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Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Cardiovorax posted:

Gascoigne is a hunter, but he isn't a Hunter. He's not bound to the dream anymore, if he ever was. That's only for people like ourselves who are on a Great Hunt.

Beastification doesn't seem to be something that affects even most small-h hunters very quickly, though. Gascoigne is described as being an old hunter, someone who has been around since nearly the beginning, like Gehrman. The way Eileen the Crow speaks about them, this actually happens less often than you'd think.

Come to think of it, the Wretched Beggar can still talk even after he transforms, so there may be something to Lord_Magmar's "not all bad" notion about beast transformations.

Gascoigne actually isn’t an Old Hunter, he’s partnered with Henryk who is very old but Gascoigne is maybe 30/40. Personally my theory is Henryk is Viola’s father and that’s how Gascoigne met his wife.

Henryk is the tragically old hunter because everyone around him keeps dying, basically. Gascoigne never dreamed yeah, the only ones we know for certain Dreamed are Eileen and Djura, who both make direct references to either the Doll or the ability to go to the dream and awaken in the real world.

I once tried to work out the Hunter generations and I think I got pretty close. Gascoigne is of the one before the player character basically, Henryk is the same generation as Eileen and Djura, with nobody from the original generation, Maria and other apprentices of Gehrmann, still “alive”. The first Crow Hunter likely either taught Eileen or taugh the person who would teach Eileen.

Also yeah the Hunter’s Mark is specific to the Hunters of the Dream, it’s the Great One equivalent of a contract I suspect. Which is related to why I don’t think the Moon Friend is malicious.

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Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
Duly noted. Still, it's implicit that he has been doing it for years at least, so whatever the process is, it isn't fast. Henryk definitely is an old hunter and he hung around for what we can assume are probably decades, you'd know that more precisely than I do.

quote:

Also yeah the Hunter’s Mark is specific to the Hunters of the Dream, it’s the Great One equivalent of a contract I suspect.
It is a contract. Explicitly. "There you go, all signed and sealed."

voiceless anal fricative
May 6, 2007

Well also the wretched beggar can go back and forth. That plus the fact that this isn't the first hunt, I'd mostly imagined it as a Purge kind of situation where everyone beasts out every so often but then when the hunt is over everyone goes back to normal.

Otherwise how would Yharnam even still exist?

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
Many characters, including the weird deformed beggar in Oedon Chapel, will point out to you that it has never been this bad before, and that Yharnam may actually not come back from the brink this time. Usually, Hunters probably act more like actual hunters, chasing down and slaughtering individual beasts that spring up from the population.

The Yharnam you see is basically in a state of emergency. The last time it was that bad was, I think, when they burned down Old Yharnam in response, sooo...

voiceless anal fricative
May 6, 2007

Cardiovorax posted:

Many characters, including the weird deformed beggar in Oedon Chapel, will point out to you that it has never been this bad before, and that Yharnam may actually not come back from the brink this time. Usually, Hunters probably act more like actual hunters, chasing down and slaughtering individual beasts that spring up from the population.

The Yharnam you see is basically in a state of emergency. The last time it was that bad was, I think, when they burned down Old Yharnam in response, sooo...

Ya and the fact that this particular night will never end, that the moon is drawing too close, etc. But I still think it's likely that any beasts leftover at the end of the night will transform back into people when it's over.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Oh also a slight correction to the video, the Ancient Echoes line from the Doll is to do with killing Rom, or at least that is the earliest I’ve seen it trigger.

The contract at the start is a standard medical contract I’m pretty sure, the fact we also got suckered into the Hunter’s Dream is unique to the player and likely due to being in the wrong place at the right time to start the Hunt.

