rathologic

hey everyone, given the recent news from twitter i’ve compiled a list of organisations and articles focused on domestic violence and women’s & children’s rights in russia. please feel free to reblog or link them to your fan content if you like.

strong trigger warnings apply for all articles & reports i’ve linked. all organisations are safe. most sites are in russian but google chrome should be able to automatically translate them. please let me know if you think of anything i could add or amend.

also if anyone needs to vent, please reach out. i’m not very active in the fandom, but i have loved pathologic a lot and this issue is very close to my heart. always here if you need someone to talk to xx

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rathologic

the “a friend of yours is being hunted” quests fucks up my whole being if I’m being honest

it’s very difficult to really explain that pathologic has the best balance of player choice and intended play I have ever seen. The other good example that’s going to pop up is breath of the wild, which indeed lets you solve puzzles in a million ways, but botw manages by being a lot less narratively heavy. Pathologic 2 definitely railroads you, with the “thoughts” menu and the “end of day” screens, or, like. that amazing bells tolling sequence on day 3. pathologic 2 has no problem railroading you and making it very obvious, but also knows and repeats that you are not going to have time to do everything on your list and you must choose how you want to spend your time. gives the player agency where it matters: in deciding which actions are going to help you survive or which moral choices you are willing to gamble your health or allies or information for.

but obviously the fourth-wall breaking makes it all a little more than just “moral choices vs tactical decision” because mark immortell addressing your inability to be the hero every time you die puts each of the two options into their own separate balance of player choice vs intended play.

for example, going to the house of death to help notkin and khan is both the moral choice (you’re not gonna let two teenagers go in there alone) and the tactical decision (you avoid infection in the crude sprawl), but you might have to skip it simply because you need that extra hour to find enough food to survive the rest of the night. you might be forced to make the “wrong” choice not by personal taste or to make another, better one down the line but because game mechanics sometimes actively work against you making choices at all

and that’s what fucks me up about the whole “a friend of yours is being hunted” quest: the question of morality in this case is not in rubin’s favour, but the options you have are not so much “help him vs stop him” and more “search for him or don’t”, between informed allyship or blissfull ignorance. BUT if you do find him and ask for answer, that’s where it spawns four npcs who will beat you to death in three punches, and those npcs straight up tell you “we know he’s here because we followed you”, so really inaction helps both you and him.

Which in itself makes for an amazing moral choice to have in a video game: it would have been easy to question the morality of “cutting poor people to pieces for the sake of a nebulous greater good” but that’s not what ends up happening, what ends up happening is: no matter your opinion, your decision not to get involved in the matter guarantees that he can get away with it.

but what really fucks me up is that it’s not a choice that artemy burakh the character really makes, because “a friend of yours is being hunted; past dawn you won’t be able to help him” appears on your end of day screen, not your thoughts menu. So you, the player, know something’s up before artemy burakh does. if you don’t speak to worm people at all that night, technically artemy burakh the character has no idea that they’re searching for his friend, or that he’s up to something. so you, the player, can make the tactical decision to bypass an entire moral struggle for him. which I had to do! not because I think burin should live or die, not because I don’t think artemy is the kind of guy to put his nose in his friend’s business either, but because I cannot beat four guys in hand to hand combat, and my job here is to keep my character alive!

Really, if we’re being honest, I want to be involved! I want to know what’s going on here! I love the complex moral choices. I crave the heartbreaking moment of looking at your old friend in the eye and asking him why the fuck there’s blood everywhere, just a few days after he asked you the same. I want the emotion that comes out of facing your crimes reflected in someone else, both of you having really shitty but also understandable justifications for it. I also want the turmoil of realizing that by trying to help a friend you caused his downfall, and even if it is deserved, it’s still your friend, and still your fault! But I am not the audience in this game, and I am not the director either. I am the actor in the middle, and I can choose how to deliver the lines, but not the scene we’re playing today.

rathologic

Anonymous asked:

im a bit of a recent follower so im not caught up on the lore...did you ever post your interpretation on the quote "no one who wants to make up a story will tell a lie"? i dont get it

rathologic answered:

hey welcome! I have not talked about this yet ty for asking :-) it’s a line from Oyun during late p1 haruspex route, from the original 2005 translation, the full(er) version being:

