electrodasher

[electrodasher]

okay my biggest tenna fanon pet peeve is him having an internal fan that blows when he gets excited or something. there’s nothing wrong with the trope itself, but tenna is not a laptop or personal computer, he’s not even a digital flatscreen. he’s a mummy of an analog cathode ray tube television. a family living room CRT of his generation did not have an internal fan.

in fact i bet part of tenna’s volatility comes from being dusty as fuck which traps heat and static electricity

[electrodasher]

I don't know if this is well known yet but if you stall for about 23 turns in the Tenna fight then there's special dialogue.

[electrodasher]

spiiin~!

[electrodasher]

[electrodasher]

Gonna post this here just in case.

I figured out how Ralsei is getting between Dark Worlds.

He's using the fountains!

Right so, lets establish some facts.

Number one. Darkners are able to move freely through Dark Worlds, despite their Light World counterparts not being able to move.

This is a plainly observable fact. No Lightner needs to act on a Ruddin or a Plugboy or Tenna or The Ghost of Gerson Boom for them to traverse a Dark World. That being said, in the Light World, Darkners are bound to their objects, and require Lightner intervention to get around. This is how Tenna and Spamton and King and Queen all know each other. Kris and Noelle brough them all to the same place.

Number two. Dark Worlds and the Light World are both different perspectives on the same "reality," and thus there is no reason Dark Worlds have to be small, isolated spaces.

For this, we turn to Ralsei's breakdown of the mechanics of Dark Worlds, as well as Entry 17.

We'll start with the funny Gaster log. Gaster describes a growing darkness, and mentions that the photon readings are "negative." Gaster is obviously talking about Dark Worlds here. If the photon count is negative, then that means Gaster is picking up on some sort of Anti-Photon, which presumably would cancel out regular photons. Ralsei's breakdown of Dark Worlds corroborates this. He describes the creation of a Dark World as "another side." Starting at the point where there is no light at all, and going backwards from there. Anti-Light.

Despite Ralsei's insistence otherwise, if neither world is the "default" and you can arrive at either by simply going positive or negative from zero, that means that both "sides" can, theoretically, be large, continuous worlds. The reason there's only one big Light World and several smaller Dark Worlds is because of the Sun, a giant source of Light that covers the whole world. Meanwhile, there seemingly are no naturally occurring sources of Dark, except for allegedly Ralsei's fountain, which no one has been able to access for god-knows how long if it really has been there for millennia. Since Light and Dark cancel each other out, even if there was a naturally occurring source of Dark, it wouldn't be able to overpower The Sun unless it were shielded from it somehow.

Number three. Darkness is contained underneath the surface of the Earth.

This one doesn't require so much explanation. Dark Fountains are geysers, they must be "pulled from the Earth," the Prophecy says:

A WORLD BASKED IN PUREST LIGHT. BENEATH IT GREW ETERNAL NIGHT.

It just makes sense intuitively. The reason why it's so easy to make a Fountain is likely because the Earth is already full to bursting with Dark. All it takes is a hole and a little Determination and blam, Dark Fountain. The person's will also colours the resulting Dark World in the process.

So, let's take all these facts into consideration.

Underneath the surface of the Earth is a vast, continuous space of Darkness, shielded from the Light. That means this space is a Dark World. Any Darkner inside a Dark World can travel any distance within the Dark World, though they cannot enter the Light World by this means, as their physical forms haven't traversed the distance.

When we take these pieces of information together, we now know exactly how Ralsei is getting around.

When a Fountain is created, it allows Darkness to gush out from the Earth, connecting the resulting Dark World to any other Dark Worlds via the vast void inside the Earth. When a Fountain appears, Ralsei dives into the Grand Fountain in Castle Town, and books it across the void to the Fountain of the new Dark World. There, he emerges from the Fountain, and heads for where Kris and Susie are so they can proceed in their quest. Then, when the fountain is sealed, he simply reappears in Castle Town. In Chapter 2, Queen wouldn't have noticed him, because she wasn't there. In Chapter 3, He could have just booked it across the wasteland outside Tenna's studio. In Chapter 4, he appears a short fall away from where the Fountain was in the First Sanctuary, and even seems to be coming from the Fountain area in the Second Sanctuary, to the right of the room where Kris and Susie fought the Gerson statue.

