The Psychology of The Pale Is Profound - Therapist Plays Disco Elysium: Part 19
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ต.ค. 2024
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It's funny to imagine Joyce Messier, prattling off all this lore about memory-pollution and the end of the world, while squinting into the blinding white light and nonverbally _begging_ you to put your flashlight away
Halfway through the video I notice he's having this deep conversation about very big ideas with this very proper woman when he's still gripping a bottle of speed, and something about that is absurdly funny to me
Joyce Messier isn't the kind of woman, who is disturbed by receiving some spotlight. And she definitely doesn't beg.
Joyce is, surprisingly, quite *disco*
Hey if she was a good negotiator, she would negotiate her way out of it
The Pale takes Disco from gritty cop drama and adds in an unexpected dollop of magical realism. I had already been reeled into the game plenty before The Pale. The worldbuilding geek in me went berserk at this point.
No. Putting on different clothes does not allow you to roll again. You want the best bonus possible when you roll the first time.
You need to discover something or at least to level up, right?
@@MaurizioOiziruam Yes. Learning new things can give bonuses that will re-open the checks. Actions can do it to. The first example of that is turning off the fan gives a +3 to get the horrific necktie.
Sometimes, just waiting long enough can give a bonus. If you keep failing the hanging man check to avoid throwing up, you will eventually get a bonus saying "you waited long enough". There are also thoughts that allow you to retake certain checks, and there is a dicemaker that offers different dice that give bonuses to various checks. If you decide you are an ultra liberal, then you get a... +5 bonus, I believe, to open the crate.
There are a variety of ways to unlock an additional attempts, but clothing does not do it. You can always savescum though.
Kim’s avoidance of The Pale is fascinating because he does not like anything that isn’t concrete and explainable… when you get a chance to explore other supranational(sic) elements he will give slight push back but he will also scoff or respond with his dry sarcasm… but The Pale isn’t supranational, it’s out there, it may not be a part of “the real” but it has very real consequences on “the real”.
Kim can’t merely roll his eyes and dismiss The Pale.
Do you mean supranatural? Supranationals are things like the EPIS/EU, the Moralintern or concepts like Europe, the West, Capitalism
Kim's motives for steering you away from The Pale is that he has concerns about how Harry will handle it.
To put yourself into his shoes, Imagine someone tells you today that Nasa has predicted that the sun will go supernova within the next 100-200 years. Maybe sooner.
There's no way to stop it, all life on earth will end.
How would you react? Shock? Horror? Casual indifference? Would you enter a depressive doom spiral and become a raving doomsayer?
I never make comments, but I really want to tell you Brady that your videos have kept me going through some extreme difficulties of grief, heartbreak, and depression within the past few months.
You talk about influencing your local ecology; I think you're doing way more good than you probably give yourself credit for
I could see the argument that the four primary copotypes are exaggerated representations of different ways of coping with the fear of inevitable death. Superstar is what you mentioned, believing that you or what you create makes your existence meaningful. Apocalypse is believing that death itself is good or meaningful in some way. Sorry is resigning yourself to the fact that nothing you do will be meaningful. Boring is just muddling through life without thinking about whether it matters.
I came to live vicariously through Brady as he discovers the pale for the first time... and ended up ordering a copy of Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death".
Excellent way to close out the work week.
The Pale is my favourite bit of lore in the entire game and almost any work of fiction. Can't wait!
In terms of gameplay, it’s also awesome that you can potentially just never find out about it during a play through!
Same. I kinda got obsessed with the pale after i beat the game and looked up every bit of info I could about it.
Man after reading the book Sacred and Terrible Air by the lead creator of DE, Robert Kurvitz your talk about how people cope with death/pale and what people do to "not die" really hits. A lot of what happens in that story goes exactly over that, too. It takes place 20+ years after the events of DE. It's a very dark story, well written and there in no official translation to English but fans hired a professional translator and an editor to do it themselves. Totally recommend to any DE fan
I definitely didn't expect you to have so much to say about the Pale. The stuff about terror management theory makes a lot of sense to me. I might have to do more reading about it. I can relate to the idea of having an immortality project.
It is entirely possible to play through the entirety of the game and never get any answers on The Pale.
