One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation. People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him. He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work. He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad. That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.
And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone. Look at Martinaise. Look at the world in which Harry lives. It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours. More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people. And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them. The buildings are still half-destroyed. The bullet holes are still in the walls. The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound. The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few. Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is. He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.
Harry is not unique in his trauma. He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied. He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM. Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets. The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines. The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is. Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’. It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that. Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating. Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads. The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor. They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die. Mental health care? What mental health care? Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist. There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists. How would they even start? If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest. Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol. He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father. So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.
To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative. Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.
All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta. If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!
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i was thinking more about characters Performing Gender, but not necessarily Transgressing Gender. I wound up focusing on Ned and Sansa bc I feel like I understand them the most but-
Sansa as a hostage is imo the most obvious (bc it’s so well done) moment of someone clearly Performing Gender but not being transgressive in that performance. Which isn’t to say it’s not a complicated performance; it’s a fine line Sansa walks between weaponizing her gender to protect herself without seeming too fake. She’s trying to placate the Lannisters by playing the perfect, dedicated, air headed betrothed because it’s the only defense she has - if she outwardly rebels, she will be punished in a likely violent and/or sexual way (which isn’t even conjecture - when she says “or maybe he’ll give me yours” Joffrey has her struck with an armored hand). She’s not quite successful in being convincing but that’s because it’s a rather extreme situation; despite no one believing her, she does make herself seem meek and stupid enough that no one suspects she’s plotting to escape with Dontos until she’s well away from KL. The fact that she even has Dontos to confide in is because of Sansa’s relationship with gender! When she saves him, she covers her rebellious slip by playing up Joffrey’s intelligence & his role as King; she reaches for “tools” of her gender AND of ~proper manhood~ to save a life and herself from another beating. Her retreats into the godswood and silence are very much Sansa attempting to recharge from these draining interactions, the same way a knight would need to stop and eat and rest after a fight. She is fighting, constantly, by forcing herself to stay within the narrow confines of a specific type of gender performance as a way of shielding herself from harm.
Ned yelling at Cat is another big one, and I’ve seen the scene referred to as Ned using his patriarchal power to scare Cat, which is a great description. It feels like a Performance because Ned is putting on this terrifying Lord Stark mask in an attempt to get Catelyn to stop asking about Jon (and Lyanna). This is not how he usually acts with those he loves! When Ned is with His People, he is welcoming of questions, curiosity, emotion, even transgressive thought (to a point! the idea that Ned is a feminist because he lets Arya learn to fight is Not accurate but you can’t deny he allows significantly more flexibility wrt gender expression than most of the fathers we meet in this series. the bar is in hell tho). Yet when Cat asks him about Jon’s mother, Ned scares her so well she stops asking & still remembers the moment bitterly over a decade later. And if that snippet we see through Bran’s eyes of Ned praying that Cat will forgive him does come after she asks (like it’s suspected), it’s clear not only that this is a performance he’s putting on & weaponizing against Cat, it’s one he does not like using as a weapon against someone he is close to. After using the power his gender gives him to cause harm, he retreats to the godswood and silence to pray and rest, much like Sansa. A spiritual cleanse, the way a soldier may pray after battle, to reset and reconnect Being A Proper Man to Being A Kind Man.
I think there’s something interesting in that two of the characters most widely defined by how well they adhere to Westerosi gender norms both dislike feeling like they had to weaponize their gender. They are exhausted by the performance, because it’s a performance. This isn’t Sansa getting excited over tourneys, or Ned teaching his sons to fight; it’s toxic masculinity, it’s structural misogyny. It’s something they’re good at, excel at, and connected to something they enjoy but when it’s paired with violence, whether done by Ned or done to Sansa, it crosses over in their minds from an innate part of themselves (The Gender) to a performance necessary due to survival (The Gender Role). And that after these performances, both retreat to nature & god as a way of resting and cleansing from the experience.
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Zephrah actively postpones ruidusborn births. It is believed that the actual number of ruidusborn in exandrian history is much larger than has been officially recorded because the stigma of it was so intense that people lied about it. Alyxian, one of the few recorded ruidusborn heroes of the calamity who received direct blessings from three different prime deities (our very own Changebringer, the Archheart, and the Moonweaver) , has been all but forgotten (read: likely erased) by history.
The Archive of knowledge that revealed the truth of Predathos and Ruidus was never some forgotten thing—it was intentionally hidden by the elites in Vasselheim. And we have no idea how long they have been operating with that knowledge. We have no idea what they have been doing with that knowledge, what silent wars have been waging for years or decades or centuries. But we saw what they were willing to do, in Hearthdell. We saw the violence and suppression they were willing to commit. We saw the pettiness of the exandrian pantheon in the Dawnfather’s response to Deanna’s: “Are you worth saving?”. In the Changebringer’s manipulative change of course in her pleas to FCG. In the Wildmother’s rejection of Opal. In the knowledge we have that Imogen spent so much of her miserable time in Gelvaan begging the gods to aid her to no avail—just for Kord to reach out only to demand that she not let them down.
