Madelyn Himegami @madelynhimegami - Tumblr Blog

I've seen a bunch of really bad takes going around about internet safety, how parents/adults have a responsibility to shepherd everyone else's kids, and how it's all just "stranger danger" again when you don't want to give out personal information.

Stranger Danger from an 80s - 90s kid who lived it

We talked to strangers. We talked to a LOT of strangers. We just knew how to do it safely.

"Don't talk to strangers" was not about never talking to people you didn't know. It was largely about sussing out appropriate help. For instance when I was little, I was always told that if I got lost in a store, I should go to the front of the store, find the checkout counter or customer service desk and ask for help, NOT just walk up to some random person in the store. When I was older I was taught that if I felt unsafe while walking alone I should duck into a store and ask the employees there to call my mom (remember, no cell phones).

I was taught to be very wary of someone randomly coming up to me to offer food or gifts andnot to get in a car with someone I didn't know who offered a ride, which if you think about it if you've ever been in a major city is a good way to avoid a lot of scams, not just kidnapping. It helped me at various points in my childhood learn to avoid religious missionaries on the street (no, I do NOT want that Watchtower, no, I do NOT want to come into your church, thanks). I was also taught not to open the door of our apartment for strangers, which is again a good way to avoid religious proselytizers and salespeople, as well as anyone who possibly might be casing your home.

The idea was to a) have a plan to ask for help, b) develop some discernment on WHO to ask for help, c) have some awareness that every single person you met might not have your best interests at heart. All of those things are still really important to know. The phrase "I don't talk to strangers" was an easy way to convey "I don't know you and I do not have enough information to decide if you are someone I should talk to right now," not "every stranger is going to kidnap me."

Kids in the 1980s and 1990s when "stranger danger" was a thing had a hell of a lot more freedom to interact with strangers than kids now - many if not most of us went places alone, took mass transit alone, carried out errands, stayed out with our friends all day, were sometimes home alone, and knew how to handle that. A fair number of the friends I had in my childhood were other kids that I randomly started talking to at the park, or wandering my neighborhood - I talked to strangers and made friends, in other words.

That also translated to being online. There were a lot of message boards, forums and websites for various interests, and people could and did just show up there and start talking to others who shared those interests. Some friendships that have endured 20 years or longer for me started when we both were in a forum talking about a band we both liked, or a movie we'd seen. We talked to strangers. We talked to a LOT of strangers. We just knew how to do it safely.

Being anonymous online

"Oh, we used to know not to give out personal information online and now every site wants it!" is not a misguided "stranger danger save the kids from mean adults!" thing.

EVERYONE was told that. ADULTS were told that.

A lot of the desire for you to use your real name and personal information online is for marketing and database creation. They want to know your interests and online activity so they can develop a better marketing profile for you. Why the hell do you THINK every company now wants you to use their app and tie it to your phone number? That's all valuable, sellable data for data brokers and marketers. YOU are the commodity. That data is also now potentially being used for things like ICE.

Using your real name online has led to people being fired, being rejected from colleges, etc. for nothing more than, say, being photographed drinking beer at a party or identifying as LGBT+. It's been used to take away people's disability benefits because they posted a photo where they smiled (yes, literally, this has been used against people) or didn't "look sick." Yes, it has also been used to identify people on the other side, but there's a cost to that. When your entire life is public and you have no privacy, there's a cost.

There actually IS a higher level of risk disclosing personal information online than there is in person. In your personal life you're unlikely to have literally a million people calling you or showing up at your door to scream homophobic insults, for example. That shit can and does happen online because more people have access to you. Internet trolls are a thing, and we can't pretend they are not. Things like swatting happen. If you're under an anonymous name on a fan site, that likely will not translate to being targeted in real life. If you're using your real name, disclosing where you live, your school or employer and your daily schedule as you live stream, it's a hell of a lot more likely that will translate to people harassing you offline, and that's happened.

At the time we were being told to guard our personal information, there were a LOT of dedicated, moderated places for children and teens to gather online and interact with others. Geocities, a website where you could create a free little website for yourself, had a children's section. There were Club Penguin, Yahooligans, and a lot of other websites specifically for kids and teens.

There was also software like Net Nanny that parents could install on their home computers that blocked access to certain sites or keywords, meaning it WAS taken as parents' responsibility to keep their kids safe. At the same time, with things like cable television, you could block certain stations to prevent your kids from watching them.

