For anyone who wants to read Lovecraft, you can read all of his [stories for free on the H.P. Lovecraft Archive.](https://www.hplovecraft.com/)
The quote that always stands out for me when comparing Bloodborne and Lovecraft comes from his story "From Beyond":
>“You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shewn you worlds that no other living men have seen?” I heard him scream through the horrible chaos, and looked at the wild face thrust so offensively close to mine. His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I now saw was overwhelming hatred. The machine droned detestably.
>“You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless! But the servants are gone, aren’t they? You tried to stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I’ve got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud? . . . Don’t know, eh? You’ll know soon enough! Look at me—listen to what I say—do you suppose there are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter? I tell you, I have struck depths that your little brain can’t picture! I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. . . . Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me now—the things that devour and dissolve—but I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants. Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move. I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still—saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you. They didn’t hurt the servants—it was seeing that made the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are—very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you—but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are not curious? I always knew you were no scientist! Trembling, eh? Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have discovered? Why don’t you move, then? Tired? Well, don’t worry, my friend, for they are coming. . . . Look! Look, curse you, look! . . . It’s just over your left shoulder. . . .”
Very cool, quite different from what ive read so far I've not seen him go into a monologue like that. I find it somewhat easier to read than his other works.
Edit: quite not white, new phone
Also supposedly a lot of inspiration from Bloodborne came not from the Cthulhu mythos but rather the "dream cycle" stories.
But yes, Lovecraft is kinda hard to read, especially that kind of scientific style of storytelling can be hard to get into
Pseudoscientific. Lovecraft famously didn't have the constitution for math. He did, however, have a very large thesaurus which he used to make himself sound smarter than he was. Basically he understood stuff just enough to be afraid of it (see his story where Air Conditioning is a major villain tell). His work is a fascinating look into what the mind of a paranoid super racist is. Not saying any of his stuff is bad at all, just not scientific.
In his defense a lot of the science wasn’t established yet.
Like how outer space works (he thought you could fly through space with wings for example in the “Whisperer in the Darkness)
We’re all limited by the knowledge of our time. It’s not like he was trying to fake it and hoping you didn’t notice
That first quote unintentionally reminds me of the shock it sent through the scientific community after the development of the microscope, which is an interesting connection to the medical theme of the game
I’ve read his complete works. It’s amazing how the man was terrified of absolutely everything— death, rural people, urban people, cults, religion, science, the moon, the sea, alcohol, even penguins. When he goes off the rails in At the Mountains of Madness describing the horrible, terrible, scary penguins I had to laugh. It’s a wonder he could bring himself to go outside.
Honestly, I tend to prefer his earlier works, which were mainly about his fear of death (the young aristocrat thinking longingly of the grave in which he’ll be buried, a man long dead who keeps his room cold to prevent his body from rotting, a corpse who doesn’t know he’s dead stumbling into a party) and didn’t tend to be so racist.
Oh, I also enjoyed when, clearly miffed that some critics did not appreciate him calling his horrors “indescribable”, Lovecraft wrote a story in which his self insert was talking to another author who said describing things as “indescribable” was lazy. When suddenly! A horror so horrible it was indescribable set upon them! The critical author admitted not-Lovecraft was right, it was indescribable.
Except Lovecraft did describe the being, and didn’t seem to notice he was undermining his own point.
There's a bunch of audiobooks on YT ( pick the wayne june ones) , I sometimes listen to those while doing other stuff.
I liked color out of space the most.
Was going to mention this. For those who don't know, Wayne June is the voice actor who narrates the also very strongly influenced by Lovecraft Darkest Fungeon games. Terrific acting.
I've read about two-thirds of his work including all of his short stories; entirely as a teen which is probably for the best as I was more tolerant of his general unpleasantness. *At the Mountains of Madness* and especially *The Shadow Out of Time* are by far his best stories.
*Extremely* based on all fronts.
I always get kinda bitter thinking about how *only* when he was *dying* did he reflect on his bigotries and think “damn, I was a real piece of work huh?” Like imagine how his writing could’ve *matured* and *evolved* if he’d lived long enough to explore that growth more intensely. Huge bummer…
Incidentally, I *adore* this [adaptation of *Shadow.*](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7jp1CT1h6c&pp=ygUSU2hhZG93IG91dCBvZiB0aW1l)
Agreed. I also like… don’t like his writing. Bland as hell. I know it was from an earlier time but there’s just zero flavor at all. His world building really is what holds it all together
For anybody interested that may prefer to listen rather than read the YouTube channel Horrorbabble has done narrations of a ton of Lovecraft stories among other weird fiction.
Below is from “The Mound” regarding a subterranean race of “super humans” called the “K'n-yanians”
Seem familiar?
“Many things which Zamacona learned about K’n-yan in that first colloquy left him quite breathless. He learned, for instance, that during the past few thousand years the phenomena of old age and death had been conquered; so that men no longer grew feeble or died except through violence or will…Births had ceased, except for experimental purposes, since a large population had been found needless by a master-race which controlled Nature and organic rivals alike….owing to evolutionary differences developing during the million or two years of cleavage.
These evolutionary differences were even more strikingly shewn in another particular—one far stranger than the wonder of immortality itself. This was the ability of the people of K’n-yan to regulate the balance between matter and abstract energy,… in other words, with suitable effort a learned man of K’n-yan could dematerialise and rematerialise himself—or, with somewhat greater effort and subtler technique, any other object he chose; reducing solid matter to free external particles and recombining the particles again without damage.…”
The Pthumerian elder fits this description pretty well. Not to mention the Chalice Dungeon fits their subterranean setting.
The K'n-yanians also worship the Outer Gods
if bloodborne players want to start reading lovecraft they should start with mountains of madness imo. it’s very short and the parallels and inspiration are very obvious. then read innsmouth, then diverge off to wherever else you like
Not sure. At the mountains of madness is (one of) Lovecraft's LONGEST works. It has an incredibly long introduction which focuses on geological technicalities which might be offputting to some people that do not have the patience.
I started with The Temple - very short and has a very similar topic to that of Mountains of Madness.
i feel like i should stress to everyone that i mean short in comparison to average novels today 😂 i get through it by viewing it not as an intro but as putting you into the secure mindset of someone who is not prepared for that shit and is so secure in the fact that he should be alone that it feels insane to encounter literally anything else
Generally speaking, yes, it is short. Relatove to his other works? Not so much
Also if you consider At The Mountains of Madness to be very short, what is for example Call of Cthulhu then?
