Transcript
Speaker: They are both floating through the air like the world's worst impression of Atreyu and Falkor I have ever seen.
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome back to Pixel It.
Speaker: My name is Kevin alongside my good friend, Phil.
Speaker: What the fuck did we just read?
Speaker: I don't know!
Speaker: I don't have time.
Speaker: I don't have time to... Hi everybody, I'm Phil.
Speaker: What the fuck did we read?
Speaker: I need your help, Kevin.
Speaker: So on the literal level, what we read was the third Bloodborne book.
Speaker: Bloodborne, a song of crows.
Speaker: I might have called it a feast for crows in the last episode, but that's that's a Game of Thrones book.
Speaker: Not right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I tell you, here's the thing.
Speaker: Here's the thing.
Speaker: Now, you you
Speaker: No more than I do.
Speaker: So I was reading this.
Speaker: I was reading this at home going, all right, Kevin is going to need to help me here.
Speaker: Kevin's going to need to help me here.
Speaker: And and and I tell you, I think the thing that I pointed out with the last book, volume two, was that.
Speaker: Whereas the first one had more of an action-y, it felt more like the video game.
Speaker: The second one, bravely in my mind, took a turn to be a more quiet, personal sort of story, you know, that was just set in that world.
Speaker: The kind of story you couldn't get out of the video game.
Speaker: Not really, you know, which is fantastic.
Speaker: And now with this, we've gone into
Speaker: Even further down that line, it is such a personal story as to be like, it's the rant, the rantings of a madman is the only thing I can really describe this.
Speaker: There's very little monsterage.
Speaker: They went full Lovecraft on this.
Speaker: There is, I would say, zero real monster-ness in it.
Speaker: Well, you got the one little centipede gentleman dude.
Speaker: Yes, and that's actually, so here's the thing.
Speaker: I might end up being even more confused than you are because I know Bloodborne stuff.
Speaker: Okay, so you, because you have some context, it actually makes it tougher.
Speaker: You think it might make it tougher for you to interpret this?
Speaker: Yes, because.
Speaker: The character that we're following is a character called Eileen the Crow.
Speaker: And her job in the Bloodborne context of the Bloodborne universe is she is a group of hunters that hunts hunters.
Speaker: Her entire job is to kill hunters who are about to flip over to the beastly side or have kind of gone mad.
Speaker: That's that's her shtick.
Speaker: Okay, so she, Eileen the Crow is the one who watches the Watchmen.
Speaker: She is the one who watches the Watchmen, yes.
Speaker: Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker: I picked up a little bit on that.
Speaker: You know, there's that kind of mournful, undertaker kind of vibe to Eileen, and it's very, very weird.
Speaker: And I guess this is kind of, this feels, based on that, this feels like the story of
Speaker: Eileen kind of unwinding a bit and not in a good way.
Speaker: Like something in the brain is going bye bye here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm not sure when and to basically repeat a motif that happens throughout this book.
Speaker: I don't know when this is right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And spoiler alert.
Speaker: Neither does Eileen.
Speaker: Neither does Eileen.
Speaker: So in the first issue, and it's almost tough to differentiate these between issues because it is the previous two books are very clearly character arcs.
Speaker: Each issue kind of tells a different part of the story.
Speaker: But in this one, it's pretty much mashed into one juicy pulp story.
Speaker: There is almost no differentiation between what's happening between from issue to issue.
Speaker: And it could be happening in any order.
Speaker: The thing that the Eileen's kind of chorus seems to be.
Speaker: When is this way?
Speaker: Is that what Eileen says?
Speaker: Yeah, she keeps asking.
Speaker: When is this?
Speaker: When is this?
Speaker: When is this?
Speaker: Questioning.
Speaker: It's in fact, the first two lines in the entire collection.
Speaker: And Eileen clearly doesn't know where she, they are when they don't even know where they are, let alone what
Speaker: date, what time it is.
Speaker: We get a lot of flashbacks, presumably flash forwards.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, and it's, and the funny thing is, is if you think as the reader that it's screwing with you, it appears to be screwing with Eileen the crow even worse.
Speaker: Yes, because she does not, she can't tell her story in any reasonable way.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So one of the earliest images that we get is her basically doing the what you would expect somebody with a plague doctor mask to be doing, which is tending to the the corpses.
Speaker: Yes, a big dam.
Speaker: It looks like a stream of corpses, literally this long drawn trench filled with with dozens, if not hundreds of dead bodies.
Speaker: She's taken it upon herself to basically bury the dead because nobody else will.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: And just these, this village's worth of dead and just Eileen with her shovel, which that was a lot of work, Eileen and good for you.
Speaker: You know, good for you.
Speaker: That is a lot of work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: I don't even really know how to approach it because the story is not linear.
Speaker: So there's really not much of a reason to talk about it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Linearly.
Speaker: It's tough.
Speaker: It's very difficult.
Speaker: So here's the thing.
Speaker: This one is tough.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is it almost seems like it was going to...
Speaker: It almost seemed like it was going to transition into a mystery, like a murder mystery.
Speaker: And I got really excited for a moment.
Speaker: I got super excited.
Speaker: I genuinely thought that's where it was going to.
Speaker: And then it did not.
Speaker: No, it was a mystery in many ways, but perhaps not a murder mystery.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Basically, early on.