People did talk about themselves. People had websites about themselves and their likes, they wrote about their day on Livejournal or reviews movies they liked on whatever website existed for that. They interacted. The difference was that every single thing they did, every single place they went, every financial transaction, was not posted for the world.

Adults online do have a responsibility, in my opinion, to label and warn - tags and ratings on fanfiction; NSFW warnings on images; notices about flashing lights; etc. but again that is for everyone, not just kids. That 60 year old may not want to get fired because a nude image randomly popped up on an otherwise innocuous feed. That college student may not want to be triggered reading a fanfic about a topic they really need to avoid. That does not mean there is not responsibility on the parents' end about their children. Maybe, just maybe, your six year old does not fucking need a cell phone with open access to the internet and social media. Maybe we should not be encouraging young people to put their entire lives online with no privacy, no room to make mistakes, and a drive for likes and favorites instead of actual engagement with others. That shit is a hell of a lot more toxic than "stranger danger" ever could be.

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Did you have fun?

Deltarune chapter 5! Deltarune chapter five. Delty-runey chapty fivey.

Had so many thoughts about this one that I had to post about it Somewhere and this is the only place I have to do longform stuff. Hi.

Unsurprisingly, huge DR spoilers below.

madelynhimegami

Good hecking post, OP. Hope you don't mind me adding some stream-of-conscious additions to it.

Among other things, I felt the exact same way about how the chapter feels like a comedic Manchurian Agent. Sans asks Susie to draw herself and her friends on a little slip of paper, and my immediate thought was "That's bait. That's to get theorists to react."

But that aside, the main thought I had coming out of Chapter 5 that dovetails with your post (as well as the statement "Let's have one more fun adventure, okay?") is something said in the last ten-to-thirty minutes of the game, pending an individual player's penchance for fucking around. Flowery, the character very intentionally designed and named to evoke Undertale's Flowey and the main antagonist of the chapter, has been defeated. He and Asgore stand before the Dark Fountain, waiting for Kris to seal it. If you talk to Flowery a couple times at this point, he says the following:

"We had our nostalgia. It's time to move on."

In addition to being full of nods, teases, and jokes at the expense of major fan theories, Chapter 5 is full of callbacks to both Undertale and Deltarune. A recurring NPC can give you a slip of paper hinting to a not-commonly-known Easter Egg on Undertale's title screen (B-A-L-L). Ralsei gets his hat back for a little while, and he points out several things in the Dark World's first major area that double as callbacks to Chapter 1. We have the six other Flowers, who are all overt references to the other SOULs and attacks used in the Photoshop Flowey fight from Undertale. Jokes are made about recurring musical motifs. Asgore shows up in kingly armor and his Undertale boss theme comes back. Susie and Ralsei go into the Big Pink Door as excited to meet the secret boss as the player ("I bet it's a new friend!" "I bet they're strong!" "I bet they have a really memorable theme!"). There's the fact that Pink herself was a secret boss exclusive to the Switch version of Undertale, and a couple of her attacks visually reference that fight.

And at the end of the chapter, we're told "We had our nostalgia. It's time to move on."

Chapter 5 marks the end of several recurring elements in Deltarune. The last Shadow Crystal boss. The last appearance of the Forgotten Man and his eggs. The final Starwalker. The Festival that's been built up for multiple chapters begins and ends. Susie and Noelle confess their feelings to each other. Asgore finally understands that it was his bad choices and obsessions that led to his life being where it is. And once back in the Light World, Susie tells Kris that the two of them can't treat the Dark World as fun adventures only for them anymore.

I think Chapter 6 is going to be very different. I think it's not gonna have nearly as much silliness. It's not going to follow the format of the previous five chapters. It's not going to be like, or even necessarily connect to Undertale. It's going to come into its own, and put its overarching narrative and themes up in the forefront. It's going to be the culmination of what Toby Fox has worked towards for over ten years, regardless of what any of the fans want, think, or like.

And we need to be ready for that.

(for my money, I've ultimately decided that speculation is fun, but at the end of the day all we can do is wait to see where the story goes.)

(that said, I do have one pet theory, that Ralsei is the video game Deltarune itself, but that's such a wild shot in the dark backed by some very circumstantial evidence, that I'll be more shocked if it turns out to be right)

It's also interesting how you bring up Mike. I wasn't one of the people that got focused on the question of "who is Mike," because it's a name that gets brought up in a way that's one part nonsensical, one part weird. So I had zero expectations of who or what Mike was, going into Chapter 3 or 4.

