Yes, it's true that Bloodborne's themes revolve around a lot of real-world forms of cyclical violence. Violence against women, against the poor, against immigrants, against ethnicities and religions deemed 'lesser' by the status quo.
I don't want to take away from the fact that Bloodborne is heavily about these things, but I don't think enough people talk about how it's also specifically about violence against children.
For starters, Victorian England, where Bloodborne takes a lot of its inspiration from, was in a weird cultural puberty limbo. It was simultaneously an era of unimaginable cruelty towards children and the horrors they were forced to endure to support their families and the industrial machine. But it was also the spark of modern western culture, where the abundant middle classes first started to consider the idea that children should have rights of any kind. It was a time period where death was on the mind of everyone, yet people were worrying less and less about infant mortality as medical advances were made, and people were really beginning to posit the idea that children were innocent beings that deserved to have carefree lives.
But to get back to my point:
Gascoigne's daughters, like many others, are inevitably orphaned by the Hunt. Both of them are likely to die due to the dangers of the city. Even if they survive, the only institutions able to care for them are the very same institutions that put their father out on the streets risking life, limb, and sanity. And even then, every member of the Choir that once oversaw the orphanage have all turned into blue-eyed beasts. The only other place of safety in the city will experiment on them and turn them into catatonic blobs.
Arianna's newborn, in a situation indistinguishable from having a child as a result of sexual assault, is likely doomed to die cold and unwanted in the sewer, as is likely the case for many other eldritch children born from ""gloriously blessed"" wombs.
The eldritch fetuses crawling below the steps of the Orphanage are in a similar manner. Born only as experiments for the institution, a statistic for some scholar to scribble down, and nothing more. They will never know the love of a parent, for not even the Great Ones appear to want them.
The children of the Orphanage, likely orphaned by the Healing Church's own Hunt, are snatched off the streets and placed under the scalpel of apathetic doctors, nothing but test subjects, a control group; mere flesh to be used and discarded. The lucky will get to live out their lives as Blood Saints, still ultimately forced to give up their bodily fluids and autonomy as a service.
Baby Mergo is ripped from the womb of Queen Yharnam after she was forced to have them, just a relic to be used by people on power. And then, their consciousness is abducted from the afterlife, effectively used by the School of Mensis as both a battery to power their fantasy world and as a fishing lure for other Great Ones.
Mother Kos is harpooned by the Byrgenwerth scholars, and ripped from the ocean like a dead man o' war lying on the dirty sand. Even though she was possibly the first Great One to successfully bear her own child, her Orphan is cut from her womb, taken from the coast of its home, and experimented on by the same people who murdered its mother for their own selfish gain.
And finally, the villagers who once worshipped Kos and her child curse all of Yharnam and their progeny for the monstrous actions of Byrgenwerth. Curse the fiends, their children too, and their children forever true. Lay the curse of blood upon them, and their children, and their children's children; each wretched birth shall plunge each child into a lifetime of misery.
And it's absolutely no accident that the way you 'transcend' the Hunt, the only way to truly end the horror, is by using the umbilical cords. Because it turns you into... an infant. The one, singular way to escape the cycle of violence is to literally make yourself vulnerable, like an innocent child. Paleblood is the water of the womb. You take in the knowledge of the umbilical cords to achieve eyes on the inside, insight (ha-ha), which is interpreted by the impotent scholars of Byrgenwerth and the Choir and Mensis to be a literal lining of the brain with eyes.
Ignorant that they are to not realize that enlightenment is achieved with the internal understanding of the self. Or, of you wish to be a bit more literal than that, "eyes on the inside" could refer to pregnancy. Which, what that means, really, metaphysically, is the instinct to nurture. Why do you think the Great Ones are sympathetic in spirit? Why do you think their singular shared motivation is the yearn for someone to nurture and to care for? The reason why beasthood and kinhood are fundamental opposites is because they function by opposite means, violence verses love. The way humanity ascends is through gentleness. Everyone who followed Willem were just too myopic to realize that.
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jbbartram-illu
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