User:Reversedragon/comm/Deltarune
To me there is a clear pattern of each character going through some kind of emotional growth in their process of growing up, although so far it's not been connected to any kind of "deep lore", it's just been a way to create a character-focused story in each chapter. _Wings of Fire_ comes to mind here: each book focuses on a specific character and has that character on the cover although there is also an overall journey for all of them.
So, I think that two things are true. One, toby had Jockington's story broadly planned, and said he "grows the beard" in reference to that story. Two, Jockington's story is not all that deep, but at the same time, it's giving us a lot more than anyone would have expected. It's the funny sports character without arms surprisingly having an actual character arc. And toby saw this as very funny apparently. So he decided to express it as Jockington the character unexpectedly "growing the beard", and put that exact image in the game as a kind of emphasis.
There may or may not be a connection in Berdly wanting to have an impressive buff body with nipples, Kris wanting to have monster horns, and Jockington growing the beard. That part is my speculation but it does definitely stand out. Maybe it's that Jockington gets what he wishes for because he's the only one that didn't set his standards too high. Or maybe he was just the only one that guessed what would happen correctly. Yeah, that's a point — maybe the real theme here is that what each of the characters wants is irrelevant to what's real, and of all things, they're learning it through their wrong guesses about puberty. Maybe this is some kind of foreshadowing to Kris or Susie having a horrible realization that the only way they will get what they want is to know what will happen and want that thing. Maybe Kris has already had that realization, for all we know, and that's why they behave so weirdly.
* Ice labyrinth, Onion = The blog entry in the sweepstakes talks about Dragon Blazers and getting lost in the ice maze. But a lot of people probably missed that "the ice labyrinth" is also a location in Dragon Ball. Goku has to go to the ice labyrinth to find some sacred water which will either make him stronger or kill him — of course he survives it. (c. DB ep 115, chapter 151) The ice maze shows some illusions and tries to get him lost. But the moment he finds the Ultra Divine Water, the entity that offers it to him is this strange and terrifying shadow blob that rises out of a pond. Bizarrely similar to Onion in some ways.
* Weird route = every time I think about the Weird route I can't not think about how Noelle is in vaguely the same position as Vegeta III/IV. the Weird route is her believing that to succeed in a world that expects her to be strong she has to first believe she's weak and inferior and has to become stronger than anyone. Vegeta is shown even when he is isolated from the Saiyan empire and its existing m.o. of destroying everybody else to continue along trying to kill everyone but himself; in my opinion this is because he is afraid of the consequences of having to coexist with others. the thing you notice immediately about the Weird route is that Noelle destroying everything, or objectifying it, or making it Fall Down, is strongly associated with ice. when Noelle becomes as powerful as possible it will also be associated with ice. this runs weirdly parallel to the way in the Dragon Ball Z era one of the very most powerful characters is Freeza, or before that, King Cold. Freeza uses his power to keep the Saiyans trapped in his galactic empire, able to kill them on a whim or treat them as disposable. technically in this analogy the player of Deltarune is Freeza, but this doesn't mean Deltarune can't go overboard showing this by extending a big heap of extra ice imagery onto Noelle.
* Thorn Ring = I am in general really biased to see random things as Vegeta, but bear with me. when I look at the Thorn Ring I think, for some reason, of when Vegeta is just beginning to try to adjust to the foreign concept of actually forming social bonds and trying to parse how to coexist with Bulma so one person on earth will not hate him, but he seems kind of dissatisfied. I seriously doubt this one was intentional. I feel like this one is me after Deltarune has been out a while attempting to read Dragon Ball through Deltarune, and finding out that I surprisingly like that reading and think it makes more sense that way. Toby Fox might be partially responsible for me creating so many gay or bisexual Dragon Ball timelines.
