Disco Elysium - Roleplaying Heaven (Patreon)

Neoreaction A Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer starts with the line "let us assume that we are fucked". This is more or less the approach that Disco Elysium takes to leftism. There aren't easy answers, or if there are answers, easy or not, we don't have them, and sometimes the best thing you can do is just really accurately represent the current dumpster-fire state of things. Sometimes the best we can do is take stock and make sure we know what’s going on around us.

In Disco Elysium you can have your character play as a self-identified communist, actively championing the working class and telling people about class warfare and the oppression by the bourgeoisie, but the game doesn't pretend that you as an individual can seriously do anything to change the politics of the world you're in. In fact, you don't meet another self-identified communist for the whole entire game, right until the end, when you find an old man alone on an island. You haven't seen another communist the whole game and he hasn't seen one for 40 years, and when you tell him that you're a communist, does he welcome you into comradeship and solidarity with open arms? Of course not, he calls you a liberal pedophile.

Disco Elysium

There are some big problems with RPGs as a genre right now. I’m spinning my big Price is Right wheel of serious problems that need my attention right now and wow, would you look at that it’s landed on “developers don’t know what makes RPGs good so they keep making action games instead”.

This is a many-faced issue and it’s about video game genres, which is a messy topic at the best of times so - sigh - strap into your gamer harness my dudes, it’s time for some serious discussion.

In RPGs like Fallout 4, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher, there can be a bit of an odd problem with genre and tone. In fact, there’s a tonal whiplash so common that we don’t even notice it any more where games will be RPGs right up until combat starts, and then become first-person-shooters, and pretend like nothing changed or in Witcher first-person stabbers and VtMB first-person-suckers? Even more than that, games like Fallout 3 or Fallout 4 are first-person-shooters first and foremost, and the actual plot of the game - let alone interesting, engaging roleplaying - is something you encounter from time to time in between Vault Dweller 69’s murder mayhem summer vacation.

Here’s a way to think about it: consider the statement “Cyberpunk 2077 is a hacking game.”

Feels intuitively wrong, right? That’s because in 2077 hacking is not something you spend most of your time doing and the narrative is not communicated to you in and around the hacking mechanics. Okay, try “Cyberpunk 2077 is a driving game” - makes a lot more sense, you spend an enormous amount of the game driving or buying cars to do more driving, and a lot of the story happens in cars actually. This statement also just makes Cyberpunk’s utter inability to put up basic driving mechanics a lot funnier.

If you’re getting the gist here, consider a slightly wonky example: “Red Dead Redemption is a horse-riding game”. This one is a little odd not just because of branding disparity but also because of a dissonance between where the story happens and what you spend your time doing.
Let’s look at a positive example: “Pokemon is an animal catching and battling game”. This is laughably true. You spend all your time in Pokemon catching and battling pokemon. Where you go and how you get there and what happens when you arrive is all dictated by pokemon-catching and pokemon-battling. Practically everybody in the world only wants to talk to you about one thing: Pokemon. “Pokemon is a Pokemon game” sounds really silly but in this exercise it’s actually the best way to say it - they designed a Pokemon who canonically created the universe which is such a walking existential crisis of a piece of Pokemon lore - through special Nintendo events you can catch him. God is dead and we taught him to use Solar Beam.

So here’s a place where a game has a fantastic synergy between narrative, gameplay and genre - “Disco Elysium is a detective RPG.” Everything you do is in service of solving mysteries, right from the start.

The first mystery is who you are, and as a sub-mystery, what you spent the last few days doing, and the short answer is HARRY YOU WORTHLESS GODDAMN PIECE OF SHIT. The second mystery, as you slowly come to terms with the damage you’ve done to the hotel, the money you owe, how badly you’re failing to perform your duties as a police officer, is the body hanging from the tree behind the hotel.

