The Lore of Disco Elysium (We Got The Book!) 

I take part in both 😎

These are two sides of the same coin, idealny united in one: spiritualism and materialism

Oh just reached the part where its speaken outright in the video hahaha

HARDCORE!!!!

Communism is human retardation given the form of ideas

Who knows! Kurvitz is the guy to cook something up, no matter if it's with the current ZA/UM or without.

All I know is that if he gets rights to the IP, I will throw money at a crowd fund if possible!

​@@JamrockHobohe got through alcoholism, failure of his dream (as a writer) and came back with a work of true art. I have faith in him

​@@phunkracyUn jour je serai de retour près de toi

I think Kurvitz and Rostov are cooking up something.

This is like warp jump in war hammer 40K

@@Mackenzie1942 I mean the pale almost sounds one-to-one like the warp. Unprepared people who travel through go insane, it's unreliable and even a slight deviation means you get lost and the paranormal way in which it interacts with "realspace" complete with the whole shivers skill, the pales version of psykers. The only discrepancy is that the pale just seems to be the warp without demons or warp-entities.

​@@erdalgucluplot twist the pale is slanesh cumjar

​@@migrivp2672so are you saying that slanesh cumed all over Elysium before became earth?

What's even more hardcore is that they've managed to discover a way through the Pale in the old days with just wooden ships and some poetry😂

dora in the dream says it might take 20 years to get over her, the bomb drops in 22 it's not impossible that from sadness this deep rebounds hardcore so hard to the core that saves the world

Thank you my friend. I will endeavor to reach enlightenment.

HOPE! UNITY! HAAAAAAARD-CORE!

I think it might be possible that it is a preventable apocalypse, but now knowing what Jamrock Hobo says about Kurvitz radicalism (and the overall feeling I get from the game really), I doubt his choice to save entire Elysium would be such a naive and heroic-fantasy type of solution.

@@brunoe1891 oh no, I don’t think that Harry would actually save Revachol super-hero style, I meant more that Harry has the ability to give people hope and slowly bring them around to his way of thinking and that that on a large scale could make change in Revachol

To the MEGA

It reminds me of when Rhetoric tells Harry to start building Communism. Same one-man vs all energy

@@Merkusethat mainly why if think that a superstar good cop combines best with a moralist alignment, bringing that upbeat, even hopeful, disco energy to a system with little hope to spare: moralism

I feel like a lot of the fromsoft games especially under Miyazaki have a lot to say about stagnation, family trauma, and the way the powerful are more petty and destructive than the powerless

@@benjaminjenkins2384 oh for sure, they’ve definitely got tons of literary merit but DE feels as though it’s specifically taking and building on a lot of the themes of contemporary capital-L literature (about addiction, religion, specific political ideals, etc) while FromSoft games are operating at like the archetypal level, if that makes any sense, in that they’re creating entirely new mythologies. Like If I were teaching Elden Ring, I feel like it would be in conjunction with other mythologies. (Not sure if it even matters lol)

It would be more under eastern canon and not western canon

​@@ile1237 That's an interesting take, how do you mean? I really hadn't thought of it fitting into eastern canon before, but I'm down to hear how!

That means a lot to me, thank you!

Wasnt that already said ingame

actual art degree

That would be probably the most beautiful thing I can imagine. All the powers in the world trembling in their bunkers, soldiers clutching their weapons waiting for the order to charge at...something. Heartfelt, serious screaming on every media channel about the end. Then when it finally hits all it turns out to be is a shift in economic models. the "stock market" crashes so hard no one can justify restarting it. I would like to imagine people would make the sane choice and move on, but some people would rather die in the past.

Enjoy the read!

