flask’s hidey hole

1) Is the "cannibal" town mentioned in Capitano's artifact story the same town Dottore visited for his experiment?

Yes, obviously. Moving on. 😂

Okay, no, being more serious--we have several strong indicators that the town Capitano hears about in his artifact is, in fact, the same community Dottore visited for his experiment. First, the description of the land itself is identical: A completely remote place (in Capitano's story "secluded and harsh,") cut off from the rest of Snezhnaya by "dense forest" and "walls of ice/snow."

This isolation has led to a sort of "halt" to time and history in the town, with both the soldier in Capitano's artifact story and Dottore's insider information confirming that the townspeople still believe Snezhnaya is under the rule of the Belyi Tsar, something which they resent greatly:

(All translations used in this post are from obsessedfish on Twitter.)

Finally, Capitano's story, Dottore's story, and Pantalone's story all describe the town as being such a harsh climate that it's actually entirely devoid of animal life:

It's absolutely all the same place.

2) Is this town actually Pantalone's hometown?

Almost certainly.

In Pantalone's artifact story, he gives us a very literal description of what happened to him and how he escaped from his old home:

Key elements of this description including having to cross a dense forest under extreme snow/ice and wind. These are the exact same details given later in Dottore's description of the town:

We're also told that Dottore was informed about the town's isolated and backward nature before he ever arrived there, information that he must have received from the one who told him about the town in the first place--Pantalone, whose only reasonable way of knowing these things about such an isolated place was if he had personal experience with them.

Furthermore, Dottore's emphasis on the young boy he meets choosing not to escape the town through the forest (which could have led to a "more exciting life") and fearing monsters instead of embracing them, is obviously an intentional echo to Pantalone's exact opposite choices, indicating that we are supposed read this boy as a narrative foil to Pantalone--coming from the same town but choosing completely opposite "possibilities":

Finally, there's the "black-haired" woman who "isn't as old as she looks." There was no particular reason to specify this one person's hair color or age--in a way that Dottore does not do for any of the other villagers at all--except to give readers the possible implication that this may be Pantalone's mother.

Finally finally, we have the fact that the townspeople were religious and valued their faith:

It should be pretty clear by now that Pantalone's story revolves, in part, around the concept of religious trauma, describing himself as a believer who prayed to gods as a child, then who gave up on faith entirely and only started experiencing goodness in life after doing so. His name itself means "Manifestation of God," suggesting a religious family of origin. The faith exhibited by the people of this town tracks directly with Pantalone's complex relationship with religion.

The circlet's subtitle isn't "REMEMBER YOUR FAITH" for nothing, after all.

This place is pretty obviously meant to be Pantalone's hometown; I'm not sure how some people are drawing the conclusion that it's a totally unrelated place.

3) If it's Pantalone's hometown, and it's really that isolated, how did he end up with nobles (which the town was too poor to have)?

As I mentioned above, Pantalone's artifact story gives us an account which can be taken as a very clear and literal summary of what happened to him after he was sold to the debt collector (presumably a native of his town): He broke out of the debt collector's "decaying shackles" and made a run for it, traveling through the forest and ice that isolated his town to discover the mountains of Snezhnograd in the distance. We can tell he left the town before contacting any nobles because he also flat out tells us "He took the opportunity to leave that frozen land" before he ever mentions the "foster father."

From his escape of the isolated town, he appears to have dragged himself to Snezhnograd, and there was "adopted" by a quote-unquote foster father, who is described as "slovenly" or idle, making money without necessarily working for it. This suggests that the "foster father" who took him was a noble or at least noble-adjacent (either a fae noble or a human who profited from good connections/old money). From him, Pantalone says he learned tactics for profiting from interest, earning wealth for himself, which he thought would ingratiate him to the nobles--only to discover that money alone does not buy a guaranteed place in society, leading to him being tricked and entangled with the mafia, who eventually sold him to Dottore.

We have no indication from this text that the debt collector Feofan's mother sold him to is the same person as the "foster father" he describes next, and we have no indication in the text that the "foster father" or the nobles Pantalone associated with later ever lived in or even knew about his isolated hometown.

Pantalone simply ended up tied up in nobles' sociopolitics after leaving his town; there's no direct connection between the nobles and the isolated village in any of the artifact stories.

4) Did the town actually have a long history of cannibalism before Dottore arrived?

No.

