The Blight's lore: Rawalpindi Experiments reference?
If you haven't read the new killer's story, here it is:
About the Opium War I
I found the Blight's (aka the Alchemist's) story heavily linked to the Opium War. More accurately, on a remote island of India, he experimented on the captured soldiers (and maybe citizens) of the Opium War I, who undoubtly were Chinese during the 1840s. As a college student from Beijing, China, I was shocked due to these reasons:
1) Talbot Grimes is a war criminal to some sort. True, Nazi doctors and sort can be a popular antagonist stereotype in horror games, yet a DBD killer is not an antagonist, but a character I'm about to purchase, use, and at least feel some empathy for;
2) His story is not that necessary to explain his powers and perks, nor does it correspond very well with the Hallowed Blight lore of 2018 and 2019;
3) Unlike the story of Doctor or Trapper that are obviously fictional, the Opium Wars are actual hystorical events and has a very specified death/injured name list of both sides. It's the kind of topic you may want to be careful with when you write for a online video game which has a rather large fan base;
4) The Wraith's story also mentioned the wars of Africa. However in that story, Philip was a young victim of war, not a perpetrator.
And that's why I've been having mixed feelings toward the Blight's release.
About the Rawalpindi Experiments
Since I never heard of any English army conducting human experiments during the Opium Wars, I decided to read more documents.
During further research, I learned about another set of inhumane experiments that likely took place during WWII, the Rawalpindi Experiments, in which English institutes exposed unwilling Indian soldiers to mustard gas to learn the effects of this infamous weapon. I think this may be one of the "real" inspirations of the Blight's story. And the altering of time, from WWII to the Opium Wars, is probably due to the developer's fear of touching "more sensitive" political matter. Nonetheless, I'm still a bit offended.
What do you think?
Comments
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One more thing, mustard gas burns severely damage skin and may cause bright yellow blisters to form. Visually resemble what the blight pustules look like in game.
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I understand if you feel unconformable about the devs using a real life conflict and crimes in a backstory, but technically, they have already done similar stuff with the Huntress in World War 1 and the Doctor all but confirming to have been part of the MKUltra experiment and his character heavily based on a real life doctor from China.
-I mean, not really. Killers are the villains of the game, their stories can show them as sympathetic, but it is not necessary for you to feel empathy about them. For example, you are not mean to empathize with the Doctor, a much worse human being than Talbot.
-His Backstory is focused on explaining the aspects of his character that would eventually doom him to the Realm and make him a Killer, how he obsesses easily in his search for knowledge and stars learning to ignore his conscience and the consequences of those actions in pursuit of that goal. We already knew a lot of details about his time in the Realm, but we didn’t know who he was before all of that.
For me, is not an issue because not only the conflict is very old, more importantly, Talbolt is still a fictional character whose crimes weren’t an event that happened in our reality, even if they happen in a real life conflict and had an inspiration from real ones, is similar to the awful stuff that Herman did.
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Yeah killers don't necessarily need to be sympathetic. Like look at the licensed ones, Michael is basically pure evil, and Freddy is a demon pedophile.
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Thank you for your kind reply! I've been rethinking a lot today. It's actually way more amazing than offensive, that the devs opt to write about invasion and chemical weapons, and the utter suffering brought to people. Many people or companies won't have the nerves to do this.
Well, to be honest I will probably not empathize with most killers. I mentioned that because the Alchemist was a survivor. At least that's what I knew back then in 2018 during the Hallowed Blight, where we get to know his experience through first person POV. Aside from the opium den thing, he seemed nothing more than a typical survivor who tried just a bit too hard to stay alive. He was becoming obsessed and I assumed that he would become a killer. (I even did some fan arts about him being a killer, if that matters.) Now that he finally is one, I expected his story to be more survivor-ish with some sort of sudden twist. And the actual result is quite a surprise, lol.
Still, the Blight is pretty cool and hopefully devs will continue to polish him. Thank you again for the attention!
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Yeah, I was also surprised at the things that Talbot did, given that he did start as a survivor, but I think the difference from other killers is that, he regretted and was haunted by what he did, but still wanted to do good despite his obsession, so he wasn’t completely broken and still had his humanity even when he was taken by the Entity:
He knew he couldn’t defend himself against the anger and accusations of his abductorーall he could do was curl up as the blows from the steel pipe rained down. His body was thrown into the grave and left for dead. Shifting between consciousness and the darkest black, he crawled for an escape, fingers sinking into rotting flesh. Black flies festered on his uncovered skin, the sensation of a hundred pin pricks stabbing into him. As he collapsed, he came face to face with a dead woman’s dazzling hazel eyes. Too weak to pull away, he could do nothing but witness his life’s work.
Poring over the school’s archives of lost texts, he uncovered scientific formulas that confirmed previously unthinkable ideas. He dreamt of ushering humankind into a new period of enlightenment. Perhaps then, the nightmares of hundreds of dead factory workersーand of those two hazel eyesーwould fade from his mind.
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By the time he was attacked and thrown into the pit, I believe he had rarely had any actual face-to-face contact with the workers and was thus unaware of the casualties. However during his time in the mystery school studying the Soul Chemical, which is likely melatonin extracted from human brains, his research could have easily gone way beyond just papers and books...?
Now I'm re-reading the Hunger from the Archives. It's actually pretty fun. Some expressions that used to make no sense somehow become accurate. And puns. For example:
He moves through the death and decay of the Void, and every part of him hurts...
(could refer to both the Entity's Void and the pit he was thrown into after being beaten up)
All these survivors marooned from other worlds... where? Not here...
("Survivors" refer to both people in the Fog, and the captured foreign soldiers he might have experimented on, who were, well, survivors of the War.)
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