Birds of Death: Bloodborne's Feminine Horror
18 May 2024
Bloodborne is a 2015 role-playing video game developed by FromSoftware and directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki. The player character, known as a Hunter, seeks to discover the source of the disease infecting the Victorian-inspired city of Yharnam. Time is frozen on the night of the Hunt, a recurring event in which the townspeople pursue and eradicate those infected by the plague. The Hunter spends time exploring and fending off enemies in a specific area before reaching and defeating a powerful enemy known as a boss, unlocking a new region. The story is cryptic and non-linear, a characteristic for which FromSoftware games are known; information is revealed through small notes and dialogue with characters in inconspicuous places. The narrative of Bloodborne is a surreal window into the terrors of femaleness as the story engages themes associated with women, such as menstruation and childbirth, through a lens of Gothic and cosmic horror.
Male and female human characters are shaped nearly identically in Bloodborne: slender and long-legged with small waists. Most clothing in the game masks this to some degree, but the flowing silhouettes of capes are not remarkably masculine either. The Hunter’s movements appear light and graceful, especially when juxtaposed against wild, gargantuan enemies. One thesis, linked at the bottom of this page, claims that Bloodborne was designed primarily for men claims that “female characters are…simply reskinned men,” but I contend that it would be more accurate to claim that the humans in the game’s universe are not sexually dimorphous. Certain clothing, hair, and facial features change the apparent gender presentation of both the Hunter and non-player characters, but the characters are androgynous by nature. Notably, the game lacks sexualized cosmetic choices; female characters are offered as much dignity in their clothing as male characters. Regrettably, even Bloodborne assumes that the Hunter will be male unless the player selects otherwise; maleness is often the conventional default in both video games and society. Anthropologist Polona Sitar states that “the male body represents the standard for the ‘normal,’ ‘neutral’ body and the events of menstruation and pregnancy are understood as anomalies” and this contributes to the shame and stigma surrounding such processes. Viewing femaleness as anomalous to nature pathologizes and defamiliarizes women, resulting in mystical theories like the “wandering womb.” This historical mythologization contributes to why the female body continues as a site of morbid fascination. Bloodborne may initially appear beset by this kind of misogyny, but much of its horror is derived from how women’s bodies are treated rather than the bodies themselves.
In the world of Bloodborne, long before the events of the game, a Catholic-tinged religious organization known as the Healing Church and a secretive institution called the School of Mensis – taken from mensis, Latin for month and root of the English word “menstruation” – developed a way to heal through bloodletting and blood transfusion. Eventually, they discovered certain blood inhuman origin not only cured ailments but made recipients stronger. The blood likely comes from a dying race called Pthumerians, tall, pallid humanoids that reside underground. Deceased Pthumerians are encountered tied from ceilings, as if exsanguinated alive; live Pthumerians have a distinct grey, desiccated appearance, as though drained of blood. Many Yharnamites became addicted to receiving this blood, which slowly lead to sickness and mutation. Such mutations resulted in lycanthropic features, a connection to the moon’s influence over Yharnam and the game itself – when the player reaches certain points in the story, the moon’s appearance changes; certain enemies will become either active or inactive during certain moon phases. The werewolf is now inseparable from the lunar cycle, but the first known links between the two concepts only appeared in the 1930s after gynecologist Robert Frank identified “cyclic, hormonally induced symptoms” as menstrual interference (Cininas 5).