Speaker: what Eileen tends to is the murder of a hunter who has been killed in a very ritualistic fashion.
Speaker: entrails spilled out and hung up on graves in a cemetery with its head severed and a note placed in the hunter's mouth.
Speaker: The note reads simply consciousness is a lake, which to me felt a little, what do you call it?
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: That, um, time is a flat surface kind of thing.
Speaker: It's yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, that's that immediately is what came to mind.
Speaker: And, and based on the fact that we are going backwards and forwards in time throughout this book, that, uh,
Speaker: is almost certainly the point.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So she sees this note and then she immediately flashes back to what I assume is her childhood.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Where her and her friend are out on a frozen lake and her friend falls through the ice and dies.
Speaker: We get some Junji Ito Uzumaki stuff happening here.
Speaker: We get a flashback to, and this kind of makes sense as far as flashbacks concerned.
Speaker: Eileen remembering a ritual, what seems to be a ritual slaughter of a cow that has its entrails pulled out much in the same way that the hunters were.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And describes herself taking part in the whole thing.
Speaker: Refers to as we were doing this, we were doing this.
Speaker: And it starts cutting back and forth between her friend who has fallen through the ice, the childhood friend, and a member of the party that is circling the
Speaker: the, uh, the dead cow with a torch and a mask on and that sort of thing, taking part in the ritual.
Speaker: Presumably these are the same people that what I took from it was that Eileen saved this childhood friend and, and, uh, and this childhood friend grew, uh, with her to take part in these, these ritual sacrifices, basically slaughtering the fatted calf, basically.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess that's as good of an interpretation as any.
Speaker: It was all I got.
Speaker: It's all I got.
Speaker: There's a lot of brief words.
Speaker: There's a lot of brief images.
Speaker: Then we're in issue number two, which starts with Eileen dreaming of herself and what seems to be her decaying matter dripping onto herself as another version of herself.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: For it's above her.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Is that what you got from that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was really interesting because in the previous issue at the very end, she describes... Hold on.
Speaker: I'm going to find it because it's really, really strange.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: that time is literally says here, time is water.
Speaker: It drowns the rats inside of me and the dead bodies rise up my throat.
Speaker: Uh, and, and she vomits in the street, uh,
Speaker: basically seems to be putting together the notions of this person who she presumably saved, who should be dead.
Speaker: She said she saw him die, but seems to be alive for some reason.
Speaker: And now she's having this
Speaker: This vision, vision of herself.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The maggots crawling out of her eyes.
Speaker: Or vomit, maggot, something raining down on her.
Speaker: And then she wakes up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it has one of my favorite quotes in this entire series, by the way.
Speaker: It's some serious grotesquerie.
Speaker: The meat is steered by thousands of small, enthusiastic puppeteers talking about the movement of rotting flesh with maggots writhing through it.
Speaker: And it's like, holy fucking shit.
Speaker: That is horrifying and good.
Speaker: There is some...
Speaker: Uh, there's some weird little lines in this that I enjoyed when we got the neat little morsels of my concern was that there are way too few and far between.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: The writer, we're getting to it, but the writer makes some choices here when we get into the third issue of this particular volume that I wasn't so sure about.
Speaker: Brave choices.
Speaker: Brave to be certain.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: I don't know if they worked.
Speaker: We get more flashbacks, more visuals, and eventually Eileen comes face to face with somebody who wears a mask on their face, much like she does.
Speaker: And she shows
Speaker: Actually, he has the head somehow.
Speaker: The head of the hunter that I guess it's the same head of the hunter.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: The head has the symbol on it that she remembers from her childhood with the ritual.
Speaker: And then they fight.
Speaker: Yeah, and then they get down to fighting.
Speaker: They get down to fighting.
Speaker: There's more flashbacks during the fight.
Speaker: Eileen seems to be fighting to kill.
Speaker: The other guy just seems to be fighting to fight and just knocks Eileen out and leaves her in the snow and leaves.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just, yeah.
Speaker: Isn't even armed by the way.
Speaker: Isn't even armed.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Eileen's got a couple of nasty looking heavy metal daggers.
Speaker: And, and, and he's just punching her.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Leaves her in the snow.
Speaker: Presumably this person is someone from her past.
Speaker: And she.
Speaker: Presumably.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think.
Speaker: So here is my read on it so far.
Speaker: And it's as valid as literally any other read is that the kid that falls through the ice died.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The kid fell through the ice died.
Speaker: That was her childhood friend.
Speaker: But now she thinks her friend is actually still alive and that the guy with the mask on is the childhood friend.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And we do get, and we do before the fight, we do get this dream sequence vision of Eileen as a, still a child, but presumably a little older than when her friend fell through the ice hunting deer and fires an arrow through the deer that goes through its neck.
Speaker: But the deer doesn't run.
Speaker: It doesn't fall or anything.
Speaker: It just, its head is now replaced with the face of
Speaker: of the boy who fell through the ice.
Speaker: And, uh, there's a lot of questions of, uh, guilt there.
Speaker: Um, you know, you know, something to do with this, this boy, this, this, this childhood death, um,
Speaker: leading her on her current path in a way.
Speaker: If it's true what you say, now this is just the writer in me spitballing here, but if it's true what you say that Eileen has taken upon herself the role of...
