ERASE the idea that America saved lives by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan from your minds. ERASE the idea that it was anything more than a political move to scare Russia and also to satiate US curiosity as to the true ability of nuclear weapons. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military bases. They were heavily populated civilian cities chosen precisely bc the U.S. wanted to see how many people an atomic bomb could kill in one go. Japan was on the verge of surrendering, the U.S. literally wanted to test out their nuclear weapons on people that they deemed disposable. That is it. If those bombs were dropped by any nation other than the US veryone involved would have been tried as war criminals.
Also erase the idea that America was the hero of WWII and got into the war because they wanted so save people. They couldn’t have cared less about the victims of the Holocaust, proven by the fact that they turned away so many shiploads of refugees that went on to die at the hands of Nazis.
i left out sources bc i figured most tumblr users know how to use google but ok
- Report produced by the U.S Strategic Bombing Group (employed by Truman) to survey the air attacks on Japan concluded that:
“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” - page 52-56
- Dwight Eisenhower future president and then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces also said:
“I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [the then Secretary of War] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” - page 380
- Admiral William Leahy, one of the highest ranking officials in the US army during WW2 wrote of the usage of the bombs:
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. […] My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” - page 441
- General Douglas McArthur, another high ranking US official in the war:
“[When asked about his opinion on bombing Japan] He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” - page 70-71
- On September 9, 1945 Admiral William F. Halsey commander of the Third Fleet publicly quoted as saying:
“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment… . It was a mistake to ever drop it… . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it… . It killed a lot of Japs.” - online source
- The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, speaking to President Truman:
“I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength.” - diary of Henry Stimson which can be found online here
- Even those deploying the bombs questioned the decision to drop them on civilian cities:
“I thought that if we were going to drop the atomic bomb, drop it on the outskirts–say in Tokyo Bay–so that the effects would not be as devastating to the city and the people. I made this suggestion over the phone between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and I was told to go ahead with our targets.” - online source
- Lewis Strauss Assistant to the Navy Secretary James Forrestal on the locations of the bombings:
“I remember suggesting […] a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. […] Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation.” - page 145
So to recap:
A lot of American generals were against using the bomb as they felt it served an empty purpose.
Those who agreed with its usage completely disagreed with dropping them on cities.
Truman went ahead and had them detonated in two highly populated civilian cities anyway. Two cities that had remained mostly untouched by regular bombings throughout the war precisely bc of their lack of value to the Japanese war effort.
I appreciate this video a lot--people don't realize how important it is to start slow if you're trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!
What elevates video games to an experience that you can only get from said video games and not from books or film or shows is one particular quality: "interactivity". You are not a passive viewer in (most) video games, and a few game developers take this idea to the next level: having your interactions--your agency--affect the outcomes of a game's narrative and direction. In a more typical fashion, a game might have you select a speech option amongst a handful in order to change an event, or to choose your player-character's morality at that moment in time. Perhaps the game might even hit you with a visual reminder that your actions have consequences, or "they will remember that."
Signalis has this quality too, but it's one that often gets overlooked when discussions are had about the game because it's not obvious that it's happening. But rest assured, Signalis remembers 'how you play.' The variables involved are a decently sized list, but for now, the core of what you need to know is that there is a distinct playstyle difference between someone who gets the Promise ending versus someone who might get the Memory or Leave ending. (We will also discuss the Artifact ending briefly afterwards.)
The core of this thesis is that your first playthrough--and your first ending--is incredibly important because that ending is the punctuation at the end of what ought to be a blind playthrough. For extra context, Yuri Stern (one of the two devs behind Rose Engine) once wrote that there were no 'good' or 'bad' endings in Signalis. There is an ending screen that we all get that shows us our own statistics and performance, but the endings were not designed to 'rate' us on how well we performed. Instead, look at the endings from the perspective of Elster. What did Elster experience in your playthrough? Consider how she might have felt at the conclusion of the journey that you, the player, put her through.
