Characters / Disco Elysium

The many faces of Revachol West, here for your viewing pleasure. As the game is primarily a murder mystery, some spoilers may be unmarked. Tread carefully. Due to large number of tropes, the character sheets have been subdivided into a few pages.

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• The Detectives^note You, Kim, Your Brain
• The Civilians^note Klaasje, Cuno and Cunoesse, The Cryptozoologists, Garte, Local Merchants, The Pétanque Players, The Capeside Apartment Complex, The Jam, The Fishing Village, The Fish Market Drunks, The Anodic Dance Crew, The Church Spookers, Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy, The Deserter
• The Dockworkers' Union^note The Claire Brothers, The Gardener, Call Me Mañana, Measurehead, Easy Leo, The Instigator, The Hardie Boys, Titus Hardie, Theo, Glen, Alain, Shanky, Eugene, Fat Angus

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Revachol Citizens' Militia (RCM)

Precinct 41

Precinct 41 Major Crimes Unit (spoilers)

Satellite-Officer Jean Vicquemare, Patrol Officer Judit Minot and Special Consultant Trant Heidelstam

Jean Vicquemare

Judit Minot

Trant Heidelstam

Voiced by: Dot Major (Jean, original), David Meyrat (Jean, Final Cut), Anneka Warburton (Judit, both versions), Amit Sharma (Trant, original) and Peter Svatik (Trant, Final Cut)

"We've come to scrape what's left of you off the pavement."

The Major Crimes Unit police team that was sent to investigate the Martinaise hanging. You, as their commanding officer, abandoned them at the beginning of your memory-obliterating bender, and they have been keeping their distance ever since.

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• Affectionate Nickname: Downplayed. While Jean has a whole slew of nicknames for you, ranging from casual mockery to plain-spoken insults, one stands out: "(our) shitkid." Your Conceptualization will remark that it certainly is "an interesting moniker."
• Anger Born of Worry: A majority of Jean's aggression comes from this. Successful Empathy and Esprit de Corps checks will reveal that behind the all insults he lobs at you, he views you as his best friend and cares deeply for you both as a colleague and a person, but having to watch you wreak havoc on both your personal and professional life over the past six years while having made several fruitless attempts at trying to pull you out of your downwards spiral has taken a huge emotional toll on him, but no matter how frustrated he is with you, he still simply cannot bring himself to give up on you.
• Background Halo: Like Kim's, Jean's portrait sports a halo, albeit a rectangular one (a valid, if rare, form in iconography). This gives an early hint that he's a good guy and your former partner.
• Badass Arm-Fold: Jean's default pose when speaking to you.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Trant is an uptight and pedantic square who comes across as a little oblivious at times. He's also a skilled and intelligent consultant who provides a wide array of valuable services to Precinct 41. He's able to psychoanalyze Harry with surprising accuracy and operate on a similar wavelength, despite their notable differences. Both of them struggled with addiction if Trant's cryptic comment about pyrholidon is to be believed. It's worth noting that pyrholidon enhances your PSY skills, including Inland Empire.
• Closest Thing We Got: Trant isn't actually trained to perform a psychiatric evaluation, saying he only an enthusiast in cognitve science and only has a familiarity with neurology on a theoretical level. However, he still knows a fair bit, knows more about it than anyone else Jean can rely on, and does a fairly good job while also understanding and clearly stating his inability to give Jean a definitive answer.
• Cool Shades: When Jean first arrives in the Whirling-in-Rags, he's wearing a huge pair of aviators and an obvious wig. Your addled brain can only recognize your Station 41 partner as "Man with Sunglasses".
• Cowboy Cop: Subverted in that, under regular circumstances, the gruff, foul-mouthed, and passionate Jean would be this, but in comparison to you he's a total straight shooter.
• Dramatic Irony: The player is likely to realize who they are long before the detective does — as his subconscious is blocking any recognition. Even high Esprit de Corps only allows a faint familiarity in their presence.
• Embarrassing Nickname: You are only able to recognize Judit as "Horse-Faced Woman", a rather unfair nickname. Speaking your mind on it is a good way to turn the one person on your squad who's still on your side against you -– however, with high enough Suggestion, you'll be able to extend her the courtesy by addressing her in a respectful manner.
  Suggestion: This is the Horse-Faced Woman. I don't know *why* you named her that, but it was beyond idiotic. You should *never* address her using those words again.
• The Eeyore: You can call Jean out on being a real downer on multiple occasions, but he's not just being a Jerkass for no reason — he's clinically depressed and has to deal with having you for a partner. He also had to see his best friend (you) fall into a slow self-destructive spiral for years, and was powerless to stop it despite his best efforts.
• Expy: Jean borrows from Planescape: Torment's the Transcendent One. Like the Transcendent One and the Nameless One, you and Jean were once practically inseparable, Jean remembers everything while you do not, and Jean, more than anything else in life, wants to be free of both you and the consequences of your actions. And like the Transcendent One, Jean is the Final Boss-esque figure that can be talked down.
• Family Man: You can first encounter Trant with his son out on the coast. Not actually a police officer, he's decided this is as good a time as any to teach his son about the Feld computer company. If you ask Judit if she's working-class, she'll say yes, if that means supporting two kids and "half a husband" on a patrol officer's wages.
• Final Boss: Jean is the closest you can get to one in DE: upon returning to the mainland, you must convince him to let you remain with the force by proving you're a competent detective who's, at the very least, trying to quit drinking and who can work side by side with a partner. As anticipated, if your arguments aren't enough, he'll — indirectly as you're still his de jure superior — sack you on the spot.
• French Jerk: Jean screaming abuse at you in a heavy accent (especially in the Maurice Chevalier Accent used in Dot Major's original dub) at first seems to indicate that he's this. Eventually subverted — you are the jerk, and he's just finally sick of your shit after dealing with it for years.
• Good Counterpart: They are the good version of the Tribunal you dealt with earlier. Led by a guy with a personal connection, an emotional woman and a dissociated man, your actions up to that point determine how they deal with you.
• Heroic Build: Both Jean and Trant are described as muscular despite the animation not making it clear. Trant says he stickfights twice a week and Physical Instrument comments that Jean looks like he works out as if the devil was on his back.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Played straight — or as straight as Harry's Ambiguously Bi undertones allow him to — and lampshaded. You and Jean were this for, at the very least, two years (as Empathy estimates), and this trope is mocked ad nauseam by your co-workers from the 41st — particularly Mack Torson and Chester McLaine.
  Torson: Where's your homo, homey?
  Jean: What?
  McLaine: It's not like that. They're what you call heterosexual life partners. They have a battle-tested relationship. A "bröderbund", if you will.
  Jean: Huh? Yeah.
  Torson: "Hetero-sexual life-partners."
  Jean: Funny apery. Male-centric workplace humour.
• Hidden Depths:
  • By the end, Jean's hostility towards the player is revealed to be born from the depression of watching his best friend and colleague drive everyone away from himself and destroy his life and career. Should you prove your aptitude by solving the investigation, Empathy can note that he eases up a bit and has some hope in you actually getting better, even if he won't admit it himself.
  • Trant Heidelstam possibly falls under this trope. Many players initially interpret him as a moralist, presumably due to his academic persona and backpedalling. However, there are several sections of dialogue that would suggest Trant at least sympathizes with communism, even if he subscribes to a less extreme left-wing ideology.
    • Trant describes the March Decree — the legislative foundation of the Commune of Revachol — as "beautiful", and attempted to get his son to memorize the text.
    • Trant recognizes Cindy's graffito as a reference to a piece of media about communism, then comments that this was a "good choice."
    • Trant suggests that critical theory should not be off the table when considering the causes of Harry's amnesia.
    • Trant's descriptions of the revolutionaries are more sympathetic than one would expect from a moralist. When Harry asks why the revolutionaries destroyed the FELD Playback Experiment, Trant suggests it was an accident or they didn't want the technology falling into the wrong hands. Trant also notes he understands the socio-economic causes of the Revolution.
    • Trant's knowledgeable on left-wing political history. For example, he recommends a text on criminal profiling in former socialist states, and is familiar with Revolutionary matronym customs. However, Trant is knowledgeable on a broad range of topics.
    • As of The Final Cut update, Trant's persistent smile will falter if you ask him which political system he thinks describes moralist Harry's or the Coalition's innermost character. He ultimately dodges the question.
    • During the moralist quest, Savoir Faire can comment that Trant looks like a 'bean-counter'. The communist quest reveals that 'bean counting' is a moderate school of Mazovianism. Note that other schools dispute whether 'bean counters' are really communists.
    • There are some in-game reasons to believe Trant isn't left-leaning. The first is his desire not to partake in anything Union-related for the sake of political neutrality; this is a moralist stance, though it could also be an excuse not to work against the communist-aligned Union. Another reason is that when his coworkers refer to him as a "lefty dink", Trant declares "Well, actually — I don't consider myself a classical leftist at all. Not in the Mazovian sense at least." Whether this implies he holds another leftist position or is a moralist is up to player interpretation. A final reason is some Esprit de Corps dialogue reveals that Captain Pryce and Doctor Nix don't wish to involve Trant, and only Trant, in the plans for the RCM's eventual uprising. One possible explanation for this is they don't believe Trant is a revolutionary — however there are other explanations, and this wouldn't preclude Trant from being a leftist.
    • Trant also comes across as a boring and strait-laced academic for the most, but the enthusiasm with which he discusses the discovery of the Phasmid with Harry and his familiarity with cryptozoology terms suggests he might have a personal interest in cryptids. An Electrochemistry check also reveals that Trant has a history of pyrholidon addiction, and practices Lo Manthang stick-fighting for 4 hours a day.
  • Jean has a hidden leaning towards approving artistic messages, only shown directly by reading through your ledger regarding past cases; in the "NEXT WORLD MURAL" case, he staunchly objected against the removal of the titular artpiece made across the wall of an apartment against the complaints of both the general Jamrock public as well as Harry, to the point of leading a city-wide vote regarding the artistic integrity and preservation of such a piece. Part of this is heavily implied to be trying to prove to Harry, who at this point was still bitterly hurting over his breakup with Dora, as noted by Minot during the debriefing, that the mural's message of love being a persistent and caring force of nature is an unquestionable truth.
• Informed Deformity: Lampshaded. It's not abundantly clear why Harry internally refers to Judit as the "horse-faced woman," given that she's perfectly normal-looking and doesn't resemble a horse in the slightest bit, with nobody thinking otherwise. Suggestion will notice this and wonder how you even came up with the nickname in the first place.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Jean is mean-spirited and snarky and seems to be actively obstructing your Quest for Identity and the investigation as a whole, but from his perspective it's justified — you threw him off the case and have been all but deliberately sabotaging the task force you put together, and this latest bout of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy and the supposed amnesia is only adding insult to injury.
• Jerkass to One: Jean is kind and mild-mannered with everyone else, but when it comes to you, all bets are off.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Ultimately, it's shown that Jean cares about Harry as a friend and a partner and that he wants the best for him even though he's exasperated by his drunken antics. That being said, he will not hesitate to leave you behind for good should you not manage to win him over.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: The treatment Judit and Jean give to you, respectively, when they interrogate you at the end of the game, but it comes from a natural place: Jean is disgusted and angry with you, Judit pities you.
• Leitmotif: "Precinct 41 Major Crimes Unit", which plays during your encounter with the whole unit at the end of the game when they decide whether or not to kick you out.
• Maurice Chevalier Accent: Jean, in the original dub. The Final Cut swaps this for a more realistic (if heavy) French accent.
• Meaningful Echo: The phrase '[fuck off,] you're cramping my style' gets repeated many times by your partner. As he clarifies, these were the exact words you'd told him and the words that had caused him to abandon you to your demons at the beginning of the story. But much to Jean's frustration, your amnesia effectively prevents the "meaningful" part from coming across.
• Mr. Exposition: If you have a high Encyclopedia skill, it recognizes the same quality in Trant, who is only too happy to bring you in to the lecture on the history of the Feld company and the coast he's giving to his son, along with a series of rambling digressions on various tangential topics.
• Noodle Incident: Talking to Cindy the SKULL during the Final Cut's Communism quest with decent Esprit de Corps will reveal that Jean, at some point in the past, "yoinked an old bottle of mustard off a hobo." No, this is never elaborated on.
• Obfuscating Disability: Not them, but Jean clearly thinks your amnesia is some kind of pathetic act at first, just the latest in a long line of similar antics. Not that he's happy to have it confirmed that you're actually suffering from mental issues.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: When Jean and Judit show up at the Whirling, you can only identify them as the Man with Sunglasses and the Horse-Faced Woman. Part of you seems to recognize them but is being blocked out by another part of your subconscious.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: On Day 3, Jean (in a wig and Cool Shades) and Judit show up at the Whirling-in-Rags to keep an eye on you. They're so obvious (they're wearing police uniforms) that Jean is exasperated you still can't recognize them. With a high enough Logic during the final conversation, you can figure out that Jean was disguising himself as Guillaume Bevy, a moderately famous Intrepid Reporter who was also assigned to your squad, and one of the last people you managed to drive off. He had long, blond hair, and he was the one with a penchant for Cool Shades, not Jean. It was supposed to be a joke, which you spoiled by acting even crazier than usual.
• Pet the Dog: Jean still resents you a lot but will offer his shoulder after the debriefing when bringing you home in the good ending. He is also one of the few characters who treats Kim with the utter respect he deserves.
• The Profiler: Trant's job is a special consultant for the RCM, who assists in profiling Harry. It is not known whether his primary role with the RCM is profiling or not.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Exaggerated as you find yourself on the receiving end of this trope throughout the entire ending scene, but justified to boot as you were a monumental prick before the game's events. You can defend yourself and snap back — as your Volition and Authority advise — but that approach, naturally, evokes even more hostility from Jean.
• Redemption Quest: Jean sets you up with one in the final stretch of the bad ending.
  Jean: [...] I know it won't happen, but... *if* you make it — if you've been sober for 10 months — tell us. I'll work with you again.
• Satellite Character: In-Universe, Jean has the rank of Satellite-Officer. As Kim reveals, this is a rank only given to officers by merit of their partner being promoted ahead of them, to ensure they retained a similar degree of authority. That partner would be you.
• Scars Are Forever: Jean is heavily pockmarked, possibly in connection to a massive measles epidemic that happened in Revachol years prior.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Justified. This is the reason behind the Major Crimes Unit's absence at the beginning of the story: you, in a bout of temper, dismissed them by telling your partner to fuck off. Jean took your command to heart.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Jean, big time, though that is justified -– he is depressed and he has been trying to change Harry for the better for literal years.
  You: (Torson and McLaine) An iconic duo, I take it?
  Jean: Yeah— not like us. Two clinically depressed old men. Where's the contrast here? We're garbage.
  • Trant semi-jokingly refers to himself as a loser at one point. Your skills quickly note that the opposite is true given that he's been quite useful to the team despite his tendency to run his mouth (they observe that he probably wishes he could genuinely call himself that out of a desire to be seen as cool and rebellious).
• The Shrink: While Trant does have quite a bit of incidental/hobbyist knowledge of neuroscience, he tries to make it clear to Jean that this does not make him qualified to actually diagnose your condition. Jean doesn't care — an educated layman's perspective is enough for what he needs.
• The Smart Guy: Trant's trivia tirades can be annoying, but they show that he's genuinely quite intelligent and knowledgeable. His dialogue shows that he's intimately-acquainted with a wide array of subjects, which include history, computer engineering, abstract art, law, international geopolitics, physics, psychiatry, and even cryptozoology.
• The Smurfette Principle: Judit is the only female member of the task force.
• The Stoic: Judit is the calm voice of reason who reels in Jean's smoldering bitterness and sarcasm.
• The Unapologetic: Jean won't take back what he says no matter how well you solved the case and stayed away from drugs, since he has been Harry's partner for too long to be swayed by just one good case. If pressed on about his absence at the Tribunal and accused of leaving Harry to get shot for a lesson he will deny and angrily comment he didn't know it was gonna happen, implying that while he does feel guilty about not being there, he won't apologize for it.
• Undying Loyalty: Deconstructed and played straight. While the deconstruction can apply to the entire Major Crimes Unit, Jean gets it the most. His loyalty to you was so strong he remained your partner even as your behavior, lack of judgment, and the constant need to rationalize your childish antics in front of your superiors twisted him into a bitter, righteously angry man. It's not known why he stood by you for so many years, but he did and that took a toll on his own mental health. Still, despite all claims to the contrary, he remains loyal up till this point.
• We Used to Be Friends: Jean was your steadfast partner — until your heavy substance abuse caused your department to lose faith in you and hollowed it out, until only him, Trant, and Judit remained.
  • Your interactions with Jean gradually makes it clear that he still cares very much about you as a friend and a colleague, and obviously does so in spite of himself. But, if anything, that is also the reason why he is so angry at you; he knows just how good of a cop you can be if you put your mind to it, and it saddens him to see you screw up and alienate everyone around you time and time again instead.
    Jean: He said, "I don't want to get better, I want to get worse."
• What Were You Thinking?: The end of the game is basically Jean asking this question to you, over and over and over again. Why did you abandon them? Why did you obliterate yourself with drink? Why did you crash your car? Why did you do everything you possibly could to fuck up? You might have good excuses — or at least good results — to answer him with. Or you might not.
• Working-Class Hero: Judit is a mild-mannered beat cop who stays with Harry's squad despite his volatility so she can provide for her family.
• Younger Than They Look: Jean calls you "shitkid" and refers to himself as an "old man", and his portrait looks vaguely middle-aged. He is, however, a full decade younger than you.