In the politest way possible, I am begging people to grasp the concept of unreliable narrators and work to start discerning when characters have clear motivations to lie.

We have numerous indicators in the story that Pantalone's hometown had no history of cannibalism before Dottore arrived.

First, we're told that the town is so isolated, they have outright fear of living strangers. In a town of starving people who have to resort to cannibalism to survive, do you really think that a singular stranger all by himself would be a subject to fear, and not, you know, a brand-new source of food they could band together to kill and eat with zero guilt?

Furthermore, the young soldier's description of the town emphasizes that they didn't even have any decent weapons:

Would a town that routinely kills and hacks up people to eat them not have any weapons with which to do so?

And realistically, how could an entire town maintain enough population to survive long-term if cannibalism was their primary means of eating? Humans take nine months to gestate and multiple years to grow to the point that we would have enough meat to feed any significant number of people; we are not in any way, shape, or form, a sustainable food source lol. Like, there is a REASON all those IRL shipwreck parties had only a handful of survivors after even one year of being stranded. You can't feed an isolated town with no external way to replenish their population on a routine of cannibalism.

And would a town that has to resort to cannibalism to survive really sit down peacefully to a meal with a stranger and give him any of their precious scraps of food, rather than just killing him to avoid losing their own almost nonexistent resources?

(IF THE TOWN ROUTINELY ATE PEOPLE, WHY WOULDN'T PANTALONE'S MOTHER JUST KILL AND EAT HER UNRULY SON INSTEAD OF SELLING HIM?!)

Like, let's use some logic here. 😂

But even if we want to skip scientific logic, Dottore's artifact story does also explicitly spell out for us that the people of this town have a diet made of entirely plants. In the one meal that Dottore shares with his hosts, he explicitly tells us that the only meat in the dish was the meat he brought.

As Pantalone states in his own artifact story, the land around his hometown was so harsh that it was a place "even wild beasts wouldn't tread," but the townspeople didn't respond to that by becoming cannibals--they responded to the lack of hunting opportunities by becoming gatherers. The writers did not go out of their way to specify that the people were eating a "dinner of plants" for y'all to be out here going "They were all cannibals all along!" Come on now, lol.

This also means that we can confirm that Dottore's later statement, "One couldn't expect them to have any other food" is an obvious and blatant lie, because we know that Dottore already knew the townspeople had access to edible plants. He's lying to Capitano, and you're supposed to be able to tell that.

5) But why would Dottore lie and make up a whole history of cannibalism?

Uhhh because his "personal experiment" just got a whole bunch of Fatui officers killed and/or permanently traumatized, my dudes? 😭

And, in fact, he probably deliberately set the Fatui unit up for that in the first place because he wanted to test two different possible uses of his drug??

We already know, from Dottore's own thoughts, that this experiment of his was personal, not sanctioned by the Fatui:

We have no indication that he was encouraged to do this experiment by the Tsaritsa nor do we see him being given permission to do this by anyone. He was not operating under the banner of "Il Dottore" the Fatui harbinger in this case, and his line about having to be "more humane while serving as Dottore" should give you a massive hint as to why he would flat out lie to Capitano here--Dottore knows that "normal people" will consider what he did to the town to be "inhumane," and he can't let Capitano or the rest of the Fatui find out he was the cause of so many civilian and Fatui casualties without facing backlash.

He had to make up the story about cannibalism to cover his own tracks, plain and simple. (And we know this is true, because even if the townspeople were suffering some kind of human-version Mad Cow Disease from long-term cannibalism, that would mean that it took the townspeople years, if not decades, of exposure to get to the point of psychosis; how could the Fatui who had only just arrived in the town possibly experience any madness that quickly if the "long-term" story was true?)

I love him absolutely as much as any other Dottore fan, but we're reallyyyy not supposed to trust every word Dottore says, guys.

6) But maybe the cannibalism event was actually entirely separate from Dottore's "experiment" in the town? Maybe these two things happened in the same place, but at different times, so Dottore was not the cause of in the cannibalism?

Like maybe Dottore went to the town centuries in the past to cure their cannibalism psychosis and then just happened to come again for a totally different experiment years later?

But does that make any sense with his reaction to the town during his current experiment, where he only avoids "surprise" about the backwards mindset of the townspeople because Pantalone gave him info in advance, or how he spends an entire night in awe of the town's appearance and isolation, acting as he's never seen it before? If he'd already studied the town and their behaviors years earlier, why would he be "surprised" in the present?

