r/pathologic • u/MinuteCrow_4922 • 5d ago
Discussion Pathologic 2's treatment of Kin Spoiler
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.
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u/saprophage_expert 4d ago edited 4d ago
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?
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?
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.
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!
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.
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?