KeiKate

I love that, if left to his own devices, he ends up dead in a ditch. I love that this pasty menace of an elf is a walking disaster. I love that his brain produces one coherent thought per day, only to have it backfire on him later on. I love that his first choice in freedom is to unapologetically be the worst version of himself. Because it makes sense. 

That’s what abuse and trauma do to your brain—they fuck with it. 

And in Astarion’s defence, the man didn’t have to use his brain for nearly 200 years—it’s probably the very thing that kept him as alive as he can be; to survive 200 years of pure shit. 

And what use is his brain when his days and nights are dictated by someone else for as long as he can remember? When he has no say in what clothes he wears. When he doesn’t get to choose what or when to eat. When his body and mind aren’t his own, distorted by torture and hunger and self-loathing, forced to obey his vampiric master. Why use his brain when his survival depends exclusively on his abuser’s whims? 

Astarion could’ve come up with the most brilliant plan possible to escape Cazador or save a mark from their doom, but he never stood a chance of succeeding—which doesn’t mean that he didn’t get punished for trying (or even thinking about it) anyway.

Existing under Cazador was a game he couldn’t win, so why bother playing? 

And it’s only by chance that Astarion’s autonomy is returned to him literally overnight. It’s only natural that he’s overwhelmed by his newfound freedom. How is he expected to make sound decisions when he can’t even recall a time when he could do and say as he pleased? 

Of course Astarion is a walking disaster when he finds himself on that beach after the Nautiloid crash—and he’s fully aware of that! That’s why it’s so crucial for him to get on the player’s/other companion’s good side.

He’s self-aware enough to be so insecure about himself that he would rather trust a stranger’s capabilities than his own. 

Being a catastrophe of a person is part of Astarion’s character journey. Not only does he have to reclaim his personhood, he has to learn how to depend on his own brain again and I think that's such a painfully beautiful, important message Baldur’s Gate 3 sends. 

Because healing isn’t pretty. Nor is it easy.

You’re not alright the moment you’re free of whatever horrors you had to live through—and that’s ok! There’s time and room for you to adjust. 

And the moment Astarion feels more or less safe within his new environment, when he’s fed and treated like a person worthy of respect and consideration, his insights, skills and perception are crucial assets to the group.

Astarion knows his art and literature, and although his little remarks are unhinged at times, he's genuinely witty. Even his objections are, considering the circumstances, absolutely legitimate.

Personally, I love seeing Smooth Brain Astarion become more and more secure in his judgement the more Tav/other companions trust and support him.

I'm sorry but for one moment set all of the interpersonal conflicts aside and look at the situation very simply. The video's message is that the executives taking away the products of Kurvitz, Rostov and Hindpere's labor from them is somehow rendered morally grey by Kurvitz being hard to work with. You cannot possibly fall for this shit.

People are hard to work with sometimes. They're flaky or rude or just incompatible. But you cannot in any way use that to somehow call the situation grey. It's not a give and take situation. People's labor was stolen from them. The world they conjured for themselves for twenty years was stolen from them. What kind of people they were should literally be the last thing on anyone's mind.

Really as soon as the narrative becomes "the poor beleaguered employees were saved by the brave intervention of the executive firing their fellow employees and seizing the IP for themselves" you have to be more than a little bit skeptical.

Hindpere herself says it. Every single aside from the ownership dispute and the fact of the IP theft is just that. An aside.

The founders of ZA/UM, Kurvitz and Hindpere and Rostov and co, were passionate and eclectic and genuine and what they made was taken from them.

Jokes aside I think his character brought back to me some thoughts I thankfully worked on years ago, it ended up getting personal but I still think it's interesting. The chemistry in my brain is chronically fucked yet Im functional and productive (and spend a ton of money on my mental health.)

I also spent years in charge of kids, being the angry adult trying to keep some order even though I was a kid myself. Many times people would look at me and see an angry person who seemed okay because their grades were good. So their opinion on me wasn't based on my good results, just the moments where I wasn't likeable.

The struggle of being normal is hidden, but the bad moments you show are used as an example of your true "nature" even if you didn't hurt people.

