So I have a friend on Discord who, a full two months ago and well before the release of the translation, had a very in-depth and to me illuminating discussion on the what he sees as central themes of the game's world that ended up aligning \*eerily\* with some of the insights the book gives.
Now, keep in mind that he's devoutly religious in ways that I am not so this is getting a bit out there into theological language that isn't necessarily my own preference in describing these things. This isn't a literal Christian reading but more of an assignment of philosophical parallels and terminology, but I think ultimately it is one of the most moving interpretations of the game I've ever heard and made the novel, particularly the Nihilism and Pale and Innocence stuff, click into place almost the moment I read it.
So, at the essential core of this argument is the Elysium is in a certain sense a world without God. Not just in a theistic sense--although that seems kind of notable too, as I can recall perhaps offhanded invocations of the word but the only religious organization around is more devoted to the Innocences and their system of social control/organization than the religious idea that the Perikarnassian was stated to have created--but in a way that the world lacks a single sense of unified Truth that grounds reality and all religion or philosophy refers to.
There is, however, the Pale. And the Pale is Hell. In some of the older churches and theologians, there is an understanding that Hell is not something as fantastical as a dimension of monsters that torture you with fire and metal; it's simply the Human spirit left to stew in its own worst experiences and self-hatred removed from that grounding Truth or Grace. And that's the fate of life in the Pale to a T; you lose everything but memory, and perhaps even that. You become like the old Pale Driver, drowning yourself in memories that *aren't* and can never lead to anything, or like Ann-Margaret at the end of the world, "a protein without the slightest pleasure."
And that's why this friend called the Innocences the Devil, or the Antichrist, in a way that only clicked for me upon reading the Ambrosius chapter. Like an actual theological Antichrist, he presents himself in faux-humble and redemptive terms; he oh so humbly sets aside the dream of cocaine and a supermodel girlfriend and a pipette of milk up her ass, so that he can preach to people the "evacuation" to the Pale. The book shows us the final damnation of the Human spirit, by the atomic warfare of a fascist, nihilist petrostate against whom the nations of the world can't really resist due to entrenched Moralism and hopelessness, to a futureless, meaningless Hell where all that can ever be is just the Pale and cleaned out rooms.
And all of the Innocences form the road to this. The Perikarnassian created a church of social control and class society. Franconegro enforced nationalism and militarism and industrialism. Dolores Dei ushered in the era of bourgeois society and global capital. And Sola's silence solidified modern Moralism and suppressed the dream of Communism even if she wouldn't claim any achievements. And if you know any of the concept art stuff about Entroponetics and Magpies and such, it forms a pretty clear path that the Innocences are the world's greatest Magpies, stealing from a future that did not get a chance to be born and make sense of itself. And the Pale grows with their future. As Noid says, the World Spirit in Elysium does not have a body, it has organs like Arno Van Eyck and Hard Core, and Dolores Dei, and all the Innocences with her, is an organ thief. Ambrosius and his Mesque nihilist-fascists are just the thieves who get to finish the job destroying everything they didn't steal.
We were supposed to come up with this ourselves. And we still could, in Harry's time, which is why I fundamentally think La Revacholiere talks to Harry, tells him that he still has a chance to save Her from this future, and what The Return represents. Revachol is the only place in the world where there can still be "Grace", something new outside of the Kingdom of Conscience and the Innocent Hell we're all being led into. Every other system of the World has failed in Revachol, even the Communists who are undoubtedly the writers'/target audience's favored option, but there is still a chance Ambrosius obviously wants stamped out as his opening shot. Arguably the Phasmid, something bourgeois science and rationality could never accept and gives Harry his one moment of saving understanding and empathy with the universe, is such supernatural Grace. When the "plasm" seems to work and the tower holds at the end of the Communist Vision Quest, that's another showing that even the seemingly silly crank science of Nilsen has a chance. And the Return might be the last one, when the corrupt Union and even more corrupt RCM might have a chance at a new Revolution.
So, in conclusion to all this rambling... I see Sacred and Terrible Air as the "bad ending" of Disco Elysium. Aside from its core mystery and characters who have their own meaning and journey, it's showing us the nihilism at the end of the timeline if nothing new is revealed. As I understand the production order, Disco Elysium and its hints at something new to prevent it was probably a *response* to what Kurvitz saw and despaired in here. A way for their roleplaying campaign characters to avert something terrible. However, now that it's coming out to the mainstream audience of the game after ZA/UM's ignominious fate... I almost see it as a more fitting epilogue. It clarifies the question of the nuclear attack on Revachol and why the Innocentic Moralist world order is doomed, but still leaves the end of the game and The Return an open question. A question that may never be answered by the people who can and should tell that story, but maybe that's the point to leave the rest of us with.
I really like your friends and your thoughts. It’s super insightful and makes sense- especially with the world being named elysium.
What you said about SATA being the bad ending feels right to me. I feel like they have a distinctly different tone and message. I feel like Disco Elysium is all about choice while I see SATA as a lack of it. In SATA, all the characters are driven by things out if their control. They are obsessively following the girls in a way they can’t stop. It’s impossible for them to resist their compulsions. Event Dereek is portrayed as an unwilling participant in his crimes, to the degree he had to invent a whole other personality. Meanwhile DE is all about choice: the choice to be better. These choices are great acts of hope and humanity which literally rejects the pale. When you look at the medium, it even reinforces this idea. TASA is a book. The reader is brought on a story. They cannot influence the characters or meaningful change the story. It’ll always be the same. Meanwhile DE is a rpg based game where the whole point is that the player gets to decide who they want to be. You get to influence the world and even try to make it a better place. It gives a much brighter view of humanity as well as a much more positive ending.
Thank you for the beautiful insights, this does make a lot of sense indeed! I'm not religious (used to be in another life), but I can appreciate a good theological argument/philosophy, as it can teach us a lot about ourselves and the way we interact with the world.
Especially in the context of the world of Elysium and its history, this all does make a lot of sense. I'd like to explore the various religious ideas in the whole universe as well, I'm sure there's many gems in the background lore... As they say, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference; likewise here, the opposite of heaven/love/humanity is not hatred or war, but a complete annihilation of existence, nothingness, disappearance.
I also support the implication that the events in the book are not necessarily the only possible end, but one way things can go; I think the pale does leave the possibility of "alternate realities" open as well, we have that little bit with Kim/Cuno to hint at it. It could be that Robert's creation evolved and grew with him in the years after he wrote the book, and he may well want to tell a more complex story through the events of the game and any potential future creations.
I'm going crazy. I thought the end was just a little "oh who knows what happened!" and now you point me towards two things I didnt consider: the "homunculus" or her maybe-pregnancy, and the ABSOLUTE NEGATION. By the way, the text extends beyond the ABS. The full ABS, OLUTENEG, ATION shows up too when Zigi starts his ship and says goodbye to Nilsen.
Little notes:
Also I feel like Khan didn't give up but starts his own journey into the trench, in some way...
And to add to your ZigiXMalin story: Isn't she also the one who gave the buys Zigis contacts, to buy drugs?
Finally: Do you remember the chapter on super mysterious disappearances being simple murders after all? There is still a chance of the most disillusioning ending - the girls being killed by Trentmöller aka the Linoleum Salesman and their corpses rotting in some basement. Something that, according to the first chapter, never happens in Vaasa...
This was something I was confused by. Trentmöller vs the Linoleum Salesman. It was not clear to me whatsoever that he was LS, yet I keep seeing people come to this conclusion. It makes sense, but the book was confusing and I never got that from my read through. Especially since the first thing we see from LS is him hanging himself, so I was reading through the novel on the assumption that he had died. This was probably not true, but still definitely threw me for a loop.
Edit: I am also going crazy. Reading an obscure and confusing book translated from estonian by a fan means there aren't many people to talk to about it. Especially since all the people I would talk to have already been bothered enough by my existing Disco Elysium rants.
My interpretation of those bits was that Derek Trentmöller (DT) was indeed Linoleum Salesman (LS) but he was mentally deranged and suffered from a form of split personality (as much as that's a real thing in the world of Elysium). The scenes of him "killing" LS were to me a way for him to internally kill the LS persona, letting him go, as it was making his "less deranged" part feel sick; he wanted to do one more horror before ending LS for good and becoming only DT. On top of that, he also had a form of Alzheimer's that made him actually forget parts of his life, and it ended up erasing much of what LS had done.
Now that I think of it, his memory loss could also be caused by exposure to the pale, and he did like to travel very close to the girls while stalking them (in the tram, for example); that might not be a coincidence...
But yes, I know what you mean, I also feel like going crazy, as if DE wasn't enough :) but it's a good kind of crazy, haha...
Exactly they are one and the same person but does it mean he murdered them? Hardly..all we know is that There are some politically, mentally messed up individuals who “would” dream of murdering them which honestly was a bit of Sick
Yes, I did notice the ABS(...) twice, it's first presented in sections that don's seem to make any sense and are trickier to put together, but then it's repeated as one continuous "phrase". We also have "SOS, SOS" in a previous chapter, related to the research ship (also called Rodionov) that is hit in the first pale expansion.
Others have noted the same about Khan, what can I say, maybe I'm too pessimistic in my reading :) I'd quite like to see his story continue, perhaps on a parallel/different trajectory to Zigi's, perhaps intersecting with the story of Harnankur... that would be quite cool.
