Bloodborne and the lovecraftian curse of class consciousness

This video will be dedicated to the commenters who told me that calling Nazis “sad nerds” was the reason I would never be taken seriously. No. This is the reason I will never be taken seriously. Since this video is my october essay, I wanted to make it really spooky. So let’s discuss the spooookiest topic possible - the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalist class.

Section 1: Introduction

I need to talk about a really serious issue here, that I’ve seen in a lot of games now. This is something that’s honestly holding back a lot of 8 or 9 games from being solid 10s. There are pieces of media here - pieces of art - that are compassionate and clever and rich, but they just fall down again and again in this one place. I’m talking of course about the Adam Driver Creator.

It takes me sometimes 2 or even 3 hours to make something even vaguely resembling Adam Driver, or even in some games I never make anything all that close, and I think we can all agree that’s totally unacceptable.

I come into so many games so excited but I’m playing and I’m just so distracted by what a poor Adam Driver the game let me create. What the fuck kind of representation is that of the most handsome man in the world? Pitiful. Do better Bloodborne.

Let’s get real about the Adam Driver Creator guys. What we need here is clearly a multiple point system to create a nose, a jawline, and general face shape. We need to make that specific face shape - wide upper jaw, square chin, NASA rocket nose. I’ve never seen a preset that comes close. A set of sliders isn’t going to cut it in some cases. I can’t even make his ears stick out. What kind of Adam Driver am I going to create if I can’t even make his ears stick out? No kind of Adam Driver at all.

FROM Software, I’m talking to you directly now: Ditch all of your existing facial hair presets. I can see what you were going for, some of them are pretty close to actual facial hair Adam Driver has had, but some of them… jeez. A full beard? When has Adam Driver ever worn a full beard? Ridiculous. And the hairstyles? I mean one or two of them… there’s a pretty good Kylo Ren in there, but where’s the weird bowl cut? Nowhere. That’s where. 3 out of 10.

Bloodborne was released in 2015 by From Software. It is an instalment in the From Software “Soulsborne” series, although it may or may not actually take place in the same universe as the Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls games. Unlike the other games, Bloodborne is set in a city resembling an 1800s European city, for example Victorian London. The other games were set in European-Medieval-style landscapes, or Tolkienesque fantasy worlds.

We all have things we’re afraid of, and that’s a provable fact because all of them are in Bloodborne. Bloodborne has some really gross, creepy enemies. Luckily for me the thing I’m most afraid of didn’t make the final cut. 

Bloodborne is enormously popular - it’s almost universally hailed as totally fantastic. Almost everywhere I’ve seen it reviewed and rated, it has over 90% approval from the gaming community. Let’s see if I can change that shall we: Bloodborne is an allegory for how Capitalism ruins everything.

Section 2: Aggressive Readings

In Sinistar or: How to Play Games Wrong, Big Joel explains quite adeptly why authorial intent and video games have a really strained relationship.

I think that’s the best way to describe it - the author’s intentions aren’t completely absent from every game, they just have a really strained relationship. Authorial Intent never really got to achieve everything it wanted, and it has this degree in art history, but Video Games is the one paying the bills, so they always do what Video Games wants to do, and Authorial Intent is always trying to get Video Games to notice something really clever it’s done, and Video Games feels stressed at work because it has this dickhead boss and you’re in the back of the car while there’s all this tension between them and you don’t understand why, and you already asked Authorial Intent earlier if you could go to blockbuster and it said no but you thought you might get a different answer if you asked Video Games and you didn’t mean to make them start fighting again you just really wanted to go to blockbuster… I’m sorry, I just need a minute…

So I’d like to talk about how I sometimes read something “aggressively”. What I basically mean by this is, as an extension of the “death of the author” concept - sometimes it’s okay to know that the author of a piece doesn’t have the intention you are talking about. If you can demonstrate that the reading of that piece of media you’re putting forth has some value, then it’s a good reading.

I want to use this term, “an aggressive reading” separately to “death of the author”, because the assumption that “death of the author” sets out to counter is that the author’s intention is the correct interpretation of the work, and the way a lot of people use “death of the author” now is to argue why their interpretation is the correct interpretation. An “aggressive reading” isn’t supposed to be the correct interpretation, but instead a valid interpretation.

