rynling | Bloodborne Background Lore

I haven’t figured everything out yet, but I think this is what’s going on in Bloodborne…

Bloodborne is loosely based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, whose premise is as follows:

The earth is billions of years old, and it has supported multiple civilizations that rose and fell without leaving any trace of themselves behind. One of these civilizations was that of the Great Ones, whose fungal bodies allowed them to benefit from long lives and peaceful societies. The Great Ones developed technology that allowed them to communicate across time and thereby make contact with other civilizations on the planet, including humans. Because the Great Ones are so physically and mentally inhuman, however, these connections are flawed. Sometimes human communication with Great Ones invokes fear, and sometimes it invokes madness that results in aberrant behavior.

In order to facilitate more productive communication, the Great Ones created dream spaces that exist alongside the waking world as separate dimensions. In Homestuck terms, these dimensions are “dream bubbles” that function as self-contained terrariums. A dream bubble preserves a certain place at a certain moment for the educational benefit of whoever accesses it, kind of like an interactive movie. Time therefore doesn’t flow inside the bubble; it repeats. This means that you can trap someone or something in a dream bubble and use it as a type of prison, and this is what the Great Ones did with Cthulhu, a priest of malevolent cosmic elder gods that would destroy organic life on earth if the planet came to their attention.

So, putting Lovecraft aside, there are three factions of Great Ones in Bloodborne.

The first faction is a group of Great Ones who are trying / have tried to communicate with humans. Humans have taken blood (and possibly other substances, such as spinal fluid) from the physical bodies of these creatures. In small doses, the administration of this blood cures illness and prolongs life. In larger doses (and in other special circumstances), the blood induces physical transformation. An organization of surgeon-scholars called “the Healing Church” has set itself up in the city of Yharnam as a religious organization to perform “blood ministration” on the populace, whom they’re using as test subjects in their experiments to bring humans physically and mentally closer to the Great Ones.

The second faction is a group of Great Ones who oppose this sort of contact and communion between Great Ones and humans. Their motives aren’t particularly clear, and “oppose” is an anthropocentric word, but they’ve acted in opposition to whatever is going on in Yharnam. One member of this faction, called “the Moon Presence,” has created a dream bubble for the purpose of training hunters to kill the humans maddened and transformed by blood ministration. This is the “Hunter’s Dream” that serves as the central hub of the game.

I’m not entirely certain about this yet, but I think the version of Yharnam that exists outside of the Hunter’s Dream may be a dream as well. What the player-character is doing is using this dream as a training simulation, and they can only wake up (meaning: end the game) by defeating the older hunter who serves as their mentor in the Hunter’s Dream, by defeating the manifestation of the Moon Presence that exists within the Hunter’s Dream, or by doing a secret third thing that I don’t really understand yet.

The third faction is a loosely federated group of spiderlike Great Ones called Amygdala, who have created and continue to maintain separate dream bubbles. Some of these dream bubbles were created in cooperation with humans seeking eternal life in a timeless space, and some were created as prisons to contain malevolent entities, and some were created seemingly for the purpose of feeding off the human souls trapped inside them. I think the version(s?) of Yharnam that the player-character navigates is this third type of dream bubble.

So essentially, the world of Bloodborne is a dream inside a connected network of dreams accessed by your player-character as they dream.

It’s hard to say, though, and I could be wrong. There’s very little text in the game itself, and this text is extremely fragmented. Based on what I’ve played so far, I get the feeling that it’s entirely possible to see everything there is to see in Bloodborne and still not pick up on what’s going on in the background story of the game.