Here is how I understand Bioenergy
It is basically a sort of manifestation of the food chain concept. Of course, the food chain is much more complicated than just “this thing is eaten by a bigger thing which is eaten by an even bigger thing”, but it exists in greater concentration in apex predators. The higher up you are on the food chain, it means that you are eating other predators that also contain a lot of Bioenergy, thus causing you to accumulate all of THAT Bioenergy until you start doing crazy things, like regenerating body parts and and being straight up a necromancer.
It is also the Monster Hunter world’s equivalent of mana, a term often used as a name for a magic source in other games. The traditional definition for mana can be overly simplified as “life force”, which Bioenergy basically is, but in video games it is basically magic in a raw state, which can be transformed into different spells. In the Monster Hunter setting, Bioenergy serves as a source of an Elder Dragon’s unusual powers, as in it’s raw state it’s not terribly useful, but when harnessed through a Dragon’s biological adaptations it can be turned into elements, like an Alatreon Funneling it through it’s horns to act as a natural taser and a Deviljho (though it’s a Brute Wyvern) condensing it into Dragon element to breathe out.
And why is it not just called mana or magic or whatever? In my opinion, the Monster Hunter games run off of a reverse of Clarke’s Third Law, which states that any sufficiently advanced technology can look a lot like magic. Reversed, it means that magic, when understood well enough, becomes science because magic is mysterious and vague in how it works, but science has been tested, poked and prodded until scientists at least have a good understanding of what is going on. And in the Monster Hunter setting, magic is just another field in biology.
(Anon, I’ve had something like this stuck in my mind ever since I finished World. Thank you so much for putting it into words, this is a fantastic explanation!)
(Decided to make this a pinned post. Feel like it’s a good example of the blogs style and, once again, whoever wrote it did a really good job at expressing this great idea.)
