Chapter Text
I started writing cucumbers in season over a year ago (2023), and I played Disco Elysium in very late 2019 for the first time. Between those two events, many things happened in my life and in the world, and some of them have influenced my read on this planet and its fictional mirror, Elysium:
- War broke out in two countries where I have friends
- I lost most of my eyesight
- Famine and genocide are pushing human lives and centuries of love into nonexistence at a heart-rending pace
- It clicked that I wasn't staying in my home country out of patriotism (which I knew) or out of love (which I didn't), but out of necessity
- A pandemic is wrecking the lives of people worldwide and looking at it in the eye is too much for most people. I am both perpetrator and victim.
- The people that brought Disco Elysium to life lost their lifelong work so that a corporate crook could line his pockets for 6 more months.
My world as it was in december 2019 is very different from how it is in july 2024. These years have been marked by grief and desperation not just for me but for many other people in the world. You could say the past year was denial in my mourning of the reality I thought I lived in, and that this fanfic had been a tool to process that. I am past anger now. I am past depression and bargaining. I am accepting the reality I live in now: Not because I think it is good, and not because I think we live in the best possible world we could hope for, but because to live and to love in a dying world, you have to acknowledge the suffering, and you have to look at it in the eye and say: I'm going to do my best anyway.
In Elysium, this death takes the form of the Pale. For Revachol, specifically, the end comes before the Pale in the form of a nuclear missile pushed by an impersonal hand that doesn't see a point in life, despite... and I think, in this narrative scheme, the story told in Martinaise was not a story of hope and anticipation through Le Retour, which I believed when I started writing this story. It's a reminder that when that nuke finally crashes, it will be absurd and terminal, and it will take the lives of people who could simply have not died. It is unnecessary. And it is inevitable because it has already been written.
Here is the story cucumbers in season was meant to tell:
- For a war to be won, someone has to lose
- Shivers is in the Physique row alongside all of the fash-adjacent gut-tightening skills for a reason
- Kim and Harry get a few more years because of the awful things they did as RCM officers while innocent people die with the nuke. They leave for Katla under the privilege of an ex-RCM condecoration, and they would see the stars for a few years, and then die a peaceful death consumed by the Pale.
This is why I can't tell this story anymore:
- Kim and Harry are only exceptional because we get to know them intimately
- Disco Elysium is a love letter to the full humanity of the people around us, and granting that depth just to them is not what this game wants me to get out of it
- I think Harry and Kim would not leave Revachol. Not out of patriotism, or out of love, but out of necessity. I think Harry cannot exist in a place where there's no pieces of his past to reconstruct, or a self to right his wrongs. I think Kim cannot exist anywhere else because he has not spent all of his life fighting tooth and nail to belong in a city that he loves just to undo all this and start fresh.
I think Disco Elysium's biggest virtue (and it has a lot of virtues) is that it tells a story about the present, in a world defined by the past and the future, which are one and the same.
Kurvitz & co. ask us: If you knew it was all temporary and nothing you did had cosmic relevance, would you still try to live?
I want to be able to say yes. I think that Harry and Kim may hesitate but also try to say yes. And I think that's a far more important thing to say than "You get a kinder death, because I like you."
In our planet, this is what happens: We are bound by the past. There are things we will never get back. Sometimes it will be other people's horrible things that change our lives for the worse, and sometimes it will be our own. Centuries old buildings will be shelled mercilessly, water supplies poisoned, and still someone will laugh and love. And they will both be just as important.
This is the story I would have liked to tell now, in 2024: Kim and Harry stay in Revachol. They will be cops because that's what they know how to do. And then there will be no RCM, or maybe they let them keep it because they're going to be crushed, anyway. They will regret not being other people, and they won't know how to be better. But they will try, every day. Maybe Kim will get a model plane. Maybe Harry will have a virgin cocktail in a dingy bar and make someone laugh. Maybe not. Maybe all of the struggle happens inside and no one other than themselves gets to see it, ever. But these things are not meaningless. And they are not the only people in the world. And when an atomic bomb levels all of Revachol, they will be gone, maybe less relevant than other people in the city that they cared for. But they were there, and the miracle of them meeting in Martinaise happened, and that is important.
And I want you to know that no matter how bad things get for us (and I believe they're getting very bad, very soon) we had this moment. We are alive and as long as we are alive, there are miracles to be had. And boring things that are not miracles. And putting our foot in our mouth. And hurting each other. And loving each other. And all of these things will matter the same when we are gone: Nothing at all, and the world.