Dear Arkane Studios,
What the fuck!?
Why did nobody tell me Dishonored was fucking awesome?
I’ve been sitting here pissing and moaning for the past 15 fucking years about how nothing
has even remotely come close to continuing the beautiful legacy of Thief, certainly not
THIEF, and yet here you’ve been, gathering dust all over your Victorian Era Electro-punk
self since 2012, and I just picked you up out of curiosity last week.
How do I feel about you?
I FUCKING LOVE YOU.
Sneaksy sneaky magicky magicky stabby stabby?
Praise the sun!
So after playing through the game three times in a row to make it feel like it’s as long
as it was supposed to be, I then I realized: I think there’s a secret villain in this
game that nobody’s discovered before.
And I think I can use SCIENCE to find this villain.
And I did.
And guess what: the SCIENCE is GOD.
DAMN.
TERRIFYING.
If we’re going to have any chance of unmasking the elusive, actual villain of the first Dishonored
game, we’re going to have to wear a number of hats this week, including our recently-acquired
Epidemiology hats and the oft-forgotten-and-underestimated Historian hats, because today we’re going
to be taking a cold, hard look at something that skeeves me the fuck out more than anything
else on the planet: DISEASE.
The first Dishonored game takes place within the confines of the fictional city of Dunwall,
and puts you in the shoes of Corvo Attano, the swarthy sex machine who is charged with
protecting the Empresss-whom-he’s-not-totally-fucking.
He does a rubbish job at this, she gets shanked, and he spends the rest of the game aveeeeeeenging
her death by running across rooftops and murderstabbing his way through the list of folk responsible
for plotting her murder.
Dunwall is having a bit of a bad time, because aside from their universally adored Empress-who-totally-wasn’t-boning-her-bodyguard
getting stabbed in the gut, the city is currently in the fight for its life against the all-consuming
Rat Plague.
Aside from killing literal truckloads of people every day, the Rat Plague also apparently
turns some people affected by it into weird, delusional pseudo-zombies before they die.
These pseudo-zombies spend their days jerking off, vomiting everywhere, and bumrushing anybody
they see that currently isn’t infected with the plague.
WTF guys, this is the exact opposite way the CDC says you’re supposed to act when you’re sick.
Cover your mouth!
Stay home!
Wash your goddamn hands!
Corvo alone has the power to turn the tide of the disease one way or another, because
of course he does, because we still believe the myth that one man armed with nothing but
a sword and gun has the power to completely alter the course of a history that depends
upon the actions of thousands of people.
Where have I seen that before?
But I’m in danger of getting off track.
The world of Dishonored, while clearly based on Victorian England, with inspirations from
France and Russia, isn’t our own world.
It’s close, but last time I checked we never seriously used Whale Oil to jumpstart our
Industrial Revolution, and we don’t have mystical emo gods who grant people Hot Topic
Hand Tattoos to go with their supernatural powers.
That being said, there’s an assload of things Dishonored takes from our very own world,
and when we wrestle to unpack them, maybe, just maybe, we can understand and appreciate
a little more the advances that have made our modern life easier.
Firearms, steam engines, bars, and sewers are all a big deal, but nothing through the
broad strokes of history has had a bigger long-term effect on humanity than DISEASE.
Interestingly, epidemics and pandemics are a relatively new thing in the history of humanity.
People did get sick, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t until we started to congregate
in cities, a practice that was made possible only by the advent of agriculture, that you
really started to see diseases and epidemics tear through and ravage a huge population
of people.
Combine close proximity with one another and a less-than-scientific understanding of personal
hygiene and sanitation, and you’ve got yourself a veritable breeding ground for death and
horror.
Thankfully, through the tireless efforts of Scientists like Max Joseph von Pettenkofer,
who went so far as to consume cholera himself to convince his contemporaries that hand-washing
could actually reduce the spread of disease, we’ve made leaps and bounds in the modern
world and made many diseases that once posed serious risks to humans all but disappear;
and in rare cases, like Smallpox, we’ve actually completely eradicated diseases with
the lifesaving magic of vaccines.
Diseases are no joke.
In 1918, the H1N1 strain of influenza killed over 50 million people worldwide; that’s
more people than have died from HIV ever, which has killed over 30 million people.
Cholera, dysentery, scarlet fever, and smallpox: few things have inspired fear and crippled
entire nations like these diseases throughout history, but one disease stands out among
them all.
A disease so terrifying that it got the most metal name in all of history: The Black Death.
The Black Death, aka The Plague, was responsible for some of the most horrific bodycounts in
all of history.
There have been many, many outbreaks of this virulent piece of shit throughout history,
and at one point killed a reported 200 million people throughout all of Europe in less than
ten fucking years.
And it’s this is where we get off our train of reality, and hop right back into the world
of Dishonored.
The Rat Plague is clearly inspired, if not a direct copy of The Plague in our real world.
The first clue is directly in the name: rats.
