So it’s been four years since Disco Elysium
first came out. It’s rare for a game, or any piece of media
really, to occupy my thoughts for as long as it did. And in that time there has been, to put it
politely as it’s the first minute of the video, a lot of material released analyzing
this game back and forth. At this point, there have been hundreds of
hours talking about various aspects of the game, be it in full or in parts.And I frankly
don't find most of them satisfying - there have been some good discussions of select
aspects of it, or a single facet of the philosophy behind the writing, but I found myself yearning
for a big-picture kind of approach. So it’s time for me to do it myself, dangit. I may be pouring a glass of water into the
ocean, but I still want to do it. There are a few reasons for this want, which
I think can set some expectations for the video going forward. One, by the law of averages, by seeking out
Anglophones talking about the game, I’m very likely to hear Americans do so. And listen, I love you all and some of the
most interesting people I’ve ever met were from across the big puddle, but you guys are
terribly one-note. The game touches upon so many things, yet
almost every analysis I found was fixated on the distribution of wheat and pigs. I know discussing more than the material reality
can be scary, but come on now. Second, they focus too much on the main plot. Which may be a weird criticism, as it is a
great story, and it takes you on a tour across some of the best characters living in the
game’s world, but that’s a bit like trying to describe a country by talking about its
history. Sure, it’s important, but it tells you nothing
about their cuisine. And there is as much to be said about a place
by not just saying what’s in it, but what seems to be missing. What shape is taken by an outline around an
empty space. As such, I will try to approach this entire
thing from my own angle. Less of a video essay on a complete work as
viewed by a player, more of a neurotic director writing notes for the non-existent backstage
crew and actors. Or, closer to the game’s roots, a game master
writing detailed notes on the fiftieth campaign that will never happen because all your players
are in their thirties and meeting once a month to even continue that one campaign you started
as university students is a miracle. So welcome to the Last Minute Essays, the
channel by a guy who always struggled to meet his word quota on academic papers and prefers
to keep things as brief as possible. Don’t look at the video length. Don’t worry about it. Before we get to the meat of this video, disclaimer
first. I am assuming you have beaten the game or
are otherwise knowledgeable about its events. If you are not, get out of here, either play
it yourself or watch a let’s play, whatever, you’re spoiled for choice. Consider this a full spoiler warning. If you want a spoiler-free review, I made
that years ago. I have no interest in repeating the story
beat-by-beat, I’m here to crack it open and see it tick. As such, things will be messy and disjointed. It’s only fair, considering that’s how
the lore is presented in the game itself. Well, I say that but some structure is needed. Labeling the parts as they are laid out on
a bedsheet. A large picture is always easier to paint
than the fine details, so let’s start big and then zoom in. Starting with how the scene is dressed, then
what plot unfolds upon it, and finally the actors telling it. And I’ll wedge the vision quests somewhere,
I guess. As well as “Sacred and Terrible Air”,
the 2013 book by Robert Kurvitz, the game’s director, taking place in the same universe. But I will also shuffle some information around
for the sake of emotional impact and- ugh. Whatever. Trust me. Let’s go and solve this fucking case already. The world of Elysium is made of pockets of
existence, called “isolas”, separated from each other by the Pale - which is more
than just an empty void. Where it touches these bubbles of reality,
it unravels matter itself into pure mathematics, these mathematics into waves, then into simple
vectors, until they also cease to exist and become nothingness. In one thought, Motorway South, a path through
the Pale is described that does not involve travel from isola to isola, from one pocket
of matter to another, but deeper and deeper into the Pale itself. At its end, there is a nothingness with no
point of reference - this is important, as if you argue that, on an ontological level,
space, time and objects are defined by relations to each other, those ties are severed at the
end of Motorway South. To reach it is to be unborn, to truly not
exist in space nor time, to disappear retroactively, erased from memories, photos and videos. You have no material body, no connection with
your past up to the point of entering it, no direction to go towards, no change that
would indicate the passage of time. One of the common philosophical cliches “Why
is there something and not nothing”, does not apply to the world of Elysium. There is nothing. You can go there, despite it not being a place
by any logical explanation. This is common knowledge taught to children
in schools, a reality that everyone has to face at some point. On some level, every single person met in
Disco Elysium knows that nothing is permanent. Not even seemingly immutable laws, like two
plus two equals four. That existing is an exception, rather than
the norm. And the nothingness is expanding. The material world is on the losing side. But outside of that deep Pale, the ‘surface
waters’ of this cessation of creation have some other properties. As things dissolve into waves, waves themselves
can travel from isola to isola undisturbed - as such, radio communications are possible
and therefore developed to a high level of sophistication. Human travel is possible across the Pale as
well, not just thanks to high levels of technology contemporary to the game’s events, as it
allows to force dimensions onto it and shorten the travel significantly, but even prior to
that - using nothing but determination and grit. Sailors braved the non-ocean chanting mantras
- “Nothing will be changed about the light, colours like grey and brown, all printed on
top of each other”. Your survival through the journey can be willed. Your thoughts, your mindset, your very soul
can pull your material body through, even as water evaporated around your ship the moment
it touched the Pale. Your thoughts may not affect reality, but
in the liminal space between the pockets of it, they have the power to shape the ocean
of abstraction around you. This leads us to the final, biggest point
about the Pale - that memories echo in it. People who traverse it regularly, like the
interisolan equivalent of long-haul truckers, have their heads filled with memories of other
people, other lives. They remember them as vividly as if they lived
through them themselves. People they never met, people from ages ago. And similarly, these ‘ghosts’ can manifest
themselves in devices that decode and play sound in some way. An intercom can replay words of someone long
gone over and over. A radio receiver can be weaponized by blasting
people with a concentrated information soup from the Pale - voices, memories and radio
broadcasts assaulting their minds. We’ll put a pin on reading deeper into this
until the end of this chapter. For now, let us focus on reality - the pockets
of matter, and one of them in particular. There are seven isolas peppered throughout
the Pale - Mundi, Iilmara, Graad, Seol, Samara, Katla and finally Insulinde, where the game
itself takes place. They are large geographical regions, more
like separated tectonic plates than continents - after all, Insulinde itself is mostly an
ocean, peppered with countless islands. Each of them is distinct. Some, like Mundi, are split into several nations
- whereas Seol has a single pan-isolan state. The people of Mundi thought their isola is
the entire world, until expeditions into the Pale discovered the Insulinde four centuries
before the game started. Given the various allusions to real languages
and cultures, it is not difficult to draw comparisons between the isolas and our reality
- for example, Mundi - the multinational, rich source of all these explorers sent out
four centuries prior, is quite ostensibly akin to Europe. And just like in our reality, the language,
framing of history, culture and general mindset are ostensibly Mundicentric. But that old world is not where the game takes
place. The numerous nations, isolas and other geographical
distinctions exist to our protagonists in the same way a real foreign country exists
to someone too working class to ever travel outside of their hometown - as a fleeting
image, a half-heard stereotype, a shadow on some distant wall. Yet despite that distance and disconnection,
they are very real, and so is their influence in the Insulinde - so let’s summarize the
history of the region. The city of Revachol, located on the island
of Le Caillou, used to be the capital of the world. Founded by explorers four centuries prior,
a city to resolve History with capital H, surrounded by enough fertile land to sustain
millions of people and located in Insulinde, naturally giving it a position of importance
in trade and international relations. “It’s where the money is”, as a certain
self-proclaimed Ultraliberal would say. The Insulide itself was seen as somewhat of
a miracle, forever altering what is thought possible by the people. Not only was it beautiful and true, it was
also mostly uninhabited, letting people start fresh without the need to, you know, kill
others and steal their shit. Though it seems that despite asking the question
about History by building Revachol, the people from Mundi did not quite like the answer. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To describe the people of Revachol, first
we need to discuss how they even got there. As mentioned before, the people of the Mundian
isola thought their little corner of the world is all there is to it. They also had a particular…let’s call
it religious belief. Every now and then, someone would be declared
an Innocence - History embodied in a person. The World Spirit materialized, the will of
the entire world made manifest, pretty clearly taking terminology from Hegel. Their actions are an inevitability, accelerated
- what would take humanity centuries to accomplish is achieved in a single lifespan. Iit has only happened five times and the process
itself is not infallible, as several of them were deemed to be false, or anti-innocences,
least noticeably of all Sola, who did jack shit in the last century and abdicated - her
story less than one, extremely easy to miss paragraph in the whole game. The last true Innocence was Dolores Dei - at
first, an unassuming woman introduced to the royal court of Suresne (or Sur-la-Clef in
modernity) by her influential husband. It was her advice that launched countless
expeditions into the Pale, eventually leading to the Elysium equivalent of globalization. Her image is in churches. Her philosophy known to everyone in the world,
weaved into the cultural fabric inseparably. T he word “Elysium” itself is noted to
be Dolorian in origin - in real life, it is a concept of blissful afterlife from ancient
Greek though, separate from Hades, a place where gods and the heroic can enjoy all pleasures
of the life they left behind. After life, death - after death, life again. After the world, the Pale - after the Pale,
the world again. Thus, the totality of it is Elysium - in Dolorean
thought, at least. We will get to Her Innocence and that entire
notion of history made manifest in more detail later, but for now let us take note of the
fact that Revachol was not created to produce agricultural goods, like certain other real
world colonies that grew to prominence - it was founded on a wave of outright religious
zeal. It was a historical certainty that it would
be made. It was a monument to the truth that there
is something beyond the Pale. For a moment, there was hope - and its name
was Revachol. Hope that the end is not inevitable, that
the barrier previously thought immutable can be broken. First, it was a colony of Suresne. Then, an independent monarchy - the Suzerainty
of Revachol - and we frankly do not know much about it compared to the game’s modernity. It was a colonial power, with its colonies
producing things like apricots, marble (by smashing cultural artifacts) and magenta-colored
cocaine. The drug would find itself to be a cornerstone
of Revachol’s economy and culture, becoming a part of identity for the royal family, which
partook in it quite openly and liberally. To some loyalists of the royal order, the
drug let the kings and queens clear their mind and think on a level unimaginable to
the common man. To others, it meant the country was ruled
by crackheads with guns. A lot of what we can learn about the economy
of the country is shown through an educational board game called Suzerainty - and while it
can be seen as a jab at strategy and board games to gamify exploitation that was definitely
horrible, the fictional game also seems to be sending winks towards its players by including
things like improving the life situation of your subjects multiplying the score by 1 - which
is to say, not affecting it at all. It definitely feels like Elysium’s equivalent
of The Landlord Game getting turned into Monopoly. Something meant to be confrontational and
thought-provoking getting sanded down to be mass-marketable and not conflicting with some
publisher’s Core Values (trademark). Then, at the turn of the century, a pandemic
of a prion disease called the Tzaarath broke out. The name comes from the Old Testament, an
impurity upon people’s skin, houses or clothing, often translated to English as “leprosy”
(even if what is described does not fit our modern-day definition of leprosy, or Hansen’s
disease). What it did to people’s health is not of
importance - all that matters is that it was deadly, incurable and made the rich and powerful
throw the masses under the bus. And that according to some choice dialogue
from Klaasje, it still is around in some parts, as she calls one of the places she was in
a “tzaarath-infested shithole”. This is the second game from 2019 that did
this. But unlike in reality, this pandemic in Elysium
provided one more thing. A spark. The first piece of domino that would kickstart
a communist revolution. It started in Graad, spearheaded by Kraz Mazov,
a sort of a mixture between being both the father of communist thought like Karl Marx
and a revolutionary leader like Vladimir Lenin. “Mazovian socio-economics” is the high-brow
name for the concept of communism. The revolution also spread to the Insulinde,
and the Commune of Revachol was born. The king of old was killed…or rather, his
nephew was. The real king smelled the smoke and abdicated,
leaving the nation altogether. A decree was sent in March of ‘02, informing
all of the world's governments about the new order in the city-state of 50 million people. Indisputably, Revachol became a communist
nation, even if the revolution failed in Graad. For a grand total of 6 years. In the year ‘08, joint military forces of
several nations, called the Coalition, invaded the Commune. They were, and still are, part of Moraist
International, or Moralintern for short - the largest political power in the world, the
successors of Dolores Dei and her will, the power to unite the world under the philosophy
of Moralism. Dubbed “Operation Deathblow”, the invasion
took the city over and the commune dissolved, even if the communists never officially surrendered. Headless, Revachol is in a limbo with no government
of its own. It was split into several zones of control
and has a few acts governing it, explicitly to the benefit of foreign capital. It’s the world’s largest tax haven. It is called a “gossamer state” - gossamer
being a material made out of cobwebs, spun by spiders in autumn. In other words, it’s delicate and sticky. The Moralintern claims that their hold of
the city-state is temporary and that they will leave Revachol alone once the situation
stabilizes. The game takes place in the year ‘51. The ‘temporary’ solution has been in place
almost six times as long as the Commune ever existed. And this, finally, is the scene upon which
the electronic play takes place. In a district of Revachol called Martinaise,
where Operation Death Blow made its landing, now a crumbling monument to the power of international
capital. A place where things come to die. Though the game alludes to things being worse
in other districts due to rampant crime and such, Martinaise is special for two reasons. One is the fact that, as mentioned before,
it is a still-breathing, scarred ruin, refusing to die no matter what. Second, it was never assigned to a precinct
as a territory to be policed - and as such, the people in it decided to do it themselves. Which makes the protagonist’s role as a
police officer arriving there to solve the murder all the more precarious. Before we move on, I think we need to discuss
what a picture this paints. Aside from sculpting a vivid, obscenely detailed
landscape that makes the world of Elysium feel real on such a level that suspension
of disbelief is almost completely unneeded, and which I have frankly not seen in any other
singular narrative-driven piece of media. Like holy shit, nobody told these people to
kill their darlings when editing the script down and I adore it. There’s not just some great Backstory Event,
there is an entire history - messy, complicated and opinionated. Unsurprisingly, the writers’ leftist worldview
is clearly seen in this “lore”, both on a physical and metaphysical level. The former of course shows itself in communism
being this fleeting dream, which the powers that be want to squash out of fear. That man-made horrors beyond imagination are
perpetuated in the name of status quo under the guise of ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity’. That there is no transition of power to the
benefit of the common man without struggle, as those who already have the power will fight
tooth and nail against it. A world where those at fault will use their
power to get away scott free, like the monarch who fucked a whole nation up and became a
venture capitalist, never relinquishing an ounce of his actual influence, while leaving
his family member to die. It is a world of eight thousand years of written
history, defined by the last four hundred, where you can see and feel every scar from
the last fifty but where, ultimately, the one moment in history that matters is right
now. There are no ancient artifacts of a lost magical
civilization that you need to find to save the world, nor are there rightful kings to
return and set right what was wrong. Humanity as a species collectively shat the
bed and it is up to them, as a whole, to get out of it and take a shower. It’s magical realism, where the magic is
not used as an escape from the world in which you and I live, but as a magnifying glass,
exaggerating proportions on the face of reality, turning it into a caricature. But on a broader scale - it is a world with
no capital-G God. Setting aside theological discussions from
our reality, God was invented by the first Innocence, historical books will tell you
that. It’s ruled by the force of History, just
like in Marxism the idea is that historical forces will inevitably lead to tension and
revolution, to the rise of the proletariat. It is a world where no memory, no moment of
the past is truly lost, as long as humanity persists - all of it can be fished out of
chaos of the thin Pale soup between the isolas. It is a world with no eternity, no belief
in a higher force bestowing a perfect design onto us. “Once, there was hope” implies that this
is no longer the case, after all. It is a world where no laws, not even rules
of nature, are eternal. It is a world that will plunge head-first
into true oblivion if something is not fucking done, right now. Though, interestingly, the forces of status
quo are also the ones quoting History as their patron. They are continuing the work of Dolores Dei,
History made manifest. They, not communism, are the inevitable endpoint
of historic forces. They’re Francis Fukuyama if you gave him
a gunboat. This is the end of history and we will shoot
anyone who disagrees. But once again, the world of Elysium itself
rejects the notion of permanency and inevitability. Surprisingly for a game explicitly written
by followers of a philosophy rooted in the material reality, it is not free of the supernatural. Or supranatural, I guess. Teenage edgelords, at least those of my generation,
like to quote Marx saying that religion is the opium of masses. Completely ignoring the fact that not only
did he try to politically move said masses, he was also a well-documented user of opioids. Faith is not the problem in Disco Elysium. It’s what we place said faith in. But we’ll get to that when discussing specific
characters. Same as the wilder cultural landscape of Revachol,
along with disco music. You see what I meant when I said this video
is gonna be messy? Actually, speaking of making a mess: In the district of Martinaise, impoverished
and still visibly scarred by the Revolution and the Coalition invasion, a dead man is
found hanging from a tree behind a cafeteria. He was a paramilitary commando sent in by
the Wild Pines company to break up a strike at a local dock, led by a labor union. Two police officers, an unlikely duo from
two different precincts, arrive to solve the case. Several red herrings and rising tensions lead
to an armed stand-off between the mercenaries hired by the company and the union workers. It turns out the murder was not politically
motivated, but rather done by the remnant of the communist army, who sniped the man
mid-coitus out of jealousy. The cops arrest him. The law prevails again and we can return to
our reality, which is perfect, mundane and nothing with it needs to be fixed unless someone
steps out of line and shoots someone in the mouth. …Alright, yeah, this chapter is a joke,
but I’m just here to say that I can bet my finest pack of Astra cigarettes on the
fact this will be the Amazon live action series that they threatened us with. Disco Elysium is a character-driven story
to an absurd degree, unsurprisingly so for a tale that is, on its face, a murder mystery. So let’s talk about what’s actually important
in the game. First, let’s talk about the boy, the disco
wonder, Lieutenant double-yefreitor Harrier du Bois from Precinct 41. As the playable character, he is the best
starting point, as not only is he the lens through which we will view the entire world,
but also because him having the most screen time means he is a wonderfully complex character
in himself. With pretty much every major character in
the game, we need to consider two aspects of them - a mask they wear, the image they
project to the world and what is hidden beneath it. Having woken up from a narco-alcoholic bender
with his memories completely obliterated, Harry’s mask is a blank canvas for the actor
to paint on. His political opinions, how he copes with
