clericbitch - Tumblr blog

clericbitch · 22 days

Text

one of the reasons i love bloodborne so much is that not only is it full of female characters (and i’ll list them at the end), it also is centered entirely around the power of a feminine body/entity and the punishment of violating that body.

the current curse of yharnam all started because of what byrgenwerth and the old hunters did to kos’s body, but there’s also the fact that the city was named after queen yharnam, whose life was consumed by the great one baby inside her. the enthusiastic consent of the virgin mary is not implied or indeed even present in yharnam’s pregnancy–this is why she is seen weeping at the blood moon while mergo ‘descends’ in its ineffable, incorporeal form. this is why she is seen in mergo’s loft, praying and weeping, staring up at where her infant rests with its wet nurse. this is why she bows in thanks after you defeat the wet nurse. you have slain her nightmare. you are putting her to rest.

(personally i’m not averse to oedon here. it says that he communes with living things through blood, is sympathetic in spirit, and the great ones are eager to reach out to and commune with humanity. the consequence of that is terrifying. i do however think oedon’s behavior is emblematic of how men treat women in bloodborne.)

what happened to kos’s body was a violation by humans. her body was ripped open, her infant taken. the voice we hear at the start of the DLC is, i believe, kos speaking her curse: curse the fiends, their children too. and their children’s children, forever, true. what happened to kos will not only never be forgiven, it will never go without punishment–that is how great a sin it is.

(i personally agree with simon here: “so our forefathers sinned? we hunters cannot bear their curse forever. it’s not fair, it’s just not fair.” he’s completely right. the ones who earned that punishment are byrgenwerth and the old hunters responsible for what happened in the fishing hamlet. however, simon’s grief overlooks the continuous harm and mutilation men inflicted on women in bloodborne’s story, long after kos’s desecration.)

i think the only characters in bloodborne who truly grasp just what’s happening and making attempts to mitigate or control it are women (or feminine-designed). simon is the one glaring exception, though i think brador has some understanding of it too. he clearly has a darker, bitter view of what’s going on: he says “nothing changes. such is the nature of man” when you strike and kill him.

like maria, brador doesn’t want you to find out about kos or what the church are doing. he’d rather you stay ignorant to the whole terrible thing, which i think is an example of privilege. brador can say that, because he’s already in the nightmare, he already knows what’s going on, and he’s used by the church to hunt down anyone who tries to discover their secrets. he can also say that because what the church is doing to people–and namely to women–are not happening to him.

but then you have characters like the lonely old dear, who is furious with the state yharnam’s in and has endured hunts long enough to know that something is going wrong with its constant failures. she’s addicted to sedatives (which are made from human blood, and created by byrgenwerth–thus they were given to her likely to ‘calm her down’), and it isn’t until she has a mental breakdown does she willingly part with this drug in an effort to help you. she’s lost all hope of things getting better, of hunters saving her, and has fallen back on the one thing she can control: caring for you.

there’s iosefka and her imposter, the former who runs a blood clinic (and does possibly questionable experiments with blood), and her usurper who is undeniably doing experiments to continue the choir’s efforts. the first iosefka is suspicious (her special blood vial is found in the nightmare of mensis, after all), but the imposter takes that suspiciousness and cranks it up to eleven. she encourages you to bring her victims to experiment on, going so far as to do this to an orphaned child. the imposter has no qualms about violating the human body for the sake of progress. is it any surprise that she is affiliated with the choir, and the church by proxy, who did these things on the regular? and one wonders where she learned how to do these things: the church, clearly. more to the point, the choir, who oversees everything in the church.

make no mistake: the imposter (and iosefka, to a certain extent) are still guilty for what they do, but it is a horror they learned. a horror women inflicted on others (including women), as they were taught to do by a higher power and merciless institution that is, to no one’s surprise, run by men.

adella and arianna know their blood is powerful and offer it in gratitude to the hunter for their help, but who taught them that? arianna wasn’t raised in the church (she’s a vileblood descendant), but she knows full well that yharnam’s culture is of harnessing women’s blood for the power in it. the one thing she can do is offer it as thanks, freely, for a bit of kindness shown to her. think about how ghoulish that is. a word of thanks isn’t enough to express gratitude. she has to offer you a part of herself–not her sexual services, since she’s a “lady of the evening,” but something far more intimate and ghastly. she gives you her blood.

adella has a similar situation, though i’m of the mind that she was much more nervous and afraid of this than she lets on. the way she speaks to the hunter when she draws her blood–how broken she sounds when you reject her–suggest that adella not only understands how vital blood donation is for her as a nun, but that it is the one thing she can offer that is valuable. again, ghoulish.