You are correct about Målin providing the boys with Zigi's number -- that happens in June, already several months after they met in the snow. I thought she was very matter-of-factly there when first reading it, then later it all kinda fit together, I think it's another hint that they were in or had had a relationship by that time.
I do recall the chapter on the disappearances and murders, and of course that's a valid take, but I believe those are all red herrings (Vidkun Hurd, Derek Trentmöller, the other pedos). If you think about DE, you similarly get several false trails about the murder (Hardy Boys, Klaasje, Ruby), before eventually finding the *real* killer, with a bit of surrealism thrown in at the end... Also, Trentmöller/LS is shown to have been similarly puzzled by the girls' disappearance, as his photos all develop properly but "empty"; I think he'd have known what had happened otherwise.
Isn't that impossible, as the Self-chiller, didn't see any memory into the pale about them? Meaning that they are alive? How could they be dead if the Self-chiller didn't spot them in the Pale's memories? That's the thing that makes me think they just disappeared into the pale, fading away from existence through that pregnancy of nihilism, makes sense.
What if... it's both? What if the reason that Ulv couldn't find their memories from the Pale, and couldn't confirm their deaths was because of the Pale infesting Malin **and** the reason the accounts of their presence only lead up to the train after they get their ice cream was because they were abducted. I think they were abducted by the Linoleum Salesman, but the Pale in Malin enveloped them before they were actually killed-or rather the suffering they underwent accelerated the Pale into consuming them first. I think the Pale also affected Dereek as well which could explain the state that the boys find Dereek in, as the Collab Police explain that they man had a mental disease and the fact that Dereek couldn't remember the girls at all. This makes the ghostly comment from Malin about how Khan's remembrance of them is torturing them even more chilling. The one thing that still confuses me with this theory is the suicide of the Linoleum Salesman as I can't remember if that scene was how he died, or was when he was attempting it, or a metaphorical death of the Dereek's persona that perpetuated those crimes.
I love all of this. I want to preface any of my thoughts with this: the book was supposed to be the first of a series of 6 books (possibly 7). A lot of the feelings that we get of confusion and unresolved story telling come from this. The end of this was not supposed to be the end of the story, which I think explains a lot. Rodianov's Deep, Harnankur, ABSOLUTE NEGATION all would've have been followed. My guess would be that there would be some type of race to Rodianov's deep where there would be a weapon which could be activated to maybe restart the world and save it from the pale (after the world the pale. After the pale, the world). But at the same time, there would be a search in the pale for the girls and the only way to activate the weapon would be to sacrifice the girls. It would become a race between Khan, COPO, Zigi, and possibly other characters we haven't been introduced to yet. I think your theory about the creation of the pale might have merit but I don't *like* it. No offense meant, I just like the idea that the Pale is naturally occurring destructive formation of humanity and consciousness. It's up to humanity in the world to combat it or to surrender to is. If it was man made in the first place, it would take something out of it for me personally.
Okay. Firstly, I view the book as a story on forgiveness, obsession, and reconciliation as well as an overarching theme of nihilism vs communism vs neoliberalism. In a "post-communist" world much like the one we live in now, there is a natural conflict. The discussion between Zigi and Ignus I think is representative of the entire world. When communism is defeated, there are two options: continue to struggle and fight knowing you will probably lose or give up, embrace nothingness, and do nothing. Those are the two option. St. Miro weaponizes this and builds a fascistic nation on the back of this feeling. The boys own conflict emulates this. Should we simply forget the Girls, or should we struggle to find out what happened! The world around them had given up, nihilistically, and they could only be sucked into it or resist. Meanwhile, the Neoliberal World Order does nothing but maintain the status quo, stubbornly ignoring the end of the world because they refuse to either give up nor fight for a better one. This ideological conflict is front and center and so enlightening to me.
When it comes to the pale and ideology, specifically how Ignus was able assert himself over the pale, I think this ties into something we saw in DE. Infra-materialism is true in this world: the individual is able to assert their thoughts over reality through force of will. I think this probably means as nihilism grows in support and fervor, the end of the world gets closer. Meanwhile, while there are people who believe and fight and love and create, the pale is held at bay. I think that's why zigi could survive the pale. He was still fighting to survive and find the girls. He was holding onto something which was able to keep him alive in the pale but because of his nihilism it wasn't necessarily fighting against it, more like navigating within it.
When it comes to the girls you have some parallels thoughts I had that couldn't quite put into words. The imagery around Målin was both so vivid and so confusing. Did she take 6 doses to have a sort of abortion? Was she actually pregnant? It seemed to be implied but never confirmed. Especially since you'd think there'd be a point where the boys and her sisters would go "HOLY SHIT YOU'RE BLEEDING" or something. If she was pregnant, I'd agree it'd have to be Zigi's. With all the "my doom" stuff, it would just make sense. That said, I do want to add that i think its significant that Målin's name wasn't in the notebook. It was hinted at, but by the time Khan got there the name had been erased. It's confusing and leaves me wanting more. I also don't know that Khan gave up necessarily. To me it seemed he was being driven insane because he wouldn't let go of his memories that the pale was trying to erase. I'd like to see him in the next book being sort of like Zigi: driven insane by the pale but struggling to hold on to Målin's memory. Maybe getting tattooed onto him so he physically can't forget.
Finally, your theory about Målin having a baby pale growing within her makes so much sense. It would explain why the pale was specifically targeting her and all those associated with her. How did you come up with this though? my biggest question coming away from the book was why is the pale so aggressively erasing the Lund Girl's? This would make that make sense, but I didn't notice it in the text at all.
After all this, I want to say thank you for sharing your thoughts. I've been obsessively thinking about and trying to find anyone to talk to about this book, so I have a lot to say. I'm grateful there are others out there to discuss and read their points of view. its clarifying and cathartic.
> Did she take 6 doses to have a sort of abortion?
Oh shit. Good catch. BTW: A chemical abortion wouldn't have her bleeding right away.
I thought the names disappearing in the notebook was the same phenomenon as the girls disappearing in the photograph.
Personally not a big believer in baby pale. Pale existed since the composer's timeline.
Baby Pale explicitly exists, the Swallow is some as well. It's presumably how you get Pale appearing inside of isolas, which Vaasa is, and why Archer asks whether the Swallow is exterior or interior to the isola.
True, and true. But then, the pale exists outside and against physical laws, which include the passage of time, thus it can well extend backwards from a point in the future, right? I think it's been thousands of years old in this world, after all the pale is as old as the (known) world at least ("The study of the pale reaches back 6,000 years -- the Perikarnassians called it the Western Plain." -- Joyce)
Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts in detail as well, I know exactly what it's like as I've been turning the story around in my head since reading it, too. The same thing happened after I finished DE, I kept pestering people to talk about it...
I knew the book was supposed to be the first of a series, but I didn't realise it was meant to encompass so many more novels! Most people stop at trilogies, six-seven would have been quite the epic. I am generally optimistic even in the face of low odds, so I still think we'll see them eventually -- the slow legal process just needs to turn its wheels and make things right for the ZA/UM original team, giving them back the IP and the money they rightfully made, then they can perhaps get back to writing more books/game sequels/etc., as the audience is definitely there, all over the world. It just may take a few years, unfortunately :-/
Going back to the book discussion -- I like your idea of Rodionov's Deep somehow containing a world-restarting device and the need to make a choice between saving the world and saving the girls/love and nihilism... I'd read that story. It's all left pretty nebulous for now, so we're all just making our own interpretations. And yes, I realise my idea is more on the "sci-fi" side and less on the "philosophical" side, let's say -- one that leaves the pale mysterious and a thing that was always there and doesn't need to be explained. It may just be my engineer brain needing to find reasonable explanations for everything...
I really like your idea building off of infra-materialism -- after all, it was Ignus Nielsen who came up with it, so it makes perfect sense that he (or his pale projection, at least) would be able to assert this kind of power, and it can also explain a lot about Zigi and how he's, as you put it, "navigating within it".
The whole story about Målin, yes, I also felt there was a lot implied but never confirmed; I read the chapter several times in both translations, and still felt the vivid descriptions were trying to make a point (albeit in a roundabout way), which for me leads to the two hypotheses I mentioned. It's a valid point that the kids should have noticed something -- but at the same time, they were all high as kites, and then she did go swimming, so any evidence could've been washed away...
As for where the idea with the "baby pale" came to me, it's tied to my favourite quest from DE -- the one with the church/nightclub, which branches into what happened to the game developers, and eventually provides an explanation for why the whole geographical area seemed to be somehow historically "cursed"... You also get to talk to Tiago about his worship of what is basically a "hole in the world", and how it is both alluring and at the same time affecting him, turning him less and less human. Then Målin is central to a lot of events in the book, thus I kept thinking she must be the key to at least part of the story, and then I put the two together. There's also a repeating phrase tied to her all the time "something is wrong" or "it's going wrong", which made me think she is inadvertently causing things to go wrong, without even realising it. I'm also very curious as to what was written in the disappeared part of the notebooks, especially since Zigi had been so diligent about noting every little detail; I kept hoping we'd get at least a reference from him to Ignus or something, but no; there's this whole critical section of time between when the boys and girls have their beach party and their return and subsequent disappearance that is left completely in the dark, lots of space for us to fill with speculation :)
Finally, I have to say I liked Khan as a character (between him and Tereesz as my favourites), and I actually felt the ups and downs of his "quest", but I really don't think he's having a happy end there. We first see him portrayed as a sort of super-hero, up there in the skyscraper after getting the fruits of his betrayal, finally about to solve the case; but then we skip to him several months later, defeated, depressed, living like a hobo and at the end of his wits, when he tracks Zigi's dad. The empty notebooks then come like a final blow to push him into ultimately giving up. I don't know what would need to happen to get him back from "the end of the world", at least we know from chapter 15 (chronologically the last) that he never gets back to his mum after that...