being a police officer, whether he approaches first contact from a place of empathy, by
spouting trivia or by flexing his *physique*, this is all up to the player's choice. Though given how the RPG mechanics work, I
think it’s safe to assume that all the skills you utilize in the game were there already,
slowly coming back as his memories recover bits and pieces of himself. Kinda like in Planescape: Torment, only you
don’t make him remember being a wizard capable of obliterating armies. It’s also worth noting that when it comes
to politics, anything Harry can present is laughably shallow. For one, due to his amnesia, this is the first
time he’s hearing most of this. Two, they’re obviously a coping mechanism
to deal with a myriad of his deeper, personal problems. If everyone just sees you as That Communist
Cop, nobody is gonna ask about why the hell you look so sad. It’s obviously because you’re a communist. But what is beneath that blank mask is immutable. There are things about good ol’ Harry that
are set in stone, defining him, even if he can’t remember them all that well. First of all, he is an addict. As ugly as that may sound, this man has a
physical and psychological dependency to every single psychoactive substance in existence,
most of all alcohol. The damage is visible on his body and all
the substances in the game don’t give you buffs because, say, drinking makes you stronger
- it’s because you’re alleviating symptoms of withdrawal. And even if you decide to play it straight-edge
and stay sober, there is no such thing as an ex-addict. For the rest of Harry’s life, the temptation
will be there. As the old joke goes - quitting smoking is
easy, I’ve done it a hundred times already. Second, he is an officer of the Revachol’s
Citizen Militia, a cop, an officer of the law. This is not just his job. It’s not a uniform he wears and takes off
after punching out in the evening. It’s who he is. The human can-opener. Attuned to the world to such an absurd point
where he can walk up to a woman minding her own business, insist that her husband is missing
and *be right*. To see a bunch of cigarette butts scattered
around a desolate beach, say that their brand being a non-popular one is connected to the
murder case and *be one hundred percent correct about it*. A man so in-tune with fellow officers that
he can feel what other cops are doing half the city over, in the exact moment when he’s
thinking it. Someone who can tell the history of a place
not just from logical analysis, but because the city itself whispers to him, carrying
its words on cold winds and drops in pressure. He has been doing this job for 18 years, despite
initially only joining for a woman that has long left him. Despite it paying like shit and being extremely
dangerous, or the emotional toll inflicted by seeing people at the worst time of their
lives, day after day. He is a detecting animal. Feeling everything, noticing everything. And right before the game starts, he nearly
kills himself, screaming about not wanting to be that kind of animal anymore. Third, he is just a guy. The game goes out of its way to tantalize
you with tropes common for stories with amnesiac protagonists. Oo, what is his name? It’s Harry. Last name Du Bois, which might as well be
the French equivalent of “Smith”. But what was his terrible past? He was a gym teacher before becoming a cop. That’s it. He’s just a cop that is incredibly good
at his job, good enough to reject promotion to captain twice, but that’s not something
extraordinary, especially by fiction standards.. A common man, troubled by mental health issues. Troubled enough to have carved the smile of
a beloved musician permanently onto his face as a coping mechanism and to have internalized
his true name to be “Tequila Sunset” - a euphemism for drinking yourself to death. Lastly, and most importantly, he is heartbroken. He had broken up with the love of his life
six years prior to the start of the game and it still hurts like a motherfucker. He dreams of that day every other night, never
able to figure out what he could do to change the outcome. His cause-and-effect addicted detective brain
just can’t fathom the simple, yet terrible truth, that the love just fizzled out. That his strained mental health, exacerbated
by his line of work and poverty, has been an issue long before this. That the writing was on the wall for long
before it happened. That even if he admits the fault lies on both
sides, there is no single mistake of his that he could walk back to fix this. They were never married, yet he can’t help
but think she was his wife. He knows her phone number at the new home,
on a different isola, by heart. He keeps the saccharine letter she wrote to
him in his youth in his police ledger and permanently crippled a man that damaged that
ledger, making it seem like retrieving the letter would be impossible. There is a hole in his heart that refuses
to heal, and everything on its outline causes him more pain. He picked up a funky, horrifically ugly tie
at a store to pick himself up some time ago, but all it did was drive him into more and
more questionable wardrobe and lifestyle choices. And boy, is he bitter about women. Even with memory obliterated by drugs and
alcohol, you can go into *obscene* chauvinism at points. Whoever invented the term “cock carousel”
needs to get an Emmy in the category of Things That Make Your Stomach Sink As You Realize
You Can’t Back Out Of This Fucking Dialogue Tree. Now, that does not cover the full extent of
Harrier’s personality, but this is what we’ll work with for now. As he is the point-of-view character, we will
address how other characters and their behavior reflect on him when discussing them. And for the sake of brevity, we will refer
to Inspector Raphael Ambrosius Costou as “you” going forward. Kim Kitsuragi is the second central character
of the cast and your shadow throughout the entire plot. A lieutenant from Precinct 57, which also
claims they should police Martinaise. His mask is that of staunch professionalism
- keeping work and private affairs strictly separate, maintaining authority and being
to the point with the investigation and everything surrounding it. He is experienced and incredibly quick to
adapt that mask as necessary - if you choose a hard-ass approach, he’ll play the good
cop, if you interview a young adult about getting drugs, he will switch to lingo and
pretend to have withdrawal shakes without blinking. He pretended to be a teenager for 15 years
and mastered the art of playing pinball to close a case. He will do anything that needs to be done
to do his job - to solve crimes and protect people. Beneath that mask is a face that is a bit
more complex. Being half-Seolite, Kim has endured a lot
of ridicule from racists, despite being born and raised in Revachol. He truly loves his homeland and not speaking
a word of the language of Seol is a point of pride to him, so this perception as “the
other” despite his life experience and identity are a sore spot to him. He is also a gay man, which probably got him
in trouble with similar types of dipshits as well. He has other feelings of inadequacy, primarily
stemming from his eyesight issues - his old partner in 57 was called “Eyes” as he
had to point things out to him, and it’s implied that he died in line of duty as Kim’s
facade cracks at moments, as he mentions he knows what it’s like to have someone die
in your stead. On a brighter side, he is also a total nerd
- listening to punk metal radio stations, obsessively taking care of his car, marveling
at cool machines. He was enamored by the idea of becoming a
revolutionary plane pilot as a child and still carries an ember of that torch, wearing a
bomber jacket. He is also pragmatic about what he can and
can’t do - which is why he dislikes talking about politics, the supranatural and the Pale. The one way he can deal with the stress of
the job is to focus on the task at hand. Due to his work, he does consider himself
somewhat of a Moralist, but definitely not enough to try and say Moralintern did nothing
wrong. If anything, he is disinterested in the systems
ruling the world at large, preferring to only think about what he can help fix himself. Which is not much, but he does what he can. Admittedly, his veneer of professionalism
makes it difficult for him to deal with emotional aspects of his job - trying to break news
of a tragedy to someone consistently shows that he feels emotionally vulnerable at those
moments. But beneath it all, is the most terrible secret
of all - that Kim Kitsuragi is a genuinely, impossibly good man. If you play as an ideal of a cop when it comes
to your skillset and Sherlock’esque ability to crack everything open like a walnut, Kim
is the ideal of a cop as a public servant. With high Esprit de Corps, upon meeting him
you *know* that he would throw himself in death’s way to save a total stranger like
you. Someone who protects. Someone who is there to show that everything
will be alright and justice will be served. Incorruptible, patient, professional and kind. The kind of person that keeps at being a policeman
despite getting zero respect and it paying like crap because he genuinely cares. I have yet to meet a person that does not
genuinely adore him, and this sort of positive influence is exactly what Harry needs. He’d be sad if you went back to drinking,
and nobody wants to make Kim sad. The RCM is the police force of Revachol, but
it is in a bit of a precarious position. It’s given power by the occupying Coalition,
and as such it serves as the enforcer of their status quo on the ground. At the same time, it is named after the Insulindian
Citizen Militia, the army of the revolution. They also use the revolutionary system for
their chain of command. They are in the weird liminal space between
being both the force of violence in service of foreign capital and something that was
deemed as needed and important by the people of Revachol themselves. It’s fitting that they’re called the “citizen
militia” rather than “police department”, as it’s a bottom-up organization, funded
with donations, not by a state as there just isn’t a state in Revachol, technically speaking. Which sounds, you know, pretty idealistic
and also incredibly obviously prone to corruption and bribery. The game is far from being uncritical of them. Aside from the aforementioned fact that they
gain their power from being in service of Moralintern, and therefore can’t do shit
if it’s some higher-up from that organization that committed the crime, there are also various
windows into just how corrupt and incompetent the majority of the force is. Being on the take of crime lords like La Puta
Madre, abusing lethal force for sport like a bunch of ghouls, disposing of outdated equipment
by throwing it into rivers. Like in real life, there is a widely understood
need for some organization that has the power and responsibility to solve crimes and break
bad news to victims - but it also attracts people who would abuse the power and dodge
the responsibility. There is also something to be said about how
openly the actions of RCM are sensationalized. There seems to be at least one radio station
giving non-stop reports of action-packed shootouts and brave blue boys protecting everyone. They’re made out to be big shots, absolute
figures of respect that everyone looks up to. Enough for a lonely old woman with a neurodegenerative
disease to take it all to heart and play the role, only to break down in tears when realizing
her gun is not loaded, she is not the police, and everyone lied to her again. Never seemingly told that the majority of
RCM’s work, at least going by your thoughts and recollections, is finding suicide victims,
telling bad news to widows and collecting garbage left by some kids doing a photoshoot
with that stupid sofa again. But despite that, there are good people within
the force who joined and stayed to fully take that responsibility. Aside from the dynamic duo of Harry and Kim,
we also meet other officers of the RCM. Alice, the communications officer from Precinct
57, is genuinely helpful and happy to go above and beyond to aid the investigation, including
pressing relevant information out of International Collaboration Police. The officers from 41 are more abrasive, laughing
at you losing your badge and gun and denying any help, but it’s clear that they’re
worried for you and don’t know of other ways to deal with the stress - and giving
money to an alcoholic is probably a bad idea. There is a visibly strained relationship between
you and your coworkers, as years of dealing with the Cool Cop That Parties Hard turned
more and more sour, as the act became less endearing and more horrifying. Oh yeah, and you told them to fuck off because
they’re “cramping your style” before starting the current investigation. Harry may be an amazing detective, but he
is absolutely abysmal in a leadership role. It sure doesn’t help that the Precinct of
Jamrock was stretched way too thin as it is already. Probably the clearest example of this is Jean
Vicqmare, your actual partner in the force. You are his best friend, and the relationship
is jokingly referred to by other officers as “heterosexual life partners”. And he watched you get worse and worse, no
matter what he did. Hell, after being notified of your situation
at the scene, he arrives to monitor your situation. He even dressed up as another cop that recently
left as an inside joke for both of you to laugh at and ease the tension - too bad your
alcohol-induced amnesia made you miss it and made the situation even more awkward. Jean is the avatar of the RCM’s attitude
to Harry in general - outwardly abrasive, but internally deeply worried and clinically
depressed. But he and the force are still willing to
give you a chance. You may be a shitkid, but you’re THEIR shitkid. And they’re not going to leave you to die
if you are willing to accept help. But there’s only so many times they can
have their helpful hand swatted away before giving up. Alright, let’s get off the cop carousel
and onto the streets of Martinaise. Cuno and Cunoesse are absolute gremlin children
and most likely your first contact with Martinaise proper in the game. Throwing rocks at a hanged corpse, screaming
slurs and taking a bunch of drugs, they are a perfect snapshot of the ruin that is this
district. They are uncooperative, rude and getting the
opportunity to punch Cuno in the face is so, so tempting when it appears. Fuck them kids. Which is an absolute shame, considering Kuuno
de Ruyter is actually an empathetic, smart kid with an artistic streak. Someone who took in a complete stranger that
camped outside his house like a shell-shocked wet cat, and kept doing what he can to keep
her safe, despite suspecting she may not be all hot air when she said she’s a killer. A boy who’ll project fake confidence and
try to scare everyone else away to keep that stranger safe. A kid that actually loves thinking about things,
solving mysteries and making up a fake city out of dirt for locusts he stole from some
cryptozoologists to live in. Real junior officer material, someone who
can actually make Revachol a tiny bit better if given the means to, who can defend your
ass from a slew of accusations, if in a crude way, after Kim is hurt in the tribunal. And he’s someone who is going to go out
just like his dad that he gets his speed from, poor and in self-induced catatonia from substance
abuse. Because the damage done by the Moralintern
is still reverberating, half a century later, still hurting people like him in indirect
ways. All that Cuno has ever known has been poverty,
violence and rubble. He’s doing the most he can out of his situation,
especially given his age, but if not given an out, this will be all that he ever accomplishes. His best idea is to run and start living in
ancient royal catacombs under the city. Not a great vision of the future. Cunoesse is much more of an enigma because
she outright avoids any contact with you, on account of you being a cop and her being
a killer. Likely a stowaway on an airship or just a
kid from a poor diaspora, there’s honestly not much to go on when it comes to her identity…except
for one fact. Fun fact - according to the dicemaker in the
Doomed Commercial District, there used to be a 24-hour window repair store. Which was a front. For a snuff radio station. And Cuno outright says she did “snuff radio
shit” - this wasn’t just a comparison point, this was the direct truth. Yeah, the small glimpse we can get into Cunoesse
is incredibly grim. And you can shoot her for mouthing off and
get an early game over. You sick fuck. I do dislike the fact that recruiting Cuno
to help with closing the case and to become a junior officer of the RCM involves him cutting
ties with her due to how deathly afraid she is of cops. Kinda wish there was a way to handle this
in a way that gives both of them at least a miniscule win. Can’t really bring myself to call a traumatized
ten year old a toxic influence. I like both of them, honestly. Too often are kids in fiction portrayed as
UwU small beans that are innocent and need protection, maybe sometimes being rebellious
teens. The real question is - do you still want to
protect a child and try to give them a better future when they call you a slur, do drugs
and generally are a menace? And if not, why does your vision of the future
exclude those children in particular? Is the future they represent not worth fighting
for? Hanged from a lone tree in a courtyard behind
the Whirling-in-Rags is the body of Lely, real name Ellis Kortenaer. A motherfucker and a killer. A leader of a group of mercenaries working
for a company named Krenel, employed by the Wild Pines group to help break the strike
that’s locking up the harbor’s terminal and to serve as “security detail” for
the negotiator that was sent in by the company. Krenel has gone through several PR scandals
and name changes in the past, due to the fact that they hire killers on behalf of corporations
to “protect their interests” in third world countries by doing a massacre on anyone
against robber barons holding them in what might as well be called slavery. And Lely was exactly that, dotted with a tattoo
mapping all his atrocities across the world, a leader of a bunch of psychopaths, toting
high-end weapons and ceramic armor against people who have nothing but their own dignity
to defend themselves with. Calling them “bullies” feels deeply unserious,
but that’s the closest word I can think of when it comes to that sort of cowardly
power disparity. Well, more like they’re the rock in the
bully’s hand. But underneath that ceramic armor was a fucked
up face with baby-blue eyes. A man abandoned by his birth family, abused
by the foster one and thrown into the military, followed by PMC service simply because that
was where the money was. Someone who found himself in a leadership
position because he could keep the other psychos in check and curb any ideas of “switching
employers” and getting all of them killed, even if it meant sinking to absolute barbarity
to placate them. Someone that would turn it all into the vilest
jokes to cope, and leverage that to appear threatening and repulsive to fulfill his latest
job without the need to fire a single round. And someone who found something approximating
love there, in a haze of alcohol and drugs, before getting shot in the mouth mid-coitus. Now, none of this is to speak positively of
his character. The world is better off without him. But he is a symptom more than a disease. The capital needed killers to protect itself,
and so it produced them - giving the abandoned and lost a monetary incentive. And once you are a war criminal, what the
fuck are you gonna do, quit and become an office clerk? He has no love for his home, yet he still
serves it, not out of any sense of patriotism but for financial gain. He was disposed of as a child and died as
a disposable, plausibly deniable asset. There are some parallels between him and Harry. On a level that the game screams at you, he
is a bloated corpse and in a dream sequence, an image of the protagonist is projected onto
his body, hanging under a disco ball, lights of a bygone era. You can feel the dread of the clock ticking
and how very soon, you will end up as a similar cadaver. But on another level, Lely is an enforcer
of the Moralintern’s interests, just like RCM is. Krenel roughed up protesters at another terminal
and the police didn’t do anything to stop or penalize them. It’s easy to see a similar scenario occurring
in Martinaise, if that district wasn’t orphaned by the RCM for decades. He’s the international level of your job,
brother coppo, even if you won’t admit it. Disconnected both from those he serves and
those he executes in that service. “Police force” created not by the will
of the people, but that of the capital. Making sure everything runs smoothly. And then you get to throw a molotov cocktail
at his half-brother and send the other two mercenaries to their employer in caskets as
well, because it turns out showing up drunk and high to a confrontation is not a smart
move when facing, say, two cops who actually do their jobs and have almost two decades
of experience in it each. Fuck them, they don’t get a paragraph of
poetics written about them. Let’s talk about their employer instead. (Re)joyce Leyton-Messier. The board member of the Wild Pines group,
pretending to be a mere strike negotiator. Actually, let’s talk about that “employer”
first - it’s one of the Indotribes, a company given monopoly by the Suzerain of Revachol. Some of them did not survive the double system
change, but the very idea of indotribes was ingrained into society so much that Harry’s
childhood posse called themselves the Fifteenth Indotribe - set to conquer the world, now
all dead from drug overdoses and traffic accidents. That money is old, entrenched, so much so
as to appear as part of everyday normalcy. Joyce is the personification of that money,
disconnected from the rest of Martinaise by having her feet placed on a boat rather than
the blood-soaked ground. The one rich person in that disctrict, coming
from the other side of the river, where all the skyscrapers shine. Educated, chatty, willing to converse with
you on every topic imaginable, from politics to the truth of reality and the Pale. She had those talks millions of times, and
she will have millions more. She doesn’t need to worry about surviving
from paycheck to paycheck. She can spare time and thought to actually
wonder about these things and reach her conclusions. You can ask people of your social strata for
money no problem, getting pennies here and there, but approaching her? That brings up shame. In this capitalist reality, she is your “better”,
with a gulf between the two of you. And even if you have nothing but the most
pleasant, casual of conversations, deep inside you are aware of it. Of this class divide. A peasant asking a noble for help is unthinkable. And we may say that this kind of thinking
is a thing of the forgotten past, but our gut will tell us otherwise. Even if the noble would think nothing of the
request if she actually heard it. And beneath that? She is a mental wreck. On a physiological level, she has been heavily
