Bloodborne Lore

Guys, this game is driving me insane. I just beat the DLC for the first time last night and I've become completely obsessed with trying to connect the dots of plot and lore it gives you.

But I just keep finding more and more questions. Like, what exactly are Blood Echoes, and why does Moon Presence want them? Who or what the fuck is Formless Oedon? What was the whole deal with (the Orphan of) Kos and what does Gerhman have to do with it? Why are the Winter Lanterns just damaged Dolls with heads made of eyes and Messengers? Why are there Messengers all over the Brain of Mensis and on the stomachs of Crawlers?

Is there a support group for people like me? I'm on the verge of making a room-sized conspiracy theory chart with red string connecting everything.

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Soulsborne lore is just fanfiction by 16 year olds.

Just go to /bbg/, or read the paleblood hunt. It's the reference work on this

Google "The Paleblood Hunt" by Redgrave, someone wrote a 90 page essay trying to figure out the plot line.

>Who or what the fuck is Formless Oedon
It's a great one and father of Mergo

nothing of it makes sense. you can make a nice little fan theory like the paleblood hunt guy did but in the end you'll just come up with a bunch of loose ends. i suggest leaving it

Blood Echoes and the Moon Presence are intentionally left a mystery to play off of that cosmic horror 'fear of the unknown and unknowable' trope. They're obviously important because the entirety of Yharnam and all the other Great One's conspiracies are all just in service to the Moon Presence, the master ruseman, getting more and more echoes. Humanity in it's current state only exists for this one space monster to farm celestial bitcoins from our memories in our blood, and we don't even know what he uses them for. Not knowing and the thoughts you'd have in that situation is scarier than just knowing what it's doing with the Blood Echoes. Formless Oedon is perhaps the most involved Great One in the plot second only to the Moon Presence itself, and basically his physical existence is microbes inside everyone's blood, and Oedon blood from the Oedon chapel that becomes a sort of secondary hub allows him to impregnate human women in the Great One's never ending quest to have a kid that doesn't die and is also equal in power to themselves. This also plays into the Moon Presence's creepiness, since he's the oldest and most alien of the Great Ones and the only one not interested in having kids.

Paleblood Hunt doesn't include the blindingly obvious parallels and references to Christianity, Catholicism in particular, which makes the game make more sense.

The Workshop uses the power of an Old One to kill Old Ones who want to fuck around with people.
Byrgenwerth uses the power of an old One to seal the real world from easy Old One incursion.
The Church (Choir in particular) use the blood of an Old One to try to become them, and it keeps backfiring.
Mensis made a deal with an Old One, they help its child be born, in return, they are collectively reborn as an Old One (the One Reborn was a dry run of this).
That's 90% of the game's backstory.

>They're obviously important because the entirety of Yharnam and all the other Great One's conspiracies are all just in service to the Moon Presence, the master ruseman, getting more and more echoes.
Moon Presence just wants to hang out in the Dream and help his homies kill other Old Ones, don't bully the Moon Presence.

>he blindingly obvious parallels and references to Christianity, Catholicism in particular
Oh no you're not that faggot who keeps claiming that Oedon is Jesus, are you ?

As for Kos, Kos was a Great One that died mysteriously in the physical realm and washed up on a beach near a fishing hamlet. Her corpse granted bounty and life to the area surrounding it so the inhabitants turned into fish people but didn't mind because they were blessed and gained insight. Also it ripped the fishing hamlet out of the physical world and into the dream world. Eventually Byrgenwerth College showed up and decided to crack open the skulls of the fish people to see if there were eyes lining their brain like Willem hypothesised, but this pissed off the Orphan, who was the reason Kos died ( great Ones can't have kids who can surpass themselves without giving up their own life, which Kos did for her child) and so the Byrgenwerth scholars started cutting up his mother's corpse as well looking for eyes inside a genuine Great One but this pissed the Orphan off yet further. He placed a curse on the Byrgenwerth scholars and their 'children' too, children being metaphorical. Failing to find any evidence that supported Willem's idea of eyes granting insight, the scholars all flocked to Laurence's idea that it was blood that would lead them to ascendance and accelerated evolution. IT turned out that the Orphan's curse was that the scholars and any groups who succeeded them would all end up trapped in the fishing hamlet dream realm after death and be tortured for eternity. This became the Hunter's Nightmare and it only grew as the church's misdeeds grew, with the player arriving on the top layer and trying to reach the bottom to discover the truth. Eventually we beat the shit out of the Orphan who has remained in the rotting womb of his mother so long he's grown old without seeing daylight, and we teach him to move on and after slaying his physical form and forcing him to return to the sea and take up his mother's role as a sea god, lifting the curse and learning that there really is hope for renewal and that hate gets you nowhere.

