Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx’s Capital (1879)
Hexbears when somebody tells them to log off:
“No superiors can relieve me of my duty, you bulldozed them all to a mass grave for trying to free humanity.”
Perfectly executed character, the ultimate personification of one of the game’s central themes: “correctness”
He pretty much spits facts when you ask about his motivations, he correctly identifies the true drivers of the problems you navigate through the game, his actions were, broadly, “correct.” But in a vacuum, what is his correctness worth? DE as a whole is pretty stiffly critical towards the need to be Right, especially if it comes at the expense of friendships and human relationships. After all, internalizing communism in the game makes you into a “very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth” who is still miserable.
I could go for ten more paragraphs about this, like the irony of his title of “deserter” despite him being one of the only people left who still holds on to the cause of Scientific Communism (he has deserted society instead), or how he’s part of the game’s indictment of the romantic idea of the “eternal vigil.” But I’ll restrain myself so that Kim won’t have to clear his throat at me.
I don’t mean it like “don’t be informed,” just that being correct is not inherently productive, like the game is telling you to at least try and take part in the society that you know to be tragically out of balance. (The game wants you to take Matt Christman’s grill pill)
What gave me chills was that the line before this. “I have seen it”, because if you pass a passive empathy check I think, your own brain will chime in to warn you “Something terrible. Worse than what you have seen.” right before this. And considering how well we know Harry by this point in the game, if his brain is warning him that something is worse than anything that he has experienced, that is bad. Harry has experienced some pretty terrible stuff and his brain is predisposed to focus on that and make an even bigger deal out of his personal problems. So the little warning that “Whatever this man has seen is worse than anything that has ever happened to you” from your own brain sets me up for some cosmic horror level shit that this line then beautifully delivers on.
God, I felt so much empathy for that man.
The most human character in one of the most human games ever made.