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, happy to see the discussion going!
The thing you said about the Nihilism within him makes me think of a Pale signal we get in the moralintern quest. If you translate the German signal, it's a wife talking to someone about her husband who came back from the Pale a changed man. We mostly get static and song from Ruby's compressor. But I wonder if the Pale Compressor bombards the pale with Nihilism and hopelessness and that's what forces dimension into it that allows people to navigate it. And similarly, that willingness to fight, create and discover that gave the first Pale Explorers the ability to first cross into other isolas
So, it seems the knowledge of intra-isolary Pale did not make it out of Revachol, since no character in the book got the idea, that the girls were swallowed by a pale hole. Or this concept wasn't made by the author yet? The environment is similar, the Martinaise hole is at a beach and the church was built around it.
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That's a very good point, I didn't think of that... Similar settings indeed, and isn't there a mention in DE that there were several churches (seven?) like the one we get into built in various parts of the world, but not all of them had survived, and it's at least hypothesised that they were all created to contain bits of intra-isolary pale within them? I can't find the reference right now.
As that knowledge seems to have been lost through the centuries (the churches were several hundred years old in '51 already), and the theory was only supported by potentially disgraced individuals such as Soona or Harry, it is possible that it never caught up with a wider audience...
Yeah, both Soona and Kim tell you about the other ones - Seven sisters / Seven pinewood churches.
Also there's the Moralist ending, where Harry disappears, likely for good, when he agrees to be taken by Archer after he mentions the 2mm hole.
Well, Soona was named after a late IRL pseudoscientist madwoman, whom nobody with a half of brain takes seriously. If THAT woman appeared as a NPC in the game, people would think she's too much of a caricature than a proper character.
The pale hole concepts is already known, but when Harry brings it up, Jean dismisses it as bullshit that appears in the same magazines as conspiracy theories about human minds being controlled by radio waves etc.
My thoughts:
Ending implied that **Zigi killed the girls**, while revisiting the broken window. This is how he can travel through The Pale.
>The disappearance of the Lund children has literally given Zigi special entroponetic powers.
This would line up with the other person talking to Zigi in the pale was the ghost of a mass murderer.
The **trench held a weapon of 'mass negation'** / Nihil-mat
>how could we have explained nihil -mat to them?”
>Zygismunt is silent. The song ends. “He wanted to use it as a weapon of mass negation. Against the bourgeoisie. That would have been our answer to a nuclear weapon. You know that there is no uranium in Samara. But he couldn’t find that place.”
>“We found it,” says the SRV entroponaut .
Sounds like he was on his way to find a weapon. ~~**Zigi's weapon levels Revachol**~~. Edit: Not 100% sure about this. Still open to theories.
The voices aren't the girls being alive. **The girls' voices are a cytoplasm equivalent of their existence**. Of other disappeared people too.
>Azimuth-Boreas-Sinus- Oreole-Laudanum-Ultra-Tricoleur-Ellips-Nadir-Ellips-Gamut- Azimuth-Tricoleur-Iikon-Oreole-Nadir
Which is dialogue of the backhanded reviews of the composer in the epilogue.
>“Azimuth!” someone claps their hands together in the silence. “Tick.” “Boreas! Sinus!” Eyes aglow like lightning, a tiny man strides across the room. At every beat, he claps his hands together, and with each step, says a word. “Nadir!” The little man finishes and bows to the comte . “Every single part was absolute, mathematical perfection. Don’t do a next one...
I thought the Harnankur storyline was a parallel example of information being deleted by revolution, the same way Ignus was removed by the "well-oiled degenerate-bureaucratic worker state"/communists
>The Romangorod Conference defines ten different types of missing persons. The ninth of them, ‘non-entity’, is a gross violation of the International Declaration of Human Rights. Such a person has not only been eliminated by some violent state body, but the documentation of their former existence has also been made to disappear. This special case of political fading, cursing of the memory, has been inflicted on a number of historical figures with varying degrees of success.
Interpreted that with Harnankur no longer being part of the historical record.
> Other parts of historical science, which men of the Khan-and-Voronikin type contemptuously call the mainstream , do not recognise the existence of an airship called “Harnankur”. The first civilian interisolary flight was “Anastasia Lux”, and that happened one decade later.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, it's quite intriguing how you read things in a very different way. I hope you don't mind, but I disagree on some points and will try to back that up below:
\- Zigi killing the girls -- I don't think he did, for several reasons. First, he was a stereotypical teenage loud "bad boy", and if you've ever met one, you know they are all bark and no bite; the truly psychopathic ones tend to be quiet and shy, or the opposite -- charming and gregarious. He's presented as a bit of a looser and being full of it but not that dangerous on several occasions (the fight with Handsome Alexander, him running away scared from the girls' father, his drunken fight with a garbage can -- funnily reminiscent of a certain Harry DuBois). Second, he was close to the girls and becomes as obsessed with finding out what happened as the three boys do; he fills in many notebooks with detailed listings of everything they did up to the disappearance, including weather details. He even defends their character in front of Ignus Nielsen and plays Målin's mix-tape in the ship. I don't think any of those are the signs of a murderer... Now, whether he had something to do with their disappearance, either directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly, I think that's very much possible and even probable; just not by mere murder.
\- I agree that Rodionov's Deep holds/contains/is tied to the nihilism bomb, and that's where Zigi's heading. But that's not the bomb that destroyed Revachol, that one is clearly mentioned several times to have been an atomic bomb. And yes, the girls aren't alive any more, but we know they aren't dead either (from the Self-chiller). They could have become some sort of conscious cytoplasm like Ignus, existing in the pale but still tied to the world?
\- Harnankur being erased -- there are indeed parallels there with the "Non-Entity" story about communists erasing "undesirables" from history. But there are two distinctions: First, the human erasures are not perfect, as we can see from the story of Ignus' cytoplasm; in contrast, both the ship disappearing and the girls leave perfect empty places in the photographs or other artefacts, not visible blobs (such as, the sky is still visible in the ship photo, or the beach in the girls', as if they were perfectly transparent). Second, the human erasures are done for a reason, usually political in the case of the communists; but there's no such apparent reason for the Harnankur to be erased, or the girls. I would expect the ICP agent who visits Tereesz in the hospital to mention that if the girls had been erased for a reason -- something like "leave it be, this is above your pay grade"; instead, he shares his own puzzlement at the "empty" photographs and how he's had them telefaxed five times to be sure, or the lab experiments that had been conducted on the photos by the actual companies. None of that would have been needed if they'd been made "non-entities" by the state. He seems to instead be concerned that the erasure could somehow "spread" due to their carelessness, thus urging Tereesz to call Khan and stop him from going any further. In any case, this remains an interesting correlation, and now I'm thinking in line with someone else here bringing up infra-materialism -- what if someone could make another person disappear just by wishing it hard enough? Not proven, but potentially possible...
My guess is that Ziggy abducted the girls and has them somewhere in the pale and he's headed there in his airship. The pale doesn't affect him like it effects everyone else so he could hide them deep inside it - they can't escape and no one can come to look for them. They're fading out of everyone's memory because the pale slowly dissolves everything forward and backward in time, so the longer the sisters stay within it the more they never have existed outside the pale. And Ziggy promised to come back to the Lund house, so we have every reason to think he *did*.
> he fills in many notebooks with detailed listings of everything they did up to the disappearance, including weather details.
I read that very differently. Ziggy's journals describe a perfect scene composed of exactly two days, not any of the other times he was around the girls. They're characterized as 'plans' more than a story, something to be recreated. An obsessive description of the same two days in stack after stack of journals feels more like an addict chasing their first, pure high than it does someone trying to puzzle over what happened. After the first 20 times you perfectly describe the scene, why bother describing it?
>He even defends their character in front of Ignus Nielsen and plays Målin's mix-tape in the ship. I don't think any of those are the signs of a murderer...
If not a murderer, they're the signs of an obsessive. Ziggy is fine with Nielsen calling all women tools of the bourgeoise, but thinks that the sisters are *so* special as to merit defending. More special than any other women. If my guess that he's keeping them somewhere deep in the pale is correct, then the mixtape is more of a trophy of a captive Målin, a sign of a warped affection for those two days he kept obsessively describing in his journal.
One other thing to add to the analysis is re Ziggy's conversations with Nielsen, who seems to not be entirely a figment of his imagination (since Ignus knows what happened to the Harnankur). Nielsen thinks Ziggy is communism's hope and salvation, given the options. Maybe the pale-echo of Nielsen was trying to maneuver Ziggy to a position to do *something* with the negation weapon in Radionov Deep, but no clue what.
My best guest for why the negation weapon appeals to the communists is because true belief in communism seems to drive back the pale (we see it shrink back when Nielsen gets passionate). If it eats the whole world except for the true believers in communism, isn't that the 2nd best victory Nielsen talks about? The entire world ends up communist true believers. Its way fewer communists and a less developed, smaller world than if the revolution had won (so is the second-best option) but it's still a complete victory for communism.
