4 Blood Echoes Digital Sampler Blood Echoes A Bloodborne Anthology
5
6 Blood Echoes
7
8 Blood Echoes Edited by Simon Parkin Illustrations by Shimhaq Blood Echoes A Bloodborne Anthology
9 Fear The Old Blood: An Introduction by Simon Parkin
10 Blood Echoes
11 Fear The Old Blood Down by the old canal in central Yharnam, past the shambling crows and the groaning, curfew-breaking villagers, there is a window that wriggles with candlelight. You can’t enter. Iron bars and taut chains hold back the city’s tide of filth. But approach in good faith and you may talk to the girl who sits, unseen, on the warm side of the pane. She doesn’t tell you her name (eventually you’ll see it’s kinder that way), but she does share with you her problem. A while ago the girl’s father sharpened his axe and, like you, set out to join The Hunt, a vigilante effort to rid Yharnam’s streets of the infected souls that keep daughters locked indoors. When he did not return, the girl tells you, her mother left to find and fetch him. Neither parent has returned yet. So the girl waits, anxious and alone in the house, too afraid to stay, too afraid to leave, condemned to the unbearable purgatory of the abandoned child. Might you, she pleads, hunt for her lost parents? You will know Viola, her mother, by her red brooch. You will know her father, period. Finally, through the window, the girl passes you a delicate music box, which tinkles a melancholic tune when cranked. With this device, she explains, her parents will know who sent you. When, an hour or so later, you meet Father Gascoigne, you assume he is just like you. He wears the same sort of highwayman’s hat, and a similar heavy leather trench coat. He wields the same kind of frightening weapons: an overengineered axe in the right hand which can, by some Yharnam mechanic’s workshop tinkering, switch between short- and long-range forms, and a blunderbuss in the left. But just as you move to greet him as an equal, he bounds toward you, hunched and tense, ready to fight, driven mad, you now assume, by whatever sickness has overtaken this forsaken city. This is a man no longer able to tell friend from foe – an affliction, you later learn, that affects most Hunters, eventually, who are contaminated by that which they pursue. What choice do you have, but to betray the child who sent you?
12 Blood Echoes Something of the man remains. Pull out his daughter’s music box, and its tune will penetrate the fog of Gascoigne’s madness. For a moment he stops his pursuit and writhes among the tilting, gravestones, hands clutched to his head, trying, it seems, to expel the memory of the person he once was, and the people he once loved. It’s a temporary cessation of hostilities. As the music box slows and stills, the rage returns. You must fight to the death. When Gascoigne lies vanquished in a pool of his own treacherous blood, you light the blue lamp by the fountain and, if you’re an inquisitive sort of person, follow the narrow path that leads to the upper part of the area, where you may drop down onto a small rooftop. There you’ll find the body of a mauled woman. She’s clutching a red brooch. Gascoigne’s last victim, it seems, was his first love. The girl who lives in the house by the canal is an orphan now. What will you tell her? While no player of Bloodborne can miss this vicious fight, it’s easy for the inattentive, or uninterested, to miss the depth of the family’s tragedy. This is the way the game’s director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, and his team of visionary artists and designers at FromSoftware prefer to tell stories: a trail of crumbled clues, easily unobserved, which must be pieced together by attentive players, who refine their theories in online chat rooms in the months and years that follow the game’s release. Some things are unmissable, however. At the beginning of the game, you arrive in this mysterious town, a sickly person drawn to Yharnam because of its reputation as a place of healing. You agree to receive the cure offered: a blood transfusion that the town’s clergy-surgeons have been administering for years, seized by the belief that therein lies the cure to all ills.
