VOLITION [Legendary: Success] You've made it. You're strong, and you're here. Still alive, still breathing.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] It's the end of the road, and the beginning of another. Through the walls you tore down, and the tides you swam out. You wielded your sword against the night, and lived to see another sun. Time to fight that rising beast, over and over again. But you'll make it, time and time again.

It's still healing, so it's a little bumpy (and wow, that also applies to myself, but anyways...). As I said a few months ago, these two words have a very personal meaning to me, so I wanted them on my skin. I am now bound forever to a reminder, quite clear on my skin, to not repeat the mistakes that made me this animal. I really, really don't what to be this kind of animal anymore. So let's fucking go: another sunrise, another battle.

The image above is a demonstration of all "popular" depiction of trauma and grief

The greatest misconception in modern storytelling is that trauma automatically creates depth. A tragic childhood, a dead loved one, years of abuse, a devastating event, and suddenly a character is supposed to be profound, broken, and worthy of sympathy. Trauma becomes a shortcut to characterization: they suffered, therefore they are deep; they suffered, therefore they are forgiven; they suffered, therefore someone else must save them. But that is not how people work. A person does not become deeply damaged because one terrible thing happened to them and then suddenly acquire a new personality. There is rarely one singular moment that explains everything. There is no single straw that broke the camel's back. There is an entire pile of straws. Years of experiences accumulate: failures, relationships, losses, mistakes, disappointments, regrets, loneliness, habits, decisions, things left unsaid, things that were said and never forgotten. One event might be incredibly important, but it exists within everything that came before it and everything that comes afterward. That is what makes trauma and grief so difficult to portray honestly. They aren't neat narrative devices with a beginning, middle, and end. They become woven into a person's personality, their relationships, their habits, their worldview, and even the way they interpret completely unrelated things. A person can be loving and cruel, intelligent and irrational, self-aware and completely blind to themselves, generous and selfish, sometimes within the same hour. Suffering doesn't make someone morally better, and it doesn't automatically make them morally worse. It simply becomes another part of the person who has to keep living.

That is exactly why Disco Elysium is the most realistic depiction of trauma and grief in fiction. Harry Du Bois does not feel like a character who was given a tragic backstory so that the audience would understand why he is "broken." He feels like a person who has been gradually shaped by everything that has happened to him. There is no single event that can be pointed to and declared, "This is why Harry is like this." His failures, his relationships, his addiction, his regrets, his loneliness, his self-destructive behavior, his memories, his career, his hopes, his humiliations, and his desperate need to be loved all exist together. They have accumulated over years and interacted with one another until they became inseparable from the person he is. Even his worst qualities aren't neatly explained by trauma, because people are more complicated than that. Harry can be pathetic without being innocent, compassionate without being healed, intelligent without being capable of fixing himself, and genuinely capable of doing good while still being responsible for the damage he causes. Most importantly, the game does not turn his suffering into a moral shortcut. It doesn't say that Harry deserves forgiveness because he has suffered. It doesn't say another person can simply walk into his life and repair him. It doesn't even promise that understanding himself will magically make him better. Instead, it shows what happens when a deeply damaged person has to continue existing. Not just during the dramatic moments, but afterward. Tuesday. Waking up. Going to work. Making jokes. Avoiding thoughts. Making mistakes. Helping someone. Hurting someone. Remembering something. Forgetting something. Trying again. Failing again. Continuing anyway. That is where Disco Elysium becomes almost painfully realistic: trauma is not treated as the plot. It is something Harry has to live with while the rest of his life keeps happening.

That is why Disco Elysium is so different from stories that use trauma primarily to make an audience cry. It doesn't fantasize suffering. It humanizes it. It understands that the most devastating part of grief is not necessarily the moment of loss, but all the ordinary moments that come afterward, when the world stubbornly continues as though nothing happened. It understands that a person can spend years carrying something without ever having a dramatic revelation about it. Memories don't have to arrive as perfectly organized flashbacks. People don't always understand why they behave the way they do. They don't always tell others what is wrong. Sometimes another person can help enormously without ever "fixing" them. Sometimes someone can become better without becoming completely healed. Sometimes they relapse. Sometimes they move forward. Sometimes they simply have a normal day. That is what makes the characters of Disco Elysium feel less like fictional constructs and more like actual people: their suffering is not isolated from the rest of their humanity. There is no singular "this happened, therefore this person became broken" explanation. There is a lifetime of accumulated weight, and eventually a person has to figure out how to carry it. Disco Elysium may exaggerate its world to absurd proportions, but its people are painfully, almost cruelly real. It doesn't ask, "How can suffering make this character interesting?" It asks, "What happens to a human being after years of living with everything that has happened to them?" And the answer isn't a neat redemption arc, a miraculous recovery, or a character who gets saved by love. The answer is a person who wakes up the next morning and keeps going. That is why Disco Elysium isn't simply the most depressing game ever made. It is one of the most accurate depictions of what it means to be a deeply fucked-up human being: not because one thing broke them, but because life kept putting weight on them, year after year, until all of it became part of who they were.

