Can someone explain the 'good' Bloodborne ending to me?

Okamisama

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zimou13 said:
As someone who has never played any of the souls games or Bloodborne I thought I'd come here to see why you guys like the game so much. From the gameplay I've watched it really looks uninteresting. I'm not trying to come off hostile, I'm actually hoping to be dissuaded. However, from what I've seen the character creation looks really outdated. The beginning has virtually no story, you're just thrown into this world and you're supposed to save it. Why should I care about saving a world I know nothing about? Most of the enemies (like the ones who are dead and get up and attack you) look pretty lame, looks like something out of Resident Evil 4. There are almost no NPC's and no dialogue choices. The variety of weapons and armor seems limited. Overall it looks like Resident Evil 4 in the 19th century. Resident Evil 4 was awesome in 2005, but ten years later I hold games to a higher standard. TL;DR: It just looks like Resident Evil 4 with less guns and more meelee
Nothing's gonna get explained to some piece of rotten jism spam bot, get the f#%k out.
 

Casual Shinji

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Silentpony said:
See I hope not. To me, leaving it all vague and open to interpretation is lazy story-writing. In fact, its a lack of story-writing.

Just throw a bunch of weird squid monsters at the player, have a spooky lady say 'The world is not enough' and then a cat moos, and then we the player are left to try to understand what the hell is going on.
Just because it's vague and largely left open to interpretation, doesn't mean it's just random ideas thrown at the wall. There's werewolves and aliens in Bloodborne, and even without a direct explanation the game manages to make these two different concepts work together within the world.

Most Souls fans make a big deal about reading item discriptions, and how the story is told through that. But I never bothered doing that with any of the games I played, and I still found these settings facinating. And that's mainly what the "writing" seems to be in service of; creating a setting that feels like it has a lot of history, but that you can never truly parse. This in turn leaves you with a sense of unease, that you can never fully understand these worlds.
 

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Casual Shinji said:
Silentpony said:
See I hope not. To me, leaving it all vague and open to interpretation is lazy story-writing. In fact, its a lack of story-writing.

Just throw a bunch of weird squid monsters at the player, have a spooky lady say 'The world is not enough' and then a cat moos, and then we the player are left to try to understand what the hell is going on.
Just because it's vague and largely left open to interpretation, doesn't mean it's just random ideas thrown at the wall. There's werewolves and aliens in Bloodborne, and even without a direct explanation the game manages to make these two different concepts work together within the world.

Most Souls fans make a big deal about reading item discriptions, and how the story is told through that. But I never bothered doing that with any of the games I played, and I still found these settings facinating. And that's mainly what the "writing" seems to be in service of; creating a setting that feels like it has a lot of history, but that you can never truly parse. This in turn leaves you with a sense of unease, that you can never fully understand these worlds.
I ain't saying its not fascinating. I love it! I find the entire thing to be enthralling.
And I don't need to be led by the nose Final Fantasy style where everything is explained in minutes long dialogue trees every few seconds.
But there has to be a limit on I guess...player driven plot revelations. Like we shouldn't have to go into the audio files of the game to find hidden dialogue or sound files that hint at what the Orphan of Kos is, or wild assumptions of alien civil wars based on the fact the tentacle monster is an old one, and the daughter of the cosmos is also an old one, and nothing else.
Its that I don't like. When we're given A and B, and expected to get to Z, especially in a world where madness, misinterpretations, mistranslations and lying NPCs are involved.
 

Silvanus

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Silentpony said:
So I've been researching a little, and there are two 'realities' going on. The real world, and the dreams(Hunters dream and any nightmare realm, and post-Rom red moon land) and the Hunt takes place on both fronts, with real world normal Hunters like Eileen, Gyula and Alfred, and the Nightmare front where the player characters fight.
Well, the player Hunter travels between the realities of the "waking world" and the Hunter's Dream, as well as the Nightmare realms. He acts in both realms throughout the game.

The real Hunt-- meaning the Yharnam night in which citizens and Hunters take to the streets to quell the beasts-- takes place in the waking world. However, when Hunters go drunk with blood, they wind up in the Hunter's Nightmare, where the Hunt is never-ending. According to Simon the Harrowed, this is the fate of all Hunters eventually (though it seems Djura, at least, has managed to escape this fate, since he has successfully retired).

It's implied that the Hunter's Nightmare is the result of a curse placed on the Hunters following the massacre in the fishing hamlet.

