waifuofbath - Tumblr blog

waifuofbath · 7 days ago

Text

(accurate depiction of me consuming this entire essay tonight)

Dankovsky through His Women

Master post: full introduction, conclusion, and references

(Eva, Yulia, Lara, Clara, Maria, Gorkhonsk’s men, Aglaya)

On gendered readings

In the twenty years since Pathologic, guilt has been hot on the Bachelor’s trail: A scorched and wailing herb bride haunts his nightmares in Quarantine and potentially alludes to the one burned at the stake he couldn’t save. Dankovsky couldn’t save Vera, couldn’t save Eva, couldn’t save Lara and Yulia (from despair), couldn’t (or wouldn’t) save Aglaya, and can’t save Maria.

It’s easy to imagine how Daniil could be read as a failed male savior damning the women around him, but most critiques of him surprisingly don’t focus on this pattern. Accusations of misogyny instead typically arise from more surface-level impressions: his condescending tone, distant demeanor, or isolated dialogue choices that come off contemptuous or paternalistic. Still, returning to the ‘trail’ in Pathologic Classic HD reveals a pattern of relationships far more ambivalent and intimate that complicates simplistic labels like ‘misogynist’. These dynamics frequently challenge patriarchal hierarchies and are essential to understanding the Bachelor's true nature; his flaws remain undeniable, but they coexist with moments of sincere connection and philosophical reverence. These are the contradictions my analysis hopes to understand differently.

If you haven’t played Pathologic, bear in mind this opinion piece is riddled with spoilers and assumes familiarity. And take it with a grain of salt; the game has famously inspired countless interpretations, so there’s no telling you’ll arrive at the same conclusion as I did without playing it yourself. I can exclusively speak of my personal readings.

On the intelligentsia

While Bachelor Dankovsky may superficially resemble misogynistic archetypes, it’s possible that he's overdetermined by his semiotics, as his association with the Russian intelligentsia makes misogyny far less inherent to his character. Players often react to personae who embody familiar ideological types, particularly the ‘rationalist male academic’ associated with hubristic scientists and colonial explorers, because Western Europe’s educated elite (like Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum) were usually fixed in mainstream power structures. This environment promoted elitism, entitlement, and the rise of “secular religions” like nationalism, social Darwinism, antisemitism, and imperialism. Many of their prominent men also openly embraced patriarchal values or excluded women from academic life (“Intelligentsia”). On the other hand, the Russian intelligentsia was not an arm of the state or cultural orthodoxy; it lay at the periphery of power, often deprived of political influence. Its members defined themselves by resisting existing hierarchies. As stated by the theory of Dr. Vitaly Tepikin, the sociological standard characteristics of the intelligentsia are:

modern-for-their-era ethical principles, moral sensitivity to their neighbor, understanding and gentleness in expression;

an independent character who speaks freely;

a critical attitude towards the government, and overt condemnation of injustice (“Intelligentsia”).

This means Dankovsky’s intellectual identity would be built on a historical convention that expected sensitivity, critique of authority, and willingness to embrace progressive reform rather than preserve patriarchal privilege. Unlike most of their Western counterparts, Russian radicals and thinkers of the nineteenth century were exceptionally feminist for their time (Greeman). They saw a link between the absolutism of the state and patriarchal family structures, making opposition to both a duty. Critics like Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and Dobroliubov advocated women’s liberation more passionately and consistently than almost any male radicals elsewhere in Europe, even surpassing Engels and Bebel in dedication (Edmondson, 17). Thus, even a haughty or aloof Russian scholar could still be ideologically aligned with feminist causes.

