#have you ever wondered why you don't love dh2 as much? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

presiding · 5 months

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a doctor turned serial killer turned doctor again, an actor who paints, a gang leader, a mining baron, and a vice overseer walk into the room.

oh yeah and they lead karnaca now.

dishonored 2 is my fav game but i think it's mid, story-wise. here's why dh1 works and why dh2's overarching story sorta misses

tl;dr: story integration is critical for gameplay that offers audience payoff, but emily's personal arc from dishonor to honor is inconsistently demonstrated in the story, and is not an interactive part of the gameplay.

essay/long version under cut >

recap: what's dishonored's deal

[skip if you want] dh1 is an underdog story: corvo is an honorable man swept up in the machinations of a callous city, so his canonical ending being 'this child will rule over an empire' isn't about the child's rule but rather about corvo's reputation being restored in a more hopeful city, due to his & the player's rejection of the violent connotations of the tagline 'revenge solves everything.'

similarly, in dh1 DLCs, daud's story arc is that of an anti-hero: a dishonorable man who realises too late he has done irreparable harm. he sees the error of his ways after a single monumental death, and eventually a single life redeems him when he/the player stepped in to circumvent a terrible fate for a child, enabling her to rule unfettered.

daud & corvo come to a satisfying conclusion within the extent of their narrative arcs. it doesn't matter that a child on a throne isn't really a fix for a decaying empire - the player's actions throughout the city of dunwall was what mattered - and these stories could be framed as parables. in that sense, young emily as a ruler is a metaphor for a hopeful future for the city & empire.

dishonored 1 & its DLCs are also great examples of storytelling with perfectly integrated gameplay - you, the player, worked towards the outcome that redeemed the protagonists.

in your efforts to save young emily, you either achieved a good outcome (corvo) or prevented a worse outcome (daud).

bringing us to dh2 -

what's emily's arc

emily's arc is a coming of age: we're introduced to a reigning empress who questions her role & skillset ("am i the empress my mother wanted me to be?"), then her titular fall from grace occurs. from there, she learns to reject the violent, selfish connotations in 'take back whats yours' tagline (a la daud & corvo!) while rediscovering why her rule is critical to the empire.

emily's rule is no longer metaphorical, but:

a literal thing for audience assessment (is emily a good ruler?) AND

the crux of her storyline.

at the beginning of dh2, emily is introduced as a disengaged leader ("i wish i could just run away from all this;" "i dont know if whether i should sail to the opposite side of the world, or have everyone around me executed"). the antihero has a precedent for the dishonored series in daud, so it's not at first glance an issue*, however, the fact that emily has ruled poorly reframes corvo & daud's endings as being less than ideal (a moralistic retcon) *we could talk here about how ready an audience was in 2016 for a flawed women as a protagonist, hell, even in 2023,,,

throwback to the beginning of this essay when i said:

'this child will rule over an empire' isn't about the child's rule but rather about corvo's reputation

emily's story arc, unlike for daud & corvo, is literally about the quality of her rule. we're no longer in metaphor territory (ironic phrase): a parable-style ending doesn't work.

does emily become a good ruler

we know she becomes a good ruler because the game says so. it is narrated to the audience via a (literal) word of god in the space of 30 seconds, after the final boss. the outsider tells us that emily becomes known as Just & Clever.

drawing a distinction here - this narration is not the same as the player actively being involved.

the player does not throughout the game become aware that emily has made political allies. during the game, she doesn't talk to these characters about saving karnaca or being a better ruler to the empire (there's a few lines might imply it, but you need to be actively looking and being careful to wait for every voice line. it's a far cry from daud & corvo's fight to save emily being unmissable - even though daud doesn't know at the beginning that's the goal).

how does the game show it

you can coincidentally not kill most of your subjects and never be aware that emily is looking to restore karnaca by means of instating a council - it's never brought up. it *couldn't* be brought up, because that council serves under the fake duke (armando), who is the last person she speaks to before she leaves for dunwall. its her suggestion that he rules karnaca, but armando's condition is that he will rule as he sees fit.

to back up a bit, emily's canonical method of restoring karnaca is by banding together key allies - hypatia, stilton, [byrne &or paolo], pastor, under a council beneath the duke's body double. they are passionate people who would each individually make worthwhile advisors, but if you think about those characters sitting at a table trying to reach an agreement, it feels like an assortment of people that emily didn't kill along the way and doesn't feel organic (up to interpretation). it's not stated if emily herself banded this council together, but logically she must have (worth a mention these are mostly characters that you as the player had reasonable rationale to kill during a high chaos run, except pastor). the underlying concept may be that karnaca's power is returned to its people - which is interesting given that the monarchy remains and armando's decision is final.

