B l o o d b o r n e

INDEX

pag. 04 Foreword by TBSkyen

pag. 08 I could imagine myself by Nobody Good

pag. 10 In a word, I am Human by Mark
pag. 12 Shedding the Skin that Trapped them by Will Verasarkin
pag. 14 I Finally Create Something Of My Own by Ashecroft
pag. 16 Bloodborne and Addiction by Bwood*****
pag. 18 From My Cold Dead Hands by Noo noo
pag. 20 The Best You Can Do Is Join Them by Steve
pag. 22 The Lonely Great Ones by Greyking
pag. 24 Bloodborne Feels Like Home To Me by Tim
pag. 26 People Spent Like Tokens by Max
pag. 28 Each Boss, a Reflection by Nora
pag. 30 Catholicism in From Software Games by Aiden
pag. 32 The Analogy of Collage by Makkovar
pag. 36 I’ll Identify With Ebretias by Amaline
pag. 38 A Clumsy Giant by Jean-Baptiste
pag. 40 There Are No Beasts Or Gods, Only People by Steampunk Lemon
pag. 44 A Full Werewolf by Anonymous
pag. 48 A Damning Condemnation by Anastasia
pag. 52 Phobic Catharsis by Gabriel
pag. 56 The Schemes of Oedon by CY
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

THE MANY MEANINGS OF

BLOODBORNE
Foreword by TBSkyen
4

Hello blasphemers and body horrors, my name is TBSkyen, and

welcome to The Many Meanings of Bloodborne.

In September of 2020, I set out on a journey through Blo-

odborne for the very first time, stumbling my confused hun-
ter from the slab at Iosefka’s Clinic to a confrontation with
the Nameless Moon Presence in the Hunter’s Dream over the
course of 20 episodes. It took just over a year and five mon-
ths to complete. Going into it, I expected Gothic Horror Dark
Souls; I expected vaguely steampunk-esque blood soaked wan-
derings through a decrepit city, desolate in the waning days of
some cosmic cycle whose workings would be illuminated only
by extensive reading of item descriptions.

In a way, I was right. Yharnam is a decaying civilization
suffering under the erosion of terrible cosmic cycles, but whi-
le the structure is familiar, the meaning is deeply different.
Dark Souls 1 places you at the centre of prophecy, a Chosen
Undead whose adventure culminates in the determination of
the fate of the world: to link the Fire, or break the cycle and
plunge into an Age of Dark. Dark Souls 2, being a more per-
sonal and introspective game whose plot mirrors the arc of a
life from cradle to grave, offers you the opportunity to accept
death and fully become yourself, or to reject finality and go fo-
rever in search of new answers. In either case, the player is put
in a position of agency and control - we determine the fates of
the world and the fate of ourselves, the games orbit around
our decisions.
Bloodborne, on the other hand, is structured like a ni-
ghtmare. And it ends like one, too. You let Gehrman free you
by decapitating you, unburdening your soul of all the horrible
insight you have learned so that you may wake ignorant, but
free, to see a new dawn. Or else, defiant, but too weak to re-
sist, you defeat Gehrman and are embraced and symbolically
impregnated by the Nameless Moon presence. You take Gerh-
man’s place and become the new steward of the Hunter’s Dre-
am, perpetuating the nightmare forever.
And finally, should you have consumed enough arcane
insight to challenge the Great Ones, you destroy the Moon
Presence... and you are transformed, becoming a wriggling,
tentacled slug, who is gently embraced by the Plain Doll who,
Virgin Mary-like, cradles you like a child.
Bloodborne has three endings, but it only ends one way:
powerlessness. It is a nightmare, and there is no amount of
strength, no insight, no might, no protagonist exceptionalism
that gives you control over it.
That powerlessness echoes through the entire game,
especially in the themes of forced pregnancy and the body
horror of birth and reproduction that recur again and again.
From Vicar Amelia’s desperate religious entreaties for sal-
vation to Micolash’s wild pseudoscientific rambling about
comprehending the cosmos, to tragic Lady Maria and Father
Gascoigne, and pathetic Gehrman himself, characters in Bloo-
dborne struggle ceaselessly against powers which are beyond
them. Temptations that cannot be resisted, mysteries that
The Many Meanings of Bloodborne - Foreword by TBSkyen
cannot be unraveled, higher beings that cannot be reasoned
with.
When I closed the book on my first Bloodborne
playthrough, and sat down to try and write a video about it,
I wanted very badly to understand the game. I wanted to de-
velop a unified theory, a thesis that would look smart in video
essay form, a definitive TakeTM on the game and its meanin-
gs that would satisfy and wow my audience. And every time
I tried to build one, Bloodborne frustrated me - even the in-
terpretation I have offered above is reductive, incomplete and
insufficient!
It is possible to piece together most of a timeline of the
events of the Bloodborne world, as dedicated Bloodborne fan
Redgrave did in his seminal work “The Paleblood Hunt.” They
lay out in detail the events of the story as they probably hap-
pened, establishing a very credible timeline and a compelling
narrative of the game, which they once claimed constituted
something close to a “definitive answer” to Bloodborne’s
mysteries. But in the foreword to the most recent edition
of the document, even they have had a change of heart:
5
“When I first wrote The Paleblood Hunt, I wrote that
there was a singular truth we could discover. Seven mon-
ths later, having read so many different interpretations
and discussion on the game’s story, having discussed the plot
with so many different people, I can only now see how absurd
that the idea of a singular story had been. There is no answer
to Bloodborne’s story. Bloodborne is a game that asks you what
you think. It asks you what your story is. What do you make
of the unknown? This is my story. This is my Eldritch Truth.” 1
I published my final episode in February of 2022, and I haven’t
stopped thinking about the game since.
At the end of my Boss Designs series, I have traditionally
asked my audience to chime in, to send me essays about their
own conclusions about the game and share what it has meant
1
Redgrave, The Paleblood Hunt
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JL5acskAT_2t062HILImBkV8eXAwaqOj611mSjK-vZ8/
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

to them. Previously, these open calls resulted may

be a couple of dozen responses, some of which were
naturally just shitposts and jokes, but Bloodborne... in-
spired a different kind of response. I ended up with almost
69.000 (nice!) words worth of responses across a hundred and
six submissions. For reference, the average commercial novel
comes in at somewhere between 50.000-100.000 words.

Bloodborne means a lot, it means a lot of different things, and

to quite a lot of people.

This document is a curated selection of twenty of those

essays. I’ve included the ones I personally found most intere-
sting or thought-provoking, and I hired my friend ARTeapot
to create the layout and decorate it with concept art from the
games. I have compiled all of the essays into a second docu-
ment, which you can find here (link to final document later),
and if you are a Bloodborne fan, I think you owe it to your-
self to at least check them out. There are a lot of intere-
sting perspectives on the game, and a lot of interesting
stories about the things it has meant to its players.
6 The essays herein have been edited for clarity, gram-
mar and spelling, as well as for formatting, and I have
tried my very hardest not to alter meaning or semantic
content. They are organized by word count, with the shor-
test essays coming first, and getting longer as we go.

These essays explore a wide range of topics, from deeply

personal stories about people’s lives and the place that Blo-
odborne occupies in them, to interpretations of its symbols
and meaning, to meditations on personal identity and the me-
aning of transformation. Some of these essays contain expli-
cit and potentially disturbing content, including discussions
of physical and emotional abuse, and content warnings have
been appended to the beginning of those essays so the reader
can make an informed decision about what to engage with.

Now, dream on.

The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

7
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

I COU LD
IM AGINE MYSELF
by Nobody Good

I have a really odd relationship with Bloodborne. As a

child and throughout my early teenage years, I always felt
like I was different from everyone else. It wasn’t in the “ha ha
I’m so quirky” type of way, however. Instead it was more of a
“everyone seems to think differently from me and I have no
idea why” type of thing. This sort of isolation even extended
to my ability to relate to fictional characters/beings. While
my friends would talk about which fantasy race they’d belong
to, I would just simply stay quiet and nod my head because I
didn’t relate enough to the ideas of those races to have an opi-
nion. Though, that all changed when I discovered Bloodborne.
I wasn’t familiar with Lovecraft or any other forms of cosmic
horror at the time, so the creature designs were completely
foreign to me. But, for some reason, I felt like I truly con-
nected with these creatures. Seeing horrendous beings with
8 such strange anatomies that were also so disconnected from
the general perception of normal humans was something that
I could relate to in a strange way.
 I could imagine myself - Nobody Good

I found out later on in my life that the reason I had felt

so disconnected from everyone was because I had been living
with undiagnosed autism for most of my life and was only able
to truly get diagnosed after I turned 18, since I was able to
start setting up my own appointments rather than having to
rely on my parents for everything. Even though I’ve come a
long way when it comes to my social development, I still find
myself constantly drawn back to those designs within Blood-
borne and have made an effort to branch out into several dif-
ferent forms of cosmic horror media. Of course, I don’t actual-
ly believe that I’m secretly some kind of eldritch being with
thousands of eyes and tentacles, but Bloodborne managed to
show me things that I could imagine myself being for once in
my life.

Hopefully this story makes some amount

of sense.
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
IN A WOR D,
I A M H U M AN
by Mark
The aspect of Bloodborne that my brain’s latched onto
is the idea of blood vs. insight, or body vs. mind.
In general, the concept of ascending beyond this plane
of existence is tied by necessity to the idea of thought. For the
veil of physical reality to be peeled back, it is the physical wor-
ld more so than the mental world that dissipates - or in other
words, the “soul” is the thing that ascends. The game (or at
least, a fan interpretation I heard) makes reference to some
Great Ones being “left behind”. Given that the tainted blood is
linked to the Great Ones, I consider the blood to be the reason
why these Great Ones were unable to ascend - i.e. they were
unable to shed the corporeal shackles of this world.
10
The game has two distinct currencies: the insight of the
Great Ones required to see the world as it truly is, and the blo-
od that represents the physical world. Willem and Laurence’s
divergence represents humanity’s separation of these concep-
ts, but I think the correct approach is a bit deeper than that.
The effect of the Old Blood upon humanity is that it intoxica-
tes us. We always want more. It is addictive. It acts as dopa-
mine - that devious neurotransmitter that’s both the cause of
and solution to all of life’s problems.
However, dopamine is a vital component to the nervous
system. It’s required for us to learn things and is as much a
part of us as atoms and molecules are. And so we have a system
where our ability to think is tied to the physical world, much
in the same way that blood is tied to the Great Ones. A dream of
transhumanism is to move beyond the physical world, and to
enter one of pure thought. For all Bloodborne’s talk of ascen-
sion, and Great Ones, and higher forms of life, everything is
always tied to blood. There is no escape from the workings of
reality. There is no escape from blood.
 In a word, I am Human - Mark

The analogue of blood to addiction and the mechani-

sms behind is has always spoken to me the most. I’ve mode-
rate anxiety and use comfort eating to both quell and stoke
that feeling. It’s no coincidence that in the deeper moments
of self-loathing I’ll happily quote Father Gascoigne or silently
scream about blood.

I’d rather live in a world where insight, knowledge and

the imagination were my only motivators. But that’s not a
world in which I live, nor is it a world in which it’s possible to
live. I am bound by flesh and neurones, but flesh and neurones
form my brain. I am both a creature of blood, and a creature of
insight. In a word, I am human.

And I guess Bloodborne’s helped me realize that’s fine.

11
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

SHEDDING THE
SKIN THAT
TR APPED THEM
by Will Verasarkin

I played Bloodborne during a very influential period

of my life. I was still in high school at the time, and had just
gotten out of a period of my life that was very difficult. I di-
dn’t know who I even was, who I wanted to be, when everyone
around me seemed to be figuring that out, at least on the sur-
face.

I went in with low expectations. I had heard of the re-

putation of Dark Souls games, and while I expected it to be
good, I didn’t expect it to be anything more than that. I was
completely wrong. The gameplay and setting worked together
to create a space that deeply drew me in and made playing the
game so much more engaging that my highest expectations.

12 As I played, I started to identify more with the main cha-

racter. I felt a genuine hunger to know what was really going
on and a fresh and burning hatred of the church that had hurt
people on such a grand scale. That hatred caught me off guard.
It felt more personal than it realistically should have been, and
it took me a long time to figure out why, to figure out what the
game really meant to me.

Bloodborne, to me, is a game about Insight. Insight into

the world, into people, and into yourself. Importantly, very
little information is given away for free, only the absolutely
basics to get you started. Beyond that, you must win every
scrap of knowledge you want. Not only that, but a lot of know-
ledge has been hidden, either due to deliberate obfuscation or
simply the passage of time. To fully understand everything,
you have to be ready to examine everything around you, to
peel back the layers of the world to reach true understanding.

That lesson was one of the best lessons anyone has ever
taught me. It was only by taking that lesson and applying it to
myself that I really began to understand who I was. It helped
me understand the reason I hadn’t had any real relationships
up to that point, why people making jokes about me dating
 Shedding the Skin that Trapped them - Will Verasarkin

women made me so uncomfortable.

