when I was a kid I played the Petz games a lot and I was REALLY interested in the breeding mechanic and selecting for unusual traits in my catz. At a certain point, more than the regular virtual pet element. So, I employed a fucked-up tactic to get my virtual pets to make offspring as fast as possible.
If you're not familiar with the games, there is an item called a "love potion" that you can spray your animals with to make them more likely to breed. They do not like this, they react the same as if they were disciplined with a water bottle- make an upset noise, run away, etc. Possibly to discourage players from over-using the item?
But I had no qualms about being nasty to my virtual pets, I was a weird kid carrying out my little freak experiments on some pixels, so I would put them in a room with a whole bunch of love potions laying about. I would make the game window size as small as I could so the virtual pets had no choice but to walk through the bottles and set them off, then yowl and run about and set them off even faster. I would let them agitatedly run around in the Aphrodisiac Torment Room for a while until the were good and doused, and pretty much instantly after I took them out of it to somewhere calmer I would get an announcement that there would be a new litter of kittens soon.
Anyway. Knowing that Noelle Deltarune also enjoys the hobby of producing mutant cats in her Cat Petterz game. I can't help but wonder if she also puts them in the Aphrodisiac Torment Room.
it's like, definitely still mansplaining if the man is dominating the conversation unintentionally and he would totally stop if you asked him to, actually. like, the term exists to describe a phenomenon that arises from the implicit bias that women are expected to simply be less knowledgeable about things. it doesn't matter if he's doing it on purpose or not. he does it cause he expects women to not know things or to not have any input. maybe don't fucking expect women to stand up for themselves every single time they have to have a conversation with a man because that shit happens like daily for a lot of women
WHAT DOES EACH SHADOW CRYSTAL & GLASS DIALOGUE ACTUALLY MEAN?
For years, the Shadow Crystals have remained one of Deltarune's biggest mysteries...
That's because they never came with a clear explanation. We knew it was connected to the Secret Bosses, we knew Seam was interested in collecting them, and we knew that using it produced strange visions that sometimes seemed to make sense, while other times seemed completely disconnected from anything happening around us.
Those visions always felt significant, yet we could never really say why.
Some players interpreted the Shadow Crystals as glimpses of the future. Others believed they showed the Weird Route, or even memories from previous cycles of the world. I used to believe it showed visions of a world that had followed the prophecy, but I don't believe that theory anymore
And with the release of ch 5, Toby Fox finally gave us the first concrete explanation of what the Shadow Crystals actually are:
At first, this revelation seems like it should settle the whole discussion.
Because, if the Shadow Crystals is the fragments left behind after a dream is deeply cherished and then broken, then perhaps all we have to do is reinterpret their visions through the concept of lost dreams
But it isn't quite that simple, because the Shadow Crystal isn't the only form this object takes. Whenever Kris returns to the Light World, the item changes its name...
It becomes Glass
And now that seems more important than ever. If the Shadow Crystal, its Dark World form, contains the power of lost dreams, then what exactly does its Light World counterpart contain...?
And, more importantly, can we use Seam's explanation to reinterpret not only the Shadow Crystal's visions, but the visions produced when the Glass is used as well?
Well, I believe ch 5 finally gave us the framework we need to start answering these questions.
To begin with, we need to step back and look at a broader pattern that's been present in Deltarune since ch 1... the way the game builds concepts that aren't merely opposites, but reflections of one another.
"A LEGEND of HOPE" and "A LEGEND of DREAMS"
"A LEGEND of LIGHT" and "A LEGEND of DARK"
Hope stands to Light the same way Dreams stand to Dark
Dreams and Hope are often treated as similar concepts in everyday language. People "dream" about the future. They "hope" for a better tomorrow. But Deltarune treats these words as separate ideas
The Dark World is, essentially, a fantasy world shaped thorugh the dreams of Lightners. It's a place where ordinary objects gain form and purpose. A small, mundane environments can become entire worlds of their own.
Not to mention that the very existence of darkners is tied to the will of whoever created the dark fountain. In other words, its the place where imagination becomes tangible.
The Light World, on other hand, would be its counterpart. Its the world that represents reality. No fantasies, no magic. What's lost doesn't simply return because someone wishes it back. Dess remains missing. Asriel went off to college, so seeing him is harder. Toriel and Asgore are divorced.
