Willow

I like singing and deltarune and may or may not actually post

[willowoperasinger]

if you don't mind me asking, what're your pronouns?

My pronouns are she/her! Silly me for never sharing them on this blog lol

[willowoperasinger]

What Ralsei ACTUALLY Is (chapter five spoilers)

It’s so obvious yall. So flowers have a higher level of consciousness and are between lightners and darkners, right? And it’s because they’re ALIVE but not aware? And Ralsei seems to have these traits too????

He can’t be a flower though, because how does he survive in the dark and show up in every dark world.

It’s so simple.

Ralsei is a mycelium network. Every Ralsei we meet is a mushroom growing in the darkness of the new dark world, that’s how he detects dark presences, because he’s a mycelium network that exists throughout the whole town and sprouts mushrooms where there are dark worlds.

Someone asked me what that does for his character……

A lot! First of all, why is he young Asriel? It’s just the same thing as the flowers, he willfully chose that form, likely because mushrooms of course are the most iconic power up from video games, which Asriel as a kid was a big Mario player.

Then, it also puts his actual power into context. No matter how many mushrooms you kill, the mycelium network is really strong and can keep growing. That’s why Ralsei brags about being so powerful and threatens to kill Flowery.

Additionally, mushrooms are well known for sexual propagation, and let’s not mince words, Ralsei is a horny little bastard! He blushes from Kris standing close to him, he seems into being in a throuple with Kris and Susie, he turns bright red from getting called cute, he gets extremely embarrassed and freezes from the word bosom, he is so horny! And this also makes his abundantly obvious crushes on both Kris and Susie kind of make more sense, because mushrooms are absolutely not monogamous, though of course Ralsei could also just be polyamorous just because so that’s a weak piece of evidence.

But also being the prince of the darkness— the king of the darkness is the mycelium, a life form specialized to grow and conquer dark and moist (which darkness is analogous to water and the town love is currently “moist” on all recruits) areas. The son of the king is a mushroom, Ralsei.

I just don’t think there’s any object Ralsei could be that solves as many mysteries and creates as few problems as him being a mushroom. The only real issue is he says in chapter three “I’m a Darkner” which the flowers are never described as Darkners, but even then cacti seem to just be normal Darkners, so maybe mushrooms are just very powerful Darkners or maybe the mycelium at the core is a powerful in between lightner Darkner but the mushrooms are just given knowledge from that powerful core.

By the way I firmly believe in Tralsei but I just think it’s a narrative development that will happen later and it’s the most clear and succinct for now in Ralsei contexts outside of Tralsei to use he/him for her if you were wondering.

[willowoperasinger]

I made an actual video if you wanna see

[willowoperasinger]

I made a video about my theory I text posted about! I hope you all enjoy it

[willowoperasinger]

“Mew Mew/Mettaton isn’t trans it’s an allegory”

“Mew Mew/Mettaton isn’t NECESSARILY trans it’s up to interpretation”

Ah yes a character exclusively uses one set of pronouns and then switches to using another set of pronouns and gets a new name and new body there are so many explanations for this other than being trans I can think of so many

[willowoperasinger]

Guys thank you for getting my stupid thing to 100 likes I’ve never had this many likes on anything other than like Reddit /ewreddit

[itsybitsyjoltik]

we can’t keep letting him get away with this

[willowoperasinger]

Nobody will listen to me (chapter five spoilers)

Susie says the back door is “up these stairs” so the room with the flowers is not the basement it is upstairs. The basement is down a flight of stairs that is also in the back and it’s just only accessible from outside. My basement on my house is also like this. There is a basement it has been referenced to have a conspiracy board. The basement is just downstairs and only accessible from outside. This isn’t that weird it’s how my basement is too. And it sucks because I have geese and the basement is where the laundry setup is so we have to carry laundry outside and dodge scary goose mouths to do laundry.

Thank you for listening to me.

