#i mean they have an achievement for jumping off the polyhedron how could i not love it?

[shitty-eyepocalypse-domains]

a hunt domain that’s just a *very* intense playground game of tag

Add in some corruption so thay you're playing tag with the plague and this is just Pathologic lmao.

[meyerlansky]

from reading the P1 dialogue trees, P1 daniil is often more approachable, pompous but well-meaning, definitely in the haruspex run where he and artemy are basically colleagues for much of the outbreak, but he becomes bitter and vindictive especially after learning his lab has been destroyed, entertains thoughts of suicide, and is swayed by the kains and their schemes. there's still good in him but I feel he undergoes negative character development

that makes sense, and don't get me wrong, i love me some negative character development, but most of the comments i see about p1!daniil are that he's "the most villainous of the healers," which just... does not square with my read of p2!daniil AT ALL. as a Consummate Villain Liker i like to think i know from villains and p2!daniil just ain't it. he cares too much, he's too invested in making sure a town he could just fuckin' leave doesn't completely succumb to a disease with [as far as he knows] a 100% mortality rate.

it also doesn't help that p1!daniil, from what i can tell, is... actively racist. from jump. in a way p2!daniil never matches, not even at his most fed-up and angry. p2!daniil doesn't get backpats for Not Being A Bigoted Asshole, but it IS imo a big difference in how their characterizations play out—every other conversation p1!daniil has with artemy in the haruspex route is "savage" this, "prehistoric" that, whereas p2!daniil is interested in learning the kin's language [i've already publicly lost my shit about the convo with the clerk in marble nest so i won't do a repeat performance of that now :P] and from what i can remember doesn't ever give artemy shit for using the tinctures or talking about the plague in the context of the lines instead of using more western methods/terminology. not to make excuses for him or anything, p2!daniil absolutely says some elitist city-slicker-who's-never-seen-a-cow-in-his-life bullshit, but a. his bitching is nowhere near as racialized as p1!daniil's casual comments, and b. most of his frustration is explicitly aimed at the town leaders, not the townspeople or the kin.

which i think is the other element of p1!daniil that doesn't sync up with p2!daniil for me; p1!daniil gets sucked into the kains' bullshit and never really breaks out of it, but p2!daniil was arguably never sucked in in the first place. everyone else makes a big deal about how he's ingratiated himself to the kains, but he doesn't even mention them in the first few conversations you can have with him, he's shit-talking them to artemy by day 5, and he's pissed with the town leaders for not running things better in the conversation about grace and the mass graves. marble nest drives it home with the georgiy conversation, but he's not as taken in by the kains' ideals or interested in their power beyond what it does for him to be associated with the kains, and specifically what that association does for him to be able to contain the plague. there's a practicality to p2!daniil that i don't get from p1!daniil—artemy's little thought blurb on day 11 is like "dankovsky doesn't know how the world works" but i think p2!daniil is a little less naive than p1!daniil wrt People In Power caring about his work. it extends to aglaya, too, p1!daniil makes a big deal about how he was ~betrayed and ~lied to, and that's why she should die so the polyhedron can live, but p2!daniil knows his head is on her chopping block from the start. i didn't get the sense at all from his dialogue in the shelter that spiting aglaya had anything to do with his desire to save the polyhedron, whereas that's the main reason he gives in p1 in the cathedral. p2!daniil comes pre-disillusioned, i think. he's still ultimately an idealist, but he even distances himself from utopianism a little bit in the day 2 town hall convo. he's less vindictive when things go badly for him than p1!daniil is, and i think that has to do with being less hopeful [and therefore harder to disappoint] in the first place.

we'll see what they do with p2 bachelor route, but me personally, i don't want them to go the route they seem to have gone with his p1 ending, where his decision to save the polyhedron seems like it's partially, but significantly, motivated by spite towards the people he's been working for nearly two weeks to save. i would like to see the endings go into his grief over thanatica's destruction, which seemed the biggest motivating factor in his fixation on the polyhedron to me—with thanatica and all his research destroyed, all he has to materially support the idea that death can be defeated is the successful use of the polyhedron, the cathedral, and the crucible as vessels for people's souls after the death of the body. i've made the comparison before, but as much as peter frames the polyhedron as his daughter, i think thanatica is that for daniil, and it absolutely makes logical sense to me that he'd fixate on the polyhedron as an expression of thanatica's ideals after being told that the research he's worked on for YEARS was destroyed as soon as he wasn't around tokeep it safe. so i'd like to see the endings of bachelor route grapple with the same kinds of past/future questions artemy's endings do, but for daniil the polyhedron's survival is keeping a tight grip on the past even if it's not the healthiest thing, and letting it be destroyed and letting the town survive instead [a town that he should have absolutley no attachment to, except that he's poured eleven days of effort into saving it] representing moving forward after a heavy loss. i'm not holding my breath, but i think it would fit p2!daniil better than "the polyhedron lives, an entire town of people die, daniil fucks back off to the capital," a la p1, would.

[that's my thinking for a bachelor that DOESN'T get the doll reveal, at least. a daniil who knows he's a character in a game, who finds out all his achievements are backstory and none of them belong to him, who finds out the people writing his story don't even like him and want him to fail for their amusement.......... that's a daniil i can see getting spiteful.]