this overarching solution could also be taken as a critique to dh1's 'put your kid on the throne,' which is another reason its worthwhile looking at how emily was shown to be a better leader. obviously my point isn't that her solution was bad given the circumstance, but i mean she has very little agency here in all. if emily was shown to be more controlling as a leader, this could be interpreted as character growth, but that's not the case.

coming of age

how do you learn & grow when you can't specify your failings? emily doesn't really touch on her shortcomings as an empress. she non-specifically worries delilah makes a better empress than her. it's hard to argue her worries are meaningful when someone good at their job will still worry when lives are in the balance.

emily's best 'aha' moments (eg. crack in the slab comment about gaining perspective) are consistently undercut by a conversation with sokolov or meagan afterwards in which she demonstrates she hasn't learned anything (before the grand palace, emily condemns 'toadies sucking up to me' and is reminded by meagan that she's part of the problem). the story is confused about what it's trying to say about emily's progress, and when she's meant to show progress, if she was meant to show any progress at all. it could be argued that emily was never even a bad ruler, she had just been fed misinformation about the problems in karnaca and been the victim of slander by her political enemies. the game doesn't make this clear - it's easier to argue that the opposite is true given that her allies only have criticism.

worth a mention here that the heart quotes about armando - a fake ruler - interestingly mirror emily's character concerns. "see how he sighs? his life is a gilded cage." but this essay is already long.

while corvo & daud spend their games (and through the gameplay) 'earning' their redemption, emily is being led by the NPCs around her to a conclusion and a fix for the political mess in karnaca: meagan & sokolov guide emily to her missions, and there's no recurring quest for emily to investigate possible allies. she is able to gather the people she hasn't killed to herself by manner of... post-game narration. during the game, she's primarily concerned with getting her throne back.

an easy fix: if there had been less dialogue & narrative focus on emily's failings perhaps the ending would have felt more satisfying. it has the feel of cut content, but i don't know what was cut to be able to comment on it.

so what went wrong?

i can't help but wonder if arkane were worried they would lose a certain demographic if corvo wasn't playable (may have been deemed too much of a risk - 2013 was a different time), and so they had to take out story elements that were unique to emily's growth as a character/empress, because the usual storyline/gameplay integration had to work for both characters - in other words, gameplay that made sense for both corvo & emily was prioritised before emily's story & character development. which is a silly problem to have in a game that added character voices for the sake of improving characterisation - maybe emily's tale would have felt more akin to a parable if she had less lines that betrayed her ignorance (to the disdain of those around her).

i wish more care had been taken with emily's story. most players will never really notice the large variety of different endings - they're not particularly satisfying in and of themselves.

it's ironic that one of Emily's complaints is about her father/protector being overbearing, when his (parallel universe) presence in the gameplay may be one of the reasons her own narrative arc falls flat.

what are the upsides here

changing tune from what didn't work - don't you think the concept is fantastic? it's a great idea overall - can you imagine if the coming of age storyline was better integrated into the game?

it's valuable to talk about the integration of story and gameplay and characterisation from a craft perspective. dh2 genuinely is my favourite game - it's beautiful, the imm-sim design philosophy makes the world a delight to explore, the combat gives endless creative options for tackling any fight, there is a far greater diversity of cast in an in-text canonical way. there's loads to love!

i love emily as a dodgy leader, to me it adds interesting dimensionality to the outsider's narrations - of course in dunwall there's never a neat happily ever after! emily, like the outsider, both work well as characters who hold ultimate power but aren't necessarily worthy of it - and this makes perfect sense for the dishonored universe's morality & critiques of power. however, within this grey area there's still plenty of room for a satisfying ending, which isn't what we ended up with, whatever the true reason for that was. and also, damn, emily's a marked assassin empress, if she can't lead well then who can?

while dh1 was criticised for its narrative simplicity, dh2 in contrast and in hindsight shows us that simplicity isn't so bad - there's satisfaction in gameplay achieves a clear, simple narrative goal.

#are you a dh1 enjoyer but less so a dh2 enjoyer?#have you ever wondered why you don't love dh2 as much?#here's 1.8k words that might articulate some of that.#light reading.i guess #this essay wasn't meant to cover everything - just the core of the plot and why its important to integrate story & gameplay #and to compare dh1 & 2 #dishonored #dishonored 2 #dishonored 2 spoilers #emily kaldwin #daud #corvo attano #this week i'm cracking things out of my drafts!#<333 don't get me started on doto.#some of this might be contentious. idk i try to live in a bubble #the meme version was easier to read i know i know #this essay would have been a lot longer had i integrated more references from the game #i know a few others have said this but imagine if they went a different way with emily #like she realises shes not fit for the job and maybe no one is and says fuck the system cause shes got a rebellious streak #and does a kickflip on the monarchy and institutes something else. i dont even care what. make it funny #and then for the sake of continuing the trend we spend dishonored 3 undoing the horrible leadership emily instates <3 #i think they really loved emily as a character. i FEEL the love i believe its there.but didn't think enough bout how she would be perceived #there's a good couple comments from baldur's gate 3 devs about how much work goes into writing women to account for sexism #there's more that i could have added to this essay but for brevity's (ha.ha) sake i'll leave it there #other textposts about this game that i see around tend to romanticise dishonoreds story a little more

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faiakishi · 5 years

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Well Delilah was a child when all the horrors happened to her. I don't think she was upset that it happened to her, just that people allowed it to happen. and suddenly she is supposed to care about the same people who built the world she suffered in. Fat chance. If you have been never taught empathy, you will never learn to show it.

