Forgetting Won’t Drop The Weight

Sometimes, memory can feel more like a punishment than a lesson. While I have only just entered my mid-20s, I am already too familiar with days plagued by whispers of my worst embarrassments and tearful screw-ups. Watching and talking to the older people in my life has revealed that collecting more is inevitable, so my focus in this arena leans towards minimizing future mistakes and, always presently, how to carry the varying weight of them. As a result, I spend a lot of time examining how people deal with their mishaps. There are many ways to go about it, comedy being my personal favorite, but the one that continues to fascinate me most is the method taken by characters in Disco Elysium and 1000xRESIST: forgetting what you’re carrying. These two games stand out specifically because they showcase what a spectacular shitshow this method often is for those who attempt it.

Starting with Mr. I-Don’t-Want-To-Be-This-Kind-Of-Animal-Anymore, Harry from Disco Elysium is a prime example of how memory-holing yourself does more harm than good. Players can end up with several different versions of Harry by the time credits roll, ranging from an empath with a foul-mouthed prodigy to a fascist who couldn’t care less about the people of Martinaise, but each version still wades through the mess left by the Harry he attempted to forget. Even if you finish as a better Harry than you started, the journey is arduous getting there. In fact, it starts you behind quite literally everyone else you meet, leaving players in a constant game of catch-up. The mystery may not have been solved immediately with Harry’s memory intact, but it definitely would’ve been faster – and everyone lets him know that.

What especially highlights the flaws of forgetting is that only Harry forgets. The world still remembers him, holds his dirty footprints, and isn’t keen on just letting it go. It remembers in very tangible ways: a police vehicle being half-submerged in a river, an empty holster that’s heavy with dreadful possibilities rather than lead, a clipboard that marks how many lives he’s taken. There’s also more intangible but equally impactful ways, such as the dirty looks given to him due to his cop status, the absence of confidence when claiming he’s not La Puta Madre’s crony, or anything about the love of his life but the grief.

No matter what, Harry has not truly succeeded in forgetting anything. At best, he gave himself a new set of issues to distract himself with. At worst, he created conditions to re-traumatize himself with his past mistakes, this time without the history to produce a meaningful apology. Because what’s a sorry worth from someone who’s a stranger even to themselves? This isn’t to discount any choices made to be better once he learns of his past transgressions, but there are opportunities forever and unnecessarily lost by erasing the original perpetrator.

1000xRESIST relates a similar lesson, but with different execution. While the Iris we know as ALLMOTHER holds onto her past, with some difficulty given time’s irrelevance to the near-immortal being, that is far from the only Iris shown. The bittersweet thing about making an isolated society of one’s clones is that it is more than a visual reflection of yourself. It becomes a sea of flesh mirrors that, due to the conditions of their production, forces Iris to mold new versions of herself outside and in. And she chooses to shape these sisters into anything but the Iris she started the Orchard as. Even if it weren’t for the physical distance she puts between herself and the clones, Iris, as ALLMOTHER, makes an active effort to never truly face herself.

While this habit of attempting to forget the past isn’t the only reason this society falls into disarray (twice), it’s one of the biggest factors (twice). Players see it for the first time slowly as Watcher peels back all of her goddess’ lies, herself unraveling more with each communion. Watcher’s stubbornness to accept these new facts only exacerbates the feeling that she inevitably burns everything over. The betrayal Watcher experiences is sharp, so much that she returns the favor more literally in ALLMOTHER’s back. It’s a reckoning that could’ve been avoided if the original Iris had not been so dedicated to hiding where she came from. I give her some grace given her unique circumstance – if I had to choose what remains with me for centuries, I’m not sure I’d make an exact copy of me either – but again, the method leaves much to be discovered, and thrown back at Iris, later.

Later on, the bloody vengeance Blue seeks is only agitated by Principal’s stage play, a cultural product created to revise an already misremembered past. This is in addition to the Provisional Government’s lethal erasure of any Iris clones that remind others of the past status quo, on top of Knower’s command to burn the Orchard’s library and replace it with new texts. Principal’s regime was dedicated to killing their history, and it literally blew up in their face. For a game full of metaphors, this is not a subtle one. Principal was doomed from the moment she created that play, maybe even since she killed any sister who first knew her as Youngest. While her fate is ultimately left up to the player at the end of 1000xRESIST, to call her authoritarian vision of society – one that required constant oversight, lies, and paranoia – anything less than a short-lived failure would be generous. In more ways than one, Iris turned on herself.

Harry and Iris are very different characters, but both share an intense antagonism towards their past selves. It drives them to keep their histories at a distance, hoping that the erasure of memory and anything that holds it can free them of their heavy feelings and accountability. But when history is not repeating itself, it is making itself known. When Harry and Iris looked away from where they came from, they robbed themselves of the ability to make their original selves better. To allow that person to say sorry to others and themselves. It leaves all involved with a weight they can feel, and a mess is almost guaranteed when trying to identify it. For all the awfulness it can bring, memory is not what hurts people. It’s the actions being remembered, and the consequences of forgetting those actions.

———

Wallace Truesdale is a writer who loves games and the many things they come into contact with. When he’s not ruining himself with sweets, you can find him blogging at Exalclaw, or hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch.