#great ones | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

reslari · 10 months

Text

Every Great One Loses Its Child and Yearns for a Surrogate Mother

So here I was watching one of the dozens of Bloodborne lore analysis/plot breakdown videos I’ve seen in my life, when the producer of the video made an offhanded comment that lodged firmly within my brain and got my thoughts running a thousand miles an hour. It’s funny, in all the videos and text lore posts I’ve seen, I can not recall anyone positing that the “surrogate” may be referring to a surrogate mother. Oh, I know there is someone out there that’s said it before, I am hardly trying to take credit for the idea, but I thought I’d do a little thought experiment of what it could potentially mean that the term “a surrogate” refers to a surrogate mother.

Now, of course, the obvious answer to why most people don’t think of it that way is because the item description specifically references children: Every Great One loses its child, and yearns for a surrogate. The context informs you that it’s talking about a surrogate child.

But what if it’s not?

Every Great One loses its child and yearns for a surrogate (mother).

Every Great One loses its child. They’re beings of a higher plane of existence, with nebulous physical forms. Some of them don’t even exist in physical form at all (that we know of), so it makes a sort of sense: They can’t carry a child to term. Their bodies aren’t built for it anymore. Maybe they never really were. So the mundane, physical, even bestial idea of pregnancy is beneath such beings and their dreamy ascended plane.

Yet, even still, they yearn for children.

So they look back to the plane they left behind, the plane they once inhabited and bred with the Pthumerians upon, and they find the humans. They’re fertile, they’re tied to the waking, physical world, and, most importantly: they’re trying to make contact.

I recall once that Miyazaki said in an interview that the implication of the Great Ones is that the more advanced a civilization is, the lower the birth rate. What is more advanced than the very Great Ones? But this seems contradictory: If their society is so advanced that they no longer feel the need to reproduce, why then would “every” Great One lose its child and yearn for another? Why do they even care?

Unless they’re simply not capable of reproducing anymore on their own, despite wanting to. The higher plane they ascended to cannot support the creation of new life. The changes to their bodies preclude them from having these children. Their nigh-on immortality means there is no reason for them to want successors or children to carry on their legacies or family bloodlines, and yet, they yearn for that which they cannot have anymore regardless. Such a simple thing, as well: While there is variance in individual members, reproduction is an extremely common occurrence everywhere in the waking world, and is typically easy to do.

Great Ones are too advanced for simple asexual reproduction: They’re far more than single-cell organisms, so they can’t just clone themselves into a second being. Further, even if they were able to form a zygote without input from a second member of their species, they’d still need to form eggs or a placenta - to create amniotic fluid, the sea within - to nurture the growing fetus until it is ready to join the world, and that’s where they’re getting stuck. They cannot nurture these children.

But the humans have great fecundity, comparatively, and there are a number of them trying to contact the Great Ones. Just like the Pthumerians before, they’re perfectly suited to carry these children the Great Ones want to term.

Whether the humans want to, or not.

I’ve seen some arguments going around the internet lately - and I’m sure it’s not a new argument, but it’s had some time in the limelight in previous weeks - about pushing to outlaw surrogacy, because it is commodifying women’s bodies. Consider that connection to the game, as the Great Ones use the humans for their own wants. Not even a need - after all, as I said, there is no reason for the Great Ones to even want to reproduce in the first place, the typical “ensuring the survival of a species by its continuation” instinct shouldn’t even apply here. Yet want to they do. They yearn for children. And they yearn for the people who can carry them, because they cannot any longer. It may as well be surrogacy tourism, to an entirely other plane of existence.

In exchange? The Great Ones have no use for traditional currency, so they can only guess what the humans would want in turn. Maybe they don’t care about that, either, but their mark does come in the form of wisdom, knowledge, the “Eldritch Truth”. Wisdom that the vast majority of humans cannot even understand or fathom, because they’re such “lesser” creatures than the Great Ones, and they don’t even speak the Great Ones’ language. Wisdom they’ll tear themselves apart over the interpretation of because multiple different schools of thought are going to pop up over the scraps the Great Ones leave behind.

What of the humans that don’t even want their bodies used in such a way?

That’s what makes this even more horrifying: I don’t think the Great Ones even care. They can hardly communicate with the humans. All the humans in Yharnam seem to want to contact the Great Ones, and there are some that find it wonderful, find it an honor. More, in fact, than ones that don’t. To the Great Ones, it likely seems the conditions of their exchange are universally accepted, even if that is far from the truth. Then, we are left with situations like Annalise and Imposter Iosefka actively welcoming a pregnancy by a Great One, but Arianna actively abhorring it.

