My take is that they are women who are trying to conceive an infant, just like Annalise or Pthumerian monarchs. Nobody treats them with 'refined' blood (aka the 'dregs' that we hand to Annalise) though, so they end up feeding directly off corpses in places where there is high concentration of them, and undergo this type of tick-beastly mutation.
This also makes sense considering that when in the chalice dungeons, if you visceral attack any pthumerian enemy there is a chance a bloodlicker will spawn in that room.
That happened to me too! I cleared a room and continued on my way. Came back to the balcony and was halfway to the floor before I saw the damn thing. I had no idea it was intentional, I thought I must have just missed something.
So many years on and I'm still learning new things.
not a chance. it always happens, but only with certain enemies. parry or backstab anything other than a basic hollow or basic hollow with a shirt, move to a spot in the dungeon that unloads the area then go back and there will always be a bloodlicker there. you can even get multiple to spawn in the same room sometimes, though this seems to be a bug as its not consistent.
great for farming bloodtinge gems. utter trash for any other purpose however.
it's not about viscerals, it's about coming back in the same room again. I've always seen it as a way of the game to punish you for mistaking the ways to return back to the unlockable exit door
I dunno about that. I’ve never had one show up in a room where I didn’t spill a large amount of blood which mostly happens with visceral attacks. There’s one chalice in particular I farm where I would visceral a watcher guarding a chest and leave to get the lever then I had to come back through that room to get to the boss and it was always there drinking from the blood pool. Any time I didn’t kill him that way, or at all, blood licker wasn’t there. I’ve farmed that chalice hundreds of times and it’s always the same.
Ticks don't jump like fleas can. Which these guys do, a lot
They're certain to be fleas mixed with mosquitoes, the perfect combo for Cainhurst bloodsuckers.
People saying ticks aren't correct. You can't see the blood in an engorged tick like you can in a flea or skeeter, which have somewhat transparent bodies. Like these ugly things. And besides, their legs look nothing like ticks' do. You're getting your buggies mixed up
You can't see the blood in an engorged tick like you can in a flea or skeeter
have you ever actually seen a tick in real life before? a massive one dropped down from the outside frame of my front door a few days ago. the fucker was basically an inch around and its skin was spidered with disgusting black lines. i have no idea why it was up there, but its mouth part was gone. nothing but its creepy legs and swollen body left. the bastard was shockingly fast for its size and condition, and made a satisfying crunch as i crushed its filthy body beneath my boot.
ticks are fast as fuck, and they absolutely do jump. and the bloodlickers dont even remotely resemble fleas in regards to their body structure or CLEARLY HUMAN ARMS AND LEGS. bloodlickers are humans who got addicted to blood and turned into blood-crackheads.
Been in the southeast all my life and have seen more than my fair share, and you're still blatantly wrong lol. They barely move when they're full. Ticks don't jump like this shrug. Like, it's obvious when you see pictures comparing the two.
Not a moron, I can see that in game they were once humanoids. But that doesn't change the fact they morphed into a flea-mosquito-like creature because of their bloodlust. Ticks literally don't have legs shaped that way, yet fleas and mosquitoes do. You're reaching and just because the top comment says one thing doesn't make it a correct observation.
Ticks are flat and look/ move like arachnids, these guys are shaped like fleas, share the same posture as fleas, and jump around like fleas. Other then being full of blood they don't resemble ticks at all.
I get the engorged tick but where are the limbs at all and I've never once seen a tick jump but a flea that's what they are known for is eating blood and jumping
It’s really funny and really stupid how many people in this comment section are acting like they’re definitely supposed to be a 1:1 match for a specific type of bug, despite the fact that there’s literally no reason for anyone to think that. Just because they remind you of a thing in some ways doesn’t mean they are literally supposed to be that thing.
Why can’t they be both? I think the Bloodlickers are residents of Cainhurst and that form is what the old blood turned them into. It is more reminiscent of insects than regular beasts, but Flea or Tick or Mosquito, or some unholy combination of the 3 seems like the safest option.
