time is no healer

and the patient is no longer here. can't like or follow from this blog.

[1411411989]

funniest thing chapter 5 deltarune has done is cause some minor discourse in very old and lefty nerd spaces i'm in about whether pl*rality is valid lol

[1411411989]

people have various feelings about the seeming reality that berdly is a minor character whose appearance in chapter 2 will constitute the bulk of his screen time, but i'm interested in what it says about deltarune broadly. in a truly serialized work i'd be looking to how individual storylines resolve to get a sense of where the ending might be headed.

in berdly's case, we get someone for whom his involvement with the dark world revealed his true character, maybe gave him a light push in the right direction, and created the chance to form more meaningful bonds with his peers. he isn't really changed all that much in his best outcome, but with better understanding of what drives him, we can more fully appreciate him on his own terms. his possible negative outcomes are much worse, from a jacked-up arm to a coma.

at best, the dark world that helps plants the seed for his real growth in the light world. at worst, he takes it totally seriously, and it nearly kills him. either way, once awake he doesn't seem to ever regard it as anything more than a passing dream. perhaps chapter 7 will conclude this is because he is a fool for this, but idk! as the closest thing deltarune has to an everyday person, i think his arc might be telling in some way.

[1411411989]

reaching my old-age grognard stage. installed a "hardcore" skyrim gameplay mod, some improved survival stuff, and alternate start mods; started a character in a shipwreck off the coast; and spent over a full in-game day getting slowly to shore, swimming from one chunk of ice to another in freezing water, then lighting a torch and shivering beneath a cloak until my character regained the stamina necessary to attempt the next swimming stretch. unironically thought to myself "wow it's so interesting how difficulty and mechanical inflexibility can serve as a constraint on player choice." then later spent several hours to get past an encounter featuring 4 skeletons and one (1) draugr and went wow, that was awesome and so satisfying.

[1411411989]

ralsei spending several chapters agonizing over the prophecy and their role in it before coming out to the fun gang and associated others and explaining that they always felt forced into having to perform maleness because of the "dark prince" part of the prophecy, and everyone is like oh no don't worry! omg you're so much more important than any prophecy. and then susie, who is trying to be comforting and who has really learned a lot about the wide world of gender expression and nonconformity in the last few days, is like "besides! you don't have to be a boy to be a prince, right?"

and so ralsei, who does not have a very clear understanding of gender and how it is performed and constructed in the year 20XX, but who had really come to terms with derailing the prophecy as an important part of their journey and also maybe a good thing in itself, is left just standing there like

[1411411989]

didn't love making the divorce primarily about asgore self-isolating in pursuit of whatever truth he is trying to unveil (didn't hate it, either, just think it's kind of a non-choice for everyone but him, since now the primary action of the divorce is really him self-ejecting from the life of the family), but turning it over in my head more I really like it particularly for what it might say about the relationship between toriel and carol

like take gender out of it for a second. you have a spouse and that spouse has a best friend, who is also pretty important at your job! and your family is really close with the friend's family, and you know the friend's partner pretty well, and you're not close but you're friends in the way two people have to be when their spouses are so close, right? like, you see them and their kids constantly.

something bad happens, and the best friend is spiraling. you can't get through to them, your spouse can't get through to them. and this is a pretty big deal, it's an all-hands-on-deck kind of thing, because not only is this friend critical to your job and your neighborhood, your family is also deeply intertwined with theirs! and as far as you know, the best friend's spouse? gives up on the marriage, gives up on the family. kicks the best friend out after divorcing them while they're getting to reconcile, plummeting their mental health even further.

i mean that's not the nice or proper thing to say, obviously, it's 20XX, everyone is free to leave a relationship that isn't working for them, the ex shouldn't be expected to stick by a partner who is actively pushing them away. ...but haven't you held it together, even though your daughter is gone? even though your spouse was diagnosed with a (likely) terminal illness? aren't you still holding it together for the best friend, actually, out of respect for what your families once had and their long friendship with your spouse (and also maybe for the sake of your sinister plans)?

you'd like to say at least the friend's ex is good at their job as a teacher, but you've heard about the dubious competency of the other teacher who works there, so you have your doubts. you'd like to say at least they're parenting their children well, except the one is obviously taking the divorce terribly. and you KNOW the ex, who has custody, isn't paying any attention to that kid, or you wouldn't be able to be in cahoots with them! (don't...don't worry about why you're in cahoots with a child. that's not important right now.)

then imagine toriel on the other end of all this unreasonable, unsympathetic judgment. then add on whatever amount of small town american conservatism and gender roles you think are appropriate for hometown and, wait, let's check--oh yeah, we got a stew going.