Silentpony said:
Also those real world hunters have all already done a tour of duty on the nightmare front, fighting their own nightmares and the old one baby of the moment, and they all accepted the first ending, to return to the real world, forget the nightmare wars, and continue with the real world hunt.
Some other Hunters-- Djura and Eileen for sure-- have been in the Hunter's Dream before, and Djura has definitely met the Doll. It's never communicated why they were there, what they did, how they left for good, or whether they undertook similar "contracts" to the one the player character did.

All we really know is that "dreaming" offers a Hunter the ability to return from the dead back to the waking world (when a Hunter dies, they return to the dream). This is why when Eileen is injured after fighting the Bloody Crow, she states that this is her "last chance", specifically because she does not dream anymore.
 

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Silvanus said:
I assumed that because a new grave is added to the Hunter's Dream if you 'wake up' that the other graves were those of hunters who also chose to wake up.
And I assumed that because the other named hunters know of the Dream, the only way they could and still be in the real world is to have woken up.
 

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THe nature of the world itself in Bloodborne is wierd and fancinating. The best I've been able to make of it is that it follows the concept of Lovecrafts Dreamlands, where Dreams are just as real as the waking world but almost on another plane of reality. With that being said, Yarnhem almost seems to be existing in both the real world and dream world at the same time, like it's straddling the borders of dimensions.

The hunters nightmare, the Nightmare of Mensis and the Nightmare Frontier all seem to be on a seperate layer beyond that, Bygenworth is a wierd case where it seems to have once been part of Yarnhem and somehow drifted off into the nightmare itself(which is why it connects to the nigthtmare realms)
 

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Silentpony said:
But there has to be a limit on I guess...player driven plot revelations. Like we shouldn't have to go into the audio files of the game to find hidden dialogue or sound files that hint at what the Orphan of Kos is, or wild assumptions of alien civil wars based on the fact the tentacle monster is an old one, and the daughter of the cosmos is also an old one, and nothing else.
Its that I don't like. When we're given A and B, and expected to get to Z, especially in a world where madness, misinterpretations, mistranslations and lying NPCs are involved.
I don't think that's really the point of the game though. Again, hardcore Souls fans can lead you to believe that you NEED to read item discriptions and go digging through EVERYTHING, but honestly these worlds seem primarily designed to keep you mostly in the dark about the innerworkings.

This might piss off some people here, but I feel a lot of Souls fans overanalyze these games, and make shit up under the notion that everything in these games is connected and means something.
 

Silvanus

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Silentpony said:
Silvanus said:
I assumed that because a new grave is added to the Hunter's Dream if you 'wake up' that the other graves were those of hunters who also chose to wake up.

And I assumed that because the other named hunters know of the Dream, the only way they could and still be in the real world is to have woken up.
That's very possible. We just know so little. They certainly "woke up", but it's unclear how or why. I find it hard to believe they undertook similar contracts to that of the player Hunter-- I don't think there's any indication that the killing of Mergo is a cyclical affair, or that it happened before at all.
 

stroopwafel

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Silentpony said:
Then Lady Maria is all 'You'll never find out the secret of the fishing village' and this is the first time a secret has even been mentioned! And then, when you get to the village its just a bunch of fish people, and the Orphan of Kos boss and still no secret! I thought after I killed the Orphan there would be a cut-scene or that shadow figure would talk, but nothing. The DLC ends and no secret has been revealed and I have no idea if I did any good. Who's Kos? Why is Kos dead? Why is the Orphan a dude if Kos is a whale? Where's the Father? Why did those weird brain things ask me if I'm Maria? Why did brain juice turn the one lady into the Blob? If I just apologized to the fire monster werewolf for waking him up, can we call off the fight?
And then there's that Micolash guy who after he dies he says 'Oh no, I'm going to wake up with no memory' which for me cements the whole thing is a dream, if the fact its literally called the Hunter's Dream and the bosses are called Nightmares didn't do it.
But again, its never really confirmed and then it just kinda' ends.
The fishing village is the origin of the beast plague as this is where the Healing Church violated Kos' corpse(the whale creature). This is what caused the curse passed on from generation to generation(and led to one pissed off orphan :p). More of the Church' experiments are found in the great cathedral. When you're dressed in church garb you can also confront Ludwig about the error of his ways. I assume you mean Laurence with the 'fire werewolf' and same as Ludwig he probably became similarly corrupted in the Hunter's Nightmare after drifting so far off Willem's teachings. The Nightmare of Mensis where Mergo's Loft resides is in a separate dimension so after you kill Micolash in the nightmare he returns to his physical body which lies dead in Yahar'gul. It is where you fight The One Reborn. I'm still wondering myself though, what did Mensis actually tried to resurrect? As for the ending of the main game; with the third ending after defeating Moon Presence I always assume you are simply reborn as an infant great one.

