most obvious thing in the entire world that i haven't seen anyone talk about is that. the credits theme and the egg room theme of chapter 5 are both "scarlet forest from deltarune piano collections." for anyone who still doubted voice and egg were fragments of the same guy, credits theme manager gaster will do "two inseparable halves that are incomplete without the other" about the man he doesn't want us to look for. and not only this but: the part that's in the egg room keeps sounding like it wants to do a don't forget but never does, while the credits theme part does hit the full "with you in the dark." after neverending night excised the "don't forget" theme from the sanctuary theme. < well this is probably meant to refer to the attempted return to form that is chapter 5 after chapter 4, but on a character level, it's, like. he's being musically tsundere about don't forget and he's being musically tsundere about the forgotten man. at least two layers of musical tsundere. what's his issue and don't you dare tell me it's the egg
wasn't aware of that lol. oh well, i love nothing more than spreading misinformation online. also them being both from the same set of tracks, while not as crazy, is still at least a little crazy i think 🤔
So hard to get across that yeah i do think berdlys actions are why he is lonely, he could genuinely get along with susie and be better friends with noelle if he would just drop the act he puts on. Him being truthfull with noelle that he does see her as smart instead of constantly putting her down in comparison to him could have improved how she sees him. If he didint insult susie so much and make her think he didint like her she might have considered inviting him. His loneliness is a result of his actions to the people around him!!!
most obvious thing in the entire world that i haven't seen anyone talk about is that. the credits theme and the egg room theme of chapter 5 are both "scarlet forest from deltarune piano collections." for anyone who still doubted voice and egg were fragments of the same guy, credits theme manager gaster will do "two inseparable halves that are incomplete without the other" about the man he doesn't want us to look for. and not only this but: the part that's in the egg room keeps sounding like it wants to do a don't forget but never does, while the credits theme part does hit the full "with you in the dark." after neverending night excised the "don't forget" theme from the sanctuary theme. < well this is probably meant to refer to the attempted return to form that is chapter 5 after chapter 4, but on a character level, it's, like. he's being musically tsundere about don't forget and he's being musically tsundere about the forgotten man. at least two layers of musical tsundere. what's his issue and don't you dare tell me it's the egg
all your flowery analyses are really fucking good and make the whole older brother thing hurt a lot more. flowery's desperate for asgore's attention but he's also taking on the most major role in trying to keep asgore happy as to let the rest of the flowers pursue their own dreams. it's also heavily implied that he still tries to make time for the and their activities in the flavor text for his fight and like. he's their older brother and their friend and trying to make them happy and trying to make asgore happy and trying to live up to what he wants to be for everyone and i am emo about it
this got longer and ramblier than i expected it would as i tried to feel out my thoughts on flowery and ralsei; as well, i’d like to give a blanket content warning for discussion of parental (or pseudo-parental) abuse and fawning behavior that goes into a bit heavier territory than my usual fare. i’m not sure if all of this was intentional insomuch as it is my own personal reading informed by my own personal feelings, but it’s noticable enough that i wanted to talk about it nonetheless.
i’ve been discussing this a lot with one of my mutuals who liked the chapter more than i did so far, so i’ll quote with their permission; “keeping asgore distracted and happy seems to be a strategy to make sure the flowers aren't hurt by him, physically or emotionally. asgore is outright being threatening and terrifying when he fixates on the dark world and dark fountain. the fact that flowery keeps fawning (…) it reads that flowery is trying to keep him from hurting anyone, and he's redirecting asgore’s behavior by trying to get him to engage with the other flowers who want his attention and love. it's a fucking horrific situation because (…) his entire existence depends on asgore’s whims.” i really do think a lot of flowery’s behavior is a fawn response, especially because asgore treats flowery in a way that very glaringly aligns with the sort of father he is to his light-world children. asgore raised flowery too, after all. asgore’s children seem already primed to carry burdens they shouldn’t by him, and oftentimes this corroborates asgore’s general lack of appropriate boundaries. asgore gets rough with kris and susie when throwing them out of the dark world, and in earlier chapters, repeatedly uses kris as an “in” to force his romantic gestures on toriel.