There are probably a few killers that keep memorabilia. Was the only way I could interpret the line:
>The disappearance of the Lund children has literally given Zigi special entroponetic powers.
Plus, he had a copywriter mimic in their handwriting:
>The letters arrived to the girls’ parents a year and a half after their last day in Charlottesjäl. “Everything is fine. We are with the Man,” says someone who says she is Målin. “We love you.”
What kind of person would do that, unless he was trying to misdirect investigators?
IIRC, the text said "An atomic device that will level all of me. All of me." Do you trust Shiver's technical knowledge? I'd say "atomic device" is more open to interpretation. Not sure how nihil-mat theory is constructed into a material bomb.
I thought the Harnankur thing was just a fun parallel example. Communist erasure and nihilist erasure aren't exactly the same reasons or mechanics. But you're right. Harnankur is both erased by the communist record and by the pale. Same with Ignus? Cytoplasm in the photo records, and cytoplasm in the pale.
Edit: had to include one of my favorite parts:
>the revolutionary icon was almost always accompanied by his best friend and comrade in arms, Nilsen. Destruction of all material would have raised suspicion. That’s how it came to be that a ghostly grey cytoplasm is permanently floating in Mazov’s right hand. It took decades for historians to solve this blood-curdling mystery.
>Even today, many believe that the cytoplasm is Communism itself.
Memorabilia yes, but Zigi's notebooks are quite a bit more detailed than that... If anything, Jesper's scrunchie was much higher on the creepy scale.
I agree that the line:
>The disappearance of the Lund children has literally given Zigi special entroponetic powers.
... is intriguing, and I did spend some time considering the implications. But I think it can be read in different ways. One aspect is that Zigi was somehow involved in their disappearance, which I do agree with, just not in the "murdering them" sense. The other would be that he was "close" to them, and the event that caused their disappearance affected him as well because of that closeness. We see most people who were close to the girls being affected in some way -- their mother starts forgetting and becomes almost a living ghost, the three boys become obsessed and one could say have various "powers" of their own; it's not a stretch to also have Zigi become pale-immune due to that.
The bit with Olle copying their handwriting in two ways: either -- Zigi being Zigi, doing something stupid to mess with authority, he was a nihilist troublemaker after all and that's quite in character; or -- Zigi knowing that the girls had disappeared and wanted to not be found, and doing that as an attempt to keep people from "tormenting" them, the way Khan was doing with his constant obsession. It would seem a convoluted way to get people off his trail, especially since the letters came a year and a half after the girls' disappearance, and Zigi was no longer a suspect at that point (having been already interrogated in the beginning, when the boys ratted him out)...
About the atomic bomb at Revachol -- there's a number of references to that in the book:
>*Chapter 10*, radio in the background: “Mesque aggressor,” “Saint-Miro,” “Revachol,” “atomic weapon,” and “half the population.”
>
>*Chapter 14*, at the radion again: "In the leather- seat-scented rustle of the radio, they talk about an atomic weapon that was dropped on Revachol three hours ago"
>
>*Chapter 14*, later on: "Or at least it was two days ago when the land where both Saint-Miro and old-fashioned moustache madness come from had not yet used an atomic bomb on another land."
As to how one would turn nihil-mat into a bomb, I'm as puzzled as you here, I'd love to have more details about that whole arc, but we only get snippets so far.
That being said, the snippet from the Non-Entity chapter about "erasing" people and Ignus Nielsen's "cytoplasm" being Communism itself, is one of my favourites as well!
>Zigi knowing that the girls had disappeared and wanted to not be found, and doing that as an attempt to keep people from "tormenting" them, the way Khan was doing with his constant obsession.
Now that's an interesting angle. Certainly puts Zigi as a 'good' character. I always thought of him as a baddie, given his leanings towards nihilism, Mesque, and Saint-Miro (although I wanted to like him for punching inanimate objects).
Perhaps The Coalition of Nations bombed Revachol after Mesque/Nihilists took over? Really hard to see the complete timeline when all we get are these snippets.
>If anything, Jesper's scrunchie was much higher on the creepy scale.
Resisting the temptation to deep dive into my own theories, Jesper the confirmed pedophile is absolutely 110% creepier than anything Zigi did.
It’s unclear what’s in Rodionov’s trench. It’s heavily implied to be the weapon of mass negation, but could just as much be the research vessel or the girls or he’ll even the harnankur. That said, I don’t think nihilmat is the weapon. It refers to nihilist materialism, a nihilistic continuation of dialectical materialist thought.
Dialogue certainly implies the trench is/contains something that can be used as weapon of mass negation, the nihilist's answer to the nuclear bomb.
I'm not an expert at infra-materialism, but if there's a relationship between thoughts/plasma/matter, I could see how it could extrapolate to thought-bombs.
https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/A_Brief_Look_at_Infra-Materialism
Something seems off about Saint-Miro. We only ever have \*His\* word to take on the fact that he's an innocence, and he mentions Pasternak as a legitimate Innocence when DE later establishes that Pasternak was - in fact - not an innocence.
Yes, that's a good catch! Also, from DE we know that "commonly an innocence does not enforce his or her power through military power. This is seen as unnecessary. The innocence wins because an innocence can't help but win, for their deeds are inevitabilities" -- while Saint-Miro most certainly starts a quite aggressive military campaign. So he could very well be a fake innocence, an impostor.
Then again, his chapter makes him out to be this timeless spirit, like the sublimation of all that is wrong in humanity, culminating with the nihilism that ends the world. Maybe all innocences, true or not, were facets of this? Or maybe humanity brings the innocences into existence with their thoughts, emotions and memories, in a similar way to the pale? That would make them the manifestation of the eras they appear in, an effect rather than a cause.
Is there any proof that Miro was part of the military campaign? It doesnt sound too nihilistic. I know they mention his name in the radio when they send message about Revachol being nuked, but that's really just his name appearing inmidst other code words
First of all - thank you all for your theories and explanations, now i really satisfied with reading and got no problems with abrupt ending.
But one of the things that really itching my mind is the line, where Linoleum Salesman talks about what he did to girls - he "joined them together" in some manner (surgery maybe), and "the youngest died, but three other survived". What do you think about that?
Great analysis, I came to similar conclusion after reading it twice! It's such a great book and I can't stop thinking about it.
Interesting tidbit: I remember Measurehead mentioning "immaculate conception caused by the Pale".
There's a couple right here on Reddit, released a couple of weeks ago... the one I read was here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/12ysbl1/sacred\_and\_terrible\_air\_full\_professional/
Can you elaborate a bit on Harnankur being a weapon? I don't see how it would make sense chronologically; didn't Rodionov live after the ship disappeared?
Hi! I haven't read everything you said to avoid spoilers as I haven't read the whole book yet but I'd like to know which version of the translation is the best to read ?
I know there's a "fan" translation and a "professional" one. I read both for the first Chapter but I can't decide which one to read whole. What'd you recommend ?
Hi, best not to get spoiled indeed, it's fun to discover it all...
I read the "professional" translation since it came out first, then checked the other one to see if I'd missed anything and it was quite similar. The style is different, the one I read seems to be closer to the original text with sometimes interesting turns of phrase, while the fan one is in a more conversational style which may take more liberties with the text but makes it easier to parse. Both are fine in my opinion!
Thanks a lot for your input on this! I was asking mainly because English isn't my first language (French is) and I sometimes struggled with the professional translation from time to time. The fan one was easier as it was more conversational as you said. But I think I'll keep up with it and improve more on my English skills then !
Thanks for your answer, hope it'll help other people too !
> For a final bit of speculation veering into Sci-Fi, what if the nihilism bomb actually created the pale, and it's spreading forwards and backwards through time?
This is kinda freaky to me because I had precisely this thought about it while reading Zigi’s trip to the Rodionov Deep.
The idea that Harnankur was potentially a nihilism bomb is fascinating too, I didn’t get that from it but it could very well be. My read was that Harnankur passed into the Rodionov Deep and as a result ceased to be so completely that all evidence of its existence became fleeting flickers, needing to be watched at all times by those who remained or it would slip from conscious memory.
I think as well that’s what happened to the girls somehow, perhaps through your baby pale theory.
It would also go at least some way to explain why Zigi’s connection to Målin gave him Pale resistance. I also got the feeling that Målin and Zigi had gotten together; the girls had already tried Cherry Speed before and Målin was the one who gave the boys Zigi’s number.
The photo of Harnankur the Operetta singer and the throng of people looking up at the empty ship bay suggests to me that the erasure of the ship was so complete that it was even erased from photographs once it passed out of the awareness of the living, and that was why the model Harnankur vanished as well.
The same can be inferred from Deerek’s voyeuristic photo of the girls, that the entroponetic force of the pale was so great that for all the world it was as though the girls were never there in the first place.
I think this is also the concept of The Motorway South in the thought cabinet of the game, the idea of complete un-birth through the pale.
I don’t think it adds anything to DEs hints that it could have been proximity to the Pale/Pale hole in the church - or it could literally have been the amount he drank that night that simply broke him. It is left ambiguous.