A lot of you may be asking Isn’t this just an excuse for you to insert your shitty political hot takes into Video Games without any accountability?

…

Because Video Games and Authorial Intent have such a strained relationship, I think they’re a really ideal medium to apply this analytical concept. The case I most want to examine today is of course, a reading of Bloodborne. I’ll say once again, I’m not trying to claim this is what Bloodborne is “about”, I just think this reading has some value. Here’s the interpretation: Bloodborne is allegory for exploitation of the worker under capitalism.

Before we get around to that I’d like to look at a couple of examples of aggressive readings to just get totally on the same page.

It’ll be easiest to get my point across if I can relate it to a piece of media everyone knows really well, and so of course I’m going to talk about the mobile app game Idle Miner Tycoon.

Idle Miner is an app game in the popular genre known as “idle clickers” - the idea being that the main interaction with the game is simply clicking - at first you click to gather in-game currency and then after some time you use the currency to buy things that make your clicking redundant, therefore allowing you to be “idle”.

This is an absolutely huge game genre, and it has been for a few years now. Youtuber Simulator was really popular a while back I think - I don’t know I didn’t play it, when I want to accurately simulate being a Youtuber I play Overwatch and say racial slurs on Twitch.

A good example of an idle clicker, that I’d recommend is “Ultimate Kept Man Life”, it’s really fun. You start off just trying to escape having to do chores and you end up making like a time machine and a space station I think? It’s pretty great.

A lot of idle clicker games are those basic mechanics that I discussed just before, plus some In-App Purchases for if you want to skip ahead and not have to wait as long, dressed up in some sort of narrative or other aesthetic disguise. I say disguise, because the window dressing of an idle clicker game is the only thing that distracts you from the fact that you’re just wasting time clicking on a screen and occasionally handing over your money to the developers for essentially nothing.

And that’s where Idle Miner Tycoon comes in. Idle Miner Tycoon is a game where you click to set up, you guessed it, a mine, and then click more to use the profits to expand your mine or set up more mines. Partly because Idle Miner has such a simple premise with no story to speak of, the mining premise seems oddly metaphorical, as if the game is saying that the players paying money for in-app purchases or clicking on ads are the miners, creating revenue for the mine owner, representing the developers by just clicking away after the developers made the initial effort of setting up the “mine”. It’s also partly because mining is an industry with a really long history of exploitation and abuse and battles between workers’ unions and capitalist bosses. I guess I just want to know why all the miners look so happy. No real miner has ever been this happy to be getting black lung. What world is this set in?

I actually looked into this a bit more and I found out that the game was made by a games company called “Fluffy Fairy Games”, based in Berlin. Fluffy Fairy Games have only created one other game, but they seem to still be active so I’m guessing we may see more of the same in the future. But Eric you can’t just say they’re going to keep on making the same stuff! Good point imaginary contrarian, except that the other game Fluffy Fairy made is called Idle Factory Tycoon. Literally just another thin aesthetic veil over idle clicker mechanics - again, oddly self-aware metaphor for worker exploitation.

I did have to go check that these games weren’t some kind of satire, because honestly, why do they keep picking like, dickensian forms of labour as their idle clicker premises?

But that’s exactly my point - that perfect self-satire wasn’t their intention. There’s an interview with the creators in which they discuss making idle clickers as a quick easy way to make games that turn a profit, with one of them even describing idle clickers as “essentially a spreadsheet with an interface”. Hopefully with this example you can see the benefit of my aggressive reading - definitely not the author’s intentions, but what serves as a better metaphor for the way that idle clicker games like Idle Miner squeeze profit out of users than Idle Miner itself?

Now, because I always have to be a debbie-downer, let’s look at an example of aggressive readings being used for eeeevil. And by evil I mean shitty homophobic nonsense. In 1954, Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, the influence of comics on today’s youth. Seduction of the Innocent isn’t the gripping thriller that you may have first thought it to be. It is instead, a long screed against comics from a pearl-clutching garbage person. Think: all the people who today say that video games are making young people violent only 60 years ago and about comics instead.

