Hopeless[and]Calmless

chaotic mindflow

[sous-chef6]

[revacholianpizzaagenda]

Mandatory Elysium version of the classic MarxEngels handholding cartoon, for DEWP's pride banner! Go check out everyone's beautiful pics and also the rest of the wiki! :D

[killers-anthem]

i will forever think about how the unofficial motto of moralism in the game is referenced in a passage in sacred and terrible air

particularly how it functions as a signifiers of moralism as an ideology of stagnation, by keeping the world exactly as it is they squander their ability to make change and let ambrosius saint-miro get elected and plunge the world into the pale. the hope promised is temporary and fleeting and they are just as ineffectual as the ghosts they create in trying to preserve the status quo, while the world is swallowed by its own history

jesper exemplifies this mindset throughout the book the singular hope for the girls rediscovery is all that drives him and once he loses it he disappears just like them. because this ideal is focused on the past and not the future it falls apart, the girls don’t want to be found and any hope is whittled away with the pretense of him being a good person or caring about them beyond reliving his childhood. the synopsis of the book shares this sentiment as do his friends

ignus nilsen says that is hope and communism itself, the only thing capable of fighting back the pale, and he is reduced to a spectre roaming the world. it is a cautionary tale as much as it is a story about the human desire to keep things as they are or return to how they were, that hope lives on even as no one believes in it. the symbol of hope broken at the beginning of disco elysium is fixed. anything is possible for this world

[palamedestragedy]

my pale theory

[yarrowdraws]

whatever

[yellow-yarrow]

Day 2 of being a Disco Elysium fan: it's so cool that Kim is canonly gay also the writers might be communists? Harry is a very relatable character.

Year 1 of being a DE fan: The pale can be read as a metaphor for capitalist realism maybe, the whole game is very hauntological... Did you know Shivers said Revachol might be nuked in the future? The game is so hopeful I bet they can change that and save Elysium

Year 5 of being a DE fan: it's such a shame we don't get to see the russian cosmism inspired evengelion third impact-like apocalypse that the Emil Cioran pope starts I really wonder if it will all end in Absolute Negation. Maybe dodecaphonic music can save the world. What if Theo Van Kok counts as an innocence. Let's look at this 2006 forum post with the wayback machine, they are quoting Witold Gombrowicz here so I read all of his dramas. Do you think Ignus Nilsen and Kras Mazov explored each other's bodies. But let's talk about something that probably everyone is thinking: what happened in Iilmaraa 8000 years ago and what was Ramout Karzai's deal

[talltarakona]

For any audio enjoyers, here’s my comic with the addition of Thomas Franklin’s voice from his fan made audiobook of Sacred and Terrible Air!

[laughingpinecone]

My part of @elysiumdancehall's I Want To Be Free animation! And my poster girl for people who want to be free would be the Innocence who called herself "alone" and then resigned... It's been a honour, love you all.

PS trying to make up a design for Sola:

[adas-trashheap]

handle with care

[craftybard]

"This realisation - the realisation of the Insignificance of the Knowledge - came to me in the form of a Revelation."

Book: "Piranesi" by Sussana Clarke

[killers-anthem]

twin peaks s2e7 | sacred and terrible air p. 252

[warsmithbelashk]

Okay, I will die on this hill:

Apart from the OST by Sea Power, the best songs to listen to when looking for that elusive Disco Elysium-feeling is by the Swedish rock band Kent.

Why?

Well, apart from Tuulik (?) admitting to listening to Kent while working on the game in a medium post, there's the whole bit of... Well, how the lyrics just fucking fits so well.

And the entire album named Isola.

And the song named Järnspöken (like the aerostatics above Vaasa in Sacred and Terrible Air). On the same album: Palace & Main (a bit longer stretch sure).

A song named Ensam lång väg hem (Lonesome long way home).

And a lot of the... Musical structure and general vibes of the record Vapen & Ammunition are very... Sea Power. Before Sea Power.

Do I need to continue?

So if you don't speak Swedish, get a translator ready.

Here you go:

Official YouTube of Kent.

And why would Kent not have done the soundtrack?

They split up in 2016. They only reunited in 2025 for some concerts in Stockholm.

[bacchanum]

the main pjöl trio portraits cause kurvitz's writing has changed my brain chemistry

[hopelessandcalmless]

#sacredandterribleair #pjõl

[revacholianpizzaagenda]

Good grief zero parades' writing is bafflingly bad. All posturing zero human depth

[jeantism]

big agree. whatever you think might be in the ZP writing wise, i promise you it's worse.

context for this was MC seeing an attractive man and her nipple hardens... but only the right one. when asking why only the right one, the skill says "because the left one hasn't seen him yet."

i mean idk it might have been funnier if i actually GAF about the character or the story or anything going on in this demo but it's all just so tryhard and blah.