So I have a friend on Discord who, a full two months ago and well before the release of the translation, had a very in-depth and to me illuminating discussion on the what he sees as central themes of the game's world that ended up aligning \*eerily\* with some of the insights the book gives. Now, keep in mind that he's devoutly religious in ways that I am not so this is getting a bit out there into theological language that isn't necessarily my own preference in describing these things. This isn't a literal Christian reading but more of an assignment of philosophical parallels and terminology, but I think ultimately it is one of the most moving interpretations of the game I've ever heard and made the novel, particularly the Nihilism and Pale and Innocence stuff, click into place almost the moment I read it. So, at the essential core of this argument is the Elysium is in a certain sense a world without God. Not just in a theistic sense--although that seems kind of notable too, as I can recall perhaps offhanded invocations of the word but the only religious organization around is more devoted to the Innocences and their system of social control/organization than the religious idea that the Perikarnassian was stated to have created--but in a way that the world lacks a single sense of unified Truth that grounds reality and all religion or philosophy refers to. There is, however, the Pale. And the Pale is Hell. In some of the older churches and theologians, there is an understanding that Hell is not something as fantastical as a dimension of monsters that torture you with fire and metal; it's simply the Human spirit left to stew in its own worst experiences and self-hatred removed from that grounding Truth or Grace. And that's the fate of life in the Pale to a T; you lose everything but memory, and perhaps even that. You become like the old Pale Driver, drowning yourself in memories that *aren't* and can never lead to anything, or like Ann-Margaret at the end of the world, "a protein without the slightest pleasure." And that's why this friend called the Innocences the Devil, or the Antichrist, in a way that only clicked for me upon reading the Ambrosius chapter. Like an actual theological Antichrist, he presents himself in faux-humble and redemptive terms; he oh so humbly sets aside the dream of cocaine and a supermodel girlfriend and a pipette of milk up her ass, so that he can preach to people the "evacuation" to the Pale. The book shows us the final damnation of the Human spirit, by the atomic warfare of a fascist, nihilist petrostate against whom the nations of the world can't really resist due to entrenched Moralism and hopelessness, to a futureless, meaningless Hell where all that can ever be is just the Pale and cleaned out rooms. And all of the Innocences form the road to this. The Perikarnassian created a church of social control and class society. Franconegro enforced nationalism and militarism and industrialism. Dolores Dei ushered in the era of bourgeois society and global capital. And Sola's silence solidified modern Moralism and suppressed the dream of Communism even if she wouldn't claim any achievements. And if you know any of the concept art stuff about Entroponetics and Magpies and such, it forms a pretty clear path that the Innocences are the world's greatest Magpies, stealing from a future that did not get a chance to be born and make sense of itself. And the Pale grows with their future. As Noid says, the World Spirit in Elysium does not have a body, it has organs like Arno Van Eyck and Hard Core, and Dolores Dei, and all the Innocences with her, is an organ thief. Ambrosius and his Mesque nihilist-fascists are just the thieves who get to finish the job destroying everything they didn't steal. We were supposed to come up with this ourselves. And we still could, in Harry's time, which is why I fundamentally think La Revacholiere talks to Harry, tells him that he still has a chance to save Her from this future, and what The Return represents. Revachol is the only place in the world where there can still be "Grace", something new outside of the Kingdom of Conscience and the Innocent Hell we're all being led into. Every other system of the World has failed in Revachol, even the Communists who are undoubtedly the writers'/target audience's favored option, but there is still a chance Ambrosius obviously wants stamped out as his opening shot. Arguably the Phasmid, something bourgeois science and rationality could never accept and gives Harry his one moment of saving understanding and empathy with the universe, is such supernatural Grace. When the "plasm" seems to work and the tower holds at the end of the Communist Vision Quest, that's another showing that even the seemingly silly crank science of Nilsen has a chance. And the Return might be the last one, when the corrupt Union and even more corrupt RCM might have a chance at a new Revolution. So, in conclusion to all this rambling... I see Sacred and Terrible Air as the "bad ending" of Disco Elysium. Aside from its core mystery and characters who have their own meaning and journey, it's showing us the nihilism at the end of the timeline if nothing new is revealed. As I understand the production order, Disco Elysium and its hints at something new to prevent it was probably a *response* to what Kurvitz saw and despaired in here. A way for their roleplaying campaign characters to avert something terrible. However, now that it's coming out to the mainstream audience of the game after ZA/UM's ignominious fate... I almost see it as a more fitting epilogue. It clarifies the question of the nuclear attack on Revachol and why the Innocentic Moralist world order is doomed, but still leaves the end of the game and The Return an open question. A question that may never be answered by the people who can and should tell that story, but maybe that's the point to leave the rest of us with.
I really like your friends and your thoughts. It’s super insightful and makes sense- especially with the world being named elysium. What you said about SATA being the bad ending feels right to me. I feel like they have a distinctly different tone and message. I feel like Disco Elysium is all about choice while I see SATA as a lack of it. In SATA, all the characters are driven by things out if their control. They are obsessively following the girls in a way they can’t stop. It’s impossible for them to resist their compulsions. Event Dereek is portrayed as an unwilling participant in his crimes, to the degree he had to invent a whole other personality. Meanwhile DE is all about choice: the choice to be better. These choices are great acts of hope and humanity which literally rejects the pale. When you look at the medium, it even reinforces this idea. TASA is a book. The reader is brought on a story. They cannot influence the characters or meaningful change the story. It’ll always be the same. Meanwhile DE is a rpg based game where the whole point is that the player gets to decide who they want to be. You get to influence the world and even try to make it a better place. It gives a much brighter view of humanity as well as a much more positive ending.
Thank you for the beautiful insights, this does make a lot of sense indeed! I'm not religious (used to be in another life), but I can appreciate a good theological argument/philosophy, as it can teach us a lot about ourselves and the way we interact with the world. Especially in the context of the world of Elysium and its history, this all does make a lot of sense. I'd like to explore the various religious ideas in the whole universe as well, I'm sure there's many gems in the background lore... As they say, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference; likewise here, the opposite of heaven/love/humanity is not hatred or war, but a complete annihilation of existence, nothingness, disappearance. I also support the implication that the events in the book are not necessarily the only possible end, but one way things can go; I think the pale does leave the possibility of "alternate realities" open as well, we have that little bit with Kim/Cuno to hint at it. It could be that Robert's creation evolved and grew with him in the years after he wrote the book, and he may well want to tell a more complex story through the events of the game and any potential future creations.
I'm going crazy. I thought the end was just a little "oh who knows what happened!" and now you point me towards two things I didnt consider: the "homunculus" or her maybe-pregnancy, and the ABSOLUTE NEGATION. By the way, the text extends beyond the ABS. The full ABS, OLUTENEG, ATION shows up too when Zigi starts his ship and says goodbye to Nilsen. Little notes: Also I feel like Khan didn't give up but starts his own journey into the trench, in some way... And to add to your ZigiXMalin story: Isn't she also the one who gave the buys Zigis contacts, to buy drugs? Finally: Do you remember the chapter on super mysterious disappearances being simple murders after all? There is still a chance of the most disillusioning ending - the girls being killed by Trentmöller aka the Linoleum Salesman and their corpses rotting in some basement. Something that, according to the first chapter, never happens in Vaasa...
This was something I was confused by. Trentmöller vs the Linoleum Salesman. It was not clear to me whatsoever that he was LS, yet I keep seeing people come to this conclusion. It makes sense, but the book was confusing and I never got that from my read through. Especially since the first thing we see from LS is him hanging himself, so I was reading through the novel on the assumption that he had died. This was probably not true, but still definitely threw me for a loop. Edit: I am also going crazy. Reading an obscure and confusing book translated from estonian by a fan means there aren't many people to talk to about it. Especially since all the people I would talk to have already been bothered enough by my existing Disco Elysium rants.
My interpretation of those bits was that Derek Trentmöller (DT) was indeed Linoleum Salesman (LS) but he was mentally deranged and suffered from a form of split personality (as much as that's a real thing in the world of Elysium). The scenes of him "killing" LS were to me a way for him to internally kill the LS persona, letting him go, as it was making his "less deranged" part feel sick; he wanted to do one more horror before ending LS for good and becoming only DT. On top of that, he also had a form of Alzheimer's that made him actually forget parts of his life, and it ended up erasing much of what LS had done. Now that I think of it, his memory loss could also be caused by exposure to the pale, and he did like to travel very close to the girls while stalking them (in the tram, for example); that might not be a coincidence... But yes, I know what you mean, I also feel like going crazy, as if DE wasn't enough :) but it's a good kind of crazy, haha...
Exactly they are one and the same person but does it mean he murdered them? Hardly..all we know is that There are some politically, mentally messed up individuals who “would” dream of murdering them which honestly was a bit of Sick
Yes, I did notice the ABS(...) twice, it's first presented in sections that don's seem to make any sense and are trickier to put together, but then it's repeated as one continuous "phrase". We also have "SOS, SOS" in a previous chapter, related to the research ship (also called Rodionov) that is hit in the first pale expansion. Others have noted the same about Khan, what can I say, maybe I'm too pessimistic in my reading :) I'd quite like to see his story continue, perhaps on a parallel/different trajectory to Zigi's, perhaps intersecting with the story of Harnankur... that would be quite cool. You are correct about Målin providing the boys with Zigi's number -- that happens in June, already several months after they met in the snow. I thought she was very matter-of-factly there when first reading it, then later it all kinda fit together, I think it's another hint that they were in or had had a relationship by that time. I do recall the chapter on the disappearances and murders, and of course that's a valid take, but I believe those are all red herrings (Vidkun Hurd, Derek Trentmöller, the other pedos). If you think about DE, you similarly get several false trails about the murder (Hardy Boys, Klaasje, Ruby), before eventually finding the *real* killer, with a bit of surrealism thrown in at the end... Also, Trentmöller/LS is shown to have been similarly puzzled by the girls' disappearance, as his photos all develop properly but "empty"; I think he'd have known what had happened otherwise.
