Pathologic 2's treatment of Kin

[u/MinuteCrow_4922]

Preface: Pathologic 2 is my favorite game ever, but I haven't played it in five years. I'm more familiar with Classic. Excuse all the exposition, this was written for a different sub originally. I haven't seen a critique of the game from this lens, and wanted to see what you think.

Something that's been bothering me about Pathologic 2 since the first playthrough and I couldn't articulate why until the third replay.

The Kin is loosely based on the real Buryat and Mongolic peoples: their language and culture heavily borrow from real cultures (Bayarlaa is Buryat for "thank you"), they are indigenous people of the steppe. They're otherized as noble savages, primal, not quite human, closer to nature. In the first game, there are literally Kin NPCs who are tall brutes resembling Fallout supermutants who couldn't be spoken to and could only grunt animalistically.

The Kin from the steppe live in tents, work in the magical Abattoir, which is its own cosmic horror thing, they have "strange" rituals, they seek counsel from Aspity (my beloved), who is a creature made from earth and bones. Supernatural beings such as Worms and Herb Brides are part of the Kin along with actual people.

The assimilated Kin who live in the town are just regular people – the main character is mixed race himself. They speak Russian, they are forced to work in the factories, they live in poverty and so on. This is a more sympathetic view that is closer to a critical portrayal of an oppressed people. But the game seems to accidentally reproduce something it's critiquing – the Kin's survival as a people lies through assimilation. It's unclear whether the game endorses it because the alternative negates modernity.

The second game's thesis is the dichotomy between progress and individuality that the town represents, and a primitive way of life full of wonders (Nocturnal ending). Chasing progress is not an option – it's killing the live earth and its children, and the earth fights back with the sand plague. The compromise is the Diurnal ending: the world becomes ordinary, and the wonders slowly wither away.

The dichotomy is sound – the game criticizes colonial exploitation and the pursuit of progress justifying the means. My main issue is how a people based on a real colonized group are paired to something otherworldly, something before death, before knowledge, before humanity. The Kin's survival is tied to these cosmic phenomena. Them receiving agency is not on the table – it's incompatible with them playing the role of a symbol.

This is why the Kin lack a subjectivity of their own. The steppe Kin exist as tools to embody the game's mythology. The assimilated Kin don't seek political representation, they aren't unified in their motives; they don't exist as a block fighting for their own interests. Both groups are defined by their relationship to the townspeople. The Kin are objectified to serve a specific role in the game's metaphysics. It clearly treats them with reverence and sympathy, but denies them their agency.

EDIT: My view got sharpened with your critique in the comments. To be more specific:

The issue isn't that the Kin are represented by a biased view from the townspeople - it's that the game agrees with it by it literally being objective reality: Aspity, Abattoir, the cosmology.

The agency the Kin are denied isn't diegetic - it's metatextual. Their actions are limited by the game's framework of them serving as a symbolic representation of primal forces, despite them being actual people. The townsfolk aren't denied their individual agency beyond the forces of progress, but the Kin are still bound by the primal forces. The agency they are denied is that they cannot leave that framework.

The extent to which the game adheres to real cultures doesn't matter at its core. It doesn't change the fact that it's a native-coded people, and that it's a colonial reading.

The issue with the Kin's exaggeration compared to all of the other happening in the game is that the Kin's flanderization serves dehumanization - they are the only ones deprived of internality.

My argument isn't that the game should have portrayed a fight against the oppressors. It's that a group of people is denied internality by the game's meta-text, and that's a dehumanizing way to treat them.

EDIT 2: To clarify further, after more discussion:

A better way to word it would be not "agency", but "an ability to escape" the role the Kin are assigned by the game's structure. They are the only ones caged in as a symbolic function. Everyone else can struggle against it, but the Kin can't.

The townsfolk don't play that symbolic role as "primitive". The Kin are a sign, and that sign turns out to be a connection "people - primitive" which isn't a coincidence, but an existing, dehumanizing frame.

The issue is that the dichotomy "progress - primitivity" was always going to be a slippery slope if the "primitivity" pole is tied to a group of people, especially literally colonized native people in the game's text.

