YOU HUNTED

“ah fuck. i can’t believe you’ve done this.”

^{–paul wheedon}

“noooooo!!” i can hear the people of earth scream in unison. “not another fucking fromsoft lore guy! please god!! strike this motherfucker dead before they start talking!!”

unfortunately, i too suffer from the unique strain of disease apparently induced by playing a fromsoftware video game. there is something about these games that drives us, the players, absolutely bugfuck insane. fromsoft’s idiosyncratic way of delivering its plot, ideas, and themes to the audiences flips a switch in anyone who delights in being presented a truly inexplicable mystery to be untangled. playing “dark souls” (2011) made me feel the same way i did as a child trying to make sense of the unsettling, eerie, dead world of “myst” (1993). or feeling like i was truly, truly on my own in the hostile, foreign world of “morrowind” (2002). it scratched the itch i had been chasing since first playing “shadow of the colossus” (2005) as a teen; i was given no direction except to go forth and was expected to carve out a path on my own.

what a fucking breath of fresh air to be given a gaming experience by a group of devs who don’t assume that you’re a total idiot! by the time i finally played it, the first “dark souls” game was really showing its age visually, but it gripped me in a way no other video game has managed to. and so has every fromsoft game since.

this disease has some downsides. symptoms include making tenuous connections between fiction and reality, fundamental misunderstandings of the mechanics of storytelling and/or video game coding, and incessant babbling in word salad sentences like “the lake of mud is real and you can kill a secret moon presence there”. “bloodborne” presents the least straightforward plot and so, consequently, it draws out the most outlandish and wild speculation to explain away its strangeness. many suffering from this syndrome will try to compile their thoughts and theories in vain attempts to make sense of the senseless. to the outside observer, these diatribes look like the ravings of complete madmen, lost in the sauce of “lore”. the origin of using the word “lore” as a tongue-in-cheek joke about overthinking/analyzing individual elements of a story comes from these observable behaviors. we know. we’re sorry.

in order to cope with this dreadful hunter’s curse, i will be writing all this shit down in a permanent location, laid out as straight forwardly as possible, in the hopes that my attempts at explanations will be entertaining to both fellow bloodborne lore psychos and people i affectionately call “fandom rubberneckers”. i understand you. i too trawl wikis of franchises and entertainment i have no intention of playing or experiencing firsthand.

but much like how you need to first make the universe in order to make an apple pie, we must first understand the entire, sordid history of yharnam before we can even begin to try to figure out what that little scamp, the hunter, was up to.

though i do this out of a love of the game, mystery, and a simple love of being right online, this has proven to be a huge effort. any support in the form of sharing this with your bloodborne loving friends or a little tip for my trouble would be greatly appreciated.