Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q87,67-DR/SoraIsATrotskyist

Sora is a child soldier fighting a grueling battle for the freedom of the entire toon population with a blade forged in the flames of Guinevere and a heart of steel and the aid of several members of the toon populace over the fantastical realm of capital.

...Or, that's what I can no longer stop seeing every time I look at _Deltarune_.

You see, Toby Fox has forever changed the meaning of _Kingdom Hearts_. As far as I know he did what I will describe below mostly unintentionally. It might not even have been him that did it. But on the day _Undertale_ and particularly _Deltarune_ arrived it was unmistakable that /something had been happening/ over time to the meaning of both _Kingdom Hearts_ and Disney movies.

If there were any particular date it would make sense to label "the beginning of the story", it would be 2011, when Toby Fox dropped a cryptic tweet about a dream he had had at the age of 20. Two abstract themes were given: "the edge where reality and dream meet", "shatter the twilight reverie". These themes, and some number of unknown other ones, would form the basis for the story of _Deltarune_ — a game which would be exploring the relationships between experience, matter, fiction, reality, mythical narratives, people, products, life, death, memory, perception, fate, religion, history, furry characters, gender, Disney, internet meme humor, and above all, anxiety over the destruction of the world.

But before _Deltarune_ could come to exist, Toby Fox first needed to make a glorified demo for _Deltarune_'s basic mechanics: _Undertale_. This game, in retrospect, was actually one giant series of hints to the past events beneath _Deltarune_'s narrative. It was the "pilot episode" to the 7 chapters of _Deltarune_. But fans of the game didn't care, and _Undertale_ became wildly popular.

_Undertale_ can be explained in a few sentences by a player who doesn't want to get far into the details. Monsters live in a cave system below a faraway mountain. A human child falls into the dungeon. The goal is to make it all the way to the other end and walk out the magical barrier that no monster can escape. A suspicious flower claims that the child cannot get out of the mountain without killing a monster. The first ordinary monster to appear claims that the way to get out of encounters is to talk to monsters and make friends, and does not mention fighting. Most of the time the game ends with the child leaving through the barrier. The overall story is very simple.

However, when _Deltarune_ exists, there is an interesting complication introduced into that story. In _Deltarune_ Chapter 1, two teenagers in a town which would appear to be in the northeast United States fall into a shadowy closet. They land in a fantastical realm of magical beings. The goal is to leave the closet world by getting to the other side. When the protagonists Kris and Susie emerge from the closet world, they realize that all the magical beings they encountered fighting wars and living out imaginary histories had actually formed themselves out of ordinary cards and board games in an unused classroom, all imbued with physicality and consciousness.

Immediately, this raises a strange question: is _Undertale_ an independent game world of its own, or did _Deltarune_ reveal it to be nested inside a larger world which created all its living beings out of inanimate objects? Was the human who fell into the Underground /actually/ a human child, or some kind of symbolic tabletop miniature dropped into the Undertale microcosm from the surrounding world of its creator? Does the answer matter? Is there any effect on the overall narrative of _Undertale_ or _Deltarune_ from the characters of one of them being less physically real than the other one? Or can the story of _Undertale_ be analyzed as a self-contained story even if it has been set up inside a framing device and the story of the game is stated to _be_ a game?

In the case of most works of fiction, it would be very unusual to be asking this question. In _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_, some British children get lost in a hidden wardrobe world and meet a magical lion of righteousness. Few people would ask in this situation if the /children/ were actually game pieces — as much as some people might have some words to say about the lion character and his relationship to real-world Christianity. In a typical game of _Dungeons and Dragons_, nobody is asking questions about what it means that the characters are in a game. But _Deltarune_ is different. _Deltarune_ is a sprite-based console-style RPG in which characters can play console games or enter entire new worlds and the characters inside those games can be revealed to be illusions. Why would a world with this kind of structure exist? If the characters of _Deltarune_ only talked about in-universe works of fiction, that would not be notable, but the observed fact that some "games" or narratives in this world take place in new physical worlds while /also/ being fiction is something else.