You seem fairly familiar with his work. I've heard people say Lovecraft was a raging racist. Is there any truth to that, and if so, is it reflected in his fictional works?
Well… yes. His stories are amazing and I love them myself, and there’s no denying their impact on horror as a whole, but much of his works are based very deeply in xenophobia. Part of why Bloodborne is so good is that it takes what Lovecraft built and successfully strips that all away.
I’d still recommend reading them because they’re very good and foundational, but yea there’s no denying his racism reflects in quite a few of his works.
You have to remember that he was very much a man of his time; the son of somewhat wealthy parents in New England in the early 1900s wouldn’t have had much chance to wind up any other way. His views did soften as he got older and got married, but he died not too long after.
Even by the standards of the time, he was a pretty massive racist. I really like his work overall, but there are a few choice bits that push the limits of tolerance.
Google his cat's name.
And yeah, it is reflected in his fictional works. He still created some excellent stories.
Obviously it wasn't the worst one, but as an Irish man The Moonbog is hilarious, because it paints the Irish as a bunch of backwards savages, even though it was written the exact year we gained independence. Probably why he was so mad at us. Dude was obsessed with Britain.
google the name of his cat
but fr. yes he was very racist (even for the time) and in a good number of his books the antagonists or cultists are just non-white people as he thinks of them in his head.
mountains of madness only really has two (human) characters after the inciting incident so if you are sensitive to that, i would say read that and then consider if you want to proceed. innsmouth does have a lot of comparisons but reads a lot more like someone who has never left their state and thinks that canada is an exotic jungle (and is also terrified of disabled people but that’s still normal today). the racism is definitely something you can sense but it’s not quite like call of cthulhu.
i can’t blame people who don’t want to read his work for that reason. he’s very much writing right after the KKK’s revival era and when naziism in the US was acceptable and popular and his work is a product of that. he’s also a dumbass weirdo who’s scared of air conditioning. final boss of fear of the unknown fr. he did create some great works and universes but you do have to have a solid concept of death of the author to see through it.
Tbh I think [The Music of Erich Zann](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mez.aspx) is the best starting point. I never hear anyone talk about it but it’s a super short story with a simple premise. It’s where I started and it got me hooked!
My favorite is a very less represented work of his, the Shadow out of Time. It’s less cosmic horror and more science tiction, but I love it.
I’ve read most of his works, and I do think a lot of the works that he inspired are better than the stuff that he himself wrote, but his influence is phenomenal.
A race of beings that project their consciousness forward in time into a race of spider-like entities to survive a global catastrophe isn’t cosmic horror?
I love Lovecraft's books. I haven't read everything, but I've read all of his novels and novellas.
Edit: People mention his famous stuff for a good reason (it's good). But I'd like to shout out *The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath*, a little less known book but I really enjoyed it. I also think parts of BB were inspired by this book and others in his dream cycle.
One of my favorites is the end of the story The Festival:
“The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”
I have the "Complete collection" book from Chartwell classics. I haven't read alot of it tho, only The Beast and The Alchemist and I think one other story.
I've read a good few. The Music Of Erich Zann is my favorite. No other books I've read require me to put then down once finished to just take it what I've read. A terrible racist and xenophobic but a brilliant horror author. Reanimator was also very good.
Don't sleep on Chambers as well with his book The King in Yellow. Lovecraft noted him as inspiration and it shows but it is kind of nice that within that collection of stories there is quite a variety of tales with not all of them being tragic.
it’s funny cause before i read any lovecraft i was like “damn, i guess people found out this guy was a huge racist, well i hope it doesn’t affect his writing” and then i read the herbert west reanimator series
I have The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and have never once come across an excerpt where he, breaking the 4th wall, fervently describes to the reader **how one race is superior to the other,** which is prerequisite for something to be considered racist if we're going by textbook definition and logic.
If you're referring to the way he describes some characters...that isn't racism no matter how hard you try to make it so. According to textbook definition and logic, at least.
I've read many of his stories and letters and I'm very fond of his work (just this last Christmas I bought a cooking book based on it...).
Now, he's not an author I usually recommed, at least to people who haven't read much. Many go in expecting a modern horror writer à la Stephen King when he falls more in the lines of a Mary Shelley, and get disappointed. His writing is baroque, sometimes over-the-top in its use of adjectives, it's slow, and he projected a lot of his fear and disgust towards humanity on other ethnicities, illiterate people, etc. So I understand that he's not an easy read for many people.
He also didn't conceive his works as part of a literary universe. The Cthulhu Mythos were stablished after his death by Derleth, a close collaborator of his, who did an amazing job but also took some liberties such as adding a good vs. evil dynamic between his entities that is present in almost every instance of pop culture Lovecraft (I won't ever forgive you for that, August).
But despite all that, Lovecraft revolutionized the genre of horror in almost a metaphysical way, and the philosophy behind his work is truly unsettling. Cosmicism for the win!
I do firmly believe that Bloodborne is one of the best iterations of cosmic horror in a videogame, at least the best one I've ever played. My final project at university was a comparison between Lovecraft's literature and Bloodborne (I studied comparative literature), so I could talk about this topic for hours.
I have read 90% of his stuff. At the Mountains of Madness is amazing, pretty mindblowing for it's time. Shame about the racism! Otherwise I'm a huge fan.
I own a physical book straight up titled “Necronomicon” that contains all of his notable works, I’m still not even halfway through yet but I thoroughly enjoy Lovecrafts works.
It becomes so clear that he was a deeply disturbed and fearful man, and it can be a little tough to read when his social views are shown off (like, he was considered overly racist *in the 1920s-30s*, which says a lot).
That being said, of the works I’ve read so far my favourite is Herbert West: Reanimator, which leans far more into Gothic horror than the Cosmic angles (again, some horrific racism at a certain point, but not important to the narrative whatsoever).
Also in other from soft games you can pick up references to Lovecraft. In Sekiro there is a physician who is uncannily similar to the physician in the story of Herbert West Reanimator.
