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moe-mah · 15 days

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jean vicquemare to the loved one of an alcoholic

I've had a Jeanalysis post brewing in me for a while and finally had some time to sit and gather my thoughts. cw for drug abuse, familial abuse, all that.

Preface: I didn't write this post to argue that Jean is actually a good person who did no wrong. He's a hostile, crass, abrasive asshole whose behavior is unhelpful to Harry. But he's like this for a reason and it's understandable how he got there, especially for people who have been in similar situations. The characters in Disco Elysium are written with so much nuance and consideration (hell, even gary and measurehead get backstories that help put their fascist beliefs into the context of their lives), that to reduce Jean down to just "an irredeemable monster, no further discussion needed" does a disservice to the care and experience the writers put into him. I'm not sure why a fan of this game would want to do that. It also hurts people who have been in similar circustances, who are often left traumatized and struggling with the difficult choices they had to make.

Having an alcoholic loved one is a complicated situation. Alcoholism is a disease, it's not something you can love and reason a person out of. After a certain point, medical intervention is needed to safely wean off the alcohol. Developing an addiction is not a moral failing, it can happen to anyone and it needs to be taken seriously.

For context, I was raised by addicts. My parents literally met each other in rehab. I've lost family to drinking and drug use. I am managing my own substance use issues. I'm not bringing this up for pity, but to explain my perspective and why Jean and his struggles with Harry resonated with me so hard.

I've had someone I love and depended on, who I begged to just acknowledge that their drinking was a problem, tell me that they didn't want to get better. They wanted to get worse.

This was a recurring situation throughout my entire life with this person. So, hearing Jean explain that Harry told him the same thing… I felt it like a punch in the gut. A very personal trauma that I never told other people about was recited to me, verbatim, by a surly NPC in a video game. There are plenty of stories that deal with alcoholism, but I've found very few that show how it affects the people around the person with alcoholism, and DE is the only one I've seen that explores when that relationship moves past tears and becomes anger. Anger, heartbreak, fear, and the struggle to put up a boundary between yourself and someone you care about when they're in danger and you can't help them without hurting yourself.

If you've never been in this sort of relationship with someone it's difficult to understand it. I'm sure you can Empathy your way to the same conclusions, but you don't know how you would handle a situation you've never been in. For more insight, consider reading through some of these posts on the Al-Anon site (a support group for friends/family of alcoholics, different from Alcoholics Anonymous) to get an idea of the struggles people deal with when their loved one struggles with alcoholism (https://al-anon.org/newcomers/how-can-i-help-my/alcoholic-friend/).

You can do everything right, be the most supportive and understanding person they know, show them unconditional love and care, and that still isn't going to cure it. This is the tragedy of this relationship: Love and support can help someone that's trying to get sober. But if they aren't trying, if they don't have the ability or desire to recognize the problem and work to recover from it, there is nothing you can do. You have to watch your loved one commit a gradual suicide. Your instincts to help will enable them to drink more.

-> I want to make a note here about what exactly enabling means in the context of alcoholism. It isn't you ignoring their problem and putting a drink in their hands. It's doing anything that facilitates drinking, even things you do to keep them safe. e.g. I've enabled alcoholics in my life by giving them free car rides instead of forcing them to find a ride or, god forbid, drive drunk. It wasn't wrong of me to do that, but it did make it easier for them to drink because I was shielding them from the consequences of their drinking. That is enabling.

We see Jean do this.

I see people say that Jean hates Harry and wants him to fail. This scene contradicts that so thoroughly I struggled to understand how people would believe that. If Jean hated Harry, he could have reported his disaster right here and have Harry fired without setting foot in Martinaise.

But he doesn't, because he can't put up the boundary he needs to and step away from Harry. Jean sticks around long after he should have left. Even in the "bad ending" where Harry is left in Martinaise, Jean says he'll work with him again if he ever sobers up.

After everything Harry did during the Hanged Man case, Jean is still willing to work with him if he manages to get clean. That's not something someone who hates Harry would do. This is a moment where fayde screencaps fall short because Jean's line delivery is miserable here, and the animation of him leaving shows him hesitating and looking back. That's not hatred, that's despair. That's a man struggling to place the boundary between himself and his friend for his own safety.

And yes, Harry was abusive and dangerous to be around during his meltdown when they first got to Martinaise.