And I'm surprised that people see the same in Jean and hate him for it, SPECIALLY because you have examples of real awful men in the game. I think many media shows unlikeable characters that have caused less harm than others but are hated anyways (Skyler my queen).

BUT they are usually less blunt about it than DE. The guy is TELLING you he is struggling and he is doing all the hard work and apologizing to keep you safe, he tells you everything you need to know about their relationship, it's in an unskippable scene!! And people still don't get it.

I got the impression that people don't understand what it means to be in a close relationship with an alcoholic. My mother is an alcoholic (Her relapses are periodic. Not so often, once every few months or so, but things are much better now) I live in the same apartment with her and when she doesn't drink alcohol, she is a good and kind person to whom I feel a lot of love and affection. She takes care of me, raised me alone, she has an extremely hard job, which is the reason why she drinks.

Nevertheless, it took me years of awareness to stop considering myself a terrible daughter. Because as soon as she drank, I started hating her. It's like a click, all empathy just turns off in relation to her. I have a very calm temperament, but if she tried to talk to me, I became irritable, angry and aggressive. She, in turn, when she was drunk, became incredibly intrusive, manipulative and hysterical.

When I first passed DE, I didn't know anything about Jean, my first acquaintance with him happened when I called the police station on the radio. And as soon as I heard his phrase about the fact that he was Harry's partner, I was covered with just a giant wave of sympathy for this man. Before that, I managed to find out what a violent drunk Harry was, how he lost his ID and weapon and suspected that the tire tracks at the hotel belonged to his car. And I immediately thought about how Jean would have to deal with this, deal with the consequences.

I also want to note that after some time, you stop taking seriously the behavior of drunk people, no matter how disturbing it may be. Whatever they say and do when drunk, you think that when they sober up, all their actions and statements (no matter how angry they make you) will simply not matter. They will forget about it, or pretend to forget it, and you will be the only one who will imprint how shitty and painful it all was. That's why you gradually develop indifference to all their statements, threats and insults. All you need from them in such a state that they would finally fall asleep and just get behind you. It becomes all the same to you that they get hurt because you have not been in control of the situation for a long time and it will be easier to deal with all this tomorrow in sobriety. This gives really terrifying episodes (later awareness when your head clears from all this) when you see that a drunk person has lost consciousness and you just... don't care. This has happened so many times already, all you can do is irritably check his pulse and drag the body out of the corridor to bed. It becomes routine. Oh, and if it still happens in public places, your stress level gets out by another 1000%, shame is added to all the helplessness, anger and irritation. That's what it means to be the one responsible for an alcoholic. And this is if you don't have your own mental illnesses or urgent things that need to be done. This is an elemental force that harms you, yourself and others. It ceases to be the person you love.

You want to hope for some kind of compensation, but you accept that you won't get it and it's easier to behave as usual. The more relapses happen, the more you lose hope that this will not happen again. You get used to being angry or indifferent, because that's the only way your brain knows how to cope with stress.. You can sympathize with a person, understand why he returns to the bottle, but all efforts turn into resentment when he is drunk again and breaks down on you.

And the way this is conveyed in Jean's behavior is simply incredible. The combination of all these conflicting emotions, pity, anger, distrust, fatigue, empathy, the desire to distance oneself and the desire to look after a person even to the detriment of oneself. You have a job and responsibilities, a personal life, but you feel responsible for him and have to come back. For me, it was so easy to read that at some point. It became a revelation to me that people see him as just an evil toxic person who doesn't care about Harry and his well-being.

Rostov and Kurvitz got ROASTED SO HARDDD damn... At first I thought it was an awful idea to make an "investigation" about a legal procedure that they are trying to keep quiet about, but seeing the interviews to the employees this is kinda good. The karma feels like a punch even for me and I'm not involved, it's painful. It's sad that they didn't notice or didn't care about the way they were affecting the people who were literally making their world come true.

And just wait for all the "communist/leftist" fans to attack these workers, the players who think they understand the game will get mad at the employees of ZA/UM.

Seize the means of production unless the product is the videogame they like.

