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[[Category:MDem v6.1 entries]] | |||
Latest revision as of 12:01, 6 November 2026
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 — even 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 either of 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 the fourth generation of My Little Pony, 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.[1]
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 solid 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 bot 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]
- ↑ I put in this line as a joke, and purely as a more concise statement of the analogy I was making. I am not meaning to imply here that Deltarune is actually referencing My Little Pony or that the reference to "twilight" is actually related to Twilight Sparkle. It just made a good pun.
* 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
- Undertale (2015)
- Deltarune (2018-) / (9k)
- Kingdom Hearts (series; 2002-)
- Kingdom Hearts III (2019)
- Sora (Kingdom Hearts)
- Knights of Guinevere (animated series, 2025-)
- Disney princess movies
- Disney fairytale movies
- representational art
- unintentional representation (arts)
- Toby Fox's dream (2011)
- at the edge where reality and dream meet, shatter the twilight reverie
- pilot episode (arts)
- Dess and the incident
- console role-playing game (Japan) / console RPG / JRPG
- adventure narrative / hero's journey (Joseph Campbell)
- Frisk (Undertale)
- The Underground (Undertale) / Mt. Ebott (generic)
- Flowey (Undertale)
- The Barrier (Undertale)
- RPG progression as horror
- it's kill or be killed (Undertale)
- Toriel (Undertale)
- mercy (Undertale)
- neutral ending (Undertale)
- true pacifist ending (Undertale) / true ending (Undertale)
- Deltarune Chapter 1
- Hometown (Deltarune)
- Kris (Deltarune)
- Susie (Deltarune)
- superstructural fantasy world (motif)
- Dark Worlds (Deltarune)
- Darkner objects (Deltarune) / objects that become Dark World characters
- war between card kings (Deltarune)
- King and Lightners (Deltarune) / conflict between Spade King and Lightners (Deltarune)
- sealing Dark Fountain (Deltarune) / Red Soul sealing Dark Fountain (Deltarune)
- Undertale is a superstructural fantasy world grounded in or made from the world of Deltarune [truth value unknown] / Is Undertale a superstructural fantasy world inside Deltarune? (question)
- Frisk was created from a flower [truth value unknown]
- Chronicles of Narnia
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- Aslan (Chronicles of Narnia)
- Dungeons and Dragons (tabletop roleplaying game)
- narrative parallels
- My Little Pony
- My Little Pony generation 4
- My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic / (9k)
- Twilight Sparkle (MLP:FiM) / Twilight (MLP:FiM season 1)
- Canterlot (MLP:FiM)
- Ponyville (MLP:FiM)
- Twilight and reluctance to learn friendship
- friendship (motif; MLP:FiM)
- adventure arcs (MLP:FiM)
- My Little Pony generation 5
- My Little Pony: A New Generation
- My Little Pony: Make Your Mark
- My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale
- Sunny Starscout / Sunny (My Little Pony: A New Generation)
- Sunny and Sprout's fantasy adventure sequence (My Little Pony: A New Generation)
- Sunny and snapping back to reality from utopia (My Little Pony generation 5)
- toy commercial cartoon (United States, c.1970-)
- MLP:FiM is a superstructural fantasy world / My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a superstructural fantasy world relative to the real world because it is based on a toy line [accurate to real world]
- Deltarune takes place in the real world / Deltarune takes place on earth, in the same sense that Pacific Rim, 3D Workers Island, Catch-22, Animal Farm, or 1984 take place on earth; this is mainly to imply that Deltarune is to be interpreted as if it were an unfiction work; this is also to imply but not state that Deltarune is to be interpreted as if it were a historical allegory [truth value unknown until chapters 6 and 7 release]
- humans (Deltarune)
- monsters (Deltarune)
- Deltarune's cosmos / Deltarune's world
- magic in Deltarune
- Dark Fountains (Deltarune)
- Ralsei (Deltarune)
- Ralsei's prophecy sequence (Deltarune) / The sky will run black with terror and the land will crack with fear
- criticisms of the book of Revelation
- When does a narrative take place on earth? / When does a fictional narrative take place in "the real world"?
