r/bloodborne

Just finished my first playthrough, these guy gave me hell !!

I am so mad at my past self for not taking the time to understand these amazing games. Honeslty they are masterpieces and I was such a clueless casual when I was younger. Anybody can git gud. You just have to keep going. And you'll get it. I mean really get it. I've never been more stoked for a new from software game after reading berserk as well. I'm glad I caught my platinum on stream 😎

About 4 years ago, I discovered a opossum video and read the following comment. “That would make a cool Bloodborne boss”

At the time, I was watching a channel that likes to do photobashing. I also wanted to try it at the time and was absolutely thrilled with the idea! This was my first and last attempt, as I lost the desire to try my hand at digital art a short time later. Today, 4 years later, I discovered the picture on my old iPad and finally decided to post it. I hope that the person who commented on the idea will see it too! This is for you, my fellow hunter

Speedpaint video:

https://youtu.be/JxuRltQtcag?si=HmOQtAxaXhjrgtJ3

it’s near the chest with all the vases to roll around in

Not that I’m unhappy with the art direction of this game, but I was just wondering whether all great ones had to look strange and weird.

Or whether a great one could resemble a human for example?

Also side question, do great ones need minions anyways, like how Kos transformed those of the Hamlet (at least in the nightmare). Aren’t they above human abilities, I.e.
Coughing baby vs Hydrogen bomb?

Patches is notably different in this game. In most other instances, he's a cleric-hating cynic who repeatedly tempts you with treasure and then punishes you whenever you actually go for it - almost consistently by pushing you off a ledge into a hole

He is none of these things in Bloodborne. The only thing that stays the same is pushing you into a hole. He's religious ("The gift of the godhead cometh!"), he's hardly cynical, he never actually tempts you with treasure (there is a message by the trail of shining coins but it only says "This way, to witness a miracle", and it honestly just seems like all he's trying to do is kill you

The only semblance of Patches's original greed and hypocrisy is that emerald pendant around his neck. Besides that, all he does is make several efforts to kill you or get you killed, and he even talks different ("Oh, doubt me not, sweet compeer. What is friendship, but a chance encounter?"). Anyone got any ideas on why he's like this?

I love this game, man.

Bumlash I really really hate you

^(I did post this as a) video ^(a few weeks back, but I really wanted to share it here too so do enjoy the results of my fixation on plague history lmao!)

Daniel Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, a semi-biographical account of the 1665 bubonic plague that ravaged Europe, mercilessly. A first person account, Defoe allegedly used the diaries of his uncle, Henry Foe, who lived in London at the time (while Defoe was only five). It is a harrowing account, one aromatic and uncensored to the brutality of plague.

>“A certain ‘dreadful set of fellows’ who habituated Pye Tavern found ghastly amusement in sitting in a room next to the street to watch the deadcart empty its loads of bodies into the burial pit and would jeer and mock at the mourners through the windows”.

Writing this in 2026, of course it is no grand statement to say how cruel epidemic can make humanity. How selfish we become in a constant buzz to survive, comfortably. I mean… we had fights over toilet paper, guys, we’re at the top of the food chain as some cruel joke I think. But, despite having lived, in a blur, through it, I will be relying on Defoe’s Plague Year as my point of reference but mainly William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, a comprehensive look at how plague effected societal development, written in a very… dry… manner...

In Journal of a Plague Year, we can see how a 17th century morality differs greatly, especially in a time of great mortality. They were far more exposed to death, public hangings being an event to go witness, and far less of a taboo hung around the concept of seeing death in its manifestation. But desperation can turn us all into beasts, and we can see this in the callous behaviour of a handful of NPCs throughout the game. The old woman, and the Yharnamite most ardently. Both care little for their fellow survivors, only bask in the pride of their own sustained life.

Plague is an equaliser, one that does not discriminate, and so it is no surprise that religion and pestilence are so closely tied throughout history.

William McNeill highlights the eastern reaction to the Black Death of the 14th century, stating that

>"Moslem response to plague was (or became) passive. Epidemic disease had been known in Arabia in Muhammad’s time, and among the traditions that Islamic men of learning treasured as guides to life were various injuctions from the Prophet’s own mouth about how to react to pestilental outbreaks. The key sentences may be translated as follows:"

”When you learn that epidemic disease exists in a country, do not go there, but if it breaks out in the country where you are, do not leave.”
and again:
”He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.”

To relate this back to Bloodborne, we can see how Yharnam’s culture revolves around the malady that infects it. But in a way unique to Yharnam’s world, religion is deeply ingrained in the disease, and is fact the very cause of it. This shows us a deep antithesis between our world and Bloodborne. When the Black Death ravaged the world, none were safe, not even holymen, and so people began to wonder at the benevolence of their God. Some returned to mysticism and paganism, but some went in the opposite direction and followed heretical yet manic belief. Another example is, as McNeill highlights, the upheavel of Flagellants in Germany whom whipped themselves as penance for their sins (and attacked Jewish communities, who were often to blame for pestilential outbreak).

