#eastern europeans things

[pierdutaintimpsispatiu]

let's make it clear: if i say 'step on me' i don't mean it in a sexualised western way, i mean it in a 'my back hurts and someone walking on it will solve it' balkan style kind of way

[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!

[purgetrooperfox]

comprehensive thoughts on the matter of "Alexsandr"

[moonmeg]

8th of March: *comes around*

My entire family: *floods my notifications congratulating me*

Happy international Women's Day, girls. I hope there's at least one man in your life who takes this day as serious as Eastern European men do 💐

[wanderer-clarisse]

characters from Rohan, from the chapter The King of the Golden Hall: Théoden King, Éomer, and Éowyn

[weedle-testaburger]

it's funny how americans can understand that not everyone who lives in a red state automatically agrees with the reactionary policies of republicans there, but not that not everyone who lives in a foreign country that does awful shit is automatically supportive of its reactionary policies

[i-write-hurt-not-comfort]

Hear me out: Ruki and Reiji are having an argument. It's messy. Ruki gets pissed off and his Romanian slips out and Reiji just FOLDS

PLEASE i've actually thought about this so so much. i'm 100% certain that Ruki curses Reiji out in Romanian when they're arguing or something, either by accident or to piss Reiji off because Reiji can't understand it.

one of my favourite things to think about is in like, a modern AU scenario which is based at university, and Ruki is an international student. obviously he's fluent in English before moving to an English-speaking country, but because he'd grown up in Romania, his English isn't gonna be perfect. and i LOVE the thought of Ruki pronouncing something really wrong and Reiji correcting him like the smug twat he is. so Ruki just calls him a slur in Romanian or something.

[musicalislife]

Why the plates? (I feel like most Eastern European household has the same plates😅.)

Video from Jure’s instagram story 2023.08.11.

[wis-art]

honestly i loooove northern english and scottish dialects they sound so cool, sometimes i wish i could speak with such charm, but i do not really want to make a mockery of anyone's accent.

[kino-rogers]

Hoodwinked is literally one of my fave films of all time and whenever i bring it up to anyone, they look at me like i'm making shit up

PLEASE TUMBLR, BACK ME UP HERE

[dear-ao3]

Olive oil for the dough of the pierogi? Are you like... Sure it works? It has different thermal properties than most other oil. Then again, I never tried this, during to a personal dislike for olives, and I'd be genuinely curious to know how they turn out.

Also, are you doing the Polish kind (small, white, can be either boiled or fried) or the Russian пироги (about a hand big, exclusively fried)? What stuffing are you doing?

bestie i just make them they way they are shown to me which is roll the dough, punch out circle with something round, fill, seal, boil for a few minutes and then freeze and pan fry with onion when its time to eat them

and the filling is not traditional. theyre my pierogis so i put what i want in them >:)

[pierdutaintimpsispatiu]

eastern european parents don't apologize. they start to act all nice and sweet all of a suden

[moodyseal]

Soup sounds so good in theory and it's cozy and warm and just THE winter dish but it's actually so underwhelming and miserable I'm sorry. It's like a soaked blanket. I wish I could like it but as soon as I get a spoonful of it I just go eëufhghhêblfj

[specialagentartemis]

May 15

It [my diary] is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere "modernity" cannot kill.

An effect we don’t really get, reading Dracula 100 years on: the clash between modernity and ancient superstition, the effect of the centuries past haunting the rational, modern, scientific world. The 1890s are long past to us, practically the image of The Past. Oh, those silly, repressed Victorians who put arsenic in their wallpaper and cocaine in their medicine! But in Jonathan’s eyes, he lives in high-tech up-to-date modernity. He has a Kodak camera to show the Count photos of the house! He writes in shorthand! His fiancée is a modern, working woman! Later, we see 19th-century medicine; Seward with his “modern” ways of treating the insane, Van Helsing with blood transfusions to try to save Lucy. This represents to them reasonable, rational, scientific modern knowledge. And the Count is a creature of ancient legend whom their modern science cannot defeat, and right now Jonathan is trapped in a centuries old castle that even with his modern knowledge and skills he can’t escape from, and that’s part of why it’s so scary.

[kaiasky]

frankly it is impressive just how bad the "full song" of planet of the bass is like it is very clear that the original was edited and produced to be tiktok-length and then u, seeing the success, hastily added a 30 second intro, a bad verse, and then repeated the tiktok-length song identically twice and called it the "full song". oh well. there's other songs

[daz4i]

it's been too long since we had a weird gay moment in bsd so. bones if you fuck up nikolai's Intimate Friend speech tomorrow i am coming for your knees