overexposed to the Pale and its damaging effects on the mind. She doesn’t sleep much anymore. A strict regimen of psychological exercise
and enough time and money to get extensive therapy keep her stable, but she admits herself
she pretty much never sleeps anymore. Another common visitor to the Pale, aptly
named the Paledriver, has none of these comforts, her original personality completely lost,
dreaming of memories that were never hers. These two women are a reflection of the difference
that money makes in this world. Yet they are similar in one way - both of
them long to return to it. To get swallowed in that haze of the past
and never return. And on a spiritual level, she is bitter. Self-described as the worst scum of all, an
Ultraliberal capitalist - one of those who first betrayed the king and then the revolution,
jumping from power to power, clinging to their own position no matter the cost. She did not do that personally - she was like
three or four years old when the Commune fell - but her family certainly did. And she got into the same position of financial
authority as they have. She would like to think of herself as a patriot,
someone who truly loves Revachol and its people - and I think it’s quite clear that she
was, for most of her life at least, a true believer in capitalist prosperity. That laissez-faire economics and absolute
freedom of the market can build up prosperity, that it would make Revachol the capital of
the world once more. It is a tax haven and has barely any laws
in place at all, a downright anarcho-capitalist dream. And yet, the rich get richer while the poor
get poorer. The run-down ruin she visited on a poverty
tourism whim as a teen did not change in all these decades. She not once boasts of her own merits, she
likely doesn’t view her position as an earned one. She claims that it was not herself that hired
the Krenel goons, that other board members made “a lapse of judgment” to ensure her
safety - and frankly, I believe her. When the Union threatens war, she is willing
to give up the terminal without a fight. Deep down, she feels nothing for Wild Pines,
the company that defined her entire life. She genuinely thought she acted as a representative
of the company because of the many million livelihoods it supported. And if those lives do not need the company,
do not need her, she’d rather sail away than risk endangering all those lives. Joyce Messier does not care about Wild Pines. Joyce Messier does not care about herself. But also, you know, she directs you towards
the fact that the Union allows drug smuggling through the terminal and pushes you to close
the investigation as soon as possible to avoid the mercenaries from going all Co Hoi on Martinaise. And they were still responding to her instructions
before Lely died, so some of the shit-at-fan-flinging and scab organizing they did was under her
approval at the very least. And if you were to, say, jump the gun and
arrest people involved with the drug operation like Ruby, or heavens forbid get into a shootout
with the Union, now that would paint the striking rabble in pitch-black colors when it comes
to PR. She’d protect the corporate interests and
minimize bloodshed. There always are *some* victims in the kerfuffle. Be it one person who is already guilty of
*something* or two cops. And the company already employed Krenel, so
even the massacre likely wouldn’t be a problem if it happened anywhere but in Revachol. It’s not the inhumanity of it that gives
her pause. It’s the proximity. Her employees. Her compatriots. When it’s this close to her face, she can
see the cost of doing business. She speaks of communists getting shot in the
head in the past with relief - but when given the gun herself, she is unable to pull the
trigger. I also need to point out some subtle contrast
drawn by the game when it comes to the approach to material wealth. Joyce cares little for her top-of-the-line
boat, never thinking of giving it a name. She calls it by the model number and views
it as, at most, a really cool tool to be used for work and recreation alike. On the other side of the river there is Lilliene,
the Netpicker, living in a pornographically poor village. She relies on her dinky little boat for survival
and calls it Sun. She outright proposes holding a funeral for
your car that you wrecked - our things are a part of our lives, after all. Do they not deserve that respect for all the
help they gave us? It’s not just a matter of “oh, when you
take wealth for granted, you stop appreciating it” - it’s that it’s reflective of how
each woman views herself as well. They’re both mothers, but Joyce will only
tersely mention her family, whereas Liliene will talk at length about her kids and dead
drunk of a husband. For the fisher, the boat is a part of her
identity (she does not care as much for the sword she carries, after all) - for the mogul,
it is an object, even if she may feel fondness for it. The one thing that is personal about her is
the fact she’d rather not use her first full name due to some past issues with it. The capital has swallowed Joyce Messier, like
it does with everything else. She may be critical of it, like a certain
artistic member of the infraculture is, but she is a part of it. Human being, model RJLM-05. A part of a machine. One that would make the whole thing grind
to a stop when removed, but ultimately replaceable. And if not for the events of the game, maybe
that would be it. But when faced with reality, there is this
one spark of humanity. Maybe it will give birth to a new flame. Or maybe it will die out in the sea of apathy
once more. We’re not there to tell. You know what, actually, let’s talk about
the other, more petit bourgeois in the game now. Garte is the *owner, not bartender* at Whirling-in-Rags,
the cafeteria where the entire game starts. He is openly abrasive towards you, in no small
part due to the large bill you built up and general mayhem caused by Tequila Sunset the
party animal. He is, quite frankly, pretty courageous. He does not shy away from mouthing off to
someone in a position of authority, both in the form of RCM and the Union police force. When push comes to shove and there is a military
tribunal happening right on his doorstep, he does not hide - he protects his business
in any capacity he can, even if it is shouting from a balcony for everyone to calm the hell
down. You start off from the wrong foot with him,
but even then he catches himself when reacting too harshly to you trying to extend a gesture
of goodwill. Also he thinks his bartender Sylvie quit because
he proposed going on a date and not because you were the worst nightmare of any service
worker. Garte likes to posture as being bigger than
he is, economically speaking, like every single middle-class fucker in a management position
that is too proud to admit they’re living paycheck to paycheck. That Whirling is just one of many businesses
he manages, that he’s there temporarily. But beneath that mask of a businessman above
it all is a man that actually cares. Even if he’s ashamed to admit it due to
it being positioned in the middle of poverty-struck Martinaise, the Whirling-in-Rags is his baby. He named it after some lyrics from a song
he likes, he’s been wondering what’s hidden behind blue doors that nobody can access for
years, he instantly perks up when learning that there are some operational pinball machines
in there as they can help liven up the place a bit. And even if the Whirling is technically a
part of the Doomed Commercial District, cursed by forces unknown to kill every business in
it, you get the feeling that it’s gonna make it and be alright. At least one person loves that dive. On the complete opposite end of that is Plaisance,
the owner of a bookstore so uninspired that it’s called “Crime, Romance and Biographies
of Famous People ''. A woman that openly doesn’t care about books, but she cares about making
ends meet. She can’t engage you in any conversation
about her inventory, actively despises a large chunk of it and would rather lean towards
the occult and run a survey on how effective her own daughter is at attracting customers
rather than develop even the most surface level interest in what she is actually selling. This is the only bookshop in the entire game
and I still don’t want to set foot there for longer than it takes to walk in, grab
the title I’m interested in and walk out. It’s a bit hard to describe that aspect
of hers as a ‘mask’, as she is just that shallow. For her, life has to have simple answers to
problems, like equipping an amulet giving you +10% to book sales. The world is a school test, and she’s trying
her hardest to find the right answers and will leap at an opportunity to buy a cheat
sheet for the wrong subject from a con artist. But there is more muddling the water there. For one, she genuinely wants her daughter
to succeed in life by pushing her towards working at a young age - even despite the
fact that her idea of success is idiotic and inherited from her own harsh upbringing that
is clearly not working for her adult ass self. But you know what, say what you will, Annette
is not Cuno. She’s bright, cheerful, clearly passionate
about books herself and a sweet kid in general. Plaisance is putting her under unnecessary
stress, but given how she was outright called stupid by her own mother and how her husband
is running a different business in a more prosperous part of the city…you know, I
kinda want to give her a break. Even if that shop is clearly gonna fail and
no amount of shamanistic amulets can stop the curse from becoming a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Maybe if she switches to a spirit medium,
she’ll actually find some success. She at least cares about that topic. And in the ruins of the commercial district
itself are…well, a bunch of failed businesses, all for their own reasons. Places such as a pinball arcade banking on
a fad, a hair salon aiming for the wrong clientele, a taxidermist who took drugs, an ice cream
place that made the world’s most horrendous marketing choices and a game developer, which
speaks for itself. And in the emptied chimney, a novelty dicemaker,
Neha. Someone who doesn’t care about the product
niche she found, roleplaying game accessories, but she does care about her craft and clients. She went out of her way to learn about the
game systems and how the dice are used and as a jeweler by trade, she has a good idea
on which materials to use and how to spice things up to add a personal touch. She loves her work, preferring to get lost
in the process when listening to her radio rather than sit at her home. Not having to pay rent is a great business
choice as well. She just chills, and the fact that someone
can simply vibe in such a desolate place is what drives the bookstore owner into believing
she must be the source of some malignant curse that drove all those businesses under. Honestly, she’s still irresponsible, considering
she says she’s been doing business there for 14 years and still hasn’t connected
her intercom. Like come on, lady, get your shit together. Neha is not much of an enigma - she does what
she loves and she is intent on keeping at it. Her previous business failed, but there she
is again, doing her craft in a slightly different way. This world is precarious. It is impossible to not lose, and the fear
of that loss exacerbated by the rumors of a curse just drives business further down
a spiral of shit. Of course you’re scared it won’t work
out, but do it scared. Lightning round for three other prominent
businessmen in the area - Siileng is not gonna fucking make it, because despite him acting
like a hotshot salesman, he’s selling stolen stuff of questionable quality off the back
of a truck. He is acting like a moneyman smooth operator,
but he’s never actually gonna fit that mask because nobody with actual money and power
will see him for more than an immigrant from a third-world country hustling to meet basic
needs. He’s the epitome of people who think tweeting
about being hustlers who grind to earn one dollar for twenty four hours of work is aspirational
and not absolutely, bone-chillingly horrifying. Frittte is a chain store manned by an absolutely
disinterested teenager that kills time to earn what is likely a laughable wage. But if you try to light up a cigarette inside,
she’ll tell you to not do it due to company policy and that it’s best not to cross the
company considering they have a private army on a payroll for “security reasons”. Even your friendly neighbourhood Frog Shop
is doing everything it can to “protect” its business. Never let a modernistic triple-T in a name
of the company and the person behind the counter fool you - that’s not what the actual company
is doing. It’s just the part you see day-to-day to
the point of it becoming mundane. Roy owns a pawn shop and just chills all day,
high as a kite on pyrholidon because he got addicted to it as a youth. He developed that dependency because it helps
with radiation poisoning and he was a volunteer helping clean up a meltdown of a reactor that
happened when people tried to use the unfinished nuclear pile as a cheap source of electricity. The project was started by the Commune but
the invasion cut it short, and a noble goal unfulfilled ended up being worse than doing
nothing at all to begin with. But if people like him did nothing *after*
disaster struck, it would be even worse. All that to say, Roy’s our boy. Love that guy. Plus he has some good ideas about how, even
if Man from Hjemdall was never a physical person, he is definitely real now that he
was imagined and permeated pop culture. The idea of him is in the air. We’ll get back to this a bit later. This is probably as good of a point as any
to talk about Ultraliberal Capitalist Harry. If you say enough things about hustling and
grinding and being entitled to the sweat on your brow, your mind chimes in and says Hey. You are working so damn hard, why are you
so freaking poor? And the answer is obviously taxes. Not the lawful taxes, because Revachol is
a tax haven after all, but the sneaky ones. Ninety five percent of your money is taken
by things designed to keep you poor - you know, food, rent, gasoline, overdraft fees
at your bank. Which is what rampant unchecked capitalism
does, but this is the kind of cognitive dissonance that libertarians who live in their mom’s
basement struggle with. Doing away with regulations and laws regarding
the capital just gives more means to those who are already in a position of power. And if, say, a revolution wiped out everyone
in a position of power in your country, they’ll just flock in from the outside and carve you
up like a pumpkin pie. For some reason, online discourse capitalists
think they’re immune to getting colonized, like it didn’t happen a bunch of times in
our history. But laws of nature don’t apply to Harry,
because if he internalizes that thought, every time he espouses the gospel of Grindset, one
real spawns in his pocket. Which is probably a gameplay concession, but
you know what, I never tried it myself so let’s actually try it. Ha-hem. Smash that Like button, subscribe, share the
video, subscribe to my Patreon, I am a hustle god and I need reality to catch up to my divine
status. This is the one time saying that is in line
with the script, please let me fucking have this. And if you opt into the Ultra vision quest,
your goal is to become an individual of high net value. And it’s not about actually being rich but
first creating a perception of that wealth by surrounding yourself with artifacts of
wealth - which is, of course, art. And that is notoriously difficult as artists
repel wealth like same-polar magnets. First you try your luck with Cindy, who is
of course offended by the entire idea of selling her work as she makes graffiti specifically
so that anyone can see it, but she is willing to get your money for literal garbage that
she spilled paint on when sneezing. And you sprint to sell it to a guy so rich
that he bends light around him - there’s not much to say about the Ultrarich Light-Bending
Guy, other than the fact that he’s a comedic spin on Joyce’s old money, inheriting all
his wealth but still being so stingy that he travels the world incognito in a shipping
container, or that he pays you 100 real for horrible business ideas because impressing
one dude with bad judgment is more important to getting rich than actually making sense
- and you sell him the art piece on promises of exclusivity for photocopied stock shares. Which adds a “net worth” to your UI which
is astronomically high and also you can’t do almost anything with. It’s not actual money you can use, it’s
not giving you any actual status to leverage. You acquired a piece of paper worth several
times your annual salary by giving a guy who knows nothing about art a piece of plastic
with paint on it. That you bought for a tenner. Because money is fake and everyone knows it
until it comes to actually giving it to the creator of the brave new genre of Art-choo. Being a man of high net worth, you need to
get a brand manager, so of course you turn to Idiot Doom Spiral - about whom personally
we’ll say more later - an alcoholic bum. You can also buy the street lamp from Roy
(which also does nothing) and slap your name onto it for a share of the stock which he
can’t cash in because neither of you know what you’re doing during that transaction. Idiot Doom Spiral, however, has much bigger
plans, high-concept shit. By which he means “re-conceptualizing”
an already-existing monument in the middle of the town. By putting a cardboard sign based on your
copotype on it and getting even more drunk, even if you told him that he needs to be sober
for the job. That’s it. That’s the vision of the capitalist future
for Revachol. Pieces of paper exchanged for pieces of cardboard
on two already existing objects, co-opting the meaning of the second one. Nothing was created, no value was added. It’s a trade of nothing for nothing. Congratulations. You are one of the wealthy elite now. People know your name and you technically
hold more value than any of them will ever see in their entire lives. And the monument symbolic of Revachol’s
history is appropriated as an advertisement spot for your Brand [™]. Onto the members of the union actually running
this place, starting with their slimeball of a boss. Evrart Claire is the figurehead of the Dockworker
Union and absolutely, fantastically corrupt. He wears an obviously ill-fitting mask of
a social democrat representing the union to line his own pockets. His office is lavish and full of unnecessary
doodads, he looks almost like a satirical drawing of a capitalist fat cat and his sleazy
demeanor is such an obvious act that it’s a wonder he ever got elected to be the head
of the Union, along with his twin brother Edgar, let alone often enough to let the two
of them rotate office chairs to dodge term limits. He brazenly tries to bribe you several times
and engages in open quid-pro-quo exchanges of services before helping you, not just to
get what he wants but to also give the entire Martinaise the idea you’re on his payroll. He gives you an oversized novelty cheque for
goodness sake. He eggs you into repeating the Union’s demand
- “Every worker, a member of the board” - only to instantly agree with you if you
say something completely antagonistic to that slogan. All at the same time as he makes obvious power
plays, like making you sit in a really uncomfortable chair while lounging in his own custom-made
throne. And all of this because it’s, once again,
a mask - pretending to be a communist union member being part of the larger facade of
being corrupt and out for personal gain. Because it’s an act put up for you and the
larger powers you work for, whether you want to or not. They know how to deal with someone who is
corrupt. Hell, they welcome it - if he can be bribed,
he can be made to do their bidding. A man supposed to represent the interest of
the workers, but actually in it for his personal profit? He’s perfect for the job. Of course they let him and his brother do
as they please. Too bad that under this mask is someone they
absolutely would not want there. A hardline communist biding his time to make
a move that would actually strike at the balance of power in place, rather than try to ‘make
concessions’ by shutting the dock down whenever things get too unbearable. Someone out to actually completely oust Wild
Pines from any equation and retake the harbor terminal for the Union. Someone who got the company used to regular
strikes over trivial shit to keep them thinking they know what they’re dealing with - while
making backroom deals to ensure the harbor can operate in full once the kerfuffle ends. Someone that could organize enough material
base for the strike to go on for months without anyone going hungry. He could never have his face plastered on
T-shirts like Che Guevara, but being ugly as sin is actually perfect for him to play
politician while actually moving forward with the socialist agenda. Hell, he said so himself. Before we move on, I just want to say, I fucking
love Evrart’s character. The entire concept of “Union leader but
actually a mob boss” is such a tired trope. But to take that expectation and flip it,
to make the charade one layer deeper, is great. And that slimy facade is so incredibly funny. But there’s also a lot to criticize about
Evrart still. For one, he is gambling with people’s lives,
not unlike Joyce whom he criticizes. He puts all bets on you running back and forth
between you two, and her deciding that the terminal is not worth the PR nightmare of
a massacre. He also lets a mentally unwell woman keep
your gun despite finding out it’s with her if you don’t do his bidding. He has several contracts with drug manufacturers
and such running through the Terminal with the help of Ruby, and while the Union kept
Martinaise mostly clean of the organized crime managing this shit otherwise, his best idea
is still just “keeping that stuff far away from Martinaise”. I don’t expect him to fix the whole world,
but it still is callous.Oh, and he is willing to let a bunch of his own people die to achieve
the endgame of his scenario. The Union also gives its members borscht spiked
with alcohol to keep them rowdy, and the game is a forty hour exercise in telling you how
much alcohol dependence can fuck you up. Not to mention getting competitors for the
position of Union head either assassinated or blackmailed out of the race. He is in the “Big Game” mode, always has
been - no longer considering people as more than numbers. The abyss of capital stares back, in a way. Because if you want to fight something organized
on such a scale, you need to size up. And also, if he and his brother get locked
up - which you can help facilitate by getting said assassinations on record - who the hell
is gonna carry the torch? His lawyer? The Hardie boys he dismissed as possible collateral
earlier? Measurehead? For an effort at community organization and
empowering the workers at large, it all dangerously relies on two people. Evrart aims to create a new system to usurp
the status quo, but the entire thing is layered in so many levels of subterfuge and obscurity
