Popular Culture Review 29.2
The player embodying the series ’ s major characters has an opportunity to effect small changes , granting hope or fostering more terror . But regardless of the impact that the player ’ s individual decisions have on the plague and the political climate of Dunwall and Karnaca , the foundations from which the greedy and opportunistic have operated remain largely intact , even on a Low Chaos playthrough . A primary example of this lies in Dunwall ’ s whaling industry , mirrored to a lesser extent in Karnaca , and its intersections with the real world and debates about the environment and the preservation of species . The whaling industry still thrives around the globe in the real world and creates passionate , uncomfortable debates between those who see it as nothing but slaughter and those who would argue that nothing is inherently wrong with the industry . Further problematizing debates about whaling are indigenous peoples who seek to hunt whales as part of an expression of cultures often destroyed or riven by incursions by colonizers . The global and more ancient origins of whaling prove hard to definitively discover . Eric Jay Dolin notes , “ Just when humans began viewing whales as objects worthy of pursuit will never be known . ... The first close-up encounter between people and whales was likely not at sea but on an unknown beach where a whale , either dead or dying , had washed ashore , no doubt astonishing and scaring the locals ” ( 20 ). Today , whale hunting may be equated with both the slaughter of sentient creatures and the diminishing of species up to the point of extinction . In Dishonored , The Heart says of whale slaughter , “ They butchered the deep ones here , breathing in the rich stink of their enchanted flesh .” The Heart also comments , ominously , “ When the last leviathan is gone , darkness will fall ,” hinting at a fate far worse than the plague and one that is ultimately driven by those at all levels of Dunwall ’ s socioeconomic scale . Digital narratives , alongside their counterparts in written storytelling , oral storytelling ,
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