13 Fear The Old Blood Then, the man tending to you presents you with the bill: “Just go out and kill a few beasts.” And at its most base and elemental, this is all the story that matters, perhaps: you are now employed as a Hunter who must help cleanse a city gripped in plague lockdown of the monsters that roam its streets. But as ever with Miyazaki’s games, this brutal ‘what’ is underpinned by a complex tangle of ‘whys’ which wait for anyone who wants to peer a little deeper into the mist, which rests over the story much like it rests over one of its cathedral doors, where the next terrible fight awaits. When it arrived, in March 2015, Bloodborne was unexpected. Throughout the 1990s, FromSoftware was an obscure Japanese video-game studio best known for its giant robot combat games. Then the studio hired a soft-faced computer engineer from the American software company Oracle. Hidetaka Miyazaki was almost thirty when he joined, an uncommon, vaguely shameful career move in Japan, especially considering it was reportedly accompanied by a major pay cut. As an adult, Miyazaki had drifted away from the video games he enjoyed as a child. Then he played Fumito Ueda’s groundbreaking Ico, and felt drawn, once again, to the dance. He made his directorial debut with 2009’s Demon’s Souls, a dingy, knotted dark-fantasy game built on the forsaken foundations of a much older FromSoftware game, 1994’s King’s Field. Demon’s Souls appeared, glancingly, to be the stuff of cliché: knights and dragons, treasure chests and fireballs. The game sold poorly at first, then through word-of-mouth, gained a whispered reputation for being, behind the tired aesthetic, unusually inventive. Dark Souls followed, perfecting the heft and weight of combat, all wrapped in an idiosyncratic mode of storytelling, where clues were as likely to be found in item descriptions tucked in inventory menus as in stentorian theatrics.
14 Blood Echoes
15 Fear The Old Blood
16 Blood Echoes Dark Souls cemented Miyazaki’s reputation as a visionary director of fantasy games set in turreted worlds of Arthurian nightmare. We felt we understood the man, and his work. But then: Bloodborne. A game built, not from Tolkien offcuts, but blocks hewn from an entirely distinct set of traditions: of plagues and pandemics; of serrated tools wielded by medieval surgeons; of the erratic firearms of black-hatted highwaymen; of slurping Cthulhu, and barrel-chested giant hogs; of pokey, night-time cobblestone streets slicked with rain – or is that blood?; of crows and rats and furred, muscular backs arched against the full moon. Like Dark Souls , Bloodborne’s world is a nest of alleyways and clever shortcuts, which snaps a little further into focus with each step; similarly, you collect currency from downed enemies to incrementally upgrade your attributes. And yes, here too, you learn the rhythms of combat in a hostile world, when to lunge and when to feint, when a quiet street is clearly leading toward an encounter with some towering terror. Bloodborne is singular, too: a game without equal, or even equivalent – a liminal dream-like portal to a distant, quasi-historical place where ordinary lives are ruled by seemingly well-meaning churchmen, and where freedoms are curtailed by diseases that exist beyond the stretch of scientific understanding. The game is set in some version of the real past when there was no distinction between the clergyman and the physician, when there were those who honorably performed their duties in these ancient roles, and those who used them only for personal gain, power, or titillation. And it is set across the span of a single night, its world shifting as the blood moon wheels, leading up to a final choice: wake from the nightmare, or end it. (In this way Bloodborne is
17 Fear The Old Blood perhaps the only video game that allows its player to skip the final bosses, albeit for a price.) The urgent oppressiveness is felt in the game design, too. Here there is no health-giving flask that replenishes each time you rest at a lantern; rather, each blood vial must be bought, exerting a continuous psychological and financial pressure on your progress. In contrast to Miyazaki’s other games, which allow players to develop their character in ways to suit their playstyle, Bloodborne offers a much narrower spectrum of options: there are few shields behind which a cautious player can strafe and tremble; here you must learn to dodge and roll away at speed, or master the precise timings required to parry an incoming blow. When Bloodborne arrived, the most recent global pandemic was the so-called Spanish Flu – a moniker laced with the same xenophobia with which the citizens of Yharnam regard outsiders. That pandemic, which arrived in the aftermath of the First World War, killed at least fifty-million people, but it had happened almost a hundred years ago, situated temporally somewhere in the mist that hangs just beyond living memory. Today there is no-one alive unfamiliar with what it means to be afraid of the air we breathe, of lonely lockdowns, of the sight of bodies being lined up on the streets, handled by professionals draped in protective clothing. Today, you might say, Bloodborne hits differently. To visit Yharnam is to tour a place wrecked by disease. The streets are filled with caskets, which lean against each other, bound in chains that suggest the cadavers, like those of the Black Death, or of COVID-19, remain a threat to the living. The footpaths around the city are lined with gravestones, a canny environmental design that marks the boundaries of where you can roam, while
