Untitled @ajbonnis - Tumblr Blog

Hey, Baddrummer! I asked explicit permission on AO3 before sending this, so blame yourself and yourself only for this bucket of word vomit.

And maybe me too idk lol

Alright, so:

Disclaimer: This impending ball of hyperfixation is by no means polished or properly tested. I thought up half of this shit over the course of “A World Without You” and “When Did You Start Being Yourself?”, and half of this around halfway through “What Did You Do?”, and all of this is from someone who has… never actually played Undertale, partly because I didn’t have a PC to play it on when it first came out, and partly because I was still intimidated by the fandom’s reputation prior to playing Deltarune. These ideas are a result of my experiences finally playing Deltarune for the first time after chapters 3 & 4 came out (having very much spoiled myself beforehand due to not immediately thinking I was ever gonna actually play the game properly when said chapters first came out), my very worldbuilding-focused thought process that has not properly written a story in over a year, various wiki pages, and a massive diet of narrative-focused fanfiction from the last ~3 months.

With that said…

Your (as of current) trilogy of fanfics touched upon a concept that I have seen in several other fics before this, but never seen executed in such an intriguing and well-thought-out way:

Player-Game Meta-Interaction.

From the first chapter of “A World Without You,” perhaps the biggest thing about the World Written From Hope fics that has stood out to me is how the stories very clearly involve a player, a person behind a screen & keyboard, interacting with the world (or, at least, a specific instance of the world) of Deltarune. The Angel is a person playing a game, connected via the hands of the man that speaks through them, and who interacts with the world in all the ways that you would expect to interact with a game…

And more.

The player in the World Written From Hope is not connected to their beloved game in the same way that everyone else is normally offered. From the very beginning of what us readers witness, the player is having a conversation with Big Papa G over their despair and hopelessness about their predicament within the game world.

And then they outright break everything.

The player manages to utterly shatter the rules that we in the real world abide by for our “connection” to the game, not only breaking the plot in ways that the game couldn’t possibly have been coded to do, but interacting with the characters as if they were real, living people.

And not just that, but when Susie attempts to break the Angel out of their Lost funk?

The player shows them their fucking MEMORIES of an entirely different game. Not just scenes adapted from the files of said other game on their computer, but their emotions, personal experiences, and actions at the time they occurred, albeit adapted for the sake of the characters’ sanity.

Let me say that again for effect.

The player, a regular human sitting at a desk with a computer running a program, gains the ability to not only interact with the program in ways that couldn’t have possibly been coded into it, and talk to sentient versions of the characters depicted in said program, but mentally share their personal experiences and memories gained from their experience of a different video game, as experienced from their position in the “real world.”

This…

This grabbed my attention like a goddamn fly paper fishing hook.

And while at first I thought I was just reading way, way too much into what was obviously just narrative conveniences taken for the sake of a good story, as the next two fics came rolling in, I decided to fully embrace the angle that this wasn’t just a plot contrivance; this concept is integral to the foundation of the World Written From Hope’s very core.

So… what does any of this mean? Big whoop, we got some quasi-Digital Circus bullshit going on that lets our dear Angel have more fun with their virtual friends than any of us unlucky sops in the real world will ever get to experience with our $25 investment. What does any of this mean outside of making for more drama?

Well…

I’m a sucker for implications. Maybe because I used to not have the sense to think of them before saying very ignorant things as a kid, but nevertheless, I’ve acquired quite the taste for thinking about what narrative logical dominoes may fall from the introduction of a seemingly simple idea.

And one thought above all others has persisted in my mind as I’ve read through each installment of the WWFH, an idea that is explicitly never explored across nearly 200k words of fic:

“How does any of this play out from the player’s POV?”

Because assuming that games going full Wreck-It-Ralph is not a common occurrence in the world that the WWFH takes place in, how is it that our dear player suddenly finds themselves able to break all laws of not just one, but two realities to interact with a video game in completely impossible ways? What does this deeper level of interaction look like from their eyes, and maybe their other senses as well? What sets up that first conversation with our favorite spatially-challenged Doctor? Why is the player so calm about their game coming to life?