This game helped me realize I was gay.

I know it’s a very biased reading of the text that doesn’t

lean on half the points the game makes, but to me, the game
has a story. The story of someone fighting against a church
that hides away information and tells them who to be, that
pits them against people it doesn’t understand just trying to
live their lives. The story of someone realizing the bonds they
are in and working to break free. And, ultimately, the story of
someone shedding the skin that had trapped them, in order to
become something that let them be who they wanted to be.

13
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
I FINALLY CREATE
SOMETHING OF
MY OWN
by Ashecroft
For me, Bloodborne spelled a different narrative than
I had been ever used to in gaming and it created a world that
drew me in, start to finish, even if it did take me 5 years to
complete the game for the very first time, remaining the only
Soulsborne game I have ever finished.
Watching the Boss Designs series and seeing how your
mind worked on how the designs of each boss worked for
each environment and how you pieced together a story both
familiar and unfamiliar to me was something that was excel-
lent to see, and so I’d like to thank you for introducing your
perspective into the world of Yharnam and the many sto-
ries within it. Whilst I will always appreciate the lore
videos of Vaatividya, something about how you present
14 the ideas put forward (especially in the Mergo’s Wet
Nurse video) makes everything feel like the lore and the rea-
sons behind some characters actions make vastly more sense
and things just fall bit by bit into place.
Bloodborne itself held a special place for me as an ama-
teur creator myself, it helped me finally create something of
my own. A setting to tell stories of characters within and a set-
ting to finally DM games of D&D within, albeit I suffered from
the same thing I do now: Never being happy with what I had,
and always having to make more. And yet, with the help of a
close friend, I managed to finally create my own gothic horror
setting where the concepts of human and monster would test
how someone would interact with both.
Would xenophobia and the fear of becoming a monster
spur you into killing them, regardless of if they were a threat
to you or not, or would you help the monsters and discover the
reason this land had been cursed. Bloodborne helped give me
a solid inspiration, and even if that setting doesn’t really exist
anymore, it helped me focus more than most things did. Blo-
odborne helped me create something real, even if it was only
fleeting, just like a dream or a nightmare.

Additionally, as a game it always captured a much gran-
der sense of wonder to me than something like Dark Souls.
It’s a hard feeling to really put into words, that sense that
the atmosphere itself was affected rather than just the envi-
ronment. Often given examples of how Yharnam’s influence
affected other places, and how places like Brygenwyrth and
Cainhurst would come to affect other aspects of Yharnam and
its future, and of course the concept that the entire aspect of
the Hunt, the Hunters, Kos and all this happened in the space
of a couple of decades.
I Finally Create Something Of My Own - Ashecroft
15
So to me, it makes it feel all the scarier that all
this happened in such a short amount of time. Unlike
Souls, which takes the Zelda or Star Wars approach to thin-
gs where all the events happen over potentially thousands of
years, which for me sort of makes it less interesting (but I un-
derstand not everyone feels the same there).
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
BLOODBOR NE
AND ADDICTION
by Bwood*****
[CONTENT WARNING:
DISCUSSIONS OF SUBSTANCE
ADDICTION]
Ohhhh Bloodborne. Bloodborne, Bloodborne... Blood-
borne. What could be said about this game that hasn’t already
been said better and earlier? Not much, so that leaves us up to
our own experiences, personal and anecdotal. So what is Blo-
odborne... To me?
To me, Bloodborne is... addiction. For the risk of soun-
ding insensitive or crass, I should state that I’ve experienced
substance addiction for several years, but I don’t wish to
go into that in too much detail. The long and short of it
is that I struggled with it for 3 years, and I’ve been clean
16 for 4 years soon. It was a real scuffed time in my life and
I’m glad that it seems to be behind me now. There’s few
things quite as awful as that feeling you have when you
know you’re addicted to something that’s hurting you.
Enough melodrama though: Bloodborne. While I was
quitting, (Cold Turkey maybe not the best decision,) I needed
SOMETHING to do with the nervous energy and constant brain
fog. My close friend suggested I try out this one game that
they had been playing, hoping that it could help distract me.
So, they lent me their copy of the new game Bloodborne and
let me go to town for a while. I booted up my PS4, unknowing
to the experience I would have.
Something clicked in my 8th attempt at the Cleric Beast.
I beat it almost hitless, 18 out of 20 blood vials still remaining.
The sheer rush of endorphins I felt after I beat it was amazing,
and it distracted me completely from the withdrawal symp-
toms. I was on Shadows of Yharnam by the end of the day, and
clamoring to play more the next. I beat the base game in 3
days. So I bought my own copy and bought the newly released
Old Hunters DLC. And then I went into NG+. Then +2. Then +3. I
kept going, and had been on the third or so NG+7 when I star-
ted the Chalice Dungeons. When I had played the story Chali-
ces a handful of times I dove into the Root Chalices and never
really came out. I’ve put almost 2500 hours into this game, and
I still haven’t burnt out. That’s more than one fourth of a year!
 Bloodborne and Addiction - Bwood*****

It might not be exactly the healthiest rebound from

my addiction, but the rush I feel playing it is spectacular, and
nothing like the highs I felt while using, thank god. It isn’t cal-
mness, drifting off for a while. It’s a furious
excitement that I still feel whenever I best
NG+7 Logarius near hitless, or keep the Orphan
of Kos from entering his second phase the
whole fight, or beat the Defiled Amygdala 30
times in a row while I farm for some top tier
Blood Gems for an interesting build.

I didn’t “overcome my addiction because of

this game!” or anything grandiose like that, the over-
coming lies with my friends, the people I love. A distraction
helps though. I jokingly call it “My New Addiction” when I
can look back on the memories of a few years ago and smile.
So that’s what it is. Bloodborne is Addiction, and it is mine.

For all the good and bad, it is.

17
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

carving out your own path, finding a new dawn, or becoming

FROM MY COLD a sidewalk slug - it speaks to a very repressed part of me that
DE AD H ANDS wants to scream: “This is who I am, and if you want to take it
by Noo Noo away from me you will have to pry from my cold dead hands.”

What does Bloodborne mean to me? Describing it feels
difficult, because it has done a lot of things for me. The first
time I played it was last year in October. That was one of the
lowest points of my life, the pandemic was in full gear, I was
failing school, moved back in with my parents, and suffering
from extreme self-loathing. I turned to the one outlet that has
always been there for me: video games.
I’d never played a From Soft game before and Bloodbor-
ne’s difficulty level was way out of my comfort zone, but it
was Halloween-ish and I wanted something spooky, and the
game was gathering dust on my shelf for two years. I must
have spent three hours trying to get past the initial mob
of Yharnamites. Having persevered through other hard
games like Hollow Knight I knew I could do it if I didn’t
18 give up. Which was a funny feeling at the time, because
with everything else in my life I just wanted to give up.
Give up school, give up art, give up my dreams of making
a life for myself by the skills I’ve spent so long trying to
hone. I can’t claim something crazy like “Bloodborne cured
my depression and ADHD!” but I started rewarding myself for
finishing assignments by playing the game. I’d already failed
this physics class twice, but I died to Gascoigne at least twenty.
I sought help, and squeaked my way through the class. All I
needed was a D... and I got it! The D in physics class that finally
gave me my bachelor’s degree in digital art!
The last leg of this story is about how the visuals and
cool character designs got me inspired to draw again. It re-
ached a point where I just didn’t care that I felt bad about
drawing, I just wanted to draw the pretty Choir robes and go-
opy celestial worm baby!! So, I did, and when I posted it on my
art page it did unknowable algorithm eldritch magic and got a
ton of likes. That’s cool and all, but what mattered more was I
suddenly found myself interacting with people who found me
through that drawing and meeting a whole community of fans
and artists and ultimately making new friends. The struggle
never truly goes away but drawing Bloodborne fanart or so-
mething inspired by its aesthetic has pulled me out of more
than a few funks now and brought me so many meaningful
connections with others like me, which I’m immensely grate-
ful for.
To try to put it into words is difficult, but what does Blo-
odborne mean to me? To me it means hope. It means that you
can always find it within yourself to fight your way through
the darkness.

Living at home had been its own series of tests. Being a

closeted LGBTQA+ person in a small conservative town when
a certain orange fascist was the president of your country is
a very particular brand of Hell, I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.
Along with fighting my way through that class, I was isolated
in a place where I can’t be fully myself, not without fear of
being othered. Which is why the themes of Bloodborne reso-
nated with me so much. You’re not an unlovable monster for
being other, and you’re worthy of compassion. Fighting your
way through the horrors forced unto the most vulnerable
members of society and escaping that cycle of violence by
From My Cold Dead Hands - Noo noo

19
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
THE BEST YOU CAN
DO IS JOIN THEM
by Steve
In many ways, I think Bloodborne was designed to be
an inverse of Dark Souls. You can see it right away just from
comparing the main characters.
One thing Dark Souls really drills into your head from
moment one is that your character sucks and is not cool at
all. The Chosen Undead is literally just some dude wielding
a sword that they stole off a corpse. Your attack animations
are slow and kind of clumsy. You’re always cowering behind
a shield or dodging for your life with a huge dramatic combat
roll. You die constantly, often in embarrassing ways.
Despite all of this, the Chosen Undead eventually gets
handed a choice that, for better or for worse, will alter the
fate of the world. Whether you choose to link the fire or
20 let it go out, your actions will have massive consequen-
ces. I think this is why a lot of people have anecdotes
about how Dark Souls helped them deal with depression;
it’s a story about someone who is seemingly powerless but
is able to accomplish great things by constantly struggling
against a world that’s out to sabotage them at every turn.
By contrast, the Hunter immediately feels like a more
competent, “badass” protagonist. You have a cool transfor-
ming anime weapon and a whole closet full of black leather
trenchcoats. You heal by bathing in the blood of your enemies.
Instead of frantically dodge rolling away from enemy attacks,
you hop out of the way with minimal effort. You don’t need a
shield; shields are for cowards. Instead, you’re packing a GUN.
And if you die, you didn’t actually, because it was a dream all
along. When you kill a boss in Dark Souls the game says VIC-
TORY ACHIEVED; Bloodborne instead says PREY SLAUGHTE-
RED. Hell, the first significant thing the Hunter does is easily
kill a monster with a striking resemblance to the hardest boss
in Dark Souls.
And yet, for as cool as the Hunter seems, it’s debatable
whether anything they did actually matters. Bloodborne has
three different endings, but the systems that govern its world
remain unbroken in all of them. You can wake up in Yharnam,
succeeding in your task but retaining none of the knowledge
you learned of the hunt or the Great Ones. You can break Gehr-
man out of the cycle but ultimately take his place under the
Moon Presence’s thumb. OR you can fight back against and kill
the Moon Presence -- but you just end up taking over its role,
so the system itself remains in place.
(The trophy description does say something about ele-
vating humanity, which you could argue is significant, but is it
really all that different? The hierarchy still exists; it’s just that
now mankind is allowed to sit at the Great One table. What
happens to, say, the residents of the Fishing Hamlet, who ap-
pear to have their own society? Or the beasts of Old Yharnam,
who have clearly regained at least a part of their human intel-
ligence? What’s to stop mankind from being just as manipula-
tive towards them as the Moon Presence was to mankind?)
Bloodborne’s three endings boil down to “bad”, “bad”,
and “idk maybe?”, with the latter being the most difficult to
pull off. There’s no option to say “this is all terrible” and tear
everything down to start again the way you could in Dark
Souls.
Dark Souls is a story about an average joe who nonethe-
less manages to bring down the gods themselves, and perhaps
even destroy the entire system that kept them in power, throu-
gh sheer unbreakable will. But Bloodborne isn’t that kind of
story; it’s cosmic horror. It’s about a cool, capable protagonist
who, despite clashing against the gods over and over again, ul-
timately fails to escape them. The best you can do is join them.
The Best You Can Do Is Join Them - Steve

