#pathologic analysis

[lilyminer]

The Theme of Family in Pathologic - a quick bit of analysis.

To me one of the most compelling themes in Pathologic is family, and how a persons connections to people represent their connections to a place.

Through my direct experience playing patho 2 and indirect experience learning about patho 1 and the demos (I’ll get to them eventually I promise) I found each of our 3 healers relationships (or lack thereof) to family communicates a lot about how each of them sees the town.

(Spoilers for the franchise below)

Daniil brings up his family in passing what? A handful of times? He has a family back in the capital somewhere, but he’s clearly an independent, high achieving young adult without the strongest ties to them. His personality makes it feel as though he’s been determined to handle his business on his own for a long time, judging by how quickly he steps up to take control of the town and how proud he is of his own personal achievements disconnected from anyone else.

On top of that he expresses a desire to not get married (he’s married to his work and all that). He’s just not that much of a family oriented person. Even if I do enjoy what I’ve heard of his interactions with the towns kids, to me his character stands in contrast to the close knit families and noble dynasties of the town. The other people in power in the town are that way because of their influential families, each bears their family name like a badge of honour. Then we have Mr. Daniil D. Dankovsky here whose name seems to almost symbolize him standing on his own, no ties to any name but his own. (Thank you little children playing your game with these characters, fantastic naming scheme 10/10) His disconnect from a recognizable family name also reinforces his place as a mostly unwanted outsider in the town.

And of course, gotta make a quick mention of popular fanon real quick. The very popular “fix Daniil’s life au” where he and Artemy raise Sticky and Murky together is just extra heart warming considering how separated from family Daniil is within the games. I’d say he seems pretty good with kids, but he’s focusing so much of his energy into a career we know he’s unfortunately destined to loose all progress on in the end that it leaves you wondering “What will be important to him after the loss of Thanatica?” And honestly I think “Maybe he’ll finally realize how fulfilling building family bonds can be.” Is a beautiful answer to that.

Then we got Clara. Clara shows up in the town notably missing a family. She’s a little girl all alone, stealing to survive because she has no one. Well, I suppose that mental image would be a whole lot more uniquely sad if we weren’t in the Town on Gorkhon where every second kids parents died of the plague a few years back. But unlike Daniil, I believe Clara having no biological parents actually connects her more to the town instead of just not having a strong connection to the parents one does have. Clara is a outcasted character in the beginning, she isn’t expected to have any strong family bonds, so she kind of fits into the crowd of orphaned children. She’s also more directly a child of the earth than others, which I guess ties her more to other miracles of the steppe then the town, but hey at least people like her are known of within the town.

But there is a position empty in the town, a vital role which must be filled, the third young mistress, someone to inherit Katerina’s position. Clara was implied to be created for a purpose, but overrode that purpose in many ways, by being a force of healing in the town yes, but also perhaps by seeking out a family she was not born into and taking on a responsibility for the town from there.

To me Clara’s adoption and how quickly she grows to care for her adoptive parents is very beautiful. As her mysteries are pealed back so is her perceived lack of humanity. She needs a family just like anyone else. It makes me wonder about the other kinds of people said to be formed of clay, if any of them ended up seeking out family dynamics of their own? Sorry if my understanding of her lore is a bit wonky, at this point I’m kinda theorizing off of lore crumbs lol.

Now time for the big finale of this analysis, the man who embodies this theme more than any other character, Artemy. As I mentioned in a previous post, Artemy’s relationship to the theme of family is one of the most compelling parts of patho 2 to me. Although I’ll be focusing less on his kids today as opposed to that post.

Completely unlike the other two healers, Artemy is connected to the town primarily by family ties. He’s Isidor’s boy, even if some npcs seem to not remember which son he is. To Artemy his last name is that badge of honour, that ticket to relevance as an authority figure that we see in the ruling families as well. To others he tends to simply introduce himself as Burakh, Burakh the local healer, sounds about right to them so he gets through situations quicker. Even after all three of his close family members are dead and buried his family connections still help him throughout the game. Trust, authority, familiarity. His name grants him all of these.