Daniil forsakes the “masculine” duty of safeguarding material tradition by his willingness to sacrifice the Town to preserve the Polyhedron. The Town represents permanence: industrial, hierarchical, bound to the past. While arguing in his research article that conservatism and masculinity feed one another, Sağlık writes, “Trying to protect the patriarchal values that have been formed from the past to the present is the main reason for [conservative politics aiming to sustain masculinity]” (1). On the other hand, the Polyhedron’s imagery in the design documents (a “rose,” “cozy,” “growing”) codes it with traits historically ascribed to the female sex: generative, sheltering, and more organic than mechanical in spite of being engineered. This inexplicable accomplishment is the Town’s anima: the irrational part of the soul, the feminine part of a man’s personality. It is a womb that insulates children from disease, yet Daniil likens its destruction to lobotomization; he values the feminine-coded as the site of possibility, intellect, and future-building. Dankovsky chooses an impossibly delicate, law-defying womb over a sturdy, earthbound body because where others see the feminine as in need of containment, he recognizes it as the most vital force worth defending at the cost of their settlement.

On player agency

The healers’ mercurial personalities present a quandary to every analyst, as their frameworks depend on the player’s decisions, which creates many Artemies, many Claras, and many Bachelors, if you played as the Bachelor at all. The predicament of the many Bachelors is why arguments cite as evidence optional dialogue without which one could easily complete every side task and main quest; these options nevertheless exist. Instead of asking, “What is this character like?” some players ask, “What can I make them do?” This can lead to treating the avatar as a direct extension of the player and the full range of player decisions becoming the character’s personality. As far as today’s topic is concerned, one could give equal weight to his sexist responses to women as one does his favorable responses. For my purposes, the aim of raising this point is not to argue that a feminist could never express sexist views; some fans allude to Dankovsky’s weakening grip on sanity to explain outbursts, though the mundane reality is that many advocates of women’s rights nonetheless exhibit internalized misogyny. Still, his multiplicity can obscure from us who we’re analyzing.

Unlike the blank-canvas protagonists of other RPGs, I see Dankovsky as an authored subject with a textual core that exists sometimes in tension with player agency. Considering Pathologic had originally been drafted as a theatrical play, some wonder how each Healer might have looked in a passive medium without player input, what single state into which this superposition of states would collapse, what dialogue the actors ultimately run through. In a way, we already have that: Once the Bachelor becomes an NPC in the other two Routes, the writers are forced to settle on a characterization. Some qualities change between the two routes in which they’re NPCs, while the most essential stay the same. For example, the Haruspex is always tied to local traditions and kinship obligations while the Changeling always expresses a supernatural belief in her sense of moral authority beyond normal law.

As some side quests return, we watch how the Healers ultimately approach them beyond the players’ manipulation. For example, Artemy can spare Vera in his own Route, but he kills her in the Bachelor’s Route, which sheds light on his nature. Depending on the order, this can have different effects. Because I saved the Bachelor’s Route for last, and as a consequence of this consistency, I ended up naturally gravitating toward certain actions or dialogue options that ‘felt’ more than others like the Daniil I had spoken with so often by then. Anything outside of that seemed more like inconsequential surplus in the spirit of ‘player agency’ for the sake of keeping the story interactive.

This is by no means criticism for a game adapted from the remnants of a theatrical play, and the problem isn’t even unique to Pathologic; superficially interactive narratives (in which one characterization fulfills a character or plot more soundly than a player’s attempts at branching out) was common for story-driven RPGs of the 1990s and early 2000s, even by long-established video game publishers.

Take SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy VIII for example, in which you can spend the game pushing away the heroine or romancing her, but the hero regardless ends up consumed by love with her by the third act because it’s so integral to his story. Whether that’s naturally foreshadowed or an unearned dime-switch depends on the player. There are many cases in retro RPGs, but this jarring dissonance overriding player choices was one of the most glaring instances of writers’ indifference to inconsequential dialogue options. So, Dankovsky’s attitudes in the Haruspex and Changeling Route about female characters (of which I’ll subsequently specify) influenced the dialogue options toward them I found relevant to him in his own route. They often made options that expressed attitudes like “Man’s share is harder,” which are always accompanied by tolerant alternatives (my personal choices) and are seldom reinforced elsewhere across the routes, best understood as vestigial expressions of interactivity rather than textual assertions of character.