The big concern here is how Ralsei is able to make it across the entire Dark World to meet up with Kris and Susie in such a short time, but given that these Dark Worlds are really only as long as they are because of winding inconvenient paths, battles, and The Plot, and the fact Ralsei can fly, and the fact he's likely holding back the full extent of his abilities, it's not impossible he could just burst through the Fountain and into the sky, then glide extremely quickly to where Kris and Susie are to meet up with them.

Other than that, I think this answers everything. Ralsei can't be an item on Kris or Susie's person, because we never see him leave or enter either of their inventories, and we watch him stay behind in Castle Town whenever they leave. And we also don't have any precedent for beings made purely of Darkness, other than Titans, something which Ralsei is decidedly not. And before you come here and tell me Ralsei is a Titan, I'm going to need you to provide any evidence of that that isn't "horns" or "titan imagery near his town" or "it would be cool."

So, yeah. That is the theory. Hope you guys like it, and please let me know if you have anything to add!

[electrodasher]

tenna would totally do cocaine

[electrodasher]

this year for halloween i wanna see one william "ant" tenna deltarune costumes of various construction quality

[electrodasher]

No need to cover them up!!! I just think this shirt would be bad ass!!

[electrodasher]

but why would kris say "no one gets to choose who they are in this world" if they were asserting their autonomy they would've said something like "no one can choose who someone else is" or "you can't choose who i am" instead

the more i think about the idea that kris Is the vessel the more sense it makes to me and i'm going a little crazy about it. like i do think it would already be interesting if they somehow wrested control of gaster's connection in order to participate in the prophecy (either to fulfill their deal with dess/carol or for their own goals), But it feels even more interesting (and more fitting to kris' character imo) if it's not just kris taking this role onto themselves, but for their very personhood to be a defiance to this role that they were created for.

"no one gets to choose who they are in this world" not just as kris hating themself as a human but also as a vessel, a "fuck you" to the idea that they have to fulfill this role for an outside force, that they are more than just "a cage with human soul and parts." they reject the appearance you give them, the traits you give them, the name you give them (and any gender you may project onto them), they reject your control of them by changing the way they say things or maliciously complying with what you tell them to do, they tear their soul out of their body and put it in a literal cage, almost mocking their/our role in the prophecy.

it also adds to their involvement with carol and dess, giving kris a motivation outside of guilt/obligation from their promise. assuming carol's motivation is to change/control the prophecy to protect her children (i believe she is working to save dess from whatever happened to make her the knight, plus the potential susie/noelle prophecy girl swap), it would make sense for kris to also want to attempt to change the prophecy not just for the sake of noelle and dess, but to prove that their life has meaning outside of being a vessel to carry out the prophecy.

also i think it would be cool

[electrodasher]

Does the Japanese dialogue tell us what pronoun Carol uses while speaking? This would be a good way to match it to the phone call we get at the end of the chapter.

To my knowledge, we have not seen what pronoun Carol uses yet! But even without pronouns, we can still tell a lot about a character's voice through other details of their speech such as gendered particles and how they conjugate their verbs. (As always, JP transcriptions + translations are in Alt Text!)

Carol generally speaks in a mildly feminine tone, ending requests with -te choudai and leaving more masculine-sounding particles such as -ka off of her questions. It's interesting that even when clearly very angry with Susie, she still maintains this quite level manner of speaking. It makes her come across with a lot of the same composure and chilliness as she does in the English version.

I also want to point out how her tone changes when Kris is leaving the Holiday house.

She suddenly starts filling her speech with a lot of highly feminine grammar, ending phrases with -wa ne, deshou, and -yo. It feels like she's really laying it on thick and playing up her femininity to make herself sound more gentle and give a feeling of emotional closeness. It's fairly unnerving, just like the same moment in the English version!

Now, let's look at the phone calls.

This line in English uses a first-person pronoun, but the Japanese does not. This is fairly common in Japanese, where pronouns are generally dropped if they can be understood from context.

Unfortunately, none of the lines from the phone calls contain any of the other kinds of grammatical details that would typically tell us more about their voice, either. You can tell that this was definitely done intentionally to hide the identity of the caller(s), because the translators actually went so far as to cut off the endings of the verbs in the two screenshots above!

The Japanese translation of the calls does give us one small piece of extra information, however. While in English, "can/cannot" is its own verb, Japanese typically expresses this by instead modifying the original verb itself, so we actually now know what "can't" in the English version was referring to--the full phrase was "can't enter."