He is a menkhu, a title he inherited through blood connection, although proving himself is still an important aspect of being granted that title. His place as a spiritual leader among The Kin connects him to presumably countless generations of his ancestors. I’d be remiss not to mention the implications of the actual exonym The Kin (to be perfectly honest I’m not sure if Khatanghe literally means the same thing as “The Kin” in their language but I’m gonna assume it does because of its similarity to other family-related words in the language). A side effect of the cultural perception of the entire community as a family in The Kin is Artemy’s family circle being expanded greatly. Even before the passing of his father he had The Kin, his kin, in a literal sense too. Whereas the town seems to emanate this somewhat hostile, individualistic single family household kind of culture. Families feud with each other, what’s good for one family is prioritized over the good of the whole. But Artemy grew up partly within a cultural context where those barriers don’t separate people quite as much.

Of course, Artemy is not descended just from the people of The Kin, and that is a very deliberate choice. Artemy never knew his mother yes, but he grew up in the town likely because of her influence on the family. He is his mother’s son, he is a member of a friend group of townspeople, he is just as tied to the community of the town as he is to The Kin. In my interpretation since he grew up alongside Grief, Lara and Rubin he might as well be their pseudo-sibling.

All these family connections further complicate the difficult decision at the end of patho 2. In a way the game is asking you to choose one family over the other. When viewing the stories conclusion through this lense Sticky and Murky being your actual adoptive children becomes the least relevant of any family connection funnily enough. They’ll be there at your side regardless, but they also aren’t your only family.

Although like many members of the fandom I agree the diurnal ending, saving the children you were meant to protect, preserving the town’s future, keeping the livelihoods of all the people you’re closest to intact, is the more fulfilling ending, I can see the appeal of the nocturnal ending as well. Artemy balances far too many responsibilities, family ties, and deep bonds for it to be an easy choice. But surprise surprise, the devs said it best: his is a story about love. I think the games exploration of the impossible choices love sometimes leaves us to make is phenomenally compelling. And in a way, I believe Artemy is the only person who truly knows the town and The Kin well enough to be left in charge of that choice, he is a child of both worlds. That’s why I believe family bonds and connection to place is so intimately linked in Pathologic. Artemy is undoubtedly at the heart of this theme, not because his individual connections are stronger then anyone else’s, but because each bond of family pulls him in a different direction, and it’s your decision which ones must be discarded and which ones must be saved.



[thisusernameisalreadytakwn]

Oaky I have some thoughts on patho 1, daniil dankovsky, and the mistresses / clairvoyance stuff

Specifically why he is so sceptical of them. While Daniil is generally sceptical of all the supernatural elements of the town when he arrives, he accepts most of it once he is either presented evidence for it by someone he trusts or experiences it first hand.

But not the mistresses. He can be polite about it (depending on the dialogue) but he never really comes across fully believing them or valuing their (vision based) advice.

And I don’t think its because he doesn’t believe that they have visions or that those vision sometimes come true, but rather that the idea of a predetermined future is so fundamentally incompatible with his worldview that he has no choice but to reject the clairvoyance.

Daniils life’s goal is to defeat death, the one thing that is guaranteed to happen, and him working against it is the ultimate rejection of fate & determinism. The idea of there being a predetermined future is the very thing he dedicated his life to disproving.

So yeah, the fact that he doesn’t believe in the mistresses is not him being a sceptic ™️ or him being an asshole or misunderstanding the towns culture. He does understand it, he just fundamentally disagrees with the idea.

And imo the games overall narrative supports his views as well or at least the idea of free will and making choices is like one of the mayor themes of the game. For Daniil it’s in the form of rejecting fate (death), for Artemy it’s choosing between the path of tradition or creating something new (it’s even more explicit in patho 2 then in classic) and for Clara it’s all about how you yourself choose if you are good or evil. (All of these overlap and are present in all routes btw, it’s that all the healers have one main thingy)

Any choice is right, as long as it is willed

This is one of the first lines of the game. If there was a predetermined future, none of the choices would be “willed”. They would just be events that happen.

[erriga]

THE QUARANTINE QUERY

(tl dr I didn't vibe with the demo for some silly and not so silly reasons)

Welcome to my special post where I will try to explain my personal problems with Quarantine and the general creative and narrative direction the next game seems to be heading towards. I decided to write a longer text instead of a couple of bullet points, because one does not simply write a thesis about a game just to later complain about it in a sarcastically laconic tone.

Things this essay is going to be:

my opinion/critique

an analysis

a reflection upon my feelings about the series in general

Things this essay is not going to be:

an angry rant about the new game in the spirit of they changed it so now it sucks

an attempt to prove that old pathologic = smart and new pathologic = stupid

Ok, with the disclaimers out of the way, let's get into it, and by it I mean levels of pretentious nerdiness unknown to many.