Okay, back the fuck up. I wasn’t really planning to go on My Delilah Rant tonight, but I guess this is going down.

Shit’s under the cut because I know this is going to be long.

“Well, these horrible things happened to Delilah as a child” You’re absolutely right. It is horrible. You want to know who else had a shitty childhood? Oh, about half the people in the game.

Let’s look at Daud, for instance. Daud canonically A) is a product of rape, which resulted in B) his mother literally murdered his father, (justifiably, but still) and raised him as a single parent in a foreign country where she was treated like dirt, likely didn’t even know the language, and had to be brutal just to get by, which ended when C) he was kidnapped as a child by a man who exploited him and likely abused him, and it’s implied that Daud ended up snapping and killing him before being unleashed onto the world. Yeah. Not really great formative years. Not a whole lot of teaching him empathy and personal responsibility, was there?

Or Billie Lurk. The child of two broke drunks who didn’t give a shit about her. Her mother physically abused her and her biological father isn’t even mentioned aside from one line from the Heart, so Billie quite possibly may not even know who he was. She was a hungry, homeless kid who at fifteen watched as her first love was brutally murdered by an aristocrat for-what? Annoying them with her presence? They literally killed her because they fucking felt like it and laughed about it. And when Billie retaliated-because she knew they wouldn’t face any repercussions for killing a street girl, people like her were disposable, those boys were supposed to be her betters-she was hunted down like a dog and spent a year on the run, completely alone, because she’d be brought to face ‘justice’ for doing to Radanis Abele what he did to Deirdre. She was taken in by a man who taught her she had to cut throats and be merciless in order to get ahead, and that lagging behind would mean a knife in the ribs for people like them. She learned she had to be terrible if she wanted to survive. Also not great for learning how to be empathetic, but she sure still managed it.

“Oh but those are the bad guys” Yep. That’s intentional. I purposely did not mention the ‘good guys’ to give this comparison a more even contrast. Billie and Daud both did terrible, awful things. What sets them apart from Delilah is that they don’t try and excuse it with ‘my childhood!’ Their brutal childhoods definitely played a part in their formation but ultimately, they accept that they are responsible for the choices they made and understand that their actions had a negative impact. And they care about that. They feel guilty. They both refer to themselves as evil people and see themselves as beyond redemption, but still try to make up for their sins not because they want to feel better about themselves but because they feel like they should. They still have a functioning fucking moral compass, despite the ‘bad childhood’ experience. They aren’t trying to say ‘my actions were okay because x’. (and likewise, nobody in the fandom really should either-their actions weren’t excusable, that’s the point) They still have a sense of empathy. That doesn’t make them good people or even redeemable, but it makes them understandable.

Now let’s look at Delilah. For starters-Delilah is a narcissist. She literally meets every criteria of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (She’s also very obviously a sociopath and is probably host to multiple other mental disorders, but I’m just going to focus on the first one)Narcissists have, at best, a very warped sense of history, and are at worst delusional.

There’s absolutely 0 proof that Delilah is Euhorn Kaldwin’s daughter, for one. In fact, there’s evidence against it. She didn’t come forward to take the throne during the first game, the ideal time to come out as Euhorn’s long-lost second daughter-she doesn’t even say she’s Euhorn’s daughter until DH2! Her story is inconsistent. And she gets her father’s hair color wrong, which is weird; it’s kind of flimsy evidence but I’m pointing it out anyway.

But let’s assume that she is a Kaldwin, to make things simpler. That Euhorn Kaldwin knew she was his daughter, treated her like so and promised her shit, and that it all ended when she got in trouble for breaking a decoration and that was the sole reason her mother was fired and Euhorn Kaldwin decided to conveniently ignore the fact that his daughter and mistress were living on the streets. (yeah, there’s more to that story) At what point was that Jessamine’s fault? Jessamine was a literal fucking child. She didn’t lie with the intent of making Delilah homeless and getting her mother killed. She shouldn’t have lied, yeah, but she was a kid and didn’t understand. Delilah’s hatred of Jessamine is so strong that she plans to remove her daughter’s soul-her daughter, someone who wasn’t even born at the time and had nothing to do with it-and inhabit her body, and would have likely arranged to have Jessamine and Corvo murdered if Burrows hadn’t done so. She defaces her memorial and still rants about her even in the last mission of DH2-you know, after Jessamine is at peace. She’s been dead for fifteen years and has literally faded from existence, and Delilah still can’t get over her anger at her. For telling a lie. About forty years ago.

