Everything political in the game otherwise is ironic nihilism except for
spoiler
Hauzmann, who is an unironic nihilist and as such at least one of the funner characters, albeit not exactly interesting
Except of course at every opportunity everyone including your own thoughts and the narration keeps bringing up that the explicitly in-universe End of History is untenable bollocks. That’s kind of a funny bone to pick.
Might be a funny bone to pick but I’m actually kinda interested now.
funny bone
If DE hadn’t existed this’d be a 9/10 game easily but as it stands that shadow looms over it at all times. It genuinely has its moments when it’s not trying to be Disco Elysium but since it tries to do that a lot it runs into a lot of issues.
Take the aforementioned example: even the fact that Fukuyama has got it wrong isn’t explored.
Spoiler for the worldbuilding and politics:
spoiler
In-Universe the End of History wasn’t just Fukuyama thinking of it, it was straight up ratified internationally by the major global players. In the roughly 100 years since then La Luz, which didn’t sign on because it was a geopolitical nonplayers nobody took seriously, has become a fascist empire that seems to want to take over the world and worse. It’s them, your communist superbloc and then EMTERR - the Worldbank, IMF and CIA all rolled into one - that are now the major players.
Nowhere does the game ever interrogate why this was signed in the first place or how in the 100 years since then with a fascist empire building up for world domination that they have a reasonable chance of getting has thought to change anything about this. Your Statehood skill will occasionally chime in on this, but since it’s basically one flat joke about FOLLOWING THE PARTY LINE AGAINST REACTIVE BOURGEOISIE NONSENSE that doesn’t really tell you anything about it either.
It seems ZP was trying to do its take on Nihilism from the book Scared and Terrible air and related short stories, the one ideology not fully explored in disco elysium, and falling flat on its face without Robert and the other writers along with not having almost a whole year of editing that disco elysium had.
This might be the influence but my read on it wasn’t that they even tried to actually interrogate anything political seriously. It feels like there’s politics in it because a discolike has gotta have the fascist, the communist, the centrist and the neollib (here combined with the ultraliberal) options to react to things and with little more understanding to it than as a sort of Fallout 3 esque moral system it becomes basically flavourtext, especially since nobody believes in anything anyways.
Spoiler for the spies and major story points:
spoiler
Basically non of the spies you meet has any allegiance to anything resembling an ideology and will often flat out tell you this. But then most of them also hate spywork, they’re not even thrill seekers or anything. The best motivation anyone has for getting (back) into it is Karoline, who wants to revenge murder fascists for torturing her which is understandable. The rest all seem to want to do suicide by cop and that’s about it.