21
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
THE LONELY
GREAT ONES
by Greyking8
My favorite reading, as well as the one I use to interpret
Bloodborne, is as follows: The Great Ones we meet are lonely...
and intent on making it everyone’s problem.
The Amygdala chose Division, splitting itself into mul-
tiple bodies to emulate the teeming humans, but these bodies
were no more cognizant than a reflection, and the attempt fai-
led. It settled down to observe the humans, starting from the
days of Pthumeru until modern Yharnam.
Mother Kos, who was discovered after Byrgenwerth
started to open the Chalice Dungeons but before the founding
of the Healing Church, chose Symbiosis. She allowed tiny
beings to inhabit her body, assuming she did not create
them herself, and shared this connection with the pe-
22
ople of the Fishing Hamlet. In a way, this was very successful:
the Hamlet worshipped Kos, and the life forms within her grew
more complex until Kos becomes pregnant with the Orphan.
But the Orphan is also a Great One, and it becomes trapped in
the Hunter’s Nightmare after Gehrman and Maria kill its phy-
sical body. ‘Death’ is somewhat fluid with regard to the Great
Ones, so whether either of them is truly gone is up in the air,
but the curse that Kos laid on the Hunters on behalf of her
slaughtered worshippers is lifted by the Sweet Child’s return
to the sea. Soon the Hunter’s Nightmare will be no more.
Left-Behind Ebrietas at the Altar of Despair chose the
most direct approach: Reproduction. This went swimmingly
for absolutely no one. The infants were physical and stunted,
curiosities and test subjects for the Choir that first found the
Daughter of the Cosmos. All the crawling babies you find in
the Upper Cathedral belong to Ebrietas.
Formless Oedon, the true villain of Bloodborne and
source of the blood that started it all, is a patient one. He chose
to implement a program of essentially animal husbandry. En-

slaving the Pthumerans and their successor states like Loran,
Oedon started herding the humans and gave them an ichor
that contained its power. The Pthumerians, under Oedon’s ca-
reful prodding, produced a bloodline that would be capable
of successfully bearing a true hybrid: Queen Yharnam. And it
worked, mostly. Yharnam was impregnated and the baby Mer-
go grew slowly inside her, until the Mensis Scholars found her,
ripped out the baby, and used the Cord as a loudspeaker to
try and call down a Great One. Oedon’s opinion on this can be
inferred from the way that despite being the head of the He-
aling Church’s pantheon, it does not lift a finger to shield its
followers from you or from the effect of their audience with
Mergo.
What’s interesting to me is that, when you kill the Wet
Nurse, the words Nightmare Slain do not appear until Mergo
stops crying. It implies that Mergo is the true Great One, and I
have to agree, but I don’t think that Mergo is really dead. The
next time you see the Queen, at the bottom of the Chalice Dun-
geons, she’s visibly heavily pregnant again... and Mergo cries
every time you strike her swollen belly. I am also partial to the
The Lonely Great Ones - Greyking8
reading that the Wet Nurse is Mergo’s attempt at creating a
Shadow of Yharnam, his own copy of one of his mother’s royal
guard, or a minion sent by Oedon.
The Moon Presence, Paleblood Flora, is the odd one out
in this, because Flora never tried to make a child. Instead, it
seems to have satisfied itself with Pets. It grooms the Hunters
and the Dream to share a little bit of its power, and watches
them live and die inside their little terrarium. It does seem
to display some genuine attachment, keeping Gehrman ali-
ve long past his natural lifespan, and embracing the Hunter
close to its chest when they meet. Unfortunately, the people
of Yharnam have attracted the attention of too many Great
Ones. If this keeps up, as it has before, all of Flora’s pets will be
dead.
And that just will not stand. The other Great Ones have
got to go.
23
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
BLOODBORNE
FEELS LIKE
HOME TO ME
by Tim
[CONTENT WARNING:
DISCUSSIONS OF ABUSE AND TRAUMA,
AND TRAUMA THERAPY]
Bloodborne feels like home to me. Or it feels natural. Or
it feels like it was made for me. To explain things properly I
need to mention trauma in my past. I won’t go into detail.
I was physically and emotionally abused as a child, for
a period of about ten years. I was never protected from the
abuse in a significant way. It felt inescapable. It came to be a
normal part of my life. My abusers have never been puni-
shed.
Video games were - and still are - my escape. Losing
24 myself in gaming took me away from the reality of my
situation.
Still, these things are true:
• I grew up in a place that never felt safe.
• I grew up in a world that was always trying to hurt me, thou-
gh I never understood why.
• I grew up in a world where, no matter what I did, I could ne-
ver make a difference.
• I grew up in a world where the bad guys got away with it, and
where the innocent suffered.
• I grew up in a world where violence ruled.
As an adult I developed depression. It makes everything
seem hopeless. It makes you feel powerless. It makes everything
punishingly difficult. Some of this may sound familiar. In fact,
when I opened my eyes in Yharnam, I felt right at home.
A place where nearly everything is trying to kill you. You don’t
even know how you came to be there or what you’re doing,
beyond the vaguest of hints: you mostly just keep going on
the path in front of you. Where the bad guys have clearly won.
Where a small mistake can destroy you instantly.
One key difference from my tragic backstory, though: you are
not powerless. Oh, it’s not easy - if it were easy it wouldn’t feel
right at all - but you have all the power you need to win.
I had already played Dark Souls II before picking up Blo-
odborne, and all those things are true of DSII as well. I enjoyed
it, but I don’t have the same connection with it. So why Blood-
borne in particular?
I was raised Catholic - in fact I attended a Catholic scho-
ol, one that was full of bullies, machismo, and casual cruelty.
The corrupt, hypocritical Healing Church is a perfect fit for
the influence of the Catholic church in my life. (I also love re-
ligious imagery more generally - churches and angels and de-
mons and all of it - which I attribute to being raised Catholic.)
But it’s not just that.
It’s the beasts.
To illustrate my point, this happened in a
therapy session I had recently. To try and
experience my buried hatred and rage in a he-
althy way, I was imagining one of my abusers.
“It’s like a film,” said my therapist, “where
you’re in control. Whatever you need to hap-
pen can happen.” I enacted various violences
on him. But we needed an ending. And Bloodbor-
ne presented itself. He is a huge beast, and he
is trying to kill me. But I am small and quick,
and he is powerless against me.
He swings for me, and it seems he is just
about to end me. At the very last moment, I
bring up my firearm, and fire directly into
his face. He staggers back, stunned by the
blast. I dash forward and reach into his
very being, pulling free some vital piece of
him. He collapses to the floor, dead.
And the words PREY SLAUGHTERED appear in red.
And his blood rains down on my skin. And I am whole.
(If you’re curious, I imagined him looking something
like the chalice dungeon boss: Abhorrent Beast.)
 Bloodborne Feels Like Home To Me - Tim

I didn’t realise it when I first played Bloodborne. But the beings reaching on a whim to hurt me.
act of fighting and killing the beasts nurtures the part of me
that never saw justice for the abuse I suffered. To go back to An incomprehensible place filled with pain. And I am the
Yharnam - and I do go back, especially when things are hard only one who can make a difference. I can fight back against
- is to step into a world that is like the inside of my head. It those who are trying to hurt me.
feels right. It feels like the world feels to me.
Death and suffering And I can win.
everywhere, cruel
and powerful

25
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

PEOPLE SPENT
LIKE TOKENS
by Max

To me, Bloodborne is an exploration of the danger of un-

chained ambition. The concept of a hunter is an easy example
one can intuit early in the game; you must slay the beasts, but
you cannot let yourself fall prey to the temptation of blood,
lest you become a beast yourself. It’s seen first in Gascoigne, a
father driven to madness and beasthood by the hunt. Lost to
his drive to kill the beasts, you must kill him.
The plague of beasts itself was caused by the Healing Church,
praising it as a miracle cure-all. This bloodlust is even shown
through the early enemies in their general lack of strategy
and preference for unfettered aggression. Later, you hear of
Byrgenwerth, their Choir, and the School of Mensis. Those
scholars, slaves to their own morbid curiosity, explored the
Pthumerian tombs, seduced old gods, and robbed mothers of
their children, all to sate that hunger in their mind. The thou-
26 ghts and feelings that would limit reasonable individuals, or
at least give them pause to assess their actions, are quiet whi-
spers under the cathartic symphony of ambition. To pay heed
to your better judgment now would only distract from the in-
dulgence. These are both two unique ways to fall to your own
ambition.

Ludwig is a great echo of Gascoigne much later in the

game. A venerated hero, now a horrific beast beyond apt de-
scription. His intention to assemble a force of holy hunters to
quell the beast plague was admirable, but all the same he was
taken by his zeal. Be you good or great, dubious or heinous,
unchecked determination will drive you to ruin. The very cur-
se Kos laid upon the people who desecrated her corpse is a pu-
nishment for their greed. The origin of Yharnam’s madness is
the result of that boundless drive for aimless progress. Master
Willem and Laurence’s conversation hinges on this concept,
caution being overridden for the sake of some greater gain.
The unknown has no limit, so when ambition is put towards
it, it too is potentially limitless. Thus, the capacity for failure
follows. When taking these jabs in the dark, when hoping to
make that next blind leap, the cost seems meaningless. A city,
a civilization, innocent people, all equally spent like tokens for

every step up an endless staircase. The mechanics of the game
even reflect this, with Rally and Beasthood. The ever present
stoking of ambition like unwieldy fire. Should I back up, heal,
and think; or should I push forward, disregard the potential
cost, and reap the rewards of my recklessness? I’ve a personal
bias for the interweaving of mechanics and plot, so it becomes
difficult to judge myself, but I believe this implementation is
both genius, and nearly seamless.
The game provides us with examples of people who at-
tempt to tame their ambition, despite its freedom and em-
powerment. Eileen’s duty, as a Hunter of Hunters, is to lay
hunters lost to the blood and viscera to rest, while keeping
herself from suffering the same fate. She may go mad in her
fight against the bloodlust of others, unleashing her own in
a desperate and frivolous attempt to stop the cycle. Though
even when sane, Eileen falls prey to her strong initiative when
facing the Crow of Cainhurst, insisting that she settles the sco-
re. The key is her effort to keep others from that path, and her
willingness to let it go. Even as she bestows her mantle of Hun-
ter of Hunters to you, she warns you of it as a burden - not only
to kill compatriots, but as another goal to tempt you, always.
Another example, Martyr Logarius, the once head of
the fanatical Executioners. Even with the Executioner’s con-
viction to purge and exterminate the vile and unclean, he for-
People Spent Like Tokens - Max
goes their crusade to keep the Vileblood Queen isolated. The
sublimation of his purpose for a greater cause. It is a single
known goal, unlike those of Mensis. His martyrous act, ironi-
cally, is undone by Alfred’s own wild aspirations to make him
a “true martyr,” and to purge the last of the Vilebloods. And
what great goal does he seek after his task is complete? He
follows his mentor, and becomes a true martyr himself.
Though, even after all I’ve said, I don’t think Bloodbor-
ne decries this type of motivation. Looking at it as both a story
and a game, it is key. You have to want to beat that next boss,
traverse that next area, to get to the bottom of this mystery,
to face abomination after abomination, to, “Seek Paleblood to
transcend the hunt.” And in the end, you are faced with three
choices. To give up your mission, saving yourself from its en-
dless cycle, but leaving others to its temptation. To cling to
it and face Gehrman for the sake of your satisfaction, only to
become the same facilitator of the cycle that he was. Or to fo-
cus that intent to defeat Gehrman, and face the Paleblood,
the Moon Presence. There you finally transcend the hunt,
you transcend the cycle of want, and gain the power to
end it. A paradox - the ambition to chain ambition. Blo- 27
odborne is not only about the danger of unchecked am-
bition, but the power one can have once it is honed and
controlled.
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
EACH BOSS,
A REFLECTION
by Nora
What Bloodborne means to me is a journey about fear.
I don’t think of Bloodborne as just a horror game, so much as
it’s a game about horror, and this was true to me years ago.
I’ve dealt with anxiety for a long, long time, though maybe
“dealt with” is the wrong wording, it might be better to say
“burdened by.” When Bloodborne first released I was immedia-
tely captivated by its world and aesthetics, but I never dared
to play it, because I was afraid I wasn’t good enough. Anxiety
and self doubt have been my constant companions, and guilt
has shadowed me for a long time, so when I saw Bloodborne,
as much as I wanted to jump in and play around, I thought I’d
just die to the first boss over, and over, and over.
I was wrong.
I grew up, and I never forgot. I’m an adult now,
28 not a scared teenager, and so I thought to myself, well,
I can’t know that I’ll fail, if I don’t try. That thought ma-
rinated in my head for a long time. I’ve made a lot of
self discoveries with that thought, I was afraid of myself in
more ways than I even thought, I was even in denial about my
own gender. It took a lot, but I mustered up just enough coura-
ge to find out, to discover that “Eldritch truth” so to speak. So
I figured, if I already went through the harrowing experience
of knowing that about myself, at long last, FINALLY knowing
that about myself... maybe trying that game I was
afraid of would be a good thing.
Finally, I was right.
I started playing, already spoiled years ago, it
felt like I was treading the ground that people braver
than me tread. I died over, and over and over to the
first major street of Yharnam, until my weapons broke
before I even got access to the workshop. But in-
stead of focusing on this failure, I focused on the
progress I made, and finally things clicked, and I
made it to the Cleric Beast.
I beat the Cleric Beast on my second try.
Having done that, I realized this was pos-
sible, but life got in the way, and I took a break for a while.
When I returned to the game, I started a new save, and so-
mething even better happened. I stormed through the streets
of Yharnam and beat the Cleric beast on my first try of that
run! Getting rid of my fear was the best way to proceed, and I
knew that if I could keep calm, I wouldn’t just beat the game,
I’d conquer it.
So, with a friend who had a wiki open to guide me when I
got lost in some areas (those woods got to me) and a newfound
resolve, I tried, and I tried. My friend and I couldn’t co-op
in-game, but it sorta felt like a spy movie, I was the agent, and
she was mission control. I was spoiled prior to playing, than-
ks to my fear making me think I’d never play it, but fear also
made me deny that I’m a girl for most of my life, and well, my
fears sure as hell didn’t win that fight. So, the adventure went
smoothly, for the most part.
Each boss seemed like a reflection of some of my own
struggles, really, and overcoming them wasn’t always easy, but
was incredibly rewarding. Amygdala is named for the part of
the brain that controls fear responses, and anxiety. I killed it,
completely unafraid. In a real sense, I won that fight before it
started, just playing this game was an act of courage.
Micolash made me rage. I’d struggled with anger issues
for a long, long time, and Micolash wound up taking much
more time than any other boss for me, just because I would
frequently get so inflamed that I wound up fighting sloppy.
(Which is definitely saying something,
because I didn’t feel ANY anger for
the other bosses.) Regardless, I won in
the end. I cooled off enough to kick his
ass.
Lady Maria, sitting in her clocktower,
guilty as can be, made me think of all the
time I’d lost, and the guilt I felt over
failed friendships from my past. A real
lingering history. Just like the pain
of the past fades with time, old
wounds scar, old hunters finally
die.
 Each Boss, a Reflection - Nora

The list goes on, but my point is that each boss fight al-
lowed me a moment of self reflection, and that this epic ad-
venture was an enriching, powerful experience that I was just
too afraid to start all those years ago.