This is unrelated to the deal about the shareholders, which needs to be solved and I keep my hopes up about it. But I'm crossing my fingers hoping these interviews won't be useful against R and K. They were going to happen anyways, but not in public and in this way ..

The perfect outcome would be R/K recovering the company, and then solving the issues with the employees. They can always employ new people but now DE is the child of many more people, if they aren't willing to share it they will destroy it themselves.

I think it's obvious how protective they are of their story and how inexperienced they were about managing a company, but they did fuck up in ways that felt disrespectful.

look. DE is a book in game format. that is THE first thing I tell people when someone asks me about it. it's not a game that one plays casually nor is it one that you can play when you aren't in a head space to not devote 100% of your brain power to reading and comprehending what it's giving you. it is ALSO a game that asks you to simply Be Uncomfortable so that it can have some very complicated conversations with you. it is a game that mirrors life and trusts you to understand that hey! nothing nothing NOTHING is black and white and everyone has their reasons. every single person is just as complicated as YOU are. it builds on itself from surface level to deep, complicated, messy and unresolved. what a beautiful thing!

it is one of those pieces of media that personally has changed my life but it's also one that I DON'T recommend to everyone because I legitimately don't think everyone can play it. I'm not trying to be a snob here I'm saying that some people just aren't in a head space (for many reasons btw) to be able to understand and take what it is trying to say. and that's ok! there have been many times when I myself have been presented with something where I have to go "Oh I'm not able to comprehend this right now. I'll come back to it." which is a waaaaay better choice than to read it, misinterpret it, then form an opinion that is uneducated and spread that because I didn't put in the time and effort to make sure I was coming at it correctly.

[whispering to you in a movie theater in between mouthfuls of salted caramel popcorn–other moviegoers who just want to watch we bought a zoo (2011) are glaring at us but i don’t care]

so in 1880 friedrich engels wrote a snappy little number called ‘socialism: utopian & scientific’. it’s a foundational marxist text and one i’d recommend to everybody–and i think some of the ideas in it are incorporated and built on in disco elysium in really interesting ways.

socialism: utopian & scientific does a few things. first, it lays out the ideas of the 18th century utopian socialists and explains the societal context in which they developed their ideas–and the core idea of the dialectic development of ideas. engels harshly critiques the enlightenment’s conception of the history of thought as a history of individual thinkers attempting to capture an eternal, immutable corpus of truth and justice–he describes this worldview thusly (emphasis mine):

What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.

and of course it jumped out to me playing disco elysium that this is exactly how human development works the world of elysium–innocences are singularly world-changing individuals who personally establish systems and ideologies within their lifetimes:

I see the shitshow that is unfolding on social media, and as someone who has known about this whole disaster for over half a year now I'd like to weigh in on it and provide some context for everyone who may not know the full story.

First off, Robert Kurvitz was fired at the end of last year. December 2021. As is strongly implied on Martin Luiga's twitter, the reason for this is greed (calling them "money men" and "crooks" and other similar statements for like, months now), and the executive producers, Tõnis Haavel (who has previously been tried for fraud) and Kaur Kender (who has previously been tried for... other things.) screwed everyone over. Kender provided funding for the game, as the majority of the original za/um cultural association did not have the financial means to.

The original za/um cultural association consisted of Robert Kurvitz, Jüri Saks, Martin Luiga, and Aleksander Rostov, originally founded in in 2009. The group, along with Argo Tuulik, played many different ttrpg campaigns over the years, several of them set in Revachol (centred around Precinct 41), and slowly built the world up from there. Kurvitz released the book The Sacred and Terrible Air, set 20 years after Disco Elysium, back in 2013* but the novel flopped, and it was decided that they would make a video game. Rostov has always been more than just an artist for Disco Elysium, as you can see from the dev threads he frequently updated promoting the game, as well as on his personal instagram, tumblr sketch blog, and several other accounts he used while the game was first gaining traction.

*The most notable credits for TSaTA are as follows:

Author: Robert Kurvitz, Editor: Martin Luiga, Cover Design: Aleksander Rostov, Worldbuilding: Robert Kurvitz, Martin Luiga, Kaspar Kalvet, Argo Tuulik. Helen Hindpere and Kaur Kender also appear in the credits.