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Thank you so much! The part about innocences being basically super-magpies is a bit of a speculation, but I guess that they are at least "normal" magpies, since they brought radically new concepts into the world without following the "natural" historical progression of things. Maybe a combination of normal magpie-ism and the charisma that we see in real-world religious leaders

@@JamrockHobo I always thought of the Innocences as progressive historical epochs being represented in a single person. The "Great Men of History". Both Hegel and Marx characterised Napoleon as one of those figures; historical progress embodied within a single man uprooting the decrepit aristocracies of Europe and imposing a rational, liberal, "meritocratic" framework. A man who set the terms for how European society would progress into the modern era long after his defeat. Lenin would also be our world's equivalent to an "innocence". The burst of communism into the world embodied within a single man, whose own drive and charisma pushed the Bolsheviks to seize the opportunity of 1917 when most of the party did not think the time was right. It was his model that defined how communism would exist as a historical force in the 20th century. We live in the shadows of these Innocences. I think a theme of Disco Elysium is the power of belief. And perhaps the "supernatural" seeming power of Dolores Dei and the other Innocences is nothing more than the fervent belief of their followers. Just as Harry's fervent belief in his own wife's power over him transformed her into Dolores Dei. She was to Harry what Dolores Dei was to humanity. The same could be said of our own "Innocences". Napoleon and Lenin couldn't really single-handedly do anything, but they existed almost as centres for people's beliefs. The belief in communism almost became the belief in Lenin. And maybe when Dolores was assassinated by her guard who said "we needed to figure this out ourselves!" it's reflecting our own reality that we have long ago abandoned our belief in our collective capacity to shape the world, by putting all of our faith in charismatic figures to guide and save us, who we assign our hope and trust to. Climate change, like the Pale, is a crisis for humanity but with no Innocence to guide us out of it. And if human belief is the only thing that can save us from them, maybe we need to make a new form of belief. Not around a person or God, as that was always an illusion masking that true power comes from collective will. As Stepan says, Communism is the religious belief in humanity's future.

​@@rohancooray194 I really wanted to add a dive into Hegel's conception of world spirit, especially since Revachol says in the Shivers check that they are a fragment of the world spirit. Maybe at a later time! Sola, the "anti-innocence" between Doloris Dei and Miro, kinda left humanity to themselves and they did in fact not figure it out by themselves. Instead, the moralintern took power and bombed the shit out of everyone. She is succeeded by Miro who draws his conclusions from a this era of human failure and decides to just end it all. If we get a next innocence it will again be an anti-innocence in some sense like you suggested, but not just the laid-back "do what you want" kind of Sola. Because time is running out. In our world just as in Elysium.

​@@JamrockHobo I'm a bit late, but thank you so much for your review of the book and how it connects so much of the weirder aspects of DE's lore together. Another moment related to the Innocences having access to the future and thus "inventing" concepts and technology before their time that comes up in the game is the assassination of Dolores Dei, with the assassin saying "We were supposed to come up with this ourselves!" (refering to the technology and religion Dei helped establish) This moment is never quite fully explained in the game and I came away from it assuming Dei was actually an alien, but I'm glad to finally know that it's because Dei was recieving information she wasn't even supposed to have from the future. Also, finding out Gary was actually right about something and his rant about the future wasn't just conspiratorial hogshit blew my mind.

That's such a nice thing to say. Thank you a lot! EDIT: Robert, please hit me up when you read this lol

😭❤ It's also a good book for non-book-persons, I recommend it :)

Ooh, dialogue from the island? Reminds me of Reverse Transmission, when the main character has a cop show going on her TV in the background of a scene- but that “cop show” is actually a clip from the final chapter where real cops are investigating HER involvement at the company. (Trying not to spoil specifics if you want to listen to RT, it’s an amazing radio drama, Alan Resnick voices a main character, it’s great)

And that both are running out of time. Note though that's its not necessarily an explicit metaphor by the game, just one that I find suiting to see why the pale is so menacing and "real"

The pale being a confirmed metaphor for climate change is pretty lame. It was much more interesting when I saw it as an all encompassing representation of modernity collapsing in on itself and a godless, anxious world - not something just seen in the news and used as a propoganda device by governments

If you lived in a northern-ish coastal setting (like me), you should read the book, because it plays exactly there. It really activated some childhood memories and made me nostalgic :)

@@JamrockHobo the first timeline of the book is saturated with nostalgia through and through. a first, innocent love, hanging around with your friends all day etc., i "felt" it too!