that if they are taken out of the equation, it all falls apart. The Claires are, ironically, strongman leaders
- not in the sense of being military dictators, but because everyone and everything relies
on them. The entire operation is carried on their backs
because once they’re out, there is likely nobody able to say how the pieces fit together
anymore. There’s probably also something to be said
about the fact that his preferred method of transportation is the same as one utilized
by the Light-Bending Guy. And that he has no idea that within his own
harbor, there is literally one of his sworn enemies just chilling. Though of course, no man is perfect and it’s
something valid to come to terms with when criticizing people who are trying to upend
the system in place. To paraphrase the lazy-eyed man himself- none
of us can see the future, the best we can do is see the coin spinning in the air and
call heads or tails. And try to catch it at the right time to get
our point. Still, he has my vote for at least trying
to make a change for the people. He has enough humanity to send away a negotiator
he actually liked to not hurt him professionally, even if he did hurt his feelings. And he’s helping me find my gun! The Hardie boys are the Union’s muscle. Drinking all day, rowdy, the kind of people
that’d hang a man as a form of street justice. And their frontman is Titus Hardie, the captain. Of the rowing team. Or at least that’s the play they put up
for you, congregating in a single place and claiming collective responsibility for the
hanging cause you can’t arrest them all. In reality they are an actually competent
unit of neighborhood watch. The game keeps mentioning the drug kingpin
La Puta Madre who has half of the RCM on his payroll - none of his influence can be seen
at all in Martinaise. There are still drug problems, like everything
about Cuno, but it’s not systemic or perpetuated on purpose anymore. There really isn’t much violent crime to
be seen other than the murder that blindsided everyone. There are several businesses operating in
the area just fine - hell, none of the Doomed ventures even mention going down due to a
robbery or anything like that. It’s all horrible business decisions and
one snuff station that I can’t get over. They are, by all metrics, the cops of this
place, only they are on the Union’s payroll rather than Moralintern’s. And just like the RCM can be colorfully described
as a meatshield wrapped around those in power by some, Evrart ultimately views the Hardies
as expendable. If you subscribe to the viewpoint that RCM
exists due to the will of the people moreso than thanks to the international powers letting
them, there really are more similarities between their group and you than differences. There’s almost a fraternal bond in both
organizations, even if your half-brothers or Shanky can be pieces of shit that nobody
really wants to deal with. They also take investigation seriously, when
not forced to play a charade for the RCM boys. Angus is outright referred to as a kid after
he dies, clearly an equivalent of a junior officer. Hell, Alain is an ex-gangster trying to leave
his life behind and use his knowledge to do some good. The most interactions you get are with Titus
himself. Aside from a facade of bravado and being a
strong-arm leader, he’s a refreshingly straightforward man. He will make homophobic jokes, and then call
Glen his best friend, even though that guy is openly homosexual. He will say something about a sex worker having
huge bahonkadoners, and then completely trust Lizzy as his legal counsel. Words mean very little to him - actions do. And he will care and respect the hell out
of the people in his immediate circle and community. Like a potty-mouthed elementary school hotshot
aged up 30 years and turning out a decent guy, even if the schoolyard language never
left him. The kind of guy who’ll think you’re leading
up to a punchline when you mention a mentally ill woman and then get deadly serious when
he realizes you’re talking about a real victim. Elizabeth Beaufort is not part of the group,
but she stands next to them as their lawyer, so let’s include her here. Posing as a mere gardener while canvassing
the situation on Day 1, from Day 2 onwards she shows her actual role as a professional
legal representative. She is terse, trying to cut off all your avenues
of prodding for answers and generally dismissive of you as a Moralintern lackey. All in all, she’s a good lawyer and it’s
too bad you play a cop. She’s also indicative of two things - one,
Evrart is more of a communist than the corrupt facade would let on. After all, Lizzie does not seem to be the
kind of woman that is in this for the money and giving you a single patsy would be much
less of a headache than the shadow-puppet play given to you by the Union at large. Two, the Union is not just a bunch of blue
collar workers fighting for their rights. It has more resources than that, it has enough
power to send Lizzy to law school and get her back. It’s not a rag-tag revolt but a true prelude
to the Return. What is the Return? Don’t worry about it. Let’s go talk to the person that got you
here to begin with. Klaasje is…complex. Because this is the one character for whom
we only directly see the facade. Several of them in fact. There are some factors to this. First, she is a professional. Someone used to lying for a living, switching
names and identities on the fly. Never telling outrageous untruths, only half-lies. A spy through and through. Second, you are sexually attracted to her
and it makes all your skills give her way more leniency than usual. Unless you catch yourself, in which case your
Volition and Drama overcorrect, because how dare she MANIPULATE you with her good looks
and charm. This is clearly a violation of YOUR agency. I’ve genuinely seen people take these thoughts
at face value and like *snap snap* what are you doing. My man, what the fuck are you doing. Are you genuinely siding with your brain telling
you a woman is at fault because YOU are sexually attracted to her and subconsciously want to
enter her good graces. Are we really doing this? Alright, with this Public Service Announcement
out of the way, let’s talk facts. Klaasje Amandou, which is absolutely not her
real name, arrived in Martinaise as a last-ditch escape effort. There are people after her, people who want
her dead. Either someone she wronged or her own employers
trying to tie up loose ends. She’s paranoid about getting caught and
put in jail because the RCM would report her incarceration to Moralintern, and she would
either get sent to a court in countries under the rule of Moralist International or worse,
Epstein’d in a cell. The latter actually happens if you decide
to arrest her, so I think it’s more than safe to say that this part of her story is
true, even if the details may be not. While in Martinaise, she partied by doing
drugs, alcohol and having casual sex, and her conquests included some Hardie Boys and
Ruby. And her latest paramour was Lely, the mercenary
on a corporate payroll that rolled into town. A bad man, vulgar and loud. And she liked that. They partied a lot, even celebrating his birthday
- and mid-party, he was shot in the mouth all of a sudden. Assuming this was meant for her, yet not finding
death in the next instant, she quickly devised a plan, got dressed up and got the corpse
of her lover hanged to fake lividity and concocted the entire stage play of “lynching”. To make it look like the Union is taking policing
to a lethal extreme while taking any potential investigation off her case. She was thorough, too, knowing exactly what
line to tell whom and who to keep in the loop the moment of the fake hanging. Not the first time she faked the cause of
death. Not the first time she had to concoct a whole
conspiracy on the fly when high as a kite. And then…she undid her own work. Because he was hanging there for days. Nobody bothered to take the body off, nobody
called the RCM, nobody gave the man the decency of a burial. So she called the cops herself, damaging the
phone wire to distort her voice. The one thing she wanted to avoid, RCM getting
anywhere near her, is something she willingly brought upon herself. She’d like to think that it was nothing
but sex and the haze of narcotics between them two. And yet, she was unable to just watch his
corpse there. People died because of her before. But this was different. She dares not say out loud why. Finally, she figured out the location of the
killer. She had a lot of time to think about it. Staring back into the scope. Waiting for the second shot, meant for her. But it never came. And if you don’t arrest her, she leaves
one final clue in the form of a red string showing you the bullet trajectory and guiding
you towards the islet from which the shot came, after which she bolts out of town. She won’t be there to see Lely’s killer
get caught, but she attempts to stack the deck in any way she can. These are the things that are definitely true,
of all the things she says. That and drug use on a scale that would make
Harry blush. Anything else she says is murky, at best. Klaasje is an archetypal femme fatale - the
woman in spy and crime fiction that is clearly deep in some bad shit, but who is also incredibly
attractive and knows it. Everyone wants her, hell you can outright
greet her by saying you want to have fuck with her. She’s aware of this and learned how to use
this to her advantage. And Disco Elysium goes out of its way to portray
how much this fucking sucks for her. Because, you know, a physically strong man
using his muscles to break open a door is admirable, but a woman leveraging the fact
that she’s not going to be suspected by most men (and some women) in a desperate attempt
to survive her own past catching up to her is horrible manipulation deserving of scorn. You feel entitled to her. So does Titus, who caught feelings too and
insisted that she should break up with Lely. So did the killer, a man she never fucking
met. And that knack for manipulation is most likely
what got her into the espionage line of work in the first place - if she’s good at it,
why not use it? There are some more things that I think are
true in what she says. For one, it’s probably not a stretch to
assume that there really is no love lost between her and her motherland of Oranje. It is a huge member of the organization that
is trying to get her killed, after all. And she doesn’t seem to have anyone waiting
for her back home, either. A loose end connected to nothing else, perfect
to be used to get entangled in something and cut off after she does her job. Finally, she is the one who first mentions
The Return by name. A socioeconomic shift brewing in Martinaise,
a rebellion bubbling beneath the surface. Not just in the Harbor with the Union, as
we can see glimpses of the chief of Precinct 41 going through a list of cops on the payroll,
deeming who would be reliable enough to entangle them in something drastic as well. There are tensions rising throughout the city. The communists never surrendered and their
deaths were not forgotten. And after Klaasje leaves, Cindy the SKULL
paints her graffito on the battleground, using heavy motor oil mixed with blood of the fallen. “One day, I will return to your side”,
it reads. A verse from a revolutionary poem. Aimed upwards, to be visible for the airships
of the Coalition. And if you provide the spark, even by doing
something as minor as flicking a cigarette at it, it will burn. Brighty, violently. Demanding attention even from those who deem
themselves to be above us, literally and figuratively. Operation “Death Blow” failed to live
up to its namesake. Revachol at large, just like Martinaise, is
alive. Battered, but breathing. It is not a corpse to be carved up and eaten
by vultures. And Klaasje doesn’t mention it as a light
aside. She is looking forward to it. She is not a Revacholian, but if she is to
be caught and judged, she would like it to be by a self-governing country. She is a tool of the elites, discarded and
disillusioned. She does not think she deserves peace, or
maybe even life given the suicidal ideation of looking the killer in the eye. But she wants to be judged, not disposed of. To be treated as a criminal, not an expense. To be part of humanity, not the machine. Well, let’s lighten things up with a lightning
round of some less-prevalent characters on this side of the river that we haven’t mentioned
yet. Gorący Kubek is an immigrant worker in the
Whirling kitchen, not speaking a lick of Suresne, and for extra shitbag points you can tell
him to “Speak Revacholian” despite no such language existing. His “name” comes from a Polish brand of
instant soups you can make in a cup, it literally means “Hot Cup”. Which, in game, refers to him spiking the
borscht served at the cafeteria with vodka at Union’s behest. The old lady cleaning the Capeside apartments
is like Martinaise personified. Frail and sickly, alone, yet knowing everything
about the tenants of her workplace. When asked about communism or revolution,
she says she knows nothing about these things, but if you tell her about, say, shooting landlords,
she'll react in panic. She’s seen and experienced violence. She’s old enough to remember both the revolution
and the landing, even if as a distant memory. She doesn’t want to ever see it again. Tommy le Homme, real name Jerry, is a truck
driver and aspiring musician working on his rhymes. He misses his family, himself being stuck
in a traffic jam of the ages. He’s also a stone-faced liar, telling you
he doesn’t smoke when taking a drag, or that he doesn’t want to anger FALN, his
employer, by illegally selling their stuff on the side despite the fact that several
pieces of that brand’s clothing are purchasable from Siileng and Cuno. And he says he doesn’t know any other drivers
despite being on such good terms with Ruby that she entrusted the keys to her truck to
him. He’s completely affable and yet completely
untrustworthy, at least to a cop like you. Call Me Manana is on the Union’s payroll,
but he views himself as an anti-establishment cowboy, or boiadero. He doesn’t view himself as a communist,
just someone following the most basic instinct there is - “I want that”. And yet, he is trusted by Evrart to keep an
eye on everything, or to conduct covert operations like recovering Lely’s armor. He stays at the gate after the tribunal, still
watching, even as scabs dispersed. Everyone knows he’s with the Union, but
I think it’s safe to assume that he’s their social infiltrator. The kind of guy that can get answers to questions
and notice the vibe of the situation, even if someone is opposed to the Union. Also his name means “Call Me Tomorrow”
and is a reference to a song by the band Scooter. Easy Leo is painting over the company containers
with Union livery. A truly innocent man, the kind of a soul that
could never suspect anyone or scheme anything. He’s happy with his life, has a loving wife,
and likes all his colleagues. Evrart openly told him he can’t be entrusted
with anything secretive, but you know what, they gave this guy with some clear developmental
conditions a stable life situation. And probably use him to leak information they
want to leak, as well as someone that will not question seemingly simple tasks that carry
some more complicated implications, like grand theft container by painting them red. The Smoker on the Balcony is a young, definitely
gay man sleeping with the equivalent of a Moralintern middle manager, calling him his
“Sunday friend”. He’s detached and his voice has a bitter
note regarding the power disparity between them two. He’s stuck in Martinaise, trying to pursue
an art degree, but his ‘lover’ can bail at any time to a better place if things get
tough. The Smoker is a mistress and he knows it,
yet doesn’t have many more options. At least he has a friend, if only on Sundays. And he also serves as a closet key to Harry
because there’s just something…so mysterious about him. Don’t worry. You’re definitely not a closeted bisexual
in his forties. That would be embarrassing, to figure yourself
out that late into your life. You’re set in stone, you won’t change
further. People are simple things who know everything
about themselves at the age of 12, at the latest. You being in the closet is definitely not
the reason why a slur named after a bundle of sticks is the only word censored in the
entire game. That you can choose to purposefully hear in
some unrelated conversations. Why are you so sensitive about this, Harry? Cindy the SKULL is definitely a persona, and
not very willing to be open with a cop. On the surface, she’s a card-carrying bad
seed. Part of a gang called the SKULLs, wearing
grandma clothes, painting graffito with fuel sucked out of cop cars and being overall dismissive
if not passive-agressive towards anyone with any sort of authority, like yourself or Joyce. She gets called a bona-fide member of her
gang by rich-kid-wannabe-gangsters Fuck The World and Pissfriend, implying that her artistic
and anti-authority stances are indicative of the group as a whole, rather than it being
a popcultural vision of a gang that slings drugs and is in it for the fat stacks of money. The fact that the aspiring Skullomaniacs have
ready answers for you if you ask about the expletives on their backs also implies the
gang values sending a message out to the world, even if it can be juvenile and based on, shall
we say, leaps in logic. Though they do definitely have a bunch of
pimped-out motor carriages and do street races, too. Cindy herself seems to have a soft spot for
the two pretender boys, perhaps showing that her “Eat the rich” act is either not entirely
sincere or, more likely, nuanced enough to not be a shallow act of teenage rebellion
but an actual, internalized worldview. She also seems to develop a soft spot for
you, despite you being a cop. She won’t be helpful with the investigation,
but she is willing to help you with artistic projects if you want to paint something on
a wall or even get you access to a meeting of her friends in a communist book club, at
the low low price of hearing you oink once to knock you down a peg. She also says that Martinaise is too quiet,
lacking in mayhem. It sounds like general brand-store edge, but
I think she is just genuinely angry. Angry at seeing how mad and disappointed everyone
is, yet doing nothing about it. She’s looking for inspiration for the message
to send out to the Coalition warships, written right where the communist strike is brewing,
what should be an ignition point for a greater change..yet nothing in Martinaise speaks to
her. The anger is silenced, and it rubs her the
wrong way. Only after The Tribunal happens, once gunshots
ring out and she sees the aftermath of the fight - what should have been an absolute
massacre turned into less than a dozen casualties with a paramilitary death squad either fought
off or returned to their employers in coffins - does the inspiration strike her. She knows what message the streets of Revachol,
the disgraced capital of the world, have for the global superpowers. It speaks from the festering wound of Martinaise,
inflicted by what was supposed to be a death blow. One day, I will return to your side. Speaking of old wounds: In a crater left by the Coalition artillery,
two old men are throwing balls at another, stationary ball. They have known each other their entire lives. They are so opposed in worldview that they
can’t exchange a single word without arguing. They both loved the same woman, Jeanne-Marie,
who could never decide between them and died while still engaged to both. They have been meeting like this, day after
day, for several years to play a game together. René Arnoux and Gaston Martin are best friends,
even if neither of them would admit it out loud. Gaston is the simpler man of the two - one
that just wants to enjoy the twilight years of his life, making himself a good sandwich
and sitting out in the fresh air, day after day. He used to be a humanities teacher, and as
such has his way with words - he writes essays and such for the Union now, but he’s not
anyone in a high position or in the know about their plans. Giving a glimpse into how Evrart and Edgar
probably respect the education he gave them, giving them an edge in the department of rhetorics,
but not ideologically. Beneath the jovial mask…well, he’s still
an optimistic man, but moreso someone that just doesn’t want to get involved. A lover, not a fighter, and that includes
loving even someone like René, despite also thinking he’s an angry prick who even drove
his army buddies away with how vicious he is. Politically, he’d best be described as a
passive Moralist. Sitting on that bench, munching a sandwich
and looking at the lazy rays of a sunrise at the Martinaise bay, he knows this moment
was made for him. He’s at peace with history, both personal
and at large. René himself is a much more complex persona. Wearing the old royalist uniform, standing
with his back straightened out, prominently displaying two medals on his chest - the highest
distinctions of honor granted by the royal family for his service. Not for committing war crimes, but for a genuine
act of bravery and resolve - crawling for several days, carrying his commanding officer
with said officer’s jaw shot clean off after he paraded his unit into a trap. He didn’t respect that princeling and his
golden rifle, but it was his duty and he carried it out - and he takes immense, personal pride
in that, even if he won’t talk about it unprompted. He was an exemplary soldier of the Suzerain. So perhaps it is no wonder he is so bitter
and complaining about everything. About the communards, about the moralist invasion,
about Gaston and him stealing his girl, the petanque game and everything in between. His side lost, and even the communists lost
after that, but not in a way that he’d find good. But beneath that bitterness is fear. Fear that just like the previously all-powerful
kings and queens, he will be forgotten. That all the pain he went through was for
nothing. Crawling through mud with a shit-eating princeling
on his back, the emotional scars that led to him hurting Jeanne-Marie, the terror of
watching his entire world crumble. How can something this terrible, something
that had this much impact on him personally, be meaningless and forgotten? If you follow the Fascist vision quest and
resolve to become a kingsman and turn back time to the Good Old Days, you naturally turn
to Rene with your question. He abhors the idea. Because if there was time travel, if there
were second chances, then all his choices would be meaningless. Including one choice he makes every day, tinged
with pain in his eyes. The choice to not tell Gaston that he loves
him like he loves Jeanne-Marie. He made that choice long ago, yet it still
hurts, just like your lost love. But he can’t go back on that decision. It has to have meaning. That pain has to have meaning. If not, then what was he suffering all those
years for? Regardless of your actions, Rene is dead by
Day 5. His angry little heart gave out as he forced
himself to man the guard booth at the harbor, a decorative role given to him by the Union
because, well, like it or not he is part of the Martinaise community. He couldn’t just sit around and play all
