From Philosophical Research
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cr. 2025-02-28T10:09Z
weird thoughts about elements
- should we be taking it more literally that many elements like Puppet and Scythe are objects? like, the world of Darkners is quite literally composed of objects as elements, thus those are the elements
- is mousewheel not just a joke, but a hint we should be taking elements literally? like, the wheel physically has three mice as elements, so that's what it says in the elements field.
(mousewheel makes me actually rather surprised there was never a joke in chapter 2 about HTML elements. like.... uh... I don't know, a physical table which has the table element, that somehow has three table row elements sitting on it. or something.)
- if objects in the Dark World can fractally become Darkners, and we know this because of the tree with an eye, should we be worried about the fact the buttons have distinctly elemental objects on them? for one, this could be hinting that for some reason it will become a plot point that all the buttons turn into people, and then we can't use them or something.
- will there be really bizarre thrash machine style shenanigans where the main characters get turned into elements because somebody connected them together and turned them into some kind of machine
- Shenlong is almost a Darkner when you think about it. he's an inanimate stone that turns into a creature (this becomes more obvious as a theme if you read Journey to the West, where the Goku or Vegeta parallel is a stone come to life). and what happens when stones come to life? you get to rewrite reality with a magic wish. this makes it quite reasonable to me that Jewel will be paired with Dragon
- but... wait... does that mean elemental pairs actually have something to do with what each Darkner or object turns into as you go deeper? Jevil turned into a scythe. Scythe is an element. what does this mean.....
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cr. 2025-02-28T10:32:21Z
the room in-between. the man behind the tree, in-between.
this is intentional. little did we know, Gaster is based on vague themes of Plateaus and Rhizome
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cr. 2025-02-28T10:32:21Z, ed. 2025-02-28T13:41:42Z
if Deltarune is primarily about different levels of reality
and Deltarune isn't primarily about reality versus magic
how do we know that magic was separated from Deltarune, and not Undertale itself
what if. Undertale and Deltarune were once one continuous reality, and then they were ripped apart
one of them becoming a higher level and one becoming a lower level in the metanarrative ladder
edit: Ralsei clarifies that humans can never use magic, only monsters can use magic in the Dark World
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[cr. 2025-03-03T13:43:39Z]
It took me a long time to figure this out,
but I think I have a genuine idea on what the three save files are: they're _initial conditions_
In physics, determinism is a really specific thing: it's basically one of the barriers between classical physics and quantum physics.
In quantum physics, it is seemingly impossible to measure particles with perfect precision because the particles are the smaller or the same size versus anything measuring them. It's like trying to measure the position or speed of a tennis ball by throwing another tennis ball, and worse yet, it's also a bit like both the tennis balls aren't solid but made out of misty fungible volumes of water. As a result, the outlines of particles appear fuzzy and mostly only become distinguished as objects by the larger-scale effect of their behavior. That got a bit long, but I find quantum mechanics fascinating.
In classical physics, most objects like tennis balls are so constant that given a particular limited slice of the universe, you can often predict a lot of processes with equations if you know the initial conditions. This is the definition of determinism in physics; it requires a lot of knowledge, and generally does not apply to the whole universe. This has an interesting artifact: in some situations, there are processes that should theoretically be predictable but which could have a number of outcomes depending on an uncertain set of initial conditions. (A mathematical model putting in all these initial possibilities is in _superposition_ , and it would outwardly appear that this might be one of the similarities or overlaps between classical and quantum physics. Superpositions in classical processes and the fuzzy wave functions around quantum objects act similarly in calculations.)
So what does this mean for the save menu? It means Gaster has taken the timelines and turned them into a superposition. All the possible save files of Deltarune might be playing along in parallel, but he may have some kind of crazy plan to reunify all the possible save files that exist into a new fuzzy object that can collapse into a number of new possible futures. Logically, it might be that just like a quantum object, when you throw something at it the wave function collapses into exactly one ending. (With a photon, it has to go one way when you throw something at it, in order for it to be physical; that's what being physical is.) But that doesn't necessarily matter if it happens to be a _new_ ending unlike the ones seen before.
This implies that the narrative of Deltarune will actually rely on the existence of _multiple players_ forming The Angel in order to produce multiple save files that would be superimposed together. The game is not requiring individual players to fix the world by messing with save files and routes, it's (hypothetically) operating on the illusion that millions of players networked together are fixing it.