[ntrider]

holding back an amused "I love you" after someone makes a really good personal comment or joke is like making the move for your sheathed blade and stopping midway through

[ntrider]

this is a normal comparison indicative of healthy relationship with the concept of love

[1411411989]

s*selle fans are stronger than me (I don't have a deltarune shipping interest) because if one of my otps got together like 66% of the way through a story and got a bunch of VERY cute and fluffy scenes and even literally listen to each other's dokidokis in a release that was being advertised like this

I would be making/consuming exclusively insanely doomed content. When you're experiencing your first teen love but the saxophones are getting louder, or whatever they say.

[1411411989]

the fundamental problem with deltarune is that it is very obviously building towards being a game where our expectations and unexamined beliefs are poked at and exploited, but surface-level "twists" like "Susie is the REAL hero" and "darkners are people too!" are both very easy reads to pick up from the narrative and yet also insanely boring as shit and would make this whole thing feel like an elaborate waste of time, so you get people tying themselves into knots to explain why "kid from the wrong side of town falls into a magic world and gets cool powers and friends and a love interest and learns to Save The Worlds" is anything other than the most standard boring isekai narrative imaginable and somehow actually a very cool subversion. meanwhile Toby is sitting on whatever actual twist is going to land here until the last possible second, much like how undertale is paced.

the problem with chapter 5 for people is it's like the last final moments before wile e coyote looks down and realizes he's running on air. we're only just now admitting there's even any cracks in the facade, just barely pushing on the Susie idea and only subtly setting up the means by which the story can thread the needle on darkners (by explicitly creating a way by which ralsei can be understood to be different from other darkners and therefore have a more "real" arc)

[1411411989]

on the one hand complaints about Susie cockblocking Kris are overblown and on the other hand they're obviously mostly jokes and on the other other hand they're jokes mostly made by the same people who were like "can't wait for the TRUE destined protagonist, Susie, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks who no one could have expected to succeed, to defy fate with the power of hopecore and kick ass!! this is going to be an extremely traditional and well-trod shonen story about how everyone collectively enforcing and playing into a standard heroic narrative is GOOD," so I no longer have to listen to that dreck. in conclusion it's impossible to say if the discourse is good or not

[1411411989]

"why does flower man say ten foot twenty" learn your FUCKING history

Washington, Washington Six foot twenty, fucking killing for fun Spread, spread, Delaware He's coming, he's coming, he's coming

[1411411989]

unfortunately i think i'm going to be a huge fan of flowery deltarune because i love a guy who intentionally sucks and then is like "ummm but don't even i, a guy who sucks, have a right to human dignity???"

[1411411989]

g*lsei theory strikes me as unlikely to appear in the main text of deltarune (a perfectly reasonable and defensible interpretation in its own right, I'm just thinking broadly about story direction), not for any of the dumb reasons people say about stereotypes or gender ratios or whatever, but because it comes too close to the central darkner/lightner conceit in a way that muddles both threads without offering a clean resolution. so far the darkner stuff seems to be partly about the existential struggle of being a certain unchangeable thing, and a coming out narrative would complicate that greatly.

like ralsei struggles with being a darkner and the prophecy yes but that's partly because being a darkner is an existentially and ontologically subaltern position. you have a weird life and debatably false history and are unable to control the conditions of your existence in any meaningful way (even castle town is just because some lightners deigned to help make it real). there are a lot of aspects of it, and particularly the way ralsei talks about it, that map easily to aspects of the trans experience, but they aren't 1-to-1, and can also be mapped to other things (you don't see a lot of analysis about darkners as, say, colonized subjects, but there's plenty of ground to work with there). the genre aspects matter, and can't just be treated identically to the real world matters they sometimes invoke. consider the x-men: being a mutant is like being queer, or growing up non-white in the u.s., or any number of things, but it isn't the same as any of those things because being gay doesn't let you shoot punch-beams from your eyes, and that matters to how stories are written and resolved

the relationship between darkners and lightners and what it means for both is a key part of deltarune's thematic concerns and cannot be resolved solely on an individual basis via-a-vis ralsei. one can't just choose to stop living as a darkner and begin living as a lightner, so that can't resolve the broader plot. at the same time, it would be strikingly dark for deltarune to invoke the trans reading explicitly and then conclude ralsei is trapped by reality. one could imagine various third routes that can thread this needle—for example, a story in which ralsei is trans and does grapple with this in the course of events and yet finds it does not resolve any of her darkner-specific problems—but again it strikes me as unlikely given 1) deltarune's intentional positive vagueness around matters of gender and sexuality (same reason I think we're unlikely to ever have kris's AGAB be even subtextually relevant) 2) the increasing importance of the genre plot elements here near the end and 3) psycholonials already exists.