Speaker: you know, cleansing the dead, basically, you know, she, she, you know, doesn't let anyone, you know, basically besmirch the idea of being a hunter by going mad or something along those lines that it's.
Speaker: And we also opened with her burying the dead rather than see them just rot in the streets.
Speaker: There's something about this friend of hers who fell through the ice, if you're right, and that child did die.
Speaker: that this is the time that she couldn't retrieve the body.
Speaker: She couldn't help.
Speaker: She couldn't save the child.
Speaker: And basically from then on,
Speaker: use that as a mission to tend to the dead, basically, so that they wouldn't suffer the same indignities that her friend did.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But again, that's just me spitballing here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we got, so just as a little background, and this is the
Speaker: This is the part where I guess the Bloodborne knowing helps.
Speaker: She arrives at a building.
Speaker: The building is called Bergenworth.
Speaker: And Bergenworth was where the study of blood, the old blood, first really took place.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So is this a, this is a church building or?
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: This is not a church building.
Speaker: This is a, this is a, this is basically a college.
Speaker: It's a university.
Speaker: It's a school.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's the school of Mensis.
Speaker: I believe it's the school of Mensis in Bergenworth college or something like that.
Speaker: Anyway, she's at Bergenworth.
Speaker: The creature that she keeps seeing with many eyes is,
Speaker: is a creature called Rom, the vacuous spider.
Speaker: I'm the fan.
Speaker: They always had good damn names in these things, don't they?
Speaker: Now, for those of you who are listening, who haven't read the comic or are like me, who haven't played the game, let me go ahead and describe Rom to you.
Speaker: Rom is, I wouldn't call Rom a spider, but, you know, Rom's got kind of a long, weasley-shaped kind of body with...
Speaker: you know, dozens of long spidery legs, admittedly, a fuzzy top or a snow covered top.
Speaker: It's kind of hard to say.
Speaker: And a head with one gaping razor fanged mouth and just dozens of black eyes like a spider's eye.
Speaker: So there are there are admittedly spider ish qualities.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Spider, spider, spider parallel, you know, spider.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, Rom at one point was a person and he was granted eyes by the old gods.
Speaker: And how?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Rom got Rom wanted eyes.
Speaker: He got his damn eyes.
Speaker: He got his damn eyes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Robbie Rom Rom.
Speaker: And I, and I will say that that does seem to be a theme in the book because we never get a look.
Speaker: We never get a good look at Eileen's eyes behind the crow mask, the plague mask she wears.
Speaker: It's just,
Speaker: gaping black, but we do get flashbacks to the eyes of the childhood friend.
Speaker: There are the wide open eyes as they drown.
Speaker: And then the other hunter that she fights, who beats her up and leaves her in the snow, wears a mask that's kind of like a plain cherubic almost kind of mask, just a plain boyish face, which immediately calls to mind a comparison to the boy dying in the lake.
Speaker: And that person's eyes you can see as well.
Speaker: But, you know, and then, of course, we've got Rom here with many, many, many super eyes, many eyes, many eyes, too many eyes.
Speaker: I'll say that I will.
Speaker: I will go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe I can't speak for the old gods.
Speaker: I don't I don't claim to know their business.
Speaker: The less said about them, the better.
Speaker: You know, they often they often have a lot of eyes.
Speaker: Yeah, they do.
Speaker: They do.
Speaker: And this one is this sucker is no exception.
Speaker: And it is is it walking out on the ocean?
Speaker: Sort of.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in the game to get to ROM, you actually have to jump into the lake.
Speaker: And when you do so, you fall through it and into basically another dimension where you are now standing upon water in the midst in the midst of
Speaker: It's water in literally every direction.
Speaker: And as far as you can see, it is just kind of this whitish fog off in the distance.
Speaker: And it extends infinitely in each direction.
Speaker: So you're in this kind of otherworldly open water, basically.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: You're basically in this otherworldly open water, and the only thing there is you and Rahm.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: And you have to fight Rom, I assume.
Speaker: Yes, you have to fight and kill Rom and Rom's little spider babies.
Speaker: We don't, we don't, I don't think we meet Rom's spider babies.
Speaker: We don't meet Rom's spider babies, but let me tell you, they are annoying because they, they're mostly just a nuisance, except one attack they have is an instant kill.
Speaker: Oh God.
Speaker: And it looks only slightly different than all their other attacks.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is, and this is, this brings me again to what is so interesting about these graphic novels for Bloodborne, because the game that from software made with Bloodborne is a combat game, period.
Speaker: There's no getting around it.
Speaker: There is lots of interesting lore that you can dig up if you're looking for it.
Speaker: Um, but this is a fighting game.
Speaker: This is an action game.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's an action RPG.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, but, uh,
Speaker: These graphic novels have basically taken this world and these creatures and that sort of thing, and Rom, who in the game basically only exists as another horror to fight, now plays this kind of different role, much in the same way that... What was the fucking nasty beast that was fought in... Oh, that was the blood-starved beast.
Speaker: The blood starved beast.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: They play.
Speaker: Now, while the blood star beast totally existed for combat in the first comic there, these are all, you know, they've taken them.
Speaker: And again, they're pulling more of a Lovecraft here with this.
Speaker: You know, these are they exist for far more than just fucking up.