Liliana’s point that Vasselheim and the other faithful elite of the world will hunt ruidusborn down to negate even the potential of this happening again isn’t new, it isn’t something this solstice and the machinations surrounding it caused, and it isn’t some unsubstantiated, fearful claim—it has been happening.
The vanguard—and Liliana—are unequivocally wrong in their means. But can you really fault them in their desire? Can you really fault the conclusions they have drawn from the experiences they have lived? If you spend your entire life being rejected by the people and the pantheon of your world for means you could not possibly control, would you not seek out someone and somewhere that would accept you? And if you found it, if some being that has been connected with you your whole life welcomed you home and wrapped you in an embrace that felt like your mother’s and says that it is starving; well, aren’t you, too?
There is likely a holy war brewing. At the end of it all, is it truly the sole fault of the people and not the organizations and society that expelled them?
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So I don't think this is actually the case but what if Eliza and Isaac's deaths werent over a petty amount of cash and a robbery gone wrong? What if, instead, Dutch had seen Arthur spending time with them, had perceived him slipping away as a threat: a threat to himself, his gang, his security, his family, afraid of losing his lead enforcer - whether he truly at that point did love him like a son, or not. And in his insecurity or fear or whatever other reason, he finds someone rotten, unrelated to the gang, and he pays them to murder Eliza and her little boy, so no one will ever tempt Arthur away from the flock, and he instead puts all his energy and time into the gang, the only family he has left.
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I'm still thinking about that post about how female characters and especially wlw and f/f ships are treated in fandoms because I got a reply that I deleted on my post about how all the Nein were big shippers on deck for Beau and Yasha that boiled down to "haha Caleb making a tower so the useless lesbians would admit they liked each other!" and it's like. He made the tower to Beau's orders. She had already asked out Yasha, who in turn had of her own volition written Beau a phenomenal, beautiful letter instead of a poem as recommended by Jester. This is factually incorrect and obnoxiously dismissive of a genuinely great dynamic and attributes all agency to a man. When you say shit like this you sound like you are Chat GPT. No new thoughts no time actually spent analyzing a relationship dynamic just "ooh i see a woman in fiction what is the phrase most associated with this ok done onto the next task".
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fundamentally the combinations of unhinged anti Arab racism and antisemitism that paint middle eastern people as inherently suspicious and crafty have fused with modern anti intellectualism under a nouveau-faugressive banner to say take the “in conditions of war all journalists are presenting particular sides, compounded by both press and national interests and the confusions of mass violence” (very true) to Therefor I Can Distrust What Every Journalist And Government Reports and go by Analogies to My Personal Experience and Vibes Alone (terrifying)
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the darkest of nights, in truth, still dazzles.
a halsin fanmix [listen]
01. Heart of Spring - david arkenstone | 02. Cé Hé Mise Le Ulaingt? / The Two Trees - loreena mckennit | 03. Pussywillows, Cat-tails - gordon lightfoot | 04. Maybe Tomorrow - f&m | 05. Don't Stop Me Now - queen | 06. I Was Born Under a Wand'rin' Star - bryn terfel | 07. A Tenuous Bond - derek duke | 08. Closer - nine inch nails | 09. Into the Darkness - jeremy soule | 10. Colorblind - counting crows | 11. Natural Light - ludovico einaudi | 12. Under the Greenwood Tree - royal shakespeare company | 13. The Grove - bear mccreary | 14. Blood Upon the Snow - hozier & bear mccreary | 15. A Quiet Darkness - houses | 16. Spellplague - alderfall | 17. Empty Chairs at Empty Tables - jonathan antoine | 18. Only Everyone Can Judge Me - crywank | 19. Blue Skies - kathryn calder | 20. The Buzzard - old blind dogs | 21. Constant Craving - k.d. lang | 22. The Cave - mumford and sons | 23. Jim Cain - bill callahan | 24. I Won't Back Down - johnny cash | 25. The Ash Grove - laura wright | 26. The Wind - yusuf/cat stevens | 27. To Someone From A Warm Climate (Uiscefhuarithe) - hozier | 28. The Logical Song - supertramp | 29. Tapestry - don mclean | 30. Big Yellow Taxi - joni mitchell | 31. Eat Your Young (Bekon's Choral Version) - hozier | 32. The Flock - david maxxim micic | 33. Changes - david bowie | 34. Ri Na Cruinne - clanaad | 35. The Moments of Happiness - ken page | 36. My Back Pages - the byrds | 37. If This Journey - tom hanford | 38. Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season) - Live - pete seeger
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