I have very limited understanding of Bloodborne lore, and less on the dlc, but from what I understand the final boss fight with Orphan of Kos is not at all accurate to what actually happened with the real Orphan, and is more so us killing a manifestation of all the pain and anger caused in the Fishing Hamlet.
I'm wondering if something similar applies to the other bosses in the dlc. They are all great, and have storytelling built into the fights themselves, but are these the actual characters stuck in the Hunters Nightmare, or moreso a manifestation of their story/legend?
You start getting more metaphysical as the game progresses, especially the dlc. This was longer than I intended, but I love dissecting this game.
You are literally in a Nightmare. Think dreams in our real life. Is everything a perfected copy like it looks in the waking world? Not exactly. Our dreams are imitations, and sometimes warped, and bleed together in impossible ways. It's the same thing here.
You used the eye of a hunter to be transported by a God-like entity into the Nightmare of all Blood Drunk and condemned hunters and beings. These hunters became fervent and beastly in nature due to their proclivities and rampant consumption/obsession of blood. This is why we had the Hunter of Hunters, to quell them.
When you go to the dlc, we see a "warped" dream-like state of Yharnam. Familiar...but not the same. We see a great river of blood from all the bloodshed from Ludwig's legacy. As all this blood flows from his boss room.
Laurence is special, considering he himself is a Cleric Beast. In the "real" world, we can find his beastly head in the Grand Cathedral. However, in the Hunter's Nightmare, we can find both his beastly appearance, as well as a representation of his human form in the form of a human skull. Laurence is cursed to always strive to regain his humanity, which will never happen. The human skull is only an intangible, symbolic reminder of what he cannot have ever again. Showing all he has wrought and how far he has truly "ascended" because of his ambitions in using blood to bring humanity to greater heights.
This skull is predominantly why people thought Laurence was the Headless Bloodletting Beast- a theory I disagree with. What we see is the symbology of Laurence's hubris and dissolution as a Man. It even says in item descriptions that the skull only exists in the Nightmare.
As for Maria and the Fishing Hamlet starts getting deeper into the proverbial fog. For after we defeat Ludwig, and ascend to the Research Hall, we find the true horror behind the Church itself. All the suffering caused in an effort to forcibly ascend humans to a higher form of existence. Maria took pity on, and even took care of the patients you now see around the hall. Leading us to find countless failed experiments before a great clock tower- the very same one we hear and see in the distance in the real world.
Maria herself had quite a guilty conscience compared to her fellow hunters. For after she, Gehrman, and other hunters raided, pillaged, and otherwise perverted the Fishing Hamlet, in her regret, she cast away her weapon and took her own life. And because life and death have little difference in a dream, we can find Maria after she's done so. Trying to stop us from further harming and meddling in the Hamlet.
Pushing on, we drop from outside the clocktower and atop a vast ocean, with which we see Nightmare Yharnam below. All of these various dream states are layered on top one another. We see the ship masts of the Fishing Hamlet from above in Nightmare Frontier. And we see Nightmare Frontier looking below from Nightmare of Mensis.
Going through the Hamlet are parasites, everywhere. Because, you see, Kos was already dead when she washed up on the beach covered in fish like slugs. Familiars of another type of life. But even then the villagers venerated the body, and spoke of her as "Mother Kos". They consumed the parasites that she brought with her upon becoming beached. They looked enough like fish, right? And this lead to their appearance, likely during the time the Hamlet was raided for sources of Great One influences.
However, Kos was pregnant when she met her fate. Whether that is what killed her is up for interpretation, but I believe so. As Great Ones cannot having children without themselves giving up their life/power, think of it as mantling. This child was obviously already dead in the real world, and was only a mere shadow of a what was. We know this since after we defeat Orphan, we only get a "Nightmare Slain" message after killing a shadow that appears from Kos' belly.
The Nightmare, though, shows a cursed undead-birth. A final act of vengeance put upon the hunters for their cruelty for what was done to the Hamlet. You can hear villages throughout the Hamlet fervently whispering prayers and curses much belike the priest as soon as you leave the clocktower and the woman speaking as we enter the dlc.
This is a wicked offspring. Born not from a theorized human/Great One union, but born of punishment and nightmares and hate. For, when we look at the sky throughout the dlc, we see an eye-like shape rather than a typical moon or sun. Almost as if we are looking out through someone's eye itself.
