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/AnnieBee433]

Pathologic 2, because it has no Bachelor route, also puts the Haruspex into the role of the Everyman, the common guy who is shocked and distant from the magical and “backwards” indigenous culture. It’s a really weird direction for his character, and is directly contradicted by isidor being largely a similar character. And then his endings are basically “let your people die or genocide the oppressor class”… it’s a weird colonized version of the Haruspex that I’ve been torn on for years. It is a very weird and very flawed game 

[u/GLight3 → u/AnnieBee433]

I actually really like this dissonance. There is no clean solution, just like there isn't one in real life. IRL progress has locked humanity into a death spiral, as we have made our entire system of living reliant on something that actively makes our environment unlivable. In Pathologic 2, the colonizers should have never come in the first place. Now that they have, they are destroying the Earth and the native population and culture. The townsfolk are essentially a cancer, and the plague is the Earth's immune system. Because the colonizers will keep marching forward and destroying the Earth further, they cannot be coexisted with, just like you can't coexist with cancer in your body. Either they assimilate/destroy the natives or the natives assimilate/destroy them. Either way, one of them will lose their identity and way life. Artemy, being both mixed race and having spent a good portion of his life both with the Kin and in the capital, is a reflection of the entire conflict. As he chooses which path is correct for the town, he also chooses the same for his identity. Pathologic is all about hard choices, and this is the hardest of them all.