(also, I just want to point out, NPD on the level that Delilah displays it does not freaking happen overnight. Delilah was likely a child narcissist. So the whole “Daddy I pwoooomise I’ll be a good girl, wHaT dId I DooOOoO’ act-yeah, no, that’s complete bullshit, it did not happen like that. If it happened at all, she was using it as a manipulation tactic. I can tell you what I suspect happened but I know if I do someone will scream ‘you’re just making shit up’ and use it to discount my entire argument, so I’m just going to leave that bit out)

Alright, so we got that established. Delilah went through some shit. She’s angry about it. And that’s 100% understandable! Anyone would be mad!

The problem is what she did with that anger.

Delilah focused 100% on enacting pain to ‘make up’ for what happened to her as a kid. This included people like Jessamine, who her retribution against doesn’t, you know, really match the crime. But it also included people like Emily and Corvo, who had nothing to do with that. Included people like Billie and Daud, who were already fucked over by those same circumstances that fucked her over. Included the lower class who were actively being fucked over by those circumstances. They didn’t ‘build the world that made her suffer’. The world is making them suffer too!

I could understand if Delilah’s plan was ‘fire and brimstone to this because it caused me so much grief’, and then worked to build a better society where people like her didn’t get fucked over. I could understand if that was Delilah’s motivation to take the throne.

But it wasn’t. Delilah wanted the throne because it was hers. She’s the rightful Empress, she’s perfect and wonderful, she’s a literal god, don’t you see?! Why aren’t you worshipping her?!!

She did not give a single shit that this system existed. She did not care about all the people it crushed under its boot. She was angry because she was better than those people, and how dare they act like she isn’t!

“Buh-but she was never taught empathy!” We’ve already established that Delilah has no excuse not to have a sense of morality. People who survived much worse conditions managed to form one. And even if no one ever showed her kindness, it would only take a scrap of self-awareness to realize that she was making others suffer just as others made her. She just didn’t give a shit.

Now, let’s move onto Delilah as a ruler. She lets her coven run wild. They murder indiscriminately-rich folk, guards, peasants, doesn’t matter. They torment and kill because they enjoy it. She encourages Luca Abele to treat Serkonos as his personal piggyback and playground. She thinks it’s funny how he fucks people over. She never sees the irony of that. She’s incapable of seeing it because those people are just her subjects. Not even in the monarchic sense, she literally sees them as just objects to serve her.

The only person, by the way, that she doesn’t treat like a disposable commodity is Breanna Ashworth. She’s the only one Delilah seems to have any genuine respect and love for. (she still gets over her death quite quickly, which plays into her sociopathy, but that’s another argument) Even Luca Abele, she sees more as a pet than a lover and partner. She shows her coven some moderate respect, because they worship her indiscriminately, but even them she doesn’t seem to care about too terribly much. Her allies are nothing to her. She turns Ramsey to stone because-why? They let him out of the saferoom and his first action wasn’t to prostrate himself and thank her for gracing him with her attention? She does this to literally anyone who annoys her.

So all those people screaming “well Emily wasn’t a perfect Empress either” well, you don’t have to worry about the Empress daydreaming during court because Delilah had Parliament torched! Court isn’t held! Delilah kills anyone who ever even suggests she do her job, because Delilah has no actual interest in ruling. She just wants to take from Jessamine and be worshipped as the god she knows she is.

When Delilah got crushed under the boot of the Empire, she was not mad that it happened. She was mad because she wasn’t the one doing the crushing.

This all, by the way, isn’t me saying that Delilah is bad as a character. On the contrary, I think Delilah is a beautifully written character! It’s just that not every character is meant to be redeemable. That’s not a requirement of being a well-written villain. And that, ultimately, is my problem with Delilah’s depiction in DH2 and a lot of the fandom’s response to her. Because she isn’t redeemable. Trying to throw a sympathetic backstory at her in order to justify her actions just comes off as cheap, because it does not explain why she does what she did. It basically says she just did it all out of anger and hate, which is not really a sympathetic standpoint.

She’s an awful person who took joy in hurting others, not out of her own pain but because she enjoyed having the ability to cause it. She has no excuse for any of it. She doesn’t care to excuse it. In her mind, this is how things should be. She’s the god. Everyone else are just objects to orbit her. It’s a fantasy incompatible with reality. And in trying to make it a reality, she becomes the oppressor she always railed against. She never sees the irony of that.

That is why Delilah is a Bad Person.

#Anonymous #delilah copperspoon #empress delilah #dishonored #dishonored 2 #dh2 #if you read the entire thing i fucking applaud you

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