> Moreover, I have spoken to Bachelor Dankovsky. He is taking a lot of interest in your affairs lately, and he seems to care about you personally...
> It is only out of respect for the Bachelor - he is for some reason absolutely sure of your innocence, that’s understandable, he’s an outsider after all - but it is only out of respect for him that I will hand you the inheritance.
> Your friend (hopefully), Daniil Dankovsky
i think a lot about Daniil calling Artemiy his soulmate when they first meet on Haruspex Route Day 1, but this is day two.
Yulia: Of course he will. The Commander sees you as his most reliable confederate. It simply wouldn’t occur to him to doubt any information you have relayed to him. Have no fear; the possibility of successful outcome is exceptionally high.
Daniil: You think so?
LATER...
Daniil: I need a few rifles.
Alexander: What for?
Daniil: Personal needs.
Alexander: No, I do not understand. What kind of needs?
Daniil: Don’t you trust me?
Alexander: Perhaps I could make an exception and issue firearms to a civilian, but in order to do so I need to know exactly what they are going to be used for.
Daniil: Self-defense.
Alexander: For self-defense I am willing out of deepest respect to issue one rifle and three clips to you personally.
The Tower oppresses the Town. The Town smothers the Steppe. The Steppe gnaws at the Tower. That’s the three different...heh...pieces. Too different to be put together, like three minds fighting over a single head. If I am not mistaken, this condition is considered to be...pathologic?
So, I know I did a Twitter thread about the ways Daniil is manipulated in Classic, and I thought I’d put it on here too.
I’m going to stop short of calling it gaslighting here though, because too many people are using that term who don’t really understand what it means. Gaslighting is specifically a form of abuse where the intention is to make the victim feel they are going insane. Not all manipulation or abuse is gaslighting - which doesn’t make it less bad, just...not gaslighting.
That being said: in Classic, there are quite a few times where Daniil can say that he thinks he’s losing his mind, and there are times when the game seems constructed to make you feel this way. Particularly I had in mind the ending of the game, and not just the part where you find out you’re a toy and always have been (that falls more under cosmic horror). What bugs me about the end and how that fits into things, is the fact that the Sand Pest and its outcomes have been chasing you - the clouds, the angels, the muggers, the firestarters, the rats, literally chasing you through houses and through town, only for all of it to completely vanish without a trace on the exact day you’re meant to give a solution to it all. I made a point on Twitter about how people attempting to gaslight you will submit you to a large amount of damage - physical, verbal, emotional, take your pick - and then remove the abuse and any signs of it just before they’re caught. it’s how they show to others that it’s you who’s the problem, not them.
Regardless of whether you think the intention is to make Daniil feel he’s losing is sanity or not, the question would be who is manipulating Daniil, and why? There are a couple answers.
The first answer is the Town. The first playthrough as the Bachelor of the game is probably the closest fitting to psychological horror as the game gets. Like Silent Hill, the Town is full of horrors that seem tailor-made to torture Daniil specifically: most of these people are uneducated (the Town doesn’t even have a school), their cultural beliefs (mostly appropriated from the steppe culture) actively prevent him from doing his job as a doctor, his word and name are constantly weaponized by people with ulterior motives, and men run around on the first two days beating women to death or burning them alive and intervening actively costs you reputation - which you need to do anything. He arrives with the hope of finding evidence to keep his lab opening and, as we later learn, keep himself from execution, only to find that both the man who would serve as this evidence and the colleague who informed you of his existence have been murdered just before your arrival. You have a lot of things riding on your success, and everything about where you are is actively working against you. The government wants you to find a cure single-handedly, but the Town has other plans for you.
And those plans are: errand boy, and scapegoat. People throughout the Town will inform you that they are scared of you when you’ve barely interacted with them, let alone in ways that should inspire fear. It doesn’t matter how good your reputation as Daniil is (and through the course of the game, there’s very little you’re made to do that lowers your reputation, and it never gets bad enough for you to be attacked on the street or refused sale from shops), what matters is the fact that everyone in Town, from the nameless NPCs to the rulers, are putting every bad thing they’ve done down as being your fault.