18 Blood Echoes suggesting that this is a city of the dead, more than it is of the living. Lit windows signal a citizen inside, and as you chat to them outside the door, you feel their anxiety, frustration, or loneliness. It is all so jarringly familiar. A few years later after Bloodborne, FromSoftware exploded Dark Souls’ claustrophobic corridors into the great outdoors in Elden Ring, a game set across the grand sweep of a vast and verdant open world. In cartographic terms, Elden Ring felt like the logical expansion of an earlier template, one that could finally be realized thanks to technological advances. To expand Bloodborne’s world in similar ways, however, would be a mistake; this is a game whose character is inextricable from pokey alleyways, cramped cemeteries, shadowy nooks behind the bins. It is intricate and vertical. Bloodborne is not an evolutionary steppingstone to some full and future realization; it is self-contained, definitive in a way that few video games ever truly feel, its own conclusion. Likewise, its tactile feel in the hands is fully formed, perfect. There is an urgent vitality to its fights. Vicar Amelia, boss of the cathedral ward, whom you fight by the light of a thousand candles under vaulted ceilings, screams like a cornered dog (as does, much later, Laurence, the First Vicar, whom you fight in a partly demolished version of the same cathedral, during Bloodborne’s one, only and essential expansion, The Old Hunters). She moves with canine lunges, her hair rendered as white ribbons fluttering in the breeze. There is something ancient and elemental to the encounter. Each monster you meet feels like the incarnation of some deep fear. Rom, the Vacuous Spider (a name that implies a rival kind of spider, one that is… profound?). The barnacled Witch of Hemwick. Mergo’s terrifying Wet Nurse. These are enemies that play on ancient anxieties: the oversized bug; the
19 Fear The Old Blood vicious grandmother figure; the adult who was supposed to nurture, but instead betrays. There are few friends in this world; occasionally you’ll find a friendly nun, trembling in a basement, whom you can direct to one of the game’s clinics, safe spaces for terrified refugees. Most of their stories, however, end in tragedy. There is no light relief here in the harried world of Yharnam (a city named after a Queen who, herself, embodies this world’s Ur-tragedy: the loss of an unborn child) where even the quasi-comic figure of Patches – a character who cameos in most of Miyazaki’s games – is grotesquely rendered as a two-faced spider. Bloodborne has endured in a way that few video games endure. It feels just as taut and urgent as it did on arrival, its impact barely diminished by the inexorable technological progress that defines, for better and worse, the video-game medium. It is a game equally inviting as it is repulsive. And as the circumstances of the world shifted around it, the game acquired a new significance, a new urgency. Now, as lockdowns have eased and we have, once again, returned to the streets, into the daylight, those months feel curiously dreamlike, and unreal. Bloodborne’s surreality is something every person, everywhere understands deep in their bones, deep in their blood. A fine time, then, to revisit this masterpiece, to hear from some of those who made the game, what they make of it now, and to acquire the perspective of some brilliant writers and thinkers. Hark! Here comes an old, familiar wooden carriage, its frame covered in moss and stains. The door swings open, to reveal an empty red chair. The horses stomp impatiently. Every muscle fiber in you screams: run away. But don’t. Instead: clamber inside.
20 Blood Echoes
21
22 Blood Echoes by Christian Donlan “Why Did You Wake Me?” In Bloodborne, men become beasts in the quiet of the night, one of several motifs that link the game to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde .
23 “Why Did You Wake Me?” I have been told many times that the writer that haunts all Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games – and Bloodborne in particular – is H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft of the cyclopean architecture and terrible ancient monsters. There is a point, I am told, where the world we’ve explored up until now will peel away like old wallpaper, and we must glimpse, behind its curling facades, the old gods with their obscure and unthinkable motivations. I’m sure this is true, but I’ve never gotten that far. When I play Bloodborne, I am drawn back to the game’s early sequences, and as I play and replay my journey through the deadly streets of Yharnam – a teetering city flickeringly lit by the burning pyres of The Hunt, and a sunset that stains the entire world the color of dried blood – I don’t think of Lovecraft at all. I think of someone who came before him. I think of Robert Louis Stevenson. This is a personal reading of FromSoftware’s game, I appreciate, and an indulgent one. Stevenson is one of my favorite writers, an eager shapeshifter offering kindergarten poetry one second, and wry travelogs the next. Looking back, I realize that there has been a Stevenson for every part of my life, from childhood with its readings and re-readings of Treasure Island, to my twenties when I first encountered his anthropological works on the South Seas – writing that must have seemed curiously out of its time in the 19th century. If Stevenson has walked with me through life, I suppose it makes sense that he walks through the odd game with me too. But the reason I think this is worth exploring is because Stevenson’s work – one story in particular, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – seems to illuminate Bloodborne in interesting ways. Odd details suddenly come into focus. New harmonies emerge. I feel, at the end of it all, like I have learned something I would not have learned otherwise.
