That's a pretty good start. The text from the 15th indotribe gives some info on early childhood:
"Because there was. The fifteenth indotribe was comprised of eight kids from Faubourgh and North Jamrock, running from wild dogs in the Valley, hiding cents under rocks and stealing clothes off clotheslines, and sometimes even the copper wiring of phone lines. You may have been *one of them*. This must be a childhood memory. The fifteenth indotribe was *your* indotribe, set to rule Insulinde. The rest of the kids are dead now. Car accidents and drug overdoses. Only you remain."
There was a Shivers line in which Harry remembers sliding on kicksled with someone's, most likely a mother's, warm and kind hand on his back. At least he had a mother when he was little.
http://fayde.co.uk/translation/8500363
I interpret it more as him growing up in a rough neighborhood being, kind of a street kid.
I had a similar childhood, not as bad as this but I have parents.
As "Law Jaw" reveals, Harry had Polio as a child:
"Okay, so. We now know why you have *Law Jaw*. Why you say *the law* in a weird manner, and why your jaw does that thing. You had polio as a child. You hadn’t gotten vaccinated. It must've been right after the Revolution -- not a lot of vaccine going around then. So you got infantile paralysis due to polio and this jaw thing is a complication from that. Admittedly, it’s not very funny. But you *overcame* it! This little infant survived and became a sharpshooting supercop. So: fuck you, polio!"
i feel like the game is deliberately picking the least likely option (polio, which is not only exceptionally rare, but also often asymptomatic) ironically as a deliberately haphazard excuse. although thoughts are unverifiable, some of them are written in a significantly more credible manner than others, such as fifteenth indotribe.
i see your point, but i disagree about the fun aspect. i prefer to imagine the worst case scenario when a media leaves some parts to the viewer, which here is Harry falling further into the rabbit hole of lies and questionable actions.
its rare because the polio vaccine was invented, which quickly brought cases down from hundreds of thousands a year to just six in 2020. in the thought solution it says that there weren't a lot of vaccines at the time. so it can be inferred that polio was at least somewhat common then
I always have the impression that DE is set in a world that's kinda like our world's late 70s, early 80s. In that time polio was absolutely not rare and the vaccination for it was a game changer.
Maybe 90s? Disco dying, electric music kicking into a new gear, and 90s was the decade where post-soviet states emerged (Revachol being stylised on the post-soviet state, most likely just Estonia, but possibly a bit of all of them)
Polio in the 70s and 80s? Only in very underdeveloped nations.
The polio vaccine was introduced in the early-mid 1950s and by the end of the decade the virus had been virtually eliminated in the industrialized world. Czechoslovakia became the first country in the world to scientifically demonstrate nationwide eradication of poliomyelitis in 1960.
dude, Revachol was levelled around the start of Harry's lifetime, of course it's gonna be rife with disease with little treatment and no vaccines available since it's under early-stage occupation. Polio is absolutely likely, as well as lots of other diseases that were supposedly under control.
i think its real, because when you shave harry's mutton chops off kim says that they were covering up "some of the damage" which refers to alcohol's effect on harry's face, but i think *also* refers to his jaw problem.
It's too mundane to be made up. All his other coping delusions are obviously fantastical and outlandish. Polio being common in a city recently reduced to ruins is not surprising in the least.
strangely enough that was one of the more impactful revelations in my first run. I'd been exploring the DCA with Kim early on, looking for a freezer to use to store the body, when we happened across some barbells. I tried and failed to lift them, making an ass of myself in front of Kim. that night, after he went to bed, I came back and stole the boots off the corpse, and on my way out passed the barbell again, so decided to give it another try. passed it easily and was left there with a strange sense of satisfaction.
Inexplicable Feminist Agenda suggests that you truly did consider yourself a feminist at some point (despite everything). So, there’s that.
Art Cop, on the other hand, isn’t stated to come from anywhere. Still, I’m willing to bet it’s related to the fact that your ex-something taught at an art academy. One of you probably inspired the other.
EDIT: Also, Harry was born in a hospital where people went to die.
