunters like yourself or npcs most of whom are again hunters but look at the image of the blood drag we get in the menu it looks like it's full of sperm cells annelise is the last of her kind and it seems like she wants to use these drugs to have a child she's undead but that's probably not that much of a barrier to the great ones who don't need to abide by human laws of existence the chapel you send ariana to is in the name of erden who's known as the formless one so yeah corporeal form doesn't even seem to be necessary considering ariana's unexpected pregnancy we find a note saying that every great one loses its child and yearns for a surrogate and that seems to be what's happened to ariana and what annalise is actively trying to become a vessel for through her blood and the blood of the hunters ariana could be some distant relation to anneliese as she wears a dress that used to belong to cainhurst nobility and that would account for her suitability as a surrogate mother but where ariana is naive to all of this the blood drag item says that annalise partakes in these blood drug offerings so that she may one day bear the child of blood the next vile blood heir and cainhurst is an entirely optional area that you can totally miss the way to reach it though is you guessed it another celestial pregnancy that clinic you wake up in at the beginning of the game is run by a kindly doctor a lady named yosefka she administers blood to her patients and cares for them even slipping you some of her enhanced private stash that gives your health an extra boost but she won't let you in once the hunt begins she prioritizes the safety of her patients and can't allow any contamination so sorry you're on your own good hunter the patients here in my clinic must not be exposed to infection later though if you come back a slightly different voice speaks through the door she sounds similar enough but i have an auditory memory and you are not yourself ma'am upon my hippocratic oath if they are yet human i will look after them perhaps even cure them as well as the window lights certainly changing this kind lady has changed her tune and tells you to bring anyone in need of help to her clinic so she can treat them so much for avoiding contamination but later you can break in through the back door and find her in a birthing position on a gurney and she's well she's really into it don't you see how they rise rise inside my head it's rather rapturous once you dispatch her and are free to explore the rest of the clinic you'll find an invitation to cainhurst castle on another gurney and remarkably it's already addressed to you who was the imposter really we don't get to know but she definitely knew some things she wasn't supposed to she's interested in advancing humanity to be closer to the great ones experimenting on anyone you send to her supposed safe place and preparing to birth one of their children this whole idea of eyes on the inside and being able to see more than an ordinary person is something the scholars of yanima particularly invested in wanting to use the blood of the great ones to push humanity out of its infancy and use it to ascend into something well greater they want to push the bounds of knowledge but in true eldritch horror fashion some things are just beyond the scope of the human mind too removed from our experience and existence to make sense of that's built into the game too with a meter marked with an eye this is your insight too little and you're going to miss some of the weirder things around you arnhem that are going to be too much for your fragile little mind too much and you're going to have to confront some things ignorance might just be bliss here the way you level up is through accumulating the blood of creatures you've slaughtered and to do that you need to speak to the doll in the hunter's dream a hub of sorts that has a workshop for hunters to mend their weapons and experiment connecting them to all the game areas the doll is only animate if you have at least one insight you can still level up through her if she's sleeping but she acts as the first incongruity with the norm a living doll wanting to look after you and she can channel blood through herself into your flesh helping mutate you into a better hunter bringing you closer to the great ones on a drip feed speaking of transfusions like i mentioned earlier injecting yourself with blood is the primary healing mechanic here but with jarnam being the home of blood ministration there's a very important part of healing that we're forgetting about blood ministration is based around healing with blood both with adding blood to the body but also bleeding a body to health victorian doctors are infamous for their love of leeches and where do you think that idea came from originally menstruation if you have periods or are close to someone that does you're probably pretty familiar with just how much pms sucks intense emotions mood swings crampings cravings and just feeling generally crappy and hormonal the only way to get rid of it is to wait for your period to finally happen and suddenly it all disappears with the arrival of blood this ended up getting translated as the toxins being bled out of a person as suddenly all of the terrible feelings and symptoms were flushed out with the blood some sort of natural cleansing or detox it's not correct but it's an observable pattern that with less medical knowledge makes complete sense to find a link with you're bleeding the bad stuff out to make the person healthy again one thing i noticed playing bloodborne is that pretty much