One obvious route to cracking open what is happening with _Deltarune_'s cosmos is to ask if there are any other popular works of fiction which have a structure anything like this — when fictional works use similar tropes, those tropes are often although not certainly chosen for similar underlying reasons. For me, one obvious parallel that comes to mind again and again when thinking about the overall set of tropes and themes within _Deltarune_ is Hasbro's cartoon _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_. The show begins with the main character Twilight Sparkle /entering/ Ponyville from another location when she did not plan to go there. In each episode, there are a small number of characters who try to tell Twilight that it is necessary to fight (the villains of the show), and a greater number of characters who are willing to become her friend if she is willing to learn from them. There is no particular end location that Twilight is trying to reach to exit the area, but in a way, Twilight's character arc from the start of the show to the end of the show looks a lot like _Undertale_: Twilight lives in a world of magic and mythical creatures and she must reach her goal by learning to coexist with others and practice Mercy. A funny thing happened when _Friendship is Magic_ rolled over into the fifth generation of _My Little Pony_. In the first scene of the series, what appeared to be another story about Twilight was shown to be fictional when the 3D camera panned out to the new protagonist Sunny Starscout acting out a scenario with wooden pony toys. In that moment, Twilight's grand adventure with her friends abruptly fell apart into everyday objects.

_Shatter the twilight reverie._

Here we realize something important — _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_ is a toy commercial. Although there was a heavier focus and more care put into toy design during the first generation of _My Little Pony_, toys for the fourth and fifth generations ("G4" and "G5") still were made and exist. Every episode about Twilight or Sunny is theoretically a story that exists in relation to toy ponies. Every episode is like one big shadowy closet of toy ponies come to life and turned into a living world. But in that case, what would exist outside the world of ponies? Kris and Susie /leave/ the closet world made out of old toys. They go back to their seemingly ordinary town, quite descriptively named "Hometown". Could _Deltarune_ be taking place in... the real world?

At first, this would seem like a strange and incomprehensible suggestion. One of the first things you notice when playing the game is that the world shows clear signs of being fictional. The town is inhabited by humans and also humanoid monsters. There are magical processes in _Deltarune_'s world, namely the ability to pierce the earth and open up new worlds inside Dark Fountains. One of the characters in the closet Dark World says that in the near future the outer world of Hometown will crack open and "run black with fear". Nobody has actually found evidence of the universe imminently tearing to bits in our world. So in what sense would it be true to suggest that _Deltarune_ takes place in "the real world"?

Here we once again need to go back to the overall body of fiction that anyone living in 2011-2026 might be familiar with. In general, a work of fiction is first distinguished from a work of non-fiction by not overlapping with actual events that have occurred in real-world history. However, a work of fiction can easily take place on earth within a universe almost exactly like ours, up to and including some number of real-world historical events. For instance, _The Long Walk_ is a work which purports to take place in the real-world Soviet Union, but the exact arrangement of events in which the characters escape the Soviet Union and the arrangement of people going on the journey is more or less fictional. In a different sense, the book _Animal Farm_ takes place on earth but attempts to present a specific series of real-world historical events through a set of characters who are fictional. "The historicity of _Animal Farm_" is a phrase a person could reasonably utter without any irony and actually have a productive discussion about, if that person was interested in how similar or unintentionally different the fictional events in the novel were compared with their corresponding real events. The Christian Old Testament is a mythical story which takes place on earth, and appears to some extent to be based on historical civilizations and derive from general kinds of religious practices and events that would have existed at particular times (the Jewish temple as an institution of ancient religion, religions with local gods identified as "ba'alim", wars between religious groups, and so forth). What I am proposing is that _Deltarune_ takes place on earth in almost the same sense that _Animal Farm_ does. Two pigs known as Napoleon and Snowball were not real-world historical entities, but the author placed them into a somewhat realistic setting on earth to demonstrate a point about what general kinds of events happen on earth.

Now I need to tell you something a little shocking: _Deltarune_ is loosely adapting Feuerbach's work _Essence of Christianity_. I'm sure this will only sound more unbelievable than the last thing I said, but there is one central game mechanic in _Deltarune_ which makes this connection clear.

In both _Undertale_ and _Deltarune_ the main character is sometimes represented by a red heart cursor. In some sequences in the games, the main character will walk through an area with projectiles to dodge where the red heart appears on top and acts as a more precise hitbox. At other times, the red heart is placed into a box by itself to traverse opponents' attacks during encounters. _Undertale_'s story refers to the red heart as "the human soul" and treats human and monster souls as critical parts of their being, stating that they contain "love, hope, and compassion". _Deltarune_ mostly does not make any reference to the red heart or "the human soul". There is one mention of it within the town library, and notably, one somewhat hidden scene where Kris ends up tearing out the red heart and kicking it around as hard as they possibly can. Even within a normal playthrough, there is still a scene in Chapter 4 where Kris can be seen swatting the red heart away with a hockey stick. Apparently, what _Undertale_ said about "the human soul" might not have been an entirely reliable narrative. What could have gotten Kris so angry at the red heart?

