#to kim and harry in their position as cops

[smthscoming]

not directing this at anyone in particular but lest we all forget... kim kitsuragi IS a cop and a centrist and acab DOES apply to him

he can be your uwu gay bby that's fine but he does make it clear he's chosen pragmatic moralism. so just like... think about that perhaps.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

ok but i need the evrart claire essay

Okay just be warned that this is gonna be less of an "essay" and more of a loose collection of thoughts, and I don't know how fresh or novel any of these ideas are going to be when it pertains to popular Disco Elysium fan discourse because I don't really do fandom, you know?

Anyway, I think the most obvious factet of Evrart's character is how he very intentionally calls to mind a caricature of corrupt union leaders, the image of a sleazy mobster who only cares about his own personal gain but pays lip service to leftist politics and pretends to care about the interests of workers as a way to obtain and maintain his power. And I think a lot of people straightforwardly read him as such, because that's the way he carries himself and the type of character the game is riffing on. There's also the question of how much of Evrart's manipulative, duplicitous attitude is just how he normally acts and how much of it is him specifically acting that way towards Harry and Kim specifically, it's important to have in mind that your main character is a cop and that would definitely play a role in making Evrart go out of his way to be a bit more of a bastard and toy with you a bit before he decides to actually do anything helpful.

However, once you dig a little deeper into his characterization, it becomes clear that he's pulling a very interesting double bluff, because it becomes apparent that the shady mobster who only cares about his personal gain is an act he's putting on. He's very self-aware about the fact that he's playing the villain, he seems to actively revel in it, but ultimately, it seems like he does it because playing the villain is the way he gets shit done.

This is not to say he's not actually corrupt, or that he's not ALSO involved in all sorts of shady stuff and taking advantage of his position of power, but the game does make it apparent that on some level he DOES have the interests of the people of Martinaise at heart.

For example, it is textually stated that the harbor doesn't need a night watchman, and Evrart created the position specifically to provide a source of income for René. He knows the pension Rene gets is not enough for him to live on, but he's also aware that René is the sort of right-wing guy who would rather starve to death than take a handout (especially from those dirty union commies), so Evrart created a job position which pretty much involves doing nothing for a few hours every night so he could help him with his economic troubles in a way he wouldn't refuse out of principle. René hates his guts, ideologically stands against everything his organization represents, and is generally an unlikeable asshole and a fascist prick, but he's also a disadvantaged member of the community and that seems to matter more.

Even when he asks you to get the signatures to build the community center, which is definitely one of the most morally questionable things he does during the events of the game (as it will improve the community, but at the same time displace the people from the fishing village), his intentions seem to be ultimately good. Due to the very nature of his character and the act he puts on, it's purposefully hard to tell when he's being sincere and when he's being manipulative. However, if Harry's drama and empathy skills are high enough when he's confronted about it, you'll be able to tell that he's not lying about his motives for wanting to build a community center or about the fact that he intends to provide better housing for the people displaced by the project, and that he feels genuine rage about their current living conditions. It can still be said that he's ignoring their self-determination and essentially forcing these people out of their current homes, but he does seem to have good intentions and think he's doing a good thing for them in the long run, even if his methods are morally questionable at best.

In that way, the Union is an extension of him in this regard too. They're pretty unapologetic about the fact that they're openly operating as a crime syndicate, but the game doesn't give you any reasons to believe they're lying when they say they're doing it as a way to muslce out all the more dangerous gangs and crime organizations out of Martinaise, or that their involvement in the drug trade is at least partially motivated by a desire to make sure it's not controlled by more dangerous and violent crime organizations. Again, they're playing the villain as a way to fill that power vacuum and make sure more dangerous people don't fill that role (but of course, that doesn't erase the fact that, noble as their intentions may be, they're still involved in all these shady activities and turning a pretty substantial profit from them too)

Of course, on the other hand, just because the game seems to hint at the fact that Evrart and the Union are, deep down, a force for good, doesn't erase the fact that he's done plenty of bad shit to further his interests, and the game doesn't shy away from this. He's still extremely corrupt, his long-term plan to wrestle control of the harbor away from the company and turn it into a worker-owned operation (which *would* massively improve the material conditions of the dockworkers if succesful) involves endangering the lives of a lot of his own workers, he and his brother Edgar pass the position of union foreman back and forth between each other to circumvent the term limit and keep themselves in power indefinitely, and if you explore all dialogue options with the Deserter it's all but explicitly stated that they rose to power by getting him to assassinate the previous Union forewoman.

These are things that Evrart himself would probably rationalize as sacrifices that need to be made for the greater good. After all, it is implied that the previous union forewoman was also corrupt, except in favor of the company's interests, and might have even been a company plant. However, this doesn't make those things morally right. Good intentions nonwithstanding, it's clear that the Claire brothers are very "the ends justify the means" kind of people, they probably see getting the previous Union leader killed or endangering the lives of the dockworkers to overthrow the company that exploits them as "pulling the lever" in the trolley problem, which is extremely callous at best.

Here's where we get a little more into "disjointed thoughts" territory, but Evrart can also be seen as a critique of the limits of trade unionism and social democrat politics. Something that I completely missed in my first playthrough but was able to catch on during my second is that the people of the fishing village refuse to unionize, and as a result they don't get the same level of support and protection that the union provides to the people of the more urban section of Martinaise. This is apparently widely known enough for characters other than Evrart to comment on (I forget what character I learned this from, but it was definitely not Evrart). So it's clear that Evrart and the Union put their interests of the members of their own organization over those of other working class people, which is one criticism that can be leveraged against the way a lot of leftists seem to treat unions as the ultimate tool for worker class liberation.

Similarly, when Evrart tells you his long-term plans, it's clear that his ultimate goals don't involve complete worker liberation. As far as the game shows, he's a socdem who's still looking to work within the confines of capitalism. There are more radically left wing characters in Disco Elysium, but Evrart is the only one with any actual power to affect change, which kinda speaks to the lack of presence of more hardline leftist positions in mainstream politics. As someone living in Latin America, I kinda ended up seeing a bit of a lot of our currrent socdem politicians in him in that respect, I guess, but i'd need more time to articulate this thought properly, I guess.

