So I thought I was finished with Darkest Dungeon 2 after I reviewed it on release, but it turns out that while I wasn’t looking they released a whole new game mode that’s more like a strategy game. In general I think the new game mode works a lot better with the core gameplay, but that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is one of the story modules that goes with it, which is “What if witches were actually inhuman monsters and it was okay to kill them to the last?”
You can read all the relevant details here. It’s a quick read; the story content of these modules is pretty minimal. I think it’s also important you see what the witches look like.
To summarize: You first have to identify witches that are pretending to be other enemies, then chop off their fingers and use them to create a spell that explodes their cauldrons and horrifically burns them. You then have to cut off one of their heads and mount it on your stagecoach, which allows you to find the parts of a witch-killing dagger, which was apparently created by the witches themselves. (Why?) After it’s outlived its usefulness, you “purify” the head by killing it, then use its remains to complete the dagger. You then have to engage in a literal witch hunt, tracking down witches who are evilly pretending to be innocent civilians, then kill them after torturing them with damage-over-time effects to activate the dagger. You then have to kill the coven leader’s familiar and tie it to your stagecoach, whereupon it is literally called the “tortured familiar”, in order to draw out the leader and kill her.
In case you are wondering, no, the other modules (werewolves and vampires) do not involve any torture, just this one.
I want to make something very clear: Historical witches were real people who were horrifically tortured and systematically murdered by an authoritarian regime. Even the ones who really were practicing “witchcraft” were just ordinary folk healers who were not torturing and killing people; that was a lie invented by the Church to justify torturing and killing them. When you make a story with the premise “But what if witches really were doing all that stuff?” it is just as offensive as a story with the premise “What if Jews really were evil vampires secretly ruling the world?” That one of those massacres happened within living memory and the other didn’t does not make the latter any less horrific or dehumanization of its victims any less disgusting. (And, y’know, maybe the witch trials aren’t so irrelevant in a time where we’re experiencing resurgent Christian fascism criminalizing and lynching health care practitioners for carrying out procedures Christians don’t approve of.) You like stories about monsters pretending to be people and think it makes a good horror premise? Cool, I do too! But leave real persecuted minorities out of it. We do not need stories asking the daring question “What if the slander used to justify persecuting minorities was actually true?” That was never acceptable, but it’s definitely not acceptable a full quarter into the twenty-first century. We ought to know better by now.
I was planning to buy the DLC at some point, but now I never want to give Red Hook another cent. This confirms my misgivings about the problematic stories in the base game (like “What if it was good for the king to extrajudicially murder people for crimes they hadn’t yet committed?”) and the fact that all the enemies are former humans that have become irredeemably corrupted by exposure to the eldritch. I was willing to be charitable then, but not anymore. At best they are thoughtlessly and uncritically repeating bigoted tropes, and at worst they are actively bigoted themselves. Do not give these people money.
Also, I know this is small potatoes, but Kingdoms mode is also full of glaring grammatical errors. Why are gamedevs so allergic to hiring editors?
You know, that paragraph about the whole “leave minorities out of it”…it eerily reminds me of a similar situation to Frieren and how people view the demons – namely that a lot of bigoted people like to use the demons as a stand in for minority groups they hate
Well, Frieren is in the same boat as this with the ‘What if there was a truly ontologically evil race it was both necessary and morally correct to genocide’, so it’s not surprising there’s a lot of alignment. A lot of otherwise good media gets undercut by ‘Let’s Do Orcs Again’, even if they append it with ‘But Nuanced, For Real This Time’
As a weird questions enjoyer, I think one of the ways to tell if something is worth asking is if making it a literal true fact would produce anything different.
For example, there was a comic where it turned out aborted babies were coming back as monsters in accordance with a myth that when you throw away a dead baby instead of burying it properly it comes back. Now, if that actually happened, it would be an argument for legalizing abortions, since now back alley abortions are actually a danger to society and the solution is to make sure disposal is done properly, rather than just telling the women it was all their fault. It could be interesting to explore the disjoint between what we say and how we act. (It didn’t, of course, but the problem wasn’t asking the question.)
The ontologically evil race doesn’t offer this, because it’s a situation where the claimed solution actually does rationally solve the claimed problem. People say this is a real thing, and if it was a real thing this would be the real solution, so what’s gained by a thought experiment of hey, it could be a real thing?