Sergeants Mack "The Torso" Torson and Chester McLaine

Mack

Chester

Two of your fellow detectives at Precinct 41, and among the most active.

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• Always Someone Better: Subverted. Their Flash Sideways seem to suggest they're getting all the glamour, glory, and girls throwing themselves at them that your skills tell you only happens in books and radioplays. On the other hand, this is in spite of being pretty big screwups in their own right, all without the excuse of amnesia or mental illness.
• Due to the Dead: During the Hanged Man's autopsy, a flash-sideways courtesy of Esprit de Corps shows Torson performing the "Stations of the Breath" — an old-fashioned burial rite adopted by the RCM as a gesture of honor towards the dead — on a suicide victim.
• Hero of Another Story: They are quite active in the field, and you can even get to see occasional glimpses of their various (mis)adventures through Esprit de Corps.
• Noodle Incident: The first time you call Dr. Gottlieb, Mack will also be present in the lazareth, awaiting treatment for accidentally supergluing his eyes shut. Gottlieb's annoyed reaction makes it clear that it isn't the first time it has happened. If you call again on a later day, it's McLaine with a bout of fish-based food poisoning.
• Similar Squad: Downplayed — there's more than a few similarities between their dynamic, and your dynamic with Kim. This is a Development Gag relating to them being the intended protagonists for the earliest stages of the game that eventually became Disco Elysium.invoked
• Those Two Guys: They're steadfast work partners, and can be heard in the background egging each other on in making fun of you as you agonizingly are forced to admit your screw-ups over the radio.

In General

Voiced by: Christopher Gee (Nix, Final Cut)

Your remaining co-workers from Precinct 41. As a general rule, you'll learn more about them through Esprit de Corps passive rolls, a snippet at a time here and there.

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• Acquired Poison Immunity: It's a common practice for Precinct 41 members to partake in the fly-infested food of a nearby kebab stand out of the belief that doing it enough times will make them immune to food poisoning.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: Communications Officer Jules Pidieu is under orders from Jean to act in this manner, because he thinks whatever you are trying to do with the strange requests you are making all of a sudden is just yet another weird and self-destructive act of yours. As such, Jules will apologize, but firmly deny your requests for reinforcements, financial aid, and gaining access to your personal records.
• The Conspiracy: Seconds before the credits roll, having a high score in Esprit de Corps will show you an odd conversation between Harry's unseen boss, Captain Pryce, and the precinct doctor, Nix Gottlieb. They're planning to recruit Harry (as well as others) for some kind of uprising against the Moralintern. It's not clear what this will entail as the syntax is politically ambiguous but it could very well be related to "the Return" alluded to by Klaasje and it precludes Trant, a moralist with communist leanings.
  • It's not clear what role Kim and Cuno will play in all this should either of them join Harry in Precinct 41, although Kim is implied to have latent leftist sympathies so he could very well be recruited as well.
• Da Chief: Captain Ptolemy Pryce, one of several legends in the RCM, now heads up the 41st.
• Dr. Jerk: Dr. Nix Gottlieb, the Precinct 41 station doctor, is quite caustic and dismissive toward you. It is made quite clear why, though; he is a very busy man, and he has essentially written you off as a lost cause who will kneel over dead from one of your multiple substances abuses very soon. If you manage to quit drinking and then tell him about it, he softens up a bit and earnestly tells you to come by his office whenever you have the time so he can do a health check and see how bad the damage is.
• The Generic Guy: Lampshaded with Detective John "The Archetype" McCoy — he is both everything a good detective should aspire to be and given very little characterization beyond "good detective".
• Hero of Another Story: Aside from the wacky hijinx of Torson and McLaine, being the sole precinct for the entirety of Jamrock has given many detectives a chance to distinguish themselves over the years. Kim, who knows a good cop when he sees one, is able to rattle off half a dozen "legendary" detectives from memory.

Precinct 57

Alice

Communications Officer Alice DeMettrie

Voiced by: Marine D'Aure (Final Cut)

Alice is the radio operator at Precinct 57 and your dispatcher for the investigation, taking care of the associated bureaucracy, performing research, and connecting phone calls as needed.

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• Communications Officer: Right there in her title. Amongst other things, she patches you through to your home precinct and any witnesses not in Martinaise.
• Foil: To your own station's Communications Officer Jules Pidieu. While Jules is basically acting under orders to Be as Unhelpful as Possible thanks to you alienating your task force before the game began, Alice is happy and eager to help you and Kim out with the investigation however she can.
• Mission Control: Somewhat one-sided. As a police dispatcher, she supplies information you cannot get otherwise in the field, but as the detectives lack any kind of handset walkie-talkies, she can only be contacted from Kim's Kineema and doesn't relay orders; you're mostly on your own.

The Wild Pines Group

Joyce

Joyce L. Messier

Welcome to reality, baby.

Voiced by: Tegen Hitchens

"Keep the peace — and I will keep my end of the bargain."

The second representative of Wild Pines sent to negotiate with the Union.