And why would the townspeople still be trapped in their confusion about historical events if they'd already come into contact with the Fatui years prior?

It simply doesn't make sense for Dottore--or any of the Fatui--to have had two different experiences with this same isolated town.

And even if we reverse it (Dottore goes to the town years in the past, cannibalism event happens years later, entirely unrelated to his first experiment there), the behaviors don't make sense: A town of people who were successfully making it by on a diet of plants, who had peacefully met strangers from the outside world in the past, suddenly all decide to become "long-term" cannibals instead of just... leaving their town to avoid being eaten by each other?

I know people really want to see this artifact set as humanizing Dottore, but unfortunately, this just ain't it, chief.

From a storytelling standpoint, it simply wouldn't add up: What experiment with psychotropic drugs would Dottore even be conducting in this specific town if not making the town go crazy? Just some completely different experiment that we never get the details of?

Does that make narrative sense compared to the alternative here?

Trying to separate the two events (the cannibal attack and the experiment Dottore was conducting) to claim they're unrelated makes entire statements from the story no longer make sense, particularly the part about pouring experimental chemicals into a water tank and then stating: "Given the right signals, it [a brain] can produce the predetermined response":

What "predetermined response" would Dottore even be talking about here if not the panic created by a psychotropic drug? Just some random response we never learn anything about? Would it really make logical sense for the writers to show us Dottore pouring chemicals into a water tank here, to explicitly tell he brought his own water supply to the town so he wouldn't have to drink the poisoned water, only to then go "Yeah, the tainted water in Capitano's story is actually completely unrelated to that. Total coincidence." Is that really reasonable from a decent storytelling standpoint?

Or the entire part about Dottore's psychotropic drug being "bidirectional," explicitly described as having the ability to cause frantic activity and to sedate:

What "bidirectional drug-induced mind control" would he mean here if his drug wasn't was what mind-controlled the townspeople into craziness? What "both" would Dottore even be talking about here if he only used his drug to cure, not cause, the original problem? If Dottore only arrived in the town after the fact, having nothing to do with the original cannibalism/rebellion, and only used his experimental drug to cure people instead of incite the original harm, then this entire line about the drug being "bidirectional" would literally make no sense and have no reason to be in the story.

Furthermore, if Dottore was the hero in this whole situation and not the cause of the cannibalistic attack, then his line about having to do "more humane" things as Dottore than he could while conducting personal experiments as Zandik would also no longer make any sense at all. Confirming again: Dottore said this line to himself because he knew what he did in the town was not humane and not okay even by the notoriously dodgy Fatui standards--if he had only done a good deed in the town and actually been the hero here, he wouldn't imply his own actions were inhumane.

But if you need more convincing, the writers also went out of their way to strongly imply that the "red wine bottle" recovered at the scene of the cannibal attack did not belong to a random Fatui member, but was, in fact, the exact same red bottle used by Dottore to pour his experimental chemical into the town's water supply:

Come on, "I hope you never know what was inside"? Yeah, that's very obviously the "turns people in psychotic cannibals" juice, my guys.

Capitano's story clarifies for the reader that the artifact set didn't belong to just the young soldier in the story who turned them over to Capitano. Instead, the set was simply a collection of items picked up at the scene of the cannibal attack, reunited in the counseling room. This is our obvious sign from the writers: We're supposed to notice parts of the artifact set may have from sources Capitano and the others did not know about. There was no reason for the writers to add this sentence specifying that the artifact set probably came from different people at the scene of the disaster, except to call attention to the bottle from the set actually belonging to Dottore, putting him at the scene of the crime.

Finally finally, we have the "four-eyed monster" comment:

Dottore states these exact words to the young boy he talks to on the night he pours his experimental drug into the water tank, and then the next thing you know, the panicked, psychotic townspeople are screaming those exact words at the Fatui who have come to calm them down.

Is it possible that the cannibal event happened in the past, Dottore just so happened to remember the random townspeople's words at that exact moment, and then he just so happened to repeat them to the child while conducting an entirely separate experiment that apparently was not designed to drive people crazy?

I guess?

But doesn't that seem like a biggg stretch compared to the more reasonable "Dottore told the boy the Fatui logo was a four-eyed monster, and that kid spread the word to the rest of the townspeople just as they all became hysterical due to the tainted water, which prompted them to then treat the arriving Fatui like monsters"?