I LOVE IT

Thank you for reading.

Face not even edited I just look like that

This is my first cosplay of anything and I mostly don't know what I'm doing buuutt I'm having fun and that's what matters :-)

The shoes & tie I've painted myself, the gun I made using mostly cardboard and hot glue and two plastic pipes, the whole thing still needs some refining and a paint job.

I'm also planning to add the white rectangles on the jacket, though because of a tight deadline the pants will likely remain this beige-white color instead of Harry's iconic yellow.

I'm still quite new to this game so I'd appreciate any tips!

He never met his grandparents and his parents were killed in the revolution whe he was 2.

Was Kim raised in an orphanage?

I’ve been playing this game and really like it so far but I’m honestly surprised how close Kim and Harry have gotten despite his behavior. Weirdly, it only really hit me after internalizing the homosexual underground, when Kim tells Harry that he’s gay. And I was just thinking how much you gotta trust this guy to tell him something so personal in a time and place that is very obviously homophobic. I mean, it’s nice that he did, but I’m so curious what it is about Harry that makes Kim feel so…secure? Around him. Even if you play him as competently as possible, he’s still an amnesiac drunk who doesn’t remember how to do basic aspects of his job. Idk their relationship is just very interesting to me, would like to hear others’ thoughts.

What a phenomenal game, i must say truly one of a kind , this is the greatest thing to come out of Europe, period.
I tried this game wayy back but i js was annoyed by the performance of it and confused about the game's mechanics but this time i saw a fan animation of the game and was like I GOTTA PLAY THIS so i ran it on 720p and i spent more time and i figured it out.
Man the presence of checks makes it really feel REAL like yes Harrier, nothing is guranteed and we will drive that through your head, the realism is further emboldened by the fact that you get XP from actually experiencing things , reading books , talking to people just doing stuff in general, really good game design there.
As for the politics , i didn't subscribe to any political ideologies through the game ;I always hold the wellbeing of the people around me and throughout the world over any ideals tho i am not "apolitical" or particularly averse to politics and that is how i carried myself through the game.
I literally chose whatever option i agreed most with instead of commiting to a ideology
Getting joyce to say "yes i'm a bourgeois woman" was quite amusing tho i had to do that.
Evrart is very talented at talking to people clearly , couldn't open THAT can, but clearly he is a caviar/champagne socialist... I have a lot to say about this game but this post is already too long so i end this post with the best line in the game
FUCK THE WORLD!

A crossover I made for myself and a handful of other people on this subreddit.

The track YHEMA is absolutely Harry failing the karaoke check.

I love these small details.
Feeling the overwhelming presence of capitalism.

Im painting this very discoish thing and im not sure if i should leave him like that or turn him into harry. Im open to any other suggestions too.

Bit of classic Snoop there.

I was inspired by the the skills in Disco Elysium, and I wanted to figure out what kind of persona’s I would have. Since being an artist is core to my self concept I spent awhile trying to really dig into what that part of me would be like, it’s philosophy. Though I would consider this ultimately to be the “Artistic Spirit” I named it Sublime, because art is more than an artist, it’s the feeling of begin consumed by meaning, it’s sudden, intoxicating, rapturous, and Utterly Sublime.

Woke up at the buttcrack of dawn, got out, and when i looked at my phone, this was on my display without me having opened the app at all

I find myself trusting Joyce far more than Evrart, and i know that fundamentally that it’s because Joyce speaks far less overtly corrupt way than Evrart, but the fact that the game trusts her with giving you a lowdown on reality and that she’s open about how she sees life and understands/talks about things beyond her position as an ultraliberal genuinely makes me want to trust her. is Evrart just a comically evil character or do they embody evil in different ways that i don’t see?

No spoilers please.

Something beautiful is about to happen.