I ended up with between 5 and 7 Hunter generations in Yharnam depending on how you want to count. The First Hunter’s of Yharnam (Gehrman and his apprentices) alongside the Vilebloods (not Hunter’s but help for timing of Maria etc.) the Executioners are likely older than the Hunters and Vilebloods; then the Church Hunters led by Ludwig and likely inspired by the Executioners attack on Cainhurst; then the Oto and Powder Keg Hunters, who experienced a similar night to our own in which Djura was the Dreamer and ended with the Burning of Old Yharnam, most of the living old hunters we meet are this generation (Eileen, Djura, Henryk etc.); next is the Choir and Yahar’gul Hunters, specialised forces for the two groups formed in response to the Burning of Old Yharnam and the loss of the Pthumeria Chalice; last we have Gascoigne’s generation, which I will refer to as the fractured generation, most of the Hunters in game are this generation and have an incredibly eclectic mix of motivations and styles and most importantly lack the level of coordination of the past generations.

The two extra generations are if you want to consider Gehrman a generation on his own before he gained his apprentices, and if you want the player and Alfred to be seperate from the fractured Generation. Roughly each generation lasts 10 to 20 years and then a few members stick around to teach the newer generations. This does of course put Master Willem at well over 100 years old given he was an old man when Gehrman and Laurence were at Byrgenwerth.

Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Dec 6, 2018

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Lord_Magmar posted:

The contract at the start is a standard medical contract I’m pretty sure, the fact we also got suckered into the Hunter’s Dream is unique to the player and likely due to being in the wrong place at the right time to start the Hunt.
I think there's more to it than that, if only because it would be kind of pathetic and really not dramatically appropriate for this to be true. Hunters have been becoming Hunters for years, possibly decades, and it's not impossible for me to imagine that the Moon Friend has agents out there in the world who look out for prospective marks to Contract.

The Dream reminds me a whole lot of Persona's Velvet Room in that way, which I think may be intentional. We might not have known quite what we were doing, but we entered into it entirely out of our own free will.

...and really, does the Healing Church seem like the types to care about medical liability to you?

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Cardiovorax posted:

.
...and really, does the Healing Church seem like the types to care about medical liability to you?

The Church no, Iosefka whose clinic we went to for treatment yes, she outright refuses to let you or anyone else in once the Hunt begins to avoid infection and danger.

But it could go either way, personally I think the Nightmare we have after the transfusion is the player character being chosen by the Moon Friend to be a Hunter. Hence literally burning the beast blood and the messengers crawling all over us. But it could have been we made the contract and then had the Nightmare/vision instead of the vision being caused by becoming a Hunter of the Dream.

Also either way we got suckered in, we came for healing not becoming a Hunter who must end the Hunt tonight and save the city. Look at Djura, whose experience broke him just about.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

quote:

But it could have been we made the contract and then had the Nightmare/vision instead of the vision being caused by becoming a Hunter of the Dream.
Another reason I find this more likely is that "contract" always implies a degree of knowing intent. With something that lives in dreams and meanings as much as the Great Ones do, I think this would be capital-I Important to them. You can't become a contracted hunter entirely unwittingly any more than you can sell your soul to the devil because he showed up at your door and asked you to sign for a package.

Well, that's how it makes narrative sense to me, anyway.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Dec 6, 2018

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


See I go the other way, everything about the player character suggests they were a foreigner who came for blood healing and ended up only being able to get it from Iosefka’s clinic, the Hunt and the Dream are not intended and likely a huge surprise. It really could be either way but the game offers enough support that I think the Hunter’s Dream was an unwanted surprise not an intentional contract. Admittedly the amnesia makes anything possible.

Maybe the contract isn’t standard but our character was in Yharnam for the healing not the hunting of that I have no doubt. Gascoigne possibly came for the Hunting, his title is not native to the Healing Church in origin and he’s become separated from the Cburch by his family and partnership with Henryk. So I assume he came to Yharnam and basically found a new religion.