Every time HP’s IP is used for something other than perpetuating his racist rhetoric, I gain an insight. I hope that bed-ridden bastard is turning in his grave.
Hell yeah, you show him! Really stick it to that 87-year-dead paranoid schizophrenic! I can't believe someone born 130 years ago with so many mental disorders would have racist elements in his work. I mean, he was terrified of penguins, air conditioning, and people who lived in the countryside (all of which he had extensive personal experience with), so it's completely inexcusable that he would be afraid of foreign people or strange cultures and draw upon extant racist tropes for use in his story.
Fuck you, Lovecraft, you sad, terrified, mentally ill 19th-century man who put some racist depictions of various kinds of people into his pulp horror. I don't care if you reexamined your views later in life and started appreciating the differences between cultures or viewing native Americans positively. Too little, too late: your works previously were racist and that's what matters.
And now we get to not only use all of your ideas but also earn social points on social media by crowing about how racist you were. Serves you right for being born in a racist time period and having bad opinions and racist beliefs from that time, instead of being enlightened and correct like we are now.
I mean Bloodborne, Call of Cthulu tabletop are all iterations of his work that I appreciate. This isn’t “woke culture” attacking you, it’s distancing the concept of the IP from obviously racist shit imbedded into the work. A small example would be a creature named “Shur-Niggurath” Like come on.
Seriously, there is little Lovecraft in Bloodborne, less than most fans say there is. Bloodborne is more like a fusion of works like Berserk, Hellsing and others ranging from Neo Genesis Evangelion to FromSoftware games of the past. So many of them are influenced by HP. LOVECRAFT BECAUSE HE influenced a lot of modern literature but I don't think Bloodborne is focused on him at any point.
The hunter's universe is common in ActionRPG games, for example Phantasy Star Online, our characters are foreign hunters looking to not only organize a hostile world full of beasts but also in search of our prizes and achievements, this is also valid for the Monste series Hunter, and also for Dragon Dogma. The difference is that Bloodborne focused on a universe of gothic horror, something that passes between concepts of Dracula, Frankenstein and Werewolf, Gehrman himself reflects an aged version of what Van Helsing would be, the great night hunter, feared even by Dracula.
However, here we do not have vampires in their typical withdrawal nor the emblematic count, here we have cosmic creatures that inhabit the imaginary and manifest themselves from the drunken minds of those who confuse the real with the Beyond. This is really very Lovecraft but also Berserk after all, as Guts progresses on his journey in search of revenge against the beings who took everything from him, he becomes similar to them, transforming into the Beast of Darkness which is similar to Moon Presence from Bloodborne.
Without lovecraft there would be no ghost busters, he was a pioneer beyond the ideas of just bloodline but also a pioneer of the ides of ancient gods dwelling just outside of reach
How not if this is part of Japan's Taoist and Shinto culture. FromSoftware is Japanese, Miyazaki is Japanese, do you think the writers read Lovecraft and plagiarized everything? Or do the concepts of Bloodborne resonate with HP Lovecraft because the primary sources have equivalent foundations?
I don’t know how you can downplay Lovecraft’s influence when everything involving the Great Ones is derived directly from his stories. Hell, the Fishing Hamlet is almost certainly a direct reference to one of Lovecraft’s story about a village full of eldritch fish people who used to be human. Likewise, Arianna’s spontaneous pregnancy with an eldritch baby is most likely a reference to the Dunwich Horror where something similar happens. The list goes on and on.
Like, Fromsoft has a pretty unique take on the Great Ones that separates Bloodborne from Lovecraft’s work and others inspired by him, but when you start looking at the two side-by-side you can clearly tell they were drawing from his stuff.
Don’t forget the Dream Cycle being very present with how BB’s world works. With planes of existence stacked on top of each other and varying degrees of how much a person can detect, as well as people being “hosts” of nightmares and dreams.
But Lovecraft is the only one nor the first to explore the dream cycle. A dream world that reflects a spiritual world and a fundamental part of Taoism and Buddhism. So the fact of having this type of structure is not fundamental that the developers' ideas came directly from HP. Lovecraft. Take for example the story of Sekiro.
It's like thinking that Pirates of the Caribbean is about HP Lovecraft and not about pirates. The protagonists are still the hunters, the eminent are still an antagonistic force but Bloodborne is much more about the relationship between the different factions of hunters than the human insignificance of Lovecraft's works. People are important in Bloodborne your character and NPCs, the problem is that the western setting has connected them directly to these common myths and legends.
Now if you see Bloodborne from the point of view of the Japanese version, it is much more about a spiritual world, about spirits, obsessions that refer to folk Yokais, about legends of jewels and haunted castles and the superior entities are not creative gods, they are a consequence of fall and ambitions of powerful figures who had their ambitions materialized as stigmas and curses. Which is something common in Japanese horror games and FromSoftware has already made several of them.
If you look at Echoes Night and Kuoh you will find many parallels with Bloodborne
In the Japanese version, the GreatOne are not treated as gods, or creator gods. They are treated as Onis Yokais that feed on the vital energy of their hosts so that they remain in existence. So make no mistake about the design aspects of the game. This is a typical Japanese game with Japanese cultural bases whose design references are European Gothic with all those cathedrals etc. Attack of Titan and Berserk are like that too.
Remember that before the souls fever, FromSoftware games were western themed and only Echoes Night and Kingsfield were western themed where only one is contemporary gothic and the other is medieval fantasy. Japan Studios followed a similar trend after a vast line of oriental-themed games Bloodborne was there next to other games like Souls Sacrifice, Rain and Puppeteer, all talking about the dream world of the soul's relationship with higher entities. So Bloodborne was one of those games with Deracine dealing with a more gothic theme but the developers were well rooted in creating oriental games.
Nothing you said in either reply disproves my primary point. I’ve already said that the Great Ones in Bloodborne aren’t portrayed the same as they are in Lovecraft’s works, so I agree with you there. You’re also right that Bloodborne doesn’t focus on the same themes and core ideas that Lovecraft did. But if you look at the story of the game and various design elements (the focus on the sea, the fishing Hamlet, the Dreams/Nightmares being separate planes of reality, eldritch abomination babies, etc), it’s pretty damn obvious that they took heavy inspiration from his stories to create the world of Bloodborne. There’s also inspiration taken from classic victorian gothic literature like Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde. And of course, you’ve always got some Berserk references, as per Fromsoft tradition. These are all true in tandem, Bloodborne draws inspiration from a lot of different places to build out its world, which is what I think makes it so unique. I just don’t get why you’d want to sit here and argue against something that is blatantly obvious.
