#What is that. Why is that. What the fuck is up with 'mancountry.' What is going on.

[callizinc]

Deltaheads anybody wanna talk about the Forgotten Man. Because literally what the fuck is all that

[velvetvexations]

Honestly the thing that pisses me the fuck off the most about Kris discourse (Kriscourse?) is that the TRFs perpetuating it just straight up lie about what is in the game. Using "Mancountry" being a place within Kris's psyche as proof that they were ever treated like a man (when it's called that because it contains the mysterious man, and has a sign saying "non-men are welcome too.") Saying that because they have unused Manly Man body spray that that was forced on them and they didn't want to use it, when in reality Susie's dialogue when you visit the Dreemurr residence with her confirms that it actually belongs to Asriel.

Headcanons are genuinely fine; I'm of the camp that you can headcanon a gay character as straight if you want to even if I think it's a little déclassé. But when people actively lie about the content of a work in order to perpetuate nonbinary erasure and for no other reason it grinds my fucking gears.

disclaimer: I am a trans woman myself

It sure does me too, anon. That's why I'm going to take this post with over five thousand notes that annoys the shit out of me and dissect why it's incredibly bad and stupid, like literally every single other case of "you're transmisogynistic if you don't agree with me about the lore of children's media."

deltarune begins by discarding the appearance and name you choose, then immediately proceeds to show the protagonist being called the name their mother likely chose for them.

Immediately a fatal misunderstanding of the game's themes that completely ruins everything Tobyfox is trying to do with this aspect of the game. It is in fact literally the opposite of the intent. In this situation, you, the player, are the one imposing your preferred identity onto Kris! Holy fucking shit, we are literally one sentence in and the whole post may as well just consist of "I am misgendering Kris so that I can obliterate their own sense of identity and fill it in with my own because I hate non-binary people and am made violently feral when a work says that's bad."

Jesus fucking Christ.

at school, they encounter susie, an outcast who's treated as a deadly monster (even by her teacher) despite the fact that she never follows through on her violent threats.

Wait, so Susie is a transfem allegory too? While this reading would not be inherently valid, the fact that neither Kris or Ralsei - who are also, apparently, transfem - are treated with anything other than respect would seem to imply that closeted transfems do not deal with things like that and it's only once you come out that you then lose male privilege. FASCINATING. Once again the relentless urge to force one's own sense of self onto the media they consume is incoherent and doesn't gel because they want literally every likable character to be that and it makes the aLlEgOrY wildly inconsistent.

Also - Susie is the own fucking cause of her problems! She could choose to not put up the facade of violence, which is one hundred percent not forced on her at all. If the aLlEgOrY is that she's transfem, there's no other way to read it than saying that trans women make up problems and should just relax. Given how they focus all their attention on things like top scars on plushies and drawings of cowboys, I can maybe kinna see see how they could have gotten that impression, but I happen to think transmisogyny is a real thing that exists.

kris and susie are then forced by their teacher to go into the closet, a dark place whose residents are oppressed by wider society.

Hey, here's an allegory that could possibly work! Too bad it isn't transfem specific!

And by the way? Everyone calls Kris they/them. Kris is trans. Kris is already trans. All this shit about the closet and Kris's name being a sign that they exist in a state of being denied their true trans self only makes fucking sense if you don't consider non-binary people as meaningfully trans ahhh they are literally just saying the loud part quiet. Like they hate non-binary people who don't connect their gender to being any kinna woman and they! Are! Saying it! OUT LOUD!

there, they meet ralsei, who initially covers his entire face and body with a cloak

Yes, Ralsei enters the game wearing a cloak. Which he takes off the second he's asked to. He says "um, alright," in a way that could maybe apply hesitancy, but he then also immediately cheerfully explains how wonderful it is to meet them. He is clearly not so dysphoric that it ever at any point makes him uncomfortable beyond that. Perhaps, I suppose, Tobyfox is saying that dysphoria isn't that bad and pushing oneself past it is unfathomably easy task that takes all of two seconds?

tells them with an air of resignation that he's been waiting his entire life to meet them so he can fulfill the role of the prince of darkness that's been forced upon him.

This is almost as murderous to the narrative as misunderstanding Kris's name.

Picking out the "PRINCE" part of why all this makes him sad is so stupid, so fucking disingenuous and clearly untrue, that I'm enraged that someone would type it out in an attempt to deceive people with an idea that's not just offensive for all the transphobic reasons this ties into but because thinking anyone would accept it is an expression of boiling malevolence for the entire human race. You have to be a dark beacon of complete and utter misanthropy to think this warping of fact would pass the sniff test of anyone with a pulse.

and I struggle to imagine the kind of cognitive dissonance it would require to understand it as anything else

I don't think the OOP knows anything about cognitive anything. Totally alien word to them. Doesn't apply to anything they've ever experienced in life.

BTW, OOP also reblogs caping for genocide. Just, you know, something to think about when it comes to how disgustingly picky they are about what's praxis and what isn't. This is who pulls the headcanon cop shit, actual, literal fascists, people who are fascists, people who support fascism, people who see Neo-Nazi PMCs killing Syrians with sledgehammers and say "ooh, my anti-imperialist senpais!" with cartoon hearts in their eyes like they just met the love of their life.

You may be thinking, oh, velvetvexations, that seems like a stretch! Perhaps it's just this one person! Well, no, it isn't, the vast majority of people who do this really are also the most disgustingly evil people to claim to be progressive, and just because this is so much lower stakes doesn't mean the constant impulse to control and silence others to accept a reality that exclusively glorifies them is not evident across quite a lot of their interests.