June hangs like a tumor in my skull. Foreboding and real and omnipresent with only the promise of its eventual end to soothe me.
There was a point I looked forward to Pride month. Then the entire country decided to call queers groomers and rapists. Then they decided to take rights away from trans kids and throw their parents in jail on federal charges. As American politics further embraces what are literal beat-for-beat Nazi party talking points in regards to the queer community, I find myself snarling at the idea of Pride month. I grip the aesthetics of the monster the world says I am, my maw opening and ready to snap any ally that calls me brave in half.
I’m tired of being “so brave” when you’re gonna kill us regardless. I was “nice and polite” and “brave” my entire life for you fucks and it got my community six feet in the ground. That “nice and brave and polite” shit doesn’t work, has never worked either.
You listen when we get mean, though. Suddenly we’re “a problem”, and that facade of sentimentality you have sloughs away like wet paper. The torches and pitchforks in your hands are borne from paranoia, from sermons spat out of a church pew. That’s okay.
We’re monsters. Right?
We’ve our means for dealing with you, too.
That anger, hot and real and vibrant in my blood, it’s never far from the surface. June, though. June brings it howling to the forefront. I can’t be any more visible than I already fucking am as a queer in America, as someone that very much falls under the trans flag as a non-binary. That tumor pulses and grows the closer we get to the month, a ball of frustration and hate that threatens to blot out all light in my mind.
So.
I try my best to compose myself.
Not out of civility, mind. But a fear of that old hate, that old blood pulsing through me and guiding my limbs before I’ve a moment to resist their calling. Distractions. Enough distractions and you can soothe anybody back to a rough facsimile of humanity. Those come in the form of old creature comforts, the familiar and the “close enough” recommendations. At least once a year I boot up Bloodborne. I never get as far as I did on my initial play through, but the ritual consumes enough of my time in June that all that anger peters out quick enough. I blink, and the Moon Presence descends on my screen as July crests the horizon of time. Swing. Cut. The nightmare dies, and I’m normal again.
Perhaps my reasons for enjoying Bloodborne are peculiar. Perhaps not. Regardless, the game and its narrative have had a staying power that feels all too personal for me. Since its release in 2016, I have played it more times than I can count. It is a time sink. But the tale of Yarnham and its world calls to me as the surrealist dream it is. The world of Bloodborne doesn’t feel so far removed from the America I reside in today-a dark, deathly serious place full of paranoia, misinformation and even more misunderstanding.
It’s difficult to place being queer in modern theocratic America in any other frame. To deny we’re a theocracy with our own death-cult fanaticism would be to engage in the ignorance of Yarnham’s church: There are no beasts, nothing is wrong, listen to us and all will be fine. All it takes is a look out the window with literal, real-world roving groups of bigots ready for violence to know our world is anything but. The beast, as a queer American, isn’t I or my siblings in the community. It’s those outside, clawing at the door and snarling to let them in. To let them burn and destroy and cut and bleed every single one of us.
For our safety.
For our own good.
Bloodborne and it’s associated trappings have found a kind of kinship in the queer community. Souls games always do, but Bloodborne has ascended the cult status of its siblings and is rivaled only by Elden Ring in critical acclaim. All the queers I know have played it. Many can pinpoint its narrative as what cracked their egg. This goes the full spectrum of our rainbow flag as well.
Bloodborne’s relational success with queers is something mimicked in the horror community. The same ironic cis-het sense of paranoia prevails there too. Queers are “shoving it in their faces”, “taking things from them”, and “demanding” things. We’re demonized even when without us, many of their favorite franchises wouldn’t exist. In retaliation, the queer community has begun explicitly taking a grander stage. We’re lead characters, writers, directors and more. The tired trope of “queers are evil” and “bury your gays” aren’t gone, but they’re gradually going extinct in the wake of nuanced character portrayals and developed queer works. In several cases, remakes and reboots have even explicitly featured a queer take on the cast.
Which leads to some absolutely delicious discourse from people who get easily disturbed about things, but I digress.
