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This Subreddit/Channel is dedicated to thoughts spawned by playing Disco Elysium. Managed by @TheKindlyOne. Powered by @reddit2telegram.
"Cold and Heavy, like truth"
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This was magical
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If DE had an official beer, what type of Pale Ale would it be?
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⚀⚀ CRITICAL FAILURE
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CONCEPTUALIZATION [Trivial: Failure]
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This will henceforth be how I name all my RPG characters
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Revachol is a city. But what was the name of the country that Revachol was a part of? Was it like Rome,where the capital city and state share the same name?
Revachol couldn’t have been a city state; it’s described as being a formerly great and powerful nation.
I’m only partway through the game btw.
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True Love is Not Possible
One of the most profound themes in DE is the blind search and belief in something that does not exist. It’s exhibited in 3 story lines: Harry’s lost love, the cryptologists and the phasmid, and communism as a whole.
We never see Harry’s love, we’re only told it existed at some point, and the perfection of that love has been boiled down to mythos and a skewed narration of Harry’s inner qualities. We don’t even know if we really loved her even though Harry’s alcoholism insists he did. Nearly every single interaction (at least in my run through) was skewed— I saw the postcard through his perspective and I talked to Dora in his perspective via a dream (thus Dora being a medium for Harry). The only time I have gotten her side of the story was when you call her on the phone and she begs you to leave, and when Jean tells you she was fuckable. For all we know, we could’ve been a terribly abusive person to her. But nevertheless, Harry’s arc is this blind search for love and coming to terms that the love is left, no drug will replace this love, and it’s okay to get up and try again.
As for the cryptozoologists, this is more obvious. The zeal the couple has in searching for the phasmid, something everyone else is very wary and skeptical of, is fueled by passion and love. They believe in it so they will look for it. When Lena wavers towards the end of her quest, she wonders if she just faked a memory that caused her to fall in love, and you can comfort her and let her know that even if the memory was false, the love she felt was real. Or, even if the memory was false, the fact that she thought she saw something was enough proof to believe.
Communism, in DE, is clearly expressed as “love”. The student explains it as the belief in a better future, and a secular (Christian) idea in humanity’s goodwill— love. Communism can maybe be built, can maybe be created, can maybe be found, the same way love can built, or that a cryptid may be found. It is a people’s undying belief in it, to keep pursuing it after heartache or dead ends, after death and failure, that causes it to become real. Even if we didn’t talk to the phasmid, Lena merely believed in it which essentially made it real in her world, which led to real tangible changes in her life (meeting Morell).
In this sense, “revolution” is as natural to humanity as art or music or love. I think this is why the game includes graffiti and a character like Cindy. Finding the right words to paint, burning it, thinking of a new idea, again and again— making art is definitionally revolutionary.
The Deserter said one point: “you’re not a real communist, because all the real communists died fighting for communism.” It’s sort of a bitter joke about never being “left” enough or that the leftist purity test inevitably ends with death, that life itself is bourgeois. I also interpreted it as something much more hopeful. Life itself is resistance, life itself is pursuit of the immaculate, that death is the proof of that life. Heaven, after all, is the only classless, moneyless, stateless, society we know of.
This thus ties into the graffiti: TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD— FOR NEW PEOPLE. IT IS TOO LATE FOR US WREAK HAVOC ON THE MIDDLE CLASS. I saw people interpret this literally— that love is tainted by bourgeois ideas or influenced by capital. I think it’s less nihilistic, in fact, it’s rather hopeful. True love is communism— when people unite and believe in the immaculate and relentlessly pursue through the unknown to search for it, when they die or fail, they still keep going and believing for a better future, that is communism. It is saying that communism will not be achieved in this lifetime, but it might be eventually, because just like love, failure and revolution is innate to the human spirit. Just because it’s not guaranteed, doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing; we don’t go on every date expecting a long term relationship, yet after every heartbreak, we often find ourselves looking for love again (there is a thread here that connects this
So we're all thinking about the same thing here right?
