no nuance december i think one of the reasons shipping daniil and artemy is such a monolith in the pathologic fanbase is that a lot of people around here are either actively or passively trying to silence and alienate people, especially poc, who are uncomfortable with and criticize the problems inherent to that ship. like, i did not expect my answer about how people need to think more critically about it to become my most controversial post, but without gaining many notes at all it’s fundamentally changed my relationship with the fandom on here.

i don’t post serious anon hate i get or talk about it at the time as a rule against giving idiots any attention but i literally got a couple death threats and racist messages from that post going around and i’ve found over the past couple days a fair number of blogs that rb daniil/artemy that have blocked me without any history between us, as well as losing about 10% of my followers, not to mention the very interesting lack of notes on that post compared to my other hot takes that are easier for some of y’all to agree with and don’t tell you to examine how you personally interact with content you like. not to mention the flood of support that daniil/artemy content (especially writing) gets, compared to significantly less reach for non shipping content and content featuring women (although this isnt as bad as most other fandoms i think). on the flip side, i’ve heard from several people lately who tell me they love pathologic but they don’t engage with it online or stay on the fringes because of how pervasive totally uncritical daniil/artemy content is and how hard it can be to get any engagement when you don’t participate in that.

what does this mean for you, a daniil/artemy shipper? the least you can do is spend a few minutes thinking about the racial dynamic of their relationship and acknowledge it in your brain. i would recommend tagging it when you post or reblog it, because people who arent comfortable with it are epic and your life would be enriched if they followed you. i personally have “burakhovsky” blacklisted and i cherish my mutuals who tag it. i also recommend going out of your way to support people who make content that is non ship or even just not that ship (even if it’s not my content you’re supporting lol) to encourage them to keep making stuff they like. for daniil enjoyers, i’ve been working through crostiina’s “tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis” on ao3, which is SO COOL so far even though i’m not actively a daniil/peter fan. idk dude just support valid criticisms of things you like and make space for people who are negatively affected by the serious problems with it.

The most important thing that happened in testing was the last question in the first press conference, allow me to set the scene:

last question of the press conference, lewis (having already answered a lifetime's worth of room temperature IQ questions) is asked if he'd sought out max??? to speak to him????

lewis' head immediately snaps to daniel, and says, in fluent universal eye language: "are? you? fucking? hearing? this?"

daniel is unfortunately of no help having already dissolved into giggles.

"I saw him come by, that's probably as close as we'll get"

the journalist presumably disintegrates into dust because I simply would not have the mental fortitude to live with this

All of AD characters except for Daniel & Pat are Himbos. Send tweet. We stan them and want to fuck them but they’d all say Da Vincky in real life

This question really had me pondering all night so I had no choice but to create a ranking:

Most to Least Himbo aka Likely to Say DaVinky

Sackler

Ben

Phillip

Clyde

Kylo

Flip

Toby

Charlie

Ronnie

Paterson

Dan

Paul

In the end, they ALL are himbos in their own way, and I think that’s really beautful

@thanatologue <- Celebrity thanatologist Daniel Davinky.

people have been in my inbox all day, saying, “but tumblr user ninakaina, what’s wrong with thinking artemy and daniil should kiss? even if daniil’s racist or classist or a bad person, why do you have to go out of your way to hate on burakhovsky content? but nina, it’s just a video game! it’s just a ship! it’s not that deep! we just want to enjoy pathologic in our own way!” and it made me realize that in my posts about burakhovsky i’ve forgotten to explain why you should care. i assumed we were all on the same page as far as what themes are harmful, but clearly we’re not.

i’m speaking from my own experience on this as a mixed asian (not indigenous) person, and i’m not going to pretend i’m the only one with these experiences or that mine are the worst in this genre. i’m also going to skip right past “they don’t like each other” and “shipping is the lamest way to enjoy pathologic” to what, to me, is the core of the issue. there are essentially two types of burakhovsky content excluding the actively, violently racist stuff people like threi make. one is where dankovsky’s racism is never addressed or is minimalized and played off as a joke, and the other is where his racism is, for lack of a better word, fixed. neither of these are tolerable to me.

