#im just a bit tired of people pointing to mourning dolls as if it proves there’s nothing amiss about how gerhman created and treats the dol

[butchladymaria]

not sure if you’re referring to my analysis essay, but at the risk of nudging into “make your own post” territory i do want to address your points here just for fun! this got long, so under the cut it goes —

Firstly, I do agree with the interpretation that he wouldn’t dress Doll in hunting attire. The thing is, there’s a vast ocean of nuance between “dressing doll in hunting clothes” and “dressing doll in hyperfeminine gender conforming clothes”, and Maria’s taste isn’t as mysterious as many make it out to be if you look closer at her attire. Maria’s homeland of Cainhurst allowed its citizens to be knights regardless of gender, but gave visually distinct uniforms for men and women. As you can see below, despite of the fact that she could have modeled her attire on either a masculine or feminine outfit, Maria’s hunting clothes far more closely resemble the masculine knight’s set.

I can’t speak for everyone, but when I point out how Gerhman feminizes Maria through Doll, it doesn’t really have anything to do with hunting attire vs civilian attire. I’m talking about how Maria’s garb shows that she was gender nonconforming by her own cultural standards, yet Gerhman omitted that in making Doll. Regardless of his presumed motivations, it’s inaccurate to just ignore that completely. In any case — just because we only see her hunting attire in-game, why should we assume that her masculine taste in fashion was solely the result of the hunt? I don’t think most folks imagine that other characters who dress masculine such as Gascoigne would be dolled up in a dress if not for the hunt (although it’s a great concept lol, good for him if true). It’s also not as if masculine civilian clothing doesn’t exist — plenty of corpses wear button-up shirts, waistcoats, and coats that fit the bill.

I don’t know how much canonical basis there is to prove that Gerhman “did love/care for Maria because of who she was and not what she looked like”, as in all my research there was nothing which points to that decisively one way or another. If that’s your headcanon, that’s totally cool! However, I will say this: people, especially parental/guardian figures as Gerhman was, as far as we know, to Maria, can care about a deceased loved one and still erase their GNC identities after death — and for a whole host of reasons. The specifics are a very complex issue for another day, but suffice it to say that those things aren’t mutually exclusive. The existence and memory of gnc people is complicated by a society that doesn’t want their memories preserved accurately — just look at any lgbt+ historical figure for that one.

On your point of mourning dolls — if you do look them up, you’ll actually find that they were only made for very small children, usually infants or toddlers at the oldest, and Maria was obviously well out of that age range. What’s more, other forms of mourning art were used for adults. post-mortem photography, hair art, etc were all common (and its actually a super interesting rabbit hole to go down, highly recommend). If you’re still going to claim that Doll was made as a mourning doll, it implies that Gerhman saw Maria as his daughter (which is decently in line with canon), but it also brings a whole lot of somewhat unsavory baggage along with it. To summarize: the mourning doll represents the culmination of the Victorian obsession with the inherent innocence of white children, and their emphasis on those children as paragons of untainted purity. I highly recommend you check out Eternal Innocence: the Victorian Cult of the Dead Child if you’re interested in learning more — you’ll see what I mean about that baggage being unsavory.

Either way, it directly implies that Gerhman was trying to make Maria in effigy as pure, innocent, and untainted. Maybe that’s okay on paper when it’s a baby we’re talking about, but Maria was a grown adult. Unlike an infant, she did have thoughts and opinions. It also puts the attire he chose for her in even more unflattering light — possibly implying he saw her gender nonconformity as impurity to be expunged…? Rather historically accurate, if nothing else. It gets even more uncomfortable when you consider that purity was heavily connected with obedience, dependence, and lack of personhood in this time period. The obsession with preserving purity seem in mourning dolls was the same variety that argued women did not belong in politics or the workplace lest they become “tainted” by the outside world (and protest being considered the wards and property of their husbands the same way children were of their fathers, among many other things). In other words, the infantilization of women was a key part of Victorian era misogyny that equated their “purity” to that of children — which must be preserved at any cost, even after death. Making a mourning doll of Maria would have been out of place even in Victorian times, but it only gets worse if you do follow that line of reasoning to its logical conclusion in the historical context mourning dolls come from.

To conclude, my larger point that I develop more in the essay is that it’s a bit of a lapse in logic to point to the historical existence of, for example, mourning dolls while overlooking the historical context of possession when it came to women and children that contributed immensely to their existence in the first place, and the deep prejudice that existed against GNC people at that time period as well. It isn’t accurate or logical to take a cultural and historical artifact like mourning dolls and completely remove the complex web of contextual meanings they were bound up in. I’m 100% in favor of acknowledging the historical influences of the Victorian Era on Bloodborne — in fact, I think it’s crucial to a complete understanding — but that’s a lot more complex than face-value comparisons. More broadly, I think we do Bloodborne a disservice by ignoring that broader historical context and womanhood, especially given how the themes of the game focuses on women, motherhood, and childbirth.

I saw this post the other day that I can't seem to refind, but it mentioned that when Gehrman created the doll, he makes her in the image of Maria but strips her of a lot of her non-gender conforming appearance. But if you think about it for a while, it makes a lot of sense why Gehrman wouldn't put the Doll in a hunter outfit. Because Maria being a hunter is what led to her experiencing the awful Fishing Hamlet, and eventually dying. Gehrman probably regrets ever teaching her, or letting her come along on that mission. It's also worth mentioning that he did love/care for Maria because of who she was and not what she looked like. When the Moon Presence brought the Doll to life, it didn't act or think like Maria because the Moon Presence can't just take her out of the Nightmare (or doesn't want to, but trying to analyse the actions of Great Ones will give you a headache). Also the whole Mourning Doll thing. Seriously, just look them up.

TLDR: Gehrman was a Personality man.