Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q7284

Main entry

7284. Q7284/Q72,84

      Mike is the Deltarune world's Stalin counterpart

      ->
      

      this is a silly cracktheory I came up with after seeing one or two questionable videos trying to read particular philosophies into Deltarune that weren't there (schizoanalysis, postmodernism, that general cluster of things). these videos were really frustrating to me but I knew I was angry at the ideas and not the people and I needed some way to let go of it. so — although I was doing all of this somewhat subconsciously in the back of my mind — I started looking at Deltarune Chapter 3 in an ironic way where everything the 'bad' videos had said must all be true, and I started doing a kind of reductio on those ideas to see how wrong they were by ironically 'believing' them.
      Toby Fox would never actually critique religion and look like a bigot against each individual religion. (despite people struggling against their ties to religion being a really central theme of the game.) okay, Mike clearly isn't modeled on the idea of a god because every self-respecting anti-essentialist knows that Some Believers Are Good People. a god people are waiting for that never appears? nah, Waiting for Godot was never a book, Capcom made that up. doing more than changing reality through tiny individual decisions that constitute moments of freedom is the way to break and violate society, and that's why there's a Weird Route. okay, so wanting Mike to be there is bad because wanting there to be positions of power that could exert influence on others is Evil. this is an almost uniquely anarchist way of thinking but whatever, I've already locked in. freedom exists because other people are independent and unpredictable and you could not possibly understand them through science without first accessing them through The Subject's subjectivity and intersubjectivity, thus you can't control Noelle. I think that conflicts with the background themes of Deltarune's prophecy and the related implication of all stories being predictions of either the real world or themselves (see: sci-fi stories predicting technologies, slash fiction 'predicting' fiction by actual LGBT people, character characterization feeding into later actions), but okay. freedom exists in Deltarune's world precisely at the moment people are about to hurt each other and at no other time. Mike is bad because Mike is a violation of Tenna's responsibility to act freely and be freedom instead of being controlled through appealing to something higher. (this is turning into such irony when Tenna came from an actual TV with a remote; let's try to ignore that.) Mike is connected to Image_Friend through the hidden TV (?), where some kind of unknown voice from the shadows seems to be summoning Friend and/or the Shadow Mantle boss (that or the Shadow Mantle boss is the hidden voice), paralleling how Mike was a hidden voice in Tenna's world. So, Mike has been established as an antagonist or Opposer figure with connections to "darkness", "demon", or "shadow abomination" imagery, overall a character you wouldn't want to get tangled up with if you could choose not to.
      clearly, Mike embodies the general concept of a need for authority when people do not understand they are already free. the ominous forms of power which exist somewhere in between Jevil, Spamton, the Knight, Gaster / the goner maker narrator, and the player appear to have the potential to make characters into Roaring Knights by teaching them to ignore or internalize pain and use pain to transcend themselves (sequence of events: trauma, dreams, Dark World magic, Thorn Ring, hand holes, star crying flood of tears, Roaring Knight, Gaster), but actually, these ominous forms of power only take away agency rather than giving characters more agency, and put them under the control of dark forces that might include Gaster or the player. thus, Deltarune's theme of violence in RPGs being bad within contexts like the hidden TV and back in Undertale exists to be a reflection of what the Roaring Knight is: the Roaring Knight exists because what might be Dess unnecessarily gave into a higher authority with essentially imperialist intentions, which literally or figuratively wanted to get stronger and build up its empire through destroying monsters. with only the information in Chapter 3, the higher authority could be Gaster deceiving Dess (seems unlikely), or Dess taking the role of The Opposer themself and becoming all the worst things fans had associated with Gaster, before threatening to pass all that pain on to Noelle to ensure Noelle is "protected". the player is portrayed as holy because they may have the power to rescue Noelle and/or Dess from this state of being captured under The Opposer that grants them false power — although they also simply might not do it and might let everything bad happen to Noelle instead.
      so, why is that particular concept Communism and not fascism? honestly, no particular reason. that part just came out of me listening to a huge pile of really bad definitions of freedom in reviews or commentaries about Deltarune and subconsciously wondering if Deltarune was eventually going to come out and be as anticommunist as these reviews instead of having nothing to do with Communism nor defending religion. I still didn't hate Deltarune for that possibility, inasmuch as even if it happened Deltarune is very well made and it was probably going to be far less intolerable than all the Chapter 4 "these are actual life lessons" commentaries. but I did know one thing: I increasingly couldn't unsee all the Materialist philosophy in Deltarune and the vague possibility that there were characters coded as Communists. was Gaster a dialectical materialist trying to fix history? was Dess a totally-not-Communist? as far as thinking of places analogies for Communism could seep into Deltarune and be way more epic than any of the insinuations of anticommunist depictions of Communism in reviews, the sky was the limit.
      early on, I was very very figurative with my "Mike = Stalin" concept; Mike was just a symbol, just an in-universe literary metaphor. later on it got really literal and I was just like, yeah, no, Mike is actually a character with an entire narrative because that would be hilarious. it would be weird and funny to just flip over Deltarune's world and discover there was more the game didn't bother to show.
      my main thought after that was that I have never believed that fascism exists in the Deltarune cosmos. I could imagine medieval console RPG shenanigans going on in the past of Deltarune's world, but not classical European fascism or modern fascisms. so, then, why would everyone be so afraid of authority and unnecessary higher powers the way they are in the interpretation I've given above? well... maybe Communism exists in the Deltarune universe but people in Hometown's region are absolutely terrified of it. hypothetically you could imagine that a news broadcast came on one day for about a minute saying something about how "we don't need anything Mike can offer", which was actually talking about one of the founders of the Deltarune cosmos' Third International, but Kris and Asriel had absolutely no idea who Mike was so they just filed it away as a totally out of context name along with all its inexplicable negative associations. thus "Mike" came to be a name you could give to any random character in an imaginary scenario who narrates orders from the shadows and hates freedom.

618. Q618/Q618 Mike is the Deltarune world's Stalin counterpart -> so, all in all, this is kind of just an elaborate in-joke I have with myself, but it does actually have a logical progression from A to B of how it makes sense, to the point it can accurately be called a theory, although only a joke theory.

Ideologies, topics, or genres

618. Q618/Q618 UTDR (pronounced U.T.D.R.) / Deltarune

Wavebuilder combinations

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along with [Item]

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forming from [Item]

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