> Prayer is the self-division of man into two beings — a dialogue of man with his heart

> The heart's need is absolute necessity, the fate of the world

> Prayer alters the course of Nature; it determines God

> The struggling heart bursts the barrier of the closed lips

Ah. The red heart is the link from man to God. _That_ explains a few things.

This chapter, "The Omnipotence of Feeling", is an elaborate explanation of why prayer and human interaction with God are important to creating religious belief. Religion would not be appealing if it did not appear to be doing something. So — to put it briefly — Christianity wins believers by creating the appearance that reality contains inherent empathy and their deepest wishes are able to move reality. _Their wishes_. Feuerbach's formulation would seem to imply that God is almost an irrelevant middleman in the process, and actually, it is a group of people all clustered around the same desires and wanting them hard enough that eventually compels reality to produce them. The closer you look at Feuerbach's words, the less they look like religion and the more they resemble _Undertale_.

> Prayer alters the course of Nature; it determines > [...] the heart's need is absolute necessity

Scattered throughout _Undertale_, the main character will periodically encounter spinning yellow glimmers of light that act as save points. At each of these save points, there is a message about some aspect within the area that "fills you with determination". Save points, however, are very important. Undertale's story specifically points multiple times to the fact that characters that have the ability to save and load are the most powerful characters in the Underground who have power over all the other characters. Humans in the _Undertale_ setting are said to have the power of thousands of monsters because a human soul possesses "determination". Only within the true ending, entries hidden away in an old grungy laboratory reveal that Determination was used to attempt to create artificial soul equivalents and gain more power with which to break down the Barrier at the end of the Underground. If the monsters had ever been anything to fear, it was the power of Determination that would allow them to close the gap in power between themselves and humans.

Here it is also worth noting that under the typical connotations of the word "heart", the power of Determination is doing the general task of making all the characters' individual wishes for such things as surviving or escaping the Underground "necessity".

> The heart's need is absolute necessity, the fate of the world

However, this same concept is flipped on its head in _Deltarune_. Only a few parts of the game address the existence of the player directly. In most aspects the game presents itself as if the story is unfolding from the characters' point of view. One exception to this is Ralsei, who presents the apocalyptic prophecy about the destruction of Hometown and the heroes' anticipated triumph, along with a blatant tutorial for the player's benefit. Ralsei attempts to reassure Kris that their choices "matter too", but overall leaves the implication that the characters are about to go through a specific unchanging arc of happenings and the player is the only entity with any hope of changing them — the characters slowly begin to doubt even this in Chapter 5.

Stated plainly, the characters have nearly lost the illusion that allowing the red heart cursor to control them is actually giving them any agency. Although the red heart wields the power to determine, and Ralsei claims it contains "the fate of the world" (!), it only brings to necessity the will of /the player/, dragging the characters along behind it regardless of what they want. Ralsei's remarks as a whole begin to sound slightly more suspicious in this context. He says that the red heart holds Kris' "will and compassion", but in context, that almost seems to be implying that the red heart both tells Kris what to want and to respond nicely exactly at the time they no longer want to.

> Prayer is the self-division of man into two beings — a dialogue of man with his heart

This one is self-explanatory once you've played the game. The concept of prayer in Feuerbach, or the concept of Determination described in _Undertale_, involves the main character, the red heart, and the player communicating. At times this "communication" is hostile and adversarial.

In other parts of the chapter, Feuerbach describes the link between man and God as an "unutterable sigh" or a "tear" "shed in deepest concealment". Here the chapter links the connection between man and God with pain, and suggests being the cause of wishes pain is ultimately what the ability to control reality pivots on. The concept of silent tears is a deeply important theme within _Deltarune_, but for now, I will just say that both in Feuerbach and in _Deltarune_, the believer remains alone with their own pain and alienated from all help while waiting for their wishes to be fulfilled.

> The [...] heart bursts the barrier of the closed lips

In _Deltarune_ the red heart is acknowledged as having the power to determine. In _Undertale_, the human soul is said to have wildly disproportionate power versus monster souls. If the quote above is to be believed, the red heart is not just powerful enough to break the Barrier but intrinsically linked to it. The red heart as it exists in _Deltarune_ conceals wishes, secrets, and pain inside it. But it appears that the disclosure of those secrets is inherently connected to the concept of _Undertale_ monsters ultimately becoming able to exit the Barrier in the true ending after the monsters and the humans have both forgiven each other. Near the end of Undertale, one particular character that might be analogized to being the god of the monsters in a figurative way (complete with the power to wield all their Determination) is forced by circumstance to become a sacrifice and stop existing in order to let the monsters out. The Christianity parallels within _Undertale_ are clear.

Lastly...