How can one tell a lie, Womb one? No one, who wants to make up a story, will tell a lie, neither will the one, who wants to conceal the truth will tell one. Our nature is our conscience’s guard.

in Pathologic Classic HD, it was retranslated as the following, which I like a lot less. while it’s more coherent English, and it incorporates the word “warden” on-theme, it scans as much more defensive from Oyun rather than “he’s invoking mystical and impersonal language in order to not seem defensive” - and framing it as “can lie” instead of “will lie” I think detracts from the theme in p1’s haruspex route that while there is an intended fate to follow, it’s made out of choices that are themselves variable (also, the word choice of “halfblood” to mean “not accepted as one of us yet” is counterintuitive given that both of p1 artemy’s parents were from the Kin):

How am I to lie, Halfblood One? Neither he who wants to imagine a tall tale, nor he who wants to conceal the truth can tell a lie. Our nature is the warden of our conscience.

anyway, my reading of this is reasonably straightforward! besides the aforementioned “in the moment, oyun is invoking his power and authority as an elder to deflect from the fact that he absolutely is lying”, what he’s saying is that lies and fictions come from somewhere in a person’s head, and thus are influenced by that person’s experiences and what underlying story they mean to convey… more directly, it’s in human nature to include a grain of actual truth in falsehoods, and its presence thus makes the lie a metaphor for the truth. the followup is also interesting:

HARUSPEX: So, you mean to say, that man cannot lie?
OYUN: One, who lost his roots, lies with every second of his existence. A child of Boddho cannot lie.

here he’s connecting “nature” to “roots” to imply that the haruspex’s isolation from the Kin will only be righted if the haruspex does what oyun says are the traditional and correct things to do. conniving old man…

the line’s a nice connection to Clara’s crystal flower story (near the same point in haruspex route) as it relates to “truth” about the Bachelor and Polyhedron. it also ties into the lore inability of creatures of the Earth, which oyun frames himself as, to tell direct lies! but it’s one of my favorite philosophical statements in all of pathologic and at the same time an extremely cool manipulation. the two aspects I think encapsulate p1 best :-)

sneez

i used to talk about this a lot on twitter a few years ago but recently i’ve been thinking again about how little agency victor kain has both within the narrative and as an individual. specifically i think a lot about how his life after nina’s death is one in which he as a person plays very little role, and the fact that his duty as her husband (and as a kain) means that after she’s gone the nature of his family’s beliefs about the preservation of the soul keep him trapped by design in a grief that is necessarily all-consuming. if he wants to keep nina’s soul alive he can never progress beyond even the first stage of grief: every moment has to be dedicated to her and her memory; he has to be constantly reminded of her and the fact that she is dead. for him to move on would be for him to essentially kill her, so he can never even attempt to recover from her loss. his life has to revolve around the space where she was. in that way i see him as kind of a living shrine, a memorial whilst he’s alive and a vessel when he’s dead. his path is called the mistress! his entire life is explicitly devoted to someone who will take his body and return to life when he sacrifices himself for her! he’s working towards a utopia like the rest of his family, but who is it for? he lost his son in the pursuit of this thing which he will never get to see, and which seemingly never had a place for him at all. the kains’ utopia doesn’t even extend to their own.

all of this pains me particularly acutely because of how clear it is that victor does have interests and desires of his own, despite his implications that he is nothing more than a mouthpiece for his family. if you believe andrey, he doesn’t even want to be here: he wants to go back to the capital to finish his degree. i often see people talk about the kains as if they are one undifferentiated entity, but a lot of the quests ‘the kains’ give you are from victor, and i would argue that in most of those he is acting as an individual rather than necessarily a kain. he wants daniil to free the wrongfully imprisoned people; he acts against his family’s interests in rewarding clara for telling him about rubin. his letter to daniil on day 9 causes me agony for many reasons but in this context specifically because it doesn’t seem like he wants to die. georgiy appears pretty unfazed about being possessed by simon (although it’s georgiy so who knows) but victor, who has two children and has been one of the town’s rulers for presumably several decades, is telling a man he met just over a week ago that he is the only one to whom he can pass on anything meaningful. you could argue that he is just manipulating daniil here to persuade him to take up the kains’ cause, but i am of the opinion that he is being genuine in this case. he doesn’t want to die. he wants his family back again, but the only way they can be reunited is with his death. he wants to finish his degree. i am putting my head through walls

carlodivarga-s

we’re doing pathologic musicology again. everybody shut up. i’m sick of writing about bel canto musical traditions and my jstor subscription dies tomorrow i think. so i’m pre-emptively saving pdfs about ethnomusicology.