Basically he’s a catholic converted to the ways of the healing church, possibly.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
Jill definitely got bamboozled by the Blood Minister, it's as factual as it gets that the contract we signed was one conscripting us to be a Hunter. The Doll refers to you as a hunter 2 minutes of cutscene later, there's a note left for us in the Hunter's Dream that tells us what we have to do to be released from the contract, and there is no other time or place where a contract could have been signed (or agreed to). Arguing otherwise is being pedantic for no reason imo.

edit:



As per the manual, Jill came to Yharnam seeking treatment for some affliction, likely assumed she was in the right spot to be treated, and she did get treated with Yharnam's healing blood by the Blood Minister... with the catch-22 being that now she can absorb blood echoes and has been enlisted to be a hunter.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Dec 6, 2018

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
It really adds up to "both of this is correct." Jill didn't see it coming, but it's absolutely signing the contract that got her the job.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
Also Jill freaks out when a werewolf suddenly climbs out of a pile of blood and then sets on fire and then little gribbly guys crawl out of the ether and start wiggling all over her, so I think it's safe to say she had no idea what she was getting into.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

CJacobs posted:

Also Jill freaks out when a werewolf suddenly climbs out of a pile of blood and then sets on fire and then little gribbly guys crawl out of the ether and start wiggling all over her, so I think it's safe to say she had no idea what she was getting into.

Yharnam: Come to get your cancer fixed, get tricked into becoming a crazy strong vampire warrior hopped up on super blood and conscripted to fight the moon (kind of).

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Night10194 posted:

Yharnam: Come to get your cancer fixed, get tricked into becoming a crazy strong vampire warrior hopped up on super blood and conscripted to fight the moon (kind of).

Not fight the moon, fight for the moon. I can actually give a small sneak peak to the crux of my theory of everything Bloodborne that I'll probably write out once we're done with the finale, Laurence is the worst and nearly everything is his fault in modern Yharnam.

Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Dec 6, 2018

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
:v: Of course, if you're already willing to go to Crazy "this is where all the weirdoes live" Vampire Town to get your incurable disease treated, you're probably hard up enough up for it that you don't really read fine print anymore anyway.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
Yeah for as determined as Jill has been, I think it's safe to say that she would've scored a solid 0 on the Yharnam Insight Aptitude Exam before signing the contract. Gilbert is able to recognize that she's not from Yharnam (like him) after the very first thing she says to him, so she definitely did not fit in with the local color even before said color turned blood red.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Cardiovorax posted:

:v: Of course, if you're already willing to go to Crazy "this is where all the weirdoes live" Vampire Town to get your incurable disease treated, you're probably hard up enough up for it that you don't really read fine print anymore anyway.

This one isn't actually advertised, funnily enough, as Gilbert suggests the only thing people know about Yharnam before they show up is the healing blood and then they discover the full nonsense and it all goes wrong for them.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

CJacobs posted:

Yeah for as determined as Jill has been, I think it's safe to say that she would've scored a solid 0 on the Yharnam Insight Aptitude Exam before signing the contract. Gilbert is able to recognize that she's not from Yharnam (like him) after the very first thing she says to him, so she definitely did not fit in with the local color even before said color turned blood red.

Her starting clothes were too stylin' for Yharnam.

Not to say there are not many excellent and stylin' clothes to be had in Yharnam.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
Isn't it explicitly said that people outside Yharnam think of it as a degenerate place full of madmen with no kind of moral compass? CJ makes a point of it in one of the early videos. The outsiders clearly have some kind of idea that things are very wrong in Yharnam. They just come there anyway, if they're desperate enough and have no other hope left.

Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Dec 6, 2018

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
Yes, it's brought up very briefly... somewhere, but it's also mentioned in passing in the blurb above. People outside of Yharnam know very well that they make alcoholic benders out of blood and liquor like goddamn weirdos, and as Lord Magmar (I think?) pointed out a page or so ago there are beasts to be found in the wild out there. The awful stuff that goes on in Yharnam and the blood itself have both leaked out into the outside world at some point in the past.

Night10194 posted:

Her starting clothes were too stylin' for Yharnam.

Not to say there are not many excellent and stylin' clothes to be had in Yharnam.