It’s been a while since I started playing. After I beat

every boss, had an awesome Strength/Arcane build, and kil-
led the Moon Presence with the Holy Moonlight Greatsword,
I’ve started a new run. It’s been fun! This new adventure is
shaping up to be just as insightful as the last.
In the end, here’s the message of this story.
With a little insight, you can make tremendous discoveries
about yourself. With a bit of courage, you can transcend.

And with just a pinch of friendship, you can make a who-

le year just a bit less of a nightmare.

Kim, if you’re watching this, thanks for helping me find my way

around, running through Bloodborne would’ve been a bit more of a
nightmare, if you hadn’t been there to give me tips.
29
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
CATHOLICISM IN
FROM SOFTWARE
GAMES
by Aiden
I’m a big fan of your series and your way of analyzing
design! I’d like to propose an interpretation of some of Blood-
borne’s (and FromSoftware’s other titles) themes that struck
me during the start of your Queen Yharnam video.
In it, you contemplated the Catholic aesthetics and symbolism
present in many of FromSoftware’s games, especially Blood-
borne, and mentioned something along the lines of “There’s
always some idea of sacrifice, punishment, or original sin, but
there’s never a Christ figure. There isn’t a Transcendent Inno-
cent.”
I believe there is a good reason for this, and it’s
rooted in Japanese culture and history. The “Souls” ga-
mes have a history of themes of religious trauma, and
30 that is because Japan has a history of religious trauma,
tracing back to the mid 1500’s with the Jesuit missio-
naries’ arrival and late colonial-era activity. During this
time, Europeans used Christianity as an excuse to move to
Japan in droves and establish footholds for the sake of material
exploitation under the pretense of “bringing Christ to them”.
While some missionaries had genuinely good intentions, for
the most part, Europeans were there to use Christ as a means
of putting the Japanese under their boot and robbing them
of everything they had. They took slaves, destroyed temples,
forced entire populations to convert, and siphoned off huge
amounts of Japanese wealth until the shogunate had enough
and outlawed Christianity in 1614.
The missionaries in Japan didn’t care about bringing
Jesus to the Japanese, they cared about using Jesus as a wea-
pon. A tool for control and exploitation that enforces the idea
of “Do what we say or suffer eternally”. With how hard Catho-
licism pushes Original Sin, the Japanese would have been told
constantly that “you’re damned from birth, and need to follow
the church and give offerings to be saved”, rather than being
told that Jesus is enough.2
2
This is, in my view, a hyperbolic interpretation. Europeans in Ja-
pan arrived with many different motivations, from cultural conquest
as described above, to respectful cultural exchange or simple trade.
Many Europeans arriving in Japan in this period were also devout
missionaries, intent on spreading Christianity in Japan out of sincere
conviction. Of course, this does not cancel out the colonizing fun-
ction of missionary work, and it is relevant to criticize it as such. But
in the 16th century, Christianity in Japan was enthusiastically em-
braced, especially by the upper classes, and Japan briefly became the
largest non-European diocese in the world. This was not because of
dastardly European subversion, but because the religion was politi-
cally useful or spiritually resonant to the Japanese themselves. Nobi-
lity were likely to embrace Christianity out of political convenience,
as it gave them easier access to European trade and firearms, but very
large congregations of devout Japanese citizens also emerged in this
time among the citizenry. Christians in Japan became subject to sub-
stantial persecution and discrimination once Christianity (particular-
ly Catholic Christianity) came to be seen as a threat to the power of
the Shogunate in the late 1590s. For a time, openly practicing Chri-
stianity was a capital offense for Japanese citizens, and significant
legal and systemic discrimination persisted in Japan arguably past the
Meiji Restoration. Christianity and missionary work is absolutely a
part of European colonialism and white supremacy, and it was ab-
solutely used in Japan to facilitate politics and exploitation. But it is
important to remember also that European nations never successfully
colonized Japan, and it remained a sovereign nation until the U.S.
occupation of World War II. Christianity was used as a political tool
in Japan by the Japanese, as part of Japanese power politics. To cha-
racterize Christianity in Japan as solely a rapacious, violent attempt
by Europeans and a morally bankrupt church to perpetuate abuse is,
in my view... overly simplistic. It runs the risk of erasing the agency of
Japanese Christians by reducing them to gullible victims of a Euro-
pean scam, rather than complex people who made choices about their
religious beliefs and affiliation for their own purposes.

Because of that, Japan (as well as China and India, who
suffered even more under colonial exploitation and Christian
rule) holds a great deal of mistrust and spite for Christianity.
To them, grand cathedrals and statues of saints are symbols
of pain and oppression. Looking at the Catholic symbolism in
Bloodborne with this in mind paints a very dark picture of the
Healing Church, showing them as an invasive and abusive con-
quering force that bleeds the city of Yharnam dry.
You said it yourself at the start of the series, the Hea-
ling Church looks almost disgustingly wealthy and opulent,
and they had to get that wealth from somewhere. It’s unlikely
that they gave out their healing services for free, and we know
from Old Yharnam that when business is slowing down, the
Healing Church will make their own business, poisoning huge
swathes of people in order to get them addicted to the chur-
ch’s healing blood. Then, when the blood turned the people of
Old Yharnam into beasts, which we can assume that the Hea-
ling Church knew it would do, due to all their research in The
Choir and the laboratories in the hunter’s nightmare, a night-
mare that was formed when the church slaughtered a fishing
village, dragged their god out of the water, and cut it open
for their experiments. Let’s not forget that the church funded
Yahar’gul’s kidnapping and experiments, took orphans to the
Choir where they were turned into horrific fetus-monsters in
the church’s pursuit of transcendence, and the fact that Mer-
go is in the top of the nightmare of Mensis would point to the
idea that Mensis, the highest branch of the Healing Church, is
the group responsible for cutting open Queen Yharnam and
stealing her child...
The Healing Church is, without a doubt, a poison to the
city of Yharnam, corrupting it, bleeding it dry of resources
and hope. There is no good side to the church. There is no sal-
vation. Only a greedy insane group of scholars that look down
on the people of Yharnam as nothing but meat for experimen-
ts and slaves to keep their money flowing while they bow their
heads to alien and unknowable gods that the people know
nothing about. They are only told to obey, and to give their ti-
thes to the glorious church that promises that all will be well,
while plotting the doom of them all.
The Healing Church is, intentionally or not, a very loud
depiction of how Christianity is viewed in Japanese culture.
Catholicism in From Software Games - Aiden
It’s a mysterious overlord that demands tribute in exchange
for a salvation that it won’t tell you about, all the while stea-
ling and cheating and lying and exploiting its subjects 3. The
lack of a “Transcendent Good” figure in Bloodborne is due
to the fact that Christ wasn’t a transcendent good to Japan.
The Catholic way of teaching Christianity tends to gloss over
the whole “your sins have already been paid for, you’re freed
by Christ”, and hammer in on “all people are born sinful and
will be punished for it”, viewing adherence to the church as
a means of salvation, rather than Christ. When that church is
deeply abusive and manipulative, however, Bloodborne is the
result.
Personally, it hurts me a little to talk about Christiani-
ty in such a negative light, since I’m a Christian myself, but I
value history and I’m not foolish enough to ignore the impli-
cations it has. In the end, I reconcile with it by realizing that
evils done by the church across the world are due to human
greed and human desire, not God. I think Bloodborne does
a fantastic job of telling this story of religious trauma and
abuse with its themes and aesthetics.
31
3
Again, I think this is an overly simplistic analysis of how Christiani-
ty exists and is perceived in Japan to this day. According to Ishikawa
Akito, associate professor of religion at Momoyama Gakuin Univer-
sity: “while more than 99% of Japanese people are not Christians, this
does not mean that they dislike Christianity, or have a negative image
of the religion. Far from it. In fact, it is fair to say that many Japane-
se people are quite familiar with various aspects of Christian culture
[...] Christmas is a firmly established event on the calendar popular
with people from all generations and backgrounds, and many couples
choose to get married in a Christian-style wedding, even if they are
not believers. Christian culture in general has a positive image. At
the same time, most Japanese people have little or no interest in the
Christian faith per se. Again, they do not critically reject Christian
teachings after thorough study; they are simply not interested and
never bother to find out.”
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
THE ANA LOGY
OF COLLAGE
by Makkovar
Why do I love Bloodborne?
Bloodborne is my favourite game I’ve never played.
I have not owned a game console since the Game Boy Colour,
I do all my gaming on PC and for the most part, I am content
not having access to console-exclusive releases, as there are
many more great games just on the one platform than I could
possibly get through in a single lifetime. Bloodborne is the
one, burning exception, a game I yearn to play, but still cannot
quite justify the expense of buying a Playstation just for one
game.
That said, I am fascinated by it. I have watched the game
being played dozens of times, devoured countless analyses
and lore breakdowns on YouTube, read a book’s worth of
essays on it. I probably know it just as well as the Dark
32
Souls games I personally played through several times, mi-
nus only the muscle memory that comes with actually going
through and learning its encounters.
What is it that fascinates me so, that draws me in like
a moth to a flame and has me come back to be engrossed in
Bloodborne’s world time and again? That’s... difficult to say,
actually. I’ve procrastinated even starting this essay for days,
because I don’t have a simple answer that comes to mind.
Whenever discussing the Dark Souls games, I fall back on the
analogy of a collage: the games are a collection of aesthetics,
powerful images and experiences of hardship which center
around some core themes. Their worlds are broken and even-
ts are not presented in a neat, linear fashion, instead relying
on thematic cohesion to convey their meaning to the player,
surrounding themes of cycles, endings, loss, grief and perse-
verance. As Bloodborne’s world works on similarly unintelligi-
ble rules, being a jumble of dreams and nightmares which are
somehow as real as the waking world, yet retain an amount
of dream logic, I think that analogy applies just as much. This
technique of presenting its meaning is also supported by an

immensely strong aesthetic direction, as I’m sure I don’t need
to tell you.
OK, but then, what are the themes I see in Bloodbor-
ne, exactly? Well, that is where I’m somewhat at a loss. Oh,
of course I can name things that are in the game. Religious
organizations abusing their power and exerting terrible con-
trol over reproductive rights of common people. Townsfolk
blaming outsiders for problems caused by their society’s in-
ternal structure. All the Lovecraftian stuff. Heck, maybe I’ve
devoured too many other people’s opinions on the game to
have a clear picture of my own conclusions? (something so-
mething, Bloodborne is actually about mercury poisoning Ja-
pan’s drinking water, something something monomyth in re-
verse, something something Nietzsche) But none of this feels
like like it reaches to the core of why I find this game and its
story so enthralling, even while divorced from any gameplay
experience.
Pondering this, I couldn’t help but think of another
subject of an inexplicable fascination: grimdark, or to be more
The Analogy of Collage - Makkovar
specific, its originator, Warhammer 40,000. Please, allow me
this tangent, I promise it swiftly becomes relevant. A lot of
people see no value in grimdark stories. If everything is hope-
less, and individual stories inevitably end in suffering, what
is there to learn? To gain emotionally? Is there a point to it?
Meanwhile, I love it. I thrive off of it. I fall asleep to lore videos
recounting planetary extinctions or cruelties of 40k’s Imperial
cult, to audiobooks detailing individual tragedies in the face
of an uncaring universe. Here too, I struggle to put the rea-
sons behind my wide-eyed wonder into words. Intellectually,
I can understand why people may find these stories unappea-
ling and depressing, something to be avoided, but I don’t quite
‘get’ my own love for them.
However, I can see that this is where my interest in
Fromsoft’s games and 40k intersect. In fact, I would be so bold
as to assert that, perhaps depending on one’s reading, the ga-
mes may fit into a definition of being grimdark. So what does
that tell us, what are the common elements between sto-
ries set in the 41st millenium and the story of the moonlit
hunt?
33
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

To finally lay it all out: my best attempt at a conclusion

is that these are stories about systems of control. Tremendous,
inconceivably grand systems which grind the individual down,
which no one can have any hope of personally influencing or
changing. Be it Lovecraftian Great Ones or gods of Chaos, the
Healing Church or the church of the Emperor, Yharnamite xe-
nophobia or Imperial xenophobia... All of these represent for-
ces exerting terrible influence over each and every character
in each story, whether they be people positioned outside or
working within the organizations and creeds presented. Each
character presents another view, another manner of relating
to the systems of power, but none are ever able to escape, to
avoid their own fate being bound with those systems.