That’s a very good point.
Maybe the only way for an ontologically evil race to work is if it’s practically impossible to annihilate them, because they’re supernatural demons or just too numerous and successful to ever really be threatened, so they can only represent the inevitable temptation toward evil inside us rather than any specific group or polity.
In video games, of course, you often need an excuse to kill lots of evil enemies wholesale. But scale is relative. The enemies you’re killing could just be innocent creatures tainted by supernatural evil, or they could be only a small faction of a larger species, or just inevitable demons or ghosts from the netherworld. There’s no necessary reason to posit a living species of intelligent beings and then say they’re all invariably evil from birth to death and that the only good solution is to annihilate them all. I’d say that idea is itself evil.
There might be a separate argument to be made that any intelligent species which was actually ontologically evil might have a lot of trouble creating a cooperative society in the first place, or that other intelligent species might have annihilated the ontologically evil species long before ‘civilization’ developed.
Too bad that Frieren went the always-evil route with its demons. It’s the opposite approach from Helck, where the humans are the ones who turn themselves into brainless monsters out of irrational fear of the demons (whose territory they then invade).
Keep in mind this also has ugly implications, given how our culture has major issues around purity and moral contagion. The real-world equivalent of this would be mentally ill people or cult members, and, like with an ontologically evil race, there are a lot of people arguing we should slaughter those people in real life too.
…That was a really disturbing comic. Sometimes it’s hard to decide what zombie apocalypses are really about: are they about the intolerable pressure of a mass society on the individual, or just about a good excuse to condemn others as an ugly mob who can be killed with impunity?
You’re right that any justification for killing people ‘for their own good’ or as some kind of necessity has ugly implications to say the least. I was just thinking about how games like Diablo brush this kind of thing off. It would be better in general if killing anyone or anything was presented as an individual choice, not some kind of inherent necessity. There’s certainly always a disturbing side to any story of supernatural evil.
It’s also got an echo in the present day “what if these seemingly normal people I encounter on the street are secretly illegal terrorists here to steal our blondest children for human trafficking? wouldn’t killing them be right? wouldn’t torturing them a bunch first just to be sure I got all of them be right?”
Yeah. I’ve seen it said there are four basic types of ‘just assume they’re evil when you see them’ fantasy species, each of which can be used for different scenarios:
* A species that’s functionally mindless and does evil things, like trying to kill people, on pure instinct. E.g., zombies, robots programmed to kill everything, etc.
* A species that can think and reason but has an inherently evil nature, such that it’s literally impossible for a good member of that species to exist. If the player characters find a member of that species who seems to be doing good things, it’s either a trick or a necessary sacrifice in order to accomplish some other evil deed. E.g., demons (in D&D, and for that matter, in Frieren).
* A species that could theoretically be good but has an evil monoculture which forces virtually all of its members to be evil. As such, only a very few members of the species who either grew up outside the monoculture or who grew up within it but had the prodigality to resist it and the strength to survive it could be good. E.g., drow.
* A species that could theoretically be good and has no monoculture, but for whatever reason is inherently biased in favor of evil, such as by being predisposed to aggression, greed, hedonism, or similar traits. E.g., orcs.
And then the different species can be used to challenge players in different ways. E.g., if you meet a demon ,they’re always evil, but can you try to trick one into doing a bit of good as part of a larger evil plan (like having him kill a minor villain in the hopes of usurping him and doing greater villainy) and then betray him before he actually pulls off the larger evil plan, or should you just kill them on sight? If you see a drow, you know he’s very probably evil but can’t be absolutely sure, so how do you deal with that? Etc.
From your description, it sounds like the witches are in the ‘drow’ category of a usually evil species who nonetheless don’t seem to have an inherently evil nature–that is, there could theoretically be a good witch somewhere, as far as we know–but the game is treating them like there’s absolutely no chance of them being good and you have to kill them on sight. Yeah, that’s a problem. I can see why that isn’t working for some people.
No, all enemy factions in Darkest Dungeon are either #1 or #2. They are always portrayed as inherently evil. There are multiple problems with this, but the biggest issue with this module is that they used a real-life minority to do it, and did it by presenting the slander used to justify their oppression as literally true.