And, call me crazy, but I've always thought the Hunter's Nightmare, was Gehrman's nightmare. At least part of it. The eye may not be his, but it could have belonged to any of his subordinates he led that would have seen everything. If anything, it's a collective dream of all of these Old Hunters. We can find Gehrman sleeping in the Dream sometimes, and his sleep talk dialogue tells us he is experiencing a nightmare and weeping, pleading for Laurence to hurry up. Not knowing what befell him long ago.
Now, call me crazier, but Orphan is a likely representation of Gehrman. I think Gehrman sees himself and his actions as regretful and nightmarish. He's stuck against the will of the Moon Presence. He lost the woman he cared about. He's been alive in this plane of existence for who knows how long waiting for his friend to help him. It's tragedy on top of tragedy caused by him and his ilk.
The Orphan's visage doesn't seem like a coincidence to me. It's that of an old man, and his weeping is actually the same soundbite of Gehrman's but warped. And the weapons they both wield are both scythe-like. Upon defeating Orphan's spirit form and ending the Nightmare, when we go back to the dream, the Doll is happy and remarks that Gehrman is now sleeping peacefully and that perhaps is suffering has now eased. She will also talk about her own sense of peace and burdens having lifted from within after we defeat Maria.
All this to say, look at the dlc as you would a true nightmare. Everything is different, time means nothing, things aren't what they seem, memories come up and are in the process of fading afterwards, and important places that seem familiar but aren't what we know. Our subconscious can tell us a lot about ourselves in dreams. What we fear, our most personal regrets, and the unknown. The same can be said of the game and it's characters.
Fantastic write-up, this really helped bring things together for me
I always interpreted it as Maria and German were lovers and lost a child - like the theme of the game - which would explain the orphan's likeness to Gehrman and Kos's female face (Maria). The nightmare is Gehrman's warped memories and trauma, which gets more and more traumatic the deeper we dig. So the nightmare is real only inside the nightmare but it is manifested by how Gehrman remembers/dreams it.
Could be that Maria also just killed herself and Gehrman took it really hard. In any case it is pretty evident that he was extremely fond of her, which also could be why she is the only boss that (likely) perfectly resembles her real self.
At least that is how it always made sense to me
Maria likely never reciprocated or knew of Gehrman's feelings. Unless you mean it as this is your headcanon. Nothing I remember makes mention of anything about Maria harboring anything romantic towards him. He was her mentor. Just his own feelings towards her. At least in passing. I have no reason to think, given descriptions and dialogue in game, that they were any more than mentor and student, with a possibly one-sided affection.
When we look at the description of the Doll's clothes, it mentions "mania"- which is a very specific word that denotes an almost obsessive connotation. The care with which her clothes were made and the likeness it holds to Maria is consummate. Although, the doll does not wear clothes resembling much of Maria's outfit. It's more dainty and feminine. Almost as if it were idealized.
It wasn't until later when people kept theorizing (in a gross manner I might add) that Gehrman made a sex doll of a woman he could not have, and unfortunately a lot of really far reaching theories end up there.
I love that transcendental metaphysical planes always end up being fucked up shitholes.
This is it.
Fantastic read. This is why bloodbornes lore is my favorite of basically any game.
None of it is real. It's just a video game.
Nope. Stop spreading complete BS on the internet. Me and Orphan of Kos went to the same high school before his gig as a Bloodborne boss.
This is what happens when you get 100 Insight.
Oh yeah? Then how come I still have PTSD from Laurence?
In a sense. The way I see it, they are about as real as Gehrman and Micolash.
Technically, what we see in the Hunter's Nightmare are the consciousness of the characters, or their astral selves, trapped in something akin to an afterlife which exists to punish them (hence why Laurence is constantly burning, as a probable nod to his initial death by fire)
Technically they are real, but they aren't real. Lady Maria is as she was at the time of her death, Laurence is as he was after he was killed, and Ludwig is as he was when he was dragged into the nightmare. But, whether the Orphan looked that way when Gherman and Maria visited the Hamlet isn't really known. Many people guess that the Orphan looks the way he does in the fight because he was killed before he was born, so when he was put into the nightmare he was given the form he would have taken should he have been born. I, however, believe he was in the same state before and in the nightmare. Bloodborne is already full of bizarre things that are hard to give an actual explanation to, so it wouldn't be too far fetched to believe that the Orphan would have been born looking the way he does.
Orphan is actually supposed to look like Gehrman, or at least an approximation of Gehrman. we fight a manifestation of ‘the’ nightmare and the form they take is the form that terrifies them the most, the man that desecrated and killed their mother.