I wrote down four statements that describe my general feelings about the demo. They will serve as a frame of reference for what my critique will fundamentally touch upon instead of trying to fit every possible complaint I might have in a disjointed fashion. Here they are:

I feel like Quarantine expects me to:

Consider Dankovsky to be a specific Character in a specific Story

Believe Dankovsky has an internal world that can be mechanically represented in the ludo-narrative

Find said internal world to be compelling enough to let it filter the whole experience of the game

(presumably) emotionally connect with Dankovsky due to all of the above

If all this sounds confusing - good! Keep reading, it's going to get even better.

So, is Daniil a character?

Yes, of course he is. But what does it mean in the context of the original game compared to Pathologic 2 and now Quarantine?

Over the years I've come across vastly different opinions about the quality of character writing in the original Pathologic. I am not including complaints about the English translations or other technical aspects, just the most basic tendency of how the game portrays its characters. Most people I've seen who have passionately engaged with the game (including me) tend to describe the original game's characterizations as nuanced, complex and strangely realistic despite their rather theatrical tendencies. But I've also heard others say the exact opposite. That the characters don't feel like real people at all, their personalities are incoherent and fall flat due to a lack of consistency, and that every single one of them, from an old man to a literal toddler, falls back on the same pseudo-philosophical cadence, which while attempting to make them seem deeper ends up dehumanizing them even further. And even though those two opinions seem to be contradictory, I think that they are both the exact same reason why the writing of the original game captivates me so much. Because it doesn't really matter.

I wrote my thesis about the brechtian influences in Classic. One of the most characteristic aspects of the Epic Theatre is the attempt to remove illusions typical to traditional theatre, among which is the illusion of a character's psychology. I believe that you can absolutely argue that the characters in patho 1 were designed to behave like Brecht's characters - lacking internal psychology, mainly serving as mouthpieces for political and philosophical arguments, more so types than individuals. But here's the catch - I believe it's actually impossible to create a character completely immune to identification, because we as humans love to project our silly little emotions on pretty much anything, including animals and inanimate objects. Compared to those cases, Gorkhon's gallery of strange individuals is a painfully human display. So it's no wonder that many of us did indeed relate to those weirdos, just like nothing can possibly stop an audience member from identifying with Mother Courage or Galileo in Brecht's play. But the fact still remains that none of those characters were designed with this kind of simple emotional identification in mind and thus the attachment we may feel to them is more of a byproduct than the main goal. Taking a character who was meant to be analytically pondered and instead adopting them as a breathing human being is in that case, almost an act of rebellion. It's like saying, this is mine now.

Coming back to Daniil, this lack of clarity of how much he was written with this sort of characterization in mind is the main reason why I found him so compelling, he always kept me asking: is this part of Daniil as a coherent whole or is it just a philosophical stance which I should ponder at this moment or is it the writer's attempt at predicting what the player (presumably a straight male player) may want to say through this character? Does Daniil say "wow" because that's how he speaks, or is it just an oversight? Am I supposed to treat optional dialogue as things he would say or just things that are sometimes said in his world? The point is I DON'T KNOW and I love that I don't know that! It gives me so many posibilities! To me Daniil's character isn't so much about what he exactly says or does, but rather the internal logic that guides him. And I am the one who can choose its exact mechanism. He is mine.

Meanwhile, I feel like Quarantine wants me to treat Dankovsky like I would treat most other characters in traditional/popular media. Here are his personality traits. He is intelligent, he says so himself, and that lady over there also said it and he knows science and formulas and speaks Latin. Here are his thoughts. He has a memory about this thing. He feels guilty about that. I suddenly have a whole army of simple sentences that are meant to help me umderstand Daniil in this new iteration. Not so much a puzzle but a construction manual. And I'm not saying that this way of storytelling is fundamentally bad just because I can parody it as simpler than it really is. I want to engage with the new game's writing on it's own terms but so far I haven't done that mostly due to the giant dankovsky shaped object blocking the view.