From a gameplay perspective the different dimensions really worked as you have greatly different motiffs that would be hard to explain otherwise and they really fit in Bloodborne's dream-like world. The way they also blended it in the narrative was brilliantly done. I love this game sooooooooo much. :p

Casual Shinji said:
This might piss off some people here, but I feel a lot of Souls fans overanalyze these games, and make shit up under the notion that everything in these games is connected and means something.
The item descriptions and environmental design is very detailed so while things are left intentionally vague there is no doubt that Miyazaki has a clear picture in his mind of what the story is about. Retracing these steps and putting the story back together is one of the things that make the lore so intriguing. Like an archeologist, you become an active participant. There is a reason why these games speak to the imagination so much. The story is very good but since many things are open to interpretation you have to use your own thoughts and ideas to fill in the gaps. But still, only to a relative amount as to not contradict the story the game actually does tell. I think Bloodborne and Demon's Souls are much more straightforward in this regard compared to Dark Souls which is a lot more esoteric in much of it's content.
 

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stroopwafel said:
Casual Shinji said:
This might piss off some people here, but I feel a lot of Souls fans overanalyze these games, and make shit up under the notion that everything in these games is connected and means something.
The item descriptions and environmental design is very detailed so while things are left intentionally vague there is no doubt that Miyazaki has a clear picture in his mind of what the story is about. Retracing these steps and putting the story back together is one of the things that make the lore so intriguing. Like an archeologist, you become an active participant. There is a reason why these games speak to the imagination so much. The story is very good but since many things are open to interpretation you have to use your own thoughts and ideas to fill in the gaps. But still, only to a relative amount as to not contradict the story the game actually does tell. I think Bloodborne and Demon's Souls are much more straightforward in this regard compared to Dark Souls which is a lot more esoteric in much of it's content.
To be fair, there are some details that I think don't mean anything or are glitches. For example, the Doll has eyes in the back of her eyes, and wild theories postulate that insight is just that - sight within. A second set of eyes.
with theories about pebbles being insight eyes ripped from skulls and drained, and skulls found in the fishing village with eyesockets hacked apart and yadda yadda.

But people forget - she's a doll! Constructed and painted. and those eye have blue streaks, red smears and purple blotches. Paint. Someone painted her eyes, and those small irises were a first run at getting the eyes right. You can tell because the eyes are different sizes, and look crudely drawn, as if someone who wasn't that great at free-hand attempted eyes without practicing.

Or there's a crow in the Hemlock that doesn't go agro. Surrounded by a murder of other crows, this one crow just kinda chills. Theories about what it could mean, does this crow have insight, does it know about the dream, was it a hunter once?
and over and over, when I think its a glitch. Of the hundreds of crows in the game, this one crow has a low detection box, or part of the code blurched.

Although to play devil's advocate to myself, one of the most legit detail concerns of hardcore lore fans is mistranslations. Lots of things get lost in translation, and not just Bill Murray's career. Apparently Rom the Vacuous Spider is better translated as Rom the Retarded spider, but it was changed because that's not a PC name in the West.
Also a lot of the hes and shes on item descriptions were gender neutral in the Japanese version, leaving it even more open to debate on who did what and who owned what.
 

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Silvanus said:
Silentpony said:
Silvanus said:
I assumed that because a new grave is added to the Hunter's Dream if you 'wake up' that the other graves were those of hunters who also chose to wake up.

And I assumed that because the other named hunters know of the Dream, the only way they could and still be in the real world is to have woken up.
That's very possible. We just know so little. They certainly "woke up", but it's unclear how or why. I find it hard to believe they undertook similar contracts to that of the player Hunter-- I don't think there's any indication that the killing of Mergo is a cyclical affair, or that it happened before at all.
Hmmm...is there any indication in game that there have been other nightmare babies? Aergo, Bergo, Cergo, Dergo, etc...and now were're at Mergo?
If the Hunt only takes place on one night, then could the other hunters have fought their own nightmare baby, and just don't remember it? They remember the Dream and hunting, but not what they hunted, or the terrible secrets gathered during said hunt?
 

stroopwafel

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Silentpony said:
To be fair, there are some details that I think don't mean anything or are glitches. For example, the Doll has eyes in the back of her eyes, and wild theories postulate that insight is just that - sight within. A second set of eyes.
with theories about pebbles being insight eyes ripped from skulls and drained, and skulls found in the fishing village with eyesockets hacked apart and yadda yadda.
For real, some people get carried away. I know the doll clips from a certain angle but trying to find a 'lore theory' about this or the pebbles in the game sound equally ridiculous. As for mistranslations, apparently Miyazaki is very nuanced in his use of language so no matter how good a job the translaters do you will never find the exact same association with certain words or expressions.

