#my current theory

[violentdelightshavevioletends]

Varrish saw nothing because Violet is not breakable.

[kurtsworm96]

Someone I follow is a terf but I don't know who

[evercelle]

a story that can't be obtained again

[oifaaa]

everyone I've talked to who has gone to a middle school has said it was awful in a way that I've never heard coming from a person that just had a secondary school that covered from about 11-13 to 18 I feel like it could and should be studied

a stupid non important at all opinion I would die on a hill for is that having one secondary school covering ages 11 til 18 is way better then splitting it up into middle and high school that's just too many schools

[egophiliac]

listen. people have always debated which character is the most normal guy but what if it has in fact been crowley the whole time. no string pulling no master plan just a guy who wants to keep his school running and is cursed with problematic students and incidents

honestly I think the funniest possible reveal would be one of two options:

ONE: Crowley has no plot relevance whatsoever. he wears the mask to cover his receding hairline. his darkest secret is the bottle of "medicinal" whiskey under his desk. this man can barely plan a PTA function with six months' advance notice, he doesn't have the time or patience for any kind of overarching master plot involving mutating students or whatever. the only thing wrong with him is that he's been running this school for (mumblemumble) years and, quite frankly, if you'd been putting up with NRC students for a couple of centuries, you'd have totally checked out by this point too.

OR

TWO: Crowley IS actually Raverne and HAS been slowly enacting a master gambit...to embezzle school funds. the overblots are still completely incidental. he has somehow less idea of what's going on than we do. we confront him about it and he's just like

[postcrashcurly]

A Deep Dive into Curly's Injuries

CW: Medical discussion and graphic themes.

I see a lot of people discussing Curly's injuries in the fandom and I thought that I would take some time to absolutely word vomit information for consideration as someone training in the medical field.

Burns and Calculating Total Body Surface

Starting off simple, we’ll discuss the following burns:

First degree burns only affect the outer layer of the skin (epidermis). Second degree burns, or partial thickness burns, affect both the epidermis and part of the layer underneath (dermis). Third degree burns, or full thickness burns, affect all layers of the skin, fat, and muscle. Third degree burns DO NOT HURT as they destroy the nerves.

Typically you will not see significant 4th degree burns premortem- they are often postmortem and resemble more of a char. The body is basically cremated/incinerated. I'll touch more on this further down.

The rule of nines is the method for estimating the percentage of affected body surface (size of the burn). I used this to roughly estimate that Curly is burned anywhere from 82-91% of his total body surface. We don't see his backside, but assuming he walked into the cockpit before the crash it is POSSIBLE that his backside isn't as burnt.

Note the R-Baux score and prediction of burn-related mortality (TBSA – Age + [17 x R] TBSA: total body surface area R: 1 (Inhalation injury) or 0 (No inhalation injury)

Amputation Possibility and Weight of Risk

While there are a lot of factors to keep in mind when it comes to Curly’s condition and subsequent survival, in order to connect reality and canon the following needs to be considered.

We'll go over two of the most popular interpretations post-crash:

1. Anya performing amputation as a preventative measure.

We have to think about the veins and arteries in the human body when discussing rudimentary amputation.

Note: Arteries carry blood away from the heart to the body, while veins carry oxygen-poor blood back to the heart. Arteries and veins are connected by capillaries. Direction as follows:

Risk to major arteries and veins would potentially result in excessive blood loss (we will focus on arteries since they are larger in diameter and their ability to withstand high pressure from pumping blood). Repairing arteries typically requires surgical intervention.

Curly's right arm ends at the wrist, while his left ends midway up the forearm. This would sever the radial and ulnar arteries.

Curly's right leg ends just below the knee. The popliteal (back of the knee) artery is the continuation of the femoral artery- one of the largest arteries in the body.

Curly's left leg ends about midway down his calf. We can assume that severs the posterior and anterior tibial arteries.

The image below is a quick edit and isn't an accurate representation of location, only a rough diagram.

Note: The legs network of small arteries are available to SOMEWHAT compensate for blood flow if one of the major arteries is damaged, but it likely wouldn't be enough to prevent excessive blood loss.

We CAN consider cauterization in emergency situations; however it would require some ingenuity and a significant heat source. Small tools that could be repurposed to cauterize Curly’s wounds would do more harm than good, and it is likely that Pony Express has banned large, heat producing objects. They ARE on a space freighter with artificial gravity and set oxygen levels, after all.

Lack of proper equipment and medical knowledge would make amputation unsurvivable.

2. Curly's limbs were eviscerated by the crash.

This is where we talk more about the possibility of fourth degree burns and what that means.

Fourth degree burns are the most severe type of burn that affects muscles, tendons, and bone.

