-EXECUTIONER-
(Left one's the og, edited on the right (dunno which one I like more...))
Started this sometime in december, left for the winterbreak, got back and finally finished this today. Pretty proud of the BG hehe (even if it is blurred to hell and back and covered up by Alfie :"D)
Hehe the butt-dog on the sketch sparks joy for me
Anyways-
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BLOODBORNE LORE Q+A PART 2: CAINHURST STATUES
part 1
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THE HUNTER ASKS:
all the statues in yharnam are weird. even the ones that look normal are so fucking weird. nearly every statue in this game hints at something much larger and stupider than we ever could have imagined.
before we start, for clarity's sake, the chalice dungeons are comprised of four major areas: pthumeru (the largest area and the aforementioned "tomb of the gods", it is a city that rose and fell eons before yharnam), the hintertomb (previously explained), ailing loran (a long ruined city whose fate echoes the fate of yharnam), and great isz (a dungeon that is overlapping with "the cosmos" and is of great story importance). they are NOT main game content. some people completely skip them because they appear to be repetitive and are honestly kind of boring. and yet....
this ties into castle cainhurst's "normal" statues. the first clue something is off is that all the knight statues are missing the right leg. all of them. and not in an uneven way that would imply they were knocked off by some art hating maniac.
it wasn't until the DLC came out that this became retroactively significant. the item description for the old hunter's trousers reads:
A widespread belief of the period was that "beast blood crept
up the right leg," and this led to the double-wrapped belt.
the dlc takes place in the time of the old hunters, the distant past. but the knights predate the hunters, right? they have to. the rifle spear was said to be based on a "lost cainhurst weapon". its a pale and poor imitation of the reiterpallasch. and the statues...
the statues in cainhurst clog up rooms to much that they make moving around difficult. they're all the same 4 statues: a queen, a king, a different queen holding a child holding an orb (?), and a tasteful contrapposto nude. i cannot stress how many of these fucking things are just lying around or shattered around the castle. the depictions of the generic king and queen (in truth, these are recreations of statues around notre dame) match depictions in other parts of the game but absolutely no mention is made of their rule now or in the past.
how old is the cainhurst lineage?
old. really, really, old.
here's the only other place you can find the statues: as gold statuettes in the treasure rooms of the pthumeru dungeons
ah, and i know what you're thinking: obviously this is just fromsoft re-using assets in that classic sloppy late game kind of way. but there's. more. a lot more. its not just this.
its so old that the armor you see in the throne rooms and a portrait of a knight in cainhurst castle can be found scattered throughout the lowest parts of the labyrinth.
in modern cainhurst, the fellow above has been transformed through dastardly means into the gargoyle-esque enemy called the "child of antiquity". "bastard of cainhurst" probably would have been a better and more thematically appropriate name.
he is not the only cainhurstian (?) depicted on the this wall of what you probably thought was reused concept art. its probably that. but its something else too. you know who else is in these paintings and also in the chalice dungeons?
her.
in the sinister chalice descriptions ("sinister" being a modifier that adds her to the dungeon for extra challenge) she is described as a "mad pthumerian". h-how can she be a pthumerian if she's a cainhurst noble?!
have you noticed that bloodlickers will appear in chalice dungeon rooms where you've preformed a visceral attack? the only other place they're found in the game is cainhurst! they're read to be blood drunk nobles who have become vampiric like mosquitos or ticks. why are they in the dungeons??
there's also this cainhurst knight who continues to live and serve his queen. i believe one of his guaranteed encounters is at the very bottom floors of the labyrinth. how did he get down there??
did he get down there?
or...did they come up? the subjects of the portraits are pale and thin.
"The old nobles, long-time imbibers of blood, are no strangers to the sanguine plague[...]"
how old? how long have they been imbibing blood? they've experienced blood plague before?!
why do both the bloody crow of cainhurst (one of annalise's knights who is evidently not a vileblood) and the shadows of yharnam (the entourage of queen yharnam) drop "blood rapture" runes which are deliberately vague about which queen the rune is in service to?
how old is the cainhurst lineage?! WHAT is the cainhurst lineage?! annalise, queen of the vilebloods, is the sole survivor of a massacre that wiped out the rest of the vilebloods (an ideologically charged name imposed on them by the church). she was left alive simply because she could not be killed but she was forced into a mask she cannot remove. but the mask does not prevent her from making us into a vileblood, as we only have to drink her blood to do so.
what could the mask be hiding? why does her dialog change when you unlock the lowest chambers of the labyrinth? how are there two undead queens?! (yucky item from bloodborne warning)
all hail the undying queen of blood!
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