24 Blood Echoes Harmonies is the right word, I think, and there are plenty. It’s interesting, for example, that both Bloodborne and Hyde hinge on formative dreams. Bloodborne begins with a dream – a drug-induced trance, and we’ll come back to this stuff – that encourages you from the very start to question the nature of what is about to unfold. “Whatever happens,” we are told in the game’s first moments, “you may think it all a mere bad dream.” All of it? Really? If Bloodborne swiftly dissolves into a dream, Hyde, famously, emerged from one. It’s one of the great legends of 19th-century fiction: Stevenson was asleep one night and crying out in terror. When his wife Fanny roused him, he asked, “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” That tale – about a respected doctor named Jekyll, who uses a potion to transform himself into the id-like Hyde and explore his dark impulses – would become one of his most famous stories. Here we have dreams as doorways, then: players disappearing into them and monsters escaping through them. Coming and going. I think a team with the rich architectural imagination of FromSoftware’s designers would appreciate this regardless of where it led. Hyde itself is a dreamlike story, and we see this most clearly, perhaps, in the setting, which pretends to be London, but cannot hold this pretense with any enthusiasm. Just as Mr. Hyde is not really Mr. Hyde, London is not really London. Stevenson grew up in Edinburgh, and the city marked him. Edinburgh is where Stevenson’s imagination roamed, and it’s the place to which it returned, regardless of where Stevenson himself was in the world: Samoa, where he died, the US, where he married, or even
25 “Why Did You Wake Me?”
26 Blood Echoes Bournemouth down on the South Coast, where he dreamed and then wrote Hyde while living in a house named Skerryvore, which he hated. (It was destroyed in the Second World War, but the floor plan remains in place; you can go there today and stand in the ghostly rooms and feel quietly foolish.) The descriptions of architecture and local detailing in Hyde’s London all suggest Stevenson’s Edinburgh. The sheer piled-upon complexity of the place is more like Edinburgh than London, as is the dampness in its soul and the students in its streets. In one beautiful motif that starts the narrative – a house with a mysterious doorway – we get so much in superposition it’s almost dizzying. Here is Stevenson’s theme – duality with its illicit promise – and the story’s true location, in the warrens of his Scottish birthplace. And, of course, a building with confusing entrances is the kind of thing one sees again and again in Yharnam, where one’s path is always doubling around, threading and rethreading, where we leave and then arrive back after a circuitous journey, appearing again from an unsuspected angle. Bloodborne isn’t the first Miyazaki game to take me to Edinburgh. I first visited FromSoftware’s take on the city when it lurked within the chill of The Undead Burg in the original Dark Souls. Here battlements gave way to a suspended web of alleyways and storerooms, the whole thing delivered in cold gray stone and moss. There was the sense of being up high, exploring a place with ancient bones, eager for ruin. It was Edinburgh as much as it was Lordran – Edinburgh as it exists in a bright memory, or the vivid imagination of a Stevenson fan. But with Bloodborne’s Yharnam, the city is delivered on a broader scale. Bleached morning has given way to that lurid, queasy
27 “Why Did You Wake Me?” sunset. Cobbled streets meet wrought-iron railings and ladders, while Gothic Revival architecture creates steep canyon walls and dim basins. Perched up high again, and drawn with Miyazaki’s switchback intricacies, this is surely Edinburgh in the 19th century, just given a bit of a shove. Behind a crippled carriage blocking the entrance to an alleyway, a horror emerges: a thuggish body, face hidden by the tilt of a glossy top hat. Is this someone I know? No wonder I cannot play Bloodborne without thinking of Hyde. But the more I have played, and re-read Stevenson’s story, the more I have thought about Stevenson’s own life and how his imaginative works fit into it. And I’ve realized, over time, that the dreams and the city are nice harmonies linking Miyazaki’s imagination with Stevenson, but what really pulls everything together for me is a shared preoccupation: both Bloodborne and Hyde are fixated with medicine, and, I think, with the entwined fear and fascination that medicine sometimes encourages. Let’s return to that dream of Stevenson’s. Over the years, the details of what Stevenson dreamed and how foundational it was to the story have become muddled, but according to Stevenson’s own family, he did not dream of Mr. Hyde so much as he dreamt of Dr. Jekyll, the polite society doctor who takes a potion and is transformed, Dr. Jekyll who is the real villain of the story. Jekyll’s medicine, self-administered, is the propulsive force of the plot: it gets readers across the imaginative gap needed to believe that one man can be two separate people – or rather that two people can be one man. And it’s interesting that Stevenson did not choose magic to do all of this. Jekyll’s medicine is created in a laboratory, and he leaves notes behind. The whole enterprise emerges from a scientific milieu.