Where to position Curly in the cockpit during the crash is… tricky.

It’s difficult to imagine the angle he would need to be in order to sustain full body burns and loss of limbs. This is the part I pondered the most, and I think a good explanation would be electrical burns from the control panel on impact.

Electrical burns are carried by nerves because it is the path of least resistance. Extremities are more susceptible to damage when a current passes through them. (Yes, this means his genitals are gone too. Sorry, folks!) *See article on electric extremity injury under Read More

Facial Injury and Eye Trauma

Moving towards Curly’s face we come back to our discussion of third degree burns, which I’ve explained a bit above. I do want to note that the survival of his left eye interested me the most while compiling this post.

Your eyes don’t melt in extreme heat (goofy ahh Indiana Jones shit).

Your eyes are mostly composed of water, which makes them resistant to combustion. Since we never directly see the eye socket beneath the bandaging it’s reasonable to assume that his right eye is not entirely destroyed but instead severely damaged (flattened, scarred, cloudy). Without eyelids or even eye drops his remaining eye would dry, potentially blinding him if the heat on impact didn't.

Another point of interest is Jimmy manually manipulating Curly’s mouth several times throughout the game.

This rounds back to third degree burns and the damage to the superficial masseter muscle (moves the lower jaw upward – mastication, or ‘protrusion of the mandible’), the deep masseter muscle (retraction of the mandible – mastication, or ‘closing the jaw with force’), the temporalis muscle (mastication, enabling jaw movement for chewing, biting, and grinding), and surrounding tendons.

Knowing this, a ‘slack jaw’ position would cause visible oral damage like dry mouth and halted saliva production. I’ll touch more on this below.

Loss of Skin and Infection

The skin is the largest organ in the human body with a variety of life sustaining functions like protection and excretory function.

In Curly’s condition, the loss of his skin leaves him open to systematic infection. Skin protects against infection by producing antibacterial substances (defensins and cathelicidins), which greatly increase when injury or inflammation are present. Without skin your body's natural defenses no longer protect against bacteria.

Pathological vulnerability is the key factor in this section. A severe and sometimes fatal response to infection (sepsis) would likely occur under these conditions without proper medical care and antibiotics.

Administering Water, Food, and Medication

This section is where some interpretation comes into play.

The average healthy person can survive approximately three weeks without food and 3 days without water (both vary greatly). According to the games timeline he was kept alive in this state for four months, which means that somehow, in some way, they were able to get him enough nutrients for basic human survival.

This was likely in the form of paranutrition bags and IV fluids since Curly does not seem to have the ability to move his mouth or swallow on his own. When your mouth is kept open for extended periods of time you stop salivating as frequently because the act of swallowing, triggered by the build-up of saliva, is no longer happening.

When having medication administered, Jimmy can be seen (or more so heard) shoving the pills down Curly’s throat with his fingers.

I can’t help but speculate that additional damage was done to his esophagus and vocal cords since there isn’t a way to push the pills far enough down to avoid the steady breakdown of the medication in his throat.

Without properly swallowing pills Curly most likely developed pill esophagitis (irritation of the esophageal lining), which causes painful acid reflux.

Speculation of Internal Injury

This is more presumptive than other sections.

Due to previous notes regarding the source and nature of Curly’s wounds, it is reasonable to assume that not only is smoke inhalation a contributing factor, but ash, technological equipment, and shrapnel also run the possibility of entering his lungs on impact.

However, when I was looking into photos of the cockpit post-crash it brought another potential inhalation/consumption risk to mind; the expanding foam.

It is known that it expands to cover potential weak spots in the ship, so the strength of the substance needs to withstand the pressure of space and maintain the artificial gravity. The cockpit is covered in it, so it is possible that in some way Curly was physically in contact with it when the crash occurred.

Whether he ingested or inhaled it something to consider, but externally there must have been some effort removing the foam from his already burnt skin.

So, what does this mean, Leo? What’s your point?

Well, there is no real point to be made. Everyone is going to interpret things differently! I just thought it would be cool to put forth some real world medical knowledge and compare it to canon! I AM STILL IN TRAINING and I have a lot to learn, but I wanted to put something together for you guys! You can take something from it, or nothing at all!

Final Notes:

Realistic Prognosis (prediction of outcome):

Without medical treatment total body third degree burns are NOT SURVIVABLE.

Extended periods of festering and infection would make skin grafting impossible (There is some wiggle room with this depending on how you perceive medical care to have changed- but I do think it's important to consider the limits of the human body).

🖤 If you made it to the end, thank you for reading! 🖤

Thank you so dearly to my love, my life, @13nn0x for the help compiling information and just generally being the sexiest person alive.

Some extra articles to refer to:

Note: Some articles include images but I put a warning on the ones that do.

