Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.
“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.
And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.
Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.
“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.
Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.
“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”
Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.
By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.
“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.
The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.
“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.
The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.
But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.
The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.
When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.
Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.
Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.
“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.
But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.
The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.
The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.
still one of the most insteresting patterns i've seen with internet harassment campaigns is this agonizing habit to combine or even frontload extremely serious accusations with extremely bullshit ones, or even just like, petty critiques or cringe reacting at art their target has made. one of salem's most prominent harassment blog accused him of all sorts of serious (though obviously spurious) accusations but a lot of them were buried under posts nitpicking how he draws guitar straps. the rodfellows callout doc proclaims to contain a serious accusation of grooming before bogging it under layers and layers of quite frankly embarassing accusations of intelectual property theft cause sometimes the artist drew mickey mouse. any moralizing about christine weston chandler's behavior is rancid transmisogynist dogshit, but it's noteworthy that the harassment campaign started because she made some comics people thought were embarassing.
it's impossible to hide that the serious accusations are post-hoc justification for cringe, people can't handle not liking the thing so they have to accuse of pedophilia, grooming, etc. it's more convenient to argue that the silly puppy art is pedophilic than it is to just not like it and leave it alone.
In Undertale, the difference in physical structure between humans and monsters represents their different... let's say "ontological" status; humans are more physical because they're more real that monsters, right, they're the ones with real agency and moral patienthood; the world is implicitly telling you that monsters don't matter, they aren't moral patients, they are to humans as NPCs are to a player. They aren't real people made of flesh and blood, they're made of magic! That's the joke, I think.
Now Deltarune, with Lightners and Darkners, takes that subtext of ontological superiority and brings it even closer to text; the Darkners are literally not real, Ralsei encourages you to disregard their lives; the Lightners stand above them in the great chain of being, and closer to the Sun.
It would then stand to thematic reason that Monsters, as Lightners in the world of Deltarune, where we already know they don't have Magic, all bleed. This is what I have been staunchly defending for years now. And yet the game has just danced around it the entire time— if it's just a simple fact of the world, why not be straightforward about it? Why treat Susie bleeding four chapters in like a big deal? Why let Darkners so consistently talk about blood?
—Deltarune does not borrow Undertale's symbolism here; blood does not anymore stand for "real", or, rather, if it does, it stands for "real" as in "visceral", as in the opposite of "sanitized".
I don't actually know if Lightners bleed or not, but it doesn't matter, because either way, this fact would not be brought up. This is not a place where things like violence or blood are talked about (just ignore the weird man in the weird costume). This is just a quaint little town! Nothing bad ever happens here. We especially wouldn't talk about it around the kids! We're protecting them from it! Kids shouldn't worry about things like blood or trauma— So even a giant bloodstain on the floor goes unacknowledged.
The Light World doesn't allow talking about anything uncomfortable. Horror movies and rock music that may contain references to scary things are banned! But in the Dark Worlds, where the kids are free from the eyes of the grown ups, and can talk about everything weird and uncomfortable they're going and have gone through, the things they know are there just under the surface but aren't allowed to speak of— they can talk about blood. The Darkness itself manifests gushing from a wound in the Earth!
And Susie— well she talks about blood all of the time. She bluntly acknowledges the truth that "everyone bleeds". And when she rejects the prophecy, when she calls out the lie of the religion which claims to be all about everyone being always nice to one another, she, herself, bleeds.
a little while back i made a post about how each of the six non-flowery flowers mirrors a specific holiday/dreemurr based on asgore's perception, memory, and idealization of that person, especially as it pertains to the fallout of the dess incident. that post skips over blue because it only exists to set the foundation for the blue post. you are now reading the blue post
to quickly reiterate the basic idea we're working with here: the flowers' explicit goal is to give asgore what they think would be his ideal world and ideal family to make up for his real family, as he sees it, abandoning him after what happened to dess. since the dess incident was the catalyst, the flowers' personalities and social roles are modeled after the ideal behavior of individual lightners in relation to it. so, aqua is an untraumatized and innocent kris, green is an unobtrusive and peacekeeping toriel, yellow is a harmless and blameless asgore, etc.