It was really funny to me how, at the end of the Mike fight, there's still not a satisfactory answer. The game makes a playful jab at theorists, then gives a complete non-answer of Mike's true identity. "If we're not Mike, then who is Mike?!" one of them asks. "Maybe it's always been us? Maybe we're Mike?" responds another, leaving the first to sputter about how that makes no ontological sense. Then you find in a dark corner of the room the inexplicable appearance of a giant photorealistic microphone that never gets seen or mentioned again. In the end, you're left to do optional minigames that arbitrarily let you "decide" who Mike is based on which has the highest score (with the joke that one game is significantly easier than the other two to get a score into the tens of thousands).

It made me wonder if there was ever a plan to do anything with "Mike" in the first place. If the name, on its own, was thrown in on a whim. Sure, there was plenty of foreshadowing and buildup to Tenna's appearance in the next chapter surrounding it, but Mike's namedrop just seemed like another nonsequitur in the pile of everything else that made Spamton unsettling. But fans speculated so much about who or what Mike was, that the official response ended up being "I have the opportunity to do something really funny here."

Anyway, that ended up being a huge tangent.

This post's discussions about fandom also makes me think about some of my own experiences with Puyo Puyo as a fandom (since it's arguably the first I Really felt a part of). Bear with me, since I beared with OP on Homestuck and Stephen King. It's been a bit of a roller coaster, being around an English-speaking community that's been trying to grasp at straws understanding something with thirty years of media exclusively in Japanese, and finally having our myths and misconceptions about the wider franchise dispelled as more people (who actually knew Japanese) looked into the media itself, and didn't just rely on hearsay.

But it's not just us Western fans that have thoughts about this franchise. There are an untold number of fans of Puyo Puyo in Japan that have lived and loved it for far longer than any of us had, for a bigger proportion of their lives than mine. Who have their own perspective of what it means to have the possibility space narrowed.

Puyo Puyo, of course, is a corporate franchise owned by Sega, and as major corporations are wont to do, Sega wants to keep Puyo Puyo going forever as a perpetual money-making device. For significant stretches of the franchise's history, including before Sega owned it, there was no interest in pushing the story and characters further, even as the seeds were planted for some interesting character arcs and concepts. Puyo Puyo has been in a stasis for decades where previously-established plot points were at best tangentially brought up, and character development has been crawling inches at a time, if at all. It's an unfortunate reality that I and several of my friends have been quite frustrated with off-and-on over the past few years.

So when the most recent Puyo Puyo game came out and showed the signs of a twenty-year old subplot-- that of Sig and his demonic heritage-- finally starting to move again, we were excited. Finally, we were learning more about this! Finally things that were only ever brought up in supplementary material was being addressed! I know at least some of us, myself included, weren't even bothered that the game completely overturned our theories surrounding Sig and his fragmented soul from a previous incarnation, because it was outweighed by the fact that the wheels were finally, finally, finally starting to turn, even if a little bit.

And yet, not everyone following Puyo Puyo was happy about it. Shortly after Puzzle Pop's story was complete, I was relayed an anecdote of a Japanese fanartist, who was satisfied with holding onto their personal headcanons. That the plot had started moving meant that those headcanons were now at risk of being deconfirmed, which upset them. They had been quietly hoping that there never would be any answers, because then they and their friends could keep their headcanons.

I guess, to bring this back to Deltarune, it's why Susie said what she does in Chapter 4. "It's just better if stuff just… goes on forever, right?"

But Deltarune was never something that was made to last forever. It started with the idea of what its ultimate ending is and will be. And no amount of theorizing or headcanons can change what it is. And we're rapidly getting closer and closer to the end.

During the Undertale Tenth Anniversary Stream (goddamn how has it been so long already, I was in my last semester of college when it came out, for pity's sake), Toby Fox very explicitly left the door open for as much possibility space for the game as fans wanted to seek out, saying "The Underground is as big as you want it to be."

Maybe the same will be true when Deltarune is complete. But maybe it won't.

Ultimately, Chapter 5 is what the newsletter said it was, "one more fun adventure," full of references and injokes and fandom nods, before everything changes. Before the possibility space begins to diminish to its most narrow. Before the real answers start. One more fun adventure to help us collectively reflect on what we've experienced and felt and created in the past, and celebrates the beauty that was there.

Cherish those thoughts, feelings, theories, fanwork, and overt silliness. Cherish this world of Deltarune as it exists now, one last time.

Because it's time to move on.

#deltarune

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Madelyn Himegami