My buddy reminded me of this remarkably prescient post from back in the dawn days of Undertale fandom, which posited that UT was in fact a work of fanfiction based on a game that didn't exist. While the author gets every detail about the putative ur-Undertale wrong, they deserve massive credit (and a groveling apology from the UT fans who dragged them over it, and who must be adults by this point and capable of reflection) for noticing the Deltarune-shaped hole in the world.
(On further reflection it's entirely possible that I was one of the fans who dragged them over it, and I was old enough to know better at the time, so I'll throw my apology on the pile just in case. Sorry! Anyway:)
Now that DR Chapter 3 is out we can take another look at why UT's moral universe is like that. A sentient camera guides us through Frisk's journey in one sentence: from the fridge to the sink to the stove, Undertale took place in the same house Kris is dreaming in, its underground dimly visible from the vast purple plains of the couch. With our newfound understanding of dark worlds and how they're made, we can conclude that Undertale is, canonically, a pretend game that a traumatized pre-teen made up with their older brother. It is a fix-it, as the UT Prime post postulates, but the target of the fix isn't Dragon Blazers: it's the life of one Kris Dreemurr, who created the half-archetypes in UT by attaching JRPG tropes to their real (and boy is that a loaded word) friends and family. The "I can save anyone" morality presented in UT is the perspective of a child, and of a child who isn't completely sure that they don't want to kill their dad.
We were primed to receive UT as a critique of video game violence because that was the topic du jour, with games like Spec Ops: The Line raising similarly adolescent questions about whether playing a military training simulator makes you a bad person. Something weirder was obviously going on in Undertale - my take at the time was that the very existence of the Genocide route pointed to something more complex than the standard read re: the game's moral system, and I stand by that - but we couldn't know how weird until we got a look at the story one layer higher in the continuum of truth and fantasy that is the UT/DR cosmology.
Undertale turns out to be Kris Deltarune working through a bunch of their anxieties. It's about the divorce of their parents, their alienation from their friends, their guilt over their (possibly genuine) culpability in the death of the neighbor kid who fell through the ice and drowned in the lake. (At least I think that's what happened, here in June of 2026.) Add to that their lingering feeling that they're not a real person, that they're not in control of their own life, and that there might be some other, realer version of themself out there who made all the right choices and ended up happy. Is it possible to do this reading without knowing that Deltarune exists? As the UT Prime post demonstrates - yeah, kind of! UT Asriel's chuuni powers and presentation tell us that this a story written from a child's perspective, and the way it presents violence and evil is freighted with a child's guilty fascination with transgression and with one's own capacity to do harm. UT has a secret scary route because kids love those. (Corporate art has noticed this and is now building multi-million dollar franchises around the idea.)
There are a bunch of fascinating things to dig into given this interpretation, but my favorite right now is this: all the major characters in Undertale are based on people Kris knew, except two. Kris invented Sans before they met in "real life." Can you imagine? The funny scary creepypasta man you made up with your brother lives here now, and he's dating your mom? Think about what's happening in Kris' head the moment you first see Sans Deltarune. The external scream of the nostalgic streamer echoed by the internal scream of a mentally ill teen as what remains of their ontological framework falls apart.
The punchline of Deltarune is that Kris is, in fact, a fictional character. DR is ultimately about trauma and unreality, and the thing about delusions is that they are self-evidently true within the framework of your subjectivity, your narrative - that's why you can't reason your way out of them. DR asks the question: what if there's something realer than you, the player? That's what all the religious symbolism is about, right, and why everyone talks like they're on drugs while they're in church? The derangement that comes from the incursion of a higher being into your sense of self, irrespective of whether it's "really happening" or not?
The horrible epistemological implications of believing that a person you invented might have some kind of consciousness - or to put it more succinctly, the question "what if my imaginary friend was real?" - has been a central theme in Toby's work dating back to the Halloween Hack. It's a question that Homestuck asked back in the day, it's a question that The Amazing Digital Circus is asking now. (It's a question I used to ask in my terrible teenage fiction. I have a core memory of an improv skit I saw at camp as a child where Winnie the Pooh learns that he's just a figment of Christopher Robin's imagination. The way the actor said "I don't want to be just a figment" has stayed with me ever since.) It's a silly, childish question, until it isn't - until you notice your parents believing in imaginary people and organizing their life around imaginary stories, until something in your life makes you wish you were imaginary too, until something breaks in your head and you don't remember how to be real anymore.
All that being said: I am fascinated to meet Asriel in Deltarune and to learn more about his part in Undertale's authorship. Please release Chapter 5 soon, Mr. Fox, before I succumb to depersonalization or AI psychosis or DID or whatever the spirit of the age is doing to us all right now
The elusive find had never been logged on iNaturalist before.
