I've been watching the videos of "Charred Thermos," a YouTube channel that focuses on lore from Bloodborne, and focuses on a particular argument: that Bloodborne is an extensive metaphor for the development of medical science in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The videos are interesting, and make a very thorough and careful argument (if I have a critique, it's that they recap their previous arguments perhaps too often, though in today's attention-lacking culture, perhaps this is a feature rather than a bug).
It's actually quite fascinating, as the author connects Yharnam with the history of medical research in Edinburgh, Scotland, and explores the way in which the elements of the story and its world each connect to various aspects of medical research, with Hunters acting as doctors, beasts representing patients and cadavers, and rituals being cadaver dissection.
While not every argument the channel makes fully convinces me, there's quite a decent amount of evidence to suggest that this metaphor was, indeed, at the center of the inspiration for the game.
Indeed, I might elaborate on some of his metaphorical observations with my own: that the game's metaphorical horror is largely how medical science, for all its benefits to humanity, also requires a kind of dehumanization of the human body, so that a doctor may engage with the visceral in a manner that we are instinctively disinclined to do.
And, indeed, the malpractices and crimes of the medical field tend to come about when doctors (and health insurers, though I don't think they're part of the game's metaphorical structure) dehumanize their patients, thinking them "naught but beasts."
Still, it does raise an interesting question:
The games of FromSoft are famously vague - giving you very little explicit explanation for what is going on or what motivates people, but with a deep and rich hidden story that is revealed (though never fully settled) when you dig into the subtle details.
But I do find myself wondering: to what extent should we interpret this as a story in its own right, or purely as a metaphor?
I remember watching a lengthy (I want to say like six or eight hours) video analyzing Twin Peaks, and making the argument that the entire show was a metaphor for the state of television, breaking down nearly every element of the show as part of that metaphor.
Frankly, the video kind of pissed me off, in part because the video's author, who appeared as a talking head in much of it (for some reason I tend to prefer a faceless voiceover, but this isn't a hard and fast rule) seemed so smug about it, but also because it reduced the human story of the show to something purely in service of the metaphor.
Ironic, especially, because I think a large part of the motivation behind Twin Peaks was humanizing its central murder victim, Laura Palmer - and that I think David Lynch was deeply humanist in his worldview, even if his works were so dreamlike.
Still, though, if the works of Hidetaka Miyazaki and David Lynch both share a refusal to explain themselves explicitly, I'd say that the thing that the former lacks, or perhaps to be less judgmental, simply chooses not to focus on, it's that FromSoft games tend not to get you terribly invested in them on a human level.
Perhaps that's unfair: after all, Solaire from Dark Souls, Warrior Jar Alexander from Elden Ring, and others have become beloved by the games' fandom. But I'd argue that each of these games encourages an almost Brechtian detachment in its audience/players.
Consider this: in the weeks since finishing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I've found myself kind of agonizing over which of the endings I chose, with the larger part of the internet fanbase seeming to agree that I chose the "bad" ending. COE33 is very much about connecting with the characters on an emotional level - indeed, the reveals and secrets of the game make the entire conceit something quite deeply personal to some of its characters. And so, I'm left really questioning my choice, even if I felt that there was a sound moral and ethical argument in its favor.
With FromSoft games, while there's similarly some ambiguity over which of, say, Elden Ring's endings is the "good" one (though I feel like the one we can probably rule out is the Lord of Frenzied Flame one - that's got to be bad, right?) I think it feels much more like a philosophical and cerebral question than an emotional one.
Perhaps that's in part due to the fact that our player character is something of a blank slate for us (I haven't played Sekiro, the only one of their games with a set protagonist).
Charred Thermos suggests, for example, that the Great Ones we discover in Bloodborne are not eldritch gods, but are actually representations of organs within the body, for example Ebrietas being the lungs and larynx, and the Brain of Mensis obviously being the Brain, and while he doesn't make this argument, most likely Oedon being the blood (formless because it's a liquid).
So, what I find myself wondering is: should we even engage with the surface-level narrative at all, then? Are we meant to ignore it and only pursue the grand metaphor?
I think there's a certain fun to finding out the hidden truths behind a story, and certainly literary analysis (of which this kind of video game analysis is a closely-related cousin) focuses a lot on this exploration of the deeper hidden meaning and themes.
But I also think that there's a danger in pursuing this kind of analytical understanding of art. A work of art that exists purely to convey some kind of lesson can become propagandistic.
I studied screenwriting in college, intending to go out to Hollywood and write movies. While I'm still sort of hoping to make a living writing fiction, I remember in the earlier days attending a screenwriting seminar here in LA, where we'd read and comment on each others' screenplays. I remember one in which a person had a scene from their screenplay or teleplay that had two characters sitting on a bench, and the way it read was essentially that one had perfect wisdom that they were just conveying to the other.
No real dramatic stakes - it was really just a scene to convey what I presumed to be the writer's worldview spoken through the voice of an authoritative character.
Now, there is a philosophical tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, where a Socratic Dialogue is essentially a philosophical essay written not as the author speaking directly to the reader, but as two characters who are discussing a topic, as if it's a little stage play.
But I think that it would be an error to mistake one of these dialogues for a play, even if the line between the two media is blurry. (After all, you can have a compelling story that is just people arguing. Consider 12 Angry Men.)
Anyway, FromSoft's works are naturally works of art - even if the story were pure metaphor and we were meant to see past the surface-level narratives, the video game medium still has artistry in its gameplay and mechanics (if Editing is the unique aspect of film as a medium, gameplay is the unique aspect of video games).
I don't mean to accuse Charred Thermos or any authors who look into the symbolic meanings of these games (another favorite being Tarnished Archaeologist) of reducing the games purely to metaphor. The metaphor is the underlying bedrock of these stories.
But I do think it's interesting that, given how obscure FromSoft's storytelling style is, that these underlying metaphors take perhaps an outsized place within our understanding of their stories.
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