saint adeline, a patient in the research hall, also offers her blood to you as a gift in exchange for you helping her achieve an ‘ascent’ of sorts. you give her life purpose by finishing the process of her experimentation, and you set her to rest. but saint adeline is a survivor of some truly horrific church experiments. she was one of the few “successful” mediums used to turn a human’s mind into a conduit to hear the cosmos (comparable to a deep sea). they manage this by tying her to a chair, and keeping a syringe permanently fixed into her arm to draw out her blood (or inject her with more). and even with all this, she’s so kind to you. she’s happy to know you. she thanks you for freeing her.

vicar amelia is the last bastion of the church, praying desperately to laurence that she won’t be consumed, either. i always figured that amelia knew things were dire, knew that the impossible task of holding yharnam and the church together fell on her, and all she could do was collapse and pray in a madness mantra, clinging to the relic of laurence. this doesn’t negate the fact that amelia was the head of a church that routinely experimented on people, kidnapped them (and children), and violated their bodies in a cosmic quest for ascension, or an attempt to drive away illness. even so, i look at her from a sympathetic perspective. she’s a broken monster, but a monster all the same.

the witches of hemwick run a corpse robbing/dismantling scheme that they no doubt give to the church and yahar’gul for their rituals and chalice dungeon explorations. they’ve found a way to turn the horrors of yharnam to their advantage. the horrific, inhuman things the church does to people’s bodies is no longer something that can be inflicted on the witches and the old women who live in the lane, but are things these women are in control of, and decide to do. it’s a terrible choice to make, but it’s the one choice they had (besides, you know, suffer).

queen annalise sits in defiance in her prison, lays out her motives (enemy of the church), and though she warns you against making a decision unwisely, she is happy to induct you into the vileblood fold, making you kindred. she is elegant in her disdain for the church, but the whole reason she’s the vileblood queen–and locked away in her prison–is because she and her kin were trying to recreate queen yharnam’s ‘communion’ with oedon and creation of mergo. they do so by feeding her blood dregs, hoping that this will be enough to coax a great one child to form within her. what i like about this is that annalise is clearly trying to control a divine conception. unlike queen yharnam, arianna, and the imposter iosefka who were… let’s say horrifyingly surprised by their pregnancies, annalise wants to control it wholly on her own. she won’t sit idly by to give her enthusiastic consent (or lament that it was never asked for). she’s going to sit on her throne and say, “this is mine.”

ebrietas and rom are both kins of the cosmos, and victims of both the choir and byrgenwerth’s ambitions: rom was used as a guard against mergo’s descent (though it’s heavily suggested that she was made this way by kos–which makes me think that she was a byrgenwerth experiment used with kos’s remains). ebrietas, who mourns rom, was left behind by the other great ones, discovered by the church, and her blood was used as a “holy medium” for all experiments thereafter. it is unclear how willingly she went along with this–the great ones are sympathetic, yes, but what about kin? both rom and ebrietas aren’t hostile until they are harmed, which makes me think that they were happy to act as guards or commune with humans. not only that, the infant experiments in the orphanage all crawl towards where ebrietas is. this suggests they feel bound to her, drawn to her, as if they’re family.

but how willing were they to take part in everything they were required to do? ebrietas may have wanted to commune with humans, but being kept prisoner in the altar of despair hardly seems like the best place for her. she was also left behind by the other great ones–abandoned, neglected–and this poor thing was then taken and used by byrgenwerth in the choir for their own aims.

considering how rom behaves in her fight, she was no more than an infant when she was experimented on. she crawls away from you, rolls and slams around, throwing a tantrum. she never actually goes after you, she does everything she can to keep you away from her. all her attacks are defensive tactics, like a child doing all it can to protect itself. and because rom was very likely a child when the experiment happened, she cannot give any consent whatsoever to what byrgenwerth used her for.

lady maria is willing to mutilate herself to keep the secret of kos’s corpse, and to prevent the hunter (or anyone else in the nightmare) getting closer to it. i personally take a sympathetic view of her keeping watch over the research hall. she’s a figure of comfort to the patients who suffer, and yeah, sure, maria was part of the horrors of the fishing hamlet, but she was also so disgusted with what she did that she threw away her weapon and positioned herself as the watchwoman in the research hall. this watching and caring does make us wonder how complicit she is in the horrors that happened, though. but i think of it like this: maria could not go back to her home, the vilebloods. maria could not turn her back on what the church was doing. maria could not stop what the church was doing. all she could do was stay, and offer comfort however she could. and then, when the nightmare claimed her, she keeps her corpse at the top of the clocktower, preventing anyone from disturbing kos’s body.