So let us Teal Deer a longwinded explanation of how this can be applied:

Kos was pregnant when she was found washed up on the shore, or killed, and it doesn’t really matter where one stands on this idea. We know for a fact that the huge, skeletal, YEEEOW-ing creature we fight as a boss is a projection, or a form that the enraged Orphan wanted to take, not its actual body, given solidity by the Nightmare. When you kill it, the real form is the shadowy embryo-like being floating over the corpse of Kos. Only when that is slain does the Nightmare Slain message play and you get the message about the, “Sweet child of Kos, returned to the ocean...”

It’s easy to extrapolate, then, that the baby was never part of a viable pregnancy. Perhaps it did die alongside Kos when she died, but if every Great One loses its child then it was never going to be properly born. Perhaps, generously, you could say that it ended up like Mergo, a consciousness in a Nightmare Realm without a body. It certainly was never allowed to properly develop into a full being, all it could do was emulate the physical forms of the creatures that took it from its mother. Perhaps this means that Kos died before her baby did, even if the pregnancy was never going to be able to finish, and in this particular exchange the child did survive in a capacity it may never have been able to before. Kos’ life for her orphan.

But what of Mergo?

Mergo only exists in that Nightmare realm, too. The Yharnam Stone that you get for defeating Queen Yharnam in the chalice dungeons is, ostensibly, a crystallized fetus, encased in solidified blood. We know of Queen Yharnam as Mergo’s mother, so does it not follow that the solidified fetus is Mergo’s form itself? And its formless, voice-only existence in the Nightmare is not just a marker of possible parentage by Oedon, but also a possible indicator that it died, which means the process of using a human (or humanoid) being as a surrogate wasn’t going to work 100% of the time. Yet, it survived in enough of a form to be worth kidnapping. As long as the Great One reaches the “embryo” development stage, it seems, the Great Ones can begin to construct their own higher realm of existence, but if they died at this early stage, it seems they can only partially construct it.

Mergo and Kos' orphan are unborn, as well. You are in the nightmares of the unborn, in 2/3 of Bloodborne’s Nightmare stages, with the Nightmare Frontier (frontier, of course, meaning border) separating the two unborn Great Ones’ Nightmares from each other, held in place by a border guardian: An Amygdala. (Amygdalae are, after all, the Great Ones through which your Hunter passes in order to access two of the Nightmare realms. It makes sense they exist to sit on the border between Waking World and Nightmare, and between the various Nightmares to keep the consciousnesses from interfering with each other).

When the Moon Presence descends from the sky, what is the first thing it does? It wraps itself around your character and presses its face into your hunter’s stomach. Now, it is easy to assume that Great Ones can’t immediately tell the difference between male and female humans, between which humans could potentially bear a child for them, and which cannot, or, perhaps, that the Great Ones don’t even care to make that distinction. Still, the way the Moon Presence shoves its head into your hunters’ stomach was always rather peculiar, as though it is trying to either “bless” your hunters’ belly with child, or checking to make sure that your hunter is not pregnant (regardless of if they are even capable or not). The Moon Presence certainly isn’t going to be bearing any children - it’s a spine wrapped in meat, with the ribs poking out. It has nowhere to even hold a baby to gestate. Clearly, your hunter isn’t much able to, either, because in the end, they’re either held in stasis in the Dream, or being touched within and without by the Great Ones turns them into a slug. Or, well, what if...?

Let’s talk about some of the Kin, shall we?

We know Rom was made the way she is because of Kos, since Micolash won’t shut up about it. Given the comments made about Rom by the development team, we can presume Rom was, as a human, female. But we need look no further than the fact Rom is surrounded by spiderlings. They bear a passing resemblance, at least in the face, to the Byrgenwerth Spider herself. But if Rom has children - where did they come from? Or, to be most precise, who impregnated her?

Instead of answering that question immediately, let us talk about Ebrietas. In the Orphanage of Upper Cathedral Ward are all those celestial larvae. They have wing-like appendages that are reminiscent of Ebrietas’ wings, and they’re all turned toward the Cathedral, underneath which is Ebrietas, as though trying to see or reach out to her. Now, if those Celestial Larvae are her children directly, then she would likely not be a full Great One, and only merely a kin; supported by the fact she drops Kin Coldblood. After all every Great One loses its child. But Arianna gives birth to one of them, too, so it could very well be that some of the women of Yharnam gave birth to them and they’re attracted to Ebrietas for other reasons.