Speaker: Yeah, there is signing.
Speaker: There's some sort of meaning being assigned some sort of thematic meaning assigned to them.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: Rom, though, I don't I don't know.
Speaker: I don't fucking know.
Speaker: At this point, I'm throwing my hands up because we roll into the third issue and there is zero dialogue.
Speaker: There's no writing.
Speaker: For the entire issue.
Speaker: For the entire issue.
Speaker: And let me tell you, Mr. Cott, who wrote this, I have heaped praises on you.
Speaker: for two podcasts now.
Speaker: Yes, you have.
Speaker: And this is where you went up your own ass.
Speaker: Oh, so you were not impressed by this.
Speaker: I was not impressed, but we get to issue three and I'm like, all right, we're going to get something.
Speaker: You get nothing.
Speaker: You just get repeated images over and over and over again.
Speaker: And the editor in me cringes because I'm like, you could have gotten this effect.
Speaker: in part of one issue.
Speaker: And guess what?
Speaker: You've already fucking done it.
Speaker: I was so annoyed by it when we, as I was flipping through, I was like, if I, here's the thing.
Speaker: If I had bought this, this comic, when it came out,
Speaker: I waited a month for it to come out.
Speaker: Yeah, just this issue.
Speaker: And it's just this issue.
Speaker: I read the previous one.
Speaker: It was like, well, maybe the Eileen and the Crow arc will turn around in issue three.
Speaker: Because I'm feeling it's teeter.
Speaker: It was already teetering for me after issue two.
Speaker: And I wait a month and issue three comes out.
Speaker: And I flip through it.
Speaker: I would be furious.
Speaker: I would.
Speaker: This is...
Speaker: This is the equivalent of in a, in a, in a, for those of you who have been to grad school, maybe you went to grad school for writing or you took a class for writing, you know, you know what, just school, just college.
Speaker: And there was always, you know, there were plenty of people in the class.
Speaker: You're writing a novel or a short story or something.
Speaker: And when someone, if it feels like when someone loses the thread of,
Speaker: and they aren't sure what to do next, they put in a dream sequence.
Speaker: And I blame Twin Peaks for this.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Twin Peaks admittedly did it right.
Speaker: Twin Peaks is... But just like a lot of things, Twin Peaks opened the door for a lot of far less talented people.
Speaker: to come in and go for the lynching experience.
Speaker: I'm not as angry about this, this particular issue, but I also see absolutely where you're coming from.
Speaker: Let's just real quick.
Speaker: Let's just go through the imagery as as it goes in this particular issue.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Starting starting from the beginning, starting from the beginning.
Speaker: We get eyes.
Speaker: We see the reflection of Eileen in the eyes of what is it?
Speaker: Rom?
Speaker: Rom.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Rom.
Speaker: And then the reflection of Rom in the eyes of presumably a crow and the reflections of the crows.
Speaker: in the eyes of presumably Eileen the crow.
Speaker: And there are a couple of crows watching from a tree and we get a closer look.
Speaker: And one of them appears to have pecked out one of the eyes of the other one.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And this is why I'm glad that you said what you said, where you explained Rom to me, because then we see Eileen the Crow floating in the waters of this lake.
Speaker: And we get shots of the what was the name of the building?
Speaker: It's called Bergen worth.
Speaker: We see Bergenworth and its giant dock or pier, you know, that's built into it that goes out to the lake.
Speaker: So and the moon has split open in a very Georgia O'Keeffe kind of way, if you know what I'm saying.
Speaker: It's a lot of spheres splitting open.
Speaker: The moon over the lake.
Speaker: Beautiful shots.
Speaker: The artist remains... I think we can both agree that even if this is a bit obtuse, the artist... So, yeah.
Speaker: My criticism of this issue is not for the artist ears.
Speaker: The artist did an amazing job.
Speaker: Still great, yeah.
Speaker: My criticism remains completely leveled at the writer, Alex... Alescott, who outlined...
Speaker: I would assume outlined this arc.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I know I would be, it would be kind of hilarious depending on the kind of writer he was that are like, it is his writers.
Speaker: We know writers.
Speaker: We know all sorts of writers.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And we know what kind of people are attracted to that lifestyle.
Speaker: And, and I can only, I can imagine like them being overdue, like it's due to the publisher now, but the writer is,
Speaker: cannot get off the bottle and has been drunk for five weeks straight.
Speaker: And the artist is just like, fuck it.
Speaker: I'll just, I'm going to put some shit together, man.
Speaker: We're getting a dream sequence.
Speaker: It's dream sequence.
Speaker: Here we go.
Speaker: Yup.
Speaker: And now, and Eileen, the crow removes her mask to reveal that she's got another mask identical to the one she took off underneath, which is also, I don't know.
Speaker: I feel like David Lynch has done that before too.
Speaker: If he hasn't, then plenty of other people have.
Speaker: Then we get a lot of, we get, let's see, 16 boxes per page here on a couple of pages with the moon either rising or going into the lake, depending on how you look at it, the eyes of Rom.
Speaker: Eileen's profile floating up out of the lake again.
Speaker: And then finally, this full two page shot of Eileen floating on her back underneath the gargantuan Rom, the spider.
Speaker: They are both floating through the air like the world's worst impression of Atreyu and Falkor I have ever seen.