all of the beasts that still look like townsfolk to some degree are coded as male all of the partially mutated people have deeper sounding voices wear trousers or scraps of them at this point or are too mutated to tell but none are marked as specifically feminine in any way well i'll accept vicar emilia that given her devoutness that's to be expected we see her on her knees reciting prayers specifically about the old blood right up until the moment she transforms into one of the game's bosses i'm guessing she imbibed a lot more blood than the average layperson especially given her church rank as in her boss title we know she was close to the source of blood and her original concept had her as saint laura rather than a vicar she even continues to grip a symbol of her faith that marks her a successor to the head of the healing church throughout her fight so yeah i'd say she's a bit of an outlier it's just a theory but perhaps people in the town who menstruated had some sort of natural protection against the old blood's effects if they didn't take much of it bleeding out some of the toxin the whole story does revolve around blood after all perhaps it was simply that the men were delegated to the traditional role of protecting their families and so they're the only ones we encounter on the street but i find it an interesting enough coincidence that i suspect there's a link replaying it after writing this i realized i'd forgotten about the women of hemwork channel lane but they don't actually turn beastly they're certainly blood drunk and full of enthusiasm for their trade from eating and burying bodies but no beasts here they're more dangerous and faster than their male counterparts though far more aggressive if the wiki is to be believed then they're unaffected by the beast plague beyond the madness the moon is inflicting on everyone even the uninfected people in the houses but the women we do see drunk on blood are far more sensitive to it so that's pretty cool they don't need a beast form i'll just go for the throat regardless hopefully i don't need to draw you a diagram to link blood to the visceral femininity that many people don't want to think about but this brings us neatly into our next section part 2 cycles don't you know devil meant troll troll meant werewolf werewolves mean the horror of flesh splitting where you least expect it as i mentioned the game comes in three major sections depending on the state of the moon as the night progresses more and more monstrous things begin to happen and the more virile and dangerous the beasts you encounter are naturally this works well in a game progression sense as you're facing more dangerous enemies as you improve but it's threaded really well into the narrative the first section is largely based around sunset the moon is just rising as you get the hang of how everything works and have time to mull on what the heck pale blood is and then swiftly forget about it as your night's taken up by the mirrored creatures who'd love to take a chunk out of your throat the second section is only triggered after killing the aforementioned vicar emilia once you kill her and touch the once human skull on the cathedral altar you'll see a vision of the past vicar emilia's predecessor lawrence being warned to fear the old blood a phrase which became an essential adage to the church and serves as a password to the next area do not take the blood lightly respect that you are playing within human forces fear the old blood with this dire warning the moon rises and night truly falls on yharnam and the creatures you face become less and less recognizably human when i think about moonlight and monsters i inevitably think of the werewolf they're monsters hidden as humans controlled by the moon a vicious revealing of our bloody history as hunters and packed carnivores i really like werewolves because they're a fictionalized version of a wolf in sheep's clothing of a monster blending in with the flock right up until the moment they bite they're a primal creature built of the fear of devolving into beasthood and the loss of rational control pure instinct they're on the edges of humanity but often when i see werewolves in fiction they're men despite the fact that lunar cycles and volatile mood are obviously linked to menstruation which in terms of themes is feminine and menstruation itself is often seen as something taboo and inappropriate to discuss it's one of those under the table kind of things despite half the population experiencing it there's a lot of work being done to normalize it these days but it's still seen as kind of icky we don't look at that we don't want to talk about it despite it being a perfectly natural process and yes there is a time and a place for everything but like the eldritch secrets of the university in bloodborne only those in the know tend to be the ones who are allowed to talk about it and uh gamers stereotypically tend to be boys and young men who probably don't want to talk about icky girl stuff and part of that is likely because i've never had to be exposed to it so it's alien and disgusting and doesn't match with the image of women they've been presented with there's a fundamental mismatch between traditional sweet femininity and not batting an eye at waking up in a puddle of blood every so often the whole girl's faint at the sight of blood thing has always confused me because what exactly do you expect people who menstruate to be doing for a week every month spend it on the bathroom floor i'll girls see more blood than boys i see a lot of people circling back to