That's just... a much more logical chain of events... right...?

tl;dr: The cannibal panic/rebellion and the experiment Dottore conducted in this town are not meant to be seen as disconnected, separate events.

7) But what's the "brain in the tank" line about? Is this literal?

I mean, it could be? I wouldn't put it past Dottore to use actual braincells in his psychotropic drugs? Prion disease is some crazy shit, soooo maybe?

But honestly, I'm just more inclined to think this was simply a particularly hard line to translate from Chinese to English, and a clearer English reading of this might be something like: "External devices aside, when it comes to human brains, there's not much difference between skulls and water tanks. Given the right input [i.e. this drug] both will produce the predetermined response [i.e. cause people to go crazy]."

Medically speaking, skulls are blood-lined tanks that our brains float around safely in, making them really not much different from a "water tank." And in this case, the result is the same: Whether you put a psychotropic drug directly into someone's skull or poison a water tank and let them take the drug into their bloodstream that way, the "predetermined response" on the humans will be the same.

I guess we'll see on this one when the official English translation is available?

8) But why did the Fatui soldiers only get a "mild" case of the psychosis compared to the townspeople if they were all exposed to the same psychotropic drug from the tainted water?

Because the Fatui didn't drink the water, they were just splashed with it:

We're also told that Dottore spent a total of ten days in the town, suggesting that the townspeople had multiple days to ingest the tainted water supply, while the Fatui responding to the scene appear to have been attacked during their very first conversation with the locals, giving them a much shorter period of exposure to the drug.

Interestingly, it appears possible that the cannibalism only started after the Fatui with their weapons arrived--the young survivor states that, at first, the townspeople just yelled at them and splashed them with the water, without more physical attacks. It was apparently only after the Fatui themselves were splashed and exposed to the tainted water that the situation descended into total madness.

Possibly says something about the Fatui there, doesn't it...

9) Did Pantalone know what was going to happen to his hometown? Was this an intentional act of revenge?

There's not really any other way to read this line:

Pantalone states that his giving Dottore the information about the location of the town was "fair trade" and that, more ominously, he "fully approved of it."

A "fair trade" implies that both parties gained something by the transaction. If Pantalone did not gain something by telling Dottore about his hometown and sending him there to conduct the cruel experiment, then there simply wouldn't be any "fair trade" for him to be mentioning here.

Pantalone knew that he would gain something from Dottore going to the isolated town to conduct the experiment--and that something almost has to be revenge, because Pantalone did not yet know if the experimental drug would work enough to have profitable applications. Dottore only deemed the experimental drug a success that could result in tangible profit after completing the experiment, but Pantalone called sharing the location of his hometown a "fair trade" long before then.

Pantalone knew what was about to happen to the people who tormented him. He "fully approved of it."

He sent Dottore there on purpose.

10) Is Glassestorre actually 45?!

To me this is honestly the funniest part of the whole thing, because I have seen sooooo many people saying that because Zandik wears glasses in this artifact story, it must somehow automatically mean Glassestorre is actually 45, not 25, and I am just soooo confused on where that conclusion is being drawn from lol.

The character in this artifact story is OG, completely human Zandik, not one of the Segments.

We know from his appearance at 85 years old that Zandik had a normal, completely human set of eyes all the way to the time of his death. Therefore, for OG, human Zandik at least, the infamous bird mask we saw him first wearing at Tatarasuna was, in fact, just a normal ass mask. One that could be taken off at any point in time. It wasn't glued to Zandik's face. He didn't have robot eyes under that mask like some of the Segments maybe--possibly--do.

So if he has normal eyes under the mask... Don't you think it's just more likely that at some point in his normal human life, OG Zandik spent so damn long squinting at computer screens and lab results in his spooky dark underground villain lairs that he messed up his eyesight and needed to start wearing glasses? And that the Fatui harbinger mask he wore was simply designed to include corrective lenses?

So... doesn't it just make a lot more sense that wearing the glasses doesn't indicate human Zandik was one particular age or matched one particular Segment, but simply that every time OG Zandik took "Dottore's" mask off, he needed to put back on his normal ass glasses?

The presence of glasses in this particular artifact story doesn't tell us anything about the exact age human Zandik was at when he needed to start wearing glasses.

It doesn't remotely confirm whether Glassestorre was 25 or 45.