Speaking of-

THE BACHELOR-CENTRIC MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE

This demo is so much about Dankovsky that it almost makes me embarrassed in his name. And honestly, I'm surprised I feel that way, considering how much I usually enjoy stories where a character's perception shapes the narrative to a great extent. I love symbolic dream sequences, guilt-driven visions and unreliable narrators. But the way Daniil's perception of himself and his surroundings doesn't really feel like a service to him as a character, but rather a narrative shorthand to spoonfeed me, the player, the most relevant information. The way Daniil's thoughts appear around objects is realistic to the extent that yes, human thoughts can be often rather simple and disjointed but there are moments where I think this mental streamlining is detrimental to his characterization and rubs him of nuance. The worst culprits of that are (IN MY OPINION):

Him calling Eva a ray of sunshine

The part where he references the fact that he and Artemy always fight about whose methods are better

Any time Daniil or someone around him refers to him as especially intelligent

Mr Little's Special Tutorial Perspective or Please Daniil Explain This To Me Once Again

None of those ideas are fundamentally bad, not at all. I'm curious to see his relationship with Eva develop, I want to see him interact with Artemy more like they did in the original, I can see some great ironic potential in the constant hyping up of Daniil's intellect and yeah, I hope Yakov is revealed to be some secret government agent or something. But I'm annoyed that I feel like I can predict all of this from just a couple of lines in the demo. I want to be confused and unsure of my own judgement. I want to be proven wrong, surprised, and ashamed of my own surface level analysis. And that can still very much happen, perhaps even in the comments on this very post or once the full games comes out. But right now I feel rather pessimistic.

I don't have a good segue for this part so now let's talk mechanics.

PRESS B TO EAT A CIGARRETE

The new mechanics try to break away from the body-first focus of the original game and the way Pathologic 2 expanded on those ideas even further. This time it's all about the mind, baby. Which - again - on itself isn't a bad idea. If this game was just 2 with different dialogues it would be very hard to justify its existence as a stand-alone product that needed to somehow be funded over those last 6 years. But the result to me feels more like novelty for novelty's sake. Not everything of course - the diagnosis part of the gameplay is definitely its most well-designed aspect, and there is a consistent logic behind it. Where Artemy saw systems, Daniils sees individual parts, where Artemy had to rely on luck, Daniil controls all the variables etc etc. The same, however, cannot be said about some of the other new mechanics.

Managing Daniil's mental state doesn't feel that much different than making sure Artemy drinks enough water and I personally think it's a wasted opportunity. I'm not going to insert myself into the discussion about whether the game's use of terms associated with bipolar disorder is accurate/tasteful because other people with relevant experiences have already voiced their opinions about that and will hopefully continue to do so in the future. My point is - regardless of what exact mental condition or more general function of the human psyche the game is trying to convey, it does so in a manner so simplistic that it doesn't encourage me as a player to connect with it on a deeper level. Apathy is blue because it's sad, Mania means, well, mania so it's red. Once again, I have only experienced a small portion of the game's final system so I might be in for a surprise and perhaps I will get to see Daniil experience something... purple?

Also adding to my previous point about switching perspectives - I think this mechanic will be an absolute gut punch in the final game. I hope it's something akin to the original meeting with the Powers That Be, especially with the way multiple characters can "jump" into one conversation at any moment. This will surely be utilized for some mind-fuckery and I can't wait to see it. I think this is also the one aspect of the demo that gives me the most hope as far as my beloved emotional confusion is concerned. Because what is the switching of perspectives supposed to indicate really? Are we supposed to filter it once again through Daniil's perspective because of the framing device of him recollecting the events? So nothing we learn by getting the insight into other characters' thoughts can be taken at face value because that's just how Daniil sees them? Are those other/new characters even real or just exist in Daniil's psyche? Does it have something to do with the time travel blahblah? Or are we not playing as Daniil at all but some other entity entirely? That's the main question I hope I don't get a clear answer to but rather contradicting paths to follow. But despite that optimistic outlook I still need to get into the final aspect that made it difficult for me to engage with the new game on its own terms, and instead deciding to take its dead corpse apart.

I CARE TOO MUCH BUT NOT ENOUGH

I just can't get over the fact how much this game wants me to identify with Daniil or at the very least find him cool. Cool as in how modern characters are often cool. Wet cats, chaotic bastards, jerks with hearts of gold and vaguely homoerotic energy with other male characters. And I'm not saying this as an insult, narrative trends are a thing, I find many of those archetypes to be endearing more often than not, but my problem is that it still only serves Dankovsky as our center of the world. By flanderizing him and making him fit into a more recognizable character archetype we lose the feeling of him being always at odds with the world around him, the way he used to be conflicted over every single thing in the original game. This new world is too suited for him to be a hero of his story, a tragic hero but a hero nonetheless, while in my opinion what made him uniquely tragic in classic was precisely the fact that he wasn't anyone's hero.

