reblog machine, basically

It’s easy to imagine how Daniil could be read as a failed male savior damning the women around him, but most critiques of him surprisingly don’t focus on this pattern. Attributions of misogyny instead typically arise from his condescending tone, distant demeanor, or isolated dialogue choices that come off contemptuous or paternalistic. Still, returning to the ‘trail’ in Pathologic Classic HD reveals a pattern of relationships far more ambivalent, sometimes intimate that complicates simplistic labels like ‘misogynist’. These dynamics frequently challenge patriarchal hierarchies and are essential to understanding the Bachelor's true nature; his undeniable flaws coexist with moments of sincere connection, even reverence. These are the contradictions my analysis hopes to understand differently. 

If you haven’t played Pathologic, bear in mind this opinion piece is riddled with spoilers and assumes familiarity. And take it with a grain of salt; the game has famously inspired countless interpretations, so there’s no telling you’ll arrive at the same conclusion as I did without playing it yourself. I can exclusively speak of my personal readings.

On the intelligentsia

While Bachelor Dankovsky may superficially resemble archetypal misogynists, he's possibly overdetermined by his semiotics, as his association with the Russian intelligentsia makes misogyny far less inherent to his character. Players often react to personae who embody familiar ideological types, particularly the ‘rationalist male academic’ associated with hubristic scientists and colonial explorers; Western Europe’s educated elite (like Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum) were usually fixed in mainstream power structures. This environment promoted elitism, entitlement, and the rise of “secular religions” like nationalism, social Darwinism, antisemitism, and imperialism. Many of their prominent men also openly embraced patriarchal values or excluded women from academic life (“Intelligentsia”). On the other hand, the Russian intelligentsia was not an arm of the state or cultural orthodoxy; it lay at the periphery of power, often deprived of political influence. Its members defined themselves by resisting existing hierarchies. As stated by the theory of Dr. Vitaly Tepikin, the sociological standard characteristics of the intelligentsia are:

modern-for-their-era ethical principles, moral sensitivity to their neighbor, understanding and gentleness in expression;

an independent character who speaks freely;

a critical attitude towards the government, and overt condemnation of injustice (“Intelligentsia”).

This means Dankovsky’s intellectual identity would be built on a historical convention that expected sensitivity, critique of authority, and willingness to embrace progressive reform rather than preserve patriarchal privilege. Unlike most of their Western counterparts, Russian radicals and thinkers of the nineteenth century were exceptionally feminist for their time (Greeman). They associated patriarchal family structures with the absolutism of the state, which made opposition to both a duty. Critics like Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and Dobroliubov advocated women’s liberation more passionately and consistently than almost any male radicals elsewhere in Europe, surpassing the likes of Engels and Bebel in dedication (Edmondson, 17). Thus, a haughty, aloof Russian scholar could still be ideologically affiliated with feminist causes.

Daniil forsakes the “masculine” duty of safeguarding material tradition by his willingness to sacrifice the Town to preserve the Polyhedron. The Town represents permanence: industrial, hierarchical, bound to the past. While arguing in his research article that conservatism and masculinity feed one another, Sağlık writes, “Trying to protect the patriarchal values that have been formed from the past to the present is the main reason for [conservative politics aiming to sustain masculinity]” (1). On the other hand, the Polyhedron’s imagery in the design documents (a “rose,” “cozy,” “growing”) codes it with traits historically ascribed to the female sex: generative, sheltering, and more organic than mechanical in spite of being engineered. This inexplicable accomplishment is the Town’s anima: the irrational part of the soul, the feminine part of a man’s personality. It is a womb that insulates children from disease, yet Daniil likens its destruction to lobotomization; he values the feminine-coded as the site of possibility, intellect, and future-building. Dankovsky chooses an impossibly delicate, law-defying womb over a sturdy, earthbound body; he recognizes the former as the most vital force worth defending at the cost of their settlement.