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Is it horrific enough?
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The Reál: What's wrong with Revachol?
I have recently been reading up on monetary policy, a surprisingly little understood area of macroeconomics. In my recent playthrough of DiscoElysium, I noticed that there are repeated references to the monetary system under which Revachol and the wider world operate. This made me wonder, what do these monetary conditions say about the world of Revachol, and do they provide a hint towards Ravachol's evident poverty? I believe the answer is that they do. If you will indulge a pointless intellectual exercise, then allow me to explain.
What do we know about the monetary economics of Revachol? We know that it is part of the Real belt of countries in the Moralist International. We know that the Real is pegged to the pigment used to print it and thus essentially the same as the gold standard. There also seems to be a central bank in the form of the Institute of Price Stability (IPS). Of course, we cannot know the policies of the IPS, but we do get some hints from the Sunday Friend. He states that the purpose of sound economic policy is price stability, specifically, the IPS targets a 2% inflation rate. We can thus infer that the IPS operates on a single mandate, different than the dual mandate (inflation and employment) used by most central banks, but not unheard of. The European Central Bank seems a close approximation as it operates under a single inflation mandate and also controls a transnational currency. Furthermore, we know that during the economy boomed in the 30s and then there was a long depression in the 40s. Joyce mentions that it was at this time that QE was "discovered." "Yes. And quantitative easing. It was a market mirage, unfortunately." The Wiki suggests that QE was or caused the mirage, which seems unlikely. QE is an open market purchase of assets by a central bank with newly created money. It's meant to expand the money supply and increase inflation, and it was historically done in the face of bad economic conditions. It thus seems more probable that Joyce is talking about QE policies instituted after the start of the depression. The boom of the 30s and the depression of the 40s, plus the use of a commodity-backed currency, is obviously meant to evoke the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Depression also saw the first attempt at a policy of QE.
So what does this tell us? Luckily for us, decades of research have gone into the causes of the great depression, such that we now have a good idea as to its cause. We know that the cause was primarily monetary. In a commodity-backed currency system, money is pegged to a commodity and its value fluctuates with that commodity. If the price of the commodity rises, as occurred at the end of the 1920s when various governments tried to buy back the large amounts of gold they sold during WW1, then that causes deflation as the currency increases in value relative to the price index. Thus, persistent deflationary pressure and the expectation of future deflation acted to contract the money supply. The contracted money supply suppresses aggregate demand, causes unemployment, and suppresses wages. We must assume that a similar event has occurred in Revachol. That the Revacholian situation is similar is evident both by the obvious Great Depression parallel, but also by the mention of QE and the hint that the Real will be turned into a fiat currency. Both suggest that the Moralist powers that be are aware of the monetary causes of the depression.
Why haven't those wise Moralists over at the IPS done anything about this? The Sunday Friend suggests that price stability is the only goal of the IPS. His reasoning is that the IPS must avoid high consumer prices and prevent deflation, but his refusal to look the monetary disaster engulfing Revachol in the face is exasperating. Clearly, an expansionist monetary policy is needed, and this will necessarily require inflation. Inflation can be a problem, of course, but only in the short to medium term; in the long term, inflation is nominal (no one has their wages set based on prices from 40
the Expression...
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The Pale's influence is ever growing, and now it's spreading into our own world...
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"Now you may make your case"
I can't finish the game because I can't stop laughing!
My first option is "I also started a nightclub and a methamphetamine lab in a church".
I can't get past it. It's too funny. This is essentially a soft lock. There's no physical way I can read the next line.
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Portrait commissions I did for @Beautiful-Tension267
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I just started playing
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Your Jordans Are Fake
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Are mutton chops frowned upon?
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The names you can choose in a random text-based choice game I started playing out of boredom, it's really destiny!
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Saw this comment describing the Disco Elysium Mobile Port, on r/TopCharacterTropes
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He is truly a BRATAN
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thought to themes of addiction). “Wreaking havoc on the middle class” means to shake the status quo, the apolitical, the comfortable, to make them join in this search.
