butchladymaria - Tumblr blog

butchladymaria · 3 days

Text

This is one of the most though provoking essays on bloodborne I've come across, actually.

Below is my 4am rambling rather than actual, coherent response.

I find it's undeniable that Bloodborne's theme has roots in Victorian era culture, which includes xenophobia, misogyny, and other things, even if some details of it could have been coincidence born of From Software itself being a Japanese studio, a country very well-known for those things. Which, not to put that out as a blanket statement for every Japanese person, but culturally, it's still prevalent, and as prevalent as any east or southeast asian cultures. This essay provides a great explanation and insight to Bloodborne's context, and great for presenting research data and citing other literatures.

I question maybe a part or two of the methodology as someone who has experience in gamedev, which means there are things that I believe were interpreted as a narrative choice when it's the limitation of the engine, programming, or time-save. However, the author also acknowledges that some of these numbers would not be prevalent with other researches, but this is Bloodborne with its limited info, which is great. Convincing.

As the author already stated and I agree, any analysis or discussion of Bloodborne or From games in general are built heavily upon interpretations, in which interpreting is unavoidable since the info is so limited. However, many cases can very much veer into It's My Headcanon and You Aren't Allow to Disagree with me while purposefully ignoring surrounding context or certain information, which is a perfectly good approach to writing fanfiction, but not great as literary analysis which many has attempted to do.

To be clear, I read fanfic like half the people out there, even if I can be picky. Although I often do "I disagree with that interpretation but I'm interested in where it's going."

However, I still think when it comes to making an analysis or putting together pieces of information and see what's the story or context, being very liberal with interpretations or choosing to neglect some canon information can be counterproductive. Especially when it's presented to the community as analysis in the space where discussions happen, and the author is very disagreement-averse.

For example, From Software often writes an archetype of Master Throw Babies Against the Wall who exists in a society where murdering babies is moral according to the over-controlling religion, which Master Baby Splatter is a founder or play a massive part in. The games often acknowledge that such religion is corrupted and have the player destroy or irreversibly alter that religion forever. Yet, we often find analyses based on the personal appeal of Master Baby Splatter, resulting in a very selective read, such as

Master Baby Splatter is actually a very righteous person who didn't *actually* kill babies.

They're nice because they kill babies in a morally justifiable way, and they dress the them up in the finest clothes before throwing them.

They're forced to kill babies because they're a grown person without an agency despite being the authority. Note that it's often a 'poor little meowmeow' male character.

They kill babies to prevent the incoming apocalypse which has never been mentioned or that apocalypse straight up doesn't happen when the religion actually stops killing babies.

Or even: killing babies can be justified because irl people have done it in the past. (Note that, sometimes, historical baby killers may not be called baby killers, but known as cruel, a tyrant, or fanatical for a reason.)

Back to Bloodborne's specific example, I find certain lens, such as 202X Feminist 'Let Women Be Feminine', which often came from more progressive English-speaking community, very much ignore the context of Bloodborne's story or meta-level read of the culture of the studio's country, where women performing femininity quite literally means survival and the failure to perform it can mean physical punishments or more.

I find it's often used to excuse Gehrman's relationship with the Doll and, by extent, Maria, as a non-conflict, disregarding the social norm that he possibly not only existed in, but also helped perpetuate or even strengthened as the first hunter. The game has no mention of his personal opinions that are unmistakably against the norm. This is a feature, not a bug. This read may include the disregard of Maria's (possible) choice of representing masculinely in which her attire much more resembles male knights of Cainhurst even though Cainhurst have female knights.

In comparison, native Yharnam women are often groomed into blood-sainthood in order to reach significant ranks, rather than being hunters. To add, the existing minority that is female church hunters have a uniform that present traditionally feminine.

It can be argued that Maria's masculinity is more about practicality of her profession, similar to Eileen, or that Maria represent the first hunters from when the gender norm wasn't this established. However, note that Eileen is a foreigner with a very specific job of killing fellow hunters who have gone mad, and an outsider, rather than being a significant pillar of the church.

This is just me echoing the essay now. In addition to that, the conflict still exists even if we pretend this isn't Bloodborne but a completely new story. We still have character A who presents themselves as against the societal norm being reshaped by character B into a new figure that follows the norm to the extreme, unable to make their own decision and can't even physically leave. With that, I doubt it's meant to be a positive that character A would be ok with the situation or happy the character B cares so much they put their replica in the finest clothes, or that we can completely deny this story line is meant to be some kind of a commentary.

To add, if we're going with that logic where femininity could've been what Maria preferred outside of her job, there's 0 in-game context of how she's like at all. The closest we have is Maria, having become a carer and/or a doctor, in her final moments still dressed in that masculine hunter attire. This is the tiniest hint that she might have been masculine. I believe it can be negligible, but it's like a scale of 0 to 10 where masc is 0, fem is 10, and complete neutral is 5. She's still very much like a 4 or 4.5 on the surface level. It doesn't mean much.

