Sometimes, I Become Harrier du Bois

October 21th, 2024

Currently Feeling: Frazzled XO

Currently listening to: Jamie XX's new album!

Editor's note: this blog post was originally supposed to go up this time last September. The date on it was 9/18. Hahaha. However, this semester has not slowed down one bit, and I want to get this post up! So, finishing what I started a month late. Anyway.

Oh god.

You ever have one of those months that really tosses you through the ringer? And you want to lift your head up and breathe and just rest, but you've got to keep treading water because. You're in the deep end right now.

Anyway, I'm graduating this semester!

So for a bit more context (and yes, I will circle back to Disco, I'm going somewhere with this). In my home page, I mention that I'm working on my master's degree. Well baby, this is it. It's go time. It's hit the pavement. It's 'we're running eight hours a day, actually scratch that, ten or twelve hours a day'. Just like Harry du Bois. Just like Tequila Sunset.

(greasy transition, but more context first).

So this means. I moved. But of course, there always has to be a wrench in the plans. My car was in a no-fault accident during that process. Great, gotta take my car to the shop among everything else. Oh and also the semester starts and I'm TAing and also I'm STILL taking classes (rant aside, it's a lot. More than it should be, but we don't have time to get into all that).

And THEN also, there was a conference. A conference I signed up for back in the spring, knowing full well it would be during the second week of the semester but not really putting two and two together...oh and also, the weekend before the conference (which you are excited about, but oh god the pile of work in front of you), there is our department retreat. And you have a pile of summer experiments to analyze. And your thesis to write.

So that's been my life for the past three weeks (Editor's note: two months). But, enough about my life. There are good things among the storm, I promise, and though it's wrung it out of me, this conference is actually a really, really good thing for me. Let's talk about Disco Elysium

I referenced that I was closing in on the ending of this game two blog posts ago, but you should also check out my much more serious last post as well. I began this game in January, when one of my closest friends came to attend MagFest with me (a favorite con in the area of mine). We were chilling the night before the con, and I was like what if I started Disco and she was like 'do it'. So we built my Harry that night.

The first thing I was obsessed about, that everyone is obsessed about, is the fact that Harry has four major abilities: Intellect, Psyche, Phsyique and Motorics. But each ability has six different skills associated with them: things like Encyclopedia, Logic and Drama for Intellect. Empathy, Authority, Espirit du Corps (you're a cop, also) for Psyche. Physicial Instrument, Pain Threshold for Physique. Composure and Reaction Speed for Motorics. And that's just a sampling.

These skills act as your internal narration throughout the game, and guide you as you think and react to the world around you. There are a few oddballs among these skills -- Inland Empire acts as your conspiracy voice, to find the unusual path. Shivers was a skill that let the city speak to you, to find yourself inhabiting the buildings and allys of Martinaise, the setting of the story. Perception, of course, guided you if you were quick with motorics. Not all the skills were quite what you'd think.

And BOY do they loved to talk to you. Your skils voices will even get into arguments with each other, making for some truly hilarious moments.

I went with a Psyche build, my final build ended up being 3-4-3-2 (which, by the way--you can min max and have an ability up to 6 and a dump as low as 1), with motorics as my dump. I was a clumsy, sweaty, oblivious fool who was trying to feel his way out of his pit. Empathy was my signature skill. I wanted my Harry to be someone who was connecting with his world through the people around him. And also realizing his burgeoning queerness, but that came later.

From here on out, spoilers abound. If you want to play the game, do not read any further. But there are two eseential things to know: firstly, relatively early on in the game you will have an opportunity to take a bath. You may want to. I did. DO NOT TAKE A BATH. Secondly, your tie, Brattan! Listen to it. And make sure you have it on when you go to talk to Ruby.

