#maybe writing this down motivates me slightly to actually speedrun all my work

[cconfusedkat]

I'm doing better mentally but at the same time it's because I'm ignoring school 😭 Listen . Times are tough 🗿

[ladysmaragdina]

I know I'm late as hell, but Dishonored 2... Which path should you choose (high/ low chaos) in order to stay the most true to Emily's and Corvo's character? I've always loved reading your Dishonored fics and analyzes, you always make the characters make such good sense =>

So this ask has been sitting in my inbox for over two weeks now. Which I feel terribly guilty about, because I want to give this question the thought and weight and few-thousand words it probably deserves, but… ugh, okay.

Dishonored 1 is my single favorite game, ever.

I’m utterly indifferent to Dishonored 2.

I’m not interested in Dishonored 2.

I have a hard time even saying that I like Dishonored 2.

I’m not going to be able to answer this question, anon. And I feel like I should explain why. (A lot of this is going to be a reatread of what I talked about in my big Dishonored 2 critique I wrote back when the game came out. Whoops)

I played through the game once, the instant it came out – as Emily in a Clean Hands run – and I really, really enjoyed it at first. I loved getting to play as Emily. I loved that the gameplay was objectively better than the first one. I loved how bright and different and rich the world looked. I was so fucking into Dishonored 2! I probably spent an extra couple of hours exploring every nook and cranny of the Royal Conservatory after knocking out the witches, and finding Corvo’s old apartment in the Dust District was a fucking treat. I love the Dishonored world. I wanted to know everything. I was gonna write so much fucking meta and fanfic.

But by the time I got to A Crack In The Slab, I was starting to realize that the story felt… off.

By the time I finished that mission and it was suddenly time to go get rid of the Duke… I mean, I was still having fun! The game was fucking cool! But I raced through the streets leadup to the Duke’s palace without really exploring. I raced through the Duke’s palace like I was speedrunning it. There are entire floors of that level I never saw, and wasn’t remotely interested in seeing. I didn’t care.

I was bored by the time I got back to Dunwall. I was frustrated by how long it took me to work through the many levels of the palace. I just wanted to get to the finale and find out how the story ended. (and then I found the ending profoundly unsatisfying)

I realized none of this mattered.

If this was ultimately a story about stopping Delilah from mantling the Outsider —- as the metaplot seemed to insist – what the fuck were we doing in Karnaca? Why did we care about Karnaca? Karnaca’s problems weren’t my problems, Emily’s problems, at least not in any clear direct way; Karnaca’s problems weren’t even bad. The bloodflies were endemic to the region instead of being a super-scary weird semi-supernatural plague; it might have been a particularly bad year for bloodflies, but it didn’t feel like anything the city couldn’t deal with. The streets were lively. There were nobles sitting in cafes playing guitar music. Shops were open and well-lit. I felt like I could go to the beach and sip mai-tais. Even the most run-down, awful section of Karnaca that we got to see – the Dust District – wasn’t much worse than anything we’d seen on a Tuesday in Dunwall.

And Karnaca wasn’t home. It didn’t feel like it mattered to Emily. Not really. It was in Emily’s empire, sure, but it was an ocean away and it wasn’t under her direct personal governance. And the Emily we met at the start of the game wasn’t interested in governing to begin with. I could never buy the sense that she cared – really, emotionally cared – about the well-being of Karnaca, because Karnaca was relatively fine, and because Emily seemed like she would rather fuck off and abdicate given half the chance. Being exiled from Gristol didn’t feel like exile – it felt like a sunny vacation, a chance for Emily to have cool swashbuckling adventures without the boredom and paperwork of sitting a throne. 

I didn’t understand what I was really doing in Karnaca, and I didn’t understand why it was so urgent and important and needed that I get home to Dunwall. I was just told that I had to get home to Dunwall because Delilah was Bad. And that she was doing some Very Bad Things on the other side of the ocean, and that if she remained unchecked things would get Worse. YOU NEED TO STOP DELILAH, I was told.

But…. gosh, that was on the other side of the ocean. That didn’t seem to affect anything here. Again, Karnaca was fine! Karnaca’s had some issues, but they were were caused firstly by the Duke, not Delilah! What bad things was Delilah really doing? Can we see them? How are they worse than anything any other nobles and rulers are doing? How would installing Emily on the throne be meaningfully different?

What would Delilah’s plan to mantle the Outsider actually mean? The finale gives us a vision of The World As It Should Be, a supremely alien lotus-eater machine where Delilah is absolute monarch; it comes so late in the game, at the absolute eleventh hour, that it doesn’t feel meaningful. It also comes totally out of left field and is so bizarre and extreme that I had no fear that it could ever actually happen. Everything about Delilah’s ascension and ultimate goal is so bizarre and extreme that I had no fear it could ever actually happen. I didn’t understand how it was supposed to happen. The mechanics of magic had never mattered before; why did they matter now? Why did the half-baked explanation for Delilah’s endgame rely on lore from the previous game’s second DLC? (What the fuck, Arkane?)

What was my motivation? Why were my missions important – why did Emily want and need to do these things? What would happen, actually happen, if I failed? What was keeping me from just walking away?

I’m really not sure.

