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With its semi-open-world structure and unforgiving gameplay, Bloodborne has ruled over our hearts since 2015. This game from FromSoftware Games takes you on an awe-inspiring journey that will keep you enchanted for months.
But be sure to keep your valuables as far as possible because you might just break them.
Bloodborne’s tedious and unforgiving gameplay is not for the casual gamers who just want to have a good time. It is challenging yet extremely rewarding and is heavily focused on a specific kind of hardcore audience.
Highly influenced by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Bloodborne is sure to intrigue anyone who wants to enjoy a bit of gothic fantasy.
Bloodborne — The story of plagued Yharnam
Bloodborne takes place in a worn-out gothic town called Yharnam, famous for its medical advances, including the Healing Blood from the Healing Church. The Hunter (player) suffers from a disease that leads him to Yharnam for a cure.
Later, he ends up in a clinic with an old doctor who performs a blood transfusion to treat the Hunter’s disease. After leaving the clinic, the Hunter discovers that Yharnam is plagued with a disease that turns people into beasts (known as Scourge Beasts).
This leads the Hunter to hunt the Scourge Beasts and find the source of the plague by uncovering Yharnam’s secrets.
Lady Maria’s story
After defeating a boss known as “the Living Failures” in the Lumenwood Garden, players can get inside the Astral Clocktower. There, they’ll see the corpse of a lady hunter sitting on a chair.
When inspecting the corpse closely, it grabs the Hunter’s arm and says the lines, “A corpse should be left well alone,” triggering a boss fight with Lady Maria.
Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower is a boss in Bloodborne’s The Old Hunters DLC. She was a Cainhurst citizen and one of the first hunters who joined the nightly hunt.
She studied under Gehrman, the first Hunter, and had a lot of admiration for him. Gehrman also formed a peculiar liking for Maria, and he later made a similar-looking doll of the latter after her death.
After training under Gehrman for a while, the two were assigned to go to a village by Provost Willem. The village was known as the Fishing Hamlet, where it was rumored that a corpse of a Great One called Kos was washed up on the shore.
Great Ones are entities from different dimensions summoned in Yharnam by The Healing Church to take humanity to its next phase of evolution.
Willem, seeing this as an opportunity to ascend humanity and evolve it, sought for the umbilical cord of the Great One’s unborn child. Willem sent his hunters and scholars to the Fishing Hamlet in search of the cord to achieve greatness, and to get what he wanted, he murdered the village’s occupants and ruthlessly examined them.
It is believed that Maria and Gehrman are the hunters who killed the child of Kos and took its umbilical cord. Maria, gravely regretting her part and feeling guilty of her actions in the Fishing Hamlet, tossed her beloved weapon, the Rakuyo, in a well and swore never to hunt again.
After the incidents in the Fishing Hamlet, Maria returned to the Healing Church’s research hall and spent most of her time in the Astral Clocktower defending the Healing Church’s darkest secret.
She also took care of the Research Hall patients as they were being experimented upon by the church. She became a ray of hope for them as they saw Maria as a mother figure, thus giving her the name Lady Maria.
After a while, many patients died due to the experimentations carried on them. Frustrated and depressed by all this, Maria returned to the Astral Clocktower, where she committed suicide by slitting her throat, giving up her life while defending the Fishing Hamlet.
Lady Maria’s significance
Relative of Queen Annalise
Maria may seem like a normal boss in the game, but her significance to the lore is more on Cainhurst than Yharnam. Cainhurst is an optional area that can be accessed after getting the Cainhurst summons.
In the Cainhurst castle, the Hunter will be able to meet the Queen of the Vilebloods, Queen Annalise. She is a Vileblood, a class of people who can use their blood for weaponry.
Maria is directly related to Queen Annalise, who granted her the powers of blood weaponry or blood tinge.
Despite Lady Maria’s access to blood magic, she refused to use that ability and preferred her skill and Rakuyo to blood magic. She frowned upon the art of using blood as a weapon and swore to never indulge in it, feeling that using the blood arts took every essence of the wielder.
During the second phase of Lady Maria’s boss fight, she uses the Rakuyo to stab herself in the chest to use her blood magic to defeat the Hunter. This shows that she would’ve done anything to stop the Hunter from accessing the Healing Church’s secret, even breaking her oath of never using blood magic.
Gehrman’s relationship with Maria
As Lady Maria trained and honed her skills under Gehrman, she grew a liking for him, and even Gehrman formed admiration for her. After Maria’s death, Gehrman made a doll that looked like her and pleaded to a Great One to give the doll life.
The Great One, known as the Moon Presence, initiated a contract where Gehrman would be stuck in a dream to guide all the hunters to continue the hunt, and the doll would be granted life.
In desperation of Maria’s return, Gehrman accepted the terms of the contract, and the Great One gave the doll a soulless life. But Gehrman grew indifferent to the doll’s company due to the lack of Maria’s personality in her.
The doll, which has the same facial features, height, and voice as Lady Maria, can be seen in Hunter’s dream, where Gehrman is stuck forever. With no soul of her own, the doll continues to help and guide other hunters like Gehrman.