Due to my ongoing playthrough of FFXIV, I actually did not get started truly with the game until this past summer, after my computer became no longer powerful enough to last FFXIV's Dawntrail update (problem fixed now, but what to do in the meantime?). And the thing about disco, is that. The game encapsulates you. It is so fun to roleplay as Harry. The game is a dialogue tree game with no combat, just skill checks and dialogue and clicking on items. Not unlike a more advanced Nancy Drew game, as I told my friend while I was playing. The game has more than a million words of dialogue. The final cut (recommended version) is voice acted, but it's still a TON of reading.

And I ate up every word.

Each character was like unboxing a rose, blooming with deeper and deeper layers. Martinaise is a city that is lived in, and Disco makes you fall in love. Makes you fall in love with your partner, Kim. Makes you fall in love with the people you are just trying to help, to make their lives a smidgen easier.

On day three, I met a woman who was standing in front of the bookstore. Her name is Billie Méjean, and she seemed gruff. I bullied her into telling me about her missing husband, who was a drunk. Most people in Revachol (the isola Martinase is in) are drunks. Or drug addicts. Poor as shit. Just getting by. The world you're in is a burnt out husk, bombed to pieces by the rest of the world for daring to become a Commune.

I of course, could not help her until a day later when the waterlock opened. This was around the time I had about 5 real in my pocket, and was currently running errands for the Union Leader, extremely corrupt but hilarious Evrart Claire. A day ago I had thrown up twice while trying to get the body hanging in the tree I had been tasked with investigating. The body had been in tree for two weeks while I was going on a bender. I think, at this point in the game, the body was inside a freezer that was shaped like an ice bear. I needed to be sure I had done a full autopsy.

Once you're across the waterlock, you meet some of the best characters, but man there ain't much there. A fishing villiage with a couple more drunks, an extremely beautiful fisherwoman, her kids, and an old lady. There are a few others scattered around the cold, muddy banks. Speedfreaks trying to start a club. Two entomologists looking for an insect cryptid. But not until you get to the docks do you find the body.

Billie Mejean's husband never made it home because he died. Slipped on the docks while he was drunk and brained himself.

So of course, I took the body back. Kim drove it back to the station after we ID'd it. The next morning, we went to Billie's apartment and delivered the news. This game has many, many gutting scenes. This one was probably the first that really got me. The conversation with Billie is heartbreaking. She really did love him, Victor. Everyone in this world has problems. Love is still so, so real. This was the sidequest that got me hooked, that made me fall in love with Maritaise, with all of the people just trying to live their goddamn lives in peace and find some modicum of happiness.

For those of you curious, I completed all of my Cuno sidequests. During the tribunal, I chose to throw the molotov cocktail made from the scarily intense blue alcohol I bought from some drunks from the Fishing Village, and my horrible tie. Somehow, I lived, and Kim lived (shocking, considering there was a shootoff). So did Titus, and so did Elizabeth. And...Cuno was my partner. That's right, for the final quest to the island, Cuno was my partner. And if you're extremely curious, I was dead set on getting a date with Lilienne, the gorgoeus fisher woman who spends her days picking nets. I personally interperet Harry as bisexual and latently in love with Kim (yes I did unlock my homosexual underground lore), the lesbian in me couldn't resist the allure of Lilienne. Kim was, of course, recovering in the hospital. I rolled up with my +8 suggestion and we took a stroll along the beach. Honestly, though I didn't think Harry and Lilienne would ever end up together, the date was sweet, given that during the island you hallucinate your own former lover as Dolores Dei abandoning you and moving on. It was a rather fitting moment then, that Lilienne and I took a stroll, and I borrowed her boat to face my past, and the past of Martinaise.

Unfortunately however, because of my foolish decision to take a bath, I missed out on one of the best scenes in the entire game: the Insulindian Phasmid conversation! Woe is me. I looked up the full conversation on youtube. "You can also eat it. If it's a leaf you can put it in your mouth. Yum yum. Or a reed."