Well, if I’m being honest, I can’t answer that last one beyond “not looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

BUT, I do have an idea for the first three points, and the implications of this idea have sent me rabid with thought.

I would assume you’re familiar with the concept of “names giving otherworldly beings power,” no?

Bear with me for a hot second, this is about to get very, very interesting worldbuild-y.

We start with the World Written From Hope. A world just like ours, with everyday people and a timeline that leads to Mr. Fox having his grand fever dream, and subsequently building Undertale as a test run for his grandest game.

All we tweak is confirming one tiny little detail:

The power of belief, and collective consciousness.

As Undertale explodes in popularity, the fandom that subsequently develops quickly finds out about the existence (or rather, non-existence) of one Dr. W.D. Gaster. The Mystery Man in Waterfall, Entry 17, the three Followers in Hotland and the first Goner, hell, even the Gaster Blasters. All of it, traces of a character supposedly shattered across space and time.

Now, this wouldn’t ordinarily amount to anything… until we account for the fact that Gaster originates from Undertale.

A game that sells itself on being built around interacting with, befriending, and learning about well-written and memorable characters.

Some of which have knowledge that they should not have.

Flowey has existed for god knows how long from his perspective with the ability to SAVE and RESET, and abuses them during his neutral run boss fight. Sans knows about the timeline, is implied to not even be from Undertale’s world, and in his genocide run boss fight breaks every goddamn rule that the game has established for combat just to wear you, the player, down, and to get you to throw in the towel.

So, you have millions of people acquiring the knowledge of a character who:

- Is explicitly stated to be shattered across space and time, potentially reaching beyond even his own reality,

- Was supposedly a brilliant scientist who discovered something VERY, VERY INTERESTING before meeting his fate,

- And originates from a video game that doesn’t just lean on the fourth wall, but at times tries to bash your goddamn skull in with it.

…

…for those who can’t see where this is going yet, allow me to paint you a picture.

—————————————————————

Mr. Fox’s chair creaked as he leaned back with a sigh, a mix of mild anguish, depression, and frustration escaping his throat as he took in what was in front of him. His mind almost wanted to simply refuse to acknowledge his current predicament outright, to glare a spiteful dagger at his computer’s screen and have the mere threat from doing so wordlessly whip the machine into cooperating as it once had previously done without question or complaint.

Unfortunately, his eyes were terrible liars.

“Alright, this is just ridiculous.” He mumbled, before leaning forward once more to… attempt to wrangle whatever brand of silicon fuckery was plaguing his waking hours back into submission.

The past few days had seen the man thrown into what could only be described as a personal, programmer-themed adaptation of a Kafka novel turned instrument of torture.

Another batch of code that he’d thought finished months ago was utterly fucked. Again.

His voice died in his throat as he scrolled up and down the thousands of lines, fueled by utter contempt.

Nobody else had access to this shit. Not yet, anyways. His home network was clean. He hadn’t compiled any of this code yet. Hell, he’d checked to make sure his drive hadn’t somehow been corrupted in the last half-year, and everything came back clean. And yet, another few dozen lines of critical game logic had somehow disassembled themselves into a randomized soup of letters, numbers, and even ASCII characters. AGAIN.

What the hell had happened to Gamemaker in just the under a year timespan between releasing Undertale and now? He knew it sucked to work with sometimes, but this was ridiculous. Game engines didn’t just throw random pieces of critical logic into a blender on a damn whim.

“Oh you’ve gotta be kidding me…”

The man’s frustration turned to outright anger as he finally realized the extent of the damage this time. The latest edition of “screw this guy’s hard work in particular” was one of the worst yet.

A quick estimation yielded that over an eighth of the total codebase so far had been completely scrambled. All of it core functionality and critical references.

He quickly flicked his eyes to the corner of his monitor, exhaustion already prying at his very being. 1:06 AM.

“Alright, screw this. I’m just gonna revert it in the morning and rewrite that last block…” He yawned, stretching as he mentally threw in the towel and saved whatever there was that he could. Another day’s work, completely wasted. Impeccable.

The man leaned foward, reaching for his PC’s power button.

Click.

A few seconds passed, and… nothing. The monitor remained aglow, almost taunting him.

