Smoking Room
(Aka. Harry's type)
Included Dolores/Dora because... something something eating (apricot flavoured) chewing gum to cover the smell of smoke etc etc
My only fanart of Disco Elysium thus far, I've yet to actually play the game myself but some of these scenes are kicking something fierce in me! Some details are still bothering me but ah, I'll leave 'em be...
a drawing of luigi and bowser on a date but bowser is huge in the restaurant + people are scared
i couldnt not draw this lMAO
also, no bystanders version under the cut
- are you sure this will help with our investigation, Detective?
Hey man sorry about your male co-star. Turns out you guys had too much sexual tension on screen so he was written into a lazy, heterosexual romance arc that lacks chemistry and depth and actually just makes him look even more queer tbh. Now he's off pretending to be happy with somebody else when the love of his life was right there all along. I'm so sorry dude. It will probably happen again :/
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
twas imperative that i post this one as quickly as possible
[Image ID: A digital drawing of Harry Du Bois and Kim Kitsuragi from Disco Elysium. Harry looks at Kim with a wide-eyed expression, saying, "Kim... what's a 'bear'??" Kim is unresponsive. A successful medium Esprit De Corps check reveals: "He's using all his willpower to clamp his jaw shut, turning his entire body into one big super bone. He's thinking: 'You, but gay.'" /.End ID]
One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation. People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him. He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work. He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad. That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.
And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone. Look at Martinaise. Look at the world in which Harry lives. It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours. More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people. And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them. The buildings are still half-destroyed. The bullet holes are still in the walls. The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound. The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few. Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is. He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.
Harry is not unique in his trauma. He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied. He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM. Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets. The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines. The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is. Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’. It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that. Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating. Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads. The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor. They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die. Mental health care? What mental health care? Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist. There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists. How would they even start? If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest. Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol. He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father. So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.
To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative. Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.
All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta. If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!
actually im just gonna make my own post about it: please read more webcomics. please try them. every time people make posts about “aw man i wish SOMEone would WRITE about FLAVOR OF QUEER THING/TRAUMA OR ABUSE BUT IN SPECIFIC WAYS I CAN RELATE TO/WHATEVER” and then it gets reblogged into a giant thread of people agreeing with it and demanding Content i die because whatever it is is definitely being painstakingly created by an indie author who would really like for people to consume it and every time i point this out people suddenly can’t read lmao
it is out there it is free it is being made from firsthand experiences by people who care very very deeply who would be DELIGHTED to hear that it’s resonating with anybody at all, please throw some of that enthusiasm and support at people who will actually appreciate it
if you’re an indie comic person and any of this applies to you i encourage you to reblog this with a link to your comic and a short synopsis so people can browse the notes and find shit they’re looking for. or make your own post on your own blog if you don’t want to fool with other people i don’t care this is a sign from the universe that you should be louder about what you’re working on because people can’t fucking find it apparently.
i’ll go first i make kidd commander and it’s about an ensemble cast of queers on their way to kill god, they live on an airship and they’re all too pissed off to die. it’s free to read and it’s in the middle of its third arc right now. it lives here http://kiddcommander.com/
go go go
on second thought gonna add if you’re a READER and you’ve had Feelings about a webcomic feel free to recommend it here too
In addition to Kidd Commander, I enjoy:
Dumbing of Age - semi-autobiographical webcomic by an ex-Christian fundamentalist; explores a wide bevy of social justice issues in more nuanced ways than I often see, especially in regards to abuse
Monster Pulse - A group of kids (some of them explicitly queer) have their body parts turn into monsters; great analyses of trauma and transhumanism
Leftover Soup - slice-of-life story about the most philosophically inclined 20somethings in the world, seriously they spiral off into fascinating discussions all the time, this is basically Having Difficult Conversations: The Webcomic; the opening is terrible but stick with it
Forward - I’m just gonna link to the author’s artist’s statement and you can decide for yourself if it’s for you
i follow a lot of podcasts, i can put together a curated list.
http://ohumanstar.com/ is incredible, it’s about trans robots (in minneapolis! not a huge plot point, but it’s where i’m from). it finished recently, so you can have a completed reading experience.
https://www.baldwinpage.com/spacetrawler/2010/01/01/spacetrawler-4/ spacetrawler started as the story of six humans kidnapped by an incompetent alien to help free the eebs, an enslaved alien race. it’s very good, sometimes it hits very hard. the first and second series are complete, the third series is updating currently.