- Fiction is partly distinguished from non-fiction by containing imaginary historical events
- Fiction is partly distinguished from non-fiction by failing to contain real-world historical events
- Fiction can take place on earth; fiction can take place on a world that initially appears indistinguishable from the real world
- Fiction can depict some number of real-world historical events and still be fiction
- memoir fiction / fiction which is structured like a memoir
- The Long Walk
- Animal Farm as allegory for series of historical events
- historicity of Animal Farm / historical accuracy of Animal Farm
- Trotskyist readings of Animal Farm
- Old Testament (Christianity)
- Jewish temple (Christian Old Testament)
- (Christian Old Testament) / (Christian Old Testament) [1]
- wars against ba'al (Christian Old Testament)
- Essence of Christianity (Feuerbach) / (9k)
- Red Soul (Deltarune) / red heart cursor (Deltarune)
- Red Soul (Undertale)
- battle box (Undertale, Deltarune)
- bullet hell gameplay (Undertale, Deltarune)
- souls (Undertale)
- soul ... love, hope, and compassion (Undertale)
- the purpose of the soul is unknown (Deltarune)
- antagonism between Kris and Red Soul (Deltarune)
- kris attacking Red Soul in bathroom (Deltarune chapter 4)
- kris attacking Red Soul in Dess' room (Deltarune)
- The narrative presented about the Red Soul in Undertale is unreliably framed in relation to Deltarune
- Feuerbach and Deltarune / (9k)
- The Omnipotence of Feeling (Feuerbach)
- Prayer determines God which determines nature (Feuerbach onto Christianity) [false literally] / Prayer makes people's needs into absolute necessity; into fate (Feuerbach) / determination (generic)
- Christianity creates the appearance that human will can move reality (Feuerbach) [may accurately describe doctrine; unknown] / Christianity creates the appearance that human sorrow can move reality (Feuerbach)
- Christianity creates the appearance that a group of people all clustered around the same desires will compel reality to produce them in that the power of people to dominate others increases as the size of a group increases
- Prayer is a repository for hidden sorrow (Feuerbach onto Christianity) / a dialogue of man with his heart (Feuerbach) / the struggling heart bursts ... the closed lips (Feuerbach)
- Prayer divides humans into two beings — man and heart (literal; Deltarune) [canon]
- Human souls can break the Barrier (literal; Undertale) [canon]
- The Barrier represents the line between Lightners in Deltarune and the repository of Lightners' own psychological secrets; this is to imply that memories and secrets are not kept in Lightners' physical bodies as such but are kept somewhere else, such as the Dark Worlds; this is to imply but not state that Undertale was made from Lightners' memories and secrets, which are what escape when Undertale is completed [truth value unknown] (Jungian psychoanalysis onto Deltarune)
- The Red Soul is the link from Lightners to Hometown's god (Deltarune) [heavily implied]
- The Red Soul only brings to necessity the hopes of the player (Deltarune) [truth value unknown]
- determination (Undertale)
- hopes and dreams (motif; Undertale) / wishes (generic) / concealed tears (generic)
- fills you with determination (Undertale)
- ability to save / the power to save (Undertale)
spoiler:encounter (Undertale)- timelines stopping left and right (Undertale)
spoiler:encounter (Undertale)- Amalgamates (Undertale)
- All the monster souls in the Underground are equal to one human soul (Undertale)
- DT extractor (Undertale)
- exactly as foretold by the prophecy (Ralsei, Deltarune)
- it holds your will and compassion and the fate of the world (Ralsei, Deltarune)
- I think your choices matter too, Kris (Ralsei, Deltarune)
- underlying game-reality beneath game world (Deltarune) / "The Depths"
- W.D. Gaster
- The Matrix (motif) / (9k)
- adventure narrative in "special world" (hero's journey; heroine's journey) as queer metaphor / isekai story as queer metaphor / (9k)
- kingdom of isolation (motif, theme, or symbol; Frozen) / ice palace (motif; Deltarune) / (9k)
- 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)
Swatch legend
Each color swatch above represents one of the below topics.
- capitalism
- Liberal-republican states / Liberal-republicanism (structure)
- bourgeois philosophies
- Christianity (cultural group)
- Christian allegorical fiction
- arts and humanities
- fiction
- horror
- dystopian fiction
- end-of-the-world narratives
- antagonists (fiction)
- underlying game-reality (Deltarune; metanarrative fiction)
- LGBT tradition (arts)
- eclectic materialism
- socialist realism (China; art movement)
- socialist realism (late Soviet Union; art movement)
- eclectic-materialist art
- Materialism (Soviet Union)
- materially-accurate statement / statement accurate to partial slice of reality at particular point in history
- "meta-Marxism" / "violet Marxism" / violet Materialism
- Trotskyism (international Marxism)