#patho meta

[moputopia]

"The town, as seen by the Haruspex on the map screen" / Fear by Thích Nhất Hạnh / "The town map in the image of a bull, seen by fully zooming out on the map screen"

[lyuricheva]

this is just me musing but personally i find it hard to care much about the specifics of daniil’s “endings” in p3, especially the "successful" ones because in my opinion, his core narrative drive makes it impossible for him to Achieve an intended outcome. i don’t think he achieved immortality guys. i think the more he "achieves" immortality the less he achieves anything at all. his only meaningful path, to me, has always been concession and that by default is always him losing. 

in short, dankovskys path to “victory” (utopia) was always doomed by both his fundamental failure of understanding and by aiming for things beyond his scope. most literally: his inability to accept himself as a doll (thing with no agency, animated by the player). this, to me, is his central dilemma.

the core mechanic of p3 is the manipulation/undoing of choices and rewriting time to achieve a "better" - or more optimized for "succeeding" - outcome. if we see pathologic as a game, or more picturesquely, a recurring re-staging of a loosely scripted play, this is a staging within which the actor is allowed limited freedom to alter the script on the go, with the audience stuck in the theatre until he runs himself dry. but it is still a staging (playthrough). 

it’s not coincidental that the time loop logic as operable by daniil - rather than just the meta-layer of every route/playthrough restarting the story - does not first appear in patho classic but marble nest: a re-doing itself, and the product of daniil’s delirium and delusion. on the brink of death, he keeps desperately reliving the same day to achieve a different (impossible) outcome. marble nest is not a full game and as such it has no outcome; the saturday never ends.

but imo the same goes for pathologic 3. in the immortality ending daniil seems to effectively remove himself from the story, gaining “agency” over it and elevating himself to a storyteller/player over an actor. but this is only a gimmick. the audience is still in the audience. the player still pilots his choices. the play is ongoing; and more importantly, the story can still restart, indefinitely. none of his choices have de facto agency over any other part of the metanarrative. there are no choices he can make that touch that. 

in order to really achieve "immortality” and free himself from the narrative, daniil dankovsky would need to stop being a playable character, and the point is that he never will. the very existence of pathologic makes this impossible - it's a paradox!

in p3, if you play it this way, daniil is a doll that the player lets gain magical powers in a deus ex machina sort of swoop, who cheats the plague and becomes immortal through the in-universe magical realism. but within the metanarrative of patho, all this means is a relatively new cheated ending which is only allowed because it precedes a next run. the doll goes back into the box. the doll is (and has been) delusional. 

i think the more victorious daniil is the more pitiful it should read. in direct contrast to artemy, yes, who makes a point of saying: it doesn’t matter that this is a story, it matters to play it faithfully to yourself and your values. daniil cannot end the story, or become immortal, anymore than he can become real. he can only ever concede to artemy or clara: remain within a story and follow either its logic or its logic.

but neither can he accept that he’s a doll. and so the loop continues. rosencrantz and guildenstern remain dead and nobody has ever been less real than dankovsky. 

[silenthillmutual]

I truly feel like im going insane - did you make that post about daniil and artemy's transness, and the differences between them? it had something about how artemy's transness brings him close to things that grow, and daniil's is connected to him being obsessed with eternity etc

...that sounds familiar, but i don't remember whose post that was, or how long ago it was wittten! i'm on mobile right now so my search capabilities are limited. i can try and find it when i get back home, but if someone finds it before me i'd appreciate a link to it!

[phantomjack]

Can I talk about how the idea of living buildings in pathologic? Because before I mostly joked about it being pathologic being weird but I finally realized that, like many things in pathologic; it’s a deeply philosophical idea given physical form. And another element of focus’s makes sense- because I think I’ve felt it. The feeling that a building like the polyhedron creates in people.

I’m not a religious person, as a matter of fact for a very long time I looked down upon and mocked organized religion as cult for people unable to find their own reason to live. Of course I realize now that that’s a wrong elitist way of thinking and I’m ashamed of ever holding that perspective. But it’s the perspective I had when this event happened to me. My family and I traveled to New York, and we visited st. Patrick’s cathedral. And I cannot fully describe the feeling that stepping into that building gave me. It was…majesty. I was utterly shaken beholding something so incredibly beautiful and powerful, and at the same time unwelcoming. I was not supposed to be there. I, someone who doesn’t believe in god and scoffed upon the idea should not be allowed to see this majesty of humanity, belief and engineering, I should be ashamed of thinking it was nothing more than a building. And holy shit can I tell you how TERRIFYING that feeling is? Because it’s deeply scary to think a building doesn’t want you there.

That building was fucking alive.

It was a great art and masterpiece built as a place of worship out of worship. It was deeply human but at the same time some evidence of a higher power, or at least such a powerful belief in a higher power that the ghost of it lived inside.

buildings are alive, not every building to such a powerful extent as that cathedral, but alive in the way that they carry the memory of something that happened in them, people who lived or died there. Have you ever entered a home and felt unwelcome? Or distinctly warm? That’s the human elements and life that have been put in that building. And that’s what a focus is I think-a pure memory of a person that can exist…physically. So maybe that’s why the buildings the stamatins designed are so strange-because they’re brand new buildings trying to capture years of human emotion and history all at once.