Ultimately, I think Evrart is an amazingly crafted character. He evokes a well-known archetype of a shady, corrupt, power-hungry union leader, but he adds a lot of depth, self-awareness, and nuance to it and subverts that characterization in several ways. I think he atually serves an important role of ideologically challenging players who share the developers' and writers' political leanings. I think it would have been very self-congratulatory and autocomplacent to make the most influential leftist character in the game an unambiguously good paragon of workers' rights and working class liberation. By instead giving us someone who's an absolute callous bastard who definitely has a bit of blood on his hands, who's a socdem at best and a self-serving mob boss at worst, but can ultimately be interpreted as a force for good, and asking the players to decide what they think of him I think it brings interesting questions to the table of our commitment to material gains, what sorts of people we're willing to work with, and the sort of acts we're willing to tolerate, and makes the game a lot more thematically rich.

I also think a good analysis of Evrart is incomplete without an analysis of the ways in which he serves a a charater foil for Joyce, but I don't feel like getting into that rn.

[suresne]

i’m hesitant to jump into the Kim Discourse but i disagree with statements that boil down his worldview/morality to “kim is a good cop first and foremost, no matter what”

there are so many examples of him doing shit in the game that directly compromises the reputation and aims of the RCM, and not just in a corrupt cop type of way (though there is some of that, obviously)

if kim only cared about being a good cop, why does he go along with harry’s unhinged side missions and whims at pretty much every chance he gets, putting aside the murder investigation? we know that he has “authority off the charts” and could make harry toe the line, but he almost never does. he has a stern affect, but it’s often just for show.

if kim only tolerates/likes harry because he is a detective of the RCM, why does kim clearly get joy from their adventures that have nothing to do with, and even sometimes interfere with, their police work? just because kim says that line to harry about how “an officer of the RCM shouldn’t be on the street” doesn’t mean he necessarily believes, even in the beginning of the game, that harry is only really valuable as a detective of the RCM. he may project that as a value he has adopted, but that doesn’t mean it’s truly how he feels.

kim uses his position in the RCM as a way to distance himself from things that are messy, like politics and emotions. it’s easier for him to say to harry “no RCM detective should be on the street” than “i care about you for some reason i can’t explain and don’t want to see you sleep in the dumpster.” because he’s a pathetic little man who can’t talk about his feelings

i’m not saying that kim isn’t misguided or that his admiration for the RCM isn’t misplaced. because he is, and it is. but making his seemingly unwavering devotion to the RCM the salient aspect of his character at the expense of other things just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

also arguing that kim could never grow or be radicalized is doing him a disservice, imo. knowing harry for a week makes kim confront the rigidity of his thinking about reality itself. is it really so strange that he could have the potential to reflect and reevaluate his worldview? the game didn’t make its characters so complex and human for them to remain rigid and unchanging.

[wanderingtycho]

By far one of my favorite things about the way Disco Elysium handles politics is that Libertarianism is treated as an absolute joke. Like the game is obviously sympathetic towards communists, but there are elements of sympathy towards the moralists and fascists as well. Not sympathy in the sense of “oh can’t we all just get along, we’re all human” BS, but sympathy in the sense that you are able to understand a persons thought process that would lead them to embrace moralism or fascism. Even if that thought process is deeply flawed, and leads to horribly off kilter conclusions, going through the centrist and fash quests gives you meaningful insight into the appeal of those ideologies.

But Ultraliberalism? The game just laughs at you, repeatedly and mercilessly. As it should, you’re a cop so poor a guy you’ve known for one day has to pawn some fancy hubcaps so you can afford rent, yet all you talk about is your grindset. Your hustle, how you’re gonna disrupt the market and groove your way into the lap of luxury. It’s delusion, utter stark raving madness, and characters treat you as such.

Kim is at a loss for words whenever you crank on your libertarian spiel, Evrart calls you a retard, you have to *trick* the mega-rich light bending guy into giving you mercury mining stocks because he’s simply too perplexed by you. Joyce, last of the self identified Ultras, doesn’t take you seriously. Sileng just goes along with it the same way he goes along with any of the other nonsense you can spout, because he’s on his own hustle, and there is no loyalty among charlatans. The only character who is wholeheartedly onboard with the money engineering and the visionary wave making lifestyle is literally named IDIOT DOOM SPIRAL.

But you see, all these things are just incidental, where the game makes it most potent jab at libertarians is when the vision quest stops. Notice I said *stop* not *end*. The communist quest line ends with a Rhetoric check in order to ask The Most Important Question about Communism. The fascist quest has you look yourself in the eye with an Endurance check to see if you can stomach the truth about yourself and your Vöws. The moralist quest ends with a heart wrenching Empathy check as you beg the iron grey and soulless enforcers of the status quo to please god help this district before war breaks out in the streets. There’s real personal stakes for Harry in all these disparate paths he can walk, what does Ultraliberalism get?

You and Kim look at a statue covered in tinsel and disco balls, Kim asks you why you went through with all this, and no matter what response you pick he’s like “Right, yeah, okay. Anyway, let’s finish the case.”

That’s it, no grand moment of pathos, no red Savoir Faire skill check to see if you really are the baddest hustler in the neoliberal hood after all. It’s completely limp, flaccid, lackluster. The game treats all the effort you put into this as exactly what it is: sad, cringe fantasies of a poor old man who’s huffing copium over the embarrassed millionaire mythos.

Disco Elysium doesn’t give libertarianism a poignant, profound conclusion because it’s an ideology undeserving of such treatment. It’s a hyper-capitalist cult mentality of toxic positivity and confirmation bias, a way for desperate people to trick themselves and other chumps into thinking they can bootstrap their way into wealth and prestige. It goes past wishful thinking into pure delirium, the game doesn’t engage with it seriously because it doesn’t have to, the only people who sincerely believe any of its tenants are morons and the clowns who sucker them.

[renmorris]

ableism in the disco elysium fandom is fucking crazy because you like, can’t even talk about Harry and Jean shooting up a church, or the hole in reality that exists there now, and how Sacred and Terrible Air confirms that trauma and death accelerate the growth of the Pale, or crazy shit like that Dora actually was confirmed by Luiga and Kurvitz to be Dolores Dei

because you’re stuck taking baby kindergartener steps with cruel morons as you have to walk them through concepts like 'disabled people aren’t evil' ‘flanderizing Kim into an emotionless or cruel or predatory person is racist' 'maybe the ableist cop who drops right wing dogwhistles and uses his position to punch down on vulnerable people isn’t a reliable source on Harry’s character' etc etc

there are so much more interesting conversations we could be having but I feel like I can barely get to them when so many people think Harry’s a bad person because he’s sick and poor as opposed to he’s a bad person because he’s a fucking cop that brutalizes civilians

[earlofbats]

Okay so because this post about Harry being a bottom I'm going to give a genuine dissertation on the thematic relevance of sub Harry and maybe a little bit about dom Kim.