flowery’s behavior towards asgore reads far differently than asgore’s behavior towards toriel for a number of reasons, but one such reason is that in both relationships, asgore is the one “in power”; as a man, and as a caretaker-figure and lightner. flowery is literally objectified as a flower and as someone asgore raised; kris, asriel, and toriel are objectified as the members of the family he is the breadwinning patriarch of. the dynamic asgore has with the flowers emphasizes the ways he treats the people in his life like tools for his own ends and the way they learn to play multiple roles in his life as a result. their wants and needs become impositions on his own even when stripped down to appease him. and his violence is framed far more severely as someone from a grounded setting than most violence coming from someone originating in the dark worlds’ heightened fantasy setting. it’s no wonder flowery fawns when he’s around; because asgore holds the reins, his approval reigns supreme, and his self-centered worldview reflects this.
moreover, though, i feel this is the case because it’s yet another way flowery acts as a reflection of ralsei. almost all of this is stuff you’ve probably heard me say before while discussing ralsei’s relationship to the role they are meant to carry out; but it bears repeating that much of what initially comes off like ralsei tutorializing or acting overbearing is instead an attempt to ensure that we don’t hurt them or their friends. it's an extension of the idea that ralsei still seems to have clung onto; that our kindness will be enough to alter the ending of the prophecy without causing it to be defied outright. this becomes apparent in the conversation ralsei has with flowery about their prayers to the prophecy; putting their faith in themself seems sacrilegious, and coping by believing that perhaps there is a prophecy that can be merciful and kind if they are only kind enough in turn is much easier. i don’t think they believe praying will really change anything, but it’s very evident to me that it gives them a sense of comfort. if ralsei can carry the weight of this knowledge on their own, no one will get hurt. everything will be okay. the prophecy (and, depending, whoever or whatever tasked ralsei with the role of its tutorial,) will be good, and gentle, and kind. and this leads to a sense of what at first seems like pride in ralsei that mirrors flowery’s own; a coping mechanism to reason out the cruelty. i can handle the prophecy (/asgore,) i am the only one who understands the prophecy (/asgore,) you don’t understand the prophecy (/asgore,) like i do, so don’t insult it (/him). (i won’t tangent about the weird route here, but i do think noelle is similarly trying to cope with what’s been done to her there similarly.) i think this is a part of why it upsets ralsei so much to see flowery encouraging them to break the prophecy’s rules. ralsei’s come to fear that doing so without proper precaution is grounds for risking punishment.
what initially may read to some as scheming or two-facedness is, in actuality, an intricate plan to mitigate harm, and this goes both ways. i think this is why flowery comes off like a know-it-all to the other flowers. it isn’t that he’s selfishly controlling them for no reason or because they don’t share his feelings; rather, he knows asgore threatens darkness with great violence, and his close friends are all only able to have their own dreams because of the darkness. if asgore loves the darkness, he’ll love them, too. he won’t hurt them when they’ve only just started to develop their own smiles. to me, it seems as though we are meant to interpret his motives as including a want to find a way to break the rules alongside them; a way for them to maintain their lives in the darkness in spite of their natures as flowers. (and this in and of itself is something ralsei may too want and be deeply ashamed of wanting, as it seems increasingly likely that ralsei is not meant to live past the end of the prophecy, ralsei sees the broader idea of trying to live past one’s fated end as sacrilege.) the more flowery fawns, the more i think he believes he can convince asgore he and his world are worthy of defying fate for.