Harry’s been drinking and partying and fucking around instead of dealing with this dead body right outside his room for a full week. That’s the back-foot you start out the game on. That feeling of anxiety, of failing at something you had no control over and weren’t even there for right at the start of the game - wow. Holy shit.

We should talk about how to start RPGs and generally tell those stories, and why Disco Elysium does it so well but first, I just want to fawn over the absolute genius of this character. The player’s experience, struggling against the decisions Harry has made and wants to make is actually identical to the character’s own experience - everything he’s done, every part of him, is an obstacle in the way of his mission and his personal growth. You might not sympathise with him - HARRY YOU WORTHLESS GODDAMN PIECE OF SHIT - but you do understand him, implicitly. It’s powerful stuff.

The first voice you hear in the game is Harry’s “Ancient Reptilian Brain” and then his “Limbic System” - Harry is clearly unwell, he drinks a lot and he has, to put it mildly, impulse control issues. He has really upsetting and oftentimes offensive intrusive thoughts, like if you’ve made Harry racist and  fail a check to convince Kim to dance Harry will call him a “yellow monkey” and… it’s just… Harry you worthless goddamn piece of shit.
Harry is a compelling character portrayed in a compelling way and I’ll try to separate them out the way that I’m trying to separate out what this game is saying from the ingenious ways it says it.

Disco Elysium is in one way like Bojack Horseman - it centers around this personal struggle we can all understand. Bojack is a Hollywood celebrity, someone who has everything and has no excuse to be the way he is. As Todd puts it to Bojack, devastatingly, “You can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay! You need to be better!” All the dialogue that comes close to Harry actually trying to improve in Disco Elysium is actually him just feeling sorry for himself - this is how they let you define the character but still keep a strong sense of who he is. Conversely to Bojack, Harry has a million excuses - I mean even, if you make Harry a communist he can repeatedly blame everything wrong with him on society (on like, the system, man) and it’s not that he’s wrong but also he’s not going to change the system, so he should just kind of get his shit together…

It’s a really bizarre experience and unlike any other video game experience I’ve had - like when Harry and Kim are told that the other resident of the hotel was raped, because Harry lost his memory and feels guilty for existing, he tells Kim “I didn’t rape her” to which Kim says “Did you rape her?” “No” “So don’t ever say that again” Harry’s intrusive thoughts are just breathtakingly awful, like man why the fuck did you say that?

It’s the first RPG I’ve played where exhausting all the dialogue options is actively bad because some of the options are just… just HARRY YOU WORTHLESS GODDAMN PIECE OF SHIT

It’s in this way that Disco Elysium has the courage to do the things it actually exists to do, to tell the story it’s there to tell, rather than just pursuing the abstract notion of choice which more than anything else is what’s ruined the modern RPG. If you exhaust all the dialogue options and choose to both tell the postbox it’s a good postbox and give it a little pat and kick the postbox you’ve just made your own experience meaningless in a really tangible way. The game even puts in a door you can’t open that you can try and try to open until Kim tells you “yeah there are just some doors you can’t open”

Let’s think about how to start an RPG then: Often RPGs start with a character creator, or else the player is introduced to a pre-written character as whom they’re going to play. On first blush one of these - the latter - might seem inherently better for telling a story, where the former allows more player freedom but will result in a more shallow character and story. I think this is a misconception, and it comes from failing to grasp how RPG stories should be told. Let’s look at some examples. Fallout 3 starts with a character creator, but then the player is shoehorned into a boring story trailing from location to location in search of a more interesting character you don’t meet until later. Fallout 4 starts with a character creator, but then the player is shoehorned into a boring story trailing from location to location in search of a more int-- okay but Fallout: New Vegas doesn’t start with a character creator - it starts with your character being murdered. This means you’re going into the character creation process with an idea of who you’re going to be playing as, and while you have the same technical freedom, you now have all these interesting decisions to make - should you follow the guy who murdered you for revenge, or perhaps even more narratively boldly, do you not even care about that? Even answering this first basic question is defining you as a character.
In CDPR’s Witcher series you play as Geraldo Riviera, and while you have some control over his choices they always reflect a strong core character. In Witcher 1 you open out the game having lost your memory, in Witcher 2 you start in a jail cell and have to explain through flashbacks how you got there. Witcher 3, even though it’s the best game, has the least engaging opening because it just plonks you into the world assuming you already understand the lore and the character and then gives you 5 hours of tutorials. It’s probably a testament to how fun the gameplay is and how well written the main story and characters are that people usually forget about the really boring start and talk about Witcher 3 with such zealous positivity.
So my point here is that pre-written versus character creator does not inherently shape how interesting an RPG is, there are boring and interesting ways to do both. To put it another way: Your character is not created in the character creator.