[porridgeperson]

I made a diagram is this what u mean

[willowoperasinger]

This diagram is perfect it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen thank you for your service

[willowoperasinger]

I know it’s been over a week but like just to be safe Deltarune chapter five spoilers beneath the cut (MORE SECRET BOSS POSTING I LOVE HER)

I have quite literally not been so fixated on a character since the actual Hatsune Miku. Like yes Noelle is my favorite character in the game (and I’d say one of my favorite characters in fiction alongside like Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Basil Hallward from the Picture of Dorian Gray and like Forrest Gump) and I probably am going to go through a heavy fixation on her just like I did in 2021 all over again in a few months but….

Right now my thoughts are SUBSUMED by Pink. Like overwhelmingly conquered by her. She has gotta be my favorite boss I’ve ever fought and I just wanna talk more about what makes her so great in my ongoing series of extreme Pink posting. I still have so much to say about her character even after my Pink Lore post but right now I just wanna talk about the gameplay.

The purple soul mode was always my LEAST favorite in Undertale. Like yes it’s a little fun and some cool things were done with it, specifically with the big muffin guy who chases you. I just felt like most of the attacks were pretty same-y because they all just had movement in the y coordinate be restricted to specific locations. It was fun because it was well designed but it wasn’t fun because interacting with it was inherently fun.

Deltarune has totally changed this. Every soul has gotten a lot more mechanical nuance of course, feeling out the charge frames on the yellow and orange souls in order to properly take advantage of their new abilities, grazing being a super rewarding and fun mechanic to make bullet hell and RPG blend more authentically, and the green soul kind of just being the same thing but with diagonals added this time. But the purple soul mode has just been developed to an insane extent. I think to demonstrate that point I have to lay out what all has been added to each soul mode:

Yellow is sideways now and can charge a big shot. It is fun to charge a big shot, it’s great to feel out when it’s ready to use, or use funne glitch and spam if you’re on PC. Still not a huge change, but it’s nice to have.

Green soul got diagonal blocking. It definitely adds some difficulty and nuance and makes you think really hard about where the shell is getting deflected to, but it’s the most similar to the original soul mode.

Orange soul is brand new and it’s really interesting because it is always moving but it slows down as it charges. It’s kind of like the slick star from Kirby Air Ride? It’s really fun and compatible with how I like to play games, but it’s ultimately a simple mechanic to just have a charge that leads to a boost of speed and the ability to wreck blue shit.

Now nothing is wrong with mechanical simplicity and I’m not saying anything bad about any other soul mode, they all are very fun and the bullets around them are super well designed, but purple goes insane.

For purple, the ability to move sideways in grids was added and each attack was given custom strings. The feeling of switching is also a lot more visually responsive and tactile, making it feel less like a flash game and more like Frogger, which is kind of huge for such a highly developed secret boss as Pink. This already allows for so much creativity, like only four points extending off of a center point, a full grid, a super specific path you have to input quickly, and then also just more Muffet style attacks except way faster and harder. Then, they added the freaking 3D thing where you’re being chased from behind and have to go further forward but as you advance you get tinier. It’s really hard. If it were a minigame it would take me an hour to T rank it. It’s still really fun though. The most important addition, though, is the TP gain and loss mechanics added for this fight.

Like most chapter five bosses, as well as most secret bosses, the fight is advanced with acts that cost TP to use. But because grazing is a much more difficult concept on purple soul, you instead have to collect pink hearts to reassemble a shrunken TP bar. This means you’re constantly trying not only to avoid attacks but to get to the points that restore your TP so you can advance the fight. It’s so much fun inherently because it pushes the risk vs. reward way up. And, even more brilliantly, Ralsei has an act in this fight that increases your max TP by 14, which is a lot, making him the central character of the fight from a gameplay point of view, which strengthens the narrative parallels. The Knight did the same thing by making Susie the main party member due to her high damage output. And, just like in that fight, our main party member for the fight is the one who talks. It’s great. I love it. I’ll talk about why Pink is turning Ralsei trans later.

The dating sequences are also just delightful. The fact that in the middle of this frantic and amazing fight you have a date sequence based on choosing puns is amazing. I really would love to have just a list of dozens of potential prompts and have a minigame version of this in Castle Town. I would absolutely T rank that shit and love every second of it. Please give Pink a Castle Town activity I would be SO happy.