Speaker: Rom would make a shitty Falcor.
Speaker: A terrible Falcor.
Speaker: I just, yeah.
Speaker: I don't think Rom would know how to pronounce Atreo's name.
Speaker: It'd probably be more something like, you know, that would be...
Speaker: That's the best poor Rom can manage.
Speaker: It's a great shot, and there they are flying in the air, and then we get another quick succession of boxes, the eyes of Rom, and then Eileen slowly floating back down into the lake, where she stands, like you said, happens in the game, standing on the lake, as an adult standing in front of her childhood friend.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Who is a child, as the title suggests.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And then the child runs away and then she watches the child run and then she turns around again and there's Rom floating like a cloud in front of her.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just hanging.
Speaker: Just hanging out.
Speaker: What's up?
Speaker: I'm wrong.
Speaker: I hang out with the old guys.
Speaker: I don't mean to brag.
Speaker: I'm just, I'm.
Speaker: And then she walks back to Bergenworth, uh, after having a brief flashback to the, the ceremony from when she was a child.
Speaker: And, and this is, and this is the part that does indeed piss me off though.
Speaker: So, Kevin, do you want to tell our audience what the final sentence is, what the final page of this fucking issue is?
Speaker: The final page is all black, and it's just the text, you are granted eyes.
Speaker: Fuck you.
Speaker: Fuck you.
Speaker: Like we get it.
Speaker: We get it.
Speaker: Your metaphor is sound.
Speaker: It is, it is, it is not just sound.
Speaker: It is over egged.
Speaker: Consider this pudding egg.
Speaker: And then some, it is just like, Oh my God, man.
Speaker: We got no eyes.
Speaker: I got no face.
Speaker: I got no eyes.
Speaker: Got no face.
Speaker: Here's this thing with a whole bunch of eyes.
Speaker: Here's this thing with a whole bunch of eyes.
Speaker: And we're floating.
Speaker: We're floating.
Speaker: We're flying.
Speaker: We're flying.
Speaker: And oops, I'm down on the lake.
Speaker: And oops, I still got no eyes.
Speaker: And oops, I'm granted eyes.
Speaker: The end.
Speaker: The end.
Speaker: Boom.
Speaker: That is... The end.
Speaker: That is the end... That is... That is the end of the third issue in this four-issue art.
Speaker: The third issue.
Speaker: And I am... I am... Yeah.
Speaker: I was... Ha ha!
Speaker: I was fine.
Speaker: I was.
Speaker: Oh, were you?
Speaker: I was fine.
Speaker: You didn't sound fine, Kevin.
Speaker: I was fine until I realized about three pages in, we're like, there's going to be, there's nothing.
Speaker: There's, this is just a dream sequence, isn't it?
Speaker: This is 22 pages of dream sequence.
Speaker: You got to be fucking kidding me.
Speaker: Yeah, it was an entire issue of a dream scene, which is just it's just I don't know, man.
Speaker: And it's you could do more than that.
Speaker: Beautifully illustrated.
Speaker: Again, beautifully illustrated artists, colorists, the lines, the inking knocked out of the park.
Speaker: But yeah, the writer is
Speaker: Mr. Cott, I'm just, I'm just, I loved the first two books.
Speaker: Loved them.
Speaker: We've had nothing but good things to say.
Speaker: Nothing but good things to say.
Speaker: They had nice little humor.
Speaker: This feels like it's one idea drawn out to its longest possible length and then quadrupled.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It was just like, because here's the thing, it's not that what you said, what the writer has to say here is
Speaker: didn't need to be said or, or didn't require saying in any way, shape or form.
Speaker: It's just, there were way better methods of doing it.
Speaker: And it feels a little too up your own ass.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: When you're just, when you do it this way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, you know, you're, you've, you've drunk your own Kool-Aid at this point.
Speaker: At this point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is, this is a little drink your own Kool-Aid moment.
Speaker: This is a little too precious.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I personally would have loved if this was if maybe we spend the first issue establishing Eileen's having a little bit of trouble remembering things in the order that they happened.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: This turns into a true murder mystery.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That would have been way more interesting.
Speaker: That would have been way more interesting.
Speaker: It actually would have been very interesting in the vein of True Detective.
Speaker: If you remember, you saw the first season of True Detective, right?
Speaker: I did.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Basically, Matthew McConaughey's character has trouble remembering things or perceiving time kind of in the proper order, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that's where his line, time is a flat circle, comes from.
Speaker: So they did say that.
Speaker: And they, yeah, I forgot about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That was, that was, that was, he's, he's in the car and he says something like time is a flat circle.
Speaker: Um, but yeah, so, and true detective, it's a story told mostly out of order until, until it gets towards the end where things kind of start falling into place.
Speaker: But yeah, it feels like it feels like that.
Speaker: There was it was they were just going for something really artistic.
Speaker: overly artsy, but it just didn't, it didn't nail the fundamentals of telling a story in any, telling a story either through plot or character or thematically.
Speaker: I don't think it really nails it on any, on any level.
Speaker: No, it's this one.
Speaker: Whereas I,
Speaker: And we've still got an issue.
Speaker: There's still an issue to go, but there's still an issue to go.
Speaker: But right now I will just say that what seems to have happened is the first volume, the first storyline, because they're all self-contained storylines, which I still think is a great idea.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The first volume is,
Speaker: is a little more grounded.