So, the Japanese version doesn't give us a lot of new information with regard to Carol or the phone calls. But it's always very interesting to look at anyways!

[electrodasher]

that's gotta be his creator, right? whoever that is

something i see nobody talking about is the dialogue ralsei has when you go back up after the jackenstein fight. if you pick the option "tell a story" when interacting with the pumpkin ralsei gives the following dialogue (poorly cropped and stretched because i could only find it in a video with weird aspect ratios):

i find it really interesting that ralsei says specifically that he had SCARCELY known anyone else, not that he had never known anyone else. he knew somebody before we arrived in castle town.

[electrodasher]

ID: Photo of the wrestling character Suicide. His costume is a full-body dark jumpsuit with flaming red accents. He wears an angry skull mask, his own name across his chest, and a golden championship belt. End ID.

my deltarune oc

[electrodasher]

As someone who used to clean blood using hot water for years depsite having periods I can totally belive susie thought hot water would be good for cleaning blood. Hot water is good for washing dishes so surely it would be good for washing blood stained clothes! <- is what I thought. For years.

rip those clothes that were never the same again

we need soviet style PSA posters about this in every public space

[electrodasher]

i'm not really worried if at the end of the story susie has to end her dark world adventures and say goodbye to the darkners forever. if she doesn't, great, everyone wins. but if she does, her character is developing in a way that would prepare her to deal with that loss without it destroying her spirit in a miserable tragedy.

sure, in the light world, she's still a 14-year-old poor autistic lesbian in bumfuckville with no career prospects. but she's already bffs with kris and they've forged an warrior's bond; she's befriending and falling in love with rich girl noelle; she has a reliable-ish adult in toriel; hell, she might even get closer to berdly. and together, they can all make each other's lives suck less.

what I'M worried about is that her fuckass guardians have always moved her around and killed any budding friendship or stability in her life. if everyone is saved and happy and then susie gets moved away, that to me is as narratively tragic as everyone dying.

and if her guardians show signs of wanting to move her away before the story ends, i wouldn't even blame her for destroying the world trying to prevent that from happening. what else is she supposed to do? children are their parents' property, and that's one problem you can't solve with magic, hopes, dreams, determination, or love.

tl;dr: look up youth liberation and FREE MY GIRL SUSIE FROM THE HORRORS

[electrodasher]

Okay, so, like, it is very Obvious that Tenna is a bit of a parallel to Asgore. Like, a manifestation of how Kris and Toriel feel about Asgore’s Divorced Behavior. With his fixation and nostalgia on how the family ‘used to be’ and wanting validation for how he ‘raised’ Kris, and his attachment to Toriel… even using the same pet name Asgore uses for her.

I mean, in his happiest moment, he literally starts growing a flower on his nose.

But also… Tenna is not just an Asgore-Equivalent. A lot of his specific divorce-related trauma and separation anxiety seem to mirror the perspective of a kid who grew up in the middle of a divorce, so that might be a reflection of Kris’ deeply-repressed feelings. And also…

I think it’s often overlooked just how much of Toriel is also a part of him. I think it's pretty heavily implied that Toriel has been having some sad thoughts about the idea that with one kid already in college and the other one almost there as well, soon she'll be all alone at home. And that very much parallels Tenna's fears about being left behind and abandoned.

You can maybe also draw a parallel between the way they resolve this concern...

[electrodasher]

it's normal when your child has to resort to operational security strategies to hide their genuine interests and emotions because they've been deemed unacceptable, right?

I find it interesting that the Noelle blog version of Raise Up Your Bat is an entirely different song from the in-game version and is just a country remix of Jingle Bells

So what if Dess made two versions of the song? A “safe” one to play to cover up the REAL version when the parents weren’t around

[electrodasher]

ID: Screenshot from Deltarune of Susie and Kris in Kris's bedroom looking at a bloodstain on the carpet. Susie side-eyes Kris, saying: "Just use vinegar, dumbass. Vinegar and hot water. Cleans it up." End ID.

who the HELL taught susie to clean blood with hot water, the thing that famously sets bloodstains? i guess since kris is transfem & susie is a reptile neither one has had to handle blood on a monthly basis. and it comes right off? bullshit. immersion broken. i demand realistic blood chemistry in my games. toby fox RETIRE