The Father, The Son, And The Incomprehensible Cosmic Being Of Unspeakable Power
We kicked off the week with a For Our Consideration op-ed from Jake Muncy tackling Bloodborne’s use of Christian concepts and imagery to craft its dense Lovecraftian nightmare. As with all things Souls related, the story’s ambiguity means there’s a lot of room for interpretation and commentary, and we got plenty of fascinating takes in the comments. WELCOME_THRILLHO pulled all of Bloodborne’s inspirations together to sum up its sad irony:
So much of what’s good about Bloodborne’s themes come from fusing the Gothic-horror idea of fearing one’s self and one’s urges, which gave rise to the werewolf and vampire mythologies, with the Lovecraftian horror of fearing the unknowable and sublime. The Healing Church takes our human need to find ourselves in the divine—to see a perfected form of ourselves and to know that we’re part of a grand plan—and turns it on its ear. They pursue that which is completely inhuman and unknowable and seek to transcend the baseness of their animalistic human existence, but drinking the blood of the Old Ones only turns them into beasts. They seek the divine in order to better themselves, but only become a worse version of themselves.
The Greeks and Romans are most famous for depicting the gods in perfected human form, yet Abrahamic religions make it a point to never give God a form—though Christianity skirts this by having Christ to walk among us, depicted visually as his Father’s surrogate. The Healing Church in some ways combines these tendencies creating icons of inhuman forms depicted in all of their maddening splendor. In Yharnam itself, the statues seen everywhere have their features hidden (maybe so as not to stir the populace) and are draped in chains. It’s only on the stairs to the Grand Cathedral and in Yahar’ghul where the omnipresent statuary becomes truly and horribly accurate.
This fellow right here points us to another of the stories ironies:
I’m of the opinion that the hidden irony of Bloodborne’s plot is how it turns out the hyper-dimensional alien beings known as The Great Ones are relatively well-intentioned (however the results of those good intentions were less than okay) while most of the humans in the game are deliberately cruel.
The various Great Ones have individual motivations, and they’re all generally benevolent to mankind: protecting us from threats, offering us power and wisdom, guiding us toward a higher plane of existence, just staying out of everyone’s way. Meanwhile, the humans given power and wisdom misuse it, act in xenophobic ways, kill other humans, scheme, lie, go mad, act unwisely, etc. The Great Ones are ignorant; humanity is evil.
And as Drinking_with_Skeletons points out, the issue in Bloodborne might not be that the Great Ones don’t love those who worship them; it might be that they love them too much:
The scarier thing might be the implication that the Great Ones do love humanity. The Moon Presence embraces your character in two of the three endings. The prostitute is forcibly, immaculately impregnated—a perversion at every level of the Virgin Mary—yet the inhuman baby that she births seems to pose no threat to her. (It’s kind of cute!) Indeed, the Great Ones’ motivation is to have children, which they cannot do without using humans as vessels, and the human antagonists of the game—a secret splinter group of the Healing Church—sacrifice untold numbers of people and begin the endless Night Of The Hunt seemingly to offer up a precious Great One baby in exchange for knowledge. Based on the Great One babies roaming the upper levels of the Great Cathedral, I’d guess that Ebrietas was offering her blood in exchange for the ability to finally have children.
If the great horror of every religious person is, “What if there is no God?” the horror of Bloodborne could be seen as deriving from, “What if there is?”