If you saw the Promise ending, then Elster had to suffer. In order to get Promise, Elster not only has to kill as many enemies as she can find (and potentially kill those same enemies again), but she also needs to receive a significant amount of damage over the playthrough. Elster needs to be both brought close to death (Deaths Cheated) and entirely die more than a handful of times. The longer your playthrough is or the longer you hold Elster in this "hell" of a reality, as it is described, it becomes even more likely that Elster will receive the Promise ending. Thus, if you genuinely struggled with Signalis' gameplay on your first playthrough, you most likely got the Promise ending. On the other hand, if you were aware of how to get the Promise ending (perhaps this wasn't your first time) and deliberately saw Elster through this process, consider the following: what is Elster's reward after doing violence and having violence done upon her? That a playthrough defined by combat, death, and ultimately failure, ends cloaked in an overwhelming amount of red, and Elster has to commit one more act of violence on the one person she actually cares about.
Elster's Promise ending is as much a physical struggle for her as it is an emotional one. Without getting too deep into an "in-universe" reading of the endings, what we can say for certain is that the fact that this particular ending was titled as 'Promise' leaves me to believe that the emotions centered around the 'Promise' between Elster and Ariane are weighed down by a very real and very deep pain. In this way, one could describe Promise as the more cruel and severe of the endings. Again, this is NOT to say that Promise is a bad ending. Rather, it is the tip of the iceberg.
In order to get the Memory ending, you would have to play Elster quite literally like a machine: fast, efficient, and with few errors. Memory is given to players who cleared through the game without much trouble, maybe even to a point of mastery. Did your Elster only kill enemies out of necessity? Did she always keep a forward momentum, rarely getting hurt and seldom dying? Maybe you, the player, are no stranger to survival horrors. Or perhaps games in general come more naturally to you. Regardless of how well you might have performed, the conclusion for Elster here is finding an Ariane who does not remember her.
What is the reward supposed to be if you--by most survival horror metrics--played well? Perhaps reward is the wrong word. Perhaps Ariane's actions (or her reactions to Elster) ought to be viewed from another angle. Because look at how Elster reacts to Ariane forgetting her: "It's okay. Please, let me stay by your side a little longer." This scene, for what it is, shows you that no matter how perfect or proficient you might be, someone else could make a mistake. Someone else could forget the promise they made with you. And yet--despite all that--to Elster, Ariane's forgetting did not matter. Because to her, she made the journey, she made it to Ariane's side. And in the end, that's all that mattered to this Elster. It was getting there. That's what was important: the Memory. A heartbreaking ending, surely? But wait, there's more.
There's Leave.
This is perhaps the most peculiar (and contested) ending not just because of its content, but because it requires some highly specific and deliberate actions in order to even unlock--even more so than Promise and Memory. Whereas Memory had Elster focusing on moving to her destination quickly and Promise focused on having Elster linger in the 'hell,' Leave is affected by Elster doing the most to keep herself physically and emotionally safe.
repeatedly attempting to open already known locked doors
exhausting NPC dialogue beyond what they already have to say
having Elster heal constantly as soon as she's hit, staying in blue/nominal health
having Elster far overstay her welcome in those 'memory' sequences (such as on the Penrose, on the beach, and any scene that involves the first-person perspective)
Instead of immersing Elster in the cruelty of the 'hellish reality/dreamscape' she finds herself in--
Instead of having Elster focused on a distinct goal--
If you had Elster linger in the environment, in the presence of other characters, and the past (her 'happier times' perhaps), Elster instead finds a state of twilight.
Because the Leave ending starts off the same as the other two: Elster still finds her way to the Penrose, goes inside, read Ariane's notes, finds the body of the original Elster-512, receives the same prompt just before heading to the cryopod that read "Go Home?" and when she accepts it, where does she go? Back outside.
