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flightworks2018-11-23 01:59 am
feralphoenix) wrote in flightworks2018-11-23 01:59 am
deltarune reaction posts
aaaaaaand to round out those rehomed posts from tumblr, here's a conglomerate of my two major reaction posts to deltarune. the first one was a collection of my thoughts from the first time i played the game, which i posted as soon as the spoiler moratorium was up, and was originally posted at this link.
the second one was from about a week later, and was originally posted here. image sources are my own screencaps of deltarune/the artbook pdf, temmie's post of the opening cgs, caps of manlybadasshero's let's plays, and my own photo of my copy of the little booklet that comes with the physical version of undertale.
OH MY GOD DELTARUNE
- first off let's collectively pour one out for all the poor guys who didn't want to think that the player was an in-game entity.
- second.............. oh my god the new system features???????? I LOVE THEM?????????? party members!!!! group ACTs!!!!!!!!! monster party members casting magic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A RUN BUTTON!!!!!!!!!!!! GRAZING BONUSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! all the new, more dynamic sprite animations were so great too... susie (her laugh!!!!!), fantasy asriel/"""ralsei""" (lmao), and chara's dramatic arrival especially. (the faceplant perfectly mirroring the chara and asriel memory sequence from undertale oh my god im crying... also holy shit papyrus was not kidding about the shambling). toby has become so powerful over the past 3 years i can't wait to roll around in this system more whenever the next upd8 and/or full game drops
- ive expressed multiple times that i wished toby would just come out and tell everyone in no uncertain terms that frisk is trans. deltarune has been one fuck of a monkey's paw. (for what it's worth i appreciate how this was handled and presented as deeply upsetting subtle horror and a sign that something isn't right here)
- naturally gaster's "survey" was super ominous but the intro of the game was deeply unsettling too, with all the christian paraphernalia lying around (undertale goes out of its way to joke about how the monsters dont know what christmas is, for example) and all the small contradictions with the end credits of undertale/the q&a/the previews of the alarm clock app (e.g. toriel's school is much smaller and doesn't have a garden, her house has a very different layout). it was very "hmmmmmmmm... okay...? what is all of this???"
- and then i got distracted by SUSIE!!!!!!!!!!!!! and asriel sweeping us away into the realm of fantasy, so i stayed in denial until talking to undyne in the end-of-chapter walkaround and it finally sunk in that this is The Bad Timeline. and the more people you talk to the worse it gets...
- the very flowey and toriel-esque structure where you have two characters immediately contradicting each other about the nature of this world manifesting itself in gaster's "this is a world where you can't choose who you are and your choices in general are meaningless" vs asriel's "i believe that your choices DO matter" is indeed very very interesting. i want to see where this goes
- i want to know what gaster's angle on all this is and why he's showing us this fucked-up alternate timeline as much as i want to understand more context of the fucked-up alternate timeline.
- one theory: i think that the asriel we meet in the dark may somehow be undertale asriel? there are so many angles to examine the dark from thematically given his involvement. like aside from it being undertale digest in plot structure, it's so tonally similar to undertale itself, between the goofs and the world's friendliness and the musical cues and how overtly queer it is. especially in comparison to the town topside where just about everything has been no-homoed. immediately after """ralsei""" (who else noticed the anagram immediately and cracked up) joins the party you can hit on him; at least one of clover's heads seems to id as a boy and they like boys; susie is encouraged to flirt with female enemies. i wonder if part of the reason asriel's giving us this fantasy segment is to help comfort frisk and give them a way to cope with how miserable their reality is right now.
- but more specifically wrt asriel it feels like the story in general is also his own redemption fantasy. in his "undertale made from the playroom equipment" fun roleplay he gets to be a kind and helpful support character who looks after and encourages frisk instead of being, well, flowey. when faced with a brash and aggressive character who's mistrustful and whose first solution to any given problem is Punch It, he stands up to susie. it makes me wonder if he's trying to act towards her the way that as postcanon asriel he wishes he treated precanon chara.
- and so his interaction with susie after the fight with the king where she talks to him about how his actions can have painful fallout for his friends... beyond just being a really great scene in general the subtext is killing me so dead
- also with what a big deal is made out of asriel's singing in the dark and the ending theme following the "field of hopes and dreams" melody i cant help but feel like the ed is meant to be asriel singing to either frisk or the player...
- i seem to recall a bunch of people insisting that toby would have to make a sequel about The True Meaning Of The Delta Rune Prophecy so those folks must have gone wild when that was the angle asriel's fantasy story took
- thank you toby for glasses + teen mane asriel he's so cute i love him
- i love susie so much!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE SUSIE SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i wonder what canon timeline suzy is like/if there's any meaning in her name being spelled differently by timeline (clam girl in undertale has ALWAYS called her suzy in ALL the viral deltarune previews, even the most recent one from the switch version! theres GOT to be something up with that). also end of chapter walkaround mk's anecdote about her has me distraught. who hurt her im going to spray them like a misbehaving cat!!!!!!!!!!
- i love that she has the exact fucking same "hair in face scary, hair out of face adorable" aesthetic as frisk and chara............ i love her....................... i love her. (gigi dg voice) unga bunga girl cute
- lancer is a good boy... his friendship with susie is so beautiful i love all of their interactions
- like ralsei+susie and susie+lancer's implications for chara and asriel are fucking fantastic and i love them but also, i love this stuff for what it is in text.......... i love how the big scary school bully accidentally trips into friendship when some lonely bratty little prince decides she's super cool............... i love how asriel realizes that he's hurt susie's feelings and needs to be kinder to her....................... i am revitalized by the sheer energy of fluffy boys and mean girls.
- fuck squad for life
- fangamer if you make a fuck squad shirt i will probably save up to buy it
- if this is canon asriel........................................... how and why is he here though. why is he the same age as frisk and susie when topside asriel is apparently significantly older (middle or high school student vs college student).
- everything that the topside townspeople have to say about topside asriel makes me so uneasy. what kind of person does he have to be to be acknowledged as the one true ideal in a world like this one? everyone uniformly idolizes him to a point that's creepy.
- everything the townspeople have to say about frisk is so distressing too... the implications that they're super withdrawn and extremely depressed are. Whoof. asriels side of their room being coated in trophies and full of personal effects and frisk's being completely barren aside from the cage...... i am so worried about this kid
- also. how did toriel and asgore wind up divorced in this world. how long has it been since asgore's seen frisk that he's forgotten that they dont like bear hugs. this version of frisk appears to have been formally adopted by the dreemurrs before the divorce, and so young that they didn't understand the difference between themself as a human and the dreemurrs as boss monsters. did chara exist in this world and if so what was their role. why was it significant to frisk (and/or chara if chara is narrating the in-verse parts of the game again) that the green crayon was missing. WHATS GOING ON
- out of everything, sans' conversation felt really different from talking to everyone else. the fact that he and papyrus apparently just moved in makes me wonder if the two of them are also here from the main timeline and if so what they're trying to do.
- i am so heartened that chara doesnt like this timeline any more than i do. also i'm glad that their "pull a mcfreaking knife out of mcfreaking nowhere" skills from the omega flowey boss fight are still a thing.