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• Affably Evil: Whether Joyce is evil or not depends on your personal perspective (though given that she openly refers to herself as a deuille, or devil, she would probably count herself as evil even if the player disagrees), but she's friendly and accommodating in all your interactions with her.
• All for Nothing: She's just this side of believing that the ultraliberal upper class (of which she is a part) can still do something to make Revachol a better place, but she freely admits that the past fifty years have been an almost complete wash in terms of digging themselves out of the hole the previous kings and the fascist and communist governments which succeeded the monarchy have put the country in.
• The Beautiful Elite: Very much part of the wealthy, glamorous ultraliberal upper class, and a well-educated party girl with fond memories of Slumming It in Martinaise when she was younger.
• Birds of a Feather: It's implied that her willingness to connect with the detective is due to the fact that in his instability she finds a kindred spirit of sorts.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: When you accuse her on spying on your and Kim's investigation:
  Joyce: Spying has such a negative connotation. I did track your progress along the coast, however, and decided I could better assist you from here...
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Joyce is based on Katharine Hepburn in terms of appearance, wardrobe, voice, and personality, but not day job. Her portrait in particular seems to be based on later photographs such as this one◊.
• Cool Old Lady: Highly knowledgeable, cooperative, friendly, compassionate, sailboat-racing Honest Corporate Executive. Also a disco holdover (like yourself) with a nostalgic, romantic streak.
• Embarrassing First Name: It's actually Rejoyce. She says it's simply inefficient and leaves it at that, but given her general openness and willingness to talk about other subjects at length, there's probably more to it than that. Your empathy speculates it may have something to do with bullying in school or some ex-lover.
• Functional Addict: Her negotiation bona fides and insightful personality bely the fact that she is hopelessly addicted. Not to drugs, though. She's addicted to the pale itself.
• Honest Corporate Executive: As much as she can be, at least. Joyce is, like most ultraliberals, self-interested and fairly unconcerned with the struggles of the working class, but unlike most she's brutally honest about it in a sort of melancholic, self-deprecating manner, and in general seems to posses a pained awareness of the flaws in the system and an earnest sympathy for its critics and victims, even if she lacks the motivation or desire to do anything about it.
• The Insomniac: If you speak to Joyce at night, you can point out that she is still up fairly late. Doing so can make her reveal that her prolonged exposure to the pale has somehow robbed her of the ability and need to sleep.
• King Incognito: Wild Pines aren't her 'employers', she's one of their senior partners, and the only one who cares enough to go down to Martinaise and try and do something about it herself rather than relying solely on intermediaries. Given that the company's layers of bureaucracy are how they wound up sending Krenel and the reason they can't call them off, she has a point.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: She ultimately decides that fighting to keep the harbor doesn't pass the cost-benefit test, so she concedes to the union's demands and lets them have it without a struggle.
• Leitmotif: "The Insulindian Miracle", with its heavily processed Ominous Pipe Organ and Ominous Latin Chanting, highlighting the strange majesty of speaking with her — whether about the lynching or reality as a whole.
• Mask of Sanity: Joyce's prolonged willing exposure to the pale has irreparably damaged her psyche, and she's perfectly aware of that. She keeps herself stable and functional through a very strict mental regimen.
• The Maiden Name Debate: The L stands for Leyton, her maiden name.
• Mirror Character: She shares a number of defining qualities with the Detective - from their love of disco to their psychological problems and addition. They also both use shortened, more conventional versions of their given names, which would otherwise have a different meaning. Her outfit even resembles the Detective's starting clothes, with a green coat over a white shirt and some colourful neckwear. In many ways, Joyce is just the detective if he were rich and successful.
• Mrs. Exposition: Joyce has an encyclopedic amount of knowledge of the world, making her a perfect candidate to give you a "reality lowdown" on the strange new world you wake up in.
• Mythical Motifs: Somewhat self-deprecatingly Joyce compares herself, and Evrart, to dragons or würms when speaking of their wealth and/or corruption. She also calls herself a deuille (a devil) when speaking of her ultraliberal bona fides, how she and the rest of her class got rich at the expense of royalists and communists alike.
  Joyce: In any case, I’m glad we can remain collegial despite my scaly bulk.
• Noble Demon: Openly says that being a member of a wealthy Ultraliberal society makes her part of "the vilest of the vile". Although getting to know her reveals that she's actually abnormally ethical for her kind, making this possibly more of a bitter, disappointed critique of her fellows.
• Not So Above It All: When giving you a lowdown on all of reality, she'll call the death of two million people a "kerfuffle", mentions regretting being born too late for the best part of the century, and isn't afraid to call herself an ultraliberal — but when she learns Evrart is purposefully trying to start a war with the Wild Pines Group, she'll eventually decide retaking the harbor isn't worth the cost in human lives it'll cost to both sides.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Her Leitmotif is a synth-laden choral piece called "The Insulindian Miracle", somewhere between the ominous and the Cherubic, both beautiful and terrifying. It gives a sense of Joyce's own underlying power, as well as fitting the strange majesty and gritty misery of the game world as she describes the pale and history of Revachol.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: Or possibly Holy Pipe Organ, mimicked by the synth backing of her Leitmotif. The ambivalence of fear and beauty, of the world, the city, and Joyce herself as an "ultraliberal", are a large part of the latter's character as she walks you through the lore of the setting.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • She doesn't hide that she is putting her and her company's interests first, but she is genuinely trying her damnedest from keeping the tension between Wild Pines and the Union to boil over into open violence, and is happy to help any way she can, while cross-referencing your decidedly unreliable info with her own sources.
  • She can provide the full sum of money you need to compensate Garte for the damage to your hostel room. This is achieved via a Volition check; you don't need to persuade her, but merely muster the will to look her in the eye and ask her for it and she'll readily pull out her wallet and reply "sure, how much do you need?" She can note that she feels 'queasy' about "the pittance the Coalition calls your salary", and vocalises after giving you the money that it isn't intended as bribery (though she makes a wry aside that the law allowing the RCM to receive donations—which it survives on—can be abused to such ends as written). There's some ambiguity, but on the other hand, what she gets out of it (i.e., you being better-equipped to do what was already your job) isn't what one would consider a typical quid pro quo.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: If the player completes the secret task of relaying information on the strike between Evrart and Joyce, she will eventually decide to cut her losses and leave the harbor to the Union, rationalizing that retaking the port by force isn't worth the cost in human lives. It turns out that Evrart and Edgar actually banked on this happening.
• Self-Deprecation: She's rarely harsh, except when it comes to Evrart and herself. When she repeats the litany of insults leveled at the ultraliberal upper class, it comes across as only partly ironic:
  Joyce: I am the vilest of the vile. A traitor, a devourer of nations and infants... I am an Ultra.
  You: Cool. I liberate pretty hard myself.
  Joyce: (shakes head) No. Not like me. I am the nether creature of the forbidden swamp, who pushed the king under a *shitwagon* and betrayed the Revolution...
• Slumming It: Part of the reason she accepted the job in Martinaise was because of her fond memories of the place back in the Twenties (when she was in her twenties). Even now she wistfully dreams of rebuilding the fishing village where she met one of her early loves.
• Snark Knight: Joyce doesn't hold very high of an opinion on anything, least of all herself, and often holds forth with a certain world-weary wit on both current events and ancient history, yet underneath it all there's still a kernel of idealism in her that wants to believe she and her fellow ultraliberals could have done better, rather than that it was All for Nothing.
• Straight Man: Joyce is — perhaps more so than any other NPC — completely unfazed by the player's antics. Much to Kim's chagrin, who was counting on you being able to put Joyce off balance and pry information out of her like so many others before. As it turns out, Joyce is barely holding on to her own sanity from too much exposure to the pale, so it makes sense that your mild misbehaviour doesn't seem like much to her in the grand scheme.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Your Conceptualization skill will describe the fishing village on the coast as "pornographically poor". Joyce will later, completely unprompted, describe the village in the exact same way.
• You're Insane!: The last thing she says to the Detective before she leaves for good is to openly call him insane... Because she sees that same level of insanity within herself.

Scab Leader

Scab Leader / Major Raul "Korty" Kortenaer

RIGHT TO WORK!

^{Click here to see him in uniform}

Voiced by: Felix Biederman (original), Mack McGuire (Final Cut)

"You think they follow me because I'm big and loud? No, they follow the rules of the market. The rules of the economy. Because they were GIVEN A JOB TO DO."

One of the mercenaries sent by Wild Pines to protect Joyce and deal with the striking dockworkers. He spends most of the game undercover as a scab agitator, though he isn't fooling anyone.

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• Abusive Parents: If you get him talking, he'll mention that his father beat the crap out of him on multiple occasions.
• Blood Knight: It's clear that he enjoys hurting people for a living.
• Boisterous Weakling: Although he talks a big talk about being a hardened, ruthless mercenary, the Tribunal shows that he really isn't as competent as he thinks he is. All the combat stories he gloats about involve him or his friends murdering defenseless civilians in third world countries, and he's an inferior commanding officer compared to Lely. In the present-day, the main threat he poses comes from him being heavily-armed and armored in an environment where no one else has access to the same firepower. Sure enough, the stand-off can easily end with the detectives using their superior wits and quick-thinking to take him down.
• Break Him By Talking: A milder example than most, but during the Tribunal, by choosing dialog options that throw him off his guard, you can lower the difficulty of the Skill Check to throw a Molotov at/shoot him and makes your actual confrontation with him much easier.
• The Brute: Like all of the mercenaries, he is a large, imposing presence, bred for violence. He can actually give the Detective some pointers on how to take on Measurehead if they fail the initial check.
• Climax Boss: Inasmuch as you ever fight anyone in the game, he's still a "boss" in that you have to overcome him with a combination of wits and, hopefully, having done your homework in the past, which gives you an edge with striking first. There's still more game after the Tribunal, but this is where the shit hits the fan the most and everything after is falling action.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Bizarrely designed to resemble Peter Daou, a former child soldier who became a minor pop musician in the 90s, then a political blogger, and the campaign manager for John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008. Daou became internet famous for his obsessive and inflammatory Hillary Clinton support in the runup to the 2016 election, in which he would accuse even the most moderate critics of her campaign or policies of being evil, violent misogynists. ^note After making a failed social network designed to 'combat fake news' called Verrit, and with the 2016 election long behind him, Daou admitted his critics were right, moved to the left, threw his support behind Bernie Sanders in the 2019 Democrat candidate race, left the Democratic party, and now identifies as a socialist. It is likely he came to the attention of the developers via his feud with the Chapo Trap House podcast, which called him a "Hillaryman" and frequently made fun of him on the show; in the game's original dub, the Scab Leader is voiced by Chapo host Felix Biederman in reference to this.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: You can inflict one upon him via the Spirit Bomb. The game doesn't mince words regarding how horrible his death is - Korty dies screaming, his face practically melts off and he suffers for a long time before finally expiring in the hospital. It's quite a Karmic Death as well, as the major meets the same fate he and his squad inflicted on Semenese civilians during their military operations.
  You - He got what was coming for him.
• Dangerous Deserter: Of course he was already plenty dangerous before, but his brother's death ultimately breaks him and lead to his leading his mercenary squad to effectively abandon their orders in favor of trying to make Martinaise run red with blood.
• Dragon Ascendant: Involuntary example and brutal deconstruction. His commanding officer and beloved foster brother was the Hanged Man, and with the latter's death he was pushed to take the lead. He is not fit for it, and on some level he is painfully aware of it, but feels obliged to raise hell in revenge.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Joyce has no ability to reel him in despite her being the leader of Wild Pines, especially after he severs communications with her, and his actions pretty much torpedo whatever she was trying to accomplish in deescalating the situation in Revachol.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He is preoccupied with avenging the death of his foster brother.
• Evil Sounds Deep: His voice in the Final Cut is almost as deep as the narrator's, and he's a psychopathic piece of shit to his core.
• Final-Exam Boss: Exactly how much verbal ammunition you have on him depends on how much of your homework you've done, particularly on the hanged man, as well as possibly researching the armor in your mind and a few other factors.
• Hate Sink: On top of being a war criminal, he's a nasty, boorish racist who throws out slurs like "loincloth" every other line. Even before you learn his true identity, he acts like a loud-mouthed blowhard who lies to your face about who he is (despite how paper-thin his disguise is).
• Inadequate Inheritor: He followed Lely around slavishly for a very good reason: while he's a brutal monster willing to follow orders he has no nose for leadership. Lely's death pushed him into a position he is not fit for (and knows it even if he would never admit it).
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: His domineering, condescending and vile personality is not solely the result of his trauma and racism, but also him overcompensating for being out of his depth and knowing it. While his ego would never let him admit it, his willingness to allow the RCM to investigate the murder is due in part to his total lack of investigative abilities or basic social skills. He also knows Lely was the superior soldier and a better person than him, and resents himself for it, but is only able to deal with that resentment by being violent and sadistic to people around him.
• Karma Houdini: Should you fail to kill him during the Tribunal, he and Ruud will escape Martinaise albeit heavily injured.
• Karmic Death: He thinks he's dealing with some defenseless natives and that he can get away with murdering them, only for him to get capped in the head instead. It also counts as an Ironic Death if you blow him up using the necktie Molotov cocktail, as he proudly mentions that his squad used to bomb civilians using a mortar.
• Last Breath Bullet: If you manage to mortally wound him during the confrontation during the Tribunal, his last act before he expires will be shooting and wounding you in turn in a spiteful act of revenge.
• Made of Iron: Even after being set on fire or shot in the head, he takes an awful lot of time to die, enough to shoot you in the hip in retaliation before passing out.
• The Mutiny: Masterminds one in retaliation for The Hanged Man's death. While he was happy being a murderous PMC thug up to this point, the death of his commander and foster brother breaks him and results in his attempt to do something even his corporate overlords could not condone.
• No Social Skills: A definite non-cute example. He says his lack of them is something of a sore spot for him, and as we see, he barely functions at anything other than killing people or threatening to kill them. Even his interactions with his own team amount to little more than "shut the fuck up before I put a bullet in your head".
• Paper-Thin Disguise: His clothes don't fit, and he's roughly three times the size of any of the other scabs in the crowd he's riling up.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Barring the fact that he casually hisses racial slurs like "kipt" and "loincloth," he takes great pride in having murdered countless innocent black people during his tour in the Semenese islands.
• Psycho for Hire: Possibly the only character in the game without any sympathetic qualities, Kortenaer is a violent psychopath through and through, and he reminisces on the war crimes he and the squad committed with what can only be described as an extremely warped kind of nostalgia. The only thing that humanizes him even slightly is the fact that the hanged man was his brother, and he feels compelled to avenge his death. If you can stomach it (various skills beg you not to) you can listen to him brag about the ghastly things his team did to other natives who happened to get in the way of corporate interests.
• Rabble Rouser: At the start of the game he's posing as a scab leader, trying to break the dockworkers' strike.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: If you show him the photo of the Hanged Man's tattoos, he'll start reminiscing about a fond memory he has of a tour they were both on. Physical Endurance quickly senses that something is amiss based on his eerily dreamy tone and strongly urges you not to listen to his story. What follows is a graphic description of Lely and a squad-mate raping a Semenese woman to death before slicing pieces of her corpse off to eat or keep as trophies. His calmness as he describes this is nothing short of bloodcurdling.
• Revenge Before Reason: Clearly not all there to begin with, but he rejects all attempts to try and walk away from the brink in favor of trying to go on a spree killing of the Union for supposedly killing The Hanged Man. Nothing will sway him from doing so.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: What he intends to do at the Whirling-in-Rags, at the climactic scene of the game. It's up to you, a disheveled drunk who talks to his own necktie, to stop him from massacring the hotel's patrons.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Kortenaer is a deeply disturbed man who became who he is from his dismal life experiences. Although he boasts about the crimes he and his squad committed, he sounds troubled when you tell him that none of the violence he's committed matters.
  You - "You think you're real tough, huh? This killing is meaningless."
  Kortenaer - "Huh?" He just stares at you with his watery eyes.
  Empathy - That struck some chord — a dark chord.
• Smug Snake: He views the inhabitants of Martinaise as drooling savages he can freely take advantage of without consequences. This first comes up when you meet him at the picket line, as it's glaringly obvious he's acting in bad faith, but he doesn't think anyone is intelligent enough to see through his disguise. He also doesn't take you or Kim seriously when you attempt to deescalate the tribunal, which can end very poorly for him.
• Sociopathic Soldier: He's a sadistic Blood Knight who thinks he's above the laws of a backwater country like Moralintern-occupied Revachol, and more interested in making a nasty example out of the Hardie Boys than in finding out who actually killed the Hanged Man.
• Straight for the Commander: You are encouraged by Kim to do this to him during the Tribunal, as the confusion it would create could allow you to catch his two subordinates by surprise. It works... until he manages to fire a Last Breath Bullet at you.
• Vocal Dissonance: The game notes that he has an oddly high, scratchy voice for such a large man. The original voice acting also gives him a slight lisp, though his voice in the Final Cut is deeper and more gravelly.
• Walking Spoiler: It's hard to discuss anything about him without touching on the fact that he is much, much more than what he pretends to be.

