Lady Maria

Bloodborne is one of the girliest games ever published. It's girlier than Barbie Horse Adventures. It's girlier than those browser-based Flash player dress-up games. It's even girlier than outrage farmers said Captain Marvel was going to be! It's all about motherhood and blood and the moon, and there's a whole thing with the School of Mensis, a foundational group in the story, which is unignorably close to "menses." You can't even get to the final boss without witnessing three mothers and their children! So it's good there's at least one female figure from it. "A corpse... should be left well alone. Oh, I know very well. How the secrets beckon so sweetly. Only an honest death will cure you now. Liberate you, from your wild curiosity." Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower was introduced not in Bloodborne proper, but in "The Old Hunters" DLC. And when she was, she changed a major chunk of the game's unspoken lore. Fromsoft games pride themselves on being cryptic, trusting the player to figure things out on their own. They treat their storytelling the same way their fanbase treats the games' difficulty level: "it's there, if you can't figure it out then git güd." So there's the blatant, surface-level version of Lady Maria's story, and then there's what's beneath the surface. Maria was one of the earliest apprentices of Gehrman, the first hunter, and a favorite of his. When a remote fishing village began venerating the corpse of a Great One (an eldritch god) that washed up on its shore, the Hunters came to town to kill the mutated inhabitants. Lady Maria was repulsed by these actions, and so abandonned her weapons in disgust and became a caretaker at the Healing Church, tending to the patients experimented upon there. But even that wasn't enough to soothe her conscience, and she committed suicide. Her body was buried next to the Abandonned Workshop in the real world, but her spirit lives on within the Hunter's Nightmare. The Hunter's job in Bloodborne is a lonely one, with you fighting the monsters of the world mostly alone. You do, however, have one friend on your side through your journey: The Doll. Functionally just a button you interact with to level up, the Doll is an automaton of unknown design, a living mechanoid who seems lifeless until you go at least a little bit crazy. As the story stands now, the Doll was built by Gehrman, who designed her to resemble Lady Maria; but the Doll and the facts of her story (she was made by an early Hunter, she is tall and has white hair) pre-date the introduction of Maria, so that couldn't have always been the intent. The Pacte des Loups uniforms the Hunters wear are inspired by the way Gehrman dressed in his everyday life, so his apprentice Maria is similarly clad: tall boots, dark pants, dark coat, tricorn hat. Hers is a different, more ornate style (possibly because she lived so far in the past, possibly because of her aristocratic background), but the connection is apparent. She doesn't wear anything covering her face, obviously, becauuse why would you ever want to conceal a connection between The Doll and the woman she's based on, right? Right? ...right? The colors are similarly muted, though between the long white hair, the feather on her hat, the exposed skin on her face, and the pure white cravat she's wearing, there's more brightness present here. The necktie needed to be so white so the blood soaked into it would stand out more. Her outfit does have a lot of different colors, it's just that they're dark and desaturated, so she doesn't look like she got dressed in the 1980s. Lady Maria is descended from the Pthumerians, a race that pre-dates humanity and were creted to serve the Great Ones. That's why she's so much taller than the Hunter, both in the game and as a toy. Her design also requires more articulation than he had, so while she still moves at the neck, shoulders, biceps, elbows, wrists, chest, hips, thighs, knees, ankles and toes, she also gets two joints for the pieces of her cape, as well as two joints to allow her ponytail to move around. That's surely impressive! Despite discarding her Rakuyo before her death, she still wields it in the Nightmare. As is tradition for all the Hunters, it's a Trick Weapon, with two different modes, but they're not as different as the Saw Cleaver's: basically, it's a double-bladed weapon that can split into a sword and a dagger. Not the most creative thing ever, but it helps to remember that (in-universe) this would have been one of the first Trick Weapons ever designed, so its simplicity may make diagetic sense. She's also armed with an Evelyn, a humongous pistol, but since her Trick Weapon has a two-handed mode, she doesn't use her firearm very often. Just like with The Hunter, there's a deluxe version of Maria available. When you first find the character in her tower, she's sitting, seemingly dead, in a tall chair. The 536-DX release includes not only that chair, but a special pair of pre-posed legs to allow her to sit in it as well. Those are unarticulated, and require you to attach both her torso and her boots to complete the look. But you can decide whether you want her slumped over, like in the game, or sitting upright, like on the cover of the DLC. Additionally, the extras include a scabbard for the saber side of Rakuyo, and "blood blade" effects that represent her attacks in the second phase of her fight, when she's given in to her homeland's native fighting style. She also had a preorder bonus, but rather than something cool like the Hunter's Messengers, it was just a display base that mimicked the floor of her arena: a nice idea, but far from necessary. Lady Maria may be little more than a walking retcon, but she is an iconic part of the series, and makes more sense as a toy than most of the other bosses would. By herself she's fairly mediocre, but the chair included with the deluxe edition boosts things up quite a bit. -- 04/27/25 What is the best action figure chair? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.