There, wriggling in the sunshine, were two creatures that had never been documented on iNaturalist before: the Golden Gate leech, a predatory worm that only exists in the freshwaters of San Francisco’s largest park.
a predatory worm found only in San Francisco? when is its next B round??
in 2015 i started working at taco bell as a 16 year old for the summer so that i could buy a gaming computer so that i could play league of legends at a higher frame rate so that i could get higher than gold. around this time i listened to the song "pink matter" by frank ocean a lot where he says "cotton candy, majin buu" while talking about pink things which are soft like pussy (which is also pink and soft). i didn't know what majin buu was and i had to look at rap genius to determine that. i saw that majin buu was from dragon ball so i spent an entire paycheck on the dragon ball manga up to the android saga. i read it all in one week instead of doing any of the practice i was supposed to be doing for marching band and got in trouble but i kept walking around everywhere going BAPIDABAPIDA BAPIDA but i never finished reading dragon ball because the books a million in the town i was living in ran out of dragon ball so i had to buy other things.
this ended up with me buying a pair of sennheisers off of amazon which i still use & also with me deciding to look at /mu/ all the time even when i was in class on my phone. one day i saw the album art for midori's album "second" and i thought "this is the coolest looking woman of all time" - i then spent all of the next year trying to teach myself japanese so i could try to determine what she was saying in the songs because i thought they were so beautiful and funny and aggro and i would walk around the school fountain in front of my high school and get into arguments with my high school ex about if this made me a weeb or not a weeb - and she was extremely positive i only listened to midori because their first album had tits on the cover even though i was very adamant out loud that that was not the case and i would even honestly say i was more adamant in my head that she was way hotter if anything in the album art for second
regardless i tried to kill myself multiple times when i was 17 and around that time i would walk down the extremely barren sidewalkless highway of north georgia that my neighborhood directly fed out onto when i had walked around the neighborhood i was living in circularly for hours and got tired of seeing the same few things - i would do this after and before school or whenever because one of the conditions of me getting out of the mental hospital was that if i got stressed out i should listen to music and walk around rather than hurt myself - and i would listen to the midori song with a title like "i want to hear but i don't want to listen" on a deafening volume and walk up and down the high way in a gulch while semi trucks and f150s would go barreling down this sidewalkless highway in the hills & i would do that all the time OR i would sit in my room and stare at the ceiling with my phone plugged into a guitar practice amp doing the same thing
when i would sit in my bed on my LAPTOP though i got in the habit of just watching hella live performances of bands like i would watch the entirety of radiohead in lallapalooza or at gingleheim or googooboogoo all day i would watch and regularly did watch, drunk as fuck in the basement of my friends mom's house, every single front bottoms performance that had been recorded and uploaded to youtube, i would watch every band i could watch and when we were in the basement we would talk about all of us learning instruments & going on tour all the time & i was like No matter what i will invent a way to go on tour but i one night remember, on a lark, plugging in the words "midori live performance" into the youtube search bar and finding a video of what appeared to be the last midori live performance and i watched it in complete and total astonishment as i saw the coolest woman of all time climbing up and down amps and hitting herself in the head so hard with a microphone she was bleeding and curled over and shouting so hard it looked like she was going to die - the most insane woman of all time with song titles like "today my boy friend does not exist" where she would say things like "today my boy friend does not exist" (i knew this from reading google translate of the title even though at the time online resources about midori were relatively hard to track down and i dont think i was even able to find lyrics in kana for these songs because "second" was much less popular and was under a different label that "aratememashite hajimemashite midori desu" and i HADNT gone to college to learn japanese in class yet and even if i HAD mariko goto speaks in OSAKA BEN and i didnt even know what that WAS really yet because i didnt have FRIENDS that were into any of this stuff and i didnt watch ANY anime other than GAINAX ones and i didnt go on WEEB FORUMS to read about stuff like that i went on WEEB FORUMS to read about stuff like whether or not the fruit of life and the fruit of knowledge in evangelion were REALLY combining and what that meant for whether or not SHINJI was a PUSSY (he WAS - and IS - AND he should DIE!))