Of course, the ‘character-consistent dialogue’ is not always positive or friendly. If anything, had I played as the Bachelor first and chosen to treat him as an avatar of myself, I would’ve been indiscriminately diplomatic to everyone, yet the occasional meanness felt just as true to him as his compassion. Nonetheless, for the sake of consistency, I treated the Bachelor’s behavior in the Haruspex and Changeling Routes as a baseline for his canonical self, though I concede that weighing authored, NPC-Daniil moments more heavily because they’re fixed in the text is an interpretive choice. A pattern surfaced: a man whose gentleness and favoritism toward women surpassed that of his peers, sometimes to an almost servile degree. This selective empathy complicates claims of misogyny, if such terms even apply cleanly to someone so fragmented.

I chose the upcoming case studies from a narrow list of characters who don’t strictly address the Bachelor by his title (almost stripping away the prestige of its credentials) but neither do they prefer his surname. Instead, they use his given name and indicate that he grants these seven in particular a degree of personal intimacy, familiarity, or at least comfortability not privileged to the remaining 22 (Adherents and Queens). Of seven characters who know the Bachelor as just plain old ‘Daniil’, five are women, who alongside Clara will become the prime subjects of the following sections: Eva, Yulia, Lara, Maria, and Aglaya.

Continue reading in:

Eva Yahn

Yulia Lyruicheva

Lara Ravel

Clara Saburova

Maria Kaina

On Gorkhonsk’s men and double standards

Aglaya Lilich

If misogyny implies disproportionate contempt or devaluation of women, then any such charge must account for the Bachelor’s extraordinary gentleness, sacrifice, political defiance, ceding authority, and intellectual deference in his relationships with them. His abrasiveness and cynicism are, conversely, most often reserved for the men he cannot seem to understand or stand beside. Granted, Daniil’s idealization of women isn’t innocent, either; it may indicate a different kind of gender bias that reverses traditional gradients without dismantling them, but the inversion fits the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, for whom opposition to patriarchal order could be a moral duty, and it threads into the imagery of his Route: a man willing to abandon the “masculine” permanence of the Town to preserve the feminine-coded Polyhedron as a scene of possibility. Call it selective empathy or covert misandry, but whatever it is, it complicates the impulse to glorify or condemn him. That the women who make up so much of the emotional architecture of his Route and the mutual exchanges of power, empathy, or selfhood that come with it is rarely treated with the same psychological gravity as his conflict with other men. But Pathologic insists that its women are visionaries and architects of fate, and my opinion of Daniil had long soured until they endeared me again to the person he is capable of becoming in their presence. Giving their dynamics less critical visibility subdues a story that’s designed to make us uncomfortable with the very idea of a straightforward protagonist. If we insist on interrogating Daniil’s ethics, we must also honor the characters who made him knowable at all. These are collaborators who challenge his epistemology, draw his loyalty past reason, and sometimes leave him diminished for having loved them.

References

“Dialogue trees from Pathologic.” Github Pages, GitHub, Inc., 12 Nov. 2025, https://pathologicdialogue.github.io/

“Intelligentsia.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 July 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia

Edmondson, Linda H., Feminism in Russia 1900–1917. 1981. University of London, Doctor of Philosophy. UCL, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1317593/1/255088.pdf

Greeman, Richard. “Victor Serge’s Russian Heritage: Part Two: Vera Podorovskaya and the Feminist Intelligentsia.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 53, no. 2, 2012, pp. 340–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41703136

Sağlık, Coşkun, The Reconstruction of Masculinity in Conservative Political Discourses*. 2024. Ankara University, Doctor of Sociology. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/3975083

Lesher, James, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield, eds. 2007. Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception. Hellenic Studies Series 22. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LesherJ_NailsD_SheffieldF_eds.Symposium_Interpretation_Reception.2007.

Hearne, Siobhán. “Masculinity and (Hetero)Sexuality in the Late Imperial Russian Military.” Slavic Review 83.1 (2024): 73–91. Web.

Freeman, Joreen. The BITCH Manfesto. 1969. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/bitch.htm

Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. Alma Classics, 2020.

#WE ARE FEASTING #Daniil Dankovsky #Pathologic

115 notes · View notes