I am glad Brador's clothes bring back the starting gear with appropriate defense stats and fancy fur coat included because it looks both stylin and gnarly.

edit: Oh, it's the Constable Set, Valtr's clothes:

quote:

"Once upon a time a troupe of foreign constables chased a beast all the way to Yahrnam, and this is what they wore.
The constables became victims of the beast, except for one survivor, who in turn devoured the creature whole, all by himself.
The fable is a favorite among Yahrnamites, who are partial to any stories of pompous, intolerant foreigners, who suffer for their ignorance. It makes the blood taste that much sweeter."

From the Yharnam citizens' perspective, foreigners who don't live a life of indulging in blood are the pompous upturned nose jerks. But to normal people like, I dunno, us, they are crazy weirdos.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Dec 6, 2018

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
One more reason why Valtr Beast-Eater is the most awesome NPC. Not even the freaky hairy blood addicts can deny how hardcore he is.

voiceless anal fricative
May 6, 2007

Valtr is the Bloodborne equivalent of a DnD lawful good paladin

marshmallow creep
Dec 10, 2008

I've been sitting here for 5 mins trying to think of a joke to make but I just realised the animators of Mass Effect already did it for me

I'm still not sure where the Blood Minister went after he got us to sign the contract, but I wonder if maybe there never really was a blood minister, and our visit with him and signing the contract was an illusion created to get us to take the contract and serve, making the minister an extension of a great one. We never do see that character again; they serve their purpose and are whisked away.

thetruegentleman
Feb 5, 2011

You call that potato a Trump avatar?

THIS is a Trump Avatar!

CJacobs posted:

Yeah for as determined as Jill has been, I think it's safe to say that she would've scored a solid 0 on the Yharnam Insight Aptitude Exam before signing the contract. Gilbert is able to recognize that she's not from Yharnam (like him) after the very first thing she says to him, so she definitely did not fit in with the local color even before said color turned blood red.

In fairness, accents are a thing, since Eileen has a weird one and she's probably from the "hinterlands," so the player might have one as well. Yharnamites also might be able to tell the difference through smell, since they can apparently smell "the moon" on people, and so can presumably smell a lack of Cold Blood as well.

Also, as a fun but mostly irrelevant sidenote, the Mensis Cage gives pretty good Arcane resistance, but really, really bad Frenzy resist; like, worse than a random hat bad. And all the dudes who wore one ended up sharing a house with a monster that gives Frenzy by line of sight. Whoops!

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


marshmallow creep posted:

I'm still not sure where the Blood Minister went after he got us to sign the contract, but I wonder if maybe there never really was a blood minister, and our visit with him and signing the contract was an illusion created to get us to take the contract and serve, making the minister an extension of a great one. We never do see that character again; they serve their purpose and are whisked away.

I always assumed he turned into that first werewolf, it's half dead and he's in a wheelchair.

voiceless anal fricative
May 6, 2007

I thought he ended up as one of the aliens in Iosefka's clinic? There's a wheelchair in there near one of the aliens.

White Coke
May 29, 2015
So is the Yarnham gameplay takes place in part of the dream or the real world? I've seen theories going either way and I don't know what to think.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


White Coke posted:

So is the Yarnham gameplay takes place in part of the dream or the real world? I've seen theories going either way and I don't know what to think.

Both are possible, personally I think Yharnam is real and being encroached by the dreamlands more and more over the night. With Yahar'gul basically being in one but not yet.

There's certain features of the Nightmares/Dreams that Yharnam doesn't have as far as we know. A host, for one, a Great One powering it, for the other. Ebrietas could be doing one of these things but it's part of her lore that she was left behind when the other Great Ones ascended near the end of the Pthumerian Civilisation.

Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Dec 6, 2018

voiceless anal fricative
May 6, 2007

I think the fact that the custscene after you beat the final boss shows the sun rising over Yharnam indicates it's not a dream

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
It's a little too early to start talking about the endings, but I will be covering whether I think the game's events happened in the real Yharnam in the real world, such as it is. Personally I think everything that has happened has been literal- any confusion about dreams and nightmares stems from the names of the two alternate planes we visit, and the human world is as real as it gets during the game's events. But one thing to consider is that, technically speaking, there is no real world. Yharnam is just another one of the many dimensional planes stacked on top of Bloodborne's cosmic world like tetris blocks.

