The Pale Blood Hunt

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The Paleblood Hunt A Bloodborne Analysis by “Redgrave”

The Paleblood Hunt - A Bloodborne Analysis

A special thanks to LordFlatline for assisting in the compiling and editing process of this work, to chim_cheree for her incredible discovery, to ENB for his incredible work on the Official Bloodborne Guide, to my brother for giving his thoughts, support, and opinions on my writings, to Hidetaka Miyazaki for breathing life back into a long-dead genre of videogames, and to the literal hundreds of people who sent me messages, theories, questions, or comments during this long writing process. I would never have written all of this without the support

of

so many people

in the Souls

community.

2

The Paleblood Hunt - A Bloodborne Analysis

It’s been a rather interesting month for me. I’ve spent almost every waking moment knee-deep in the rich world of Bloodborne, exploring every nook and cranny, twisting together each tiny shred of information into a ball of yarn that I can try and spin into something tangible. I had no idea when I first tossed out a casual theory in the hopes of getting opinions on it that I would go on to write the equivalent of a dissertation on the story of Bloodborne. Lorehunting is a bit of a dead art in videogames, it has been ever since the explosion of the internet and the widespread availability of knowledge. The Souls games are the first to be subject to lorehunting in a long time, the last example I can think of being the original four Silent Hill games. It's a dead art for good reason too, as you can only keep a secret hidden for so long when one million people are trying to unravel it. I don't think I've found the answers to the secrets. In fact, I find it very likely that some, if not all of my theories will wind up being proven false or supplanted with better, more well thought out theories. Indeed it's such an evolving process that it happens every day. When I first started writing, nobody had yet made the connections between the Powder Kegs and Old Yharnam; Cainhurst and Annalise were considered to be almost vestigial parts of the game; wild accusations were being thrown left and right, the most insane types of speculation. I write this not to engage in literary masturbation and toot my own horn, but to show what an evolving process our understanding of Bloodborne’s Lore has become. Who knows, one month after writing this, it may all be completely invalidated. It was because of the rampant speculation that occurred in the weeks after Bloodborne’s launch that I decided to sit down and take a different approach. I didn’t want to connect the strings that weren’t there, I wanted to grasp at the straws we could find and form the unfinished puzzle for us to fill in. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the genius behind the Souls franchise, grew up in poverty in the city of Shizuoka. Unable to afford any means of entertaining himself, Miyazaki would spend most of his childhood reading books found in his local library. He was fascinated with western tales of fiction, but his English was not fluent enough to understand every single word. Many times 3

The Paleblood Hunt - A Bloodborne Analysis

he would read a story and find that he couldn’t understand half of it, and so he would connect the words he could find and fill in the blanks, forming a story of his own that used the pieces that had been laid out before him. Now, we must do the same. There are words out there that we can understand. Ignoring them and misinterpreting them will do nothing but hinder our ability to understand the world of Bloodborne. I want to follow in Miyazaki’s footsteps, by looking at the words that I can understand and filling in the blanks that I can’t. I want to connect the story, not to supplant it with my own. It is for this reason that I have decided to be so stringent, so exact, and so precise in every quotation. What I want more than anything is to be proven wrong, to have my information corrected, to