the laura and the great ones and the secrets being kept and mined out of the depths of yharnam but not much about the associations between moons mothers and monsters and speaking of monthly conditions i think there's something to be said about the idea of becoming a werewolf being healing as well they're that part of you that's allowed to snap when someone crosses a boundary the part that's filled with the righteous anger a lady is never supposed to admit she has the savagery becomes the most talked about part of the legend but i think part of that is the fear that deep down humans are beastly and that's something the game is very concerned with that we might devolve into base creatures that only lust after blood and carnage which is definitely something we're all drawn to and often entertained by of course we are you're playing this game aren't you or at the very least you're interested in hearing me talk about it the wolf part the primal part the beastly thing lurking under the skin is terrifying and you know to fit into society you have to be better than that there's shame bound up in that too you have to be restrained you often have to deny that part even exists but what about the wolf that loves you that's part of your pack who's loyal and defends you until it's dying breath what about the wolf who raised you who'll kill anyone threatening her pups what about the pack you go out for coffee with and howl together about all the little things that are stressful or bringing you joy what about the wolf you curl up in bed and indulge your most primal instincts with what about the wolf inside you that loves and protects you and stubbornly bites whatever gets too close to keep you safe does that make you a monster externally werewolves are everything a woman shouldn't be in society they're brutish and have monstrous appetites they're violent hairy and uncontrollable they're animals ariana lets us know that janam has some of our world's sensibilities for what's appropriate for a lady visiting her window before the moon is properly up as a female hunter will have her respond with i'm off during hunts and besides this is no place for ladies i wouldn't want to drag you down too she knows her place in society is on its outskirts even though her services are clearly in demand despite her being looked down on for providing them she's not a capital l lady despite being dressed like one and she's aware that associating with her might drag you down too reputation matters here being a lady matters i also find it super interesting that she can smell you through the window and she's not the only one several people comment on your scent and the chapel keeper who hosts the only genuine safe place can tell you're a hunter thanks to your smell even through the copious amounts of incense and he's blind he knows you're friendly purely through your smell i thought at first that maybe it was because you were covered in beast blood but then you'd smell like a beast wouldn't you an ariana clearly differentiates it from the stench of blood and beasts there's something primal in recognizing a stranger by their scent too there's some sort of scent marking that's unique to hunters whose veins are full of blood echoes converted through the living doll in the dream a hunter's daughter recognizes your scent as well because you smell like her father gascoigne a hunter you have to kill yourself after he loses himself to the hunt the bloodlust taking over him completely like a werewolf in the moonlight his fight has three phases with him becoming more aggressive in each stage but the most alarming one is definitely when he suddenly snarls and his skin splits as his body shifts into a huge beast that immediately lunges for your face there's one thing that ties him back to his humanity though and it's the little music box his daughter gives you to help identify him if you play the tune to him he flinches back and whines as if you're hurting his ears or perhaps he's ashamed or confused for a moment something is pulling on the human part of him on his human experiences and love for his family but uh don't spam it and try to forcibly yank him out of his blood drunk state because he will transform into his tanki b state with over 70 health learn from my mistakes over time hunters end up inevitably giving in to their lust for blood the more they hunt the more blood they spill and take in the more proficient they get they forget that these creatures were human once they take pleasure in their skill and the thrill of the hunt they get drunk on the enhancing blood and start to turn themselves but we meet a character who serves as a guardian in that respect eileen eileen the crow is a hunter of hunters killing off those who lose themselves to the hunt she's appropriately dressed like a plague doctor a beaked mask protecting her face against the splatter of blood maybe she stuck a ball of incense at the bottom of the beak like real plague doctors did with herbs she's been at this a while and if you complete her questline fully you take on her role when she's mortally wounded like many of the hunters you meet around the world she's no longer connected to the dream and so only has one life remaining falling to a beast or a blood drunk hunter means game over for her but still she treads the beat of the hunt night after night if you attack her and make her aggressive she'll ask you to tell the little doll i said hello as you dissolve into nothing so she knows the score she's lived the same night over and over just like you but now she's entered a different phase for you