Well. Eh... This was weird.
I'm honestly quite unsure of how to begin this one.
Song of Crows is the third installment in the Bloodborne comic series, though every installment stands alone, their stories unconnected. Right out of the gate everything seemed kosher and fine: The art was awesome and though the writing was a bit confusing, I did already get the sense of what the comic was going for, already seeing the hints of a full-circle-resolution type thing that was only going to make sense at the comic's eventual conclusion. But then... shit got really weird.
Writer Ales Kot did make it pretty clear at the start that things weren't going to be so straightforward.
Woven into the narration where our protagonist Eileen questions her place in time and her reasons for her decision to bury the dead of Yharnam there is also a musing on the nature of the story about to be told. Tres meta.
If you put the fragmented narration together it states quite clearly, addressing both Eileen and us the readers, and it informs us:
No matter how hard you try to understand, you'll never know the whole story.
Not your own, not anyone else's. At certain points you may be convinced you do.
You may even choose to convince yourself that you've found the right angle from which to see the totality of the world, of the universe. You'd be wrong.
For time is the deepest grave of all. And graves tell no complete stories.
There's a hole in the center of the story.
There's a hole in the center of my story. And time is the deepest grave of all.
It has no shape. But time has a flow.
Time doesn't have a shape. But we make shapes of time.
First things first: This isn't exactly Eileen the Crow's story from the game. It is also not her origin story. Once again, if you came into this comic looking for answers, you're going to be disappointed. Eileen the Crow from the game either vanishes or is killed by you, at the end of her story arc in the game, never having given in to the insanity or the blood-lust that many of the game's other characters do. At no point before that ending did she gave in to madness.
When we meet her in the game, she, in spite of her age, in spite of being cut off from the Hunter's Dream and thus susceptible to true death, continues to hunt the hunters who've gone mad or who've become beasts, holding fast to her duty, until it finally kills her, or until, after you've helped her in her fights and she finally realizes that she just cannot continue, she ends up giving you her blessing, after which she vanishes from the game. It is unclear what happens to her.
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If you take the comic's story as possible, then it takes place after that vanishing. But almost nothing else of this story can be discerned. We follow Eileen as she tries to make sense of her situation, confused as she is about her place in time. At points we are gifted with flashes to her childhood, which may not actually be scenes from her childhood and instead could just be a symbolic representation of an event yet to come, or an event that has happened but which she is hiding from herself. Or there might be some strange synchronicity thing going on where one lake hides a dead child, the other a Vacuous Spider or something. The Child might also just be a representation of Eileen herself.
There's also another hunter who shows up and tries to guide her and who Eileen ends up fighting, but who I'm sure is Eileen herself, and since this Hunter's eyes are visible, I think it's safe to say that this is a representation of Eileen's consciousness that has been given insight. Although she's likely not even there.
What I'm trying to get at is that this is a very non-linear comic book, and that it is all rather experimental. I ended up loving it, but even here at this time when I think I've understood a lot of it, it still remains bewildering and really quite disorienting.
What does become clear is that there is a definite point where Eileen lost the plot, where she definitively lost her grip on her place in time and reality; at the end of Issue 2 when she met Rom the Vacuous Spider and the spider likely gifted her with eyes, though it is likely this event took place far in advance of issue 1.
To Have Eyes in the world of Bloodborne is to have gained knowledge, and to have become intimate with the dark secrets of the Bloodborne universe, which frequently also leads to true Lovecraftian insanity of the mind. Which is where Eileen finds herself at the start of the comic.
The meeting with the spider is represented by a rather experimental approach and the delivery of both subliminal and symbolic imagery. It might also have been padded out a little too much.
A hole in the ice, becomes a whirpool, which becomes a crow tearing out the eye of another crow, which, weeping suppurating goo, becomes the Blood Moon, gashed and weeping fluids, and becomes the other hunter with her visible eyes and all of them originate from the dark eyes of Rom the Vacuous Spider. Or something.
I honestly love it.
It's this type of convoluted story telling that is so easy to dismiss as a creator deep inside his own arse, or trying to be artsy or deep, but because Bloodborne's own stories tend to be focused on insanity, dreams and the nature of reality, and the stories and characters tend to be very difficult to follow or even understand, their information so hidden and secret, that I do think, that even though it certainly won't be for everyone, that of the three so far, this might be the comic that's closest to it in spirit.
Either way, it was an unsettling but pretty great experience.
Early next year will see another Bloodborne comic and I'm really, really looking forward to it.
In the meantime. If you are confused by all of this but are starting to get interested in Bloodborne. You could do worse than to take a look at VaatiVidya's story video. The man gives a pretty coherent and insightful look at the world, and is likely to really calm you down with his dulcet tones.
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One last thing though. A little niggle I had about A Song of Crows:
Strangely enough. Though Eileen is said to perform sky burials in the game, as a way to honour and 'help' the Hunters who've gone mad, and the first time we see her there, she is standing by corpses she hoisted into the air, and even though there are a few depictions of a form of sky burial in both Eileen's investigation in issue 1 and her flashbacks to a time in her youth in subsequent issues, in issue 1 she bizarrely is introduced to us burying corpses in the ground. I'm not sure why she's introduced burying in the ground rather than actually performing sky-burial, which she then continues to end up doing anyway later in the comic. It's an odd little inconsistency, I think. Or it could be I'm just missing something.
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