Meanwhile, the Dark World is filled with the idea of escapism... of being able to forget the reality you live in and have adventures in a world created based on your desires. There's a fantasy that's more desirable than reality itself
Dreams may be born within the Dark, but reality belongs to the Light.
That's why, if the Dark World's version of this object contains the power of lost dreams, then perhaps the Light World counterpart represents the opposite side of that same symbolic relationship.
Not lost dreams. But... lost hopes
SHADOW CRYTAL DIALOGUES
If the Shadow Crystal is created when a dream is held onto tightly and then broken, then each of the visions it produces should represent something that was once deeply desired by someone... and then ceased to exist
With that in mind, when analyzing each dialogue, we should ask ourselves:
What was the dream?
How was that dream lost?
Why is the vision presented by the Shadow Crystal precisely the reflection of that loss?
"You thought you saw the television get smashed to pieces."
We can start by thinking about what Tenna represents
Tenna is born from a dark fountain created in the Dreemurrs' house by Kris, in a chapter that constantly returns to the theme of family
The Dreemurrs and Holidays families used to gather around the TV to watch the specials together, and Tenna witnessed those happy moments as well as the eventual separation between everyone and the constant arguments between Toriel and Asgore.
In other words, the television carries deep symbolism for these families
That's why when the Shadow Crystal shows the TV being smashed to pieces, we can interpret it as showing the dream of seeing the family united again, lost, leaving behind only fragments of something that can no longer be recovered
"The prophecy's text does not warp in the crystal's lens"
This is a curious dialogue because it follows a different logic from the others... here, nothing changes.
And this absence of change may carry a very important implication. No matter how much someone might dream of changing the outcome, the prophecy will always remain the same...
That's why the prophecy's text doesn't change.
The story will have only one ending, as I've theorized before
Everyone else disappeared… and you saw Noelle smiling at you, with arms full of flowers"
This is the hardest dialogue to interpret within the logic of lost dreams, because at first glance it seems like something good, because Noelle is smiling and holding flowers
But at the same time, it also makes you uncomfortable because it starts with "everyone else disappeared..." and that's the detail that changes the ENTIRE context of the scene
Well, throughout Deltarune, the past exerts a lot of influence on various characters. For example, Noelle remains deeply marked by Dess's disappearance. Asgore continues to live surrounded by memories of what existed before...
Again and again, Deltarune returns to themes of nostalgia, memories, and the feeling that there was once a simpler and happier time than the present
And with this in mind, the Shadow Crystal's vision starts to make much more sense. Because when we ask what one of Kris's deepest dreams might be, we can say it's the desire for everything to go back to the way it used to be
And it's precisely this lost dream that the Shadow Crystal shows
The quartet of Kris, Asriel, Dess, and Noelle no longer exists. The two families drifted apart, Toriel and Asgore divorced, and Rudy and Carol's relationship was likely affected by everything that happened.
However, Noelle is the only one left from those happier times, even though her relationship with Kris is now more distant than it was during their childhood.
So when the Shadow Crystal shows everyone else disappearing and Noelle remaining before Kris, perhaps it's showing only the fragments that remain of that dream...
When we look at it this way, this vision becomes sadder. Noelle smiling with flowers can now be seen as something painful to witness. It hurts to know that this dream is lost. It hurts that a similar tragedy happened that ended up marking and pushing everyone apart.
Even though her smile might seem to carry a connotation of happiness at first glance, we can't overlook how it's surrounded by the absence of everything that should have been around it. The flowers also reinforce that melancholy as well
They're beautiful, but also ephemeral... and ch 5 repeatedly draws attention to the fact that flowers don't last forever. They're associated with memory, with transience, with things that can't simply be preserved forever...
And it hurts even more because Kris and Noelle still care about each other, yet neither of them seems willing to openly acknowledge it...
"You thought you saw toys strewn on the floor/You thought you saw the computer lab/You thought you saw the lobby of the church"
The Dark World is a world of fantasy created from the will of its creator. So these visions can be interpreted as the Shadow Crystal showing what remains once the fantasy ends
GLASS DIALOGUE
It wasn't only because Glass is the Shadow Crystal's counterpart that I started associating it with the concept of lost hopes.
There's a much more specific piece of evidence within the story itself, and it comes from Noelle during the Weird Route:
* It feels like... I've just been watching myself through glass.
* Watching someone else move me through my life.
* That's why I want... to do something crazy.
* That's why I want... to break free.
* But, I can't. I couldn't.
* Because I'm just Noelle.
* A Noelle that has to do Noelle things.