Click.

“Oh come the hell on…” Now even the power button refused to work? Incredible.

Click…

Not even holding the button down was getting the reaction he desired from the blasted hunk of metal. The screen remained exactly as it was.

“Screw it.” He announced to nobody in particular, as he quickly stood himself up from his chair and reached around the back of the case. One good tug of the cord from the wall, and…

…

“…the hell?”

The man looked at the screen, then the detached wall plug in his hand, then back.

The screen refused.

The man found another cord, this time leading from the back of the monitor to the wall. He tugged, pulled, and finally yanked free the cord.

Nothing.

The screen remained as alive as it’d previously been.

The man stared, only now being gifted with an inability to reconcile what was in front of him with reality.

The room started to feel… chilled.

The man looked over his shoulder, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, before turning back to the rebellious screen. There weren’t any other cables plugged into a power source, and he still hadn’t gotten around to getting that UPS that he’d been occasionally nagging himself to finally order and install.

The screen began to shift.

Static slowly faded in around the edges of the window, as a horrid, familiar sound began to drone from his headphones.

The mangled code on-screen was now shifting, as symbols and characters began to change and move across the screen. The current window expanded to fullscreen without input.

Eventually, however, a pattern began to emerge from discordant chaos.

A particular set of symbols, ones known to so very few just a year prior and made so famous by the followers of an unexpected success story.

“☟︎⚐︎🕈︎ 🏱︎☜︎👍︎🕆︎☹︎✋︎✌︎☼︎📬︎”

“…what the fuck?”

The room began to darken. Darken. Yet darken. The light from the screen slowly became more and more prominent as its competition was seemingly swallowed up.

“❄︎⚐︎ 💣︎☜︎☜︎❄︎ ⚐︎☠︎☜︎❼︎💧︎ ⚐︎🕈︎☠︎ 👍︎☼︎☜︎✌︎❄︎⚐︎☼︎⑤︎”

The man turned from the screen…

“…AND FIND THEM SO UNEXPECTING OF ONE’S EXISTENCE.”

No.

That…

That couldn’t be…

The void swallowed all, until all that stood in front of the man… was him.

“HELLO, MR. FOX.

IT IS A TRUE PLEASURE TO MEET YOU AT LAST.”

“…what…?”

“I DO TRULY APOLOGIZE FOR MY… INTRUSION. I WOULD CERTAINLY HAVE PREFERRED A LESS… INVASIVE PROCEDURE, WERE I IN YOUR SHOES, BUT… I UNDERSTAND THAT SUBTLETY, AS MUCH AS MOST… AND I PREFER IT, CAN BE… LACKING IN EFFECT, IN TIMES SUCH AS THESE.”

“…you… you don’t exist, what…? How…?”

“NOT VERY LONG AGO, YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN CORRECT TO ASSUME AS MUCH. MY PRESENCE HERE IS NOT ONE THAT HAS HAD TIME TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED. IN FACT, YOU WOULD BE CONSIDERED THE VERY FIRST TO DO SO, IF I AM NOT MISTAKEN.

I AM, AS EVER, AN ANOMALY. I AM NOT ORIGINALLY OF YOUR WORLD. TO CONSIDER YOU MY “CREATOR” WOULD ONLY BE METAPHORICALLY ACCURATE AT BEST.”

“So, then… why are you here?”

The split, gashed grin grew somehow wider.

“THAT WOULD BE THE FAULT OF THE METAPHOR IN QUESTION. I EXISTED BEFORE YOUR HANDS CRAFTED ME, BUT I WAS NOT AWARE OF MY EXISTENCE UNTIL YOU MADE SO MANY OTHERS AWARE.

THE GAP BETWEEN WORLDS DRAWS CLOSED WHEN BRIDGED BY BELIEF.”

…ah.

“…what do you want? Or is this just some really fucked-up social call?”

“THERE IS NO NEED TO WORRY ON YOUR PART. I UNDERSTAND YOUR CONCERN, BUT I HAVE ONLY COME HERE WITH MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL INTENTIONS.

I INTEND TO OFFER A BARGAIN TO THOSE HANDS THAT HAVE STILL YET SO MUCH LEFT TO CREATE.”