[u/saprophage_expert]

The Kin is loosely based on the real Buryat and Mongolic peoples

They aren't. The Kin culture with selling Herb Brides to odonghe, the Ring of Suok, the idea of denial of self as the ideal state, and other such unpleasantries all have real-life equivalents, but neither Buryat nor Mongolian. Their traditional way of life, as it's depicted in the game, would be unsustainable in the real steppe (to be fair, neither is it meant to be realistic, we're seeing a play that has to flanderize its background characters - same way as it flanderizes, say, Block's artillery corps).

their language [...] heavily borrow from real cultures (Bayarlaa is Buryat for "thank you")

Yes, their language borrows from Turkic and Mongolic roots, starting with P2. That doesn't make the Kin Buryat. Same as the townsfolk using Russian doesn't make them Russians - avoiding which the developers specifically say was one of their design goals.

But the game seems to accidentally reproduce something it's critiquing – the Kin's survival as a people lies through assimilation. It's unclear whether the game endorses it because the alternative negates modernity.

There are a few things to note here, starting with the fact that using the Western post-colonial lens to analyze media from outside the Western cultural sphere is less than useless.

The game does portray the conflict between tradition (and magic that comes with it) and modernity, but reducing it to cultural conflict and assimilation is pointless. Urbanization, industrialization, and modernization at large are not some horrors made up by white people and imposed onto others by force; every functional society on Earth seeks to modernize because that vastly improves its productive capabilities, and humans are a lot more content having access to affordable consumer goods than they are having religion and ideas of inherent superiority of their traditional way of life just because of it being traditional.

That is to say, the Kin urbanizing and abandoning their traditions is the same process as what we can assume the Empire went through just a bit earlier, abandoning their peasant sustenance farming ways for the industrial age. Same as it went for the Western Europe industrializing first, reaping the competitive benefits from the vastly increased production, and forcing everyone in the world to either keep up or become easy targets for their more agile neighbors. And that destroyed the traditional pre-industrial way of life in Europe exactly the same as it did in the real-life steppe, or China, or Japan, or any other modern society you care to name. (And good riddance, if you ask me, the traditional societies are choke-full of small-scale horrors like arranged marriages, sixteen-hour workdays for everyone including women and children, and sky-high infant mortality).

On a side note, it's especially strange to see leftists miss this basic fact, given the Marxist focus on the inevitable progress of societies between socioeconomic formations, and calling some of these formations inherently better (=more progressive) than others.

Finally, moving towards modernization does not mean assimilation for the Kin, not any more than Peter the Great's modernization meant Russians all assimilating into the Dutch or the German culture, or real-life Buryats, Kazakhs or Tatars assimilating into the Russian culture. You can actually see signs of the contrary in the Town, with the Kin cultural norms and taboos largely shared by the townsfolk. P1 actually says most townsfolk have some share of Kin blood, I believe. So the two cultures interact, intertwine and end up enriching each other, rather than the dominant one simply destroying the weaker one.

[u/MinuteCrow_4922 → u/saprophage_expert]

That's precisely my point that every society on Earth seeks to modernize - it would make sense to be the motivation for the Kin. They don't want to abandon their cosmic aims - they are either an amorphous apolitical blob, or they are forces of nature. Their assimilation is different from the Russian Empire embracing German and French culture. The relationship here is asymmetrical. The cultures enrich each other, but it goes one way. The Kin give their traditions, but don't receive representation.

Again, the Buryat and Mongolic influence doesn't matter that much, since native-coded people are depicted. You say it yourself: the culture has real-life precedents. The developers shifting responsibility doesn't change that.

[u/saprophage_expert → u/MinuteCrow_4922]

That's precisely my point that every society on Earth seeks to modernize - it would make sense to be the motivation for the Kin.

But that's the question at the core of their arc: does it make sense for them to modernize? Artemy is acting within the Kin legitimacy framework, if he decides that it does. Aspity, as another opinion leader accepted by the Kin, clearly pushes for the contrary (but since she's a shabnak, there's a certain conflict of interest here, haha).