I know this constant comparison to patho classic can get tiring, so let me use another point of reference which is also the reason why I am even writing this post in the first place - The Marble Nest. I love the marble nest. I find its narrative structure to be expertly crafted, emotional beats placed in just the right places and godd i still cry over the fact that they put his soul into a nutshell. And the funny thing is that TMN does share a lot of similarities with the new demo. It's a Daniil-centric story with a framing device that encourages us to look at the entire experience as Daniil's impression of the reality around him. It's a short and rather simple experience with a strong central theme. So why do I feel so emotional when Daniil talks to the death in that game but feel pretty much nothing when he talk about dying in Quarantine? Maybe because The Marble Nest is still steeped so deeply in the theatre influences which I hold dear to my heart while Quarantine moves away from them and maybe towards another medium entirely. Theatre never pretends to be reality and it's artificiality is always front and center. Film meanwhile often has the tendency to try to replicate reality or even try to be reality itself. In one of those cases I feel like an active audience member and in the other like a passive voyeur of some vision of reality. Or to put it simply, in one case I am afraid of Death and in the other, I am watching someone act out being afraid of death. That is a highly personal preference though and I'm genuinely happy to see that many people do indeed relate to this portrayal of Daniil, especially when it comes to how his mental problems are displayed front and center. And that's amazing! I want to see all the fan input that comes out of it and I hope the final game delivers on everything they hope for. But for me? I think I might need to take a back seat, at least for now. Watch the scene from afar, perhaps get a fuller picture. Because I want to care and understand and know and feel. I really do. But sometimes it's not possible and that's also good.

So, if you've read this overwritten mess to the end, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and encourage you to voice your opinion. Art doesn't exist without discussion so let's discuss!

POST-SCRIPTUM - ON THE NATURE OF MAKING GOOD THINGS IN YOUR PAST

One last thing I wanted to add which feels highly relevant to the my critique is the question of what to do when someone says they liked your old work better? I like to think of myself as an artist and I think that many of us do, even without getting into how according to Beuys everyone is an artist. So you make a thing, some people like, perhaps many people do. So you keep making things, you grow with them, change, realize your old ideas were often childish or naive which you can only do through gaining experience. So you make new things, often drastically different from the ones you made before. And someone says "I liked the old stuff better". And they don't say it as an insult, even though it may sometimes feel like it. Because you cannot recreate whatever you did in your past. And you want to grow. Does that mean that you got worse instead? That you peaked in your past and it's all downhill from here? Of course not. You know that. I know that. I hope every artist knows that. And yet it still hurts. It hurts to be perceived as a line graph when in reality you are a recursive function.

----

all images made by me, the ones with yellow background are from a shitpost animatic, the white one was a joke I made after hearing the famous"sherlock mind palace fruit ninja" pitch, and the last one is me in my Daniil cosplay. Goodnight Bikini Bottom

[faustfish]

three of them?

[shmowder]

the symbolism of the Polyhedron as a chrysalis is evident, in not just the architecture and silhouette, but all of the Kains' blatant allegories of larva, breaking out, and transformation—AND YET only now did I make the connection to why moths and butterflies were being studied in Thanatica; the curtians are never just blue, are they? Both the bloodsucking kind to boot.

Well, caterpillars retain their memories as they undergo metamorphosis. They were once thought to melt completely, turning into a soup of goo, brain and all, only for this notion to be refuted by the above statement. Both can't exist at once. If caterpillars do actually fully dissolve to the cellular level, then it's nothing short of a miracle to reconstruct their neural network with the memories intact. It's a hard disk reset and overwrite, you cannot go back.

They don't just sprout wings one and done either. It's more of a controlled death, they die simultaneously as they are reborn. Exiting the pupa might as well be a second birth—like the Polyhedron—this is practically a womb. Once all cocooned inside, a caterpillar begins dissolving itself by releasing protease: an enzyme that breaks down proteins. It kills itself, slowly, in what is theorised to be an immensely painful process, at the exact same instant, the butterfly builds itself, wings, antenna, and the rest. This closed-loop process of histogenesis and histolysis allows for the nervous system to remain intact as the butterfly forms around it instead, driven by genetic instructions to keep a blank slate. Less of a broth, more of a stew.

