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#one time back during the earlier covid months not too long after my last halfhearted suicide attempt
ot3 · 2 years
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i was wondering if youre so inclined if u would mind explaining whats so good about disco elysium? all i ever see ppl say is that its communist and theres old gay men which is like. well cool but that doesnt tell me anything about it actually. it seems like a lot of reading but its not like thats stopped me before (<- read all of orv on your reccommendation and hasnt stopped thinking about it since)
disco elysium is just a really meaningful piece of work. For starters, the prose is beautiful when it's not being funny as well, the world is rich and intricate and fully believable, and the characters are deeply compelling. Disco Elysium has you playing as an amnesiac detective coming out of the tail end of a more or less suicidally thorough bender a completely different person. It's up to you to pick what kind of person he is, but you can't choose to be Not a fuckup. You're still just a fuckup. You're always a fuckup.
I really found the way disco elysium dealt with mental illness to be super refreshing and honestly the most cathartic almost any media has been on the subject, for my personal tastes. I find a lot of media where mental illness comes into play leans either too indulgent or too saccharine for me. By indulgent i mean it really wants you to buy into How Sad we're supposed to feel about our character's mental state. And by saccharine I mean stuff that's focused almost exclusively in portraying mental illness in an almost hurt/comfort way, for lack of a better term. Disco elysium is not about the poignant, tragic beauty of mental illness nor is it about taking this character on a journey of Coping and Healing, although you could definitely play it closer to one way or another. Disco elysium is a game about being at war with your own brain and body, but also you still also need to work because. Well. It's your job, dipshit. It's humorous, it's crass, it's completely off the wall, capable of balancing the absurd and mundane in severe extremes to result in the realest feeling portrayal of mental illness I've come across. It handles addiction in what I'm sure is a similar way, but I can't speak as much on that subject because I don't have any firsthand experience with being an addict despite my best attempts to develop some sort of chemical dependency in the last two years.
But also yes, the game is very much about communism. Everyone saying that is absolutely correct but I think it's hard for people who haven't played it to understand just how About Communism it is. The author of the game and the novella its based off of is a self-proclaimed communist from estonia. This is not a western perspective on communism, nor is it a truly soviet one. It's a perspective on communism from someone who grew up in a country that was occupied by the soviet union multiple times and only regained its independence in 1991. It's a really fascinating thing to engage with because it just approaches politics so differently than any western stuff I've seen.
The game is in many ways miserably depressing and wholly pessimistic, but it's not the pessimism of the truly misanthropic doomer, it's the kind of pessimism you find in someone who is looking for any reason not to be pessimistic and just not finding any. It's a narrative that looks into it's main character, and looks into it's own world and is desperately searching for any reason to believe there's hope there and coming up empty handed every time but, god damn it, still looking. I think that right now something with that sort of message is important. It's a piece of writing that says to it's audience 'things are bad and getting worse, and we can't pretend otherwise, but this is your world. live in it.' And also it's really fucking funny. It's really one of those things I think as many as people a possible should experience. You won't find anything else like it in the world right now.
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