“ah fuck. i can’t believe you’ve done this.”
“noooooo!!” i can hear you scream from across the globe. “not another fucking fromsoft lore guy!”
i too have this inexplicable mental disease that causes you to write way too many words about video games and care way too much. in order to cope with this, 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. and i know that if you were to scour any of the 1284175367465 bloodborne wikis, you wind up knowing less about bloodborne than you did originally. its incomprehensible……and we LIKE IT that way!!!
in order to make it clear which bits are non-canon, i will post pure speculation in italics and important nouns in bold. i am peppering this with as many wiki links as possible to back up my claims. not gonna lie this looks like a fucking MAD magazine editor went to town on it or like the timecube website submitted a guest article.
but much like how you need to first make the universe in order to make an apple pie, we must first talk about the history of yharnam before we can talk about what that little scamp, the hunter, was up to.
if you enjoyed this, consider throwing a little cash my way. i’m embarrassed at how much time and effort i put into this.please help me justify it to myself.
donation link
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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- foreword: explaining the fromsoft game design ethos and the perils of taking shit too seriously
- common misconceptions
- history of yharnam:
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- history of yharnam part 1: the founding of pthumeru, cainhurst and the labyrinth, the discovery by byrgenwerth
- history of yharnam part 2: fishing hamlet, caryll and the runes, leaving byrgenwerth
- history of yharnam part 3: research hall, maria, and gehrman
- history of yharnam part 4: the raid on castle cainhurst, logarius, and ludwig
- history of yharnam part 5: lower pthumeru, rom, and the bloodletting beast
- history of yharnam part 6: the choir, kin, and ebrietas
- history of yharnam part 7: the school of mensis, ailing loran, and yahar’gul
- INTERMISSION: is ebrietas the source of the healing church blood?
- history of yharnam part 8: silver, black, and white
- history of yharnam part 9: laurence, djura, and brador
- history of yharnam part 10: the night unfurls
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- contemporary yharnam history (wip)
- hunter’s dream
- the hunter
- cleric beast
- blood-starved beast
- terror/pthumeru
- watchers/more pthumeru
- hail the nightmare
- darkbeast
- the witch of hemwick
- amygdala
- rom, the vacuous spider
- moonlit melody
- false god hymn
- the one reborn
- micolash
- of the pthumerian line
- queen of vilebloods
- soothing hymn
- celestial emmissary
- ebrietas, daughter of the cosmos
- lullaby for mergo
- the first hunter
- moon presence
- ludwig, the accursed/ludwig, the holy blade
- living failures
- lady maria of the astral clocktower
- orphan of kos
- appendix
THIS GARBAGE OWES ITS EXISTENCE TO THESE RESOURCES:
- LastProtagonist’s Bloodborne Japanese Retranslation Guide – an exhaustive effort that took years of effort. i cannot even imagine lol. thanks, chiefs.
- bloodborne-wiki.com – the driest, but most technically correct informative resource on bloodborne on the web
- bloodborne.fandom.com – for quick reference with visuals in an easier format than the above wiki
- r/tombprospectors – who were exploring the chalice dungeons manually for years cataloguing EVERY chalice you could possibly generate.
- some thoughtful translation and insightful explanatory work about boss names (and great illustrations) from shetani of shetani’s lair
- the time and labor intensive ps4 datamining work of:
i recommend reading this with the great map by hypn0tyk hosted on bloodborne-wiki open in a tab so you can try to keep locations straight. try being the operative word.
if you find anything that’s egregiously wrong please send me a little email or something so i can become more sick by thinking about it.