28 Blood Echoes
29 “Why Did You Wake Me?” But it’s never that simple, of course. The potion Jekyll drinks is a plot device, certainly, but it was also a crucial, totemistic element from Stevenson’s original dream, and its power hinges on an idea that has stuck around to this day: that medicine can actually be a kind of magic. And why not? We put huge hopes into it – we hope it will cure the sick and return our loved ones to us – and we do so while, most of the time, not having the purest idea of how any of it works. What kind of magic is it? Miyazaki’s no stranger to magic himself – it vibrates through the Dark Souls games and illuminates the grand vistas of Elden Ring. But with Bloodborne, he too chooses to focus on medicine, and its own attendant Hyde: illness. Yharnam is a place that people visit to be cured – by a transfusion of blood. But by the time the player arrives, the city itself is in the grip of a pandemic of sorts: a disease that turns people to monsters, a la Hyde, while also creating an atmosphere of paranoia. The streets are filled with bonfires and hunting parties, while many of the player’s early conversations are furtive, mutually suspicious affairs, whispered through doors that are locked and bolted. We first stand in this world not in one of Dark Souls’ prison cells, but in a room that is unmistakably a surgery, rising from an operating table and surrounded by the tools of a surgeon’s trade. Blood ministration is the engine of Bloodborne – what this strange therapy promises and where its origins truly lie. But the game is propelled along, particularly in the early stages, by what blood
30 Blood Echoes ministration does to people. Yharnam’s medicine may be turning people into monsters, but the fear of medicine that comes with it is almost more powerful, shattering the population into paranoid groups hiding out in houses, and emptying the streets of all but the boldest and most deadly and most desperate. Stevenson too knew medicine. He had lived most of his life with a blood-spitting illness that was assumed to be tuberculosis but even today is inviting new speculation and new diagnoses. Illness – and its treatment – sent him around Britain, then around the world, in search of cleaner air and more hospitable climates. It sent him to bed, where he played with his stepson’s tin soldiers on the rumpled bedclothes, and wrote much of his greatest work – including Hyde. Today, Hyde is enormously famous. To quote his wonderfully perceptive and empathetic biographer Claire Harman, “the story is so embedded in popular culture that it hardly exists as a work of literature.” This fame brings attention. There are pages of analysis detailing possible precedents for the eruption of Hyde, from acquaintances of Stevenson himself, to figures like Deacon Brodie, a cabinetmaker who led a secret life as a criminal. (Stevenson’s family had one of his pieces, and Stevenson himself later turned his narrative into a play.) And Stevenson’s horror story is endlessly reimagined and retold, recast for each generation and picked through for interpretations. Freud looms large over Jekyll, who feared but also freed his own purest impulses. Jung inevitably casts his shadow, too. But when I read Hyde today, more than anything I am struck that this is the work of a man who had a chronic illness, and an illness that came and went in waves of relapse. Stevenson was “a professional sickist”, and if he worked from his bed because of illness, shouldn’t that illness, and its treatments, inform his work too, shaping his imagination and
31 “Why Did You Wake Me?” giving not only a force but an ebb and flow to Jekyll and Hyde’s relationship – a relationship born of medicine, created in part by that mysterious potion? It might seem strange to picture the endless hacking and slashing of Yharnam, and the bottomless cruelty of Hyde, and think of medicine. But there has always been fear in medicine, and there has always been violence too, from the first Egyptian medical texts with their instructions to probe wounds with a finger and see if the patient cries out, to the work of William Harvey, who was only able to convince people of his theories of blood circulation by killing a dog on stage – and letting the arterial spray reach the first few rows of his audience. Even now it’s there. Henry Marsh, the neurosurgeon, felt his calling as an undergraduate when he saw his first surgery and “found its controlled and altruistic violence deeply appealing.” He admits that his first glimpse of neurosurgery, with the patient sat up, head shaved, felt like a scene from a horror film. This is Hyde’s world, forged in the contradictions of medicine – a medicine that predates germ theory and the specific point, according to the historian David Wootton, at which medicine as an enterprise stopped hurting people and began to help them. And it’s Bloodborne’s world too – perhaps the richest part of its world. The first time I saw the hero of Bloodborne in the game’s striking cover art, back to the viewer, clad in leathers, Saw Cleaver and other deadly mechanisms in hand, a small voice spoke somewhere in my head and said: Surgeon. Surgeon? I wondered. But the voice had spoken, and it spoke with certainty. I have not been able to shake the idea ever since.