First I wanna establish the "Harry is definitely a subby little bottom boy" and is also definitely Bi and probably has some sorta fucking complex about it.

Evidence A. Contact Mike, Guillaume Le Million, Measurehead (when fascist).

Harry tends to idolize and gravitate towards extremely masculine figures.

This is probably due to a reflexive need to feel masculine and have masculine role models in the face of elements of identity that are seen as unmasculine by society and have become exacerbated by the breakup which had to be pretty emasculating for Harry.

Also :

Imma start a Harry's Kink counter here +1 light bondage.

+1 auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Uhm +1 uhh,Spanking? Additional +1 for being what I think is most possibly the horniest thought you have in the game also:

+1 Kim is a Dom.

I think Harry has kept his attraction to men or his desires about men fairly low key for his entire life. The way he conceptualizes Homosexuality in general as an "underground" society filled with whispering rooms and forbidden secrets is likely more of a reflection of how Harry views his own sexuality than how Queer culture is manifest in Revachol. (In reference to the way both Kim and The Smoker kinda laugh Harry about it)

The organizational element of the idea being likely reflective of the way internalization is akin to paranoia.

Harry is also extremely intimacy starved and I think part of that is due to an unmet need for affection and the desire to be taken care of. That masculinity and status as both a survivor and an oppressor was sorta thrust onto Harry, he was born the last year of the war on a hospital floor, given a name associated with war time and survival, grew up probably in a little street urchin gang, got into *Disco* (man I'm sure Harry brushed elbows with the underground then.) Was a gym teacher a good balance between masculinity and caretaker and guardian something that harry clearly excels at and enjoys. Then Dora encouraged him to be a cop for unknown reasons perhaps prestige, money, because Harry has a bleeding heart.

Engage Heterosexual Cop hell for 12 years then an additional 6 single Cop hell years.

And now you're like :

Another element is Harry's tendency to worship and diefy his partners which like man that's gotta be the subbiest fucking thing you can do. I honestly can't articulate all of the reasons why that's just extreme bottom behavior.

Harry is an empathic jelly creature who is forced to handle a job with dead people in it all day and has created this reflexive hyper masculine obsession to compensate for his perceived inadequacy in not living up to the patriarchal capitalist ideal of what's supposed to be his birthright as a well off, able bodied, 'straight', occidental, man.

Except the actual issue is that Harry is mostly perceived or perceiving himself as that, when in reality he's in clear conflict with his actual identity as a Poor, mentally Ill, bisexual, occidental, man.

And it's those last two that end up kind of making this smoke screen to Harrys deficiency in privilege. He can mask or hide behind being an Occidental Man.

Can buddy buddy with patriarchy and take up the idea of a Big Strong Manly Cop.

Something that Kim also seems to be doing by seeking out positions of authority he can compensate for the disrespect he gets as a Poor, blind, gay, seolite, man.

Last of which probably won't get him far because of how "juvenile" his body type is.

Kim can't really coast on patriarchy much the way Harry can. He has to work twice as hard cuz there's not a lot he can hide behind.

Pursuit for control in the face of denial

Vs

Shielding ones self behind control as a means of denial.

Dom/Sub dichotomy.

[just-plumli-stuff]

People are always talking about how we baby Jean but what about Harry? I’m basically sorry cop Harry in real life, and one of the most emotional things for me in Disco is finding out HARRY DOESN’T SUCK. In fact, Harry is a certified 360 spin kick genius. I assumed we were a depressed alcoholic floating through life and just an utterly destroyed broken human being. But despite all that:

-You’re famous enough Kim knows who you are and goes with your amnesia because he thinks the famous Harry Dubois is playing a funny prank. He lets you do all this shit cause he trusts you are THE Harry Dubois.

-Jean will take you back in literally every ending. He came to the Whirling in a wig, you guys have to be on better terms than he pretends you are to do that. He’s a dick, but honestly a lot of straight male friendship is calling each other slurs cause their fathers never taught them how to express love.

-Judit is weirdly defensive of you and I don’t know why she would be unless you were a GOOD BOSS. You let a chick on your task force you progressive thinker!

-Trant has some pretty kind takes on your position and seems if anything in awe of your methods. If Harry was a total fuck up would he try to mental gymnastics there must be a reason you got so drunk you wiped your brain?

- the Unsolvable Case and the World Mural, the other two times you were drunk off your ass were recent. Harry probably always been a drinker, but it’s possible shitty Harry is a more recent development.

I just wanna imagine Harry personally changed the lives of everyone in the phone call room and that’s why these 2 IQ losers are somehow carrying Precinct 41’s closing rate. Harry is a leader of men and chicks. HARRY DUBOIS ISN’T STUPID HE’S JUST TOO SMART FOR HIS OWN BRAIN AND A LITTLE SILLY.

Edit: I FORGOT MY THESIS. Super apologetic people will apologize for shit they didn’t even do. If you, like me, woke up as Harry Dubois and assumed you are the worlds greatest fuck up you need to examine why. Harry could have been literally anyone but we assumed he/we were a bad person.

[randomisedmongoose]

I've been thinking about parents and kids in Disco Elysium.

Fathers first: who actually has a present, positive father figure?

Kim never knew his, and says that he thinks his father wasn't that great of a person anyway. Harry doesn't remember his, and doing the fascist route and talking with Measurehead indicate that he wasn't around, if not actually abusive. Little Lily's dad killed himself, and wasn't that much of a help before that anyway. Judit's husband is, according to her, half a husband and probably not that good of a dad. Acele's dad was a drug lord and "a bad man". The paledriver says she "never had a father" - she might have forgotten him, though. But the father she remembers definitely isn't hers. Plaisance's husband, Annette’s dad, is distant and quite possibly emotionally abusive. Cuno's dad is... uh. Yeah. No. Abusive and pretty much gone. Easy Leo and his mum had to move from Iraesh because his da was too violent. Billie's husband Victor doesn't seem to be that good of a father to their kids, even if she clearly loves him and will miss him awfully. The racist lorry driver has three kids. Wonder how good of a dad he is (my money is on not that great). Tommy Le Homme has children that he misses dearly, but he's still distant from them.