One of those reasons could reasonably be that, say, Ebrietas was their Great One parent. More of a “father” than a mother, as little as those words really mean in the biology of breeding with Great Ones. We know the Choir was using Ebrietas for their experiments into ascension, and it could also be reasonably argued that her blood was cut in with Oedon’s for blood therapy and treatments. That could give her easy access to ensuring someone like Arianna’s womb developed a Great One child. One that was hers. You also see her bent over the Altar of Despair, grieving, apparently, a body that looks suspiciously like Rom’s. In this scenario, there’s more than a small argument to be made that Rom’s pregnancy is from contact with Ebrietas.

Yet, if you ascribe to the idea that Ebrietas is kin, rather than a full Great One, it paints an even bleaker picture. Ebrietas was ascended from a “lesser” being, was left behind when the rest of the Great Ones ascended, and now exists to bear children, of which she has had many. Left behind in a realm where conception and birth is possible - the Waking World. Combine this with the number of children that surround Rom, and... well...

What if the ascension to Kin (at least, of the ones who were blessed by the Great Ones, and not created like the Celestial Emissaries) is either caused by or done because they are used to carry Great One children to term?

In this bleak scenario, Rom and Ebrietas both are essentially broodmares for the Great Ones. Ebrietas likely for Oedon, and Rom? Rom could be for Oedon as well, but we don’t know how much contact with Oedon’s Old Blood she had - but we do know at least one Great One she was touched by: Kos.

The changes to their bodies could have come because they successfully carried for a Great One, though it’s not guaranteed. While we know that contact with Kos can turn people (and. dogs.) into fish-like creatures, Queen Yharnam was never anything but a Pthumerian (though, again, the rules could be different for the Pthumerians), so it’s not guaranteed. But a human that is continually impregnated, to be a surrogate mother for Great Ones that yearn for children then turning into a Great One by exposure (but not so much of a Great One that they can no longer bear children), who then continues to give the Great Ones the children they want is a horrifying enough fate.

But I can do one worse. I can make all of this even more gruesome:

Parasitism is a very common theme in Bloodborne. In modern medicine, someone who wishes to be a surrogate mother can do so through traditional surrogacy or gestational surrogacy. Traditional surrogacy would be as I described it before: Where the surrogate mother’s own eggs are fertilized and the child is carried to term. Being used for one’s own fecundity to bear a Great One’s child would be an example of the former, generally speaking. Whomever bore the children would be the human half of the infant’s parentage.

But there is a second type: Gestational surrogacy. In modern medicine, this is where In Vitro Fertilization comes into play, and the embryo is implanted into the uterine lining of a surrogate. The baby is not biologically related to the person whom carries it: it is a different couple essentially “borrowing” a fertile surrogate’s womb in order to gestate a child because the original couple cannot bear the child for any number of reasons.

We know Great Ones can, at the very least, conceive children amongst themselves. Kos was pregnant, after all. So Great Ones are capable of breeding and, at the very least, getting through the very first stages of pregnancy.

In the most bleak scenario, what is happening in Yharnam isn’t Great Ones breeding with humans to just make the humans carry their babies because the Great Ones can’t have children -

They’re implanting their own fetuses into the wombs of Yharnamites and forcing them to carry unrelated children to term.

Like wasps laying eggs in tarantulas, except they need not enter through a wound.

It would be easy, as well. Oedon exists within the blood; “formless”, but still existent. Small, abstract enough to transport a fertilized Great One egg, zygote, even a small embryo and transfer it into a Yharnamites’ body. Other Great Ones would have to do it in different ways, but it makes sense this way why Oedon is usually the one pointed at for being the Great One parent for most of the infant Great Ones in the game.

Thinking of it that way, it makes sense why Elden Ring’s Bloodborne callback reference to Oedon is the Formless Mother; Oedon was never actually a "he" as the item descriptions refer. Oedon is just another Great One looking for a hapless mortal to bear the children it desires, but cannot carry.

Every Great One loses its child and yearns for a surrogate, a mother to carry and bear its child because it can no longer gestate. A child it does not even need, but wants anyway, for utterly inscrutable reasons.

Hope that “Eldritch Truth” was worth it.

#bloodborne #great ones #tw: pregnancy #a lot of tws relating to pregnancy and forced pregnancy in fact #and leaning hard into Bloodborne's argument of pregnancy being body horror #relatedly: there's an argument to be made that Kos and Flora are in a slapfight over Maria because of the points here #Flora wants Maria for a surrogate but got bamboozled by Gehrman and the Doll #Meanwhile Kos is keeping Maria hostage in the Nightmare because Flora keeps sending Hunters after HER babies #(and also because of the whole fishing hamlet massacre. she hasn't forgotten that either)#maybe I'll expand on that eventually #long post

41 notes · View notes