I suppose it should come as no surprise then that Bloodborne, a title already at home in the queer community, eventually got a “de-make” courtesy of the incredibly talented Lilith Dot Zip. The result is Bloodborne PSX, a creative work both faithful to the playstation era and the gothic cosmic horror of From Software’s hit. I’m not just saying that because Lilith was kind enough to sit down for an interview either.
Bloodborne PSX is a passion project from a parallel universe, one where From Software saw what Konami was doing with Silent Hill (which itself was an answer to Resident Evil) and decided to upstage both of them. It uses vocal assets from the ps4 release, but that’s where the “borrowing” ends. The rest looks familiar in an unsettling way, a liminal space gas lighting its way into your summer memories from middle school. It feels and looks like so much from the ps1, right down to character creation, inventory screens and more. The thing that was most apparent to me right off the bat was the draw distance for the environment. To save processing power back then, developers kept the draw distance low and hid the fact the map hadn’t loaded in a variety of ways. This is literally the reason Silent Hill was a town coated in fog at all.
In PSX era Yharnam, it’s done with the dark twilight of the night. The moon hangs heavy above you, and casts the world in a low poly horror show. Be it the graphical limitations (or if you’re imaginative, that same darkness) or simple switch up, I found this to make Yarnham a far more sinister place. The reduced draw distance both feeds nostalgia and makes the town feel all the more desolate. I booted up the ps4 version to see if it was just in my head, and it wasn’t. Even without interacting with the environs, PS4 Yarnham felt like a bustling metropolis. A single aesthetic choice lent that much weight to the overall vibe.
The second thing players notice is the control scheme. While this is adjustable, the default plays with tank controls familiar to anyone who played Dino Crisis or the original releases of Resident Evil. The reason for this is that the ps1 didn’t originally have the dual analog sticks. This was a feature added after 1996, and many popular titles from the consoles lifecycle didn’t use them until the last two and a half years. Ape Escape was one of the few that used them actively! This minor detail has likely led to a lot of gripes, but the second I realized why this was intentionally done I busted out laughing. The loving adherence to nostalgia oozes from the title just like this during its entire run time.
Which also should be addressed: Bloodborne PSX is not a “full” de-make, and ends with the Father Gascoigne fight. While it is a faithful remake otherwise, Bloodborne enthusiasts will likely find themselves progressing through the title rapidly. So Lilith was sure to include tons of easter eggs, cheats and fun tidbits along the way for replayability. The inclusion of Big Head Mode especially made me smile, as it was a constant activation in games I played with friends as a boy.
Bloodborne PSX is a triumph, borne from the love of a title and what it meant to someone. The fact that one of our queer siblings was at the forefront of it’s development and release has also unfortunately lead to all of the expected unsavory responses. In that interview, Lilith states “we shouldn’t have to be brave”.
And you know what? She’s right.
As a queer creative myself, it’s absolutely exhausting waking up every day and wondering what fresh hell awaits me in America. I’m so tired of telling myself “I have to lift these weights, because someone has to be strong enough to shove people off my friends”. I loathe the fact that I have to double check every face-out upload on my twitter account. Only to feel guilty about that, knowing the insane patriarchal and toxic double standard of entitled respect I’ll receive simply for being more masc presenting than my friends and white.
I’ve fully given up on correcting people about my pronouns. I’m so tired and I don’t care anymore.
We shouldn’t have to be brave. We should simply have the right to create a full life and a portfolio that makes us happy.
That’s why I love Bloodborne PSX so much. That’s why I’ve nothing but respect and admiration for Lilith and what she accomplished. She did it because she fucking wanted to. She did it masterfully, openly and proudly. BBPSX and Lilith are great examples of what we as a queer community should strive more for, especially during pride.
Passion and queer excellence.
I highly encourage all of you to support Lilith over on patreon, which she just launched. If you yourself are a queer creator as well, I want you to take this from the review.
The world we find ourselves in can be a horrifying place. It’s easy to lose hope in a world full of monsters. But as we find ourselves in this ongoing nightmare, the hope we can hold fast to is that this will not be forever. There’s a life to be had after, one we can ascend to if we’d like. Hold fast to that hope. Hold fast to the sure belief in a better world where we have the luxury to choose to be brave.
-J