Speaker: It still has the strange fourth wall breaking sort of thing, the existential angst, all of that stuff.
Speaker: But when you get down to it, it's a really deep...
Speaker: sword and sorcery kind of thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, when you get down to what is happening is we are running from a big goddamn monster and eventually we're going to have to have a throwdown with this thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And all along the way, we're getting angsty.
Speaker: The hunter, the hunter has his MacGuffin that he is, he is carrying across the wastelands of Yharnam and there's a monster on their tail.
Speaker: There's a, there's a dragon following them.
Speaker: That's pretty much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like you said, sword and sorcery.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Grendel's mother is coming after them and they got to be ready.
Speaker: That's all.
Speaker: And you get some cool set pieces.
Speaker: And it made me think a lot of Robert E. Howard or Conan the Barbarian.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If anybody here likes the idea of just good old fashioned sword and sorcery pulp, and you haven't read any Robert E. Howard, do yourself a favor.
Speaker: It's really solid.
Speaker: It's not without its problems.
Speaker: You know, those old pulp writers always are, but at least this guy never tried to start his own goddamn religion.
Speaker: You know, so at least there's that.
Speaker: But in any case, it starts out with that.
Speaker: The second volume is a more personal story, and it gets a little more ethereal, a little more thoughtful and personal and tragic, that sort of thing.
Speaker: There's no real...
Speaker: Splatterhouse combat speak of.
Speaker: And it's also it's also a little bit more of it has more plot.
Speaker: The second one has a second volume has a lot more plot than the first one does.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then with this one, it feels like we've gotten completely out of it and it's just become a there isn't much in the way of plot.
Speaker: at all.
Speaker: It's a very introspective character piece, which has its place, which can be very, very good.
Speaker: But I think part of the reason that it's disappointing beyond it being a little, a little overwrought is,
Speaker: Uh, let's be honest.
Speaker: It's a little, a little too, I don't know.
Speaker: I, I can't, I feel real bad.
Speaker: I can't speak for this writer, but it, it, it feels like a little too, I'm clapping myself on the back here as I write this.
Speaker: Uh, this is the Obama.
Speaker: This is like the Obama metal meme of, of, of Obama giving himself a metal, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think it's extra frustrating because as Kevin pointed out, it started to feel like we were getting kind of a murder mystery thing, which is super appropriate for the character.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And and could be a really interesting turn.
Speaker: Warhammer.
Speaker: I'm going to bring up Warhammer for the thousandth time in my life.
Speaker: The Black Library, they do all their fiction.
Speaker: They've been doing fiction for the Warhammer universes since the early 80s, late 70s, something like that for a very long time anyway.
Speaker: And they recently came out with entire a few years ago, they came out with an entire imprint that was just dedicated to horror.
Speaker: Now, the Warhammer, whether it's 40K or fantasy, there's lots of room for horror in there, but they've never really.
Speaker: They've never, like, focused on the spooky stuff all by itself for an entire series.
Speaker: And they've certainly never done an entire imprint in their publishing house dedicated to just that.
Speaker: And then, not long after that, they came out with an entire imprint dedicated to mystery.
Speaker: So you've got an entire series of books and short stories that are detective stories and murder mysteries and shit like that set in
Speaker: the 40k or age of sigma universe and that shit's so cool that's so cool and that's what a clever idea you know because you know that's that's such a neat idea and and that's immediately what i started to think about when i was thinking those terms where it's like oh yeah this could be like he's like think about that like you got a sherlock holmes story in the midst of uh this horrifying you know love crafty in universe that could be that could be neat that could be
Speaker: That could be really neat.
Speaker: And it's not our job to say what a writer should have written.
Speaker: You know, you write your own thing, Boo Boo, but that would have been better.
Speaker: That would have been really cool.
Speaker: With our tremendous disappointment, we move on to... Yeah, with all that in mind.
Speaker: With all that in mind, we move on to issue four.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Which starts again with a phrase that I have started to shudder at when I see it in this book.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Eileen saying, when is this?
Speaker: And like, I don't care, Eileen anymore.
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: I've you have driven.
Speaker: When is this as a metaphorical and introspective character device?
Speaker: That phrase is as is gone.
Speaker: I don't care when this is.
Speaker: Just tell me, what are you doing?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Whenever you are, just tell me what you're doing instead.
Speaker: That's just it.
Speaker: That's the problem.
Speaker: You know, it's like it'd be one thing if Eileen the Crow was a character that was super well fleshed out in the video game.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But I've never played this game, but I know that she wasn't well fleshed out just in the video game, not in any easy sense of the word.
Speaker: Like, not in a way that you would be like, well, I wonder what she's up to right now.
Speaker: Oh, she's having an existential breakdown.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: No, we don't know enough.
Speaker: Like, we don't know enough about her and where she is and what she's doing.
Speaker: We don't have, excuse me, it drops up.
Speaker: We don't have the ground.
Speaker: It's not grounded enough for us to pull out.
Speaker: the fucking tablecloth out from under us.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: There's not you have to start in some level of reality before you can go into all of this.
Speaker: Where am I?
Speaker: What's happening?
Speaker: Who am I?
Speaker: How is this all working?
