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Can’t stop thinking about Disco’s character designs in general but also specifically about how caricature esque the two main characters are designed and how on purpose that is.

Harry looks like every middle aged alcoholic man I’ve ever met. My uncle is almost his spitting image. He looks like someone you’d meet on the street or at the pub or the grocery store and you wouldn’t think twice about. He’s so painfully human and so painfully average that he sees himself reflected in almost every single person he meets in game. And to top it all off he’s a complete blank slate. He really *could* be any of them.

Kim looks so stereotypically Asian that, despite only being half Seolite on both sides, he cannot escape the racism that comes with his heritage. No matter how hard he separates himself from that part of him he’ll never be able to avoid that it’s the first thing people see when they look at him. It’s to the point that he’s *proud* of how distanced he is from that history because of how much pain it’s brought him.

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some opinions on fanfic trends for Disco Elysium on AO3 for the past 2-ish years; i address racism, ableism, jean and kim tropes, accesorization of harry and the way the game themes appear to have warped.

some of you may know i've been reading every fic published on the disco AO3 tag chronologically since 2019 for a little over a year and jotting down some trends (not a proper statistical study, just some tracking of when certain tropes are introduced and when and how they reproduce because i like observing that kind of thing.) there's been an uptick in trans(masc) Kim and Jean character studies since late 2022-early 2023, among many others, but these ones were like overwhelmingly prolific once they were introduced.

harry, kim and jean are overwhelmingly the characters with most fanworks in the tag. and having read a little over 4k works it turns out that people engage in a very distinct way with them for the most part that tracks with the growth of the trans Kim and Jean character studies as a trend.

the disco elysium fandom's english-language writers are, according to my cursory snooping, overwhelmingly trans, some flavor of gay, white and from north america and western europe. given personal anecdotes, i also suspect they are upper middle class (though not as statistically huge as the previous things) and struggle with mental health. in the past decade or so a lot of fanworks have followed a trend of exploration focused on catharsis and personal relatability.

now, kim and harry appear so much in the text with so much detail that there's plenty of personal details to pull from to write them, where as jean's total presence in the game (rarely achieved in one run but i'm taking into account all his mentions and lines) is smaller so it follows that people need to fill in some gaps and there's more characterization freedom. jean is white, younger than both harry and kim, canonically depressed, non-canonically confirmed by his character player an amphetamine addict but presented as a functional person during the game, and covers a very specific narrative hinge that i understand as relevant: he's a bridge between pre-Martinaise Harry and his Martinaise self.

he's objectively a very comfortable character to play with because he's mostly a blank slate except for his relation to Harry and his vitriolic grief towards him. so logistically i understand why people who struggle with mental health, are white, are anywhere between 17 and 35, are functional and able-bodied and may or may not have a complicated relationship with a close person who struggles with addiction or other health issues might go "YES, GOOD CATHARSIS NARRATIVE FOR ME". but the sheer amount of works that value Relatability over engaging with the characters or the themes has resulted in a very strong ripple. which leads to trans kim.

the game paints a deep and vivid image of kim, both from within harry's own perspectives and the objective things he says out loud. he's a walking contradiction, he's alienated from his body and selfhood, he beat himself into submission to stay alive. he's a walking reminder of his assasinated communist parents, the people who killed them paid his salary, his body (racialized, disabled) is both a hindrance to his assimilation and a tangible proof that he could have belonged somewhere but doesn't, that no matter what he does it will be considered first. so he watches his words, his movements, his appearance. so he partakes in hypermasculinity. he's canonically gay, mixed race, diasporic seolite, and disabled. and somehow, the only one of this that is recurringly explored in most fanworks is his homosexuality, usually in the form of being a guiding figure to harry or as a Fellow Gay Cop to jean, or eyes, or someone else.

now, we have the trans kim trope. my opinion on the trope isn't relevant to the point i'm trying to make, but i will say i think transmasc kim is something i enjoy in theory, i think it's a worthy exploration that works very well with the hauntings of embodiment and perception that exist in kim's canon self. but it's very jarring when all of these tales of gay trans kim refuse to engage with race, or with physical disability. like, after you've read 800 trans kim fics you start noticing how solid that avoidance is, how big the elephant in the room is, and i can't help but think that, coupled with the explorations of Jean, the issue is: the white ablebodied writer is unwilling to engage with race and disability.