this is foreseeably an endless cycle of death after death taking in more and more blood as you learn and change but for eileen though the hunt continues night after night it has an end point and that end point is unkind she knows there'll be no reward for her work only the inevitable death that awaits her when she's finally outmaneuvered as she gets older and slower but she does it anyway because she wants to stop the endless suffering even if you mess up her quest and have to fight her her voice lines still indicate that she wants to break this cycle of death the nightmare only i can stop this madness enough for this terrible dream but for hunters that are too far gone and filled with bloodlust there's a far worse fate than being picked off by eileen and that takes the form of the hunter's nightmare the dread i felt on buying the dlc and entering an area bathed in sunlight like that feels so viscerally wrong after playing through a long night full of terrors i love that sunlight's usually the signal that you're safe now and everything will be okay but here boy was it unnerving your deeds are out in the open now there's no cover from the beast no masking the violence you are seen and the ones that find themselves here have been judged inhuman it opens with a version of the main games areas but covered in what might be washed up waves of clay or driftwood warping the landscape you'll have become intimately familiar with over the course of the game the moon's reign over the people isn't broken here it's permanent the cycle has ended with the needle pointing firmly to hunt but the reason this nightmares even appeared in the first place is a punishment from the great ones themselves not for the hunt but for what started it which brings us to part three babies cursed caffeines their children too and their children forever true important disclaimer here whilst pregnancy and motherhood are wonderful things and yearning for a child is a huge motivator for the plot in bloodborne i want to make it clear that i do not think they are the be-all and end-all of a person's life your life can be complete without children you can have biological adopted or fostered kids or just be that really cool aunt that drops by often you can be the babysitter you can just not like kids as long as you treat them like people [ __ ] whatever but please keep any trad wife and gender critical [ __ ] out of my comments section a bunch of overlapping health factors means it would actually be quite dangerous for me to be pregnant and i've had one or two uninformed and not medically qualified people tell me that having a baby would fix my chronic illness because that's what i was biologically designed for which is frankly disgusting you don't create life to fix yourself or a relationship but also being pregnant might actually kill me the baby or both of us and while that doesn't matter much to me because i genuinely don't want kids for some people that will be utterly heartbreaking some people are desperate to be mothers and parents but simply can't be nobody's designed to have children if you have a functioning uterus you're capable of carrying children but it's not your purpose we're conscious creatures who get to choose our own priorities and for some people that's having six kids and devoting your life to raising them all with love for others children just aren't a factor also like i mentioned in the intro pregnancy kinda squicks me out another being growing slowly inside of me leeching my energy and rearranging my organs is nope don't like that that's an eldritch horror right there respect to anyone who willingly goes through that mess but no thank you meanwhile back at the plot we're told that every great one loses its child and yens for a surrogate and that these eldritch unknowable beings are using the beast plague as a way to replace their lost children at birgenworth the college which discovered the source of the old blood you can find a note that says 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 this whole plague changes who can be an acceptable surrogate mother for their children making humanity more compatible with the great ones who all seem to be unique from each other but like i don't know the rules of eldritch morphology i have no idea which ones are sexually compatible with each other and i'm sure the internet has made charts for that or something but i am consciously choosing not to look no insight here i've seen what you people draw with tentacles once the great ones were discovered the need to know more to understand these creatures led to the unleashing of the beast plague because the bergenwood scholars couldn't resist overreaching curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction drove it to insanity as the cat tried to comprehend the unknowable and then the cat grew a bunch of eyes on both the inside and the outside and anyway they wanted more insight into these miraculous entities and when kos the great one washed up on the shoreline of a fishing hamlet and strange stories were spreading about the locals ella insmouth bergenworth dived right in they sent the first hunters to cut the villages open in search of mutations and internal eyes ripping apart man and beast alike for knowledge and secrets but their worst transgression was taking cossa's still embryonic child from her to study in this ultimate sacrilegious act the hunter's nightmare was born imprisoning every hunter who loses themselves to their worst instincts just as the scholars followed theirs for personal gain and hunters are very much painted as