There is actually little to no direct connection between the Great Ones in Bloodborne and H.P. Lovecraft's gods. Even the Fishing Hamlet does not seem Lovecraftian. I've mentioned before that Bloodborne incorporates several concepts based on Christianity. The monsters in the Fishing Hamlet are fish, not a reference to Dagon as in Lovecraft's works, but rather a nod to how early Christians used the fish symbol to identify true followers. The Fishing Hamlet in Bloodborne symbolizes the lost faith that Byrgenwerth's scientific curiosity killed, while the Orphan of Kos on the beach is a metaphor for "God is Dead" or the death of God, as discussed by Friedrich Nietzsche.
To reach Kos, we pass through the faithful, and then encounter the allegory of the cave. In this context, the cave represents the perceived world through distortions and shadows, symbolizing fears, while outside lies knowledge and reason, the tangible reality. It's when we realize that in the reality of that world, there is no God; there never was because He is dead. All that remains is His lingering and abandoned essence, to which those souls trapped in obscurity cling.
Therefore, the DLC attempts to show the player through metaphors and abstract concepts how the scourge and the Church are connected to a purposeless quest, and that only the irremediable acceptance of destinies is the sole reason or truth.
That’s all well and good, but did you just miss the part from earlier where I literally explained outright that Lovecraft wrote a story about a village of eldritch fish people who used to be human? Fromsoft was not subtle with the references, this is getting ridiculous. And saying that the Great Old Ones are nothing like Lovecraft’s works is just outright incorrect. Sure, there are plenty of personality differences distinguishing the two, and Fromsoft elected to create their own array of eldritch squid gods rather than lifting established Old Ones like Cthulu, but they are blatantly still Lovecraft-inspired. Like, the very idea of “Great Old Ones” comes FROM Lovecraft. Sure, he wasn’t the first guy to write about the concept of unknowable entities that drive you crazy with forbidden/incomprehensible knowledge, but I’m pretty damn sure he came up with that specific name.
Like I said before, things can be inspired by several different things at once. Yes, there is plenty of imagery and lore that draws from Christian iconography/ideas. That doesn’t suddenly invalidate the several dozen references to Lovecraft’s work, alongside the clear influence those stories had on the design of Booodborne’s world.
In Bloodborne, the Great Ones have familiars known as Arthropods, also called phantasms. This is a large phylum of invertebrate animals, ranging from crustaceans to insects like spiders. The monsters in Bloodborne are referencing these phyla, where humans serve as hosts for these creatures to develop through their bodies.
As Arthropods grow through the process of molting, they shed their exoskeleton to evolve into more adult and developed stages. So in Bloodborne, there are many aspects of transcendence and metamorphosis, as everyone has gone from embryos to men and women and hopes to shed their human shell to transcend into new beings. Therefore, the brain eyes may be a reference to the eyes of insects like flies or bees, which can perceive the reality of the world better than human eyes.
This is a concept that other games have explored, such as Resident Evil, Parasite Eve, and others, and although it can be compared to H.P. Lovecraft, it has other sources.
And regarding Berserk, there's very little connection as well. Bloodborne doesn't have a "Hand of God," an elite of higher entities that use humans. The Great Ones in Bloodborne are almost irrational, being much more forces of nature or representations of nature's fury than an actual cabal. What you find in Berserk are more like fanfics, with bits and pieces here and there, such as a weapon, an accessory, an outfit, or a character that might remind you of Berserk, and this has been done in many games for a long time. Van Helsing would be a more concrete reference, especially considering that the main targets of the hunters are creatures equivalent to werewolves and a nobility with vampiric traits.
However, what truly sets Bloodborne apart is its ability to gather all these elements uniquely and create its own universe that is not a simple plagiarism or fanfic of anything. It's a solid and consistent universe with its own narrative, so Bloodborne cannot be compared to H.P. Lovecraft because it has its own value.
I think you are just fundamentally misunderstanding what am I saying. I am not “comparing” Lovecraft’s stories and Bloodborne, I’m highlighting one of Fromsoft’s many inspirations while creating Bloodborne. There’s nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from another source. I 100% agree that Bloodborne does a fantastic job iterating on its references, blending together ideas from gothic and cosmic horror to build something wholly unique. But I don’t get why you insist on arguing against Lovecraft’s influence when it is literally plastered across the walls of the game’s latter half.
My post started with the argument about how Bloodborne has little base for inspiration and. HP Lovecraft, I never said it didn't exist but I emphasized how this is something subtle and much more based on the player's introspection than actually a relevant argument present in the game's concept. With this I emphasized how some things apparently derived from HP Lovecraft may have other sources.
I never ignored what I said but how can I refer before if there is Lovecraft in Bloodborne there is so much from other origins such as Berserk and Hellsing.
For anyone who wants to read Lovecraft, you can read all of his [stories for free on the H.P. Lovecraft Archive.](https://www.hplovecraft.com/) The quote that always stands out for me when comparing Bloodborne and Lovecraft comes from his story "From Beyond": >“You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shewn you worlds that no other living men have seen?” I heard him scream through the horrible chaos, and looked at the wild face thrust so offensively close to mine. His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I now saw was overwhelming hatred. The machine droned detestably. >“You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless! But the servants are gone, aren’t they? You tried to stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I’ve got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud? . . . Don’t know, eh? You’ll know soon enough! Look at me—listen to what I say—do you suppose there are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter? I tell you, I have struck depths that your little brain can’t picture! I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. . . . Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me now—the things that devour and dissolve—but I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants. Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move. I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still—saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you. They didn’t hurt the servants—it was seeing that made the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are—very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you—but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are not curious? I always knew you were no scientist! Trembling, eh? Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have discovered? Why don’t you move, then? Tired? Well, don’t worry, my friend, for they are coming. . . . Look! Look, curse you, look! . . . It’s just over your left shoulder. . . .”