I say this because some of the staff at za/um are now accusing fans of being unable to overcome the "auteur theory" of it all (ie. seeing Kurvitz as the singular creative mind behind it all) but the fact is that they have now lost not only the original ttrpg campaign's game master, The Sacred and Terrible Air's author, and Disco Elysium's lead writer/director (Kurvitz) but also their lead writer for the Final Cut's political vision quests (Hindpere) as well as their "co-founder" and art director/designer (Rostov). They are all CREATIVE LEADS, and not just well known only for their reputations/titles.

Luiga himself (who originally broke the news) was an Elysium world builder and provided much of the pale and innocence-related lore. He was also a part of the original tabletop campaigns (Chester McLaine is his player character!), but left midway through Disco Elysium's development due to creative differences (or as he says, "bad vibes" at the company). He is credited as an editor, but claims to have written a good chunk of the text in the game, including much of Joyce's dialogue about the pale. I have seen people discredit him due to his early departure, but Rostov also tweeted out confirming that he, along with Hindpere and Kurvitz were no longer at the company, with no additional comments. Rostov also posted a drawing on his twitter several months back depicting a man jerking off over an NDA, so take that as you will.

So what does this mean for the future?

Luiga has said that he has hope for the sequel, which could either mean that the script was finished or nearing completion before Kurvitz was fired (likely, and fits a pattern in the industry) and it's just a matter of finishing the actual game development aspect, or it may be that he has hope for the original za/um creatives to be able to re-acquire the IP.

I think it's worth pointing out that the original pitch for "Disco Elysium" was actually "The Return", and Disco Elysium was meant to be the smaller-scale prequel to introduce players to the world. Considering that the team was planning on this sequel all along, I think it's possible that a large amount of the "original" game was written years ago, so it's not all that far fetched to believe that the basic outline may be finished, or even that a large portion of the script already exists. Keep in mind that there are a large number of writers for both Disco Elysium and The Final Cut, and it may still be possible to work with a base that the others provided. We have no idea how far into development the sequel may be. Of course, proceeding without three key members of the original team is kind of a kick in the balls, and imo really quite disgusting, especially with how long the company has been keeping their departures secret (dishonesty is not a good look lmao), but it may still be canon, true to the authors' vision, and genuinely a good game in the end.

Argo Tuulik, original Elysium world builder and part of the old ttrpg campaigns, as well as a main writer on Disco Elysium, is still working at za/um. Justin Keenan, former writer on The Final Cut who wrote the political vision quests alongside Helen Hindpere, still works at za/um (and has been promoted to lead writer, according to his LinkedIn), as does Kaspar Tamsalu, who painted several character portraits, (René and Gaston) and worked as a concept artist on the original game. Plenty of the original creatives still remain. The sequel could very well still be in good hands at the development level, even if the higher ups are "crooked".

like, you’ve come to this shitty part of the city, where they don’t like cops (technically you don’t even really have jurisdiction, but everyone is trying to ignore that part) and you’re here explicitly to spoil the dick-measuring contest going on between your precinct and the precinct of the other cop on the case. 

however the other cop on the case, who is sent from the infamous Jamrock precinct, has been completely blowing you off for three days. you might assume that he’s trying to freeze you out and solve the case before you get there as part of the pissing contest between your precincts, right? WRONG. 

when you get there the case isn’t solved, the body is still in the tree, and the detective you’re meeting? he’s basically a walking talking hangover who has somehow (and you’re not sure if this is legit or not) forgotten literally everything. he doesn’t even know his name! when you shake his hand he either refuses to tell you one, tells you some bonkers name that is clearly not real, or says “it is not time yet” (what the FUCK does that mean???).

and then later on, to add insult to injury, this fucking idiot who rummages through the garbage like a starving racoon starts just…figuring everything out somehow? like, he somehow knew there was a bullet in the body? that the hanging was faked? how the actual fuck did this guy know that the victim was enjoying himself when he died? HOW??? you don’t believe in the paranormal or anything like that but now this big drunk fool has you questioning not only your own sanity but the very nature of reality.