The Hanged Man (spoilers)

Lely / Colonel Ellis Kortenaer

Love did me in.

Voiced by: Mikee Goodman (The Final Cut), Felix Biederman (original, Missing Trailer Scene)

"There's nothing funny about jokes."

"Lely", short for Lelystad, colonel in command of the mercenary squad sent by Wild Pines. One week ago, he was murdered and strung up naked in a tree behind the Whirling-in-Rags, and you were sent to investigate. Depending on how overactive your imagination is, you may wind up having a conversation with his corpse.

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• Abusive Parents: At several points. Not only was he abandoned as an infant by his real parents (inside a woodchipper, no less), by his foster brother's admission, his foster father beat the crap out of both brothers on several occasions.
• All Girls Want Bad Guys: Klaasje is pretty frank that the fact that he was a grotesque killer excited her. She has quite the time describing his scars and tattoos to you and Kim.
• Anti-Villain: He is definitely portrayed tragically for such a bad dude. The psychopathic bravado you see on display in the "Doorgunner Megamix" that earned him the undying hatred of the locals was mostly an act so his squad wouldn't see him as soft, plus it was his warped idea of a joke. While he was unquestionably a terrible person who would do terrible things without much thought, he didn't actually seem to revel in it the way his squad did. It's heavily hinted in your Inland Empire conversations with him/his corpse that underneath everything he's still just the scared little boy who was left in a leaf compactor by his birth family and beaten by his stepdad. This is in sharp contrast to the rest of his squad, who also act in the way shown by the "Doorgunner Megamix", except it's very, very real, and they are definitely not tragic figures.
• Asshole Victim: Zigzagged. He didn't rape Klaasje, but that was part of the fantasy they shared, and he did get up and sing a paratrooper song (about taking and holding foreign soil) in front of the crowd at the Whirling. But on the whole, for someone who was ostensibly "just" a thug for hire, his character is surprisingly humanized throughout the course of the investigation. You gradually learn that his life on the whole was rather tragic, and that while he unquestionably still was a violent war criminal like the rest of his squad, he was probably also the most morally upstanding one of them (which admittedly isn't saying much), surprisingly given how much life had kicked the ever-loving crap out of him. That said, Korty can tell a story about the time Lely went out and brought an innocent woman to the squad so they could gang-rape her to death, so it's not like the Doorgunner Megamix talk is just talk.
• Boom, Headshot!: How he actually died. You won't discover it unless you thoroughly examine his corpse, because it was a Pretty Little Headshot that hit him in the mouth, and the exit wound was tiny to the point where it ended up being hidden by his hair and the post-mortem swelling. Much to the disappointment of the true culprit, who had hoped to make his death much more gory.
  The Killer: Now that I think of it, I wasn't aiming for his mouth. I wanted his brains to spill out on her... but... (shrugs) you can't have everything.
• Covered with Scars: One of the things both you and Kim notice during the autopsy, and the most striking sign of the extremely rough and violent life he had led.
• Expy: Like Planescape: Torment's Nameless One, he's a nameless (in his case Only Known By His Nickname), heavily scarred, heavily tattooed war veteran with a softer side, and along with the Deserter, serves as a road-not-taken Foil for the Player Character, much like the Nameless One's past lives. Of course, while the Nameless One's corpse-like appearance didn't stop him from being quite the successful ladies' man, he was never quite as far-gone as the Hanged Man — left to rot for seven days at the point when you meet him. And much as the Nameless One's spoke with the dead and recovered Repressed Memories, the Cop can carry out a conversation with the colonel's corpse — albeit only through the power of your imagination, courtesy of your Inland Empire and Empathy skills.
• The Face: Oddly enough, given the way he looks, he was actually the charismatic leader of his group. He may have chosen to intimidate and harass the locals, but he was also the one most likely to gather intelligence and choose the peaceful solution.
• Face of a Thug: Thanks to his facial injury, he really nails the "evil mercenary" look. And while he was definitely a bad dude with plenty of blood on his hands, he was also the most personable and reasonable member of his squad.
• Foil: Your subconscious directly compares him to you multiple times, and the more you find out about Lely the more you realize you had in common. Both he and the detective were extremely decorated agents of their respective fields, both have a history of being good at solving problems through talking, both had a tendency for alcohol and drugs, and both of you were done in by love — him more directly, and the detective emotionally. Your first dream is of yourself hanging in his place (with disco ball lights, of course), directly comparing his bloated corpse with your alcohol-bloated pre-corpse.
• Given Name Reveal: He exclusively went by his nickname "Lely", short for Lelystad, the name of the town he grew up in. He refused to reveal his full name to anyone all his life, even Klaasje, saying that it was his alone to know. You are finally able to uncover said name, Colonel Ellis Kortenaer, after asking Alice to look up his records after giving her the serial number for his armor. Having this knowledge also allows you to piece together his familial connection to Major Kortenaer, giving you a psychological edge against him during the Tribunal.
• Hookers and Blow: He went really off the rails at the Whirling-in-Rags, in a way which got all the locals' backs up.
• Human Notepad: He's covered in a pattern of strange grid-like tattoos. They're based on the riverways of Oranje, which medieval mercenaries would tattoo on their bodies to show where they'd fought — so that they would, symbolically, always know how to find their way home. He's also covered in star tattoos, each of which marked some atrocity he committed.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: Despite of his generally scary outward appearance and all-around bad attitude, Klaasje noticed how his baby blue eyes somehow still managed to give him a strangely sympathetic quality.
  You: He had blue eyes, didn't he — your brother.
  Kortenaer: Baby blue, yeah... Like someone fucked up and put a baby's eyes on a grown man. It was creepy, but bitches... bitches like that shit, I guess.
• Kavorka Man: It's tempting to think of him this way, since your only interactions with the guy who completely swept Klaasje off her feet are as a bloated, disgusting corpse. Even she admits that his scarred face was pretty frightening — but he had an amazing body.
• The Leader: Of the mercenary squad hired by Wild Pines. What is surprising is that, despite his intimidating size and looks, he was actually not a particularly headstrong leader, but actually leaned more towards being both the levelheaded and charismatic type.
• Male Gaze: You — or, at least, Inland Empire — are drawn to his penis. There's a reason for this.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Like most things involving Inland Empire, your "conversation" with him is either magic or imagination. On the one hand, it's preposterous that you could talk to a dead person, but on the other this "imaginary" version of Lely gives you details that there is no way your subconscious could have known, like that he had an abusive childhood, or that his death involved love. Indeed, at the far end it gives you information even Lely had little way of knowing, such as that he was killed by communism,. It's ultimately up to the player to draw their own conclusions.
• Moses in the Bulrushes: One of the few explicit details you learn about his past is that his real parents are unknown as he was found as an infant, left to die inside a leaf compactor.
• Not Blood Siblings: He's Raul Kortenaer's foster brother.
• Out with a Bang: A dramatic version. He was assassinated right as he was mid-coitus with Klaasje. Probably as a result of this, Inland Empire will tell you that he enjoyed himself in his moment of death and has a minor, but notable, obsession with his genitalia during the field autopsy.
• Pragmatic Evil: Later conversations with his mercenary team paint him as the brains and conscience of the operation. While still a ruthless and murderous mercenary, he definitely would not have supported going rogue and massacring a bunch of local civilians.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: This is the reason the Hardies give for lynching him, but it's a lie. He and Klaasje both liked rough sex, and everything between them was consensual. Although he did rape people in some of his military tours and even arranged one as a lesser evil when his soldiers were thirsty for blood.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: His extensive life of violence and combat did not only manifest in a collection of scars on his body. There are several hints that his psyche had their fair share of some really deep ones too.
• Skippable Boss: In a loose sense; dealing with the autopsy and main investigation is a major component of your investigation and requires some planning to do correctly. You are directed by many characters to make this your top priority despite being able to complete the game without ever going near the backyard.
  • The game even offers a sarcastic achievement for managing this, "What body?"
• Talking to the Dead: Obviously you can't actually talk to him, but Inland Empire allows you to imagine you are.
• Token Good Teammate: As good as a violent and cruel mercenary can be, but in contrast to his downright monstrous squadmates, his atrocities do have an upper bound. Raul's story about him raping a Semenese woman to death is later revealed to have been a ploy to keep Ruud from going and killing a hundred more, and Raul notes that Lely would have let the people of Martinaise off the hook for the lynching with at most one murder to send a message, a far cry from the wholesale slaughter the Tribunal aims to be.

Krenel Mercenaries

Phillis de Paule and Ruud "The Killer" Hoenkloewen

de Paule

Hoenkloewen

Voiced by: Tegen Hitchens (de Paule) and Mikee Goodman (Hoenkloewen)

"Oh, people are gonna die today. We're not leaving it like this. These *tribals* hung him up for everyone to see."

The two other members of the squad send by the Wild Pines company to protect Joyce and put hard against hard if need be in the negotiations with the Union. Unfortunately, the death of their leading officer, who happens to be the Hanged Man, has caused the squad to go rogue, and they are laying in low as they plan their revenge.

