like yeah i have encountered people online who think their ocs who exist in a contextless bubble deserve the same reverence as fully realized characters, and that mentality is annoying, but i don't actually think the end goal of all art is to became a webcomic, i think it's a perfectly fine if people want to flex their creative muscle by creating funky character designs with wacky backstories just for the joy of creation itself, like you don't have to be personally invested in it, but it's a bizarre way to moralize art especially coming from a group of people who otherwise seem to be against that?
Peeling off the broken breastplate of a stoic knight who only fights and never speaks, just to realize thereās nothing in there. Not metaphoricallyāthe armor is literally empty. It doesnāt appear to affect him. If the armor stays mostly in the shape of a knight, he just gets back up to keep fighting. But with the chest plate off he just sits there, equally impervious to curiosity as I reach up into the cavity where his body mightāve gone. Stubbornly, no answers are found anywhere in there.
So I forge him a new breastplate and on the inside, because I know he has plenty of room, I put a little pocket. Not big enough to hold anything functional of course. Just a little extra piece to see what heāll do with it.
He comes back next time with some grievous injury to his nothing, presumably from the massive shredded gash across his thigh plates. He sits and waits. I fix it for him. He is still nothing in there. I decide to add a drawing on the inside, of the type of beast I imagine could rend metal into scraps with a single blow. He puts it back on. He no longer moves as if he is injured.
Over time the interior of the knight becomes decorated with whatever odds and ends I could think to attach to the inside of a guy whoās got room to carry it. What really gets me is that he never removes any of it. Never requests a change. Not even when I installed a curtain rod for a small tapestry, or a bud vase to carry roses for his beloved, or an accordion folder for letters. He didnāt say a word for any of the many, many drawings of mythical beasts that now fight forever inside of his shell.
There are plenty of other forges. Iām not entirely sure why he keeps coming back here anyway. Weāre pretty popular, but he could get his armor fixed a lot quicker (and with fewer ridiculous modifications) literally anywhere else. I asked him if I could get a look at his nothing again. He flipped up his visor and nodded his head so I could take a look. It was the same as it had been, filled with drawings and trinkets and weird little fixtures Iād put in there. I asked if he was annoyed by it, or liked it, or felt anything at all, but he literally only ever says nothing, so Iām not sure why I asked.
Thereās not much room left in his nothing now. When he comes back for repairs Iāve had to fix my own foolish additions. Some of these pieces are intricate and irritating to repair, but I fix them anyway. It feels wrong to take any of it away from him now, even though Iāve been rudely encroaching on his nothingness to the point where itās barely even there. How he squeezes his nothing back into a body so full, Iāll never understand. But itās a game to me now, finding a spot not yet filled and putting something there. A dark part of me wonders if he ever gets filled up completely, if whatever sorcery holds the nothing-knight together may break, and it will all clatter unceremoniously to the floor.
When he hands me his breastplate yet again, it is so shockingly disfigured that I wonder if being made of nothing has somehow kept him alive. No ordinary knight could sustain such injuries. So I fix it. And he waits, unmoving, in a quiet corner of the forge. Itās like heās watching, even though I know the reading glasses I put inside his helmet were just for fun. Iām careful to put it all back exactly the way it was when he last left. Thereās no room to add more this time.
He examines the breastplate, and pauses before putting it back on, like heās looking for something. Is he worried about the fit? But it suits him just as it always did. He calmly points to a little space, about an inch, between a miniature shelf and one of many pockets. Thereās nothing there. I ask him whatās wrong, and again he points. Itās the most emotion Iāve ever seen from him, and itās barely anything at all. I take it to mean he wants something there.
I spend some time engraving a little snail in the gap. He watches, as much as nothing can watch. When Iām finished he holds the breastplate, but he doesnāt put it on right away. I ask him if somethingās still wrong. He says nothing, and puts it on. I tell him I canāt add anything else. Even if he could ask, thereās no room left.
Next time he comes back, thereās nothing wrong with his armorāhe lets me check to make sure. I ask him what heās doing here. Out from one of many pockets, he retrieves a tiny rusted knife. Itās in miserable condition, barely worth saving. I tell him I could make him a nice new one, but Iāll fix it if he likes. He puts it away and reaches around to find something else, a needle and thread. Better condition, but Iām not a sewist and I tell him as much. He puts them away. He then retrieves a little twisted piece of wax paper. I open it. Itās candy. I ask if I can eat it. He says nothing. I eat it. Itās flavored with cinnamon. Iām surprised he let me take it.
