Editing User:Reversedragon/UTDR/pointed-tail/v2 (section)

== Footnotes ==

<references>
<ref name="d">Theme: Dark Worlds and darkness being the space outside reality, or a hidden place beyond reality.</ref>
<ref name="p">Theme: Dark Worlds as subconscious or collective unconscious.</ref>

<ref name="ut17">Theme: W.D. Gaster "falling into his own creation", or other characters generally "falling into a creation".</ref>
<ref name="utg2">Theme: W.D. Gaster - "One day he vanished without a trace" / "They say he shattered across time and space".</ref>
<ref name="fm">Theme: Kris trying to draw a person and ending up drawing a tree over the top.</ref>

<ref name="sp">Theme: siblings that try to act cool and get into trouble they aren't prepared for. Seen in Undertale (Papyrus), Deltarune (Dess).</ref>

<ref name="e">Theme: fictional narratives and dreams always have to {{em|terminate}} at some point even when they don't end properly.</ref>

<ref name="cd">Theme: "Proceed." "Proceed." "Proceed." / "The feeling of numbers going up".</ref>
<ref name="g">Theme: "She was used up. You were used up."</ref>

<ref name="ch4w">Theme: Chapter 4 floating prophecy panels. "A cage of human soul and parts" / etc.</ref>
<ref name="n">Theme: Deltarune characters wanting to break free from constricting narratives.</ref>

<ref name="dr2">I'm not marking up these themes play-by-play because I think readers are stupid, or think they need a grade-school-textbook "comprehension questions" section. I'm marking up themes because it's genuinely easy to forget all the tiny moving parts of the actual games, and because when I wrote this post [[User:Reversedragon/UTDR/pointed-tail/v1|as a stream-of-consciousness]] laying out everything explicitly it got too unwieldy and redundant even for me. So now you get this post as a better-paced narrative with the connecting themes all laid out down here. Deltarune is absolutely dense for a console-styled role-playing game, I'm telling you.</ref>

<ref name="qm">"observers creating plural realities is a misconception": The joke here is that I thought really hard into the notion of Undertale being magical and Deltarune being mundane and said, you know, if everything in Deltarune is explainable through magic and Jungian psychoanalysis, what if the whole Sans and quantum physics thing is specific only to Undertale. What if while Undertale is all soft sci-fi about things the manifestation of quantum physics in Deltarune is a lot more realistic? {{em|Many worlds, shmany worlds, it's all nearly-standard quantum field theory here.}} This is probably a bit of a {{thingamajig|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale-ism. I think the save menu shenanigans in Deltarune where Gaster is helping you split timelines probably contradict this interpretation. But, for novelization purposes I just thought the concept of the Deltarune save menu {{em|not}} being canon to the story and there only actually being the Undertale and Deltarune timelines seemed more fun. Kris has a save file because the red heart device can still go backward and rewrite time and the save file represents the moment it was put in.</ref>

<ref name="cn">This is supposed to be the Deltarune world's version of {{book|The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe}}. Because monsters wrote it, it's about the idea of nonhuman characters getting dragged into a violent world of humans that doesn't make any sense where the humans are always trying to fit things into narratives and justify wars, but the monsters just don't understand it.</ref>

<ref name="r">The reason is that it's fake. It's a fan game, or a purported concept for one anyway. But that doesn't mean it isn't funny to imply "the reason" is that some terrifying Gaster aura is protecting the secrets of {{game|Undertale}} and {{game|Deltarune}}. Within {{game|Deltarune}} Gaster is trying hard to make sure nobody finds out who he really was, and Gaster or the Memoryhead hiding the {{thingamajig|caps=y|Redacted}}Tale route of {{game|Undertale}} is just an extension of that.</ref>

<ref name="gb">In Chapter 4, when Kris and Susie find the dusty remains of Gerson, Susie makes sure to conspicuously say out loud, "monsters turn to dust when they die". I believe the reason she says this is that she sees Kris is a human and isn't clear whether Kris already knows about monster funerals. In principle, Susie is never talking to the player, she's always talking to Kris. So, here when Kris talks about monsters "turning into skeletons" Susie takes that as them not having remembered her lesson.</ref>