That means a lot, thank you!

THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN

I was thinking of getting sunles sea for it sounding similar to dredge and both just sound like interesting game premises. I’ll be sure to get it next time it goes on sale (:

@@apollo4294 sunless sea is a very good game as long as you are in the mood for a (1 part) brilliantly well written adventure book (1 part) very tense survival exploration boat game

The last game I played right before I played DE for the first time was Mask of The Rose (part of the FL universe). I saw the storytelling parallels too.

Haha. Feel free to come back after playing the game! Even though I must say that it doesn't spoil the main investigation, only other cool stuff that you shouldn't get spoiled about.

that game looks pretty cool

Oh, were you involved? Yes I loved it! I'm sorry for pronouncing it "Ibux" haha :) I thought it was Ibux so it sounded like "E-books" :D

​@@JamrockHobo allegedly I was involved (for legal purposes and because the book really does swallow you, so I am missing some memories about parts of the process). no worries on the typos and miss-spellings. I'm sure there are a number of them in the translation too. we're also preparing an updated version to release in a few weeks. among other things like spelling errors to be corrected, we got some great community feedback in a couple of places!

Haha, not *that* short! Thanks a lot!

This makes me really happy, and proud! Thank you! Also, I always appreciate a good rambling when you have the time for it :)

@@JamrockHobo I don't have a lot to add, but I might as well show my appreciation for such a good video and engage the algorithm at the same time. So, I dabble with post-apoc fiction, and continuously struggle with the worst aspects of the genre which you (and others in the comments) have so well pointed out. DE is an inspiration for me and your observations on Kurvitz' writing are things that, indeed, I have continued to think about for days after watching the vid. One particular highlight of your vid for me is the section about Half-Light's introduction to the Cop of the Apocalypse thought. I spent a long time trying to figure out what exactly it was trying to get at with some very poor attempts at translating Greek. Now it finally makes sense! Yay! I don't know how difficult that was but it's very much appreciated. Have you read the case file from Harry's ledger that got dropped from the game? It was called THE COLLAPSING TENEMENT. You can find it in a quick search probably. It is illustrative of the kind of weight that Harry carries with himself every day of his life, and one of the things he was probably trying to forget in getting rid of the ledger and drinking himself amnesiac. Also, boy, that case sure does bear a resemblance to a large number of other things, both from the game and real life! The other thing I want to do is drop a recommendation for Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which I recommend to basically anyone that has thoughts about apocalypse fiction beyond "wow, cool apocalypse!". The protagonist of the story is an empath. She feels what other people around her also feel. That means she cannot perform acts of violence, physical or otherwise. She is one of the rare genre protagonists that does *not* thrive in such a world. As a note of color, the apocalypse in question is not a large spectacle but simply the slow inevitable consequence of climate change, economic disparity, global pandemics, mass famines, gang violence, corporate slavery and a political strongman promising to make their country great again. It takes place in the far, far future of 2024. It was written in 1993. Anyway I'd love to see some of the things you ended up cutting from the script in future vids. Ta ta!

@@jmh8817 Thanks for the recommendation, I will soon have a look into the novel! As well as into the case file!

Thanks a lot, I appreciate it!❤

😭❤

And future content shall come!

😭❤

😭❤️

Thanks so much!

I recommend trying out the Ibex translation. The one that is pinned in the Reddit made me question my English reading skills too.

Thanks, I appreciate it! Yeah you often finish a game without knowing much about the world. I didn't even know what Elden Ring about until I saw a lore video haha

❤️😭