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• Amoral Afrikaner: Played With. Oranje isn't South Africa, precisely, but Kortenaer, de Paule, and Hoenkloewen borrow a lot from the stereotype: they're racist, sociopathic Private Military Contractors with obviously Dutch surnames and a history of committing war crimes against black tribals in Third World countries. Also, de Paule in particular has a strong hint of a South African-esque accent in her few spoken lines.
• Animal Motifs: Hornets, contrasting the Hardie Boys' bees and specifically in reference to how in nature, even a single one of the former can kill hundreds of the latter within but a few minutes. Bees are also known to prioritize defense and are largely harmless if left alone, while hornets actively hunt and antagonize other insects.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Applies to all of them during the during the climactic Tribunal scene, where their anger and all-around Trigger Happiness is greatly exacerbated by the fact that they're drunk off their asses and high on combat drugs. Hoenkloewen in particular is so out of it that his mumblings are barely intelligible, almost inaudible, and he has to support himself against a wall, waving his BFG in every direction. His drunkenness may in fact be the only thing that saves you.
• Angrish: Ruud's few lines of dialogue are just the individual words you can suss out of the incomprehensible slurry of drunken threats and sobs streaming from him throughout the confrontation.
• Armor Is Useless: Downplayed - their armor is some serious protection (the breastplate is apparently capable of resisting a rifle built for taking out light armoured vehicles) and the fact that Korty and de Paule arrive to the Tribunal without helmets is key to how you can even try to put them down... though Kim is a good enough shot to simply shoot Hoenkloewen straight into the eye holes of his helmet anyway.
• Ax-Crazy: Hoenkloewen is the most unhinged of the four, and according to Korty, he used to fire mortars at random locations in Semenine when he was bored, hoping to hit a village.
• Berserker Tears: Hoenkloewen is audibly weeping during the Tribunal, and so drunk he's practically unintelligible.
• BFG: Hoenkloewen comes in armed with a rifle that fires six-round bursts and is designed to take out light vehicles. The fact that he's too drunk to be effective is the main thing that saves Harry after your first shot at Korty. If you fail to dodge and aren't wearing the mercenary breastplate, Harry takes a grazing wound in the shoulder from something that could have turned him into red mist.
• Breast Plate: It's not easy to see in full detail, but de Paule's armor is form-fitting in a way that emphasizes her physique. Since she usually has her back to the camera, it's rather easy to notice one detail.
• Clothes Make the Superman: Despite Korty boasting about fifteen years of combat experience, the Krenel mercenaries really don't seem to be in any way effective in tactics - the Tribunal just has them appear out in the open, heavily-armed, armored and inadvisably greatly-inebriated with little direction or plan. If they actually had either (and weren't sloshed to the point of swaying), it'd probably be a miracle if anyone they saw survived. But their "experience" consisted largely of brutalizing woefully-outmatched natives in third-world countries while they seemed to have expected that would happen again, and so it's possible for you to take them down with quick-thinking, fast-talking, and shooting first.
• Creepy Monotone: One of the main things you notice about de Paule is that, despite the fact that she appears as intoxicated as the rest of her comrades, she speaks in a chillingly emotionless and flat voice for most of the Tribunal, as opposed to Korty and Hoenkloewen who are shouting angrily most of the time.
• Communications Officer: de Paule is the squad's radio operator.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Invoked, as the three mercs are battle-hardened professional soldiers geared up in military-grade arms and armor, and are up against what amounts to two plainclothes detectives, a group of armed civilians, and a lawyer who's way out of her depth. In the mercs' most impressive iteration of the tribunal, de Paule was implied to have killed Theo, Shanky, and Angus and managed to injure the rest, including Kim, while you blacked out. She might have gotten some help from Ruud, since he survived Kim's shot, but that's only speculative. It was still down to six Hardie Boys and Kim versus one merc, and they only narrowly won.
• Dangerous Deserter: What they ultimately become by The Tribunal. While previously a loyal mercenary death squad for Krenel and Wild Pines tasked with doing whatever, the death of their leader results in them going off the reservation in a particularly brutal fashion, and no matter how well you manage in dealing with them, they WILL always go down fighting, killing some of the Hardies and wounding Harry.
• Dark Action Girl: De Paule is the only woman on the squad and, despite being uncomfortable in the frontlines, she will take down at least three of the Hardie Boys (as well as potentially severely injure Kim if you fail to warn him) before going down in the better outcomes.
• Decapitated Army: For all of their posturing, the Hanged Man's death broke any semblance of competent leadership they had, with command devolving to the Second in Command. With no respect for others or even the situation they're in and no better ideas, his idea is simply to go rogue and engage in a disorganized spree killing.
• Eye Scream: Once the Tribunal fire fight goes off, Kim manages to pull off an almost impossible shot by nailing Hoenkloewen in one of the only weak spots in his face-concealing helmet. Namely, the right eye slot. (Un)Luckily for him, he actually survived that shot, and was easy pickings for the surviving Hardies if they won that fight, or he gets recovered by Kortenaer if he was still alive.
  Narrator: Blood gushes from the helmet's eye-sockets as Ruud staggers back, disoriented. The sounds coming from his helmet are not human.
• Fish out of Water:
  • These mercs are used to operating out in the field in wartorn, third-world countries where they can pretty much do what they want with impunity. This mindset is on full display at the mercenary tribunal, where Korty, de Paule, and Hoenkloewen think of the people of Martinaise as "loincloths", and believe they can commit a mass murder in the street without consequences, in a city that's effectively run by the equivalent of the UN.
  • Before you even meet them, Joyce notes that they've effectively gone rogue without their leader, since they have absolutely no idea how to conduct themselves outside of a war zone. The hanged man was savvy enough to slowly deescalate the situation by making some noise without actually hurting anybody, and had the social awareness to maneuver around this society with reasonable competence. Without him, the mercs act like a bunch of thugs without any awareness of concepts such as "law" and "decency." Joyce predicts that after the mercenary tribunal, no matter the outcome, Krenel is going to have to work around the clock for PR and yet another rebranding.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Their standard armour includes face-concealing ceramic helmets with filter nozzles, though Hoenkloewen is the only one you actually see wearing his in-game.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: The logical conclusion of this trope would point out Hoenkloewen, the only one of them who is helmeted during the Tribunal, as the most vile of the quartet and that wouldn't be a wrong assumption - he's such a sick bastard that he used to fire mortars at random locations in Semenine hoping to hit villages just because he was bored and Korty's awful account of his squad raping a Semenese woman to death was Ellis assuaging Rudd's desire to murder far more civilians. While Korty's Inadequate Inheritor aspect and past does a little bit to humanize him and even de Paule at least expresses an inkling of a misgiving due to not being used to the frontlines, Hoenkloewen is barely even capable of expressing himself at the Tribunal, let be humanized by what else is known about him - the only thing he's got there is it's presumed he's genuinely upset about Ellis' death.
• Karma Houdini: The mercs become this in the event that some or all of them escape with their lives. It's stated in no uncertain terms that the surviving mercs won't face justice for their actions because they're shielded by Krenel's money and prestige. Then again, it's likely there will still be serious repercussions for what they did (see Pyrrhic Victory for further details).
• Keystone Army: Horrifying deconstruction. The mercenary squad is a fairly experienced and lavishly equipped death squad, but were extremely dependent upon their commander in general, and particularly in Revachol. His death basically destroyed their ability to effectively operate or carry out their mission. However, losing their leader did nothing to actually make them go away and instead just made them go rogue with the intent to engage in a disorganized killing spree using the finest equipment their PMC can buy.
• Kill Tally: Hoenkloewen has a tally of his kills as stick figures edged into the brim of his helmet. With high enough Perception, you notice that they are different colors and count about fifty black ones and two white ones at the end.
  Kortenaer: (about Hoenkloewen) What do you think he does?
  You: Kills black people — almost exclusively?
• Light Is Not Good: The futuristic, bright white design of their armor is what really makes them stand out among the ruined streets and faded buildings of Martinaise, and is ultimately used to underscore the savage menace beneath the shiny surface.
• Meaningful Rename: Krenel used to be Downwell, and before that Somatosensor, each time rebranding after an on-the-job atrocity irreversibly tainted the previous iteration of the PMC.^note This is likely a reference to Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi and its multiple atrocities and rebrandings.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: A blatant, straightforward example with Hoenkloewen's nickname: "the Killer".
• Politically Incorrect Villain: They liberally pepper their angry ranting and raving with a lot of racial slurs during the Tribunal, and openly boast about their numerous war crimes, which mainly were committed against the indigenous Semenese people.
  • When Kortenaer introduces Ruud as "the Killer" and asks you to guess what he does, with enough Perception you will notice that Ruud's helmet is marked with several black lines and only a few white ones. The option "He kills black people?" becomes available and, if chosen, Kortenaer outright confirms to be true.
  • In fact, the group of them are so blinded by their own hatred and racism that they repeatedly refer to the Martinaise locals with racial slurs that don't even apply to their races, calling Titus Hardie a "loincloth" among other atrocious things despite the fact that they don't even make sense in context.
• Psycho for Hire: They are a squad of unstable mercs who have decided to go rogue to gun down the locals.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Even if some or all of the mercs don't leave Martinaise in body bags, it's likely the survivor(s) will be in a tough spot because of their actions. They won't be tried for the murders they committed (or the attempted murder of two police officers), but they'll have to explain to their employers why they got drunk and murdered a bunch of Moralintern citizens in broad daylight. This will be especially bad if de Paule is the only survivor, as she'll likely take the fall for the deaths of her squadmates so soon after losing their high-ranking commander (and presumably their expensive, high-tech equipment as well if their bodies weren't recovered in time). Keep in mind that Krenel is said to only have about 1,000 soldiers on their payroll, so losing even a few of these seasoned, highly-paid veterans in such a short span of time is not an insignificant loss. The Union's huge reserves of manpower means that the deaths of a few Hardie Boys isn't anywhere as significant, given they can be cheaply replaced.
  • It's even worse if the player broke the deadlock between Wild Pines and the Union (although it's implied that will eventually happen anyway even without the player's intervention). The mercs were sent to Martinaise in the first place to protect Wild Pines' property, support the scabs in breaking the strike, and intimidate the striking dockworkers into surrendering. Not only did they fail to accomplish these tasks, but their abortive pogrom ends up being completely pointless when Wild Pines decides to let the Union have the harbor without a fight. Even if Wild Pines sent an expedition force to occupy Martinaise, it would never be able to win an asymmetrical guerrilla war with the Union's vast paramilitary army, especially now that the martyring of the Hardie Boys has made the locals hate Wild Pines even more. Besides causing what will likely be another embarrassing PR scandal for Krenel that will call their effectiveness as security contractors into question (after it's already renamed itself many times for similar incidents), the tribunal directly played into the Union's schemes. No one is going to be happy with what the surviving mercs did... except for maybe the Claire brothers.
• The Psycho Rangers: Four armed outsiders, three men and a woman, enter Martinaise. Their leader goes off the rails at the Whirling-in-Rags. One of the others stays out in the open and obfuscates who they are; the other two lie low and wait. The Station 41 team, or the mercenaries? The themes for both the mercenary tribunal and the moment when your squad questions your actions in order to determine your fitness to continue on as a detective even share a similar melody.
  Joyce: As your investigation reaches a climax, so does theirs. They are your shadow. Arm yourselves. Armour yourselves...
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: They did this disturbingly often while out in the field. While their Colonel was complicit in this behavior, he was also the only one who kept them from going completely off the rails with it.
• Rasputinian Death: Ruud and Phillis can both get shot in the head by Kim, but according to him still needed to be subdued and taken out afterwards. Phillis apparently lasted long enough to give Kim some nasty bruises with the butt of her gun.
• Revenge Before Reason: Like their leader, they were never terribly reasonable to begin with but the death of their CO results in whatever semblance of restraint or discipline they had snapping like a twig. The mercenary tribunal consists of them showing up drunk and drugged out of whatever minds they had with the intention of trying to commit a three man genocide on Martinaise in general and the Hardies in particular, and nothing anyone can do will dissuade them from carrying it through.
• The Rich Have White Stuff: Being murderous Hired Guns on the payroll of various megacorps means they are quite well-funded, and as such have access to high-tech white armour which would be futuristic even in our world. The ceramic plates look like thin porcelain and are lighter than plastic, but virtually impervious to bullets. The sophistication of their gleaming armour is in stark contrast to their crudeness and brutality.
• Smug Snake: While it's true that they have a firepower advantage over the Hardie Boys and the detectives, they severely underestimate how capable their foes are of fighting back despite only having muzzle-loaders. The best outcome has them all getting wiped despite their bluster, no doubt because they allowed the detectives to outwit them.
• Sociopathic Soldier: The mercs are sort of a deconstruction of this trope. They're so violent and maniacal that it hinders their effectiveness as operators. They have a fondness for debauchery and excessive violence for its own sake, which leads to them making breathtakingly bad decisions. After getting thoroughly hammered, they initiate a firefight with the Hardie Boys in broad daylight with dozens of potential witnesses nearby. While it's true that the Hardie Boys are an informally-trained paramilitary group, they still have weapons and are capable of fighting back even if they're at a disadvantage. This also leads them to think they can get away with threatening two high-ranking detectives and face no repercussions for it. Talking to Korty reveals that he barely put any thought into the operation beforehand and has virtually no experience as a commander. Hoenkloewen is so drunk that he's barely able to stand upright or keep his rifle from flailing around, which in real life would raise the risk of him accidentally shooting one of his squad-mates. They're definitely dangerous, but they're also incompetent and arrogant in a lot of ways, and the only reason why they have lasted so long in the business is that all of their prior experience was in brutalizing poorly armed natives in third world countries. That may be why you and Kim can potentially nail all three of them in quick succession despite having inferior weaponry and training.
• Support Party Member: Downplayed with de Paule, who is normally the squad's radio operator. During the Tribunal, she is still a clear threat as a combatant, being heavily armored and a good shot, but you will notice that she is clearly uncomfortable in her armor, and is obviously trying to hurry things along because she doesn't like being on the frontlines.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Defied Trope. Once the Tribunal begins, they are all angry, drunk, and out for bloody revenge, and all state with absolutely no ambiguity that they will not step down until they have executed all the Hardie Boys and anyone else they think are even remotely responsible, and they will reject any and all of your pleas for them to stop what they are doing and see reason. Exhausting your dialogue options with them will result in them starting their massacre and forcing you to kill them. Ultimately, the only way to steer the situation into anything remotely resembling a sane outcome is by picking your dialogue choices carefully to distract Kortenaer and get him on the backfoot, and then taking the first shot and hoping for the best.
• The Mutiny: Their decision to massacre the Hardies amounts to this, since for whatever Wild Pines's many sins they have no reason to desire a horrifying (and PR-unfriendly) bloodbath in the port district. But by this point none of the mercs care.
• Total Party Kill: If you play your cards right, every single one of them leaves Revachol in a casket.
• Trigger-Happy: Both Hoenkloewen and de Paule fall heavily into this. During the entire opening of the Tribunal, they are both clearly chomping at the bit to open fire on the Hardie Boys, and though they have discipline enough to wait for Kortenaer giving his go-ahead to do so, they are constantly begging him to give it to them.
• Unobtanium: Their bullet-resistant ceramic exoskeletons are made of uncommon materials. Hunting down a complete set of your own will take the entire game.