day, enjoying the last of his days. There must be a place for him to belong in
this new, ugly world, a place to fill. And there was - by Gaston’s side, at least
platonically. But instead he chose to die alone, ignoring
the fact that the pain exists to steer us away from hurting ourselves. Well, since we’re already here, let’s
talk about the other “traditionalists”. There are a few magically racist people around
in Revachol. The aptly named Racist Lorry Driver is gonna
talk your ear off about how the white Occidental race is in decline and how all the others
are gonna take over via a cultural victory, like in a game of Civilization. He’s a boring thing, honestly, like people
who flood your replies when you say something positive about a person of color - chauvinist,
bitter, homophobic and squealing like a pig if you press him just a bit. The only reason he doesn’t do drugs is because
they’re of foreign origin, at least as far as he knows. And the fascist vision quest also reveals
that, in no uncertain terms, he’s an incel stuck in a perpetual downward spiral of being
unfuckable due to how toxic he is, which in turn only makes him more toxic. Dude spent more time researching fascists
obsessed with magical rituals than he did even considering getting a hobby. If he turned back time, he’d do the same
and just find himself in the exact same spot. The other openly “traditionalist” guy
in the game is Gary, the Cryptofascist. Aside from the 10/10 joke of him being a fascist
helping a pair of cryptozoologists, Gary is a sad little guy. He lives in a basement, you open his door
at Evrart’s behest because he’s a ‘weasel’, which likely implies he was telling the outside
world about what’s moving in Martinaise, collects racist cups, can’t afford waste
disposal, his only connection to anyone in the game is a an elderly couple that is from
out of town and he makes a living from delivering pies. He has an outright crisis of faith when he
sees Kim, because he’s both a despicable foreigner and a respectable officer of RCM. And once it makes him feel bad, rather than
think that he should not be an asshole, he course-corrects by saying Seolites are the
good foreigners because they sided with the Suzerain. Anyway, Gary wears a polite mask of a soft-speaking
man, under which there is barely hidden rampant racism, and even further beneath that is just
a man fraught with economic uncertainty and no faith in himself, both when it comes to
getting out of poverty and just being kind of a general pushover. He wants nice things and driven by that kind
of greed he takes the cuirass of the body armor off Lely’s corpse, and then he instantly
berates himself because it’s not the right thing to do and he can do better and oh man
he’s so sorry. And he thinks it’s all the fault of a grand
conspiracy of foreigners - which, you know, he’s not entirely wrong about, but given
that he’s willing to lick your boots clean because you work for the RCM, he’s definitely
not blaming the right people. He’d rather claim a racial minority controls
waste disposal in Revachol like a mob than think the people with his skin colour can
be a bigger part of the problem. When asked about going back in time, he claims
that Seol is technologically advanced because they managed to smuggle some technology from
the future and now have a stable timeloop where their current tech level means they
will be more advanced in the future. Given that it’s an isolationist country,
it’s hard to tell how far ahead they are, but Gary’s idea sounds implausible. Less so because of time travel, more so because
that kind of acceleration would grow exponentially and Seol would fucking transcend. It’s like with the idea of Singularity,
if you make an AI advanced enough that it can make something more advanced than itself,
then its’ creation will follow suit and before you blink, boom, superintelligence. Same principle but applied to technological
progress. You get a D, Gary, we’ll get back to your
core idea of information moving backwards in time and incorporate it later. Finally, we have Measurehead, a black supremacist
towering over everyone else, with phrenological tattoos all over his skull, to prove his superiority. A man who appropriated the iconography and
ideology meant to belittle his identity and went “Fuck you, ham sandwich, it actually
proves I am above you”. Which is pretty fucking sad, considering that
holding all of these pseudoscientific viewpoints at once made him a one-dimensional pile of
contradictions. Sure, he thinks kojkos, the Elysium equivalent
of slavic people, are beneath him, but he’s also in a polyamorous relationship with several
kojko women. He may think everything is biologically predetermined,
but he also thinks going back into the past is an idiotic idea and that you must always
move forward to face the difficulties of the present. He’s a raging fascist working for an explicitly
communist Union, most likely because his beloved mother worked for them too - the office you
go through was once her office. Hell, he believes he had great parenting in
general, because his mom spoiled him and his dad employed tough love to make him strive
to be better, though thankfully it never got into physical abuse. He also believes in love being the primary
motivator of everything anyone does, and yet views the entire world through the lens of
ideology explicitly built on hate and prejudice. Most funnily, he believes in being a pinnacle
of a human being…and he prevents himself from ever nutting inside a woman. He tries to wax poetic about how his spirit
will live on, but nobody takes him seriously outside of his physical capabilities. His worldview is a joke to everyone in the
Union and if you kick his ass, one of his girlfriends just decides you’re the new
Measurehead without missing a beat. Jean-Luc is driving his lineage, both genetic
and spiritual, into a fucking wall and he’s too preoccupied with trying to look and sound
“superior” to see it. You’ll never even see him as anything more
than a caricature unless you opt into the vision quest and get a private heart-to-heart
where you can tell that he is an actual human being with a family, morals and a personal
code regarding self-improvement and facing life head-on. And he explicitly states that once you both
leave the office and go back into the public again, the “racial struggle” is back on. This man is so close to being a gigachad that
could inspire others, and instead he decides to bore them with talk of “haplogroups”. Interestingly, the chat with Measurehead also
heavily implies Harry was raised by a single mother. No analysis on that one, it’s just neat
that you get to learn more about him even as you decide you explored all the sensible
options and it’s time to make Kim sad by being a raving fascist. Oh, I should actually mention the internalized
fascist thought too. It drives you to drink more and use dogwhistles. As in, you get morale damage from being openly
fascist because it reminds you how “shit”everything is and gives you bonus strength from drinking. It’s incoherent rambling with no end goal. Just complaining. And this is how the vision quest ends as well. Looking into the mirror, you realize it’s
all shit. You, the people, Revachol itself. It’s all shit and you’re going to suffer,
and maybe one day you’ll get to shoot the pieces of love in your heart that still hurts
to make them stop. You get severe nerve damage to look “serious”. Go forth, noble sufferer. Go forth like an icebreaker ship. Destroying everything in your path to make
way for others, who are also shit, always alone and cold. The “noble sufferer” bit gave me a serious
pause. I’m about to get personal, or I guess national,
for a bit here, but in Poland there is this concept that was born in, shall we say, national
philosophy and literature when this country was wiped off the map for over a century. “Poland as the Christ of nations”. That we died to cleanse the rest of Europe
of their sins and that it was noble for us to do so. And of course, this martyrdom culture is still
prevalent because of everything else that happened after we appeared on the map again. Not to mention Europe’s sins were definitely
not fucking absolved. But there must be meaning to this near-eradication
of culture and language. No. No there isn’t. Suffering only makes you suffer, there is
no nobility to it. We had the lucky break of surviving and honestly,
nowadays? Maybe we should focus on actually building
up what we’ve got and apply that history of martyrdom to see the same garbage being
done to other human beings as I’m writing this fucking script. Nobody ever got shit off their clothes by
rolling in it. It’s also interesting that for a vision
quest concerned with “Revacholian nationhood”, this is the only quest that does nothing with
the statue of Philippe in the roundabout. The monument of an extravagant, spendthrift
king suspended in mid-explosion as the Communists destroyed it, arguably the symbol of Revachol’s
history itself - the fascist vision quest does not concern itself with it at all. All the other vision quests do - using it
as a marketing stand for your Brand [™], or to recruit people to a communist discussion
circle, or as a tool in contacting Moralintern. In every other vision quest, there is some…well,
vision of the role of Revachol in the grand scheme of things. Not the fascist one. It’s entirely self-centered. In your grand quest to restore old greatness,
you don’t even think of duct-taping the statue or something. Which I think is a deliberate choice, especially
when contrasted with the three other vision quests. Let’s move on before I start drinking myself. How about some books? The Communist thought is…funny. For one, the notion of “The Last Communist”
is hilarious. It is upon you to build a classless society. You alone will build a commune. This is a perfectly logical statement to make. It also makes you incredibly sad at the state
of the world, the burden of seeing “reaction everywhere” feels as if Kras Mazov fucked
you personally. You get a collective -2 to your stats, but
you can rebound from that penalty, because you get 4XP every time you say a leftist thing. Quiz time! If one level equals one stat point you can
put into a skill, and to get that one level you need 100 XP, how many times do you need
to mention communism to break even on the two negative points you eat for keeping the
thought around? Give your answers now, lest you risk being
compared unfavorably to a second grade child! The answer is 50. You need to say 50 communist things, in addition
to the seven you need to say before even unlocking the thought. I’m pretty sure there aren't even 50 dialogues
where you can voice a political opinion in the game, or it cuts it very close. Sure, in the long term you’ll gain way more
than you ever lost, but the “long term” reaches far beyond the ending of the game. Or you can discard the thought like a class
traitor you are after getting enough XP - oh yeah, discarding a thought also costs 1 full
XP, so no matter what you do, Kras Mazov has truly fucked you over. And me too, as I am only halfway through this
goddamn script. Fucking amazing ludonarrative design right
here. Ten out of ten, no notes. As part of the communist vision quest, you
are tasked with organizing, and for that you need to find fellow communards. Not just those in the Union, the truly underground
ones. After some asking around and one oink, you
get to meet the two-person book club of Steban and Ulixes, though the latter is such a fervent
follower that he’s dubbed “Echo Maker” by the game, so we’ll treat both of them
as one. They are doing what every true leftist does,
talking about a bunch of theories and complaining about other leftists. The bickering drove away all other members
of the book club and it’s just the two of them now, so you are trying to get organized
with people who couldn’t keep a hobby group together. And to get in their graces you need to discuss
books - any books. Be it quack pale medicine, pulp detective
novels or even board game rules, discussing culture and what can be inferred from it and
viewed from a socialist lens is their jam. Though they seem to be more interested in
talking than actual research, as you can also find a copy of a magazine they write for,
La Fume. They drove their entire readership base away
by issue 4 with bad takes like “You only like fast-speed racing because you can watch
brands crash”, with it being overtly clear they never engaged with the sport in any capacity
at all. They both wear a mask of cynicism peppered
into their genuine thoughts, and before we get into what’s underneath it, they give
you a book on the theories of one Ignus Nilsen, the right-hand man of Kras Mazov himself. Ignus is quite the character, as he is also
mentioned in Sacred and Terrible Air. A fighter through and through, someone that
carried the revolution to Samara, which is a People’s Republic to this day - in name
only, because it’s more known for having a president doing his 30th year of ‘service’
and violently suppressing all discontent (worth noting that Steban and Ulyxes praise the country
in their writing regardless because it’s nominally communist). And Ignus’ legacy was tarnished even further
as he did some war crimes towards the end of the revolution, including impaling people
on trees. If communism failed, his second choice would
be absolute oblivion. By the time of the book, which happens in
part 20 years after Disco Elysium, he was censored out of photos, but because he was
so prominently photographed along with Mazov, they could not quite get rid of him completely. So now, Mazov is seen in pictures with a ghostly
plasm by his side. Some say that this plasm is communism itself. Which is ironic, considering his theory of
infra-material realism concerns itself with a substance known as “plasm” as well. It postulates that being revolutionary enough
can subvert even the laws of nature - that a society that is wholly and truly communist
can yield better crops, build structures deemed impossible by contemporary architecture. That it can fight off the pale itself. All we need to do is maintain high enough
levels of belief in the revolution and the world can be remodeled. There is an obvious issue with that theory,
and it’s not even the fact that it’s fantasy Lysenkoism and if I had a time machine, I’d
punch Lysenko in the dick as the second thing I used the contraption for. But it's so lost in theory that it assumes
that human minds can be fit into a rigid mold. You’ve played this game for a solid number
of hours before getting to this point, you’ve been in Harry’s mind. Hell, you’ve been alive yourself for a given
number of years. There’s no such thing as an unchanging person,
nor is there anyone without any self-doubt. And even that single moment of doubt can uproot
the foundations of the entire society if it relies on this inframaterialist idea. It aims to uplift humanity without taking
people into account at all. In the best case scenario, it would create
a small, isolationist society. Even a single glance of an outside perspective
could ruin everything. You know who had a crisis of faith himself? Kras Mazov. He shot himself and while the reason is never
clarified - be it disillusionment with movement or problems external to communism completely
- do you really think expecting an absolute, lasting ownership over the soul of humanity
itself is in any way a good goal to set, if even the father of the movement decided that
oblivion was preferable to continuing the fight? Not to mention, it’s in direct contradiction
of at least half of the in-universe’s symbol of communism - a reverse star above a set
of antlers. The star symbolizes a reversal of the old
order, and placed above the natural world symbolized by the antlers - but they are still
included in the symbol, as even if humanity is elevated above it, it has to work in harmony
with the rest of the world. The turnips truly do not care who planted
them. And with that theory internalized, you go
back to the two intellectual revolutionaries and ask the big question of communism - are
women bourgeois? No, wait, sorry, I got the wrong one, how
did this get into the script. The actual big question of communism is - what
is even the point, if it is impossible? And the ironic facade cracks. There is no more intellectualizing, no rhetoric
written around every talking point imaginable, no more Twitlonger threads. Steban has to ask himself, on an intellectual
level, why does he care? Why about something that already failed in
his home country? He thinks of his mother, working in La Delta
as a cleaning lady, and concludes as follows: Communism has to be believed in *because*
it is impossible. Just like the Perikarnaasian church believes
in the divine beyond the immediately obvious mundane, so does communism believe in the
future of humanity, no matter how different the current situation may be. In the darkest times, should even the stars
go out? Or in other words, should we forget about
our dreams of a better tomorrow, even if they seem impossibly distant? Before leaving, you can propose a project
for the two. They were clearly building a model of one
of Nielsen’s impossible structures out of matchboxes, but it collapsed every time. With the mask down, they even seem a bit embarrassed
by their faith in that they could build something like that. But you grab the matchboxes again, and build…and
build…and complete it. And then, after a few seconds, it collapses
again. But for a few beautiful seconds it was there. Something deemed impossible, built collectively
by the three of you. Now, you can read this as confirming that
Lysenko was right and the irl famines only happened because we didn’t believe in the
crops hard enough. That the structure only collapsed due to the
moment of disbelief that “you made it”. But again, I think it’s worth focusing on
what is not there. There is no collapse during the construction. As long as the three of you worked together
and focused on the task ,the tower kept growing taller. As long as the double helix of history kept
extending, the construction was stable. It collapsed when it stopped. Nothing in this world is permanent. Not matter, not the people, not communism,
but also not the impossibility of communism. 100% of communism will never be built, because
the work can never be done. But the impossibility of a perfect world should
not stop us from acting on trying to build it. And the act of building can achieve so much
more than endless theory, even if that theory is used as a blueprint of what you’re building
towards. Once you leave the bookclub, you can see that
the duo plastered posters inviting more people to their circle on the statue of King Filippe. The vision for Revachol’s future as organizing
a movement that will, at the very least, hear everyone interested out and discuss what is
wrong and what can be done to move forward. Onto the other side of the river. Across the waterlock, there is a village that
is pornographically poor. And yet people live there - an old lady, a
mother of three small children and a trio of drunks, plus some people who are not around
during the game but mentioned by others. It’s not much, but it is theirs, and as
such they would not want to leave - which is a thorn in Evrart’s side, as he wants
to basically gentrify that side of the river. He promises the displaced people affordable
housing elsewhere, as he views the village itself as beyond help, but he is basically
saying he knows what benefits them better than they do. Once again, The Big Picture mode makes him
disregard people in favor of humanity. We discussed Lilienne, the net picker, earlier
a bit. She is down to earth, doing what little she
can to feed her family and get by. Her husband is dead, mostly due to drinking
issues, but she has mourned him for an appropriate time and moved on - working class people can’t
afford to get emotional for long, living hand-to-mouth means that there just isn’t time to process
the feelings in full, lest it affect you even when you are trying to make a living. Isn’t that right, Harry? Either way, you can take her on a date by
NOT bringing your own alcoholism to the forefront and you spend a nice few moments looking at
the lights across the bay. As inaccessible as those stars of capitalism
are, they sure are pretty. And that’s it, you two just vibe for a moment. And it’s nice. And anything more would require you to get
your shit together for more than a week, but there is this lingering feeling of hope - you’re
not a completely lost case, even to a woman that just met you. She gives me the feeling of someone who wants
to have more times like this, just chilling and processing the emotions of everything
- be it the loss of her husband or even something as material as mourning a car that you sank
in the ice - but who is unable to do so due to her material conditions. And she symbolically drops her guard around
you by giving you her sword. It does nothing, but damn does it look cool. Her kids are…well, kids. Little Lily is cute and a polar opposite to
Cuno, a truly innocent child despite growing up in poverty. The twins are much more cryptic, but mostly
due to being rather shy and more interested in their playtime than talking to you. But they do get up to all kinds of shenanigans,
like using a raft to go to the abandoned sea fort. Isobel, the washerwoman, is an old lady that
is warm and welcoming to everyone, willing to shelter people who need it in her home
for free. Be it you or Ruby, the law or the one running
from it. She’s wary of the RCM, as a few years ago
they chased some suspects in the area and it was a massacre. She is the most wary of signing Evrart’s
papers for the renovation, but will relent if you say it would make the situation better
for the kids. Unfortunately, not much to dig into here,
she’s just someone who saw a lot of shit but still wants to do the right thing for
anyone in her arm’s reach. South of the women is the Society of Moribound
Alcoholics. A trio of drunks sitting around and drinking
with each other. Rosemary is an ex-teacher, who now deals alcohol
and drugs to fuel his habit and has trouble keeping what he was talking about in mind. A respectable position, ruined by addiction. Kinda like Harry. Don’t Call Abigail is so traumatized by
some event in his past that he can’t stop repeating the phrase that is his namesake. Apparently Abigail traumatized him so much
that his mind is repeating her name on loop. Kinda like with Harry. And finally we have Idiot Doom Spiral, a man
who worked in high-concept advertisement and can spin yarn for days, a great speaker. And no matter how much he goes over the events
of his past, he can’t figure out what drove him from being a successful man to a homeless
drunk, other than losing the keys to his home and office. He also doesn’t recognize his own jacket
if you bring it to him. There’s clearly some psychological issue
here, only exacerbated by the alcohol. Just like with Ha- okay, you get the idea. Further from the village are some ruins of
days past. An unstable fish market where you find the
