OKAY so i think a huge part of Tenna’s character is the fact he is a performance artist. I will say I was in performance art groups for an undisclosed amount of years and there’s. There’s a certain vibe 🆗 there’s specific mindsets and attitudes that I feel Tenna speaks on in rly specific ways that I dont see dug into very often.
Tenna’s whole psychology sort of orbits around the fact he’s an entertainer. He lives to serve you, but he’s not exactly necessary. His self-worth and self-expression and overall ability to keep others happy are all psychologically melted together. You can see he genuinely loves to entertain and finds it very fulfilling, but the nature of that requires a level of people-pleasing and repression.
more under the cut bc this is fr a 4 page essay
Being a literal object made to serve the lighteners definitely underscores this, but I can't think of any other darkeners that are this, uh… neurotic? unwell. about it. (well there’s a certain puppet secret boss im side-eyeing but he psychologically goes the other direction. Flips a middle finger to god and tries to ascend to another dimension. classic.)
Tenna’s survival literally depends on if other people are happy enough with him or not. And to do that he’s forced to act a certain way. In obvious ways like always having to keep the energy up and ignoring conflict,
but this extends to trying to suppress his own negative emotions, thoughts, and needs, being forced to do things that are against his own morals,
and a fawn response to threats.
There’s a sort of conundrum with the nature of performing arts where it’s kind of inseparable from your physical self. Whether you're using your face, voice, hands, etc. (or your whole entire body, in Tenna’s case), when a comment or critique is made of your performance, there’s just one less degree of separation between the thing you put out there and your whole You (I love TV = I love Tenna :) no degree of separation from the abstract concept of TV and his own idea of himself). So there’s the whole self worth thing already tied up in there. I’m not even gonna get deep into that one I feel like we know where that one’s going.
But the other question becomes, exactly how much of myself am I willing to give up for approval? What’s the right way to balance self-expression and individual identity with giving the people what they want? ... Or do we bother balancing it at all?
(and this is true of any art anyone puts into the public eye, but performance art is just kinda extra weird about it, by nature. For example, actors are expected to get hair cuts, keep or change their bodies to be a certain way, they lack anonymity because their face is tied to their art, so you're expected to behave a certain way when you're off the clock too-- it just requires so much more self-editing.)
Tenna’s such a beautiful example of this. In a very unsubtle (imo) way you see him bulldoze his own emotions for the sake of performance, upkeep his own denial to try to keep the happy facade up, and go to lengths to hide personal information. And it’s obviously stressing him out.
He’s internalized it to the point where it’s starting to come out in odd ways that dont make sense anymore, too.
"everyone's gonna know I..." know what. that youre a single mother. babygirl what are u talking about. + we all agree that the audience in the second one is like. some sort of manifestation right. can a professional please give this guy some cognitive behavioral therapy im begging
And then the dude does not know when to give it up. In a bad way.
There's a saying that originated from broadway i think, “the show must go on.” There’s a cute happy song about it but the attitude in the showbusiness is very real. It doesn't matter what you're personally going through, you’re expected to show up and perform no matter what, Or Else. Or else you ruined everyone else’s months of hard work, or else the show will suck and it will be your fault. In a lot of performing art mediums, there’s no retries, either. You mess up on stage and your moment is stained forever :) so you better do it right! no pressure.
In Tenna’s case, the “or else” is “or else you get sliced into ribbons”. He’s expected to pack up Toriel, keep it a secret, and keep the fun gang occupied for an indefinite amount of time until the Knight picks up its to-go order. Ive said it before and ill say it again this dude is doing like 5 hours straight of comedy improv with a gun to his head HE DOESNT EVEN RLY WANT TO KEEP YOU HERE. HE RUSHES YOU THRU THE FIRST BOARD, ROUND 2 WAS VAGUELY SLAPPED TOGETHER, AND THE BONUS ROUND IS NONEXISTENT THE MAN IS FREAKING OUT BACKSTAGE TRYING TO KEEP IT TOGETHER. OR ELSE.
And then he has a mental breakdown live on stage and he just has to keep going. What other option is there.
And then his crew leaves, and his friends leave, and Mike leaves. But Tenna doesn't get to leave. The show goes on. Until the very end he's still cracking jokes and trying to herd you back to the board. Even his boss fight with the fun gang is just More Games!! He acts genuinely confused if you start whacking him in his fight!!
it's kinda meta in a way that an amount of people read Tenna's on-stage mental breakdown as a sort of temper tantrum for not giving him enough attention, which is similar to the way celebrities irl get dismissed when they go thru mental health issues. so so many signs pointing to how much he actually does not want to do any of this and is very scared. i mean to be fair that's the lie he gave us right before his battle. (covering up the deal with the Knight for Kris)
Maybe Kris/the knight really DID promise a reward, but the way he gets nervous as hell and shakes when he's alone with Kris-- that's not the usual reaction to someone you expect a prize from. they both know what the consequences are.
In conclusion: Tenna is a patron saint of performance art to me and all of his lovely complexes and mysterious deal with Kris perfectly represents the secret psychological horror that is to exist at an audience’s whims. Thank u for staying this long here take this shitpost as a reward
This fic has been such a constant part of my experience in the Spamtenna fandom that seeing it finished makes me feel surprisingly emotional. It was the first fanart for a fic I had ever done and it was so fun I decided to make a bajillion more 😭
Follow the author @hatorbee to see what elese she's written! I love her work
It's been just over a year since Deltarune chapters 3 & 4 released! I did the 3D work, which mostly means Tenna 📺 I figured it's been long enough to share some "behind the scenes" stuff, starting with a look at the Maya file for his static poses...
I'd individually render the poses to get that early 3D shine ✨ Here's some of them at their original resolutions! I would work from text descriptions from Toby, and sometimes there'd be a Paint sketch to help out. Gigi drew the concept that I modeled from and some poses too!
I had a lot of fun pushing myself to match the dynamic poses Toby had in mind for Tenna - making him so crazy and expressive was something I couldn't have done without his prompts. He'd draw the faces on afterward too, which really brought Tenna to life!
(lots more after the Read More cut...!)
Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative 👍
There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses… Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.
When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two… Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't…? Well. Don't worry about it.
These ones are cute… Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.
Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legs…
Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.
Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic 🙄
I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in… I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?
After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.
As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"…! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this ⬇️
This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.
Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah… Just like this.
Say it with him, folks!!
For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.
Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.
I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute… Huh, I already said that…?
Phew!! That's a lot of Tenna. I hope it was fun to look through my posts! Oh, one more thing - the Fangamer Mr. Tenna Figurine just straight up uses the 3D model I made, which I think is really funny and cool and nice. Check it out if you want! Thanks for reading!
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