He keeps bringing me candy now. His armor is the most laborious to repair out of every client my forge serves, but itās my own fault so I canāt complain. Sometimes he keeps me company while I work. I wonder if he is trying to tell me something when he hands me mints. I wonder again at the lemon lozenges. He stares at me when I eat, as much as nothing can stare.
One day he brings me a little jar of honey. I thank him, I tell him Iāll save it for dinner. He watches me work, he puts his repaired armor back on, and he stays. My shift passes slowly, and when I finally pack up to leave itās dark outside. He follows me out of the forge. I ask him where heās going. He points to the jar in my hand. I ask him if he wants to watch me eat it. He says nothing, but the nothing-knight clearly wants something, so I open the lid and dunk my finger in the honey. I try not to get any on my chin. He stands there, inches away, watching me try to consume this jar of honey without a utensil. It tastes like clovers. About half the jar is left when Iāve finally had enough of pretending to be a bear, but he doesnāt move to leave.
I ask if heās going to follow me home. He says nothing. I tell him he can if he wants to. Again, nothing. I start walking, and he follows at my side. I know heās not going to say anything ever, so I fill the silence. I tell him Iām grateful for the sweets, I tell him about how his various components are made, I tell him Iāve never met anyone made of nothing before. I tell him itās a rare opportunity for a smith to work so much on the inside of something. He says nothing. I tell him again how much I like the candy.
It occurs to me that maybe filling me with sugar is as close as he can get to filling someone elseās empty armor with trinkets. Iām not sure if thatās really why he does it. I tell him I donāt have room to be filled with anything on the inside, not like him. Iām not a container for much besides food. He offers me another piece of candy. Maybe he likes containing something, the way I like to feel full. Maybe itās nothing at all.
ā
I didnāt edit this even a little bit. Thanks for reading!
āNot āsuperhumanāājust āhumanā, if I may kindly correct you. If only you understood the immeasurable vastness of humanity, you would never want to become something else. Are you ready to die, Bachelor Dankovsky?ā
Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like "posts that a gnome would make" or like "are you a phone"
thoughts of the day: it always frustrates and saddens me a bit when the fandom tends to reduce daniil and artemy's stance on children to "daniil outright hates them, artemy outright adores them." if we're talking exclusively PCHD, i'd argue it's much more "daniil treats children like children, artemy treats children like small adults." and i want to expand on what i mean by that and how i think it can end up producing that first interpretation of the characters. this is gonna get long, so i'll put it under a cut, but let's talk about how daniil treats children first. i might do another post expanding on how artemy interacts with children in the future, because i do think that's interesting as well. this just got way too long talking about daniil specifically.
and i want to preface this by saying: yes, i am absolutely cherry-picking the dialogue where he is nice to kids or expressing concern for them. i am well aware that he has dialogue where he can threaten to spank or hit kids, yell at them, or call them things like brats. i'm not at all trying to deny that he has those options or even saying that it's wrong to play him that way if you choose. you can absolutely make him suck with kids. if that is the way you played your bachelor route and subsequently the way you interpret him, that's fine! but please, for the love of all things holy, do not just point out every instance where he can be rude or harsh to kids as an argument against this post. i know those instances exist. i am not trying to pretend they don't.
my point is twofold, though: first, artemy has the same amount of threatening dialogue towards children (and can, y'know, actually follow through with physically hurting kids much more than daniil), and second, he has plenty of options to be kind, concerned, and helpful. that's what i want to highlight. this isn't meant to argue "it's impossible to play daniil in a way that makes him dislike kids,"' it's "'daniil has a lot of opportunities to engage with kids in a positive way and i'm frustrated that kid-hating daniil seems to be most people's default." i'm also talking just about PCHD in this post, so p2/p3/marble nest will not be factored in.
okay. disclaimers over. let's get to the dialogue.
so in general, daniil's stance on the kids in town is often 'oh my god, a child should not be in your position.' which makes sense, frankly! he's not used to this town and the sheer amount of orphans left by the first plague. it's jarring to see so many children, a lot of them quite young, walking around unsupervised, getting up to all kinds of dangerous things, and being put in positions of power. daniil often expresses alarm and concern about all those things.
(fretting over whether sticky has parents he lives with)
(alarmed that a little girl is in the termitary and asking how old she is)
(alarmed that said little girl is, in fact, in charge of the termitary)
(concerned that kids are in the streets unsupervised)
i could have sworn there's at least one other instance like this, but this is what i could find from my searches/memory. anyway. what does he do with this concern? well, in many cases, he immediately shifts to trying to be the responsible adult himself. he doesn't just tut about how someone should be looking after them and then turn away, he steps into the role himself to either police their behaviour or try to keep them from doing dangerous things.
