hello! i'm kyra. 21+. this blog is mostly pathologic, but i sometimes post about other things. askbox is open, please be courteous and respectful or i'll cry.
MY FICS
Samovar (one-shot, post-canon in the Capital)
The money in his pocket, left over from the Town, was enough to buy anything in this shop he wanted and then some. Bread and eggs, if he chose; meat, if he liked; fruits, even, and that chocolate he’d always liked and could never find in the larger shops. He didn’t have to count his coins. He didn’t have to consider whether buying a single egg here would mean he couldn’t afford medicine for a patient two hours later. He didn’t have to scrape and budget and prioritise — and he didn’t have to starve.
—
Day X, in which the Bachelor returns to the Capital and remembers what it's like to afford food.
Bread and Twyre (longfic, post-canon labour union)
The Town and the Kin, an Odongh had once whispered, were sewn together wrong. Isidor had torn those old connections apart, and it was left to Artemy Burakh to suture the severed halves back together in a better way. Blood could, and would, flow through them as one common body. And it would, and must, start with solidarity.
This, too, could be its own form of utopia.
—
In which Artemy unionises the butchers and workers, strikes against the rulers, and finds a new way to unite the Town.
immortality as theft (you have to steal life from something else) immortality as parasitism (there is something else inside You that is keeping you alive and you become less of yourself more and more the longer it stays in you) immortality as violence (everything is trying to kill you because everything is supposed to die and the universe will always try to find a way to right the wrong that is You) you understand
#at least once a month I think about that one post about laminating a paper towel#and how that makes it immortal but also forever prevents it from fulfilling its true purpose#yes you will live. but at the cost of everything that makes you You
Scenes a Dracula adaptation could include: Arthur and Quincey hyping Jack up for his proposal completely unaware that they're proposing to the same person.
“Not “superhuman”—just “human”, 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?”
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.
I agree and only want to tack on that I don't find the opportunities to play him as cruel to children in any way mitigating to your claim; any healer can be cruel to any character (including Clara toward kids), yet fans tend to arrive at somewhat cemented consensuses for each relationship on some basis. I also don't think all choices are made equal; when I want to read any healer as having some textual core independent of players' projections/HCs, I personally tend to fall back on what they're like as NPCs beyond their own respective Routes. In the Haruspex Route, I remember Dankovsky taking particular interest in/harboring respect toward Capella, with more faith in her Mistress capabilities than her own Healer:
Note how he uses a nickname, which is strongly implied to distinguish those who feel friendly toward her from those who don't in these two options:
(Here, an offer of friendship is juxtaposed against not calling her 'Capella', implying a dichotomy). In turn, Capella whispers to Artemy in one of her voiced dialogues that the very Bachelor for whom she has no love lost was seen towing specifically children out of danger. From this, when paired with the amount of quests putting him at their service in his own route (which lead him to more often interact with children than their very Healer can), I infer he'd likely feel more inclined toward warmhearted dialogue to Capella than rude or aloof responses. I don't doubt more (and better) examples exist, I just hope this is illustrative despite my Capella-bias.
an excellent point, and thank you for the addition! this reminds me to talk about how he can treat clara in her route, too. i think this is pretty telling and lends to my point about how he treats children like children, including clara. when the inquisitor comes, his first instinct is to make sure she's okay by any means necessary. he tells her to hide, he gives her money, he swears that he'll vouch for her if she's arrested, and he promises to get her out of town safely.
there's another circumstance where he offers her money. and as you say, both of these are him acting as an NPC without player input. he chooses to be helpful and concerned about clara even without that player bias. but i also want to highlight how he can act towards her in his own route.
when he's testing her blood, he can be frankly desperate for any reason to believe that she isn't the plague. he's making sure that she knows what the accusations are. he's begging her for information that could help him prove she's not guilty. and even when she can't provide that information, he can send her away telling her to avoid the inquisitor so she's safe. and when he does test her blood...
she outright offers to let him turn her in so that he can get a victory. and his first response is to worry that the inquisitor will torture her and say that he won't allow that. and even when she insists, his only options to respond are:
1. he'll respect her choice, but he's going to vouch for her innocence anyway
2. he refuses to turn her in at all
3. he'll take her to the inquisitor as she asks, but he calls her a saint
throughout both her route and his own, daniil can and does treat clara as a young and scared girl much more than many other characters do. he goes out of his way to help her and he goes out of his way to protect her. very few characters treat her like the teenage girl she is, but daniil does. even when she's calling him a demon, he's helping her. and i'll keep banging my "daniil cares about kids" drum about it.