Wertham claimed that Wonder Woman’s strength and independence from men made her a lesbian, which like, no, being raised on an island inhabited only by women probably made her a lesbian. He also claims that there is a subtext of BDSM fetish play in Wonder Woman, which firstly the creators were fairly open about, and secondly, Fredric, I thought you were trying to make me like comics less.
He even called Superman un-american and fascistic. Superman? Un-American? Wertham’s clearly never read the issue were the American government puts Superman in prison as a baby.

What I really want to talk about though, is the claim Wertham made that Batman and Robin contains a subtext for a homosexual relationship. This spawned decades of cheap, lazy homophobic jokes about Batman and Robin, and probably forever tarred a father-son dynamic that was supposed to be a wholesome and positive relationship for not just children but also parents to learn from.

The lesson to take from this example is that aggressive readings of media have their place, and that as a valid interpretation instead of the correct interpretation, they shouldn’t be attached to that piece of media for life. If you aggressively read something, then people can go experience the piece of media that way and have that experience and keep it at that.

Taking that idea on to Bloodborne I should say this: it’s easier for an aggressive reading to take hold as the “correct interpretation” when there isn’t already an obvious interpretation that it has to displace. Luckily I don’t have to worry about that, because Bloodborne is notoriously easy to understand, with clear plot and obvious, uncomplicated lore. Right?

Section 3: What the fuck is going on in Bloodborne?

In Bloodborne your character goes to a doctor called Iosefka for a magical cure-all blood transfusion. Iosefka tells you “hold up my dude this blood will turn you into a mindless beast in service of entities from higher planes of reality. Is that cool?” I’m just kidding of course, Iosefka doesn’t tell you anything.

You take the transfusion, wake up, go downstairs and get killed and wake up inside a dream - we’ll get back to that. There you’re given a weapon to defeat the werewolf that killed you by little skeleton dudes.

When you come back to the dream you meet Gehrman the hunter who tells you “hey my dude sorry to be the bearer of bad news but we’re all trapped in a nightmare reality basically living as tiny pawns in a cruel game played by interdimensional hellbeasts that you can’t even perceive without going completely insane. They’re exploiting us all in order to settle their interpersonal affairs like very very unsexy greek gods but the good news is if you play along with it they’ll mostly leave you alone.” I’m just kidding of course, Gehrman doesn’t tell you dick about shit.

So you set off into the world killing the other members of the hunt who have begun transforming into beasts and who are finding and killing beasts themselves and also seem to see you as a beast too.

As with any Soulsborne game you get used to just dying and dying and dying. You’ll even be standing in the Cathedral Ward area just admiring the view and a fucking dark portal will just scoop you up to space, deal you a bunch of damage for no reason and then throw you back down, and since you’re so used to dying you don’t think twice about it.

After you’ve killed a few different bosses in Bloodborne you’ll make it to Rom the spider - a big mama spider with lots of horrid babies. Once again, I see people online referring to Rom as male, like, come the fuck on guys. Anyway look away at this point if you don’t want to see horrid spider babies. I definitely tried to make my girlfriend do this part for me more than once. 

Defeating Rom is a wild ride, and I don’t mean hiding in the kitchen while Natalie kills the giant spider, I mean after you defeat Rom. You see, Rom was, by some sort of magic, holding back the true nature of the world. Rom was keeping you all from seeing the giant creatures manipulating you and when she’s gone you can see them. The Great Ones.

These huge creatures, perhaps cosmic beings, perhaps cthonic entities, have been watching you, and everyone else all along. The spooky dark portal that scooped you up in Cathedral Ward? That was a Great One just picking you up in its hand and crushing you. The truly brilliant thing about the way this twist works is, you can see the Great Ones before you defeat Rom, if you have enough insight, which is an in-game points system. However, when you can’t see them yet and you get scooped up in Cathedral Ward, there’s actually a faint outline of a hand holding you up. You just weren’t looking to see it, so you probably missed it the first time. That’s just insanely cool.

Obviously finding out the true nature of the universe completely changes everything. Now instead of killing a bunch of bosses until the game tells you it’s over, you have to… Oh okay, so maybe not.

At the end of all the killing you defeat a creature called “Mergo’s Wet Nurse” and then Mergo, an infant Great One. This was your mission all along. You were really working for yet another Great One, known as The Moon Presence or, if you’re a real fan like me and you know it’s real, much scarier name, Flora. At this point, back in the Hunter’s Dream, you can be executed by Gehrmann to awake blissfully ignorant back in Yharnam, Defeat Gehrmann and then get forced into being the new Gehrmann by the Moon Presence, or if you’ve collected certain items, fight the moon presence and wake up as a tiny alien squid baby.