yellow is the most obvious connection after aqua, especially with the whole dess thing in mind. yes this is still a post about blue. look at yellow's intro with me
we meet yellow when he investigates a "crime scene" and the kids pin it on him. he immediately starts beating himself up over it and proceeds to attempt suicide in many wacky ways while the kids try to tell him it wasn't his fault and he can stop obsessing over punishing himself for it. it is almost identical to asgore's self-described guilt spiral after the incident.
we get this from asgore after he's figured his issue out a little. yellow's whole thing happens long before that realization, embodying an imagined version of asgore who is victimized and falsely accused despite his innocence; in other words, who asgore hopes he really is, an ideal that exists to justify his continued descent into guilt and resentment.
so. still a post about blue. still a post about which lightner blue is connected to. still recalling that the key factor in these connections is how asgore wishes people acted or what he hopes their behavior meant regarding the dess incident.
when asgore is consumed by guilt and self-hatred, it's because he's blaming himself for what happened to dess. when yellow is consumed by guilt and self-hatred, it's because he's blaming himself for:
consider the operative fantasy here. asgore is wracked with guilt and wants to prove that the incident wasn't his fault, so yellow is innocent and falsely accused. he feels that his family blamed and shunned him for what happened, so the flowers support asgore unconditionally and see him as their hero. with the fantasy ultimately revolving around a young girl succumbing to some sort of tragedy, what does that girl have to become in order to absolve asgore's guilt for failing to protect her?
someone capable of avoiding the tragedy entirely. someone mature, competent, and fully able to protect themself.
it's blue who has to protect yellow, not the other way around. it's also blue who frees yellow from his self-imposed cage and helps him realize he wasn't at fault for blue's flowers getting crushed. immediately after this, the blue/yellow battle begins, where the gimmick is:
unsolved cases i wonder if there's a really major unsolved case that maybe is sort of important to this chapter? involving dess and asgore maybe? i don't know i can't really think of anythi
where yellow's intro has him blaming himself for a crime committed against blue('s flowers), the last round of the justice act is a crime committed against yellow himself...'s flowers. his, uh
his secretest petals done was stolened
importantly, these secretest flowers were for blue. this time around, yellow's reaction is notably angrier:
the shift here is the same one that happened with asgore. while he obviously cared about dess, the prevention of another tragedy now consistently comes second to the act of revenge.
more importantly, asgore's revenge plot is leading him to the knight. if dess turns out not to be the knight in any way/shape/form then beat me and take my blood but we're not playing around rn.
yellow makes a big show of cursing out whoever took the flowers that were supposed to be for blue, only to find out that blue was the one who stole them all along. the evidence we use to pin the crime on him is a blue string he left behind.
listen i know this bit looks insane i know it does i have tried to put it as take-it-or-leave-it as possible and the larger idea here doesn't hinge on this. but. asgore is looking for the person that created the original fountain so he can get revenge for his life falling apart after what happened to dess. if the knight really did make that fountain, however the hell that would've worked, he's looking for dess. like with blue, she's part of what's getting avenged and she left something behind that seems to prove she did it. (attempting to figure out what is going on there is too close to lore theory type territory and that's not what we're doing rn. i don't touch that stuff. let's move along)
there's also the more immediate concern re: fountainmaking with kris having created the flower kingdom and asgore conflating its creator with that of the first fountain. regardless of whether it was kris or dess/knight that made that one, it's worth noting that kris and the knight's dark worlds are uniquely identical. it's also worth noting,
it's blue rose all the way down. it's blue rose all the way down. let's look at the blue rose. why the hell were these things crawling all over the ch5 countdown page despite having nowhere near the plot significance that would suggest?