Naturally, those kinds of stories strike a chord with

some, like me, ourselves having to contend with our place
under capitalism, with religious influences over our lives and
upbringing, with xenophobia on the rise, with the dreadful re-
ality that the forces and systems of power above us are dri-
ving the world we inhabit towards seemingly inevitable
demise.
34
Only, through fiction we are able to look from the
outside in, appreciating the big picture and having the
ability to comprehend these immense forces in their com-
plexity nigh on entirely, or at the very least to appreciate their
inscrutability, in a way we never could look at the system of
exploitation we are actually stuck on the inside of. Fiction pro-
vides a safe distance, an opportunity to appreciate all the de-
lightfully grim ironies and tragedies of the setting before our
eyes with a degree of detachment. Thus, I suppose, allowing
for a kind of emotional katharsis we could not experience in
reality, when people’s lives and livelihoods are continuously
at stake. So, all in all, religious organizations abusing power,
exerting control over reproductive rights, xenophobic mobs
and Lovecraftian horrors absolutely are the themes which
keep me coming back to this game’s lore and story. More im-
portantly, it is the way all these intertwine, creating an intri-
cate web of oppressiveness, mystery and terror, all of which
descend to haunt a single lonely hunter.
The Analogy of Collage - Makkovar

35
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
I’LL IDENTIF Y
W ITH EBR ETI AS
by Amaline
When I found Ebrietas, she was in mourning. At least,
that’s what it felt like to me. What else do you call it when you
find someone - a thinking person, someone ascribed the abi-
lity to communicate, learn, and teach - sitting silently beside
a corpse? There was no otherworldly ritual in that place. The-
re was no sense of malevolence from this weird and godlike
being, and more than there was from Rom. The Daughter of
the Cosmos seemed perfectly content to leave me be. I didn’t
think of it all that much at the time, and just stuck to my usual
Souls game paradigm of sparing anything that I could get away
with. There’s a satisfaction in the small defiance of being non-
violent in the face of such an overwhelmingly hostile franchi-
se. There was an entire rest of the game to explore. I only
ultimately played Bloodborne once, but years later, that’s
the scene that stuck with me most, probably because of
36 how different it was from everything that came before
and after.
I played Bloodborne on launch. A lot’s happened since
then. I’ve come out as gay, and a trans woman, to most of the
important people in my life. I’ve become a lot more politically
aware. I’ve had panic attacks in the dead of night where my
mind spirals into fevered dread over things too big for me to
ever really engage with on a personal level, and I’ve forged
some of the strongest and truest friendships anyone could ask
for. This playthrough has been the first time I’ve engaged with
the game since then, and it feels... different, now.
See, there’s a thing about trans-ness, something about
the way it challenges people’s ironclad assumption of how the
world works that makes it an easy target for hysteria and de-
magoguery. You can see how it gets into the heads of indivi-
duals who by any other metric are reasonable, rational, and
kind. People who genuinely believe in tolerance and diversity.
It’s this little nugget of insight that sets the world off-kilter for
them, a seed of cancerous lunacy that takes root deep in some
chemical and animalistic part of their brain where fear and di-
sgust form the toxic pools it needs to thrive. It starts small, but
once transphobia sets in, it turns malignant shockingly qui-
ckly if nothing is done to root it out. It seems to devour every
opinion a person has, every value they cherish. They start ma-
nufacturing monsters out of whole cloth, casually proposing
outright fascistic invasions of privacy and personal liberty as
if they were the world’s most common sense.

Before long, there’s barely anything left; just the transphobia.
In Bloodborne, as you venture through Yharnam, you
are granted the eyes to see what was originally hidden to you.
The fundamental laws of nature, humanity, even physiology,
are not what they seem. Your insight deepens, and your con-
cerns drift from the feral, tangible beasts in the city streets
to weirder, more ethereal, altogether more intangible things.
The game’s sense of horror is visceral and fleshy, reveling in
showing off the myriad awful ways the human body can be
mutilated and contorted. It delights in the grotesque, and sex
- biological sex, not the act, never any tinge of romance - is ne-
ver far from its mind. Yarnham is a queer place, in the archaic
sense of the word, and that queerness is utterly terrifying.
The Amygdala are perhaps the apotheosis of this. Until
you’re properly drunk on Insight and knee-deep in the Night-
mare, they’re invisible. But as madness sets in, it all starts to
become clear. All the strange phenomena, all the blurring of
the edges of the world, all the unseen perils - it’s all them! It’s
all the Amygdala, watching, lurking, clinging to the world and
waiting for their chance to... something. It’s never clear what,
but it’s surely nothing good.
You don’t need any Insight to see Ebrietas.
She’s just there. Existing. A person that seems too strange, too
inhuman to ever understand.
The game invites you to see something sinister there. To
read in a dark, alien motive, even as it spells out in plain engli-
sh what the Great Ones desire so desperately - a child. That’s
it. Our culture has such revulsion for people having children
who ‘shouldn’t’ that this desire reads as horrific almost on its
own. Tinges of eugenics and bio-essentialism infect even some
of the most well-intentioned fantasy and science fiction. I re-
member deep discomfort as I was dragged into watching the
Hulu adaptation of A Handmaid’s Tale, not just by the ob-
vious and visceral oppression of the show’s world, but by
the way biological motherhood is equated with womanho-
od. Virtually every infertile female character is hideously
evil. Adoption is kidnapping. Surrogacy is rape. Trans pe-
ople simply do not exist. Ebrietas will never be a mother in
the only way that matters to a lot of people, no matter how
deeply she studies blood and medicine. I won’t either. We’re
I’ll Identify With Ebretias - Amaline
both monsters in that way.
Bloodborne isn’t an especially long story, and its ending
- attained by wading through the fire and the ocean of blood
- is the game’s other image to remain fixed in my head. Day
breaks, not for a human, but for... whatever we are now. May-
be what we’ve been all along. It’s not a frightening revelation,
but a hopeful one, set to gentle music and the light of dawn.
After the gore-drenched twilight of the rest of the game, it’s
honestly a relief.
Do I think that the giant tentacle creature in the church
basement is intentionally a trans allegory? Of course not, it’s
silly and personal and born of fractured recollections of the
game’s worlds and events. But in any story that colors a cate-
gory of people (even a strange and otherworldly one) as being
dangerous and horrifying simply as a case of identity, my gut
response is always going to be sympathy for the creature. Hu-
mans have made a lot of categories like that over the course
of their long and inglorious history, and never once have
they led to anything other than tragedy, persecution, and
horror. Human history is a bit sparse on star lasers and
visitors from other worlds, but I feel there’s still a les- 37
son worth learning there.
So I’ll go ahead and identify with Ebreitas, silly as
that might be. And maybe, if we’re kind and patient, peo-
ple might be a little quicker to Make Contact when they
encounter something that seems beyond their com-
prehension, and a little slower to reach for their
guns. We star monsters have some stories
to share, if you’re willing
to listen.
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

ned people into beasts, and the Moon granted humanity the
A CLUMSY GIANT means to defend itself against the beasts, but its gift trapped
by Jean-Baptiste the Hunters in an endless cycle of dreams and bloodshed. As
others have pointed out, the notion that “Every Great One lo-
ses its child and then yearns for a surrogate” could lead to the
There are two aspects of the game that specifically came interpretation that the Great Ones see humanity as children
to mind as I thought about it that they want to care for, again with disastrous results.
after you called for interpretations in your latest video.
Overall, I really like the idea that for once, the eldritch
The first is a short statement found in the lore descrip- entities outside the realm of human comprehension are not a
tion of the Moon rune: “The Great Ones that inhabit the night- malevolent, hostile force but more sympathetic, helpful cre-
mare are sympathetic in spirit, and often answer when called atures, who unfortunately are too removed from us to truly
upon.” This could of course be interpreted in a variety of ways, help, or whose power is tragically channeled through the de-
but the one that I come back to is this very unusual idea that lusions of morally bankrupt human beings.
these eldritch creatures, who are the source of so much suffe-
ring and chaos, are actually just trying to help. There is such Speaking of which, the second aspect I’d like to talk
a contrast here with the classic Lovecraftian story, where the about, is the fact that so much of the evil in this game comes
secret truth of the universe is that although there are greater from the abuses perpetrated by institutions of care, by orga-
minds and entities behind the mysteries of existence, they nizations that are supposed to provide medicine and relief to
are unimaginably hostile and contemptuous of humanity. people, organizations that the people trust because they hold
medical, academic or spiritual knowledge that the people
In contrast to this, if you follow this statement
38 from the Moon rune, the elder gods of Bloodborne are
don’t have.
not plotting the downfall of humankind or destroying The Healing Church is both a religious institution and
their sanity deliberately, they are actually just answering the provider of health care through blood ministration.
calls for help or knowledge, trying very earnestly to grant
the wishes that are asked... it’s just that the help
they give always produces gruesome and
disastrous results, either because the
people calling on them are despi-
cable murderers and torturers,
because the true nature of the
Great Ones is so incompatible
with our reality and understan-
ding, or even maybe because to
the Great Ones, we are just as
eldritch and incomprehensible
as they are to us, and they don’t know
how to help us in a way that fits our re-
ality.
The School of Mensis was granted an au-
dience with Mergo, but it destroyed their bodies
and fried their brains, Laurence and the Healing
Church were granted Paleblood, but it tur-
 A Clumsy Giant - Jean-Baptiste

The Choir presents itself as an orphanage, a place whe-
re helpless children are cared for. The School of Mensis is a
secret society dedicated to studying the mind, but it also is
coded like an academic society, that recalls early psychiatric
hospitals where the patients were treated like subjects for
experiments.
The Byrgenwerth Institute is a university, where distin-
guished scholars study the secrets of the world through scien-
ce for the betterment of humanity. And the Hunters and all
their subgroups and variations are of course enforcers for all
these institutions, ostensibly empowered to protect the peo-
ple, but actually used to protect the interests of their masters
and cover up their abuses, much like a police force.
All throughout the game, we see the fallout of systems
that have spiraled so far out of control that the truth of their
abuse is spilling out, ruining the society they were claiming to
uphold and serve. When focusing on this, all the eldritch hor-
rors, elder gods and mutant beasts don’t seem to be the point
of the story, just the means to these systems’ ends.
that Great Cthulhu actually was a clumsy, incomprehensible
giant trying to help, and that the horrid truth of existence
is that powerful, corrupt people will destroy the world and
themselves to serve their own deluded ego. This also stands
in contrast with the Lovecraftian forms of horror, which have
frequently been interpreted as manifestations of a deeply ra-
cist fear of the unknown and the foreign, where “primitive”
cultures are evil-worshipping mutants and where the deepest
evil found in man is his atavistic link to “savage” species, in-
stead of a need for control and validation so absolute that it
turns apocalyptic, corrupting even the assistance offered by
the gods themselves.
At this point, I feel like I’m rambling, so I will conclude
my thoughts here.

Although I only have a very cursory knowledge of the

real-world history of these types of institutions, based on
what I was taught, it looks like the game is trying to evoke the
abuses of certain institutions of Europe in the 19th century.
These would be the ones that tried to control and quarantine
plagues, that explored the occult (often by appropriating the
spirituality of other cultures) and those that researched phy-
sical and mental health and often used and abused their pa-
tients for research, especially mentally ill people. In the game,
they are presented not only as corrupt and mostly interested
in controlling the narrative, but also as completely willing to
torture and devour the thousands of people that rely on them
for care. The victims of these abuses in the game are the wor-
king class people who can’t afford to lock themselves up and
party during the Night of the Hunt, the orphan children with
no one to claim them, the uneducated public who wasn’t tau-
ght enough about medicine to question their doctors, the pe-
ople of an isolated and “primitive” fishing village whose dei-
ty was hooked and gutted for research, and even the Hunters
who are told the atrocities they commit are for a good cause.