Dan Olson made a video a while ago talking about the deceptive endings of Bloodborne. What initially seems like the best ending, reawakening in Yharnam as yourself, is perhaps the worst, and it all depends on your philosophical view of the game. The game models Insight, which I mentioned before, as a kind of madness, following the Lovecraftian tradition that if someone learned the deeper truths of the cosmos they would appear mad to everyone else.

With that in mind, the ending where you reawaken as a Yharnam hunter is one where you have no insight into how the world works. The ending where you become Gehrman allows you to escape that cycle, that trap, but still leaves you in a different trap. The third ending, although you sacrifice your humanity, allows you to become one of the creatures able to actually affect change in the world. It allows you agency, perhaps control.

There are your three endings, working in service of the great ones, becoming a middle man to them, or joining that upper level of existence.

Here’s where we can start with that aggressive reading. Three classes. An oblivious oppressed class doing what they are told by a higher ranking middle class in service of the interpersonal interests of the upper class. Okay, now I sound crazy… or do I just have a higher insight score than you…

The rich and powerful control the actions of the working class in myriad ways. Politically, if you make changes to healthcare, education, workers’ rights, the benefits system, or anything that the government is basically supposed to take care of, you’re going to affect the actions of the working class.

A little while ago in the UK there was a really intense period of xenophobia targeted at Romanian immigrants, which was fueled by hateful rhetoric by right wing newspapers. It coincided with the expiry of a law that was stopping Romanians from getting easy work in the UK, and when I say it coincided, I don’t mean it was a coincidence. After the expiry of the law and the waves of romanian immigrants who were supposedly going to flood the country never came, specific anti-romanian rhetoric dropped off dramatically. 

To me, the invisible, interdimensional creatures manipulating a group of workers into slaughtering each other as they continuously imbibe a supposed magic cure-all from the creatures which ultimately only makes the situation worse, reads pretty smoothly as a class system metaphor.The “Old blood” of the Great Ones might be Capital, or it might be a constant flow of garbage ideas through shitrags like the Daily Mail. I don’t know that I’d point to things as specific allegory beyond the basic points, I just think if I had an alien ask me “what’s a class system, how does that work” I’d say “it’s like fucking Bloodborne”. And then they’d say “What’s a Bloodborne” and I’d remember they were an alien and I had a lot more actual explaining to do.

The primary currency system in Bloodborne is “blood echoes". It's pretty funny considering that blood, sweat and tears is the idiom we have to mean labour when we want to conceptualise labour infused with its product. It's funnier than that though, because if you've read Kapital the one takeaway lesson if you get nothing else is that only labour can create value. When a business profits, that's labour that hasn't been paid back to the labourer. So if value can only come from labour and Bloodborne’s currency is blood… I dunno... I just think if I had an alien ask me “what’s a class system, how does that work” I’d say “it’s like fucking Bloodborne”. And then they’d say “What’s a Bloodborne” and I’d remember they were an alien and I had a lot more actual explaining to do.

The metaphor goes deeper than that though, and I mean deeper - there’s a second optional quest to the game, working through the Pthumerian chalice dungeons. These are dungeons deep underneath Yharnam full of exceptionally horrible critters. In one of the dungeons there is another Great One, called Ebrietas. Great Ones are worshipped and revered, but for whatever reason, she is trapped in the dungeons. Evidence suggests that other Great Ones ascended to a higher plane of being, but she didn’t.
I see the dungeons, which are supposed to give you a window into Yharnam’s past, as a perfect extension of the metaphor because what came before Yharnam looks just like what came before Capitalism: Serfdom, monarchy, worship. Belief in higher powers and theocratic societies and hereditary monarchy.
As a brit it’s my duty to see an allegory for the monarchy in any video game I play, but as a socialist it’s my duty to compare the queen to a tentacle monster from space living underground worshipped by a cult of the undead.

