#Eastern Europeans

[songs-of-the-east]

Armenian Folk Costume

[hyperrspy]

why is that???

there are only two types of balkan kids: 1. you can watch blood and gore without flinching 2. you're THE biggest scaredy-cat the world's ever seen

and there's no in between.

i don't make the rules okay? just follow em.

[selenedistress]

Russian and eastern european RPGMaker game fanartists please keep it up I love you.

[bisexualgoth]

bonus: say in the tags how old u were in the tags + what's your legal drinking age or, if u never drunk before, feel free to say your age too + why, if you have a reason why you don't drink!

[idiotsonlyevent]

slavic chilchuck moodboard

[sidebee-hive]

Triptychs by Polish painter Kazimierz Sichulski:

1. The Hutsul Madonna, 1909

2. Adoration of the Shepherds, 1938

3. Adoration of the Magi, 1913

4. Spring, 1909

[kurumeki]

One thing that rubs me so wrong is that Ukraine won last year and UK has "graciously" agreed to host the event, since it cannot happen in Ukraine for obvious reasons, but rather than celebrating Ukraine and their culture and heritage (because Eurovision wants to be impartial), they shove UK heritage down our throats instead. Like... didn't we get enough of that this week with your silly monarchy thing. Give us a break. Celebrate Eastern Europe!

[k7ino]

hoffstrahm yuri and aihh a hoffman i guess

[ozcarr-remade]

Actually so pissed we only got like. 30 seconds of Dimitri before his personality got overwritten.

I really thought Copernicus was gonna be my favorite by a wide margin…. but the way they animated this guy was so charming, so I just don’t know anymore.

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Kolomyia: Ukrainian Easter Eggs at the Pysanka Museum 1 2

[centaurianthropology]

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!

[sappho-ilmarinen]

Eastern European games inspired by this post.

[solcattus]

Woman combing her hair, 1840

By Pavel Alekseevich Desyatov

[kevinarthur64]

ДаркСталкерс

[monaddecepticon]

Mathematics is gatekeeped by an elitist language that excludes the wider public.

And that language is English with a very thick foreign accent

[her-biness]

“I ruin people”