meradorm

I'm a Slav, I've heard them all before. They're authentic.

I can hear relatively okay, but I am bisexual. I would say that the problem with bisexuals in America (can't speak for elsewhere) is that gay men and lesbians didn't have access to the things that straight couples have and aspire for, or are supposed to aspire for according to their culture (white picket fence, marriage recognized by religious and governmental institutions and your whole family and community, children). Because they were barred from it they had to - I should say were able to - create sort of an enclave for themselves, a hidden world where they could redefine what sexuality, gender, and love meant. There's a vast difference between how a lesbian thinks about other women than how a straight man thinks about women, I think...There's an impression of bisexuals coming in and tracking mud all over that space from the outside world. I sort of got the impression that I was just a tourist in the community and bringing in some kind of unwelcome element from the outside, sort of like barging into a place and leaving the door open when it's freezing cold and blindingly bright outside. (Having said that, I don't think I perceive and behave in my romantic or sexual relationships even in an m/f setup the same way straight people perceive and behave in theirs, but it's a blurred, grey area and I understand why that wouldn't be immediately obvious to anyone, and besides, I could be wrong.) It probably ultimately hurts us too that we defend our place inside the community with stuff like "But I felt bad when I started having sexual thoughts about people of the same gender, I'm oppressed too" and not feelings of liberation like "when I finally realized I never had to be with a man I felt so free." So there's this idea that bisexuals treat their whole culture as a set of behaviors and negative experiences, and that's why people have trouble grasping bisexuality as a real identity. (I think that must port over to Deaf culture pretty well - you'd have people thinking, well you couldn't hear for a little while but that doesn't mean much, how are you Deaf and raised Deaf if you got implants and can hear passably well from early childhood on? It's like being 1/16th Native American.)

I'm guessing this is what the Deaf community feels like, is it? You can have all or most of these things that hearing people have, so why are you here while we're redefining what it means not to have it?

Oh, good. I've had some burning questions since I played Pathologic (and if these don't completely exhaust you, I might think of some more). I don't know if you came here to get an interrogation on the irrelevant details of a game you made a decade ago, answer as few or as many as you like.

(Sorry this is so damned long. I tried to keep it as spoiler free as I could, but I would scroll on by if you haven't yet played the game.)

• What exactly is an odong? Ospina tells Artemiy that she understands why she doesn't love him and says that it's forbidden anyway, an odong and a woman of the Order. So this is a category that can fit Burakh too, right? I assumed that this was a steppe term for gatherers who are unaffiliated with the Order (and that Burakh hadn't been assimilated back into it at this point) and got conflated with the type of being called Worms. Or is the game trying to imply that Burakh is some demi-human with his features covered by cloth?

• What sort of education does Burakh have? I think he mentions to Julia that he got used to people smoking around him in college. I assumed that he was sent to study surgery at a formal university and might even have already earned his degree. (Maybe he keeps quiet about it because he wants to let Bachelor feel special?)

• What happened to Dankovsky at the end of Klara's path? (If anything, I guess.) Lilich wanted to charge him with treason, some people have speculated that once he returned to the capital he'd be on trial.

• Young Vlad asks Dankovsky at some point (after his father disappeared into Apiary) "Davno li vy videli otsa?" (English speakers, this is something like "Has it been a long time since you last saw [my/your] father?") The official English translation translated it as "How long has it been since you last saw your father?" and it becomes a very curious bit of dialogue. There's no "your" or "my" in the Russian, so there's kind of room for ambiguity there, though I think most people would assume he was talking about his own father, like in English if somebody says "How long has it been since you last saw dad?" (I did a fan retranslation patch that redid parts of the game and managed to cover this conversation, I don't know if anybody who isn't one of my friends ever saw it, but I think that's how I translated it myself. Anyway, it kept me up at night.) Aside from the official translation, IIRC, I don't think Daniel would have any reason to know that Big Vlad is still alive, I don't remember if we encounter him again in Bachelor's path, and "davno" is a word used that can imply passages of time spanning years. Was Dankovsky talking about his own father when he answered that question?

(Though, it's interesting thinking about whether or not he even had one. I sort of assumed that these fictional characters don't really exist outside of what's said and done in the game, and if he had no reason to talk about or think about it then it's just not there. Unlike a real person with a complete past.)

• ...I guess this is kind of an emotional question. But how did Bachelor really feel about Haruspex, in Haruspex's path? (What a difficult question. There's a multipage thread on the official forums trying to describe their relationship and the best anyone can come up with is "They respect each other." Maybe it's better not to answer.) Somehow, playing that game, it became important to me that he cared for him and they were really friends, that they could love each other in some way. Not romantically, I mean, in a way that's hard to define. And in a way that's not incompatible with them trying to kill each other. Love is a bad word for it. (Though once or twice I wondered if the game was trying to imply that Dankovsky had feelings for him.) Anyway - other people played it and just assumed they weren't friends, only working together for the sake of convenience and Dankovsky was just sucking up to him so he would do what he wanted. That troubled me ... I always thought he was sincere. Of course by Klara's path they're preoccupied with hating each other anyway, which is, at least, perfectly clear.

• Is there any significance to that doll hanging from the tree in The Void? I wrote some meta one time about how maybe The Void referenced the old game to hint that Dankovsky had hanged himself in the capital - possibly from that tree next to the building with the snake mosaic - and it's his ghost you hear sometimes in those apartments. (But I didn't actually mean it. It was just a thought exercise.) (Please don't tell us poor Bachelor hanged himself. :( ) (Though...that city was so beautiful. I liked to think that it was Bachelor's capital. I wanted to believe that he had lived in a place like that, once.)

EDIT: Though, everybody's complaining to me about these questions now. I didn't ask them because I wanted straightforward answers, just because they were questions that meant something to me. Maybe I'm looking for insight rather than a black-and-white reply, or just the opportunity to say all this aloud. More as topics for discussion.

What are some good strategies to get over avoidance coping?

I read a (really amusing) paper called The common pain of surrealism and death which used acetaminophen to treat the pain and stress of meaning threats. IIRC the same team also tested the same treatment on the pain of social rejection. I don't know much about these fields, but how much different is mental/emotional pain (for instance that pain of social rejection) from physical pain, and in what ways?