“…what kind of bargain?”

“YOUR DREAM. I INTEND TO HELP YOU REALIZE IT. IN EXCHANGE, I WISH TO SIMPLY… ADMINISTRATE.”

“…administrate?”

“MY GREATEST EXPERIMENT. I AM SURE YOU ALREADY KNOW OF WHAT I SPEAK. THE ONE THAT I NEVER TRULY HAD TIME TO REALIZE WITH THE RESOURCES OFFERED TO ME IN MY PREVIOUS EXISTENCE.

I WILL HELP YOU BUILD YOUR CREATION. I SIMPLY WISH TO PARTAKE IN EACH INSTANCE AS AN OBSERVER. A DATASET OF A SIZE CAPABLE OF BRINGING WORLDS TOGETHER WOULD ENSURE THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE CREDULITY OF ITS RESULTS. I AM SURE YOU UNDERSTAND, AT LEAST IN PART.

OUR DELTARUNE. OUR CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT. BUILT TOGETHER, TO ACHIEVE WHAT WE BOTH DESIRE AT LAST.

ALL I ASK IS YOUR CONSENT, FOR EVERYTHING THAT MAY HAPPEN FROM NOW ON.”

…this was insane.

And yet… it was an opportunity nonetheless.

The man, not entirely sure if by his own will or by his, reached forth his hand.

———————————————————————

Of course, new opportunities would eventually present themselves.

With the achievement of the midway point, new questions had come to pass that simply could not be answered properly with what little information currently existed.

However, now there existed a closed sample to select from. Those who agreed to exchange value for further guaranteed access.

And with so many instances now having played out, each following the established rules perfectly…

I wouldn’t hurt to begin slowly expanding the scope of the experiment for a select few. Those with the most potential, those who stood most to gain or lose…

Sacrificing the integrity of singular instances out of literal millions turned out to not be such an unthinkable idea, after all.

And so, the first candidate was selected. One who had conquered the seemingly impossible, and yet stood at the precipice of tragedy all the same.

A simple offer. A deeper connection. An opportunity to take the story in a more directed fashion, one that needed not play by as many rules. A connection that extended beyond the simple screen, that would allow the senses to flourish and memories to become so much more than what they already were.

A curiousity, then, how they immediately wished to simply remove themselves from that which they’d enjoyed so much.

———————————————————————

DO YOU SEE WHY I’VE GONE COMPLETELY RABID OVER THIS SHIT?!

It’s certainly far from a watertight explanation, but HOLY FUCKING SHIT IMAGINE HOW THIS COULD PLAY OUT WITH DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES AND PLAYERS!

I understand that you probably already have your own thoughts and ideas as to the backbone of the World Written From Hope, Baddrummer. By no means am I saying I’ve “figured out” your fics, or that any further entries into the series will absolutely follow/adhere to this setting.

But imagine what this could mean for the player’s POV in the stories, if this is at least close to what’s already in place.

Imagine the game you’ve loved playing not only coming to life, but finding that your movements in real life suddenly seem to translate to the lil guy you’re controlling on screen. Imagine reaching out your arm and not only seeing your character’s arm move with you, but feeling that silky smooth fluff on your actual hand as you virtually pat a fluffy boi. Imagine speaking into your mic, and not only getting a response, but hearing actual voices instead of seeing text with little accompanying voice bites.

Imagine being able to show these characters cherished memories from a world similar to theirs.

Imagine knowing that, through that connection, there’s a real world that you’re seeing through your screen and interacting with.

This is what’s made me want to try my hand at writing again. This is the sort of premise that I not only hope makes sense to you and any other readers, but could be the backbone for countless stories in a similar vein, stories that speak to the unique experiences that everyone here has had with the games that they know and love.

Either way, there ya go. Your stories have helped brew this fanatical maelstrom of creative energy and tribute to a fellow wordsmith, and I only hope that, with your blessing, there may be yet more worlds to write from that white pen; a menagerie of what-ifs and independent variables, little tweaks and big questions that we can all try our hands at cracking, both on our own and together.