Of course, “humans were the real monsters” is a tired

trope, but there is something to appreciate about this idea
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
THER E A R E NO
BE ASTS OR GODS,
ONLY PEOPLE
by Steampunk Lemon
Bloodborne is a game I’ve played so many times over
the years it’s difficult to really pin down a single reading of
the game. I’ve loved all of the Soulsborne games but Bloodbor-
ne is definitely the one I’ve spent the most time with; both in
the game actually playing it and outside of the game thinking
about it and trying to understand it. I don’t even know how
many times I’ve just wandered around an area with the mo-
nocular looking over the architecture and trying to parse the
environmental storytelling, or how many times I’ve died to a
boss at the last moment because I was too busy admiring the
wonderfully crafted attack animations or the fantastic soun-
dtrack. Something about the game’s world and aesthetic
just fascinates me in a way very few pieces of media ma-
nage to.
40
I think that, as I see it, there are definitely a few
clear thematic threads running through the whole game
though. The ever-present oppression and control exerted
over the people of Yharnam by the Church and its various sub-
sidiaries is a major one. Whether it’s the swathes of Yharna-
mites patrolling the streets with crude weapons, on a mission
to hunt down beasts only to become beasts themselves, and
be slain by their former peers, in a cycle of violence that en-
sures the Church stays in power as the people are too busy
fighting amongst themselves; or the horrendous experiments
conducted by the Choir, there’s a theme of the powerful and
privileged viewing those below them as dispensable, as pawns
in their game. This is perhaps seen most clearly in Yahar’gul,
where the School of Mensis near literally builds a stairway to
the cosmos out of the piled-up corpses of the townspeople. The
Chalice Dungeons, in my view, play a pretty important role in
this regard. They show us that this is nothing new, that Yhar-
nam stands tall on endless catacombs that stand as testament
to ancient societies that were just as brutal.
All this is done in the name of ascension, of transcen-
dence to the level of a Great One. To me, this reads as the
height of arrogance; the upper classes of Yharnam believe
themselves so above the working classes, the ‘beastly masses,’
that they aspire to literally become a higher level of being,
a new species, so desperate are they to distinguish themsel-
ves from the ordinary folk. The game definitely feels dren-
ched in class politics, taken to a logical extreme, although the
strong xenophobia in Yharnam, combined with a long history
of real-world ‘scientific racsim’ could definitely work for an
 There Are No Beasts Or Gods, Only People - Steampunk Lemon
anti-racist reading as well. The powerful in Bloodborne are
more than willing to bring a never-ending nightmare on the
powerless if it allows them to indulge their fantasies of supe-
riority.
I love the character of Micolash because of how much it
feels like the game is poking fun at this attitude; he has the-
se delusions of grandeur that he has committed atrocities for,
but yet is so clearly a pathetic and laughable character, with
a silly whiny voice, who can’t even hold his own in a fight. He
tries to attain this scholarly look by hiding out in a giant li-
brary, but it’s painfully clear from the rot and dust all over the
bookshelves that he hasn’t actually read any of them. He also
sees the people around him as puppets, as manifested in the
creatures he summons to fight for him. And his head is literal-
ly in a cage.
That’s the fascinating thing to me though; the goal of
‘transcendence’ is not only a goal paid for in blood, but one
that seems to bring misery on all those who seek it. Willem is
reduced to a vegetative state, Rom is left devoid of all thought,
the Scholars of Mensis all either go mad or die, and Lauren-
ce is left to burn as a hideous beast in an endless nightmare
tormented by the memories of his human self. And the Gre-
at Ones themselves? Miserable, really; the game never seems
to characterize them with any Godly powers or transcendent
wisdom. They are defined, in fact, by very human experien-
ces. Ebrietas, the Choir’s Great One, and creature that the
Church was originally built around, weeps at the Altar of
Despair, presumably at the loss of the Rom-like creatu- 41
re there. Mergo cries for their mother, and the Orphan
endlessly laments the loss of his. Oedon simply desires a
child, by whatever cruel means necessary.
As for the Moon Presence, or Paleblood, or Flora, whi-
chever of its many names, it seems to seek surrogate children
in the form of the Hunters. After all, does it not protect the
Hunters with immortality, help strengthen them through the
dream? It even hugs the player in a tight embrace should they
defeat Gehrman. The Great Ones are nothing special, not real-
ly. They are nothing to aspire to, not any greater than huma-
nity. Not so different at all really. Kos even has a human face,
buried under all the tentacles.
I hear a lot of players are disappointed with the ‘Chil-
dhood’s Beginning’ ending, as all your hard work is rewarded
by becoming little more than a little squid. But I think that’s
the point. The whole game has been trying to show you that
‘ascending’ is pointless and futile, and that ending is exact-
ly the disappointment that it should be. There is no ‘higher
state of existence’. There isn’t a lower one either. Throughout
the game the beasts are shown less as monsters and more as
victims of the Church’s arrogance, quite human themselves
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

and capable of fear and even of conversation and intelligence;

with Ludwig and the Afflicted Beggar being rather talkative in
particular.

The upper classes may see the normal townspeople, the

‘beasts’ as subhuman, animalistic and degenerate, but this is
simply another delusion, another way for them to make them-
selves feel as though they are special, above everyone else.
They alone tread alongside gods, not like those mindless ani-
mals on the ground, they think. Beasts, humans, Great Ones,
are all very similar in the end. The Moon Presence even sports
the same hollowed ribcage as the most basic beasts found all
over Yharnam, they’re really not so different.

This is the main theme of Bloodborne in my reading;

it’s a fundamental refutation of the idea that some people are
inherently superior, or inferior, to others, and I think that’s a
pretty uplifting message for such a bleak game. There are no
beasts or gods, only people; flawed, often arrogant people,
and maybe the world would be a better place if we stop-
ped trying to find ways to make ourselves feel superior
42 and just learned to accept that we’re all not so diffe-
rent.
There Are No Beasts Or Gods, Only People - Steampunk Lemon

43
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
A F U LL W ER EWOLF
by Anonymous
Bloodborne helped me accept being gay.
Which is really weird, because
it’s not exactly overt with queer themes or
anything. But since the start of this series,
I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn the
gibberish emotions I felt towards the game into
something coherent, and it’s not been easy—in
part because at the time I first realized the con-
nection between Bloodborne and queerness I wasn’t
“out” exactly, although the truth is that no one ever
comes out just once. But anyway.
I was raised in a pretty tight knit religious community
that... held some strong opinions both on being gay and
what was considered “appropriate” entertainment. Ear-
ly on as a kid I loved spooky stories, but of course thin-
44 gs like ghosts, zombies, vampires, magic, etc. were a Big
No-No. Despite that, or maybe because of it, I found my-
self really drawn to werewolf stories, since they seemed
so comparatively down to earth, made of flesh and bone in-
stead of spirit, y’know?
Once I hit teenagehood and started realized I had a de-
finite attraction to men, I started feeling much more discon-
nected from the world I knew, and became more and more in-
terested in what was considered “edgy” entertainment in my
community; at the same time though, the risk of being socially
ostracized for not living according to “biblical standards” me-
ant that I couldn’t really experiment or even be seen enjoying
certain movies, games, etc., let alone try out any sort of ro-
mantic anything. In my mid to late teens, I started hearing
plenty about this Dark Souls series and how good it was once
you adjusted to the initial challenge. My curiosity was piqued,
but I felt like there was no way I could be caught playing a
game with a title like that without getting in trouble (being a
teenager, I lived with my parents at the time).
Hearing about Dark Souls soon meant I heard about
Bloodborne,
which also looked
really cool because of my aforemen-
tioned werewolf obsession (that to
this day I still carry around, lol). However, the extreme
violence (coupled with the fact that the Christian deno-
mination I was a part of viewed blood as sacred and media that
involved a “misuse of it” was distasteful) meant it was off limi-
ts. However, somewhere down the line I heard that there was
the cosmic horror element, and that seemed like a convenient
justification: if anyone asked, I felt like I could argue that it
wasn’t “bad,” it was about aliens and a disease! That’s what’s
causing all this stuff! And it’s a horror game, you’re not sup-
posed to “like” it! So, one day when I knew I’d be home alone,
I ran down to Gamestop and bought a used copy.
I didn’t enjoy it.
It was so bloody that I got kinda squeamish, and I coul-
dn’t even make it to the first boss, since it was so difficult. I
eventually decided that it was too risky and hard and I hid it
in a drawer. Even if I had all these possible excuses for why
it shouldn’t be offensive, if my folks or anyone just saw me
playing it without context I’d be sure to be in hot water.
Ironically, this meant that Dark Souls, as long as I could
avoid mentioning its title, was easier to get away with, since it
drew from the same generic fantasy tropes that hundreds of
video games had before. Plus, I could turn the blood effects off.
I grabbed it on steam and fell in love with it. At this point, my
issues with sexuality and religion were making me extremely
depressed, and Dark Souls’ message of “Don’t you dare go hol-
 A Full Werewolf - Anonymous

low” really resonated with me. I beat the game, tried to get my to be aware of this, to feel guilt over it, meant that I was at
less-devout friends into it, and played through and loved Dark my core human— but if I “gave in” to my “beastly desires,” I
Souls 2 as well. At that point, it seemed right to give Bloodbor- would be kicked out of the church and lose that divine spark. I
ne another chance, and this time I stuck it out. The inevitable felt like I was half beast, half man... or in Old English, half wer.
eventually happened: my dad saw me playing it and I got into My favorite animal has been a wolf since I was a kid. Wer-be-
a ton of trouble. No matter how I tried to plead my case, even ast, wer-wolf. Etc. Etc. I think in the end this feeling is what
pointing out that I was technically old enough that I could buy draws me to pretty much all werewolf stories, but really hits
it from the store without parental permission, I got the “our home in Bloodborne. After all, Bloodborne is a story
house our rules” ultimatum and was asked to throw away the about how a powerful church institution deals
sinful disc. Which I did... and then downloaded a with (initially) werewolfy beasts, beasts that
digital copy and picked up where I left when you visit Old Yharnam are reve-
off. aled to have complex thought and
emotion despite the dehumanizing
But there was more than propaganda by the church.
just “my religion didn’t ac-
cept gay people, my religion Huh, actually now that
didn’t accept Bloodbor- I write that maybe the
ne, therefore Bloodborne “Bloodborne is gay”
is gay.” I had a hard time claim isn’t all that
putting my finger on it, weird.
but there was something
else going on, and I don’t 45
think I was the only one
to feel that way.

As a queer per-
son raised in a very
religious space, I al-
most didn’t like I
was truly “human.”
Like, this Christian
ideal of humans as
having a spark of
the divine within
them, something
that elevated
them closer to God,
didn’t make sense to
me. I felt like, well,
a beast, with beastly
needs and desires and
senses that were “un-
natural.” But of course,
the fact that I was able
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

Of course, the actual mechanism by with the beast co-

mes out (heheh, get it, comes out) in Bloodborne aren’t spe-
cifically related to orientation, instead just fairly universal
“evils:” violence, greed, CAPITALISM— ahem, sorry— but man,
it hit me hard.

As I dodged my parents looking over my shoulder and

made it through the later parts of the game, I saw myself in
a lot of the characters, especially Gascoigne (who be-
ars a religious title) and Djura (the white hun-
ter who protects the beasts of Old Yharnam,
a top tier queer ally). But the character
that really stuck out to me was Lauren-
ce. Laurence was someone who was deeply
ingrained with the church, with religion;
but his thirst for knowledge (you might
even call it passion) led him down into a
place that caused him to become “evil,”
a beast in the form that the church
was fighting. When I found him, a
sorrowful werewolf draped in the
46 Grand Cathedral like the Pietà,
literally eternally b u r n i n g
with his guilt... I
felt like I was looking
in a mirror.

The queer themes in

Bloodborne are definitely
subtext, but I think they’re
definitely there. I mean,
just anecdotally, in my time
online I’ve seen a not
insignificant over- l a p
between Bloodbor- n e
fans, furries, and gay
people, and I don’t
think that it’s entirely
a coincidence.
 A Full Werewolf - Anonymous

In any case, Bloodborne being an inherently kinda gay

story is something that I’ve gotten out of it, and it means that
it’ll always be a really personal piece of art that I’ve returned
to over and over. Now, as I write this, I’ve moved out and
am starting to live a life that feels right for me.

I’ve gone full werewolf and I’m happier for it, and Blood-
borne helped me get there.

47
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

A DA MNING
CONDEMNATION
by Anastasia

Bloodborne being a spiritual successor to Dark Souls has

a lot to live up to, many expectations to uphold, certain stan-
dards that it needs to fill. To me, these games always have a
powerful atmosphere and tone, which is rich material when it
comes to interpretation. So, with that out of the way I’ll just
come right out and say it: The Souls games are about critici-
zing Christianity as an institution.

In Bloodborne, the people that the church abuses are

the poor, the downtrodden, the people who are purposefully
turned into violent monsters by the upper echelon of society
and are used to create a perpetual cycle of violence. We know
that the residents of Yharnam are extremely xenophobic,
violently hateful towards “outsiders”, “foreigners”, ne-
ver trusting anybody who could be suspected as such. To
48 me this reads as racism firstly, but also bigotry towards
anybody the Church would label as undesirable. After
all, it is the church who says the Old Blood is what keeps
people healthy from the plague while falsely claiming it
is outsiders that bring the plague in. The same church whi-
ch seems to be primarily inspired by the real-world catholic
church. One which has a... troubled history with poor people,
to put it lightly.