<ref name="tngg">{{TTS|tts=holiday-girl-12-25|holidaygirl1225}} blog entry: "{{TTS|tts=the-newest-girl-girl|the_n3w3st_g1rl_g1rl|href=https://deltarune.com/the_n3w3st_g1rl_g1rl/}}"</ref>

<ref name="oe">"Oll'een" is both an anagram of "Noelle" and a pun on "Halloween"; it's said "All(w)-een". I was weirdly excited when I was messing around with the letters in "Noelle" and they spontaneously happened to {{em|almost}} become another holiday. Thought it was a little frustrating to me there wasn't a second "O".<br />
My thought process on Oll'een was this: Ralsei, in theory, may represent the idea Kris looks up to Asriel and sees Asriel as "perfect", thus when they want to create a totally friendly and likeable character that does everything right, they reference Asriel. But if Susie were to create some kind of platonic ideal character like that, she would probably be judging herself off {{em|Noelle}} as the nicest person she knows. And she might also slip into the idea she will never be as cool as her perfectly likeable character. This leads Susie's mind to create a perfect {{em|villain}} with ideal evil aura who degrades others rather than building them up.</ref>

<ref name="mm">By "this is going to come back later", I specifically mean "come back later" in my interpretation or adaptation of Undertale and Deltarune. Got you.</ref>

<ref name="np">Theme: uncovered secret that left home due to happiness.</ref>

<ref name="rk">For anyone who is totally new to {{game|Deltarune}} and suddenly had to see {{TTS|tts=Rules Card's|Rouxls Kaard's}} speaking quirk out of nowhere... I am so sorry. {{TTS|tts=Rules Card|Rouxls Kaard}} speaks in a version of early modern English he makes up as he goes along. I did not create this character.<br/>
Whenever I try to write a {{TTS|tts=Rules|Rouxls}} line, I think I'm too familiar with actual Shakespeare lines and old dialects of English, so I tend to default to making it sound {{em|nearly}} grammatical. Then I look at it and go, is that too correct?? Did I make it wrong enough??</ref>

<ref name="rg">Theme: Ralsei being fluffy and friendly not to give you a sense of security but to hint that he's in league with Gaster who is mostly helpful and friendly.</ref>

<ref name="LLr">Theme: Rouxls Kaard trying to date people and fix them after their divorce.</ref>

<ref name="ww">Theme: "You can never wash it all away."</ref>

<ref name="kg">A moment after I wrote this I realized this almost sounded like Kris was making some kind of dark joke about genders and how much it "hurts" to have to choose one. I'm going to say this wording is intentional in terms of the broader narrative, given everything else I said about Dess. Dess got his wish, but the process hurt.</ref>

<ref name="tc">It's notable that in-game, Berdly is reading the Deltarune version of {{book|A Tale of Two Cities}}. I've decided for complex reasons that this wasn't thematically important to intrepreting the text. {{game|Deltarune}} has... a lot of themes in it which confusingly begin to imply it is trying to present some kind of Western-Marxist message about "[[E:shovel dream|object-consciousnesses]]" and "ideologies" or about capitalism tearing open in a crisis, but then as you get through Chapter 4 and begin to delve deeper into the text, you see that these weird hints of Marxism in Deltarune are mostly an illusion, and mostly there for no particular reason as far as the story or world are concerned. Deltarune is mostly a "psychological" text which focuses on character personalities and relationships, and as its theory of society it leans on [[Ontology:Jungian psychoanalysis|Jungian psychoanalysis]] and the Jungian view of dreams and mythological archetypes. Said another way, {{game|Deltarune}} is not about Leninism; revolution is not one of its major themes.<br/>As for my insertion of the Communist phoenix characters into {{thingamajig|caps=y||Redacted|Tale}} that then carried over into "{{thingamajig||deeracted|run}}"... those are there to fill in the void. But those three are just a side story I wanted to use to explore the idea of "Deltarune without the main characters, in some other town". They're still not important to the story of Kris, Susie, or Noelle.</ref>

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