welllll. a blue rose is associated with impossibility, unattainability, mystery. that's relevant to deltarune as a whole, but it's especially relevant to the entire dess situation. ch5 is all about the unsolved mystery of her disappearance and asgore's years-long attempt to prove the existence of the impossible thing that caused it. for both the characters and the audience, the truth of what happened to her is out of reach. beyond that, dess herself is inaccessible. we know next to nothing about her.
a blue rose is also an artificial object. it has all those associations in the first place because it doesn't exist in nature and has to be manufactured. everything we do know about dess has come secondhand. hometown really can't be trusted to give us an accurate read on her, seeing how every hometown segment is packed with people rattling off their skewed perceptions of other characters. no one can accurately describe susie or kris, nevermind a missing girl whose image has most certainly been warped over time. she's defined by blurry memories that are just fading further and further into the distance.
even dess, if we attribute gml_GlobalScript_UNUSED to her, has been losing herself in this same way. appropriately enough, the best example of this comes from her chapter 5 text:
our idea of dess is a thirdhand construction based in already biased perceptions from people who haven't seen her in years. she's a figment of our imagination, and for those close to her, a collection of memory.
blue's introduction immediately plays on these ideas of perception and transformation:
from his first lines, he's talking about reducing an abstract concept to a simpler shape, attempting to "put a face" to someone we've only heard of, and oscillating between different forms. the butterfly schtick on its own establishes transformation and shifting images as part of his character. this bit is also just him saying he can control his talksprites and he'll use whichever one he feels like. his awareness of and control over his talksprites (plus having them at all when the only other talksprited flower is flowery) indicates a level of meta knowledge, pushed even further by his constant use of what i can only really call lore buzzwords.
there is, so much to say about this type of talk popping up so frequently with blue but the important thing for my purposes is just the presence of it. with dess, we have a character who is defined by a lack of definition and by an uncertain connection to the more esoteric pieces of the game. the people that were close to her are still in the dark on what really happened to her. both in and out of the game, all anyone can really do is cobble something together in the vague shape of her, a shifting image informed by personal preference and ultimately dictated by whatever they need her to be.
with asgore in particular,
i mentioned back at the start how blue as a representation of dess fits into the overall fantasy construction of the flowers. this fantasy, much like asgore's obsession with getting revenge, exists not as a response to her disappearance itself but as a response to his own feelings of guilt and abandonment in the aftermath.
now. uh. stick with me we got this far. let's flatten the whole situation out a little. we're looking at a man who was at the scene when some as-yet-unnamed tragedy happened to a young girl. in the fallout, his wife divorced him, he was removed from the police force, and he stopped seeing his kids despite living down the street. he blames himself for what happened, but still feels he's been unfairly ostracized. he thinks that if he can prove it wasn't his fault, he'll get back everything he lost. what happened to the girl herself is an unmentionable footnote in his attempts to prove his own innocence.
it sounds...bad. it does not sound good. it sounds "Bad." the fact of "sounding bad" doesn't instantly mean something in its own right but it does mean that there's a returning theme to consider here.
so. the two crimes that bookend blue and yellow's plotline are about special flowers getting crushed and secret flowers getting stolen.
you know what this thing is and i don't need to explain the themes and such of it. when the animation (rose/shatter/whateva) plays here, it is accompanied by this sound:
(sidenote there's no ominous_stab_harsh_1 or an unharsh ominous_stab. it's just this one. idk)
there are currently six sounds beginning with the snd_ominous label, all of which come from the weird route. snd_ominous itself is the "weird route jingle." snd_ominous_stab_harsh_2 makes its first appearance here, when you force the thornring onto noelle. it is only used in two other instances.
the second time is later in wr chapter 4, when you have the option to make kris close their eyes and think of noelle. the sound plays when the screen cuts to red.
the third and final instance of this soundbite is not in the weird route. it's at the end of standard chapter 5.