Disco Elysium is engaging because of the story, and the questions the story asks you to answer about your character. They even implemented a mechanic to reflect the way that your decisions shape your character as the story progresses. It’s called your cop-o-type: if you keep trying to apologise for the bad things Harry did you’re “Sorry Cop”; if you keep seeking out the party wherever you can find it you’re “Rockstar Cop”, et cetera.

A lot of RPGs are adaptations of TTRPGs - that’s Table Top Role Playing Games, like Dungeons & Dragons - except D&D is the example everyone uses but most people prefer playing more interesting TTRPGs with less racism and rules human beings can follow. For example I play a game called Monster of the Week with some friends, the basic premise being that your character exists in a “monster of the week” show, like Buffy or X-Files. TTRPGs generally (but not always) involve a group of people collectively telling a story, bound by certain game mechanics and rules. Skill-checks like you experience in video game RPGs are decided by rolling dice. Games like Monster of the Week, Cyberpunk or, yes, Dungeons & Dragons have one member of the group act as the Game Master, the person who is essentially telling all the rest of the story that the player characters don’t decide. The title sounds grandiose, but it’s more like you’re putting on a play and one person has to play all the bit parts.

I bring this up because VtMB and Cyberpunk are adaptations of TTRPGs, but Disco Elysium feels like an adaptation of the concept of the TTRPG. The game is really self-conscious about this too, not just in the dice roll skill-checks, but there’s an abandoned office in the doomed industrial block that used to house a game company. If you grew up with pokemon you’re probably familiar with devs putting themselves in the game, but ZA/UM’s developer office in the game is a TTRPG designer that went bust because they were too ambitious, which is both charming and darkly funny.

Where it really shows of course is the gameplay itself. Disco Elysium feels like playing a game GM’d by a very smart and funny friend who knows what you like. Let’s look at an example - one of the first big obstacles in the game is the harbour gate, which is locked and guarded by a huge muscular racist. Measurehead is quite a character, we’ll get back to him. This is really funny to me because a big, heavy, locked door is possibly the most classic trap GMs will set for players. It’s a classic, and it asks players to examine how they approach problems. Is there a riddle to solve, can you batter down the door, can you figure out where to find the key, have you tried pushing instead of pulling?

The same reflection of the player is going on here. Only Measurehead can give or deny you access to the harbour. Measurehead is a bodybuilding hyper-racist with tattoos all over his face and body to show off his superior phrenology and anatomy. I love that this game opens like this, just mocking racists and fascists right to their faces. In another game you would be this huge muscle-punch-man, and your deep moral choices would be whether you become a fascist or try to help people. Instead you’re a sad alcoholic trying to scrape his life back together after a meltdown, and this racist calls you a degenerate and a gay. Measurehead isn’t a white supremacist by the way, he isn’t even white - his whole schtick is how the white race is degenerating and his race is going to rule now instead.
There’s a check here where you can make Harry subscribe to Measurehead’s “superior race theory” and good lord Luigi is this a funny scene. If you ask to learn about racism from Measurehead, he teaches you all about the races of the world from his perspective.

