Siding with RLD leads Kim to take you aside and ask what’s going on, if you’re really into “race stuff” or are just humoring this guy to stay on his good side. Through Kim, Disco Elysium not only demonstrates that people in its world are racist, that characters will notice and confront this racism, but also that there are repercussions for you, too, behaving like a bigot. Other options are to essentially just nod along as RLD rambles on until you can awkwardly change the subject, or directly tell him to “fuck off,” which affects his future cooperation at the cost of doing, well, the right thing. You’re faced with an early choice here: do you back Kim up in this rather straightforward situation (against a character who, I reiterate, is labeled only as Racist Lorry Driver ), or do you, the guy with such extreme amnesia that he has a dialogue option to ask about the concept of money, suggest your partner is overreacting? Follow the latter branch of the dialogue tree far enough into the weeds and you can outright agree with our friend Racist Lorry Driver, declaring that you are “down” with racism. So it’s apparent that this man has truly touched a nerve. Up to this point, Kim has been by-the-book yet never particularly confrontational. Kim has none of it, sternly correcting the man on his background. It’s the sort of assumption people like me (part-Vietnamese) often deal with: Kim doesn’t look like everyone else, so he must be from somewhere else. So when a character named Racist Lorry Driver tells him “Welcome to Revachol,” Kim sees right through the charade. And I’ve never been to Seol,” he tells you if you ask. “I don’t speak a word of Seolite, I’ve never met either one of my grandparents. But Kim has also lived in Revachol, the city where the entire game takes place, all his life. In the game’s fictional world of Elysium, his parents are immigrants from the country of Seol, coding him as East or Southeast Asian (One character, “Gary the Cryptofascist,” greets him as “yellow man”). The last option gave me pause during my initial playthrough of the game, as I kept seeing these occasional dialogue options to blame economic woes on The Foreigners, extoll my white character’s believed biological superiority, or express skepticism of “the homo-sexual underground.” You can say some pretty nasty stuff in Disco Elysium, but exploring these options reveals a portrayal of prejudice that is surprisingly thoughtful about both its origins and its repercussions. The game provides a whole host of dialogue options to define your character in a number of ways: the aforementioned doom-saying crackpot, a person who is sorry about absolutely everything all the time, and even a fervently nationalist, misogynistic fascist. He is also a lens through which Disco Elysium deals with its themes of bigotry. The little white circle around his character portrait’s head can, I can only assume, denote his obvious sainthood. He’s the straight man learning to use you as an unstoppable detecting force, the good cop to your qualitatively bad. He’s stuck with you, after all, and even in such a state of total personality annihilation, you get results, dammit. Kim is in a truly impossible situation, yet handles the player character with admirable pragmatism, supporting your increasingly unhinged methods and even offering a little smile or pat on the back sometimes. I mean, the apocalypse is nigh, so it makes perfect sense to sign your name as “The Gloaming,” right? What this means, then, is that Kim must put up with you (or, well, me), the player probably choosing all the most ridiculous dialogue options. A middle-aged, no-nonsense cop in Coke bottle glasses and a sweet orange bomber jacket, he is instead the partner of the player character, the initially nameless detective with luxurious mutton chops, a mean case of alcohol-induced amnesia, and a regrettable affinity for disco. Kim Kitsuragi is not the protagonist of Disco Elysium, and for that he is more or less a living saint.
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