Like constructing a second building from the debris of the one you're still demolishing, only both crews are working at the same site, in the same spot, within the same shift hours. If the construction crew is fast enough it gets to incorporate bits of the old building into its new structure before the said bits are demolished.

Instead of the caterpillar fully reverting into an embryo once enclosed, the critical parts get reused by the butterfly, and not recycled. Which is how they retain their memories! The very same memories the Kains use as the building blocks of a soul, the death defying loophole, the key to immortality, inside the wooden cocoon.

[thanatika]

the holy trinity of why arcane season 2 was so bad, in order:

that original show pitch the showrunner wrote that made it clear they never saw the piltover vs zaun conflict as a justified class struggle

that interview quote where one of the writers talked about how they left an immense amount of character development scenes to happen offscreen or "told with a meaningful look" as a way of doing "economical storytelling"

that other interview quote where it was revealed that compared to S1, where the animators were given the story and told what needed to be animated, but then given some leeway on details and style, the design of S2's story partially involved the animators coming to the writers with visual ideas, and the writers picking ones they liked and trying to make a story to fit it. (and to be clear, the animation in S1 is what really elevated the decent writing and covered for some of its narrative holes and made the show great. but clearly that doesn't work if you fully lean on it as a crutch.)

this isn't even getting into all of the reasons and examples within the show itself. but seeing all of these little behind-the-scenes tidbits come out over the past few weeks has made me go oh. i get it now.

[jestersuper]

my brain is a machine that turns stuff i like into surprising crossovers

[dislocated-thumbs]

The only true Pathologic fan

[katherinakaina]

Hmmm... We've been preoccupied with 'where will Artemy get the living blood' question. But what about all the twyre needed? In p1 specifically he can't get it without providing Worms with blood and organs. They say that's just how it grows, on blood. Continuous human sacrifice is needed all the time just to make the herbs grow. Blood will always be necessary to make the panacea because the Earth just doesn't surrender her wonders without it. Seems like the Termite ending has just as much of it as the Humble does. It requires slaughtering bulls forever at the very least. Forever, no getting away from it, that would be utopia.

[nightcigale]

Brain empty

[inblackwoods]

Isidor and Simon, Daniil and Artemy

There’s one line that Daniil says to Yulia that has been driving me absolutely batty. Yulia says:

“You can call these demons what you want… you may refer to the Hair Eater as ‘time’ if this will make you any happier. I am comfortable with a more juvenile vernacular. It is what I am used to.”

And Bachelor replies: “You are repeating something that Isidor had once told me, almost word for word…”

When did this conversation happen? We don't have many letters between Daniil and Isidor to know how well they knew each other or how often they spoke. How did they meet? Why? How close were they? It’s hard to say, but Daniil refers to Isidor as “[m]y gentle associate, my selfless advisor.” Assuming he’s not being sarcastic, this is high praise. It also makes me think that Daniil took Isidor’s words to heart- deeply. That means that this idea, that people can be using different words to talk about the same things, is one that Daniil is more comfortable with than he’s always given credit for. Bachelor might be more open to setting aside semantic/linguistic differences for the sake of finding middle ground to agree on.

In the introductory healers cutscene, Daniil says, “it seems unlikely that we will ever get along well,” and then a few moments later he amends that statement to, “no… We won’t ever get along.”

That sounds sad. He seems almost like he had hope that the other two immediately dashed to pieces. Before, it was "unlikely" that they would get along "well," not impossible that they could get along at all. Now it is simply "we won't ever get along." He seems uncertain, perhaps because it is against his hard logic to completely bar any possibilities without confirmation. And he is usually adherent to standard social etiquette/ideas about politeness. It is possible that certain ideologies can find overlap and find a means of coexistence. But unlikely. Termites and Utopians don't often share tables. 

But Isidor tried to teach him that they could, and Daniil tried to remember that.

[screemnch]

On Theatre movie adaptations, on theatre and non-theatre. On death.

Oh I love it when a piece of media has traces of theatre in it. Like, this ancient artform that’s permeating other ways of storytelling. It immediately adds another layer to the story, and makes you consider everything else with a new perspective. Maybe a little Brechtian, I guess.

It’s no wonder I’m a huge pathologic fan, that game oozes theatre, and is extremely overt in its messaging in terms of “hey, this is a story” and it creates this fun, see-through layer that you can look through but still acknowledge - this isn’t real. But the emotions are. It’s not real, but it talks about real things. Somewhere behind the stage is the director, waiting for the audience to gasp and laugh at the right moments. Maybe this isn’t a play, but it is upheld by the props and catwalks of a play, and you can feel yourself peering up at the stage, maybe even knowing ahead of time where the story will go, but feeling it all nonetheless.