On player agency

The healers’ mercurial personalities present a quandary to every analyst, as their frameworks depend on the player’s decisions, which creates many Artemies, many Claras, and many Bachelors, if you played as the Bachelor at all. The predicament of the many Bachelors is why arguments cite as evidence optional dialogue without which one could easily complete every side task and main quest; these options nevertheless exist. Instead of asking, “What is this character like?” some players ask, “What can I make them do?” This can lead to treating the avatar as a direct extension of the player and the full range of player decisions becoming the character’s personality. As far as today’s topic is concerned, one could give equal weight to his sexist responses to women as one does his favorable responses. For my purposes, the aim of raising this point is not to argue that a feminist could never express sexist views; some fans gesture to Dankovsky’s weakening grip on sanity to explain outbursts, though the mundane reality is that many advocates of women’s rights nonetheless exhibit internalized misogyny. Still, his multiplicity can obscure from us who we’re analyzing.

Unlike the blank-canvas protagonists of other RPGs, I see Dankovsky as an authored subject with a textual core that exists sometimes in tension with player agency. Considering Pathologic had originally been drafted as a theatrical play, some wonder how each Healer might have looked in a passive medium without player input, what single state into which this superposition of states would collapse, what dialogue the actors ultimately run through. In a way, we already have that: Once the Bachelor becomes an NPC in the other two Routes, the writers are forced to settle on a characterization. Some qualities change between the two routes in which they’re NPCs, while the most essential stay the same. For example, the Haruspex is always tied to local traditions and kinship obligations while the Changeling always expresses a supernatural belief in her sense of moral authority beyond normal law.

As some side quests return, we watch how the Healers ultimately approach them beyond the players’ manipulation. For example, Artemy can spare Vera in his own Route, but he kills her in the Bachelor’s Route, which sheds light on his nature. Depending on the order, this can have different effects. Because I saved the Bachelor’s Route for last, and as a consequence of this consistency, I ended up naturally gravitating toward certain actions or dialogue options that ‘felt’ more than others like the Daniil I had spoken with so often by then. Anything outside of that seemed more like inconsequential surplus in the spirit of ‘player agency’ for the sake of keeping the story interactive. 

This is by no means criticism for a game adapted from the remnants of a theatrical play, and the problem isn’t even unique to Pathologic; superficially interactive narratives (in which one characterization fulfills a character or plot more soundly than a player’s attempts at branching out) was common for story-driven RPGs of the 1990s and early 2000s, even by long-established video game publishers. 

Take SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy VIII for example, in which you can spend the game pushing away the heroine or romancing her, but the hero regardless ends up consumed by love with her by the third act because it’s so integral to his story. All the player can effectively determine is whether that’s naturally foreshadowed or an unearned dime-switch. There are many cases in retro RPGs, but this jarring dissonance overriding player choices was one of the most glaring instances of writers’ indifference to inconsequential dialogue options. So, Dankovsky’s attitudes in the Haruspex and Changeling Route about female characters (of which I’ll subsequently specify) influenced the dialogue options toward them I found relevant to him in his own route. They often made options that expressed attitudes like “Man’s share is harder,” which are always accompanied by tolerant alternatives (my personal choices) and are seldom reinforced elsewhere across the routes, best understood as vestigial expressions of interactivity rather than textual assertions of character.

Of course, the ‘character-consistent dialogue’ is not always positive or friendly. If anything, had I played as the Bachelor first and chosen to treat him as an avatar of myself, I would’ve been indiscriminately diplomatic to everyone, yet the occasional meanness felt just as true to him as his compassion. Nonetheless, for the sake of consistency, I treated the Bachelor’s behavior in the Haruspex and Changeling Routes as a baseline for his canonical self, though I concede that weighing authored, NPC-Daniil moments more heavily because they’re fixed in the text is an interpretive choice. A pattern surfaced: a man whose gentleness and favoritism toward women surpassed that of his peers, sometimes to an almost servile degree. This selective empathy complicates claims of misogyny, if such terms even apply cleanly to someone so fragmented.