and. it happens. at the exact same time. just like the last noelle scene (and similar to the rose/shatter), the sound plays just as the screen cuts to red.
again. this sound only appears three times. the first two are well-trodden ground as to their implications irt sexual violence. the third one is here. as far as i could tell from (desperately) going through the code, there are no other instances of an snd_ominous-tagged sound playing outside of the weird route. the only almost-exception is snd_board_ominous, the 8-bit version of snd_ominous that plays during the sword route. otherwise, nothing. on a similar note, that red screen only appears during these two scenes, both times accompanied by snd_ominous_stab_harsh_2.
so. what the hell?
the fantasy the flowers embody in the dark world is about innocence. the idealizations they represent are built around restoring the innocence thought to have been destroyed by the incident. the crux of yellow's connection to asgore is in relieving his guilt through an image of him that has only ever hurt himself, not his loved ones.
in the weird route, the rose imagery (and snd_ominous_stab_harsh_2 as the sound linked to it) corresponds to innocence being violently destroyed. we also now know that it signifies a point of no return. it's not clear how much a weird route failure in ch5 really counts as a cancellation, but whether or not you've aborted the route, you're still not getting the thorn out. there's no restoring the kids you break here to the way they were before. can't uncrush the blue flowers.
if blue acts as a representation of dess in response to asgore feeling responsible for her "shattering" (let's discuss that language another time...), blue's relationship with yellow is doubly significant in that blue is much more levelheaded, competent, and knowledgeable than him. blue displays a higher understanding of the world and a stronger sense of agency than any of the other flowers, save for flowery. the imagined dess here then exists not to restore her innocence, but to bolster asgore's, just as the tragedy itself motivates him towards revenge far less than his own suffering at taking the blame. blue isn't one of those shatterable flowers. he's the one the others go to for advice. he knows more about the world than the rest of them do. he's...mature. an adult.
i am not interested in claiming that a csa angle is either strictly literal or strictly metaphorical for the same reason that i'm not interested in doing so for the weird route. we are looking at a game structured around exploiting and violating children's autonomy. the story is heavily predicated on the systemic abuse and endangerment of children by caretakers who feel entitled to using them as tools while repeatedly insisting they only want what's best for them. things like the thornring and the lake act as symbols while still carrying the full narrative weight of what they signify, and the distance of "metaphor" is frankly useless in a story deeply invested in granting the real and the symbolic equal legitimacy.
so! what am i interested in claiming.
i think that asgore sees the incident as a massive destruction of innocence, with himself and dess at the center of it. to this day, it's still just them and kris who know what actually happened. it's evocative of csa in the same way kris's own guilt and repression surrounding it is. dess's abstraction through hometown's memory and players' guesswork makes her an extra malleable subject for the construction of a self-affirming fantasy, especially with asgore defining her by his own suffering in the wake of her disappearance and by the mystery/impossibility/unattainability attached to it.
for all the flowers, the connection to a lightner primarily serves to alleviate asgore's guilt by providing him with a simplified version of someone who does not blame him for what happened and whose personality attests to his innocence. with dess, this manifests as someone who is not hurt if he fails to protect her, who tells him outright that he didn't wrong her, who affirms his victim status, who personally absolves him.
as an end note: blue, like i went over, is very self-aware. he knows what his role is in both the overarching story and the fantasy within it, and he uses this understanding to recalibrate his life's structure into something desirable. to return to his first lines:
he has some wiggle room in the margins, and he goes against the direction he's supposed to be set on when he can manage it. his dream for his limited time in the dark world was all about having agency and autonomy after a lifetime as a flower.
his outlook is an optimistic one, but like the others, he knows that his existence only goes as far as the fantasy world he's tied to; when we stop watching the dream, it comes to an end. the memories stick around, but the autonomy does not.
ultimately, it suggests an existence that depends on being witnessed and imagined by someone else, within the confines of their desires and their fantasy.
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