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Welcome to Thinking Through the Darkness, a LoreBySpec podcast with me, your host, Spec.
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This is a podcast where we talk through all of the pre-production that goes into making the theories that you see on the LoreBySpec channel and its associated channels.
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Let's get the shilling out of the way first. If you haven't gone and subscribed and liked and commented on the videos on LoreBySpec on the YouTube channel, please go ahead and do that now. That's one of the best ways that you can support me.
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This podcast is also available anywhere that you can find podcasts. So if you are listening, if you could like the podcast and maybe leave a little review, that does wonders for the algorithm on the podcast side, which really helps.
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So I'll be the first one to say that I'm a bit behind in terms of content, at least for the upcoming Should You Play series — and not necessarily because I'm running out of games to recommend, but we're starting to veer into the realm of more obscure than I can justify.
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And what I mean by that is: we fall into the pool of games that you will often find difficult to recommend, for themselves.
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And what I mean by that is — in the year of our Lord 2026, who on earth can recommend Disco Elysium? Purely for the fact that I don't believe, in general, that people would have the literacy to understand what Disco Elysium is trying to do.
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I think Disco Elysium is really important as a game. But I find it very hard to recommend, because it's a bit like how people take certain bodies of literature and feel like it's very right-wing, when that wasn't the intention of the writer at all.
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Like people looking at Fight Club and not seeing its undercurrents, and various other misinterpretations of literature.
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And I feel like Disco Elysium falls squarely into that sphere of — you might not understand the rhetoric that it's trying to talk about, if you don't have a fundamental opinion or knowledge about rhetoric, politics, sociology, workers' rights, unions,
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the beat of what a city is — but also things like recessions, and political climates, and understanding balances of power. How government bodies, or places like police, will in themselves have their own dogmas and their own worlds within them.
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If you can't understand, or take, or grasp that there is nuance in the world — if you are somebody who fundamentally thinks that things should be black and white, should be X, Y and Z — you are going to miss so much about what Disco Elysium is trying to tell you.
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Disco Elysium is also hard to recommend because of just how dense it is. It's very ready — it's very — you have to be willing to be in a frame of mind to read a lot with Disco Elysium.
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And the best analogy I can give for Disco Elysium is: think of the early Fallout games, but make it political. And if you understand what a statement that is — if you think of the original Fallout games, and I don't mean the newer 3D Bethesda ones, although they are inherently political —
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I mean the early ones. That blend of super-dark humour mixed with the realities on the ground of a civilisation that is just restarting itself.
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If you're not ready for heavy dialogue, intense thinking, understanding, also RPG mechanics and rolls of dice — you're not going to fare well with Disco Elysium.
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I'm somebody who found myself — even though Disco Elysium would be very much my jam — skipping through chunks of dialogue where internally, when Harry was going through his inner dialogues, just skipping through, because I get it, I get it. There's only so many times you can hammer the point home before it becomes annoying and repetitive about what it's trying to do.
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But this is meant to be reflective of somebody's inner struggle and inner torment. This is meant to be somebody who has irrevocably effed up in many ways.
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He's battling through not only his own addictions, but how he's torpedoed his career, his reputation — and this being his last hurrah, into working on a case that nobody wants to touch.
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Because it's in the epicentre of workers' rights and unions, and things being at such a tipping point that the powers that be need somebody who this needs to fall on, essentially.
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And that's ultimately what Disco Elysium is all about. It's very much a talking point about who we fail in society, why we fail them, why certain things are perceived to be one way when they should really be perceived another,
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how we interact with varying segments of our society, how we tend to pool ourselves into groups and communities that have a different worldview — that can, in many ways, ostracise us. From not just other communities and other people who we could find mutual ground with,
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but how we can just pigeonhole ourselves into places and themes and things that ultimately, when you think about it, don't resonate with what we want at all.
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But we have found ourselves in X community because we
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identify so heavily with our job, and what we do, and how we wish to be perceived — that that can often overwrite what we know is right. And how sometimes there aren't any good solutions to a problem.
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Sometimes you need to bend the rules. Sometimes you need to do things that would not be in your wheelhouse. Sometimes you have to give in to the existential — the things that are outside your control, the things that might be beyond your comprehension and understanding. That that in itself might be the answer to a component that you'll never be able to rationalise with other parties. And having to be okay with that.