32 Blood Echoes
33
34 Blood Echoes by Grace Curtis Through the centuries, human societies have had a complicated, even fraught, relationship with blood. A ubiquitous liquid seldom seen, often feared. Blood Be The Price
35 Blood Be The Price Blood has taken a back seat in the cultural mainstream in the past hundred years or so, and that’s probably for the best. No longer a mystical substance linked to every disease imaginable, a vessel for circulating divinity and sin, blood is mostly just… blood. Another part of the body. We don’t tend to think about it, and unless something has gone very wrong we don’t see too much of it either. But maybe blood has become a little too sanitized, a little too taboo. Why do TV ads for menstrual pads always fall back on that insufferable blue goo? Why do vampires always pull away from their victims’ necks with nary but a little trickle on the chin? Even when we see blood in horror movies or a gung-ho action film, it seldom feels right. Water with a bit of red food coloring, splattering artfully across the wall. Where’s the fun in that? Real blood has texture. It clots, it clumps. It stinks like hell. FromSoftware was probably the perfect studio to put this ancient symbol back into the spotlight. Part of what makes the studio’s work so compelling is its sheer granularity. Dark Souls stripped away the convenient abstractions of other games, laying bare the hugeness of its world and your own place within it. Every action in Dark Souls, from swinging a sword to climbing a ladder, has bite and weight. Think of how the controller shudders if you attempt to roll while weighed down with too much armor, how tedious and tense it feels to track back on foot to the place where you last died. Dark Souls never lets you forget that you’re a small creature with a slow, breakable body. And then there’s Bloodborne. Every inch of this game is sharp metal rendering flesh, open wounds, transfusion tubes, boils, soiled bandages, afterbirth, dirty needles, flags of flailed skin. Just to survive you’ll have to get soaked up to the shoulders. And yes, it’s awful – the constant violence, the omnipresence of disease and infection, the surrendering of a body to religious frenzy, your own physical and mental fragility within it all – but for all its queasiness, there’s something perversely comforting about
36 Blood Echoes Bloodborne’s commitment to blood and the body. It keeps you grounded throughout the game’s escalating horrors. It is a leveler. Person, beast, or god, we are all equal in the face of a well-swung cleaver. Everyone bleeds. Ask any woman, serial killer, or woman-turned-serial killer, and they’ll tell you the same thing: bloodstains are a nightmare to clean up. Attack right away with soapy cold water, and maybe you’re in with a chance of clearing the spill. Maybe. Blood, patient and thick, will work through unattended fabric, leaving a rusty shadow that will linger forevermore. Blood is a clue to our own rawness, our terrible delicacy. It reminds us that what is taken out cannot be put back in. Out, damned spot. It’s also a focus of mass fascination, a ragged-edged borehole at the center of the great Venn diagram of popular culture and science. Before we had concepts like bacteria, serotonin and DNA, blood was the culprit for every happening inside a human body. Hippocrates believed blood is one of the four ‘humors’ that control our wellbeing, alongside yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. A healthy body must balance the four. But, unlike the other humors, which adjust themselves naturally through bodily secretions like sweat and vomit, blood tends to stay where it is. So, doctors invented bloodletting – a gristly attempt to maintain the ‘natural’ equilibrium. It all feels so medieval, doesn’t it? Slicing, puncturing, or, god forbid, leeching the body as a treatment for every known disease. But bloodletting only fell out of favor relatively recently. “During the first five decades of this century the profession bled too much,” William Osler wrote in the first edition of Principles and Practice of Modern Medicine. “But during the last decades we have certainly bled too little… the abstraction of from twenty to thirty
37 Blood Be The Price ounces of blood is in every way beneficial.” That was in 1892, three years after the founding of Nintendo. Here’s a fun anecdote: in 1799, when he was 67, former American President George Washington came down with what looked like a severe throat infection. He asked for bloodletting, a common treatment he’d found beneficial in the past. When the first round failed to improve him, they drained some more, and then more, and still more. When Washington died, his doctors had claimed approximately five pints. While an overabundance of blood is an easy fix, wrong blood is a more insidious, grimy concept. It is typically considered permanent. Royal bloodlines must be kept pure at all costs (which is why the average monarch’s family tree resembles a telephone pole). Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, considered it the duty of science to “give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable” by using, among other methods, what Galton called ‘judicious mating’. Urgh. People experienced blood-based discrimination as recently as the 1980s. Victims of the HIV pandemic were treated as physical pariahs long after the greatest riddles of the disease were solved. Like the ‘unsuitable races’ of Galton’s feverish muttonchopped imagination, AIDS-sufferers were perceived as having an undesirable element, a permanent wrongness that literally ran through their veins. Such defects were considered beyond treatment and could only be bred out. Or, failing that, sufferers must be shunned. What is turning Yharnamites into beasts? It’s a pressing question, but one about which The Healing Church, Yharnam’s central authority, seems oddly incurious. As far as the church is concerned, beasthood is an ailment without prevention or cure. The only solution is slaughter.
