r/DiscoElysium

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.

I woke up simultaneously wanting to know how this game could even be adapted to be appropriate to <10 year olds, and proud that my son was playing best character Kim.

He shall be played with an assortment of drugs, gadgets, even more drugs, and explosives.

I think reasonably it makes the most sense for him so long as the dm lets me have his charisma be the casting skill just for fun.

Or a sorcerer.

Edit: what about harry though?…. Obviously a haunted one or changeling so you can do the skills as alternative personalities that come forwards! But the class eludes me, probably bard or a class based on whatever his signature is?

Edit: way of the drunken master?