The water is so many things in dishonored 1. It’s a framing device, as the story begins on the boat and ends at the lighthouse, and most important transitions happen while travelling by the river. It’s clearly a symbol for the underworld, for the dark and the unknown, with the leviathans, the stories of eerie lights and faces in the river.
It is, in addition to all that, a deadly element, a source of misery and destruction and a symbol of extreme class division. An entire part of the city is completely gone, destroyed by the flood, but the Heart points out several times that should anything happen, the Dunwall Tower will be the last to fall. Various NPCs in the city have lost their homes and entire families to floods. Cold water is the last thing the plague victims feel. The water is where lower class children find their death as they’re sent to collect river krust pearls. It’s an element that progress and science for the upper class tries to conquer by building the waterlock, but it stands unused in favour of other security contraptions that can kill people on the spot.
There are purely mechanical reasons explaining why Corvo is the only character in the game that can swim, but it also merges nicely with his role in the story. He’s a character of dual nature. He’s barely escaped death and has since then been in an unknown, ambitious state in the public eye, missing, vanished, neither dead nor alive, a “masked felon” that might not even exist. He’s one foot in the metaphorical grave, in the other world, twisting and manipulating the reality around him as he pleases, travelling in and out of the void in a way most people can’t. He is, in addition to all that, a foreigner and a man born into lower class who ended up at court by a weird twist of fate. He’s never just one thing.
I really like the moment in the first mission where, in order to escape, Corvo needs to jump off the drawbridge into the river to save himself. He can travel between two world, so he jumps into water and disappears in the sewers - into the dark, into the world of the supernatural and the outcasts, where no one can find him. It’s no coincidence that one of the overseers in “High Overseer Campbell” comments on the existing maps of the city, stating that they’re really old, outdated, “older than the Kaldwins”, and immediately suspects that Corvo disappeared with the help of some dark magic, because he is Serkonan. These impoverished, dilapidated, flooded parts of the city, the poor, the foreigners, and the supernatural, are all connected in his mind. These are all things that don’t exist on the map. They all belong to the other world and hidden by the dark waters. They exist, but they’re dangerous, elusive, deadly.
If you get a new blog following you and immediately sending you an ask requesting help with vet bills for their cat, that is a scam. It is always a scam.
This time, the blog in question was created yesterday and reblogged a ton of stuff to seem legit.
