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Disco Elysium question: What was the point of the prion disease? (hexbear.net)
submitted 15 hours ago by BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
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In disco Elysium you live in a nation some time after a failed socialist revolution. Said revolution was sparked off, in part, due to an infectious Prion virus-disease-thing. I never really understood it, neither in game nor metatextually.
Was there actually a virus? Why did it make people socialist?
And metatextually: why make it part of the story? DE has a lot of esoteric stuff going on - the insulidian phasmid, the actual presence of divinity and weird holes in the world. But that stuff usually, to me at least, serves some sort of clear parallel to the real world and a way to critique it - Wonders and loss of nature, climate change, spirituality getting coopted by the state, so on and so forth. Or not exactly clear purposes, but it doesn't strike me as something that's coming completely out of the blue.
The prion disease kind of is. I can see how a plague could lead to social unrest, the game however makes an effort to make it clear it was the disease itself. And also, why make it prion if it was just regular old "plague makes people angry"? Even if that's part of the explanation, there must be more to it.

So whats your take?

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[-] Esoteir@hexbear.net 52 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

dubois-depressed "What did this tzaraath do?"

joyce-messier "It made people overthrow their governments."

dubois-depressed "Wow, really?"

joyce-messier "Of course not. It was a highly infectious microorganism that destroyed brain tissue. The actual causes of the Revolution were material. The pandemic only provided the spark."

the game makes it pretty explicit it was the unrest caused by the government failing to contain the disease, and not the disease itself that caused the revolution, the person that says the revolution was caused by the disease itself is measurehead lmao

[-] BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net 11 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

That's also delivered to you by Joyce who is an agent of capital. I trust her as much as I trust Measurehead.

edit: and still: why Prion?

[-] Chana@hexbear.net 35 points 13 hours ago

Joyce is a materialist ultraliberal. She understands the mechanisms of capitalism and social change and explicitly sides with the dominant side (capital) out of self-interest and a kind of anti-left defeatism

[-] Llituro@hexbear.net 30 points 14 hours ago

You can trust this answer because it would be better for capital to answer in the affirmative, a brain disease gave everyone the communism.

[-] robotElder2@hexbear.net 23 points 13 hours ago

It's an admission against interest. If Joyce wanted to lie about Tzaraath in service of capital she would agree with Measurehead. She has no need to lie about it because the revolutionary moment has long passed and she doesn't want to because lying that poorly would wound her pride.

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 24 points 14 hours ago

She is evil but she gives correct political analyses more often than Measurehead.

[-] marxisthayaca@hexbear.net 23 points 13 hours ago

that's the point of her. She is evil because she knows what is to be done and yet she still sides with capital.

[-] BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net 2 points 14 hours ago

That's true. I just, I don't know. As I said, why make it a prion disease?

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 19 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Maybe just because a widespread prion disease is catastrophic and a more standard plague might have seemed to the devs to be more containable due to modern advancements (whoops), or because it being a prion disease could be rhetorically convenient for apologists for capital who can then pathologize their political opposition, which would not apply as well in the case of widespread tuberculosis or something.

It's a fraught strategy, but many authors like to demonstrate a widespread social trick by first tricking the audience with it (this gets used for racism allegories all the time), so the prion brainrot story is more likely to be viewed by some of the audience as credible than historical and easily-debunked examples. The reason it is a fraught strategy is partly demonstrated by threads like the current one.

[-] Esoteir@hexbear.net 15 points 13 hours ago

joyce-messier "And how would you stop a prion -- a complex folding protein; un-life -- with the technology 50 years ago?"

de-encyclopedia "It was a funny time in history. They'd discovered transistors and rock music, but they didn't know anything about prions. Nobody did."

between that and measurehead pointing to the revolution just being brain damage after the fact, i think you nailed it, this is why they chose a prion disease

[-] BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net 2 points 13 hours ago

I suppose. Just seems like there'd be something deeper to it. A prion disease seems deeply metaphorical, brain being slowly eaten, mad cow disease, all that stuff. Seems like they put as much thought into that as they did the rest of the game, so I just want there to be some big significance to it I guess.

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 9 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

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

[-] Euergetes@hexbear.net 5 points 13 hours ago

Prions are the coolest, fancy protein grains what make more grains till your brain is a scrambled old heap.

besides the writers just finding it cool it avoids worldbuilding an authentic epidemic, as there hasnt been prion outbreaks to scale irl. if you did a flu people would have expectations for how that shouldve went

[-] Esoteir@hexbear.net 4 points 13 hours ago

me personally i think it's because it's a setting with sci-fi elements and they needed a cool medical name for a deadly disease

in literary terms though? i think if there was a allegorical reason for a prion disease, it was to represent the brainrot of the capitalist monarchy that the communards rebelled against. the old government allowed something to fester that was eating away at the minds of its people, and the people rose up against them because of that

[-] D61@hexbear.net 8 points 12 hours ago

(Never played the game so... shrug-outta-hecks )

A viral or bacterial plague could be stopped, much easier, through Capital working in its own self interest and generating some type of treatment/cure.

