proud mess

Tell me something, dead man.

if harry can ever quit his cop job and can ever get over his struggles with toxic masculinity then he would make a killer drag queen

KIM KITSURAGI - "Nice shoes, by the way. I like the green. Goes with the orange." He looks at your snakeskin shoes and smiles, suddenly.

All the DE doodles from this year

always thought this line was funny considering there’s Plenty of instances of kim calling harry his partner, and harry of course refers to kim as his partner all the time.

most of these i’d interpret as kim referring to him in a case-partner sense— i imagine that it’s a pretty common occurrence for non-partnered officers to pair up with each other on big cases considering kim mentioning that certain procedures (field autopsies, death notifications, etc) require two officers by RCM protocol.

but there’s a couple examples where it feels more… deliberate?

it intrigues me that the best example i could find of kim asserting him and harry’s partnership is from apologizing to him after the most egregious way you can fuck up your relationship to him in the game.

kim never ‘corrects’ harry anywhere else other than that convo with jean. kim seems to already be falling into viewing him and harry as official partners— only becoming self-conscious of it when suddenly faced with harry’s “actual” partner. his protest in front of jean feels like he’s correcting himself just as much as harry.

i dunno if i have any big conclusion i was trying to reach here, i just always found the line funny and even more telling when i looked up just how much he contradicts it everywhere else in-game. spongebob meme vc you likeee me don’t you lieutenant.

bonus result that doesn’t have anything to do with the rest really but i didn’t know you could tie at suzerainty and i’ve never seen this dialogue before. kim.

ok so i'm thinking more about kim and le retour and like

i think there is a real (and likely) possibility that kim never wholeheartedly embraces communism, even if he becomes favorably disposed to it because of harry.

kim has a tendency towards skepticism and a resistance to ideology (he was a moralist after all)

BUT the thing is, you can fight hard for a cause (and mean it!) even while doubting its means and/or its aims. and it's not like kim is skeptical of everything. he believes in the RCM. what happens when the aims of the RCM change (as is implied by the EDC check with pryce and gottlieb at the end of the game)? does that loyalty disappear?

and, even more importantly, whom do we know without a doubt kim believes in by the end of the game?

harry. he trusts and believes in harry implicitly to the point of death. if harry dives headfirst into le retour, kim is coming with him.

for any holdovers from the les mis fandom: enjolras: "you don't believe in anything." / grantaire: "i believe in you."

maybe that's enough? maybe, in a weird way, this kind of loyalty, this kind of love is also revolutionary? (i'm now thinking of dobreva and abadanaiz....steban says "[abadanaiz] was [dobreva's] partner and stabiliser, the planet who kept her in orbit")

doubt and skepticism are sometimes necessary to keep us from veering off course. this is part of what kim provides for harry. la revacholiere says that harry NEEDS kim to keep her on this earth. they are both imperfect, but they make each other better.

ideological purity is not possible. but love is (in this world and the next).

we need to get trant invited to a book club meeting so he can go full lefty dink talking vredefort school economic psychology with steban and ulixes. harry is like “trant i made some friends in martinaise that i think you’d like” and they go to a meeting together and steban and ulixes get on their high horse about the readings and the vocabulary etc but trant knows so much more than them. they spout a bunch of obfuscated nonsense jargon thinking it’ll lose trant but trant replies with a very precise and thorough critique of the logic that’s twice as complicated and by the end of the night their ongoing conversation is unintelligible to anyone but nilsen himself and trant has thoroughly earned their respect. they both are invited back and it becomes one of the only normal activities harry has ever regularly done with anyone from work. the one thing i can’t decide on is if it’s funnier if: a) harry gets completely lost amidst all the highly specialized language and concepts and just kinda sits there being overwhelmed, or b) harry shocks all of them by not only keeping up with but advancing his readings so that he manages some really insightful stuff on a topic trant thought he didn’t even know existed 

Elysium

Where do you think Luke Castellan ended up? Elysium, Asphodel, or The Fields of Punishment?

question for disco elysium ppl that hopefully has a spoiler-free answer (we are on day 3): is it possible to complete the game without ever finding out about the pale at all? has anyone done this, either on purpose or accidentally?

finally finished disco elysium yaaaaay

Mick Jagger in The Man from Elysium Fields