Look into my soul, I know—everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can’t be bad!
Sources: Pathologic Classic HD, Pathologic 3, assorted House of The Dragon stills and cast interviews, The Forge and MANEATER! by @ninakaina, December by Michael Miller, and one drawing by me.
Pathologic 3 If It Was Good; or, Bad Grief Nation Vindicated Forever; or, The Escape Ending
The Angel of the Holy Grail saw Galahad come riding, so he took the Holy Grail off the shelf. And inside the holy chapel made for Holy Grail hiding, the Angel could be seen to smile to himself.
i made a post several months ago that explored bad grief as the shakespearean fool within the structure of pathologic classic and pathologic 2 which i think was probably one of my best posts of 2025. the one part of it i don't really like is this:
i just don't think it's a very strong argument; this doesn't feel solidly applicable to what is happening to clara in her route. while grief does represent a particularly absurd perspective on death, and its exploration in changeling does help shift the presentation of death away from what it was in bachelor (which is why i was determined to discuss it), i just don't feel strongly that it affects clara in that way or has much bearing on the primary messages or events of the story that follow. which seems like kind of a missed opportunity! bad grief is such an interesting figure in his context, it makes you wish pchd or p2 incorporated him more into the trajectory of the story.
on an unrelated note, for all my friends and followers who did not play pathologic 3, there is the option on day 10 to escape the town -- yes, for real -- which is facilitated by bad grief. this is a real ending with its own cutscene which results in daniil returning to the capital and the credits roll. it is batshit insane. synopsis: you locate grief squatting in isidor's house. he asks if you want to leave. you say yes. he says Are You Sure (point of no return). you say yes. he says okay go downstairs. you go downstairs. maria is here and she claims that she's in love with you (?) and she's going to tear down the portrait of you she has on her wall (?). you may tell her you're in love with her (?) and kiss her (?) and receive a necklace from her as a token (?). you step outside. bad grief's people smuggle you out of the quarantine in a casket (!) to a waiting train on the steppe, where clara tells you to go fuck yourself one more time, you hug eva, you see a lovely odongh in a lovely hat, and you leave. game over (after a bit of fucking around in the capital, where incredibly you do arrive).
my argument is that this is not only a legitimate ending, it is also a Good Ending (as opposed to a Bad Ending), and the only one that makes for an interesting, coherent, and motivated story. bear with me.
pathologic 3 is not a very good story. overall in terms of writing (structure, characters, themes, mechanical execution) the trajectory of the game is consistently downward; excepting a few exciting moments late game, it only gets worse as you go. this culminates in day 12 being an absolute nightmare for too many reasons to elaborate here, the day 12 endings feeling like a shroom trip, and anything you have to go back and alter after day 12 in order to get the polyhedron ending (see: aglaya's poison allergy) being downright insulting. all of which makes an ending on day 10, which you can access without ever progressing to day 11 or beyond, appealing if only as an abortifacient. but this isn't just any early ending: it's bad grief's.
the very second interaction dankovsky has with a member of the bound, upon arriving in town, is with bad grief, in which bad grief introduces his casket gambit, setting up the eventual mechanics of the escape ending. this both resembles and perverts the arrival of the fellow traveller in the opening of p2, which is a striking moment that sets the bizarre, dreadful, and folkloric tone of p2-- and introduces us to the friendliest of p2's masks, whose deal ending feels like a natural comparison to the escape (jon rathologic has some good posts about the late/deal endings if you're interested). the fellow traveller, like bad grief, is an antithesis to mark immortell and the Theatre of Death; their approaches to this resistance, and the directions their resistance takes, are both similar and drastically different in spirit.
a shipment of caskets is, by any measure, a dreadful omen. but while artemy sees the fellow traveller riding the caskets into town, for bad grief, all they're carrying is designer knockoffs. while the bodies of artemy's assailants are still warm on the ground nearby, bad grief expertly segues dankovsky into an argument about the authenticity of his red boots. the message grief leaves us with in our first interaction is that the reverence of death prevents people from ever checking what's inside a casket-- and that oversight can be an opportunity for the pragmatic and unscrupulous. this is bad grief overtly as the gravedigger to dankovsky's manic-depressive hamlet (bit of a tautology), throwing bones in the air. how absolute the knave is! in this process, bad grief elevates the fellow traveller's eerie lightheartedness around death and its friends to a place of sheer spectacle, caricature, almost Camp, but in doing so makes it more human. accordingly, the workaround grief offers us isn't magical or metatextual, but mundane: literally, he'll sneak you out of town in a casket, and you can apply all the metaphors you want.