- i want susie and chara to team up to Smash This Timeline
- asriel's choice of what to do for frisk being to comfort and empower them... chara's choice apparently being "WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS. GIVE ME THE MEATSACK IM GOING TO GO BEAT THEM UP"... im overwhelmed with affection for these characters
- so what, as players, can we do in this timeline? this is explicitly our save file now. so with what little power we have, inside the constraints of the game's programming... how can we help? our helping guide frisk through asriel's story to make friends with susie might be a start, but... we still know so little.
- additionally the mew mew kissy cutie 1 vs 2 debate now has some really funny implications when looked at as undertale and deltarune huh
- mettaton still being a ghost apparently makes me so worried for mad mew mew. is she okay
- i am also very sad that we had to find out gerson's surname, crystal's name, and shyra's name like this. though, i do not know how much of the extra lore we can trust is consistent between timelines given the differences between deltarune and undertale
- i wonder a little if this is a timeline SO alternate that monsters were never banished beneath mt ebott at all...
- i also wonder if the build-a-human from gaster's intro is going to show up again in any way... all the options for shirts and hairstyles are so cute. some of the options for traits were a little alarming tho lmao. i didnt know what to name mine because i wasnt sure if this was supposed to be representing an existing character or someone new so i just named them what i named chara in my first undertale file before i knew what their real name was
- i need to rewatch the stinger specifically again just so that i can believe my own memory about how blatantly its telegraphed that this is OUR chara, undertale canon timeline chara. what are you and asriel doing here!!!!!!!! i'm happy that us players aren't stranded in deltarune with worryingly depressed frisk solely in our care but HOW
- wild theory that has a high chance of being proved wrong: true lab log 17's wording is so similar to gaster's official announcement of deltarune on the undertale official twitter... he was scattered through TIME as well as space, so... all this time we've been assuming that the "you two" he mentions in that log are sans and papyrus or sans and alphys but. what if it was chara and asriel all along. did gaster bring them here after undertale like he brought us
- nervous about the future of undertale 2: the halloween hack, but i have a very large amount of faith in toby so i'll try to hang in there and stick around to see where this is going.
OH MY GOD DELTARUNE: THE SQUEAKQUEL
Thoughts & Observations About The Protagonist
- i think i am basically going to stick to calling them "the deltarune protag/mc" or something similar until we can get confirmation on what they actually want to be called. we still don't know that yet since they've never introduced themself to anyone (ralsei already knows them as "kris"/knows susie's name; the player can pick whether they call themself kris or a hippopotamus when introducing themself to onionsan).
- from what toriel says about how they're going to be going to college soon too, i think we can safely guess that they're in high school (so, 15-18). they seem to be the only kid in their class who still wears stripes unless the blue borders on susie's shirt count as stripes?
- and asriel could be anywhere from 18-22, so the age difference between him and the protag could be anywhere from a few months (enough for asriel to make the age cutoff) to 7 years. but asriel also appears to be in the same vague age group as burgerpants, bratty, and catty, and bratty refers to herself and the other older monsters as "big kids" compared to the main character, so the age difference is probably at least a few years. burgerpants says he wants to go to the same place as asriel, so maybe asriel is at least not in his last year yet...?
- the way that asriel's side of their bedroom is stacked with trophies and personal effects and the protag's only got the wagon and birdcage initially got me worrying, but looking at the way that toriel is still fussing about how asriel is doing at college (and her Very Extreme overprotectiveness of him - trying to sentence bratty to 1 million years jail for kissing him/actually sentencing asriel to 5 million years jesus, and getting catty LITERALLY ARRESTED for horny dancing with him at prom????? fuckin yikes lmfao) i think we can clearly say that asriel is the favorite. the way that toriel tears into the protag if you goof around with the toilet too much (she initially worries that they're sick and then says that if they're doing another toilet prank like the time they put a bath bomb in the toilet they get to pay for the plumbing) is... concerning. it seems like when they were kids asriel and the protag pulled a lot of pranks and got into a lot of trouble, but the protag is the one who gets blamed for them in the end because asriel is Just Such A Nice Boy (tm).
- the protag shows signs of being very severely depressed (sleeps all the time, has stopped engaging with friends) but toriel seems to not... quite understand this. she needles them for sleeping in, and if the protag calls her while out in town they seem to ask her for a ride home but she refuses to pick them up because ~walking is healthier~. hey toriel, what if they were hurt or sick or someone weird was following them around, and they needed your help?????? at least part of this seems to be her punishing them for ~making her wait half an hour after school for them~ but all of the mc's weirdness that results from us having them hoof it around town to gather information for us... noelle gets worried about them, and some other villagers say it's weird too, but toriel seems to just be like "ah yes, good, my weird kid is acting neurotypical now, this is all i could have ever wanted" and while this is a writing choice that i think works well with the worldbuilding (this toriel grew up in a different culture and has never lost kids) i will fight her for this child if i have to. w.d. "i'm helping!" gaster assigned ME as their babysitter and im ready to Throw Down
- like this isn't to say that i think toriel doesn't care about the protagonist at ALL, she clearly seems to, they just seem less close/she seems less attentive towards their needs because she understands them less and is more invested in asriel.
- in the beginning when she takes their hand they hang their head. :(
- lies down on the floor thinking about susie taunting them in the beginning like "you can't even walk around w/o somebody holding your hand" she's not.................. 100% wrong............... also rudy in the end of chapter walkaround like "did your mom make you come visit me" WELL TECHNICALLY SORTA..............
- this kid seems really attached to asgore though. if you have them go to his flower shop in the walkaround they actually approach him by themself, without player input. and if you got the egg from the weird guy in the dark, they'll put it in his fridge... their visitation w/him appears to be limited though, he doesn't seem to have had them stay over at his place for a while (if ever) considering that he's all "it will be great! you can have my bed!! i will sleep somewhere else... wait, hm"
- still curious as to when exactly the protag was adopted into the dreemurr family and under what circumstances. they've been a family member for AT LEAST eight years judging by the old photo on toriel's desktop, and the protag at first didn't seem to realize just how different they were from the dreemurrs so either they must have been really young or had limited contact with other humans... asriel's yoshi birthday party that toriel talks about seems to have happened before the mc was adopted, just by the way she tells it to them
- still want to know what the Fuck caused the divorce
- i wonder about their handedness too because of the stinger - their ACT gestures are done with their right hand but both the great yeet and the knife pull are done with their left hand. is that ut chara popping in or is that the protag themself getting real done with our shit? We Wont Know Until The Final Game I Guess, let's all hope toby gets a great team together that loves and supports him
- anyway, we know that they sleep a lot (this may have been a thing since before asriel left, since toriel says that he's carried them to school at least once?) (the jpn version apparently specifies that when he did that he carried them as in In His Arms lmao) and that they eat a lot too since toriel gets all pissy about "dont eat the Whole Pie"
- their favorite food is marshmallows. the dark candy item is marshmallow flavored, the junk ball smells like marshmallows, if you let them sniff the scented markers they go for the marshmallow one, and the hot chocolate from the diner bunny is filled with homemade marshmallows.
- they don't care about christianity. alvin the pastor says that they only seem to care about the "sick" fruit juice (the communion wine) and otherwise don't participate, as compared to toriel who's very pious and asriel who used to be in the children's choir.