You see, long before the actual cause of the Plague was discovered, rats were historically
associated with the disease.
In fact, preceding almost every single major outbreak of The Plague there was a spike in
the rat population, followed by rats dying by the hundreds.
Shortly after these dead rats started showing up all over the place, people got sick.
This is just as much the case in our world, as it is in Dishonored’s, where you literally
find rats fucking everywhere.
Couple this with the painted red marks to designate the plague that resembled the crosses
people put on the homes of folk with the plague in real life with the black, necrotic, and
gangrenous marks that cover victims’ skin, as well as the other symptoms, and we’re
talking about some textbook-as-fuck Plague.
So...what the fuck causes the plague?
Rats.
Well, sorta rats.
Actually, we’ve drilled down the source of The Plague pretty damned well.
I present to you yersinia pestis, one of the meanest piece of shit bacteria on the planet.
Resistant to vaccines, and growing resistant to antibiotics, this monster doesn’t know
when to quit, and it’s been terrorizing humanity almost as long as we’ve existed.
Is there hope against this unstoppable beast?
Actually, yes.
A ton, actually.
But we’ll get to that.
How does the plague in our real world work, and what does it teach us about Dishonored?
How can we use this knowledge to unmask the identity of the Super Villain that Arkan Studios
oh-so-very-much wants to keep hidden from us?
And what the fuck do rats of all things have to do with it?
I mean, rats generally don’t like hanging out with humans all that much, certainly not
enough to give them diseases easily.
There must be some sort of missing piece of this equation that connects humans, rats,
and the plague.
But what could it be?
Something small.
Something seemingly innocuous.
Something so insignificant that you’d never expect it to be capable of obliterating entire
cities and yet here it is: the flea.
That’s right.
Fleas are the ultimate vector that spreads the plague from rats to humans.
Here’s how it works: fleas, generally, aren’t fond of humans.
We’re just not the tasty blood meal they want most of all, and we don’t have a lot
of hair to hide in.
But, unfortunately, fleas don’t have the luxury of being picky.
When a rat infected with The Plague dies, all the fleas on that rat are left without
anything to eat.
Worst of all, rats tend to die all at once, together, so these fleas can’t even hope
to jump to another rat host for food.
Thankfully, there’s another option: people.
Humans and rats tend to live very close to one another, because humans are a reliable
source of food; and when there are no rats to feed on, humans become the reliable source
of food for fleas carrying yersinia pestis.
Fleas carrying the plague jump on humans, bite them, and KABOOM, ya got the bubonic
plague now, son.
The fleas eventually die from the plague itself, which eventually clogs the digestive system
of these pests, but it doesn’t matter.
The plague has now been spread to humans.
So.
Do you want the good news or the bad news?
The bad news is, untreated in an age without antibiotics, the real-life equivalent of The
Rat Plague has a mortality rate of over 60%.
The good news?
Bubonic plague isn’t really that contagious.
You have to have blood-to-blood contact with someone that has the bubonic plague in order
to catch it.
So your friends and family just get to watch you die a horrendous, painful death, but you
can die knowing that, as long as they keep the house rat-free, they might live to see
another day.
But here’s a question for you: how does a disease that spreads only by rats destroy
almost half of the population of a city of thousands in just two years?
This is what happened in Dunwall, and this is exactly the thing that happened in our
real world.
I mean, sure there are a lot of fleas on every rat, but to be entirely honest, this is not
the best medium for spreading the plague to a population.
On top of it, we still have rats now, and we still have fleas, and yet only 15 people
in the United States got the Plague last year, and most epidemics and pandemics are diseases
that spread from human-to-human, but we know for There must be something we’re missing
that will help us wrap our heads around this terrible disease, and explain, once and for
all, how the plague spread in our real world which, ultimately, will help us understand
Dunwall just a little bit better.
and hopefully unmask the identity of the real super-villain.
So!
I built an epidemic model, because fuck-yes, I’m addicted to these things now, and using
this and real world data, we can finally figure out what the fuck is going on.
Let’s look at rats, first.
The plague in Dunwall was originally started when the Spymaster of the city imported rats
with the disease and integrated them with the local population in order to eradicate
the poor, because there’s no tactic that works better to eliminate poverty in your
city than by committing biological warfare against your own people.
THAT will never backfire.
Anyway, starting with a mere 100 infected rats, this disease spreads like wildfire as
rats mingle, fuck and die left and right, and in just a month, over 7000 rats would
be infected with the plague.
And it’s around this point that things start to get really terrible, for the rats at least,
and it’s when you’d first start seeing signs that things are going to get really
bad for the humans, too.
In another month, you have over two-hundred THOUSAND infected rats running around, because
rats don’t know about quarantining or washing their hands.
The good news is that things are just about at peak awful for the rats right now, and
in a few days, most of the rats that will be infected will be infected, and not long
after, those that’re going to die will be dead.
Unfortunately, it’s right about now that things start to get terrible for humans.