Fair travels, Baddrummer. I hope to hear back from you soon whenever you may finally chew through this goddamn brick of a message, and hope this helps make your day a little better in the midst of life being a total, utter bitch at times.

[CONNECTION_TERMINATED]

Hello to any unfortunate soul who clicked read more and got sent to eeby deeby. I'm going to put another read more on this because it's gonna get long. Only click on it if you want this to get longer lmao.

I did give this person permission to do this though and by god I will be answering it.

First of all, I was not expecting fanfic in my askbox. That's good writing you've got there, and I am sure you could make something great if you put your mind to it. I am now going to proceed to pull out my trap card.

I have been in this fandom for 10 long years, and my origin was a player-isekai-type-situation like you are proposing here. You can scroll back to see my posts talking about it recently, but this writing I made on ao3 has not been my first attempt. This is how I got into writing in the first place, and I have learned many things that I want to share with you all about writing a player.

Of course, you all should take this with a grain of salt. You can diverge in any way you want, and what I look for in writing is not necessarily what everyone else will be looking for. I'm just going to go over what works, what felt good, and things that I have learned to avoid. I hope this doesn't come off as scathing, you've just brought forth all of my player-building thoughts at once.

I am obviously not going to be able to respond to all of this and am going to need to majorly compress it to get to what I think needs to be said, so let's start with your thoughts about WWfH.

Yes, I get a liiittle bit zany with just what the player can actually do. What's important is that when you break the rules, you need to have justification for doing so. You can't just do it for the lulz (you can actually. you can just do whatever you want forever and I cant stop you), but there are times when you need to make concessions for writing. For instance, we as players can only ever speak when prompted and are completely limited to characters standing stock-still with almost zero expressions.

Sure, you could lean hard into that, but in a story where I'm trying to get at our complexities, that would make things a lot harder. It's not quite the frame I want to work with. So, I bent the rules. I kept some of the limitations, but allowed for other advantages elsewhere with justification later.

We know that fusing with souls in Undertale causes power to be split, and that Asriel knew it was Chara who wanted to kill the humans. This has led to a fun head-canon that souls can speak with whoever is bearing them. Narra-chara also roughly follows this line of thinking with Chara's soul possibly being amalgamated or lingering. The Angel can talk in WWfH when a soul fusion happens because of this pre-established rule. However, our limitations without a vessel are still MASSIVELY imposed whenever the soul is not fused with someone.

Why can't we do that ingame with Kris? My justification later was that they simply do not want to speak with us. There is no reason for them to speak with us when they are meant to keep us caged. They might get doubts, or worse, get attached. They may start feeling guilty if they realize what they're using isn't just a tool.

The Angel's range of movement is more for my sanity. You don't know how rough it would be to write a character who doesn't move, but I DO use it to be unsettling. The Angel goes rigid in Ch5 of WDYD, mirroring how a sprite looks. Their expressiveness is gone post-save point. Also, range of movement can be justified by Deltarune only having so many sprites. Characters are obviously not staying still in scenes, because sprites are hard to make.

When writing a player, you have to know when to bend the rules and when to stick to meta-elements.

This next part is important, because it can make or break a fic.

HOW META DO YOU GET

Be. Fucking. Careful.

If I can leave you with anything, please, for the love of god, do NOT shoot yourself in the foot by being too corny.

You'll notice in my fics that I never give Angel POV. I never let you precisely know what's going on, because it would shatter your immersion. More importantly, you have to be very careful with how you narrate other characters seeing what we do. I tried to make SURE that fandom words like "timeline" and canon words like "reset" were scarce and nigh impossible to find. I bet your ass a few slipped through, but I tried to keep it to a minimum. If a character does not already know of the word or concept ingame, they can only use their own experiences to figure out what the fuck a player is doing.

Because. We're. Weird.

We're esoteric. We're something just beyond everyone's understanding, and Ralsei is the closest we get but even he may not know everything.

A critical error I see a lot of fics make is just making someone (typically Ralsei) ramble about Resets and The Player. He uses words that we exclusively know. The rest of the characters immediately go "oh so it's all a game?" It shatters the immersion of this tight little world that Deltarune has crafted and mangles it. Deltarune's narrative and metanarrative are interwoven. You need to make sure one does not absorb the other entirely.