Instead of back out to the endless red desert from before, she's met with a blue, calm night sky seemingly reflected by water. Quite literally, this is the Elster's "twilight." Twilights are a literal signifier for a period of time between daylight and darkness (and vice versa) but they could also signal a period of obscurity and ambiguity. After tossing away her armor and curling up on the ground, Elster almost looks peaceful. Maybe. Because after all that the player put her through (and also what they did not), can we surmise that Elster was able to at least find a little relief at the end?
We never see the inside of the Cryopod in this ending and I have to ask why? Did Elster never go inside? Or was there no one in the cryopod at all?
Allow me to briefly introduce a new idea (I know it's late in this already long essay but stick with me): have we yet considered that every piece of text that shows up on screen like the ones we see above (unless otherwise identified as Alder, Falke, Isa's memory) has always been Ariane talking to Elster? Because here's another detail about Leave, it's the only ending to not include "Remember Our Promise".
We find in Ariane's own notes near 1:1 phrasing as she described why she wanted to leave Rotfront on the Penrose. What comfort could Ariane possibly find after these words flash on the screen: "In the end, I had to leave you behind. I wanted to see you again, but it's too much. Forgive me." That is, unless, the final words in Leave were not meant for her by Elster but for Elster by Ariane. Again, if we're viewing the game from the perspective of the player's/Elster's interactions and experiences having a tangible effect on Elster, then who's to say it did not also do the same with Ariane? How did Ariane feel after witnessing Elster try so desperately to survive, healing at every available opportunity, checking locked doors that would surely never open, talk to other Replikas that were surely doomed? Was the pain too much for Ariane as she realized that this Elster would rather soak in the memories of happier times than to deal with the pain of the cycles? Perhaps Leaving after such reality-bending nightmare is reasonable response for both Ariane and Elster. But this is not to say that Leave is the happier ending.
One last thing: the Artifact ending. In fact, acquiring the Artifact ending is in and it of itself a meta-narrative ending. By pure technicality, Artifact is an ending where those who found it first (and the resulting players who looked up the guides made afterward) dig much deeper in the game--into the nature of the dreamlike reality itself--to find a new conclusion through mutual means. In other words, Artifact could not be obtained without multiple players controlling multiple Elsters convening and contributing together, like in the scene showing the graves surrounding a newly created or conceived 'tesseract'--that shiny object in the center, which is also the symbol of the game itself.
And the results of their (half-literal and half-figurative) ritual was conceiving a new reality?/present?/ideal? where Elster and Ariane are finally together. Does this mean that, with their efforts combined, they found a way to beat death and live with each other once again? It's almost like this ending serves as a congratulatory thank you from the developer just as much as it might serve as an actual extension of the game's events into something new?/hopeful?/neverending? Perhaps it can also be as simple as viewing the dance that Elster and Ariane share as complete and utter wish fulfillment for the viewer (for the player and whoever the Red Eye is). But the Artifact ending rabbit hole is another talk for another time...
Back to Yuri's words from earlier,
"I wish people would be more open to let others figure out for themselves how their ending made them feel. Instead of telling a streamer "you got the best ending!", maybe you can ask "did you think this was an interesting conclusion?" and they can decide if they liked it or not."
If you made it this far, I would like to thank you! Did this perspective of player agency affecting the ending of Signalis make the game more interesting to you? What made your first playthrough of Signalis interesting in the first place?