This is probably one of the earliest times in the game you realise that Disco Elysium takes place in a world like ours but with totally alternate history. Measurehead will tell you about how the occidental (western) races are generally superior except for the “maun” and if you ask for an explanation um… “A RECEDING GENETIC POOL HAS LED THE MAUN ON REPREHENSIBLE STREET PARADES, IN MAUN CITIES LIKE STAADSKANAL AND VREDEFORT, WEARING WOODEN CLOGS ON THEIR FEET, AND LITTLE GREEN TASSELS ON THEIR HATS.” RIP Disco Elysium cancelled for anti-dutch racism.

Measurehead is like this because in his own words “MOST RACISTS ARE NOT GOOD EXAMPLES OF THEIR RACE” which is also demonstrably true - the white racists you meet are pretty disgusting and if you choose to make Harry a racist he’s not exactly peak male performance.

The ways to get past Measurehead are both measures (ha) of the character you’re forming Harry into. One is to subscribe to his race theory, which considering you’re a white man with an asian partner in a racially integrated world, won’t hold you back personally but will sabotage your relationships and make Harry an even more worthless piece of shit. Also it costs a skill point to forget internalised thoughts like this so a lot of players will probably just carry on not realising that they’ve made Harry permanently racist.

The other way to get past Measurehead is to successfully beat him in a fight, which is a really hard check to pass. I mean, look at him, look at you, it doesn’t make any sense - but that’s what’s so great about it, and this is what I mean about Disco Elysium being RPGs done right - it’s not likely, it doesn’t make any sense, so if you do it you have to do it spectacularly. They’re really giving you the thrill of rolling a nat-20 here when you luck out and manage to punch this semenese giant, and even better, it only works then if you follow up by 360-spin-kicking him in the face.

Harry’s partner, Kim, is one of those characters who's obviously going to be a fan favourite as soon as you meet him - of the “too pure for this world” variety. He kind of has to be for the design of the game, to be fair. Harry can be a variety of things, and a lot of them are very offensive and troubling, and so the character of his partner has to have the patience of a saint to counter it.

But it also makes sense for him in order to just live in the world. When you meet a racist trucker in Revachol who tells Kim “Welcome to Revachol” in that way you’ve heard from a million tedious boomers who just think they’re being so fucking clever when they say they identify as an attack helicopter or they ask someone where they’re really from or… and Kim’s attitude in dealing with him is just jog on dickhead - it’s great.

After you deal with Measurehead, you can talk to Kim and compare him and the trucker. Whether you say “I like this racist better” or “I think the last racist was better” Kim tells you “I think the next racist will be the really good one” “How do you know there will be another racist?” “There’s always another racist”

And you know what - he’s fucking right. Gary the Cryptofascist - yes, Gary the Cryptofascist really is the pinnacle.

So if you meet The Cryptozoologist - a person who hunts for cryptids - out in the western half of the map, you can accept a long quest where you have to check all the traps he’s set to catch the Insulindian Phasmid. The Insulindian Phasmid, you learn, according to this man who hunts bigfoots and mothmans, is a huge invisible stick insect that lives in Revachol. Spending a bunch of time running around on the beach looking for nets that may or may not be full of locusts, finding out one was empty, figuring out what happened to it, investigating and - disappointingly - finding out it was sabotaged by Cuno, the gobshite junkie kid you meet throwing rocks at a corpse, it’s a great quest because it just drives this feeling of absurdity and futility so hard. Its the imagine sisyphus happy of the game - you’re looking for this stupid giant stick insect you surely must know doesn’t exist, everyone tells you it doesn’t exist, and no matter how many times you choose the contrary dialogue option you slowly have to reach the conclusion that it just doesn’t exist. And what are you rewarded with, after all this? Gary the fucking cryptofascist.

The cryptozoologist’s friend Gary is labeled Gary the Cryptofascist, and he’s an openly racist little turd the moment he meets Kim. If you’ve salvaged a mug with a racist caricature on it from the dumpster earlier, you can ask him if it’s his and he finds it just fucking hilarious. Fuck Gary.