Very excited to hear your thoughts on it especially as there are more moments of interaction. I particularly love how discovery invites reconceptualization of several earlier interactions. Are the kids here so hopeless and acting out because they're inhabiting a doomed world? Are the anxieties of the grown ups more reasonable for this? Are the strange things we've come across more explained now or does this revelation about the world only offer more questions?
It's also neat how Kim tries to guide Harry away from learning about The Pale--whether this is to protect him, to keep the investigation from derailing, or something else entirely is up to interpretation but it does texture Kim's character in a way that deepens him for all those factors being capable.
My favorite moment that becomes recontextualized by learning about The Pale is the conversation held with Tricentennial Electronics. On first blush, it's an uncomfortable moment of hearing a recording long expired and mistaking it as an active conversation. Kim would rather not linger on it. With knowledge of the Pale, this explains *why* the 'recording' is trapped in the aether here and it gives more rationale for Kim's discomfort around it. What I love is that--even more than that--what the operator in the 'recording' is talking about--that comfortable loss of self, Shivers suggesting you are hearing the words of a ghost, that haunting line : "...as if my mind's been wiped clean... It's so nice to be able to finally forget."
History is dangerous and Disco Elysium imagines a setting where History is a force that's ever-growing, ever capable of wiping out the Now. And so much of Disco Elysium is trapped in that. In memory. In clinging to memory. In the power of forgetting. In the relationship of all that to the self. It's the journey of both the player and the protagonist. I love it.
I never got answers on the pale, nor found my gun, in my first playthru
The key to Harry is what he does remember. He tries to forget about who he still remembers the rhythms and physical layout of Revachol. Home in the here and now on an instinctive level. As sad and broken as he is, his devotion to the people of his home has kept him alive and relatively sane.
I really hope he goes to talk to the Paledriver after this.
Joyce is such an interesting character. Way more honest than other characters, while also lying in very subtle or different ways in comparison.
The commentary you add in terms of psychological dynamics really adds to the writing of the game.
Thanks for this really great series.
I once met Ursula von der Leyen at an event I helped organize. The experience of interacting with Joyce reminded me a lot of the experience of talking to her. Someone extremely smart, persuasive, very personable on the level of interpersonal interaction. Not with ill intentions per sé, but with the kind of power and privilege that if she decides that people need to be hurt to achieve some other goal, she will just *do* that. And she'll genuinely find it regrettable, but to function in the position in life she's in she cannot dwell on that.
Really gives you a new appreciation for what 'evil' is. That at least one of the people who made the Tunesia deal that causes so many people to suffer is basically... a whole person, with positive sides. Makes my skin crawl.
I always loved the way "The Good Place" described how humans approach their own mortality:
"“All humans are aware of death. So we're all a little bit sad all the time. That's just the deal . . . but we don't get offered any other ones. And if you try and ignore your sadness, it just ends up leaking out of you anyway."
What I like about Joyce as a character is that you like her in spite of yourself.
It increasingly feels like this game was written for you. But that's the magic of it. This game was written for everyone.
There's a moment you almost definitely won't see, which isn't a spoiler out of context. A woman is describing a great city on the other side of the world. Drenched in twilight. A place of democracy and history and beauty. It was built for...
You can respond to the prompt with "me" or "all of mankind", and both are correct. I feel like that's a good summary of the game. It was built for me. It was built for everyone. Whether you're a psychologist or a doctor or a social worker, a former addict, broken-hearted, political, hopeful, downcast, into cryptids, into pinball, there's something in it for you.
Also "we're doing this to survive the plague of reality slipping away" is a great summary of Disco Elysium.
Always nice to see these videos, but I wish you wouldn't remove all the sounds beside dialogue. The music and the ambient noises are like the second voice in each dialogue, I miss them while listening to the video
Edit: also at times, the algorithm supresses low volume speech as well, so some phrases get cut off too
Sometimes I have to do that due to copyright issues unfortunately. Despite playing on streamer mode, TH-cam flags the music that plays whenever I am at the docks and sometimes at other places in the game.
@@eurobradythat's unfortunate. Weird that it's only with certain tracks, since all of them are composed and (supposedly) owned by the same group/label
Yeah it doesn't make sense to me. It seems to be a YT issue as it doesn't give me any trouble with most of the band's other pieces. It also flags the track that plays whenever we are in the void, like at the very beginning of the game. The only thing I can do really is use voice isolation, which does distort it sometimes, but otherwise it all has to be muted.