(responding to taya's intention to go outside by shutting that down immediately)
(rejecting sticky's offer of a guide to the silent house, even though this would save him time on his quest, because he doesn't want sticky to leave the house when it's dangerous)
(trying and failing repeatedly to get notkin to stop swearing. and hey, i did a whole spreadsheet of curse words in PCHD. excluding the protags, notkin swears the second most out of every character in the whole game, beaten only by bad grief and BEATING andrey stamatin. bachelor's got a point here.)
(generic 'please for the love of god stop doing dangerous stuff')
and i have to say, the funniest manifestations of this are the multiple times he tries to ground children that are not his. including clara. absolutely sensational. daniil, you can't do that.
while we're on the topic of dangerous situations for kids, too, i want to bring up how he handles the dogheads and khan demanding the rifles, and specifically the difference in how he handles it when you are playing him vs when he's acting without player input in the haruspex route. obviously, in the bachelor route, you have to give the kids the rifles. it's a main quest. you have no choice. but even when daniil does grudgingly get them the rifles, this exchange happens:
he's insistent on making khan promise that he won't do anything rash that might make the soldiers open fire on them. and even after khan promises, he keeps pushing to make sure khan will keep the other kids in check too. he does not want to be handing these kids dangerous weapons.
now, if there is no player input... he won't give them proper ammo at all. acting in his 'natural' state (if we can call it that), without player input, he tries to give them fake bullets so they can't hurt anyone or end up in an actual shoot-out with soldiers.
this gets him imprisoned by a bunch of twelve-year-olds, which, objectively, is hilarious. but i think it's telling that he tried to find any way out of giving kids anything that could get them into a bad situation.
(now, admittedly, when daniil tells artemy where to find the actual ammo, he does call the kids little gits and say he hopes they shoot each other after all, but given that the kids were literally going to torture him to death, he's maybe entitled to a bit of anger and harsh words. i still think the fact that he tried to keep weapons out of their hands in the first place has relevance.)
as far as the last bits, i want to highlight little instances of him being genuinely sweet and comforting to kids, often in ways that went beyond what he had to do or say. these are the ones that really made me go 'okay, yeah, you can absolutely play him in a way where he doesn't just feel concern for kids, he actually likes them a lot and is pretty good with them.'
(the side quest where you help the little girl and boy. note that he's using her childish language to meet her at her level by saying 'daddy' as she does instead of 'father,' and comforting her when she's crying. even if he rejects the quest, he does it as gently as possible and calls her pumpkin when he does it.)
(reassuring taya that what happened in the termitary is not her fault)
(comforting murky by not rejecting her childish fears, but telling her that he'll lock the scary thing up if it comes for her)
(after having to literally crawl out of his own grave when he's been shot multiple times and attacked by dogs, he's still calling grace sweetheart and reassuring her that he's okay and not 'hers' [read: a dead body] yet)
WHEW. anyway. that was long. that's my "you can play daniil in a way where he seems to really care about kids, actually" propaganda. as with so much in pathologic, it completely depends on how you choose to make the protagonist you're playing. can daniil be cruel and dismissive to kids? sure, absolutely. but can he also be compassionate, caring, and concerned? definitely.
and that's what i mean when i say that he treats kids like kids. i think the presumption that artemy is better with kids comes from two sources. first of all, his bound are all children, so there's a natural association. he does interact with them more. and second of all, he speaks to them more like equals, as if they're small adults. he gets involved with what they have going on already. he doesn't condescend to them. and let's not forget, daniil has a consistent habit (with adults and with children) of trying to be helpful or compassionate, but expressing that in the rudest way possible. he's the stereotype of a new yorker who will call you a useless idiot while carrying your sofa up six flights of stairs for you because he saw you struggling on the street. he's often kind, but often not nice. a lot of his concern about children is expressed in ways that do seem condescending or even controlling. he's chastising them for things like swearing. he's ordering them to stay inside or stop wandering the streets. he's trying to GROUND KIDS THAT AREN'T EVEN HIS. but he's not doing it because he hates kids, he's doing it because he sees a bunch of vulnerable children in dangerous situations with no adults stepping up about it and he decides to be the one to do that, albeit sometimes in a rude way.
and that's quite enough rambling from me, so. there we have it. tl;dr daniil cares about kids.
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! Thatās a big deal! Iāve never thought about it before but now that I have, itās ridiculous to me that thatās not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why donāt we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
Itās July 20th. Thatās the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. Iām ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and Iām going to have a goddamn potluck. Youāre all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
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