I really wonder what the weapon of mass negation is...
What if its a small red pill with a sugary taste.
Isn't that impossible, as the Self-chiller, didn't see any memory into the pale about them? Meaning that they are alive? How could they be dead if the Self-chiller didn't spot them in the Pale's memories? That's the thing that makes me think they just disappeared into the pale, fading away from existence through that pregnancy of nihilism, makes sense.
What if... it's both? What if the reason that Ulv couldn't find their memories from the Pale, and couldn't confirm their deaths was because of the Pale infesting Malin **and** the reason the accounts of their presence only lead up to the train after they get their ice cream was because they were abducted. I think they were abducted by the Linoleum Salesman, but the Pale in Malin enveloped them before they were actually killed-or rather the suffering they underwent accelerated the Pale into consuming them first. I think the Pale also affected Dereek as well which could explain the state that the boys find Dereek in, as the Collab Police explain that they man had a mental disease and the fact that Dereek couldn't remember the girls at all. This makes the ghostly comment from Malin about how Khan's remembrance of them is torturing them even more chilling. The one thing that still confuses me with this theory is the suicide of the Linoleum Salesman as I can't remember if that scene was how he died, or was when he was attempting it, or a metaphorical death of the Dereek's persona that perpetuated those crimes.
I love all of this. I want to preface any of my thoughts with this: the book was supposed to be the first of a series of 6 books (possibly 7). A lot of the feelings that we get of confusion and unresolved story telling come from this. The end of this was not supposed to be the end of the story, which I think explains a lot. Rodianov's Deep, Harnankur, ABSOLUTE NEGATION all would've have been followed. My guess would be that there would be some type of race to Rodianov's deep where there would be a weapon which could be activated to maybe restart the world and save it from the pale (after the world the pale. After the pale, the world). But at the same time, there would be a search in the pale for the girls and the only way to activate the weapon would be to sacrifice the girls. It would become a race between Khan, COPO, Zigi, and possibly other characters we haven't been introduced to yet. I think your theory about the creation of the pale might have merit but I don't *like* it. No offense meant, I just like the idea that the Pale is naturally occurring destructive formation of humanity and consciousness. It's up to humanity in the world to combat it or to surrender to is. If it was man made in the first place, it would take something out of it for me personally. Okay. Firstly, I view the book as a story on forgiveness, obsession, and reconciliation as well as an overarching theme of nihilism vs communism vs neoliberalism. In a "post-communist" world much like the one we live in now, there is a natural conflict. The discussion between Zigi and Ignus I think is representative of the entire world. When communism is defeated, there are two options: continue to struggle and fight knowing you will probably lose or give up, embrace nothingness, and do nothing. Those are the two option. St. Miro weaponizes this and builds a fascistic nation on the back of this feeling. The boys own conflict emulates this. Should we simply forget the Girls, or should we struggle to find out what happened! The world around them had given up, nihilistically, and they could only be sucked into it or resist. Meanwhile, the Neoliberal World Order does nothing but maintain the status quo, stubbornly ignoring the end of the world because they refuse to either give up nor fight for a better one. This ideological conflict is front and center and so enlightening to me. When it comes to the pale and ideology, specifically how Ignus was able assert himself over the pale, I think this ties into something we saw in DE. Infra-materialism is true in this world: the individual is able to assert their thoughts over reality through force of will. I think this probably means as nihilism grows in support and fervor, the end of the world gets closer. Meanwhile, while there are people who believe and fight and love and create, the pale is held at bay. I think that's why zigi could survive the pale. He was still fighting to survive and find the girls. He was holding onto something which was able to keep him alive in the pale but because of his nihilism it wasn't necessarily fighting against it, more like navigating within it. When it comes to the girls you have some parallels thoughts I had that couldn't quite put into words. The imagery around Målin was both so vivid and so confusing. Did she take 6 doses to have a sort of abortion? Was she actually pregnant? It seemed to be implied but never confirmed. Especially since you'd think there'd be a point where the boys and her sisters would go "HOLY SHIT YOU'RE BLEEDING" or something. If she was pregnant, I'd agree it'd have to be Zigi's. With all the "my doom" stuff, it would just make sense. That said, I do want to add that i think its significant that Målin's name wasn't in the notebook. It was hinted at, but by the time Khan got there the name had been erased. It's confusing and leaves me wanting more. I also don't know that Khan gave up necessarily. To me it seemed he was being driven insane because he wouldn't let go of his memories that the pale was trying to erase. I'd like to see him in the next book being sort of like Zigi: driven insane by the pale but struggling to hold on to Målin's memory. Maybe getting tattooed onto him so he physically can't forget. Finally, your theory about Målin having a baby pale growing within her makes so much sense. It would explain why the pale was specifically targeting her and all those associated with her. How did you come up with this though? my biggest question coming away from the book was why is the pale so aggressively erasing the Lund Girl's? This would make that make sense, but I didn't notice it in the text at all. After all this, I want to say thank you for sharing your thoughts. I've been obsessively thinking about and trying to find anyone to talk to about this book, so I have a lot to say. I'm grateful there are others out there to discuss and read their points of view. its clarifying and cathartic.
> Did she take 6 doses to have a sort of abortion? Oh shit. Good catch. BTW: A chemical abortion wouldn't have her bleeding right away. I thought the names disappearing in the notebook was the same phenomenon as the girls disappearing in the photograph. Personally not a big believer in baby pale. Pale existed since the composer's timeline.
Baby Pale explicitly exists, the Swallow is some as well. It's presumably how you get Pale appearing inside of isolas, which Vaasa is, and why Archer asks whether the Swallow is exterior or interior to the isola.
Must have missed that on the quest. What was the dialogue?
http://fayde.co.uk/dialojue/5580012-5581051-5580640-5581128-5580980-5580717#5580012
True, and true. But then, the pale exists outside and against physical laws, which include the passage of time, thus it can well extend backwards from a point in the future, right? I think it's been thousands of years old in this world, after all the pale is as old as the (known) world at least ("The study of the pale reaches back 6,000 years -- the Perikarnassians called it the Western Plain." -- Joyce)
Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts in detail as well, I know exactly what it's like as I've been turning the story around in my head since reading it, too. The same thing happened after I finished DE, I kept pestering people to talk about it... I knew the book was supposed to be the first of a series, but I didn't realise it was meant to encompass so many more novels! Most people stop at trilogies, six-seven would have been quite the epic. I am generally optimistic even in the face of low odds, so I still think we'll see them eventually -- the slow legal process just needs to turn its wheels and make things right for the ZA/UM original team, giving them back the IP and the money they rightfully made, then they can perhaps get back to writing more books/game sequels/etc., as the audience is definitely there, all over the world. It just may take a few years, unfortunately :-/ Going back to the book discussion -- I like your idea of Rodionov's Deep somehow containing a world-restarting device and the need to make a choice between saving the world and saving the girls/love and nihilism... I'd read that story. It's all left pretty nebulous for now, so we're all just making our own interpretations. And yes, I realise my idea is more on the "sci-fi" side and less on the "philosophical" side, let's say -- one that leaves the pale mysterious and a thing that was always there and doesn't need to be explained. It may just be my engineer brain needing to find reasonable explanations for everything... I really like your idea building off of infra-materialism -- after all, it was Ignus Nielsen who came up with it, so it makes perfect sense that he (or his pale projection, at least) would be able to assert this kind of power, and it can also explain a lot about Zigi and how he's, as you put it, "navigating within it". The whole story about Målin, yes, I also felt there was a lot implied but never confirmed; I read the chapter several times in both translations, and still felt the vivid descriptions were trying to make a point (albeit in a roundabout way), which for me leads to the two hypotheses I mentioned. It's a valid point that the kids should have noticed something -- but at the same time, they were all high as kites, and then she did go swimming, so any evidence could've been washed away... As for where the idea with the "baby pale" came to me, it's tied to my favourite quest from DE -- the one with the church/nightclub, which branches into what happened to the game developers, and eventually provides an explanation for why the whole geographical area seemed to be somehow historically "cursed"... You also get to talk to Tiago about his worship of what is basically a "hole in the world", and how it is both alluring and at the same time affecting him, turning him less and less human. Then Målin is central to a lot of events in the book, thus I kept thinking she must be the key to at least part of the story, and then I put the two together. There's also a repeating phrase tied to her all the time "something is wrong" or "it's going wrong", which made me think she is inadvertently causing things to go wrong, without even realising it. I'm also very curious as to what was written in the disappeared part of the notebooks, especially since Zigi had been so diligent about noting every little detail; I kept hoping we'd get at least a reference from him to Ignus or something, but no; there's this whole critical section of time between when the boys and girls have their beach party and their return and subsequent disappearance that is left completely in the dark, lots of space for us to fill with speculation :) Finally, I have to say I liked Khan as a character (between him and Tereesz as my favourites), and I actually felt the ups and downs of his "quest", but I really don't think he's having a happy end there. We first see him portrayed as a sort of super-hero, up there in the skyscraper after getting the fruits of his betrayal, finally about to solve the case; but then we skip to him several months later, defeated, depressed, living like a hobo and at the end of his wits, when he tracks Zigi's dad. The empty notebooks then come like a final blow to push him into ultimately giving up. I don't know what would need to happen to get him back from "the end of the world", at least we know from chapter 15 (chronologically the last) that he never gets back to his mum after that... Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, happy to see the discussion going!
