i've been sitting on this griefpost for five years so i might as well just make it and if it becomes a video essay someday pretend you never saw this. the thing you need to understand about the mark immortell bad grief dichotomy is that it's about Tragedy vs Comedy; not as exclusive categories of media, but as matrices within the same work. mark is the leader of the verse-speaking Tragedians, while grief is a comedian-- specifically, a shakespearean fool. the vest-and-tunic silhouette of his pchd outfit and the asymmetrical color blocking of his p2 outfit evoke motley, and in both games he speaks in rhymes, riddles, and puns. even his use of a playful trade-name fits him in with the nameless and nicknamed roster of shakespearean fools. like lear's Fool, he mocks the most defensive and grandiose protagonist directly: "ain't he tall, ain't he vested in emergency powers..." and receives a sort of license in doing so, as dankovsky treats him like an ally throughout the game and sometimes remarks on his cleverness while also telling him to kill himself. i'm going to focus mainly on bad grief and the anti-theatre here because i think mark+tragedy is more self-evident and the tragic matrix of pathologic is more widely discussed, while the comic requires a more careful reading to establish its presence, but trust that there is so much to say about mark+tragedy and you should say it.
pathologic-the-play isn't strictly a tragedy: rather it's easily read as something of a problem play, presenting moral and technical dilemmas with a mixed, ambiguous tone and forcing the audience to develop their own interpretation and judgement of the events. this also proves itself in the way comedy forces its way discordantly into the dark plot. in p2, we're made to understand from the get-go that the town is entirely populated by Tragedians, and mark's theatre of death is the theatre of inevitability, of tragedy, absorbing everything into itself and commanding everything outside: including bad grief, who of course is relegated to the theatre of death if he dies in-game. grief's position as the fool on this stage is why he has the ability to save artemy from the theatre of death on the first day. the whole premise is kind of silly, and the conversation with the fool-ish fingersmith npc presents it in a bizarrely lighthearted manner consistent with the style of humor grief employs-- at the end of which you're encouraged to "go say hello" to bad grief. it's a moment of literal, mechanical comic relief, a jarring moment where the plot surfaces from punishing drama for one unexpected breath before diving yet deeper. you could say that like the placement of the porter's scene in macbeth, bad grief's antideath boon gives the lead actor a moment to duck backstage and wash the blood from their hands. the face of the comedic matrix of the play, grief's interlude begs the question of if the theatre of death is as inevitable or as bleak as it seems; if this really is a pure tragedy.
in both games, like the gravedigger in hamlet, grief provides an alternate view of the grim themes at hand: not a lighter one, but certainly a more absurd one, through the same type of "meaningful nonsense" that defines the wise fool. the Gravedigger appears in only one scene, following the harrowing death of ophelia; the gravedigger turns a miserable scene (ophelia's funeral procession) into a farce in which he is literally throwing bones in the air as he coaxes hamlet into engaging with his nonsense. this is an emotional and thematic turning point in the play. susan snyder says "In the [to be or not to be soliloquy, death] was at least a significant reality, at once fearsome and desirable. Now the comic perspective calls even that reality into question... the end of life makes every life equally absurd." grief's confession to clara in the changeling route similarly perverts the theme of Death which has been so mythologized in the bachelor's route previous: what was terror, what was incomprehensible wickedness, what was The Invisible Enemy, to bad grief is "some jolly fun times". this is a thematic turning point for pathologic as well, as the player's perspective shifts from The Invisible Enemy to The Path of Logic: of the difference in hamlet after his conversation with the gravedigger, santha cassell says "he is beginning to approach death in a more complete, less intellectual way, one more conducive to action, and with increasing affinity with the wise fool's perspective." clara is undergoing a similar process through this quest as she grapples with pragmatism and scrupulousness (choosing whether to keep this confession secret) and is invited to recognize both death and transgression as not always matters of mythological or dire motivation, but as mundane, human processes: something that she can interface with and, for pragmatic purposes, may also be able to enact.