But the Town has another way it’s manipulating Daniil, by almost making him a member of it. I don’t think I got a screenshot, but I’m sure that somewhere along the line Daniil comments that he’s starting to talk like one of the townsfolk. You can see this happens to Andrey, too, later in the game; he talks in what Daniil calls “Griefisms”.
You have been sent here to fight an adversary that inherently cannot be beaten - in foolish hopes that a miracle would happen and your outstanding mind would stumble upon a once-in-a-million chance. And just so that you wouldn’t give up, they kept insisting that the adversary must be destroyed. Do you see how insidious the Powers That Be are?
> But why? Their motives are becoming less and less comprehensible to me by the day.
The second answer is the Powers That Be.
Three people enter the Town that the Powers That Be want to get rid of: the Bachelor, the Inquisitor, and the Commander. It wants them all to fix or solve or demolish something in the town, and doesn’t really care what happens to any of them. Pathologic 2 spells it out clearer for you that Aglaya, Block, and Daniil will all be executed upon return to the Capital if their answers are not what the Powers That Be want to hear. And for the time that you are in the Town as Daniil Dankovsky, the Powers That Be - like the town itself - actively work against you. The trains that are meant to bring food and medication never, to my knowledge, arrive, and most days bring about a new letter from the Powers spelling out for you how disappointed in you and your progress they are. Some of the ways they attempt to manipulate Daniil through these letters are subtle, but most of them are unsubtle suggestions that what he’s been able to accomplish is not good enough, that he was meant to work alone.
Even one of your first letters from them is suspicious; early on in the game, they write to let you know that they are in no way responsible for the outbreak, which is an incredibly suspicious thing to say. What is the point of sending such a letter? Would the player have really thought that they were if they hadn’t suggested as much through denial? After all, what called you to Town was a letter from Isidor Burakh. But yet, the Powers That Be are the ones who leave you stranded in the Town with limited resources, no help, and constantly shifting goalposts. Aglaya makes this clear to you when she arrives: you were never supposed to be successful.
The letters from the Powers That Be do not serve any purpose other than to upset Daniil, and most if not all of them contain lies: that a train will be arriving, that they don’t mind if you have help in carrying out your plans, that Thanatica still exists, referencing conversations you’ve never had, signing drafts of letters you didn’t consult on with your name. One of the reasons i had put this down as gaslighting is because people who gaslight like to keep you off balance and emotionally fragile so that you’re easier to manipulate. You’ll do whatever they want to make the feeling stop, because you just can’t handle the stress anymore, and in the process you come across to others as unreasonable, unhinged, crazy, dangerous, so that no one will trust you. And that’s exactly how Daniil starts to come across to the townspeople: deranged, strung out, dangerous, untrustworthy.
You can contrast all that to a different letter they send you where they claim to be proud to call you one of your own. Combine the two, and you get honeymooning. They want to remind you of the good (or at least, not-as-bad) times you’ve had with them. This behavior serves two, sometimes three purposes: to keep you off balance from the violent back-and-forth, dizzying nature of what they’re doing to you, and so that you’ll defend them to people who can see what’s going on and want to get you out of it. You’ll even convince yourself that you’re not really being mistreated. If you were being abused, would they be so nice to you?
You are the last friend our family has. I hope our attachment to you doesn’t look obtrusive.
> It requires too much from me. I’m not comfortable with it.
> No, not at all.
The third answer is the Kains. Specifically, Georgiy and Maria repeatedly manipulate Daniil, though I’ve no doubt in the text above Victor stating their attachment to Daniil is also a manipulation, and one possibly planned by either or perhaps both of them. The text above probably looks normal, but think about the purpose it serves: to reinforce that Daniil is friendly with the Kains. Your only two options are to say that it doesn’t bother you, or to express that you feel your boundaries are being violated by their attention. But I even thinking about picking that option... Well, it feels mean.
