(tags via @starkittyshine)
my read of spamton as transmasc comes first and foremost from his association with mettaton, who’s canonically transmasculine. we’re told by swatch that the NEO body in queen’s basement was created by a lightner:
to me, this is very clearly mettaton. the use of they/them for the lightner, which is what all ghosts use when not fused to a body, as well as the visual similarities between the two NEO bodies:
pointed wings, long legs, high shoulders, the gun arm. not to mention the shared musical motifs.
in deltarune, mettaton is a shut in who rarely leaves his house. the only people he talks to are his cousins (one of whom is presumably also deeply in the closet). he’s bored and lonely, and he dreams of a body of his own — an allegorical transition in the worlds of undertale and deltarune. one day, he goes to the library and opens the paint program on the communal laptop. but nothing comes of it. he thinks nothing ever will come of it, that his hopes and his dreams will never be realized.
like. closeted boy makes his ideal body on a computer but gets scared and tries to delete it and scrub it from existence but the idea is so powerful that it’s still there and it ends up in queen’s basement. and spamton knows about it somehow?? did someone tell him?? and he wants it desperately because he thinks it’ll give him freedom. but it fails because of all the Literal strings attached, because the guy who made it is so deeply closeted and repressed.
spamton is frustrated and angry and he turns to the person who put him in this body and demands their soul, their power, the thing that makes them one of the heroes of the prophecy. he either doesn’t know/doesn’t fully understand that this soul is causing them pain and taking their autonomy or he doesn’t care and wants the power anyway. he covets this young transfem person for what they have because he’s deeply dissatisfied with himself. the fun gang cuts all of his strings but one. he thinks they’re setting him free out of friendship; he sees it as kris finally repaying his “genorisity” that he showed them. in his excitement, the last string on the NEO body snaps, and he falls lifelessly to the ground. he finds himself back in his old puppet body.
“It seems... after all... I couldn't be anything more than a simple puppet,” he says, his voice sounding the clearest and most normal it has since you met him. “But you three... you're strong. With a power like that, maybe you three can break your own strings. Let me become your strength.”
the nail in the coffin to me is how rattled kris is after the encounter and how ralsei (egg who is so repressed that she won’t allow herself to feel anything but happiness) tries to immediately brush it off as a malfunctioning program and move on.
there’s also this video essay i found quite interesting, goes through a lot of little evidence for the concept and how spamton as a character is coded, both literally and metaphorically.
it’s all so, SO interesting to me. i often forget just how interesting it is to me because fans are generally so uninterested in talking about it and would rather have yaoi shipwars or whatever
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
origamiaround