If you see someone drowning, and you swim out to help them, they will instinctually climb your body and drown you while trying to get out of the water. Lifeguards are taught this, and the correct course of action is to throw the drowning person a floatation device for them to pull themselves onto. Addiction works similarly: if you try to help the person directly, they will likely use your help to further enable their addiction. The substance they depend on is often self-medication helping them cope, and to lose it feels like drowning, like dying. Keeping their relationship with you is nowhere near as important as survival. You will come second to the bottle, always, until they decide to make a change themselves.

This brings up the ugliest part of having a relationship with an alcoholic. If the addiction has progressed to the point where the person rejects any attempts to help, you need to step away from them. Your concern and fear will not overpower a chemical dependence. Your attempts to help keep them safe will enable them. Sometimes, it's only after losing jobs and relationships that addicts have a "wake up" moment that drives them to finally seek professional qualified help. Other times, they don't, and they die. Either way, you will feel guilty. You will always feel so guilty that you aren't doing more to help them, no matter how many times it is made clear to you that they won't accept help. This is what 90% of my therapy appointments are about lol

You could involuntarily commit them, take away all their agency and put them in a facility that is equipped to force wellness onto them. But that can be a very traumatizing process and can be prohibitively expensive. For the purposes of this post as it pertains to DE, we don't know if facilities like that even exist in Revachol. The medical practicioner they have on staff at P41 is wildly dismissive of Harry's problems.

(someone drinking at harry's calibre, with his heart condition, is liable to die if they try to stop drinking cold turkey, this is extremely irresponsible.)

In fact… everyone is. Yes, even Kim, the most patient character Harry meets.

Revachol is a depleted, war-torn city-state under oppressive control, preparing to boil over by the time we meet Harry. The RCM, like our police, is not trained or equipped to handle mental health problems. The only insight we get into what mental health resources might exist in Revachol is Jean talking about how they haven't been able to effectively treat his chronic depression.

Jean is out of his depth and handling it poorly.

Jean, particularly, is underequipped to deal with this issue. It was a deliberate choice on the writer's part to make Jean ten years younger than Harry. They are partners, but inherently unequal. As a satellite officer, Jean's rank and career is teathered to Harry-- He calls himself a Lieutenant, but that's only because Harry pulled him into that rank during his own unsustainable, burn-out-inducing, case closing frenzy. When Harry burns out, Jean is left holding the bag. He's forced into a position of authority over his commanding officer in a way that mirrors the parentification that children of alcoholics often experience.

He's not supposed to be the one in charge, and he's clearly struggling. Contrast how he talks to Harry vs how he talks to other coworkers.

Mack and Chester openly ridicule him to his face and he barely reacts, more focused on asking about Harry. And I won't even bother with fayde screens for how he is with Judit; half of her lines are her scolding Jean for being mean and he never says anything to her in response, even though he outranks her. Look up any scene she's in and you'll see it. And when Kim speaks up, Jean is quick to defer to him. Jean shouldn't be in charge and I don't think he wants to be.

There's also this moment where Jean, while talking about a "hypothetical" precinct 41, he implies that his worthiness as Harry's partner was in question. He doesn't think particularly highly of himself.

Jean's relationship with Harry is complicated.

It's never explicitly stated how long Jean and Harry have been partners, besides this one check speculating that it was either a minimum of two years, or a shorter but very close partnership in the task force. The language is not certain at all but it's the best we have.

Regardless, they were close. The homo/life partner jokes Mack and Chester throw at him implies that they're normally a tight duo, work spouses even. And in the time they were partners, Harry and Jean developed the special task force, solved cases at an unprecidented rate, and then Harry crashed and took out the team with him. Jean has experienced Harry at his highest functioning and his lowest.

No matter how you play Harry, Jean is never surprised by what he's done. He always indicates that Harry has done shit like this before. He's seen this all before. He's seen attempts at sobriety, he's seen sorry cop and superstar cop, he's heard the Contact Mike speech enough to recite it himself. He knows Harry better than arguably anyone else we meet in-game.

He's put up with this abuse and still stuck around.

This one is extrapolation on my part, but I always took this following line as implying that he's tried doing these things with Harry before. (because I did the same thing with my loved one lol come on!! let's start jogging together to break your drinking routine!! it didn't work.)