interesting side effect of the town’s culture being mostly built around cattle rather than horses is that the soundtrack of p2 in particular has essentially ended up creating an entire musical history and lexicon that is identifiably SIMILAR to that of The Area Near The Baikal Rift Valley while being obviously different.

classic’s soundtrack interestingly arrives at a similar point to this with completely different means in that the classic soundtrack is basically just. ‘is it bleeping and blooping? ok sick ship it’, while also borrowing at points quite clearly from the actual musical traditions of the region. which produces the effect in the listener of, basically ‘this should sound… other than how it does? but it makes sense?

p2′s soundtrack is trying more obviously to do Authenticity in a way that. has historical precedent, certainly (hi borodin). but it is also trying to do that by borrowing from musical traditions that don’t completely mesh with the way that the town’s musical traditions would have developed. because the town-on-gorkhon is very fond of bulls, culturally speaking, and not horses.

a lot of the extant classical music from the area where pathologic is (presumably) set is not only literally About Horses, which are culturally important, but musically refer to the various gaits of The Horse. (this example is in tuvan but it is not only about horses but the 2/4 rhythm is Trotting-Like. buryat music uses similar music and the same scale, and many of the same instruments, as tuvan music.)

this is not something that bulls particularly have, and so while bulls occupy an equivalent cultural position in the town-on-gorkhon this obviously necessitates a completely different musical tradition. which is also one that doesn’t really exist in the real world, but for which vasily kashnikov and theodor bastard have pulled from existing traditions. they have, however, also created an entire musical language that feels like a place’s musical language essentially out of whole-cloth.

the way that they have done this is essentially to take something about the culturally important animal (lowing, for the bulls – similarly to how actual tuvan, mongolian, baikal, and yakut music refers to horses’ gaits). and then to use that as a basis for the musical ‘world’ of the game, in a similar way to how extant music uses horses. it’s most obviously used in ‘song to boddho’ but a lot of the music in p2 makes a lot of use of drone which could quite easily be interpreted as The Sound That The Local Culturally Important Beast Makes.

(also the p2 soundtrack has a passacaglia in it. this isn’t relevant to this conversation in any way but it’s neat.)

rathologic

it's frustrating because aglaya is already villainized by nearly all the characters in patho2 (yulia as the slight exception), and the point of this is that you, the player character, are asked to approach this fellow person trapped in an impossible situation with grace instead. the Haruspex, a character who is fundamentally about extending his love to everyone in the game (as described by the devs!) has the ability to extend love, platonic or not, to her! logical! so seeing people talk about how much they hate her IN PATHO2 is like extremely jarring.

aglaya never does anything to harm the player in p2 (boring choice, but that's not my point); the closest thing would be that she causes fan favorite badgrief to have a lasting personal crisis. but a lot of the violent hatred towards her instead seems to stem from her flirting with you...? and it's always visceral want to see her dead kind of hatred. sorry people can't handle a woman in a position of authority speaking somewhat impolitely to them but the "flirting" part does really bug me so I'll get into that

the single major change p2 implemented to aglaya's story was that the Haruspex can meaningfully be on her side by agreeing to her request to leave the town together. it's weird to see that disparaged by fans for her using the imagery of romantic attachment, while the player's never forced to use the same imagery in return. the escape's not "you instantly fall in love with each other and run away" it's about a way of reacting to the fate imposed on both of you by the narrative: pathologic 2 simply describes fate through the lens of romance, re: nara and the brides, re: "a fate like a good wife, emshen... your wife" (re: the option to call aglaya your wife on the train).

