For Fans of Philip Pullman

Where the 2007 film softened Pullman's challenge to institutional religion, the BBC/HBO His Dark Materials series (2019-2022) restored the books' moral core. Ruth Wilson's Mrs Coulter is genuinely terrifying precisely because she believes in the Magisterium's authority even as she subverts it. James McAvoy's Lord Asriel is messianic and pitiless in equal measure. The production's willingness to honour the ambiguity of the Authority storyline is what separates it from most fantasy adaptations, which tend to flatten complexity into simple heroism.

Guillermo del Toro and Philip Pullman share a belief that the imagination is not an escape from reality but a way of surviving it. Ofelia, like Lyra, is a girl in a world controlled by authoritarian adults who uses fantasy as both refuge and resistance. Both works insist that fairy tale logic can carry moral and political weight. Where Pullman uses parallel worlds and Dust to argue against institutional power, del Toro uses the labyrinth and the faun to ask what obedience costs a child who still believes in magic.

Both Pullman and the creators of Disco Elysium are interested in a very specific question: what happens when an institution's ideology fails the people it claims to serve, and what does a person do with that knowledge? Disco Elysium's detective protagonist, like Lord Asriel, is a man whose intelligence makes him dangerous and whose beliefs make him reckless. The game's political philosophy is worn openly, as Pullman's is, and neither flinches from the conclusion that consciousness itself may be the universe's most subversive act.

Pullman's Dust is Ruskin's particles of consciousness, the physical residue of thought and free will. Outer Wilds, without any explicit connection, dramatises almost exactly the same idea: knowledge accumulates, cannot be unlearned, and changes what the universe means. The game asks players to sit with the fact that understanding something beautiful does not make it less terrifying. That is precisely the emotional register of The Amber Spyglass, which ends not with triumph but with the bittersweet cost of awareness.