A Doodle I Did With My Friend (kind Of) Of My Favorite Part Of The Changeling Route

(Short, truncated, but hopefully not reductive) Russian history lesson!!!

A perspective that needed to be beat into the dirt when I first started playing Pathologic was that the Bachelor was a city dandy and dandies inherently imply conservatism, which is a British Victorian ideal that has been described like this: "the upper classes were expected to affirm their masculinity through sexual distance, abstinence and self-control," a kind of "cerebral, self-denying asceticism" (Ashish Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; btw). The image of a well-dressed, well-spoken and educated man is found in a lot of core western texts - like Pride and Prejudice, where Darcy is in an ideologically conservative space because he's a part of a protective wealthy class.

But, you know, be careful that bias doesn't drip into your interpretation of Daniil Dankovsky, because his political and social positions are wildly different. The Victorian upper and upper-middle class were historically borne from an accumulation of luxuries brought in through global dominance and colonialism, which drove that subsection of people to the far right. Also, because of this wealth and national expansion, people were moving to cities (to London) in droves. England shifted from a rural to urban-based country. "By 1851 over half the population lived in settlements of 2,500 or more, peaking at around 80 per cent by the 1890s," according to an article by R J Davenport, just to give you some numbers.

Okay, but Russia? "87 percent of the population was rural when revolution broke out in 1905, and 85 percent still rural when it erupted again in 1917" (Dorothy Atkinson, Stats on the Russian Land Commune). Of the small percentage are the intelligentsia, educated people who went to college, which was at first dominated by nobles and then by the turn of the century was overrun by "commoners" (like Dankovsky, who in a monarchical society mostly made of peasants is still beneath high, noble classes)

From these commoners came liberal radicals, and from some of these liberal radicals came futurists. This is what Dankovsky is (Futurism/Utopianism. You see).

(Okay, Russian futurists are different from Italian futurists and there were many different types of Russian futurism, but everything came from Marinetti)

This revolution was running parallel to other cultural revolutions inside Russia, inside cities, and parallel to the Bolsheviks. But post-revolution, Lenin condemned the intelligentsia as the chaff between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in assistance to the bourgeoisie. So they are all summarily stomped asunder.

But this is where the Bachelor is! This is where he's coming from. And I think all modern Russian media that concerns itself with futurism or the culture surrounding 1917 is written with the inexorable knowledge that all of this Utopianism will be usurped by the USSR. Dankovsky may be doomed by the narrative but the narrative itself is doomed by history.

This is not in-depth at all, I'm sorry, but I hope it's serviceable.

being alive is just so unfathomably cool cant believe im about to go for a trot around the block. WHAT THE HECK DO YOU MEAN THERES A WHOLE BLOCK TO EXPLORE WITH SQUIRRELS AND BIRDS ARE YOU KIDDING ME? every dang day we are blessed with this. wow

the thing about being nonbinary is that you really do start to forget that other people have such strict walls around what is and isn’t allowed for genders. i thought we all agreed that we made that up. could you climb out of the cave real quick and feel the sunshine for a minute.

This is their dynamic to me

The realization that Hbomberguy could come back any day now. He’ll pop up in our sub boxes with no warning. There is no way we can adequately prepare ourselves for that bisexual british man’s next rabbithole recap. All we can do is hold on. And wait.

Imagining Sticky going to the Capital when he's older to study like Artemy and Daniil did, and people already think he's kinda weird because they've never heard of the town or its eccentricities, and now he's claiming to be friends with (or for the dadkovsky believers [me], the son of) disgraced, notorious, exiled/executed scientist Daniil Dankovsky?