Very cool, quite different from what ive read so far I've not seen him go into a monologue like that. I find it somewhat easier to read than his other works. Edit: quite not white, new phone
Also supposedly a lot of inspiration from Bloodborne came not from the Cthulhu mythos but rather the "dream cycle" stories. But yes, Lovecraft is kinda hard to read, especially that kind of scientific style of storytelling can be hard to get into
Pseudoscientific. Lovecraft famously didn't have the constitution for math. He did, however, have a very large thesaurus which he used to make himself sound smarter than he was. Basically he understood stuff just enough to be afraid of it (see his story where Air Conditioning is a major villain tell). His work is a fascinating look into what the mind of a paranoid super racist is. Not saying any of his stuff is bad at all, just not scientific.
In his defense a lot of the science wasn’t established yet. Like how outer space works (he thought you could fly through space with wings for example in the “Whisperer in the Darkness) We’re all limited by the knowledge of our time. It’s not like he was trying to fake it and hoping you didn’t notice
Ah yes, that's definitely a better word for it
That first quote unintentionally reminds me of the shock it sent through the scientific community after the development of the microscope, which is an interesting connection to the medical theme of the game
I have and I love it, the shadow over Innsmouth is my favourite
I’ve read all that I can. Which is why I always return to Bloodborne. It sings to me.
La la *laaa*...
I’ve read his complete works. It’s amazing how the man was terrified of absolutely everything— death, rural people, urban people, cults, religion, science, the moon, the sea, alcohol, even penguins. When he goes off the rails in At the Mountains of Madness describing the horrible, terrible, scary penguins I had to laugh. It’s a wonder he could bring himself to go outside. Honestly, I tend to prefer his earlier works, which were mainly about his fear of death (the young aristocrat thinking longingly of the grave in which he’ll be buried, a man long dead who keeps his room cold to prevent his body from rotting, a corpse who doesn’t know he’s dead stumbling into a party) and didn’t tend to be so racist.
Oh, I also enjoyed when, clearly miffed that some critics did not appreciate him calling his horrors “indescribable”, Lovecraft wrote a story in which his self insert was talking to another author who said describing things as “indescribable” was lazy. When suddenly! A horror so horrible it was indescribable set upon them! The critical author admitted not-Lovecraft was right, it was indescribable. Except Lovecraft did describe the being, and didn’t seem to notice he was undermining his own point.
Once you know about his childhood (and his mother in particular), a lot of his phobias make perfect sense.
Yep, this sort of thing doesn’t come from nowhere. The penguin rant always makes me laugh, though.
There's a bunch of audiobooks on YT ( pick the wayne june ones) , I sometimes listen to those while doing other stuff. I liked color out of space the most.
Was going to mention this. For those who don't know, Wayne June is the voice actor who narrates the also very strongly influenced by Lovecraft Darkest Fungeon games. Terrific acting.
For sure go with Wayne June.
*Pickman's Model* is my personal favourite.
Reading The Nameless City is like exploring the Pthumeru dungeons.
Also the Dunwich horror screams bloodborne
I've read about two-thirds of his work including all of his short stories; entirely as a teen which is probably for the best as I was more tolerant of his general unpleasantness. *At the Mountains of Madness* and especially *The Shadow Out of Time* are by far his best stories.
I think *The Color Out of Space* is my favourite, but he's got a few good ones. A lot of his stories are so hard to get through, though 😮💨
*Extremely* based on all fronts. I always get kinda bitter thinking about how *only* when he was *dying* did he reflect on his bigotries and think “damn, I was a real piece of work huh?” Like imagine how his writing could’ve *matured* and *evolved* if he’d lived long enough to explore that growth more intensely. Huge bummer… Incidentally, I *adore* this [adaptation of *Shadow.*](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7jp1CT1h6c&pp=ygUSU2hhZG93IG91dCBvZiB0aW1l)
Agreed. I also like… don’t like his writing. Bland as hell. I know it was from an earlier time but there’s just zero flavor at all. His world building really is what holds it all together
I don’t hate his style, but I’ll readily admit it’s very *dry* for some ppl.
I think The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is my favorite.
For anybody interested that may prefer to listen rather than read the YouTube channel Horrorbabble has done narrations of a ton of Lovecraft stories among other weird fiction.
Below is from “The Mound” regarding a subterranean race of “super humans” called the “K'n-yanians” Seem familiar? “Many things which Zamacona learned about K’n-yan in that first colloquy left him quite breathless. He learned, for instance, that during the past few thousand years the phenomena of old age and death had been conquered; so that men no longer grew feeble or died except through violence or will…Births had ceased, except for experimental purposes, since a large population had been found needless by a master-race which controlled Nature and organic rivals alike….owing to evolutionary differences developing during the million or two years of cleavage. These evolutionary differences were even more strikingly shewn in another particular—one far stranger than the wonder of immortality itself. This was the ability of the people of K’n-yan to regulate the balance between matter and abstract energy,… in other words, with suitable effort a learned man of K’n-yan could dematerialise and rematerialise himself—or, with somewhat greater effort and subtler technique, any other object he chose; reducing solid matter to free external particles and recombining the particles again without damage.…” The Pthumerian elder fits this description pretty well. Not to mention the Chalice Dungeon fits their subterranean setting. The K'n-yanians also worship the Outer Gods
if bloodborne players want to start reading lovecraft they should start with mountains of madness imo. it’s very short and the parallels and inspiration are very obvious. then read innsmouth, then diverge off to wherever else you like
Not sure. At the mountains of madness is (one of) Lovecraft's LONGEST works. It has an incredibly long introduction which focuses on geological technicalities which might be offputting to some people that do not have the patience. I started with The Temple - very short and has a very similar topic to that of Mountains of Madness.
i feel like i should stress to everyone that i mean short in comparison to average novels today 😂 i get through it by viewing it not as an intro but as putting you into the secure mindset of someone who is not prepared for that shit and is so secure in the fact that he should be alone that it feels insane to encounter literally anything else
"Very short" *checks length* 158 pages (I know, not very long for a book BUT compared to most other Lovecraft's stories, it is relatively long)
it’s 800 words above the limit to be considered a novella. it *is* very short.
Generally speaking, yes, it is short. Relatove to his other works? Not so much Also if you consider At The Mountains of Madness to be very short, what is for example Call of Cthulhu then?
