#dorales

[renmorris]

every day I think about Harry and Dora as soulmates as horror. people bound cosmically together who turn each other into the worst versions of themselves. Dora taking Harry from his life as a teacher and making him a cop, one of her toy soldiers. Harry turning her into Dolores until Dora is erased, overwritten. Harry giving life to Dolores and representing the therrier that shot her, driven mad by seeing the inhuman entity underneath. they make me sick in the head.

[renmorris]

Given that Harry tends to be right about things in all the worst most painful ways. How in PJÕL the Lund sisters seem to be experiencing Dolores as a parasitic thoughtform that they have to scrub themselves from reality to escape from?

I think Harry did this. Not intentionally and maybe not wholly on his own, but I think his love for Dora and his deification summoned whatever Dolores is. First it made her lungs glow. Then it eroded her entirely.

[renmorris]

one of the things I’ve been chewing on since Martin Luiga confirmed that Dora is for real Dolores Dei is that aside from the cosmic horror angle, which I love. I also love the very simple fact that…

Harry and Dora let each other down.

He couldn’t live to enforce her laws in the world she made, and the system that she created failed to save Harry and uplift Revachol out of poverty. Capitalism requires that poverty exist and Dolores can’t undo the damage it did to Harry just because she’s arbitrarily decided that he deserves to succeed.

She lives in the world she made, with the consequences of her actions but she can always go somewhere else, somewhere more prosperous like Mirova.

[renmorris]

Harry in the dream saying that Dora had glowing lungs is so horrific btw like…no one will ever believe him. Not even the Dora in his mind.

Harry is this Cassandra-esque figure for Elysium. Screaming about Dolores Dei's monstrousness as the therrier-assassin, declared insane. And now he’s subject to special insight and visions about the incoming apocalypse and bombing of Revachol that causes it. No one believes him.

His ex used to be another person. No one will believe that either.

[renmorris]

so we link to that medium article Luiga write awhile back about the ttrpg campaign a lot, where he talks about how he played Chester, how the idea of the 41st campaign was that Cops Are A Gang etc

and I just kind of forgot that at the very end he says this about another fan's analysis?

As a bonus, I thought to add a link to an analysis that was very precise and beautiful in both my own opinion and Robert’s. But I couldn’t find it. But it was on the Iron Works Forum, written by Wrath of Dagon. It had zero comments under it. It was elytical of it to be thus.

and today sm on the official server dug up the post!

Disco Elysium (possible spoilers)

TLDR it’s about Dora as Dolores but in a more literal direction

which is an idea I see pop up from time to time I even have an au because the idea was intriguing to me

but I feel like it’s worth revisiting?? now that we have team ibex's pjõl translation and a broader- though still very vague sense of Elysium's more supernatural components

[renmorris]

in many ways Dolores feels like a continuation of Twin Peaks' embodiment of evil, BOB. who is gendered by the cast as 'the evil that men do' but also struggles for possession over Laura's body. And Laura doss commit acts of violence against people more vulnerable than her, like sexually abusing a disabled man who is unable to leave his house and escape from her.

Sacred and Terrible Air feels like it’s revisiting the concept of:

'girl desperately crying out for help from a picture perfect middle class family (with something rotten inside of it) who is pushed into choosing death/non existence over continuing the cycle'

but this time with multiple Laura’s of various ages etc

[renmorris]

I mean the absolute horror of the Lund sisters/Dora IngerLUND connection is just, I find it to be unrelenting. that the girls unexisted themselves and their very small sister so they wouldn’t have whatever is happening to Dora happen to them

[renmorris]

because like…even as a historical figure and possible inhuman horror Dolores Dei's evil and influence didn’t come from magic, it came from her brutal military campaigns, the dehumanizing racism she weaponized against Mesque. it came from being elected into a system created and maintained by human beings

maybe she didn’t have to breathe and she had glowing lungs

but her deeds are human, the legacy she left was terrible and human