- as far as school goes noelle helps them with their homework sometimes, and it seems like monster kid is usually their partner for group projects if they aren't late. their locker is right next to toriel's classroom too.
- they have seen save points before, but don't seem to understand what they are. narration describes the save points as "the flickering lights that only [they] can see" - maybe DT is just an unknown property in this timeline because alphys isn't a scientist.
- the fact that save points never appear in town concerns the hell out of me, especially because save points are all over the place in the dark, and tend to appear whenever the mc gets closer to the rest of the party. naming the team causes a new save point to appear, for instance.
- they come to really, really care deeply about susie over the course of the story. they're actually the one who sends us to go with susie while she's trying to jailbreak everyone alone, they shield her from the spade king's attack of their own volition, and they get annoyed at monster kid for badmouthing her. they also tell toriel by themself that they were with a friend when gaster finally stops clogging their phone post-dark world.
- (that this is something so unusual that it makes toriel lighten her intended punishment towards them........ Im Still Worried, That Hasnt Stopped Being A Thing Or Anything)
- i find it very interesting that in the dark, where they seem to be so much happier and livelier, they're wearing the Designated Frisk Colors, blue and pink, rather than the green and yellow they wear topside. those exact shades of green and yellow are actually super rare in the dark. part of this might just be that colors are abstracted in the dark world, but...
- idk if this is meant to be A Thing (tm) or anything but it's also interesting how the mc's color scheme is blue/cyan in the dark (integrity/patience) while susie's is purple (perseverance) and ralsei's is green (kindness)...
- since there's discussion about how the soul/the player's control functions in deltarune in terms of the party system, it's probably worth noting that both ralsei and the narration identify the red soul as the protag's. what does that mean for the great yeet??????????? Fuck If I Know
- i made a post about this elsewhere but it's also probably significant that the protag's hair and skin color are the same as frisk's.
- another thing that makes the stinger stick out as weird is that the protag is SO much more submissive to the player than frisk and chara are in ut. like even during a normal undertale playthrough, sometimes the kids will veto certain ACT options ("cry" against mettaton is shot down by chara, for instance) or railroad you into choices (notably roleplaying with alphys). there are a Lot of moments topside where you can tell the protag to do something that they don't want to do, and they will do as commanded. if you tell them not to play the piano in the hospital, for instance, they'll hold their hands out over the keys like they want to play but won't, and you can make them read alphys' anime review despite their legion of no's (while most yes/no prompts have yes at the left, this one has the giant no cloud on the left). they will resist you trying to make them throw away the junk ball, but if you push them they'll still do it.
- i like that the game draws a line between stuff that a player will tend towards doing anyway to gather as much information as possible and learn about the world not realizing that they could be hurting the mc's feelings until it's too late, versus the junk ball, which you Know they want to hold on to, and which therefore becomes an act of deliberate cruelty if you force them to drop it.
- light brought this up on twitter but where Did they learn to play the piano? the hospital receptionist says they usually play more beautifully even with the missing keys, so they were probably very good once, but toriel doesn't have a piano...
- but anyway, the mc being so obedient both fits in with their depression and with the worldbuilding - a Big part of christian life philosophy is unquestioning obedience to authority, and even though they don't seem to care for it they've still been pickling in this culture all their life... especially given that they're in the care of this world's toriel, who can be a little bit yikes wrt control at times.
- so... what's the deal with the stinger??? is this the main character finally deciding that they've had enough and fuck you in particular, or is this ut chara interceding on their behalf and warning the player to Be Nice, You Jerk???? while the mc is mostly associated with frisk-ish qualities in the narrative with some chara-ish ones thrown in due to nurture (i guess every human who spends time with asriel absorbs prank-liking from him via osmosis), the visual direction of the stinger is heavily tied to chara.
- the faceplant (where the protag usually falls backwards frisk-style) and their pushing themself up look exactly like temmie's cgs of chara and asriel's meeting.
- this shambling walk brings to mind how papyrus describes chara poorly piloting frisk's body in a no mercy run.
- the little finger wiggle before they reach into their own chest to grab the soul is similar to the way that asriel wiggles his fingers when he reassumes boss monster form. (chara and asriel often echo each other's personal cues in undertale.)
- pulling a knife out of nowhere is something that ut chara does for frisk in the omega flowey boss fight - no matter what weapon you have equipped while fighting asgore, the attack animations during that boss battle are ALWAYS the knife one. i believe this is the case for the final attack on sans in his boss battle too but i've never actually fought that dude myself so take that one with a grain of salt lmao
- and this sure looks like it could be the original generation creepy face! that red flash in their eyes echoes the soulless pacifist stinger too.
- basically: ???????????? i'm all ears for whatever the followup on this turns out to be.
- anyway, one last thing about the stinger is that i like how its connotations change hugely depending on your individual actions in undertale. toby's confirmed for us that undertale remains however we left it... so this probably seems extra ominous to a player who's done the no mercy ending before. "let us erase this pointless world AND MOVE ON TO THE NEXT"... is a phrase that might be echoing through some people's minds now lmao. but if you've only done the true pacifist ending your reaction might be more in line with mine, which was "baby What are you doing. i know I sure didnt teach you to act like this, whatcha up to. what are you Doing here"... once you realize you can wiggle the soul around in the cage this also turns from something that's targeted at the protag to something that's targeted against YOU, the player. i just think the personal context you bring to that whole thing is neat
- my instinct is still that the protag is this world's equivalent of frisk (because their story role, coloration, and a lot of their traits etc are so similar - they even get the "lol nope the main character is not who you thought it was" fakeout as ut frisk but at the beginning instead of at the end) whose main differences are because of the environment in which they've been raised, and that goner human was meant to have been chara's counterpart (since we can name them both and have the most direct influence over them out of any character).
Thoughts And Observations About Susie & Ralsei
- that conversation they have where they casually destroy precanon chara and asriel? still good just sayin
- i would really like to know how susie's vicious cycle with the other kids started. aside from noelle they all hate and fear her, and she seems extremely sensitive to the fact that she's disliked... her solution to this however is "if i'm SUPER SCARY then everyone will HAVE to leave me alone" which just... makes everything... worse......
- extra sad because if you talk to her for like two minutes it already becomes abundantly clear that her bark is worse than her bite...... and how quick she is to completely unravel when lancer accepts her.........
- i love that she explicitly embodies the precanon ut chara-esque "theyre ENEMIES youre SUPPOSED to beat them up thats how it WORKS!!!" line of thought. just mechanically it's an interesting thing to manage and it's fun to watch the change in her as the story goes on...
- i still want to know whether her eating really weird stuff is because that's just her species' natural diet, whether it's just because she's so hungry, or because she has pica or something...
- the fact that SO MANY of her noodle incidents seem to have to do with food really seems to point to her not getting fed enough on a day to day basis... who hurt her I Will Fight Them
- but in light of this, the way she offers the candy to lancer as soon as he says he's never gotten to try it before... lies facedown on the ground i love susie so much
- i wonder what kind of monster she is, anyway??? her starting weapon, the mane ax, says it's forged from the mane of a "dragon whelp", but she looks very different from the dragon family at the diner... maybe she's a different kind of dragon? i saw someone (i think it was aera?) suggest kelpie on twitter which i like too
- if ralsei has nothing to do with extraplanar asriels and is instead just toby dogshaming his baby boy on a metatextual level, my other guess would be that he's an old imaginary friend of delta asriel's. that would still fit in to the dark world's theme of things that have been forgotten or abandoned by the topside monsters, and there doesn't seem to be a toy that corresponds to him in gerson's old classroom which is the topside form of the card kingdom, so...
