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liddlebirdnerd · 3 days ago

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Been thinking a lot lately about the dog Erik kills in KCD2. More accurately, how the dog Erik kills is symbolic of Erik’s loss of sanity and sense of self without Istvan, possibly gives us some insight into how he and Istvan built a bond, and is just altogether possibly the greatest cutscene in the whole game. KCD2 spoilers and a long autistic rant beneath the cut. Like seriously it’s over 2k words I’m so sorry

DISCLAIMER: I do not think Erik is a good person, that his actions were justified, or that he can ever be fully redeemed. When I speak of him being like Henry know that I mean due to the circumstances of how they came to be involved in the war, and that my Henry is no saint either. When I speak of him being sympathetic, know that I mean prior to his breakdown and actions post-dog scene and in terms of empathising with the massive amount of trauma he must have experienced, not in his actions towards innocent people.

Even if the dog did nothing but sit quietly in the corner, we would know that the dog is symbolic of Erik. Throughout the entire game, Erik is heavily associated with the colour white— his armour is white, his horse is white, even his hair is lighter in KCD2 than it was in KCD1 (which could mean nothing). There’s a whole other conversation to be had here about the significance of that colour in particular for Erik (a colour associated with innocence and purity for an antagonist who’s heavily implied to have been groomed at a young age???? Good stuff) but we don’t have time to get side tracked with that.

The dog is also completely white.

Which isn’t a coincidence. To my knowledge, there’s not a single other fully white dog in this entire game– every other dog is some combination of browns and white, kinda like Mutt is. Which means they recoloured an entire new dog just for this scene. Is that necessarily hard to do? No, but it means they intentionally created a new, all white dog, just for Erik to kill. Coincidence? I think not. To say nothing of Istvan’s motto– “the stronger dog fucks the bitches”. But the way the dog acts throughout this scene makes it even more clear that he’s a representation of Erik, both in the past and in this present moment, and it provides a lot of insight into how his relationship with Istvan likely began.

When Henry first shows up in the cutscene, the dog is barking, nipping at, and generally being a pain for Erik, who kicks and swipes at it.

It doesn’t do much– the dog keeps barking and snarling. Until Markvart leans down to pat it.

It’s what placates the dog into lying down obediently and quietly, just moments after Markvart starts petting him. He’s also doing this while talking about how “Sigismund’s armies will take care of that” in a menacing tone; I haven’t yet decided whether that’s significant too, or just coincidence due to the conversation that’s already happening in the cutscene. But it does feel significant to me that he’s showing the dog kindness while talking about sending an army to take care of Jobst and Liechtenstein.

We’ve obviously never seen Istvan and Erik’s meeting, and it’s unlikely we ever will unless at some point Warhorse makes KCD3 and adds backstory cutscenes for characters (characters other than Henry, no less). But what we do know is that Istvan “found” an orphaned Erik following a raid on his village, where his parents (and presumably everyone he knew/cared about) were killed by Istvan and his men, and took him in as a sort of mentor/Father figure. It’s pretty reasonable to imagine a young Erik was initially angry and aggressive from the grief and trauma of his village being raided, much like Henry can be.

Presumably, Istvan had to gain his trust somehow, and being an orphan himself, was almost certainly kind to Erik. Istvan, for all his dozens of faults, does care about him a lot, after all– it’s hard to imagine their meeting going any other way than this interaction between Markvart and the dog. A young, hurt, orphaned Erik, snarling, lashing out, quite possibly directing his anger towards himself like Henry does, but finding comfort in this older man who shows him kindness. Maybe Erik hid during the raid and blamed himself for not being able to stop them, or maybe he tried and failed, but escaped with his life. Maybe he ran, and Istvan found him when he came back to bury someone he cared about much like Runt and Henry. Can you guys tell I love the Erik/Henry parallels in this game?

This is followed by a great shot of Erik walking in the opposite direction of Markvart towards his horse. The dog stands and goes to follow Erik… but doesn’t. He turns back to the older man that showed him kindness after being kicked down, and follows him instead.

You can see the way it hesitates and turns back to Markvart better in the actual scene.

Now, it makes total sense for the dog to do this, you know, given Erik was just kicking him and Markvart petting him gently, but if we’re sticking to the idea of Erik being the dog, to me this is a representation of how Erik doesn’t really know who he is without Istvan. Rather than follow himself, and make his own decisions, he sticks by Istvan’s side as his right hand man, obediently. He was second in command in Vranik, and I’m sure a man as desperate for Istvan’s approval as we saw in KCD1 Erik took that job seriously, but he was still second in command. I don’t think Erik has strayed from Istvan’s side in a while, and maybe, much like the dog, he understands that being with himself is scary and possibly even painful. Because as much as people attribute Erik’s breakdown to Istvan’s death and a show that they were so in love that Erik went so severely off the deep end, you can’t tell me Erik was a mentally sound person before this.

Which brings us to the messenger bringing the news. Lord Toth is dead.