the thing about kim kitsuragi is that he’s just as lost and desperate and unhinged as harry, but they have both “chosen” opposite ways of “coping” with that. whereas harry has relinquished all control over himself and his life completely to the demons that possess him, kim has become the demon possessing himself. he is literally so obsessively controlling and suppressing himself that he’s basically always just a second away from completely snapping and he has made that dance on the edge of absolutely losing it his home - he’s consciously torturing and punishing himself by keeping himself there, because he’s fucking terrified of himself. of his insurmountable desires, the sheer magnitude of his emotions, his longing, his grief, his anger, the things he’s capable of - and the things the world is capable of. he has locked all of that away so long ago he doesn’t even know how to stop choking on himself anymore, it’s become who he is. until harry comes along. and just fucking strips him bare. like you have to understand, harry is the first person in god knows how long to actually see him, despite his truly insane amounts of effort to conceal himself from the world, who sees him for who he truly is and decides he’s a fucking miracle and the best thing that ever happened to him exactly because of it. and kim sees harry in return, not immediately, not completely, but once he’s caught a glimpse, once he understands, he does not avert his gaze again. they recognise each other as their own. and harry makes him come alive again, awakens parts of him he thought long dead and gone, helps him find some sort of balance between rigorous control and absolute chaos, and kim does the same for harry, the other way around. they help each other meet in the middle, they make each other better, they complement each other like two pieces of the same thing, I don’t know how else to say this without resorting to comparing them to yin and yang but like. that’s what they are!! they look like opposites until you realise they’re just inversions of each other, and both hold within themselves exactly what the other was missing. we’re talking textbook soulmate shit here, and the text explicitly supports this reading, it’s literally how it introduces him to us, but I’ve made a whole post about that already. anyway, I could go on and on about this but this is already way too long so. what it comes down to is this: no, kim is not “too good” for harry. on the contrary, they’re so exactly right for each other that it’s almost ridiculous.
wakaba shinohara makes me fucking insane. you are the main character’s best friend and you know it. you do your best to keep her from harm and still you fail because she is the main character, and you don’t even know the extent of what she’s going through, and you’re not around for long enough to find out because you’re the main character’s best friend and the story doesn’t need you to know. but you know her like no one else does, if only in words. you know when she’s had a fight. you don’t know why she’s wearing something different today but you know it isn’t good. you know how to cheer her up, but you don’t know why it isn’t working. she gets a funny look in her eyes and then she’s sorted it out on her own, but she thanks you anyway. one day, something happens to you and you finally feel seen and important and special, and then once you’ve been hurt again you realize that you’d fallen into the arms of a different main character, and you can never be a protagonist on your own: your specialness lies in your proximity to special people. you fight her in the arena above the forest, and she refuses to draw her sword. you forget it the next day. time goes by and things are so boring for you, and it’s too quiet around here, and you wish something exciting would happen, a fight or something, wouldn’t that be exciting? a fight? you’re the main character’s best friend and she’s escaped the story but you don’t know it, and you wait a while at the door of the tower she’s never explained to you, as the sun sets, peaceful, quiet, and you don’t know she’s gone for good, you don’t know you’re soon going to forget that too. you wanted to do your math homework together.
Death by allegory! They Live (1988), Society (1989), The People Under the Stairs (1991), Snowpiercer (2013), High Rise (2015), Mother! (2017), The Platform (2019), Us (2019)
So the reddit-tier takes that Disco Elysium 'is an apolitical game that makes fun of all sides' are obviously wrong, this game is incredibly left-leaning and a basic familiarity with the text should make that clear.
But what makes Disco Elysium leftist is the problems it discusses more than anything. The game asks questions about corporate power and labor and How We Can Finally Build Communism, and even where it presents these cynically, the very fact it's asking those questions and not others is what makes it a leftist game.
(libertarian disco elysium would have a 2-hour plotline about the moralintern's gun laws, fascist disco elysium would do the same about race, etc etc)
Anyway, it's tempting to see a game ask the questions leftists ask and go "Oh, we know the answers to those" because if you're politically engaged and on tumblr you probably have a favorite brand of leftist politics and a degree of familiarity with its proposed solutions. I've seen a few posts that try to analyze disco elysium by going "Alright, so keeping in mind that Hoxhaism is obviously correct, where did the characters go wrong?". I think those posts represents a failure of the same kind as the mindset quoted in the first paragraph: a desire to apply one's own politics to the game beyond the degree warranted by the text.
But that's the point where you have to take a step back and look at the broader message of the game, because We Don't Know How We Will Build Communism (But Must Try Anyway) is a core theme as well! No, disco elysium does not specifically endorse syndicalist anarchism, it does not specifically endorse marxist-leninism, it does not endorse Sanders-style democratic socialism, it will contain a counterargument for all of those movements. It's a leftist game asking leftist questions, but there's many movements trying to answer those questions in their own way, and elevating one above all others makes for poor analysis of the text.
