It might surprise you to know that being neither a girl nor a brat, I’m pretty unfamiliar with the concept of “brat girl summer”, a craze that swept through our hotter months thanks to Charli XCX. I have since had a rapid education that’s left me feeling like I’ve glimpsed into the Lovecraftian, lime-green abyss.
To summarise, Brat Girl Summer is one of those vibes with such virality that political figures adopt it in an attempt to be hip and cool—here’s the mayor of London Sadiq Khan doing it, also democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris—thus rendering any political commentary it could have on millennial existential dread (something I am familiar with) in our money–driven capitalist nightmare invalid.
Or, as Disco Elysium (a game which I’m starting to realise has way more in common with brat summer than expected) puts it: “Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it, instead.”
At this point, you are probably wondering if I have lost my grip on reality. More the fool you, because if contemplating Brat Summer has hurled me into the abyss of my own mind, then that just makes it even more Disco Elysium, doesn’t it? Anyway, here’s noted Australian singer Montaigne, who also happens to have worked on games like Stray Gods, tying this thematic masterstroke together with a parody of Charli XCX’s “360”.
You might see this as a silly little gag, but, as you can see below, it’s highlighted one unfortunate truth about a game that’s topped PC Gamer’s top 100 rankings for a while now—Harry Du Bois is, inescapably, brat.
(Image credit: The PC Gamer Slack channel.)
His sad, washed-up, exhausted, despondent, has-to-roll-to-look-at-himself-in-a-mirror face may be the most natural evolution of the brat girl summer aesthetic. Here’s Charli XCX explaining the concept:
“You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like, parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.” Harry Du Bois is brat.
I think, with all seriousness, that you could put this quote in a Savoir Faire success dialogue as a custom mod, and it’d take months for anybody to notice. Harry with his faded disco mystique, fragile mental state, and existentially apathetic attitude to the decline of just about every faculty—the yearning to party through the end of the world—and the subsequent absorption of his flare into the system of capital and political powers that be? That’s brat.
Either way, Montaigne—who was nominated for an emmy for their work on Stray Gods and collaborated on 1955, a chart-topping song with over 840,000 sales—has touched on the fact that Disco Elysium, a game that came out in 2019, has both predicted (and embodied) a trend that wouldn’t happen for five years. I think. Regardless, I want a full version of this cover.