Fathers are distant or gone, and that’s almost universally seen as a good thing that they are, because when they're actually there they're awful. The only positive, present father figure we get on screen is Trant. He's supportive, interested in Mikael's hobbies, protective and inclusive. We get one possibly positive father figure story from Measurehead, but the man himself is described as the perfect pinnacle of masculinity, which in this setting probably isn't that good really, when not seen through his son's eyes.

Also, Harry's own relation to fatherhood. We don't know what happened when Dora got an abortion, if Harry wanted her to or not (and it doesn't matter really, it was her choice to make) but it does mean he's not a father now. And judging from what the game tells us about fathers and everything we know about him pre-game, this is probably a good thing.

Mothers, then? Much more present, and a bit more complex.

Kim doesn't remember his mother, either. Harry has a fond memory of his, being loved and cared for, but she's spoken of in the past tense. Lilienne does her best and seems to genuinely care for her children, but she works all the time to put food on the table. Joyce is a mother, how good she is is up for interpretation. In any case she's not present, but considering her age her daughters are probably adults. Billie clearly loves her girls and knows and supports what they do, she's present in their lives even though they're nearing adulthood. Judit is an overworked cop with a partner that doesn’t seem to contribute much – not the best of circumstances for a kid, but we have no idea who helps her and her situation outside work.

The only mother we get an explicitly bad picture of is Plaisance’s, Annette’s grandmother, and by extension, Plaisance herself (hello, generational cycle of abuse, we'll get back to you). There are two bad mothers that are more metaphorical: the Mother of Silence, aka. the 2 mm hole in reality, that will eat you whole and never spit you out, and Dolores Dei, who is described as Humanity's Young Mother – nurturing and abusive at the same time, granting humanity the complete world while murdering the parts of it that rejected her gifts.

So mums run the entire gamut from godly to shitty with every flavour of overworked from all social classes in between. Despite the caring mother figures, we're left with a complete picture of children as largely abandoned by their parents emotionally or practically, if not outright abused.

Distant and abusive parents tie very nicely into the theories of the Pale that says that it consists of recycled memories, and part of what makes the world stagnant. Everybody's stuck in a perpetual cycle of generational abuse with no way of getting out. It takes drastic action to change it, because you're not just working against your own trauma and ingrained habits, but against the grain of history.

But, here's the kicker, we as a player can do that – to some extent. We can try to break Harry out of the cycle. We can make him kinder and calmer and less violent. But he had to literally erase every aspect of himself, and he didn't even manage to do it completely.

We can save some kids, but no matter how we play the game, we're not allowed to save some of them. The ravers, we can help them. Cindy, we can give her a little bit of artistic inspiration. Mikael is set already, he doesn't need us. We can do our best to make sure Little Lily and her brothers aren't evicted. We can even give Cuno something other (better is debatable) by recruiting him to the RCM.

Cunoesse though? She's lost to us in all futures. She's the only person in the game besides ourself that we can actually kill (not counting the mercs), and the only one beside ourself that actively wants us to do it. There's already been circumstances that led her to where she is, and we the player can't break her cycle. All we can do is hope that there's someone else who can. And boy does it seem bleak.

[d1sc01nf3rn0]

Everyone argues that authority is a skill that's about how much you make people obey you BUT I disagree, and I say it's a skill that's about being trustworthy.

Like, yes, if you have high authority the skill starts getting authoritarian BUT only you are able to hear it, and you're free to listen to it or not. And even then, even Volition gets paranoid and reactive like that.

HOWEVER people feel compelled to listen to you when you say it, and based on the dialogues I say it's because they're evaluating how much they can trust said authority. That's why when you fail the skillcheck you come up with authoritarian or nonsensical arguments.

On the contrary, if you pass a high authority check, your arguments can be pretty sensible and well intentioned (like asking Titus to tell you who's the "rape" victim, because the victim needs help, regardless of what happened to the guy that did it).

The most perfect example of this, is the skillcheck at the Mercenary Tribunal.

It could be a reaction speed skillcheck, but no. It's an authority skillcheck, and they make emphasis on the fact of whether Kim trusts you enough or not.

Kim listens to you not because you're his superior, he listens to you because he trusts your orders.

Kim starts listening to you from the beginning because you're from the RCM, and he believes and trusts in the RCM, despite everything. It's after multiple things in the game that he *TRULY* trusts YOU.

It's a repeated fact in the game that no one listens to you because they don't trust the police; but modifiers that give bonuses to authority come AFTER you do things that make them trust you, even a little.

Another similar example is that "Evrart told them to cooperate" is a modifier. They listen to you, because they trust Evrart. They don't believe he would have told them to cooperate otherwise. They only listen to you based on that trust.

Cuno would be another example, where he starts telling you stuff because you respect him; not because you're an adult, and certainly not because you're a cop.

In the same sense, that's also why you're able to fail an authority skillcheck regardless of you lvl of authority if you lack certain modifiers. You could have a lot of authority, but that doesn't mean people will trust you enough to do or say everything you ask.

A missed point when it comes to positions of authority is that they must be trustworthy, because at the end of the day, it's does not matter how high in the hierarchy you are, people won't listen to you if they don't want to.

Harry's "human can-opener" reputation comes because people feel compelled to tell him stuff; maybe because they understimate him, feel at ease with him, or another reason, but it rarely is just because he's from the RCM.

[ishouldgetadiary]

there are definitely cleverer people to discuss this at length than me and there are probably people who already have and come to the same or better conclusions, but i do just want to say that an aspect of kim kitsuragi i can't get over is his disconnect from being seolite (outside of the racism). i don't know, it's very important to have asian characters with strong cultural ties who have that culture accurately expressed through their character/stories and i do love those characters, but it's somewhat rarer to see the alternative (at least, when race and culture is acknowledged at all), let alone it being a point of pride for them, the same way it is for kim. all of this to say, i feel haunted by what he says when you ask him about his heritage.

i didnt ask him about it on my first run (because i found the way the question is initially asked to be kinda rude and i was afraid of if it'd make him like me less, lol) but i did in my current replay and the way he dances around the topic, 'i'm half seolite, well technically, my parents were both quarter, i guess you could also say im quarter, i don't know the language or culture and i've only lived in revachol', it fucks me up so bad! first is how you can tell it's mostly a defensive tactic for him, at least when he starts the rant— somebody asks about the race thing? deflect. i'm only half. i don't even know the language. i'm not one of those seolites. second is how he loosens into pride when he realises/remembers that harry isn't asking to be racist, he is genuinely having trouble remembering that the concept of race exists, but also because it lets kim kinda show that it is something to be prideful about in revachol.