- he still seems to be counted as a different being than delta asriel given that you can hit on him so much (the hugs, the ribbon, the way he blushes if you stand too close to him while he's in the party...)
General Observations And Questions
- monster culture in hometown seems to be Significantly closer to humans' than ut monsters' was. aside from them having adopted christianity they have a graveyard (it seems like the objects the monsters' dust was placed on are buried there to match human funerals?) and they eat physical food, including meat. susie mentions a free ham sandwich day and remarks once that none of the magical food she eats in the dark is filling and that she finds it weird. monsters have very human-style bathrooms now too, so i guess it's confirmed that physical food means physical poop. alvin the pastor (is he gerson's son, or grandson? his drawing of gerson is still hanging up in gerson's old classroom) says something about the angel, so it appears that the delta rune prophecy itself still exists and has been merged with what monsters have absorbed of human christianity.
- now, does the abandonment of the darkners/the change of the balance in dark and light have anything to do with that assimilation into human culture??? judging from toby's comment in the afterword about how getting the town layout right Here And Now was essential and the fact that there's still another dark fountain that needs sealing somewhere further away from the card kingdom (plus the knight and the queen mentioned by jevil and the spade king), i'm inclined to think that the rest of the story's dark world areas will also correspond to various parts of town.
- i love seam
- during parts of their dialogue seam's remaining button eye sometimes rotates in a way that reminds me of omega flowey's "everyone else"??? i also love... that the little buttonholes close like the button eye is a compound eye... toby that's very homestuck of you
- (i also love that susie's theme is just fukcing. vriska guitars)
- a couple soundtrack observations: rude buster quotes asgore's theme at 0:27, field of hopes and dreams sneaks the a part of once upon a time in at 1:17ish, imminent death and vs susie both quote you idiot/your best nightmare, and darkness falls (which i believe is a neutral end-exclusive bgm...? actually the game over bgm) quotes gaster's theme. the hometown theme (plus its variants, such as school) quote snowdin town. also tracks that prominently feature once upon a time tend to use the a and c parts only; the b part is so far absent.
- it's already been noted that don't forget is mcfucking everywhere, but the prophecy theme is pretty prominent in chaos king etc too. i want to say that the waltz line in the circus is the backing to lantern in a dif key which would fit because of jevil and seam's past friendship.
- also the variation on lancer's theme used for thrash machine cracks me up every fucking time
- the alarm clock sample dialogue where asgore mentions rudy seems to imply that in the undertale timeline rudy has since passed away maybe? so i'm very worried about him. his concerns about noelle's future and the way he brushes you off if you ask about his illness makes it sound like his prognosis is actually pretty bad... if deltarune is The Game Where We Get To See Firsthand What Its Like When Monsters Fall Down i will cry lmao
- noelle's mom does in fact seem to be the mayor, from the way that she describes the situation... i'm wondering if noelle's mom is also the one who left asgore the note threatening to evict him, since it's signed "c" and there are a lot of christmas-themed names that could start with c. (i think we can rule out catty and catti since they're a young adult and a teen respectively who still live with their family)
- (hey what happened to their dad's arm??? has he just always not had one or did he lose it somehow or?????)
- i wonder where noelle lives... maybe that gate she hangs out in front of is the front gate to her family's house or something and they have a really bigass place
- I Am Deeply Concerned For Noelle???? her dad might be dying, her relationship with her mom seems strained, and she seems kind of... downtrodden. petition for susie and the protag to envelop her in friendship
- the holidays apparently used to be a lot closer with the dreemurrs and i wonder if the reason that changed is because of the divorce, since rudy and asgore are apparently close/rudy has that whole hopeless crush on him... rudy suggests that the dreemurrs used to live next door to them so i wonder if toriel's house at the top of town is a place she moved to with asriel and the protag afterwards/asgore didn't always live in the flower shop
- the trellises in asgore's back room are really pretty. i am also deeply concerned about his well-being considering (gestures) that entire situation. his remark about the flowers from the wedding bouquet vs the local climate is interesting, i wonder if that means that the dreemurrs moved here from another place or if asgore and toriel just got married somewhere else (wherever they and rudy went to college?????)
- for that matter, where does SUSIE live???????????? is she in the apartment complex or is she just... roughing it somewhere
- speaking of susie's living situation it's... concerning to me that when she and the protag just fucking went missing for an entire day nobody seemed to have told either of their parents or was even all that worried... they just went "yeah thats susie and [the mc] for ya lmao"... on alphys' part this is probably part of her anxiety/desire to be ~the cool teacher~ but?????? shouldnt two kids disappearing be a huge deal ESPECIALLY in a small town like this....... you guys........
- human assimilation definitely has not done the monsters any favors
- prostrates myself on the ground hoping against hope that the royal guards are still dating even if they have to keep it a secret from everyone else.......... also i hope that fuku fire and skateboard girl are dating too. please toby thats my favorite obscure npc ship
- HEY SPEAKING OF FUKU FIRE............. WHERE THE FUCK....... IS GRILLBY??????????????? she has a line about how she isnt going to apply for a job at the diner despite liking the uniforms bc she thinks serving drinks is a weird job for a fire elemental
- BUT GRILLBYS IS RIGHT THERE ACROSS THE STREET??????????? HIS NAME HAS JUST BEEN SCRATCHED OFF AND CHANGED TO "'Sans" NOW THAT SANS IS USING IT AS A GROCERY STORE???????????
- the possibilities that i can think of are that grillby either moved out or died a long time ago due to the weirdness of deltarune's timeline............ or that delta grillby is one of this universe's goners
- since the colorful bird w/the big head in the library is this universe's equivalent of one of the gonered gaster followers... and when characters get erased from the timeline their accomplishments remain, but nobody remembers them...
- that's something else that i'm curious about. we still know so little about how gonering works and why it happens - most people's assumption is that the undertale goners got erased from the timeline along with gaster because of how close they were to him, but ut clam girl apparently going gray because she knows too much about the multiverse, and the presence of goner human in deltarune/grillby's absence makes me wonder if that's the case.
- still want to know what gaster's angle in all this is; i think it's probably deeper than just Im Chaotic Science Lmao. that he's the one who brought us here/lets us restart on the game over screen,and that he's the one who gives us the "in this world your choices don't matter" half of this game's flowey vs toriel conflicting paradigms, seems significant. what's up with you buddy?
- ETA since the interruption of the goner maker/shoving the protagonist into our arms is apparently by done chara (based on their typing quirks in english + tone in japanese), i am now even More eyes emoji.
- also why is this the world where he can talk w/o wingdings? (though my assumption is that toby did that so that it would be easily legible lmfao)
- i............. think it's cute how he apparently only looked at the wikipedia page for humans for 5 minutes before setting up the goner maker though dfjdkslfjsldkl
- really do think that the visual themes of claustrophobia/the suggestion that hometown, like the card kingdom, is so cloistered because they've locked themselves in against some sort of outer peril is gonna be A Thing but can't say much about that yet... very ominous however
- also i'm starting to wonder if hometown is built along the side of mt ebott since people say that toriel lives at "the top of town" and not "to the north" or whatever, and also because...