Speaker: You can't just go straight into that or it's meaningless.
Speaker: It doesn't mean anything.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's not being compared.
Speaker: There's no comparison point.
Speaker: No, exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: As far as we know, this is just what it is.
Speaker: Her that's this is as far as we know, this is just what Eileen's life is.
Speaker: And if that's the case, it's not very interesting.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: To us as the reader.
Speaker: And what's interesting about her in the game is that she has a very distinctive accent.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: She is the only person that sounds, I guess she's Scottish.
Speaker: She has a Scottish accent in the game.
Speaker: And one of her trademark things that she says to you is, a hunter must hunt.
Speaker: But even in the game, you never get any hint that she's really having the existential crisis that you would think about.
Speaker: I even looked up her lore just because I was like, this is weird.
Speaker: This is weird.
Speaker: It was a weird pairing to use Eileen the Crow for this particular story.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It doesn't seem to connect.
Speaker: It doesn't seem to connect with anything that you really...
Speaker: talk to her about in the game she is the only character one of the only characters that is distinctly not from Yharnam and they reference that in this book that she is from somewhere else she used to take part in these ceremonies when she was a kid that it's not a Yharnam thing she's not from here
Speaker: And that's kind of cool because now that you say that, these flashbacks to her taking part in this bloody ritual sacrifice sort of thing does smack of if she's an outsider and what we know about the Yharnam world, like it does have that feeling of like the Catholic Church of England.
Speaker: versus the pagan rights of the people outside, you know, the Scots.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You know, that kind of thing.
Speaker: The Celts.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The Picts.
Speaker: You know, it has that.
Speaker: And I like that.
Speaker: Where's that story?
Speaker: I would have loved that story.
Speaker: I would have loved a flashback story of, you know, her coming of age and, you know, why she left there and all that.
Speaker: That would be fucking cool as shit.
Speaker: Yeah, it would be.
Speaker: Damn it.
Speaker: So we don't get that we get.
Speaker: No, we don't suppose we don't.
Speaker: We get her returning back to Yharnam.
Speaker: She leaves Bergenworth.
Speaker: She goes back to Yharnam.
Speaker: And this final issue is probably the one that is told in the most linear format where she returns to Yharnam.
Speaker: She basically returns to the house.
Speaker: I believe it's supposed to be the house that she sees in the beginning of the dead hunter.
Speaker: I think.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: I think she's returned to the house of the dead hunter.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And she is looking for this masked person who may or may not be her childhood friend, all grown up, and kind of basically her lingering guilt over not being able to save her childhood friend.
Speaker: So she gets out onto the roof,
Speaker: And I'm, it may seem like I'm blowing through this, but it's basically one large illustration per page.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: She gets out onto the... You get to a certain point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: She gets out onto the roof and sees this person, and she has another series of flashbacks, the drowning and all that, and she just says, I let go.
Speaker: And this character...
Speaker: It's really interesting because she's on the roof and this character, the masked man that she's been, you know, dealing with, she drops her weapons, you know, and just reaches out to this person.
Speaker: Kind of the same gesture that she did in the last issue when she saw the little boy who fell into the lake.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: She reaches out and the person just falls backwards off the roof and she steps forward and she looks down and there's the
Speaker: Basically, there's the body lying in the snow.
Speaker: So she returns back down and she sees the imprint and there's no body and it starts to snow.
Speaker: And she lays down in the hole that was left.
Speaker: And the snow just falls upon her.
Speaker: Yeah, fills it completely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So basically it kind of comes full circle.
Speaker: And that's the thing is I don't know.
Speaker: I don't necessarily know how to read it.
Speaker: I don't think that that masked person was ever there.
Speaker: I think it was just a visual manifestation of her grief and
Speaker: coming back over not being able to save her friend as a kid.
Speaker: And the imprint on the ground, the reason why there is no footsteps around it is because she actually fell, she threw herself off the building out of her own grief and is laying there in the snow.
Speaker: And clearly it didn't kill her because...
Speaker: I'm assuming this is before the events of the game, as with everything else.
Speaker: It does.
Speaker: There is kind of the final panel.
Speaker: is her on her back being covered in snow and there's, there's kind of a, a splash of blood or something like that.
Speaker: But yeah, it's not clear.
Speaker: It's not totally clear.
Speaker: Uh, it also doesn't seem like, what was it?
Speaker: A two story drop?
Speaker: I don't think that's killing these hunters.
Speaker: I don't, unless that was a much taller building than it seemed to be.
Speaker: And I, I really think it was like two stories tall.
Speaker: I think that was it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I actually didn't notice that the first time is there is a little bit of a pool of blood underneath her.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which kind of does lead credence to the idea that there was never any person she threw herself off the building.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I happen to agree.
Speaker: I think you're right.
Speaker: I think because there is a line when she sees him first in this final issue, she sees him in the house.
Speaker: And it's a pretty good line.
Speaker: It's a hole in the shape of grief.
Speaker: And so, yeah, I think that does suggest that as just as you say, that he's some sort of manifestation of old errors and old grief and, you know, the things that we can't let go of, which is a very worthwhile thing to tell a story about.
Speaker: But my grief against this particular storyline still stands.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I agree.
Speaker: I think this could have been told in a
Speaker: It could have been told in a much more focused way or there could have been more interesting through lines.
