#codeword: superstar cop

[exilley]

Thinking about that disco elysium review from the person who grew up in iraq on how the game captures why life in a broken system is still a life worth living and also how orv says the world is too unfair to love and too full of good to hate and how pandora hearts says your personhood is merely an extension of your experiences and the fact that you are able to find joy in it is a testament to our legacy of kindness and revolutionary girl utena says systems cannot be fixed but we can always leave them behind for something better no matter how terrifying that may be and how hunter x hunter insists that even in a world defined by cruelty and apathy people will always find ways to care and and

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As far as minor Disco Elysium characters go i love René Arnoux. diversity loss your fascist grandpa has internalized homophobia. He also “this is why im terrified for future generations”’s a couple of cops in their 40s

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I enjoy playing Harry like he's beholden to every single impulse his skills pump into his mind. "Revive the Communist movement, soyboy" and i'll say Right away Half-Light anything for you 🫡

[exilley]

hi exilley.. wondering if i can get your take on disco elysium playthroughs? thinking about watching one as an alternative because i can't play the game, is de a game that works as a playthrough and if so do you recommend any? don't know the details but it seems some options are going to be unavoidably missed and there are paths you must choose individually.. is this a matter of choosing a good playthrough (political alignments come to mind) or is it a game better reserved for personal interactive playing?

HI JEMM I'M SORRY IT TOOK ME OVER A DAY TO RESPOND. i was lost in the sludge. sad!

unfortunately it is as you speculate: DE is not an experience well-suited to be relegated to a playthrough. the game's core mechanics are built around player agency and the machinations of thought. you accumulate skill points and assign them to different skills across various categories and navigate the story by uncovering new insights based on the political and interpersonal leanings you opt for Harry. there is foundationally no way for any two playthroughs to be the same. THAT BEING SAID. all this means is that Disco Elysium's thematic content is built on its replayability. while i think it's impossible for something to substitute the experiential factor/metatext of the game's merits, i don't think it's impossible for people to engage with the story on its face. start with watching the full playthrough linked, then branch out and look for more specific scenes/sequences that people have uploaded to youtube. rewatch parts you've already seen before, compare different playthroughs from different people, and if you want to commit that sort of time and energy, this is a great resource to reference specific lines for analytical purposes.

this game is something very special for a lot of people and from what i know of your interests you'll really like it! Disco Elysium is essentially just a glorified text adventure, so its gameplay is 90% reading anyway. just dont go into the tumblr tags until you've seen at least a full playthrough of the game though. trust ^_^

[exilley]

My take on dolores dei for a bust project

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Cant believe everyone always cuts out this response to the "mental illness" quip. I'm sure we have officers way more mentally ill than me. (He does not know what money is)

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the funniest variant of the disco elysium hater breed are the ones who go "this game made fun of my conservative beliefs 😠👎" put against the reviewers who are like "this game made fun of my leftist beliefs 😊👍"

[exilley]

Disco Elysium has such a holistic approach to its gameplay. Every choice you make has consequences but those consequences are elastic and forgiving. You get second tries. There are multiple ways to achieve the same outcome. Harry is a protagonist who is written to respond to and be influenced by the world rather than vice versa. Everything Harry says and does is a reflection of who he is, every politic and every thought. The whole thing is a reaction to his past and a reflection of the things that made him into what he is. It manages to strike the heart of the privilege and authority at his disposal as a ranking police official by tying it into his personhood rather than separating it. And that’s the thing about the game, one of its core narrative components is the concept of how intertwined politics are in our human condition and the ways in which people are driven towards certain ideologies and for what reasons. Principally, it is interested in people, and the gameplay captures this so elegantly and concisely. I have to get up and pace around the room while I think on this a bit more

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I forgot the game lets you do this fhggggg

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underrated dialogue option

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It is a uniquely bitter experience for me to see the fandom emasculate or hypermasculinize Kim because not only did the game go to great lengths to deconstruct racist ideas and explore how they can be internalized by the victims, that is just like. A thing that happens to asian diaspora and minority pretty frequently. Like that's bigotry from real life. I'm not one to be doom and gloom about the struggles that come with carrying a stigmatized or greatly misunderstood condition of personhood but that shit hurts to see personally given how misogyny complicates my own racial identity

[exilley]

The overlap between harry du bois and pheonix wright hijinks astound me. Pheonix ate glass once. Harry would absolutely chow down on window shards. Both had a relationship with a woman who broke a piece of them forever. Both of them take morale damage if they say or do something ludicrous against their will. Kindred spirits in the department of being former art students. You see what i mean

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I dont know if this take holds any water or if it's already been said but a point of interest in DE's dissection of cop culture is in how it depicts the rampantly dysfunctional nature of cop socialization. Everyone who works for the RCM is an asshole or burnout of some kind and everyone is aware of just how deeply entrenched they are in their stinky burntout assholery but they fully tolerate each other anyway because the only ones who like cops are the state and other cops. Which is also basically just the state. It's a bout of oligarchical schadenfreude that these people pass around like a game of hot potato and it's what forms the basis for a bond both thicker than blood and thinner than water, as it's said. Harry's colleagues are sick of his shit but he's still One Of Them.

[exilley]

Starting my collection