#elysium colony

[emissary-of-stuff]

A solar eclipse and an aurora borealis? That sounds so cool!!

[fleshadept]

nothing made me more disillusioned in recent years about how fandom treats women than playing disco elysium, seeing people post about it while i was playing, and waiting for this guy to show up everyone was obsessed with and shipping harry with and making angsty art about because clearly he showed up later in the game and he and harry had History and i know he’s the guy in disguise in the whirling-in-rags but he’s gotta become more prominent. then i get to the end of the game and he has one meaningful conversation with harry and kim and that’s it.

i saw so much fanart of this asshole who arguably has less screen time than any woman relevant to the plot of the game that i thought he’d become a major character. sure he’s kinda interesting but klaasje, ruby, elizabeth, even lena the cryptozoologist’s wife and the novelty dicemaker have more compelling dialogue than him. there are so many insanely good characters in this game and y’all can only post about the men you want to ship. it’s insane

[stressfulsloth]

"This--" she points to herself. "Has taken her place. It will devour you, Harry. I will eat your mind."

[failchild]

thinking about fruits in disco elysium

[vermilionstarlight]

If I could have any one Skill from Disco Elysium speaking in my head, guiding my hand. It would be Shivers.

Idk man. It would fix me. To feel the oncoming rain and the biting cold and know it's alive and there for me. That it loves me. To get whispers on the wind of stories happening around me, lives of others both current and long past all living in the same city. To hear her voice.

To hear her voice would fix me. The voice of a city, of humanity. She's always there and always supporting me and I am a part of her and she is a part of me and we are inextricably intertwined, and so is every single other person that lives as her.

She has seen me at the precipice. And she has seen me walking away from it. She is the precipice. And she is the long walk home. And she is the dying girl. And every girl who came before her. And every witness who stood silently by. We are keeping one another on this earth. She does not wish to see me dead, and nor do I wish to see that for her.

She is beyond me, and around me, and with me, and part of me. A god. The only god I could bring myself to worship with true, unwavering conviction. A god of humanity. More than any individual could ever hope to be, and yet tied inescapably and inextricably to her humanity.

[kyriolex]

You all need to play Sovereign Syndicate

It is a crime that the Sovereign Syndicate has such a small fandom. It's basically Disco Elysium in steampunk London, except:

Harry DuBois is an alcoholic minotaur magician

Klassje is a psychic sex worker

Kim Kitsuragi is a secretly sentient automaton

The Deserter is a monster-hunting dwarf with PTSD

Yes, it's smaller and shorter than other RPGS because the studio only had 20 people. But it's DAMN impressive for an indie game of its size, and well worth the price.

Also there's a side quest where you can supply machine gun blueprints to the Comanche Nation for use against the Texan invaders. Just saying.

[voidami]

[g-a-r-o]

Either tumblr's suggestion algorithm is so accurate and aggressive that they've pegged my interests immediately and are recommending content regarding Disco Elysium and Ultrakill and nothing else directly off the bat or my specific breed of autism is being spread in the water supply and all of you are infected

[lordsireno]

AU where Clones have been maintaining the space colony ship Elysium as it takes its cryo sleeping citizens to Utopia. Then first captain Argus wakes up after long being decommissioned, finding the whole place in critical condition- apparently that way since the disappearance of C- and the current leader R asking for him to save one specific Elysian from thawing out.

[crustaceousfaggot]

Someone needs to make a fucking. History Of Elysium textbook. I need to understand this world and its history better than I understand my own but holy shit there is so much of it and it's all out of order

[titusandronicusonice]

Fredric Jameson (left) in his best Harry Du Bois cosplay pictured with Eqbal Ahmad and Yasser Arafat

[emissary-of-stuff]

See, it's funny cuz he's the cannibal.

[transkholins]

the last tor newsletter had a really good article on cozy witch romance books btw

[himitsu-medusa]

It's nice seeing that a place in the world still has snow, even if it's a fictional one

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Surprised to see that you as a communist (and a lot of other communists too) seem to like disco elysium so much. doesn't the game make fun of communists a lot?

It does! Quite frequently and gleefully, in fact.

My blanket response to this type of question about most pieces of media would be that, in the words of Big Joel, "I am not a politics robot". My enjoyment of a piece of art is almost entirely orthogonal to how much its implicit or explicit worldview aligns with mine. And I think ultimately that's the way you end up having to approach media if you're a communist who plays videogames at all. Or reads fantasy books. Or watches anime. Or... you get the idea.

But in the case of Disco Elysium specifically I think the read that the game depicts communism just as negatively as all the other ideologies it criticizes is a quite shallow one. Ultimately we're being shown this world through a very communist lens. Like yeah the game has a lot of (usually pretty funny) jokes about firing squads and about "communism is about failure" and about pretentious overeducated college communists who do nothing but read theory and then do some leftist infighting about it, it doesn't shy away from the immoral actions of the revolutionary army, it depicts the dockworkers union as extremely shady and corrupt and basically a crime syndicate (although this depiction is way more nuanced if you actually take the time to dig deeper and talk to people about it), and generally doesn't shy away from pointing at the ugly parts of a variety of communist movements past and present. But, under all of that, the game's understanding of issues like class and poverty and crime and colonialism and imperialism and international conflict is ultimately rooted in a very marxist worldview.

I once saw someone say something along the lines of "everyone in this game talks like a communist regardless of political alignment", and while that's obviously an extremely hyperbolic statement, I do think there's a nugget of truth in it, the clearest example being Joyce Messier. Joyce is an ultraliberal, the furthest thing from a communist you're going to find in the DE universe. And yet, when she talks about the world she does so in very marxist terms, like in her famous "Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself" quote. Like. You'd never catch a real libertarian expressing that idea Like That. And a lot of the more serious, in-depth political discussions in the game are similar.

Plus, ultimately... regardless of how much criticism the game piles on it, of all the ideologies it criticizes, communism is the only one which is not depicted as a completely lost cause. The communist vision quest ends on a quite hopeful note, unlike pretty much any other one, and the Union is ultimately shown as having tons of popular support because they're the only ones who have actually gotten shit done to somewhat improve the lives of the people of Martinaise. I have lots of thoughts about the way Evrart Claire and the Dockworkers union are depicted actually, but for the time being I'm just going to say that the read of "unions are corrupt and union leaders are greedy fat cats who only care about their personal gain", while not exactly lacking in textual support, is likewise an extremely shallow one.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Disco Elysium's setting was formerly the site of a communist revolution that established the Commune of Revachol. It didn't last long. The Coalition of Nations brutally put the communists down, divided the city among themselves, and enforced a free market capitalist system. The results are depressingly apparent in Revachol's dilapidated district of Martinaise. "The literacy rate is around 45% west of the river," Joyce Messier, a negotiator sent to parley with Martinaise's striking union, tells our protagonist. "Fifty years of occupation have left these people in an *oblivion* of poverty." This state of affairs is overseen by the Moralist International, a union of centre-left and centre-right parties that professes to represent the cause of humanism, but whose primary concern is transparently the preservation of capitalist interest – a Coalition official happily tells us that "the Coalition is only looking out for *ze price stabilitié*", arguing that inflation in Revachol must be prevented, comparing it to a heart disease that could block the "normal circulation of the economy". The people of Revachol don't matter. Their suffering and oppression is only significant as a necessary symptom of the system functioning as intended.  The most biting aspect of this critique of capitalist exploitation can be found in the cynicism of those who represent Moralism, or at least, its interests. The aforementioned Joyce Messier is its perfect embodiment. She does not believe in the facade of humanity Moralism presents to the world, and is under no illusions about what it has done to the people of Martinaise. She tells you how bad things are, freely admitting that the pieces of legislation put in place by the Moralist Coalition to govern Revachol are there to keep "the city in a [...] laissez-faire stasis to the benefit of foreign capital". This corrosion of belief via cynicism, this depiction of a system that continues to operate unimpeded despite few believing in it, feels all too familiar.  This critique of liberal capitalism's hypocrisy, cynicism, exploitation and deep-rooted connections to colonialism, is particularly powerful in recognising the precarious position it finds itself in. It has reached a stasis that seems, paradoxically, both insurmountable, and on the verge of collapse. Moralism relies on this contradiction. It's unofficial motto, "for a moment, there was hope", underlines the degree to which its dominance depends on the preclusion of the idea that a better world is possible, that there is no alternative, echoing the End of History sentiment that created the (rapidly disintegrating) political consensus of our lived reality. Despite growing dissatisfaction with the status quo in the real world, it has, indeed, proved difficult to imagine an alternative. The oft-repeated phrase attributed to literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson, that is is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism, has almost become a cliché. However, the mistake Joyce makes, and one that we should avoid, is to assume that this means an alternative won't emerge nonetheless.

[...]

In a world where everyone is encouraged to look out for themselves, Disco Elysium suggests we should remember the value of collectivity, camaraderie and community. The Deserter has forgotten that though the communism he identified with is dead, the values that brought people to its cause in search of a better world remain as valid as ever. Bleak as it is, those values exist in Martinaise. They exist in us. Their latent power has the potential to lead us towards better horizons.