I chose the upcoming case studies from a narrow list of characters who don’t strictly address the Bachelor by his title (almost stripping away the prestige of its credentials) but neither do they prefer his surname. Instead, they use his given name and indicate that he grants these seven in particular a degree of personal intimacy, familiarity, or at least comfortability not privileged to the remaining 22 (Adherents and Queens). Of seven characters who know the Bachelor as just plain old ‘Daniil’, five are women, who alongside Clara will become the prime subjects of the following sections: Eva, Yulia, Lara, Maria, and Aglaya.

Continue reading in:

Eva Yahn

Yulia Lyruicheva

Lara Ravel

Clara Saburova

Maria Kaina

Gorkhonsk’s men

Aglaya Lilich

Conclusion

If misogyny implies disproportionate contempt or devaluation of women, then any such citation must account for the Bachelor’s extraordinary gentleness, sacrifice, political defiance, ceding authority, and intellectual deference in his relationships with them. His abrasiveness and cynicism are, conversely, most often reserved for the men he cannot seem to understand or stand beside. Granted, Daniil’s idealization of women isn’t innocent, either; it may indicate a different kind of gender bias that reverses traditional gradients without dismantling them. Call it selective empathy or covert misandry, but whatever it is, it makes the impulse to both glorify or condemn him difficult. That the women who make up so much of the emotional architecture of his Route and the mutual exchanges of power, empathy, or selfhood that come with it is rarely treated with the same psychological gravity as his conflict with other men. But Pathologic insists that its women are visionaries and architects of fate, and my opinion of Daniil had long soured until they endeared me again to the person he’s capable of becoming in their presence. Giving their dynamics less critical visibility subdues a story that’s designed to make us uncomfortable with the very idea of a straightforward protagonist. If we insist on interrogating Daniil’s ethics, we must also honor the characters who made him knowable at all. These are collaborators who challenge his epistemology, draw his loyalty past reason, and sometimes leave him diminished for having loved them.

References

“Dialogue trees from Pathologic.” Github Pages, GitHub, Inc., 12 Nov. 2025, https://pathologicdialogue.github.io/

“Intelligentsia.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 July 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia

Edmondson, Linda H., Feminism in Russia 1900–1917. 1981. University of London, Doctor of Philosophy. UCL, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1317593/1/255088.pdf

Greeman, Richard. “Victor Serge’s Russian Heritage: Part Two: Vera Podorovskaya and the Feminist Intelligentsia.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 53, no. 2, 2012, pp. 340–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41703136

Sağlık, Coşkun, The Reconstruction of Masculinity in Conservative Political Discourses*. 2024. Ankara University, Doctor of Sociology. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/3975083

Lesher, James, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield, eds. 2007. Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception. Hellenic Studies Series 22. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LesherJ_NailsD_SheffieldF_eds.Symposium_Interpretation_Reception.2007.

Hearne, Siobhán. “Masculinity and (Hetero)Sexuality in the Late Imperial Russian Military.” Slavic Review 83.1 (2024): 73–91. Web.

Freeman, Joreen. The BITCH Manfesto. 1969. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/bitch.htm

In terms of her relationships, Lara’s generosity is bound first and foremost by her love for a man: her militaristic father whose memory casts a shadow over her lifestyle and qualities. Daniil’s attention nevertheless gravitates away from her more visible connections to men we associate her with like Artemy, Rubin, or her father, toward her friendship with women. Within moments of meeting, he recognizes Maria Kaina’s respect for Lara and even follows up with Yulia about her (“Could you tell me about Lara?”). His fixation on her interpersonal dynamics with women as a way of deciphering her suggests a deeper interest in her emotional world than her ties to men. But for all the weight he places on Yulia’s analyses, the Bachelor remains undeterred by her warning and open disdain for Lara; his reluctance to take Yulia's word at face value and resistance of any external influence suggests he’s invested in preserving his warm opinion of Lara. 