Cryptic/Fictional/Historical Characters

A Certain Creature (spoilers)

The Insulindian Phasmid

The reeds sway strangely... No, it's nothing.

Voiced by: Yuan Zhang-Taal (Final Cut)

"The arthropods are in silent and meaningless awe of you. Know that we are watching — when you're tired, when the visions spin out of control. The insects will be looking on. Rooting for you."

As it turns out, the cryptid Lena and her husband were searching for was Real After All. You not only get to see this massive stick insect, you can talk to it — after a fashion.

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• Ambiguous Situation: How much of what the Phasmid tells you are things you already knew but never pieced together, and how much is it stuff you are somehow sensing via its strange effect on humans? Heck, is it even intelligent, or are you just imagining it like so much else?
• Benevolent Monsters: Shy, herbivorous and empathetic, the Phasmid is a very unusual giant video game insect. It mostly expresses deep pity and admiration for your ability to not go completely insane with the brain you have. As a parting gift, it gives you the evidence you need to solve your case: the murdered man's helmet and the sniper scope for the murder weapon.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: It's a three-meter-tall stick insect. Rather than a monstrous foe, however, it's a skittish, curious animal of a species which has managed to go almost entirely unnoticed during three hundred years of human settlement in Insulinde.
• Book Ends: One of the only things you know about your pre-amnesia freakout is that you screamed "I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore!" Upon discovering the Phasmid, you can declare that it is exactly the kind of animal you wished you were.
• The End of the World as We Know It: What the Phasmid predicts humans are bringing — the pale is somehow a byproduct of human intelligence. At least that's what your imagination tells you.
• He Was Right There All Along: It's definitely already watching you when you're on the Deserter's island, but it may have also been around when you were laying lures for it. A background detail in the description of you checking the traps is that there's just some reeds blowing in the wind nearby. Reeds which the Phasmid can imitate with its natural camouflage.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: The Phasmid, along with most other forms of life, are terrified of humans thanks to their seeming ability to create the pale.
  Insulindian Phasmid: You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing — just by accident.
• Left the Background Music On: The game describes the sounds the Phasmid makes when you get close to it as strongly reminiscent of the click and hiss of a tape recording — the sound of which is audible throughout the game, particularly whenever you save or load. So was that sound just part of the game's interface? Or was it an in-universe hint that the Phasmid, or at least a phasmid, was lurking somewhere nearby in the reeds that can be found in town and up and down the coast all through your sojourn in Martinaise? The game itself has nothing more to say on the subject.
• Leitmotif: "La Revacholiere", a remix of "The Cryptozoologists".
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: The Deserter can't see it. It's also had some kind of degenerative neurological effect on him, over the many years they've shared the island together. Trying to directly point the creature out to him has him go catatonic, as if his brain's short-circuiting.
• Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: It's a 10-foot whiskered stick insect that can fold itself up to resemble a reed. As a species it's managed to stay out of sight from humans through the 300 years since Insulinde was first colonized, with this specific individual implied to have been living alongside the Deserter for decades.
• Playing The Heartstrings: Its theme is a lush, sweeping string piece, bittersweet and sad yet full of hope and wonder, suggesting that despite all the hardship and violence behind you — and still ahead — somehow it's all going to be okay. It makes for a distinct counterpoint to the anticlimax of finding the actual murderer, as if that was the side-story and this is the solution to the real mystery.
• Perception Filter: Its pheromones, no longer useful as the species reproduces parthenogenically, have evolved to have psychoactive effects on humans which cause them to forget having seen it and ignore it when it's there — but you (and Electrochemistry) theorize that it must take time to work, meaning it must also rely on its natural camouflage until the memory stuff kicks in. It may have inadvertently allowed the Deserter to survive hidden on his island for around 43 years because of this ability extending to its surroundings; he accidentally found the perfect hideout where nobody ever looks, almost directly on top of the creature's nest.
• Thieving Magpie: The Phasmid feathers its nest with a few treasures discovered along the coast: Klaasje's missing passport, the scope for the Deserter's rifle, and the Hanged Man's helmet, which Cuno kicked into the sea.
• Truly Single Parent: Its species has evolved to reproduce through parthenogenesis and have no need of a partner to fertilize their eggs — which means all extant Insulindian phasmids are clones, genetically speaking.
• Walk on Water: Like certain spiders, water-striders, and other much smaller arthropods, the phasmid's long limbs and proportionately tiny body weight allow it to suspend itself on the surface of the sea and inlets of Insulinde using surface tension. At the end of your conversation, it streaks away across the water at high speed.

Kras Mazov

Kras Mazov

"Du cristal à la fumée."

The father of scientific communism, the Premier of the Communist Party of Shest and Graad during the Antecentennial Revolution, the head of the Eleven Day Government, and the figurehead of the communist movement, even to this day.

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• Color Motif: Both he and his ideology are heavily associated with white, it being the official color of communism in Disco Elysium's world rather than red.
• Glorious Leader: He was this to the communards.
• Never Suicide: His death is widely believed to have been a suicide. Once you resolve the "The Suicide of Kras Mazov" thought, however, you can begin to question this. Although it is left ambiguous whether you are actually asking good questions about the more unclear circumstances surrounding Mazov's demise and that the current government might have a vested interest in obscuring these, or just inventing baseless conspiracy theories because the idea of your ideological hero killing himself in a fit of depression is an uncomfortable thought to carry around^note this possibly references the suicide of Salvador Allende, which was only confirmed a suicide in 2011, almost 40 years after his death. During the Pinochet regime there was an ongoing belief (encouraged by Fidel Castro, who had been a personal friend of Allende) that Allende had died fighting the coupmakers or possibly been killed by a stray explosion during the siege of the presidential palace; the 2011 report unambigiously confirmed that Allende had used an AK-47 given to him by Castro to commit suicide.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: As the founder of communism in-universe, he's clearly meant to be a stand-in for Karl Marx, right down to his name, initials, and even his appearance: full beard, balding in the front, hair longer in the back. His life was admittedly quite a bit more dramatic than Marx's, however, incorporating something of Vladimir Lenin by leading his own Communist revolution rather than merely theorizing about it. His popularity among modern youth culture also evokes Che Guevara. His death by suicide inside a government building under siege, and uncertainties concerning exact cause of death, evokes Salvador Allende, while the fact that it happened at the end of a bloody world war where he lost and as he was slowly being overrun in his capitol gives shades of Adolf Hitler and his demise.

Ignus Nilsen

Ignus Nilsen

A Vaasan Communist who was one of the major figures of the Antecentennial Revolution.

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• The Archmage: Yes, really... or at least that's what some of his followers believed. Nilsen's belief in historical materialism — the idea that art, culture, and philosophy arise as a byproduct of the material, economic world, and can't be abstracted from that world in the form of ideals — was supposedly so strong that it manifested as quasi-mystical powers. Kim is skeptical.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: He believed that political thought could manifest as "plasm", a physical substance or energy. Later interpretations of his version of infra-materialism extend the concept, theorizing that sufficient belief could hold up buildings, enhance the growth of crops, and eventually allow telepathy and psychokinesis, making advanced communists into something like wizards or Jedi.
• The Lancer: Kras Mazov's most favored contemporary, second only to Mazov himself in terms of influence on in-universe communist thought.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed:
  • The Communist vision quest makes it pretty clear he's one for Che Guevara, travelling the globe inciting revolutions both successful and failed, only to meet a premature end.
  • His and his followers' eccentric beliefs about psychic plasm could be a send-up to J. Posadas, a real-life Trotskyist who incorporated ufology, nuclear war, and dolphins into his brand of Trotskyism. It's briefly mentioned that some Mazovian-Nilsenists believe that sufficiently-intelligent marine mammals are capable of generating plasm, which seems to be a reference to Posadas' belief that dolphins would eventually play a major part in instigating a world revolution.
  • His followers' beliefs that sufficient levels of "revolutionary plasm" causes increased yields of turnips is a parody of Lysenkoism, a Communist anti-genetics pseudoscience, founded by Trofim Lysenko, adopted as official state policy of the Soviet Union in response to the catastrophic famines that arose as part of dekulakization, mismanagement and poor weather conditions. According to Lysenkoism, "evolutionary biology" is "bourgeois" or (worse) "liberal", because it is dependent on a great individual plant rather than the collective efforts of many plants^note There was also a running backlash in the USSR against the very idea of genetics thanks to its association with the Nazis and their embracing of eugenics, making it even easier for ideas like Lysenko's to take hold. Lysenko's proposed replacement, "revolutionary biology", meant sufficiently Communist farmers would be able to drastically increase crop yield, turn one species of plant into another, create hybrid plants through grafting them together, and that these changes were all passed down to the plant's offspring through "plasm". Several Soviet scientists would point out that these ideas were all impossible and were going to get people killed, but Lysenko had the ear of Josef Stalin, so he was able to have his critics labelled as "fascist" and sent to labour camps; while the Soviet Union eventually abandoned Lysenkoism in the mid-1960s^note Though it only did so with great difficulty; while more levelled-head Soviet politicians and bureaucrats had long since realized that Lysenko's theories were quite disconnected from reality, and even though Stalin was no longer around to protect Lysenko, his immediate successor, Nikita Khrushchev, remained wary from speaking out against him, as he feared the embarrassment upon the Soviet scientific community that could result from denouncing one of its supposedly leading biologists. It was first when Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, allowed a greater degree of freedom of criticism in the Soviet scientific community, that Lysenko and his theories was finally ousted from mainstream science, as several other high ranking scientists finally could speak out against him without fear of reprisal. its adoption by China was partially responsible for the Great Chinese Famine.
• Remember the New Guy?: Downplayed. Though he was minutely present in the original version of the game through the occasional historical allusion (most prominently, when acquiring the key to the sea side cabin, you can notice with high Encyclopedia that Nilsen would hide out and write books in a similar, small fishing cabin for large chunks of his life) references to the character were only added to the game as part of The Final Cut. Discussion of his work and the branch of communism he founded figure heavily into the communist vision quest a Communist Cop can undertake starting on Day 4.
• Shout-Out: Among the game's many references to Planescape: Torment, Nilsen shares a first name with a party member from that game, the Ax-Crazy pyromancer-turned-literal fire elemental Ignus.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Among Communists, particularly the People's Republic of Samara, he's regarded as a heroic champion of the workers and is known as the Evangelist of the Revolution. His opponents tend to remember him more for ordering 12,000 prisoners of war impaled on sharpened spruce trees in the Samaran backcountry during the retreat from Graad, after which they began calling him the 'Apocalyptic Shrike.'

