Diablo 4’s door-making NPC is a beautiful soul adrift in a miasma of pain and horse manure

Friends, I have a new obsession. A sparkling dopamine oasis l that I simply cannot tear myself away from for more than a few agonising minutes at a time. Oh, Diablo 4? It’s alright, yeah. Quite fun. But it’s recently taken a backseat to something far more illustrious. His name, the subtitles inform me, is Denysov, and he lives in Diablo IV's world of Sanctuary. He is a lone man, with a lone hammer, who, despite nightmare and terror unfolding all around him, come hell or harsh splinters, just works on his lovely door all darn day.

Denysov is an NPC with a single animation loop, and I cannot begin to explain how much I admire this wonderful human and his stoic, yet chirpy, demeanor. There are what look like two flayed corpses dangling from a nearby post, but as far as Denysov is concerned, they may as well be a couple of plastic bags caught on a spiked fence. But it isn’t apathy for his fellow Sancturian sufferers that grants him such lucid and serene concentration, no! The opposite in fact: he knows the greatest way to honour the departed is to keep the wheels of industry turning tirelessly in their stead.

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He’s a folksy, working class hero. The sort of salt-of-the-earth, splinter-fingered, chapped-lipped cherub that Bob Dylan would have written a song about. Oh, Mr. Door Makin’ Man, make a door for me, he’d sing. Silence Robert! We’d all say. We’re listening to the sonorous, deeply inspiring reverberations of hammer on wood, something you could never hope to emulate, you crusty binch.

As we’re given so little information, it’s our duty as scholars of Door Makin’ Denysov to analyse each wholesome utterance that he exhales from his wonderful lips (each as ornate yet practical as miniature, perfectly made doors to his pious soul), and thus glean whatever insight we can from the lone paean his Door Makin’ Majesty deigns to impart upon us. Let’s unpack it, shall we!

“Been working on this door for days…”
For days, he says! Truly an artisan’s artisan. My secret suspicion is that Denysov, skilled as he is, could easily finish the door in a single day, but opts instead to each night retire to the land of dreams, wherein angelic choruses inspire fresh flourishes each morning. To Denysov, a door is not a door without at least three divine visions inspiring little fish or whatever on the corners, maybe a handle in the shape of a swan’s delicate neck.

“Not much else to do ‘round here.”
Again, we’d be foolish to mistake this apparent apathy for some sort of malaise of the soul, for what Denyson is really exhibiting here is the sort of Zen mastery you’d normally need to sequester yourself away from the rest of society for decades to achieve. Denyson knows there’s plenty that could be done. He’s clearly exhibited the sort of creative mindset that tells us he’s never actually been bored for a single minute of his blessed existence. Instead, Denyson knows that the time has come to make a door, and thus, the world around him has simply ceased to exist.

“Even less to sell. Hm. Should fetch a nice price.”
You see that. A nice price. Not a high price. Not a tidy sum, or some other such covetous colloquialism. In his perfect soul, the actual money plays a very secondary fiddle to the knowledge that the transaction itself denotes a shared moment of appreciation over such solid craftsmanship. The gold is ephemeral, nought but trinketry in the glow of the riches that form when two folk stand there, chins ‘twixt thumb and forefinger, in a silence so robustly angelic that even the unspoken phrase “Yep. Bloody nice door, that,” cannot pierce it. A nice price indeed! Should we all be lucky enough to fetch a price so nice for our endeavors one crisp winter morning! And even as the armies of hell bear down on us, and goatmen chew off one of our ears probably! We would then, I am certain, finally know - oh not just repeat the words like foolish, gaudy parrots, but truly know! - that truth and beauty need not be mutually exclusive.

Thank you, Denysov. Bloody nice door, that.