>Christianity, Catholicism in particular
Nice try, religion-shitter. Nobody cares about your mythology and you will end up in the discarded pile of history soon.

He's gotta be doing something with all those blood echoes though. We never find out what he's doing with them or what they even are aside from holding memories of the people they've been in. Does he just want to watch dream tv all day? In that case, why does he hate other Old Ones having kids? He's hiding something damn it, and I'll wring it out of you if I god damn have to you Mensis fuckwad.

>after slaying his physical form and forcing him to return to the sea and take up his mother's role as a sea god, lifting the curse and learning that there really is hope for renewal and that hate gets you nowhere.
That's fanfiction at this point

Not him but it did seem like a particularly hopeful ending in terms of what we generally get from these games.

Exactly, Orphan probably stays dead after the hunter kills him and that's it.

Fucking impossible captchas

I don't think Oedon is Jesus and I'm an atheist.
It's just that playing through the game I got the impression that this all came from a nightmare that happens when a young Buddhist boy reads up on Christian history and gets nightmares from it.
You'd have to blind and totally uncultured not to see it.

But you go up to his spirit clinging to his mother's corpse and smack it he returns to the sea with a cutscene and everything.

youtube.com/watch?v=0QBx5DG1LrU

>Every Great One loses its child, and then yearns for a surrogate. The Third Umbilical Cord precipitated the encounter with the pale moon, which beckoned the hunters and conceived the hunter's dream
He's obviously planning on building a blood baby.

>humans return to earth
>sea creatures return to sea
It's a metaphor, user

There is no monotheism in BB. The only thing resembling to catholicism is the global imagery and the organization of the church. They know different great ones exist and strive to ascend to them

I do believe that it wasn't Kos' corpse that sent the fishing hamlet in the dream, but it was the Orphan that cursed Byrgenwerth that put the hamlet, the clocktower, and the hunter's nightmare in a nightmare.

How much blood would you need to make a baby? Not too much I don't think. Unless he wants to compress it so hard that it becomes solid like flesh. But that'd be gross.

This. The fishing hamlet was a normal place in reality and it's only after brygenworth fuck their shit up that the orphan drags them all into a nightmare

>Every Great One loses its child, and then yearns for a surrogate
So does that mean that Gherman and you in one of the endings are its surrogate child?

Or the doll.
It has eyes on the inside, ya know.

So how do the great Ones always lose their child? Is it like a biological thing that their children just can't make it to adulthood without them dying to give their children their power or is it a sort of they kill each others children every time without fail.

>So how do the great Ones always lose their child?
They don't. The part of the dream which encompasses Earth is an insane asylum for Great Ones.

The latter most probably. If Oedons child Mergo was doomed to die biologically then Moon presence wouldn't have sent a legion of hunters out to slay it.

UNLESS it was normally doomed to die but the wet nurse was artificially keeping it alive...hmmm....

I do believe that Mergo is already dead in the "real" world but kept alive in Mensis by the Wet Nurse

If you take the thing about great ones not being able to have children who surpass themselves without dying, wasn't the Moon Presence trying to have a kid also? It used the Blood Echoes you collected to make you stronger, it kept you in the hunt where you could grow your eyes in the inside, and in the end if you were worthy you were born as tiny Squid Old One after killing it.

>Formless Oedon is midichlorians

OF COURSE!