Deobreva and Abadanaiz

Julia Deobreva and Jean Abadanaiz

Julia Deobreva from Graad and Jean Abadanaiz from Revachol were the two leaders of the Communist Revolution in Insulinde.

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• Behind Every Great Man: Gender-Inverted. Deobreva was the outgoing, mercurial, public facing charismatic leader. Abadanaiz was much calmer and quiet and less publicly visible, but also seen as one who kept Deobreva grounded in reality.
• Defiant to the End: Deobreva's last words, before she was executed by firing squad, were a loud exclamation of "Capital is past!"

La Puta Madre (spoilers)

La Puta Madre

A man in a white suit walks through a garden coaxed from soil that had once been covered in ashphalt — a city block closed of from the rest of the city by dark buildings.

A notorious Jamrock mob boss who leads a massive organized criminal network all throughout Revachol West. He may have more connection to the case's suspects than may be readily apparent...

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• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Forces a police informant to dig his own grave in front of him while wearing a dirty RCM uniform.
• The Don: He's an infamous mob boss with roots all over the city.
• The Dreaded: Any and all men or women in Revachol with even the slightest amount of knowledge of its criminal underworld knows damn well to steer clear of anything to do with Madre's immense power and control. This is what makes Ruby so paranoid and desparate to escape from him, that she would rather hide underneath an abandoned factory's caverns and decide that it's Better to Die than Be Killed when she believes that she's all out of options.
• Gender-Blender Name: Or at least nom de guerre. "Madre" means "Mother" in Spanish and so is explicitly feminine. In spite of this, the Madre is consistently referred to as a man and seems to be confirmed as one.
• The Ghost: Madre and the members of his outfit make no physical appearances, aside from one passive Shivers check when confronting Ruby. Even then, his overarching reach of power is what influences Ruby's actions throughout her backstory.
• The Omniscient: Has patsies in every known industry. Kim even notes that he definitely has RCM officers on his payroll.
• One Bad Mother: A vanishingly rare male example.
• Pragmatic Villainy: According to Jean, Harry would never be considered a mob asset on the basis that he's too unstable to be used in such a capacity.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Dresses nicely and has a strikingly crude nom de guerre.
• Villain in a White Suit: In his only "on-screen" appearance, through a Shivers sequence, he is described as being dressed in a crisp white suit.

Guillaume le Million

Guillaume le Million

Guillaume le Million was a disco legend whom you idolized when you were young and emulate in present day. He died while on tour, either deliberately by hanging himself or accidentally by Autoerotic Asphyxiation.

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• Always Second Best: Played with. Encyclopedia says that music history has relegated him to the rank of "second greatest male disco artist", but from all appearances he was always your personal favorite artist.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: In-Universe, Guillaume's death by Autoerotic Asphyxiation is implied to have caused your fascination with the act.
• Pretentious Pronunciation: If his name doesn't rhyme when you say it aloud, you're not pronouncing it right.
• Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: Except replace rock & roll with disco, but le Million lived a pretty hedonistic lifestyle which might have contributed to his death.
• Smug Smiler: He is the originator of "The Expression", and unlike you he presumably pulled it off without creeping everyone out.

Dolores Dei

Dolores Dei

The first death is in the heart.

Voiced by: Anneka Warburton

"After life, death. After death, life again."

Her Innocence of interisolary travel and the connected world, one of the principle figures behind Moralism. She was the principle adviser to Irene La Navigateur, Queen of Suresne, 300 years prior to the events of the game.

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• Angelic Beauty: Described as being "insultingly beautiful", just seeing her on a stained glass window in the church transfixes you in a way that your Skills try to warn you away from, though it's later revealed this is due to her name and appearance subconsciously reminding you of your ex-fiance, Dora.
• Ambiguously Human: Beyond her supposedly glowing lungs and her almost divine beauty, the secret serviceman who assassinated her claimed that she was unnaturally warm to the touch (like a furnace) and that he observed her forgetting to breathe for up to ten minutes at a time. Whether or not any of this is true or just a mix of allegory taken literally and the ramblings of an insane man is left ambiguous.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: She eventually faced her end at the hands of a member of her own secret service. According to witnesses, the young man in question was overheard shouting "We were supposed to figure it out ourselves!" while he assassinated her, and he later personally testified that he killed her because he feared she was a Humanoid Abomination; though most historians write him off as insane, some wonder if there wasn't some truth to his words...
• Bold Explorer: The Patron Saint of exploration, as the means by which travel across the pale to other isolas could occur was discovered during her reign, leading to the Columbus-like discovery of the New New World of Insulinde, an isola apparently entirely empty of human life until that time.
• Cherubic Choir: The theme that plays in the abandoned church, under the gaze of the broken stained-glass window of Dolores Dei consists of a sweet-voiced choir singing over a low, discordant Drone of Dread, seemingly hinting at the link between the saintly and beautiful Innocence with the pale which was first explored during her reign. As well as the link between her church and the 2mm hole of nascent pale in the world.
• The Chosen One: A criteria of being an Innocence. They are considered History Itself made manifest, and their actions are not only blessed but inevitable.
• Dark Messiah: Being a cynical take on the Jeanne d'Archétype combined with the "Great Man" Theory, she's both a figure capable of influencing humanity into great deeds as well as a ruthless demagogue unafraid of enforcing her will over those who stand against her.
• Disposable Love Interest: An in universe example. She's mentioned as first appearing as the wife of an influential Marchese man, but your Encyclopedia skill will note that next-to-nothing is actually known about the man himself and that he vanished from historical records not long afterwards, almost as though his only role in life was to introduce her to the court.
• The Fundamentalist: Her critics accuse her of being one. She waged several wars against the Mesque State for trying to move away from the Innocentic church in response to their growing secularism, violently suppressed dissent with a personal force called the Army of Humanity (name implying, that their opponents are not even human), and spearheaded mandatory education and colonisation programmes to spread her message. Even Kim, a staunch Moralist, does not try to downplay her actions as being any less than troubling.
• Heart Symbol: Not quite, but it's because of her and her reputedly glowing lungs that the heart symbol is replaced by a set of lungs as the symbol of love and faith in the Real Belt, where Revachol is located.
• High Priest: As Innocence she was something akin to The Pope of her day, the spiritual and political leader of the world — almost a prophet, a once-in-a-lifetime divinely inspired leader of the Moralist church.
• Jeanne d'Archétype: A mysterious woman who appeared at court, led the church to war and triumph, and was struck down by one of her own followers for being something other than human.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: She was eventually murdered by one of her bodyguards who was convinced she wasn't human. According to the bodyguard, Dolores radiated heat like a furnace and would sometimes neglect to breathe for minutes at a time. Whether he was telling the truth or was mad is never explored. ^note There is a possibility that she was overdosing with a drug described in Sacred and Terrible Air that, said to make the overuser burn up like a furnace.
• Meaningful Name: Dolores Dei is Latin for "sorrows of God."
• Messianic Archetype: A Christ-like saviour figure considered 'the greatest Innocence,' not the founder of the Crystal Dragon Jesus Moralist church but central to its reform, but subverted by her Joan of Arc-like crusade against less devout nations. Following her death the church renamed itself to Dolorianism in her honour.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed:
  • As noted above, she's arguably a dark take on Joan of Arc, being a fundamentalist warmonger who inspired others with her seemingly otherworldly presence.
  • She's also likely inspired by Queen Isabella I of Spain, also known as "Isabella the Catholic", who was known for her piety and spreading colonialism to the New World in the name of Catholism.
  • She also has a lot in common with Madame de Pompadour, a highly intelligent French courtesan who became an extremely influential politician. She negotiated the 1756 Treaty of Versailles, and established economic policies influenced by Adam Smith that enhanced France's colonial powers and laid the groundwork for modern capitalism.

Dick Mullen

Detective Dick Mullen

Dick Mullen is a fictional detective who would never lose his badge.

Voiced by: N/A

"Another Dick Mullen book woefully misrepresenting the police work. In this one our detective returns from a trip, having successfully solved a 100-years-old cold case, only to embark on another. Does he finally face the taxing nature of his occupation? No! He doesn't even look like a normal law officer."

A fictional Vespertine detective from a successful series of crime fiction novels which glamourizes police work to a downright unrealistic degree. Mullen solves cases including robberies, murders, and even sexual crimes in his books.

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• The Ace: Dick Mullen is a tough, determined, upstanding copper who would never lose his badge.
• Artistic License – Law Enforcement: As your skills (most prominently Esprit de Corps) often point out, his books are completely inaccurate to the life of an actual police officer. As you read Dick Mullen and the Mistaken Identity, you notice that several of Mullen's actions are at best very questionable for a supposed officer of the law to carry out, and at worst breaks several laws and regulations regarding proper police conduct, and that if he were a real officer, Mullen's suspects could very easy get Off on a Technicality if their cases were even taken to trial and his bosses would have good cause to fire him several times over.
• Badass Longcoat: Wouldn't be a hard-boiled detective without one. You can even wear a facsimile of it in-game!
• Faking the Dead: Apparently has done this multiple times to solve a case.
• Expy: He is very obviously meant to be a riff on Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character, with several of his stories carrying titles that are slightly altered versions of Chandler's crime novels.
• Hardboiled Detective: To the extreme.
• Hand Cannon: Carries a .45 pistol.
• Series Fauxnale: One of his books is called "The Final Case of Dick Mullen". It's around 40% into the list of sequels you read.
• Tuckerization: Almost certainly named after podcaster Nick Mullen, the original voice of Titus Hardie.

The Man from Hjelmdall

The Man from Hjelmdall

A series of trashy Barbarian Hero fantasy novels about a nameless hero from the fictional nation of Hjelmdall. The series is a favorite of bigots due to their racist and sexist nature, and the Man himself has become a symbol of bigotry to the point that wearing a t-shirt with him on it is a recognized Statement.

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• Barbarian Long Hair: If his silhouette on the t-shirt you can buy is any indication, the Man has long hair that looks oddly similar to your mullet.
• Comically Invincible Hero: Most of your dialogue options while browsing the book, when not mocking its bigoted themes or recycled writing, will lampshade how Hjelmdallermann wins every conflict he comes across with little effort, making any potential drama or tension within the book's conflicts meaningless.
• Department of Redundancy Department: He's Hjelmdallermann: The Man from Hjelmdall.
• Dual Wielding: The Man from Hjelmdall primarily dual wields zweihänders. If high enough, Hand-Eye Coordination and Logic will disdainfully point out it is physically impossible to dual wield swords that big, and that it is a safe bet that the author of the book has probably never once held a sword in their life.
• Expy: There are quite a few Sword and Sorcery stables this series could be a reference to, though the most prominent one is probably Conan the Barbarian. Though stuff like the, er, problematic fan base also suggests that there is a bit of the Gor franchise mixed in.
• No Name Given: The main character is only known as "The Man from Hjelmdall" or "The Hjelmdallermann Man".
• Politically Incorrect Hero: For certain values of "hero", as a Conan Expy after all. The Man from Hjelmdall is portrayed as the heroic main character of his series, but both out-of-universe and in-universe he's portrayed as holding "objectionable" positions on certain races and women.
• Same Story, Different Names: The author recycles the same plots multiple times with different titles.

