Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and the ways in I am a Herd Animal
Schools in Slovakia love sending kids to variety of vacations or trips. I savored every one of them, not only because the stress of daily grind ceased, but because I was a curious piece of shit. And even if the fucking school was like hey. We are going to a decaying hotel with a broken furniture, I was like YAY! Walks around the decaying post-socialist resort next to ZemplÃnska Å Ãrava pond!
However, even if I was a person who just loved to be...everywhere, I was friends with the most negative people ever. Always complaining. Being mad the rest of class didn't like them. Thinking our trips aren't interesting. In the end, I learned that I only feel happy alone. Because I am, in the simplest possible terms, an emotion sponge! Some folks with a fancy degree would call it hyper-empathic autism.
It's like a horse. Sure you can be eating hay and chilling but a single rush of panic of horse five paces from you and you are also panicking. Because hey, there could be predator!
Now, I love Kingdom Come Deliverance. It's extremely well presented, has solid writing, interesting characters, just a touch of that slavjank special sauce that makes my own slavjank-born self really happy.
It also has one of the most amazingly written bits of gay romance I've ever seen in a game. In fact, I do believe the romance between Janko and Jindrich is... honestly unprecedented in the history of games. There is MAYBE Kaidan Alenko from Mass Effect. but he's barely there in second game and he ends up as barely integrated character. Let's take a stock at what happens in Kingdom Come Deliverance. You meet a guy, a fuckboy silly guy who becomes your best friend and throughout two games, you become closest companions, battle-sworn and covered in blood, and you can, explicitly, start a romance with him (here I will let my pettiness add that this romance is way better written and performed than the straight romances). In a game taking place in medieval Bohemia, and trying to be as "historically accurate" as possible, this is practically revolutionary. Historical fiction admitting that history is more than just surviving scraps of business lodgers and punishments and sermons is rare. Kingdom Come Deliverance allowing itself to contain the multitudes of what human experience actually could have been, and in many places was, is staggering to me.
But then, in both a genius stroke and a rather cruel twist to my heart the romance is left open-ended. Other than you unceremoniously telling your ghost dad "Yea sorry dad I am not marrying a woman, I am spending my life with the most annoying man ever to be invented.", the game doesn't end on a clear resolution of all the problems ever. Ján is to be married and this also casts a dark shadow on the romance. I do like the fact there is no "FUCK were TWO MEN and this is 15th century" - the bond and their conflicting feelings simply exist, and blossomed and happened.
Now, when I played this, I kept away from fandom and fanworks. And my... own personal opinion when credits rolled was "Oh OK. So he'll... have a wife. Make a kid. They both start sleeping in their separate room like almost every married couple and fuck and love people they actually give a fuck about. Like many nobles did. Yea, I suppose this is the best way for the relationship between men to exist and keep existing. Heh, the historians in the KCD universe will have a field with this one for sure." And I was calm and happy. Started to formulate my opinions, lovingly started Hardcore Pacifist replay which I regretted instantly because I didn't disable Bands of Bastards and there is 10 billion forced mass battles.
But then, I started reading other people's opinions AND my horse instinct activated. The herd was telling, wait we need to justify it, we need to explain it, we need to break it off. But it wasn't just THAT. Some horses in the herd had extremely deeply well formulated analyses. And my dumb brain seeing them was like "wait. I am a fucking moron. Why do I want happy ending? Or as happy as there can be. Shit I am so stupid. Media shouldn't only have good outcomes. What about themes? God I am so stupid for refusing to see other angles and meanings. I am a moron."
This, isn't the only time this particular system activated mind you. Bruabba from Jojo has been a comfort ship for almost 4 years now and they both ... die. And I have been going through not only making them not die but rewriting it. Because it's fun. Because it stabilizes my nervous systems and produces dopamine and sense of reward. But even then I feel like "But the original deaths and tragedy of Vento Aureo had points. It exists for a thematical reason. I am a moron for choosing emotional satiety over meaning." I also significantly over headcanon them, to which my brain says "You are a moron for not just making your own things." And I've no answer. I just wait for it to shut up, and then, like a kid playing Nintendo DS after bedtime I just...pull a blanket over my head and keep doing it and hope this Brain Parent doesn't come and yell at me again.