And then there was Ruby. Oh, Ruby, my most wonderful instigator. The game's build of this character reveal is absolutely artful, the number of crumbs you gather about her building to an absolute storm. Talk about a character haunting the narrative. And yes, in my run Ruby managed to survive. I had to pass a 28% rhetoric red check to stop her from killing herself, and somehow succeeded. Boo yah. I signed up to play disco elysium knowing there was a delightful amount of yaoi (ahem, Harry x Kim forever). However, I did not know that I would get treated to an absolutely salacious yuri story as well. While I don't exactly think Ruby and Klassje make for the healthiest couple, I would be lying if I said I didn't absolutely love toxic yuri. And oh boy are these two deliciously toxic. Ruby, to me, is an extremely relatable lesbian. She dresses masc (I did not care for her in-game outfit and chose to believe she exclusively wore men's cut jeans and flannels), she's a radio nerd. She hangs out with a bunch of men, but sometimes hangs out in the village and keeps Isobel the washerwoman company. Obviously I was smitten with her, and of course she would be involved in an affair with Klassje.

Klassje. What a can of worms. In a side tangent, the same friend who recommended this game to me would sometimes watch Bojack Horseman when they were having a hard time of it, because "well, at least I'm not fucking up as hard as Bojack." This is how I feel about Klassje. My god this woman really did it to herself. But in my humble headcannon, I do believe that Klassje and Ruby both ran, and ended up running into each other again in Revachol, maybe in Jamrock, and perhaps decided to start over again, together. Maybe they kiss, maybe they don't. But that's what I'd like to think.

Now that I think about it, this game fits in with Bojack Horseman, and with the TV show the Good Place. Three things, interperetations if you will, about someone who really fucked up, putting their life back together. Slowly, and with many false starts. For, Klassje's life is no messier than my own (Harrier's). Harry literally begins the game waking up from a week-long bender with no memory of who he is and what he came to do. His own past haunting him to the point where he wants to drown himself and never wake up again. Things get quite dark once you begin learning about the leadup to your amnesia.

But. Importantly. No matter how many false starts, no matter how many fuckups, you just keep taking one step forward at a time. One step, every day. It gets easier. Every day, it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That's the hard part. But it gets easier.

Other random favorites: I was allll about the doomed commercial area. Plaisance's weird superstitions, the abandoned radio call in RPG , and of course, my favorite side character in the entire game: Neha, the Novelty Dicemaker. I asked her for an Amber die with a mosquito inside of it. Meeting Tiago in the church was also a high point for me, as was speaking with the Smoker on the Balcony. I helped Soona finished her game, and of course helped the speedfreaks (minus the speed lab) create their club. Disco really shines with its side characters, I wanted to talk to every single one.

And in case you're curious, the fanfic for disco is entirely dominated by Kim/Harry. Unsurprising. But, if you filter for the w/w only, things get WILD. Of course people have written Ruby/Klassje. But my personal favorite bitty, someone was on their galaxy brain level shit and wrote Dolores Dei/Irene la Navigator, which was a pull that not even I, seeker and purveyor of the finest yuri, saw coming. People also wrote Lilienne/Joyce, which made me giggle. On something like Day 4 or 5, Joyce changes her boat mooring from the Martinaise waterfront to the Fishing village, and when I talked to her she paused in talking and gave this like, extremely pointed pause directed at Lilienne, which absolutely sent me. Again, again, this is really in the weeds but I love to see what kinds of fic people are writing about a thing, especially weirdly obscure things. As someone who has written weirdly obscure fic themselves, it brings me great joy.

All in all, a thoroughlly enjoyable gaming experience. 10/10, would play again no hestiation. There were some things I missed out on, missed rolls, I forgot to do my vision quest unfortunately. But an absolute masterpiece of a game. If you like story based games, mysteries, communism, ttrpgs, impressionist art, or gay shit, I would recommend this game.

Though I do have blog plans for an in-depth read of The Haunting of Hill House (novel AND show and their interplay and my obsession with Eleanor Vance), and of course my now runnign Sleater-Kinney bit, I can't say it will come before too long unfortunately. Things are CRAAAAZY right now, so in the meantime. Happy Halloween, and I'll see you on the flip side. XOXO -- Storm