I’ve just spent an hour hunting down these traps looking for the phasmid, and dealing with that little ginger shitweasel Cuno and persevering on for the dream of seeing this cryptid and what do I get instead? Gary. Perfect.

Gary is the punchline at the end of this long joke. You chose to believe there was something more in the world, something magical and exciting and special and what you get instead is just this racist, the most tedious and banal kind of evil. You finally have to accept the phasmid doesn’t exist because the cryptozoologist’s wife is tired of being dragged out to these far-flung places and then being left behind in the hotel while he goes out in the cold setting traps for a fucking stick insect. It’s brutal. It’s really good.

And then of course you get to the end and the Insulindian Phasmid is fucking real.

Disco Elysium’s approach to RPGs is so refreshing and excellent it’s changed both the way I want to make video games myself and the way I play TTRPGs. It’s made me go back to TTRPGs differently!

I've been playing solo scenes with the players in my MotW game to understand their characters better, because what Disco Elysium is doing is exactly the same thing with you. The design of the story, the quests and side-quests is this fantastically symmetrical storytelling where whatever you choose determines what is meaningful to you in the late-game, which they then exploit to bring home their messaging.

If you play the phasmid quest you see the phasmid at the end, and that's meaningful because of the cryptozoologist, and the cryptofascist, and Kim. It's a far cry from letting you choose to be a fascist Neo-Roman cosplayer and see um… If you chose to be a fascist then… um… Well it's bad for you because… Wait did we forget to put in consequences for you choosing to be a fascist? Oh god oh fuck is our game actually about anything?

Disco Elysium on the other hand mocks you for being a racist or a fascist, it makes fun of you for those bad choices and punishes you by harming your character relationships. It's openly hostile to you, the commenter typing right now that I don't understand Caesar.

Disco Elysium has an achievement for defending the political center 7 times called The World’s Most Laughable Centrist fuck I love this game.

When you meet the phasmid, if you’ve done the right things to prepare and you pass the right checks, you can talk to it, like properly hang out and philosophise with this big magic bug about what it’s like being a big bug and how it feels about the world, and how it feels about you… I know this seems odd but I think part of the reason I kept thinking about Pokemon around this game was the core message here with the phasmid - that human struggle in all it’s futility is always foregrounded while in the background our existence on this planet is destroying our vibrant, beautiful and diverse ecosystem.

There’s so much to this game, even with how much I’m going into in this video I haven’t even had time to process my thoughts about the scientist who’s exploring a tiny hole in the universe or the tragic depictions of addicts and alcoholics and the mentally ill, and I really haven’t given my powerful king Cuno the time he deserves. I’m still excited to play it more and dive into the mysteries this game has that I still haven’t even touched, and in March they’re bringing out even more!
The Final Cut is going to have fully voiced lines and more political choices and… just more. God I’m going to be playing this game forever aren’t I?

Even savescumming my first playthrough didn’t spoil anything. Let me explain a bit more: Savescumming, the practice of reloading your save to try something over and over in a game until you win at it, is generally ridiculed in the gaming community, hence the "scum" in the name, but what if you treated savescummers like normal people? Okay no, I mean it, it's pretty universally looked down on because, well, it's cheating, right?

You're cheating the game, and when you cheat you're cheating not just yourself, but cheat what your country can do for you… how does it go?

Okay, confession time. I savescum, a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. Like I have so many hours in a day and I want to get through games to see what they're about, and I know that most of the time, if I fail at something I just don't progress in a game. Generally speaking, games will leverage more content against no more content, and I'm a big stupid gamer baby. I want the content. Give me the content I'm a big baby waaah

In most games when you win you get content and when you lose you get no content, but Disco Elysium has something it wants to say, so it doesn't need to incentivise you to win. When you win you get content and when you lose you get content. It’s probably the first game that I’ve done a playthrough savescumming to get all the best outcomes, gotten to the end and said “Yeah shit I really want to know what happens when you fail” because the failures are so entertaining and meaningful.