unlike the late or deal endings, the escape ending does not exclusively hinge upon a singular decision point. in order to arm it, dankovsky has to first track down bad grief on day 7, following the arrival of the inquisitor, to ask about an escape. this is very much in line with dankovsky's character and motivations -- he has always only stayed in the town insofar as it has been physically impossible for him to leave, and it makes sense that the episode with karminsky only makes him more determined to get the hell out -- and now we recognize bad grief as the force that can offer an escape from the inescapability of tragedy, if anyone can.
bad grief gives us a few quests to complete in order to make our escape possible. the one i want to talk about here is the switchman. synopsis: you need this guy to throw some levers so the train can leave. you go to his house and ask him to help. he tells you he doesnt really want to because he's scared, but he and his wife have a son in the capital who they haven't heard from in a long time and they don't know if he's alive or dead and would you mind finding out for them? this sends you to grace, the actual expert on the subject of death. she tells you, as you might have expected, that she doesn't know, because if he is dead he's not dead here so she can't hear him. but more importantly she tells you something that's kind of surprising to hear from grace: because he's not here, his fate is up to your imagination. she's not telling you to make up a lie, she's telling you that whatever you say will be true.
this is the kind of pathologic-classic-changeling-route philosophy that p3 is overall sorely missing in its mainline attempts to make death cerebral and poignant. what grace is telling you is, like bad grief's comments about freedom in p2, patently true. pathologic 3 is a video game. the facts of the world are confined to what it shows us, and anything out-of-bounds in its world or story is left to be defined by the player's imagination, regardless of religious thinking around things like authorial intent. death happens within the story, and so death can be defeated wherever you control the story, which is wherever the storyteller does not. we may now go and inform the switchman that his son is alive, and he and his wife agree to help and ask to come with you to the capital to reunite with him.
this quest is a requirement to unlock the escape ending. if dankovsky does not not hear and then practice this absurd, abstract perspective, bad grief sends you a taunting letter on day 10 about failing to do your part, and doesn't do shit for you. so when we go to isidor's house to make our escape, it's with this knowledge of how the world works, or at least having already made a leap of faith in its direction. rather than coming to know simon, dankovsky has learned "to approach death in a more complete, less intellectual way... with increasing affinity for the wise fool's perspective." the switchman and his wife are even in the train car when you escape, a reminder of the lesson you learned.
the capital is a place that has never existed before. when we're in the town, it isn't real. when it exists, the town doesn't. when we leave town, maria's token (the token of a Mistress, who by the logic of the previous games has the ability to bring dolls to life with her imagination) becomes the only thing that anchors the town to reality, as is visually emphasized in the escape cutscene. clara tells us as we're leaving that she's going to handle everything. when we reach the capital, we aren't told anything about the fate of the town or of our friends there. it's out-of-bounds; which, as grace and bad grief taught us, puts it in our hands. this forfeiture is the victory over death. only by refusing the story, and by relinquishing his imaginary power over the fate of the town, can dankovsky defeat Death-- if that's what you decide.
my favorite daniil dankovsky song of all time is galahad by josh ritter, and while the angel could easily be pchd's executor, i've always liked to imagine it as bad grief.
At this Sir Galahad got angry. "Angel," he said, "don't you tempt me; I wish to go to heaven and not to hell. When stable boys look lonesome, when the women call me handsome, I'll hold my virtue very firmly by myself."
"I guarantee you'll hold it often," said the Angel. "Oh, one more thing: 'fore you drink the cup, please take your armor off. I gotta carry you to heaven, and despite what you'd imagine, I have trouble bearing heavy things aloft."
isn't that nice? listen to galahad by josh ritter. obviously the offensive and incisive double-talk of the angel reminds one of bad grief and the lowest common denominator of the fools a la thersites ("In Heaven there's... no pillage and no rape; perhaps you've come by some mistake to me, this seems more error than knight-errantry"). but in its deconstruction of the protagonist there's also an interesting connection between the way that the angel slowly convinces galahad to remove the items that define him (helmet, boots, armor) and dankovsky's definitional association with his coat and bag, which the executors take from him when you go to speak to the developers in pchd.
similarly and differently (i <3 dialectics), there is a sort of surrender of the self involved in the escape ending. in order for grief to "carry you to heaven" (smuggle you out of town with the corpses), you have to let go of yourself-- this time not the coat and bag, nor are we talking about the White Buddhist anatta that the simon plotline attempts to explore, but the very idea that you are the protagonist, the knight in shining armor. the escape ending provides a narrative fulfillment beyond what we've come to expect from pathologic games, granted that you, daniil dankovsky, are not the main character of the world. it's an antihero narrative: the guy who realized he was out of his depth and went home.
unlike in p2, bad grief claims no interest in escaping for himself-- but in getting you out of town and staying behind, he has actually, truly released himself from the story; he gets to exist and/or not-exist in a world that's now free of you, the player, who pulls the tripwires of fate by opening the game. fittingly, this is the only ending you can access in a world where lara is alive, and even may have successfully assassinated alexander block. it's kind of sweet; of course bad grief would find a way around the rules of the world, and of course it would be a way that offered lara a chance to win.
