Father Gascoigne teaches you both the game, and fear of the Old Blood || Bloodborne Analysis

[0:00]Father Gascoigne is the first major boss of Bloodborne, and the first major roadblock for most players. And in that way he makes a solid teacher for the game's mechanics: Master the flow of aggression and evasion of this fight, and you're well equipped to figure out the rest. He's also the first confrontation with what the curse of the Old Blood looks like in practice. We find him obsessively carving into the corpse of an already dead Yarnam villager, and upon the player's approach, he turns immediately to aggression, reasoning in his bloodlust that you'll be a monster sooner or later, so he might as well kill you now. Like many Bloodborne characters, Gascoigne blindfolds his eyes, which ties into the many eye and insight themes in the game. But beyond that, he's relatively unremarkable, dressed in modest Hunter fashion and for all intents and purposes, quite "normal" as it were. Which I think is the point: as demonstrated by his daughter's music box, the sound of which seems to force him to remember his humanity, Gascoigne is a normal man with a family, an ordinary person who might have had an ordinary life, except the violence and bloodlust and brutality of the hunt and the curse of the blood and the sins of the church and the horrors that he has seen transformed him and made him monstrous to the point that even the love of his children can no longer call him back. That is the curse of the Old Blood. Subscribe here for shorts or see my detailed analysis of this character over on my main channel.