And a few times he's attempted to warn Kim about these behavioral patterns. He warns Kim of something that explicitly happened to him (being told to fuck off) and later something that is implied happened to him (bewitched by Harry's charisma and skills as a detective).

And he is deeply hurt by what Harry said to him during his meltdown. He can NOT let it go. Even though Harry has no memory of it (which Jean doesn't believe, and in some endings remains convinced Harry was fucking with them about the memory loss).

Ever have someone who hurt you claim that they don't remember? And they expect you to move on? I have, and they usually blamed their drinking to absolve them of any responsibility. They were drunk, so the abuse they hurled at me didn't happen or matter. That's what Jean is dealing with right now. His partner, a mentor who got him his rank, a man he has been working closely with and felt unworthy of it, screamed at him that he wasn't good enough and ordered him away from the crime scene.

He ordered Jean and the others to leave. Jean did not willingly abandon Harry, and in the end he still struggles to leave him if he needs to.

Jean, having seen Harry have these episodes before, assumed that Harry went home sometime after they did. It was the weekend, they all went home. He didn't realize Harry was still in Martinaise until later, when Judit found his unopened monday mail at his apartment. By that point the water lock was broken from Harry smashing a billboard into it, so they couldn't even get back into Martinaise if they wanted to until it was repaired on day 3.

And Jean follows his order to not get involved in the case, but still shows up to keep an eye on him. The G-Bevy wig was an inside joke, an attempt to be funny to lighten the mood after Harry blew up at him. He probably expected Harry to laugh, deny the things he said, and then pull his team back onto the case. He did not, and Jean believed he was fucking with him by pretending he didn't know him to twist the knife after the fight on Friday. So he hangs around keeping an eye on Harry, waiting for him to drop the act. We also find out he's asked around town to get an idea of how Harry's been acting.

So he's not technically working the case, just kinda supervising. They're worried about him.

Unfortunately you spend the first few days doing side tasks, which lulls Harry's team into thinking nothing will happen. They've been watching you putter around with a cop Jean knows is capable of handling you. No one in Martinaise likes the RCM, so it's not like they'd call for more cops to come back.

(oh hey jean wasn't the one to suggest they leave harry.) He was willing to get a room even though Jamrock is 20 mins away. But they left anyway, right before the tribunal happens. No one in Martinaise likes the RCM, so it's not like they'd call for more cops to come back.

In the end, or in most of the endings at least, Jean takes Harry back. He can't help it. Unless you've played a particularly heinous drunk Harry and chased Kim off, he throws an arm around Harry and walks him to the car.

"He just can't."

Maybe Harry successfully stops drinking after this. Worth noting Jean is only upset about the drinking. Alcohol seems to bring out a particularly dark side of Harry that other substances don't, which is understandable. Booze makes sad people sadder, and sadness comes out as anger in men like Harry and Jean.

So maybe this time, now that he's been wiped clean, Harry can actually successfully tackle sobriety, or at least teetotaling. It's clear a big driver behind Harry's addiction was trying to dull the anguish over Dora. He also drank hard enough to blank himself temporarily before, after a few bad cases.

Maybe instead everything will come back again, and he'll drink harder. We don't know. Probably won't ever know because a sequel is unlikely.

Anyway.

I typed all this up because I haven't seen a lot of Jean takes from this angle. He's a representation of a man in a complex, and unfortunately fairly common, situation. Many people have had to make the impossible decision to cut an alcoholic they loved out of their life to escape the manipulation and abuse that can accompany drunkeness and addiction. It is a miserable situation to be in, and it was nice to see that facet of addiction explored in a game about an addict, written by people who struggled with substance use themselves.

That's my take on it, at least.

#ABSOLUTELY GENIUS ANALYSIS OP #holy shit #thank you for writing this #and im so sorry for your experiences #after playing a super drunk playthrough and ending with cuno i thought that they wouldnt take me back #after jean accepted me i thought 'ok this was the worst i couldve been and he still took me back? there's no bad ending then #I FOUND OUT NOW #so i guess if you end up alone and drunk he'll reject you? thats so fuckinhg sad #cause kim and cuno defend you #but when there's no one there to say 'he'll get better guys! he worked so hard'#and harry is all alone there to defend himself #which he cant because its the upteenth time hes been like this #jean finally moves on #its so fucked #but if harry wasnt going to get better #its the good ending for jean if he leaves him there

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