Galahad stood naked in a pile of his armor, his boots and helmet scattered all around. His perfect lips they sipped the Grail; his perfect heart commenced to fail; his perfect body fell upon the ground.
The Angel smoked a cigarette, and when he was sure Galahad was dead, he picked all of his clothes up off the floor. Then I put on his boots and armor, I laid his body on the altar, put his helmet on, and I headed for the door.
yknow, the kind of girl that makes you wish you were a perfect serpent *looks around expecting everyone to understand what I mean* yknow, a serpent? *looks around* perfect serpent?
i love ur takes! if u want, can u pls go into more detail abt why the characters were done dirty. esp artemy khan murky. i feel like i had Problems but couldnt put my finger on why and then u articulated it perfectly with the little stuff
disclaimer: adaptational changes are not inherently bad. erasing or altering things i liked about the previous games is not inherently bad. the thing is that whatever happens instead needs to be compelling. in the below cases what happens instead is uncompelling or just plain dogshit
spoilers below
artemy:
the above is editorialized of course but is literally what happens. the p3 endgame tells us certain things about what it supposedly means to be authentically indigenous (not wearing a shirt or living in a house), what it means to be in community (losing your individual personhood), and what it means to be connected with your heritage as a mixed race person (you can't, mixed identity is something to be overcome and abandoned if possible) which are not only a bit racist but also so fucking frustrating from a character perspective given that the ability to hold both things simultaneously (the kin and the town, individuality and community, tradition and progress, surgeon and menkhu) is one of the things that's so compelling about artemy and the attempt to force a mutually exclusive decision is part of what made the p2 endings so shit. this is like that dialed up to 11 from a character perspective. he literally says he's no longer "a half-blood from a lost little town". hello. the artemy i know takes pride in being that.
x
khan:
khan's entire character core has been removed in favor of a mystical discipleship with simon that makes one of the prime examples of what i call the white buddhist problem. khan and victor's relationship has historically been the most overtly fraught relationship in house kain. in this game it seems like they're just fine. khan isn't considered, and doesn't seem to consider himself, a rebel against his family's utopian ideals. kaspar "It's for Simon's sake that Father and Uncle are throwing away their lives. Well I don't believe in all that metempsychosis." kain is throwing away his life -- and the welfare of the dogheads! -- in favor of "the path to the light" (pursuit of enlightenment). beyond how cringe the whole buddhist coding smeared on simon is to me, it's just ridiculous to do this to khan of all people. his resistance to simon's philosophy and the deification of simon gave pchd a lot more dimension and made him awesome and it's just gone and now he's a whole different guy who i think is a lot less interesting and a less meaningful addition to the world. i posted about how ridiculous his conversation with capella and maria is already. and for all the time he spends ruminating on philosophy and humanity and sight, he has nothing to say about youth liberation or parental despotism. even when a soldier enters the polyhedron to try to forcibly remove a child based on a parent's will, khan is just like soooo that just happened. he died by accident. where the hell is my boy. p2 had the issue of framing khan's philosophy as wrong when he actually has the strongest position on children's rights, and p3 addresses the problem by.... not having him or anyone express that kind of philosophy anymore.
murky:
murky is a much less serious situation but she's another victim of p3's failure to have, like, any interpersonal tension & therefore any sense of development. first of all i think most of the kids are depicted as less intelligent in this game than in previous ones but that's hard to qualify. mainly i was really frustrated by the fact that she and artemy seem to be tight from day 1. i just don't understand why ipl would go out of their way to remove the emotional heavyweight process of murky and artemy building their relationship over the course of p2. what happened to the hoof kick to the chest? you couldn't even let it happen offscreen? murky doesn't really say anything mean and has nothing to even say about isidor iirc except that he isn't her grandfather. like why are we even here. for fanservice? for the fanservice of daniil telling fan favorite murky a fairy tale? does anyone know if there's a reason murky is so widely loved historically
everybody meet my oc i finally drew her. she's the herb bride in bad grief's gang. she's my everything. if you need money sarnai can help you out 😁 (do not borrow money from sarnai)
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