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Disco Elysium is a game that asks a lot of you. It asks a lot of you intellectually. It asks a lot of you in terms of questioning where you stand, why you stand there,
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and — can you have empathy for the people standing who seemingly are opposite you? When the truth is, in reality, when there's two people standing opposite each other, they're very rarely the problem. It's normally a third person, or fourth, who that actually needs to be directed against.
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In modern politics, we seem to have this notion that it is a left or a right that is causing most of our issues, when in reality it's — well, likely neither. It is the people who are in power who are doing most of the harm.
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It is the companies who are polluting our air, not the individuals. It is the billionaires who avoid taxes. And it's the people who are using their overwhelming wealth and overwhelming power to accumulate more.
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And that makes it far less of a left or right division. But we never see outside of ourselves long enough to be like — hang on, we are not the primary issues here. We're just being positioned as such.
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And until we're able to take a step back to understand that our ops are not actually our ops, the sooner we'll actually be able to make some significant change, and hold the people accountable for what ends up trickling down to the rest of us.
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But if you don't have a primary understanding of these nuances of shifts of power — if you have not learned from history, if you have never taken a history class, if you have looked at current events and been like, this is brand new — I can promise you it isn't.
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We have had this in a shape and form for hundreds of years. Modern society as we know it is only a couple of hundred years old. We have instances of where all of this has played out before, just in different packages.
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And it nearly always comes down to the people who are not doing right by the power that they do have, and pooling within their own said units.
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I'd love to recommend Disco Elysium as being a crash course. But if you are so in-depth
in your own cohort that you see everyone else outside of you as other, I fear Disco Elysium will teach you the wrong lessons.
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I fear it will teach you more about confirming your own bias than it ever will in showcasing that your struggles are happening on the other side of the fence, in a different faction, too. The shape just might be a little bit different.
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And you need to have some sort of media literacy education, I suppose, might be more fundamental in being able to parse the themes that are happening in Disco Elysium, so that it has the impact that you hope it will have.
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Because it's a masterpiece. It's a masterpiece. And especially in its Director's Cut, where it has voice acting and music and stuff like that — it's a masterpiece. But it's also tremendously hard to recommend, because what it's attempting to do is very difficult.
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It is attempting to showcase significant nuance. It's attempting to show you that the detective that's running around, who you think is just one of the pigs and just one of the bad guys, is actually somebody who is deeply into disco culture,
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who has significant challenges with drugs and addiction, who is suffering very deeply from the loss of his relationships, who is being ostracised by his own unit and used as a scapegoat — but everyone else just sees him as being with the popo, as being one of them, when the truth of the matter is far more nuanced than that.
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Harry is deeply empathisable, to me. I mean — Harry is one of two things. You will either get him as a protagonist, or you will not.
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If you have never struggled with any sort of addiction, if you have never struggled with any sort of relationship difficulties, if you've never seen the impact of drugs and what that lifestyle has on a person, on a body —
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if you think that people who suffer from addictions are nothing but the scum of the earth, then you will not empathise with Harry as a protagonist.
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If you do not watch the withdrawal that happens with Harry, if you do not see him basically having a heart attack, if you fail the first few rolls at the start of the game — you will not empathise with Harry as a protagonist. And Disco Elysium is going to be a struggle for you in that case.
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Because they want to make him flawed. They want to make him endearing — and in a way that does not glorify alcohol dependence or drug abuse. But it does give you a very clear, and a very realistic, portrayal of just what happens in your head internally when it comes to having vices.
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If nobody has ever been through things like passive suicidal ideation, if people have never been addicted to things, if you've never had anxiety, if you've never had that overwhelming sense of — you look at something and your brain just goes in a completely off-the-wall direction. That gnawing in the back of your head as you are doing daily tasks.
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Disco Elysium has such a phenomenal way, art, making that so realistic, and making that so in-your-face and aggressive, as to what it's like having to endure something like that.
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Harry's brain tries to push him to lengths of licking whiskey off a table in order to get his fix. And things that would make most people be like — ooh — about, Disco Elysium has no qualms whatsoever in putting that front and centre, in your face.
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And never in a way that glorifies it. But in a way that makes it very clear just what happens in someone's brain.
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Disco Elysium, for me, I relate to hugely — because I suffer with schizoaffective disorder. So the way the voices pop in for the different parts of Harry's brain — be it his rhetoric, be it his savoir faire, be it his electrochemistry, be it all of these things that pop into his brain —
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I relate to, as someone who has to deal with that as the psychosis elements of things. I've absolutely had those versions of that inner dialogue. It's actually very relatable to me — that there is a version of me, and then there are the bits of my brain that fire in the same way that the inner dialogues in Disco Elysium point to.
