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Sometimes I get worried I'm letting Kara out of my rants but really her story is more about domestic violence stuff and how androids try lying to themselves so they feel like fitting in the world - in this case "becoming human", a horror story about acceptance - but not exactly only about yourself but the fact what the others want shouldn't be what u want. Cuz that's what Kara's and Alice's journey became after they changed Alice's character.

I feel like mfs say Connor's story is the best one cuz it got lotta makeup. Few people gonna get some refs and really gonna sound like an average sci-fi game instead of touching sensitive subjects like Markus and Kara's story does. And also got the dynamic with Hank that is basically a comic relief.

I got some bad news...nobody is free from caginess.

Could this be related to our recent Twitter conversation about Jacques Lacan's "Desire is the desire of the Other's desire"? Well, it doesn't really matter either way, but if that's the case, I feel I significantly underexplained the concept, so I'd like to add some context here.

Firstly, this concept isn't about denying the desire for the Other's desire from an individualistic perspective that believes in an established self. It's an analysis of how human desire is formed in a way that's beyond our control. For a simple example, a child eats cake because they feel their parents want them to, in order to satisfy their parents' desire. Well, the child might actually like the cake, but that’s another story. Desire is something mediated, not merely a direct relationship between the child and the cake as an object of desire.

Looking at the game's story through the lens of the Other's desire, we can observe the following:

Thus, in this game, desiring the Other's desire is neither portrayed entirely as positive nor entirely as negative. Your sarcastic take on Kara and Alice desiring to be like a human family as the meaning of "become human", in my opinion, is somewhat superficial. They have managed, among themselves as androids, to embody a very human perversion of desiring the Other's desire.

As a side note, in critiques of DBH within the Japanese-speaking world (my mother tongue), Sartre is often brought up: This stems from an interview where David himself referenced Sartre and described choice-based games as "existentialistic". The story arcs—Markus's movement for rights and Connor's forced complicity in oppressive structures—can indeed be interpreted through Sartre's concept of engagement (commitment). Therefore, when I learned from L'art de Quantic Dream that David has read Freud, Jung, and Lacan*, I found it intriguing as material for interpreting the work. Existentialism proclaims that humans are free and live by their own will, in contrast, structuralism, as used by Lacan in his interpretation of Freud's psychoanalytic theory, suggests that humans, despite believing they live by their will, are unconsciously bound by structures. My primary interest in engaging with fiction is predominantly in discovering the aspects that, at first glance, seem to deviate from today's "morality" in characters or humanity in general, whether intentionally placed by the author or not, and in finding ways to deal with them instead of merely condemning them as toxic. It was in this context that I mentioned "Desire is the desire of the Other's desire" as a clue to such exploration.

* "Si le jeune David ne saisit pas vraiment la portée des textes du médecin de Vienne, il n'hésite pas un seul instant à feuilleter ceux d'autres psychanalystes comme Lacan ou Jung." The verb "feuilleter" is used in the original text, suggesting he just skimmed through or glanced at the works. However, considering that in his country, philosophy is a standard part of the curriculum in secondary school (lycée), it makes me wonder if this kind of knowledge is more common there than what someone like me from outside might assume. But I don't really know for sure.

My monthly contribution to the dbh fandom

babe wake up another beat just dropped