#from the check the first time you try pyrholidon

[mrtequilasunset]

you wanna ride that pyhrr with them soooo bad

[satelliteaccident]

hi there i recently read main and perdition and i just wanted to say (again) how much i liked it. you said that you may have some pointers on how to write in the style of the game and i actually wanted to come back to that because i want to try to write some myself soon. if you've got any tips i'm all ears. hope this isn't weird or anything 😅

hi em! not only is it not weird, you've made my day. thank you for the kind words, and thank you for giving me the chance to blather about writing and (hopefully) be useful.

*clears throat* *takes off "just chillin" hat and puts on "guy who sometimes knows what he's talking about" hat, which mostly means remembering how to find the shift key*

Hi! I'm Six. I'm an editor who has worked in the publishing industry for about ten years across print, web, radio, podcast and television.

I also write Disco Elysium fanfic. In the process of planning and writing Main and Perdition, I worked hard to craft something that I hoped would play, intelligently, in the DE sandbox.

I didn't wholly succeed. Time permitting, I'm happy to grab a figurative highlighter and point out spots where I failed, why, and what to do differently if you don't wanna do the same dumb things I did.

But this post is not that post! Instead, it's...

How To Mimic Style: Tips For Writing Your Disco Elysium Fic

Pick your playthrough.

One of the most beautiful, epic, fascinating things about DE is its multivariance. That trait extends to Harry. Is he a pacifist sober Sorry Cop who throws his gun into the sea, or a fiery anti-racist who throws hands and roundhouse kicks, or a ~mystic visionary~ who hears voices and does pyrholidon about it?

Yes! And no. Which is phenomenal to experience as a game player, but it's table-flippingly antithetical to writing a fic with a coherent emotional through-line.

So decide which Harry you're writing. It'll help you narrow down what your guy might or might not do, and it'll also help you write characters (Kim, Jean, Judit, Garte, Sylvie, and so many more) whose responses greatly depend on how Harry behaves.

It'll also help you spot places where the game, in its richness, has left space for you to write into questions it leaves unanswered -- but more on this when we get to tolerating discomfort.

Embrace the skillset.

It's daunting at first, but working with it rather than avoiding it helps you understand who's in Harry's head, what they do, and how mighty they are. (It also helps to pay attention to how they talk, but that's less about writing DE fic and more about honing an eye and ear for dialogue -- yet another possible future post.)

To help me with who and what when I was drafting M+P, I made this spreadsheet:

It was my zero-draft bestie because it helped me figure out what skills might comment in any given moment, which I suspect contributes to the places where the fic succeeds at feeling similar to the game. Feel free to use/share if it helps you, too.

As for how mighty, that's where stats come in. I didn't do a full stat sheet for M+P Harry, but I did decide his base attributes (INT-PSY-FYS-MOT). The game lets you put a total of 12 points across them; a base of 3 is average, with 1 being shithouse and 6 being HARDCORE TO THE MEGA. I also chose his signature skill (Inland Empire, which is my favourite one to write because I too am a middle-aged white bi-sexual sopping-wet-dog guy who never became a poet or an entroponaut).

I could then do the maths when deciding, "How hard would it be to succeed at [thing happening in the story]? Is that something this Harry is capable of? If so, is it obvious to him that he'll succeed, or would it *Princess Bride voice* take a miracle?"

And then, when I'm on my A-game, I follow up with my favourite DE-writing question: Regardless of whether Harry *could* succeed, would it be a chewier, more compelling story if he failed? (Yet again, more on this when we talk discomfort.)

So. Difficulty levels: know 'em, check 'em, put 'em in a stew fic. I worked from this screenshot, though I don't remember where I took it (this was at least a year ago, ack). Apologies to whichever wiki I have failed:

Let shit go wrong.

This is hard. It requires tolerating discomfort -- which is already hard -- in a situation where you are at the keyboard and can make it stop, which makes it that much harder.

But shit going wrong is the absolute beating heart of DE.

Let's weave some threads together. In the first section, I mentioned writing into spaces the game makes with unanswered questions; in the second, I mentioned making space in your fic-writing process for skill checks to fail.

Letting shit go wrong is how we as fic writers can expand into those spaces -- and when we do, sometimes, something beautiful is allowed to happen.

While I leave it to each reader to decide whether anything beautiful did in fact happen, here's one example of how this process unfolded in my practice.

I hated reading the solution to "Rigorous Self-Critique." *Hated* it. I hated what it showed me about Harry's callousness, his violence, his utter disregard for boundaries. Most of all, I hated this:

You held a young woman by the arm and kept her in your apartment for 20 minutes against her will. 

What the fuck. What the fuck? Who *does* that? (Harry.) *Why?* (Because he wanted to.)

*Fuck*.

This section, you may have noticed, left me feeling kind of a lot of discomfort.

I could've pushed that feeling away. I could've made excuses. ("I mean, the pale makes people confused about which memories are theirs and which are someone else's, right? That must be what happened, because Harry would *never* do that.") I could've done mental gymnastics to avoid the conclusion that what Harry did was wrong. ("Well, maybe he was *helping* her, and he just doesn't remember!")

I wouldn't have been -- and you, person reading this, wouldn't be -- bad for doing any of those things. Life is hard. Sometimes, elective hardness (shush) is too much. That's okay.

But I sat with the discomfort. I followed it into the space in the game: what happened in those 20 minutes? Who was this young woman -- did Harry even know or care? How did she escape? I followed it into the space in my story: what would happen if Harry, as he is post-Martinaise, failed a check (in the fic, he "succeeds", but the outcome of that success is failure #justlittleelysiumthings) and recalled what happened?