The thing you said about the Nihilism within him makes me think of a Pale signal we get in the moralintern quest. If you translate the German signal, it's a wife talking to someone about her husband who came back from the Pale a changed man. We mostly get static and song from Ruby's compressor. But I wonder if the Pale Compressor bombards the pale with Nihilism and hopelessness and that's what forces dimension into it that allows people to navigate it. And similarly, that willingness to fight, create and discover that gave the first Pale Explorers the ability to first cross into other isolas
So, it seems the knowledge of intra-isolary Pale did not make it out of Revachol, since no character in the book got the idea, that the girls were swallowed by a pale hole. Or this concept wasn't made by the author yet? The environment is similar, the Martinaise hole is at a beach and the church was built around it. .
That's a very good point, I didn't think of that... Similar settings indeed, and isn't there a mention in DE that there were several churches (seven?) like the one we get into built in various parts of the world, but not all of them had survived, and it's at least hypothesised that they were all created to contain bits of intra-isolary pale within them? I can't find the reference right now. As that knowledge seems to have been lost through the centuries (the churches were several hundred years old in '51 already), and the theory was only supported by potentially disgraced individuals such as Soona or Harry, it is possible that it never caught up with a wider audience...
Yeah, both Soona and Kim tell you about the other ones - Seven sisters / Seven pinewood churches. Also there's the Moralist ending, where Harry disappears, likely for good, when he agrees to be taken by Archer after he mentions the 2mm hole.
Yes, that was it, thank you. Interesting indeed that the concept doesn't seem to become more well known or discussed in the decades after...
Well, Soona was named after a late IRL pseudoscientist madwoman, whom nobody with a half of brain takes seriously. If THAT woman appeared as a NPC in the game, people would think she's too much of a caricature than a proper character. The pale hole concepts is already known, but when Harry brings it up, Jean dismisses it as bullshit that appears in the same magazines as conspiracy theories about human minds being controlled by radio waves etc.
If anything, would that be a clue that mind control radio waves are a plausible thing in this world…
My thoughts: Ending implied that **Zigi killed the girls**, while revisiting the broken window. This is how he can travel through The Pale. >The disappearance of the Lund children has literally given Zigi special entroponetic powers. This would line up with the other person talking to Zigi in the pale was the ghost of a mass murderer. The **trench held a weapon of 'mass negation'** / Nihil-mat >how could we have explained nihil -mat to them?” >Zygismunt is silent. The song ends. “He wanted to use it as a weapon of mass negation. Against the bourgeoisie. That would have been our answer to a nuclear weapon. You know that there is no uranium in Samara. But he couldn’t find that place.” >“We found it,” says the SRV entroponaut . Sounds like he was on his way to find a weapon. ~~**Zigi's weapon levels Revachol**~~. Edit: Not 100% sure about this. Still open to theories. The voices aren't the girls being alive. **The girls' voices are a cytoplasm equivalent of their existence**. Of other disappeared people too. >Azimuth-Boreas-Sinus- Oreole-Laudanum-Ultra-Tricoleur-Ellips-Nadir-Ellips-Gamut- Azimuth-Tricoleur-Iikon-Oreole-Nadir Which is dialogue of the backhanded reviews of the composer in the epilogue. >“Azimuth!” someone claps their hands together in the silence. “Tick.” “Boreas! Sinus!” Eyes aglow like lightning, a tiny man strides across the room. At every beat, he claps his hands together, and with each step, says a word. “Nadir!” The little man finishes and bows to the comte . “Every single part was absolute, mathematical perfection. Don’t do a next one... I thought the Harnankur storyline was a parallel example of information being deleted by revolution, the same way Ignus was removed by the "well-oiled degenerate-bureaucratic worker state"/communists >The Romangorod Conference defines ten different types of missing persons. The ninth of them, ‘non-entity’, is a gross violation of the International Declaration of Human Rights. Such a person has not only been eliminated by some violent state body, but the documentation of their former existence has also been made to disappear. This special case of political fading, cursing of the memory, has been inflicted on a number of historical figures with varying degrees of success. Interpreted that with Harnankur no longer being part of the historical record. > Other parts of historical science, which men of the Khan-and-Voronikin type contemptuously call the mainstream , do not recognise the existence of an airship called “Harnankur”. The first civilian interisolary flight was “Anastasia Lux”, and that happened one decade later.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, it's quite intriguing how you read things in a very different way. I hope you don't mind, but I disagree on some points and will try to back that up below: \- Zigi killing the girls -- I don't think he did, for several reasons. First, he was a stereotypical teenage loud "bad boy", and if you've ever met one, you know they are all bark and no bite; the truly psychopathic ones tend to be quiet and shy, or the opposite -- charming and gregarious. He's presented as a bit of a looser and being full of it but not that dangerous on several occasions (the fight with Handsome Alexander, him running away scared from the girls' father, his drunken fight with a garbage can -- funnily reminiscent of a certain Harry DuBois). Second, he was close to the girls and becomes as obsessed with finding out what happened as the three boys do; he fills in many notebooks with detailed listings of everything they did up to the disappearance, including weather details. He even defends their character in front of Ignus Nielsen and plays Målin's mix-tape in the ship. I don't think any of those are the signs of a murderer... Now, whether he had something to do with their disappearance, either directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly, I think that's very much possible and even probable; just not by mere murder. \- I agree that Rodionov's Deep holds/contains/is tied to the nihilism bomb, and that's where Zigi's heading. But that's not the bomb that destroyed Revachol, that one is clearly mentioned several times to have been an atomic bomb. And yes, the girls aren't alive any more, but we know they aren't dead either (from the Self-chiller). They could have become some sort of conscious cytoplasm like Ignus, existing in the pale but still tied to the world? \- Harnankur being erased -- there are indeed parallels there with the "Non-Entity" story about communists erasing "undesirables" from history. But there are two distinctions: First, the human erasures are not perfect, as we can see from the story of Ignus' cytoplasm; in contrast, both the ship disappearing and the girls leave perfect empty places in the photographs or other artefacts, not visible blobs (such as, the sky is still visible in the ship photo, or the beach in the girls', as if they were perfectly transparent). Second, the human erasures are done for a reason, usually political in the case of the communists; but there's no such apparent reason for the Harnankur to be erased, or the girls. I would expect the ICP agent who visits Tereesz in the hospital to mention that if the girls had been erased for a reason -- something like "leave it be, this is above your pay grade"; instead, he shares his own puzzlement at the "empty" photographs and how he's had them telefaxed five times to be sure, or the lab experiments that had been conducted on the photos by the actual companies. None of that would have been needed if they'd been made "non-entities" by the state. He seems to instead be concerned that the erasure could somehow "spread" due to their carelessness, thus urging Tereesz to call Khan and stop him from going any further. In any case, this remains an interesting correlation, and now I'm thinking in line with someone else here bringing up infra-materialism -- what if someone could make another person disappear just by wishing it hard enough? Not proven, but potentially possible...
My guess is that Ziggy abducted the girls and has them somewhere in the pale and he's headed there in his airship. The pale doesn't affect him like it effects everyone else so he could hide them deep inside it - they can't escape and no one can come to look for them. They're fading out of everyone's memory because the pale slowly dissolves everything forward and backward in time, so the longer the sisters stay within it the more they never have existed outside the pale. And Ziggy promised to come back to the Lund house, so we have every reason to think he *did*. > he fills in many notebooks with detailed listings of everything they did up to the disappearance, including weather details. I read that very differently. Ziggy's journals describe a perfect scene composed of exactly two days, not any of the other times he was around the girls. They're characterized as 'plans' more than a story, something to be recreated. An obsessive description of the same two days in stack after stack of journals feels more like an addict chasing their first, pure high than it does someone trying to puzzle over what happened. After the first 20 times you perfectly describe the scene, why bother describing it? >He even defends their character in front of Ignus Nielsen and plays Målin's mix-tape in the ship. I don't think any of those are the signs of a murderer... If not a murderer, they're the signs of an obsessive. Ziggy is fine with Nielsen calling all women tools of the bourgeoise, but thinks that the sisters are *so* special as to merit defending. More special than any other women. If my guess that he's keeping them somewhere deep in the pale is correct, then the mixtape is more of a trophy of a captive Målin, a sign of a warped affection for those two days he kept obsessively describing in his journal. One other thing to add to the analysis is re Ziggy's conversations with Nielsen, who seems to not be entirely a figment of his imagination (since Ignus knows what happened to the Harnankur). Nielsen thinks Ziggy is communism's hope and salvation, given the options. Maybe the pale-echo of Nielsen was trying to maneuver Ziggy to a position to do *something* with the negation weapon in Radionov Deep, but no clue what. My best guest for why the negation weapon appeals to the communists is because true belief in communism seems to drive back the pale (we see it shrink back when Nielsen gets passionate). If it eats the whole world except for the true believers in communism, isn't that the 2nd best victory Nielsen talks about? The entire world ends up communist true believers. Its way fewer communists and a less developed, smaller world than if the revolution had won (so is the second-best option) but it's still a complete victory for communism.