I didn't know thatm everything I read about it said what I had said.
Gehrman didn't kill Kos. She washed up already dead on the beach.
I think Maria is the only one "real" in the sense she's the same type of being as the Hunter. My head canon is that the Nightmare is showing us the mental echoes of the other characters. I don't think Ludwig ever became physically a giant horse monster in a room full of corpses. But I think mentally, that's what he had become. I believe his arena is really just another one of the cells beneath the Cathedral in the waking world. That's also why I believe there's two cathedrals, one attached to the research hall and one where we fight Laurence. They're the memories of different cathedrals based on how people perceived them at different times in Yharnam's history.
Ludwig and Laurence had both transformed before death. These are all real people, but we're not fighting their physical forms if that makes sense. When you go into a dream world you leave your body behind and only your conscience travels there. The nightmare is a dream world where hunters' consciences are taken after death as punishment for what happened in the Hamlet. It's essentially an alternate hell made by a Great One as punishment for them.
My understanding is that everyone we meet in the Hunter’s Nightmare are dead in our world, we were able to visit the nightmare because we’ve got the blood-drunk eye. But they all used to exist at one point in the real world
Spoilers ahead: The entire game is already not "real" even in the context of it's own universe. You're essentially tapped into a nightmare. Whether your own or someone else's or an eldritch being, it's a bit up to your own interpretation. But remember: yharnam is also a dream world just like the other nightmares you visit. None of them are truly more or less real than the other, they're just an interconnected labyrinth of dream worlds inhabited by intelligent dream constructs that think their reality is the real one. But then you have to ask: is the world your character came from actually more real? Is a dream less real than reality when you currently exist in the dream? The game is purposefully vague and leaves it up to you to decide what real actually means.
Life is a dream we all must wake from… before we can dream again.
They are real. The dreams/nightmares are other dimensions manifested by the subconscience of the Great Ones. They were dreamed into reality, basically. But accessing them is the problem.
It’s a different dimension and timeline, so technically yes, but they aren’t real to Yharnam’s. You could make the argument that Martyr Logarius exists in a separate dimension and timeline as well.
I thought they were real too turns on it was all just a dream.
So… yes? Kinda? Ludwig, Lady Maria and Laurence are the real deal. They were trapped in the Hunter’s Nightmare for their sins and by killing them we set them free.
As for the Orphan of Kos, I have no idea. I’m going to assume it’s real since it’s a Great One and even when their physical form dies, they still continue to exist in another form and the Hunter’s Nightmare manifests the unborn child and possibly attaches the non-physical form to the manifested version of it’s body. But yeah I can’t be 100% sure about the Orphan
And fuck if I know what’s going on with the Living Failures.
Everything is real in the sense that they do exist in a metaphysical space. Like the nightmare to me is a real space and not just a hallucination.
But it's also a projection, as far as I understand it. The collective consciousness of the hunters got trapped in an eldritch space. And so, the things we see in the nightmare become distorted versions of physical reality.
You ever have one of those memories where everything looks blurry and distorted when you try to remember what happened? The nightmare is kind of like that, except this is a real eldritch space.
Old ones don't exist "in reality" but the only parts of the game that truly do are the intro where that guy talks to you, and the ending of the "yharnam sunrise" ending. The rest takes place in this liminal dream space of various levels of dreams.
They are real things, in the sense they exist. But your average person won't even interact with them.
Yeah a colony of living failures moved in next door to me. They’re terrible neighbours.
The dream world is weird because we people spiritually project their souls into it, people materially transported from the waking world to the dream world, places and objects materially transported from the waking world into the dream world, and places and objects from the waking world copy/pasted into the dream world.
It's intentionally contradictory because it's supposed to evoke a sense of eldritch incomprehension. Our mortal minds can't possibly grasp how the dream world works, nor can we grasp how the Old Ones work. That said, even if the player can't comprehend how it works, we can comprehend the effects. Killing the Orphan lifts a curse, killing the baby ends the beast plague, and killing the MP causes the player to become a god. In that way, it's a very pro-humanity story, in that even if we can't understand everything, we can still triumph against impossible odds.
As the years go by, I've come to rather dislike this aspect of the lore. I think it's lame that the player is surrounded by all of this science from others, but never has the chance to dive into it. There's an ongoing message in Bloodborne of "Don't blindly follow orders! Think for yourself! Unravel the mystery!" and in the end the mystery is ultimately unsolvable and you blindly follow a piece of scrap paper telling you to eat the umbilical cords.