I Think One Of The Greatest Strengths In Disco Elysium's Writing Regarding The Worldbuilding Is That

I think one of the greatest strengths in Disco Elysium's writing regarding the worldbuilding is that any time a character does some exposition on just about anything, it's not merely a dictionary definition (as encyclopedia might tell it), but something that reflects on the speaker as much as it does on what's spoken about.

You can ask characters about even the simplest things, such as "What's a scab?", and the game doesn't tell you "A scab is a worker hired by companies when their normal employees are on strike." The game tells you what a scab is THROUGH the perspective of a Union man like Manana, and the truth becomes distorted through his perspective. So even if you know what a strike is before going into the game, it's STILL worth it to ask the scab leader "What's a strike?" because his response won't just tell you what a strike is, but perhaps even more importantly, what kind of man he is.

I think a trap that a lot of fiction taking place in a different world with a different history, whether it's fantasy, science fiction, or something noiresque like DE, is that the author "knows" what the objective truth is, and often uses a character to tell the objective truth to the audience. It ends up reading like a history textbook. The characters don't FEEL anything about the history; it's just a fact. The characters are almost unimpacted BY that history despite the elaboration happening at all telegraphing the history is, in fact, and important part of the story.

It's a really engaging way of writing dialogue, because the reader isn't just memorizing rote facts, but is trying to distinguish between which parts of the dialogue are a consequence of the speaker's bias, and which parts are the objective truth. It's a great tool to muddy the waters about what's actually good and bad. If two characters have differing opinions about a topic, who's right? Could both of these viewpoints be true at once? Is one party actively sowing misinformation? Has the truth been grossly distorted by the passage of time?

- I will be your eyes

- Then I will be your ears

Help, I can't take it anymore 😭

Love how Sam's big archives trauma was like:

"There is a skeleton inside of you"

but like

more ~evil~

randomly got the motivation to return to my tma spiderman au silliness. venom jon (someone said jenom and i’ve unable to get it out of my head ever since)

ok lore wise [beware tma spoilers] jon having the symbiote is equivalent to him becoming an avatar. he dies end of s3 era and oliver banks gives him the symbiote, and he relies on feeding the symbiote to survive. the symbiote itself isn’t sentient (there are instances of this in the comics so don’t come at me for that) he just has to feed it either trauma (s4 era) or straight up eat people (s5 era). martin is all for it because he’s a monster kisser

Kingfisher is 1920s occult mystery webcomic that updates weekly, about an amateur scholar and his roommate/bodyguard try to unravel the strange mysteries of the Kingfisher Box.  

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