And I ended up with M+P.

It's not a perfect fic. It may not even be a *good* fic; I've spent too much time with it to have an opinion on its goodness. But it is absolutely an answer-through-story, and I feel less discomfort and more satisfaction, more joy, for having written it. I hope this post helps you have that experience, too.

[of-lilacs-and-lightning]

Disco Elysium brain rot

So I have Thoughts about Disco Elysium and I'm gonna dump em here so I'm sorry.

I finished my first 2 playthroughs and have started on my third. Out of curiosity I looked at the trophies for it, not that I particularly care, but if there was stuff I was really missing out on, I wanted to be prepared for my next go. And as I was scrolling through them I was like fuck, I've missed a lot, how did this happen?

My first playthrough I went full emotion heavy Harry, talking to my tie and the city, apologizing to everyone about what a mess I made, but ultimately playing it safe and trying to help people, and not abusing drugs or alcohol. This is when I got the "Unbelievably Boring F**k" trophy, which we'll get back to later.

Second playthrough I did intelligent Harry, immediately gaining points with Kim by talking to him about his car and board games and obscure trivia when Encyclopedia chimed in. I chose not to use alcohol or cigarettes, but I did use Pyrholidon ONCE just to see and Kim being a narc brought it up at the intervention with Jean at the end. Again, I tried to help people, generally didn't act like a fuckup, but still didn't get a lot of progress in the way of trophies.

I'm almost finished with the first day on my third playthrough. I fully punched Cuno in the face. There's not a trophy for that, but after you do it, Cuno respects you, and stops giving you such a hard time while you're investigating.

Now I am obviously in no way encouraging punching a 12-year-old in the face (although if they had let me do it to MacCready in Fallout 3 I WOULD HAVE), but it did make me think about how the game, in some ways, rewards you for doing bad things.

On my second playthrough, Garte was of course giving me a hard time about my bill and how much I owed him. My first time through, I just begged Joyce for the full amount of the tab and paid it without complaint. The next time however, I was given the option to sneak away undetected. I botched the white check and ended up sailing headfirst into Lena's wheelchair as I ran. Garte found me ass over teakettle and told me that okay, the drinks were on him, and he'd give me some sort of discount and only charged me 75 reál. However, I discovered later that if I had passed the white check and just run right out the front door, Garte would charge me 100 reál after I had to come back to talk to him again about the investigation.

The point of all this though is that, like running from Garte or punching Cuno in the face, the game becomes a little bit easier when you're kind of a dickhead.

Drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes give pretty big bonuses and make it easier to pass important checks. If you don't try to dig into your past with your ex, you won't have fainting spells. Working with Evrart, who's a corrupt greasy slimeball, is the only way to get your lost sidearm back. Plus if you just accept his bribe, you can pay Garte off immediately and keep your room at the Whirling-In-Rags. The "Unbelievably Boring F**k" trophy pokes fun at you because you're so straight-laced, which isn't typically Harry's style. Two trophies are only available if you piss Kim off and let him die during the tribunal.

But really, if you think about Harry, a lot of that makes perfect sense. From what we know of Harry based on people who knew him before his amnesia, he was a pathetic addict, moving from one vice to the next while somehow still staying upright enough to solve cases. So of course it would be easy for him to fall into the same patterns again, it's all his body has known for a while. The game constantly reminds you that you just woke up from a three day blackout, from throwing up in front of the body of Lely in the tree, to Electrochemistry whispering in your ear tempting you, all your body craves is to get back on that bullet train to hell.

But you have the power to stop it. You have the power to make different choices, and become more than all the mistakes you made leading up to this moment. And it's hard. Doable, but definitely not easy. It makes you look and feel kinda pathetic and hopeless. You fuck up white checks a lot, and say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Your hands and feet don't quite remember how to do the things they used to, especially without chemical help. But as you solve pieces of the puzzle, internalize different thoughts to help give you boosts, and rely on Kim when you don't know how to move forward, you get stronger. Checks become easier, you remember the right things to say, and by the end you report back to Jean on the island having solved the mystery, gained Kim’s trust, and discovered a goddamn cryptid to boot.

We all know the line about Kim and how he'd sacrifice his life for ours without hesitation. This is even before he knows Harry, before he's seen how bad things can get. You have to actively try to fuck it up with him, and most times he'll follow your lead even if your methods are unconventional. Kim becomes your guide, and he doesn't degrade you, he doesn't make you feel stupid, he teases you gently when you make mistakes, he steps in front of a bullet for you.

I think it's truly wonderful and masterful storytelling on the part of the developers to incentivize people to make bad choices. Because a lot of times in real life, bad choices are easy and can make things fun, for a little while at least. And once you have become accustomed to making bad choices its like it's all your body knows how to do. It's complete muscle memory, like being trained how to use a firearm or driving a Kineema. It's possible to break these patterns, and in the beginning it feels bad. You feel low and like you'll never be able to integrate into society again. But there's hope and redemption, and people who will stick up for you even when you're at your worst.

I hope that everyone who is struggling has at least 1 Kim in their life. I hope that people who are in recovery from whatever they're fighting against know that you can always try again, you can always make new choices. You can get stronger, you can become acquainted with yourself and the world again. And hey, if Harrier Du Bois can solve a murder case with half a brain, I bet we can get through whatever we're dealing with.

And I want Harry and Kim to kiss that is all