I'm not gonna finish the essay abt this I’ve been working on before chapter 5 comes out (DELTARUNE tomorrow!!!), so I’m just gonna call my shot here for posterity:
the DELTARUNE prophecy is a metanarrative element which serves as the diegetic representation of the fact that DELTARUNE is a linear game with one ending, because DELTARUNE is a linear video game about linear video games. (Hot take, but I don’t actually think Toby Fox was lying when he said the game has one ending) Your choices don’t matter because, as in all video games with one ending, despite your status as an agent within the world of DELTARUNE, you have no say over the outcome of the linear, pre-written, hard-coded story. The game ends the way the game ends, and then after that you turn it off and the screen winks out and it’s over. The prophecy is no more preventable than the ending of any other linear game you’ve played, no more changeable than DELTARUNE’s code and script. You are not saving Aerith. The very act of playing the game fulfills the prophecy. It is going to come true.
The only way to influence the game’s plot progression is to (metaphorically, within DELTATUNE’s metanarrative symbology) glitch the game: the crux of the weird route is that you perform an obscure, convoluted, and arcane series of actions akin to a speedrunning exploit, breaking the bead off its predestined prophesied path. But the thing is that using glitches to break a game doesn’t force the code to write you a new ending. It just breaks the game. “Even if it’s broken, [the Prophecy] always appears somewhere else.” So i doubt that even the choice to veer off the road directly into a deer will change things in the end. It’ll just kill the deer. Won’t even get you what you want. And even if it did, would it really be worth it? Is a terrible choice better just because you chose it?
So your choices don’t matter because they have no influence on the linear structure of the game/the prophecy. Except actually, your choices do matter, because kindness, even to fictional characters, is not only meaningful if it has extrinsic value. Your choices in DELTARUNE may not shape the story, but they shape the tone of the game, the lives of its inhabitants, and ultimately determine how fulfilling you’ll find your experience playing it. If none of that shit matters, why even bother playing linear video games anyway? Why not just watch a playthrough? Fuck, why shouldn’t all linear video games just be movies at that point? The answer obviously is that your choices and your agency and your INVOLVEMENT in the game matter a great deal, because the experience of being a participant in the game’s story can be such a rich one. I like recruiting enemies and getting cheerful cutscenes when they all help me beat the big bad, I like doing secret boss side quests, and I like hunting for eggs. Tenna’s survival isn’t going to decide the ending, but it decides whether Tenna gets to survive. A playthrough of DELTARUNE that only interfaces with the main plot—that slaughters every enemy as efficiently as possible, that doesn’t bother with the side quests or optional NPCs, that involves no exploration, that does not make this little fictional world a happier place, if only for now—is a failed playthrough. I mean look at Ralsei—the trajectory of his arc is not “actually you ARE real/a lightner and therefore matter,” it’s “you matter even though you’re not real because you’re real and matter to ME!”