- on second examination? that creepy bunker where the bgm and even the birds chirping go silent... what if... just maybe......
the second one was from about a week later, and was originally posted here. image sources are my own screencaps of deltarune/the artbook pdf, temmie's post of the opening cgs, caps of manlybadasshero's let's plays, and my own photo of my copy of the little booklet that comes with the physical version of undertale.
OH MY GOD DELTARUNE
- first off let's collectively pour one out for all the poor guys who didn't want to think that the player was an in-game entity.
- second.............. oh my god the new system features???????? I LOVE THEM?????????? party members!!!! group ACTs!!!!!!!!! monster party members casting magic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A RUN BUTTON!!!!!!!!!!!! GRAZING BONUSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! all the new, more dynamic sprite animations were so great too... susie (her laugh!!!!!), fantasy asriel/"""ralsei""" (lmao), and chara's dramatic arrival especially. (the faceplant perfectly mirroring the chara and asriel memory sequence from undertale oh my god im crying... also holy shit papyrus was not kidding about the shambling). toby has become so powerful over the past 3 years i can't wait to roll around in this system more whenever the next upd8 and/or full game drops
- ive expressed multiple times that i wished toby would just come out and tell everyone in no uncertain terms that frisk is trans. deltarune has been one fuck of a monkey's paw. (for what it's worth i appreciate how this was handled and presented as deeply upsetting subtle horror and a sign that something isn't right here)
- naturally gaster's "survey" was super ominous but the intro of the game was deeply unsettling too, with all the christian paraphernalia lying around (undertale goes out of its way to joke about how the monsters dont know what christmas is, for example) and all the small contradictions with the end credits of undertale/the q&a/the previews of the alarm clock app (e.g. toriel's school is much smaller and doesn't have a garden, her house has a very different layout). it was very "hmmmmmmmm... okay...? what is all of this???"
- and then i got distracted by SUSIE!!!!!!!!!!!!! and asriel sweeping us away into the realm of fantasy, so i stayed in denial until talking to undyne in the end-of-chapter walkaround and it finally sunk in that this is The Bad Timeline. and the more people you talk to the worse it gets...
- the very flowey and toriel-esque structure where you have two characters immediately contradicting each other about the nature of this world manifesting itself in gaster's "this is a world where you can't choose who you are and your choices in general are meaningless" vs asriel's "i believe that your choices DO matter" is indeed very very interesting. i want to see where this goes
- i want to know what gaster's angle on all this is and why he's showing us this fucked-up alternate timeline as much as i want to understand more context of the fucked-up alternate timeline.
- one theory: i think that the asriel we meet in the dark may somehow be undertale asriel? there are so many angles to examine the dark from thematically given his involvement. like aside from it being undertale digest in plot structure, it's so tonally similar to undertale itself, between the goofs and the world's friendliness and the musical cues and how overtly queer it is. especially in comparison to the town topside where just about everything has been no-homoed. immediately after """ralsei""" (who else noticed the anagram immediately and cracked up) joins the party you can hit on him; at least one of clover's heads seems to id as a boy and they like boys; susie is encouraged to flirt with female enemies. i wonder if part of the reason asriel's giving us this fantasy segment is to help comfort frisk and give them a way to cope with how miserable their reality is right now.
- but more specifically wrt asriel it feels like the story in general is also his own redemption fantasy. in his "undertale made from the playroom equipment" fun roleplay he gets to be a kind and helpful support character who looks after and encourages frisk instead of being, well, flowey. when faced with a brash and aggressive character who's mistrustful and whose first solution to any given problem is Punch It, he stands up to susie. it makes me wonder if he's trying to act towards her the way that as postcanon asriel he wishes he treated precanon chara.
- and so his interaction with susie after the fight with the king where she talks to him about how his actions can have painful fallout for his friends... beyond just being a really great scene in general the subtext is killing me so dead
- also with what a big deal is made out of asriel's singing in the dark and the ending theme following the "field of hopes and dreams" melody i cant help but feel like the ed is meant to be asriel singing to either frisk or the player...
- i seem to recall a bunch of people insisting that toby would have to make a sequel about The True Meaning Of The Delta Rune Prophecy so those folks must have gone wild when that was the angle asriel's fantasy story took
- thank you toby for glasses + teen mane asriel he's so cute i love him
- i love susie so much!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE SUSIE SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i wonder what canon timeline suzy is like/if there's any meaning in her name being spelled differently by timeline (clam girl in undertale has ALWAYS called her suzy in ALL the viral deltarune previews, even the most recent one from the switch version! theres GOT to be something up with that). also end of chapter walkaround mk's anecdote about her has me distraught. who hurt her im going to spray them like a misbehaving cat!!!!!!!!!!
- i love that she has the exact fucking same "hair in face scary, hair out of face adorable" aesthetic as frisk and chara............ i love her....................... i love her. (gigi dg voice) unga bunga girl cute
- lancer is a good boy... his friendship with susie is so beautiful i love all of their interactions
- like ralsei+susie and susie+lancer's implications for chara and asriel are fucking fantastic and i love them but also, i love this stuff for what it is in text.......... i love how the big scary school bully accidentally trips into friendship when some lonely bratty little prince decides she's super cool............... i love how asriel realizes that he's hurt susie's feelings and needs to be kinder to her....................... i am revitalized by the sheer energy of fluffy boys and mean girls.
- fuck squad for life
- fangamer if you make a fuck squad shirt i will probably save up to buy it
- if this is canon asriel........................................... how and why is he here though. why is he the same age as frisk and susie when topside asriel is apparently significantly older (middle or high school student vs college student).
- everything that the topside townspeople have to say about topside asriel makes me so uneasy. what kind of person does he have to be to be acknowledged as the one true ideal in a world like this one? everyone uniformly idolizes him to a point that's creepy.
- everything the townspeople have to say about frisk is so distressing too... the implications that they're super withdrawn and extremely depressed are. Whoof. asriels side of their room being coated in trophies and full of personal effects and frisk's being completely barren aside from the cage...... i am so worried about this kid
- also. how did toriel and asgore wind up divorced in this world. how long has it been since asgore's seen frisk that he's forgotten that they dont like bear hugs. this version of frisk appears to have been formally adopted by the dreemurrs before the divorce, and so young that they didn't understand the difference between themself as a human and the dreemurrs as boss monsters. did chara exist in this world and if so what was their role. why was it significant to frisk (and/or chara if chara is narrating the in-verse parts of the game again) that the green crayon was missing. WHATS GOING ON
- out of everything, sans' conversation felt really different from talking to everyone else. the fact that he and papyrus apparently just moved in makes me wonder if the two of them are also here from the main timeline and if so what they're trying to do.
- i am so heartened that chara doesnt like this timeline any more than i do. also i'm glad that their "pull a mcfreaking knife out of mcfreaking nowhere" skills from the omega flowey boss fight are still a thing.