* Fallen Down = the state where Goku etc is on the ground and could be dying but isn't quite yet. when you are Fallen Down, you can get back up only using.... Determination. it makes so much more sense when you read it this way. I don't know why I never figured this o— oh right, I hadn't watched Dragon Ball or assumed every fucking writer had read it
* Rudy lying in bed with illness = this one will make you mad. this had very clear significance in Dragon Ball: it happened in the arc where there were two different timelines. Goku is lying in bed and thanks to time travel and timelines, he literally has one ending where he dies and one ending where he survives. the image of Rudy lying in bed is literally supposed to make us question whether there are two endings. Toby Fox has, unbelievably, interpreted the image of Goku lying in bed as a quantum superposition. Goku lying on the ground could also be a superposition. I really have to wonder where this whole motif of reading Dragon Ball as a superposition all started, but I could not say.
* Objects being people = this one is a real stretch — I'd believe the Thorn Ring theory before this — but in Dragon Ball many people are named after objects, almost always foods. I am not sure what this would actually say about Deltarune. given how the Dark World is supposed to be a close metaphor for the Light World, it would probably be a clearer parallel if any major characters had clearly unbelievable names, like Kris had a classmate just named Pear or Rake or something and those were just the kinds of names people had. Burgerpants/Pizzapants does not count.
* Undyne the Undying = in Undertale, Undyne "feels everyone's hearts beat as one", apparently gaining the power to protect the earth. this moment, rather obviously, runs parallel to Goku and Mr. Satan directing the people into the Spirit Bomb to protect the earth. however, there is another very very important implication to this when we look at the schizoanalyst themes in Deltarune. the parallel drawn between Undertale-Deltarune characters and Dragon Ball would seem to imply that Toby has interpreted the Spirit Bomb as a representation of people bursting out of society around their supposedly comparable and shared experience of oppression and forming Rhizome. (this, by the way, has some rather contradictory implications in the context of Dragon Ball — if Goku organized people into Rhizome, then Rhizome only works when charismatic capitalists show up to motivate people.)
For reference, there is more than one SCP where somebody has to make a sacrifice to keep some awful force sealed, like that one with the well (SCP-7776, which is rather gruesome), and there are a bunch of SCPs where information is redacted from lower-level personnel so the SCP doesn't find it as easily. The latter thing would be almost exactly what's happening with Kris and Ralsei versus the player.
There are a lot of details to go over as support for this theory that, I apologize, I don't totally remember off the top of my head. So here are all things I immediately remember: * Toby Fox stated somewhere in either a Japanese interview or page about Earthbound Halloween Hack (?) that as a kid he projected onto Varik the protagonist of _Brandish_ that he was secretly afraid of monsters and had no genuine reason to fight them. * In Undertale, the way Chara weaponizes Asriel and also Asgore, indirectly turning both against the humans, is a parallel to a certain kind of player who would merely use an RPG knight to turn people into enemies and destroy them. (That's somewhat obvious / known) * Thus it could be said that Undertale was already played once before the player ever appeared, when Chara became the player of the narrative and "played" the monsters of The Underground by sending Asriel to fight the humans. By one interpretation Flowey's shape is a visual metaphor where the flower is a "real" object from outside the game world (The Underground) and Chara forcing Asriel to ultimately become a flower symbolizes Chara bringing in terrible cynical attitudes from the real world that corrupt the game world and creating this cynical falsely-"realist" being, Flowey. (This analogy and a few other details came from Howard Blast's video) * Themes of reality versus fiction are important in both Undertale and Deltarune. Undyne asks if anime is real. Asriel and Mad Mew Mew attempt to realize parts of anime shows, or children's drawings that resemble them. Undyne has the ability to be a hero without a player, against the player, banishing the player. So does Sans, in his own desperate way. Anime shows exist in a level below Undyne and Alphys, then above there are the "true heroes" of the Underground, then above that there's the player. * Deltarune makes the theme of layers of fiction obvious fairly quickly. Alphys is caught looking at important "animated schoolwork". Noelle talks about Dragon Blazers. Kris and Susie can clearly see a room of cards, and the card kingdom Dark World. * In the Dark Worlds, main characters have new appearances telling us a bit about them. Inanimate objects get personalities and stories mirroring and elaborating on basic facts about them. Messing with