my charitable reading of this is that the white ablebodied writer doesn't want to write about what they don't know, they don't want to overstep. my neutral reading of this is that the white ablebodied writer doesn't consider how sexuality and gender's material realities are tied to race and ablebodiedness in the real world because they are the Default Categories and it didn't occur to them that kim's experience of them might overlap. my least charitable reading of this without directly falling into the assumption of ill intent is that the white ablebodied writer is uncomfortable with the idea of the fact that their experience of gender and sexuality isn't universal and it's not as emotionally cathartic to think about how they might be racist and ableist because they put on horse blinders and they're trying to write things they like, and understanding this is unpleasant and doesn't belong in their feel-good hobbies.

people love to talk about kim's body without acknowledging the way asian masculinity and femininity exist in relation to whiteness when it's harry or jean in the room. people love to talk about kim's body without engaging with the power relations that exist in many disabled people's sexuality.

the tropes' strength lies in the relatability factor (very high) and the willingness of both author and audience to engage with the canon material for the characters they are writing (very low). and so you end up with a lot of jean character studies about his feelings towards harry (when everyone but kim in the game also knows both harries, but jean is prioritized consistently) and a lot of character studies about kim (that ignore most of the lived experiences of him because they're directly tied to his and his parents' race and alienation that are not particularly cathartic for the white author and reader)

one of the big themes of the game, if not the biggest, is failure. specifically it asks the player to think about what to do when you have failed and you know there are no blank slates, and asks you to empathize not only with harry, whose every thought you're privy to, but to everyone you talk to that has the same rich landscape beyond your brief interaction. when relatability is prioritized in fanworks, this question falls apart, the purpose becomes to find ways in which these characters are like you (the author, the reader) so you can afford them the level of humanity needed to feel emotions about them.

harry's tropification follows four large trends: self-loathing, aggressive addict, psychic omniscient prophet, overwhelmingly emotional and adoring puppy. some authors sometimes are capable of depicting both, usually as if they are unrelated and it's a harry-esque contradiction, but it's truly baffling how rare it is to find stories that engage with all of them or with multiple of them as inextricably bound together like canon material does. harry needs to be relatably lovable (heartbroken, self-loathing, fixable by love, fixable by the universe, capable of change that gets exponentially better) or relatably hateable (physically and emotionally abusive, manipulative, unreasonably needy).

most fics in the relatable lovability fall on the kim/harry ship, most fics in the relatable hateability fall on the jean/harry ship. here's where it ties into the big tropes for kim and jean: the fanworks about a game that asks a question about failure and questioning certainty become stories about inevitability.

jean's vitriol in the game comes from the same place as harry's self loathing: a visceral response to decades of failure. they're not objective truths (i'm thinking about the mirror reveal being intended as a way to make the viewer realize harry isn't a reliable narrator at all, but especially about himself: you see a regular guy, conventionally handsome but clearly in pain and growing old and sick. he calls himself horrible shit, however).

playing up jean's part as the Bridge is comfortable because it allows the player to separate Harry's failures from their agency as a player (something that greatly drives the point of the game home, emotionally speaking -- you're not that different from Harry. Harry's not that different from anyone else he meets. the irreversible failures exist for all of us, as do the chances to try again.) if jean is right in resenting harry, and moreover, he's objectively describing harry's behavior, harry's failures become logical and inevitable consequences of his Way of Being. if Harry calls kim a slur, or threatens children, or scares civilians, that's just because that's how Harry is (according to Jean and Harry's own brain), so the possibility that one of your tries might be meaningfully good becomes... less weighty. it's a fluke, and you'll fail again, so don't get your hopes up. it's almost an excuse to believe that there's nothing new under the sun and going back to old habits is inevitable, but the conclusion becomes "so nothing i do really matters" instead of "it's hard and painful to try again when you've failed so many times before. what does this say about the person who tries?". and in that way jean is an interesting character because understanding why he resents harry for being able to try more freely than him without the weight of memory is important to the theme. what has to click to start climbing out of the grave? can anyone do it? will i ever do it? why now, and why not when i tried to pull him out?

and similarly, when we write about kim, we have to confront what makes him who he is and not another generic character to write, and the fact of the matter is that being a cop, being visibly of seolite heritage, having PTSD, having a visual impairment on record that interferes with his cophood, his cophood being the only identity he appears to have had a choice over, how he treats harry because he's a cop vs. other harry parallels who aren't, how he treats harry whether harry respects him or not... they're important. and trans kim could be a way to approach these themes but it's currently existing in a vacuum of authorial catharsis, and the refusal to address the real politics that give emotional weight to disco elysium is becoming a worrying, overwhelming trend. i urge you all to think about these things a little.