- i want susie and chara to team up to Smash This Timeline
- asriel's choice of what to do for frisk being to comfort and empower them... chara's choice apparently being "WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS. GIVE ME THE MEATSACK IM GOING TO GO BEAT THEM UP"... im overwhelmed with affection for these characters
- so what, as players, can we do in this timeline? this is explicitly our save file now. so with what little power we have, inside the constraints of the game's programming... how can we help? our helping guide frisk through asriel's story to make friends with susie might be a start, but... we still know so little.
- additionally the mew mew kissy cutie 1 vs 2 debate now has some really funny implications when looked at as undertale and deltarune huh
- mettaton still being a ghost apparently makes me so worried for mad mew mew. is she okay
- i am also very sad that we had to find out gerson's surname, crystal's name, and shyra's name like this. though, i do not know how much of the extra lore we can trust is consistent between timelines given the differences between deltarune and undertale
- i wonder a little if this is a timeline SO alternate that monsters were never banished beneath mt ebott at all...
- i also wonder if the build-a-human from gaster's intro is going to show up again in any way... all the options for shirts and hairstyles are so cute. some of the options for traits were a little alarming tho lmao. i didnt know what to name mine because i wasnt sure if this was supposed to be representing an existing character or someone new so i just named them what i named chara in my first undertale file before i knew what their real name was
- i need to rewatch the stinger specifically again just so that i can believe my own memory about how blatantly its telegraphed that this is OUR chara, undertale canon timeline chara. what are you and asriel doing here!!!!!!!! i'm happy that us players aren't stranded in deltarune with worryingly depressed frisk solely in our care but HOW
- wild theory that has a high chance of being proved wrong: true lab log 17's wording is so similar to gaster's official announcement of deltarune on the undertale official twitter... he was scattered through TIME as well as space, so... all this time we've been assuming that the "you two" he mentions in that log are sans and papyrus or sans and alphys but. what if it was chara and asriel all along. did gaster bring them here after undertale like he brought us
- nervous about the future of undertale 2: the halloween hack, but i have a very large amount of faith in toby so i'll try to hang in there and stick around to see where this is going.
OH MY GOD DELTARUNE: THE SQUEAKQUEL
Thoughts & Observations About The Protagonist
- i think i am basically going to stick to calling them "the deltarune protag/mc" or something similar until we can get confirmation on what they actually want to be called. we still don't know that yet since they've never introduced themself to anyone (ralsei already knows them as "kris"/knows susie's name; the player can pick whether they call themself kris or a hippopotamus when introducing themself to onionsan).
- from what toriel says about how they're going to be going to college soon too, i think we can safely guess that they're in high school (so, 15-18). they seem to be the only kid in their class who still wears stripes unless the blue borders on susie's shirt count as stripes?
- and asriel could be anywhere from 18-22, so the age difference between him and the protag could be anywhere from a few months (enough for asriel to make the age cutoff) to 7 years. but asriel also appears to be in the same vague age group as burgerpants, bratty, and catty, and bratty refers to herself and the other older monsters as "big kids" compared to the main character, so the age difference is probably at least a few years. burgerpants says he wants to go to the same place as asriel, so maybe asriel is at least not in his last year yet...?
- the way that asriel's side of their bedroom is stacked with trophies and personal effects and the protag's only got the wagon and birdcage initially got me worrying, but looking at the way that toriel is still fussing about how asriel is doing at college (and her Very Extreme overprotectiveness of him - trying to sentence bratty to 1 million years jail for kissing him/actually sentencing asriel to 5 million years jesus, and getting catty LITERALLY ARRESTED for horny dancing with him at prom????? fuckin yikes lmfao) i think we can clearly say that asriel is the favorite. the way that toriel tears into the protag if you goof around with the toilet too much (she initially worries that they're sick and then says that if they're doing another toilet prank like the time they put a bath bomb in the toilet they get to pay for the plumbing) is... concerning. it seems like when they were kids asriel and the protag pulled a lot of pranks and got into a lot of trouble, but the protag is the one who gets blamed for them in the end because asriel is Just Such A Nice Boy (tm).
- the protag shows signs of being very severely depressed (sleeps all the time, has stopped engaging with friends) but toriel seems to not... quite understand this. she needles them for sleeping in, and if the protag calls her while out in town they seem to ask her for a ride home but she refuses to pick them up because ~walking is healthier~. hey toriel, what if they were hurt or sick or someone weird was following them around, and they needed your help?????? at least part of this seems to be her punishing them for ~making her wait half an hour after school for them~ but all of the mc's weirdness that results from us having them hoof it around town to gather information for us... noelle gets worried about them, and some other villagers say it's weird too, but toriel seems to just be like "ah yes, good, my weird kid is acting neurotypical now, this is all i could have ever wanted" and while this is a writing choice that i think works well with the worldbuilding (this toriel grew up in a different culture and has never lost kids) i will fight her for this child if i have to. w.d. "i'm helping!" gaster assigned ME as their babysitter and im ready to Throw Down
- like this isn't to say that i think toriel doesn't care about the protagonist at ALL, she clearly seems to, they just seem less close/she seems less attentive towards their needs because she understands them less and is more invested in asriel.
- in the beginning when she takes their hand they hang their head. :(
- lies down on the floor thinking about susie taunting them in the beginning like "you can't even walk around w/o somebody holding your hand" she's not.................. 100% wrong............... also rudy in the end of chapter walkaround like "did your mom make you come visit me" WELL TECHNICALLY SORTA..............
- this kid seems really attached to asgore though. if you have them go to his flower shop in the walkaround they actually approach him by themself, without player input. and if you got the egg from the weird guy in the dark, they'll put it in his fridge... their visitation w/him appears to be limited though, he doesn't seem to have had them stay over at his place for a while (if ever) considering that he's all "it will be great! you can have my bed!! i will sleep somewhere else... wait, hm"
- still curious as to when exactly the protag was adopted into the dreemurr family and under what circumstances. they've been a family member for AT LEAST eight years judging by the old photo on toriel's desktop, and the protag at first didn't seem to realize just how different they were from the dreemurrs so either they must have been really young or had limited contact with other humans... asriel's yoshi birthday party that toriel talks about seems to have happened before the mc was adopted, just by the way she tells it to them
- still want to know what the Fuck caused the divorce
- i wonder about their handedness too because of the stinger - their ACT gestures are done with their right hand but both the great yeet and the knife pull are done with their left hand. is that ut chara popping in or is that the protag themself getting real done with our shit? We Wont Know Until The Final Game I Guess, let's all hope toby gets a great team together that loves and supports him
- anyway, we know that they sleep a lot (this may have been a thing since before asriel left, since toriel says that he's carried them to school at least once?) (the jpn version apparently specifies that when he did that he carried them as in In His Arms lmao) and that they eat a lot too since toriel gets all pissy about "dont eat the Whole Pie"
- their favorite food is marshmallows. the dark candy item is marshmallow flavored, the junk ball smells like marshmallows, if you let them sniff the scented markers they go for the marshmallow one, and the hot chocolate from the diner bunny is filled with homemade marshmallows.
- they don't care about christianity. alvin the pastor says that they only seem to care about the "sick" fruit juice (the communion wine) and otherwise don't participate, as compared to toriel who's very pious and asriel who used to be in the children's choir.