the problem is that in real life, people do date people who are racist towards them. that behavior is most often tolerated because because the person facing it either thinks “it’s not that big a deal and we don’t have to talk about it” or “i can fix them”. unfortunately, it is a big deal and you can’t fix them, but people keep trying because we’re inundated with social pressures and media messages that tell us such a relationship is possible. so yes, in the best case scenario, even your “racism bad” hurt/comfort angst fanfiction where dankovsky, a violent racist, learns the error of his ways so he can have sex with an indigenous man is still contributing to a culture that makes people of color, especially young lgbt people of color, vulnerable. this is something that has to be pointed out and criticized whenever it appears. even if you enjoy it. 

i have never once said stop making burakhovsky content. i have said take a good look at yourself and think about what you’re doing, and the fact that so many people think that means “stop what you’re doing” makes me think they know deep down they're doing something they shouldn’t be. pathologic is a game about confronting racism, so let me enjoy it by doing so.

yo i saw your anti burakhovsky post and i personally haven't thought of it as problematic, could you explain why you think of it that way? this is an honest question, like i don't have a strong opinion on it either way, i just thought it was interesting :)

hi! i haven’t been online in a while so i didn’t see this (it was sent about 2 weeks ago). i’ll probably miss some beats here but bear with me. 

first of all, i’ve seen some really good posts about racism in the WAY burakhovsky is often portrayed in the patho fanbase, by relying on stereotypes of brown & indigenous men for artemy. many of those posts are by actual indigenous people, which i can’t find in the search function (surprise surprise) but i highly recommend them and if anyone can find them please do link them in the reblogs. 

secondly, daniil is racist. that’s basically one of the central aspects of his character. i went into a whole explanation of this but... play the game. either of them. you can also go though the pathologic wiki and look at item hover quotes for a good side-by-side comparison of daniil and artemy’s perspectives. daniil’s racist. he spends the whole game outright dismissing artemy’s race and culture and artemy himself due to his race and culture. granted, basically all the white people in pathologic are racist in one way or another, but daniil is definitely up there on the list, and it’s a lot more serious than many other characters’ microaggressions because. he literally tries to get them all killed. his view of the plague in classic is that it’s the fault of the kin culture for their religious practices, and his solution is to bury them all (townsfolk & kin). so. inherently. shipping him with a member of the kin, especially one who he actively dismisses in order to advance this agenda, is something that people should at least put more thought into.

people will come into my inbox and compare daniel to kyle ron and the onceler and expect it not to bring me great joy. we’re overlooking bbc sherlock here tho

genuinely curious, what if someone only ships burakhovsky from a patho1 perspective?

fyi i haven’t played classic in like 5 years but i’m trying to get through it again, i’m like halfway through the bachelor so i’m not 100% on the specifics of everything but that is the one where daniil says the plague comes from the kin’s “unsanitary” slaughtering practices and decides to kill everyone actively so i don’t feel positively about it. 

ship what you want i guess but it’s a good opportunity to put some real thought into the power dynamics (both individual and societal) that go into relationships and the way characters are interpreted in fandom

good work today everybody. thank you all for your anonymous daniil hate

what's one of your pet peeves in bur//da content? something creators could learn from?

thanks for the ask! i may not be the person to bring this to, as i don’t really read that stuff, and i assume you don’t mean the truly heinous content because uh. i think the people who make that aren’t gonna give a shit what anyone says about it. but there is one thing that comes to mind!

here’s an example. a few weeks ago i saw a “steppe wedding” (quoted caption) cosplay, which was based on someone else’s art. it was a really good cosplay and i could tell a lot of work went into it. one of the pictures showed artemy fastening a Charm (from p2) around daniil’s neck as part of the ceremony.

the problem is, we know what the charm means in steppe culture. here’s the touch quote from the p2 alpha: “One cannot draw good fortune, only craft it, like this hand-woven charm. Coil it around your wrist, and your touch will leave no prints, making it tough for evil spirits to chase you.” this has nothing to do with a wedding ceremony, and we can see that the charm is even being physically misused in the image (hung around the neck rather than coiled around the wrist). granted, that’s the description from the alpha, so the creators may not have seen it, but you can just search it up on the wiki, and even p2 itself establishes that the charm is just that, a lucky charm.

this reeks of orientalism. here, the charm serves as a hollow, de-contextualized signifier of a culture that the work claims to represent. it’s an item of spiritual significance being used as a purely aesthetic prop to give the scene a feeling of connection to a culture from which it is, in truth, completely alienated, and in particular to give it a feeling of exotic mysticism. to make this even clearer, in the original art, a simple strip of leather was used instead of the charm, which makes it seem like the charm was added as a purely stylistic element. this process of stripping cultural symbols of their cultural significance, to make them interchangeable and merely indexical of “culture” (a consumable and reproducible version thereof), is part of orientalism. 