It also makes it more meaningful when the game tells you no, like the door that doesn’t open, or when you read a postcard from Harry’s ex-girlfriend and Harry just fucking dies if you try to keep reading. That’s fucking good as hell. You can be killed by a postcard. You can also be killed by a fucking chair.

Okay hang on let me explain that.

Health in Disco Elysium isn’t like in other games. In other games your HP isn’t diegetically explained, it’s just generic “health” which can be diminished as you are shot repeatedly or diminished entirely because you thought about a cazadore but this general system can swing between as plausible a possibility as “you’ve been shot multiple times, you probably bled out” and as ridiculous as “you’ve been shot in the head multiple times but don’t worry buddy, it’s all chill. You’re fine. You rule.”

In Disco Elysium health is directly tied to Harry’s feeble heart. When you hit zero health for any reason, Harry has a heart attack and dies, which means if you have 1 health when you go meet Evrart, when he insists you sit on an absurdly uncomfortable chair, and you take 1 health damage from the chair, the chair can kill you.

Ah jeez I haven’t even mentioned Evrart Claire.

Okay, we’re getting into the real serious spoilers territory. This is a mystery solving game, so I mean this part: I’m about to give a lot away.

Evrart is the Debardeurs’ Union boss who is leading the strike which has the harbour closed. His union guys hanged but didn’t kill the hanged man you’re here to investigate. Evrart is a fascinating character, and not just because he’s secretly two people - oh, yeah. Evrart and his twin brother Edgar pretend to be the same person, and they even switch out between meetings and there’s only a small tell for which is which.

The person you meet at the denouement of the mystery explains how Edgar is the real brains behind the operation, he went to university and he’s a social democrat with a big plan for how to evict the Wild Pines corporation from Revachol and if you talk to… Edgar… or… it’s probably Edgar anyway, if you talk to him he tells you his plan, how he engineered the strike and used the murder to stoke up tensions because he’s going to liberate Martinaise to create an autonomous workers state, which is pretty fucking cool except Evrart and/or Edgar is the most corrupt and untrustworthy person you’ve ever met, so???

I just love how inscrutable he is. He’s always one step ahead and always up to something and you just have the feeling you never quite know what he wants or what he’s planning.

The game gives you an option to ask Evrart why he’s fat which - HARRY YOU WORTHLESS FUCKING PIECE actually this is a really clever line, because people read fat people as greedy, selfish, often dishonest or lacking in integrity and self-control and… no, fat people are just fat. Evrart just has diabetes, and he’ll tell you that if you ask, which is kind of great, because it really makes you realise how much you fell for this aesthetic prejudice (but he still can’t be trusted). Evrart’s one of the most fun characters to talk to because you simply never know where you stand with him. When he acts like he’s using you as a pawn you feel like you might be working together, and when he treats you like an equal he’s probably just using you as a pawn, but you never know.

Speaking of speaking, RPGs have a speech problem - i.e. If you don't put all your points into speech you're a fucking idiot. No seriously, this is another really strong place that Disco Elysium excels compared to other RPGs.

The real issue here is obviously a design one. While it seems obvious enough that you should have a variety of stats for various things including speech, really it's like if your car had 7 different stats and one of them was "wheels”. You’re like number of wheels? Size? Grip? No. Wheels.

Disco Elysium just fully embraces this and acknowledges that most role-playing is going to be through speech. Of Harry’s 24 stats, 13 of them directly relate to how you interact with other characters and what dialogue options you get, 10 are about your physical abilities but can still affect speech, and then there’s Shivers which is just a fucking fantastic mechanic for an RPG - if you listen to one of Harry’s Shivers thoughts you get a long interaction giving you detailed flavour-text about Harry’s surroundings, or something that happened in the past, or something really far away that he’s thinking about, or just something he doesn’t have a rightful way of knowing or understanding.

