#they are basically the same attitude to 'true' face of (unescapeable) existencial horror but mensis are nerds and league are jocks

[katyspersonal]

Hi I just saw your lore posts on Arianna and Cainhurst

It reminded me that I wanted to ask about the League. Do you think they were basically Yharnam’s police?

I do think that Vermin is one of the possible reflections of human dregs or otherwise a way to reflect the evil, and we do know that the rune of Impurity was discovered thanks to Valtr!

I am using this ( x ) retranslation document, and interestingly, localisation and either of translators versions say that the rune was found 'inside' of Valtr, not BY Valtr! So I presume that because he ate a beast, there were strange vibrations coming from within him, that Caryll or someone familiar with Caryll's rune language deciphered and wrote down (Adeline and Ludwig prove that other people can discover new runes on their own).

^ My inspiration for there being multiple ways to envision human dregs was the fact that on the Clocktower dial, there is a rune that looks similar but not the same, and I always felt like it was someone else's vision of the concept!

So yeah, for a long while I was thinking that Impurity was supposed to reflect Valtr's personal vision of evil, that supposedly would have to include a lot of broken laws too. But now I think its more likely that it was rigged by the concept of HOW Impurity was discovered! Whether Valtr was consciously trying to process whatever weird Insight he received upon eating a beast or someone basically just leaned an ear close and listened to his body, in either case - this concept of human dregs is tied to beasthood. And why beasts are bad? Well, because they eat their own, are blood-hungry, etc etc.

In offline mode, Vermin can be found by killing Old Hunters that have red glowing eyes instead of mob's regular yellow:

Red eyes appear to be special for beasts too - Abhorrent Beasts have them, many Beast Patients have them (that we all know have especially poisoned blood, I speculated it was the use of blood from Blood-Starved Beast ( x )), a special scourge beast that deals poison damage in Old Yharnam has them... Choice of red eyes feels like displaying very massively spoiled blood. But you also can get Vermin if you fight a boss with a League confederate and the confederate survives, so: Ludwig, Laurence, Paarl (beasts); The One Reborn and Shadows of Yharnam (have to do with cursed Pthumerian rituals); Rom and Living Failures (both are associated with lumenwood that reaches for the stars to be saved from curse of beasts, however Rom is also a spider person like Patches but with 999+ more Insight, so maybe blood/Pthumerian bit too).

So yeah... I tried to find some system here, but not only in online mode you get Vermin out of ANY hunter you defeat in PvP, but also Valtr himself talks about how Vermin is pretty much everywhere. So, as long as someone's blood is taunted by hunt/beasthood/ministration/whatever else, he (and anyone that keeps the rune in mind) will find Vermin in their body. And in Yharnam it is... well... EVERYONE...

I presume the post about Arianna inspired you to send this ask because she is supposedly on Valtr's hit list as a sex worker, so I will just say the goals of the League are different from that. Sure maybe in his constable past he would try to close her booth, but times have changed and the only reason he'd have something against her is by sensing Vermin in her. That might even come off especially strongly because Vilebloods are "cursed"; but at the same time, it might not even be there because they exclude themselves from the circle of blood and hunt the way hunters and the Healing Church do it and their "beasthood" manifests differently! It is up to interpretation what's up with Vilebloods, though I do like the idea that ironically they do not have human dregs (at least as they are present in others), and poor Shadows of Yharnam only became exception because of getting infested with snakes who DO have Vermin!

Another bit about 'police' comparison is that the League appears to be a hidden society, whose mission is so insane that virtually it means killing everyone - perhaps with taking their own lives when they're done. Rather than ensuring certain 'rules' are followed and punishment follows only if they are broken, they are in the position where the single 'rule' (to not be the "filth") is broken by everyone or almost everyone ALREADY, and they are exterminating ones like that. It is more like... idk, a secret society of fanatics. A cult, sort of? Actually:

League more or less shares the same mindset as what School of Mensis is doing - forcing themselves to be redpilled about whatever horrors lurk within world of humanity! Forcing oneself to look at something that is everywhere and presumably there is nothing TO do about it besides either killing everyone or killing yourself. Only, League doesn't have a cage that (presumably) lets the person to handle it without mental pain. League confederates only have their own willpower and guts to carry them through it (RIP Yamamura).

TLDR; I am not sure whether Valtr would judge Arianna or not, but his problem with fellow humans by now evolved into higher plane (but at the same time into more basic plane...?) so he'd definitely not bother. UNLESS vile-blood is corrupting as well, and Arianna sharing it with hunters would count as spreading human dregs (ie Vermin). THEN Arianna is dead. Overall I think if he found a person who is clearly a harm on the society but just HAPPEN to not be filthied by Vermin, he'd still not get them off the hook easily. Just that the League as it is doesn't deliberately police the bad guys, but exterminates the ones with impure blood; simply doing the SWIPER NO SWIPING could've been just a fun light-hearted change of the pace for them.