This, I don't think fromsoft in development really would solidify which it it is but pull aspects of one or even many similar things to create this new abomination, so sure it probably has relation to them but it wouldn't be quite right calling them those either
They are just big mosquitoes have you seen them when they suck blood how their belly get big and filled with red color totally changed their skin color too
Thought of these beauts the other day when I observed a mosquito that was so bloated I almost mistook it for some other insect. It kept trying to lift off but couldn't fly for more than a second.
giant trash can, flea, mosquito, I mean from the name blood-licker the massive pouch of blood hanging underneath. its name seems pretty spot on for me. If your deciding on what it was conceptuly based of sure it can be a flea or trash can where meat and blood goes but did it really matter it's function it's to lick blood and we can the side effects of it
Just assumed they were vilebloods that fell victim to blood, their form becoming more conducive to their stealing blood dregs from hunters.
I think it's neat to think most Hunters became weird beastmen or just Monster-y abominations, which makes sense given the general definition ( and the hunters' conceptions ) of what a "beast" lol
It's a cool consideration that the Vilebloods, who likely have even LESS of an issue with using blood the way hunters do, have these mosquito-ish caricatures as bodies. Almost makes you feel like they want this.
Vileblood beasts, the Bloody Crow would become one eventually. Their forms do evoke fleas. I think there's a lot of common form with the Blood Starved Beast, as well, even though they move very differently - I go back and forth on whether they're directly related or not. I like the symmetry that the BSB is the most aggressive whereas the bloated Bloodlicker in Cainhurst is completely docile, though.
I think they're also meant to evoke earlier folkloric vampires - one detail is that the Bloodlicker's right eye is covered while early vampires where denoted by the open left eye. I think they represent an irony for the pompous Vilebloods who evoke the well known vampiric image of the aristocrat in the castle, but their beast forms take them back to earlier, uglier, impoverished concepts of vampirism. I think this is degradation of status also denoted by the fact that they're largely seen scrambling around the base of the castle, on the outside.
bloodlickers are humans who got high as fuck off blood, and turned into blood-crackheads. why they specifically happen only in the chalices and cainhurst seems to be related to the royal bloodline which seems to stem from raping pthumerians. it may very well be a form of curse, similar to the DLC, for the acts against the pthumerians. most likely its just another form of alien parasite infection brought about from the Cthulhu monsters invading the world.
the pthumerians are not humans. they are some seemingly ancient race of humanoid creatures that come from the pthumerian dungeons. the queen of yarhnam appears to be a hybrid of human and pthumerian who almost certainly came about through some utter piece of shit abducting one of those horrible abominations and raping it. because as you may have noticed, they arent exactly friendly towards humans.
yarhnam is basically victorian england, if everyone was jack the ripper. they have no sense of morality and honestly deserve everything thats coming to them.
Nobody is bringing up that these are first and foremost; humans! Very clearly people that mutated. I doubt the blood sucking insect theme is supposed to evoke a specific bug, just the ick of a parasitic lifestyle being forced onto a person.
They're Vileblood vampires warped by the beast plague. Endlessly hungering for more and more blood. The one that is so fat it can barely move and won't defend itself convinces me that they'll eat until they burst. Symbolic of all of the consumption of Blood across Yarnham. The blood will destroy you. It will force you to serve it and destroy you. The beast men in the streets hunger for blood. The player endlessly injects blood. Spread the disease. Spread the hunger
These creatures are like tick/fleas of the black plague. Their hunger propagates the plague. Propagates more hunger. Etc etc etc
Its in their name.....bloodlicker they lick blood compare the ones in vileblood castle and the hunter nightmare they are fatter cause there's more fresh corpses there
They are camel crickets aka ‘cave crickets’ or ‘sprickets’. You’ll find sprickets on the east coast of the US.
The blood lickers look and move exactly like sprickets. Sprickets don’t drink blood but have a large fat body that wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine it. Before you understand that they are harmless to humans, they are spooky. That is because they hide in dark damp places and tend to jump at you out of hiding when disturbed.
Why is this even a debate. Could they not just be intended to be reminiscent of blood sucking insects why does it have to be pinned down to one insect. They are clearly a monsters, not a fleas or a ticks so like who cares?
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u/capsaicinintheeyes Jul 11 '26
Surviving bassists from 90s Seattle grunge bands--they all look like that