The final super attack being a super fast input hostile date feels almost like a payoff of the dates from Undertale. Like finally a date that can kill you.

I also love the attacks that use the Switch Undertale bullets because I played Undertale primarily on Switch (about fifty hours on steam and over 200 on Switch). The best part for me is absolutely the part where she knocks the bullet box around like every time something like that happens it’s awesome but this is the coolest one.

And man the visuals with all the dummies waving lighters and the lip synced idol animations for the one red soul attack and how many sprites they gave her and her freaking portrait and visual novel art and her theme song which is so brilliant and perfect and frantic and fun and so so well arranged and composed and just AHHHHHH

Pink is everything that makes me love every other secret boss times a million. I guess all she lacks is like a super mysterious and foreboding presence, but ghosts are still mysterious in Deltarune and she absolutely is a character with intrigue because of some of her shop dialogue. I’m interested in knowing more about her and I think some people are being insanely uncharitable towards her and I think it’s because they can’t imagine a goofy trans girl with Miku in her theme is actually lore relevant. I think she’s as lore relevant and as complete of a character as somebody like Spamton, don’t get me wrong, she isn’t as narratively essential as the Knight or even Gerson, but I couldn’t imagine chapter five without her.

Thank you for reading my text post about game design which I know nothing about!

[willowoperasinger]

When I played Mina the Hollower and beat it within a few days of launch I thought this is it. This is my 2026 game of the year. This game is everything the top down 2D adventure game genre was never allowed to develop into. I thought for years no game could ever execute this genre as well as Link’s Awakening but here is a game that was its equal in so many ways and its superior in terms of the raw fun factor.

I was sure, nay, certain, that nothing could top this game in 2026. I loved the characters, the graphical style, the music, the degree of customization, and most of all the gameplay. So many systems to engage with in such a variety of ways, and just constantly engaging moment to moment gameplay.

…

Then like a month and a half later the real game of the year released.

Speaking in as non specific of terms as I did for Mina because these are two games best experienced knowing as little as possible.

Deltarune Chapter Five demonstrates every single angle of the artist/art/audience relationship so effectively and so joyously and so shamelessly in this perfect, shining, self contained little gem with the most fun gameplay in the series yet. While doing that, it also furthers the main characters’ arcs in a really subtle but ultimately really important way, as well as having some revelations hidden beneath the surface, and a finale like little else I have ever experienced in a video game. This plus a scene taken from and fed back into my nightmares that will never cease to haunt me.

And two of the top three sexiest Deltarune characters to date (number one is Tenna and it’s honestly not even close)!

Deltarune Chapter Five is such a monumental accomplishment and I see why Toby has been dreaming of it for ten years. Deltarune is such a special, magical game and it just gets more magical as time goes on. I can’t begin to express how much I recommend Deltarune. It is super important to play Undertale first, but that’s also a great game! The only thing I can say about Deltarune is that it does certainly make me not wanna play other games. Quite literally nothing hits the way Deltarune does.

VIBES spoilers here but Deltarune is a surreal and dreamlike game and the atmosphere of this off putting and unsettling but beautiful dream is at an all time high in chapter five. It made me feel things I haven’t felt since I first played Final Fantasy 6 or Earthbound. It presented me with sights and sounds out of games I could swear I’ve imagined in my sleep that will never be real.

Specific visual and flowery (the adjective) line of dialogue spoiler:

“Here the sunset comes from the back of your eyelids”

This is true. The sunset rendered in this game in collaboration with this song that aches with a decade of nostalgia for a time I was barely conscious enough to be aware of is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in a game. It’s enough to bring tears to my eyes. It’s like the first time I played Silksong and the world was just so alive and vibrant like I never knew a world could be. It’s like ten years ago when I first played Final Fantasy 6 and, even though I never beat it, I found myself so moved by the music and visuals and so constantly feeling these deep emotions for these simple characters whose names would always escape me.

The story doesn’t remain, the time spent grinding is indeterminate, but the feelings that game made me feel have been imprinted into the outside of my heart, waiting to stir again to feel that scar tissue close up and complete me for the first time since I was a child.

