my AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Belerion/works
Millennial dysthymic disaster of a human. Born in the shadow of the Cold War and Chernobyl. She/her. 🇸🇪 Nazis and TERFs fuck off.
I follow the old ways (forn siðr) of Scandinavia.
Disco Elysium (my current obsession), Warhammering since '98, metal-head, thoughts of Anarchy and shitposts.
Wh40k armies: Iron Warriors, Drukhari, Space Vikings, Space Vampires and magenta-flavoured Black Legion.
Been here since 2010.
One of the less discussed aspects of Disco Elysium which I like, is the way The game depicts Joyce and Evrart is completely flipped as you play the game.
Joyce and Evrart are mirror images of a sort, but we see how their actions are interpreted differently based (in my opinion) on how theyre respectively depicted. Evrart is morbidly obese, has a facial deformity, appears unkempt, has an unpleasant voice, and is passively aggressive in a grating way. In contrast, Joyce is attractive for her age, well-dressed, prestigious, and speaks in a refined manner. As disappointing as it may be, humans are unfortunately harsher towards people they consider unpleasant.
And so, despite both withholding vital information, “asking” you to compromise your professionalism, wanting an escalation of conflict, and lying about their true motivations/role, the Fandom is more favorable to Joyce while viewing Evrart as an insincere and corrupt mob boss.
But as the game progresses, the player can unveil further information. Joyce knows where the remaining mercenaries are but refuses to tell the player their locations, in one dialogue chain she is non-chalant and unconcerned that the mercenaries are a deathsquad who murdered, tortured, and raped innocents en mass. And most importantly, Harry can realize Joyce is at the top of the company and was one of the individuals who chose to respond to a strike with a deathsquad. When confronted, she does not deny this information, calls herself the face of the company, and accepts responsibility for the mercenaries.
On the other side, several skills claim Claire sincerely wants to better the lives of the citizens, is honest in his stated motivations for the youth centre, and doesn’t intend to make the villagers homeless. We also see several instances in which he offers aid to the people of martinaise, either giving them “filler” jobs or sending the hardy boys to help mentally unstable people like the pigs.
At the start, Joyce is depicted as a respectable businesswoman and Evrart as a contemptible mob boss. But at the end, Joyce is depicted indifferent to the violence she caused, and Evrart is shown to be sincere in his beliefs and goals.
“They often, but not always, take the form of a Police Procedural. The Hero is often an Anti-Hero; typically a Defective Detective. […] The genre arguably originated with Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall’s Martin Beck novels, which introduced many of the concepts and conventions, such as deconstructing the clean surface of the welfare state, dealing with older, down on their luck cops and social commentary and social realism, set in deserted sceneries in an unforgiving climate.” (My bolding)
Doesn’t that sound familiar eh?
And of course, further down you find:
“Disco Elysium, though technically created on the other side of the Baltic Sea (ZA/UM are Estonian), blends the themes of Nordic Noir with New Weird elements, with the framework of a grisly murder investigation being used to explore both broader sociopolitical themes as well as the private inner demons of the Defective Detective player character in a world that may or may not be slowly willing itself into collective oblivion.”
Hey, man, c'mere. Listen. Get in real close, this is important.
You’re gonna make stuff again. You’re gonna make stuff you’re proud of. You’re gonna make stuff you’re excited to share. You’re going to feel that overwhelming drive to create, not just the frantic I want to want to you’re stuck in now. You’re going to have awesome ideas, and you’re going to make them into reality. You’re going to create again. You’re still an artist. You’re still a writer. You’re still home to the same passion you had before. You’ll find it again. It’s not gone. It’s just resting. Let it rest. You’re going to make stuff again. I promise.
For the longest time in Disco Elysium, I couldn’t figure out why Empathy was the stat chosen to represent Moralism, the other political stats made more sense to me.
Rhetoric is Communism, constantly arguing for you and dismantling the arguments of others, choosing to feel smart and miserable over acknowledging your hopelessness under capital.
Endurance is Fascism, purely physical, purely reactionary. No intellectual angle and not the emotions of your mind, but of your gut. The squirming, uncomfortable feeling of your insides telling you that everything sucks in your life because of *them*.
Libertarianism is Savoir Faire, the slimy show off stat, the ooze and groove and grinding of a real hustler. The kind of mentality that leads a terminally poor cop to walk around the most destitute ghetto in the city bragging about his net worth and his visionary money manifesting, to which normal people rightfully treat you as if you’re insane.
All well and good, all tracks, but then there’s Moralism, the political center, the Kingdom of Conscience. The stat for this would seem plainly obvious, Volition, right? The self control stat, the stat of temperance and rationality and measured action. The boring stat. Hell, Volition is the one who chimes in approvingly when you try on the Moralist pants. It seems like a perfect fit, but no, the stat for Moralism is Empathy.
Empathy, the stat that lets you, even forces you to feel for others. To reach them at their level, cut through to the source of all their feelings, the Superego. What does any of that have to do with Moralism? With slow, incremental progress and La Responsabilité?
At first, I thought it might have been an oversight, one Psyche skill swapped with another. Then I thought maybe it was meant as a subtly pro-moralist statement, that extreme political ideologies make it harder to connect with others, and being more “sensible” politically makes you more relatable. But that doesn’t really gel with the games stance on centrism, which is decidedly not positive, with the Moralist International depicted as a cold and dehumanizing force of oppression.
It didn’t make sense until I completed the Moralist political vision quest, which is by far my favorite out of all four. With Harry on top of the statue of Frissel III, begging and pleading with Coalition Warship Archer, it’s an Empathy check you have to pass to make the faceless drone on the other side of the radio see you. Hear you, acknowledge you as a person who is suffering, acknowledge the suffering of Martinase and Revachol under the unfeeling negligence of the Moralintern.
That’s when it hit me, Empathy is the Moralist stat because it taps into a universal human experience. Most people don’t have consistent political beliefs, even those ascribing themselves to more radical points on the spectrum. Most people have a complicated relationship with faith. But that moment of Harry on the statue, shouting desperately at a dreary sky for someone to please do something about this, that moment is empathetic to us all.
Regardless of political leanings, whether secular or spiritual, that gnawing existential dread is consistent. The world keeps getting worse and worse, and nobody with any power seems to care, every day we’re met with the silence of God and the silence of Capital. That’s why Empathy was chosen to embody Moralism, to recognize that deep down we’ve all felt that anxious longing. To look up at the sky and hope that something, someone. Anything, anyone, would please just listen and hear. Please just do something about this.
I like when people make evrart posts where they describe the ways hes supposed to be unappealing like hes fat and has an annoying voice and is mean and im like 🤤 Oh yeah rigjt
“evrart claire is a huge ugly fuck and yet you should hear him out” i agree but he’s cute too come on
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