It works really well for me that the same Great Ones who were ruling over the Pthumerians now rule over Yharnam, only secretly, because again that just reads smoothly like what happened when Capitalism started to become popular. As the world industrialised, the power structures under the top level reorganised and society became something totally new, but the old blood changed very little. In Bloodborne a group of scholars who study the great ones have a mantra: “Fear the old blood”.

There is a rich and full lore to Bloodborne, and I shouldn’t go any further without giving credit to VaatiVidya without whom I honestly wouldn’t understand a single thing about Bloodborne beyond the basic plot. I’ve watched hours and hours of his content, which I’ve been writing off as valid research for this video, but he and people like him spend so many hours more researching by looking in game files, reading every single item description, and talking to characters while wearing different costumes to try to trigger new responses.

From Software don’t like to just lay things out plainly: you could go through Bloodborne and get to the end and not really get the big picture. If you want to understand things better you really have to engage, and the more you engage the more you get out. The game (all the Souls games too) really rewards curious players.

It’s a strange thing to do, to deny your players easy access to information - to create a rich lore and then withhold it unless the player puts in the effort to read item descriptions and so on. Or it’s strange, until you discover that From Software are really big fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. I mean credit to them, they made a medieval fantasy series where you have to do a silly amount of just walking around, and a cosmic horror game where you don’t understand anything that’s going on and feel like a tiny stupid insect in an indifferent universe, so good job guys I’m sure they’d both be proud.

I think it’s an interesting approach to game design - to narrative design that is - to let people experience a limited story, with the ability to go and discover more for themselves that would enrich the main story of the game. It’s interesting because that’s how life can be. Your own experience is very limited, and the “lore” is out there if you want to go find it. If you don’t, you could get to the end and say “bloody hell what was that all about?”

See, now we’re getting towards that part where I argue why this reading has value. Let’s explore the allegory a bit more first.

In “White Trash: A 400 year history of class in America”, Nancy Isenberg talks about the conditions of the colonies during the foundational era of America. I’ve recommended that book before and I’ll just keep doing it. America has long clung to a myth that it does not “have” the class system. There is an idea of a country founded on equality and freedom where anyone can become totally self-made. This is hysterically untrue.

The colonies of America were a place for Europe largely to send people it didn’t want any more to do labour it didn’t want to do in order to turn land it owned but didn’t want into profitable land instead. In 1630, John White wrote “Colonies ought to be emunctories or sinks of state; to drain away the filth”.

Nancy Isenberg writes that in 1608 someone described the poor in London as “dirty and disfigured monsters living in caves”. When I read that, the first thing I saw in my mind was the Yharnam members of the hunt. Around the same time, the 1610s, someone moving to America could gain fifty acres of land per servant they brought, and it didn’t matter if the servants survived the journey. Someone would be made incredibly wealthy in exchange for removing the “idle poor” from European cities. Debtors, addicts or even children could be kidnapped from the streets of european cities and sold into the navy or into indentured service and sent to America. 

It’s worth pointing out that an enemy roaming the streets in Bloodborne is the Kidnapper. There are tonnes of Kidnappers, carrying sacks as they genuinely would have done in the 16 and 1700s. There are parts of this allegory that I think, fit really well because of the nature of the lovecraftian genre that From Software wanted Bloodborne to fit into - the industrial era setting, the feeling of oppressive conspiracy.

Another element that fits the allegory really well - to my mind anyway - is the third ending. The way you get the third ending and become the tiny alien squid baby is to collect three of a special item throughout the game and consume them. The odds of you completing the game that way without knowing to look out for it are miniscule, and the most likely thing that happened if you did manage that was that you started the game with some additional knowledge.

It’s ironic that climbing up the metaphorical social ladder was only really achieved by most people because they took part in a community around the game. Most people who got the third ending will have found out how to through shared knowledge - therefore through people working together.

Maybe your ratings of the three endings do depend on your philosophy, your preference between humanity and power, but I think it’s pretty clear that none of the endings are what you’d call ideal. The best outcome would be that your new world hasn’t secretly controlled by alien squids, that the hunters didn’t murder each other, that Gehrmann wasn’t trapped in a dream, never quite within reach of real agency. Wouldn’t it be nicer if everyone just left the old blood behind? 