similarly, another picture (and the original art the cosplay is based on), seems to show a handfasting ritual, which is i guess just what comes to mind when one thinks of non-christian weddings. in this, artemy’s hand is painted with what seems to be the steppe rune samn, which references the circle of life. i don’t see what connection this has to a wedding; maybe i’m just being shortsighted, but it seems like another empty signifier of “culture” in the same way that chinese characters are often stripped of their meaning by western audiences. yes, the kin are not real, but the cultures they’re based on are, and orientalism is, which is why this is just a pet peeve.

if any of the creators behind these images see this, i’m not attacking you personally at all. this is just the example that immediately comes to mind and that most clearly represents the stuff that annoys me. there is... a Lot. of burakhovsky marriage content in the world, and generally wedding ceremonies in art are a breeding ground for uncomfortably stylized or decontextualized representations of culture. i haven’t seen “steppe wedding” content outside of burakhovsky, probably just because that’s what’s popular, or i’d be irritated by that too. yes i know it’s not that deep, it’s just a video game, whatever. y’all asked for a pet peeve here’s a pet peeve.

broke: artemy x daniil

woke: artemy x bad grief

white pathologic fans: wouldn't it be great to ship the white racist with the indigenous moc?

HSJSJXMSM media enjoyers will see a male protagonist with dark hair and a male protagonist with blond hair, one of whom is very big and one of whom is very small, and all other aspects of plot or character fly out the window

You def don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but I gotta say the daniel stans about gonna make me block the whole tag like this is just kyle ron all over again. And the whole pair thing has issues, not just in and of itself, but of the way people portray it. Showcasing Artemy, an indigenous man, as some kind of “beast” that has to be tamed by the white daniel who is soft and uwu is just plain hideous, not to mention the common based-in-homophobia views plain in it (big tough masculine man with small soft feminine man), and don’t even mention the trans fetishization that has suddenly taken root. Any time someone says “let people enjoy things” they’re about to have the worst take of their life or say they enjoy something highly illegal.

No one is saying you can’t like the ship! Just don’t snap in half bending over backwards to defend it. Just acknowledge the flaws in it and challenge how it is often portrayed. Sorry for ranting that one blog annoying the life out of me

need you to know im laying in bed and as i read this i half sat up and hit my mattress because i could not agree more ❤️ this really is kyle ron all over again

the ways you guys stretch to defend dankovsky is so funny and i wanna say, first of all, another character being racist doesn’t make dankovsky less racist or vindicate his racism, and BLAMING his racism on maria is pretty rank. i wanna say second of all i think i was pretty clearly uncertain about the topic of why it’s “ok” for me to like maria and one thing i didn’t outright say and should have said is that yes, maria is a colonizer. every white person in pathologic is a colonizer. the kains are more of a colonizing force than most, and she benefits hugely from colonization. it doesn’t make dankovsky less of a colonizer, and i’m not shipping her with people of color. also when i say i like maria, it doesn’t mean i like the kains. i think if you look at my posts in good faith you can see that my favorite thing about maria is how she subverts expectations of her, eg. the expectation that she’s a faithful member of the kain family and will be just like her mother. also in p2, which is where i love her specifically, she says "even if we have to die to defend it, the town must live” so the way people are blaming her for dankovsky trying to get the town destroyed is something else for sure

once again ive never told anyone to stop shipping burda & i never will, im constantly just saying there should be more critical conversations about it, & if artemy/grief was more popular it would be good to have similar critical conversations about that. & what we’d probably ultimately realize is that daniil and grief are not the same (or even treated the same) at all and therefore the dynamics they present with artemy are practically incomparable. im pretty sure ive dug more into griefs racism in the past and its definitely something i think a lot about but if you try to frame “dont you think youre a hypocrite” as a good faith question im not gonna sit down and type out a thoughtful & fully sourced analysis for an hour or two

imagine saying “its so annoying when people criticize the overwhelming prevalence of one racist ship to the point that there is very little other content or discussion for the media in general, when they don’t even consume or recommend other content or make any of their own” in a response to my post recommending other content and mentioning that i make my own