* Just like Kris has to do Kris things...
* But Kris... you changed.
* Kris, YOU actually changed!
* You found out how to stop being Kris!
It's curious that Toby Fox chose the word Glass specifically. After all, Noelle could've described the same feeling in different ways. For example, she could've said that she feels distant from herself, always trapped in the same routine, tired of doing what's expected of "Noelle", unable to escape the role assigned to her. Instead, she compares the experience to watching herself though glass
Furthermore, she says she's "watching someone else move me through my life." So the problem isn't a lack of awareness, because she knows what's happening and has the desire to "do something crazy" and wanst to "break free." But she lost the ability to turn that will into action
Noelle was also the one who noticed that Kris is acting differently. With our influence, they're talking more, acting differently, and even their voice has changed.
But the problem is that Noelle is wrong to believe that Kris has REALLY changed, because this change doesn't mean Kris has managed to break free from the constraints of doing "Kris things".
In fact, this change came precisely from their ability to "act" having been lost. During the Weird Route, Kris becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the control we exert over them
In other words, Kris is less and less capable of deciding who Kris is
That's what makes the choice of the word glass even more interesting. Noelle is describind a situation in which someone remains present, still conscious, and still capable of observing their own existence, but no longer occupies the place of an agent within it. They're there, but something else is conducting their life.
So if we connect the word glass to what Noelle is describing, we can formulate a more specific hypothesis:
Glass shows what happens when you lose the ability to act on your own life.
You still exist, but you start to feel like you no longer have control over where your life is going. You can still see the world, but you feel like your presence no longer has the same power to affect it.
And that's exactly why I interpret the power of Glass as lost hopes.
If a lost dream is the fragment of something someone deeply desired and that was eventually broken, then a lost hope can be understood as the moment when someone stops believing they can still do anything about their own reality.
And this makes even more sense when we go back to ch 3 and 4, when Gerson says that Susie possesses "the white pen known as hope." This fits Susie particularly well because, from the beginning, she is the one who most challenges established rules.
She was the one who created S-Action and R-Action
And in moments that seemed hopeless... she comes up with solution that weren't expected
And that connects directly to the prophecy, which gives us a very specific condition for the final tragedy to happen:
In other words, the tragedy happens when hope, the belief that there's still something that can be changed, is lost.
So now, let's look at the dialogues shown when using Glass though one specific question:
What happens when you lose the ability to act on your own reality?
“You thought you saw through your hand.”
You continue to exist within reality, but you no longer feel you have the power needed to interfere in the direction your life is taking. That's why seeing through your hand represents precisely the loss of the ability to interfere in reality
"You thought you saw your mother holding someone else."
It's as if you've lost your place in the world. Reality continues functioning even if you don't interact with it. It's as if someone else has taken your place... even in your family
"You thought you saw Susie glaring at you, coldly..."
As I said before, Susie is the character who challenges the rules, and her relationship with Kris is very important for understanding this dialogue.
In ch 1, Kris acts outside our control to immediately protect Susie against King's attack. It's precisely this moment that begins to transform their relationship, making them closer.
That's why seeing Susie glaring coldly at Kris could represent that, upon losing the ability to act on their own reality, the trusting relationship between them would remain distant.
"You thought you saw Susie in a far-off window, unkempt and glaring" [After abandoning Weird route in ch 5]
I also want to connect all of this with this dialogue, which seems to be very similar to the previous one
By the time we reach the point where the route can be abandoned, a lot has already happened...
Kris and Noelle have both been forced into situations neither of them wanted to be in. Kris has repeatedly resisted the control imposed on them, and both characters have endured immense psychological pressure
But abandoning the Weird Route doesn't necessarily mean everything that happened simply disappears. Even if Noelle insist that "nothing changed", there's no easy way to erase what the two of them experienced.
Kris won't forget what they were forced to do, or how many times they tried to stop things from getting worse. The damage remains even after the route itself is abandoned.
And it's precisely in this context, when using the Glass, that Susie is seen from afar.
That's especially important because she's the characters who represents safety for Kris... she's their LIGHT
And the most extreme parts of the Weird Route happen when Kris is left alone with Noelle, precisely because Susie isn't there to intervene
So if we once again consider Susie as someone who can act, break rules, and find new paths, then seeing her, even from a distance, becomes a symbol of hope to Kris might still be able to regain their autonomy. But now, compared to the previous vision in the Pacifist/Neutral route, that hope feels much farther away.