not trying to shoot anyone down, just thinking about likely story directions. the existential curse of being a darkner is really interesting to me and ralsei is obviously a key character in its resolution, so I'm curious how the game resolves his feelings of powerlessness and only existing for a specific purpose, especially with the obvious subtext that we are the "lightners" to the game's cast, who are all "darkners" within this broader context.

[1411411989]

very interesting thing about deltarune to me is that it's so clearly About Games in some respects and like all of toby fox's work is replete with references to games that have influenced him, and people clearly want to talk about it, but the vast majority of people simply have not played enough fucking video games to say anything of value about them.

"weird route is a commentary on JRPG tropes" which ones? from which specific games? because it doesn't particularly resemble any I've played beyond the existing deltarune RPG trappings. "weird route treats romance as the most important thing just like how games with romance treat it as more important than platonic relationships" again, which ones? because even fire emblem, the series most popularly linked with relationship-building-as-gameplay, doesn't universally privilege romance over friendship; they are often statistically identical. And for all that we're obsessed with tropes, no one ever touches on some of the ones deltarune and undertale actually deploy with extreme obviousness, like asgore very straightforwardly being a maou villain in his castle ruling over mazoku with a vendetta against the human race! but that would require actual attention to JRPG tropes and not just indulging the English-speaking internet's tendency to lump every retrograde tendency conceivable on an imagined Japanese object.

for all this talk of tropes, no one engages with actual games! sword route is an explicit zelda knockoff, no one wants to get into that? yeah sure mother 3 Lucas masked man dessknight whatever, how about the fact that Paula in Earthbound, the party's glass cannon mage, specializes in ice spells? for all that people want to be like "weird route/genocide route is like X thing in RPGs," barely anyone ever talks about soul nomad and the world eaters, the game with a literal evil route where the demon-possessed main character breaks the story by choosing violent and aggressive action at every turn, leading several side characters from the main route, including characters who are largely comic relief, to become heroes who try to stop you!

Breath of Fire 2 has been explicitly named by Toby as an influence, has you playing as a protagonist referred to frequently as the cursed/fated child, contains a town building mechanic about recruiting NPCs, literally STARTS in a town named hometown, and "Lost where the forest would grow, the children followed the pointed tail. The poor children!" could be read as a literal summary of the prologue of breath of fire 2, in which the two children in your party travel through an area where a forest should be but is dying (a key plot point), end up in a dark cave, and follow a literal pointed tail into the end of the prologue and the death of childish innocence! All these games are extremely playable right now on most any computer that could run deltarune! It's never been easier to emulate!

It's cool that deltarune has so many people theorizing but I wish people understood that drawing direct links to specific games can be way more valuable than just gesturing broadly to "this is what RPGs are like," and that if you are going to paint with a broad brush, you can't make any meaningful points unless you really know your stuff!

[theonion]

Scientists may be one step closer to answering the question of whether you are ineloquent or just an asshole after participants in a study of your communication skills confirmed Friday that their crying was not linked to what you said, but to the way you said it. “The words themselves aren’t mean, but your harsh tone makes us feel like you think we’re stupid,” said visibly distressed sources, adding that they would never even consider talking to you like that.

Full Story

[1411411989]

I'm very curious to see if deltarune chapter 5 can successfully find another note to asgore's character past "isn't it funny and pathetic when a man is a career failure and emotionally needy" without just leaning on "well he is also obviously sexist and ignores people's boundaries" to justify laughing at him. It doesn't have to in order to be a good story! But after a decade of "lol divorced dad is a failure, look he does MENIAL LABOR TO MAKE ENDS MEET", I'm ready to see what else mr. fwugradiation has to show us

[rejamart]

tiny chapel

[1411411989]

the only good "racial trait" in fantasy rpgs is when they make it a rule that minotaurs can't get lost or confused by spatial trickery. that's just good clean fun that is