So that’s a focus I guess-or part of the explanation of what a focus is. Which makes the idea of focus’s even more terrifying to me honestly, they’re created to dazzle and behold a feeling, but they *cant grow* from that-for growth you need some human element. If a focus is a story it must be read, if it houses a person it only houses what remains of that person. That life that was put into peoples homes and places like that cathedral was peoples lives, people who come in and out and change and pray. A focus is just a captured memory, and memory can’t change unless it’s remembered, but with no human element to remember it than the person who’s in focus can’t change. They’re no longer human.

(Of course the utopian ending isn’t a good ending for daniil. It’s not beating death, to some it might even be a fate worse than death. )

[moputopia]

i enjoyed pathologic 3, but i really disagree with the dev interview i saw which claimed that P3 can work as an entry point to the series.

when people say that you can just play pathologic 2 instead of playing the first game... i disagree with that, because i think P2 is weaker than P1 in basically every way except mechanically, but i can definitely see the argument. if you're not too bothered about lore or getting the best story, and just want to play a solid survival horror rpg with above-average writing, it makes sense to jump right to P2.

P3's writing is on par with P2, and the time travel mechanics were a bold move that ended up way more well-handled and engaging than i was expecting them to be (albeit with a huge amount of bugs, which is unsurprising and will hopefully be fixed in the coming months). it would be cool if the game became enough of a hit to inspire future games to experiment with causality and time manipulation in this way.

but as far as the story goes, i do think someone who hasn't played the first two games, or at least the P1 bachelor route, is going to have a diminished experience. for one thing, it's probably just very confusing if you haven't experienced the story linearly first.

but also, P3 was at its most compelling to me when it was the most open about being a conversation with the first game. when i would move through a story sequence and characters would parrot lines that i recognized verbatim from pathologic classic, like distorted echoes thrust into an altered context.

occasionally, character name spellings will randomly switch to the localizations that were used in the infamously janky 2005 english translation of the first game, prior to the 2015 rerelease. peter becomes petr, yulia->julia, aglaya->aglaia, etc. it didn't even occur to me that it was unintentional until i saw people reporting them as typo bugs, it just felt like all of these different tellings of the story melding and collapsing. it didn't break my immersion when daniil randomly calls grace "laska" in a line of dialogue, it felt rewarding because i know that is her name, in another version of this story. just little things like that, they all added up.

IPL was remaking a game, and instead of doing a straightforward remake, they decided to give the protagonist the ability to go back and change his own story. they made him obsess over the tragedies that happened to him and the people around him, and then gave him the power to go back and change things, to rewrite what happened in the hopes that he was making something better. and honestly, i have to assume that's a bit what it feels like to remake a game itself, to go back and try to rewrite a story that was already written.

[moputopia]

putting this here because it's literally so true. now i want to make a diagram like this for the classic bound.

[moputopia]

describing artemy only as "trained in steppe lore and traditional medicine" is also very strange to me. like, yes, he is, but it's cutting out a pretty major part of his character? artemy didn't spend the last 5 to 10 years training as a menkhu, when you start the haruspex route the narrator immediately tells you that he was sent off "to study modern medicine in the academy" and that he's "been travelling from town to town learning theoretical and practical surgery for several years now". this is an important part of his character setup, it's part of why he has a hard time being accepted by his community as his father's heir in both games.

it sort of feels like they're solely focusing the "traditional medicine" side of artemy's character as a way to set him up in contrast to daniil's character, but that really strips a lot of nuance away from both of their characters and their dynamic. the way they act as ideological foils to each other isn't as simple as a "traditional vs modern medicine" thing (which is already a questionable dichotomy to draw), because they don't even fit neatly into that false dichotomy. artemy is trained in both "traditions" of medicine, and daniil literally wants to defy the conventional understanding of modern medicine by defeating death. their differences in how they approach medicine is part of their dynamic, but for most of the game (in most routes) they're collaborating for longer than they're working in opposition. their ideological clash is more in terms of their personal motivations and philosophical perspectives than anything, imo.

[moputopia]

speaking of the 7 mildly important new NPCs we're expected to care about, i do think serafina and platon were underutilized. not in the sense that i want them to have any more screen time than they do, they have plenty, but they should have done something to affect the story. as it is, you could have replaced them with two test tubes containing precious samples that dankovsky needed to keep the academy from throwing away, and the plot would have stayed the same. basically they fail the Sexy Lamp Test about poor representation of female characters but for lab assistants.

i think the obvious answer is that one or both of them should have defected against dankovsky and sided with the inspector. serafima would be the obvious choice, since she's characterized as the one who is "devoted to the mission of thanatica, not bachelor dankovsky" — she could be convinced that dankovsky running off on the lab was him abandoning them, or decide that using him as a scapegoat would provide a chance for thanatica's work to continue without him (and isn't that the sort of ruthless sacrifice dankovsky himself might make to preserve something precious, anyway?). though at the same time, platon might be the better choice just for the surprise factor, since he's characterized as more of a loyalist true believer. either way!

P3 is missing something like the day 8 "thanatica has already been destroyed" moment of the classic bachelor route — a big moment of sudden betrayal to confirm for the bachelor that even if he escapes the town, things are hopeless for him and his goals. a betrayal from one of his assistants would provide that, it would give them some purpose for existing as characters, and it would alleviate the problem of the inspector coming across as kind of toothless in your many conversations where he does nothing but yap at you, if he was the one who turned serafima or platon. and even in the interpretation that the inspector dialogues are all in dankovsky's head, i think one of the assistants could still fit as yet another voice of his self-doubt.