Maybe, just maybe, we could ignore the weird ascension to godhood plot. Maybe my real motivation had nothing to do with Delilah – maybe Emily just wanted to get back to the home that was taken from her. Maybe this was a “take back whats yours” story. But Emily didn’t seem to really want the throne back. The Emily we met at the beginning of the game was bored with governing and wanted out of Dunwall. If we’d had more time and attention paid to that shift in her character, I’d buy it, but you can’t do a complete and instant 180 on a character’s feelings and call it motivation.

Or maybe my real motivation was to get home to Dunwall to save Corvo. But the opening sequence made it seem like Corvo was dead. That’s not a valid motivation either.

Maybe my motivation was to avenge Corvo? I don’t buy that the way I bought Corvo avenging Jessamine in Dishonored 1; in Dishonored 2, Corvo is not the focus and meaning of Emily’s life, and I can’t see her structuring her entire life around fighting back from exile just to avenge him. Emily has hopes and dreams and a distant love interest and isn’t the same hollowed-out husk of vengeance that Corvo is. Sure, he’s her father figure, but I don’t buy that as her sole motivation.

This lack of motivation trickles down to the individual missions of the game.

If I don’t really know or care about what Delilah is doing, why is it so important to stop Breanna Ashworth?

Kirin Jindosh is supposedly making an army of Clockwork Soldiers, but what does that mean? How soon would they be ready, what are the logistics, how powerful are they, how are they worse than Tallboys or other existing technology, what was he going to use them for? Why is it so important to take him out? Couldn’t we just bribe him or write him a strongly-worded letter? I’m going to be the Empress – couldn’t I make his soldiers illegal or shut down his factories? Why do I have to go to such an immediate and awful extreme?

Sure, the Duke is a dick and should probably be replaced by a better ruler. Doing so doesn’t feel important. I’ve never met the Duke. He never did anything to me. Karnaca’s in decent shape, all things considered. Killing or replacing him  feels like taking out the trash.

Where are the stakes?

Why do I care about any of this?

Tangent – I feel like I’ve got to talk about Corvo a bit here. Would Corvo have a different, stronger, more personal attachment to Karnaca? Sure, but I’ve never played Corvo’s route in Dishonored 2 and can’t speak to it. Personally, I always got the sense that Corvo felt like an outsider in Gristol and that he would have tried to distance himself from Serkonos in response to this, and that returning must have felt oddly alien, like an ill-fitting suit. Now, this is a cool thing to explore. It might make him more invested and interested in some aspects of the game – I’m thinking of the Duke and Stilton in the Dust District, specifically – but I don’t think it fixes the core issues about lack of motivation in the overarching plot.

So, let’s talk about that overarching plot. Would Corvo feel more strongly about getting back to Gristol and restoring Emily to the throne and/or bringing vengeance to her “killer”? Probably! Corvo’s arc in Dishonored 2 isn’t about toppling Delilah and seeking vengeance for his own sake, but rather for Emily’s sake (or at least the memory of Emily-who-we-think-is-dead). That’s less selfish and entitled, more emotional and tortured. That’s honestly more interesting to me. But that’s the exact same story we got in Dishonored 1. Corvo’s entire existence in Dishonored 2 feels like a rehash of Dishonored 1. The vengeance arc in Dishonored 2 feels much more muddled and unfocused and distant in comparison. It’s not as good.

I think Corvo’s story and motivation are more clear and pressing and straightforward than Emily’s; but I think Dishonored 1 did that exact same story and motivation much much better. Corvo’s story in Dishonored 2 honestly makes more sense to me than Emily’s story. Which feels utterly backwards! One protagonist has a storyline and motivation that has no real weight or drive or urgency behind it. The other protagonist has a slightly stronger storyline that is still a weaker, fuzzier retread of the first game.

I think Dishonored 2 is badly written.

I like it on the micro level – I like the characters and the levels – but on the macro, i think it’s a confused jumble that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a vengeance story? Is it a story about stopping a supernatural threat? I don’t know, and I don’t think it does either. The game doesn’t manage to mesh those ideas at all, and neither idea holds water on its own. I am utterly confused and turned off by the game’s decision to make the vengeance so un-urgent and impersonal and the villain’s magic-driven plan so distant and obtuse and ill-defined. I think that in deciding to make the scope bigger, it bit off way more than it could chew and lost sight of what matters in storytelling.

Dishonored 1 was a tightly-focused straightforward revenge plot where I understood exactly what I had lost, how much it mattered, and what was at stake. Dishonored 2 is a fucking mess.

I can’t write about which choices Corvo and Emily would have taken because their choices don’t make sense to me; because their existence and participation in this story makes no sense to me; because the story hops from point to point without establishing thematic or plot coherence; because I don’t understand – emotionally, really buy and feel and understand – why I’m meant to give a shit about any of it.

I played the game once, started a High Chaos replay, wandered away from the game after the second mission, and uninstalled. I have no interest in replaying it. I have no interest in ever picking up Death of the Outsider. The fact that the writing seems to be moving away from the vengeance quest and doubling down on its focus on the supernatural (and the fact that they’re dragging back characters – Corvo in Dishonored 2, Daud in DotO – whose arcs had finished) has honestly killed my interest in the franchise at this point. I don’t feel anything about this other than a profound sense of disappointment. 

I wanted to like Dishonored 2. The game is gorgeous and fun and an improvement on the original in many ways. I wanted to answer your question, anon. I truly wish I could, and I’m sorry for how salty this post has become. I’m sure someone else would have fantastic headcanons and insight.

But I just. don’t. care.