(CW: Includes Photos) Clinical spectrum of electrical burns - A prospective study from the developing world by Ashok Kumar Sokhal, Krishna Lodha, and Rajkumar Paliwal. LINK

(CW: Includes Photos) Electro-Amputation of Lower Limbs Due to a High-Voltage Shock: Report of an Unusual Case by Suraj Sundaragiri, Senthil Kumaran M, Venkatesh Janarthanan, Chaitanya Mittal, Gerard Pradeep Devnath S. LINK

Ocular Burns by Gregory C. Patek, Amanda Bates, and Allison Zanaboni. LINK

Drug-Induced Esophagitis by Fatima Saleem and Ashish Sharma. LINK

Better among the two for Burn Mortality Prediction in Developing Nations: Revised Baux or Modified Abbreviated Burn Severity Index? by Sheerin Shah, Renu Verma, Rajinder K Mittal, Ramneesh Garg. LINK

[umblrspectrum]

hi heres art so you pay attention to me now go read the tags

[grailknightmonty]

upon the heart of magic mountain 🌸🗻

from the oceanic goddess revered in the cyberpunk city on its hillside, to the stories of the ochre-feathered canary who's song hasn't been heard in years, it has been long thought by theorists that perhaps the magic imbued into this mountain was no coincidence- but rather the creation of mystical beings seeking to make a haven of sorts, a home protected by the powers that lie within this volcanic formation.

[gammija]

joking aside, while jonny, alex and tim fearon are all credited as [ERROR], the casting image clearly has different garbled text for all of them. So it seems like [ERROR] is something like a status condition, though how exactly you get it... dimension-hopping? avatarhood? being a computer and/or tape recorder? who knows

[whenthelightisrunninglow]

aim for victory!

[jel-jel-jel]

So no Marina?!?!

[paragonraptors]

for science (because im curious)

if you have more than one worldstate, pick for the one you consider your "main"/"canon" worldstate or the one you plan to use first for da4! also feel free to lay out your reasoning in the tags gushing about your dragon age runs is accepted and encouraged here.

[eddiesgayjuice]

I looked into the Tardis, and the Tardis looked into me. I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here. I want you safe. My Doctor. Protected from the false god.

ROSE TYLER: 'Bad Wolf' -> 'The Reality War'

[egophiliac]

I'm trying to avoid getting spoiled so I haven't looked up what's happening in the Jp server's main story, but for my own sanity I need to ask; is the story at a point where we know whether Lilia will get better/survive his almost-empty magic reserves..? Was it a true death flag from the start or only a plot device for malleus' overblot....?

not yet! I do think they're going to get back to it eventually, but -- keeping it as low spoilers as possible -- there's been...let's just say a LOT going on in the meantime.

enjoy 7-6!!! :)

[petrichara]

On commodity feminism:

“Since the late nineteenth century, word and image have increasingly propagated style. Images of desire are constantly in circulation; increasingly it has been the image as well as the artefact that the individual has purchased. Fashion is a magical system, and what we see as we leaf through glossy magazines is “the look”. Like advertising, women’s magazines have moved from the didactic to the hallucinatory. Originally their purpose was informational, but what we see today in both popular journalism and advertising is the mirage of a way of being, and what we engage in is no longer only the relatively simple process of direct imitation, but the less conscious one of identification.” -(Wilson, 1985, as cited in Breward, 1998).

“Femininity is recuperated by the capitalist form: the exchange between the commodity and 'woman' in the ad establishes her as a commodity too.” (Wilson, 1980).

“Feminist morality, including the tensions it contains, has been turned into yet another raw material in the never-ending drive to expand or renew the commodity-sign values of consumer goods. Feminism is reduced to the status of a mere signifier or signified, so that it may be re-encoded by an advertiser as a sequence of visual cliches and reified signifiers, i.e., it can be worn as a stylish sign. In this way, feminism has now been rehabilitated for the world of advertising - its primary meanings taken over by the system of fashion, and some of its most important alternative formulations translated back into the language of the Western male ethic of possessive individualism (see Macpherson, 1962).

Change, in these representations, has no referent in the time and space of history, but is simply a marker of novelty, or difference, represented in fetishised form by special commodities. Commodity feminism elides the social dimension which conditions the contradictions experienced in daily life.

Feminism becomes "depoliticized" as ads turn "feminist social goals to individual life-style" (Rapp, 1988, p. 32).' When framed by ideologies of possessive individualism and free choice, feminism in its 'new' commodity form forgets its origins in a critique of unequalsocial, economic and political relations.” (Goldman et al., 1991).

