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Disco Elysium question: What was the point of the prion disease? (hexbear.net)

submitted 12 hours ago by BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

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In disco Elysium you live in a nation some time after a failed socialist revolution. Said revolution was sparked off, in part, due to an infectious Prion virus-disease-thing. I never really understood it, neither in game nor metatextually.
Was there actually a virus? Why did it make people socialist?
And metatextually: why make it part of the story? DE has a lot of esoteric stuff going on - the insulidian phasmid, the actual presence of divinity and weird holes in the world. But that stuff usually, to me at least, serves some sort of clear parallel to the real world and a way to critique it - Wonders and loss of nature, climate change, spirituality getting coopted by the state, so on and so forth. Or not exactly clear purposes, but it doesn't strike me as something that's coming completely out of the blue.
The prion disease kind of is. I can see how a plague could lead to social unrest, the game however makes an effort to make it clear it was the disease itself. And also, why make it prion if it was just regular old "plague makes people angry"? Even if that's part of the explanation, there must be more to it.

So whats your take?

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[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 8 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

The people most affected by a prion plague would also still tend to be the ones who are vulnerable in general (because the rich at least have a better ability to quarantine, among other things), so the most ardent supporters of the socialists are the most disproportionately infected, and we have seen how capitalists will seize on whatever they can to pathologize their opposition. I think it's meaningful, but the metaphor is that people who were left by the ruling elite to have their brains eaten and are protesting that condition have their protest blamed on the brain damage and not the neglect that caused the brain damage. That is more persuasive a lie than if they were protesting having their lungs destroyed.