From Semen and Scars and Luxury Cars
Feb. 14th, 2018 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vandrendehareI've been on a frothy darkwave binge, primarily thanks to The Aviators, and this song:
A video game fan song, of all the adulthood denying things. Here's the thing. The game in question, Bloodborne, is a legitimate piece of gothic/weird fiction, and the sequence that this song refers to is one of the most affecting sequences in the game. Affecting, and a sequence that I do not think can be effectively conveyed outside of interactive media.
Early on in the game, your protagonist, amnesiac, afflicted with a mysterious disease and driven to seek treatment in the city of Yharnam, pioneer of blood ministration. The cure might be worse than the disease, though, since it plunges the protagonist into a nightmare of endless bloody slaughter with only the thinnest of apparent threads. You are a hunter. You're trapped in a city full of beasts on the night of the Hunt. Don't think too hard about it, the old man in the wheelchair says, killing beasts is just what you hunters do.
In the early evening of the hunt, there are some people still unaffected, or only marginally affected. You can tell by the lanterns and censers hanging outside windows and doors. No one's going to open their door to you on the night of the Hunt, and most people seem to think that the difference between the hunters and the beasts they hunt is vanishingly slim. You might be inclined to agree. There are very few sympathetic voices on the other side of the doors. In fact, there are three.
The first is a dying man who tells you to head for the cathedral and gives you a small personal flame thrower, more a mild deterrent to the beasts than an effective weapon, but not without use.
The third is a sex worker, fallen descendant of an ancient line. You can convince her to move to safety, after which she is able to supply you with vials of her special-properties-bearing (and implied menstrual) blood for a time.
The second is the subject of the song. A child, younger daughter of a short-lived compatriot hunter, a man who becomes drunk on blood and becomes a beast. Her mother has gone out looking for the father and not returned. If you should find her, give her the music box they use to remind the hunter of who he is when the blood goes to his head. The mother, you will be able to identify by a broach with a distinctive red gem.
Those who guessed where this part leads win a shiny No-Prize. The broach is found on a messy corpse and only after you have killed the bestial hunter who was her killer. This is nothing unusual, not special, not strange. What is truly affecting is what happens next.
What you choose.
You can inform the girl of her new status as an orphan, returning the broach to her. Despair takes the child then, sure as the beasts will eventually infiltrate her house and murder her. There is no further response to your knocks at the window, and as the night wears on, and Yharnam is progressively destroyed, her fate doesn't stand in doubt.
You can choose to keep your secret, at which point she will ask where is a safe place she can wait out the night. At this point, you may be aware of two possibilities. You can keep that knowledge to yourself, but sheltering in place is not an option, and the child will eventually stop answering your knocks, when the beasts find her.
You can send her toward the clinic you sought out at the beginning of this nightmare, where a sympathetic physician claims to be treating the ill. Or you can send her to the chapel, where a blind and incredibly sketchy beggar is sheltering hoping for some companionship in the final hours of his city's life.
Unbeknownst to you, an impostor has since infiltrated the clinic, overpowered its mistress and is performing experiments on the patients within. Send the girl there, and later on, once you find the secret path to the parts of the clinic previously denied you, you'll find a ribbon on the body of one of the panicked, flailing things within.
The chapel is safe. The beggar is simply awkward and desperate for friendship. Unfortunately, the path between the child's house is stalked by an evil hog the approximate size of a U-Haul. Traverse the area later, and you will find the ribbon, stained red with blood. No other sign.
Later, you can discover that the older daughter has returned home, but by then, the moon has become as blood and the older child is been driven mad. Her dialogue through the window is rambling, covetous of her sister's ribbon, and trails off into bloody chuckles.
You cannot save the girl, any member of the family, in fact. But this is something you only find out in successive playthroughs, trying different choices in hopes there is a solution, something that will allow the child to survive the night. No one survives the night, no innocent, no one complicit, not even you, though something of you always endures to see the sun. In aggregate, you learn that the fate of the city and its inhabitants, even the child who might tell you she loves you almost as much as she loves her family, depending on your actions, is sealed.
There is no option to escort the child. No option to place her in the care of sympathetic and sane fellow hunter Eileen the Crow and convince them to flee the city together, though I have seen heartfelt fix-fic comics to this effect. This might be a bit of failure of interactivity, but its an understandable one. You are trapped within a nightmare that bleeds into reality around you. There is no safety by your side. In a few minutes, you could be overcome by cloaked, sack bearing figures and dragged to a dungeon in a part of the city where the buildings are infested with eye-gouging semi-invisible crones and the streets are full of milk-truck sized, carnivorous hogs. There is no way out of the nightmare but through it. Even those who made it to Oeden chapel lose their minds and lives, one by one as the night drags on, saving the lonely, blind beggar for last to be taken in his solitude.
That said, I will leave you with a song about what's going to doom us.
A video game fan song, of all the adulthood denying things. Here's the thing. The game in question, Bloodborne, is a legitimate piece of gothic/weird fiction, and the sequence that this song refers to is one of the most affecting sequences in the game. Affecting, and a sequence that I do not think can be effectively conveyed outside of interactive media.
