#daniel davinky

[ninakaina]

no nuance december i think one of the reasons shipping daniil and artemy is such a monolith in the pathologic fanbase is that a lot of people around here are either actively or passively trying to silence and alienate people, especially poc, who are uncomfortable with and criticize the problems inherent to that ship. like, i did not expect my answer about how people need to think more critically about it to become my most controversial post, but without gaining many notes at all it’s fundamentally changed my relationship with the fandom on here.

i don’t post serious anon hate i get or talk about it at the time as a rule against giving idiots any attention but i literally got a couple death threats and racist messages from that post going around and i’ve found over the past couple days a fair number of blogs that rb daniil/artemy that have blocked me without any history between us, as well as losing about 10% of my followers, not to mention the very interesting lack of notes on that post compared to my other hot takes that are easier for some of y’all to agree with and don’t tell you to examine how you personally interact with content you like. not to mention the flood of support that daniil/artemy content (especially writing) gets, compared to significantly less reach for non shipping content and content featuring women (although this isnt as bad as most other fandoms i think). on the flip side, i’ve heard from several people lately who tell me they love pathologic but they don’t engage with it online or stay on the fringes because of how pervasive totally uncritical daniil/artemy content is and how hard it can be to get any engagement when you don’t participate in that.

what does this mean for you, a daniil/artemy shipper? the least you can do is spend a few minutes thinking about the racial dynamic of their relationship and acknowledge it in your brain. i would recommend tagging it when you post or reblog it, because people who arent comfortable with it are epic and your life would be enriched if they followed you. i personally have “burakhovsky” blacklisted and i cherish my mutuals who tag it. i also recommend going out of your way to support people who make content that is non ship or even just not that ship (even if it’s not my content you’re supporting lol) to encourage them to keep making stuff they like. for daniil enjoyers, i’ve been working through crostiina’s “tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis” on ao3, which is SO COOL so far even though i’m not actively a daniil/peter fan. idk dude just support valid criticisms of things you like and make space for people who are negatively affected by the serious problems with it.

[ninakaina]

yo i saw your anti burakhovsky post and i personally haven't thought of it as problematic, could you explain why you think of it that way? this is an honest question, like i don't have a strong opinion on it either way, i just thought it was interesting :)

hi! i haven’t been online in a while so i didn’t see this (it was sent about 2 weeks ago). i’ll probably miss some beats here but bear with me. 

first of all, i’ve seen some really good posts about racism in the WAY burakhovsky is often portrayed in the patho fanbase, by relying on stereotypes of brown & indigenous men for artemy. many of those posts are by actual indigenous people, which i can’t find in the search function (surprise surprise) but i highly recommend them and if anyone can find them please do link them in the reblogs. 

secondly, daniil is racist. that’s basically one of the central aspects of his character. i went into a whole explanation of this but... play the game. either of them. you can also go though the pathologic wiki and look at item hover quotes for a good side-by-side comparison of daniil and artemy’s perspectives. daniil’s racist. he spends the whole game outright dismissing artemy’s race and culture and artemy himself due to his race and culture. granted, basically all the white people in pathologic are racist in one way or another, but daniil is definitely up there on the list, and it’s a lot more serious than many other characters’ microaggressions because. he literally tries to get them all killed. his view of the plague in classic is that it’s the fault of the kin culture for their religious practices, and his solution is to bury them all (townsfolk & kin). so. inherently. shipping him with a member of the kin, especially one who he actively dismisses in order to advance this agenda, is something that people should at least put more thought into.

[ninakaina]

people will come into my inbox and compare daniel to kyle ron and the onceler and expect it not to bring me great joy. we’re overlooking bbc sherlock here tho

[ninakaina]

genuinely curious, what if someone only ships burakhovsky from a patho1 perspective?

fyi i haven’t played classic in like 5 years but i’m trying to get through it again, i’m like halfway through the bachelor so i’m not 100% on the specifics of everything but that is the one where daniil says the plague comes from the kin’s “unsanitary” slaughtering practices and decides to kill everyone actively so i don’t feel positively about it. 

ship what you want i guess but it’s a good opportunity to put some real thought into the power dynamics (both individual and societal) that go into relationships and the way characters are interpreted in fandom

[ninakaina]

good work today everybody. thank you all for your anonymous daniil hate

[ninakaina]

what's one of your pet peeves in bur//da content? something creators could learn from?

thanks for the ask! i may not be the person to bring this to, as i don’t really read that stuff, and i assume you don’t mean the truly heinous content because uh. i think the people who make that aren’t gonna give a shit what anyone says about it. but there is one thing that comes to mind!

here’s an example. a few weeks ago i saw a “steppe wedding” (quoted caption) cosplay, which was based on someone else’s art. it was a really good cosplay and i could tell a lot of work went into it. one of the pictures showed artemy fastening a Charm (from p2) around daniil’s neck as part of the ceremony.