Throughout the game, people will comment on Maria’s attachment to you and what they feel is your predestination to be romantically paired with her. All this, despite the fact that you don’t really interact with her that much. I’ve seen this be explained as forced heterosexuality, but I think it also is a way of the Kains manipulating Daniil into doing what they want. Daniil gets upset whenever people cry; when children cry, he tries to calm them and fix whatever’s upset them - there’s an entire sidequest after the army arrives in which Daniil kills a group of soldiers, spurred into action by upset children. Whenever he encounters Maria crying, he reacts with discomfort, and she uses these tears and upset to manipulate Daniil into thinking Aglaya has lied to him, effectively distancing him from one of the only people in the game with a rational mind to show him support and tell him the truth. I don’t think the two are in any way unconnected. Something abusers, manipulators, gaslighters love to do is isolate you so that you only have one source of information to go to. If they cut you off from other people, they can continue to feed off of you. You’ll never have a chance to question if what you’re being told about yourself or others is correct, you’ll just be a constant supply of drama for them.
DANIIL: Was there any particularly notable backstory? I’m deadly tired of all these people. They’re inhuman. They tell the future, believe in walking zombies, and die in all manners of painfully abnormal ways.
AGLAYA: Your line of thinking is obviously fallacious - and I was implying something rather mundane. I promise you no one can really tell the future around here and neither are deaths inspired by third parties uncommon. Mysterious phenomenons do occur here sometimes... but hardly more often than anywhere else.
You can see, first, the effect all this has had on Daniil, how dispiriting the past several days have been to him. But you can also see here exactly why a family that prides itself on multi-generational reincarnation and manipulation through “fortune-telling” wants to keep its blunt instrument in the dark.
That is, ultimately, why they are manipulating Daniil. Georgiy knows full well when he tells Daniil at the beginning that everyone, even himself, will lie to Daniil, that being that honest upfront is more likely to lead Daniil to trusting him. They want to sway him to their cause; this is why you are told that your success here depends on the wellbeing of the people Maria considers useful: herself, her father and uncle - who she gets out of the way later on to come into her power, the architects of the Polyhedron - which she will use to ascend to power, and the theatre director who has pledged himself to be her loyal servant. Eva’s on the list, too, but her inclusion was deliberately set up to make you depend on the Kains later in the game, considering that it’s Maria who convinced her to commit suicide:
DANIIL: Why did Eva die then?
AGLAYA: I have a distinct suspicion she was made to die.
DANIIL: By whom?
AGLAYA: One of the Kains. I’d even go so far as to claim that they may have performed human sacrifice.
It’s a two-for-one deal: try in vain to make a Focus of the Cathedral, and remove from Daniil the last piece of influence who was not totally in love with Maria. Maria “cries” and is “upset” at you for thinking Eva’s death is her fault, but no one directly tells you Maria is responsible - all Aglaya does is tell you the Kains are at fault. The rest is just you remembering how nasty Maria was about Eva at the beginning of the game. I wouldn’t even say that Maria was removing a rival for Daniil’s affection. She really does only view Daniil as an object: if you speak to her on day 12, she assumes that you’re leaving, and doesn’t even ask you to stay (for kicks, contrast this with either ending of Pathologic 2 when you speak to Daniil as Artemy, where he’s supposed to be your rival. what was all that about Maria being in love with you...?); he’s not even present in his own ending cutscene. Even Mark Immortell says you’re leaving -
And actually, that’s a really fascinating conversation you can have with him on day 12. It’s where the game outright admits exactly what Aglaya told you: it’s all fake. Maria cannot really see the future, you’ve just been manipulated the entire game to achieve someone else’s goals, and unless you’ve gone around and saved Artemy’s or Clara’s bound, it’s too late for you to turn back and make a different decision. If you’ve picked Daniil’s ending, you just destroyed an entire town on the basis of outright lies.
Well, sure, I also thank you for saving my life, kind sir. Hats off to you... “I’ll have a chance to put my life to good use in the near future.” That’s what they all say, right?
Jesus Christ there’s a lot to unpack with this. I want to go from the bottom up, because I actually screenshot most of this conversation with him.
It wasn’t I that have saved your life, Mark Immortell. I want everybody to hear that! I would have killed you if I could.
There’s so much animosity and contempt in this line, directed to a guy I’ve spoken to I think a total of three times - by which I mean an actual conversation was held, as opposed to opening a dialogue that goes nowhere.
Is this just because of the pantomimes he directs? I can’t imagine this is a special dialogue option because I opted to take Artemy’s ending. Are we supposed to get the impression Daniil actually tried to kill Mark and found that he couldn’t?
Farewell, puppeteer. Best of luck in your creative endeavours ...Is that how my line is supposed to sound, right?
I know this option was probably just meant to be in response to seeing himself portrayed in the pantomimes at night, but this certainly makes me feel A Way about how Mark as a character is used in Pathologic 2. Like Daniil has gained self-awareness.
I still don’t get it. You are an entirely different creature - how come you’re in the same boat with the Utopians?
What is there not to get, oh esteemed and wisest of bachelors?
So I guess the contempt is mutual.
You were a puppeteer. Your Masks foretold our future - or maybe they imposed it upon us, in all honesty, I don’t see the difference. All this time I was absolutely positive you were connected to the plague.
I wish they’d actually explored this answer in-game in Daniil’s route instead of just sort of dropping this in out of nowhere at the end. I guess they assume the idea will cross your mind at some point in time, and it does make sense for Daniil to think this given that the mechanics of the game are explained to you by the executors and tragedians, who then show up later in the game when the Theatre is being repurposed, outside of peoples’ doors when they’re sick, and then, of course, as pantomime actors.
(I also think it’s kind of interesting that Daniil doesn’t see a difference between having your future told to you, and having it imposed on you. I think he sort of has a point: if you tell someone what they’re going to do, you’ve put the idea in their head. If they follow through, retroactively it’ll look like you managed to predict something, when it’s just as likely you’ve put your will in their mind. You didn’t necessarily know anything, you just brought it to life through manipulation.)
I thought that the whole point of the Utopians’ ideology was neglecting the laws of fate and the limits it imposes upon us.
So in other words, Mark doesn’t fit as a Utopian because he was the one directing fate and imposing its limits.
Which means that the Utopian ideology is fake. Daniil’s attachment to it is based on the fact that he wants people to be able to pick their own fates, down to being able to decide for themselves when it’s their time to die. Isn’t that supposed to be what the Polyhedron represents to him? The fact that stands and exists when it shouldn’t be able to is meant to be proof that limits can be overcome, but like with Aglaya’s reassurance that no one here can really tell the future - a segment that further proves Daniil’s point that Mark simply imposed his will on the world - this suggests that there must be a much more mundane explanation for the Polyhedron’s existence.
The Utopians are all charlatans. Peter can’t explain to you how the Polyhedron works, Andrey doesn’t really do anything to protect his brother or Eva despite his bold claims that he can and will do anything - something you can call him out on, Maria can’t really predict the future (wasn’t she the one giving you your list of Bound? isn’t it just a little too much that she happened to put herself, her family, and the people she needed to use to reach her end goals on the list? and that there’s absolutely nothing you can do to save Eva, because Maria makes sure to get her out of the way?), Georgiy is lying to you, Victor doesn’t even want to be there, and Eva is now dead.
I think this circles back to Artemy & Daniil’s bickering in the opening dialogue. Artemy says “Any choice is right, as long as it’s willed,” which didn’t really leave any impression on me when he first said it because I thought, ‘Aren’t all of their actions willed?’ And, to a degree, they are; but Daniil’s actions aren’t his own will. He’s acting on someone else’s plans, and has been for the entirety of the game. His whole route is about being manipulated, and once you can unravel it from this conversation, you can take that string a lot farther. Aglaya does mention that it seems a little too convenient for you to arrive when you did, and she doesn’t buy The Powers That Be’s claims that you & her & Block being sent there was for completely unrelated reasons to them hating all three of you.
But you weren’t sent here by The Powers That Be. Their timing was serendipitous. No, you came here because your colleague sent you a letter that seemed too good to be true and was certainly too relevant to your work for you to ignore, right when you needed it most. And when you get there, both your proof and your colleague have died, and conveniently your continued existence relies entirely on a family that desperately needs you to run all their personal errands.
Does anyone else question the legitimacy of the letter you receive from Isidor? Georgiy claims both that they were unaware Isidor had sent a letter to you, and also that Simon was preparing to meet you. Then later on, he also says that they’ve been following your work in the Capital. Isn’t that a little, hm, suspicious? Your timing isn’t just great for The Powers That Be who want to get rid of you, it’s also fantastic for a family that wants to make a power grab and needs someone completely ignorant of local customs and politics on their side. Clara says, “Those who favour hard logic and direct action are bound to be misguided” - and she’s right, because your “unbiased” approach to the Town and the issues at hand make you easy for the Utopians to manipulate to their cause. Artemy says, “You will act justly, but your justice will blind you” - and he’s also right about that. Daniil isn’t lying or wrong when he says he’s going to follow the truth and restore justice: the problem is that, as an outsider, he isn’t going to get the full truth from anybody. He has shreds of the truth that he can follow, and the fact that he can’t access an entire story also makes him easy for everyone - all of the ruling families, the other healers, the Bound, Aglaya - to manipulate, and they all do.
The reason saving the Polyhedron isn’t the “right” choice isn’t just about morality, it’s also about the fact that it isn’t your will to do that. You haven’t been acting on your will for any part of the Bachelor’s route. You haven’t been an active participant in the story, you’ve been an object. You’re just an instrument someone else is using.
But I also want to make this clear: as many jokes as I see about this, I don’t think it’s fair to use this as evidence of Daniil being evil or stupid, etc etc. But I’ll get into that elsewhere.
You are correct, oh the keenest of the astute! So what? I have cognized this side of Existence from backstage, so to speak; from where the strings go and the machinery is hidden - and yet I willingly swore allegiance to the Utopia. Does that tell you nothing?
That you think you’re god? Are you aware you’re a toy, and trying to overcome that?
I don’t believe you’ve changed. And you being with them is fearsome to me. You are an alarming tone in the jubilant orchestra of creators.
Is this Daniil realizing for the first time that he’s been manipulated?
It doesn’t tell me enough. You are, as always, a double-dealer...
Interesting. I wonder if he’ll talk more to the other characters in their routes that will make this have more sense to me.
Pff... You know, I’m glad you’re leaving. You are a dangerous person, dealing with you would be and arduous task...
Seems like he’s admitting that, for as easy to manipulate as Daniil was, he’s not entirely stupid. Like Daniil would be a threat if he stuck around longer, had the full story. But this is also a hint that the Utopian ending isn’t actually Daniil’s ending. After all, he’s leaving. He’s not a part of the end at all.
You’re back to being annoyed already? And I was just planning to ask as to what you’re going to do with your life.
Me? Hahaha... That’s ridiculous! And it’s very tactless of you to ask me a question like that! Oh no, no offence taken... by me; you haven’t offended me, after all - you’ve offended the Scarlet Mistress herself. My life belongs to Maria now... And I am merely her humble servant... always at her service.
This loops back into implying that the entire route has been orchestrated by Maria, proving Aglaya’s point - and Daniil’s - that she can’t tell the future, and that foretelling the future is indistinguishable from imposing it on people. Maria did what she could to make sure things went her way. By “telling” the future, she made it happen.
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.