The best way to see the Pale is like an antimatter that destroys anything it touches, both physically and metaphysically. And it surrounds the entirety of the continent
The Pale Driver will also describe how it feels and makes it so attractive.
OH MY GOD ITS TIME
I’ve been anticipating you getting to this one!!!!
The fact Harry just stood there listening to the crazy pale lore with a bottle of speed in his hand the whole time and Joyce just refused to acknowledge it is so good
That's disco, baby. Death anxiety is disco...
Ok but for real I used to hang out in nightclubs around London and there was this weirdly frantic air I hadn't felt in more sedate cities, felt like everyone there didn't expect to live much longer, like they were trying to party so hard it left a mark. I didn't know anything about psychology at the time, but learning this now I feel like I have a better understanding of the behaviour
oh, it's so perfect. can we please acknowledge how awesome the soundtrack is? how good it feels when brady walks away from the conversation and then "instrument of surrender" comes up? love it!
if he gets the 'you know what' ending he'll adore how it expands on these ideas
I'm sure we'll remind him to explore every character's questlines. And he'll be reminded when he'll get closer to the endgame.
Really fascinating discussion on death anxiety and terror management theory! A very clear segue from the Pale in retrospect, and I love seeing different interpretations of it. Also put a lot into perspective regarding my own recent endeavours. Loving your perpectives, and the eloquent presentation.
The best thing about this game is how fleshed out and well realized the world is. Even though you only ever scratch the surface, it is overwhelmingly evident that there is so much more going on in this world that you're only getting mere glimpses of. I suspect that the failed call-in game you stumble upon in the doomed commercial district is partially a reference to this game, especially when you and Kim talk about world building concepts.
Every time I see a new video Im so happy this literally makes my day
"Thanatology" - oh my, I've just imagined a Pathologic series...
"It doesn't matter anyway" -- is that such a bad thing? Is it so bad to be ok with dying?
I am so hype for this
If you want Joyce to answer the "What are you?" question, and get into her core beliefs then you're going to have to go back to some of the other reality-based questions that you stopped with halfway through and sit through the full history lesson.
I wonder if it's worth going back to the Paledriver and seeing if she's got anything more to say, now that you know what her deal is?
I am re watching your series on Disco Elysium, which I am looking forward to finishing once such is possible. I previously watched it to fall asleep, and must have missed your thoughts on the Pale. I just wanted to say that you, Brady, have made a comment on political systems that you also made on religious institutions, one that I often hear on religion, that it is a response to the inevitable infinite death of humanity. I am a political science major and I have never heard anybody, professor, student, creator, author, philosopher, make that proposal. I have never thought about it myself. You may call yourself inadequate or "less-than" in the realm of politics, but you are anything but.
I'm not much of a commenter, but I really appreciated your thoughts on the pale and how people react to death. I've been interested in the topic since taking a college class on the anthropology of religion last year, and now I have an entire subfield of psychology and anthropology to look into if I ever decide to go for a master's degree. As a biomedicine undergrad major, I'm suddenly coming up with ideas for research studies that could look for physical, biological correlations to these phenomena. Definitely going to give the book you mentioned a read, if nothing else.
Honestly , I love your videos. They really helped me to understand Disco Elysium through another light.
'The Pale, for example, is a fundamental story mechanism because it cements the writers' own philosophy and ideology not as a religion, but as a scientific approach to history, society and economics (which are simply appendages of the same organism). It is the admission, within the diagesis of the narrative and setting, that the writer's don't have all the answers, and an outright rejection of capitalist realism.
It is not a phsyical thing or force, it is a theme made explicit, an illustration. Why do you think it's called the Pale? Because it looks pale? No, it is the absence of perception and obversation. The world of Disco Elysium are a series of archipelagos, which thematically is saying they are where ideologies have cleared away the pale, coalescing into the Known, the limits of possibility. You don't discover simply more of the same when you explore the Pale, it is not simply fog covering land. It is new paradigms and states of being. What is possible outside our limited world is literally Beyond the Pale.
Contrast to the specific choice the writers made to call the currency in Disco Elysium the reál, which is the Brazilian unit. Why Brazilian? Why not dollar, or mark, or euro or franc, or yuan, or any other currency unit name? I think it's a straightforward literary choice. Money, in the setting of DE is the realist thing. This is another little marxist commentary. The Real Belt, where the moralintern controls the world with markets and force, is reality. It's what is, what exists and what's possible. What exists outside that is Beyond the Pale, a phrase meaning "outside acceptability".
