tbh i completely overlooked that stuff, it was the symbolic stuff i found interesting. the notion that a game indicts me as i play it isn’t go to slow me down, so i didn’t focus on that tweet like you have. i’m more interested in reading into what bloodborne may have been communicating, which obviously entails playing the game…
i could’ve made a list of caveats, but
eh, whatever
i really wasn’t presenting this person’s tweet thread as the definitive analysis of bloodborne or whatever, so having it torn to shreds instead of just seeing maybe some talk about the good ideas it presented is a hell of a lot more tiresome and discouraging to me
Bloodborne is absolutely about perpetuating a violently misguided system and the player’s actions make things measurably worse. I guess the game’s tone is more dispassionate than actively indicting you though
Not everyone blathering about a game they love is doing critical games talk? The souls games were “the player is a source of evil” since they started, so the take is clearly played out, but to dismiss this new angle? I’ve never been able to identify how Bloodborne was both more gruesome and feminine than other souls games so after a decade of dick waving it’s kinda nice
It’s worth actually discussing and I hoped you wouldn’t delete it. I’m sorry I went at it so hard. I do think that one of the recurring motifs of the game is menstruation and childbirth; as I joked to daphny over dm, “Angela Carter taught me that anything with werewolves is about periods”. I mean that unironically.
The game’s approach to horror is reflected in the foetal motifs of the game; the horror plays out a recapitulation theory of its own genre. From gothic architecture to terrifying folklore beasts to betentacled monsters that destroy your mind to gaze upon them, the game’s plot follows through successive stages of the development of horror as a genre, as if the work itself is a gothic horror foetus obeying the discredited theories of a 19th century scientist.
There’s echoes of the original Alien and Eraserhead in it, as the horror angle is mostly played from (and most effective from) a perspective cismen horrified at the biological processes that arise from having ovaries.
Really, Bloodborne at times feels like a game length treatise on the demon fetus from berserk
The mishmash of horror genre staples in Bloodborne felt a bit too ‘for variety’s sake’ than it was thematically aligned for me. The snake forest, the castle and some other side areas felt really disconnected from the Lovecraftian stuff it eventually focuses on.
Other than a handful of scenes and locations I’ve never felt like the game is particularly concerned with building out this kind of meta-theming or saying that the player specifically is the problem in this world. The player feels kind of irrelevant and powerless in the wider context of what’s happening.
I like the foetal reading since there’s a lot of implications of humanity being child-like relative to what’s come before. Alternatively they are like beasts in need of animal husbandry by something bigger than they are.
I also think it fits that the game feels somewhat incomplete.
my bloodborne meta take was always that the themes of humanity refusing to accept their limitations and foolishly attempting to become something greater than themselves were fromsoft’s way of channeling frustration at being pressured by sony to develop “for the next generation”
look at how many polygons we can do now, we need to show off this tech with something truly mindblowing!
To twist the knife to prove the point will give two examples about not being implicit:
Silent Hill Downpour where the game pops up “OBJECTIVE:ESCAPE FROM SILENT HILL” and I hit eject on my ps3.
Crusader of Centy before the final boss the monsters you’ve been killing the whole game beg for their rigt to exist and how you’ve been committing genocide the whole game. I also stopped playing then because it was the moral thing to do.
This is what has made the general (cismen) gamer discourse of “avoid talking about menstruation at all costs” with regards to Bloodborne REAAAALLLY FUNNY.
I gave a talk about taboos and games with some students once and I asked the audience for examples of things that were universally taboo. Menstruation was mentioned (after sexism, racism, nazism, genocide, necrophilia etc.) and menstruation got the biggest silent pause from the audience.
I must prod at this with a close reading of Bloodborne for next time.
definitely more like what i was hoping to encourage in terms of Having A Nice Thread, so: thanks
i shouldn’t have deleted my post—i was just feeling embarrassed. i’d forgotten how kneejerk we can be about certain things… like, i don’t have the energy to be so disdainful toward “the game indicts you for playing it” lines of thinking, nor do i hold every person rambling about video games to the selectbutton standards of games criticism, so i really just didn’t even foresee that reaction
maybe i should’ve posted a picture of the berserk fetus to draw focus to that
I think that the aesthetic variety makes sense when you look at Bloodborne’s approach to 19th-20th c. horror fiction the way that Castlevania was an homage to hammer horror films and D&D modules.
Like, the game can feel like an anthology series about horror writing when you traverse areas in sequence. The side areas are often peripheral to the central narrative of the healing church but they explore the shapes taken by horror as the genre was birthed.
I can definitely see it and I think the approach makes sense. I just feel like it didn’t resonate strongly with me. There’s also a lack of early science fiction references which would make sense with a broad approach to industrial era horror (maybe Shelley, Verne and Wells). Lovecraft is probably the biggest influence in this respect but possibly also the only one.
The anthological reading is interesting but not one I subscribe to.
I’ve been longing for a 50s scifi B-movie Souls-like set on the moon or some shit where you fight giant ants or improbable robots but with a From Software twist. Maybe have rayguns I dunno.
Shelley is definitely a present and overt influence, I think! The medical and reproductive horror as persistent imagery, strongest in the beginning of the game and the very end of the game, definitely feels like a call back to Frankenstein
That is fair, I forgot about the clinic and the deceptive nurse (I forget her name). I think it gets blended a bit with most of the new technology and information coming from the old ones rather than just being humanity’s attempts at controlling nature but it’s definitely there.
I’d love for some radium age sci fi souls. Imagine a game influenced by Locus Solus, the Nyctalope on Mars, The Prisoner of the Planet Mars and its sequel, War with the Newts, The Machine Stops, The Moon Pool, Navigators of Infinity, The Enchanted City, The Heads of Cerberus, The Clockwork Man, Aelita, The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix, and of course the Northwest Smith stories