but more immediately, ralsei is an object, and this colors the aforementioned just as it does for flowery. loathing one’s self for being useless and being told usefulness is the only way one can matter is part and parcel of objectification. flowery claims that becoming a human will free him from the fate of a flower, but he is unable to defy fate as long as his attempts ultimately do naught but adhere to it. he remains objectified as a sort of aspiring multitool of asgore’s; thus, in the end, the darkness he longs for cannot prevail over the sun-lit “way things ought to be.”; as long as he depends on the light, he will never cast off the fate of a flower. ralsei, on the other hand, is the darkner to end all darkners; their room is perfectly empty, their hobbies are entirely tailored to be as useful to the lightners as possible, and doylistically, their being the only darkner in the party casts them as a sort of microcosm of every darkners’ struggle. ralsei doesn’t simply idealize kris and susie because they are the heroes of the prophecy; their status as lightners is critical to the dynamic between them, and as an aspect of why ralsei defers to them rather than simply seeing them as “fellow heroes”. like flowery, a lot of what initially comes across like a comedic excess of affection towards kris (and susie, though we are not shown this as often,) is, upon closer examination, deeply concerning behavior that stems in part from how ralsei has been taught to view themself in relation to the lightners by the hierarchy. it’s not a coincidence that one of ralsei’s go-to moves when trying to help kris and susie out is letting them literally walk all over them; and it’s not a coincidence that reading the way flowery talks about asgore gives one a sense of deja-vu.
note the wording of ralsei’s prayer. have mercy on them, have mercy on susie. ralsei never asks for the prophecy to have mercy on ralsei.
this got long because i wanted to give ralsei their due alongside flowery, as i think ch5 is most interesting when flowery is read as a series of mirrors that work to realize ralsei as a character rather than as simply a part of a self-contained asgore-centric conflict. the two of them are martyr-complex royalty in every sense of the word. but to circle back to what you were saying and end on a slightly less miserable note, i do think flowery’s affinity for the other flowers is very sweet. he teaches aqua to safely use knives, he acts as a dance rival to blue and sparring partner to yellow, orange outright considers him like an older brother to her, and so on. in turn, they back him up when he needs them. asgore may find them a bother now that they’ve developed their own voices, but flowery genuinely cares for them no matter what they want to be. and i think he tries to extend this to ralsei, too, noticing something’s up and using the rival approach or sparring-partner approach to try and help out. in the end, though, he’s unable to do so because he’s just as trapped as they are. in the end, he is unable to defy his fate, and ceases to be anything more than the prophesied flower man.
What the hell did Kris and Catti summon? Or... just Kris, I guess. Since Catti bailed at the last second. I've seen some people suggest they made contact with Gaster and while I get where they're coming from, since Gaster is famously associated with the number 666, I feel like that wouldn't make much sense. If Gaster is so intimately involved in the creation of Deltarune/Hometown, I don't think you can just summon him like a regular demon. He's been there since the beginning. Maybe they summoned the FRIEND horde?
I feel that, when approaching this question, there's some benefit to be had in first trying to tackle the WHY and WHEN. FRIENDmania has made people a little too comfortable with treating "They were just playing around and accidentally summoned the inciting incident" as the mold. In my opinion that mold is a faulty one, since:
The event wasn't necessarily pre-Dessapearance.
We're probably supposed to connect Kris "studying the occult" with their ongoing desire for magic. That's something you have to factor in.
So let's back up and think about the Kris magic stuff. What is the significance of it? I don't think it quite has to do with their being human, that's a factor only brought on by the Dark Worlds. It's a bit of Undertale-based misdirection that hides the more logical extrapolation, that being that they want it to some end. They want a miraculous solution to a serious problem.
The Shadow Crystal quest is also gesturing to this.
Do you honestly think it'll get you what you want...?
And when I think about what "want" might go back to their childhood, one narrative comes to mind: Dess. They want to save Dess.
That is where the WHEN comes in. I am suggesting this event happened post-Dessapearance and was performed in service of saving Dess. Kris wanted to make some sort of wish or pact with whomever they summoned. I don't think Catti was wise to that element, however. It's easy to imagine that Kris wouldn't have been communicative about that aspect. At most they told her it was very important to them.