& there's a fascinating meta aspect to the fact she can tell the haruspex as the player has the ability to make this choice, to be the only person in the world who Could not villainize her, and maybe even help her under an extremely short time limit. her expressing attraction to the haruspex (through a reflection, even) is for once not a weird misogyny thing but a reasonable way of parsing her feelings and needs into something that you might listen to! it fits within the societal framework expected in the game, and adds a discussion of romantic love to p2's dissection of the ideal of love in general; "discussion" meaning it is given to the player to see how you feel about it, and remains open-ended.

then she doesn't even make it and replaying you Know she'll never even make it which lends all the more meaning to choosing to flee with her. since patho2 is a game at its core about symbolic choices representing love + what it means to the player to choose to undergo challenges for no extrinsic rewards! her whole quest is a microcosm of key themes of patho2 (aka: "udurgh"), and potentially, a moment of respite and genuine friendship during one of its most stressful phases. if someone felt strung along by it I have great news for them about the final impact of every other quest in the game

and furthermore the connections she sees between herself and the haruspex are genuinely there. they're both trapped in the game they both will cease to exist after it and meaning is derived, both for the player and for her ("touch me with your words"), from choosing to fight the inevitable however briefly instead of just submitting to death - and love being the only driving force that can motivate that choice. how did you miss the point about love when it's the only point the game ever makes.

The choice to leave with her is SUCH an interesting one bc it is really, to me, the choice to act as the Player or to act as Artemy. Like, canonically, it's a big leap to think that Artemy would give up on his friends, his kids, and his town and just leave without having ensured the town's safety. Making this choice is (imo) you asserting your will as the Player to give Aglaya that last little bit of hope, that the two of you could escape the game entirely, and in doing so recognizing that it IS all a game - something which Artemy the character is bound by the limits of the game to be unable to do without Player interference.

It is the ultimate symbolic choice, and yet making the decision to stay is equally symbolic - you are saying "No, for all intents and purposes I am Artemy, he is me, we are acting with the same intent. Artemy wouldn't do this, so I won't do it either." Artemy embraces the fate laid out for him by the narrative, while the Player has the option to impose their will and reject it. (Obvs this interpretation is dependent on your own ideas about Artemy's character, which will be a little different for everyone depending on dialogue choices etc., but this is at least how I personally figure he would respond in-character vs. the Player's motivations and goals)

Also the song that plays as you walk back to town, Umbraya Erze, is by far my FAVORITE song in the game and so encapsulates the mix of hopelessness->frustration->determination you feel in that moment. So tl;dr Aglaya supremacy

rathologic

There's something very sad to me about how the 'win' conditions for the 'good endings' of marble nest both involve utterly surrendering Daniil in one way or another. Like first you've got the standard acceptance of death ending which plays out in character.

image

He's exhausted, forced to examine the futility of his philosophies about death, and ultimately come to the conclusion that the only way to know the truth about death is to experience it. And this is presented as a win! Like yes you as an individual will be annihilated in every conceivable way but maybe there will be some formless residue still capable of feeling something afterwards ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I guess there is something to be said for the fact that the concept of death as a change in state here seems to imply the potential truth of a lot of those odd Thanatica theories about human consciousness but its not like there's anything left of him to get any satisfaction out of that!!!

And then you've got the much more meta heart ending. I forgot that in this ending there is actually a blatant fourth-wall break instead of the usual vague puppet metaphors.

image

This is thematically similar to the framing of patho classic in that it makes you evaluate why you care about something that's just a game. There's an extra layer here though because you have to be the one to break the illusion. There's no room for denial or to say 'It mattered to me' because the player must be the one to state that none of it matters. That there will be no death, that Daniil can't die because he isn't real. The game gives you a little pat on the back for this but then just leaves you with the dread-inducing reminder that someday you will have to confront the reality of your own death for realsies without the comfort of knowing that its just a video game which didn't exactly leave me feeling like I had won!

Idk it just sits weirdly for me that marble nest pushes this narrative about accepting death to conquer it, but I don't think any of these endings actually represent a triumph over death. It's smoke and mirrors. Death isn't defeated, it's just redefined into something that can be defied.