Early on in the game, your protagonist, amnesiac, afflicted with a mysterious disease and driven to seek treatment in the city of Yharnam, pioneer of blood ministration. The cure might be worse than the disease, though, since it plunges the protagonist into a nightmare of endless bloody slaughter with only the thinnest of apparent threads. You are a hunter. You're trapped in a city full of beasts on the night of the Hunt. Don't think too hard about it, the old man in the wheelchair says, killing beasts is just what you hunters do.
In the early evening of the hunt, there are some people still unaffected, or only marginally affected. You can tell by the lanterns and censers hanging outside windows and doors. No one's going to open their door to you on the night of the Hunt, and most people seem to think that the difference between the hunters and the beasts they hunt is vanishingly slim. You might be inclined to agree. There are very few sympathetic voices on the other side of the doors. In fact, there are three.
The first is a dying man who tells you to head for the cathedral and gives you a small personal flame thrower, more a mild deterrent to the beasts than an effective weapon, but not without use.
The third is a sex worker, fallen descendant of an ancient line. You can convince her to move to safety, after which she is able to supply you with vials of her special-properties-bearing (and implied menstrual) blood for a time.
The second is the subject of the song. A child, younger daughter of a short-lived compatriot hunter, a man who becomes drunk on blood and becomes a beast. Her mother has gone out looking for the father and not returned. If you should find her, give her the music box they use to remind the hunter of who he is when the blood goes to his head. The mother, you will be able to identify by a broach with a distinctive red gem.
Those who guessed where this part leads win a shiny No-Prize. The broach is found on a messy corpse and only after you have killed the bestial hunter who was her killer. This is nothing unusual, not special, not strange. What is truly affecting is what happens next.
What you choose.
You can inform the girl of her new status as an orphan, returning the broach to her. Despair takes the child then, sure as the beasts will eventually infiltrate her house and murder her. There is no further response to your knocks at the window, and as the night wears on, and Yharnam is progressively destroyed, her fate doesn't stand in doubt.
You can choose to keep your secret, at which point she will ask where is a safe place she can wait out the night. At this point, you may be aware of two possibilities. You can keep that knowledge to yourself, but sheltering in place is not an option, and the child will eventually stop answering your knocks, when the beasts find her.
You can send her toward the clinic you sought out at the beginning of this nightmare, where a sympathetic physician claims to be treating the ill. Or you can send her to the chapel, where a blind and incredibly sketchy beggar is sheltering hoping for some companionship in the final hours of his city's life.
Unbeknownst to you, an impostor has since infiltrated the clinic, overpowered its mistress and is performing experiments on the patients within. Send the girl there, and later on, once you find the secret path to the parts of the clinic previously denied you, you'll find a ribbon on the body of one of the panicked, flailing things within.
The chapel is safe. The beggar is simply awkward and desperate for friendship. Unfortunately, the path between the child's house is stalked by an evil hog the approximate size of a U-Haul. Traverse the area later, and you will find the ribbon, stained red with blood. No other sign.
Later, you can discover that the older daughter has returned home, but by then, the moon has become as blood and the older child is been driven mad. Her dialogue through the window is rambling, covetous of her sister's ribbon, and trails off into bloody chuckles.
You cannot save the girl, any member of the family, in fact. But this is something you only find out in successive playthroughs, trying different choices in hopes there is a solution, something that will allow the child to survive the night. No one survives the night, no innocent, no one complicit, not even you, though something of you always endures to see the sun. In aggregate, you learn that the fate of the city and its inhabitants, even the child who might tell you she loves you almost as much as she loves her family, depending on your actions, is sealed.
There is no option to escort the child. No option to place her in the care of sympathetic and sane fellow hunter Eileen the Crow and convince them to flee the city together, though I have seen heartfelt fix-fic comics to this effect. This might be a bit of failure of interactivity, but its an understandable one. You are trapped within a nightmare that bleeds into reality around you. There is no safety by your side. In a few minutes, you could be overcome by cloaked, sack bearing figures and dragged to a dungeon in a part of the city where the buildings are infested with eye-gouging semi-invisible crones and the streets are full of milk-truck sized, carnivorous hogs. There is no way out of the nightmare but through it. Even those who made it to Oeden chapel lose their minds and lives, one by one as the night drags on, saving the lonely, blind beggar for last to be taken in his solitude.
That said, I will leave you with a song about what's going to doom us.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-14 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-15 02:08 pm (UTC)To be clear, the sequence is a very small part of the overall game, which is pretty easy to miss, if you're not looking for it.
The game as a whole provides most, if not all the pleasures other games do, perhaps with a higher barrier to entry than most (its developers are known for designing games that favor mastery over accessibility), and with a very strong, well-done aesthetic. If that aesthetic is not a person's thing, it will be a turn-off, certainly, but gothic horror is my aesthetic every day of the week, and it morphs almost seamlessly into cosmic horror, which is my aesthetic at least every other day of the week.
The game is played from the point of view of a witness to a tragedy - the fall of Yharnam, and that's an interesting perspective, what when most of games will have you be the one who averts tragedy.
In some ways, bearing witness to the tragedy is less depressing than your fate in the Souls series, where you bear the consequences of the current round of tragedy and become the catalyst for the next round of the same exact damn tragedy.
But there are other reasons to play games, and if sense of empowerment within a story is one (and I feel like I need to defend that want, because it's legitimate, and no less legitimate than other reasons why people play games), then, yeah, a person will bounce off it as hard as if they don't like the aesthetic.