Bloodborne is a game steeped in mystery and blood. Despite having been released almost a decade ago, Bloodborne is a game with a strong following and plenty of gamers and FromSoftware lore masters that keep the discussion going. It is a game so deeply beloved that it is probably one of the first games that most players recommend to people looking for a challenge.
On the flip side, very few gamers can claim to truly understand the story of the game, and even fewer have personally laid their eyes upon one of the major clues to the game's mysteries. At the very bottom of the Chalice Dungeons lurks the captured Queen Yharnam. The combat with her, along with the artifact that she drops, are the keys to uncovering answers to the central questions of the game's narrative.
Bloodborne Is Viscerally Feminine
The Chalice Dungeons are a polarizing part of Bloodborne in general. Some gamers love them and others would rather never approach them. What is important, though, is that through using the Great Pthumeru Ihyll Chalice, which is only acquired after conquering six chalices, the hunter is granted an audience with Queen Yharnam. The chalices used to get there deal with Pthumeru, the ancient civilization on top of which the city of Yharnam is built. The player gets a sense of what lies in store for Yharnam, as it already happened in Loran and Pthumeru. When the player finds the Queen, she is chained in her wedding dress, visibly pregnant (unlike in her appearances in Rom's boss room and Mergo's Loft) and bleeding from her womb.
Queen Yharnam was impregnated by Formless Oedon, and it is deeply unclear if this was something that was intended, as seen with Arianna and Imposter Iofska. Her doomed progeny is Mergo, the baby whose cries the player hears throughout the game. The important detail here is that the Queen is chained up, fighting the Hunter while handcuffed in the beginning. She is half mad due to what has happened, and it is clear that the stillbirth of Mergo was both violent and wrong. Her blood has been used to further this madness. Mergo is, after all, formless like its father.
Upon killing the Queen, the player is gifted the Yharnam Stone, which resembles a lithopedion: a calcified infant. This item has no use other than bragging rights, but it tells the player so much with so little. Mergo is the youngest pure Great One the player comes across -- so young that it cannot survive without the Wet Nurse to protect it. It is at the core of the nightmare of Yharnam, as killing it is what spurs the end game and calls down the Moon Presence should the player choose to rebuke Gerhman's offer of a swift death.
Yharnam's child, wanted or not, was torn from her womb in worship of the gods and became a Great One itself after Mergo's Wet Nurse made it her surrogate, as the Great Ones are wont to do. They were both trapped within the nightmare. This directly mirrors what the old hunters did to Kos -- killing her and ripping the child from her womb, thus creating the nightmare that traps blood-drunk hunters. Their literal and metaphorical blood is what holds the pieces of the nightmare together, and when slaying Mergo (which is the consequence of killing the Wet Nurse) and the Orphan of Kos, the player gets the message "Nightmare Slain." The violence of femininity and motherhood is what brings the story together. The reconciliation of the wrongs done to the mothers by "releasing" their children is the only way to resolve anything within Bloodborne.
Queen Yharnam's Monstrous Motherhood Links It All Together
When viewed through this lens, Bloodborne is a tale that relies heavily on an understanding of the harshness and horrors of pregnancy, motherhood, and miscarriage. It's possible that this was on game director Hidetaka Miyazaki's mind, as he had a child during the development and release of the title. Queen Yharnam is a ghost -- a specter with no context without the Chalice Dungeons. Delving into them will paint the story of a desperate civilization falling to ruin, just like Yharnam itself. It tells of how the sacrifice of their Queen's body was not good enough, and the player sees other women similarly sacrificed in the Blood Moon who go mad from the incompatible creatures growing within them.
Queen Yharnam is the most visceral demonstration of those central themes and can put the whole affair into context. She shows the player the inherent wrongness of what is happening in a deeply relatable way. The Great Ones long for children. The meddling of others to fulfill that desire causes more strife than good, and ultimately that is what drives the plot of Bloodborne.