dont get me wrong— i think kim kitsuragi is genuinely proud of being as revacholian as anyone else. he loves revachol. i dont think he’d go along with harry so easily on random side quests or have opinions on if harry helps or hinders the people of martinaise if he actually didnt care. i dont even know he’d still be a cop or (more accurately) be one for as long as he has been, especially when he’s spent most of it as a juvie officer, if he didnt believe in revachol. it’s people, what it is, and what the country could be. people like to take his position as a police officer as just his way of feeling a sense of power in a post revolutionary (khm. and racist) world that has never had the space for him or his dreams, but kim is more three dimensional than that. ESPECIALLY when there are ways that being a cop gives him less power than regular citizens in revachol. he likes, wants, and believes in both, and that’s not necessarily hypocritical. in the same way, i dont think it’s at all hypocritical that his pride is rooted in both his love for revachol AND the way white supremacy has impacted him. because yk, when he’s proud about his lack of connection to his heritage, it’s not just his love for revachol speaking, it’s also the disdain that we, the player, hear for seolite people (at least what we hear from or related to kim).

that all being said, i dont consider that to be a terribly complex thought at all— real life people are complicated and multifaceted, so kim kitsuragi is written to also be complicated and multifaceted. in disco elysium, the writers are never worried about presenting the world in a better or worse way than it already is. yes, it is definitely a heightened version of our reality, but it also presents everything as direct as possible. case example would be the racist lorry driver in what he says versus how he’s presented. in that very first interaction when kim confronts him and harry catches up on what just happened, he denies and hides in the same way a lot of people deny and hide that they are being racist, but you, the player, cannot avoid or pretend he isnt being racist, because it is literally in his name. you are not given the grace of real life where there is the option of either the benefit of the doubt or genuinely questioning your own assessment. despite all of that, ultimately, it is still haunting for that early kim question to be so reminiscent of what i see in real life.

in the example of a shorter ramble, kim's own ramble weirdly reminds me of myself, but in the opposite direction. i very easily and quickly tumble into word vomit and over-detail my heritage just to make it make sense that my name isnt white. and i'm not gonna boohoo over my own personal situation at all when i know i benefit from white supremacy, but i hate that ultimately, white supremacy ‘won’ when it comes to 'me'. because just like kim kitsuragi, i don't know a language that isn't english, i dont know a different culture, and i've only lived in my predominantly white country.

but a more apt comparison is my own father. a man who’s internalised shame cant even allow him to comprehend why somebody white would want a tan, because he’s always been at least a little tan, and that’s part of what ‘clocks’ him as not fully white, who does try to connect with his mother’s culture, but just kind of ended up with only odd bits and pieces of it and the language, because it was something that would’ve just made life harder than it should be, and despite everything, he’ll still do things like dunk on chinese people. there may be more to say, but you get the gist. and yet somehow none of it has quite reaches the point where he can recognise it in himself. because he knows racism and white supremacy is bad and he’s obviously against it, but it is hard to acknowledge that it is greater than just the lorry drivers and measureheads of the world. because we live with the consequences and the rot of white supremacy within us. assimilation has done it's job to it's logical conclusion.

… and yet it is a limbo, and a hollow one at that. regardless of how white i am, i still dont fully relate to my fully white peers, because there are ways in which i dont share in their accepted shared experiences. my father has never felt accepted in either club, ‘too japanese for white australians and too australian for japanese people’ (can you believe that disco elysium was almost banned from my country)! our fully white peers will never know what it’s like to be able to look at the face of a complete stranger of a different race and see family. to see their aunts, or grandparents, or parents.

but kim kitsuragi talks of that limbo with pride. he may never feel a true sense of community with either white people or other seolites, and this is something his brain seems to choose not to fully acknowledge, even though he definitely feels it. and really, it’s haunting in the same way i find both my father’s and my involvement in society disconcerting. the truth that, in spite of where white supremacy and assimilation can get you, you will never truly achieve the community or peace of mind there is in ignorance.

despite all that, on a brighter note, i do think that in terms of what kim truly likes harry for and what gains his trust in him is the choice for harry to be that sense of community he needs. (if i am remembering right) kim will only really trust you if you chose to defend him from the several racists you’ll encounter and make jokes at their expense with him, because it’s highly HIGHLY unlikely that barely anybody goes through that effort for him. even when it’s pretty clear that the writers were going for humorous ‘haha, white guy trying his best to be an ally’ dialogue choices, kim himself doesnt really show that he finds it obnoxious or unwanted, it’s genuinely something he would rarely get other rcm members even though that is the community he’s definitely and wholly part of.

anyways i have no idea if this post made any sense or if im really wrong (i could be!) because it came from a more personal place than maybe typical character analysis but whatever

[sydmarch]

Who is Angus to Evrart?

full dialogue of the scene that line is from:

You - "Tell me about Titus Hardie and his crew."

Evrart Claire - "Oh, they are simply fine young men -- all seven of them! Exemplary Union members. Always working to advance their position in the local socialist-democratic movement. Core members."

Evrart Claire - "Old Theo used to run them, but things really *kicked into gear* when Titus took the reins and named the group after himself." He starts laughing. "Gotta love his initiative." You - "What more can you tell me? Who's second in command? Who's the most violent?"

Evrart Claire - "Harry, they're almost all of them *great* guys, born leaders. Whatever happened, I'm sure they only had the best interests of Revachol in mind."

Evrart Claire - "Work with them -- hell, interview them! But don't fight them. They really are just like you -- men who like beer, women, and some *order* on the streets."

Half Light - Separate one from the herd. You - "So let me ask you this... Which one of Hardie's boys is your least favourite?"

Evrart Claire - "Oh, that would definitely be Fat Angus. His feet smell from a city-block away and he's always having noisy stomach troubles. Horrible, revolting guy."

You - "So let's say something happens to Fat Angus... let's say a citizen's arrest..."

Evrart Claire - "You would die, Harry," he says, grinning. "You would die and in the process start a bloody and completely unnecessary war between the Débardeurs' Union and the Citizens Militia."

Evrart Claire - "Angus, his ever-growling stomach, and his smelly feet are all part of the Union. You have as much right to *arrest* him as he has to arrest you... "

Evrart Claire - "...actually less, because it's his home and his backyard. You are a guest here, Harry. Please remember that."