All it tells us is that, in this particular story, Zandik forewent wearing "Dottore's" mask and instead simply wore his normal glasses, which makes perfect sense because he didn't go to the town as "Dottore"! He was undercover, going there personally as just "Zandik" to conduct his experiment in secrecy! He couldn't keep his involvement in the experiment a secret from Capitano and co. very easily if he had waltzed into the isolated town wearing his literal harbinger gear, now could he?

The presence of the glasses in this scene actually confirms only one thing: The monocle Zandik was wearing at 85 was not for show; he really did just need glasses for most of his life.

Whether that glasses-wearing started in his Dar Al Shifa 25-year-old days or decades later, at 45+ plus, this story does not say in the slightest, so I'm really not sure where people are getting the idea that we can figure out which Segment is which from it.

(As an aside, by the way, I'm personally still inclined to think Glassestorre is 25. In Omega's retelling of Zandik's past, he tells the story in chronological order, showing Glassestorre right after 18, and explicitly zeroing in on Glassestorre when talking about what Zandik did directly after being expelled from the Akademiya:

It makes absolutely no sense to think that the Segment shown on the screen as Omega says "I got expelled and joined the Fatui" is not, in fact, the 25-year-old Segment matching the age when, you know, Zandik got expelled from the Akademiya and joined the Fatui. 😂

And especially after reading this artifact set, where we confirm that OG Zandik thought of "Dottore" as a "role" he played, a mask he could put on and take off, doesn't it make wayyyy more sense for the "unmasked" Segments to be the ones from before Zandik "became Dottore"? We know that it wasn't until 35 that he really saw himself as "Il Dottore," so doesn't it just make way more sense from a symbolic perspective that Zandik "put on the mask" when he "became" Dottore at 35, and kept it on regularly all the way until he ceded the harbinger role to Omega in his old age, when he was able to become just "Zandik" again?

"But then what about Columbina's comment about 'looking young' to Sweatertorre in Lazzo?!"

I mean... don't you think it's just way more likely the devs didn't fully have Dottore's Segments' ages hammered out at that point? Considering we've already seen several retcons--Webttore has seemingly entirely disappeared, and the original ages given to the voice actors for the scene in Sumeru when the Segments are killed also don't perfectly match the ultimate list of Segments we were given--it seems far more likely to me that the devs simply didn't have the full roster of Dottore's Segments pinned down at the time Lazzo was storyboarded and then released, so at that moment, they just treated the Segment in the meeting as "younger than Omega" with no specific age, then later had to retcon that when they settled on the final designs and ages for the Segments in Nod-Krai's development cycle, when they needed to show Dottore's full(-ish) backstory on screen (and probably wanted the younger segment to look at least slightly closer to Webttore's design)?

Are we really going with the more convoluted "He started wearing a mask but then stopped for a while but then started again, and he grew his hair out but then cut it but then regrew it again!" instead of just the far more commonplace explanation: "Hoyo devs retcon shit all the time and just changed Sweatertorre's age after finalizing the designs post-Lazzo"? Really? 😭)

BUT ANYWAY! All this to say that the presence of glasses in this artifact story actually has no bearing at all on the debate of whether Glassestorre is 25 or 45.

Let the debate rage on, I guess.

Wait, but then how old was Dottore in this artifact story? When did this all take place?

We can actually, maybe, make a semi-rough estimate of that, because of three things: Pantalone is already a harbinger at the time this takes place, but Zandik does not have Segments yet, and finally, it's (possible) that Pantalone's human mother is still alive and "not that old."

Pantalone's story confirms that Pantalone is a harbinger at the time he tells Dottore about the town's location (Sandrone is listed in his story as a "colleague" and he has access to the private Fatui opera box mentioned later in Sandrone's animation). We know that Pantalone became a harbinger sometime between the ages of 26 and 30 (likely 30, as it's implied the "physical examination" he goes through at 30 is being submitted with other "forms," possibly indicating this is his clearance/setting up his new medical record when becoming a harbinger.)

There is either a 13 or 18 year age gap between Zandik and Feofan, depending on how you read the series of events in the Anomalous Tree Marrow medical records (I'm inclined to think it's supposed to be closer to 13 years, as the emphasis on 85 and 72 years of age later seems specific enough to be purposeful). This means that Zandik, at the time of the new artifact set, is minimum 43, but possibly older depending on how many years this takes place after Pantalone became a harbinger.