Alongside some of the greatest acting in the whole game as Erik processes this, another thing we get is near silence, until the dog starts barking. I haven’t quite decided how I interpret the dog’s barks, but I’m leaning towards the barking being representative of Erik’s pain bubbling to the surface, as the dog gets louder and louder until Erik draws his sword. It could also have something to do with Erik blaming himself, but I feel that takes a bit more imagination.

This is something Henry says to Erik during their duel, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something similar was running through Erik’s mind at this moment. He is all alone. And he doesn’t know who he is without Istvan.

Erik is silent, attempting to hold onto some semblance of sanity, but ultimately fails when his anger boils to the surface (it’s not lost on me that the dog’s barking gets to its loudest point here) and he kills the dog. Brutally.

With it, we also witness the death of Erik as he knows himself with Istvan alive. It’s the death of obedient Erik, of quiet Erik, honestly, of somewhat reasonable Erik. Before now, Erik was a surprisingly sympathetic character– most of the reason to hate him was that he was on Sigismund’s side and close with Istvan. Which I’ll come back to later.

We witness the death of his sanity. Because it’s only after the death of this dog that we get the beginning of his emotional breakdown.

Erik doesn’t visibly react until this dog is dead. He holds it together until he can’t anymore. And with the dog gone, we see just how far he can sink now that he has no master to follow, and no sense of identity without him. He becomes plagued with the need to take revenge on Henry.

When Erik runs off, we also get one of my favourite lines in the whole game.

Markvart says this, but he stands just a moment later and walks away, shrugging off what he’s just witnessed. “Shame about that dog”, but he leaves, distracted by something else, and leaves the dog’s corpse there, uncomfortably taking up the screen and shoving the disturbing image of its mangled body after news of Istvan’s death in our face.

And… is this not how many players feel about Erik? Is this not how the characters feel about Erik? That he's just Istvan's lover who's probably gone through a huge amount of pain and suffering, but nothing much more than that?

Once again, Henry in their duel, but let's not forget how perceptive Henry can be. He picks up on the fact Erik and Istvan are lovers just through the way Erik speaks about him. And Henry saw Markvart do this too. It’s no secret that Erik was likely groomed into his relationship with Istvan, looking at how he’s unlikely to be much older than Henry and seems to have known Istvan for years based on how close they are and how certain Erik is that his parents were weak and Istvan did him a service by killing them in KCD1 (something likely the product of a lot of manipulation of this poor, hurting thing Istvan took in). Even if you, like Warhorse, disregard this sentiment and choose to follow KCD2’s canon of those events, where Erik had no idea Istvan was behind their deaths, Istvan still hid that from him. Istvan still did it. Isterik is messed up no matter what angle you look at it from.

It’s something most people accept. But few people really think very hard about it. Few people really think about how Erik is just a Henry from another lifetime, a Henry taken in by a more sinister person than Radzig. “It’s a shame Erik suffered so much, but oh well.”

This scene, and “shame about that dog” is also incredible for another reason; it subverts the way we know the characters. Throughout KCD1 and early KCD2, Erik is not portrayed as especially antagonistic. He’s Istvan’s lover, but that’s mostly something Henry can use in the hostage exchange, more than a reason to hate him. Really, when discussing Istvan in KCD1, Henry’s genuinely quite curious as to the story behind Erik and Istvan, rather than outwardly hating Erik for being associated with Istvan. When Erik speaks of how Istvan killed his weak parents, and that Henry could never understand, he comes across, dare I say, sympathetically. I struggle to not sympathise with a man who looks to be barely out of teenagerhood saying those things, knowing what Istvan is capable of (they visibly aged Erik up in KCD2, or perhaps just made him resemble his actor more, but in my heart, KCD1 Isterik will always be how I visualise them), and I’m just putting it out there, that made me hate Istvan far more than any sword or betrayal of Radzig/Zizka ever could.

But Erik killing the dog? It’s what motivates so many people to hate him. Jim High, Erik’s actor, has said himself that it’s something people tell him all the time when meeting him, that they hate his character for what they did to the dog. Warhorse knows how audiences feel about dogs dying in media, and by having Erik kill the dog in this scene, he’s forever cemented as a villain to the audience before he even fully goes off the deep end with the Jewish quarter of Kuttenberg. It provides us with a reason to be motivated to hate Erik on Henry’s behalf.

In contrast, Markvart’s moment of sympathy towards the dog is something that really humanises him for the audience. We see so little of Markvart in this game, and he exists for so much of it as some evil bastard who killed Henry’s parents, someone who takes up an entire main quest of KCD1 with the sole goal of killing him. He is the main villain of the first game, and possibly even the series in Henry’s eyes, and a lot of players were foaming at the mouth to kill him for a long time. But for all we talk about his death scene humanising him, I see this one glossed over a lot. He’s not a bloodthirsty, completely evil man, foaming at the mouth over death, something his own death scene expands on but this scene introduces. The maid with the water pitcher gasps when Erik kills the dog, but outside of that, Markvart is the only one to get down to its level and say something about what happened. And once again, he’s the only one to show the dog kindness prior to its death.

Another part of the beauty of this scene is how many ways it can be interpreted. If your interpretation is different to mine, I’d love to hear it, and if you stuck around this long to listen to my yapping… honestly, I’m impressed, but thank you.

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