monsters here as several humanoid creatures raise their arms to cover their faces and back away when you approach they're still lucid enough to know what you are and that you want to hurt them and if you run in all guns blazing excited to tackle this new area you might just miss it even if you let them live the enemy hunters trapped in the nightmare will just slaughter them anyway and you'll know even if you can't see because the echoes still feed into your meter interestingly they're the same types of creatures that a retired hunter jura is actively protecting an old yharnam outside of the nightmare when the beast plague became a major problem a lot of the old city was burned to contain the spread and the older districts that had been built on top of over the years was simply sealed off jurors there watching over the beasts insisting that it's not right to kill them because they were people once and they can't hurt anyone whilst they're locked away down here if he sees you attack any beast he'll start firing at you with a gatling gun from the top of the clock tower throughout the entire area but you can make him friendly by being a pacifist the beasts are less friendly but i find it really interesting that the ones that are protected in the dream don't initially attack at the start of the nightmare section i should think you still have dreams well the next time you dream give some thought to the hunt and its purpose why are you doing this what is this pale blood you're searching for at this point in the game did you even remember that's what drew you to anum is it worth it the overarching theme of the dlc is secrets and forbidden knowledge and what parts of ourselves are willing to lose in order to reach them the final boss of the dlc is a manifestation of cossa's infant child screeching and wailing and beating you to death with a briny iron-crusted placenta that that's very not good but it's also a continuation of every child we see being killed or taken from its mother in the main game for a start the main protector of the secrets of the scholars of byrgenwerth takes the form of rom the vacuous spider she's not a great one but she is kin so she can only exist on one plane of existence whereas great ones can kind of be wherever however [Music] kin also happened to bleed a whitish fluid instead of the red you might expect pale blood we found it though it only seems to be for her head her body bleeds red i've tried looking up exactly what rom is online but there seems to have been endless debate on that front since the game launched with contradictions on both wikis and many many discussions on reddit and other forums so yeah take that she has kin with a hefty grain of salt but even though she's largely an empty vessel vacuous or at this point perhaps a shell emptied in order to be puppeted by an actual great one she has a lot of babies so many they swarm and guard her and most of her fight will be spent fending them off if you want to do their mother any damage another mother holding arcane secrets once you've broken the seal by killing rom that's when the red blood moon descends we hear a baby crying in the distance and see a lady all in white blood trailing from her abdomen beginning to cry as well this is queen janam presumably who the city was named for as we never see her alive the blood stain across her abdomen and bound hands suggests that she too had her baby taken from her against her will perhaps even before he was born separating mothers and babies seems to be the worst infringement on the natural order and it always leads to tragedy here if ariana has her baby killing the child immediately kills her too there's an inherent link between them what one suffers so does the other though we don't see much of queen jarnam she's always accompanied by her child's cry both of them already long dead it's implied that her baby murgo's cry is what pulls the moon closer but i don't know if it had to be mogo in particular perhaps the cry of any great one's child would have done the trick his and his mother's spirit seemed to be trapped in the hunt and it's implied that mogo was either stillborn or forcibly removed from his mother's womb before he was ready to be born in either case he didn't survive his wet nurse though is alive and kicking or slashing she's guarding her empty pram and is very determined to keep you away from it i really love her design it's very ornate and she shares some similarities with yharnam's boss fight in that she can copy herself to distract you admittedly i've never fought queen jarnam because she's way down in the chalice dungeons as extra content and anyone who's played bloodborne knows how much of a slog they are they're randomly generated for technically endless content with cup bosses at the end of the levels but they don't hang together well at all thanks to the lack of designed enemy placement to accommodate the randomness and the rooms and mini bosses repeat over and over add nauseam maybe that's the true eldritch madness of bloodborne banging your head against the chalice dungeons for tiny insights into the law anyway queen jannah's boss fight has you fighter while she's still pregnant with mergo and his cries can paralyze you when she makes a clone of herself to avoid taking damage it seems she can't copy mergo can't separate herself from him or perhaps isn't willing to and so you can tell who you need to stab by the baby bump which is kinda messed up her dress is completely white but gets increasingly bloodier the more damage she takes and when she's hurt enough she can use her own