The Catholic Church, which teaches its followers that

one of the strongest forms of piety is martyrdom.
The Catholic Church, which taught people to practice
flagellation (the act of beating, burning or whipping oneself
to ‘ease’ spiritual suffering.)
The Catholic Church which was originally formed from
the idea that worldly possessions are corruptive to the souls of
mortal men.

The same material possessions which are taught to be

given freely to the Church, even though the Catholic Church
uses this money to buy expensive decorations and artistry in-
stead of contributing towards the well-being of its followers.
The same Church which taught people to worship the rotting
 A Damning Condemnation - Anastasia

organs of mortal men as holy objects. The same Church which

made people buy “indulgences” to get into heaven, or to buy a
dead sinners’ way into heaven. The same church which made
sure that faith is practiced exclusively through the Church,
by restricting the common man’s ability to read their reli-
gious text. The same Church which enforces all of these rules
through a strict hierarchy. That being granted power from the
Church is derived from god. The same Church which began the
Crusades (holy wars designed to wipe out competing faiths.)
The same Church which used missionaries in place of Crusa-
ders when war became unpalatable. The same Church which
teaches people to trust the church first and family second. The
same Church which tells its followers to send their own chil-
dren to be sexually abused and tortured for simply being gay.

All of this can be seen in Bloodborne. That beasts will

sacrifice themselves and achieve some level of transcenden-
ce, that piety can be found in flagellation, that the church is
luxurious and flaunts their wealth as much as they can. That
living hand to mouth is desirable, as long as you buy the one
precious holy resource from the Church, That this money re-
ally goes towards the construction of superfluous artistry,
that faith is practiced through fathers, vicars, bishops and the
like. That the power and strength the church lends to people
is derived from [old] god[s], that this structure is maintained
through strict hierarchy and segregation, that you shouldn’t
trust your family or neighbors, as any of them could become
beasts.

That the Church enlists warriors to fight “holy wars”,

and that these warriors are granted holy statuses and exemp-
tions, that the violence in finding and destroying beasts is a
holy act in itself, that this violence is something which is hi-
ghly encouraged. That this violence is perpetuated through
the one specific resource the Church grants people, that peo-
ple who enact this “holy violence” are typically found to be-
come addicted to it, that, with enough time, these same holy
warriors are themselves labeled “beasts” and hunted as such.

That, given enough time, the church will cannibalize its

own population as long as it keeps this structure and hierar-
chy. And, importantly, Bloodborne tells you something more:
that communication with old gods can be done privately.
You don’t have to have anything to do with the Church at all.
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

50

And that when this hierarchical power goes unchallenged it
will destroy everybody involved. We know this to be the stan-
dard because of the now destroyed nation of loran, which was
also afflicted with a similar plague. That faith through blood
ministration doesn’t always have to look like the Healing Chur-
ch of Yharnam. We know that the plague manifests differently
in different cultures, as found in Cainhurst castle. That we see
this same process at the end of its life-cycle in Cainhurst, with
the entire populace consumed entirely by the desire to achieve
piety through luxurious lifestyles, and that the only one who
seems to retain their mind at all is the Queen of Cainhurst.
That all of this violence is a self-perpetuating cycle, and that
the only way to help is to break the cycle. That being involved
with the lives of those who are a part of the cycle perpetuates
it.
If we look at Djura we can see a man who adorns him-
self in armor that excels at 3 things: resisting blood, resisting
beasthood, and resisting frenzy. He makes sure that despite
the fact he lives among the beasts of Old Yharnam, that he
can avoid continuing this cycle of violence. And what he choo-
ses to do is to protect the downtrodden victims of the plague,
and to remember that they are people. That when the night
of the hunt is over, they will once again be human. That he
is a rebel amongst his kind, and has little interest in artistry.
He is a man who, when you simply choose to not harm those
he desires to protect and greet him on his own terms, he will
show you respect and teach you about the plight of the beasts.
A man who even in his dying breath is iron-clad in his faith in
his fellow man, and that beasts are really just people. Djura, as
a character, stands against everything the Church represents
and desires. Blood ministration in Old Yharnam comes from
within the community instead of the church. That the “bea-
sts” of Old Yharnam willingly choose to peacefully live amon-
gst themselves in squalor instead of perpetuating the cycle of
violence.
That is what Bloodborne represents to me. It exists as a
damning criticism of the Catholic Church, in the ways that it
perpetuates abuse and violence simply to maintain hierarchy,
and that the Church will one day fall, and that people are able
to leave abusive institutions by breaking the cycle of abuse.
For real life people, breaking this cycle means breaking all ties
to the Church, and living in spite of what the Church stands
A Damning Condemnation - Anastasia
for. Living hedonistically, treating fellow men as people to be
loved and cared for, instead of feared and hated, and to reco-
gnize suffering as what it is instead of deluding people into
believing it’s somehow good for the soul, and that strength
through community is found from WITHIN the community,
NOT from a higher authority. That being labeled a monster by
an authority figure doesn’t mean you’re actually a monster,
and that we should be working to protect the most vulnerable
parts of our community.
As Martin Niemöller once wrote:
First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out— 51
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me.4
4
“ First they came...” confessional poem by Martin Niemöller.
The exact date is unknown, but it began circulating in the 1950s.
Notably, Niemöller was a national conservative and Nazi sympathi-
zer in the early 1930s, but changed his views over time as the persecu-
tions of the Third Reich increased in intensity.
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

dborne and other horror media. I feel a kinship with stories

PHOBIC CATHARSIS
by Gabriel
[CONTENT WARNING:
DISCUSSIONS OF TRYPOPHOBIA, SPIDERS AND INSECTS,
SUICIDE, BODY AND GENDER DYSPHORIA AND
DISCUSSIONS OF MEDICAL ILLNESS]
While I personally haven’t played Bloodborne, I’m in-
timately familiar with its setting. It is a delightful example of
many different types of horror, from good old body horror,
various different phobias, cosmic horror, etc. I kinda mentio-
ned this vaguely before in a comment, but I have a list of pho-
bias equivalent to a minor novella. There’s the trypophobia,
with other major ones being arachnophobia (fear of spiders),
insectophobia (fear of insects), acrophobia (fear of heights),
and nosocomephobia (fear of hospitals). This goes alongside
many other minor phobias and just generally anxiety in-
ducing things. Exposure therapy has helped with some
of them, but it’s not exactly the most expedient pro-
52 cess. On top of all that, I have moderate general anxiety
and social anxiety. I’m not the only one with this sort of
experience.
that tell of worlds similar to our own in which everything is
terrifying. Most of all, I can experience horror in a way that I
can explain.
So in an attempt at some sort of weird catharsis, I’m
using this as a way to explain why I’m scared of Bloodborne.
Buckle up, this is gonna go in a lot of weird places.
To set the sort of system I’m using for this, I’ll start with
something I’m less afraid of in Bloodborne: werewolves. Don’t
get me wrong, those loud dogs can certainly startle me if they
get the jump on me, but what I feel with something like the
Cleric Beast or Blood Starved Beast isn’t really fear. More so
I just feel a sort of bad nostalgia if that makes any sense. I’ve
personally been a trans woman for about two or three years
at this point. Along with that realization came a lovely thing
called gender dysphoria, aka a dissatisfaction with my body
compared to that of a traditionally feminine per-
son for those uninformed. The biggest
part of that for me was body
hair. Even before I
transitioned I
couldn’t

Plenty of people I’ve met have felt similarly afraid

of the world. Between all of them, there’s two general
ways people cope. The first is humor. If you can find
a way to laugh at the scary thing, you won’t be sca-
red anymore right? I like to call my phobias a col-
lection for this reason. Some people collect Poke-
mon cards, I collect things that frighten me. We all
have hobbies. The other one is to submit to that
fear. Find ways to experience the fear and
fear like it in a way that doesn’t actually
hurt you. The majority of that comes
from horror media. Being scared
of horror movies lets people
feel fear in a way that’s con- trol-
led. Safe. I’m the type that goes for the
latter. Obviously there are limits to
what I’ll experience, but in gene-
ral I’m utterly fixated by Bloo-

really stand it. So whenever I see werewolves in media, I feel
an uncontrollable awareness of every single hair on my body.
Bloodborne combines a level of body horror to many of the
beasts in Yharnam, so that just makes them all the more di-
sgusting in my mind. So props to From Software for making a
creature that isn’t terrifying but is more just real bloody and
gross.
Trypophobia is certainly a new fear for me. Quite a few
people will say it’s not actually a phobia because it’s not cau-
sed by any sort of childhood experience or whatever, but go
ahead and look at the Amygdala and say trypophobia doesn’t
exist5. There is something about this sort of pattern that just
freaks me out. It occurs often in nature, being found in certain
species of fungi and certain patterns in insect nests. However
where I know this sort of pattern from is within human bio-
logy. Fun fact: if you scrape your knee hard enough on gravel
you can remove the top layer of skin of your kneecap! Yeah
it’s pretty gross. The reason I bring it up is the healing pro-
cess of that certain injury and similar ones I had due to being
an accident prone child. The way that layer of skin heals, it’s
similar to this pattern, a sort of web-like matrix of
developing skin tissue. This pattern in the Amyg-
dala is like starting at our planet’s biology and
having it stare right back. I look at the head
and see the processes of life and death acti-
vely looking back at me without a single
care in the world. It’s like looking at
whatever thing created all the life
on Earth and feeling that you are
not welcome to see it.
Spiders and insects are pret-
ty well represented in Blo-
odborne. It’s common for
people to fear them, and
likely my sentiment mi-
mics others. For me, it’s
the legs. They are spin-
dly, frail and mathema-
tical in design, to the
point where I won-
der if these creepy
Phobic Catharsis - Gabriel
crawlies are even organic at all. The legs of a spider or insect
are meant to be quick. They move in a flash. A spider that you
were once so sure was just sitting on the kitchen counter can
disappear in a matter of seconds. These legs are unpredictable
and dangerous in my mind. Everytime I see something that
resembles insect legs, I tighten up and nervously check every
inch of my skin for tiny invaders that aren’t even there.
Just describing them alone is enough to make me tense
up. It’s that sort of effect that I think explains just the sheer
amount of spiders, insects and the like in all of From Softwa-
re’s games. They are a visual representation of the hyper awa-
reness one must have to survive the cruel and dark worlds you
inhabit. It’s also probably not a coincidence that arachnids
and insects in Bloodborne can be found anywhere there is an
institution of power. Pests. They are meant to be pests.
There isn’t a specific boss or enemy that features a fear
of heights in its design, but there’s plenty of high places
and sheer drops in the layouts of Yharnam’s towering ci-
tyscape. You fall down from Byrgenwerth to fight Rom.
You frequently have to fall down large drops when navi- 53
gating the nightmare of Mensis and Hunter alike. They
are a point of no return. You either fall down and survi-
ve or you perish. This height for me enhances the cosmic
smallness Bloodborne goes for. I find the surrounding void of
the Hunter’s Dream to be quite effective in giving me that fe-
eling. Tall pillars endlessly climbing into the sky. Both bottom
and top are obscured by clouds. It’s the stuff of my nightma-
res. I developed Acrophobia as a teenager after getting stuck
on a ski lift during a blizzard. That wasn’t the only reason but
it was definitely a major one. I think the worst part of it is not
really the falling part, but more the threat of falling. That pe-
rilous in-between of land-bound and free falling is something I
can’t shake. I imagined several times of just falling from a high
5
Trypophobia is not currently recognized as a diagnosis in resources
such as the DSM-5 and other medical resources. Nonetheless, it’s a
common and prominent enough aversion that it has a common name,
and there is a genre of troll-memes dedicated to causing discomfort
in people who experience it. It has not yet been widely studied, and
its causes are not known, although there are a lot of theories out there.
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

place, which just brought up even more questions. Was I the It’s been nice to explain all these thoughts in my head, even if
type of person to jump? Would anyone notice? Would anyone they get pretty grim at some points.
care? Luckily, at this point my answers to those questions are
no, yes, and entirely yes. Often our brains are so used to our Maybe catharsis isn’t the right word, more so just relief.
own perspective and thoughts that it’s hard to see anything The fear exists now, outside of my head. Better out there than
else. It was and still is a good idea to seek help. bouncing around in my brain right? Hopefully it helps for those
reading as well.
A creepy hospital is a common trope in modern horror It’s nice to know that we’re not alone in having fears. It’s the
media. People die in them all the time, so it’s easy to slap a one thing we all have in common.
dark filter over one and call that a horror setting. Bloodborne
doesn’t do that. The fear of places like Iosefka’s Clinic and the
Research Hall aren’t in dark rooms and bloody corpses. It’s in
the medical professionals that betray their patients’ trust.
Sure they are plenty dark and bloody, but I’m much more
terrified of these places because of the horrible treat-
ment of people placed there. I’ve been to hospitals
a lot in my life. I mentioned before I was a child
that usually had some sort of scrape or bruise.
However the first time I went to a hospital was
when I was seven. In this case, it was pneu-
monia. Likely if it wasn’t treated so quickly, I
54 would have died. Certainly not the best first
impression. Later on I would visit hospitals
more for numerous things. Medications for
mental illnesses, blood tests to make sure I
could take those medications and even some sur-
geries to remove precancerous pieces of skin.