Again, I'm not super against the headcanon that Maria might have been fem. It's very much the case of do whatever you want. Still, I find it strange when it's used as a base for an analysis to dismiss the contrast between her, Gehrman, and the Doll through the modern feminist lens of Let Women Be Feminine Even When She Works Masculine Jobs. My reasoning is that it's so far-removed from the context of Yharnam to be applicable.

Here are fun images I just took. This is how the doll looks like next to Maria, both have most clothes removed while still have their body intact. (Such as without the jacket, Maria wouldn't have a torso model.)

This is the difference in body type and musculature that isn't just clothes. 3 layers don't make anyone that thicker. Maria also has pronounced ass (core muscles power you btw if you ever done combat sports) while the Doll doesn't.

Even when it's just the hands and feet, Maria's bigger. Even if she wears gloves, it would presumably be a snug fit for fighting. The Doll's daintier even when it comes to hand and feet. What the hell.

I suppose that a part of it is very likely an artistic direction pushed with the 'make the Doll gangly and inhuman because this is a horror game and she gets to look a bit unsettling' more than/in addition to 'an idealized version of a woman created by man who has a hidden mania about her', but this is something to chew on, for sure.

To be clear, I'm also not arguing that Gehrman's mania surely is some sort of sexual perversion, even if that it may have a hint in his English dialogue. It's unclear, and I'm not gonna take a strong stance based on what doesn't have concrete evidence. Although, I agree with the essay that the text directly tells you he treats her as a subhuman tool more than anything. Whatever it is, it's still unhealthy. A part of his characterization that's a feature, not a bug.

However, I do have gripes with the constant insistence from the fandom that every From Software game has some sort of severe mistranslation, such as this one line of Gehrman or the entirety of Ranni's ending dialogue, so that the English dialogue should be entirely ignored or discarded. I'll list my thoughts why that's the case under the cut by the end of the post.

Anyway, even if we completely ignore Maria, the Doll's creation still resembles Frankenstein's monster unloved by its creator as the essay has drawn a comparison to, which I agree. I find it fascinating that she has human-level cognitive abilities, sentience, and even emotions previously 'not in her programming', and yet she's subhuman. In a way, this concept is popular across many genres of fiction in addition to horror. It would include modern sci-fi like Blade Runner or Ex Machina, dark and gory existential action/comedy like Chainsaw Man, or even many thrillers I won't spoil.

Here's my tangent about translation.

I don't think anyone can just use the Bad Translation IGNORE IGNORE card as soon as the canon English line doesn't conform to our interpretations because:

It's localization not a direct translation. 1:1 isn't how languages work, especially not languages from entirely different roots and entirely different social connotations like English-Japanese pair. I'm too tired to cite or explain this bc it's a universal knowledge which most people already know, but I think they don't realize how different the connotations can actually be. I'm just gonna ask you to trust me because I know two languages well enough to read research papers in both. One being Indo-European and the other being Kra-Dai. The difference is very prevalent.

Miyazaki himself has had obsession with fantasy and mythologies written in English since childhood and he prioritizes recreating that experience in English.

He can read and write functional English even if not to a literary level.

Great deal of care and attention has been poured into the English language used within the game. With voice audio exclusively in English. Just check steam and check the full audio category for this one.

Miyazaki has interviewed that From Software has always worked closely with translator Ryan Morris.

Regarding Ryan Morris, here's an excerpt of his interview. Which, reading it, I'm inclined to believe this isn't someone or a leader of a team who would grossly neglect the tone of the game to mistranslate it, especially not when he actively asked Miyazaki himself to clarify his original, archaic language multiple times.

One of the big challenges of translating From games is nailing the tone. "[Miyazaki's] original texts are like scripture, and then it's filtered through me because I have to interpret it," Morris said. "We ask hundreds of questions, but some of the more subtle things, like levels of absurdism, are a little bit too abstract to really discuss. We usually ask a lot of factual stuff, like 'what's going on? And why? What's the relation here? And what's the background here?' so we know what language can be used and what can be left out while still mapping to the facts." "It's been a bit of a collaborative effort with some characters," Morris continued. "I interpreted Solaire, with some flair, and made some choices with how he would speak. There's not quite as much embellishment in Japanese, although it all means the same thing. It's sort of a holistic translation where you're taking the context into account as you're trying to make a coherent character. Miyazaki takes each character quite seriously, I think he kind of falls in love with them, and tries to make them speak very sincerely in almost all cases, but they can be misguided." Localising a From Software game follows roughly like this: Frognation is sent the Japanese text, which they then translate, with the help of Q&A sessions with the FromSoftware team. Usually a batch of received text will be for one particular character, and while it's usually the complete chunk of text relating to that character, sometimes this text will grow, in some cases even double. Once the dialogue is translated, Morris and Miyazaki go to London to work with the voice actors in-person, though that changed a bit with Elden Ring due to the Covid-19 pandemic (about "50/50" was in person, according to Morris).

#rbing to the bloodborne blog too #me when soulsblogger i really like reads my essay. wtf !!! (positive)

66 notes · View notes