I watched and read “Waiting for Godot” for uni last year, and it was absolutely awesome. The movie is not on a stage - there’s a vast expanse of nothingness all around the actors, instead of a wall that the audience can see through. And yet you can almost feel the limits of the stage within the camera angles. You know the tree is a prop, and the sky behind and around it is all a backdrop. I could see the starry night sky, be hurled into space, and it would be a projection on the back curtains of the set, behind which Pozzo and Lucky prepare for their entrance.

“Rosencranz and Guildenstern are dead” is also a play adapted into a movie. It has that same “play within a play” element that pathologic does, it’s self referential. It actually goes a layer deeper - a pantomime within a play, within a play. And the end of it - the open acknowledgment that this will all happen again, to thunderous applause. It has this strange, fairytale, dreamlike quality to it. You believe it as long as you’re in it, but when the credits roll, or actors take their bow, when the story ends - it becomes nothing more than a story. The curtains lower, and your eyes open. It’s comical and tragic, because with the knowledge that a play has a script comes the knowledge that things are not subject to change. A play is both wonderfully perpetual, and yet horribly final. Fatal even. It gains new life in each adaptation, but its essence stays with the script, and there really is no point at which you could say “no” to the story - you are just as bound to it as the characters on stage.

Unless, of course, you deal with the narrator. Some plays include this strange figure in the story, and allow the characters to interact with them, with their fate. Although, of course, even that is written in the script, predestined, inevitable. Pathologic interacts with the narrator only in the briefest of terms - a conversation. “Into the woods” sees the characters kill their narrator, and sees the story fall apart and pick up its own pieces. But “Into the woods” regardless if it’s the movie or stageplay version (don’t come for me) is built off of that fairytale feeling. Even the characters themselves see their roles transparently, know the trappings of who they must be, and try their best to defy it. They kill the narrator so that they can change what is written, because they know their story. Even if they know how it all ends, it is inevitable that they will struggle and fight for agency.

And that struggle too has different ways of manifesting. “An ordinary miracle” (“Обыкновенное чудо”, 1979. God someone please ask me about it, I swear I’m so normal about it) has the characters constantly engaged in a power struggle with the Wizard - the narrator of the story. They don’t kill him. Instead they leave him powerless and dejected, until a miracle happens, a resolution to a conversation he did not know how to end because he too is bound by an inevitable fate. He is just as doomed by the narrative as the people he gathers and drags around. The finality of theatre speaks to the finality of life. When characters on stage struggle to fight the narrative, they face not only the power of their creator - they face death. Death in either obscurity, or tragedy, or worse - a constant unresolved immortality. A conversation without an end.

But it doesn’t even need to be that dark. “Ah, Vaudeville, Vaudeville…” (“Ах, водевиль, водевиль…” 1979) is a comedy about a young girl who wants to be an actress. And yet, when adapted into a film, it takes great pains to maintain its presence as theatre. The greek chorus / dancers double as an audience, gasping and laughing at the right moments. They dance off stage, where the seats are usually placed, while the actors stay in the liminal space of the stage (dude, it expands and shifts all the time, you can see all of it and then it unfolds another chamber of its guts in a hidden camera angle). And yet they interact with each other, sing to each other, argue, communicate - and that is the nature of theatre. To speak, to have a conversation.

Returning for a second to the sad, however, the death. It’s present even in this comedy. The backdrop of the stage is all paper playbills, they represent the generations of actors that stood and will stand on stage. Entrances are made by actors dramatically ripping the backdrop to step onto the stage. Behind them is a white, vaguely floral void. Every character either wanders on stage from the wings, or tears through this wall, often accompanied by loud fanfare. Except for one. Death.

When the young girl’s father dies towards the end of the movie (apologies for spoilers, but I also don’t expect most people to go and watch this old Russian movie), it seems as if he is about to wander through the torn backdrop and into the white backstage void. But he stops, and instead disappears through the power of movie editing. Almost making it feel real, somehow. As if it was not an actor exiting according to their cue, but a genuine tragedy that catches you off guard and leaves you searching for someone who will not come back.

Theatre is a conversation that ends eventually. But death doesn’t. The struggle against the formula of the theatre, even as we step towards films, or games, or what have you - is the struggle against death. And it’s not a conversation that has a clean ending.