Circling back to the WHAT, we can now approach it from a new angle. What outcome is the most tragically ironic? There are probably multiple directions you can take, but so far my favorite is one proposed by @/brutalcritical. It's that the summoning singlehandedly brought Dess back, but as the Knight.
what do you think of the idea that each of the flowers represent kris to some extent?
as a sort of pair to my last ask; yes, though again i'm unsure of the authorial intent. aqua seems to be the one most immediately similar to kris in dress and appearance, but i feel like overall she is far less like kris in personality than she initially appears, and may be instead somewhat influenced by the view of kris held by others (the “weird kid”, a troublesome and carefree prankster, ect.) flowery seems to be a sort of externalization of kris’ fear of being replaced or left behind by their family; as well, i can see him being a microcosm of kris in situations where asgore only really payed mind to them as an “in” to give flowers to toriel. but yellow, i think, is the flower that most directly reflects kris’ own internal world. yellow in particular seems like an almost caricaturish version of kris’ self-image; constantly wracked with guilt, constantly engaging in self-sabotaging behavior at the slightest provocation. it’s easy to read asgore’s vengeance-driven and violent behavior as something kris may have seen before and internalized; the flowers overall know asgore was chief of police, but not unlike asgore's light-world children, they don’t really seem to get what that means or what his temperament did to lead him there; flowery seems to get about as far as associating asgore’s conspiratorial behavior with his violence and tries thusly to dissuade it, but yellow internalizes the violence without a second thought. it’s incredibly likely, at least to me, that he’s a major cause of both kris’ and yellow’s guilt; and while i do think yellow’s desire to be a cowboy is fairly earnest, it does stand out to me that he is the one second-most tailored to asgore’s preferences behind flowery (as well, kris is the one primarily associated with allusions to asgore’s cowboy fixation; kris notably does something that causes tenna to freak out after mentioning it, which i think corroberates the idea that asgore doesn’t treat kris super well day-to-day). blue, then, acts as sort of a hopeful endcap to yellow’s krisisms; he turns out to be the culprit behind the case of yellow’s missing petals, but he took them because he wanted to use them to make a romantic gift to share with yellow, and yellow realizes (well, after self-flaggelating again,) that no crime had been committed in the first place. kris is doing a lot of things their father would call “wrong”; keeping dess’ whereabouts a secret, creating dark fountains alongside her; but in the end, darkness is a force i feel we’re meant to sympathize with.
Have your thoughts on the weird route changed significantly? I found the total absence of darkners pretty disappointing (since i wanted to see how everything continued downgrading but alas), but fitting. And noelles weird flawed idea of freedom.. im curious where it goes
tacking on another content warning for discussion of weird-route-typical subject matter; response under the cut.
i'm really hoping noelle's weird route arc goes in a direction i like; i don't necessarily think noelle’s monologue here is strictly indicative of a suicidal urge on her part, but i do think it’s being framed that way on purpose. i think the worldstate itself frames a want for freedom from it as a want for death; spamton’s ill-fated quest for freedom has been noted to be framed like a suicide, and i feel this is one setting he’s worth bringing up in since he’s genuinely thematically linked here. moreover, though, as you said, this conception of “freedom” is flawed; spamton coasts off of the exploitative nature of the worldstate to get his way, but this in turn prevents him from ever truly becoming “free”. we coast off the exploitative nature of our power over kris and noelle to get our way, but this in turn simply reinforces the inevitability and lack of agency that deltarune’s worldstate embodies. it’s tricky to explain, because while i think “to chase a flawed idea of freedom is to run into the arms of your own end,” is a fair reading, i personally feel there’s a much stronger case for “in this world, you are told there are two choices; stay and live, or run and die”. (it’s interesting to consider mew mew’s hidden dialogue as a sort of challenge to this idea; that there are things in the light world that would terrify her new friend pink; metaphorical hunters, vicious and unrelenting that one can only escape via coming into one’s own in the dark.) namely, i could see this reading being a reason for why noelle relents to the idea of a white-picket-fence life with susie on the normal route; not because that kind of life would actually the better option for the two of them, or because that is their endgame, but because this is what she’s been taught safety is. (it’s fascinating to me that even at her freest on the normal route, where she stands up to her mother and forgoes the festival’s trappings, she still can’t help the impulse to associate staying in hometown with that safety; ch5 generally really drives home just how hometown consumes everything that comes from it like an ouroboros; asgore needs to go back, dess seems expected to inevitably be brought back, and even if noelle and susie get together, they will be consumed by it too.) water in deltarune often symbolizes things like fluidity, change, and the all-too-sympathetic darkness, but on the weird route, it becomes just one more potential block of ice; something to vanquish and turn stagnant; into light, into the bright glow of a “scene transition”, into the unending white of freshly-fallen snow. kris and noelle walk towards change, but they come out “used up”; stagnated.