[hopefulleafva]

Papyrus Wrote the UTDR Mystery Valentine

Okay so with a 2025 release for Deltarune chapters 3&4 confirmed I want to get this off my chest and document it for future me to either feel vindicated by or have a good laugh at how wrong it was. This has been eating me alive since the Valentine’s newsletter and I never said anything but I want this out there before anything new comes out.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is a theory other people have already made posts on or not because all I ever see is “it’s Gaster!” or “It’s not Gaster, it’s Dess/Egg Man/[Insert mysterious character here!]”. If someone has posted this theory before I missed it entirely. Not looking to steal anyone’s theory thunder here.

I’ve convinced myself this is Papyrus and just want to get my thoughts down here.

So. I see a lot of people talk about how the flippant and humorous way it’s written makes them think this isn’t Gaster. To get the Gaster stuff out of the way, my stance is that everyone has their own preferred idea of how they think Gaster acts and whether or not he could have a sense of humor, but we really have yet to learn a lot about him in canon. I don’t love us trying to make rules about what is and isn’t ���in character” for him when we really haven’t met properly and have very little dialogue to go off of. I get a lot of people are basing their ideas of him being serious off Entry 17 and the popular assumption that the intro voice is Gaster. I think that’s fair and very understandable, but even still it’s only an extremely limited peek at what the guy is like. Point is, maybe he does have a silly sense of humor and maybe he doesn’t. I don’t want to entirely dismiss the idea that Gaster wrote this based on “it’s too silly, Gaster is serious!”. But I also think that the idea that because the speaker is a mysterious voice with meta knowledge of Deltarune that it MUST be Gaster is also a bit shaky.

Anyway.

Is it just me or does the bizarre roundabout way of phrasing things in the letter perfectly fall in line with how Papyrus speaks?

One of my favorite notes in the Undertale Legends of Localization book (HIGHLY recommend by the way, a really fascinating read) was this:

While yes, it’s important to bear in mind that this was the quote of a localizer and not Toby directly, I think it still rings very true for Papyrus’s character. Don’t really think I need a laundry list of examples for this point, right? Papyrus’s fun and unique way of speaking is such a memorable part of his character that you encounter in all routes.

Which is why it’s so interesting to me that this mystery writer seems to have a highly similar way of phrasing things in a unique and playful way.

The first one that really sticks out to me is the “I never forget someone I don’t remember.”

Really reminded me of the little bit you get after a post neutral run reset.

While not something I originally weighed in to my theory, it is worth noting that this bit between Papyrus and Sans occurs immediately after Papyrus has recognized Frisk after seeing them for this “first” time. This makes the mystery valentine writer’s preceding comment that they will know the forgotten person they are looking for immediately upon seeing them extra interesting.

This bit also stood out to me:

Because it also felt like very familiar phrasing. It took me a while to realize what it was making me think of.

Down to the quotations around a common phrase like it’s an alleged thing not a very common thing??? Like MAN.

While these were the only two parts I felt directly and strongly paralleled specific phrasing Papyrus has used before in canon, there were a few other things that caught my eye.

A faith in the power of love, and the power of belief.

(Yes, I realize the “even if you don’t think so” appears to negate the idea of Frisk’s beliefs being an important part of their ability to change, but I’d say Papyrus is still emphasizing that his beliefs are significant in this.)

Very strange that the writer doesn’t dismiss the idea that the person they have forgotten they wanted to help could be themself. How could you forget yourself? But then again…

And while not really the same degree of strength in a parallel, I just want to bring up that the letter writer remarks that the reader is odd yet reliable for responding out loud to a piece of written communication.

It is strange that the author seems to have still heard the reader’s out-loud reply to the letter. A weird instance where a mode of communication that has limits on what SHOULD be able to be perceived by the other person somehow has those limits broken and allows that person to comment on something they shouldn’t be able to perceive.

Kind of like if you were having a phone call with someone far away from you but they still seemed to somehow be able to know exactly what you were looking at and where you were. Where have we heard that before…?

Also come on. You can’t tell me “PUT ON YOUR COAT AND WASH YOUR FACE! OR, PUT ON YOUR FACE AND WASH YOUR COAT. NOT NECESSARILY IN THAT ORDER. OR, IN ANY ORDER AT ALL.” doesn’t sound like a Papyrus-ism.

I know some people may point out that Papyrus already has Valentines that are very explicitly from him in the newsletter, so it would be weird to have three that are and one that wasn’t. But I don’t think that necessarily should refute this idea. It could be possible the “signed” valentines are from Undertale’s Papyrus, and this one is from Deltarune’s Papyrus. Even if you subscribe to the idea that UT Papyrus IS DR Papyrus, this could simply be a letter sent from a different point in time.

Anyway, this has been eating me alive since February so I wanted to get it off my chest. Maybe this is completely off base, but interesting to think about.