- as far as school goes noelle helps them with their homework sometimes, and it seems like monster kid is usually their partner for group projects if they aren't late. their locker is right next to toriel's classroom too.
- they have seen save points before, but don't seem to understand what they are. narration describes the save points as "the flickering lights that only [they] can see" - maybe DT is just an unknown property in this timeline because alphys isn't a scientist.
- the fact that save points never appear in town concerns the hell out of me, especially because save points are all over the place in the dark, and tend to appear whenever the mc gets closer to the rest of the party. naming the team causes a new save point to appear, for instance.
- they come to really, really care deeply about susie over the course of the story. they're actually the one who sends us to go with susie while she's trying to jailbreak everyone alone, they shield her from the spade king's attack of their own volition, and they get annoyed at monster kid for badmouthing her. they also tell toriel by themself that they were with a friend when gaster finally stops clogging their phone post-dark world.
- (that this is something so unusual that it makes toriel lighten her intended punishment towards them........ Im Still Worried, That Hasnt Stopped Being A Thing Or Anything)
- i find it very interesting that in the dark, where they seem to be so much happier and livelier, they're wearing the Designated Frisk Colors, blue and pink, rather than the green and yellow they wear topside. those exact shades of green and yellow are actually super rare in the dark. part of this might just be that colors are abstracted in the dark world, but...
- idk if this is meant to be A Thing (tm) or anything but it's also interesting how the mc's color scheme is blue/cyan in the dark (integrity/patience) while susie's is purple (perseverance) and ralsei's is green (kindness)...
- since there's discussion about how the soul/the player's control functions in deltarune in terms of the party system, it's probably worth noting that both ralsei and the narration identify the red soul as the protag's. what does that mean for the great yeet??????????? Fuck If I Know
- i made a post about this elsewhere but it's also probably significant that the protag's hair and skin color are the same as frisk's.
- another thing that makes the stinger stick out as weird is that the protag is SO much more submissive to the player than frisk and chara are in ut. like even during a normal undertale playthrough, sometimes the kids will veto certain ACT options ("cry" against mettaton is shot down by chara, for instance) or railroad you into choices (notably roleplaying with alphys). there are a Lot of moments topside where you can tell the protag to do something that they don't want to do, and they will do as commanded. if you tell them not to play the piano in the hospital, for instance, they'll hold their hands out over the keys like they want to play but won't, and you can make them read alphys' anime review despite their legion of no's (while most yes/no prompts have yes at the left, this one has the giant no cloud on the left). they will resist you trying to make them throw away the junk ball, but if you push them they'll still do it.
- i like that the game draws a line between stuff that a player will tend towards doing anyway to gather as much information as possible and learn about the world not realizing that they could be hurting the mc's feelings until it's too late, versus the junk ball, which you Know they want to hold on to, and which therefore becomes an act of deliberate cruelty if you force them to drop it.
- light brought this up on twitter but where Did they learn to play the piano? the hospital receptionist says they usually play more beautifully even with the missing keys, so they were probably very good once, but toriel doesn't have a piano...
- but anyway, the mc being so obedient both fits in with their depression and with the worldbuilding - a Big part of christian life philosophy is unquestioning obedience to authority, and even though they don't seem to care for it they've still been pickling in this culture all their life... especially given that they're in the care of this world's toriel, who can be a little bit yikes wrt control at times.
- so... what's the deal with the stinger??? is this the main character finally deciding that they've had enough and fuck you in particular, or is this ut chara interceding on their behalf and warning the player to Be Nice, You Jerk???? while the mc is mostly associated with frisk-ish qualities in the narrative with some chara-ish ones thrown in due to nurture (i guess every human who spends time with asriel absorbs prank-liking from him via osmosis), the visual direction of the stinger is heavily tied to chara.
- the faceplant (where the protag usually falls backwards frisk-style) and their pushing themself up look exactly like temmie's cgs of chara and asriel's meeting.
- this shambling walk brings to mind how papyrus describes chara poorly piloting frisk's body in a no mercy run.
- the little finger wiggle before they reach into their own chest to grab the soul is similar to the way that asriel wiggles his fingers when he reassumes boss monster form. (chara and asriel often echo each other's personal cues in undertale.)
- pulling a knife out of nowhere is something that ut chara does for frisk in the omega flowey boss fight - no matter what weapon you have equipped while fighting asgore, the attack animations during that boss battle are ALWAYS the knife one. i believe this is the case for the final attack on sans in his boss battle too but i've never actually fought that dude myself so take that one with a grain of salt lmao
- and this sure looks like it could be the original generation creepy face! that red flash in their eyes echoes the soulless pacifist stinger too.
- basically: ???????????? i'm all ears for whatever the followup on this turns out to be.
- anyway, one last thing about the stinger is that i like how its connotations change hugely depending on your individual actions in undertale. toby's confirmed for us that undertale remains however we left it... so this probably seems extra ominous to a player who's done the no mercy ending before. "let us erase this pointless world AND MOVE ON TO THE NEXT"... is a phrase that might be echoing through some people's minds now lmao. but if you've only done the true pacifist ending your reaction might be more in line with mine, which was "baby What are you doing. i know I sure didnt teach you to act like this, whatcha up to. what are you Doing here"... once you realize you can wiggle the soul around in the cage this also turns from something that's targeted at the protag to something that's targeted against YOU, the player. i just think the personal context you bring to that whole thing is neat
- my instinct is still that the protag is this world's equivalent of frisk (because their story role, coloration, and a lot of their traits etc are so similar - they even get the "lol nope the main character is not who you thought it was" fakeout as ut frisk but at the beginning instead of at the end) whose main differences are because of the environment in which they've been raised, and that goner human was meant to have been chara's counterpart (since we can name them both and have the most direct influence over them out of any character).
Thoughts And Observations About Susie & Ralsei
- that conversation they have where they casually destroy precanon chara and asriel? still good just sayin
- i would really like to know how susie's vicious cycle with the other kids started. aside from noelle they all hate and fear her, and she seems extremely sensitive to the fact that she's disliked... her solution to this however is "if i'm SUPER SCARY then everyone will HAVE to leave me alone" which just... makes everything... worse......
- extra sad because if you talk to her for like two minutes it already becomes abundantly clear that her bark is worse than her bite...... and how quick she is to completely unravel when lancer accepts her.........
- i love that she explicitly embodies the precanon ut chara-esque "theyre ENEMIES youre SUPPOSED to beat them up thats how it WORKS!!!" line of thought. just mechanically it's an interesting thing to manage and it's fun to watch the change in her as the story goes on...
- i still want to know whether her eating really weird stuff is because that's just her species' natural diet, whether it's just because she's so hungry, or because she has pica or something...
- the fact that SO MANY of her noodle incidents seem to have to do with food really seems to point to her not getting fed enough on a day to day basis... who hurt her I Will Fight Them
- but in light of this, the way she offers the candy to lancer as soon as he says he's never gotten to try it before... lies facedown on the ground i love susie so much
- i wonder what kind of monster she is, anyway??? her starting weapon, the mane ax, says it's forged from the mane of a "dragon whelp", but she looks very different from the dragon family at the diner... maybe she's a different kind of dragon? i saw someone (i think it was aera?) suggest kelpie on twitter which i like too
- if ralsei has nothing to do with extraplanar asriels and is instead just toby dogshaming his baby boy on a metatextual level, my other guess would be that he's an old imaginary friend of delta asriel's. that would still fit in to the dark world's theme of things that have been forgotten or abandoned by the topside monsters, and there doesn't seem to be a toy that corresponds to him in gerson's old classroom which is the topside form of the card kingdom, so...
- he still seems to be counted as a different being than delta asriel given that you can hit on him so much (the hugs, the ribbon, the way he blushes if you stand too close to him while he's in the party...)
General Observations And Questions
- monster culture in hometown seems to be Significantly closer to humans' than ut monsters' was. aside from them having adopted christianity they have a graveyard (it seems like the objects the monsters' dust was placed on are buried there to match human funerals?) and they eat physical food, including meat. susie mentions a free ham sandwich day and remarks once that none of the magical food she eats in the dark is filling and that she finds it weird. monsters have very human-style bathrooms now too, so i guess it's confirmed that physical food means physical poop. alvin the pastor (is he gerson's son, or grandson? his drawing of gerson is still hanging up in gerson's old classroom) says something about the angel, so it appears that the delta rune prophecy itself still exists and has been merged with what monsters have absorbed of human christianity.
- now, does the abandonment of the darkners/the change of the balance in dark and light have anything to do with that assimilation into human culture??? judging from toby's comment in the afterword about how getting the town layout right Here And Now was essential and the fact that there's still another dark fountain that needs sealing somewhere further away from the card kingdom (plus the knight and the queen mentioned by jevil and the spade king), i'm inclined to think that the rest of the story's dark world areas will also correspond to various parts of town.
- i love seam
- during parts of their dialogue seam's remaining button eye sometimes rotates in a way that reminds me of omega flowey's "everyone else"??? i also love... that the little buttonholes close like the button eye is a compound eye... toby that's very homestuck of you
- (i also love that susie's theme is just fukcing. vriska guitars)
- a couple soundtrack observations: rude buster quotes asgore's theme at 0:27, field of hopes and dreams sneaks the a part of once upon a time in at 1:17ish, imminent death and vs susie both quote you idiot/your best nightmare, and darkness falls (
- it's already been noted that don't forget is mcfucking everywhere, but the prophecy theme is pretty prominent in chaos king etc too. i want to say that the waltz line in the circus is the backing to lantern in a dif key which would fit because of jevil and seam's past friendship.
- also the variation on lancer's theme used for thrash machine cracks me up every fucking time
- the alarm clock sample dialogue where asgore mentions rudy seems to imply that in the undertale timeline rudy has since passed away maybe? so i'm very worried about him. his concerns about noelle's future and the way he brushes you off if you ask about his illness makes it sound like his prognosis is actually pretty bad... if deltarune is The Game Where We Get To See Firsthand What Its Like When Monsters Fall Down i will cry lmao
- noelle's mom does in fact seem to be the mayor, from the way that she describes the situation... i'm wondering if noelle's mom is also the one who left asgore the note threatening to evict him, since it's signed "c" and there are a lot of christmas-themed names that could start with c. (i think we can rule out catty and catti since they're a young adult and a teen respectively who still live with their family)
- (hey what happened to their dad's arm??? has he just always not had one or did he lose it somehow or?????)
- i wonder where noelle lives... maybe that gate she hangs out in front of is the front gate to her family's house or something and they have a really bigass place
- I Am Deeply Concerned For Noelle???? her dad might be dying, her relationship with her mom seems strained, and she seems kind of... downtrodden. petition for susie and the protag to envelop her in friendship
- the holidays apparently used to be a lot closer with the dreemurrs and i wonder if the reason that changed is because of the divorce, since rudy and asgore are apparently close/rudy has that whole hopeless crush on him... rudy suggests that the dreemurrs used to live next door to them so i wonder if toriel's house at the top of town is a place she moved to with asriel and the protag afterwards/asgore didn't always live in the flower shop
- the trellises in asgore's back room are really pretty. i am also deeply concerned about his well-being considering (gestures) that entire situation. his remark about the flowers from the wedding bouquet vs the local climate is interesting, i wonder if that means that the dreemurrs moved here from another place or if asgore and toriel just got married somewhere else (wherever they and rudy went to college?????)
- for that matter, where does SUSIE live???????????? is she in the apartment complex or is she just... roughing it somewhere
- speaking of susie's living situation it's... concerning to me that when she and the protag just fucking went missing for an entire day nobody seemed to have told either of their parents or was even all that worried... they just went "yeah thats susie and [the mc] for ya lmao"... on alphys' part this is probably part of her anxiety/desire to be ~the cool teacher~ but?????? shouldnt two kids disappearing be a huge deal ESPECIALLY in a small town like this....... you guys........
- human assimilation definitely has not done the monsters any favors
- prostrates myself on the ground hoping against hope that the royal guards are still dating even if they have to keep it a secret from everyone else.......... also i hope that fuku fire and skateboard girl are dating too. please toby thats my favorite obscure npc ship
- HEY SPEAKING OF FUKU FIRE............. WHERE THE FUCK....... IS GRILLBY??????????????? she has a line about how she isnt going to apply for a job at the diner despite liking the uniforms bc she thinks serving drinks is a weird job for a fire elemental
- BUT GRILLBYS IS RIGHT THERE ACROSS THE STREET??????????? HIS NAME HAS JUST BEEN SCRATCHED OFF AND CHANGED TO "'Sans" NOW THAT SANS IS USING IT AS A GROCERY STORE???????????
- the possibilities that i can think of are that grillby either moved out or died a long time ago due to the weirdness of deltarune's timeline............ or that delta grillby is one of this universe's goners
- since the colorful bird w/the big head in the library is this universe's equivalent of one of the gonered gaster followers... and when characters get erased from the timeline their accomplishments remain, but nobody remembers them...
- that's something else that i'm curious about. we still know so little about how gonering works and why it happens - most people's assumption is that the undertale goners got erased from the timeline along with gaster because of how close they were to him, but ut clam girl apparently going gray because she knows too much about the multiverse, and the presence of goner human in deltarune/grillby's absence makes me wonder if that's the case.
- still want to know what gaster's angle in all this is; i think it's probably deeper than just Im Chaotic Science Lmao. that he's the one who brought us here/lets us restart on the game over screen,
- ETA since the interruption of the goner maker/shoving the protagonist into our arms is apparently by done chara (based on their typing quirks in english + tone in japanese), i am now even More eyes emoji.
- also why is this the world where he can talk w/o wingdings? (though my assumption is that toby did that so that it would be easily legible lmfao)
- i............. think it's cute how he apparently only looked at the wikipedia page for humans for 5 minutes before setting up the goner maker though dfjdkslfjsldkl
- really do think that the visual themes of claustrophobia/the suggestion that hometown, like the card kingdom, is so cloistered because they've locked themselves in against some sort of outer peril is gonna be A Thing but can't say much about that yet... very ominous however
- also i'm starting to wonder if hometown is built along the side of mt ebott since people say that toriel lives at "the top of town" and not "to the north" or whatever, and also because...
- on second examination? that creepy bunker where the bgm and even the birds chirping go silent... what if... just maybe......