We can see how, in turn, Yharnamites either remained concerningly loyal to the Healing Church, or cursed it for all it was worth (while also blaming outsiders for the spread). In Bloodborne, unlike the people enduring the Black Death, the Yharnamites had something tangible to blame (and were right in their assumptions). In turn, the existence of Great Ones is not questionable unlike humanity’s deities on Earth. They, in the know, had something terrible to point fingers at. Perhaps this is why the people the hunter speaks to are so spiteful.

McNeill states, in relation to this:

>“God’s justice seemed far to seek in the way plague spared some, killed others; and the regular administration of God’s grace through the sacraments (even when consecrated priests remained available) was entirely inadequate psychological counterpoise to the statistical vagaries of lethal infection and sudden death”

It is this psychological aspect I want to focus on here. Bloodborne’s plague is characterised by its development into vacuity and madness. It turns men into mindless beasts, animalistic, and thus of course (with the cosmic element) taps into their inner psyche and entity. The actual bestial visual to their metamorphosis is merely a side effect of this beasthood. The plague is entirely an attack on the psyche and ones DNA (in a way that reminds me of Rabies and the way it makes its host terrified of water for its own survival. Like that… that is absolutely horrifying). This helps it hide before the effects become overt, and also manifests as a test of surrounding mentalities.

How could the Yharnamites tell if their loved ones were becoming beastly, or just losing their wits? There was an ardent obsession with madness and insanity during the 19th century due to the plane of unknown it resided upon. It is not a stretch to conclude that the same could be said of Yharnam, a city in the likeness of 19th century Edinburgh. It already has a very prominent medicinal element to it, and the beastly scourge is mostly psychological. It begs the question of what Yharnam might have looked like before the hunt our character enters into? Some artists have visualised it, but I wonder what the culture and society was like. Were they paranoid? Turning on their fellows out of utter terror of the malady that threatened them?

The Hunt became a common, nightly event. This is not the first Hunt to have happened in this world, only the most damning. Thus, we can assume that each previous hunt must have been worse than the last. The city slowly deteriorated from the inside out, literally eating itself alive. Small fires broke out (in one case, literally). The burning of Old Yharnam, the sealing off of Byrgenwerth, the initial invasion of the Fishing Hamlet — one can only guess at the way the common Yharnamite reacted to these events, and how it effected their mentality and hope.

Perhaps, like in the case of Gascoigne’s eldest daughter, it wasn’t the plague that killed off all. Perhaps it was the sudden descent into grief and anguish, death at every corner. McNeill explains

>“Painting also responded to the plague-darkened vision of the human condition provoked by repeated exposure to sudden, inexplicable death. Tuscan painters, for instance, reacted against Giotto’s serenity, preferring sterner, hieratic portrayals of religious scenes and figures. The Dance of Death became a common theme for art; and several other macabre motifs entered the European repertory.”

Death became apart of Yharnam because of this sickness. It, like victorian death rituals (of which I would like to explore in regards to Bloodborne in another video), became an every day part of life. It is almost unthinkable to a Western culture where death is feared and branded in taboo. But due to the vehemence of it that occurred, Yharnamites did not become more sentimental and kinder to the dying, but crueler.

This, also, makes one wonder what was the control of the Great Ones, and what was simply human nature in reaction to the pestilence?

Another brief connection I want to interpret from this information is the prevalence of rats. Infamously, rats are seen as the catalyst for many plagues (most notably The Black Death) which had the infection ride on fleas, and in turn rats, on ships all over Europe and Asia. Rats were the perfect host for many infections due to their burrows or “cities” that existed in vast quantity underground. They bred disease (though I think it’s time we stop with the stigma against rats. They’re incredibly intelligent creatures and ever so cute), in these dark, damp, closely-knit communities… not unlike a harsh winter in a medieval European settlement which beckoned families to huddle in close quarters for warmth.

Disease is not something one can completely prevent, as it is attracted to our comforts and unavoidable disgusts alike. But, in regards to Bloodborne, I can see an interpretation seep from the labyrinths beneath the city. The Pthumerians, an anaemic, pale race of people long killed off. They are the rats, the catalysts for the scourge. Though they did not found the Healing Church nor harvest Kos’ corpse, they sought the knowledge from Great Ones all the same — and achieved it, in the form of Queen Yharnam. They are the root of everything that happens in Bloodborne, and they scurried beneath the ground (another connection to Edinburgh, also, with its underground streets), festering knowledge and ambition.

Yes, ambition are the fleas that attach themselves to the Pthumerians and, eventually, the Byrgenwerth Scholars. Ambition heralds madness and beasthood or failed ascension in the form of Kin. Bloodborne’s plague is both psychological and physical; it has a celestial origin, yet is bred by human ignorance. It causes paranoia and strife, a failure in believe or a kind of rapture. Ambition, like most of Fromsoftware’s games, is the catalyst for apocalypse.

(bonus: crow set is clearly inspired by a plague doctor + the incense urns throughout the Cathedral Ward proves there is at least an aspect of miasma fear; along with the constant references to scent).

Worth it!

Mine is this barn in Hemwick. It feels like a horror short movie by itself inside a videogame.