I've seen a couple of takes about Disco Elysium being copaganda going around recently, and beyond the fact that DE is relentlessly critical of the police force in general and makes explicit reference to the failures of the system that allow the officers in game to abuse their power, I also think it's important to note that there very literally is an in-world version of copaganda that the writers of the game use to parody that romanticised view of the brutality of policing. The RCM at their inception were structurally inspired by in-world copaganda- their culture, their "fashions, even weapon preferences, borrow heavily from classic Vespertine cop shows." Every investigation is it's own little drama, every officer imagining themselves to be the bad-ass hero of their own crime serial. Detectives name their cases like they're naming episodes of a TV series in a "robust but literary system"; a title that "draws inspiration from snoop fiction and Vespertine cop show staples". They give themselves nicknames to sound like cool, suave fictional officers- Ace, Dick Mullen, etc.- from the cool, suave world of copaganda.
The legend of the RCM's inception, the "point of contention" over its uncertain origins, is even an extention of that; the whole organisation is shrouded in this self-fictionalising mythos that allows for distance that in turn obfuscates much of its violence to the officers that participate in it. They get to convince themselves that they're not abusing their power; they're the hero of the story! The dichotomy of "good guy" taking out the "baddies," a manifestation of the libertarian fantasy of the "good guy with a gun" who does what it takes, just like in Annette's detective novels, and at the same time who rails against oversight bodies like Internal Affairs/'the rat squad' because due process slows down the immediate satisfaction of Swift Justice, despite Internal Affairs existing to protect the citizens from overreach on behalf of the police. "Wanton brutality" from police in their real world is a cold bitter reality but Dick Mullen was "made to crack skulls," "bend the rules and solve cases no one else can," and which version of that story is more comforting to the overworked, underfunded officers of the RCM?
The level of fantasy and detachment required for the cops to still see themselves as the good guys after everything that they do in the line of duty mimics The Pigs and her breakdown too; she parallels Harry so clearly. Both "did right by the kids" in the past, hoping for a better future- Marianne (The Pigs) by looking out for Titus and the Hardy boys when they were young, Harry in his role as a gym teacher. Both abandoned and left behind by the system that the RCM uphold- a brutal capitalist landscape with no safety nets. Both turning the source of their trauma into a costume, a performance, a shield, shaped by "radio waves and cop shows." The Pigs uses RCM items scavenged from the Esperance where they'd been thrown away, while Harry uses the Dick Mullen hat that Annette gives him but both are essentially in costume.
Harry identifies himself with the fictional detective as a kind of wish fulfilment; Dick Mullen is "wicked smart." He doesn't fuck up his cases and when he's sad it's not pathetic; it's effortlessly cool brooding and everyone sympathises. Everyone loves him. His violence- "skull crack[ing]"- is justified because he's a "good guy" enacting that violence against the victims of police brutality sorry "bad guys". He doesn't ever face repercussions; "Dick Mullen won't be sent to the clink for the sake of some legal niceties!" So if Harry is Dick Mullen then his failures, his breakdown, they're all just a part of being a "bad-ass, on-the-edge disco cop." He's not wrong, he's a hero! This idealised fictionalised idea of the police force, this "new, sadly better, reality" that both Harry and The Pigs cling to is "escapist stuff," "receed[ing] into a ludicrous fantasy world," so far removed from the brutal material reality that they're in.
My point is, idk. Disco Elysium is so far from being copaganda. It is a multi-million word long dissection of it, of the purpose of policing, of state sanctioned violence and its interaction with capital and the fallout experienced within the wider community as well as the trauma cycle created for individual officers. A dissection of how copaganda interacts with RCM culture and perception, and by extension how we interact with irl perceptions of police through that lens.
stormborns
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