'
stolen from reddit
i got so many questions.
if I were to pick just one today I'd ask - what if a person *wishes* to disappear into the void/pale/nothingness? is that depression?
I'm loving this series. And your analysis. I'm always excited when I see a notification of your next video.
Oh, by the way, the Jamais vu thought gives you 1 XP every time you click on the orbs (the mostly green circles that you can find all over the screen). Try to click on them: not only for the experience, but sometimes they open dialogue options and enable new thoughts.
Oh my god, me catching up on your recent playthroughs and hearing you address something I had just been wondering about, such a wild coincidence! I was wondering why people get so heated and defensive about trivial things, like which way a toilet roll faces in its holder or whether or not pineapple can be put on pizza, so hearing you introduce terror management theory as a potential explanation for that is blowing my mind! Such an interesting concept and it does make so much sense that if you know that someone has a different view than yours about something small, what are the bigger more important things that you could be wrong about? Fantastic analysis as always Brady, you're like the only person I've seen who's pointed out all of these massively significant links and themes that are running through this game!
Brady! Wanna know how to fight the pale? You need to go to church for that information!
Does he mute the music of the game in editing? I notice some of the voicelines a bit muffled. Also the games music is great, so its a shame not to hear it, it gives a lot of ambiance.
I loved listening to the terror management theory and mortality part.
LORE TIME BABY
Hey Brady!
This is defo my favorite game and maybe top 5 of all media i've consumed for the past like 20 years, so just wanted to say - i enjoy your playtrough and thoughts on it a lot! (often while drinking my morning coffee before work)
So can't wait to see your progress into the DE, keep it up man ✊
p.s. yes maybe im a little bit obsessed with sadness and frivolous pop culture too, my comrades
It’s always fun watching your videos, assuming you’re going to play a game and instead getting my entire existence recontextualized.
KIM TRUSTS YOU
There are some kind of voice filter that cuts music and changes voices slightly. It started from previous part.
Oooooh a midnight premiere! I know it's just the timezones but from the list of things to do late Friday night, this is definitely up there
What an interesting reaction to learning about the pale! I've ordered "The Denial of Death" (and "Escape from Evil" while I was at it), looking forward to reading more about this. More book recommendations when appropriate, please!
LETS GO ANOTHER UPLOAD BRADY I LOVE YOU
Really looking forward to this, thank you!!
Love your playthrough. I feel like you're learning a lot and having a great experience with the game and it's super entertaining to watch. I'd advice you to engage with every aspect of the game because it's totally worth it :)
Oh... Oooooh, if this is where you come from, you will absolutely love [REDACTED]. Well... At least I hope you will go there. I have my doubts that you can reach it.
The most frustrating thing is, I can't even help you in any meaningful way to get [DATA EXPUNGED].
I didn't expect you to reference terror management theory. I'm interested in the work of Ernest Becker
I love the pale. I think in addition to what you said : knowing that the creators of the game are marxists, I believe it is meant to be the vacuum left by the failure of the revolutions. Different eras and their efforts to reach utopia create almost different realities. The way that the different modes of economic and social organizations of the governments feel unreal. Our capitalist world operates on capital as its main value, so organizing around something else feels ‘beyond the pale’.
And the way it is constructed in this game is definitely meant to reflect trauma; not (only) on a personal level but on a societal level, collective trauma that expand from personal to communal. With every character of the game you can see it, in a very leftist way the writers are showing you that the past love and the old heartbreaks all in a way connect to the history of the town. The personal is portrayed as the political. I know that Euro Brady does not engage with the politics that much, but if you engage with media from old leftists or talk to political organizers you will know how much the “lost efforts of utopia of the past” (that got destroyed by the capital), weighs on people.
People think of the past (the creators are being from a post-soviet country), and the communes across the world (Revachol being heavily inspired by the Paris commune, their french accents etc.) with the hurt and yearning similar to what we see in the game. The reason why apricot flavor is both the main import (or export?) of the state in the game and the smell of Harry’s ex-lover. His yearning for his lover is meant to parallel the yearning of the hope that once was. Hope that things were going to be better. Before the mercenaries bought out by the companies bombed out the city. The game shows us a post-apocalyptic world where people cannot let go of the beauty that once was. Which is very rare in post-apocalyptic media I feel.
