In disco Elysium you live in a nation some time after a failed socialist revolution. Said revolution was sparked off, in part, due to an infectious Prion virus-disease-thing. I never really understood it, neither in game nor metatextually.
Was there actually a virus? Why did it make people socialist?
And metatextually: why make it part of the story? DE has a lot of esoteric stuff going on - the insulidian phasmid, the actual presence of divinity and weird holes in the world. But that stuff usually, to me at least, serves some sort of clear parallel to the real world and a way to critique it - Wonders and loss of nature, climate change, spirituality getting coopted by the state, so on and so forth. Or not exactly clear purposes, but it doesn’t strike me as something that’s coming completely out of the blue.
The prion disease kind of is. I can see how a plague could lead to social unrest, the game however makes an effort to make it clear it was the disease itself. And also, why make it prion if it was just regular old “plague makes people angry”? Even if that’s part of the explanation, there must be more to it.
So whats your take?
well considering that the disease itself is only discussed by two people, measurehead and someone who is an awful person driven by capital but despite that still admits that the revolution wasn’t a brain disease and that the communists might have built something better than the coalition if they had won, i think joyce is the much more reasonable source here lmao
You’re right, I’m being a bit of a dismissive dick. I’m sorry. I remembered it as if it was way weirder and didn’t have a definitive answer thru Joyce like that - It just bothers me it basically boils down to “covid but revolution came”. I like your literary explanation of the brainworms like that.
To me it still feels like there is some unanswered bit, but I can’t put words to it, so who knows what it is. I just generally find the tzaraath a weird detail I suppose.
it’s all good, im searching through the text using the disco elysium explorer site bc it’s been like three years since i played DE so im working off of the literal text than what i barely remembered like an hour ago
i think purpleworm nailed it more than i did, the writers choosing a prion disease makes complete sense to me now under that lens
I think they also just liked the imagery of a disease that literally puts holes in your brain for <insert disease that makes people act abnormally>. Literal brainworms would be too on the nose