I really, really love Susie and Noelle's scenes during the Holiday Manor segments of chapter 4. Not just in a yuri sense, but specifically because there's this little meta game being done with Susie, Dess, and her memory + how it's preserved and like... the Idea Of Undertale in our perception as an audience.
Deltarune is "A game you can play after you complete Undertale", right? Toby calls it that himself. It is steeped in the expectations we have from that game. Its characters. Its plot points. Its motifs. The impact it had on us as a story, both from the audience's perspective AND from the creator's. Back when chapter 1 first came out, Toby talked about his anxieties regarding this new project, and being unable to "make us feel what we felt with Undertale".
Watsonianly, in Deltarune's story, there is this insanely intricate web of small town drama and trauma and history between Hometown's residents.
...and in barges Susie.
Susie who is the new girl. Susie who doesn't know anyone. Susie who has no respect or attachment to the "mythology" of Hometown, both in a religious sense and in the sense of the history of the people who live there.
Susie who, in the manor, says she "never played the original dragon blazers". Only Dragon Blazers 2.
To me she feels like a sort of implicit allegory for the new Deltarune fan? The one with ZERO attachment to Undertale. Because they never played it or because they played it afterwards. The one experiencing THIS story for its OWN sake.
She's unshackled by the core theme of nostalgia that binds every other character, because the objects that inspire it in Kris or Noelle or Hometown as a whole, they mean nothing to her. They hold no sacredness, no significance. So she tramples over them. A sort of desecration through cluelessness.
Which is EXACTLY what she does with Dess' memory! With her room, kept perfectly still and unchanged in the years since she disappeared, her guitar shoved in the closet to gather dust.
These are objects that MEAN something, that hold an incredible significance, to Noelle and to Carol and what and who they lost. They're something that (presumably) Carol preserved in an obsessive need to hold onto everything left of her daughter.
And it stagnates. It's frozen. It's no less dead, just because it is preserved.
...and it's precisely by desecrating that reverence that Susie is able to breathe new life into it. To create new connections with Noelle. To quite literally Make Art.
Waltzing into Dess' time-frozen room, not giving a fuck, plopping down against her bed waiting for us to make noise. You can see Noelle warn her to leave the room untouched, but she follows her shortly after. The ice melts.
Later, grabbing the guitar. playing it (badly!) but playing it for the first time in actual years. Making Noelle laugh. Reminding her of her sister.
It... kinda reminds me of the reverence we as an audience have for Undertale as the original source material.
Think about it. Didn't Toby have to calm everyone down when he released chapter 1 and reassure us that playing Deltarune would leave the ending we got for undertale untouched? Because people would be preventing themselves from interfacing and experiencing and CONNECTING with a new story, with a new piece of art, out of fear of it affecting... the one they'd already experienced. the one in the past, the one they'd already finished and closed and left to sit untouched on their desktops ever since.
This aspect of Susie is the thematic beating heart of chapter 4. It's the potential, the fire Gerson sees burning in her eyes.
And it ties back to Susie's own trauma and abuse and her being forcefully cast as the villain. Someone bad, broken, not good enough. Someone who should keep her nose out of things outside of her range.
Her confrontation with Carol when she snatches the guitar from her hands... sure she might not know the history/the context/the """sacred texts""", and that CAN isolate her and negatively affect her ability to navigate the social situations in Hometown (and allegorically her artistic output. she can't play the guitar, the piano, or write all that well), but she HAS value. Her perspective has value just by virtue of being new, original, revolutionary, her own, something SHE and only she can bring to the table. And those can improve through practice, dedication, and support. Ralsei himself, while well intentioned, makes the same mistake by shutting her healing skills down.
Total knowledge and reverence for Dess' memory and the past has frozen the Holiday family (and Hometown as a whole) in the past. It's locked them in stasis. they know how things were. they know how things "should be". they cannot deviate. every week they worship a prophecy that dictates their past, present and future.
"Only then will the worlds will be SAVED". But should that really be the goal...? When you save a game, you preserve the things you've already done in it. The only thing you can do is overwrite it or start again. It's an inherently cryogenic process.
...In the game MOTHER 3, The Dragon is a mythological creature slumbering under the crust of the earth, kept in its sleep through 7 magic needles. The needles can only be removed by someone who knows the move PK Love, when its power is needed. Once the last needle is removed, the Dragon will follow the heart of this person, good or bad, by bringing on the apocalypse and destroying the world.
today I saw someone pushing the idea that Maria in the movie adaptation is better because she's not terminally ill so she's like a "normal girl" which makes her death more "tragic" and this was on reddit and it got 12k upvotes without a single mention of how ableist that is
and i'd call this a "common reddit L" if not for the fact that I've also seen this idea pushed on Tumblr too. And it makes me wanna KILL SOMEONE! TELLING ON YOURSELF, TRULY, ABOUT WHO YOU DO AND DON'T VALUE IN THE WORLD! that movie and its fans make me foam at the fucking mouth, man.
not thinking of those who struggle to live to the fullest as being as human as themselves, who apparently "deserve" to do so, rather than considering how "tragic" it must feel to know you likely never will as everyone looks down on you (some real high-grade nazi shit)
fans of the sonic movies trying as hard as they can in their extreme, gleeful media illteracy to make the games' storytelling worse again because they prefer tired offensive jokes and paving over backstories and personalities with copies of other blockbuster movies
Black people have been hidden and whitewashed from history so much, I PROMISE you that a random teen making black vocaloid edits on Pinterest is not gonna kill anyone's representation
there’s a notion I’ve seen people spread that I don’t like when it comes to deltarune human designs ( I don’t think it’s wrong to see the monsters as white bc I sure do for a few of them ). but when people hc characters as black ( say specifically Noelle + berdly ) people jump to “oh! Well Noelle can’t be black, she’s a corny preppy rich girl!” “Berdly can’t be black, he’s and annoying nerd.” What makes you think black people cant act like this 😭
Do you think being rich and living in the suburbs + being nerdy and corny is white exclusive traits 😭 do you think being silly or geeky or dainty and soft are traits black people cant have 😭 like it really shows that people think of certain personalities as “white default” and if a black person acts that way its unrealistic . I think you need to unpack what you think a black person should behave like for you to think this way 😭😭😭😭
The thing is I was so pleasantly surprised that it was such a widely accepted hc to think of tenna as black!!! I was genuinely so happy about that!! ( esp tenna being so layered and complicated and not being that great a person all the time) we get happy seeing people treating black people as actual human beings!!! The bare minimum!!!
But I think it just holds a conversation about the way people push black people / characters in the box all the time. Like we’re not allowed to flawed/imperfect/be annoying/ get upset or angry be short tempered like other characters or they’re seen as “aggressive” “unreasonable” or a racist depiction bc they dare show a human emotion . But if they have no flaws / relatively sweet, geeky and silly, animated or bubbly but people say they “aren’t interesting” or find them “boring. “Too much” “I care about the other characters more”.
I don’t think there should be a justification or “a reason” for characters can be black . They’re just people, but the way talk about this makes it feel like there needs to be a reason. You just don’t see them as human enough to coexist with everyone else.
Especially with blue being introduced in this newest chapter ( THE MOST EXPLICITLY BLACK CODED DELTARUNE CHARACTER BTW ) who is a kind, gentle and feminine gender non conforming black man people have truly just don’t know how to behave.
( denying his blackness in the first place bc of how he acts. “he’s blue, not black”) whitewashing him by straightening his hair ( he literally has locs in his sprite) or finding some excuse to not care about him at all. like we know exactly the type of people you are if this is how you react to the very explictly black coded character in general 😭