Her (spoilers)

Dora Ingerlund; The Ex-Something; The Apricot-Scented One; The White Mourning; The Caustic Echo

Voiced by: Anneka Warburton

"We don't have anything to talk about anymore. Every combination of words has been played out. The atoms don't form us anymore: us, our love... "

Your ex-fiancée. The very existence of *her* constitutes a majority of your past and present actions.

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• Angelic Beauty: Your idealized vision of her takes the form of the literal Messianic figure Dolores Dei, who also qualified for this trope. In real life, Jean will confirm that she was ridiculously pretty, but ultimately a normal woman with her own flaws.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's never firmly established if Dora left Harry because she was cold and heartless (as Jean claims), if she genuinely loved him but was driven away over the years by his toxic behavior, or if she simply stopped loving him and moved on. Harry's dream of her ultimately doesn't provide any clear answers either, because the version of Dora he interacts with is so distorted and warped by a combination of Harry's extreme self-hatred and guilt from believing that he failed her, the anger he feels towards her for leaving him, and, not least, his Madonna-Whore Complex, that she barely resembles the actual woman any more.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Her relationship with you can be seen as a deconstruction of the trope. She initially fell in love with you because she was attracted to your raw energy and devil-may-care attitude. But your mental instability and self-destructive behavior made the relationship turn increasingly sour over the years and eventually it drove her away. Maybe.
• Alpha Bitch: Jean's dismissive opinion of her. She was a well-off middle class woman who was always out of your league. Incredible in bed, though.
• The Dreaded: In your mind — your skills are terrified of her, or rather, you remembering her. Inland Empire in particular will take every opportunity it can to distract or otherwise warn you away from clues that remind you of her.
  Ancient Reptilian Brain: We're trying to help you. All these processes — these tortures, voices and tremors — are just *distractions*. Flares and countermeasures. To keep you from the *last dream*. The worst of them all.
• Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: Invoked In-Universe. Your brain pictures her as Dolores Dei and steeps everything surrounding her in heavy-handed symbolism, to the point where it's impossible to tell what actually happened and what's just you searching desperately for meaning in her leaving you.
• Everyone Loves Blondes: Her incredible blondness — so blond her colour motif is associated with white rather than with gold — is something you can't stop thinking about in terms of why she was so attractive. At least in your dream, she claims she was never as beautiful as you imagine her as, as if her blondness symbolised beauty to you so much that it overrode her actual appearance.
• Final Boss: Or Post-Final Boss — inasmuch as a game like this has either — depending on how you view the tribunal and whether or not you rest in the sea fort before or after tracking down the Deserter. Subverted in that while in many ways the final confrontation of the mystery of who you are, The Reveal your Quest for Identity has been building toward all game, you meet her in an easily missable dream sequence, you can't fight her, and there are no dialogue checks that will work on her. You can't defeat her, convince her to stay, talk her away, or gain any kind of real closure, other than the knowledge that maybe someday (perhaps twenty years from now), the pain of her leaving won't hurt quite as badly. Until then she'll still be part of you, in your dreams every other night.
  Dolores Dei/Dora: No, Harry. No. I don't want a *massive epic showdown*. I want to go to the aerodrome.
• I Have Many Names: In your mind, she's the *ex-something*, or the Apricot-Scented One, or the Shadow. Anything that will let you distance yourself from the pain of actually remembering her.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: When you finally face her in the last dream. You can't win. You already lost years ago.
• The Juggernaut: By the game's standards of combat, she is the one person you cannot stop. No matter how hard you and your skills might try, you cannot talk her out of leaving you at the end of your dream.
• Light Is Not Good: One of the forms she takes in your mind is that of a white shadow.
• Lost Lenore: Word of God says she is designed as a subversion. You treat her with all the vaguely religious melodrama of this kind of plotline, but she's not dead — her relationship with you is. You are mourning her while she is still alive, and have been doing so for six years, turning her into a symbol of beauty and personal salvation that no human being could ever be. The disproportionate intensity of your grief, when she's alive and quite happy, is part of why your pain has nowhere to go besides hassling her with pathetic phone calls, seeing her in your nightmares, and threatening to kill yourself because it will make her feel sorry.invoked
• Love at First Sight: It happened mutually between the two of you. You met by chance at a bus stop on Wayfarer Road; she thought you were one of the "coolest" people she had ever met, and you found her incredibly beautiful, and you instantly made a connection.
• Love Hurts: And how! Your mind tries its hardest to block the memory of her. And seeing how you react to rediscovering her existence by having a blackout from the sheer emotional stress that washes in over you when you do, can you really blame it?
• Loving a Shadow: Not initially. At least by appearances, she genuinely loved you and you genuinely loved her, years ago. By the time of the game, however, your obsession with winning her back has turned her into something inhuman, impossibly young and beautiful but also cold and cruel and indifferent to your suffering. The version of her you face in the last dream tells you outright that your mind has warped her into something the real Dora never was, even setting aside her taking on the appearance of the resident Messianic Archetype.
• Madonna-Whore Complex: She is the subject of yours, which makes it impossible for you to think about her in a normal way. You imagine her as a beautiful, sexless holy mother figure, while also having options to call her, and any woman who reminds you of her, a 'whore'.
• Recurring Dreams: You were dreaming of the day she left you up to three-to-four times a week before the investigation, which is heavily implied to have been the primary factor in your mental breakdown. Your Reptilian Brain and Limbic system later reveal that they've been making sleep almost impossible for you in an effort to stop this happening again.
• The One That Got Away: No matter how you play, the loss of her weighs extremely heavily on you. Most tellingly, when you wind up reflexively calling her on the phone, the choices in your dialogue tree are conspicuously limited — you can only react with extreme sadness, confusion and distress over hearing her voice, made worse by your amnesia making it so that you don't understand why you're reacting like that.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: There are indications that a big hurdle in your relationship was her status as a Uptown Girl. Though more on your part, than on hers. While all objective evidence, such as her letter, appears to insinuate that she loved dearly you despite your financial status, you were extremely self-conscious about the fact that you were poorer than her and plagued by doubts that you weren't good enough for her, and nursed fears that she would leave you over this. Becoming a part of the RCM was originally a bid to impress her, but it turned out you actually excelled in the field. The stress of being a detective did, however, also worsen your metal state and lead you down a path of intense substance abuse and depressive episodes, which played a big part in souring and eventually entirely dissolving your relationship.
• Sexy Scandinavian: As her name implies, she has roots in Vaasa, Elysium's equivalent of Scandinavia. If you pass a Encyclopedia check upon being told this, you will remember that Vaasa has a bit of a reputation as being the homeland of impossibly beautiful blonde people.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Apricot-flavored chewing gum. It is unknown how much Dora saw it as a part of her identity, but you cannot help but associate her with it.
• Trauma Button: Of a sort, for the Detective, considering that the space she took in your head instigated your blackout, and that the paper of hers you find hidden in your clipboard facilitated a second blackout. Even subconscious reminders of her are enough to deeply upset you.
• Unreliable Narrator: The dream you have of her leaving you in the guise of Dolores Dei, who states that she's been so warped by your own memories, nostalgia, self-loathing, and insanity that she barely resembles the original woman. Her dialogue with you swings between her sadly but gently trying to let you down, coldly and hurtfully outlining your personal issues as justification for it, and venomously dismissing you as a poverty-stricken failure. Some of her dialogue also implies that you are subconsciously aware of the fact that your perception of her is quite divorced from reality, as she more than once pleads with you to stop seeing her as a godly icon, and instead accept that she was merely a human being with all the flaws that entails.
• Uptown Girl: She was a young upper-class socialite and you were a high-school gym teacher when you met. There are several implications that her rich background made you feel inadequate, and both motivated your entry into law enforcement, in a bid to impress her, as well as started that rift that eventually drove the two of you apart (though the latter is possibly just said feelings of inadequacy speaking).

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The Coalition

Archer

Coalition Warship Archer

We are acknowledging and accepting you.

One of the heavily armed aerostats floating over Revachol, enforcing the internationally mandated ceasefire. The moralist vision quest involves establishing radio contact with it.

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• Affably Evil: Depending on your point of view. The second signaller is very genuine in their belief in moralism, and will wax lyrical about its successes to you. It doesn't take a genius to notice it hasn't been doing Martinaise much good, nor forget you're talking to an artillery-wielding war machine more or less holding the city at gunpoint. It gains an even more sinister aspect if you persuade it you have vital intelligence and allow an aerostat to pick you up, at which point you apparently disappear for good.
• Arc Words: The Moralintern in general is repeatedly described as "ominous" — possibly well-intentioned, but nebulous and inexorable, even inhuman somehow, like Dolores Dei herself.
• Dread Zeppelin: Somewhere between this and Cool Airship, depending on one's opinion of the Moralintern. It is a massive aerostatic, the largest of several circling over Revachol, heavily armed and ready to rain down destruction on the city should revolution threaten to rear its head again.
• Given Name Reveal: With sufficiently high Inland Empire and the hint provided by her accent, you can correctly guess the second signaller's name: it's Elena.
• Gunboat Diplomacy: Archer and the other aerostats surrounding Revachol are there to maintain order, dangling the hope of democracy while also standing ready to smack the city down again in the event of another uprising. This has been in effect since the end of the original Revolution, now over forty years ago.
• I Am Legion: Coalition Warship Archer, as represented by the second signaller, speaks in the Royal "We", explaining that comms officers are trained to identify themselves in the third-person plural to ensure they never forget they are speaking for the Moralintern and first world as a whole, not only themselves. This also reinforces their facelessness only adding to the ominous sense of inevitability which surrounds them.
  Coalition Warship Archer: For instance, as second signaller we represent Coalition Warship Archer, which in turn represents INSURCOM and the Coalition more generally, which in turn represents the Moralist International, which itself represents the interests of 1.2 billion people across the world.
• Mr. Exposition: One of the strangest qualities of the encounter is that Archer doesn't seem all that surprised you've gotten in contact with it, and is quite happy to discuss the ins and outs of the Moralintern and its philosophy with you at length.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: The Moralintern, right or wrong. The second signaller, and presumably most of her fellows, are true believers in the Moralist International vision of democracy and stabililty for the entire world — eventually. Even if that means that some people, and nations, fall through the cracks in the meantime. If you can persuade the signaller that Martinaise really is a powderkeg about to erupt into violence, she's alarmed, enough to pass word up to her superiors... who wash their hands of the matter as a purely local affair, in keeping with the theme of moralism's incremental change amounting to no change at all. On the other hand, you do manage to shake the second signaller's faith in the Moralintern's infallibility.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Persuade it you know where a fresh spot of the pale is developing, and they'll send another airship over to scoop you up. The game ends with a newspaper headline saying you haven't been seen in weeks, with the implication that you have been unpersoned — whether permanently disappeared or inducted into the Moralintern in some capacity is left ambiguous.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: It's in service to the Moralintern, what were you expecting? Tell them about any other problem other than the pale and Archer will tell you to fill in some forms, submit them to your local government office and expect them to get back to you in a couple of months. And it will sound very satisfied as it does so.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The Moralintern is characterized throughout the game as lethargic at best and an outright bureaucratic obstacle at worst. When you inform the Archer of the 2mm hole in reality, they immediately dispatch an extraction dropship so you can be "debriefed" by the secret task force they've set up to deal with such phenomena, revealing that this is one issue that they take deadly seriously.
• Sapient Ship: Played with. Although in reality you're only talking to someone onboard, the way the conversation is framed it appears the ship itself is talking to you. This is wholly deliberate on Archer's part — officers are trained to speak as if they are speaking on behalf of their ship, and thus the Moralintern, as a whole.
• The Voice: Unseen on screen, their portrait is abstract art.

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