#catch me writing an actual essay about the trauma of being a first generation immigrant

[oplishin]

Person of Color throws in their 2 cents in patho 2’s endings

This mostly looks at the endings from a thematic level and not the physical plot consequences they have.

I’m a first generation immigrant living in a predominately white culture. My take on the endings honestly changes based on how terrible I’m feeling about race atm. Currently, my mood is lying down on the floor and thinking about the hopelessness of reconciling trying to understand how you fit into overlapping, fractured racial identities. Right now, the hopelessness of the endings feels appropriate.

We’ve been discussing race a lot lately in class, and a lot of it relates to Artemys struggles. First generation immigrants and people of mixed race don’t fit cleanly into any category- weve separated ourselves from where our parents/ancestors initially came from, but we aren’t white either. There isn’t an easy solution to trying to understand how we fit into the world.

The solution a lot of us came too when we were too young to understand what the choice meant was total rejection of our native cultures. We fit into white society, but we didn’t understand the cost of that until much later. Throwing away your background means that the struggle to understand yourself becomes so much harder. And I really feel that with the Diurnal ending. It’s a desperate choice that feels right at the time, but it has devastating consequences. No matter how much it sucks, race determines the way we interact with different parts of the world and the way different parts of the world interact with us, so it shapes our identity. By throwing his culture away, Artemy is losing an integral part of who he is.

With the nocturnal ending, I... personally felt even more loss there. Even beyond the fact that so many characters are dead now. Artemy has grown up in white society for a lot of his life and it’s not something you can just separate from yourself by throwing yourself into your native culture. Getting a bit more personal here- if going to China and not having to deal with racial dynamics was an option I had I would be on a plane right now. But Chinese culture is really different from Chinese American culture. I don’t fit in there any better either because people don’t see me as Chinese. And I feel like that’s an important factor in the nocturnal ending. Growing up in white society makes you fundamentally different from people of the same race who grew up in your native culture. Artemys experiences are most likely radically different from many Kin people. Add the fact that Artemy is a white passing person of mixed race who’s ALREADY perceived as an outsider a lot do the times and hhhhh pain.

Being “a uniting bridge between peoples” is an impossibly hard task for ANYONE to undertake, and in my current mood, I’m kinda glad the endings feel like that.

So that’s kind of a summary of my positive, relatable feelings about p2s endings.

When I’m feeling better about things, I look at them and just see a lot of cold, useless cynicism. I guess that’s a common criticism of depressing pain games lmao. I think part of the appeal of patho 2 specifically is that there feels like all the pain youre going through is FOR something: your family, your friends, your people, your town. And the fact that the endings say that “nope! There isn’t a better future! It’s just more suffering from the same racial dynamics until the end of time!” feels like a slap in the face. I do think it would be unfair to ask a video game to offer a perfect solution to a racial struggle that’s been around for decades, but. This ain’t it chief.

I guess my ideal ending would just. Throw out the binary choice completely somehow. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I don’t have time to get into it fully atm because there’s. A lot. The biggest point is that Artemy has to make the active choice to try and understand his own racial identity, and there have to be people around him who can support him as he does that. It’s not a perfect ending, but like I’ve said 4000 times, there isn’t one. There is no perfect racial identity box will work for anyone. But... it’s important to try, at least.

I feel like a lot of PoC will disagree with me, which is totally valid. These are just some of my personal feelings.