Pale is sort of that nostalgia that the Paledriver is addicted the high of. It is the feeling of doom that everyone is feeling and everyone describes in different ways.
If I remember correctly, you actually can ask the Fritte girl about the pale....
Just letting you know.... This episode isnt in your playlist!
When i played it the first time, i thought the pale was a metaphore of depression spreading the world
20 hours of VODs still on day two 😅 (idk how long it takes it still will be a great journey)
How does this apply to people that are afraid of reality?
Where do addiction fit into this?
Is it avoidance of death?
Hell yeah
I'm so happy to see you uncover the Pale lore, since it's difficult to find by design, yet so rewarding. Love how you connected it to death anxiety - whether it was intended by the game designers or not, it feels like a very natural interpretation.
When you are done you should read “sacred and terrible air”
I had to pause this video just to think about death for an hour
I am very glad he can get invested into the lore
Why do you consider participating in politics and economy as a part of a cultural project? Do you actually think it is voluntary? Are laws set just to people who opt in? Aren’t majority of humans workers? How is workers vying for more rights an external project but companies’ exploitation is neutral? Non-politicality just is not a luxury majority of us actually have- ignoring it might be, but that’s also a privilege.
I don’t mean to sound aggressive. I do like your commentary and playthrough, or else I wouldn’t continue to follow your videos. It’s just that I feel like there is a lot that is missing from the perspective when you only approach politics as a deflection from personal issues. Not only in the game but in real life as well. Psychology is not just personal but also very communal. So societal issues affecting people cannot only be a deflection, as we are social animals and the rejection of our musings around ‘the common good’ seems to me like a betrayal to our skills of empathy.
Didn't want to burn through them when you took a break, so just came back to your videos and catching up. Love your playthru still, curious how is the exprience of recording alone and for shorter burst influencing your experience..?
It's been a much better experience. I can record more often and feel less distracted while recording.
The pale is more of a philosophical concept
Hey, I'm really enjoying this playthrough/analysis of yours! You should be aware that this episode needs to go down one spot in your playlist as it is before episode 18 in the list
Fixed! Thanks for the heads up
omggg
based brady
Was this filmed off-stream? The last stream on twitch ends at 18 o clock
Yes I moved the recordings off stream, it's better for my schedule.
Strange question but i think i might know the answer. Hows your general knowledge of history?
I ask cuz while im not a political guy myself, i do enjoy learning about how people lived and view the world at time they experienced it and as i caught up to more contemporary history i felt like i understood how our current world political system came to be. So while i dont engauge with political discourses I do like leaning about it like a kid looking at ants sorta way.
I just wonderd if your aversion to politics stems from underdeveloped historical knowledge.
I hope he doesn't over-analyze every single minor interaction, like don't worry because this game is PACKED w really major ones I can't wait for him to get to. he's in for a ride.
you can't escape getting a political alignment, but it's really profound to go the centrist (Moralist) route wc is what i think he's heading towards. it's the least radical one, best sidequest, heavy critique, and thought-provoking about what it means to be centrist (or apolitical in his case). i love politics and i chose that one still to reflect myself irl, no regrets
I'm not apolitical, though. I've even talked quite a bit about my views already, I am just choosing not to do deep dives into that subject here because it's not really what I'm after for this particular project. When the game integrates my choices into the narrative, though, I will surely react and talk about it. I just feel like I have more than enough to say already about the psychological themes I'm engaging with. I'm looking forward to seeing the game's reaction to the way I've been disengaging with that side of it, though. I'm sure it will rip me apart pretty well 😅
@@eurobrady hello pls don't think i'm complaining alright, you do have lots to say abt the psychological themes and i appreciate them, it's like i'm getting free lectures and a side therapy
im entranced by your approach and just excited abt the ones you'll encounter. honestly going through a tough time rn, prepping for a career defining exam in isolation while going through a massive breakup and your explanation on the johari(?) window helped me a lot in knowing myself in that blind spot/hidden quadrant, since the open area has turned to shit. sorry might've missed when u talked abt your views, i only saw ~3 episodes so far.