The first dozens of infected humans start to show up, and, just, shit gets terrible.
I’ll save the play-by-play, but in less than two years, an entire third of the population
has died.
Thankfully, at about this point, the epidemic has reached an equilibrium, even if left untreated.
There are still people getting sick, but the rate of infection is much, much lower than
before.
There’s something really, really strange that happens when you compare these numbers,
however, especially the number of dead rats losing infected fleas with the number of people
infected with the plague.
If you look at the peaks of both of these, the plague among humans reaches a fever pitch
at around day 500, but the number of dead rats losing fleas doesn’t peak until 1000
days into the crisis.
What does this mean?
It means that, while the bubonic form of the rat plague initially spreads from rat-to-human,
it must also be another way.
How could this possibly be?
Well.
In two ways.
And while I’d love to ask you if you’d rather have the good news or the bad news,
today, all of our news is bad.
One: the plague, while initially “bubonic,” meaning it affects the lymph nodes and causes
terrible, painful swelling in your lymphatic system, can invade other areas of the body.
It can infect your circulatory system, giving you septicemic plague, which can kill you
before you’re even showing symptoms, or it can infect your lungs, causing pneumonic
plague, which, unlike bubonic, is really, REALLY easy to spread to others by coughing.
But this doesn’t really show up until later, and as shown in this graph, creates a second,
noticeably-smaller outbreak of the plague near the tail end of the bubonic strain.
But if you can’t spread the rat plague by coughing, and the rats aren’t solely responsible,
what the actual fuck is happening?
It’s almost as if there’s something else spreading the disease, something, or someone
who’s been working behind the scenes against the people of Dunwall--nay, no, this sinister
piece of shit has been responsible for not just fictional outbreaks of the plague, but
has been actively working against humans anywhere that have succumbed to this terrible onslaught
against our nervous systems.
Who is this evil bastard?
Pediculus Humanus Corporis: aka the louse.
Yep.
You heard me.
Lice.
Lice are little shits that love to hide in clothes.
We typically think of them as living in hair, but the face of the matter is that lice will
hide just about fucking anywhere humans are.
Beds, pillowcases, your shirt, these motherfuckers love to crawl over everything, jump down from
their hiding places to feast on our flesh, and then skip on back up into wherever they’re
holed up.
Thought the Spymaster was the main villain?
NOPE.
That shitty admiral motherfucker?
NOPE.
That creepy emo guy whose only friend is an evil old lady?
NOPE.
It’s these blood-sucking motherfuckers, just hanging out in everybody’s clothes
because, before goddamn washing machines were invented, people just wore the same pair of
underwear for fucking months because GROSS.
Dude I didn’t shower for two days this week and my dick smelled like sweet and sour chicken
from Panda Express, I don’t even WANT to know what these people smelled like.
Kinda recontextualizes victorian-era romance novels.
“And then he unlaced his pantaloons and a great miasma issued forth from underneath
his moist leather.”
BLEH.
Thankfully, while Lice are evil bastards, it’s relatively easy to get rid of them.
You just wash the fuck out of your clothes and yourself, and...that’s it.
To think, Piero and that dude with the beard spent all that time devising a cure, and all
they needed all along was laundry detergent and a washing machine.
Anyway.
That’s why we don’t get the plague much these days: sanitation and technology.
Washing machines have made it really, really fucking easy to keep our clothes clean and
from being infested by garbage organisms like lice, so hopefully, sometime soon, Dunwall
learns this little trick and keeps a new plague from cropping up in another 20-30 years.
Also, be sure to dump every body you can in the river.
Wash up!
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
Hey!
Do you wanna know more about the Black Death, and its impacts on our world that extend beyond
a video game?
Then you need to check out The Black Death: The History and Legacy of the Middle Ages’
most Deadliest Plague.
MOST deadliest? Okay. The History and Legacy of the Middle Ages' Deadliest Plague.
It’s a really amazing, albeit short overview of the effects of the plague on both Europe
and the entire world, and, if you’re busy like me and have too much stuff to do, you
can actually pick it up as an Audio Book at audible.
Audible is one of the top places in the world to get audio books, and even cooler, you can
actually get your first audiobook FREE when you sign up for a 30-day trial membership
at audible.com/shoddy.
Audible is one of my favorite ways to listen to classics that tend to put me to sleep,
too, like the Art of War, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
I’m much less likely to fall asleep while doing dishes listening to someone else read
Nietzsche than if I’m reading it by myself.
You can pick those books up and like literally thousands more at audible.com/shoddy, so go
there now!
ALSO, Alex, the writer of our very own PSYCHO, is going to be doing a charity stream for
Extra Lives on November 19th.
Click the link in the description to find out more, yo.
Also, quick shout out to Katharine R. Dean, whose masters thesis on modeling plague transmission
in European Cities served as a huge basis for a lot of my work this week.
Thanks for doing the hard work for me, Katharine, and good luck on your PHD.