#yharnam

In nights of revel led astray In gilded halls and ballrooms fine Beneath masks of secrets ashen gray Where red-stained lips sip luscious wine

When all is mirth and feverish laughter's peel Where shifting walls cast vaguery-shadows Secret whisper pass and never reveal Idylls lived in grassy amber meadows

When pleasure sickens and turns around Where beauty is death and everything between Smell and sensory sorrow blend with sound And ashes seek to ascend to green

Canals overrun by mobs that roam Dancing to a song true and Ethereal From eosian skies to vesper's gloam Dreams glow true and truly unreal

Silken gowns that hide knives to pierce Lies told by all to all else and sundry Honeyed words whose venom appears To soothe and mellow their inherent tragedy

Libations offered in Passionate ecstasy White stained robes that bleed to violent red Where Pleasure reigns supreme her Fantasy Of Rictus smiles who scare the dead

Where shadows hide name and face When masks are no longer seen a threat Where all that's seen is beautiful grace And screams are joy, not throes of death

Cards flash to accent flashier colours Hats that grow and swallow their wearers Dolls who speak and offer flowers To vanishing men and magic bearers

Twelve nights of raucous Passion Thirteen days of celebrating Pleasure Where vanity and disgust is all in fashion Ah, Carnival. Ah, streets aglow with treasure

I escaped the hospital dog only to die fistfighting the Yharnam xenophobes

Woke up and had no clue how to equip my items. Kept accidentally pressing the heal button. Tried fighting the dog with just my knife. Dies pathetically.

"Our thirst for blood satiates us, soothes our fears."

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.

The Plague and How it (maybe) Spread

The name of the plague, “Ashen Blood", that struck Old Yharnam comes from the greyish, pale appearance of an afflicted person's blood. One observation we can make is upon striking the Blood Starved Beast in the Chapel of the Good Chalice, the blood is a gray color.

Game notes state the Ashen Blood plague triggered the spread of the beastly scourge (sometimes referred to as the Beast Plague), but never directly explains how.

A common theory is that the Healing Church introduced the populace of Old Yharnam to an infectious agent in their research into the Old Blood and the Great Ones, resulting in the Ashen Blood plague. Below are some of my thoughts on this theory:

The grayish blood of the sick and the Church's interest in "paleblood" is quite the coincidence. Moving forward with the idea the Healing Church used Old Yharnam's citizens as research subjects, the Church may have thought that the pale color of the Great Ones' blood (which we can assume they discovered during the events at the Fishing Hamlet) was a key component of ascension - or becoming a Great One.

Their logic might have been that the blood was key to facilitate a transformation - or it may have been an exploratory venture into the biology of the Great Ones. Regardless, once the people began falling ill, and with the antidotes only providing temporary relief, the sick may have sought blood healing.

As for the causative agent of the Ashen Blood plague, I personally believe it was derived from snake venom.

Snake Venom and Blood

Snake venom, in some species, can destroy red blood cells (RBCs) through a process called hemolysis. Since RBCs are what gives blood its color, the assumption is that blood devoid of RBCs would be pale (the remaining blood products, like plasma, are a pale color).

But, hemolysis causes the contents of RBCs to leak into the rest of the blood. This is often seen in phlebotomy after a blood sample is collected in a vacutainer tube treated with an anti-coagulant. Once in the tube, the blood will separate nicely in layers unless hemolysis occurs - then the blood components will unevenly separate or "mix".

I say all this because, if a person is exposed to venom with hemolytic properties, their RBCs would rupture inside the body and not result in pale-colored blood. Their blood would likely still be pink if not reddish, not fully pale or pale yellow.

I'm being a stickler about this observation (the numerous other medical inaccuracies in this cosmic horror, fictional video game setting notwithstanding…), but there are other thoughts I have on this theory:

1.) Healing Church involvement in Forbidden Woods:

There is a white church hunter on a thatched roof in the Forbidden Woods, and there are Church Giants in a secret passage linking these woods and Central Yharnam (…a ladder leads up into the graveyard near Iosephka's clinic). While the giants could be there to keep those from the Forbidden Woods out of Yharnam, they could also be there to provide safe passage for Healing Church members traveling to and from.

2.) Causal associations:

You use the same antidote to cure yourself of slow/rapid poison following attacks from the snake-men and snakes as you do the poisoned beasts in Old Yharnam. While Bradford Hill's (commonly "Hill's") criteria for determining epidemiological causal associations is not perfect, it helps here.

3.) Thematic inspirations:

The science of Bloodborne appears greatly inspired by research of the mid-1700s to the end of the Victorian era (1901). To name a few, we see the influence of Galvani (medical electricity), electromagnetism, and the study of optics (as seen in the Nightmare Lecture Hall, and by the existence of glasses). Victorian era doctors believed snake oil could act as a pain reliever and could cure ills, despite most of its use being a hoax. Not only is the use of snake products a historical tie-in, but it it also another false remedy which seems on-brand for the Healing Church.

Transmission

As for how the people of Old Yharnam were exposed to the infectious agent that led to the Ashen Blood plague, there is less material to work with. One theory is the use of the water supply as the mode of transmission, and I can't help but gravitate towards it. I'm not suggesting they milked a million vipers and dumped the products into the water, but again, there is little point in holding tight to real science in a game taking inspiration from Lovecraftian fiction.

A common-source infection (such as water) suggests they wanted it to spread, but not between people, and for it to spread quietly. Also, poisoning means a delayed or slow death, leaving plenty of time for the Healing Church to study the sick (and observe potential compound effects of blood ministration).

Evidently, things got out of control with the infected, and the Healing Church had hunters burn and abandon Old Yharnam. This stops the spread of the Ashen Blood plague, and allows the church to wash their hands of the situation.

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