Silentpony said:
Hmmm...is there any indication in game that there have been other nightmare babies? Aergo, Bergo, Cergo, Dergo, etc...and now were're at Mergo?
If the Hunt only takes place on one night, then could the other hunters have fought their own nightmare baby, and just don't remember it? They remember the Dream and hunting, but not what they hunted, or the terrible secrets gathered during said hunt?
Arianna becomes pregnant from Oedon(the formless great one) and eventually gives birth to a Celestial after you break Rom's seal and the red moon descends. At the same time you receive the note to ''find the nightmare newborn, and silence it's harrowing cry'' ie Mergo. So yeah, defintely during the night of the hunt more great ones are using humans as surrogates for their offspring.
 

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Silentpony said:
Johnny Novgorod said:
I submit From Software doesn't "write" its games with a very clear canon or cause-and-consequence train of events in mind. To me the games are impressionistic and deliberately vague and obfuscating in the interest of creating an oppressive atmosphere. Like nightmares.
See I hope not. To me, leaving it all vague and open to interpretation is lazy story-writing. In fact, its a lack of story-writing.

Just throw a bunch of weird squid monsters at the player, have a spooky lady say 'The world is not enough' and then a cat moos, and then we the player are left to try to understand what the hell is going on.
They're leaning kind of heavily on Lovecraft influence in the storytelling style.

The thing being that Lovecraft was a pioneer, a century(ish) ago. We've evolved a tad since then in our media. Lovecraft also didn't work in a audio-visual interactive media. He may have been sparse on the details, but in a videogame you're seeing, hearing, and interacting with the detail in front of your face. When everything is a vaguely presented web for the consumer to fill in, theres a certain stylistic consistency. When the details are all plain to see but the backdropping world building is randomly nebulous, it becomes a bit contradictory.
 

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Silentpony said:
Hmmm...is there any indication in game that there have been other nightmare babies? Aergo, Bergo, Cergo, Dergo, etc...and now were're at Mergo?
If the Hunt only takes place on one night, then could the other hunters have fought their own nightmare baby, and just don't remember it? They remember the Dream and hunting, but not what they hunted, or the terrible secrets gathered during said hunt?
Well, sure, it's possible, but the story doesn't give any indication that the killing of a Great One child has happened cyclically before.

In fact, I'd say it's very unlikely, because the Mensis Ritual-- which allows the Cult of Mensis (and the Hunter, who follows them) access to the Nightmare Frontier where Mergo waits-- happens in the waking world during the course of the game. That's not a cyclical event, because it takes place in the waking world-- the real world.

That's what allows Mensis and the player Hunter to get to the Frontier, and it takes place in the real world halfway through the game. Djura and Eileen (or other Hunters who may have dreamt) could not have traversed the Nightmare Frontier before us.
 

RedRockRun

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Item descriptions, lad. You must read them all.

But here's the gist of it:
Mankind has wanted a way to transcend humanity. Different people have different opinions on how to reach this point however.

The College of Byrgenwerth seeks transcendence through insight. They think that if they can obtain the knowledge of the Great Ones then they can become them or beings like them. In order to see beyond the ken of mortals and to that of the Great Ones they acquire eyes - literally lining the inside of their heads with them. Under the guidance of Provost Willem, they, "Fear the Old Blood," and never delve too deep - despite Willem using a third umbilical cord to commune with the Great Ones. Perhaps as a result though, Rom comes to reside at Byrgenwerth to conceal Willem from the rest of the school as if to keep forbidden knowledge hidden. Among this knowledge is that of Queen Yharnam of Pthumeru, her stillborn Great One infant Mergo, and the existence of the Blood Moon.

The Healing Church, founded by Laurence after he split from Willem and Byrgenwerth, uses blood as method of communing with the Great Ones. This stems from the fact that the Great Ones desperately want to have children but cannot give birth to live progeny, seeking surrogate mothers such was the case with Queen Yharnam of the long dead Pthumerian civilization. Through communion, members of the Church are blessed with transfigured blood that holds curative qualities. However this turns them into beasts along with those who have been administered the blood.