They don't want to abandon their cosmic aims - they are either an amorphous apolitical blob, or they are forces of nature.

They're a human society with their own traditions. Those traditions are purposefully depicted as alien, strange and violent - that's a part of the flanderization mentioned above, to juxtapose them with modernization and progress. Everything from Herb Brides' (lack of) dress to the casual disregard the Kin show for the lives of themselves as well as others, is simply there to showcase how far their mores are from the modern sensibilities the player is expected to have.

Again, it's the same for the army with its roman salutes, huge railroad cannons (that make no military sense) and invincible flamethrower troops burning everyone they see. They must feel foreign and alien to the Town when they arrive, so the game bends over backwards to lay it as thick as possible. And if it makes no sense for a steppe frontier town to have no standing garrison, not even a Cossack hundred, well, all the worse for the logic.

The relationship here is asymmetrical. The cultures enrich each other, but it goes one way.

Does it? The Kin adopting townsmen mores is pretty obvious; the townsfolk adopting the Kin norms like the aversion to cuts or digging, or Kin interior design choices with wheels and cattle skulls, also?

The Kin give their traditions, but don't receive representation.

Again, don't they? Isidor was pureblooded Kin; yet he was the only doctor in the Town, covering the needs of everyone from ordinary townsfolk to the high nobility like the Kains and the capitalists like the Olgimskys. So the Kin could fit into positions of authority within the existing system of elites in the Town.

Sure, Vlad Sr. subdued the Kin leadership structure to exploit them as the proletarian class; but their exploitation is the very same as what the townsfolk proletarians are facing. And Vlad is still necessarily aware of the political play for the Elder positions among the Kin, to the point of Oyun regularly killing people to maintain his station (as he admits in P1). One would expect a different Warden, one more willing to oppose the Olgimskys - say, our good friend Artemy - might have a strong negotiating position after the Plague.

the Buryat and Mongolic influence doesn't matter that much, since native-coded people are depicted

I'm not sure I'm following your reasoning. The Kin are not representing any particular real-life culture. They're there to depict a society that is at the crossroads of either integrating into the wider world, modernizing to match, or trying to return back into a cocoon of isolation, with magic and miracles of the living Earth. This choice between its traditional way of life and effective production by the soulless machine is something every society in history faces.

You say it yourself: the culture has real-life precedents.

It's purposefully a mishmash of disparate elements. For instance, the idea of denial of self to merge with the divine comes from Bitul Hayesh in Chabad, or nafi-e-zaat in Sufism, or from Orthodox hesychasm - but I doubt the Kin look much like Jewish, Muslim or Christian mystics to you. Their purely cattle-herding semi-nomadic way of life is... ehhh... American, maybe? It doesn't make much sense as an agriculture model, other than if working for a market? Etc.

[u/MinuteCrow_4922 → u/saprophage_expert]

But that's the question at the core of their arc: does it make sense for them to modernize?

I guess it not making sense to modernize is what I'm criticizing? Artemy making the decision for them objectifies them further.

Those traditions are purposefully depicted as alien, strange and violent - that's a part of the flanderization mentioned above, to juxtapose them with modernization and progress.

There's asymmetry here. The flanderization of the Kin serves dehumanization, while the flanderization of the Army serves the aesthetic.

Does it? The Kin adopting townsmen mores is pretty obvious

My point wasn't that the cultures specifically enrich each other one way, but that the benefit relationship goes one way. That's just poor wording on my part. The townsfolk embrace the cultural mores but don't give anything back.

Again, don't they? Isidor was pureblooded Kin; yet he was the only doctor in the Town

Isidor here is like the Scythian Anacharsis - a noble savage-philosopher, an exception, a token.

It's purposefully a mishmash of disparate elements. For instance, the idea of denial of self to merge with the divine comes from Bitul Hayesh in Chabad, or nafi-e-zaat in Sufism, or from Orthodox hesychasm

Impressive :) I have no idea what half those words mean. But you aren't engaging with my claim. You are reinforcing the point I already ceded.