Even with how often I’ve gone, I still fear

hospitals. I fear that these people that swear to
take care of people like me will utterly ignore
that trust. Honestly, that’s a far more realistic
fear here in America than being turned into a blue
alien.

Bloodborne is an utterly fascinating game. You

don’t even need to play it to understand its mastery over
horror. I’ll likely play it at some point whenever I can find
the time. The reason I like it so much is that I can relate to
it. I’m scared of a lot of things, which you can probably tell
for certain at this point. Even so, there’s something about
explaining those fears to random people
that makes it feel more tangible.
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
THE SCHEMES
OF OEDON
by C Y
The events of Bloodborne began with the discovery of
the old labyrinth beneath Yharnam. There, Byrgenwerth le-
arned of the Old Blood and the knowledge of the Great Ones.
Byrgenwerth soon obsessed over transcending mankind to
the next level, but stayed away from the Old Blood, for Master
Wilhem had understood that the blood would become their
undoing. However, Laurence, intoxicated by the promises of
the Old Blood, left Byrgenwerth despite his teacher’s warning
and founded the Healing Church along with his sympathizers.
However, unbeknownst to the Healing Church, they
had inadvertently reawakened an ancient being when the Old
Blood was imbibed, a being whose existence compels all
around him to draw blood, consume blood and worship
blood. His name, Oedon.
56
“Human or no, the oozing blood is a medium of the
highest grade, and the essence of the formless Great One,
Oedon. Both Oedon, and his inadvertent worshippers, sur-
reptitiously seek the precious blood.”
The urge to draw blood, the scourge of the beast, those
are no mere side effects of Blood Healing, it is but the conse-
quence of imbibing the Old Blood, it is
the worshiping of a Great One, the
one true Great One.
What did I mean
by the one true Gre-
at One? Well, most
“Great Ones” we know of have a physical body, with a clear
human or Pthumerian origin, and are pitiful, mindless beings
despite the cosmic powers and knowledge they possess. All,
but one. He is formless, omnipresent yet invisible, His presen-
ce is prominent, overwhelming even, to all denizens of Bloo-
dborne. Incidentally, there are no powerful kings and father
figures, nor male-gendered Great Ones known in Bloodborne.
All, but one, Oedon.
“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.”
Ebrietas shares many traits with the Celestial Child born
of Arianna’s womb at the advent of Oedon which soaked the
moon blood red, suggesting that the human race once bore
the children of Oedon, most probably the people of Loran, be-
fore their civilization met their ultimate demise and remain
buried underground until the inciting incident. Similarly, the
Amygdala are plentiful yet identical, and their history goes as
far as Pthumerians, it would not be a stretch to say that they
are the children of Oedon and Ptumerian Queens.
Mother Kos may seems like the exception, however, the
effects of her parasites on the people of the fishing hamlet
and the form that the untainted Orphan takes, suggests that
Kos may just be from another humanoid civilization, who uti-
lized these parasites to attain cosmic power similarly to pa-
rasitic phantasm molluscs granting human eyes insight and
lumenwood Kin cosmic powers.
Speaking of invertebrates and parasitic celestial crea-
tures, the Moon Presence, or shall we call it the Pale Moon,
who serves as the antithesis to Oedon’s blood soaked moon. It
desires the death of “Great Ones”, the children of Oedon. With
the help of Gehrman, hunters and the Hunter’s Dream were
born to hunt the Great Ones. Perhaps it’s the Moon Presen-
ce’s instinctual retaliation against the maddening blood, and
a pact was formed between Gehrman and the Moon Presence:
for the power to suppress the scourge of the beast and end the
nightmare Bygernwerth started, in return Gehrman needed
to supply more able bodies to hunt down “Great Ones”, aka
the hunters.
 The Schemes of Oedon - CY

For hunters to reach the Hunter’s dream and enjoy its

“perks”, they needed an invitation, the paleblood. The iconic
first message of Bloodborne in Japanese reads: “Request (at
a shop) for ’paleblood’, to fulfill and complete (your duties
of) the hunt” This wasn’t a Macguffin, rather the very reason
why The Hunter is in Yharnam. Hunters are romanticized as
powerful, just; the peacekeepers of Yharnam. Outsiders flock
into Yharnam for fame, power and blood alike, with the note
of ‘paleblood’ in hand. The Hunters who consumed the blo-
od of the Pale Moon can also utilize Blood Echoes obtained in
their hunt, unknowingly to them that’s no different than im-
bibing and spilling the maddening blood. Blood Echoes in Ja-
panese reads: “Blood’s living will before death(to be honoured
and memorialized)” It is akin to a memorial or honouring of
the dead, carrying on their will when blood echoes are con-
sumed, however the ones they honour are not the victims of
their blade, rather the will of the maddening blood, the will of
Oedon. The mark of Blood Echoes and the hunter’s mark is one
of the Hanged Man, which is generally read as resignation,
sacrifice and stuck in time, all very apt descriptions of
the hunters. The Hunter’s Mark can also be read as an
inescapable fate, no matter which branch you take at 57
the crossroad, they all lead to the same fate-- a fate of
ruin.

The Moon’s general tarot readings of deceptions and

illusion is apparent throughout Bloodborne, but there is
another reading: a truth that one cannot admit to. Wilhem
and his hidden eyes, Lawrence and his mistrust in the Old Blo-
od, Maria taking her own life, Gehrman and the lifesize doll,
Rom veiling the truth, Micolash and reality, even the Moon
Presence itself has a truth it cannot admit-- it can hide in the
veils of the pale moon, but it cannot break free from the cycle
of blood.

Oedon thrives as blood is spilled and consumed, no mat-

ter if it’s the blood of humans, beasts or celestial beings, for
flowing blood is an offering to Oedon, His maddening poison,
and His sweet aphrodisiac. Oedon is untouchable, unslayable,
for He resides in a different plane. A plane that no other can
perceive let alone enter it, for He is the one true Great One.
All are but slaves before Oedon. No one escapes His influence,
not the Celestial Beings, not the Ptumerians, not Byrgenwer-
th, not Yharnam, and neither will you.
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne
You see the true horror of Bloodborne isn’t Eldritch
monsters or existential dread, it’s an ancient hunger; a hun-
ger for knowledge, a hunger for power, a hunger for Blood. A
hunger that makes us beasts, monsters and all horrors alike.
A hunger so deeply seated in each of us, we can never hope to
ignore. A hunger so irresistible, we will stop at nothing to feed
its appetite. A hunger so insatiable, we will forever be slaves
for its conquest to consume everything. A hunger so terrifying
we succumb to paranoia, of others and ourselves. So we bu-
ild walls, sharpen our weapons, and cut down those different
from us. Soon, we will all crave violence, we will crave... blood.
“We are born of the blood, made men by the blood, undone by
the blood. Our eyes are yet to open... Fear the Old Blood”.
All the endings of Bloodborne are pessimistic at best, in
the face of the inescapable ancient hunger. After slaying pret-
ty much anything that crosses Their path, The Hunter fights
and defeats Gehrman, however, without enough “eyes on
the inside”, They become bewitched by Moon Presence,
and replace Gehrman in his role in the Hunter’s Dream,
58 only to perpetuate the same cycle of violence until the
end of Yharnam. In the event where The Hunter has
enough “eyes on the inside”, They are able to resist the
allure of the Moon Presence’s temptation, defeating it only
to be reborn as a similar “Great One” the Moon Presence was.
On the surface, it seems They have transcended the hunt, and
became the “Great One” that no other man could, but all They
did is replace the previous Moon Presence, residing within the
same nightmare realm aptly named The Hunter’s Dream. Soon
the cycle of blood shall begin anew, The Hunter, now Moon
Presence, will beckon new hunters into their dream to hunt
the Great Ones, just as the previous Moon Presence did to The
Hunter Themselves. A new hunter shall arise, and with enough
“eyes on the inside’’, shall slay Them and replace Them, just as
the previous Moon Presence did to the “Great One” before it.
The role of the Moon Presence is nothing more than to be an
ignorant puppet in the cycle of blood. And yes, the last ending
where the hunter wakes up from the Hunter’s Dream is the
absolute worst, because The Hunter chose to literally close
Their eyes to the horrors of Yharnam despite everything
They’ve learnt and the strength They’ve obtained through
the sacrifice of many, only to continue Their hunt of the
beasts and hunters alike in the waking world.
My main takeaway from Bloodborne is that we physical-
ly exist in a system that is perpetuating a cycle of violence but
we are powerless and ignorant against it, even if we participa-
te and climb to the top of its ranks. Ascension in Bloodborne
is generally hollow, both literally and figuratively, while bea-
sthood is gained when involved in perpetual violence without
insight, which explains why beasts mostly exist in Old Yhar-
nam. It’ll all be clear as soon as we look at Bloodborne with a
different lens-- Yes you guessed it, the capitalism lens.
The poor are constantly exposed to abuse and violence
of all forms, they lack opportunities to gain insight of their
situation let alone overcome it, armed with only anger and
grief, all they can do is lash out, rebel and disobey the sy-
stem. The Middle Class, aka the hunters, thrown into a classist
war, fed with lies so the real threat remains
hidden, forced to perpetuate violen-
ce and swear unquestioning alle-
giance to the blood for their own
survival, only to become beasts
themselves and be hunted. Mid-
dle Upper and Upper Class who
seek to ascend ironically cover
up their eyes and cage their
heads in hopes of gaining
insight to ascen-
sion, as they
use and
abuse
 The Schemes of Oedon - CY

everyone and everything in their reach and take out anything

that stands in their way.

But alas, all shall fail miserably for the simple fact that
they have their own eyes and minds shut off. Meanwhile the
richest of the rich sit back and party while they watch the rest
of the world burn, much like the rich Yharnamites on the Ni-
ght of the Hunt, or more accurately, Oedon in the grand sche-
me of things. This is a system where many lose and a handful
stand to win without even lifting a finger, so long the system
continues. All this because Willem and Laurence wanted to
“ascend” the human race to a higher plane. *cough* Private
space race *cough* in the middle of a global pandemic. *cou-
gh*

However, there isn’t to say that there is no merit to par-

ticipation in the system, nor is it intrinsically bad. Only by
participation, can we gain insight into the situation, as long as
our eyes are opened. Only with insight, can we have the choice
to act against violence, as long as our minds are opened. Only
by choosing to act, can we achieve “eyes on the inside”, and
truly transcend. 59
I’d like to read “eyes on the inside” as the capacity for
self-reflection and self-actualisation, so one can learn of their
true self, and work on living accordingly to their strengths,
weaknesses and their needs, until they finally transcend from
the insatiable hunger of their wants and desires, breaking free
from the system, at least mentally and spiritually. Victims and
perpetrators of violence, without the liberty for
self-actualization, eventually
become beasts; the blind cha-
se after advancement, without
self-reflection, results in stillbir-
th or vacuous minds.

And so I’ve come to realize that the hunt

itself is more important than transcending the sy-
stem. To be conscious and open minded, to do good wi-
thin your capabilities, to be kind to others and ourselves
that we don’t yet understand, to find peace and happiness
within the mundane; all of it, is a “transcendence” of its own.
It’s the hardest thing that I’ve ever tried, and from time to
time I do slip back to being a hungry slug, hellbent on mind-
 The Many Meanings of Bloodborne

less consumption. Still, so long as I have “paleblood” in mind,

embers shall reignite my burnt out heart over and over, the
earth shall pave a road before me upon a sea of void, and the
winds shall usher me forward down the path only I can thread,
true to myself, I shall inch slowly towards the ideal self that
I’ve yet to know.

Last words to all my fellow struggling hunters out there:

Seek “paleblood” to “transcend” the hunt,
and may you find your worth in the waking world.

60
A deep and heartfelt “Thank You!” to everyone
who submitted essays for this project.
I am sorry I could not include all of them
in the main document, but I hope you know
that I read every single one of your submissions
multiple times, and I was grateful for your time
and attention every time.
- TBSkyen

the night, and the dream,

were long...
WE ARE BORN OF THE BLOOD,
MADE MEN BY THE BLOOD,
UNDONE BY THE BLOOD.
OUR EYES HAVE YET TO
OPEN...

FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.

THE MANY MEANINGS OF BLOODBORNE
by TBSkyen & community authors

BLOORBORNE ©
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Sony Computer Entertainment
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