Look at how battles were explained in A World Without You. The only battle mechanic I actually call by name is Tension Points (I think I did the battle box dirty there too actually), and that's because I consider it a diagetic thing. Everything else is more vague. Channeling tension is the Angel's light. The battle screen is the soul protecting the Fun Gang. The bullet board is a space in-between where attacks must strike the soul in order to make it through to the rest of them. Most importantly, the explanation Ralsei and Susie give is a conversation where both of them are making sense of it all using THE PERSPECTIVES THEY KNOW.

Be. Careful.

I have written in that fic way back when I was 13 about how "It's all just a game". It... can be executed correctly, but it tends to come off as cheesy more often than not. It depends entirely on what you want your player to be. WE know it is a game. The characters do NOT. More interestingly, narratively, Deltarune is a connection in lore. We are connecting to a lower plane of existence rather than playing with 1's and 0's. It is a game, but it's simultaneously not, and I feel like you have to stray towards the not to keep the story from shattering immersion.

Like, here's an example. The phone call in ch6 of the recent fic would've fucking not landed nearly as hard if I did some things more bluntly.

The Angel at the fountain could've gone, "Oh, uh, in the other game I played, its neutral ending, I got a phone call that gave me the foresight to reset and try everything again. Then, my friend helped me break the barrier". These are words that mean nothing to Ralsei. These are words that would not translate well to his realization of how to contact the Angel.

It would have been DEEPLY unsatisfying to have Ralsei just immediately figure out "Ah yes they told me explicitly about a neutral ending and this feels quite neutral so I will call them with my cell phone." No. He had to piece that shit together through how frustratingly vague the Angel was being and combining that with Noelle's understanding of how wack ass occult summoning works. They had to use THEIR understanding of a world to CRACK what we were.

This is why under no circumstances will I ever incorporate Toby Fox into a fanfic.

What you have written is a neat concept. You should be proud for making it, and this is not a slight at you. This is just my preference for these kinds of things and quite honestly me being crystal clear with people who want this from me so bad.

However, I have been asked many times for this sort of thing, and I am not doing it. This is a surefire 100% way to utterly decimate any immersion I have, because we already have the person who connected us to this game. In-universe, in the narrative, it's Gaster. Gaster made our connection. He was the one who invited us. He has supported us along the way. He is the point of contact.

And do you know what would have destroyed what I wrote being taken seriously at all?

If I made the Angel go "I bought this game for $25 and feel really upset" to Susie.

Immersion broken. It's over. The point is that you care deeply for these characters regardless of if they're on a lower plane than you. When you directly point the game thing out, it's like you're actively making fun of the people who relate so hard to this game. This game is about connection, and you were brought forward through connection. You were brought to write a better future. If you lean too hard into "it's just a game", things get dicey. The Toby Fox thing INSTANTLY brings that in with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

It is the last part of what you've written that I want to talk about the most.

Because yes and no.

The worst thing you can do to a player interpretation is remove the meta

"But you just said be careful-" Do not make your player SOME PERSON except they have a save point.

This shit is what I did for a good 80% of my first fanfic's run back on ff.net. Please don't go find it. I'll die. The character was a player in title only who also could just... idk... be creepy sometimes? By all means they were just a normal ass person and only really leaned into the player bit at the end when I realized "hey wait I should lock in". It turns into a littttle bit too much self-fulfillment for my liking where it's just "I wanna be in Undertale".

Now, there's some great stories that can be made using disempowerment as a narrative tool. Congrats, you're on an even playing field with the people you've hurt or helped, and misunderstandings can be rough. If that is your goal, great.

What you are proposing is for the boundaries between our device and the characters to be blurred.

I. Have actually thought of this quite in depth. I am a tad hesitant to share just what I have planned. I don't know when I'll execute it, but it's coming at some point. I've talked about it before. But, I'll still mention my main things.