38 Blood Echoes Similarly incurable is Ashen Blood, another disease that ravaged Old Yharnam sometime before the events of Bloodborne. Rather than seek an antidote, the authorities simply locked the whole city away. Everywhere you turn in Bloodborne you see powerful people trying to insulate themselves from an incoming tide of disease and death. They think of beasthood as an external threat, a problem confined to the weak, the poor, the mad, the non-believing, the sinner. It is a problem for people like Arianna, a resident in a dark corner of the Cathedral Ward who apologizes for only having “whore’s blood” to offer you.
39 Blood Be The Price
40 Blood Echoes The game opens with a wonderfully vague order to “just go out and kill a few beasts.” From there the player gradually ascends Yharnam’s caste system: from ordinary citizens to church servants, to a member of the clergy, to a hunter, to a vicar, and finally to the gods they serve. The higher you go, the worse the scourge becomes. The most twisted and monstrous transformations are right at the very top. Even those players who mindlessly cut through Yharnam’s backstreets without a thought for the story, eventually clock on to the game’s central irony. The Healing Church is not a sanctuary from beasthood. It is the source of the infection. But infection is only half the story here. There’s much more to Yharnam’s bloodlust than just a fear of disease. The Healing Church holds power through faith, and their faith is founded on the provable miracle of blood ministration – one part medicine, one part salvation, a cure both for illness and existential ennui. Liquid divinity pumps out from the cathedral and flows into the nest of streets below. And the people, sickly and distrustful as they are, drink it by the bucketful.
41 Blood Be The Price Whether they’re hiding in a cellar to escape Roman persecution in 303 CE, or sitting around a gilded table in St. Peter’s Basilica in 1962, Christians have pretty much never stopped arguing about what it means to be a Christian. Among the oldest arguments is transubstantiation. For some Christians, particularly Catholics, this tradition distinguishes theirs as the truest version of the faith. They believe that the bread and wine consumed during Sunday mass are the literal body and blood of Christ. Not a metaphor, not a purely symbolic rite. The real deal. The importance of blood as a religious symbol extends beyond the menu at the Last Supper. The blood of Catholic saints has been coveted as sacred and miraculous throughout history. Thomas Becket’s blood was mingled with water and sold as medicine to pilgrims in medieval Canterbury, healing them of every imaginable ailment. Worshipers today can travel to the city of Naples and witness the miraculous “liquification” of the blood of Saint Januarius. When the blood failed to liquify in 2020, it made headlines in the Catholic press – a bad omen indeed. Bloodborne is nakedly critical of institutional religion, but doesn’t belittle the power of faith. The members of The Healing Church are not frauds. The gods they worship are utterly real. Their practices really do work (just take a look at your HP bar every time you guzzle down a blood vial). They’re just human beings engaging with something bigger than themselves, something they can’t fully understand or control. They are isolated, greedy, hung up on ascending to some higher plane of existence. They allow ‘Blood Saints’ like poor Adeline to suffer for their purposes, turning them into immobile human blood-farms. And the saints suffer gladly. They give everything they can. Better to have a touch of the divine than to live a meaningless life, right? Strapped to a chair, blind and disfigured, draining herself by the liter, Adeline whispers, “Please, I beg of you. I want to be something…”
42 Blood Echoes