the doll is there to help the hunter gain strength and keep them company. she cradles you happily if you ascend as an infant great one, suggesting she will happily look after you once again. gerhman does have that… off color joke about using the doll–and he is clearly blindly obsessed with maria–but the doll’s behavior to the hunter always struck me as perhaps the only example in the doll’s life where she could develop an actual bond with the hunter. you give her a hairpin, she weeps happily, and gives you the tear. she prays for you at the grave, begging the moon presence to keep you safe, to free you from the nightmare. she’ll clap or bow depending on the silly gestures you give her. she’ll have conversations with you as you progress in the game, can sense the change within you once you sample a special type of blood, and the hunter can free her from the grief that attaches her to maria.

i’ve written before about how compassion is what makes all the difference in bloodborne, including the doll and the hunter’s relationship. you can read that here.

eileen the crow takes on the solemn task of putting blood-addled hunters to rest before the nightmare can consume them. she does this with the full knowledge that she is no longer bound to the dream, and is thus no longer functionally immortal. she welcomes the hunter to town, warns them about what’s ahead, and points them towards a simplified version of their task: hunt, and keep a little fear in your heart. eileen is also one of the rare examples of an older woman in yharnam who is not only capable of fighting and glad to fight, she does so with merciful intent. the witches of hemwick have their own dark plots, and the lonely old dear is… well, a lonely old woman. but eileen? eileen is–to be brief–a fuckin’ stone cold badass. she’s committed herself to a thankless, endless task not for the hope of a reward, but because it’s the right thing to do.

gascoigne’s daughters and viola show the effect of the hunt on the ‘smaller’ people of yharnam, and the humanity of blood-addled hunters and the other human bosses. gascoigne is an outsider of yharnam pulled into the church, whose slow degradation was so powerful that he would enter a fugue haze and forget his own family, until a song lulled him back to himself. he and viola clearly loved each other–they inscribed their names on the music box, and its their music box that soothes him (and then later torments him). whether or not you think he killed his wife, these facts remain true. the man became a monster, was tormented by the memory of his dead wife’s love, and slipped further into madness.

yurie the last scholar of the choir braves the forbidden woods and what’s left of byrgenwerth to find any trace of their knowledge, or even any trace of how to continue the choir’s aims. she doesn’t seem to mind that master willem is chillin’ on the balcony, nor does she drop the key to the door/have an interest in unlocking it, which makes me think she’s also there to ‘guard’ byrgenwerth and willem. from what? the hunter? the school of mensis?

caryll is the only reason why runes exist. she worked for byrgenwerth, and was able to transcribe the voices of the great ones into symbols. this suggests she’s some type of medium or in possession of a cosmic power that not only allows her to understand the great ones, but survive that contact. simple gratia, for all of her bungling with hunter techniques, was still employed by the church and armed with a chunk of metal to fight the beasts.

mergo’s wet nurse gracefully and ruthlessly guards mergo from the hunter. her name as wet nurse means she’s the one feeding and caring for and nurturing the infant great one (likely because yharnam is incapable, as they are of a different species entirely). she is aggressively protective. the moon presence/flora is aggressively possessive. after you defeat gerhman and end the night for him, she descends and cradles you close. either she makes you her new infant/prisoner, or you defy her and fight her.

despite this, the doll prays to flora for mercy and protection for you. “oh flora, of the moon, of the dream. oh little ones, oh fleeting will of the ancients…” she’s asking for the moon presence to be kind to you, yet much like oedon’s heartbreakingly lonely communing with humans (yharnam, arianna, imposter iosefka), the moon presence is too eager to breach that loneliness and to have her surrogate child, to the point where she will actually fight you if you defy her.

beyond that, there are so many female characters in the game that are central to the narrative, are figures of ferocity and power, and some have reached iconic status. even the side characters have some small part to play in establishing what’s happening in yharnam, how it effects the ‘smaller’ people, or what their roles are in the institution of the church and yharnam’s culture.

here’s a list of every single female character in the game, bosses included:

the doll

the lonely old dear

iosefka

imposter iosefka

arianna

sister adella

vicar amelia

the witches of hemwick

gascoigne’s daughters

viola

eileen the crow

old hunter henriett

yurie the last scholar

queen annalise

simple gratia

runesmith caryll

saint adeline

lady maria

kos

rom

ebrietas

queen yharnam

mergo’s wet nurse

the moon presence/flora

that’s twenty-five female characters in this game, even if they’re deceased or npc hunters or just mentioned in descriptions. the deceased ones are still given either plot significance or they possess an item that preserves them in memories forever.

and honestly i just……… really really really love that the game is like this. this game is such a feral feminine-esque game that it holds a dear, special place in my heart in ways that dark souls cannot (though dark souls 3 [and some parts of das2] certainly do as well).

eta: god, how could i forget the weeping widows in cainhurst? you know, the ones who had their throats slit, and who scream out of their wounds to paralyze you if you get too close?

332 notes · View notes