[revacholianpizzaagenda]

Re: tags no no it's cool, thanks for this one example, I should go fetch some of my own to back my claims. There's a whole range. Clunky dialogue trees, fancy words that don't say anything underneath, a nominally communist pov character whose interiority doesn't reflect that in any way that matters, a lack of internal characterization, a lack of reactivity, YA-tier spy work, the occasional odd railroading...

[yekokataa]

The Making of Disco Elysium - Part Three: Writing

[xiaodidi]

"One of the things we discovered about worlds, art, characters, and mysteries over that time […] is that you really cannot have a concrete answer to anything very interesting; you only need to have theories. Alan Moore says the same thing in From Hell: ‘We will never know who Jack the Ripper is. He will be a superposition of all our theories about who he could have been. That is the extent of our knowledge.’ And that keeps mysteries mysterious. That's also Epistemology, that's how knowledge works. You only have these theories, and some seem more likely or more adequate at certain times. […] But the other thing is: it can't be only that tool. There needs to be an actual preference from the storyteller, like a " word of God" thing. But the storyteller can never tell it directly to the people who hear the story. Lynch does this in Mulholland Drive. There's this DVD where he gives clues about how you should watch Mulholland Drive. And they in no way help you descipher Mulholland Drive. But what they do tell you is that Lynch isn't just throwing stuff at you to be dreamy. There is an underlying logic, and there is a preference there. And if it's this way - if it's both open and systemic - then you can have your cake and eat it. This is also representative of what mysteries are like in the real world. We know there's an actual truth about what happened. We can't get to it. And we have to deal with the superposition of possibilities."

[warsmithbelashk]

Reading Sacred and Terrible Air. Some notes so far:

Some of the names are hilarious. Sven von Fersen got his from Axel von Fersen, Konrad Gessle from Per Gessle, De la Guardie from de la Gardie.

Vidkun Hird is trying so hard to be the Co-ed Killer by way of Vidkun Quisling.

Järnspöken is a fucking amazing pun. Kurvitz knows and speaks Swedish, I am convinced. (I will elaborate should people ask me)

Kronstadt must be semi-inspired by Kronobergshäktet.

Königsmalm is a weird name for Kungsholmen.

Charlottesjäl is a VERY STRANGE name for a place. Charlotte Soul? It is a beach resort, Charlottestrand or Charlottevik would make more sense. Maybe Kurvitz doesn't know Swedish that well? Or he's trying to be Eesti-poetic with a language that is... Musty and strong and direct.

Horse drawn trams in Vaasa, where Revachol has electrical ones forty years earlier (The Bow Collector)? Yeah, this being a prototype work kinda shows.

Vaasa as a city is less its real world namesake Vasa in Finland, and more obviously Stockholm. And as a proud Gothenburgian it twists my guts to see a Stockholm-insert be called "the only Metropolis of the Nordic countries".

[revacholianpizzaagenda]

Crossposting from an old reddit convo because this beautiful post got me thinking about it again. How can we square the circle of Revachol begging for Harry's help in stopping the nuke VS the fact that not only Elysium's entire narrative structure hinges on the circumstances of that damn nuke falling, but also that Revachol herself is, on other occasions, dead certain that the world will end very soon ("THE AGE OF MAN IS OVER" etc)?

She knows what will happen and says as much in no uncertain terms. That doesn't mean she can't hope. Rodionov also knew what would happen, and Rodionov still hoped, still worked to help his fellow countrymen even in the face of annihilation. What did Revachol say to Dros's comrades, whom he saw speaking to her as they were being gunned down? She must have known that the Revolution would fail just as surely as she now knows about the nuke. I think she still put her faith in them, because what else could she do?

I'm also sure that her appeal to a RCM officer means that there WILL be some strange window of opportunity when this whole thing could theoretically be stopped here, in Revachol, on the ground (certainly not 22 years on, given the specifics of where the nuke comes from. No way to stop THAT, practically and almost ontologically). I just don't think it'll succeed, for a variety of reasons. There's plenty of precedent for characters wanting to accomplish something and failing. In the game itself, the narrative emphasis on the figurine, for one.

But there's also the possibility that she's referring to something stranger than what you or I could possibly imagine. Some weird extraphysical third option. For example the fuck is "I CANNOT PERISH WITH IT", how the hell is she expecting to keep existing past the very end of the world? In this branch of the nuke conversation in particular, it almost seems like she is expecting Harry to perform something that will not change the course of history per se, but rather preserve her essence somehow.

Sigh. I really hope we'll find out some day…