Evrart Claire - "Oh Harry..." He starts laughing. "This is getting real grim and there's no need for that. We are friends." He sits back and looks you in the eye with a wide smile.

i love thinking about this dialogue in comparison to when you get his real opinion on the hardies:

Evrart Claire - "Harry, I bugged her cabin. I bugged her whole boat. I had cameras surveying her boat. Hell I even wanted to bug that thermal cup, but my boys advised against it."

Savoir Faire - They must have done it while Joyce was busy questioning the locals. You - "So you've been listening to our conversations all the time?"

Evrart Claire - "Not me personally..." he stretches his arms like a discus thrower. "I had guys recording and processing this information for me." You - "The Hardie boys?"

Evrart Claire - "Hell no!" he exclaims. "They'd fuck it up. They can't do anything right. I mean my *real* boys. My special task force boys."

Kim Kitsuragi - "Where are these boys?"

Evrart Claire - "They sure as hell aren't hanging out in the open with beers in their hands for the cops to question." He bursts out laughing. "They're pros, Mr. Kitsuragi."

he doesn't like angus & doesn't even like or trust the hardies as it turns out! and yet i do 100% believe that he meant it when he said harry would die & it would start a war between the rcm and the union. not because he really cares about the hardies personally but because it would reaffirm the union's power/obviously they would have to respond to something like that. but finding knowing his true thoughts about the hardies casts an interesting light on this convo:

You - "The remaining mercenaries are organizing a tribunal to take on the Hardies."

Evrart Claire - "Tribunal?" He appears aghast. "That sounds *serious* Harry. We Union men should be *shitting* ourselves..." He rubs his chin and smiles suddenly: "I wish you hadn't told me that. I'm gonna lose *sleep* over this. Let's change the subject."

Empathy - He's clearly happy about the tribunal.

You - "You don't *seem* too worried about it." Evrart Claire - "Oh, Harry, what do I *really* think about the tribunal? You're trying to climb to second base with old Evrart before you've even courted him properly."

obviously he's happy about the tribunal because his end goal is to start a war with wild pines but there's a total lack of concern for the hardies both here where they come up specifically or for the union in general when discussing the prospect of a war with harry:

You - "Have you ever heard what two Giant Seraise Hornets can do to an entire colony of bees? They destroy it."

Evrart Claire - "I have. It's a great story, Harry." He nods. "Did you also know how the bee colony kills the giant hornet? They swarm and blanket it entirely, until it suffers a *massive heat stroke* and dies." Empathy - He crosses his hands, contently, thinking of the interior temperature of the wasp rising. Endurance - They cook it alive in its exoskeleton.

Evrart Claire - "Harry, we outnumber them fifteen hundred to one. And that's just Martinaise. With all the unions in Revachol -- and with public opinion on our side -- we can hold off two men. Or fifteen men. Or even fifty men."

Evrart Claire - "The more they send, the worse it's going to look for them. They made a *huge* mistake hiring those guys. *No one* likes foreign mercenaries. The leftists hate them, the fascists hate them, even the moralists think they're *in bad taste*."

is he really just that confident in the union? does he view the hardies specifically as expendable because he doesn't have much faith in them? or are his real thoughts more along the lines of "yeah people are probably gonna die but if that's what it takes then so be it"? we already know he's willing to kill if need be but i'd imagine he'd view tiphaine holly (an ineffective leader who's his direct opponent) differently from the members of the union he's supposed to be looking out for... we can never get his opinion on the tribunal after it happens (screams cries throws up) but i could see him being overall satisfied with the outcome.

Evrart Claire - "What was always going to happen. We take the harbour and she fucks off to Ozonne, uncorks a bottle of wine, calls her partners and says they need to distance themselves from this nasty business before the big shit spinner splashes everyone."

Evrart Claire - "Only difference is the Union doesn't have to lose 2,000 men to machine gun fire."

like, 3-7 deaths compared to 2,000? anyways this is so much more than the question you actually asked i just love to think about my fucked up little guy.

[1tbls]

de/dm thoughts. i don't know all dm lore/history yet so excuse any inaccuracies

hmm, i think kim and harry would be tall-men, since that seems suited to their class, to the fact that they live in one of the major cities of the world and their status as cops. this in-between space, in a way. the tall-men seem pervasive and relatively secure in their position in society, though of course there's still socioeconomic inequality.

jean would be a kobold because i think it would be funny. judit a human or dwarf, im not sure.

trant would be an elf or half-elf?

these ones are just vibes. joyce = human. neha = half elf. cunoesse = feral little beast girl like izutsumi? cuno = awful tiny halfling child.

[thegrimreaperisanerd]

hii i have a maybe somewhat difficult question:

how do you go about writing all of the police/detective stuff? I have no knowledge at all about that except having played the game a few times and watching bbc sherlock back when that was a thing.

I have so many cool kimharry things in my mind that i need to get on paper but i don't know how to involve all the cop stuff in a natural way because i don't know anything about it and don't want it to be too wildly incorrect.

so yeah.. how do you even learn the things for this?

thank you so much i love your work

Quite a difficult question I won't lie...... But I've answered at length so it's going under a readmore

This isn't my favourite thing to discuss online as it can trigger my psychosis, but I have an actual dismaying amount of experience with cops. I don't want to talk about it but... Bit like Cuno I suppose. Good ending for that kid is doing public services training ages 14 - 16, and going "oh this is shit actually" once he's got an out from his abusive parent, then working at a restaurant

I quite literally cannot go into detail - so don't ask because I WILL delete this post - but an ex military police officer told us a "funny story" about a "prank" he played on some kids in an occupied location during the late 80s that I recognised as psychological torture, but made my peers laugh. So I decided to become a faggot and poet instead.

~NOW FOR THE FUN ADVICE THAT IS ACTUALLY OF USE TO YOU!

Research:

Honestly, the amount of time I spend looking up stuff for writing is probably more than the time I spend writing. The internet's being fucked by SEO but it's a start. Like... There's plenty of info out there written on the police and their role in systematic oppression, I'm pretty sure there's free PDFs floating around on Tumblr actually...

If it's more "day in the life" I honestly don't know. Maybe reddit or if there's one of those "Ex-[blank} reviews [blank] in movies" videos on Youtube for cops, but obviously take everything said with a pinch of salt.

FAYDE:

Fayde is the best tool at your disposal. We bully Kim a lot for his dedication to the RCM but that makes finding out info pretty easy. EDC too! I've never played with high EDC so just typing in key words (especially names of other officers to try and get character info) and scrolling through is helpful.