The School of Mensis utilizes dreams to directly contact a Great One. In particular, they devote themselves to the Moon, "Mensis," being Latin for, "Month," lunar cycles historically having been used as the basis for months. The School lures a Great One to them for communion by using a third umbilical cord along with their cages so that they enter the Great One's domain within the Nightmare Frontier. The Great One they contact is Mergo, an infant born from Queen Yharnam of the Pthumerian civilization. Only Mergo was never alive, stillborn like all other attempts by the Great Ones to have surrogate births using human mothers. This contact destroyed the school, however it created a Great One from their brains, the Brain of Mensis, and it is this brain that gives birth to the Nightmare of Mensis, overseen to a degree by Micolash. One other thing of note is that the School of Mensis and the Healing Church are enemies, evidenced by a dead Choir member locked up by Mensis and a Choir spy gathering intelligence within the Nightmare of Mensis.

The Hunters don't seek communion, but the Hunter's Dream which they find refuge was created from communion with the Moon Presence also know as Paleblood. This was achieved though Gehrman's use of a third umbilical cord. Hunters within the Dream are locked in a cycle of killing beasts during an unending night. The scourge of beasts they seek to end points back to the Blood Moon which is connected to Mergo and the Moon Presence, and by destroying Mergo's Wet Nurse, a hunter may be freed from the Dream by Gehrman, joining other hunters such as Eileen and Djura who also no longer dream. Of course this also dooms hunters to eventually become beasts when the Pale Moon rises again. The order of events remains somewhat unclear though, as does the causes of certain events. For example, the Blood Moon may have been beckoned by the School of Mensis when they enacted their ritual to commune with Mergo, and this may have caused the scourge of beasts to descend upon Yharnam. What seems fairly certain is that the Moon Presence has claimed Gehrman like an adopted child, and by killing him and freeing him from the Dream, the Moon Presence embraces the hunter who inherits Gehrman's role within the Dream.

The true ending involves the hunter using three third umbilical cords to gain such a level of insight that the Moon Presence can be resisted and killed. This is the transcendence that everyone was looking for. They didn't go far enough like Byrgenwerth and the Healing Church or jumped the gun and tried to transcend too soon like the School of Mensis whose minds were not prepared. The importance of the cords cannot be overstated in this regard. By using three, one's thoughts are elevated to the level of a Great One. Then by seeking Paleblood, the wishes of both humans and Great Ones are fulfilled: One transcends humanity without becoming a beast or being overcome by insight, and an infant Great One is finally born. In a way it can be seen as putting all the pieces together, utilizing blood, insight, and dream.
 

Rangaman

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From what I can figure, the idea is that the Hunter (you) become a Great One, akin to Ebrietas or the Moon Presence. This is significant because the various groups that are significant to the main plot (the Healing Church, the Byrgenwerth Scholars and the School of Mensis) were all trying to accomplish this. The achievement you get talks about how you'll "lead humanity to its next childhood", which I take to meaning period of discovery and creativity.

Yes, this is all assumption. Yes, I know waaaaaaaaaay too much about Souls lore. And I don't even watch VaatiVidya.

EDIT:
RedRockRun said:
NVM, that's knowing too much Souls lore.
 

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I?m all for the mystery and intrigue, but what gets my goat about SoulsBorne most is, what are the chances realistically speaking of meeting all the obtuse requirements for the missable trophies, just by paying attention to the lore trails?
 

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hanselthecaretaker said:
I?m all for the mystery and intrigue, but what gets my goat about SoulsBorne most is, what are the chances realistically speaking of meeting all the obtuse requirements for the missable trophies, just by paying attention to the lore trails?
The series ultimately has rather few trophies that are directly tied to completing questlines or that would be easier to achieve by paying attention to the lore. Most of the achievements aside from the ones you get from just completing the game can be reached by either simple exploration (most of the covenant achievements), or reading the messages written on the ground (like finding Ash Lake and the Dragon covenant, which is next to impossible without either hints or insane OCD).

Perhaps the best example of what I'm assuming you mean would be the aforementioned "good" ending of Bloodborne, where you really need to connect the dots yourself to find and then consume all three cords. What certainly doesn't help that the name for some fucking reason is translated to "Third Umbilical Cord" instead of "Third of an umbilical cord".