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bike tory posted:You can assume that Rom is the one who maintains that plane though, since it collapses when you kill her. I think it stands that there needs to be some sort of living anchor for the dreams. It would also explain why Rom's arena is so empty: It is vacuous because it is her mind space and she is devoid of thought and memory now. Meanwhile other mind realms are composed of things people remember or imagine.
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Dec 5, 2018 01:46
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marshmallow creep posted:It would also explain why Rom's arena is so empty: It is vacuous because it is her mind space and she is devoid of thought and memory now. Meanwhile other mind realms are composed of things people remember or imagine.
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Dec 5, 2018 01:51
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Tenebrais posted:This was an awfully long way to go to figure out that the werewolves are being triggered by the full moon.
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Dec 5, 2018 01:51
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Tenebrais posted:This was an awfully long way to go to figure out that the werewolves are being triggered by the full moon. Yes but the reason matters a lot and the fact that they’re stronger and more numerous now doesn’t change how many were being created before the full moon was not 0.
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Dec 5, 2018 01:56
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It's still a hilariously "well, duh  " moment, though. That post made me laugh out loud because it's just such a completely obvious thing in hindsight.
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Dec 5, 2018 02:00
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Tenebrais posted:This was an awfully long way to go to figure out that the werewolves are being triggered by the full moon. It's kinda funny really. The game does a whole bunch of overtly playing with conventional narratives, mating werewolves to plague imagery in really interesting ways, and then it turns out, no, it's totally the Moon. Or something passing itself off as the Moon, in any case.
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Dec 5, 2018 03:21
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I mean, the moon and the werewolves are very definitely not the only thing going on here
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Dec 5, 2018 03:28
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It's such a perfect bait-and-switch-and-then-switch-again you kind of have to appreciate it, though. It starts out werewolves, and it would be perfectly understandable for you to go "I wonder if the moon has anything to do with it," and then the game is all, oh wait no, it's the cthulhus doing it! And then it swings back around to "nope, totally the moon" when you don't even expect it anymore, which only makes it funnier. You have to give them kudos for how perfectly they play with your expectations there. It gets you both coming and going.
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Dec 5, 2018 03:36
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I really like how it circles back around to the Moon being the cause of it all, in a roundabout way. It's cool that, all along, bloodborne has been playing with the tropes and cliches of Victorian horror and here at the end it's finally come back to transformations caused by the full moon!
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Dec 5, 2018 08:01
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Cardiovorax posted:It's still a hilariously "well, duh
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Dec 5, 2018 08:45
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It's also worth noting that personally I don't think the moon is causing the beast plague, making it worse yes, causing it no. Just using the Blood of the Great Ones seems to be enough to induce transformation in humans, and beasts are just a very common path thereof.
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Dec 5, 2018 09:31
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That baby Mergo is dead. When you kill the Orphan of Kos, you don't see "NIGHTMARE SLAIN" appear on the screen - only when you stab the shadowy remainder bit afterwards. When you kill Mergo's Wet Nurse, you don't see "NIGHTMARE SLAIN" - just when the baby's cries echo into it being dead. A wet nurse is someone who breastfeeds a baby in lieu of its mother. You killed the thing taking care of it.
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Dec 5, 2018 09:57
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Mergo technically wasn't ever alive by the usual definition of a living creature in the first place. Every Great One loses its child etc etc, and Mergo was the child of Queen Yharnam and... something. People speculate Oedon, who I have hardly even mentioned in the LP so far, but I might cover that in the next episode. Either way, Mergo doesn't have a physical form for us to kill, it's just a living consciousness hanging over Yharnam that exists everywhere and anywhere (hence why you can hear it crying during the blood moon phase no matter where you are in the game). imo "NIGHTMARE SLAIN" is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to Mergo because there's not really anything to slay, and we don't end up slaying it.
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Dec 5, 2018 10:29
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Apparently the music box you got from way earlier in the game can be used to interrupt the Wet Nurse so that she never summons the fog, and it also makes the baby cry before it disappears- is that true? I've found proof of the former, but nothing of the latter, and I'm wondering if it's some kind of video game urban legend.