Granted that she’s less cold and analytical than Yulia, he actively seeks Lara’s perspective and believes her character assessment over his instincts, even regarding her judgment of male colleagues he’s expected to count on. Though he and Artemy work closely and constantly in the Haruspex Route, the Bachelor refuses to offer him Rubin's location, but he entrusts Lara with assessing whether or not Artemy is entitled to know. Another male colleague he’s less sympathetic toward than to Lara is Alexander Block: a paradigm of masculine order, to whom Daniil owed his life just a few hours prior but for whom he shows no particular gratitude. Block embodies “masculine order” expected in the culture of late Imperial Russia. As Hearne explains, the military was central to shaping and standardizing masculinity in the empire, where valor, obedience, and stoic discipline were cultivated as universal male attributes in service to the state (Hearne 2024). Lara’s father, the man whose absence most defines her life, was molded precisely by a system that demanded men subordinate themselves to hierarchy and violence. Aglaya recognizes the potential Dankovsky had to become a man like General Block, and he himself was nearly conscripted into this mold: “My father was an officer. Until I enrolled into the university, he never abandoned the hope to make a military man out of me.” His resistance reveals an aversion to the army and a partiality instead toward the intelligentsia. The irony is that Lara seeks revenge against Block, the commander who executed her father, while Dankovsky, though raised under similar patriarchal pressure, resists both his father’s legacy and Block’s authority. Where the Town and the empire at large valorize military masculinity, Dankovsky exposes its brittleness through emotional outbursts and defiance of male superiors, which accentuates his affinity with Lara’s skepticism toward martial ideals. The game only offers the player an opportunity to object to her plans of assassinating the Commander out of Dankovsky’s concern for her safety. Rather than controlling her with  threats, his emotional appeal (“I need you alive” despite the fact that she isn’t one of his Adherents) suggests concern more personally chosen than out of obligation. And his caring in this moment doesn’t do away with her autonomy; she rebukes him for his solicitous disagreement. Alternatively, he wishes her luck then ensures Alexander Block treats the very woman making an attempt on his life with “utmost respect”.

Occasionally, Lara’s labor rehumanizes Daniil, who, through her, takes a step closer to realizing that rationality cannot save everybody, and not everybody wants to be saved. In the face of his mission and a strict sense of purpose, he invests care in her shelter project without being asked. Securing resources like shmowder or uncontaminated food is a matter of life or death in the midst of plague, and a drain on time Daniil could be spending on his primary mission to eradicate the disease, yet he diverts these resources to Lara’s shelter. The gesture is doubly costly: materially, because each item could have been used or bartered for essential supplies; and strategically, because it binds him to a project he considers idealistic ("Lara reads too much classic literature"). That he does this anyway because “Lara would be happy,” and blames himself if he fails denotes a willingness to prioritize a woman’s humanitarian vision over utilitarian calculus, even when the exchange rate is, by all appearances, irrational. When she becomes a self-chosen martyr notwithstanding her innocence (because someone must be and she’s willing to play the part as atonement), Daniil appeals to reason and logic to reject her self-condemnation as unproven theory. But he’s unable to entirely understand Lara’s motives or change her path, and he begins to see the limits of rationality in their collapsing Town as he says, “Thinking is no longer a commodity everyone can afford.” His behavior is not without contradiction, and the tension that occasionally rises between them despite his eagerness to help Lara is one manifestation of the tension between noble aspirations and the pragmatism of everyday survival.

For Lara, the Bachelor often breaks from his usual clinical professionalism and demonstrates a rare desire for personal closeness. He introduces himself by his first name, “Daniil,” not by his title, and in turn, Lara privately refers to herself as “Your Lara” while addressing him. Both hold status, so their social capital is built on perception, yet he behaves more openly with her. On the day he’s meant to take her blood test, he explicitly recognizes the effect of gender on witness testimony and asks questions meant to center her perspective to counteract those of the men who have spoken. Even then, he drops official business to hear her out on more poignant matters. At this point in the story, Lara has been living under a cloud of suspicion, so Daniil runs a blood test to determine whether she’s a plague carrier, and when the results come back negative, there’s a soft intimacy in the way he announces, “Now you know for sure that there's no reason for you to hide your eyes.” He admits failure and that his reasoning has misled him to Lara, who is neither a colleague nor subordinate but becomes a confidante.