Deltarune Chapter 5 is the first game I have played since I was eight that has made me feel the same way as Final Fantasy 6 and it has made me extremely emotional for the past week.

So main takeaways:

-Go play or replay Deltarune chapter five

-Please buy Mina the Hollower, it is worth your time and it is one of the best games

-Silksong is really goated

-Please play Final Fantasy 6 (personal note to myself too I really need to finish it)

[seriffromhl]

All of kris' anime hatred leaving them the moment they see a catgirl:

[timelockedchosen]

And this is why I ship PinkxKris

[willowoperasinger]

I wanna add for everyone who isn’t aware that the evidence for Kris is as follows:

Kris doesn’t wanna read anime review

Kris doesn’t like the word tsundere

To this I say….

Kris doesn’t like reading in general and knows it’s Alphys’s review. As an anime fan, by the way, I would NEVER want to read an anime review, especially from the TEEN ZONE. That sounds like torture.

How can Kris hate the word tsundere unless they know it? So there’s two possibilities. One is Kerdly and Berdly is just flirting with Kris and calling them a tsundere. But the other is that Kris watches anime and doesn’t like the tsundere trope because it reminds them of themself.

I think Kris likes anime because they made a fake world that was basically all anime and Japanese so at this point they gotta be a snobbish weeb rather than an anime hater.

Also also Maddy the ghost of Pink is either a high school dropout or an adult who graduated high school. Mew Mew is in high school though so shipping Pink and Kris is fine (and really cute) as long as you like don’t get the ghost involved in an interpretation of her as an adult that is the way to make it strange.

[willowoperasinger]

Nobody will listen to me (chapter five spoilers)

Susie says the back door is “up these stairs” so the room with the flowers is not the basement it is upstairs. The basement is down a flight of stairs that is also in the back and it’s just only accessible from outside. My basement on my house is also like this. There is a basement it has been referenced to have a conspiracy board. The basement is just downstairs and only accessible from outside. This isn’t that weird it’s how my basement is too. And it sucks because I have geese and the basement is where the laundry setup is so we have to carry laundry outside and dodge scary goose mouths to do laundry.

Thank you for listening to me.

[shakingsmallfry]

SPOILER WARNING FOR DELTARUNE CHAPTER 5 SECRET BOSS

Has anyone else realised that the dog dollar is kinda really useful for the chapter 5 secret boss??? Like, with Susie's "share food/item" (can't remember the exact wording) ACT it raises the enemy's Doki by *3*. I get that isn't much, but it's way better than throwing away any actually decent healing item.

[willowoperasinger]

I will say one dogdollar went towards making my dogwidow which has really good stats and if you don’t care about money it can be super useful.

I guess the trade off is pretty enormous but that doesn’t apply to major boss encounters because you don’t get any money from them.

But yeah the other three dog dollars are Pink food

[meorpin]

new idea for punishment

[molabuddy]

MEW MEW 助けて!

[willowoperasinger]

I love them oh my god

[entryn17]

seeing people go "oh my god just let ralsei be a feminine boy" pisses me off so bad bc we literally Got a feminine/ gnc man chapter 5. blue. but they dont like him bc hes black

SAY ITTTTTTT

[chuckeroo777]

The Fandom Nailed it. Somehow.

[ID: A meme featuring a venn diagram. The upper left circle has a picture of IMAGE_FRIEND, and is captioned "The secret boss is a pink and yellow cat!" The upper right circle has a distorted monochrome picture of Woody, and is captioned "The secret boss is a puppet being controlled by an entity from the inside!" The bottom circle has Cube Watermelon's artwork of Apple Girlington, and is captioned "The secret boss is Toby's japanese magical girl OC! The center of the diagram has an image of Pink, the actual secret boss of chapter 5, who fits all three descriptions. End ID]

[willowoperasinger]

Theory Gatekeeping (mild chapter five spoilers)

Why is the first response to a theory somebody doesn’t like “actually that’s not a theory it’s a headcanon?”