That’s because Kris has now experienced just how much control WE can take away from them. The realization of that loss makes the possibility of regaining agency feel EVEN MORE distant. That’s why Susie appears so far away in this new vision, after the Weird Route has been abandoned
"You thought you saw Noelle close against you, whispering."
This was the hardest dialogue to interpret, and I spent a long time thinking about it, which significantly delayed me finishing writing this theory
First, it's interesting to note the contrast that exists with the previous two dialogues. While Susie appears farther and farther away, Noelle is close to Kris...
And the reason for this might lie in analyzing Noelle...
She is perhaps the character who most clearly embodies the experience of wanting change while being unable to believe she still has the means to make that change happen
She says she's just a "Noelle" who needs to do "Noelle things," just as Kris is a "Kris" who needs to do "Kris things." Therefore, she can't see a way out of the role that's been built around her.
Yes, Noelle has her own desires, including the explicit wish to "do something crazy" and "break free," but the recognition that she wants to escape isn't accompanied by the ability to do so.
That's why I interpret her closeness to Kris as a form of identification. In a situation where Kris loses the ability to act on their own reality, Noelle can recognize something in them that she experienced herself. She knows what it's like to remain conscious while something else seems to be steering your life.
Her own identity is already surrounded by expectations about being a good daughter, being a good student, and doing what a "Noelle" is supposed to do
Then the Weird Route pushes that to the point where she's literally being driven forward by the command Proceed.
Meanwhile, Kris is dealing with an even more extreme form of interference, whether it's coming from us or from whoever is controlling them through the phone
Within that context, Noelle appears close precisely because, in a state of lost hope, she's someone who can recognize what it means to be a passenger in your own life...
This also explains the contrast between the two characters. Susie is distant because she represents what's been lost, the possibility of acting. Noelle is close because she represents someone who shares the experience of having lost that possibility
That's why I think the vision of Susie after the Weird Route is so important. Her distance shouldn't necessarily be read simply as "Susie likes Kris less". The Glass could be showing something much more internal:
The more Kris is confronted with their inability to control what's happening, the more distant the possibility of recovering that autonomy seems. Before the Weird Route, there was still some hope that Kris might be able to stop things from going any further.
After seeing just how far our control can go, and realizing that even resistance may not be enough, that hope can feel much more remote
CONCLUSION
The Shadow Crystal contains the power of lost dreams, the fragments that remain when something deeply desired is broken. That's why its visions reflect what's left behind by those dreams:
The shattered television, the empty remnants of former fantasies, a childhood that can no longer be recovered.
The Glass, meanwhile, may contain the power of lost hopes. Not the loss of the thing you dreamed about, but the loss of hope that you can still do something to reach it. That's why its visions revolve around transparency, displacement, distance, and separation
You're still present. You can still see your life. But you can no longer fully interact with or change what happens next
In other words, a dream can be broken, leaving behind a shard.
Hope can be lost, leaving you looking through a glass at the life you can no longer control
game with the conceit that you are a swarm of medical nanobots injected the patient as an experimental last-ditch effort to save their life. you can expand your swarm and create all sorts of specialised bots, but all the resources to do so are ultimately from the patient's body, so if you drain them too much they die. you are fighting against tumour cells, though, who have no such concern, so maybe sometimes taking too many resources for yourself is better than giving it to the cancer?
envisioning the gameplay as divided in stages, the first one being just 'get rid of all the cancer cells before the patient dies', where you have to balance aggressive expansion to improve your capabilties with not throwing the patient's vitals too out of whack, researching better 'weapons' that kill cancer cells faster or with fewer deleterious health effects, etc,
then a 'solidifying' phase where the cancer is gone, but the patient might be in poor health and you start building systems to catch opportunistic infections, automated systems that respond when something about the patient is off (fever, low blood pressure, broken arm, whatever), and some rudimentary communications capability. not enough of whatever mineral in your resources? you could communicate with the little wearable medical device the patient has on their wrist to tell them to change their diet! or, y'know, you could give them a craving for a specific kind of food. either works
and then in the third stage, you really go deep into host manipulation and host cooperation mechanics. you can make your host superhuman, get messages from them about what changes they want to their body and implement them, and in return they do things for you. change their diet, buy a better communications interface, tell all their friends that medical nanonbots are great. or you can effectively turn them into a zombie, just a vessel for the bots. or split the difference, and make the patient want specific things that the swarm can easily provide to build 'trust'.
yes this does mean you can induce your host to want to be a girl and then be really happy with you for speedrunning their medical transition
Sapphic Dynamic where the popular queen bee type is hopelessly in love with the weirdo girl that runs Anime Club. She's so down on herself, writing in her diary "Erin is so cool. She can beat Super Mario Brothers in under five minutes, she learned Japanese to read imported manga, and she runs an Anime Club even though nobody shows up. She's committed to that club longer than I've committed to a hair style. I just know about clothes and makeup, she'd be so bored by me. Oh what would I do for her attention?"
