I hate unhappy endings

WOWOWOWOWOW that artifact set is a feast for Dottolone/Panttore fans!

I'm going to be putting on my tinfoil hat and reading way too deeply into everything here, but hear me out:

(By the way, all the translations here are from obsessedfish on twitter.)

The earliest interaction we have from Pantalone and Dottore in the new artifact set appears to be this one, from Capitano's artifact, where it's stated that the two of them booked the "little dark room" to talk together and came out laughing. Pulcinella tries to spite them by blocking them from ever booking the room again--but it turns out that they just never do, making this a one-off event. The fact that they actually went out of their way to book the "counseling room" for one occasion and one occasion only suggests that whatever conversation they had there was something significant...

Perhaps it was even... this conversation, which also ended in laughter?

Did Pantalone and Dottore book the Fatui counseling room to share their pasts with each other, passing off what was almost certainly a deep show of trust, revealing their personal vulnerabilties, as "casual conversation" even in their own minds, finding humor in their shared suffering (to all the other harbingers' confusion or contempt)?

Well, this artifact set certainly leaves that option wide open. After all, we find out that even if Pantalone wants to pass his past off as "casual conversation" in his thoughts, he certainly has no intention of sharing any details of his story with anyone else:

Then we find out that Pantalone divides his own life into "before twenty years old" and "after twenty years old," the time at which he suddenly started experiencing "happiness" more regularly:

Need I remind everyone of what happened when Pantalone was 20?

This is the devs literally telling us:

Meeting Dottore brought happiness to Pantalone's life.

Goddamn this dog is SO GOOD at chess.

Then it just goes absolutely crazy. We're told that Dottore recently told Pantalone about a new experimental idea of his, and Pantalone was the one who suggested exactly where to safely and secretly conduct his inhumane experiment: Pantalone's own hometown.

This, too, is part of the "fair trade." Dottore receives a place to conduct an unapproved personal experiment, and Pantalone receives revenge. A brutal and horrific end to the people who tormented him as a child.

None of this is an accident. It's a perfect encapsulation of the "you aid me, I'll aid you" nature of their relationship. Their very desires in life align perfectly, so that the actions they were naturally going to take conveniently and continually balance the scales of "transaction" between them.

But there's something much more than transactional about this. The way Dottore goes about this is entirely personal. He knows exactly what town he's going to for this experiment, and he goes about his experiment with extreme prejudice, the first sign of this being that the artifact goes out of its way to separate "Zandik" and "Dottore." He's not there as a Fatui harbinger; he's explicitly there for personal pursuits:

Second, it's not just any random townsperson he chooses to sit down with. The only person Zandik bothers to describe in any detail is a single woman, one who is very, very intentionally described as "black-haired" and "not as old as she looks":

I would argue there's a pretty strong implication here that this woman is Pantalone's cruel mother, the one who sold him off after using or letting others in the town use violence and restraints to torment her child.

It's not an accident the only person Dottore remotely shows any interest in describing is this woman. He was there, in part, for her.

Then they drop the absolute craziest implications on us:

Pantalone sits in the theater, watching an opera about "love and forgiveness" which he says no one in Snezhnaya really likes, because they're all convinced that you must earn your happy ending by virtue of deep personal suffering first.

Funny critique of Russian classics aside, it's abundantly clear from the next few paragraphs that Pantalone has associated himself with the situation on the stage--receiving a "happy ending" requires suffering under the shackles of injustice, then breaking free from your own suffering, only to face the next plot device pitted against you to drag you back in despair, again and again until at last you truly find your "warm home."

Pantalone doesn't care for the saccharine play on the stage, with its unearned happy ending. His happiness has been bought with blood and tears, a true Snezhnayan love story, and his happy ending arrives unannounced through the door at the final moment, bearing news that all is well--the cruel shackles of the past are gone forever.

Dottore literally goes right back to Snezhnograd from Pantalone's hometown, suffering motion sickness and all, and apparently even goes straight to the opera to find Pantalone and tell him that he's killed Pantalone's evil mother and wiped the town that tortured him as a child entirely off the map--by turning them all into cannibals who ate each other.

AND THEY SAY CHIVALRY IS DEAD.

Furthermore, the pair's internal dialogues are even lovely subtle mirrors of each other:

Pantalone remarks that he fought against his fate by fleeing his town, tearing through the veil of the silvery birch forest that isolated the rural community:

On Dottore's first night in Pantalone's hometown, he simply stands in this exact forest, contemplating the untameable nature of human potential:

(These "infinite possibilities" are the same "possibilities" Pantalone mentioned in his earlier conversation with Dottore, when he commented on the tragic humor of them both being born into miserably rigid communities, yet somehow still having their fates follow different possibilities--restraint or exile.)

This isn't a generic statement. While Dottore's talking about all of humanity here, he also has one specific human who demonstrated incredible potential in mind, and we can tell this is true because he critiques the town bitterly, saying that, given their unique circumstances and environment and given how far Pantalone had managed to rise, the town had had every opportunity to evolve into something truly incredible, separate from the limitations of the rest of the world. They had the potential to pursue entirely different paths, to make different (better) choices, and to lift themselves out of their archaic behaviors into enlightenment--and yet instead, they chose isolation, blindness, and cruelty to those they did not understand (Feofan), demonstrating that "human potential" is not always synonymous with "greatness":

"More possibilities should have emerged here" could absolutely be read, if you choose to, as "Feofan shouldn't have faced the 'possibility' he did, being tortured by the miserable people of this place."

Even the innocent child that comes across Dottore conducting his experiment is not spared this critique:

Pantalone is the child who ran, who broke through this exact forest to slake his curiosity and hunger for the outside world, for something more than the limitations of the tiny village allotted to him. Pantalone is the one who responded to Dottore's monstrosity not with fear but with hope:

And thus, for Dottore, Feofan represents the "goodness" in human potential, the "infinite possibilities" that are worth admiring, rather than the mundane, mean-spirited, and backward limited "possibilities" chosen by other human beings.

Pantalone shines like gold in Dottore's eyes, is what I'm saying, enough that destroying those who would have bound him--destroying them with unique cruelty, in a truly violent manner--was something Zandik made into a personal task, from which he sallied home like a knight in shining bloody armor to deliver Feofan's happy ending personally, echoing the "reaching a warm home" line across both Pantalone's thoughts:

And Dottore's:

(Tiny aside here, but I'd even argue that there's a hint that all of this must have taken place relatively early in Pantalone and Dottore's partnership [though after Pantalone made harbinger at 30], because it was specifically different types of drugs and their effects on humans that Zandik was experimenting with at the time he met Feofan in his medical lab--at that time, Zandik was testing poisons that would be profitable for the Fatui, and here he was supposedly testing psychotropic drugs that would be profitable for the Fatui. The similarity of the research suggests these events didn't happen that far apart--at least they happened before Zandik was inspired enough to change the direction of his research again.)

All in all, the pictures from the artifact set come together to suggest an organized series of events:

Pantalone revealed his traumatic past to Dottore.

In response (okay, possibly), Dottore dredged up a truly horrific experiment that would result in not only death, but gruesome and violent death.

Dottore proposed this experiment to Pantalone, entirely by coincidence and not at all with intention, of course.

Pantalone immediately realized the potential (possibly the goal all along) and told Dottore where to find the people who tormented him.

Dottore went to Pantalone's hometown and obliterated them all, including the person who was likely Pantalone's mother, with extreme prejudice.

Dottore further smeared the reputation of the townspeople even after their deaths by disguising his experiment, claiming the townspeople had been cannibals all along and surely went crazy on their own long ago.

Despite his motion sickness, he hustled back to Snezhnograd not to review the results of his experiment or even rest after his travels, but to go straight to Pantalone at the opera, to tell him what had happened to all the people who wronged him so long ago.

Like, be still my heart??? Romance has a name, and its name is Dottore.

Yes, sure, I know--Dottore likely wouldn't have done all this if he didn't already have an experiment in mind, if there were no benefit in it for him. I'm not saying love magically made him an altruist who would have gone out and fought Pantalone's mother directly just to avenge his "friend," but I am saying there's enough here to suggest that it wasn't just out of convenience that Dottore did all this. Given his motion sickness alone, he could have chosen a closer location for the experiment and had a much easier time of it, right?

Yes, Dottore did this because it benefited himself, giving him a unique environment in which to conduct his experiment.

But simultaneously, this was a deeply personal effort that he undertook, knowing how much it would mean to Feofan.

The fact that Dottore's personal interests aligned exactly with an opportunity to avenge Pantalone isn't just a coincidence, it's the point, demonstrating perfectly how well these two characters' interests and desires fed into each other for centuries. It's not just "you aid me, I'll aid you"--it's "whenever I'm aiding you, it turns out that I'm also aiding myself, because we're that intertwined by our mutual choice to reject fate."

I think, more than anything, what this artifact series tells us is that Pantalone and Dottore are virtually identical in their habit of cloaking personal vulnerabilities behind carefully curated detachment, with Pantalone hiding his trauma behind talk of profit and value and Dottore distancing himself from his own experiences by reducing his human life to scientific objectivity.

Both of them laugh at their suffering to each other's faces, make light of it entirely... And then turn around and, disguising their actions as purely transactional mutual benefit, choose to fiercely defend each other, lashing out at injustices the other has faced both symbolically and literally, in a way that they never managed to protect themselves.

In before we find out that Pantalone had Dottore's childhood village burned to the ground, just calling it now.

It's truly a flavor that has to be savored.