there is something so nostalgic and bittersweet about revachol when you're an eastern european.
the fishing village looks like any half-abandoned village near the water. whirling is any semi-decent hostel. yeah, the architecture is run down in smaller towns. there are preserved world war II damages that serve as memorials of all the people who lost their lives fighting or just trying to survive.
you find yourself exploring martinaise and suddenly you're like "oh, renne and gaston remind me of these two old men i knew when i was a child. they were friends and they hated each other. they would always wave at me when i rode my bike past them and said hello."
or, you see cuno and cunoesse and they remind you of these kids you were mildly scared of when you were little because they seemed so tough, when actually they had no support from adults in their lives and were just trying to seem tough to navigate life as best as they could.
or, you meed lilienne and she reminds you of your mum's friend whose children you used to play with. her late husband was an alcoholic and she had to be tough for the kids. she was really nice to you.
you're a cop in a corrupt system, but you're also a man you could meet in real life. maybe you have a man like that in your family. maybe you recognise a bit of yourself in him.
i think it's a part of the beauty of disco elysium. revachol is a fictional city, but all these little things about martinaise make it seem so familiar, a world that you remember from your childhood all those years back, before they build glass skyscrapers and renovated the old houses, and these nice family from city centres started moving to the suburbs.