the problem is, we know what the charm means in steppe culture. here’s the touch quote from the p2 alpha: “One cannot draw good fortune, only craft it, like this hand-woven charm. Coil it around your wrist, and your touch will leave no prints, making it tough for evil spirits to chase you.” this has nothing to do with a wedding ceremony, and we can see that the charm is even being physically misused in the image (hung around the neck rather than coiled around the wrist). granted, that’s the description from the alpha, so the creators may not have seen it, but you can just search it up on the wiki, and even p2 itself establishes that the charm is just that, a lucky charm.

this reeks of orientalism. here, the charm serves as a hollow, de-contextualized signifier of a culture that the work claims to represent. it’s an item of spiritual significance being used as a purely aesthetic prop to give the scene a feeling of connection to a culture from which it is, in truth, completely alienated, and in particular to give it a feeling of exotic mysticism. to make this even clearer, in the original art, a simple strip of leather was used instead of the charm, which makes it seem like the charm was added as a purely stylistic element. this process of stripping cultural symbols of their cultural significance, to make them interchangeable and merely indexical of “culture” (a consumable and reproducible version thereof), is part of orientalism. 

similarly, another picture (and the original art the cosplay is based on), seems to show a handfasting ritual, which is i guess just what comes to mind when one thinks of non-christian weddings. in this, artemy’s hand is painted with what seems to be the steppe rune samn, which references the circle of life. i don’t see what connection this has to a wedding; maybe i’m just being shortsighted, but it seems like another empty signifier of “culture” in the same way that chinese characters are often stripped of their meaning by western audiences. yes, the kin are not real, but the cultures they’re based on are, and orientalism is, which is why this is just a pet peeve.

if any of the creators behind these images see this, i’m not attacking you personally at all. this is just the example that immediately comes to mind and that most clearly represents the stuff that annoys me. there is... a Lot. of burakhovsky marriage content in the world, and generally wedding ceremonies in art are a breeding ground for uncomfortably stylized or decontextualized representations of culture. i haven’t seen “steppe wedding” content outside of burakhovsky, probably just because that’s what’s popular, or i’d be irritated by that too. yes i know it’s not that deep, it’s just a video game, whatever. y’all asked for a pet peeve here’s a pet peeve.

[ninakaina]

Also out of curiosity, is there any way to ship burakhovsky in a way that's respectful and not racist? I'm a sucker for cute ship art so I fell for it when I found wholesome art the other day and now cannot stop but don't want to be a part of the racism enabling group (also ily ur a god for answering my dumb rambles)

honestly i’m a lot less concerned about you as a poc than white fans! i can’t like lay down the law for you or anything, it’s more of like a dialogue between us comparing experiences like we’ve been doing :) i get what you mean tho, we all have internalized racism to work through. and i do have a lot of mutuals and even friends who ship them, many of whom are white! 

in general i don’t tell people how to consume content or what content to consume, i really only get involved with the creation of content, and i don’t know if you’re a content creator. in case you are though, or to like help you think about the content you’re consuming if you’re trying to do some work on yourself, i’d say a couple tropes to be concerned about are (and this is just about the race angle, but i acknowledge there’s a lot of intersection with mlm fetishization and other tropes related to that that i don’t list here):

artemy being portrayed as dirty/angry/violent in contrast to feminine/”civilized” daniil is something that multiple indigenous community members have spoken up about. when in actuality we know who goes buck wild and shoots 10 people for a letter

going off that, there’s a lot of content that seems to romanticize or sexualize artemy physically overpowering daniil and being violent towards him

there’s weirdly a lot of content in which daniil gets transformed/brainwashed/otherwise “corrupted” by “steppe magic”, which is pretty rough.

herb bride!daniil. it’s bad.

also artemy being portrayed as stupid and daniil like exposing him to things he’s never heard of before comes up a lot? also weird because artemy has been travelling from town to town learning surgery and is ostensibly a pretty worldly guy. feels reminiscent of infantilization of asian men, not sure this is as serious as the other stuff tho

in general, just like... don’t be part of the racism enabling group. don’t reblog from threi. block fictional-serial-killer. if you see something racist or people defending something racist, don’t associate yourself with that-- you aren’t obligated to do anything about it, but you can if you want, and i’m always here if you want me to get after someone for you.

as always i’m gonna say the best thing you can do is support creators who make non burakhovsky content (not necessarily me lol). it is really hard to get attention for other stuff, and that discourages ppl from making more. any way to make the community feel less monolithic makes more space for people with differing opinions / who are more sensitive to this stuff than we are.

[ninakaina]

broke: artemy x daniil

woke: artemy x bad grief