I don’t necessarily blame the Great Ones by the way, even if I talk about the system as them manipulating everyone else. Certainly some of them are malevolent and some of them aren’t, but I don’t hate the rich for being rich, I hate when rich and powerful people are shitheads. Unfortunately rich people and powerful people are shitheads a lot of the time.

It’s a bit anticlimactic isn’t, me not building to a conclusion where I say eat the rich? It would work better if I was sticking to blaming this secret shadowy group who were manipulating society wouldn’t it? Well the problem is, there are some people who would like it better if we could blame one group who were manipulating us from behind the scenes...

Is he talking about Nazis again?

Sorry guys, I’ve gotta talk about Nazis again.

Section 4: Madness

The secondary currency in Bloodborne is Insight. Having more insight will reveal more to you in the game. There's a lot of that in Bloodborne - before you discover any messenger accessories the tree stump behind the church is empty and the message when you click it says “the stump is connected to the nightmare, but there are no messengers" which I found inexplicably hilarious on my first playthrough so I kept going back to check the stump and laugh to myself.

In the lovecraftian tradition, as I said before, madness is a perceived state of being and not an internal condition. People appear mad to others who simply have not discovered the truth. In his book Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault points out that in the past, before the advent of sanitariums and other institutions to essentially remove the “insane” population from the “sane”, the concept of madness was seen very differently. Madness was a state that potentially anyone could go through at any point. With this point of view the lovecraftian dichotomy between madness and, as Bloodborne models it “insight” doesn’t seem unreasonable. The mad are simply people with a different point of view.

In Bloodborne, the deeper you dive into the bizarre nightmare world, the more insight you will naturally gain: When you take your transfusion of the “old blood” you see a vision of your beastly self reaching out to you; after you fight the first mini-boss, the Cleric Beast, you gain 1 insight and can see the doll in the Hunter’s Dream as alive; consume an item called “Madman’s knowledge” and gain more; 15 insight and you’ll see new enemies; 40 insight and you can see the Great Ones even before you defeat Rom; 50 insight and the game actually changes the musical score in the Hunter’s Dream; 60 insight and the sound of a baby crying follows you everywhere you go; 100 insight and Hidetaka Miyazaki watches you every night while you sleep.

The reason to discuss and think about this model of insight against madness, I think, has to do with understanding why other people have different points of view and different political beliefs. How many times have you seen someone you disagree with talking about their beliefs and reached for the word “crazy” to describe it. I certainly know there’s a huge trend among right wing and even centrist dickheads to describe leftism as a “mental disorder”.

Leftist Youtuber Angie Speaks just made a video about conspiracy culture, which is really good. It got me thinking about how much the actual way Capitalism functions, the oppression of workers, would read as a “crazy conspiracy” to someone if they didn’t believe it. It also made me think about how easily you could believe other conspiracy theories if you had some of the information and not all of it. It would be like having some amount of Insight, enough to make the game harder and scarier, but not enough to properly understand what’s going on.

The kinds of conspiracies that you might be drawn to believe in if you can see that the world is wrong, but can’t see how, or see that some people get all the money and power, but don’t understand who, are often extremely harmful. I’m talking about the Deep State conspiracy theory, White Genocide, Nazism, the alt-right conspiracy theories that SJWs are taking over universities and through universities, all of society. People who believe those things could make the same aggressive reading of Bloodborne I’ve made, just inserting their views instead. They would maybe claim that the invisible monsters manipulating the hunt are jewish elites, or Obama, or blue-haired SJWs, or Hillary Clinton. 

I think a lot that when people learn information, and the information changes their point of view, it’s like the discussion around Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The common misconception that the creature in Frankenstein has led to lots of people smugly informing others “Um actually, Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster”. I think there are three people in this situation: people who think Frankenstein is the monster; people who know Frankenstein is the doctor; people who get that Dr. Frankenstein is the monster.

The people believing that a secret cabal of jews control the media, or that SJWs are ruining society with safe spaces and trigger warnings - those people know that Frankenstein is the doctor. They have some of the facts, some understanding of how power, class and money interact in the world, but the fact they know they know something lets them think they’re totally right. They’ve got 15 Insight and they think they understand the whole game.