this was the point i decided that i had to go to college and learn japanese because that girl was on stage hitting herself in the head with the microphone so hard she was bleeding & if she was being like that over the songs and i could feel that without understanding what she was even saying then if i could understand what she was saying they might be the most beautiful songs of all time. i of course took japanese and german at the same time because as a 15 year old i probably watched eva 5 dozen times and thought asuka was "very cool" -
eventually my friend started driving me to school because we all started doing early enrollment at a college that was about a 20 minute drive from their house but a 40 minute drive from my house and my mom would drop me off at donut store parking lot 20 minutes from my house so that i could ride the next 20 minutes with my friend and he'd always give me the aux but it would play songs alphabetically from my phone meaning the first thing that would happen every single time i got in the car was the song AI NO UTA by midori would play, and every subsequent car i would get into for the next like 8 years would do this, and it would do it multiple times a day, and it would do it every day, and it would often be extremely loud and annoying, and i developed a habit of immediately shutting off car radios as soon as i got behind the wheel so i could choose my song first, because i fucking loved ai no uta when i was 16 but sort of got pavloved into thinking it was annoying by all of this
anyway when i started going to art school and inventing women i thought were cool to draw one of the things i did was start loading pimple with traits related to thinking dragon ball and midori were dope where as a parody of myself and the way i was acting when i was 16 and after meeting about 30 different animation students at SCAD who all would say stuff like "pool" by tricot would make a really good anime opening! and me always thinking to myself, secretly, "not as good of an anime opening as i thought yukiko-san by midori would make when i was 16 and my entire life was reading dragon ball and getting in arguments with my parents and girlfriend and listening to midori and imagining getting hit by cars" and so i designed a hoodie that i drew pimple wearing in some comics where she screen printed the word "DESTROY" in japanese onto the right sleeve because that's what mariko goto says in that song
but i remember i was like, at the time, as a 21 year old, thinking, "midori is so cool, it's so crazy nobody really knows midori yet still, but when i finish my million dollar web comic IP 'Manifesto' then this will be a very cool easter egg" - anyway midori Now is a band which a lot more information has been translated and exists and i didn't KEEP taking japanese classes because when i was 18 i got so SICK from having to sleep in an UNINSULATED SHACK OUTSIDE OF MY PARENTS HOUSE FOR A YEAR THAT I FAILED ALL OF MY COLLEGE CLASSES AND HAD TO TRANSFER SCHOOLS TO A PRIVATE ART SCHOOL THAT DIDNT HAVE JAPANESE CLASSES AND I THREW UP EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR A YEAR BECAUSE I WAS INHALING SO MUCH DUST AND NORTH GEORGIA DETRITUS AND SINGING SONGS SO LOUDLY ON MY GUITAR MY THROAT WAS SEMI PERMANENTLY FUCKED UP - culminating of course years later in me on the opposite side of the country, in portland oregon, getting tubes shoved down my throat to find out if i have a "GERD" and how many prilosec generics i need to take in a day which i ended up taking none of ever
i was very convined all of this would matter some day and i would say a lot of this stuff to anybody who i talked to in the course of having conversations with them about our lives and interests and when AI NO UTA by midori would play on my car radio and i had a new passenger i would usually have to say something about how it was the first song that always played in my car and it did start with really loud and annoying drums but they were the coolest band of all time but i also was very convinced none of it would matter and i became instilled with a lot of different, bespoke, fear of "none of this will matter" based drives and ways to make all of this matter and i drove myself insane threading and needling various different references and signifiers of things like "the thing that represents the point in my life where i was trying to kill myself this way" vs "the thing that represents the point in my life where i was no longer trying to kill myself this way" but every time i tried to make stuff, stuff didn't work or if it did work i wasn't sure things mattered or didn't matter regardless,
& when i was 26 i was touring with a band & we were in new york & i was sitting around one morning with the tape label people who organized the tour & i had been driving the tour van & selling the merch & taking pictures & i was extremely exhausted because we had stayed up the entire previous night waiting for someone to drive from new jersey to new york to deliver us drugs & i slept barely at all & one of the people on the tape label - everybody decided after this tape label was SCAMMERS & frankly before we even went on tour i knew this tape label as SCAMMERS but everybody was being nice because they didnt yet believe they were SCAMMERS even though they were SCAMMERS and would go on to be fully recognized as SCAMMERS nobody was allowed to talk about it but they said one morning as we were crowded around an air bnb in new york - i believe it was long beach, new york - and there was a like cafeteria long table inside the air bnb we were sitting on, and the chief scammer of the scammer label said, "next time we all go on tour, in april, we can go to japan, because we've got a tour lined up with this artist, and this artist, and DJ510MARIKO" and he said DJ510MARIKO like she was the least important artist of the 3 artists, but it clicked inside of my head like 10 million explosions, and i said "like, mariko goto?" and the guy said, "huh?" and i said louder, "like, mariko goto?" and he said, "oh yeah i think so" and i was like "like the dj project of mariko goto from midori after she quit midori and was institutionalized and then took a break on and off from making music you're saying we could go on tour with her" and he was like "wow you know a lot about this" and i was like "yeah she's like the coolest woman on earth" and he was like "yeah you could go on tour with her" and then we never went on tour with her and i never finished manifesto the end
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