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Edit: I also wanted to talk about my point about Lena believing and thus forcing the phasmid into existence in her universe. It reminds me of Descartes “I think, therefore I am”. Existence hinges on thinking.
This is what the Pale is. We know the Pale is made from thoughts. The student says that revolution can stave off the expansion of the Pale; this implies that the Pale is made of old memories, outdated ideas and/or conservative (racist, misogynistic, fascist, capitalist/ bourgeois etc) thought that literally destroys the world. If we take Descartes’ point to be true, people still continually believe/think about regressive things and it manifests as the Pale. The Pale didn’t exist until humans came and thought and made it devour the world around it.
I wrote this comment on an older thread I really wanted to share about the solipsistic nature of DE:
“i found the reading of inframaterialist communism genuinely so interesting. i think it's totally possible, in the world of DE, to believe in communism so much you grow more crops. this is the world that also has the pale-- a literal nothingness that eats the world that is also built on memories, nostalgia, and beliefs. if there is such a force in a world, then anything is possible. if beliefs can consume matter, why can't they create matter? why can't they yield more crops?
i found myself rereading the book and trying to extrapolate it to a "satire" or absurdist POV of historical materialism/material reality, but i came up short. even in the real world, when we believe, there is more yield. the stock market is almost entirely stabilized through trust and belief that a company will do good. western society itself is held together by string, by debt and credit and hoping/assuming people will pay back what they owe. western society is held together by people holding each other hostage through debt, shame, or reputation. so, if there is a society held up by belief, why can't it be a communist/revolutionary belief? maybe not to the extent of breaking physics, but why not? theory is always just "why not?". the fact that humans even exist is a miracle and a manifestation of hope in all of spacetime, why can't communism exist, why can't communistic beliefs break and inform science?
it came off to me like the communist students and inframaterialism was a bit of a satire on leftist discourse, and most of it was written like a wink-wink joke, but it actually was very enlightening.”
We think how unattainable and absurd communism is, but look at how much of our world is held up solely by the belief in capitalism. The world we live in now is already absurd. We should not be afraid of a better future just because it is “absurd”. We should be used to the absurd.
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years ago). The IPS's overly hawkish monetary policy is reminiscent of the famous Lost Decade in Japan. In the 1990s (and through the 2000s), Japan had a policy of "price stability" (this is what gave me this idea). The policy of "Price Stability" meant that Japan had basically no appetite for inflation. Japan supposedly had a 2% inflation target, but practically targeted a number basically just above 0%. The result was an incredibly tight monetary policy that resulted in no growth to aggregate demand and so virtually no Real GDP growth and high unemployment. Many commentators have suggested that this is because the Bank of Japan felt that it was irresponsible to allow inflation (perhaps "immoral?"). A further connection to the Japanese situation is the use of QE. Japan's QE policy was famously unsuccessful (Google Japanese liquidity trap), but it was unsuccessful because Japan fought it with its other policy instruments. QE doesn't work if there is no inflation because people will just hold it as base money without spending or investing it.
Conclusion:
The biggest problem is obviously that the real is pegged to a commodity. The pigment standard is recreating the conditions of the Great Depression. Furthermore, the Moralintern is, due to fear of inflation, allowing the Revacholian depression to continue as a policy choice. The failure of the QE program shows that Revacholian financial markets do not believe that the Moralintern is serious about ending its contractionary monetary policy. The proposed shift to Fiat currency, mentioned by Joyce, could be a step in the right direction, but can we trust the Moralintern to realise that its hawkish monetary policy is doing more harm than good? I doubt it. Revachol must reform as an operative state and exit its monetary union with the Moralintern. That seems the only viable path to ending the depression.
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"The bourgeoisie are not human"
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Compilation of some of my fanarts from 2021-2022
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Found this shoe in the wild. Was Quebec a major influence on DE?
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"Detectives!"
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So, Are you? [Sorry for bad edition]
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