Fish Noise
Jul 25, 2012

IT'S ME, BURROWS!

IT WAS ME ALL ALONG, BURROWS!

Cardiovorax posted:

One more reason why Valtr Beast-Eater is the most awesome NPC. Not even the freaky hairy blood addicts can deny how hardcore he is.
He just wanted his friends back :smith:

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Fish Noise posted:

He just wanted his friends back :smith:
:smith:

quote:

But one thing to consider is that, technically speaking, there is no real world. Yharnam is just another one of the many dimensional planes stacked on top of Bloodborne's cosmic world like tetris blocks.
Or, as it were, that they're all real. Bloodborne leans really heavily on Lovecraft's Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath for its setting and we can fairly confidently take from this that the Dream-Lands are very real.

I mean, they're at leasts real enough that you can take a weapon home that you found there and smack a dude with it back in Yharnam - and at that point, "realness" is just a matter of degrees.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
I guess what I meant was, there's no "prime" dimension. Bloodborne doesn't have a World-Zero from which all the other stuff spawned, it just is a big coexisting spaghetti knot multiverse and presumably always has been. In a lot of science fiction and horror fiction, the dimension in which the protagonist comes from is treated as the bonafide original, which is why The Upside-Down is called The Upside-Down and not The Other Dimension That Exists Parallel To Our World for example. Not so in Bloodborne.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Yeah fair, although I think it's worth noting that the Dream Worlds are born of the powers of Great Ones and fragments of the real world, as far as we know this is not true of the dimension Yharnam is in.

I also don't think you can ever see actual Yharnam from any of the Dreamworlds, the one you see in the Hunter's Nightmare Fishing Hamlet is actually the one you fight through to reach Ludwig, just all the bits you didn't see.

Certainly the Dreamlands we visit so far are all formed based on places in the waking world, Hunter's Nightmare is obvious as Yharnam and the Fishing Hamlet, the Nightmare Frontier is potentially Loran, and the Nightmare of Mensis is Pthumerian in origin I believe, plus Mensis Scholar additions, The Hunter's Dream is the Workshop. The Lake where Rom is probably the most "unique" dreamland and it's made by a Great One said to be Vacuous.

Even the Lecture Hall appears to have been part of Byrgenwerth before it got stranded in the Dreamlands.

All of this leads me to believe that while the dreams are certainly real, they weren't before they were created, the dreamlands as a whole may be another plane of existence but it's one with no substance until shaped by the mind of a Great One or Human Host.

Basically the plane Yharnam is part of always has been so, whereas the Nightmares and Dreams formed later as far as I can tell. Likely without a mind shaping them they're all like the pit you find the big brain in, empty void with nothing but Great Ones living in the darkness.

Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Dec 6, 2018

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!


The night, and the dream... were long.

LGBT War Machine
Dec 20, 2004

ooooohawwww Mildred
Thanks for yet another excellent playthrough. I have no intention of playing this game, it isn't really my thing, but I have really enjoyed your LP and the explanations you gave during each episode. Very much looking forward to your next one.

mortons stork
Oct 13, 2012
So wait, the Moon presence was causing the hunt, and not Mergo? I always read it as the birth of a great one causing the blood to go haywire. drat. And since the hunt is periodic, how the gently caress is Yharnam supposed to get back up after this one, which destroyed it pretty much entirely?

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
Presumably they won't, much like the other realms destroyed by the beast scourge. Great Isz, Ailing Loran, etc. This kind of thing has pretty explicitly happened before, although maybe not for the same reasons.

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ChaseSP
Mar 25, 2013



Yharnam is hosed with a scant 3 people surviving in this playthrough, one of which being fully insane.

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