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But it's meant to be overwhelming, because that's what Harry's going through. And I think that that would be quite off-putting for a lot of people. Because how can you think that that kind of mindset, just existing and walking around, is a survivable state of mind, right?
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If your brain is constantly pulling you in various directions — that's just how I feel, like. It's a very good description, at least for me, when I am going through a bad bout of what my brain looks like, or what my brain tries to tell me to do, of stuff that's completely off the wall.
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And I just fear that, in recommending people to play Disco Elysium, you are assuming a lot about them, right? You are assuming that people would get it, in many ways.
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I've recommended games that are obscure — like Wanderstop, like The Beginner's Guide. But the narrative in there, it takes a little digging, but it's not a huge amount of digging. It's still very — Davey does a great job in being able to make a complex topic very streamlined, and not diluted at the same time.
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Davey's work is naturally open to a lot of interpretation, and he welcomes it. Disco Elysium is like — this is the reality. You have to look at it dead in the face. There's no room for flinching in Disco Elysium, right?
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There's no being able to back up from Disco Elysium. You have to be both
feet in. You dive into the deep end of that swimming pool, and you trust that you will get out at the end with a little bit more than how you entered.
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And if you're not prepared for that, if you don't want that, if you don't want a game that will make you think — because, let's be honest, the game is structured in a way that you are not meant to agree with every faction that you encounter. But it does ask you to empathise with them.
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And I think that's a level of nuance that a lot of people are not going to be able to have. A good differentiator that I like to put on this is — sometimes we have factions in games that are unempathisable.
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Caesar's Legion in New Vegas is a faction just for being a bad faction, right? They are very stereotypical in their approaches. They don't advocate for women and children — women and children are slaves. If you do not join their ranks, you are a slave too, or murdered. You are made an example out of. It is very beat or be beaten, in terms of culture.
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There's no redeemable angle for the Legion. They are conquering for the sake of conquering, and it makes them, as a unit, very one-note. Caesar and the Legate are titles that have been handed down — they are not one person, which makes their goals and objectives very one-note as a result.
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If you think — ultimately, if you're to zoom out of New Vegas — what is the point of the Legion conquering the West? There isn't much of one. Like, what's the end point, if the Legion conquer California and the NCR? What happens then? The answer is: not much.
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You either just keep expanding, or it starts to consume itself. Equally, the NCR want to expand, but in a very controlled way. But equally, that too, in time, if you expand too far beyond your borders, will consume itself.
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We see that in some endings — a true NCR ending, reaching as far as Goodsprings and Primm, and the taxes being too much for the normal civilians in these annexes, that they end up having to move on as a result, out of the territory.
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We also see it further on, in the Fallout TV show, of how Novac and other areas are abandoned. We don't see the NCR having much power at all, outside of the two people who we see who are NCR-aligned. Because growing without reason to becomes a detriment to the body. It has to be contained.
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And where this pulls back to Disco Elysium is that you don't get that layer of simplicity with Disco Elysium. It fundamentally can't.
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You either look at Cuno and Cuno's Essie and see them as just being degenerates, or you see them as being symptomatic of a society that has failed them.
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You look at the people who are fundamentally creating the strike, and you see that they too, themselves, are spinning the wheel for their own benefit too — not just for the people who they are, quote-unquote, advocating for.
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You see the realities of the people who are just in the day-to-day — of people who are either looking for work, or being stopped working, and who that attracts as a result. Some of the racists that show up to the rally, and how these things can all converge to make both sides, neither side, all sides, unempathetic.
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So it's hard to recommend Disco Elysium for the uninitiated, for the unopened, for the people who want things to be of a singular viewpoint.
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And that's a real shame. Because if people were more open, then maybe the need for games like Disco Elysium — maybe we wouldn't need them to exist in the first place, to try and teach us all of these fundamental, and equally impossible, lessons.
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This has been Thinking Through the Darkness, a LoreBySpec production, with me, Spec. Thank you so much for listening.
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I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with me today.
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Just as a reminder, don't forget — if you haven't followed the LoreBySpec YouTube channel, go ahead and subscribe. It's free there.
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And if you ever feel inclined to help me keep the lights on over here, head to Ko-fi, which is in my description, to help support the podcast.
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Once again, thank you all so very much for listening, and I will see you all next time.