Her cheerleader friends are supportive, like "Are you kidding, girl? You played Sonic on your iPhone once! She's not out of your league!" but she still doubts if she'd be enough to keep up with Erin's zest for life.
"I went to Paris over Summer break, like some normie loser. Erin spent the entire Summer decompiling an abandonware point-and-click Nancy Drew game so she could port it to her Android phone. It's hopeless, she'd get bored of me in a week!"
Just started reading Sherlock Holmes and all the adaptations are wrong. This man is a delight. He gets excited about hemoglobin and is ecstatic at the thought of Watson as a roommate. He purposefully forgets how the solar system works so he has more room in his brain for crime. He shows Watson the dirt stains on his trousers and he can tell what part of London they come from based on color and consistency. (As far as i can tell Watson didn't ask, Sherlock just gets back from walks and tells Watson about the stains unprompted.) The text specifically says "Holmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with." Why does every adaptation make him unpleasant and rude, he's literally just eccentric. He's such a goober, I love him.
I keep getting shown an AI ad where a guy is cooking burger with entire assembled burger and French fries sitting on the grill and poking them with a spatula and I haven’t once paid attention to what this AI burger man is attempting to sell me.
Been re-reading my copy of Sherlock Holmes, and I never noticed how little Watson actually speaks in the text. Other than a couple questions and a few equivalents of ‘oh my!’, the main way we hear his thoughts are through his narration. Now I know this probably because ACD had a limited amount of words, and watson dialogue wouldn't be as interesting to the readers- But I like the idea of 'WORD FAMOUS DETECTIVE and his hypeman that he brings along’. You never hear a peep out of that guy, he just stands menacingly in the background until Holmes says something like “ah yes. He was 6ft tall.” and he goes “ AHH FUCK YEAH, THATS MY FUCKING BITCH I LOVE YOU YOU’RE THE SMARETEST PEROSN IN THE WORLD I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU GOT THAT LETSS A FUCKING GOOOOOOO!!!!!!” and then falls silent again.
my top travel tip I've never seen anyone else recommend is: choose a lamb to slaughter.
now, it's important to note that you can't just pack or buy something with the sole intention of leaving it behind to appease the forces of chaos. nor can you throw that candy wrapper in the hotel room trash can and call it even; if it's indisputably garbage, it doesn't count. the sacrifice must be chosen from among the actual belongings you brought with you, and you shouldn't designate it until you're packing up to leave.
with your eleven o'clock checkout time or uber ride to the airport fast approaching, take a final, grim inventory. the ideal lamb to slaughter is something small, lightweight, easily replaceable. of little monetary and no sentimental value. a spare USB-C cable that's sorta worse for wear, but still works. one of those little travel toothpastes—not quite empty yet, but you can snag another at any drugstore. the nub of an eyeliner pencil you could've used for another week.
take the lamb out of your bag, kiss it goodbye, and place it on the nightstand or bathroom counter or wherever you would've left it if you'd just accidentally overlooked it while packing up. then, to karmically cancel out any additional effort the housekeeping staff will have to expend to dispose of your lamb, gather up all the sheets and towels in one easy-to-grab pile on top of the bed, and leave.
I used to lose stuff every time I traveled, and they were usually things I'd actually miss! but it hasn't happened once since I adopted this superstition a few years ago. and sure, the practical explanation is that it naturally forces you to think about everything you brought with you and check in the places you'd be most likely to leave them. whatever. I find it way more fun to believe the universe craves chaos and blood and expensive prescription eyeglasses yet is reasonable enough to be negotiated down to a half-spent ballpoint pen instead
A doll youtuber I watch has made a video about the history of Polly Pocket, and she's describing the plots of the dvd specials, one of which features an elderly woman named Ms. Throckmorton, and my reaction was
friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly
like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices
Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.
The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.
The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.
There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.
The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.
I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.
#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies
