u/JunkyardGamer

As someone who suffers from self-hatred a lot of the time, Disco Elysium truly captures how it feels. Everything feels above you, better than you, more important than you. Everything feels like it's fully capable of defeating you in some way somehow. But I also think the Ancient Reptilian Brain and the Limbic System show how self-hatred like this can really just toy with you, as it can make you delude yourself into hating yourself so dramatically that it's just an exaggeration. These two are essentially just bullies most of the time. It's one side of Harry bullying the other. They come up with these dramatic, poetic speeches to shit on Harry most of the time, and when you think about it you realise just how ridiculous they are, only covered in poetic cadence.

Like, these guys are absolutely right in reminding Harry of his problems and everything, but the self-hatred they make him experience is clearly a monumental exaggeration, and they actively want him to have low self-esteem instead of even trying to overcome it. The moment he tells them he wants to do something good or improve, they mock him every single time with absurd statements. He can literally just be taking a shit in the morning and Limbic System will say, "ooo the shit you just took is a metaphor for you ooo spooky!!!" and the Ancient Reptilian Brain will follow it up with, "The toilet water represents the oblivion that you, the piece of shit, will end up in eventually. FLUSH YOURSELF, HARRY!" Or he can be eating a bar of chocolate and they'll say, "The sweetness of this chocolate is so much more divine than anything you ever accomplished in your life, Harry boy". Doesn't Limbic System spookily try to gaslight Harry into thinking the sound that Kim's MC makes is some kind of abyss or death approaching and calling for him, when it's literally just the car's engine that wakes him up?! Like, it's just so fucking stupid when you really think about it and I love it. I actually found this quite relatable and I thought it was a wonderful representation of how even self-hatred can be melodramatic and delusional and not just happiness, and even though it's definitely very real, it really made me think about how much of my self-hatred is just an exaggeration and I should also have a bit of Volition. I actually found this quite similar to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly where he shifts between self-hatred and self-love drastically, it's just two extreme worlds colliding, all the while trying to balance politics and personal life and acknowledging the good and bad he does in everything. One moment, Harry is a superstar, the other these two shits try to convince him he's some utter failure who works in a shit factory and everything is some metaphor or comparison point for him in very abstract and elegantly phrased ways. I found this interpretation of this side of these two 'characters' pretty fascinating, funny, relatable and well-done.

Edit: Thanks to the replies, I actually stumbled upon a dialogue-finding tool for the game, and Evrart indeed acknowledges this.

I'm wondering if there's some kind of hidden detail in the game that acknowledges this other side of the bees vs. hornets analogy, can you bring this up with Joyce or is there a passive Encyclopedia check or something that tells you? Because this is what essentially happens in the tribunal. It's still not pretty at all, but it shows that using strength in numbers properly can indeed defend your metaphorical hive from metaphorical hornets to a good extent.

Edit: I might have been a bit over-excited while making this post, so I think I should change the sentiment to "my favourite" instead of "greatest ever in all of fiction" because as someone rightly pointed out, there's no way I could know that even if it were a reasonable thing to assume. I still do think he should be among the top of gaming though.

I'm sure many, many people in the fanbase believe this, but I've never actually come across a post or a statement which explicitly appreciates how *Harry* is genuinely one of the best-written characters of all time, not just Disco Elysium being overall a fantastic work of art. He absolutely deserves to be considered not only one of the all-time video game greats along with Doom Slayer, Kratos, Master Chief, Mario, Link, FromSoft characters etc, but one of the all-time greats of fictional media in general.

His character is just so incredibly deep. He's a fantastic anti-hero in terms of writing, but also one of the most human characters ever. His past full of human experiences, tragedy, despair, struggle, love, jobs, longing, competency, incompetency, professionalism, unprofessionalism, moral ambiguity, his spiral... and his present self (during the events of the game) being one of the most engaging player-controlled characters in gaming. He's just so deeply human while also having some curious abilities that add a lot of mystery to him. We don't truly know him or his past because he alternates between being reliable and unreliable in recalling experiences, but we can make enough inferences over the course of the game to understand him, to empathize with him and also to scrutinize him more and more. His thoughts and especially his 24 skills are just fantastic devices that need no introduction; they're incredibly immersive, especially the latter, having conflicts, memorable lines, multifaceted behaviours and so on. Like, he's just a wonderful character all around with multidimensional personality and story, with his actions and his place in the world of Elysium also being explored amazingly.

I recently finished watching Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul for the first time. They immediately became two of my favourite things ever, and BCS is honestly even better than BB. I will easily put Harry on the same level, if not even higher than a character like Jimmy McGill in terms of depth and quality, honestly, and that's saying a lot. Watching BCS also reminded me a lot of Harry for reasons that overlap with those stated above, as I followed Jimmy's story. And it also made me wish for a second game so badly yet again. It's truly tragic what happened to the original creators, because I wholeheartedly believed they had the capability to blow our expectations out of the water and top the game with its planned followup, just like how I felt BCS improved upon BB, which I did not expect but was utterly pleasantly surprised to see, and one of the reasons why was how Jimmy was an even better-written character than Walt. I would've loved to see more of Harry's character, more of the world of Disco Elysium and more of his skills. It could've been an even more insane and incredible experience, but alas I am still happy with what we have.