In my Monster of the Week game - okay you know what, just fucking play TTRPGs, they’re good as hell. You get together with some friends, or you make some new friends, and you build characters and through the wonderful story you’re telling together you can become a fan of these characters you made together and honestly it’s the best thing in the world, and if that isn’t enough, remember if you’re the GM you can make the stories to push communist propaganda on your friends, because friends don’t let friends be scabs.

At the end of the mystery, after the strikers and the company pinkertons have had their shoot-out, and you know that the union boys didn’t kill the victim, they just staged the hanging. You only finally get to actually solve the murder after everything has already played out, and it brings you to the island, and to the deserter.

This is the old communist who hasn’t seen another communist in decades. He’s been living on an island, watching everyone through his sniper scope and seething with bitterness. He was part of the communist revolution that took place in Revachol a long time ago, and he’s the only surviving member of his force, still at war with the world - he never gave up, he just stayed and rotted.

It feels so perfect in a game so defined by struggle, personal and psychological and social and systemic, that the guy who turns out to have done it is this old man defined by that total inability to change anything because he’s overwhelmed by just how extremely wrong the world is - and overwhelmed by the neurotoxins secreted by the giant stick insect that are making him lose his mind, of course.

He was watching the woman in the hotel, and he became obsessed with her, and when he saw her with a man, he murdered him in a jealous rage. It was stoked on by Edgar of course - as the deserter puts it, “Never trust a social democrat who quotes [Marx]”.

And yeah - you shouldn’t trust Edgar or Evrart, they are both just astonishingly untrustworthy. It’s pretty much the only single thing you can be certain about with them - but the deserter did the murder for his own reasons.Just like every time you talked to Edgar or Evrart, he’s been manipulated but he also did things for his own reasons, which is the worst way you can get manipulated.

You haven't seen another communist the whole game and he hasn't seen one for 40 years, and when you tell him that you're a communist, does he welcome you into comradeship and solidarity with open arms? Of course not, he calls you a liberal pedophile. You can also appeal to him by picking the most misogynistic dialogue options. This old man poisoned by bug farts and sexism is probably the funniest and best depiction I’ve ever seen of the full-revolution-or-nothing types on the left who think they’re better than anyone else’s answers or ideas. For all that he understands, he also understands nothing - you just want to scream at him “not everyone is a fucking liberal pedophile get a grip god damn”

In short: The Deserter isn’t wrong. It fucking whips when he’s just brazenly like “the bourgeoisie isn’t human” or “capital has to take off its mask of humanity to kill everyone”, it’s not that he’s wrong it’s just that he’s a useless old incel on a fucking island huffing stick insect fumes and losing his mind.

Most of all the deserter is a perfect oxymoron - he’s cut himself off from everyone because he thinks only he has the answers to improve society. He’s literally a communist on an island. It’s great that instead of positioning him as ideologically useless, it’s really clear what he’s doing wrong. It’s not his radical beliefs that are wrong, it’s being an old incel on an island watching women through a telescope and thinking you’re smarter than everyone. He’s so not wrong that in one ending Harry really really takes on his politics, and one way you could read it, there’s going to be a revived new revolution. My friend was even saying the RCM could be a kind of revolutionary vanguard. After all, as the cryptozoologist’s wife says, it’s “complicated” - they aren’t exactly the cops, they’re the RCM - the Revachol Citizens Militia.

The old communist on the island is Harry, and Harry is all of us. Okay man, never trust Socdems, it’s all the system, it’s the counterrevolutionaries’ fault - fine, man, but you’re just an old incel on an island watching people through the telescope, at least Evrart is building a free Revachol. There’s no excuse - or, there’s a million excuses, but the only thing that matters is we’ve just got to get our shit together.. HARRY YOU WORTHLESS GODDAMN PIECE OF SHIT