The "thankyou" page is back !!! Last time it was "How long did it take her to smile?", but now it's "Where will it take place?"
For context, the first box is your email and the second box is for your answer !! Please share any responses you get!!
Remember this image from the Spamton Sweepstakes and how people were saying that the size of the numbers had to do with how much Snowgrave we were gonna get in each Chapter?
I'd like for some future Deltarune chapter to give the player the choice to make Ralsei wear his hat again. But this obviously is not just a stylistic choice, it's a test to see if you understand his character. If you truly care about him. He has been slowly— and hopefully will keep — building an identity of his own these past few chapters. An identity outside of the prophecy and outside of his expectations as a prince and as a Darkner, and making him wear his hat once again would be admitting that we don't see him as a person, but rather as an object with no feelings or opinions. Kind of like a far more painful and everlasting "Good. Keep smiling" that would be the total confirmation for Ralsei that he never deserved an identity.
I think that could be neat.
Let's see how many people make him wear the hat again.
With us being 4 Chapters in, halfway through the game, and still not knowing what object Ralsei embodies, I think part of it could be due to his Light World form being something unusual, but I think another, possibly bigger, reason for this narrative choice not to reveal what he embodies has to do with the theme of Darkners being people, despite what he tries to tell us.
Ralsei claims that Darkners are just objects, that they don't matter, that they love serving their purpose, and in Chapter 1 he even said that being useful to Lightners is the only way for them to be fulfilled, but Susie has consistently questioned this or shut it down; this is one way that we as the audience are nudged towards questioning it. Darkners are also written with the same complexity as Lightners, and most of them are content in Castle Town, where they're just living their lives in the Dark World and forming social bonds with each other, largely away from Lightners, and not being "useful".
Even Tenna, another lonely Darkner with low self worth, who reduces himself to just being a TV and claims he was happy just serving his purpose, indicates that he has dreams beyond it. As the Chapter 5 cutscene shows, his unhappiness in Castle Town doesn't come from being useless, but rather from being lonely in the Dark World; he lost his partner (the only person that truly understood him), and then seemingly lost a friend as a result, being left all alone. He dreamed of having a family with Spamton, he dreamed of traveling... he has desires beyond his purpose, and when his survival doesn't depend on being useful, those desires actually appear to matter more to him.
We're clearly meant to question the idea that Darkners are just objects, that they have no desires outside of their purpose, or that serving their purpose will give them a truly happy and fulfilling life. Especially when you consider the existence of a Darkner like Spamton, for whom being useful to Lightners is outright impossible; he's spam mail, doomed to be ignored and useless.
Ralsei himself wishes he could join Kris and Susie on their adventures in the Light World, wishes he could do their homework, and is starting to develop interests and opinions that aren't in service of Lightners; the previous lack of those wasn't due to him naturally being just an object with no real feelings, but due to him repressing himself because he believed he's not "supposed" to have any real personality or desires. He also claims that being useful is what makes Darkners happy, but we see that the things that actually make him happy are spending time with his friends and being treated like a friend rather than a servant; being comforted when he's upset, being told it's okay not to smile... he's not being "useful" there, and his Lightner friends are actually caring for him, but it makes him feel better.
He's clearly not just an object. He's a person. And I think the choice to not reveal what object he embodies is, at least in part, meant to emphasize this, along with his visual design.
If the player doesn't know what object Ralsei embodies, that makes it harder for them to reduce him to just being said object. There are theories about what his Light World form is, but we still don't have anything concrete. The player only gets to knowingly interact with him in the Dark World, where he is a person. His Dark World form strongly resembles the Dreemurrs, which is brought up even within the narrative itself, where he's especially noted to resemble Asriel (their names are even anagrams of each other). He could easily be another child in the family, and he wouldn't look out of place; the pink horns are a small enough difference that they could be assumed to be some kind of fantasy condition or just a color variation.
In the Dark World, he looks like a lost Dreemurr kid, and he acts like a kid. This, along with our lack of knowledge of his Light World form, makes it harder to believe him when he says he's nothing more than an object, and makes it more apparent that he's an unreliable narrator.