The thing is, they aren’t going to have the whole picture. The thing is, having all the insight isn’t even going to be enough. In fact, it might just make the whole world seem scarier, and leave you to draw the wrong conclusions entirely. The lore is all out there if you want to put in the effort, reading item descriptions and wearing a cauliflower head to talk to the villager in the DLC just so he’ll recite a little poem for you. (If you’re still wondering about this allegory, the villager is Zizek and the poem is “I am already eating from the garbage all the time”.)

You have to read and learn and make that effort. You have to share what you know and be willing to receive ideas from people, just not hateful ones. Some people like to pretend that feminist ideas are hateful, that SJWs hate men or white people, but it’s like I said before: I don’t hate the big squid aliens, I just don’t think the system should exist. I don’t hate rich people, just rich people being shitheads. Feminists and SJWs don’t hate men by default, just men who are being shitheads.

Section 5: The Canary

Commuting is once of the times that, if you have a job, especially a job you don’t like very much, you really feel like a small piece in a large machine. Some people commute in different ways to make it more fun, and I think a part of that really has to do with not feeling like you’re just part of the crowd.

The setting of Bloodborne is powerful because the misery is pungent, and obvious, but at the same time the system can remain hidden, at least until the big reveal. Similarly, I can go to a place like Canary Wharf, near to where I live, and there isn’t really one thing I can point my camera at and say “LOOK! A Capitalism!”.

That’s why it can be useful to find a good metaphor, or allegory.

Places like Canary Wharf are so soulless and grey and depressing, and the kind of architecture that demonstrates wealth and power but also cold efficiency is probably what our era looks like in the collective cultural mind’s eye. If there was a modern Soulsborne game, maybe it would take place in a city of glass and steel and concrete and plazas with unimaginative, curated greenery. Maybe the stock enemies would be men in suits. Just your own custom Adam Driver versus a thousand haunted, demonic Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorneys.

Doom 2016 has some explicit anti-corporate themes, but also, the entire game could be read in a similar way to what I did here - an anti-capitalist metaphor. It contains the same kind of divide-and-conquer workers-tearing-each-other-apart nightmare as Bloodborne, and the reason is, basically, Capitalism is that specific kind of nightmare and so it’s a specific kind of scary story we relate to. Hbomberguy made a video about Lovecraft that covered this stuff pretty well, but just sticking to “aggressive readings” and the value of seeing this capitalist metaphor for a second, I’d say that if people want to understand the nightmare that capitalism is, a lot of games turn out to be a useful metaphor, just especially Bloodborne. When you play most games, you and a bunch of other low-level mooks fight and kill each other until you rise up to the level where you can take on the boss.

In God Bless You Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut, millionaire adult son of the Rosewater family, Elliot Rosewater has gone totally craaazy and wants to help people instead of just managing his family fortune forever. When his father comes to find him and talk him out of it they have an exchange that really lays bare a central idea of the book:

Elliot: “I think it's terrible the way people don't share things in this country. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. There's plenty for everybody in this country, if we'd only share more.”

Mr. Rosewater: "And just what do you think that would do to incentive?"

Elliot: “You mean fright about not getting enough to eat, about not being able to pay the doctor, about not being able to give your family nice clothes, a safe, cheerful, comfortable place to live, a decent education, and a few good times? You mean shame about not knowing where the Money River is?”

Mr. Rosewater: "The what?"

Elliot: “The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts' content. And we even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently.”

Mr. Rosewater: "Slurping lessons?"

Elliot: “From lawyers! From tax consultants! We're born close enough to the river to drown ourselves and the next ten generations in wealth, simply using dippers and buckets. But we still hire the experts to teach us the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons, bucket brigades, and the Archimedes' screw. And our teachers in turn become rich, and their children become buyers of lessons in slurping.”

Mr. Rosewater: "It's still possible for an American to make a fortune on his own."

Elliot: “Sure—provided somebody tells him when he's young enough that there is a Money River, that there's nothing fair about it, that he had damn well better forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. 'Go where the rich and powerful are,' I'd tell him, 'and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You'll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear.'”

Vonnegut was a socialist, and a humanist. He believed in the power of people working together, looking out for each other. He didn’t want us to all to carry on holding power at the top of some imaginary system pretending that the system was just and right. A system quite like the system of power in Bloodborne.

I guess I’m saying if we all work together, we can get the best ending. Not one where we as individuals get to join the group at the top - a better one than that.