You seem fairly familiar with his work. I've heard people say Lovecraft was a raging racist. Is there any truth to that, and if so, is it reflected in his fictional works?
Well… yes. His stories are amazing and I love them myself, and there’s no denying their impact on horror as a whole, but much of his works are based very deeply in xenophobia. Part of why Bloodborne is so good is that it takes what Lovecraft built and successfully strips that all away. I’d still recommend reading them because they’re very good and foundational, but yea there’s no denying his racism reflects in quite a few of his works.
Thank you for sharing, I may in fact read them.
You have to remember that he was very much a man of his time; the son of somewhat wealthy parents in New England in the early 1900s wouldn’t have had much chance to wind up any other way. His views did soften as he got older and got married, but he died not too long after.
That's fair, I know times were different. Hard for me to just fully dismiss, though.
Even by the standards of the time, he was a pretty massive racist. I really like his work overall, but there are a few choice bits that push the limits of tolerance.
Google his cat's name. And yeah, it is reflected in his fictional works. He still created some excellent stories. Obviously it wasn't the worst one, but as an Irish man The Moonbog is hilarious, because it paints the Irish as a bunch of backwards savages, even though it was written the exact year we gained independence. Probably why he was so mad at us. Dude was obsessed with Britain.
google the name of his cat but fr. yes he was very racist (even for the time) and in a good number of his books the antagonists or cultists are just non-white people as he thinks of them in his head. mountains of madness only really has two (human) characters after the inciting incident so if you are sensitive to that, i would say read that and then consider if you want to proceed. innsmouth does have a lot of comparisons but reads a lot more like someone who has never left their state and thinks that canada is an exotic jungle (and is also terrified of disabled people but that’s still normal today). the racism is definitely something you can sense but it’s not quite like call of cthulhu. i can’t blame people who don’t want to read his work for that reason. he’s very much writing right after the KKK’s revival era and when naziism in the US was acceptable and popular and his work is a product of that. he’s also a dumbass weirdo who’s scared of air conditioning. final boss of fear of the unknown fr. he did create some great works and universes but you do have to have a solid concept of death of the author to see through it.
Tbh I think [The Music of Erich Zann](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mez.aspx) is the best starting point. I never hear anyone talk about it but it’s a super short story with a simple premise. It’s where I started and it got me hooked!
The horror in the museum is a good one too
Innsmouth is cool. I forget what it’s called but also the one with the German submarine and the city below the sea
The Temple, which is one of my favourites.
I’ve read a fair amount of his stuff, but *The Colour Out Of Space* is by far my favorite. It’s perfectly executed horror with a ton of suspense.
My favorite is a very less represented work of his, the Shadow out of Time. It’s less cosmic horror and more science tiction, but I love it. I’ve read most of his works, and I do think a lot of the works that he inspired are better than the stuff that he himself wrote, but his influence is phenomenal.
A race of beings that project their consciousness forward in time into a race of spider-like entities to survive a global catastrophe isn’t cosmic horror?
It evoked more awe in me than horror, but I can definitely see that too!
I LOVE Lovecraft's writings. They were a big part of my teen years.
I love Lovecraft's books. I haven't read everything, but I've read all of his novels and novellas. Edit: People mention his famous stuff for a good reason (it's good). But I'd like to shout out *The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath*, a little less known book but I really enjoyed it. I also think parts of BB were inspired by this book and others in his dream cycle.
One of my favorites is the end of the story The Festival: “The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”
I have the "Complete collection" book from Chartwell classics. I haven't read alot of it tho, only The Beast and The Alchemist and I think one other story.
I've read a good few. The Music Of Erich Zann is my favorite. No other books I've read require me to put then down once finished to just take it what I've read. A terrible racist and xenophobic but a brilliant horror author. Reanimator was also very good.
Don't sleep on Chambers as well with his book The King in Yellow. Lovecraft noted him as inspiration and it shows but it is kind of nice that within that collection of stories there is quite a variety of tales with not all of them being tragic.
- Colour out of Space - Pickmans Model -At the Mountains of Madness All should be required reading. (Pickmans model is more straight horro)
Horrible human being, but one of my all-time favorite authors. Even his non-eldritch stuff is still really good.
he’s pretty great when he isn’t absolutely shitting-his-pants terrified of black people
Riight
it’s funny cause before i read any lovecraft i was like “damn, i guess people found out this guy was a huge racist, well i hope it doesn’t affect his writing” and then i read the herbert west reanimator series
This sentence makes absolutely no sense no matter how many times I read it.
i’m saying the racism is apparent in the writing
I have The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and have never once come across an excerpt where he, breaking the 4th wall, fervently describes to the reader **how one race is superior to the other,** which is prerequisite for something to be considered racist if we're going by textbook definition and logic. If you're referring to the way he describes some characters...that isn't racism no matter how hard you try to make it so. According to textbook definition and logic, at least.
Nah man, he’s racist and sexist. Still like his work though.
ok man
I've read many of his stories and letters and I'm very fond of his work (just this last Christmas I bought a cooking book based on it...). Now, he's not an author I usually recommed, at least to people who haven't read much. Many go in expecting a modern horror writer à la Stephen King when he falls more in the lines of a Mary Shelley, and get disappointed. His writing is baroque, sometimes over-the-top in its use of adjectives, it's slow, and he projected a lot of his fear and disgust towards humanity on other ethnicities, illiterate people, etc. So I understand that he's not an easy read for many people. He also didn't conceive his works as part of a literary universe. The Cthulhu Mythos were stablished after his death by Derleth, a close collaborator of his, who did an amazing job but also took some liberties such as adding a good vs. evil dynamic between his entities that is present in almost every instance of pop culture Lovecraft (I won't ever forgive you for that, August). But despite all that, Lovecraft revolutionized the genre of horror in almost a metaphysical way, and the philosophy behind his work is truly unsettling. Cosmicism for the win! I do firmly believe that Bloodborne is one of the best iterations of cosmic horror in a videogame, at least the best one I've ever played. My final project at university was a comparison between Lovecraft's literature and Bloodborne (I studied comparative literature), so I could talk about this topic for hours.
I have read 90% of his stuff. At the Mountains of Madness is amazing, pretty mindblowing for it's time. Shame about the racism! Otherwise I'm a huge fan.