http://www.rice-boy.com/see/ rice boy is a “brightly colored and surreal fantasy adventure story”. bittersweet chosen one stuff. also by the same author is the order of tales (completed) and vattu (on going, i think it’s near completion)
https://www.egscomics.com/ very queer cast of magical teens. starts out very rough, but that was 19 years ago. lots of gender transformation magic and magical hijinks, with a helping of tragic backstories and nerd stuff.
https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1 about a couple of weird magic british school children at a weird british boarding school. there are a couple chapters in particular that hit hard. also, it’s just very well drawn and written and it always updates MWF, which is more than most webcomics can say.
http://diggercomic.com/ digger is just a good comic, i should reread it again, it’s been awhile. it’s about a “take-no-nonsense” wombat who finds herself dealing with a talking buddha statue, a tribe of the best anthropomorphic hyenas you’ll see, and a dead god.
boy have i got good news for YOU
the good news is that on this list (to my limited knowledge) both my comic and gunnerkrigg court feature wlw protagonists!
the other good news is there are TONS of us working outside the aggregate sites, please please don’t assume those companies are indicative of everything going on in webcomics as a genre. my thoughts on that could fill a whole other post but i wanted to bring it up here at least.
I also just remembered there’s the website https://archivebinge.com , which is FANTASTIC if you’re looking for something specific. It’s limited by the fact that the creator needs to post the comic themself, but it’s got a great tagging system for both genres and content warnings:
and lets you know when new posts go up even on independent sites! Extremely useful for finding and reading a bunch of comics without taking agency from the creators.
i read a shitton of webcomics but here are my recs specifically for ones that aren’t on networks like hiveworks so they need more love (on mobile so sorry if formatting gets weird)
Softies i can’t summarize better than page one sorry. there’s a bit about a stubbed toe that will hit you like a freight train to the feels.
Job Satisfaction is slice of life about queers and demons and queer demons.
Radio Silence is a coming of age story about a British band on tour.
Ingress Adventuring Company is about Professor Toivo Kissa. He is an elf and he goes on adventures instead of doing his job, which is professoring.
Skin Deep is about a girl who goes to college and finds out she’s a sphinx (i feel like everyone reads skin deep but also not enough people read skin deep).
Sfeer Theory has a magical university for a very complicated magic system, if you’re into Lore.
Outliers takes place in a superhero world but these boys are just trying to be happily married in peace.
Some LGBT webcomics just off the top of my head
Muted - fantasy comic about a gay, poly witch in New Orleans.
Paranatural - All ages fantasy comic about middle schoolers who fight ghosts.
2 Slices - Classic, trope-y romance comic with a queer spin
Alice and the nighmare - Fantasy/sci-fi retelling of Alice in Wonderland.
Sleepless Domain - Magical Girl genre deconstruction. In a mysterious fantasy/sci-fi world where teenage girls sometimes have superpowers, how are those girls treated and valued? Content warning: This comic is usually pretty cute but has some serious violence early on.
Chaos Life - autobiographical slice-of-life comics about an agender illistrator and their gay, disabled wife.
Boy In Pink Earmuffs - All ages comic about two best friends who solve mysteries together and are also crushing on eachother.
Magical Boy - Fantasy comic about a trans boy who finds out he’s descended from a long line of magical girls and is destined to save the world. (tapas exclusive)
what’s up if you’re in the notes looking for recs you can’t see most of them because tumblr hides anything with a link in it, view this reblog to see a big ol’ list of webcomic links
hi hello @webcomiclibrary is another really great resource for finding new comics to check out! They maintain a very nice tagpacker archive with lots of different options to search through to find The Queer Story You’re Cravin’.
also not to toot my own horn too much but I make @cloverandcutlass which is a f/f fantasy romance featuring a trans girl protagonist! it’s about Disappointing Your Parents (and learning to be okay with that), and also about being a big gay disaster in general
What’s good y'all I muted this post ages ago because a lot of people are incapable of behaving normally when webcomics are being talked about BUT it appeared on my dash again so I checked the notes a bit and wanted to reblog the webcomiclibrary link! that’s all back to the void for me
Someone needs to jokingly tell Harry that actually "its not women that are bourgeoisie, gender is bourgeoisie." He would immediately internalize this. He would then begin to trans his gender without realizing what he's doing.
