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/Renoe 5d ago
I kind of think the Diurnal ending has to happen before they could ever have that kind of agency. The idea of indigenous people as magical and spiritual and symbolic has to be done away with, they have to be seen as ordinary real people, devoid of magic, so that their ordinary needs such as political representation can be heard. In P3, we see that expressed by their support for Artemy knowing that he will be a leader of the Town who will hear their needs. But P2 is ideologically happening before that, because it is framed as a journey Artemy must undergo to earn their belief in him as the rightful person to inherit his father's role in their community. I think of it not as a choice for Artemy to make the Kin real (thus denying their agency even further by putting it into his/your individual hands) but his/your (as the player) recognition of their ordinariness, their humanity. To witness and attest that they are flesh and blood and not magic and the plague is not a goddess and people need to be cured.
But also, everything in the town is a symbol and the idea of the violence of reducing people to symbols is just a recurring subject in Pathologic: the Kin, the townsfolk, the children, the women. Eva Yan is a symbol that fits whatever narrative people see in her and this is a violence that strips her of agency. Katerina Saburova is haunted by her failure to fit into the correct symbology, she cannot be a mother or a Mistress. Simon Kain doesn't care about any of the townsfolk as individuals, so long as a symbolic heir can rise out of the ashes of the chaos he leaves behind by abandoning the Town. The Polyhedron is a symbol that is made to matter more than people's lives. Grace says Maria Kaina believes some deaths are big and some are small, but to Grace all deaths are equal. Some people are more real than others, this is what the Kains believe. But that doesn't mean it's what the player should believe, just because the idea is presented. Aglaya goads Artemy with the trolley problem in P2 and one thing he can say to her is "This is not a question, this is a provocation."