I started reading Shadow over Innsmouth graphic novel but got distracted.
"The Colour out of Space" really stuck with me for some reason. Such a creepy story. Love it :D
I own a physical book straight up titled “Necronomicon” that contains all of his notable works, I’m still not even halfway through yet but I thoroughly enjoy Lovecrafts works. It becomes so clear that he was a deeply disturbed and fearful man, and it can be a little tough to read when his social views are shown off (like, he was considered overly racist *in the 1920s-30s*, which says a lot). That being said, of the works I’ve read so far my favourite is Herbert West: Reanimator, which leans far more into Gothic horror than the Cosmic angles (again, some horrific racism at a certain point, but not important to the narrative whatsoever).
Also in other from soft games you can pick up references to Lovecraft. In Sekiro there is a physician who is uncannily similar to the physician in the story of Herbert West Reanimator.
I’ve tried a story. I honestly don’t get it.
Try azathoth it's only 3 pages, I'll send it to you
Every time HP’s IP is used for something other than perpetuating his racist rhetoric, I gain an insight. I hope that bed-ridden bastard is turning in his grave.
Hell yeah, you show him! Really stick it to that 87-year-dead paranoid schizophrenic! I can't believe someone born 130 years ago with so many mental disorders would have racist elements in his work. I mean, he was terrified of penguins, air conditioning, and people who lived in the countryside (all of which he had extensive personal experience with), so it's completely inexcusable that he would be afraid of foreign people or strange cultures and draw upon extant racist tropes for use in his story. Fuck you, Lovecraft, you sad, terrified, mentally ill 19th-century man who put some racist depictions of various kinds of people into his pulp horror. I don't care if you reexamined your views later in life and started appreciating the differences between cultures or viewing native Americans positively. Too little, too late: your works previously were racist and that's what matters. And now we get to not only use all of your ideas but also earn social points on social media by crowing about how racist you were. Serves you right for being born in a racist time period and having bad opinions and racist beliefs from that time, instead of being enlightened and correct like we are now.
I mean Bloodborne, Call of Cthulu tabletop are all iterations of his work that I appreciate. This isn’t “woke culture” attacking you, it’s distancing the concept of the IP from obviously racist shit imbedded into the work. A small example would be a creature named “Shur-Niggurath” Like come on.
Seriously, there is little Lovecraft in Bloodborne, less than most fans say there is. Bloodborne is more like a fusion of works like Berserk, Hellsing and others ranging from Neo Genesis Evangelion to FromSoftware games of the past. So many of them are influenced by HP. LOVECRAFT BECAUSE HE influenced a lot of modern literature but I don't think Bloodborne is focused on him at any point. The hunter's universe is common in ActionRPG games, for example Phantasy Star Online, our characters are foreign hunters looking to not only organize a hostile world full of beasts but also in search of our prizes and achievements, this is also valid for the Monste series Hunter, and also for Dragon Dogma. The difference is that Bloodborne focused on a universe of gothic horror, something that passes between concepts of Dracula, Frankenstein and Werewolf, Gehrman himself reflects an aged version of what Van Helsing would be, the great night hunter, feared even by Dracula. However, here we do not have vampires in their typical withdrawal nor the emblematic count, here we have cosmic creatures that inhabit the imaginary and manifest themselves from the drunken minds of those who confuse the real with the Beyond. This is really very Lovecraft but also Berserk after all, as Guts progresses on his journey in search of revenge against the beings who took everything from him, he becomes similar to them, transforming into the Beast of Darkness which is similar to Moon Presence from Bloodborne.
Without lovecraft there would be no ghost busters, he was a pioneer beyond the ideas of just bloodline but also a pioneer of the ides of ancient gods dwelling just outside of reach
How not if this is part of Japan's Taoist and Shinto culture. FromSoftware is Japanese, Miyazaki is Japanese, do you think the writers read Lovecraft and plagiarized everything? Or do the concepts of Bloodborne resonate with HP Lovecraft because the primary sources have equivalent foundations?
I don’t know how you can downplay Lovecraft’s influence when everything involving the Great Ones is derived directly from his stories. Hell, the Fishing Hamlet is almost certainly a direct reference to one of Lovecraft’s story about a village full of eldritch fish people who used to be human. Likewise, Arianna’s spontaneous pregnancy with an eldritch baby is most likely a reference to the Dunwich Horror where something similar happens. The list goes on and on. Like, Fromsoft has a pretty unique take on the Great Ones that separates Bloodborne from Lovecraft’s work and others inspired by him, but when you start looking at the two side-by-side you can clearly tell they were drawing from his stuff.
Don’t forget the Dream Cycle being very present with how BB’s world works. With planes of existence stacked on top of each other and varying degrees of how much a person can detect, as well as people being “hosts” of nightmares and dreams.
But Lovecraft is the only one nor the first to explore the dream cycle. A dream world that reflects a spiritual world and a fundamental part of Taoism and Buddhism. So the fact of having this type of structure is not fundamental that the developers' ideas came directly from HP. Lovecraft. Take for example the story of Sekiro.
It's like thinking that Pirates of the Caribbean is about HP Lovecraft and not about pirates. The protagonists are still the hunters, the eminent are still an antagonistic force but Bloodborne is much more about the relationship between the different factions of hunters than the human insignificance of Lovecraft's works. People are important in Bloodborne your character and NPCs, the problem is that the western setting has connected them directly to these common myths and legends. Now if you see Bloodborne from the point of view of the Japanese version, it is much more about a spiritual world, about spirits, obsessions that refer to folk Yokais, about legends of jewels and haunted castles and the superior entities are not creative gods, they are a consequence of fall and ambitions of powerful figures who had their ambitions materialized as stigmas and curses. Which is something common in Japanese horror games and FromSoftware has already made several of them. If you look at Echoes Night and Kuoh you will find many parallels with Bloodborne
In the Japanese version, the GreatOne are not treated as gods, or creator gods. They are treated as Onis Yokais that feed on the vital energy of their hosts so that they remain in existence. So make no mistake about the design aspects of the game. This is a typical Japanese game with Japanese cultural bases whose design references are European Gothic with all those cathedrals etc. Attack of Titan and Berserk are like that too. Remember that before the souls fever, FromSoftware games were western themed and only Echoes Night and Kingsfield were western themed where only one is contemporary gothic and the other is medieval fantasy. Japan Studios followed a similar trend after a vast line of oriental-themed games Bloodborne was there next to other games like Souls Sacrifice, Rain and Puppeteer, all talking about the dream world of the soul's relationship with higher entities. So Bloodborne was one of those games with Deracine dealing with a more gothic theme but the developers were well rooted in creating oriental games.
