#berdly deltarune

[aviarylyric]

Kerdly anim!!! I worked so hard...

[tainebot01]

Very controversial take (to the fandom at large primarily but I assume you would get it):

Susie and Berdley are basically the same person who got different outcomes

Barely anyone in town cares about them with the literal exceptions of Kris and Noelle

Know jack squat about their home life but the implications are astounding

We only meet relations of them in UT but not them directly (Possibly Berdley mom in the 10th anniversary stream and Clam girl talking about her Neighbors Kid Suzy (and if we wanna take the Susie Gaster Theory into accounts a brief glimpse of her dad in the one room in waterfall))

Both make assumptions based on past experience or their skewed observations and mindsets (Susie expecting everyone to see her as a criminal like usual in ch 1 pre character development cause everyone expects that out of her, and Berdley with his thoughts that anyone who genuinely cares about him must be romantically interested in him cause why else would they bother sticking around?)

The Primary way they achieve any kind of Development is via the Spade family (Lancer and Queen especially) with some other outside help

Get the aid of the denizens of the respective dark worlds to achieve great things (The Ultimate Group Project to defeat Queen and Susie getting Tv Worlds citizens to save Tenna)

Etc etc etc

The primary difference is how they reacted to the first positive comment to happen to them and how said were presented

Susie through lancers friendship and eventually Ralsei and the old man’s kind ness as well slowly became a better person than she thought she was, becoming another healer in the party and becoming more of a goofball rather than the Violet tormented she once was.

Berdley ever since he won that spelling bee craved to be seen more and unfortunately in his eyes the lesson he learned was to be someone useful and smart, primarily useful and smart and if he failed either of those things he figured the town would just forget him once he couldn’t be that person. Instead of the Shy bluebird nerd we get ourselves a hollow persona of a Snobby smart person whose own fear and dread of not being good enough made him obliviously obnoxious and annoying . And unfortunately someone that The player would happily remove because, as we all know, the worst thing a character can be in media. Is Annoying

Yet if the player decided to stick to kindness we see the chance of him being a better person somewhat free from the persona he has had for years.

To conclude this…

For the weird route and Susie. If we take out Berdley and commit ourselves to this ending we bring her down to berdley’s level in the narrative: someone who does their role then we ignore them for the actual task at hand: Reaching Side B or whatever happens at the end of this road

In the Nice route we give a chance to lift Berdley out of this position he put himself in, a chance to not have to be someone who’s value they believe relies on being Smart and Useful

In the Weird Route we basically bring Susie down to Berdleys level even if she herself has grown: ignored by the story and when the disappearance of Kris and Noelle is known, most likely permanently labelled by the town as someone disgusting

By removing Berdley, we basically put the only person who could help break him out of his shell in the light world into his role

Someone not too Important, but not too Unimportant…

(Thank you for reading this till the end and I apologize if I worded things weird)

No weird wording at all, this is definitely on to something!

And here’s my take for why this is the case:

It’s because they’re both dragons.

Susie’s dragon connections are pretty clear by now - Gerson refers to her as such, her bonus minigame features her as kaiju Susiezilla, this overall forms a pretty neat reinterpretation of the Dragon, Knight and Princess dynamic with her, Kris and Noelle respectively.

As for Berdly…

Getting the low hanging fruit of the “Ice Age” line aside, in real life dinosaurs still exist. As birds.

Now, dinosaurs and dragons tend to be conflated in many an rpg - see chronicles trigger, mother 3, final fantasy… and Deltarune, given Asriel’s connections to both green dino and purple dragon.

But there’s another way in which Berdly is a Dragon - the role he fulfills as aspiring second in command to Queen. “The Dragon” being the archetypal role of the penultimate challenge to the heroes, the one doing all the heavy lifting before confronting the Big Bad Final Boss. The Masked Man to King P from Mother 3, Metal Sonic to Eggman from Sonic, the many admins to the evil team leaders from Pokémon… you get the picture.

Because nothing in Deltarune is played straight we get to see Berdly be as exhausting to Queen as he is to the fun gang, but funnily enough this places him in a similar position to Lancer from the previous chapter…

when “The Lancer” is another well-characterized archetype as the complementary support to the Hero, as a more heroic counterpart to The Dragon… which Susie ends up as after rejoining.

So the dragon is our lancer and Lancer is our dragon. Confused? Good.

But on that note, the aforementioned Mother 3 features what I believe may be the driving reason for these parallels.

There was a cut plot development involving the Bird of Light, a counterpart to the Dark Dragon involved in the harrowing finale of the game (keeping it vague to avoid spoilers, expect a lot of crying…), yet the only remaining allusions to the bird in the final version are through the Egg of Light… also known as the Hummingbird Egg (“it’s my hummingbird!” hasn’t been used yet huh Toby?)

Given the Forgotten Man I mentioned above alludes to a strange translation choice in Mother 1 that Toby is familiar with, I wouldn’t put it past him to draw on this cut plot point of a Bird associated with Light (or glow in the dark armor at least lol) as a counterpart to a Dragon associated with Dark, plus the meta idea of the bird being removed from the narrative despite being a little more important than initially thought.

[youravianhero]

hey bergly kid do you play dragon blazers 👀

‘Do I??? I know everything about Dragon Blazers! I have almost all of their merch!! You doubt my gaming knowledge, Dreemurr boy??’

[trashmallard115]

figuring out how i wanna draw kris under their hair and mysterious green shadow

[digital-grass]

my take on the fun gang's parallels for quirky weird route aus

[miichimatsu]

Got hungover and for some reason my brain kept waking me up cuz if I slept in the wrong position kerdly would be doomed

[youravianhero]

You do know that their actual name is Susie Gaster and not Susan right?

‘Susie, Susan- same thing!! And what are these images?? Is that an ice cube? Why is that here???’

[youravianhero]

Have you never asked yourself, if you're truly happy? What if you reach "the top", achieving what you always dreamed of? What happens after that? I can already tell you: it's lonely at the top. If you're above everyone else, then who could ever look you in the eyes?

‘I- I don’t need anyone! Nobody can match my superior intelligence anyways!’

[He’s fidgeting.]