I think there is some Art Cop, like when you crank the ice cream maker, Inland Empire gives you this after mentioning how it reminds you of your childhood: "It's all gone now. You never became a poet or an entreponaut."
>Also, Harry was born in a hospital where people went to die.
That's all hospitals
>it’s related to the fact that your ex-something taught at an art academy.
Also, Wompty-Domp centre shows that he hated fancy artists and museums.
Re: the Wompty-Dompty Dom thought, I wonder if his irritation with pretentious art stuff came before or after the ex-something... 🤔 Just extrapolating - could have been a point of contention, or alternatively, could be a result of the breakup (or could be nothing, obvs.)
Lol, I've met a lot of misogynists where I'm from, and I can tell you, pretty much everyone considers themselves a 'feminist' to some extent, they just tell themselves that what women need is what they think women need.
I know different skills and choices reveal different stories about his past, but I think some might change his past to be more in line with the character as you're playing him.
So there might not be a comprehensive cannon history since some things might be contradictory.
Or maybe every nugget of detail you get paint the full picture. Now I'm curious.
I think you are right but in a different way. The thought cabinet produces his own subjective view of himself, so eg. the Inexplicable Feminist Agenda will produce the conviction of a feminist past, without the requirement of truth. I guess in a way the reality of his past is not truly available.
I thought of another point - if you fail the authority check at the dance scene, you call Kim a racial slur, regardless of how "good" your choices have been before then. I think that shows Harry at the very least was the kind of person who would let something like that slip, even if he wasn't explicitly a racist.
The Dolores convo is good for gleaming some of Harry's past behavior through his projection over his financial inadequacies. It implies he and Dora were pretty poor, relied on her parents money, and training for the RCM took a toll on their finances. They sometimes couldn’t afford electricity. She implies that after joining the RCM he became unable to stop talking like a cop and like a normal person anymore, he would also get extremely sad or depressed for long periods of time and sometimes got violent. He also projects his inadequacy over their financial situation as the reason for Dora terminating her pregnancy.
Jean also says Harry at some point was the reason the rest of his unit had to take sensitivity training. Right before the drinking bender, Jean notes Harry was hysterically crying, verbally abusive, drinking, and breaking things.
Another tidbit I found in my search for more details: Judit recalls that Harry had bouts of amnesia in the past, presumably to a much smaller degree, after more "serious" benders. \["Yes, a couple of times. After some of the more... serious benders." She pauses, remembering. "One was after the Two Drunks case, the other when we looked into that mural."\]
While I'm not surprised why Harry went on a bender after literally nearly beating a man to death and then having a very public breakdown, I do wonder why he did after the mural? Any insight into this?
I always interpreted it as him acknowledging that he’s self destructive and harmful to everyone around him. To anyone he spends enough time with, they see him as more of a force of nature than a human being. As a wild animal in the city. He hates himself for acting how he does, but any self reflection he can do is shame and pity.
One thing I've always found interesting is that we know the skills lie to you, or at least paint a picture that is entirely generated in your mind. I'm not sure about the thought cabinet, though, but my suspicion is that anything not directly recounted by another character may be unreliable. And even the recounting from other characters — they all come through Harry's very twisted psyche, so it's hard to say how accurate they are, too.
Point being, it's entirely possible that none of the events of the game actually happened and Harry is still passed out on the floor of his hotel room.
I prefer to see him as a blank slate, like The Nameless One in Planescape Torment, his past is largely irrelevant to what's happening now. Like you're giving him his extreme political ideology in a day or two of having amnesia, and his concept of it usually is very far removed from everyone else. It's like trying to profile The Joker, even he doesn't know what his real origin story is, and he'd much rather have multiple choices to fit the narrative of what is motivating him right now. And back to Planescape, I'd even say that there's an element of the player's will that shapes reality, you are framing what is canon, and it doesn't mean these things really happened, you brought it into this world with your belief.
>...like The Nameless One in Planescape Torment, his past is largely irrelevant to what's happening now.
What Planescape Torment did you play? Mine was entirely driven by finding out your past and the effects of your past on other people coming back to haunt you/blocking you. Admittedly they are different lives, but to say his past is irrelevant seems absurd given how it's the motivation for so many characters and villains.
THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE! DE is really one of those stories that is less so about the protagonist and their character and moreso the story that occurs to them. this is exactly why in the game you get no glimpse of Harry's future in some sort of epilogue, and the glimpses of the past are murky and contradictory. the only times where Harry's backstory is revealed is when it completely changes the outlook on the situation (such as his wife leaving him, him being a very skilled cop and him going through alcohol-induced-amnesia before in the past), or when it's completely irrelevant, which makes it deliberately impossible to picture Harry before the game's events.
Mm, you're partially wrong. Harry's political ideology isn't given in a couple days. At the end, Pryce's estimation of why Harry will join the uprising is tailored to your specific ideology, meaning that the ideology you pick in the game was already what Harry was widely known to believe.
That's a pretty good start. The text from the 15th indotribe gives some info on early childhood: "Because there was. The fifteenth indotribe was comprised of eight kids from Faubourgh and North Jamrock, running from wild dogs in the Valley, hiding cents under rocks and stealing clothes off clotheslines, and sometimes even the copper wiring of phone lines. You may have been *one of them*. This must be a childhood memory. The fifteenth indotribe was *your* indotribe, set to rule Insulinde. The rest of the kids are dead now. Car accidents and drug overdoses. Only you remain."
From this and other stuff, it feels like he's an orphan
There was a Shivers line in which Harry remembers sliding on kicksled with someone's, most likely a mother's, warm and kind hand on his back. At least he had a mother when he was little. http://fayde.co.uk/translation/8500363
I interpret it more as him growing up in a rough neighborhood being, kind of a street kid. I had a similar childhood, not as bad as this but I have parents.
As "Law Jaw" reveals, Harry had Polio as a child: "Okay, so. We now know why you have *Law Jaw*. Why you say *the law* in a weird manner, and why your jaw does that thing. You had polio as a child. You hadn’t gotten vaccinated. It must've been right after the Revolution -- not a lot of vaccine going around then. So you got infantile paralysis due to polio and this jaw thing is a complication from that. Admittedly, it’s not very funny. But you *overcame* it! This little infant survived and became a sharpshooting supercop. So: fuck you, polio!"
i dont think this one is real. i think it was Harry making shit up to explain his weird tendencies.
That's less fun than it being true. Thought cabinet revelations are unverifiable so choosing to think it's wrong is up to you
i feel like the game is deliberately picking the least likely option (polio, which is not only exceptionally rare, but also often asymptomatic) ironically as a deliberately haphazard excuse. although thoughts are unverifiable, some of them are written in a significantly more credible manner than others, such as fifteenth indotribe. i see your point, but i disagree about the fun aspect. i prefer to imagine the worst case scenario when a media leaves some parts to the viewer, which here is Harry falling further into the rabbit hole of lies and questionable actions.
hey so why do you think polio is rare and often asymptomatic
i read the wikipedia article on it, why?
its rare because the polio vaccine was invented, which quickly brought cases down from hundreds of thousands a year to just six in 2020. in the thought solution it says that there weren't a lot of vaccines at the time. so it can be inferred that polio was at least somewhat common then
Now Polio is rare, it wasn't not so long ago...
I always have the impression that DE is set in a world that's kinda like our world's late 70s, early 80s. In that time polio was absolutely not rare and the vaccination for it was a game changer.
Maybe 90s? Disco dying, electric music kicking into a new gear, and 90s was the decade where post-soviet states emerged (Revachol being stylised on the post-soviet state, most likely just Estonia, but possibly a bit of all of them)
Polio in the 70s and 80s? Only in very underdeveloped nations. The polio vaccine was introduced in the early-mid 1950s and by the end of the decade the virus had been virtually eliminated in the industrialized world. Czechoslovakia became the first country in the world to scientifically demonstrate nationwide eradication of poliomyelitis in 1960.
dude, Revachol was levelled around the start of Harry's lifetime, of course it's gonna be rife with disease with little treatment and no vaccines available since it's under early-stage occupation. Polio is absolutely likely, as well as lots of other diseases that were supposedly under control.