As an upward limit on Zandik's age in this story, we can tell Zandik almost certainly did not have Segments at this time (if he had, he would very likely have sent one of the Segments to conduct the experiment instead of suffering the long travel and motion sickness by going himself, or at least would have noted at the end of the story that he should have sent one of the Segments and spared himself the motion sickness). We don't have an official date for the creation of the Segments, but we do know that before Feofan was 38, no Segments were ever mentioned. The earliest appearance of the Segments is the medical record from when Feofan was 56 (Zandik 69 at the minimum).

So some time between 51 and 69 (minimum, plus five years to both numbers if you go for the bigger age gap), Zandik created his Segments. I'd guess it was around 69, as this would have allowed him to create all the Segments in one swoop.

Long story longer: Zandik is minimum 43 in the new artifact story, maximum 73. I'm much more inclined to say it was around the lower number, though, because if the black-haired woman who "looks older-than-she-actually-is" was supposed to be Pantalone's human mother, then this story series can't be that much after Pantalone became a harbinger.

It's statistically more likely that Zandik is in his 40s here, but take your pick, I guess lol!

Okay, okay, one last thing I wanted to say:

Did anyone else catch that the sedative Dottore gives Capitano in this artifact story is possibly connected to the sedative Capitano used to save the Natlanese in the Natlan archon quest?

In the Natlan archon quest, the Natlanese from the Collective of Plenty have been inflicted with abyssal corruption following the war with the abyss. This corruption causes them to see everyone around them as monsters and to start raving and attacking anyone who comes near (hmm, surprisingly familiar).

Capitano arrives and offers a "medicine" called the Draught of Lucidity, which has powerful sedative effects and can bring people back from their psychosis.

Soooo we have Capitano years ago pocketing a powerful sedative created by Dottore that cures people who are experiencing psychosis involving viewing others around them as enemies... only for Capitano to later encounter someone in Natlan experiencing psychosis that makes them attack everyone around them, and... whip out a powerful sedative from his pocket.

Could be a total coincidence, but like... get this man two nickels or something, I guess? 😂

If this is the same drug, by the way, that would mean that Dottore indirectly saved some of Natlan's abyssal war victims lol. His prediction that the drug would serve both good and bad ends definitely came true?

Anyway, PHEW! I'm done! Thank you for coming to my Tedtalk! This has scratched Star's tongue that's been itchy for the last two days, dying to discuss questions of reading comprehension in the Genshin fandom spaces lololol.

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.

Just when I thought Dottolone couldn't possibly be more canon, Hoyo goes and hits us with this

First off, THEY HAD A TRYST IN THE CONFERENCE ROOM. These two smug bastards got their freak on in that government-funded therapy office, and I will not be convinced otherwise. Pulcinella also knows exactly what they did (the line about wanting to run Pantalone through with a pike ahahaha). Excited for the deluge of fanwork the "counselling office" will to inspire. It's Sandrone at the opera house all over again

Doctor "stimulation-and sedation-each-had-their-applications" Zandik over here telling on himself. Mmhm, mmhm. I'm sure they do. I'm sure Pantalone is familiar with these applications too

AND MY FAVORITE PART "His doctor liked him to spend his leisure in public places." Are you kidding me???? I know this isn't an official translation, but I can't get over the wording. HIS Doctor. They should just make out on screen because it would be less gay than whatever they have going on here. Dottore is actually sending his husband out for little enrichment activities so he doesn't obliterate his lungs at his desk. I can't fucking stand them.

(I'm also terribly enamoured with all the reflections on the opera in Pantalone's artifact. It's EXACTLY what I imagined his and Snezhnaya's attitude toward tragedy to be. This idea that you can't have an easy story of love and forgiveness. It has to be steeped in suffering and hardship. There needs to be catharsis! I feel so giddy about all of it. )

I didn't think Pantalone's backstory could break my heart even more, but here we are. Poor Feofan has come so far. The way that he and Dottore casually share everything with each other, even the darkest parts of their souls. Siccing Dottore on his hometown behind the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability is a spectacularly exquisite act of vengeance on Pantalone's part. I expected nothing less, and I'm gnashing my teeth in anticipation of seeing more of this side of him.

All of this is delicious. It's everything I've ever wanted for this ship and more. Four years later, Hoyo has absolutely delivered. It genuinely feels as though they're looking at all the Dottolone art and fic and saying, "hmm, actually. I think they can do better. These two could still be gayer, more toxic, more codependent."