I'm pretty sure that prions are a problem because an "infection" can't be treated or cured with antibiotics, the spread can only be stopped when the infected organism dies and its remains are treated in a way that can chemically denature the malformed proteins. Its a cascade of malformed proteins causing other proteins to fold in a bad way which causes other proteins to fold in a bad way...

Maybe there's some meta context there about "social contagion" or the "cascading failures" of capitalism or "the domino theory" from the Western world during the Cold War.

[-] BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net 10 points 12 hours ago

How can you post on hexbear without having played Disco Elysium? @mods please kill this user with hammers

[-] peeonyou@hexbear.net 5 points 11 hours ago

i've never finished the game.. i started it like 500 times, and never made it through all the way

runs for my life

[-] BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net 8 points 11 hours ago

adding you to the list

[-] CrispyFern@hexbear.net 7 points 11 hours ago

But did u get the communism achievement? hst-gun answer carefully

[-] peeonyou@hexbear.net 1 points 7 hours ago

umm a prion destroyed my computer before i got that far!

[-] Esoteir@hexbear.net 13 points 13 hours ago

I trust her as much as I trust Measurehead.

measurehead "THE REVOLUTION CAME TO REVACHOL FROM GRAAD, IN TZARAATH-RIDDEN POTATO CARTS -- IT IS LITERALLY AN ILLNESS. A PRION DISEASE THAT LEAVES THE PARIETAL AND FRONTAL LOBE RIDDEN WITH HOLES. A SOFT, SPONGELIKE MASS OF DEMENTIA, HALLUCINATIONS, AND PARANOIA... THE REVOLUTION IS FATAL FAMILIAL INSOMNIA. A HEREDITARY PRION CONDITION PASSED FROM THE KOJKO TO THE OCCIDENTALS..." He pauses in theoretic self-reflection. "BUT NOT SEXUALLY, PROBABLY THROUGH TRADE ROUTES AND POTATE-ACID, THE PRIME COMPONENT OF THE POTATO PLANT..."

well considering that the disease itself is only discussed by two people, measurehead and someone who is an awful person driven by capital but despite that still admits that the revolution wasn't a brain disease and that the communists might have built something better than the coalition if they had won, i think joyce is the much more reasonable source here lmao

[-] BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net 4 points 13 hours ago

You're right, I'm being a bit of a dismissive dick. I'm sorry. I remembered it as if it was way weirder and didn't have a definitive answer thru Joyce like that - It just bothers me it basically boils down to "covid but revolution came". I like your literary explanation of the brainworms like that.
To me it still feels like there is some unanswered bit, but I can't put words to it, so who knows what it is. I just generally find the tzaraath a weird detail I suppose.

[-] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 5 points 12 hours ago

I think they also just liked the imagery of a disease that literally puts holes in your brain for . Literal brainworms would be too on the nose

[-] Esoteir@hexbear.net 6 points 13 hours ago

it's all good, im searching through the text using the disco elysium explorer site bc it's been like three years since i played DE so im working off of the literal text than what i barely remembered like an hour ago

i think purpleworm nailed it more than i did, the writers choosing a prion disease makes complete sense to me now under that lens

[-] Philosoraptor@hexbear.net 17 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Prions can lie in wait for years (or decades) before manifesting in symptomatic cases. That's part of what makes them so dangerous--vast swathes of the population can be infected before the first person starts showing symptoms. Most of them also don't have any conclusive non-destructive diagnostic test. They're diagnoses of exclusion and symptom; the only way to know for sure whether or not any particular case is caused by a prion is to do an autopsy after death. Those characteristics together make it the perfect "stealth" plague: invisible until the first cases, and already ubiquitous by then, with no known treatment or even diagnostic instrument.

If we wanted to get really "English-teachery" about it, you might compare that kind of functionality to ideology, and think about the role that ideology plays as a behavior motivator (and historical Prime Mover) under capitalism (that is, under ultraliberalism and moralism). Joyce rejects it as a causal agent of the revolution because she is, as others have noted here, actually a materialist and it is a stand-in for ideology. I have no idea if the devs meant that parallel to be drawn, but it's an interesting reading.

[-] BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net 7 points 12 hours ago

This is exactly the kind of response I was hoping for. Thank you

this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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