of course, clara condemns grief's behavior outright-- because grief's behavior is condemnable. the meanings of grief's meaningful nonsense-- as well as the style of his nonsense-- are constantly objectionable. pchd grief as a character is most like troilus and cressida's thersites, the worst-behaved of the fools: "a fool who exceeds his license... we do not empathize with him. like any other fool he asks riddles, calls names, and offers commentary but with unmatched vituperation. his language... poses a large contrast to the discourse of the soldiers around him, who are usually engaged in elevated debate... he is vessel and valve for what is unspeakable to others." (cassell) grief's dialect is so distinct from the rest of the bound that dankovsky picks up when andrey is imitating it (and in this imitation, andrey is aligning himself with the absurdly graphic/pedestrian perspective on death that grief represents), and is also far cruder than the others (idt anyone else says "cunt" even once). he is also distinct from the other bound in his lack of a characterizing path line. even his total lack of development or sympathetic dimensions differentiates him from the other bound, sharing thersites's constancy and self-knowledge within his bad manner. a fool is not meant to change or reflect; it is not a character, but a literary device. through all these discordant qualities of language and position, grief speaks frankly and consistently to violence and social collapse. he's the right fool for pathologic-the-play: a dissonant but shrewd finger on the pulse of the town, and in the establishment of patho as a problem play he serves the same role as thersites in t+c: "we are not allowed to assume much about the structure and premises of a play if a character is there to disrupt the patterns that it tries to establish." (cassell again)
but p2 bad grief is Different. as mark has been brought to center stage mechanically, grief's role has also been increased in scope narratively. while he's still in an imitation of motley, his relationship to the principal characters is no longer that of a licensed fool: instead he's the protagonist's best friend, a peer, who offers concrete support in addition to the definitional thematic/social/individual insights in form of "verbose nonsense" (quote artemy), but without the fool's license relies on the patience of his friends to weather his objectionable comments and erratic behavior. what i'm saying is p2 grief is mercutio. like mercutio, grief performs all the functions of a shakespearean fool for the first half of the play, including the "comic relief" antideath mechanic as discussed above, but with the added dimension of genuine care for artemy and a real character's positionality within the social world. mercutio's death in act iii of r+j is a different type of thematic shift: it instantly drops the illusion that mercutio is the fool (in the sense that the fool is other than a real character, sort of a suprahuman in its own right, who can always get away with ridiculous behavior; other fools die, such as in titus andronicus, but only as absurdity in itself), and it makes death and dire consequences a reality for the other characters, kicking off a sharp turn towards darker themes. it's the decisive moment that makes the play you're watching into a tragedy; the literal death of comedy. bad grief's ego death in act iv of p2 immediately strips away all of his pretenses. grief's enlightenment is part of the arrival of the inquisitor, and emphasizes it as the pivotal point of the play. like mercutio, what happens to him has nothing to do with farce or knavery, but is a form of real consequence; he throws himself unwisely into danger ahead of his friend, and what happens to him tells artemy that the situation they're facing is far stranger and more harrowing than he had imagined-- this death of comedy also mirrors and marks the shift in tone and pace that carries through the rest of the play.
it's grief's alignment as the fool (representing both madness and clarity) that allows him to see aglaya's truth, but as soon as he does, he becomes a tragic character, losing all the unique freedoms he claimed previously. still, grief's ongoing preoccupation with Nature -- which has gone from a gleeful mockery of the evils of the world, the gravedigger's awareness of his existence inside a tragedy, to a total and tragic devastation of the self -- maintains the fool's wisdom, and actually further establishes him as a fool due to his abandonment of attachment to the plot. from the cathedral, he's a truer outside perspective than before: he says, "i just keep my eyes on the ball." but his comedy is now of the metatextually absurd, not the immediate. on day 11 he encourages artemy to sit with him instead of going looking for aglaya's papers: "i mean it. come on, sit. they're draggin' you down your path, so don't go. imagine how shocked they'll be when you don't listen!" when artemy refuses, grief says "don't go... or are you just a puppet?" this is a cosmic joke: indirectly, grief is pointing out that you, the player, are indeed little more than a puppet-- you don't have the option to agree, just like you didn't have the option to run away with him. and his other, nihilistic assertion is also ironically absolutely right: you're trapped in a problem play, surrounded by tragedy, and the only way to get control of the situation-- to unequivocally win-- is to refuse the entire premise. the game won't give you the option to stray from your ordained path; tragedy begets itself, consumes everything it touches, ensures its own fruition. but you can stop playing. you and grief both know this isn't real. the perfect solution is to walk offstage, or just sit down with your best friend and stop delivering your lines. but you won't, will you? because you're invested, you're buying into the violence and tragedy and discontent, you're suspending your disbelief and dismissing your voice of reason-- because you're the mad king, you're ajax, you're hamlet, you're romeo. because you're the greater fool than bad grief.
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