corpse of a drunk who hit his head after a board broke under his weight. A parking lot that clearly served as an execution
site during the Revolution or the Landing. And finally, there is the Feld building, what
used to be the headquarters of a cutting-edge radiocomputers company. They were working on a tape computer, but
the prototypes were destroyed by the revolutionaries - though, interestingly, your save icon in
the game seems to invoke the image, as if you were playing the game on a tape computer
yourself. In front of it is Trant Heidelstam, a civilian
consultant for the RCM, taking his young son on a history tour. He doesn’t tell you that he knows you, but
your cop sense can tell he is your half-brother just like Kim. Trant is a wonderful exposition dump about
Feld and Revachol’s history, but probably the most interesting part about him is the
fact that he is a recovering Pyrholidon addict. He keeps up a strict training regiment and
occupies his mind with a plethora of topics. He is yet another mirror of Harry, someone
that went through a similar problem and got out the other end, all smiling and mainstream-passing. He’s just as much of a sponge, soaking up
all the information in the world. This is likely why he is the most sympathetic
to Harry at the end of the game, saying that your affliction may be a perfectly natural
reaction to the world and having to constantly receive all the information from it, all the
time - he can see himself in the same position as you, maybe on a path where his personal
life worked out worse than it did, without a loving son and, implicitly, a wife. And in-between his rants on everything and
nothing, you can see a bit of a communist peeking. Maybe not a revolutionary, but someone who
considers the Commune as beautiful and tried to get his son to read the March Decree, if
only the boy was not more interested in radio games about dragons. But for everything, there is the right time. And there will be the right time to explore
inside the Feld building too, but let’s go meet my favorite characters in the game
first. In a tent on the sea ice, a group of young
people plan to build a nightclub in a nearby abandoned church. And to keep it afloat and spin some tapes,
they also plan to cook speed in there. But first, they need to have it checked out
because some *spooky* assholes set up shop there first. So when a cop walks in, he is both a solution
and a problem. The first one you’ll most likely meet is
Acele Berger, recording sounds of the ice with a contact microphone and high as a kite. A daughter of a crime lord, she was the one
who proposed the idea of setting up a speed lab and knew it had to be approved of by the
Claires to keep the operation running. She also knows how to talk to police officers
by being as terse and to the point as possible, but that experience does nothing to help her
when watching a grown man break down in tears in front of her - and if that happens, a bit
of genuine empathy shines through, as she admits to self-medicating with drugs and offers
lending an ear to your woes. Beneath the business-as-usual facade of dealing
with police, she is deeply worried. She is perpetuating the cycle of drug bullshit
that got her father killed and even worse, she fears that she will not amount to anything
more than that. She feels disillusioned and stupid, sitting
out in the cold and recording ice for music that may never come or worse, be dismissed
by everyone else. She shares the passion for music with the
rest of the group, but when faced with how unsure the prospect of actually making it
is, doubts settle in. And Harry can take her device and say that
the world is cold, big and scary but the future will be alright, as long as she carries on. Empathy for empathy. I think it’s also particularly poignant
that when you discover true HARDCORE and bust a move in the church, she is more preoccupied
with recording the music and dancing reverberating through the floorboards than joining the rest
of the group in the moment of ecstasy - that microphone is their tool of building a path
to the future, after all. She’s also the youngest in this group of
young people, being somewhere in her late teens or, more probably, early twenties. Her boyfriend is Pete Andre, a leader of the
group by virtue of being the only one who can talk to others and stay on topic, the
designated guy to pick up the phone when ordering a pizza. He truly wants to set up a club for anodic
music, which is this world’s version of electronica with music composed with the use
of synthesizers and recorded sounds, truly making the entire world an instrument in some
way - but he’s also beset by self-doubts, thinking it’s impossible to get anywhere
with that dream without the speed lab. He’s forward thinking and imaginative, but
held back by what probably was a life full of taking Ls. At his own admission, he is a poor, uneducated,
balding dude - but now he has radical spikes on his hair. They make people think he’s twenty, and
he’s definitely not twenty. He also sucks at dancing, which probably speaks
to his social skills as the glue holding the posse together. They didn’t follow him and that dream because
of his affinity for music, for sure. Third in the group is Noid, real name Karl
Holtzmann, a trained carpenter and thus likely in his mid-twenties. A dude distrustful of all authority and established
societal rules, self-described as politically ill. He calls the Moralintern the Big Bad, Dolores
Dei a mass murderer, all Innocences thieves of organs of the World Spirit, all religions
false to the core and the left-right dichotomy in politics a disagreement on how to distribute
wheat and pigs - in other words, an endless discussion on economics. And yet he is a spiritual dude, believing
that setting up a rave club in an abandoned church is akin to giving a soul to a corpse. This is likely why he finds the entire political
discourse disinteresting - it’s asking the wrong questions, according to him. He also thinks communication with words is
unideal, that pure and primitive things like dancing are much better when it comes to getting
a read on someone, which is also reflected in his attire - he wears suspenders to imitate
a human ribcage not as some grand statement or allegory that can be translated into words,
he just thinks it’s cool. You can accuse him of being fascist-adjescent
due to how heavily he relies on his gut feeling and an almost-primitivist mindset, but he
wants nothing to do with nationalists or xenophobes. But he’s also just someone who sucks at
socializing and opted for the slow approach of getting the read of someone’s sines/vibes,
rather than keep trying and failing to hold up a conversation. He had time to develop his own set of views
and ideas, and he’s going to voice them to anyone asking without much restraint, as
long as the sines are alright. He is genuinely one of my favorite characters
in the whole game full of favorite characters. Just a true believer in Hardcore and its role
in the future of mankind. Finally, we have Germaine van der Wijk, or
Egghead. A party boy cryptid that communicates in almost
nothing but hype slogans overheard from other disc jockeys. Beaming with an infectious smile, he is there
to get people moving, to be the spark that starts the fever of a party. He also has the technical know-how on operating
the equipment for anodic music. But below that are…some interesting things. For once, if you write up the group after
getting wiser to their speed shenanigans and evict them (you monster), his smile drops
and you can instantly see that man is easily over 40. Two, he’s worried that the jam they’re
using as the start of their entire operation is not hardcore enough. Which is pretty similar to the worries of
Acele, just worded differently. Three, he holds absolutely no political beliefs
and is easily swayed by the situation, and you can tell him to adjust his slogans in
any way you want…and when faced with oblivion made manifest, he embraces it and screams
about the end of all things. Fortunately, even he can tell when things
get “too” hardcore. Finally, and most tellingly, he’s silently
opposed to the speed lab plan, but he’s going along with the group. He wants the anodic music club to be pure,
and true, and beautiful. To stand against the darkness of the world
with the power of Hardcore alone - for the core of the movement is love. To do anything else is to not truly believe
in it. The group as a whole are interesting to me
because…well, by anime definitions, they are not that young. Most other media would probably portray a
group of people trying to create a nightclub for a new generation of music as late teens
at best. But…well, we all age. Those kids doing drugs and partying all night
to music that their parents hate do not disappear after their twenty-first birthday. And if they truly believe in the beauty and
truth of Hardcore, or rock, or whatever, well, who’s to say they won’t try to spread
it in any way they can? Man, I’m definitely >not twenty< myself,
you think I don’t relate to that? I also love that if you internalize the thought
about Arno van Eyck, the anodic musician that inspired the group and whose jam they’re
playing, you start to notice posters about his concerts and albums all over Martinaise. They were always there, but until you met
the group, they were not relevant to your investigation and perception of the world
- but now they are. In part, this is a common experience for any
of us, and in part it’s a beautiful way of portraying Harry expanding his horizons. Especially beautiful as his internal thoughts
about the ravers are initially rather dismissive - notably, Andre’s spikes are noticed to
be both futuristic and completely idiotic by Conceptualization, his art sense. This is as good of a moment as any to talk
about musical influences within the game. First, of course, we have disco - the music
of the future of the past, dead and only popular with old people like yourself. A music of The New, an era of growing prosperity
that was supposed to last forever and obviously didn’t. It’s both the symbol of something that was
beautiful but is no more, of hope that died - and yet of the future that is to come. After all, Harry in all his disco-ass attire
and funky tie is still alive. He still has hope. And maybe it’s just my Polish soul speaking,
but have you ever been to a wedding without at least one disco song being played? It may not be everywhere, but it’s there. It will survive. More importantly though, there are three real
world bands that had *immense* influence on Disco Elysium, to the point where their song
lyrics are part of the text of the game. The first of them is Scooter, and if I mention
that their self-described genre is “Happy Hardcore”, you will probably get why. And if you don’t remember them, well, let
me say the phrase that will wake up all sleeper agents of my age: Doot-doot-doot doo-doo-doot-doot-doot,
doo-doot doo-doot doo-doo-doob-doob-doob. Egghead is quite overly based on HP Baxxter,
the frontman of the band - someone who became the voice of youth well into his thirties
and still goes on strong today. Like, you may think of Scooter as something
you heard in the nineties and early aughts, but they’re still making music. Techno was the sound of the future, and it
still is. It probably can’t be overstated how much
the electronic music of that era influenced music of today - and if it can, ask someone
who actually knows something about music to tell you how I’m wrong. Listening to their songs, old and new, for
this video, holy shit they are infectious. Nonsensical lyrics, yet incomparable vibes. Still constantly experimenting. Truly hardcore. The second band is Einstürzende Neubauten,
an industrial band. With a name that means “Collapsing New Buildings”,
their method of operation is different from Scooter, as they play music on…pretty much
anything in addition to traditional instruments. A percussion set made out of empty plastic
containers, a cigarette, the audio recording of a riot, whatever the hell this thing is. They started out harsh and aggressive, with
their music mellowing out over time but still retaining that experimental edge by doing
shit like a song called “Silence is Sexy” with several seconds of silence in it, because
it’s meant to only be heard in full by people suffering from tinnitus, though they do bring
the ringing in during concerts as well. The influence is seen all over the place in
Martinaise - the graffito of a human pictogram you can draw is the band logo, the Dolorian
poem used as psychological regiment in traversal of the pale is the lyrics of a song that the
band’s vocalist, Blixa Bargeld, recorded with Teho Tearado. The band has been going on for forty years
and is still hasn’t stopped. Still experimenting. Still trying to squeeze music out of anything
they can find. Finally, there is Sea Power, an alternative
rock band that you’ve been hearing all over this video, as the entire game’s soundtrack
are remixes of their songs, including The Smallest Church in Saint-Sanes - or in Sussex,
originally. The lyrics that Tommy thinks up when stuck
in the jam are from their song as well. I can’t say much about them, as I haven’t
really listened to them nearly as much as the other two bands, but I need to note two
things. They started in 1995 and are, you guessed
it, still going. And they have such a wide range of material
and styles that they experimented with that they were called derivatives of The Cure,
Pixies and Joy Division at different times. I think it’s fair to say that Disco’s
sense of aesthetics is located right between these three bands. It’s happy and somber, aggressive and thoughtful,
gibberish and poetic. But always experimental. It takes the building blocks of our reality
and reassembles them in a fictional world that is alien, yet painfully and joyously
familiar. An oil-on-canvas graffiti. Alright, let’s see who and what’s inside
the church, shall we? Within the abandoned church on the coast of
Martinaise, built by the first settlers in the region 380 years ago, there are a few
things. For one, there is a huge stained glass window,
now cracked and missing parts. It does not depict any idea of a god or a
historical figure of a saint, but a figure that was contemporary to the church’s builders
- that of Dolores Dei, the woman who sent them there, towering over the queen of Suresne
that she was ‘merely’ the advisor for before being declared an Innocence. The faith of the people who built this place
was not a belief in the divine - it was an absolute devotion to the idea of this expansion
into the new world changing everything. That this woman, the embodiment of the World
Spirit, is the closest representation of a universal truth that we have. Aside from that, there is a lot of technical
machinery, including a radiocomputer. And a two millimeter hole in reality itself,
somewhere up among the rafters. Don’t worry about it for now. The first person you meet in there is Tiago,
or the crabman, so named by the wannabe club organizers as he’s climbing up the church’s
carpentry like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He used to be a street gang member, dealing
with drugs and violence, but one day when working on renovating the abandoned church,
he found what he dubbed the Mother of Silence - which is, of course, the aforementioned
hole. Swallowing all sounds around it, being in
its vicinity puts you in a perfect stillness, and the experience is downright spiritual
for Tiago. He left the old life behind and came to live
here and partake in silent communion, getting closer and closer to the source of the silence,
hoping one day to be taken by it whole. But beneath that zeal, there is also loneliness. He truly wants to fully devote himself to
this one, exceptional thing, but the mention of other people settling in the church gives
him pause as he says he hasn’t talked to anyone in a while. There is some pain lingering in that sentence. He’s also very direct in criticizing you
for your quite obvious substance abuse and advocates leaving those addictions behind
in favor of this religious elation. He also claims that he has mostly forgotten
about his past, leaving those memories behind. Which..is curious. It definitely draws a parallel to Harry in
a way, an addict who left an old life behind, though not through overdosing, but through
whatever the hell that hole is. Either way, he serves as the spiritual/instinctual
interpretation of the phenomenon. Of being in direct proximity of it and experiencing
it with your senses directly. The other Spook is Soona, a programmer for
the failed Fortress Occident game development studio, and she is the one who set up all
the electronics and the computer in there. She is obsessed with finding the hole’s
exact location, as she blames it for the failure of the studio. Not without a reason, as a catastrophic data
wipe occurred both on the main copy and offsite copy that was not even hooked to a computer,
and she was able to narrow down the source of that anomaly to the church. She is an introvert, even sorta antisocial,
preferring to focus on work rather than chit-chat. She has been squatting in the church, fully
committed to that task of scientifically measuring exactly what the hell that hole is and how
it swallowed the information while it was being compiled on the radio waves. Quite ironically for her outright positivist,
science-driven methods, she is fueled by faith. That it wasn’t her, or anyone else’s,
fault that the studio failed. That there is a discernible outside force
that fucked them over. And that maybe by blaming it, they will be
able to bond again and forget that the studio was heading towards doom due to the fact that
there were many, many other problems that were definitely human faults. After some back and forth and setting up a
nightclub to use the ravers’ audio equipment to get a better read of the hole, dubbed by
Soona as “The Swallow”, two interesting things happen. For one, once the nothingness is pointed to
by the microphone, it reverberates through everyone. Cutting off the mic doesn’t stop it, nor
does stopping any step on the way to the speakers, not until Egghead cuts the power to the system
as a whole. Even though The Swallow is quite literally
nothing, this brief instant of recording it conveyed enough information translated into
a low, rumbling, incomprehensible sound to shake the foundations of the temple for what
seemed to be like eternity. Second is that upon this experience, you can
recollect a past conversation, guiding you towards describing what that thing is - it’s
the core of the Pale. Not the one surrounding the isola, but a brand
new one. It already started swallowing matter, starting
with sound and information. It stands to reason that the end of Motorway
South is a similar point of true nothingness. And the church was built around it by people
fully aware of it, as a method of protection. To keep oblivion at bay with faith. And you know what, considering the fact that
this place has been standing for hundreds of years, I think it’s safe to say it fucking
worked. This leads to several conclusions - one, to
build a new church to the Hardcore in the ruins is to save this little corner of the
world. Two, Tiago is in reverence of the end of the
world made manifest and I sure fucking hope the time being surrounded by people who love
music will make him reconsider where he puts his faith. Three, considering Harry’s knowledge on
the Pale and that Tiago said he has been losing memories he no longer needs, as well as the
fact that this realization unlocks a thought that the amnesia was a deliberate choice,
we can safely assume that it was not just alcohol, drugs and brain damage that threw
your entire memory into the oblivion. Fourth, maybe all the failure in Martinaise
can be blamed on it! Well, no. It certainly doesn’t help and it does have
an effect on its surroundings, but there is so much more than went wrong. And as we discussed, it can be suppressed
by humanity. In the end, it all falls down on us, even
if it can be overpowering and unfair. Still, I can’t help but feel some familiarity
here. Absolute nothingness…odorless, colorless…containing
infinity of information within it, but not understandable to any person…a place of
religion built around it… Oh god fucking damn it, it’s the Kabbalah
again. Let me cook for a second here. So, in the kabbalistic Tree of Life, the topmost
node is called Keter, or the Crown. It is nothingness, and yet it is the starting
point of all creation. Containing all possibilities, but unknowable
to a human mind, it’s something we can know of, but not know about. It’s, well, it’s God. Now, there has been some information about
the world of Elysium released post-release, most notably this graph here - a theory on
the formation of the Pale. I think “theory” is the operative word
here, as I doubt the creators would ever give a concrete answer to a world built on differences
in perspective and uncertainty, and I suspect this is the working framework that Moralintern
uses, for reasons we will get to when discussing their side of this whole thing. But let’s take it at a face value here. There is information going backwards in time,
from future to the past, and there are people dubbed “Magpies” who are able to parse
it and create Novelty, something that has not existed in the world prior. And the side-effect of it is the Pale, a miasma
of the past, eroding matter. In other words, every sudden shift in status
quo destroys the world. And Magpies are definitely real, as not only
are there Innocences bringing human progress that should take centuries in a single lifespan,
but we also get things like a thought about Arno van Eyck throwing away his mixtape because
he may have seen it bring forth a future that he was afraid of, not to mention previously
mentioned Gary’s conspiracy theory of Seol tapping into the future to advance their technology. And there is certain dialogue down the line
saying the Pale is man-made. Now consider that the first Innocence, the
Perikarnaasian, the starting point of all written history in-universe, was said to invent
God and made all people equal before him. That his civilization was said to inhabit
a ‘super-isola’, implying that there was much more land before than there is now. Even accounting for the spread of the Pale,
they called it “The Western Plain”, implying it was located in one direction, not all around
them. And that there were people in other isolas
before being “discovered” by Mundians, and that given the obvious bullshit of race-science,
they are a single species in Elysium just like we are in real life, not a bunch of independently-developed
similar evolutions, like crabs are. Now let’s take a look at the Tree of Life
again. Let’s flip it on its head and rather than
assume the material world was created from nothing, let’s take it as the starting point. What if, operating under that theory, it was
nothingness that was made out of the material world? As a side-effect of those Novelties? Then Perikarnaasian truly invented God. And we are truly equal before it, for it will
be the end of us all. It may have not existed before, but once the
idea was created and permeated the air, it became true. If we can make Man from Hjelmdall exist, why