Good keywords are "precinct", "RCM", "Militicia" as they'll bring up opinions/ info from other characters.

The RCM is not a traditional police force:

I would worry less about accuracy and more about being interesting. It doesn't need to be a perfect representation of police work since the canon makes a point of there being a distinction in the powers and roles of the RCM. Go listen to the collapsing tenement cut content. You don't need to write about them filling in forms if it's not relevant. It'll show in your writing if you're unsure/ bored.

Make them worse:

If you're going to write one of the officers doing something shitty (yes, that includes Kim and Harry) but worry that you've gone too far then I promise you haven't. Dickheads are drawn to positions of power and the impunity it gives them. There's a reason I wrote one of the 57's officers as a groomer.

Make them less competent:

Don't trust the police, but also don't expect anything of them.

As recently as Monday I had to call for the fire brigade because a lit (thankfully poorly made) petrol bomb had been left under a neighbour's car (I live an irritatingly interesting life for somebody who lives in the middle of fucking nowhere) nobody was harmed. Cop came to find me afterwards to get an interview from me since I'd spotted it and he told me, I kid you not, "Yeah, we're not gonna do anything unless anything else happens." Like, I expected as much but I wasn't expecting him to up and fucking say that. You're welcome for 85% of my council tax, you fucking moron.

Harry's a special case because he's, like, psychic and got "maybe if I solve *THIS* one my wife will let me sleep in the big bed" disorder, and nobody wants to read a case fic that they... don't solve (or do they..? *winks*) But if you care about realism you need dick-in-hand dipshits. Another favourite quote of mine from an officer two years back; "Is 'right wing' the good one or the bad one?" So the advice here is you're writing a cop well if you're reading it and thinking: holy shit please just go work at a TESCOs instead.

Don't worry so much:

You should write, first and foremost, for yourself. I like detective fiction, I have wasted an unfortunate amount of my life dealing with police due to my job and shit childhood. (I did originally write far more about this, but frankly it's better for myself if I don't bother. That's why it's taken me five days to answer this)

I've read/ watched a lot of detective fiction and I'm always more drawn to stuff that is less based in police work. Private investigators, investigative journalists, kid detectives like Nancy Drew, ect.

In particular my favourite book, perhaps of all time, is called Hideaway by Dean Koontz and is two fathers (one: the killer's father - a talented doctor who brought his shithead son back to life - and another, the doctor's most recent patient to be brought back from the brink who has developed a psychic link with the killer as a result) trying to stop him, but never actually meeting! It's one hell of a read if you need inspo.

Val McDermott is a good author for crime writing with less police input, too. She has a book called Killing The Shadows which is excellent. The Killer's motive is taking out crime writers who've romanticised psychological profilers after he was wrongly convicted. Fair enough! Until he starts... Killing about it? Sort of defeats the message... Anyway, what's fun about this book is that before each crime writer is killed (in the same way they wrote THEIR killers killing!! Love that) you get to read the first chapter of each writer's most famous work. So you are essentially getting six crime books in one (first chapter of at least) ...Also the main character's husband is a crime writer called Kit, which I've only remembered just double checking the book name now. Lol???

...This is just turning into me recommending books.

TLDR: write what you know, write what is fun, ACAB, don't even worry about it

[thegeminisage]

ranking voyager characters from favorite to least favorite

i meant to do this at the end of season 1 and again after the finale but we'll just have to go with at the end of season 2 instead

seven of nine - i haven't met her yet but i just know.

janeway & tuvok - cop out to do a tie? possibly. they remind me so much of kirk and spock respectively. every time i go "oh no it's gotta be tuvok" it switches to janeway. every time i go "oh no it's gotta be janeway" there's another good tuvok episode. tuvok is such a wonderful look into vulcan culture through the eyes of someone who was not alienated from it and abused by it, and you never doubt his ability to get ANYTHING done, even if it's sketchy as hell. i think about his wife of 68 (almost 69! nice) years and his 4 babies and his orchids and his lute all the time. man can SING. on the other hand, janeway is such a breath of fresh air after deanna troi - who i love, but who was constantly victimized for being a woman. janeway just gets to be janeway - she's excited about exploration, she's deeply compassionate, and none of these things make her weak anymore than they made kirk weak. sometimes her adherence to her Ideals is a little picardian, but i forgive her, because she reminds me way more of kirk

chakotay - sometimes a man builds a bathtub and your opinion of him rises by. a lot. i've always liked the difficult position he was in of trying to balance maquis and starfleet interests and protect both sides from themselves and each other, but the ADDED LAYER that for much of the journey he has CANONICALLY been in love w janeway is simply too much to bear. also, i think his trust issues w betrayal are very gripping and they compel me. he has been through so much SHIT and i do love a little traumatized guy. ALSO also, they don't do enough w this in canon, but in my mind palace he and tuvok HATE each other (chakotay hates tuvok for being a spy, tuvok hates chakotay for nabbing first officer job), which i think is extremely funny

the doc - my best friend the emergency medical hologram...i like that he's a brand new kind of person, even if it brings up infuriating questions about the status of all these endless holodeck characters we create and then carelessly abuse or delete. he doesn't have a name! people treated him like he didn't exist! watching him come into his own and bond w kes has been one of voyager's great delights. also, gay king.

b'elanna - she doesn't always get a lot to do but when she does it's almost always good, racism episode notwithstanding. what i like most about her is how ride or die she is. she was willing to get her ass beat to give tuvok a tiny chance of escaping torture, she was willing to die to take down her own superweapon, she defended chakotay when his actions were entirely indefensible (AND she's secretly in love w him?? girl.), she will not hesitate to do any number of crazy things for Her People, and since she's estranged from her family or whatever they are all aboard this ship. you couldn't ask for a better friend than b'elanna and good for her. also, she gets to be gay with janeway about once a season so far which i've really enjoyed. she could do so much better than tom paris

harry - harry also rarely gets anything to do, but that makes his episodes all the more distressing. he's just a little guy! the so-called baby of the ship, until he was replaced by an actual baby with tiny adorable mother-killing spines on its head. i'm still mad that the really big important harry kim episode we got turned out to be such fucking garbage when the concept was SO good, and i'm not super hopeful for his future, but who knows. btw, he could also do better than tom paris. he and b'elanna could ride off into the sunset w/o him

kes - i don't dislike kes, and her scenes with the doctor are especially nice, but i feel like she, like deanna, gets victimized a lot, and her whole thing with neelix was so difficult it's hard to get the taste of it out even though it's over now. that said, i do love how compassionate and mischievous she is, and i love when janeway gets to give her mom hugs :( <3