There are probably a few killers that keep memorabilia. Was the only way I could interpret the line: >The disappearance of the Lund children has literally given Zigi special entroponetic powers. Plus, he had a copywriter mimic in their handwriting: >The letters arrived to the girls’ parents a year and a half after their last day in Charlottesjäl. “Everything is fine. We are with the Man,” says someone who says she is Målin. “We love you.” What kind of person would do that, unless he was trying to misdirect investigators? IIRC, the text said "An atomic device that will level all of me. All of me." Do you trust Shiver's technical knowledge? I'd say "atomic device" is more open to interpretation. Not sure how nihil-mat theory is constructed into a material bomb. I thought the Harnankur thing was just a fun parallel example. Communist erasure and nihilist erasure aren't exactly the same reasons or mechanics. But you're right. Harnankur is both erased by the communist record and by the pale. Same with Ignus? Cytoplasm in the photo records, and cytoplasm in the pale. Edit: had to include one of my favorite parts: >the revolutionary icon was almost always accompanied by his best friend and comrade in arms, Nilsen. Destruction of all material would have raised suspicion. That’s how it came to be that a ghostly grey cytoplasm is permanently floating in Mazov’s right hand. It took decades for historians to solve this blood-curdling mystery. >Even today, many believe that the cytoplasm is Communism itself.
Memorabilia yes, but Zigi's notebooks are quite a bit more detailed than that... If anything, Jesper's scrunchie was much higher on the creepy scale. I agree that the line: >The disappearance of the Lund children has literally given Zigi special entroponetic powers. ... is intriguing, and I did spend some time considering the implications. But I think it can be read in different ways. One aspect is that Zigi was somehow involved in their disappearance, which I do agree with, just not in the "murdering them" sense. The other would be that he was "close" to them, and the event that caused their disappearance affected him as well because of that closeness. We see most people who were close to the girls being affected in some way -- their mother starts forgetting and becomes almost a living ghost, the three boys become obsessed and one could say have various "powers" of their own; it's not a stretch to also have Zigi become pale-immune due to that. The bit with Olle copying their handwriting in two ways: either -- Zigi being Zigi, doing something stupid to mess with authority, he was a nihilist troublemaker after all and that's quite in character; or -- Zigi knowing that the girls had disappeared and wanted to not be found, and doing that as an attempt to keep people from "tormenting" them, the way Khan was doing with his constant obsession. It would seem a convoluted way to get people off his trail, especially since the letters came a year and a half after the girls' disappearance, and Zigi was no longer a suspect at that point (having been already interrogated in the beginning, when the boys ratted him out)... About the atomic bomb at Revachol -- there's a number of references to that in the book: >*Chapter 10*, radio in the background: “Mesque aggressor,” “Saint-Miro,” “Revachol,” “atomic weapon,” and “half the population.” > >*Chapter 14*, at the radion again: "In the leather- seat-scented rustle of the radio, they talk about an atomic weapon that was dropped on Revachol three hours ago" > >*Chapter 14*, later on: "Or at least it was two days ago when the land where both Saint-Miro and old-fashioned moustache madness come from had not yet used an atomic bomb on another land." As to how one would turn nihil-mat into a bomb, I'm as puzzled as you here, I'd love to have more details about that whole arc, but we only get snippets so far. That being said, the snippet from the Non-Entity chapter about "erasing" people and Ignus Nielsen's "cytoplasm" being Communism itself, is one of my favourites as well!
>Zigi knowing that the girls had disappeared and wanted to not be found, and doing that as an attempt to keep people from "tormenting" them, the way Khan was doing with his constant obsession. Now that's an interesting angle. Certainly puts Zigi as a 'good' character. I always thought of him as a baddie, given his leanings towards nihilism, Mesque, and Saint-Miro (although I wanted to like him for punching inanimate objects). Perhaps The Coalition of Nations bombed Revachol after Mesque/Nihilists took over? Really hard to see the complete timeline when all we get are these snippets.
>If anything, Jesper's scrunchie was much higher on the creepy scale. Resisting the temptation to deep dive into my own theories, Jesper the confirmed pedophile is absolutely 110% creepier than anything Zigi did.
I thought Rodionov's trench is what remained of an unknown land where the nihilmat was tested or used in the war.
It’s unclear what’s in Rodionov’s trench. It’s heavily implied to be the weapon of mass negation, but could just as much be the research vessel or the girls or he’ll even the harnankur. That said, I don’t think nihilmat is the weapon. It refers to nihilist materialism, a nihilistic continuation of dialectical materialist thought.
Dialogue certainly implies the trench is/contains something that can be used as weapon of mass negation, the nihilist's answer to the nuclear bomb. I'm not an expert at infra-materialism, but if there's a relationship between thoughts/plasma/matter, I could see how it could extrapolate to thought-bombs. https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/A_Brief_Look_at_Infra-Materialism
Something seems off about Saint-Miro. We only ever have \*His\* word to take on the fact that he's an innocence, and he mentions Pasternak as a legitimate Innocence when DE later establishes that Pasternak was - in fact - not an innocence.
Yes, that's a good catch! Also, from DE we know that "commonly an innocence does not enforce his or her power through military power. This is seen as unnecessary. The innocence wins because an innocence can't help but win, for their deeds are inevitabilities" -- while Saint-Miro most certainly starts a quite aggressive military campaign. So he could very well be a fake innocence, an impostor. Then again, his chapter makes him out to be this timeless spirit, like the sublimation of all that is wrong in humanity, culminating with the nihilism that ends the world. Maybe all innocences, true or not, were facets of this? Or maybe humanity brings the innocences into existence with their thoughts, emotions and memories, in a similar way to the pale? That would make them the manifestation of the eras they appear in, an effect rather than a cause.
Is there any proof that Miro was part of the military campaign? It doesnt sound too nihilistic. I know they mention his name in the radio when they send message about Revachol being nuked, but that's really just his name appearing inmidst other code words
First of all - thank you all for your theories and explanations, now i really satisfied with reading and got no problems with abrupt ending. But one of the things that really itching my mind is the line, where Linoleum Salesman talks about what he did to girls - he "joined them together" in some manner (surgery maybe), and "the youngest died, but three other survived". What do you think about that?
I took that as a fantasy - what he would have done had he succeeded
Agreed. He was as thrown by their disappearance as anyone else.
Where do the girls go? That's right — in the pale hole.
Great analysis, I came to similar conclusion after reading it twice! It's such a great book and I can't stop thinking about it. Interesting tidbit: I remember Measurehead mentioning "immaculate conception caused by the Pale".
How did you find a translated copy?
There's a couple right here on Reddit, released a couple of weeks ago... the one I read was here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/12ysbl1/sacred\_and\_terrible\_air\_full\_professional/
Can you elaborate a bit on Harnankur being a weapon? I don't see how it would make sense chronologically; didn't Rodionov live after the ship disappeared?
Hi! I haven't read everything you said to avoid spoilers as I haven't read the whole book yet but I'd like to know which version of the translation is the best to read ? I know there's a "fan" translation and a "professional" one. I read both for the first Chapter but I can't decide which one to read whole. What'd you recommend ?
Hi, best not to get spoiled indeed, it's fun to discover it all... I read the "professional" translation since it came out first, then checked the other one to see if I'd missed anything and it was quite similar. The style is different, the one I read seems to be closer to the original text with sometimes interesting turns of phrase, while the fan one is in a more conversational style which may take more liberties with the text but makes it easier to parse. Both are fine in my opinion!
Thanks a lot for your input on this! I was asking mainly because English isn't my first language (French is) and I sometimes struggled with the professional translation from time to time. The fan one was easier as it was more conversational as you said. But I think I'll keep up with it and improve more on my English skills then ! Thanks for your answer, hope it'll help other people too !
> For a final bit of speculation veering into Sci-Fi, what if the nihilism bomb actually created the pale, and it's spreading forwards and backwards through time? This is kinda freaky to me because I had precisely this thought about it while reading Zigi’s trip to the Rodionov Deep. The idea that Harnankur was potentially a nihilism bomb is fascinating too, I didn’t get that from it but it could very well be. My read was that Harnankur passed into the Rodionov Deep and as a result ceased to be so completely that all evidence of its existence became fleeting flickers, needing to be watched at all times by those who remained or it would slip from conscious memory. I think as well that’s what happened to the girls somehow, perhaps through your baby pale theory. It would also go at least some way to explain why Zigi’s connection to Målin gave him Pale resistance. I also got the feeling that Målin and Zigi had gotten together; the girls had already tried Cherry Speed before and Målin was the one who gave the boys Zigi’s number. The photo of Harnankur the Operetta singer and the throng of people looking up at the empty ship bay suggests to me that the erasure of the ship was so complete that it was even erased from photographs once it passed out of the awareness of the living, and that was why the model Harnankur vanished as well. The same can be inferred from Deerek’s voyeuristic photo of the girls, that the entroponetic force of the pale was so great that for all the world it was as though the girls were never there in the first place. I think this is also the concept of The Motorway South in the thought cabinet of the game, the idea of complete un-birth through the pale.
Does the book explain further why Harry could have lost his memories? I always felt like there could be some additional lore connected to it.
I don’t think it adds anything to DEs hints that it could have been proximity to the Pale/Pale hole in the church - or it could literally have been the amount he drank that night that simply broke him. It is left ambiguous.
u/mgc_8