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Dec 5, 2018 11:03
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CJacobs posted:Mergo technically wasn't ever alive by the usual definition of a living creature in the first place. Every Great One loses its child etc etc, and Mergo was the child of Queen Yharnam and... something. People speculate Oedon, who I have hardly even mentioned in the LP so far, but I might cover that in the next episode. Either way, Mergo doesn't have a physical form for us to kill, it's just a living consciousness hanging over Yharnam that exists everywhere and anywhere (hence why you can hear it crying during the blood moon phase no matter where you are in the game). imo "NIGHTMARE SLAIN" is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to Mergo because there's not really anything to slay, and we don't end up slaying it. I have a theory about Mergo based on the loot you get from the actual queen Yharnam fight, which is possibly Mergo's fossilised stillborn fetus. My assumption goes that Queen Yharnam wants her baby back, and so had the Pthumerians infiltrate Yahar'gul and help get you here so you can kill the Wet Nurse and thus Mergo will return to Queen Yharnam. You then go down into the Pthumerian Dungeons and kill her, chronologically if that even happens.
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Dec 5, 2018 11:18
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CommissarMega posted:Apparently the music box you got from way earlier in the game can be used to interrupt the Wet Nurse so that she never summons the fog, and it also makes the baby cry before it disappears- is that true? I've found proof of the former, but nothing of the latter, and I'm wondering if it's some kind of video game urban legend. It doesn't do anything in either case, I demonstrated as much on a stream a while back because someone was askin about it. The music box fires an invisible projectile when you use it, however, so you can use it to break physics objects and ring trap bells in the chalice dungeons from farther than arm's length away. I don't know why, possibly checking if Gascoigne is present and in range, because if you use it while you're standing behind something during his boss fight it won't work on him. edit: However, if you use it while you have Gascoigne summoned to your world as an NPC (to fight the Cleric Beast), he chuckles. CJacobs fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 5, 2018 11:22
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quote:Every Great One loses its child etc etc, and Mergo was the child of Queen Yharnam and... something. People speculate Oedon, who I have hardly even mentioned in the LP so far, but I might cover that in the next episode. I generally choose to accept that answer simply because it's very atmospheric. quote:My assumption goes that Queen Yharnam wants her baby back, and so had the Pthumerians infiltrate Yahar'gul and help get you here so you can kill the Wet Nurse and thus Mergo will return to Queen Yharnam. You then go down into the Pthumerian Dungeons and kill her, chronologically if that even happens. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 5, 2018 13:55
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Before this video it was my understanding that Mergo was the source of the Beast Plague, and that by ending its Nightmare you're ending the plague. I'm interested to see this alternate interpretation with that in mind, because it means we've been played. We were told that our job as a Hunter was to stop the plague, but we've been manipulated by events into doing something completely unrelated to that goal.
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Dec 5, 2018 14:04
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Cardiovorax posted:Formless Oedon is explicitly noted as a Great One who never takes a physical form, so there is this guesswork that the reason you never see Mergo is because it's as formless as its father - the presence of Mergo consists entirely of its cry in the air. The Bell-Ringing Women are said to come up from the dungeons, and in general the bag men and the old women found in Yahar'gul are also found down in the Pthumerian Dungeons as are the skeleton coffins (without the coffins admittedly). The One Reborn also has a distinctly Pthumerian Elder looking main body, and the Shadows of Yharnam are also Pthumerians considering they're literally Queen Yharnam's body guards. Even the unique blood looking enemies are all over the Pthumerian Dungeons, and the Witches of Hemwick who are working with Yahar'gul given the executioners in Hemwick show up in the Dungeons Summoning Mad ONes. They're not dead, just long gone mad underground. The Dungeons exist in the physical world and Queen Yharnam 100% is still alive because she's the source of the forbidden blood that made the Vilebloods of Castle Cainhurst. My interpretation is Oedon basically made the same pact with Annalise as it once did with Queen Yharnam, to bring forth a child of blood. The first was Mergo, who was stillborn and thus went to the Nightmare as an infant and created the Wet Nurse as a guardian/caretaker, which is actually a child's interpretation of Queen Yharnam's bodygarud Shadows. Basically all the stuff that's true of Queen Annalise is also true of Queen Yharnam, because whatever Queen Annalise did to attain her immortality involved Yharnam's blood. At no point does the game say the Pthumerian people are dead and gone, just their civilisation fell to ruin and the dungeons are the last remnants. Also, killing Mergo "stops" the plague because it's getting worse in response to the nearness of Eldritch Truth/Beings. We have in fact done exactly the letter of what we were sent to do, there's a bit more going on but we have in fact completed the job of the night by killing Mergo, we just haven't ended future Hunts.