I don't think I like to comment. I try to do it more lately, but omg... This episode is like AMAZING! Even though some of the death anxiety problem seem alien to me personally. I'm not sure if I'm simply on the nihilistic (or nihilistic/hedonistic) "way out" that you've mentioned, or what else could it be. But the theory you've mentioned makes so much sense while trying to contextualize other people's behaviours etc. Thank you for this amazing episode, even though there was not so much gameplay - it was completely worth it to watch it and hear your thoughts about it!
Time literally evaporated while I was watching this. I was caught completely by surprise when you went into your outro.
thinking about it, the sad thing about the pale, is that it actually would destroy any symbolic immortality... even if you have a great life, and left behind an amazing legacy, if the pale swallows everything, it may literally destroy history... but perhaps i'm understanding that wrong.
anyways on earth, even if the planet cracks apart tmrw, everything you did still happened and had an effect on the universe, with the pale, everything you did may literally cease to have happened in the past.
you think you know that the world is an "Oblate spheroid" but, as Woolie said playing this game, "fuck what you know", walls of elemental regret between continents and archipelagos
Very interesting. I can't relate to wanting to live on after my death, wanting an immortality project, very much, besides wanting my loved ones to continue caring about me even after I'm gone. I know a lot of creatives who struggle with legacy and fear of death in this way, but personally, anecdotally, I find it deeply unrelateable. I want to contribute to a better world and all that, but my name and face don't have to be associated with it at all, and if I ultimately contribute extremely little/practically nothing, I'm okay with that too.
Thank you
That's so interesting - my (second) Masters thesis was about death, and specifically what stories, thoughts, secrets, and memories die when a person dies. This was a playwriting degree, so it was a very different research process, but still! Remote high five from one death obsessed weirdo to another.
I've never really looked into immortality projects, but I think it connects well with my dissertation play. You've given me some interesting stuff to look into!
After tthe heart-racing stress of the last episode this was our " ahh finally solid ground to recalibrate " "talk about your awareness/love/respect of death and thanatology; a completely lite second course 😌😌" moment www + hello someone who knows about thanatology by name - staring in smitten dankovskyisms - your mention of the immortality project and terror management was new to us completely - when we make our art we go very solidly off of vibes and unformed thoughts 40-70 % of the time- recognizing themes and motifs that are being pulled in come latter- but that theme is one we feel like is coming through ( if unintentionally at first as processing )
- [ and ] we've still not scratched the itch on what we're trying to say - other then a surface level analysis " we feel like the internet is crying for connection and our internal experience with our gestalt may help someone if with share it & one is able to add their own interpretation through it: create from it - connect it to ones internal narrative - have a conversation / open sub-surface dialogue that is open to many if they recognize it"
- we like that you have an appreciation for the esoteric without linking it to drugs / alcohol -(or that what we got from the snippet ) - one can make and enjoy art | writing | theory | philosophy of that type without "party eyes" ( a point of contention we have with the greater internet, no we dont do drugs /drink to make our art - but if we did - so what? does that make it lesser somehow?? (( to some yes obviously it does )) A very protective instinct we have over disparate art community scattered over the web (( at odds within our need to project a truthful fractal of a plural being who doesnt do those things so that they may be observed and not found lacking of facilities )) ((( we are living the " make sure you always present as good queer/gay/trans representation " trope / expectation on loop,, with our sheezy trying to break away and be so openly unappealing no one looks up to us ))) Fun topics today www )
- thought project - people keeping asking you if youre in a cult / and or / trying to start one - do you A: get so annoyed you do a nietzsche and burn your legacy down to memory or B: say the haha funny answer " Yes but its decentralized "
I would love to see your understanding of Terror Management Theory and the videogame 'Endwalker'. Among many other explorations of finding meaning amidst fatalistic circumstances, and certainty among doomed civilizations that they had tried their best, it features a competition between various nihilist perspectives at the end of the world.
That talk about the Pale is a really interesting scene in the game. Most of what happened up to this point could have been in our world. This is where we realize that it is not. These people grow up knowing that their world is actually ending. it won't end in their lifetime, not even in their great-great-great grandchildren's lifetime, but it is in the process of disappearing. It's a melancholic certainity every one of them has to face as a kid. Does it change the way they live their lives? Most of them don't cross the Pale, and thus isn't really affected by it. But knowing that the world is dying reframes everything about how they see the world. It's a really interesting concept for me. Our future is open - we might go extinct, or we might reach the starts ,who knows? Their future is mostly closed - their prospect is to understand how it will end, but it has a definitive end.