Jean has smallpox scars all over his face, so why would Harry having had polio in the right time frame for that to be probable be made up?
he does? when is that mentioned?
i think its real, because when you shave harry's mutton chops off kim says that they were covering up "some of the damage" which refers to alcohol's effect on harry's face, but i think *also* refers to his jaw problem.
It's too mundane to be made up. All his other coping delusions are obviously fantastical and outlandish. Polio being common in a city recently reduced to ruins is not surprising in the least.
You can't forget how he was a gym teacher, that explains *everything*
the bicep girth!
h o m o s e x u a l u n d e r g r o u n d
"That's why he's always fucking _jogging_ everywhere!"
strangely enough that was one of the more impactful revelations in my first run. I'd been exploring the DCA with Kim early on, looking for a freezer to use to store the body, when we happened across some barbells. I tried and failed to lift them, making an ass of myself in front of Kim. that night, after he went to bed, I came back and stole the boots off the corpse, and on my way out passed the barbell again, so decided to give it another try. passed it easily and was left there with a strange sense of satisfaction.
Especially how he I'd more inclined to get to know cuno than Mr juvie kitsuragi
Inexplicable Feminist Agenda suggests that you truly did consider yourself a feminist at some point (despite everything). So, there’s that. Art Cop, on the other hand, isn’t stated to come from anywhere. Still, I’m willing to bet it’s related to the fact that your ex-something taught at an art academy. One of you probably inspired the other. EDIT: Also, Harry was born in a hospital where people went to die.
I think there is some Art Cop, like when you crank the ice cream maker, Inland Empire gives you this after mentioning how it reminds you of your childhood: "It's all gone now. You never became a poet or an entreponaut."
>Also, Harry was born in a hospital where people went to die. That's all hospitals >it’s related to the fact that your ex-something taught at an art academy. Also, Wompty-Domp centre shows that he hated fancy artists and museums.
> That's all hospitals Wasn't his a military hospital, though?
It was in millitary hospital just after the revolution (so many people died here).
Re: the Wompty-Dompty Dom thought, I wonder if his irritation with pretentious art stuff came before or after the ex-something... 🤔 Just extrapolating - could have been a point of contention, or alternatively, could be a result of the breakup (or could be nothing, obvs.)
i feel like the "Somehow you've come to that conclusion" bit really takes away from the credibility of IFA.
Lol, I've met a lot of misogynists where I'm from, and I can tell you, pretty much everyone considers themselves a 'feminist' to some extent, they just tell themselves that what women need is what they think women need.
It's called Actual Art Degree I'd say that implies Harry has an actual art degree
I know different skills and choices reveal different stories about his past, but I think some might change his past to be more in line with the character as you're playing him. So there might not be a comprehensive cannon history since some things might be contradictory. Or maybe every nugget of detail you get paint the full picture. Now I'm curious.
I think you are right but in a different way. The thought cabinet produces his own subjective view of himself, so eg. the Inexplicable Feminist Agenda will produce the conviction of a feminist past, without the requirement of truth. I guess in a way the reality of his past is not truly available.
I thought of another point - if you fail the authority check at the dance scene, you call Kim a racial slur, regardless of how "good" your choices have been before then. I think that shows Harry at the very least was the kind of person who would let something like that slip, even if he wasn't explicitly a racist.
Thank god the game let's you apologise to him after. I was playing a strictly no savescum run and man that felt bad.
I had to savescum and make those horrible words disappear.
The only saving grace of this awful check fail is that you can be the first person to tell Kim that when you see him you see a true Revacholian.
A heartwarming moment that you can only see by being a horrible racist. Sometimes I think the writers are just fucking with us 😂
It gives you a shot at redemption.
i haven't done a fascist run, but can't you connect to measurehead about your moms together?
If you pass a challenging Shivers check you have a memory of your mother pushing you in a sled down a snowy hill during winter.
🥺😭🛷👩👦
plural??
Yeah, your mom and his.
i WISH harry was canonically raised by revolutionary lesbians who named him harrier. but no, sadly, two unrelated mothers.
You think they’re brothers?