the position of objects results in the card people complaining that somebody "put Spade King and his strange son into power". * Everything in the Dark Worlds mirrors something that's happening in the Light World. Keep that in mind: _everything_ . * In the Dark Worlds, Susie can deal with her problem of being forced into the role of a bully, and Noelle can deal with her fear of tyrannical moms. What problem is Kris dealing with? Clearly there's something going on between Kris and the Red Soul the player uses, isn't there? * In the Light World, Kris keeps the Red Soul in a birdcage. This is a physical object. Is this physical object's concept mirrored somewhere in the Dark Worlds of existing or later chapters? * Within the Dark Worlds, Kris, Susie, and Ralsei are chasing after a mysterious "Knight" and trying to close the Dark Fountains. * Spamton is a Darkner. Beyond his basic traits of being a spam email his existence and his role are all made up. Spamton tries to say something out loud about The Knight, and then he is silenced. * Ralsei tells Berdly not to create another Dark Fountain, like there is an unspoken carefully crafted plan and Berdly is screwing things up. Berdly has already been framed as not as smart as he thinks he is, underscoring that he might not know what Kris knows. Put next to the incident of Queen explaining The Knight, this seems to subtly provide context that maybe Queen is dangerously close to revealing something about The Knight the player is not supposed to know. The Dark World reflects your repressed problems; Kris having to constantly evade the player's knowledge they are fighting the player would be a problem. * Queen is revealed to be aware she is only playing the role of a villain, and in a sense, is only trying to help Kris and Noelle. Despite Dark Worlds containing villains, we _know_ that in a fantasy RPG sense most characters in Deltarune are on the side of Kris. They may not be great friends with Kris, but in an emergency, they're all allies. * Jevil and Spamton are affiliated with Gaster. Neither of them genuinely feels like much of a threat to the cosmos. They turn into useful items. Jevil has the feel that his purpose is to distract The Angel with a sidequest and a long battle. Spamton seems like a selfish entity that wants to break out of his Dark World and cause trouble, but once again, he is an evil that Lightners created; his nature as an antagonist is all made up. He's probably the way he is because Gaster only told him a fragment of the plan he could be trusted with and left him to contain himself in the Dark World. * Most characters inside Deltarune are friendly. Even Gaster, or Geoff the text box guy, or Garfield the letter writer, or the eGG man behind the tree, are all relatively friendly toward the player. It's really like there are no characters who are each other's enemies until The Angel showed up. It's more like Gaster put on his Opposer hat to fight The Angel just to make sure nobody else would fight each other. * Keeping this in mind, isn't it strange Queen doesn't already know who The Knight is? Spamton seems to, but he's not supposed to tell. * So, it's possible Kris is not the Knight, but it's very important to remember the Knight is a very secret thing to somebody and it's rather forbidden for Darkners and people who aren't Kris, Susie, or Ralsei to know about The Knight. If The Knight isn't Kris, then The Knight is implied to be fully in cahoots with Kris against The Angel. * In the prison scene in Chapter 1, when Susie is left with Lancer she tries to destroy him. The whole time Ralsei was explaining something about this scene to Kris. Ralsei may have been explaining that as long as Susie is "imprisoned" in a Dark World she will never be able to kill anybody in the Light World — the way she did halfway try to before — so even if The Angel pulls some kind of Chara event where it tries to divide the world into warring kingdoms that hate each other using an RPG knight, as long as they always have somebody connected to The Angel and they keep making Dark Worlds and telling The Angel the goal is to seal them, it won't be able to break out into the Light World where it can cause real damage. * In Chapter 2 there is another scene of Ralsei explaining something to Kris the player doesn't get to hear. * In Chapter 2 Snowgrave exists. This is, more or less, an event of The Angel partially breaking out of its prison to use a Lightner to kill a bunch of inanimate objects. The Angel is able to seriously harm Berdly without reaching the Light World. The Weird route reads oddly like an SCP breaching containment, potentially to nastier and nastier levels in later chapters. * December Holiday is suspiciously missing. Almost nobody talks about her. Any time information is omitted in Deltarune there is some chance it is intentionally being hidden from The Angel. We don't know what it would look like if Kris failed to successfully banish the player without inviting The Roaring and they had to find a new ritual subject. Was December, perhaps, the previous host that failed to contain The Angel? Was Spamton specifically warning Kris about the concept of a containment breach?