I am autistic and I am only now learning what it means beyond Tumblr posts and some very unhelpful summaries. And, as it turns out, it explains why I despise ambiguity. Either be, or don't be. This combined with my natural anxiety of a herd animal makes me feel like anything but a complete fairy tale is doomed. And this is not even getting to the fact every meaning I do build stands on feeble foundations of the fact I am a moron and not intellectual enough. Fuck my feelings of Jindra and Janko don't include a deep analysis on how in modern day we only assign meaning to relationship which have been legally validated and structured as emotionally exclusive! A stupid person like me should just scroll through and let others tell me and override every single piece of my own enjoyment! Let my heart bleed out and fill it with sweat and others of others!
And if I dismiss a meaning just for enjoyment, am I not a consumer? Someone who blanks something just to feel it? The worst kind of scum?
The way I've been kinda... negotiating with this deeply inset system is sometimes with logic. Academical analysis never follows from simple premise of this must be, but this could be and why. There is no academy professor who will beat the shit out of me for choosing a wrong angle. Works are to be discussed from many lenses. That's why we started to drift away from author only foci as the ultimate meaning maker. Kingdom Come Deliverance gave us a ... gay romance (YES, gay is a wrong word, look I am not writing out some historically appropriate word every time). We can look at this like, does this have meaning? What does it? Queer theory, Marxist theory? What does it mean for them to be two men, from different social strata, how can we apply it to rest of literature etc. And one guy can't do all these analyses. We need a lot of us guys in the circle.
And beyond that, there is...meaning to be gathered even from my own stupid interpretations. And not just emotional meaning like "aw yes this is cute" "what the fuck Janko is hot? I don't want to be attracted to blond twunks". Fully closing our eyes to some viewpoints loosens our ability to understand, but it's not like we only have one reaction. I should be able to, without guilt say "Yes, I understand the beauty of this if it remains unfulfilled, and I understand what logically follows. But for me, this story ended like this. Realistically, Grounded but allowed to be permanent."
And frankly... Sometimes we just have media where we think deeply, and sometimes we have media where we fuck around. For me, for example, Vento Aureo saved my life during a time of deep depression. There is a meaning in tragedy and suffering but I think... I think I should be allowed to imagine permanence too. Resistance to the idea everything queer must be cast and buried three miles deep and turned to corpse. And again, I understand. How fulfilling it can be. How it can reflect on someone. But fuck, that someone isn't me. I am just... a guy. Sometimes I want to think about the ugly truth of how famous people play with queer identities while letting LGBT people suffer, like in Mulholland Drive... and sometimes I just want to say "yes, this, for me survives in the margins and that's meaningful"- And even if I am stupid, it doesn't mean I don't... understand the pain, sacrifice and the negative things.
I know it won't calm my brain. As long as I am here and enjoying this. Thinking on it. Or remembering. My brain will be like "you are wrong for reading it like this". Any opinion or signal will tip my fragile mind into stupidity. It digs and digs into the grey and will fish out the black, because certainty is what it wants and black is safer than shimmering white. Self-created meanings and decisions are fragile like glass and besides you moron can't fashion a sword that's brittle. You can't trust yourself. But I don't regret it and I am still glad I played it and I will throw that blackness back into the ocean.
And when I feel like this I will wander ZemplÃnska Å Ãrava alone. Talking to the polluted water and the gulls. If I ever feel like drowning in other people's voices that I should listen to (because they are handsomer and smarter and I am stupid and illiterate) that's what I can always do.
In the end, I considered drawing cards, for this question. "What ending is there for Jindra and Ján?" But like many people who come to tarot anxiously - I already have preferred answer. Why ask? What will I do with the negative? What will enforcing a meaning through letting fate decide do for me? Why not just simply declare? Tarot is a word of symbols and it can encode flexible messages as well as signal them. As such, I suppose this is what I'll say to the waves.
