#i played SmartCop so my playthrough was all fact dumping about the world

[s0ym1lk]

I finished Disco Elysium last night and have come to the conclusion that it is, ironically, about learning how to honor history while also letting it go.

Disco Elysium is set in a world drowning in history. You spend the whole time walking through a bombed-out city, exploring walls where people were lined up and shot, bunkers filled with propaganda, and monuments that were put up and torn down and put up again. The layers upon layers of history that you dig through in every encounter just overwhelms you.

Harry Du Bois is likewise drowning in his own personal history. When you start the game, you literally wake up in the 'ruins' of Harry's own personal country - the room he'd wrecked on his multi-day bender prior to starting the game. He clings to an outdated music style and an outdated celebrity that he models himself after. He worships his ex so much that his brain turns her into a god.

It's no surprise that the most joyful parts of the game are ones in which history is erased or made irrelevant. Harry's relationship with Kim, for example, has no history to it at all. While Kim knows that Harry is a self-destructive asshole, based on the aftermath of Harry's bender that he's able to witness, Kim also begins his relationship with Harry from a point where he's fundamentally a different person, who can and does make different choices than old Harry would havea. Every time Harry's past comes up, Kim is able to relate to him in a different and more positive way, simply because the old Harry and the new Harry are different people. Contrast this with Harry's interactions with his old partner Jean. Those interactions are really depressing, because they're so one-sided - Jean is left to shoulder all of the pain Harry caused to him, but when he tries to lash out, Harry doesn't understand. For example, when Jean tries to pull a mean prank by dressing up as the reporter Harry drove away, the joke goes completely over Harry's head, because Harry doesn't remember his past OR his old partner. Jean is stuck in a cycle of trauma and abuse that he's trying to perpetuate with his actions. Harry literally can't remember enough about himself to be a part of that anymore. That's why his relationship with Kim works so well in comparison - he can leave his past behind and become a better person who has healthier relationships.

Another place you see this quite well is in the storyline for the dance club at the church. The church itself reeks of history, and not in a good way. It's abandoned, worn-out, broken, and it has a giant stained-glass window of a woman who blanketed Elysium in terrible history and destroyed it, then convinced everyone that she was a saint. The history in that stained glass literally towers over you and forces you to cower beneath it. When you help the teens turn the church into a dance club, you disrupt all that. The power and sanctity of the church's history doesn't totally disappear, because the church is still there, but it fades into the background as it's overtaken by a new history. That new history extends to everyone present. It covers the teens, all of whom are either running from a bad past or leaving the people they were behind(you'll notice Disco Elysium has a lot of characters who have become different people than they used to be). It covers Harry, who has struggled to let go of the cool person he was in the days of disco, but ends up not just writing the new anodic music but busting a move to it. It covers Soona the programmer, who's trying to essentially come to terms with her history at Fortress Accident and move on from it. It's a really powerful image, to find the seed of the world's destruction in the church and to be concerned about that, but to then turn it into a bass track and dance to it joyfully anyway. Sure, the end of the world is coming. That kind of sucks. But in this joyful moment, who cares?

Look at Harry's former relationship with Dora. You spend all this time being triggered by things related to her, like chewing gum, the Dolores Dei references, and near the very end of the game finally have a dream where she turns into a god and leaves you. Harry is obviously an obsessive person. He obsesses about Dora and turns her into something larger than life, even though she tells him frankly that she's just a regular woman. Harry tries to cling to that history by getting her back. He gives her figurines that he remembered she would like. He tells her he's a better person and that they can make it work. He can try to kiss her. He can beg her not to go. She leaves anyway. Despite Harry's desperation, you can tell as the player that this is an unhealthy relationship, and that it's good that Dora left him. You can also see how her leaving triggered Harry's descent into brokenness, and how he never truly recovered from it because he couldn't let go. I don't think it's a coincidence that Harry only manages to face this history after he loses his memory. Some of that past had to be scraped away before he could face the truth and overcome it.

Finally, the reveal of the killer absolutely drives this point home. The whole game follows the traditional detective novel arc, where every detail is a Chekhov's gun leading to one big conclusion. The footprints, the eighth Hardie boy, the drugs, the smoker on the balcony, all of it. And the kicker is that it does all come together - but not in the way you want it to. Because most of the clues are smoke and mirrors. The killer is a sad old man you've never met before hiding on an island, clinging to (you guessed it!) the past. He's drowning in history and can't let go of it. If he feels totally irrelevant to the rest of the game, that's because he is. He doesn't matter! The world let go and moved on without him. The game strongly implies that it was this moving on, and not the old man's politics, that cause him to commit the murder. When he pulled the trigger, he wasn't really thinking about moralintern supremacy or being loyal to the communist revolution. He simply couldn't watch two people steeped in history choose to let it go and find happiness together in moving on. So he killed the merc in a fit of jealousy. Everything else you track down in the game is just people trying to mitigate the consequences of that murder by protecting each other.

History is important, and paying attention to it is how we learn from our mistakes. But what Disco Elysium doesn't want people to do is to get so obsessed with the past that we get stuck in it. You can't live in a bombed-out city or a trashed hotel room forever. You have to let it go.

You may ask, what about the pale, and the end of the world? To me, the game is literally manifesting existential dread as a parallel to the player's own understanding of our world and our limited existence. We know the world will end at some point. Elysium knows it literally - it's being slowly swallowed up bit by bit. We as the players know it metaphorically. We know that we get 100 years, give or take, to live. We know that the planet is slowly being destroyed. In a way, that's our history too. And so the game says to you, it doesn't matter. You should care, but don't get so caught up in caring that you forget to live. Ultimately it doesn't really matter that the world is ending. What matters is something smaller and more personal - that you care about the people around you, that you try to help where you can, and that you dance to anodic dance music while you have the chance.

#disco elysium #disco elysium spoilers #i don't know if people will agree with my conclusions but #if you do #it becomes very funny that so much of the game is then made totally irrelevant #i played SmartCop so my playthrough was all fact dumping about the world #even the politics gameplay becomes irrelevant #which i think fits the conclusion because the politics stuff is so satirical #to me it reads more as a criticism of people who care about that stuff than as a real analysis of it #the game essentially says 'every single one of these political philosophies hurt people #'isn't it time to let them go and start caring about something else?' #okay i could go forever but i'm done