> nature listens not to the plaints of man. Hence man turns away from all visible objects. He turns within [...]. This uttered sorrow of the soul is God, a tear of love shed in deepest concealment over human misery ... the concerns of his heart made objects of the independent, omnipotent absolute being

This quote clearly frames exactly what Dark Worlds are. In _Deltarune_ the wishes of the characters within Hometown (these characters are known as Lightners) manifest as fantasy worlds containing quests — when they wish to turn away from their inner pain, reality disappears into darkness and all previously "visible objects" come to life. But, if "nature" did not grant them anything, and characters are seen opening Dark Fountains at moments the player does not have control of them, then how are their wishes acting on the world to construct new worlds? In the quote the tear of misery and God are the same thing. But the tear of misery is hidden inside people. So, when Lightners physically pierce the earth, they are actually tapping into some interior realm that counts as being within them although it is below their entire physical reality. This implies a cosmology in which thoughts or Ideas are effectively bottled inside Lightners as some kind of lower foundation that matter is only painted over. Within Feuerbach's time, this kind of thinking was not unheard of. Feuerbach was not entirely a Materialist, and some Christians today will still try to present "energy" or some other correlate of "the experience of having a soul" as the foundation of all living things. That said, _Deltarune_ does not make it clear it is using either of these exact models, and gives evidence its cosmology may be more complicated.

After seeing these Feuerbach quotes, it should be evident that the relationship between _Undertale_ and _Deltarune_ is more than a strange hypothetical. _Deltarune_ is very clearly making some kind of commentary on the similarities between mythical narratives as they exist in religion and mythical narratives as they exist in fiction, as well as the relationship between religion or mythical narratives and reality itself. It poses the question: if toys constructed by people were somehow able to break free of the mythical narrative that following the will of people gives them power, is that the same thing as — or a productive elaboration on — the process of breaking free of religion and the potentially oppressive influence of a god?

I think you can already vaguely see where this is going.

[unfinished]

* book of Revelation
* Feuerbach   / Essence of Christianity  / Theses on Feuerbach
   * "how to kill god in real life"
* Umineko     & Animal Farm
   * Chronicles of Narnia - Lion, Witch, & Wardrobe
     * what is happening in wardrobe? history & justifications / problem solving.
   * fantasy books as inherently historical  / as superstructural world
     * Starlight Glimmer vs Celestia  - mention only briefly
     *   Sunny playing with Twilight figure scene  - purpose of G4/G5 themselves
     * Wings of Fire  - roleplaying historical processes
     * Dragon Ball  - Materialist view of Buddhist histories. weirdly better.
   * Digimon / Ultraman series ?  - s.f.world,  eating = Materialism = winning
     * Pokémon = Idealist, Digimon = Materialist.  don't, or very briefly
   * annoying 3DWI video   a.k.a. "losing Umineko speedrun"
     * That really annoying 3DWI video that missed the point of narratives
     & interpretations & even what postmodernism is actually doing
     just to wave away Stalin and Trotsky.   he's indistinguishable from PragerU
   * Howard Blast  - interprets deltarune like susie did?  "no axes or battles"
     * H.B. misses TADC style payload of mystery man is Dess
   * Animal Farm  - as challenge to be won.
* The Matrix     & 'red pill' conservatives   & queer internet
   * The Wizard of Oz   * Serial Ex. Lain [haven't watched]   * Undertale
   * "heroine's journey"  / constructing queer hero's journey  / Lacanianism
   * Homestuck  - 'why did LGBT+ co-opt my Materialist battle fantasy?'
   * OMORI  * Yume Nikki ending  * The Truman Show
   * Xemnu.   * Baudrillard's 'economic' nonsense
   * Knights of Guinevere  - escaping from tower. accidental KH connection
   * I have no mouth ...   * Amazing Digital Circus - capitalist?
* kingdom hearts
   * frozen   * Let It Go     * toy story
   * Gameoverse [unfinished?]  - failed Kingdom Hearts
     * funniest part is people actually noticed this.
   * Nina Paley's bold ideas & failures
* Deltarune

Relevant motifs or claims

3903. Q3903/Q39,03 The Matrix (motif) / (9k)
3903. Q3903/Q39,03 adventure narrative in "special world" (hero's journey; heroine's journey) as queer metaphor / isekai story as queer metaphor / (9k)
618. Q618/Q618 kingdom of isolation (motif, theme, or symbol; Frozen) / ice palace (motif; Deltarune) / (9k)
618. Q618/Q618 tin man (existential materialism) / inanimate or non-conscious object which pulls off a virtuous or courageous feat despite having no empathy ("heart") nor cognition ("brain") of its own / (9k)