Anyways, yeah, GOD I love when theatre gets its grubby hands on things. Love it so much.

[lilyminer]

One thing I find endlessly fascinating about fandom cultures is how different fandom communities can become so heavily linked together. Becoming like one community of fans who feel drawn to a group of similar pieces of media because of how many fans they have in common.

Some of them are fairly obvious, like some I’ve run into over the years. Like fans of the book series Warrior Cats also tend to get into the book series Wings of Fire. Both are fantasy xenofiction books with intricate world building. Hell for a while there a lot of the most popular creators from one fandom were also popular in the other. Or people who get into The Magnus Archives also tend to find other podcasts like Welcome to Nightvale interesting. Once again they share a medium and similar appeals.

And this effect can lead to situations like I just found myself in where I get into one fandom just to have both fandom discussions and algorithms alike pull me into a circle where multiple pieces of media are so often brought up together they form a subgroup of a fandom space.

My current interests have led me to what I’ve affectionately nicknamed “the depressed Northern/Eastern European video game complex” which from what I’ve seen contains the game I initially showed interest in Fear and Hunger, Pathologic, and Disco Elysium.

Before anyone pulls out their pitchforks I’m in no way saying these games are the same. First of all they do have quite distinct tones. Especially if you, say, compare Disco Elysium (a game filled with so much hope it’s bursting at the seams) to Fear and Hunger, (a game which aims to make progress feel hopeless at every turn). All I’m saying is the second I started looking up Fear and Hunger on sites like YouTube I might as well have typed in Pathologic by how often I saw content for that game instead. And when I did look up Pathologic the algorithm seems all too ready to introduce me to Disco Elysium too.

As a Canadian these games, to me, look like they were developed in pretty close proximity to each other, European standards of distance might say differently idrk. But the vibes and environments of these games feel so similar to me. So yes, there’s certainly debate to be had about if the inspiration behind each games vibe comes from a common experience but to me there’s definitely something there.

Well anyways I find that collective of close-knit fandoms very interesting. I’ve gone as far into Fear and Hunger as I safely can, did a wonderful play through of Disco Elysium. And now I’ll take what seems like everyone’s advice on my next game. See y’all after I play some assortment of the Pathologic games!

[polyghost3]

Watching pathologic 2 lore videos rn to understand my gay little fanfics better

[emwallas176]

Cannot get over the duality of Smallville. In my mind, Clark and Lex are the leads of two very different shows. I’m only on season one right now but it’s so fascinating how everything that comes later is already baked in from the beginning. You can see the tragedy of their friendship even before the first crack forms because at the heart of it all, there’s always going to be a lack of understanding between Clark and Lex. It’s just who they are, how the both of them were raised.

Because on one side you have Clark. He’s an alien. He feels alone in the world, like he has to hide himself. This feeling becomes an instinct where even though he is an open and honest person there’s a part of himself that never really gets to see the light of day.

And then you have Lex who barely even knows the meaning of the word trust. He was raised in business and politics (most of it not even above board). And that’s not even mentioning the influence his father specifically had on him. He’s been taught to lie and keep secrets and ultimately restrain from divulging any part of himself without some serious teeth pulling. In fact, Lex usually won’t give up a lie until he’s been caught outright. He’s always dealing in half-truths and lying by omission so that he can stay ten steps ahead of everyone else because he was taught by his dad and has learned over and over again through experience until it was practically hardwired into his brain that sharing information with other people is a losing move and usually just puts another bullet in the gun someone’s already got aimed at your chest.

So what do you get out of that? Well, you get two people from two complete different spheres (two houses both alike in dignity and all that) who make the choice to be friends, not knowing that the choice is an impossible one. Because neither can ever be fully honest with the other (they don’t know how to be fully honest with anyone) and eventually the lies pile up between them. The misunderstandings become more than just circumstantial. They become delusion and obsession and mistrust and bad faith. They can talk and try to fight it all they want but at the end of the day their constant miscommunication leads to what was always their ultimate destiny—the end of their friendship and the start of something worse.

[lilacs-echoing]

hot take, if your first response to a character hallucinating/having identity issues is to diagnose them w schizophrenia, bpd, did... youre not being creative with your analysis of literature

lit analysis means knowing that characters can be symbols in themselves and the things they experience can also be symbolic. characters can hallucinate and not actually be schizophrenic. yes this is about fight club & you.