Nothing you said in either reply disproves my primary point. I’ve already said that the Great Ones in Bloodborne aren’t portrayed the same as they are in Lovecraft’s works, so I agree with you there. You’re also right that Bloodborne doesn’t focus on the same themes and core ideas that Lovecraft did. But if you look at the story of the game and various design elements (the focus on the sea, the fishing Hamlet, the Dreams/Nightmares being separate planes of reality, eldritch abomination babies, etc), it’s pretty damn obvious that they took heavy inspiration from his stories to create the world of Bloodborne. There’s also inspiration taken from classic victorian gothic literature like Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde. And of course, you’ve always got some Berserk references, as per Fromsoft tradition. These are all true in tandem, Bloodborne draws inspiration from a lot of different places to build out its world, which is what I think makes it so unique. I just don’t get why you’d want to sit here and argue against something that is blatantly obvious.
There is actually little to no direct connection between the Great Ones in Bloodborne and H.P. Lovecraft's gods. Even the Fishing Hamlet does not seem Lovecraftian. I've mentioned before that Bloodborne incorporates several concepts based on Christianity. The monsters in the Fishing Hamlet are fish, not a reference to Dagon as in Lovecraft's works, but rather a nod to how early Christians used the fish symbol to identify true followers. The Fishing Hamlet in Bloodborne symbolizes the lost faith that Byrgenwerth's scientific curiosity killed, while the Orphan of Kos on the beach is a metaphor for "God is Dead" or the death of God, as discussed by Friedrich Nietzsche. To reach Kos, we pass through the faithful, and then encounter the allegory of the cave. In this context, the cave represents the perceived world through distortions and shadows, symbolizing fears, while outside lies knowledge and reason, the tangible reality. It's when we realize that in the reality of that world, there is no God; there never was because He is dead. All that remains is His lingering and abandoned essence, to which those souls trapped in obscurity cling. Therefore, the DLC attempts to show the player through metaphors and abstract concepts how the scourge and the Church are connected to a purposeless quest, and that only the irremediable acceptance of destinies is the sole reason or truth.
That’s all well and good, but did you just miss the part from earlier where I literally explained outright that Lovecraft wrote a story about a village of eldritch fish people who used to be human? Fromsoft was not subtle with the references, this is getting ridiculous. And saying that the Great Old Ones are nothing like Lovecraft’s works is just outright incorrect. Sure, there are plenty of personality differences distinguishing the two, and Fromsoft elected to create their own array of eldritch squid gods rather than lifting established Old Ones like Cthulu, but they are blatantly still Lovecraft-inspired. Like, the very idea of “Great Old Ones” comes FROM Lovecraft. Sure, he wasn’t the first guy to write about the concept of unknowable entities that drive you crazy with forbidden/incomprehensible knowledge, but I’m pretty damn sure he came up with that specific name. Like I said before, things can be inspired by several different things at once. Yes, there is plenty of imagery and lore that draws from Christian iconography/ideas. That doesn’t suddenly invalidate the several dozen references to Lovecraft’s work, alongside the clear influence those stories had on the design of Booodborne’s world.
In Bloodborne, the Great Ones have familiars known as Arthropods, also called phantasms. This is a large phylum of invertebrate animals, ranging from crustaceans to insects like spiders. The monsters in Bloodborne are referencing these phyla, where humans serve as hosts for these creatures to develop through their bodies. As Arthropods grow through the process of molting, they shed their exoskeleton to evolve into more adult and developed stages. So in Bloodborne, there are many aspects of transcendence and metamorphosis, as everyone has gone from embryos to men and women and hopes to shed their human shell to transcend into new beings. Therefore, the brain eyes may be a reference to the eyes of insects like flies or bees, which can perceive the reality of the world better than human eyes. This is a concept that other games have explored, such as Resident Evil, Parasite Eve, and others, and although it can be compared to H.P. Lovecraft, it has other sources.
Okay? Dunno how that contradicts a single word I’ve said thus far, but you do you I guess
And regarding Berserk, there's very little connection as well. Bloodborne doesn't have a "Hand of God," an elite of higher entities that use humans. The Great Ones in Bloodborne are almost irrational, being much more forces of nature or representations of nature's fury than an actual cabal. What you find in Berserk are more like fanfics, with bits and pieces here and there, such as a weapon, an accessory, an outfit, or a character that might remind you of Berserk, and this has been done in many games for a long time. Van Helsing would be a more concrete reference, especially considering that the main targets of the hunters are creatures equivalent to werewolves and a nobility with vampiric traits. However, what truly sets Bloodborne apart is its ability to gather all these elements uniquely and create its own universe that is not a simple plagiarism or fanfic of anything. It's a solid and consistent universe with its own narrative, so Bloodborne cannot be compared to H.P. Lovecraft because it has its own value.
I think you are just fundamentally misunderstanding what am I saying. I am not “comparing” Lovecraft’s stories and Bloodborne, I’m highlighting one of Fromsoft’s many inspirations while creating Bloodborne. There’s nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from another source. I 100% agree that Bloodborne does a fantastic job iterating on its references, blending together ideas from gothic and cosmic horror to build something wholly unique. But I don’t get why you insist on arguing against Lovecraft’s influence when it is literally plastered across the walls of the game’s latter half.
My post started with the argument about how Bloodborne has little base for inspiration and. HP Lovecraft, I never said it didn't exist but I emphasized how this is something subtle and much more based on the player's introspection than actually a relevant argument present in the game's concept. With this I emphasized how some things apparently derived from HP Lovecraft may have other sources. I never ignored what I said but how can I refer before if there is Lovecraft in Bloodborne there is so much from other origins such as Berserk and Hellsing.
yeah I had to progress to the first moment of insight to even get a hint that there was lovecraftian influence
Literally at the start of the game next to some crows. I wonder if people picked up on it back then?