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Dec 5, 2018 14:18
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quote:Before this video it was my understanding that Mergo was the source of the Beast Plague, and that by ending its Nightmare you're ending the plague. People call Dark Souls a very vague plot that is mostly told in item descriptions, but I think it has nothing on the plot of Bloodborne. Great game, but I really had no idea what my own motivation was for large parts of it. Not that I needed one. I'm a hunter. A hunter must hunt. quote:At no point does the game say the Pthumerian people are dead and gone, just their civilisation fell to ruin and the dungeons are the last remnants. Then again, there's this guess that the snakeballs infesting the people of the forest come from the tomb, so who knows? Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 5, 2018 14:20
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Strange Matter posted:-Blood, which is the Church's route. They figured that if you just shot yourself up with enough of the good stuff you'd evolve basically on your own. And they were pretty much right. The inferior product gives you beasts, but eventually they were able to refine their procedure enough to create the Celestial Emissary. Out of everyone they seem to have succeeded the most, but at the cost of the greatest collateral damage. Byrgenwerth and Mensis were disasters, of course, but it's the Church that reduced Yarnham to this state. Speaking of Mensis, their method was the most direct. CJacobs mentioned in the prologue to episode 29, that the blood is inert without the will of a Great One behind it, though. The "inferior product" does little, so I guess they were just collecting "blood saints", like the two ladies you end up keeping in Odeon's Chapel - who generate blood that does stuff without a Great Regular blood must have been placebo-like in regards to Yarham's Blood Transfusion craze. It was only that of blood saints that did the cool stuff, like healing folks.
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Dec 5, 2018 14:38
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I do agree with Lord_Magmar that the blood is transformative in humans, but what it turns you into depends on a lot of factors. By itself it probably really does do absolutely nothing, it's just moldy blood found in tombs that will eventually form rock-solid crystals if you leave it alone. But with the influence of our glowing moon-shaped entity friend you lose your humanity and revert back to a state of beasthood; beasthood which exists within all of mankind according to a number of item descriptions. With the influence of science and genetic meddling, you ascend to kinship. When injected into the purest hierarchical bloodline (namely Cainhurst, who are descended from Pthumerians) you become nearly immortal. edit: Which ties into what I was saying during the bonus feature at the end of the episode. The Pthumerians ascended from proto-humans to super-humans because they imbibed the blood, but thanks to Queen Yharnam serving as a medium they were able to have free contact with god only knows how many cthulus and cthulu-adjacents. It stands to reason that it wasn't just the blood that made their population into super-humans (since this is the same old blood that turned Ailing Loran to ruins either soon before or soon after), but the influence of their surroundings changing the effects the blood had on them. CJacobs fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 5, 2018 14:44
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CJacobs posted:But with the influence of our glowing moon-shaped entity friend you lose your humanity and revert back to a state of beasthood; beasthood which exists within all of mankind according to a number of item descriptions.
