#pathologic 2 meta

[amphorographia]

So, the Pathologic 2 Artbook includes a bunch of character descriptions from the design documents and (as a pretentious literature postgrad and obesssive lover of this game and its lore) I wanted to share some of my favourites.

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The Heroes:

“The Changeling is skin, this [story] is about contact and caress, kinaesthetic things . . . as a means to create meaning, develop the world and bring peace to it”

“The Haruspex is blood and organs . . . [this story is about] the interconnectedness of everything and restoring the connections”

“The Bachelor is about vision and the brain . . . [this story is about] comprehension and rational (analytical) interpretation”

“The Bachelor sees

The Haruspex hears (rhythm)

The Changeling talks”

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The People:

Aglaya Lilich - “To her, contending with God, too, is a form of restoring justice and natural law.”

Commander Block - “inspired by Antonius Block from The Seventh Seal” (a disillusioned knight who returns to find the Black Plague choking his country. Tormented by his own lack of faith, he is determined to evade Death long enough to redeem himself)

Georgiy Kain - “above all, a Smith, a Sculptor. [. . .] as a rock can be turned into a statue by chiselling away the unnecessary, so can a human be turned into a superhuman.”

Grief - “He’s an ‘anti-Immortell’ who runs an ‘anti-Theatre’ at the Warehouses”

Mark Immortell - “He has no past: he is the Theatre incarnate, its spirit materialized in a carbon-based avatar. [. . .] Mark is a harlequin.”

Maria Kaina - “A mistress in the making . . . still barely more than a child, very immature” / “Das Ewig-Weibliche [the Eternal Feminine] comes to mind.”

Murky -  “she follows [the Haruspex] everywhere. Conscience itself, walking on dirty feet.”

Vlad the Younger - “His life’s goal is an attempt to turn the Kin into the Town . . . [much like] those naïve landowners who sought to ‘enlighten’ the peasants”

Foreman Oyun - “He governs the Kin on the Olgimskys’ behalf . . . like a Nazi-appointed village elder. There is an important difference, though: no one despises this elder.”

Andrey Stamatin - “an impetuous and amoral adventurer . . . based on Benvenuto Cellini” (a talented Renaissance sculptor, goldsmith, and writer who was repeatedly prosecuted for sodomy, theft, and murder)

Peter Stamatin - “Not to be turned into a drunken clown . . . This is a tragic character who must elicit sympathy and compassion.”

Stakh Rubin - “[He is] like Levi Matvei in The Master and Margarita” (a student near-crazed in his devotion to his Master, tragically unaware of his inability to fully comprehend or follow said Master’s life and teachings)

Kasper ‘Khan’ Kain - “a Kai from H. C. Anderson’s The Snow Queen” (a boy who falls victim to corrupting influences which replace his youthful innocence and sense of wonder with cold realism and rationalism)

Yulia Lyuricheva - “She’s a ‘scientific mage’ in the same sense that the Stamatins are architectural mages.”

The Rat Prophet - “A demon, a chthonic ‘thing from below’ . . . a dweller of the underside of Kain’s enlightened world.”

[thevoidintheeye]

The Diurnal ending is, I think for more people than just me, the most intuitive one. It’s the most human one, for sure – the majesty of the world beyond sacrificed to make our ordinary lives safe and livable. Status quo achieved. It’s making the world of Pathologic – which was alien and bizarre, horrific just as often as beautiful – just like our world. And we live in our world, so if anything, it seems more comforting that the characters should end up in a world we can understand. It feels so nice, to think that after all the horrors, these people can become more than just their pain.

But it’s also part of a larger, rather common story – one of coming of age. This boy left town and came back a man, and the town he finds is not the place of magic and wonder he remembers from his childhood, but a perfectly ordinary human settlement. The strange and the obscure mechanisms that rule ur lives, that once seemed unkonwable, have with time and experience resolved themselves into comprehensible shapes. It’s about growing up, about learning to let go of the wonder and terror of the world seen through the eyes of a child, and it’s about accepting the dry commonality of what was once awe-inspiring and incomprehensible. It hurts, to let go of that magic, but it’s a necessary hurt. To become an adult, you have to let go of being a child.

But then we have the Nocturnal ending, and that is another beast entirely. I find it hard sometimes to find the good in this ending – the plague still roams the streets, and the characters we have spent so much time getting to know, to understand, to even survive to the next day, are largely lost and unmoored. This ending isn’t even for the Kin – for they too are humans, not some manifestation of the earth itself. Why choose this, when it seems so very few people benefit?

Is it you, who simply fear to accept the real world? Is this the ending then, where you, like Peter Pan, cannot stand to grow up and chooses to be a child forever? Turning your eyes away from the inevitable march of adulthood and industrialization, you retreat into fantasy, letting the whole town sink into obscurity? No, I don’t think so.

I think that, in some ways, this may be a more mature ending than the Diurnal one. That ending is about taming the world, making it fit into our anthropocentric model of it. We are so prone to imagine ourselves as the main characters of Earth. We think that the world really is that small, to fit under our microscopes and into our charts and models. We think awe and wonder are things to grow out of. We think that what it means to be an adult is to dominate – to understand the world, for what is knowledge but another way of possessing something; to bend it to our will and make it conform to our wishes. But it’s not.

The Nocturnal ending isn’t for humans – it is for everything. It’s not opposed to humans, but neither will it cater to us. There will be utopia – there will also be plague. Sometimes it will be beautiful, just as often it will be horrific. Humans are an animal, just like any other; no more, no less – and we will need to learn to fit into the fabric of the world as it is, or we will be lost. We need to learn that the world really is bigger than us, that we are simply parts of a larger system, that the world we live in doesn’t exist for our benefit. Nature is not cruel, but neither is it kind. It simply is. And reconciling with that is not necessarily an intuitive thing to do.

[silenthillmutual]

i think it’s really interesting that when artemy is talking to daniil about possible damage control for the outbreak and proposes they make a panacea, daniil says, “think about it. a curative serum for an unknown disease? this contagious, and this lethal? on such short notice? what a utopian thought.”

i know that his use of “utopian” here means ‘overly optimistic’ because daniil is a pessimist and very cynical, for a lot of very good reasons i’ll write up on here later (since twitter nerfed my last account where i had an actual thread about it) but here’s what i think is interesting about this:

‘utopians’ are a faction in the game. specifically, they’re the faction under daniil’s care. daniil’s supposed to have a certain level of...magnetized attraction to them. they’re his bound, the people he’s supposed to take care of. and obviously, as a healer, artemy himself doesn’t fall into that. 

except daniil, who would have received his list by now, is lumping him in with that group, and there’s just no way in hell that’s a coincidence.

i’m sort of thinking about this in the same vein of ‘i’ll have more to say when i finish the game’ way in which it’s grouped with it being very very very interesting to me that when artemiy dies, he is woken up by a utopian, one of daniil’s bound: mark immortell.

when you play as daniil in the marble nest - in which you are currently dying and repeating your last day alive as a loop - you are woken up from your dying dream about death by a termite, one of artemy’s bound: sticky.

i just think it’s really neat how the narrative makes them complements of each other. one is built up as representing all heart with no brains (which we know isn’t true, regardless of what people say to artemy) and the other all brains with no heart (which we should know isn’t true, regardless of what people say to daniil), an outsider and a local. i just think it’s cool the ways they click together like piecing something broken back together.