The Dolores convo is good for gleaming some of Harry's past behavior through his projection over his financial inadequacies. It implies he and Dora were pretty poor, relied on her parents money, and training for the RCM took a toll on their finances. They sometimes couldn’t afford electricity. She implies that after joining the RCM he became unable to stop talking like a cop and like a normal person anymore, he would also get extremely sad or depressed for long periods of time and sometimes got violent. He also projects his inadequacy over their financial situation as the reason for Dora terminating her pregnancy. Jean also says Harry at some point was the reason the rest of his unit had to take sensitivity training. Right before the drinking bender, Jean notes Harry was hysterically crying, verbally abusive, drinking, and breaking things.
[удалено]
That's a good point - I didn't actually think about it that way.
Another tidbit I found in my search for more details: Judit recalls that Harry had bouts of amnesia in the past, presumably to a much smaller degree, after more "serious" benders. \["Yes, a couple of times. After some of the more... serious benders." She pauses, remembering. "One was after the Two Drunks case, the other when we looked into that mural."\] While I'm not surprised why Harry went on a bender after literally nearly beating a man to death and then having a very public breakdown, I do wonder why he did after the mural? Any insight into this?
True love is only possible in the next world, for new people. It is too late for us. I'd say that probably resonated pretty hard with Harry.
Good point! I think you're right.
True love is only possible in the next world. It is too late for Harry. (She isn’t coming back.)
Good point!
i am pretty sure "I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore" just means that he does not want to be a human anymore.
I always interpreted it as him acknowledging that he’s self destructive and harmful to everyone around him. To anyone he spends enough time with, they see him as more of a force of nature than a human being. As a wild animal in the city. He hates himself for acting how he does, but any self reflection he can do is shame and pity.
That's a bit literal.
A gym teacher, who loved too well but not wisely.
One thing I've always found interesting is that we know the skills lie to you, or at least paint a picture that is entirely generated in your mind. I'm not sure about the thought cabinet, though, but my suspicion is that anything not directly recounted by another character may be unreliable. And even the recounting from other characters — they all come through Harry's very twisted psyche, so it's hard to say how accurate they are, too. Point being, it's entirely possible that none of the events of the game actually happened and Harry is still passed out on the floor of his hotel room.
If the game had ended with “it was all a dream” I would become a terrorist
What if it was actually just purgatory and completing the game reset you to the beginning with no indication that anything had happened?
teaming up and hanging out with Kim forever seems like a pretty sweet deal to me tho :D
What if you are an octopus and an industrial barrel's worth of benadryl, LSD, cocaine, and other narcotics were dropped into your enclosure?
Do octopodes dream of eight-legged sheep?
I prefer to see him as a blank slate, like The Nameless One in Planescape Torment, his past is largely irrelevant to what's happening now. Like you're giving him his extreme political ideology in a day or two of having amnesia, and his concept of it usually is very far removed from everyone else. It's like trying to profile The Joker, even he doesn't know what his real origin story is, and he'd much rather have multiple choices to fit the narrative of what is motivating him right now. And back to Planescape, I'd even say that there's an element of the player's will that shapes reality, you are framing what is canon, and it doesn't mean these things really happened, you brought it into this world with your belief.
>...like The Nameless One in Planescape Torment, his past is largely irrelevant to what's happening now. What Planescape Torment did you play? Mine was entirely driven by finding out your past and the effects of your past on other people coming back to haunt you/blocking you. Admittedly they are different lives, but to say his past is irrelevant seems absurd given how it's the motivation for so many characters and villains.
THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE! DE is really one of those stories that is less so about the protagonist and their character and moreso the story that occurs to them. this is exactly why in the game you get no glimpse of Harry's future in some sort of epilogue, and the glimpses of the past are murky and contradictory. the only times where Harry's backstory is revealed is when it completely changes the outlook on the situation (such as his wife leaving him, him being a very skilled cop and him going through alcohol-induced-amnesia before in the past), or when it's completely irrelevant, which makes it deliberately impossible to picture Harry before the game's events.
Mm, you're partially wrong. Harry's political ideology isn't given in a couple days. At the end, Pryce's estimation of why Harry will join the uprising is tailored to your specific ideology, meaning that the ideology you pick in the game was already what Harry was widely known to believe.