not the more abstract ideas like “The Divine” or “The End”? And we have made at least one more of it,
somehow. Granted, I am being dramatic and making a
wild assumption that the Pale is no older than written history, not to mention tying
a real-world theological concept that is not even mentioned in the game into it, but I
didn’t choose this way to live my goddamn life, it chose me. But I do think that the Pale having this infinity
of noise within it is, in some way, a deliberate choice. This game throws several languages at you,
you think referencing probably the best-documented mystical tradition is out of the question
here? Anyway, you can make it into a bass line for
the Van Eyck jam and boogie so fucking hard that you hear Revachol itself speak to you. A genus loci of the city, a fragment of the
World Spirit, speaking in cold winds, drops of pressure and shivers down your spine. And the dance is described as idiotic, free
of any reflection and so powerful it heals your body from the self-inflicted scars of
addiction. Noid was right. There is truth that is not expressed in words,
and the rejection of authority of being ‘sensible’ brings you closer to it. Twist by twist. Turn by turn. Your body says to itself and to the world
at large that there is a future, despite all odds. But dancing is tiring so let’s go talk with
some old people. Lena and Morell are an older, married couple
who arrived at Martinaise from Jamrock, staying at Gary’s place. And they are on a search for the Insulidian
Phasmid - a stick bug that imitates river reeds and that nobody believes to be real. It is professional for Morell, as he is an
actual, academic cryptozoologist, but it is also deeply personal for both of them - after
all, this bug is what brought them together. Two people on the dating scene well into their
adulthoods, united by a half-remembered childhood sighting of an enormous arthropod recounted
by Lena whenever she wanted to impress a boy. Morell is slightly less nuanced out of the
two, so let’s start with him. Despite what image you may have of someone
into things like cryptozoology, flat Earth and other “THE ESTABLISHMENT IS LYING TO
ME, PERSONALLY”, there is nothing but academic professionalism coming out of Morell’s mouth. He is intricately aware of how rigorous proof
needs to be to confirm a species of cryptid, and how many sightings were hoaxes or false
positives. But there were two confirmed species - and
that is all he needs to keep going. Even if he’s compromising his health and
overworking himself, he will go on. No matter how minor a lead may be, he will
follow it, even if he knows deep down that chances to succeed are a million to one. Because the truth deserves verification, not
being swept under the rug because it’s silly and other things connected to them were debunked. He will not rest until everything is either
confirmed or denied - and in the latter case, he will look failure in the eye and accept
it in every case…except for the Phasmid. Because that’s the one that Lena saw as
a child, that’s the one that drew them together. He may put up a front of having the same academic
distance to it as all other cryptids, but confirming that this one is not true would
hurt. Not just because his wife’s account rekindled
his faith in the field, but because he would feel, on some level, that he failed her by
not finding it. He could’ve gotten a job that actually pays
the bills, for one. Men will literally work themselves into an
early grave looking for a stick bug rather than go to therapy. Fucking mood. Lena is paraplegic due to an accident, but
she takes it in stride. She is cheerful, helpful, happy to talk your
ear off and a bit of a racist grandma - between Morell, her and Gary, we have a perfect spectrum
of cryptids taken seriously versus cryptids as a thin veil for bullshit race science. Definitely something to be said about how
entrenched that is into the whole conspiracy theory genre, considering Gary is their friend
and lodger and that every flat Earther I ever witnessed in real life was waving a gun in
front of the US flag. Lena is also more than happy to recount tales
of cryptids that sound more like…well, tall tales. She is a layman and does not have the same
aggressive scientific rigor as her husband. More importantly, however, she is also worried
- first about Morell being lost on the other side of the broken waterlock and then...that
her memory of the Phasmid was just her imagination. That her relationship was started with a lie
and what that means for those years of love and happiness. That rather than his eyes lighting up when
she mentioned the Phasmid, she’ll only remember slight surprise at the fact she is disabled,
as she didn’t mention it before arriving at their meeting. Because sure, the love is true and infinitely
more complex than just the two of them fancying each other due to a shared hobby, but that
was the initial spark - and if that was never truly there, she can’t help but wonder how
discovering that would change their home and the bond between them. Maybe not immediately, but over time, it would
erode the most beautiful thing that ever happened to her. And she is thinking that maybe never knowing
for sure is better than the cold sting that failure would bring. She leaves the scene on that note, even if
you try and convince her that their relationship is beautiful and doesn’t hurt you to think
about it, unlike love in general. And, well, we will have to leave Lena at that
for now. Before moving on, we need to consider one
thing - is communism a cryptid? Or even leaving the authors’ chosen dream
of the future aside, is any possible better world a cryptid? There have been several false positives and
hoaxes when it comes to utopias, after all - be it the promise of a classless society
dissolving into a military government as temporary solutions entrenched themselves into permanence,
cults promising beauty and truth but only bringing mass suicide, or even the thought
of life after death giving us solace after a lifetime of struggle that in reality gave
us such charming things like “A death cult has a lot of political sway on the world’s
main superpower and they crave the end of the world because Daddy is going to make it
alright”. Given the damage left in the wake of every
instance of these things, is it truly worth looking for a better future, do we truly need
to search for it, or is better an enemy of good enough? Should dreams stay inside our heads, never
to be seen in reality, lest they are crushed by the precariousness of this world? Whatever, we have a case to solve. Solve problems of today, dream tomorrow. Let’s go meet our primary suspect. Ruby is the main suspect throughout a large
chunk of your investigation. A truck driver with short red hair, a truck
cabin full of posters with movie starlets in suggestive posing and attire, a lot of
technical know-how about radio operation and the Pale, she is someone that catches your
eye and sticks in your memory quite easily. Which makes her a perfect patsy, given the
fact she’s neither the killer, nor the mastermind behind the fake hanging. She just doesn’t fit in - among other truck
drivers, the Hardie Boys or even as a drug trafficker. But let’s take it in a semi-chronological
order. First, she was coordinating the operation
for La Puta Madre, the drug kingpin of Revachol - the kind of man to make a snitch dig his
own grave while wearing a dirty RCM uniform. She was good at her job, enough to gain respect
from the man himself, enough for him to give her a courtesy call to inform that he’ll
be coming after her after defecting. Definitely more than he would give a random
schmuck that crossed him. But rules are rules, especially when there
are no rules. Currently, Ruby is employed by the Union as
the coordinator of the whole drug smuggling operation. Her truck serves as a command center of sorts,
with a set of radio frequencies used to monitor and course-correct a fleet of trucks. She is also, understandably, paranoid as all
hell - thinking that Union will only protect her for as long as she is useful to them and
not a minute longer, swapping hair colors constantly to keep people off her track. One may wonder, why did she switch employers
if she kept slinging drugs, but I think this may simply be the fact that the Union does
not bury people alive or strike fear into the hearts of everyone that hears them mentioned. They may be a mob, but they’re not La Puta
Madre. It’s also clear she does have a conscience
- if you walk into the Feld building ruins to confront her alone, you just die, as she
believes you are a peone of her former employer there to get rid of her, but if Kim accompanies
you, she just uses the Pale latitude compressor to cause both of you enough pain to incapacitate
you and slip away. Hell, she tested it on herself to make sure
it works as intended and dials it down after a while due to the visible anguish it’s
causing. She doesn’t want to be a killer if she doesn’t
have to. She’s also on good terms with the Hardie
Boys, who even considered giving her membership into that neighbor watch, and if she thinks
that they sold out her location, it stings - even if she anticipated it and accounted
for it. She also fooled around with Klaasje and took
the later rejection from her in good faith, and the discovery that the blonde framed her
hurts a bit too. She thought that sharing a few drinks and
some intimacy would at least make them close enough to not be stabbed in the back by a
woman who can stage a cover-up in seconds after witnessing a murder of her lover. In retrospect, it makes sense that it wouldn’t. But it doesn’t make the realization taste
any less bitter. Finally, she is suicidal, having her finger
on the eject button just like Harrier does. And for similar reasons, too - the thought
of having control over how and when you die is intoxicating. For you, it’s more about having people regret
having a hand in turning you into such a mess, for her it’s more about being able to prevent
anyone else from getting dragged into her problems, but ultimately it’s all rooted
in the desire to have control over that final moment and how it will impact others. The problem is, both the truck-driver and
the detective thought about it so much that it stopped being an idea and became an option. A priority option at that. People not respecting you? Gun in the mouth. Ruby’s death ray getting smashed and her
suddenly being at risk of being caught? Gun to the chin. They’re both used to doing it, even if they
obviously never pulled the trigger. But once all the prior steps become routine,
the last one is so much easier. And to save Ruby, you need to give her another
option. Just let her walk away. Because that is the one thing she needs to
reconsider something she was picturing time and time again before. A scenario she didn’t even think of when
imagining this situation. You know, to get a little personal, when I
was a teen and a young adult hearing about how terrible retirement options are in Poland,
I used to joke that I hoped the money would at least cover the cost of some rope. That joke gets way less funny when you get
older, so I try to not think of it anymore. You kinda realize that being dismissive like
this stops you from actually working towards solutions that would be actively helpful. Even if it’s initially a joke used to relieve
anxiety regarding an uncertain future, one day will be dark enough that you will remember
the words but not their context. Well, since the topic got dark and Ruby isn’t
the killer, let’s talk about real darkness next. Dora Ingerlund is your one true love, impossibly
beautiful, a woman that defined your entire life. One whose presence was so obviously a part
of you that the very idea of going on without her in your heart is unbearable. And she left you, leaving you in Revachol
and flying to Mirova, in Graad. It’s been six years and it still hurts. The future together that never will come true
haunts you - after all, we don’t tell ghost stories of those who died content in their
beds, but those who still had a lingering attachment to reality. A spectre is not just a spirit of the dead,
it’s a promise unkept. Dora haunting your dreams is made all the
worse for two reasons. One, she was a fixture so permanent, that
her image in your mind is conflated with that of Dolores Dei - mythical, everpresent, radiant
and unknowable. Your own mind put distance between the two
of you as much as she did by physically moving. She is no longer a person, but a figure, a
god in human flesh. The feeling of abandonment has to be all the
worse when you feel the impersonation of World Spirit herself left you. Like this one event just made you stop being
a part of the world itself. You are completely disconnected from everything,
but you still exist. And it hurts. It hurts so goddamn much. Two, despite being the Human Can Opener, Harry
cannot figure out what he could do to prevent this. Being richer, being more ‘normal’, not
drinking anymore, bringing her gifts in the form of her beloved figurines, none of this
works. She genuinely loved him at one point, but
she does not anymore. It’s as simple, and as incomprehensibly
complex, as that. She fell for him because of how cool he was,
a daredevil-type not caring about the world, smoking at a bus stop. And it was the same thing that frayed their
relationship - an undeniably cool decision to make the world better as a detective, growing
substance abuse like he was still a teen, financial hardship that came with all these
things. The man who can solve any mystery, find every
connection no matter how tangential, cannot ever discover why this happened. Because ultimately, he couldn’t have prevented
that from ending, not without stopping it before it even started by not being himself
in the first place. And if he cannot resolve the mystery of the
most important thing in the entire world, why continue being a detective? Why would he want to be this kind of animal
anymore? But no matter how hard he tries to forget,
including a full derealization courtesy of self-induced amnesia, it still is such a big
part of him. When thinking of home, he thinks of their
address at Voyager Road, not where he currently lives. When reading her words in a letter kept inside
his ledger, they overbear him and cause him to faint, right after having a flight of suicidal
thoughts. Not to mention, the image of Dolores Dei can
be incredibly easy to find in all of Insulinde. It’s not a good place for a recovering addict. But just like an alcoholic can’t stop doing
groceries and seeing the display of all the bottles behind the cashier, he can’t stop
living in Revachol, in an era of history defined by a woman so idealized that she naturally
represents his lost love. For anyone who is not Harry, Dora was just
a pretty middle-class woman. A regular person who made a regular decision
to break a relationship off due to it becoming really toxic on both sides. But what else is love, if not elevating our
fellow human beings to something that is much more? On that note, let’s talk about Her Innocence
a bit. Because her image in the world is…well,
idealized. It’s no coincidence that there were several
failed expeditions to the Pale on her orders before the successful one. She was just as capable of fucking up as any
of us, but the one success overwrote several failures in history. She wasn’t an infallible force of It, she
was human - but in their veneration, her contemporaries made her into much more, and much less, than
that. On the day of her coronation, her lungs started
glowing - with lungs in Elysium taking the role of a heart as understood by us, the symbol
of love, the spiritual center. She was also killed by one of her guards,
shouting that her discoveries were supposed to be made by humanity. In his eyes, she was no longer human. Forgetting to breathe for several minutes
when he watched her. Burning hot as a furnace when he touched her
body after shooting her. He doubtlessly loved her, in some way. How could he see her as something more than
a human being if he didn’t? I couldn’t help but notice that one of these
things is described in Sacred and Terrible Air. In one chapter, describing a bunch of teens
getting high on a new strain of amphetamines from Samara, a girl takes way more than the
proposed dose and burns up like a furnace. It’s pleasant, but it freaks her friends
and sisters out, because not only does she feel hot, her body temperature goes up as
well. So I feel like in those final moments, Dolores
Dei was in a similar situation, but her aide didn’t know about the cause behind that
phenomenon, only the effect. She was so much more than human, after all,
not a person that is flawed and could take drugs or overdose in any way. As Egghead said, the Perikarnaasian church
established by the first Innocence is about love. So is Hardcore. So was the mania surrounding Dolores Dei. But as her image put on top of the Dora-shaped
hole in Harry’s heart explained, love is also the mask worn by the greatest of darkness. To love, truly love, is to open yourself to
the possibility of being hurt more than you could imagine. No matter how fucked up the world is, it can’t
hurt you if you don’t love it. Which may make nihilistic disregard of everything,
the Pale itself, seem appealing. After all, you can’t be hurt any more if
you just cease to be. But I also think that we need to take a look
at the other side of this. Being loved. Which elevates you to more than you were,
allows you to do what was previously unthinkable. And I think that there is no doubt in the
fact that Harrier du Bois is loved. Not by Dora, but by his precinct, by Kim,
by the people with whom he crosses paths during the investigation, by the city of Revachol
itself - it tells him in no uncertain terms, after all. And that…can make him unbearable, honestly. A superstar cop, disregarding those who give
him this strength by telling them to fuck off cause they’re cramping his style. Seeing the heights of his achievements, but
not all the hands that dragged him there. To love without being loved leads to ruin. To be loved without loving back does the same,
just slower and with less heartbreak for the object of love. Only when both of these things meet can we
truly realize how much we can do. Something, something, dialectics, something,
synthesis - listen, I’m not re-reading Hegel in full for this video to make this sound
smarter, I already spent way too much time getting here. Anyway, let’s talk about those who love
Dolores Dei the most. The Big Bad. The one physical representative of the Moralintern
that we talk with is Charles Villedrouin, or as I will refer to him going forward, the
Sunday Friend. He’s in Martinaise on an unofficial capacity,
which is to say to get his willie wet. He’s a bureaucrat through and through, working
on endless meetings and graphs to make sure the price of the inter-isolary real is stable
and that the inflation goes neither too high or low, to ensure economic growth while keeping
the prices of necessities affordable. And he’s so lost in that abstraction that
he genuinely cares nothing for people themselves. He knows that the man he’s sleeping with
is studying arts, but not any of his works or opinions on the subject. He can recite the GDP of Moralintern nations
by heart, but he won’t tell you anything about the culture, cuisine or tourist spots. And he’s very sure that Revachol will become
a member state of Moralintern, despite non-core nations never achieving that and the blatant,
aggressive poverty right outside the window of the room he’s in, completely ignored
and unmanaged by his own organization. Hell, during the Moralist vision quest, he
takes a sight-seeing tour through the war-torn ruins, admiring the history on display. People are trying to live there, my man, I
agree that history is important but can we get those buildings photographed and renovated? But there is still a human being under that
mask of statistics, trivia and generalizations. Strike at him personally by implying he is
connected to the murder and watch the facade crumble. He will get angry, demand your badge, drop
all the roundabout speeches and get directly to the point. There is a person underneath that mask of
facts and logic, explaining away all of the world’s ills. Too bad you have to slap it off to see his
face, even for a brief moment. The Moralist thought postulates the existence
of the Kingdom of Conscience. A moment in time where all the problems will
go away and we will get there incrementally, in time. After all, so much blood was spilled by people
trying to make changes too quickly. Don’t make a statement, don’t rock the
boat. We’re on a good course and we’ll get there. Only for the full internalization to go - no,
nothing will change. The status quo is god, and if you come across
an opinion, discard it. This is not about making things better, it’s
about control - over the world, and yourself. If you insist everything is as it should be,
that everything in our world is reasonable, that this is normal, you will have that stability. And you need to be stable so fucking much. Look at yourself. Say “none of the above” and heal 1 morale. The Coalition airships are where they need
to be. The Moralist vision quest involves contacting
the closest thing there is to direct line with Moralintern itself, one of the airships
above Revachol, to establish a committee of responsibility for the fate of the city. The things are getting unreasonable, with
all that political tension brewing and a hole in reality a hat’s throw away from it all. Someone in power should really do something
about it. Before discussing the talk with Airship Archer,
there are some things of note about the process. You use the statue of King Filippe as a huge
antenna for communication - once again, the vision quest uses the monument as a symbol
for Revachol itself, and here it is used instrumentally, as a tool. Moreover, you can stick a sword on it to improve
the signal, and putting it in the horse’s mouth is actually more beneficial than putting
it in Filippe’s hand - a thing that is beneath the notice of Moralintern, as you get it from
the impoverished Net Picker, and an animal viewed as nothing more than means of locomotion
actually help you get in touch with the Powers That Be. Finally, there is some entroponetic interference,
words from the Pale buzzing along the static, including some words from Kim that he doesn’t
remember saying…because he hasn't said them yet. But you can hear them again, verbatim, when
inspecting a generator at the end of the game. But it’s also not a certain event, as he
can get shot and hospitalized, so you can visit the generator with Cuno or just by yourself. The information in the Pale is not just an
echo from the past - it includes possible futures as well. I am aggressively pointing towards the Tree
of Life diagram again. When you finally get to speak with a signaler
aboard Coalition Airship Archer, she talks using “we” almost exclusively. She is not a person, she is a representative
of something much larger than her - but with high Inland Empire, you can get under her