Hearing you speak on your masters thesis has really intrigued me about the psychology of the creative process.
Is there somewhere I can read it?
Really enjoyed your little lecture on Terror Management Theory. The idea of our actions being motivated by an existential anxiety seems really intuitive. I am a complete psychology and anthropology layman, but maybe I'll read up on it.
I'm loving this series so much Brady, thank you. It's made me think of a lot of profound things and introduced me to concepts in psychology I wouldn't have otherwise. You'll definitely live in my memory
Whats wild is that on my high int, low psy playthrough (my first), this was a bit of lore I completely missed. Its surprising how interwoven a detail it is, especially in *certain* sidequests later on.
I'm so happy you didnt miss learning about the pale and learning more about Cuno. Theyre some of my favourite moments in the game.
Yeah, Kim was worried that you would freak out about what is essentially the heat death of the universe - entroponetics as a word comes from entropy. The pale is more personal than that, in that it can be felt, and touched, and can affect people who come into contact with it, but it is also something that is not an existential threat in any meaningful amount of time as far as the human experience is concerned. We live in this world: we know that the light in the universe will one day die out and everything we know and love and do is cosmically meaningless and will disappear. But that's also beyond the scope of our existence so we carry on.
It was more climate change coded than heat death of the universe coded. We ignore climate change but we know that sometime in the future it will destroy everything. We don’t know how quickly, but it’s quicker than you think.
Does joyce ever mention the Magpies?
In the presence of death avoidance theory, one has to wonder if it is fundamentally different in the world of Disco Elysium? Because while it's clear the Pale isn't likely to kill most people as individuals, it does appear as if it will destroy all symbolic immortality, all history and memes. I don't know when the Pale's expanding nature has been discovered within this world's history, so perhaps this is a revelation introduced to culture more recently-but it certainly does beg examination into the behaviors of people in this world, where the death of all things appears truly inevitable.
They knew of it since the Pernikarnassian calling it The Western Plain as Joyce said and we learn from the pale driver of what it feels like in the pale and asks questions of what happens on Motorway South and what was Harry trying to achieve drinking himself to losing everything.
"Well. On to the next crisis"
your focus on terror management theory sounds highly theistic in origin and the theory itself (or at least your explanation of it) sounds like it was written by some kind of nationalist. hearing it be put forward as such an objective axiom of human behavior was really grating to listen to. your experiences aren't universal and there are people who can comfortably allow themselves to exist without being remembered
I know this is an old comment but do you think you could elaborate more on how you saw this? I'm interested in what you have to say because I didn't see any of that when I was listening to Brady, but after reading this comment I can kind of see what you mean.
I want so much to see his perspective on The Deserter
what i am about to say is a spoiler so if you haven’t played i would recommend not reading further than this
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the pale is a very interesting concept and i think it is a metaphor for climate change.
i do not think so
It's a metaphor for several things. Climate change is one of them. Political nihilism/apathy is another. It's also thematically linked to Harry's self-destruction and that apricot-scented thing he's trying not to think about. Also, as Brady discussed, the regular old inevitability of death. It's a complex game-there's a lot going on.
On paper it seems like metaphor for the heat death of the universe, and to take it a step further manifestation of nihilism growing in the world
It's also meaningful, metaphorically, that the pale literally destroys meaning itself.
@@sleepysnekk i think the fact that joyce talks about how it is expanding, that will slowly result in the death of us, the comments on how “extremist” are the only ones taking it seriously and how governments, corporations and people find convenient ways to ignore it. on top of when you are talking to the phasmid it mentions how “the pale, too, came with you… there is a unanimous agreement between the bird and the plants that you are going to destroy us… it’s advent coincides with the arrival of the human mind”
Is it just me or does the game audio sometimes quiet down or cut out completely in this episode?
58:27 “conversating”
Ah, yes. Even an indirect, even tangential interaction with the Pale will cause even those with the most hardy of academic familiarity with sanity to forget temporarily how to speak…
The video is not that long..
you're referring to a timestamp that doesn't exist and also i can't tell if you're trying to imply that "conversating" isn't a real word, but if so, i'm here to inform you that it is in fact a real word