Unpopular opinions about Hitman

[Screaming_Meat]

@unfunnyguy

That’s true, but no one talks about Vanya specifically. (And I mean she’s like one of the best lore-wise and not just gameplay wise) Everybody always simps for Dawood cause of his cartoonish bad guy personality. I just feel like no one really talks about her interesting backstory and the way her queen stuff is like kind of a coping mechanism for her trauma.

i dunno, i’ve had some pretty cool chats with people about shah.

long chat

@Accidental_Kills98

I mean I don’t think Shah genuinely thinks she is a rani, I think she is putting on an affectation.

@Screaming_Meat

from what i gather, shah is a delusional, paranoid, narcissistic psychopath who suffered ptsd from the failed hijacking and lost herself in a constructed myth (with rima’s help)

the whole deal with kale being okay with the kashmirian whacking his childhood friends is because he believes they are deluded by their own pr: shah as royalty and dawood hinting he is the maelstrom via his films (kale thinks he’s above it, but he says a few things that suggest even he has fallen for his own bullshit).

part of why i love chasing a ghost so much is how well the geography reflects the targets’ inner workings.

take dawood as a quick example: his tower is flashy, half-empty (wazir calls him a ‘hollow man’ at one point), full of images of himself and pompous decorations and furnishes, has a film set telling apocryphal stories about himself, and it is all situated high above everyone else. that’s dawood written in architecture, man.

now, if we apply that thinking to vanya, we see she lives on the same level as the citizens of mumbai, though she has retreated to an out of the way, imposing, decaying, overgrown train station no longer directly connected to the main line (if that’s not an on-the-nose physical representation of her mental disconnection from reality, i don’t know what is). inside is an almost otherworldly realm, sprouting with life and colour and brutally enforced fantastical courtly rituals; a reflection of her rich but ultimately deranged inner-life.

she cray.

@Accidental_Kills98

Vanya is the complete opposite in that she represents the historic exploitation of the Indian subcontinent. Not only does she act and dress like someone the British installed to power but she bases her operation out of a very British looking railway station. The British railways of India are not only one of the famous monuments to The Raj but they are also a rallying cry for racists and neo-colonists (“The Indians would never have developed a railway if it wasn’t for the Brits!”).

She hoards their resources to use for herself like a Rani and it is reflect everywhere with water, she has a private wash basin and a reflecting pool all for her use on top of her using the luxury sleeping cars for her use but the cargo cars for her guards. She sends every able bodied man, woman and even children to work for her until they collapse and die while she does nothing but take in the net profit of the businesses for herself while granting token gestures like puddles of water and scraps of food.

In other words she is no different than the British Empire’s treatment of the Indian and their treatment of the Indian subcontinent is n different than banditry like Shah engaged with or the dacoity she descended from. No better, different or saner than Rangan’s boastful exploitation of the worker.

The base is overgrown and disconnected from the mainline not because it means she has flown the coop but because she represents something from India’s past they excised for good reason and simply abandoned, left to gather creepers, weeds and crumble into the dirt like so many servants and slaves. It is a failed system and Shah’s true insanity is not her belief that she is a Rani but that it is a system that she can use to her gain.

There is no difference between colonialism and the world development system, they are both used to exploit natives in poorer nations under the hopes that they can gain some level of good for themselves. That is the true meaning of Mumbai as a level, that economically rich nations did exploit nations once as colonialism and twice as capitalism.

Another is pretending and pretensions and how we lose ourselves in what we think about ourselves. Rangan thinks he is a big Bollywood action star because he was a pirate. Rangan is a snivelling, boastful coward whose only skill and use for the pirates was as an accountant. His entire criminal enterprise consists of low risk yet highly exploitative enterprises and he talks about how much he screws around with people behind their backs. We only see him kill once and that is against a defenceless man. He takes that money and uses it to make films where he is the big hero that everyone loves or the fearsome pirate that everyone was scared of.

Shah defaulted to violent thuggery after she was abandoned by The Maelstrom after the raid. She began thinking she was a powerful woman cut from the same cloth as the old ruling class. What she is thought? She is a bandit, she is no better than the dacoity her parents were and she can’t stand how Rangan has some level of adoration among who she considers her property. She forgot that you can rule through fear as much as you can rule through love or both but the main thing is to be respected. She thinks she is respected becuase she is awesome but she isn’t because she is seen as no better than a thug.