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Dec 5, 2018 14:52
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CJacobs posted:I do agree with Lord_Magmar that the blood is transformative in humans, but what it turns you into depends on a lot of factors. By itself it probably really does do absolutely nothing, it's just moldy blood found in tombs that will eventually form rock-solid crystals if you leave it alone. But with the influence of our glowing moon-shaped entity friend you lose your humanity and revert back to a state of beasthood; beasthood which exists within all of mankind according to a number of item descriptions. With the influence of science and genetic meddling, you ascend to kinship. When injected into the purest hierarchical bloodline (namely Cainhurst, who are descended from Pthumerians) you become nearly immortal. Personally I think it doesn't require any entity to cause beasthood, there's beasts from outside Yharnam (Valtr chased one into Yharnam and ate it) and the Moon Friend probably didn't have anything to do with Loran. I just think if you act beastlike you end up beastlike, my interpretation of what people turn into with 0 other influence is actually the Pthumerians and Church Servants/Giants. I also admittedly assume Isz, Loran and Pthumeru Ihyll to actually all be different Pthumerian Cities, with different end points, hence the shared Pthumerian enemies in all of them. What we know of them suggests Queen Yharnam becoming so powerful was unique, and possibly why the civilisation ended up failing, she overstepped her bounds in the deals between the Pthumerians and the Great Ones, by attempting to have a son who would be both King and Great One. Basically my interpretation of the Blood is that it's inherently transformative, the initial transformation merely makes you "human" by fixing illnesses and injuries etc. further infusions continue to push you to human but build up the transformative capabilities, eventually leading to people become beasts/kin/superhuman, depending on who they are and what they've done. By itself it just transforms a human into well, a human, with nearly no imperfections, with no other influence, or enough of a controlled influence, it then makes you literally more human. So all the big humans are basically super full of blood but have no kin/beast so they remain just big humans. When we get to the end I'll explain what I think is going on with the Moon Friend and the Blood Plague after we finish, because I do have an interpretation I think is internally sound but we need to see some endings before I go into it. There is a reason we're performing the Hunt and meant to end with killing Mergo and it is not malicious on the half of the Moon Man by my interpretation. So yeah, I think the plague is literally just the blood, and it will always transform you into something eventually, just what and how long depends on how much blood you use and who you are and what you do, and what the Great Ones see you as. We know their words can cause transformation in humans with the eldritch blood, that's how the Caryll Runes kind of work. You are reshaped by the words of the Great Ones, in particular Beast's Embrace and Milkweed are strong enough to over-ride the Hunter Rune, Hunter's Mark in inventory, we got implanted with at the beginning of the game which is why we are mainlining blood all night but remaining "human". Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 5, 2018 15:17
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Don't the Caryll Runes make an explicit point of conveying the power of the Great Ones without the use of blood? I think there's even an item description that says Master Willem would've been proud of Caryll, because his work gives you power without relying on blood at all.
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Dec 5, 2018 15:24
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Cardiovorax posted:Don't the Caryll Runes make an explicit point of conveying the power of the Great Ones without the use of blood? I think there's even an item description that says Master Willem would've been proud of Caryll, because his work gives you power without relying on blood at all. They do, but that doesn't mean it isn't how the blood transformations work, just that they work without it. I admit this is a bit of a hole but I've always felt transformation, proper transformation, involved a lot of things and the blood just allowed it to happen.
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Dec 5, 2018 15:48
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CJacobs posted:Mergo technically wasn't ever alive by the usual definition of a living creature in the first place. Every Great One loses its child etc etc, and Mergo was the child of Queen Yharnam and... something. People speculate Oedon, who I have hardly even mentioned in the LP so far, but I might cover that in the next episode. Either way, Mergo doesn't have a physical form for us to kill, it's just a living consciousness hanging over Yharnam that exists everywhere and anywhere (hence why you can hear it crying during the blood moon phase no matter where you are in the game). imo "NIGHTMARE SLAIN" is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to Mergo because there's not really anything to slay, and we don't end up slaying it. I will go into my understanding of what happens after you wrap up the game as I have a very different understanding of what is going on.
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Dec 5, 2018 16:06
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Lord_Magmar posted:They do, but that doesn't mean it isn't how the blood transformations work, just that they work without it. I admit this is a bit of a hole but I've always felt transformation, proper transformation, involved a lot of things and the blood just allowed it to happen.
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Dec 5, 2018 16:18
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Cardiovorax posted:That the blood works as a catalyst of sorts seems fairly obvious to me, too, simply because of how many different things it does for different people. It's definitely clearly stated that the runes do not need blood to function, though, and in fact are remarkable for specifically the fact that they don't. There's not really any specific reason to assume that they work differently for the player than they would for anyone else, if only they had the tools to use them. Fair, my idea was more that the runes work on their own, but when combined with the blood can have much greater effect. But my idea is that like, the runes are literally "describing" what you are in Great One tongue and the blood responds. So like the runes work on their own, the blood works on its own, even insight works on its own, but combining them creates greater effects. It is worth noting we have had a Caryll Rune, well not one by Caryll but the same basic idea, from the moment we woke up after the transfusion, it's the Hunter's Mark in our inventory, and that suggests to me part of why we don't go crazy or mutate badly is because we're already a superhuman hunter as designated by our hunter rune. In this way the Corruption Rune makes one a Vileblood, the Beast's Embrace makes one a beast, and the Milkweed makes one Kin. They're all marking us as something in addition to human, so that's what we become. Caryll Runes are just the language of the Great Ones. Everything about the Great Ones is in some way transformative, their language their blood their knowledge, all of it changes humans into something else, something potentially greater, because I don't buy the beast transformation is 100% bad, the kin transformations are clearly not 100% good and that's the other major direction humanity goes in.
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Dec 5, 2018 17:48
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The reason why we don't go crazy is that we have been tied to the hunters dream which dramatically slows down the process.
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Dec 5, 2018 17:51
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Lord_Magmar posted:Fair, my idea was more that the runes work on their own, but when combined with the blood can have much greater effect. But my idea is that like, the runes are literally "describing" what you are in Great One tongue and the blood responds. So like the runes work on their own, the blood works on its own, even insight works on its own, but combining them creates greater effects. Fun fact: the Hunter's Mark is actually the Caryll Rune for blood. Specifically blood. You can even split it up to form the individual letters of the word. b l o o d Layer them over each other, and what do you get?  If the blood has any effect on the runes beyond what it would ordinarily do, then I think the fact that we are blood-marked in addition to and beyond what the runes already do to us probably has a lot to do with it.
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Dec 5, 2018 17:58
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Hunt11 posted:The reason why we don't go crazy is that we have been tied to the hunters dream which dramatically slows down the process. Which is what the Hunter’s Mark Rune in our inventory is representative of yes.
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Dec 5, 2018 17:58
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Going by Lord_Magmar's suggestions, perhaps a compromise would be to say that the blood is naturally transformative and doesn't require outside influence to have that property, but the presence of our moon buddy or other Cthulhu related dickery triggers this transformation to start and do whatever it does to you based on your environment. Otherwise it just sits dormant.
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Dec 5, 2018 18:12
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I'm not sure how that would explain why basically the same thing happened to places like Ailing Loran, but if you go with the idea that the presence of a Great One makes whatever it already does just by itself happen much much faster, then I can see that working. Yharnam had the bad luck to not only mess around with blood, but do it in a way that left someone really, really unhappy with how they did it.
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Dec 5, 2018 18:18
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The other thing to point out is that the three routes to ascension are all incomplete. Byrgenwerth and the Church achieved a measure of success using insight, runes and blood in various ways but frankly Rom and the Celestial Emissary are pretty pathetic examples of supposedly divine beings. And Mensis fared even worse, failing to transform themselves into anything better than dead people or spiders. Each method is met with failure because the adherents were blinded by their own dogma. Byrgenwerth were too afraid of the Old Blood's properties to explore its potential, and the Church pretty immediately drank their own kool-aid as soon as they were formed and left behind the progress that their predecessors had made.
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Dec 5, 2018 18:33
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It's really a mistake to think of the Great Ones as "divine," I think. The ascension to Kin is remarkable because Kin are equal to the Great Ones in kind, just not in magnitude. Once you are Kin, whatever process of evolution made them what they are today is, theoretically, just as open to you. And that is, if nothing else, quite remarkable.
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Dec 5, 2018 18:46
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Cardiovorax posted:It's really a mistake to think of the Great Ones as "divine," I think. The ascension to Kin is remarkable because Kin are equal to the Great Ones in kind, just not in magnitude. Once you are Kin, whatever process of evolution made them what they are today is, theoretically, just as open to you. All these achievements are remarkable, but are they actually worthwhile? That's what the game asks you to answer. Bygenwerth and the Church successfully bootstrapped themselves into a higher state of existence, but at what cost?
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Dec 5, 2018 18:59
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That definitely is a very good question, of the kind that everyone can really only answer for themselves
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Dec 5, 2018 19:00
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So if the runes are transformative by themselves, but can react with the blood does that mean that the Hunter's Mark is stabilizing the player and the other hunters by counteracting the Moon's beastification? It doesn't seem to be completely effective going by Gascoigne's transformation but it seems that in general hunters are far more physically stable.
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Dec 6, 2018 01:48
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White Coke posted:So if the runes are transformative by themselves, but can react with the blood does that mean that the Hunter's Mark is stabilizing the player and the other hunters by counteracting the Moon's beastification? It doesn't seem to be completely effective going by Gascoigne's transformation but it seems that in general hunters are far more physically stable. 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.
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Dec 6, 2018 01:56
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