YES. EXACTLY. I find it so interesting that any Ralsei Object theory is incapable of providing a full picture of his character, and that the more we know about him, the less certain any one particular object becomes. Not to mention that the game has directly disproven the idea that he's something Kris carries around with them. Whatever Ralsei is, it's entirely secondary to who he is as a person, but the game has left the object, the thing that we can use to overwrite his identity with something else, as an open question about his character, leaving us to weigh the question of what Ralsei is as opposed to who Ralsei is. We want to find an answer to what he is so we can better understand him, fit him into the rules of Darkners that we've been given, but we risk losing that understanding if we hold ourselves to the "what question" too closely and sacrifice the ability to think of him as a person.
When the AI bubble pops, the demand for computing power will fall much more quickly than the supply. For a brief window, we will have an amazing digital surplus.
What If The Shadow Crystals Are Not Determination?
Well that's a silly question. Of course they are Determination. Seam said so!
Not quite, though. They said they were made from the power of "will", before doubling back and correcting themself by calling that power something else. Something we didn't get to see.
It's certainly IMPLIED. But until the official UT/DR Bluesky account goes ☐☐☐☐☐☐ tomorrow and proves me wrong next week, we don't know.
It's not like we call our little canine overlord Straightforward Tony, after all.
But then, what else could they even be? And why?
Well, I've been thinking a little bit. About darkness and about light. You can thank Andrew Cunningham for this one.
What is DETERMINATION? What does it do, in Deltarune?
It is the power, present in all Lightners, to pour their will into a blade and make. To stab into the earth and draw out darkness, and from the purest vagueness of dreams, create a Dark World.
What it isn't, however, is the ability to save and reload. Every save point ("the light only you can see") makes a very particular point to not name the exact "power" that it fills you with.
Likewise, the track that plays when the light emitted by the SOUL closes a fountain or banishes the Titan is simply called "Your Power"
This vague other "power" seems to be closely related to the concept of Light.
So, if Darkness is tied to Determination and to the creation of a narrative, then what is related to Light?
If Darkness is Dreams, then what is the white pen of Hope?
Darkness, and by extension Determination, seem to be related to the ability to create, to make. And in doing so, they place us on the set path of a narrative. Dark Worlds even tend to be pretty linear, as opposed to the generally more open-ended Light World. And the consequence for excessive darkness is the ultimate fate of the world, the catastrophe spoken of in glass, the Roaring.
In the dark, only blind eyes can see the path forward. But then how can you know there's any other path?
Meanwhile, what does Light allow us to do? It allows us to end the narrative, if we choose to see it through to the end. And it allows us to revert any progress we made, whether to do it over and over again or to see what we can do differently.
Darkness shows us the path laid before us.
Light, the white pen of hope that cuts through the ocean of ink, allow us to change our fate.
Determination is the power to stand strong against adversity, to remain true to who we are, and to maintain our will against all odds.
The power to exert our will upon the world, to change a future that doesn't suit us and choose our destiny, is Agency.
This may sound a bit strange, of course. Gerson straight up told us that the light blinds us from seeing any other way forward, and that the spaces in between, where it's darker, are the better way to go.
But the path of blinding light is only there because it was traced before, right? Someone or something, whether fate or the Angel, a former royal scientist or a little white dog, had the Agency to create this path that we follow. So if we want to subvert that, much like Frisk's Determination overpowering Flowey's, we need to hold greater Agency than the creator.
And for that, we need to look into the gaps they left behind. The darkness where there is no light.
The shadow, to be purified by the cat.
The Pure Crystal, once acquired, will be the true form of the Shadow Crystals. The crystallized will of the tears from the fallen star will give us the full power of Light.
Agency. The will to carve our own path. The power to see the happy end we Hope for.
Although, I suppose all of this still works if it turns out the Shadow Crystals ARE Determination. Maybe Agency is built into it as well. I still think it's something separate, the wording on the save points and the "Your Power" track is too specifically vague to make me think Light is Determination. But still, in the end, I guess my idea was closer to:
What if the Shadow Crystals are NOT made of Shadow, but of Light?
So, was there any point to all of this?
As a matter of fact? Maybe.
Because if the Pure Crystal gives us greater power of Light, if Agency is the [Hyperlink blocked] that Spamton craved so much (and that would bring him closer to HEAVEN), and if that's all tied to the power to change the narrative for the better in a major way, then I have an idea of what it may allow us to do.
The Light we already have lets us use our save files.
Perhaps a greater Light can let us use Kris'.
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