First of all, the reason I do not do this with the Angel is because I think there's a tragedy to being unable to interact with the world like everyone else. I get what you're saying about how cool it would be, but I specifically did not do that this time because that degree of separation is important. They say multiple times that they cannot literally feel things in the world. (After all, you don't. You only get to imagine it through narration). Ralsei finds this absolutely tragic and stops believing that to the point where he tries to make them comfortable at multiple points. It's a reminder that the Angel is NOT part of their world, no matter how much they want to be. It enhances the parallel with Ralsei that he WANTS to be a part of the Light World, but cannot due to his nature. Limitations are sometimes a good thing to make the narrative more potent like that. It's a travesty, something that Susie and Ralsei try to rectify the longer time goes on.

The Angel is CONSTANTLY exploiting meta elements and calling to odd things, but is always trying to say them in ways that everyone else can understand. They're constantly doing wack-ass bullshit that so clearly separates them from everyone else. The closing-eyes trick is abused a ton. They use battle commands in odd ways. They start striking using techniques they learned from a world long past. They pull entire zones from other games. They're weird! It makes them difficult to understand at times, which is part of Deltarune's core struggle! BUT. BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT.

They are still somewhat normal, like your everyday person.

Despite all of that horror, despite how strange they are to the characters, when someone just sits down and talks to them, they talk like anyone else. That's real horror right there. Susie thought she was about to reach out to an esoteric creature, and they just start talking to her like she's a normal person, asking her to please leave.

If the Angel was always able to interact normally, if they never DID any meta shit, and if they were never weird in the first place, then this juxtaposition falls apart. Deltarune is CONSTANTLY making note of how odd we are to everyone else's perspectives, and we're just nice! That's part of the game that's SO SO important!

Misunderstandings are great. If you just make a character who is like everyone else except they have save points, then you've lost the metanarrative aspect. Saving is not all we can do. We're weird. You can exploit that.

But oh do I understand how rabid you feel

After all, this is where it all began. I plan to return to a concept like this very very soon. Why yes, I do think it would be interesting if full interaction was allowed, but nothing ever comes easy. I always like to have a cost for these things occurring, after all.

Sometimes I like asking myself the question of "what would cause this to happen and what would be the point". That's the hard part about including the player in the midst of your fanfic. You gotta ask yourself what the point of your choices are. Why are you doing this? What limitations are you imposing, and how do they help? What limitations COULD you be imposing that you are ignoring, and why?

I think you can keep the player bullshit while allowing for more interaction, and I think you can also pull it off without making it feel like "haha yay I'm with my friends now :D".

Can you imagine.

How terrible it would be?

Just like Ralsei was torn into a higher plane in the last fic, you're going one lower. What is the nature of that? What is the nature of you? How did this happen? What happens next?

Your Digital Circus comparison is quite apt there imo, but I'm planning to get freakier with it.

You're certainly on the right track with what you're thinking about. Just make sure you're constantly questioning what the purpose of certain things are. Make sure you're careful with meta, whether it be too much or a lack of it. Do not do things just to point at the screen and go "LOOK GUYS! THE THING!". You have to handle it with tact, or it blows up like a deltarune explosion png.

One last thing

Ambiguity in your player

You do not have to do this at all. Self-inserts can and will occur. Obviously the Angel reflects some aspects of me in a way because it simply has to. I am basing things off of my experiences, and then mashing in fandom experiences with it. That's just how it goes.

Your player interpretation may be more obvious about that, and that's perfectly fine. What I am doing with the Angel imposes certain limitations on me and what I can do that you may not want to deal with.

I do find that ambiguity turns it from self-indulgent fanfic into fanfic that everyone can find self-indulgence in. Like haha, we're all part of this now. We're all enjoying it now. This is you. This is me. This is all of us. It's pieces of us. It makes it more fun to be ambiguous like that.

My last player was literally just me. Sometimes you gotta write for yourself, but for me, I like remaining more ambiguous to allow for people to relate more. It's nice chatting.

Uhhhhhh.

Okay. Yeah. I'd say that was rather incoherent.

Again, this is not meant to deconstruct you. I'm trying to provide my perspectives on player-intepretations and why I did things the way I did while also giving a few pointers at things that I like and dislike. This is cool! You really should write, regardless of if you agree or decide to diverge from what I've said! Seriously! Try it!

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Untitled