Speaker: I think it was it was bold to kind of decide to experiment with this particular thing.
Speaker: over the course of four issues of a comic.
Speaker: I just don't necessarily agree with the approach or the fact that it was stretched out for so long.
Speaker: Yeah, I will absolutely give credit to the writer in terms of
Speaker: You made a choice.
Speaker: You tried something different.
Speaker: That's always worth doing, especially when you've got two storylines already under your belt here with this series.
Speaker: And so you got you're on your third one.
Speaker: Things are going well.
Speaker: So it's like, OK, let's try something out.
Speaker: You know, and that's a good thing to try something out.
Speaker: But the problem with this one is that it was all one note.
Speaker: It was all the surreal and all the weird, and it wasn't grounded in anything.
Speaker: It didn't give us.
Speaker: I'll tell you what.
Speaker: Me and the fiance went to a movie this past weekend.
Speaker: We went to see Zola.
Speaker: Do you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I know of the story.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: First and foremost, go see Zola.
Speaker: It was fucking excellent.
Speaker: It was super weird.
Speaker: It was very surreal.
Speaker: It dealt with the notions of, you know, the what do you call it?
Speaker: The untrustworthy narrator.
Speaker: And he said, she said, and
Speaker: this and just surreal everything.
Speaker: But it and so it had all these bizarre moments that made you go because it was for those of you who don't know, it's a movie that's based on one hundred and forty eight long Twitter thread.
Speaker: And so it's like they're going to be a lot of moments in something like that where you go, what the fuck?
Speaker: couldn't have happened.
Speaker: And there are plenty of moments in there like that.
Speaker: And it and it and it you question, you know, the story they're telling you and the visuals they're giving you all the time.
Speaker: And and but it's
Speaker: But it's still grounded in a real world with people that you believe that that that you you have some sort you yourself as the reader have something that you can compare it to.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You can relate with that.
Speaker: You can believe.
Speaker: Now, do we as readers of Bloodborne, of all things, are we going to have a whole shit ton of things in common with these people?
Speaker: No, but that's not what I'm talking about.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: It's about giving us some level of reality to work with first before everything goes off the hinges, before everything goes off the rails.
Speaker: Even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas pulled that off.
Speaker: You know, like this can be done.
Speaker: You can have your surrealist bombshell storyline, but it still needed it.
Speaker: Where he fucked up is that it just it wasn't grounded in anything to begin with.
Speaker: We were on a cloud to begin with.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: I agree.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think it's disappointing, but I will say we've built up a lot of goodwill with these storylines so far that I'm still looking forward to the next one.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I'm still looking.
Speaker: The next one is the Veil Torn Asunder, I believe.
Speaker: Yes, yeah.
Speaker: And Veil's... And this is the final, final one.
Speaker: Final one, wow.
Speaker: We are just tearing through these Bloodborne books, but...
Speaker: You know, it's funny.
Speaker: Bloodborne, I feel like, is such a rich little world that it seems like there could be more.
Speaker: There could be more to it.
Speaker: There could be... When you talk about Warhammer 40K and how basically you could spend your entire life just reading Warhammer 40K,
Speaker: stuff.
Speaker: Like there's so much times that I've considered it.
Speaker: There is so much Warhammer stuff from the indie games and video games.
Speaker: And there's, there's, there's the tabletop stuff.
Speaker: There are the novels.
Speaker: There's everything you could just audio dramas.
Speaker: They've got everything.
Speaker: You could just do Warhammer.
Speaker: And that is pretty fascinating.
Speaker: And I feel like there's other properties that occasionally could benefit from... I know it's almost overly capitalistic, and I don't like it in that sense.
Speaker: It's like, oh, profits, we could mine this thing dry.
Speaker: And I don't think... I'm not trying to think of it like that.
Speaker: And I'm thinking of it more like...
Speaker: Hey, it would be cool just to have more stuff in this universe.
Speaker: There's something to be said for a universe that you can get lost in.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You know, Five Nights at Freddy's proved that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Five Nights at Freddy's is about animatronics stuffed with the dead bodies of kids.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And on its face, just a little scare game.
Speaker: That's all there is to it.
Speaker: But there is so much lore filled into that thing that people like that's their whole thing.
Speaker: I've got friends who are not gamers, but love games.
Speaker: The MatPat videos, when he comes out with a lore, they know them backwards and forwards.
Speaker: They know it all by heart.
Speaker: And they've never even played a Five Nights at Freddy's game.
Speaker: They just love that fucking universe and all the mystery behind it and stuff.
Speaker: And I think you're right.
Speaker: Bloodborne has a lot of room for that.
Speaker: And all that FNAF money being funneled right into your least favorite Republican senators.
Speaker: Hey-oh.
Speaker: Hey.
Speaker: Hey.
Speaker: See, we can still be topical.
Speaker: We know what we're doing.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: That wraps it up for this evening.
Speaker: Thank you all for listening.
Speaker: If you want more from us, please go ahead and leave a five-star rating if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or whatever rating if you're listening on another platform that gives ratings.
Speaker: I don't think almost any of them do, but who knows?
Speaker: Leave a five-star rating if you're on Apple.
Speaker: Follow us on Twitter at PixellitPod and...
Speaker: That about does it.
Speaker: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker: Bye.