blood to make her dagger more potent lady maria in the nightmare pulls a similar trick fighting with her own blood and setting streams of it on fire in the most gorgeous boss fight i've ever seen but it seems that some people with strange blood can use it very creatively all of the gems you use to enhance your weapons have blood needed into them so blood is an active part of every hunter's arsenal not just for healing it's interesting to note that maria is also related to the cainhurst nobles and vilebloods like ariana is so i guess she decided to use her blood as an advantage in combat all of her weapons rely on precision and dexterity controlled motions rather than wild or reckless swordplay she was staunchly disciplined perhaps to stave off the madness associated with her lineage and ended up unable to continue hunting after the guilt of killing coz in her child throwing her weapons down a well when she could no longer stomach them and ending her own life now in the nightmare she's protecting that final secret of the fishing hamlet to keep that knowledge locked away like rom does for bergenworth she appears dead when you encounter her dripping blood from her neck and wrists in an apparent suicide but getting close to her will wake her right up the only thing she says to you is both a warning and admission of guilt a corpse should be left well alone oh i know very well how the secrets beckons so sweetly only an honest death will cure you now liberate you from your wild curiosity she clearly regrets what she did to cause in the villages and doesn't want anyone else to fall for the lure of forbidden knowledge forgetting the human and ethical cost she seems to be trying to atone somewhat by taking care of the patients in the research hall who've been experimented on to try and transform them into kin several of them asking and one begging to see lady maria but her fate is already sealed and she knows that her suicide finally trapping her here permanently rather than escaping from her misdeeds she trained with german the host of the hunter's dream who's been guiding you this far and he'd likely have met the same fate as her trapped in that nightmare except that there's a great one binding him to the dream part 4 gods i ain't against gods and goddesses in their place but they've got to be the ones we make ourselves then we can take them to bits for the parts when we don't need them anymore see every great one wishes for a surrogate and the moon presence has chosen german he's trapped in the hunter's dream stop coaching every newly contracted hunter through the process of what to expect in yharnam where to go next and how to use the various workshop tools and alter runes he's an old man now tired and ultimately stretched too thin by his long service he really just wants to leave the dream to die in peace but the moon presence needs him there to keep this area alive and to funnel more hunters into the infected areas ensuring there's always someone to keep the beasts at bay it's a reflection of the real hunters workshop that you can find off the beaten path in yharnam all eroded with time now but it's really cool to see the origins of a lot of the hunter's tools and practices and often when you kill another hunter in battle you'll get the crest of whatever faction they belong to people like the powder kegs who placed emphasis on firepower of the strategy or the cosmic eye badge of the choir elite members of the healing church whose eyes were always turned heavenwards minds on ascension these badges unlock the various uniforms of the faction too that you can get from the little messengers in the dream the echoes of all the lost hunters are still tangibly here and you get to choose what kind of strategy and approach your hunter will go with the dream starts to break down once you kill mogo's wet nurse mogo's cries finally stop as he's released from the endless night queen yarn bowing to you as she fades away in gratitude returning to the dream shows you the workshop on fire and uh that's not good doll will tell you that german is waiting to speak with you by the tree in a field of moon flowers that's been locked behind a gate so far in the game and then you get the final boss fight of the game german himself he may be old tired and an amputee but he's still a master hunter and boy does this fight show it off tonight gammon joins the hunt but the thing is you don't have to fight him depending on what you choose you can just let him execute you there and then to release you from the dream the way german longs for and you'll wake up as the sun rises on yanum it feels like a good ending but really you're only delaying the inevitable the hunt will always begin again and maybe this time you won't have the support of the doll in the workshop after all eileen no longer dreams fighting gearman and ultimately killing him is a bit trickier because congratulations you freed the old man from his torment but we need a new host now that's you you end up sitting motionless in german's wheelchair push gently towards your new post at the workshop by the doll as she tells you that the hunt begins again and your captor is the true final boss only able to be accessed if you've consumed three umbilical cords from mogo ariana's baby and impostor yosefka you need to witness these mothers and children to understand the cycle of the hunt you need to understand how much longing the great ones are filled with their need for an inevitable loss of their children and you need to stop them from violating humanity to get new children by removing their blood