[...] "Angel cage theory". [...]
the area of darkness with eyes on it outside the Dark Worlds, in-between. this is intentional. little did we know, Gaster is based on vague themes of Plateaus and Rhizome
I hate that this is more likely to make sense than be a joke because I am pretty sure that the point of Gaster being shattered across time and space into seemingly millions of Gasters that are connecting to millions of players is that when he is shattered like that he is in-between.
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.
[edit:] Noelle says she got out of the ice labyrinth in Dragon Blazers by going "every possible direction". this is a very intentional detail
Keep in mind that Deltarune begins with a survey. It was called SURVEY_PROGRAM. The opening contains a bunch of seemingly pointless questions. But hundreds of thousands of people are each entering in answers to it. You can already begin to see the point each time you see a let's play open up the goner maker and give different remarks about it: the segment wouldn't be interesting when playing by yourself, but it becomes more interesting when people share it for others. Then there was Asriel's drawer. What does this mean? Three different drawers is supposed to imply that Deltarune's future is made of hundreds of thousands of player save files that are all slightly different coming together. This is how the files can go to different places individually but all sum up to one ending: the one ending is related to all of the files together, and the basic fact many players are playing the game is diegetic. Now? There's this survey about "how long it took her to smile". There is definitely some scheme going on with this thing. Maybe Gaster is trying to change the event by starting with a lot of possibilities, or make it happen when it never would otherwise. Maybe Noelle hasn't smiled yet in relation to some particular thing, or something. Maybe the future will be really different correlated with whether _the mayor_ ever smiles. It's weird we need a survey about something so specific. The vessel sequence makes sense because Kris being controllable is important to the story, and the vessel showing up might be important for all we know. So this person that takes a variable amount of time to smile must be really important.
Here is my further addition to the theory I only realized today: I think Gaster is fabricating heaven. I think the purpose of all these surveys is to manufacture a world above the Light World which otherwise from the point of view of the Lightners wouldn't have existed. Gaster or somebody figured out that the Dark World can be alive when there is a world above it, so he started fabricating heaven so the Light World would be alive. In-universe, Gaster invented us, no joke.
I haven't seen anybody read it that way, but if it did happen to be correct, the possibilities for later chapters would be more interesting. Maybe if Toriel was in the Dark World the route she would do would be about the things she is trying to escape from — I have no idea who she is going to get kicked out of town as a failure instead of Asgore, but definitely somebody innocent. Alphys has to leave, but you end up with a new teacher and Kris's choices don't matter.
- 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.....
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
in the main story Kris is supposed to banish the Angel. but in the Weird route Noelle is being associated more heavily with religious themes. if Noelle is the Angel, then what happens? she gets banished. so, the Darkners banish her.
this would sort of imply that the Dark Worlds have to inevitably end with something below them ripping them open, but maybe they could. Dark Worlds often end from above anyway. and we know they can get even darker and create living trees. maybe that's just it. Noelle manages to make everything dark and destroy the Dark Worlds but it doesn't truly work because the Darkners kick her out and then the Dark Worlds cease to be connected to the Light World.
* december * carol * rudy * papyrus * dess (memory) * carol (memory) * papyrus (projection)