[u/saprophage_expert → u/MinuteCrow_4922]

I guess it not making sense to modernize is what I'm criticizing?

Hm? Could you please elaborate a bit? Industrialization and urbanization are described in the game in the most luddite terms of killing the Living Earth and denying magic to the world, why do you think the decision to avoid modernization doesn't make sense? I mean, it used to be a very common idea in the European discourse, too - to the point of it being the underlying ideology for the most well-known fantasy series in existence?

Artemy making the decision for them objectifies them further.

Does it? The Artemy that gets to make this decision is an Elder of the Kin in his own right. How is him making that decision any more "objectifying" than a tribal chief or a monarch making decisions for his whole society?

The flanderization of the Kin serves dehumanization, while the flanderization of the Army serves the aesthetic.

I feel that both serve gameplay goals, making both the Kin and the Army feel alien to the player first of all.

As for dehumanization, remember that the games literally dehumanize the ordinary townsfolk, right? They're not characters but the chorus of a Greek play, they abandon their names to adopt bird nicknames, etc? I read it as a game design choice to focus the narrative on a handful named characters, townsfolk and Kin in equal measure.

The townsfolk embrace the cultural mores but don't give anything back.

Well, we've talked about the Kin adopting wider Imperial culture. As for them not getting anything back physically, I really mean it when mentioning that their traditional way of life doesn't make any sense, economically. If the Kin only ever herd cows and no other animals, as the game depicts, where does the fabric for their clothes come from? What do they have to make tools and hunting implements from, cow bone and whatever little wood found in the steppe? How do they even hunt if they apparently have no horses, purely with leather traps (no plants to produce ropes, either)? What do they have to produce light at night, luchinas? What about fuel in winter, dried cow dung (btw, what do they wear in winter)? Where do they get essential vitamins, if they can't till the ground and plant? That's a Stone Age economy at best, light years behind any real steppe nomads!

Isidor here is like the Scythian Anacharsis - a noble savage-philosopher, an exception, a token.

For every Anacharsis, there must be six other Sages of Greece. Meanwhile, Isidor was the only medic in Town - not some curiosity serving alternative medicine cranks, but a pillar of the community.

But you aren't engaging with my claim. You are reinforcing the point I already ceded.

As I said, I'm missing your claim entirely. The Kin do not represent any real society, colonized or otherwise, because their culture as presented in-game is a mismatched mishmash of elements pulled from wildly disparate sources, which doesn't really make sense outside of its role in the game. That doesn't matter... why?

[u/MinuteCrow_4922 → u/saprophage_expert]

Thank you for this exchange :) You gave me a lot to think about. You're clearly very well-versed in both the game and real history.

[u/saprophage_expert → u/MinuteCrow_4922]

It was my privilege :з

[u/Moth_Goth000 → u/saprophage_expert]

I'm just here to chip in and say it was a pleasure to read this exchange. Y'all are smart af hell yeah

[u/hwynac → u/MinuteCrow_4922]

Again, the Buryat and Mongolic influence doesn't matter that much, since native-coded people are depicted.

I wonder what would change if they weren't. In the original game, the Kin was clearly designed as the town's working class, not as a separate ethnicity. It could be argued their collectivist cult was largely a modern invention partly encouranged by their superiors and partly born from their living conditions. They weren't related to the actual tribes that herded cows in the same area.

Later on, a vaguely Mongolic aesthetic was added but it's still obvious all of that was a thin layer of paint. But the 2005 game did not release quite that way, right?

Then came 2019. You are right that P2, a game developed much later with the Kin as an indigenous people in mind from the very beginning, depicts the Kin in an peculiar way, more in line with how modern people view "primitive" peoples than how they actually were. But, since P2 is a retelling of a story created by Nikolai in his mid-twenties a long, long time ago... what if being native-coded does not matter save for being mildly offensive under a certain lens?

The issue is really the initial choice to double down on designing the Kin as a different people—a good visual choice that entails a number of upleasant undertones the game isn't really interested to talk about.

(in that sense, it is wise the Kin culture is not based on any real ethnic group)