There is a big difference between the two and there is some overlap but not much.

A headcanon doesn’t affect the story or characters in a meaningful way and could absolutely be true right now and just probably won’t come up. For example, I think Kris is AFAB because Susie doesn’t question the bloodstain in their room, Aqua is analogous to young Kris and is female and asks Seth about their gender (which seems to be how she learns about nonbinary), and Man Country implies Kris identified as a man at some point, which could have coincided with their headband they wore to be more like Asriel, whom they seem to idolize. But I’m not saying this is gonna come up and be important and change the direction of the story, so it’s a headcanon. However, if I were to build a case that it is of tantamount relevance to the characters, like Ralsei Tampon theory or something, it would be a theory! A kind of shitty theory but still a theory.

Theories just say that they fill a hole in the story or will come up later. They answer mysteries that are relevant to the story and characters that can change the plot as is or moving forward. For example, Ralsei being trans. Ignoring all the evidence, this absolutely would defy the prophecy by taking the prince out of the equation and therefore be extremely relevant and affecting to the story if it were true. Ralsei being a trans girl is actually invalid as a headcanon if you ask me, because it has such major story implications. It is much better described as a theory. I personally find it to be a strong theory, but it’s okay if you think it’s weak. The headcanon version is that post game Ralsei comes out as trans, but the theory that Ralsei is going to transition during the events of the game is absolutely a theory even if you think it’s bad.

Here’s a theory everybody thinks is bad: Asriel’s dust.

But this could not possibly be a headcanon! Asriel being dead completely changes the story! A theory is not a better version of a headcanon and a headcanon is not a worse version of a theory, they are two completely different things.

Moral of the story is it’s okay to have a shitty theory.

[willowoperasinger]

What Ralsei ACTUALLY Is (chapter five spoilers)

It’s so obvious yall. So flowers have a higher level of consciousness and are between lightners and darkners, right? And it’s because they’re ALIVE but not aware? And Ralsei seems to have these traits too????

He can’t be a flower though, because how does he survive in the dark and show up in every dark world.

It’s so simple.

Ralsei is a mycelium network. Every Ralsei we meet is a mushroom growing in the darkness of the new dark world, that’s how he detects dark presences, because he’s a mycelium network that exists throughout the whole town and sprouts mushrooms where there are dark worlds.

Someone asked me what that does for his character……

A lot! First of all, why is he young Asriel? It’s just the same thing as the flowers, he willfully chose that form, likely because mushrooms of course are the most iconic power up from video games, which Asriel as a kid was a big Mario player.

Then, it also puts his actual power into context. No matter how many mushrooms you kill, the mycelium network is really strong and can keep growing. That’s why Ralsei brags about being so powerful and threatens to kill Flowery.

Additionally, mushrooms are well known for sexual propagation, and let’s not mince words, Ralsei is a horny little bastard! He blushes from Kris standing close to him, he seems into being in a throuple with Kris and Susie, he turns bright red from getting called cute, he gets extremely embarrassed and freezes from the word bosom, he is so horny! And this also makes his abundantly obvious crushes on both Kris and Susie kind of make more sense, because mushrooms are absolutely not monogamous, though of course Ralsei could also just be polyamorous just because so that’s a weak piece of evidence.

But also being the prince of the darkness— the king of the darkness is the mycelium, a life form specialized to grow and conquer dark and moist (which darkness is analogous to water and the town love is currently “moist” on all recruits) areas. The son of the king is a mushroom, Ralsei.

I just don’t think there’s any object Ralsei could be that solves as many mysteries and creates as few problems as him being a mushroom. The only real issue is he says in chapter three “I’m a Darkner” which the flowers are never described as Darkners, but even then cacti seem to just be normal Darkners, so maybe mushrooms are just very powerful Darkners or maybe the mycelium at the core is a powerful in between lightner Darkner but the mushrooms are just given knowledge from that powerful core.

By the way I firmly believe in Tralsei but I just think it’s a narrative development that will happen later and it’s the most clear and succinct for now in Ralsei contexts outside of Tralsei to use he/him for her if you were wondering.