neelix & tom paris - another tie. this is so difficult for me because i started out HATING tom paris and really liking neelix, and a few plotlines/episodes made me reverse my opinion. tom paris got a lot better when he was like yeah i decided i'm not gonna be a shitheel anymore! especially that he went on a multi-ep arc tricking us into thinking he was backsliding when really he was doing secret agent shit. props! but he's still not terribly interesting. neelix was AMAZING in the atom bomb episode but my interpretation of him as a guy who was gentle not in spite of but BECAUSE of past suffering didn't last long when he decided to be so fucking horrible to kes for no reason. i really want to get over it with neelix the way i got over it with tom paris, but for now they're both at the rock bottom of this list

for fun, i think my season 1 list would have looked like: janeway, tuvok, doctor, b'elanna, chakotay, harry, neelix, kes, tom paris. probably? it's hard to know now. we'll see how all this shakes out by the end of the series.

[valfruits-archived]

i think the most interesting conversation to have re: the puta madre topic is the impulse people get to cast harry in a (comparatively) positive light as a good cop for not being a gang leader's peone. which is interesting bc then we get to questions like why? why is carrying out violent acts on a gang leader's payroll considered worse than doing so on a governmental one? being madre's peone would make harry a corrupt cop but corrupt in comparison to...what, the great respectable stand-up act of being a regular old cop? and its like, if harry was an awful violent cop but wasn't working for madre does that still make him a better cop? is that supposed to be a merit in his favour that softens the blow that is recognising that he is part of an oppressive system? that he's been part of it for years and has actively taken part in dishing out violence and ruining lives? its very notable that most (if not all?) conversations we can have in the game that revolve around finding some kind of resolution w.r.t harry's feelings on being a cop is with other cops - kim says he doesn't think harry was madre's man and that's a compliment from him but then kim is also a cop (would it make any difference to ruby to know that harry isn't madre's when she still has every reason to fear him & what he could do to her?)

like on an instinctive gut-reactive perspective it DOES feel intuitively worse for harry to be a cop thats puta madre's peone but that feels like a bit of a smokescreen because what we're comparing it to is him still being a cop just not a double-crossing one & arguing about tiers of goodness of cophood feels like arguing about which actively sinking boat will sink the slowest.

[queen-beefcake-sqx]

Color Associations in Disco Elysium (part 1)

I already can tell I’m going to be posting…. a lot about this.

so I was exploring the usage of the color blue in Disco Elysium using the Fayde dialogue viewer and I stumbled down a whole rabbit hole because there’s so much this game does with color association.

See, there’s a lot of REALLY oblivious references to the color blue in DE. The game outright says blue is for mystery. It’s also explicitly the color of moralism. The game hands us those associations.

But it’s also so much more complicated than that. Blue is also a color of sadness and horror (Harry refering to himself as a sea monster who sees the world all in blue when he puts on a pair of shades, the blue lining being the defining feature to identify Billie Mejean’s husband, Insulinde’s reputation as “The Blue Immensity”). It’s also a color Kim is DOUSED in, between the pen and the notebook and the handkerchief, giving us a solid positive connection to latch onto and possibly helping emphasize his connection to the RCM. (More on Kim’s blue in a second.)

But then. BUT THEN. There’s the color combos, and there’s where things get really interesting. Blue’s combined with white to indicate the RCM (possibly pointing at its history coming from the ICM and the communards’ white star), with red to tie back to Evrart’s corruption (only the shipping crates and The Pig’s lights use this combo), and with green to reference Dora (the ocean is also referred to often in blue-green, which I think fits — both are symbols of both serenity and oblivion and horror for Harry).

But as I was looking through Fayde, there was one combo that suddenly stood out as unusual:

While inspecting the royalist soldiers, I was struck suddenly by this description. The game doubles down on the association between the royalists and blue-orange (and gold) — René’s medal, the one for combat veterans who worked to stomp out the revolution, is described as a blue star against an orange sun.

We have a single character who is glaringly associated with orange — Kim. He’s the only one regularly referred to with the color, including these references post-tribunal:

Kim isn’t a royalist or a fascist, though, but the combo still makes sense. All of his blue things are things he doesn’t wear overtly, things he keeps hidden until needed. They’re things he can give away when he needs to. They’re disposable, to an extent (although I’m sure he’d be in misery if his notebook got ruined). Blue is also just…. not present in his portrait at all, and I have a strong theory that the colors used for the portraits aren’t 100% just aesthetics. His blue things add an air of mystery, but they’re never paired with a reference to his orange.

But you know what Kim is paired with? Black. And white, his white halo, but orange and black are his signature combo — when you get his black jacket, those two colors are swapped on his portrait even though the white halo remains. They’re connected.

There is a grand total of TWO places in game that I can find where orange and black are mentioned together outside of Kim’s ensemble. The first is from the Superstar Cop thought:

The moment of accepting your “superstardom” puts you as black-on-orange — another thing that’s easy to connect back to Kim. He’s cool. He’s admirable. He’s a superstar himself to the point Precinct 41 is tripping over themselves when he suggests he might come work for them.

With the connection to Kim becoming loudly apparent, the second instance gut punched me:

If you alight the message in the plaza, it lights up orange-black. You know, the message about returning to somebody’s side, as you rapidly approach the end of your time in Martinaise and your time with Kim. You can yell at me for shipping goggles but unless you’re just a COMPLETE asshole to Kim we cannot deny any of the respect and fondness Harry has for Kim from minute fucking ONE. “He’d take a bullet for you.” Come on.

One other interesting thing about orange… If you’re drunk while trying to come up with a name, apparently you get this interesting conceptualization check:

Orange and gold, like the royalists? I tried hunting down other references and found…. well…. this:

If you imprison Klaasje, the Moralintern come for her and this haunting Shivers line happens. The most notable references to the water are almost always blue or blue-green, although I haven’t combed thoroughly. Still, this PARTICULAR moment being gold-orange …. like the Royalist soldiers, like Harry at his worst (Tequila Sunset) …. gold-orange isn’t a very positive combo in universe. Not at all, and I wonder if the Shivers line is referring back to Harry and what a horrible decision it is to imprison her….

——

EDIT: WAIT I FORGOT there’s one other place where blue-orange shows up. Not simultaneously, but intechangibly, yet again in a place attached to Kim:

This one probably doesn’t mean anything but….interesting choice, DE….