skin by guessing what the name of the actual person is. The “La Responsabilite” part of the discussion
with her is not very important - if you focus on the rising tensions between the Union and
Wild Pines, her superiors dismiss it as a local affair, even if she clearly sounds distressed
about the situation. If you mention the 2mm hole in reality, a
contingency protocol kicks in and another ship swoops in to take you for questioning
- this is game over and Harry is never heard from again. It’s unclear if this is due to him being
disposed of or integrated into the faceless structures of Moralintern. But the case will not get solved without you. With godly Shivers, you can even hear Revachol
pleading with you to stay, as you are needed in that city, not somewhere else. What’s much more interesting is the chat
you can have about Moralintern’s protocols, structures and beliefs. One question is particularly poignant - the
signaler says that this world is the only one she knows, but what do you think of it? After all, you, dear player, know at least
two worlds now - that of Elysium and the one you live in. Is Elysium completely alien and weird? Perfectly in line with our own world? And is that being “in line” a source of
comfort or anxiety for you? But as for the Moralintern itself, they operate
on the assumption that everyone will be reasonable. That weapons of mass destruction in the hands
of the powerful are a good thing, because the possibility of mutual eradication keeps
everything civil. That history will go roughly in the course
predicted by them, and with several contingencies in place to course-correct if the events ever
get too *unreasonable*, with them squashing the Commune of Revachol being implied to be
one such contingency. It’s also why I think the theory of how
the Pale forms is the working theory of Moralintern - any Novelty is a risk of more Pale developing
and engulfing the world. As such, we need to SLOWLY get to the future,
and nip anyone who can accelerate the process in the bud. Don’t worry, they’ll solve history. In 3000 years, give or take. It took 8000 to get to the point where we
are, so really, we’re most of the way there. Don’t rock the boat. Trust the course. Don’t think about how there needs to be
a future in the first place for their theory to work, so the ideas they are so deathly
afraid of need to come from somewhere, they don’t just get ripped from the future wholesale. During one dialogue tree, she also asks you
if you’ve ever been to Advesperacit, the city where Dolores Dei was crowned. Describing the feeling of awe and wonder in
seeing the sun set there, and thinking “This was all for you, for this very moment”. Which you can interpret as an expression of
belief in the system and how things are better than they ever were before or, you know, spitting
in your face as you sit in the middle of a collapsing district of a city torn apart by
the Coalition and robbed blind to this day. It’s easy to say that a moment of beauty
was made for you when it literally was. At the cost of so many others. This right here is the heart of Moralintern. The project inherited from Dolores Dei by
people who love her so much that they do not see her as a human being. They continue her perceived role as a deity,
elevating themselves above humanity by cutting themselves off from it. Is there something ominous about them? Yes, but not because they are alien and unknowable. It’s because they WISH they were alien and
unknowable and will do everything they can to project that image. A conglomerate with individual people obscured
by the system at large. But there are humans in it. So, so many human beings, trying to incrementally
cut their faces off to become a force of nature. They are scared. Scared of anything knocking this current “normalcy”
off balance. Of their own human fallibility. They will not roll the dice, follow that violent
act of coming up across one possibility at the cost of all others - but they will lunge
across the table to punch anyone who does in the face. The very idea of a pocket of the Pale in the
isola that they did not account for is so terrifying for them that they have a whole
contingency protocol in place to manage it and unlike with anything else, they act immediately
to put it into their equations. They are not scared of the end of the world,
or violence erupting in the streets, or the suffering happening on a daily basis in the
world. They are scared of failure. That Dolores Dei’s actions were not the
right course for humanity’s happiness. That for all the love that we put in her,
the Embodiment of the World Spirit did not love us back. But there was one more thought that occurred
to me when I saw Harry stand on top of that stupid monument, having an airship that he
summoned with his voice put a literal spotlight on him. On top of his world, illuminated, alone, with
the power to set the course of history with his words alone. Is- Is Harrier du Bois a goddamn Innocence? Now, this is a charged term, so first let’s
clear it up. As it works in the universe, the Innocentic
system is clearly a Great Person Theory in all of its bullshit. For one, there have been a total of five of
them by the time of the game’s events, and two of them - Erno Pasternak and Sola - were
deemed to be “fake/anti” because their vision of the future was either crushed or
they did jack shit, respectively. That’s a 40% failure rate right there. Moreover, it’s quite interesting how there’s
7500 years between Perikarnaasian, the first one, and Franconegro, the next ‘real’
innocence. Imagine if Napoleon decided that he’s Jesus
reincarnated and everyone agreed with him, that’s what we’re dealing with here. And Franconegro is *clearly* Napoleon, a man
so beloved by Hegel that- you know what, let me just quote him: “I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding
out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see
such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches
out over the world and masters it.” But nevertheless, all of these people were
real, embodying the spirit of the times, the sensation of the direction the world was heading. If not through supernatural means, then through
societal expectations and simply being the right person at the right place. First, we desired for there to be something
greater than ourselves, that gives our lives meaning. Then, bloodshed and mastery over others. Then a sense of unity, a common identity called
a nation. Then discovery, both in expedition and sciences,
progress towards a kinder world. And finally, with Sola, we didn’t know what
we wanted - and so, she did nothing. And we also know that Magpies are probably
real. That one can glimpse into the future. We are almost certainly playing as one, after
all. Looking through that lens, what is Harrier
du Bois? He is a man that crashed and burned but got
back up. Who was ravaged by the war on his own body,
scars dealt by those around him and by himself. Yet here he stands, against all odds. Alive, breathing, with a future. A man capable of speaking with a self-proclaimed
fragment of the World Spirit, the air enveloping all of Revachol. Of understanding that city on such a level
that it feels like his bullshit becomes real. Someone born in a city where all political
and economical ideologies failed, who failed himself several times. And yet here he is. You can even see how he would be mythologized
if he WAS declared an Innocence - born in the last year of the Commune, with a name
like armor given to him by a single mother, as he is the child of Le Revacholiere herself,
introduced to us in his disheveled state by a lover, who has left the pages of history
after leaving him, as if it was her historical role to give us this absolute wreck of a man
embodying all of us. Because let’s be real, this is the most
relatable protagonist in all of fiction. And I’m saying that as someone with no internal
dialogue whatsoever. If the final dream happened to me, I would
try to obliterate my entire sense of self with drugs too. If an Innocence is meant to represent centuries
of history compressed into a single lifespan, should there not be one who failed and yet
kept going to become something completely different than what he was before? A period where we throw up all of our history,
good and bad, up in the air and decide which fragments to catch and which to let fall? At the moment in which the game takes place,
your thoughts describe the lack of an Innocence as “humanity being left all alone”. One day, I will return to your side. Of course, he would never receive such recognition
officially. He is a working class man from a bad part
of a bad city. He’s not from Mundi and he does not claim
to have as intimate knowledge about the rest of the world as he does Revachol. The system only accepts Europeans who can
make bold claims about the entire world. The people responsible for it will not even
know he exists. But boy oh boy do you wanna know who DOES
get chosen 20 years later? Sacred and Terrible Air is a novel taking
place in the 70s, 20 years after the events of Disco Elysium. I don’t intend to tell the story beat by
beat, as it is a vibe that needs to be experienced first-hand, you can find a link to a fan-translation
in the description of the video. But as for the rough outline: In the socio-democratic
nation of Vaasa, in the Katla isola, four sisters just disappeared out of thin air. Twenty years after the fact, three boys that
were their schoolmates still can’t move on from that fact. They were close, and the lack of closure hurts. The narrative keeps jumping between the ‘past’
and ‘present’, and at some point they just mold into a single, indistinguishable
blob. And like halfway through the novel, we get
an internal monologue from Saint Miro, the current Innocence. Remarking on how he is the reincarnation of
the previous five and always embodied the will of the people, not their spoken wishes
but those told to him by that sacred and terrible air surrounding all of us. Saint Miro is the Innocence of Nihilism. Putting in a single lifespan what should have
taken millenia - the end of us all. Yeah, you know how if you have the Cop of
Apocalypse copotype, Revachol warns you of a nuclear missile hitting the city in the
future? That’s him. You know how upon meeting Kim, you can say
that there are 5000-something days left, or roughly 27 years? That’s Saint Miro too. Fucker literally ends the world. So much for Moralintern’s doctrine of everyone
in power being reasonable. The Pale engulfs all. And the literal apocalypse does not take our
protagonists off their course of finding out what happened to the girls they knew, because
if all is going to end anyway, they want to at least finish what they started. No truce with the Furies. Allegedly, the book is numbered as #0 on its
spine, and it was supposed to be an introduction to a larger series of novels, killed by abysmal
sales. I wonder if they would take place beforehand,
or if there is a future after all, a new world emerging from the Pale. I definitely think that if the games would
continue after Disco (Please), they would give us at least an attempt at course-correcting
this. After all, in games, the possibilities are
endless and it’s the roll of the die that determines which path History will take. Especially considering that the Pale is not
the cessation of existence in the books - a character engulfed in it is described as “becoming
a mass of protein”, so it feels like it’s a death of meaning and identity before anything
else. And, as we discussed, even if the end is inevitable,
it can be held back. But it is up to humanity to do so and if we
fall into nihilistic ideation, some fucker will speed this up for us before we say “Wait,
no”. We also get Ignus Nilsen as a character in
the book, who is another character’s perpetual mental companion, as a gray mass of plasm
arguing the value of communism with someone who only looked into the ideology because
he hated rich people and I think it’s really funny. It’s also implied that he wasn’t actively
censored out of photos but actually yeeted himself into the Pale and is barely hanging
onto not being retroactively erased from all of time because a few people try to remember
him as much as they can. What a stupid dipshit. I love him. The idea of air as crucial to our understanding
of the world is all over Disco Elysium. Lungs are a symbol of love, Revachol speaks
in air pressure and cold winds, the computers compile files “on air” by using radio
frequencies. And I think it’s a very interesting choice
because, well, air is communal. It’s as much yours as everyone else’s. You breathe the same air as people you share
space with, you speak thanks to it, you can hear music carried by it. It’s always changing. An invisible, yet vital force all around us. In real life, of course, we have a load of
idioms that came to the same conclusion - love is in the air, wind in your sails, air so
thick you can cut it with a knife and so on. I think it’s important to notice how this
deliberate change was made. Because if it’s the air that dictates the
course taken by history, if it’s literally the voice of the World Spirit in the game,
then it’s all on us, equally. Nobody breathes out more air than others. It may seem like they do, that some voices
carry more weight than others, but it’s all the smaller voices carried by the wind
that shape the big ones too. There can be no change without the thought
of it permeating the air. If there was a God invented by Perikarnaasian
that we are all equal before, maybe it wasn’t the Pale after all. Maybe it was the air, now elevated to divine
status. The invisible coat of matter surrounding all
of us. Sacred and terrible. It’s a small thought, but one I thought
deserved its own section. Let’s get this case solved. There is an islet in the Revachol bay. This is the place where you go to discover
the truth. One such truth was already discussed, with
the final dream and the ghost of unfulfilled promises that haunt Harry. But there are two more truths that need to
be unveiled. The truth of the case. And the truth of the world. Iosef Lilianovich Dros, a political officer
of the revolutionary army, is the killer. An old man who deserted during the Operation
Death Blow and spent his entire life jumping between smaller islands, hiding from the Coalition
armies. He spent over twenty years on this one, the
anti-air fort he was supposed to man during that crucial hour. He is a hermit by choice, isolated from the
world because he cannot bear the thought of everyone else moving on. Of his pain upon witnessing the deaths of
his friends and the dream of the Commune crushed by the capital. He is, in part, a foil to Harry - a man still
haunted by his past and the failures of it. By his own personal failing that let him live
on while everyone he ever cared for was murdered. Refusing to move on from that, claiming the
material conditions for the revolution were lost. That there is no hope and the world will wither
like him, sick and forgotten. He is blind even to symbols of sympathy to
the revolution shown by Martinaise, like the statue of Filippe being suspended mid-explosion,
symbolizing his downfall, not restored. In the darkest times, should even the stars
go out? They already did, answers Dros. Even so, his actions betray his words. He held onto hope, dark as it may be, to one
day kill Rene - a monarchist parading in his uniform, right in front of the revolutionary’s
scope. He held onto it like a sweet treat for later,
for the darkest day when he would need that squeeze of the trigger to not point the gun
at himself. And yet, he never did. There must have been hundreds of dark days
on that islet, yet none of them were bad enough to take that shot. And the knowledge that Rene died of a heart
attack strikes Dros. He cared for that angry cunt, in his own way. To care about another person is the most human
thing there is. He also desired more, in the form of Klaasje. It was a sexual fixation, but he did watch
her, day after day. He left her dried flowers without even knowing
why after the kill. There was some hope he saw in her, even if
he cannot articulate it. Some love, twisted as it may be. An urge to be at the side of another person
once more. There is one sentence that resonated with
a lot of people: That once the Capital takes off its mask of humanity to do the deed, just
for a second, to murder the kindest people you ever met with fear and power in its eyes,
you will see. That the bourgeois are not human. Except…that’s bullshit. And I’m tired of people treating it like
it’s not. Let’s phrase it this way. Imagine a woman, troubled and with a long
history of doing bad things, peppered by an ungodly amount of drugs. One day, at the end of her rope, she meets
a man. Brutish, aggressive, blood soaked, yet she
sees something more in him. Something beautiful. And as they are together, you could even say
“as one”, a man she never met kills him. Out of spite, anger and frustration. Out of entitlement to her, to punish her. The killer can tolerate seeing her ruin herself,
but not in the embrace of that…thing. Am I talking about Klaasje and Dros, or am
I talking about Le Revacholiere and the Coalition? Of course, the scale is astronomically different,
but I think to deny the humanity of the actions of the Coalition is to deny the humanity of
Iosef, and I cannot abide by that. People made those horrible decisions in both
cases. In both cases, they may wear a mask of that
choice not being dictated by human impulses but as a last revolutionary act of aggression
against a fascist hired by the capitalist Indotribe or as a calculated operation for
‘the sake of humanity’ on a neat spreadsheet. Both of these are masks put over jealousy
and anger. Both Dros and Moralintern stooges wish they
were not human. But that is not a mercy given to either of
them, or any of us in general. And that would be a horrible note on the nature
of humanity to end on, but there is one more truth located on this islet, a few steps away
from Dros. The thing that kept him here and intoxicated
on his youthful, revolutionary zeal for all these years. The Insulindian Phasmid is real. It’s right there, chittering in the reeds. A miracle, something thought to be impossible
because all these other cryptids were debunked - it’s real. Reality is more than what we predict it is. Because basing our vision of the world on
nothing but past experiences is playing with probabilities at best. But truths are not something that’s probable
or improbable. They simply exist. If you manage to get close to the Phasmid
and speak to it through the power of your IMAGINATION like you did with the corpse,
the discussion is…well, peculiar. Be it truly the thoughts put through by the
phasmid or just Harry’s realization upon seeing it, it doesn’t really matter. Because the ideas put forth are quite simple
- it’s just an insect. Humanity is the true miracle, one that we
take for granted because of the fact that we are it. But in the scale of all life, how special
is a species of beings whose thoughts are so complex that they infect the very air around
everything? The Pale is also of human origin, it didn’t
exist before us - and it’s those very thoughts that make it happen. There is nothing that eats thoughts and they
will asphyxiate the world at this rate. And we will wipe out those other beautiful
things without even noticing. We kinda need to get our shit together as
a species. And holy shit, dude, move on. Imagine if you never witnessed this stick
bug beauty because you wallowed in your past non-stop. There is so much more wonder in your future. Be glad that you are this kind of animal. For no other animal is as miraculous as you. This is the truth shown by the isle. The ugly and the beautiful. The mundane circumstances of socio-economics
that put a man in this desperate, isolated state and the miraculous realization of just
how complex the world is, how much wonder the future may yet hold. We are forever between those two forces, the
past and the future, existing in the present. At the invisible, empty space outlined by
these two opposing forces of history. Infinite in possibilities, despite being nothing
at all. And even if you’re cynical about that infinity,
you have to admit it’s the only place where music and dance exist. That’s pretty hardcore. Looking back at the script, I do realize how
silly it may seem to treat a video game about a fictional world with fictional characters
like it’s the source code of reality itself. And to those possible accusations I just want
to say - hey, fuck you. Of course it’s idiotic. But I also think that something this sincere,
this open about its soul needs to be celebrated. It’s not even about the authors, any work
is a separate being from their creators, it’s like saying I know a person by being good
friends with their kid. And I really like this kid. I think their future is bright and they’ll
do great things. I was also told by a few people, hi honey,
that I should split this video into parts. I hope that if you have reached this point,
you will understand why I wanted this to be a single, holistic take of the whole game. Just like cigarette butts in the sand on a
beach being left by the culprit, everything is connected to something else. For a moment I pondered on whether to draw
parallels between Revachol and Poland, because the sense of failure in the air is fucking
palpable here. But you know what, maybe it’s just the national
spirit of martyrdom talking again, it’s definitely better than 30 years ago. I certainly don’t live among ruins and I
think other people are more qualified to find beauty in that through Disco than I do. There is still much work to be done to make
this place better, though. There always is. I wanted to harken back to reality for a moment
here, talk about the sad truth of the IP being stolen by goddamn vultures, or about how “staying
vigilant” would ring hollow as there is a genocide actively taking place as I’m
writing this holy shit what are we doing. But I think any call to action like this would
fall flat. Instead, let me phrase my conclusions in the
following way: Our thoughts and actions are carried by the
wind. Every word we say, and those we stop ourselves
from saying, have an effect. Small as it may be, the more voices there
are, the more they resonate in the air. You have an immeasurable, miraculous power
at your disposal. Do what you consider to be best with it. And remember that it, and in turn we, are
alive, changing and volatile. You cannot hold a miracle still in your hands,
only its corpse. And as such, the work towards a better future
never ends. Humanity, have faith in yourself. You are loved. Finally, we’re at the end! Thank you so, so much for bearing with me
for all these hours. Before you go - the thumbnail for this video
was made by Ranveld. If it enticed you to click this video, give
my boy a follow. This massive undertaking was made possible
thanks to the support of my Patrons, now visible on the screen. Absolute, massive thanks to all of them for
sticking with me despite breaking the promise of monthly uploads twice. Going forward, I’ll probably relax a bit
with the deadlines, but I hope projects like this are worth it. Happy new year!