Seems likely, considering it presses it's face-hole unto your bellybutton. It's more like an adaptation I think. Because when you consume the Umbilical Chords and beat him, you become a very underdeveloped slug-squid and get the "Childhood's Beginning" trophy.

Freeing yourself from Moon Presences control means you can take his place over the Dream, reshaping the world and transforming yourself into a new Great One, I think.

Also, a side note, because he's MOON Presence, his ability to change the moon phases indicates his control over the Dream and everyone in it. The moon irl and in real world myth, controls tides, menstrual cycles/reproduction, your level of sanity (there's actually real world statistics on crimes and the vividness of dreams), and secrets and magic (the witches sabbath folklore). Once "the night ends"/you wake up in the sun, you're free from him.

But, what I'm wondering is if it's really him that's creating and regulating the Hunter's Nightmare. Because the moon there looks corrupted and occluded, then disappears when you kill the Orphan of Kos.

Also also, he's clearly Nyralathotep from Lovecraft's stories, and he's the only Old One who actively interacts with humans, sometimes taking human forms. Which makes me think the Blood Minister in the first cutscene is also him.

I think what Moon Presence really wanted was a new Gerhman, and that you killing it wasn't part of it's plan.

Most of the other "Old Ones" you kill don't seem to be legit Old Ones or are so lame they don't matter.
-Rom was apparently a human student of Wilhelm, transformed.
-Celestial Emissaries were human orphans, transformed by the Choir.
-Amygdala's only seem to function as gates into different parts of the dream. Which makes sense, considering they're named after a part of the brain.
-The Brain of Mensis was a diseased mess.
-Kos was dead, it's Orphan seemed sorta deformed.
-Ebrietas was "abandoned" for some reason, and was weeping over the corpse of the real "Rom". She led to a bunch of medical development though.
-Mergo's Wet Nurse might only exist to look after Mergo. Doesn't seem to do fuck all else.

Moon Presence by far does the most in the game, making up the entire nightmare and levelling system.

>Wilhelm
Willem. He's not some god-damned kraut.

I like to think the eye/moon in the nightmare is a representation of Kos' curse. She's watching the hunters for eternity with a baleful eye.

I highly doubt the Moon Presence is in control of each nightmare realm.

Sorry, all the talk of making a superior race made me think of Germany.

It's all a dream

That's kind of the point. The story isn't meant to be 100% coherent. It's incomplete to make you feel like a Lovecraft protagonist when you try and understand it.

That's the true genius of Bloodborne. It doesn't tell a good story, it tells a story that gets stuck in your head for months and drives you crazy to think about. The real Madman's Knowledge was in you ask along.

The beast curse came from Loran. They were cursed by one of the old ones because they were having bastards as the betrothal ring says the Old Ones considered marriage a sacred thing. The curse by Orphan affects Hunters only and causes them to go blood drunk, most of the hunters you meet in game are blood drunk which is why they attack you. Eventually the blood drunk hunter will be brought to the hunters nightmare which was created Maria in a deal with the Orphan. In the hunters nightmare the hunters can fight and kill for eternity which is either hell or paradise depending on how far they are gone. Gherman and Maria were part of the original group that murderraped their way through the hamlet, but he is also claimed by the moon presence so he can't be pulled into the nightmare and eventually find rest in mindlessness.

yes, all great oned try to create a dreamscape where they can hide. They need to bond with humans to create the dreamscape which varies based on amount of people and their own personal values.
>Nightmare of Mensis was all fucked up and jagged because like 100 people were pulled into it
>Hunter's Nightmare was a hodge podge of different areas in Yharnam because it was made out of the hunters
>Hunter's Dream is the workshop because it's only Gherman
When you ate the umbilical cords you weren't human anymore so the MP couldn't turn you into the dream host

Moon Presence is Mommy ayy lmao what needs make babby with u

Pretty much this

The game tells you everything it wants to tell you, there's not much more than that. Souls games in general are better aesthetic experiences than actual stories, FromSoft simply refuses to do more involved plots even though they easily could.

The Old Hunters was a step in the right direction though.