On the Bloodborne Doll

The Doll, everyone’s (at least second) favorite feminine character in Bloodborne. The caretaker of the hunter’s dream and the guide to transcendence, ever looking out for the player. How can she possibly embody the source of all the nightmares and be accused for overpowering The Great Ones in causing agony to the protagonist, but in some interpretations — she just could. If you think about it, she continuously sends you onto quests for worth, in a world that has none.

Benevolence

There is no doubt that The Doll has a loving face: she seemed to be the only un-contaminated existence in the turmoil of Yharnam, and sometimes serve as an anchorage for the player to check in with every once in a while to level up—or simply to stay sane. She is the outlier in this world of chaos, and somehow players have a tendency to aspire to her status of tranquility and optimism. However, the protagonist character never had the conditions: in the waking world, where you cannot walk two hundred feet without shedding blood, where you cannot spend a single hour without staring straight into eldritch monstrosities, is it all but impossible to achieve or even progress towards calmness, hope, and the ability to love. Therefore it becomes a pain to be bestowed upon the love of The Doll and pressured to be assimilated into the “built to love” framework while the realistic situation never permitted such change to take effect. The hunter engages in the chaos of the waking world (as well as in nightmares) in order to subdue the them, but the very engagement with this mayhem prevents himself from being ever exonerated from the turmoil he is working to relieve the world off of. This essentially corrupts The Doll from being a lighthouse and a point-of-reference for the ideal situation into a unreachable carrot-on-a-stick, whereby the hunter essentially eliminates any possibility of personal salvation — in the process of desiring salvation itself.

Desire

The Doll was created as an embodiment of Gehrman’s somewhat problematic longing for his student Maria. However, the old hunter seemed to have abandoned the doll as scrap work, despite the delicate craftsmanship and faithful commitment devoted to the doll’s creation. The reason? Obedience. The beauty of Maria consists little in her physical appearance, but manifests through martial arts, defiance, and self-determination. This beauty was arguably consummated by her decision to surrender to remorse and guard the fishing village in the nightmare as a form of atonement. None of these substantial points can be replicated by a mere doll, built to accept, obey, and eventually discarded by the very reason of creation. Gehrman has undoubtedly navigated the system for a long time. He has seen countless iterations of hunters succumbing to the plague while fighting it. To see somebody bold enough to defy the entire cause of the plague is definitely a refreshing sight, except that for somebody tired of the system, desiring someone in defiance instead of looking for docility eventually leads to defiance being extended to Gehrman himself, this is embodied through the tragedy at the clock tower, the makeshift remedy thought up by Gehrman, and how cataphorically that seems to fall out. The Church desires command and control, and can get what they want through a self-reinforcing cycle of manipulation. Gehrman, on the other hand, seeks to outplay the system, but eventually loses the right to love because of the action of loving.

Worth

This is one of the most subtly profound concept that permeates interactions between the player and The Doll. Every time you say goodbye to The Doll, you hear the iconic line “May you find worth in the waking world.” The Doll lays down this abstract concept, but does not go on to elaborate on what she’d like us to find. If we venture into the waking world ourselves, it’s hard to find so called “worth” there by our own standards. Thus the embodiment of worth and the ultimate power of defining what it means goes back to The Doll herself. The desperate world had tortured the hunter enough, and in comes a detached being trying to remind that hunter of him worthlessness: The (animate) Doll only exists in the dream, she’s ultimately a mechanistic figure that has never witnessed what the waking world is like, yet she sends hunter after hunter there with the implied promise that meaning and worth will one day be discovered, while worth for her is probably no more complicated than sweeping graves, stacking books, and exhibiting that indifferent benevolence to the hunter every once in a while. She repeatedly urges the hunter to find worth, but dehumanizes the hunter by the very repetition — all whilst keeping the hunter comfortable enough to not question her explicitly, and continue searching the nonexistent representation of meaning.

Winter Lanterns

This is a more literal interpretation, since the lanterns are in a trinity structure along with The Doll and Lady Maria, and they embody the nightmare side of this symbol. They only appear in nightmares, and share the silhouette of The Doll along with her elegant dress, yet has a horrifying head and a frenzy-inducing lullaby. My interpretation as why part of the demons in the nightmare manifests as the “friend” of the hunter is that his subconscious has long realized that The Doll is in no position to deliver him from this tragic world or be of any personal worth to him at all, yet he is structurally unable to get rid of The Doll while the hunt is on, and thus continues this worthless interaction long after he’s tired of it. This crystalizes in the form of Winter Lanterns, that not only represent the hunter’s longing of what could be the potential, and his frustration and lack of agency in the status quo.

Conclusion

To say The Doll and the nightmare are fighting on different sides is a misstatement. They are the ugly and gentle face of the same nihilistic force that perpetrate each other’s effect on the hunter, leading to an array of self-defeating endeavors, dead ands, and unresolvable paradoxes. To turn to one when the other is getting on your nerves is not the solution. It would be to classify them both as nihilistic forces, and either accept that Yharnam doesn’t offer much for hunters to pursue, or make your peace with them in some other way that doesn’t involve a permanent cycle of being disappointed by one side, turning to the other, being disappointed again, and so on.