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Huh what who said that

kim kitsuragi

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"The world of Elysium is a fictional world that is aware that it is fictional. You could think of Pale as what happens when a reader puts down the book and puts the book away. As long as you remember, it exists. When no one remembers it anymore, it stops existing. For me the simple answer would be that Pale is an acknowledgment of the fictional nature of Elysium, the writer’s relationship to its creation and the reader’s relationship to it." - Argo Tuulik on the Pale

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Got so caught up in making my tiny disco dolls I haven’t been writing and now the only thing I can think to write is tiny disco dolls

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Gifties

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Alright I need the very niche few of you who have these overlapping interests to aide me here.

I want, very badly, to make Disco Elysium Kim and Harry doll customs. Of course I’m running into a huge problem with this which is: their tragically unique face shapes and stylized proportions. Both face and body.

Typically when I do male doll repaints I use BTS dolls (bc I like their slightly larger than Barbie proportions) or the new Disney ILY dolls, and on occasion make minor sculpting edits to feminine face sculpts to suit my needs. This works for most of what I’ve done (ocs, the mandalorian, stuff like that) but I’m in a corner here. I have several options but none are great.

- I could use one of the two that I usually do and make some large alterations and pray for the best. If I choose to do that I’m going to have to find decent base dolls which I don’t doubt I can do. Pros are it’s within my comfort level, cons are it’s very limited.

- Monster/Ever after high. They have very stylized sculpts but their proportions are just a bit *too* much in terms of my preference. So I could shrink some monster high high heads and go from there. Pros are it’s also familiar and closer to the stylization I need, cons are shrunken heads are more difficult to work with and risk breaking to achieve the size I want.

- Third option is to sculpt and print/cast unique face molds, which is not a prospect I’m excited about but is something I am feasibly capable of. Pros is I can guarantee the most accuracy with the least need to make alterations, cons are I have very minimal experience with this so I have to fucking LEARN shit while also asking for a favor to print/mold/cast/whatever the final results.

-secret fourth option where someone smarter than me knows a doll that would make the perfect base

TL:DR I want to make Kim and Harry dolls but I need ideas on what base to use. If anyone knows some specific doll brands or characters that work well for the characters or have any advice/input on the matter pls hmu! I am unfortunately dedicated to this project.

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WIP Wednesday

okay i usually do this on my fallout blog but i can post something here too, especially since its not fallout. This is like. a half-wip? in that i’m not painting him he’s going to someone else for that, he’s gonna be their project, but i did make the wig and printed his head so??? fuck it! it counts. here is some fenris dragonage. 

i dont go here i just make things for friends if you find this please dont follow me expecting any dragon age content

@bioelectriccell its ur man

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Ch 4 is up, the gun has entered the scene, I'm fucking free

"Rhetoric: If guilt had a flavor, it would be the tar ridden run off of this conversation."

Drops this and runs

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Softober: A NSFW Disco Elysium Charity Zine is out NOW! Enjoy all the works from the fan challenge in one neat collection - PLUS exclusive fics and art you won't find anywhere else!

$10 minimum - all proceeds will be donated 🍉 30 artists & writers! 55 pages! 4 fics! 34 art works! Link above!!! 🥀

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Marriage? Hand in marriage? Please???

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There’s more high school time bullshit dimension au rattling around in my brain I might get around to eventually

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I wonder what they’re gossiping about

(It’s Harry)

@mrtequilasunset

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this painting but it's Kim talking to Alice while he's dropping the body off about this freak ass bear he met in martinaise and how he talks to the wind n shi

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What’s this? Kim pov? Gasp!

"Rhetoric: If guilt had a flavor, it would be the tar ridden run off of this conversation."

Drops this and runs

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Rook, known for full body slamming into the nearest surface, currently beating off the ruptured spleen allegations with a stick.