from circulation so killing german as the host of the dream and consuming the physical biological link between mother and child their umbilical cords to make yourself suitable calls the moon presence down from the heavens you are her next child though she's the true final boss she's not as strong as german or at least i've found her fight a lot easier if i kept my distance unlike the other great ones we encounter she works through other people rather than manifesting in our reality the only way to draw her out is to remove her puppet she's mostly skeletal brittle-boned but incredibly fast to compensate her face is just a hole a yonic slit in the place where we'd normally look for eyes a soul or in bloodborne's case wisdom and knowledge beyond our natural comprehension what she represents is motherhood the only remaining fleshy parts of her are her um holy face and the surrounding phallic tentacles defeating her triggers the childhood's end ending where the hunter really does become her baby reborn as a little tentacled monstrosity bridging the gap between human and great one you transcend the current limits of humanity and possibly awaken a new era you've become a god we see humans constantly trying to harness the power of the great ones throughout the story with the graves in the chalice dungeons being mined for materials churches erected to pray for wisdom and the horrifying revelation in yahar ghoul all the village locals are mysteriously absent unless you count the abominations of mutated mass burials bursting out of coffins if you get too close any human-shaped thing you find is going to be a blasted corpse leaving behind the skull of a madman their revelation seemingly too much for their bodies there's a foreboding coral chant in the air too reverberating off the empty stones and deserted alleyways at the end of the village a black void shrouds the moon and shimmers before stretching open and birthing a mass of well goop we love a bit of goop on this channel but look at it it's a mass of rotting bodies all piled into one big boy an artificial human attempt at birthing a great one this is why alchemy forbids human transmutation guys this is the kind of [ __ ] that happens look at it it's full of vomit this is an attempted ascension but humans just aren't there yet and to try and compensate for our lack they just chucked more and more souls and blood into the mix to this horrifying result incompatible humans perhaps the few that make up the still animated parts had a little peculiar blood in them like ariana or yosefka it really doesn't bear thinking about most of the game's plot has you running from church landmark to scholarly retreat all trying to understand to comprehend the great ones as gods and ethereal beings they revered unloved and above all feared mostly killing a great one gives you the message prey slaughtered but there are a couple of notable exceptions murgo's wet nurse the moon presence and the orphan of course all monstrous mothers and children violently separated they instead give you nightmare slain though mogo's wet nurse isn't his mother she's claimed him from queen jarnam he's her surrogate baby keeping his essence alive in the endless dream and it's not the wet nurse's death that triggers the message there's a gap as what remains of baby mogo cries for the last time before silence falls and the message displays he's finally free these creatures aren't just standard prey for a hunter they're the ones holding the nightmare of the hunt itself together all because humans decided they needed to know and took that pathological curiosity to violating extremes we transgressed against the gods and the gods protected themselves breaking the cycle of this dangerous pursuit of knowledge comes in the form of ascension and the doll holds you close and comforts you as your new nurse she's your surrogate mother now just as she was a surrogate maria for german having an identical voice and character model her clothes covered in the same lumen flowers maria comforts her patience with inside the nightmare she's always been there to look after you throughout the hunt it's what she was made for hunters have told me about the church about the gods and their love but do the gods love their creations i am a doll created by you humans would you ever think to love me of course i do love you isn't that how you've made me and she'll love you as you grow into a new monster to her you were always a god just as you were human or great one though the game's bread and butter as predator and prey you eventually transcend the hunt so that you no longer need to partake in the corrupting blood you're a source of it now a holy font you no longer need to play with the primal you've risen above it but still there's a deeply animal and deeply human desire for life in children rooted in every great one that even cosmic forces way beyond our comprehension bend two they still crave that connection to cradle a child of their own to spend their nights watching over the constellations their own little stars held close to their breast their world revolves around their children just like ours [Music]

Channel: Honey Bat

Views: 537,473

Keywords: Bloodborne, video essay, fromsoft

Id: sJVXV14Vv3M

Length: 47min 7sec (2827 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/LanceHalo]

oh i love Honey Bat! her essay on Nier Automata is one of my favorite videos, its rly well made and i love the game as well as what she was talking abt!

[u/[deleted]]

Love this channel.

[u/Kigo_is_my_namo]

Creepy and interesting, very well narrated. :)