that brings me to my biggest question of the weird route, then; “why is this romantically coded?” there’s the whole engagement motif and spamton’s leering, of course, but at this point it seems evident that there’s an additional element of us gradually replacing susie in noelle’s life, or at least, trying to. the lake scene and the study session are the most obvious examples to me; susie and noelle get time together off-screen at the festival, but those particular moments are scrubbed free of susie’s presence and replaced with “kris’” instead. and that’s not even getting into the, well, weird amount of suggestion surrounding kris and noelle as a couple or susie being left out of kris and noelle’s relationship in both ch5 routes. one of the very first notes i took on ch5’s normal route was one about how qc (who ordinarily is very welcoming to susie,) only addresses noelle and kris when talking to the whole group, there’s this very oddly pointed bit with known spamtonguy and divorcee asgore bringing up roses as romantic set dressing, there’s a tradition of winning festival king and queen yearly among the dreemurrs that kris seemed to have been at least partially caught in the crosshairs of, susie mentions at one point that she thought kris and noelle were a couple before she got to know them better on at least one of the routes; the list goes on. it feels like it’s building up to something that’ll happen in ch7, rather than remaining purely subtextual or metaphorical (though i wouldn’t mind that necessarily), but i have no idea what. there’s definitely a lot of room for further thought there.
hi! i love your enthusiasm about ralsei and flowery. I was wondering how you feel about ralsei being a "tutorial" character, laying out how the world works vs flowery, defying expectations with his abilities and calling into question the way ralsei limits themself. do you think ralsei "letting go" per se will have implications for ralsei's physical strength/capability? like... literal hidden power?
possibly? we do see them tap into some latent fire magic this chapter. i’m not sure if flowery is a great benchmark for that, though; that is to say, i don’t necessarily think flowery’s self-imposed stat boosts and deeper understanding of battle mechanics than most other characters are necessarily indicative of any real ability to change things on his part. “flowery told me!” is a funny scene, but it’s also there to sort of poke fun at the fact that the information flowery told susie in question is kind of useless to her. it definitely does irritate ralsei that flowery is that assured of his own protagonism, and that i think is really interesting alongside the old man’s firm statement that a hero isn’t necessarily a good person; there’s a throughline in ch4&5 of questioning the idea of heroism the prophecy presents us with, and both flowery and the old man outright quote phrases used by or referencing undyne the undying in heavily referential chapters. but flowery ultimately has a powerscalers’ understanding of a lot of things, albeit a kindness-driven variation; if every number goes as high as it can and he gets all of the recruits he needs, he can win against anyone; and he carries this into his confrontation with the knight. he is, and i think meant to demonstrate to us as an audience, unable to achieve that distant shining ideal of “beating the knight” because he foolishly sees the knight as something to ultimately beat, not someone to come to an understanding with. it’s another thing that makes him quite like ralsei; recall ralsei’s reaction to the titans in ch4. as inevitable as it is that the knight will be defeated at the end of the prophecy’s story; that when the roaring comes the darkness will be done away with forever, i feel that doylistically this goal is being framed as a kind of dooming of one’s self. i’m curious as to how that and ralsei’s relationship to offensive magic will play into channeling ralsei’s displaced self-loathing into a more healthy range of emotion beyond simply smiling along.
Eggs are protein... Eggs represent bad memories and trauma... Friend chasing Kris who knows what happened "That day"... Friend is definitely making sure they dont talk about what happened like how Normal NPC killed Onion for looking too much into things.
looking at the pink fight again and i also just saw that her text before she splits into "mew mew" and "pink" is. black with a white border. hey do you. do you know who else is. do you know who el
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