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deltarune chapter 4 is the kinda game that makes me wanna write shit like this

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* (Oh, these parentheses I keep opening?

* (I'm collecting them.

* (Right now, I'm 1,762 parentheses deep.

* (Oh, my precious parentheses... (I don't ever want to close them!

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is it risk assessment or threat assessment that murderbot thinks is always wrong? and murderbot thinks it’s too optimistic, right (whichever one it is)? help me (.file) i forgor :(

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Did a brand new kind of bowling shot today

we called it the "trust the Force Luke" shot or the "through God all things are possible" shot

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Despite everything, it’s still ponies

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Hardest part of writing is accepting that some people will not fucking get it & you just have to like cope with that because over-explaining it just makes it worse

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joke from whenever toby clarified he had to add save points to chapter 4 light world segment

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I really, really love Susie and Noelle's dynamic in the Holiday Manor segments of chapter 4. Not just in a yuri sense, but specifically because there's this little meta game being done with Susie, Dess, and her memory + how it's preserved and like... the Idea Of Undertale in our perception as an audience.

Deltarune is "A game you can play after you complete Undertale", right? Toby calls it that himself. It is steeped in the expectations we have from that game. Its characters. Its plot points. Its motifs. The impact it had on us as a story, both from the audience's perspective AND from the creator's. Back when chapter 1 first came out, Toby talked about his anxieties regarding this new project, and being unable to "make us feel what we felt with Undertale".

Watsonianly, in Deltarune's story, there is this insanely intricate web of small town drama and trauma and history between Hometown's residents.

...and in barges Susie.

Susie who is the new girl. Susie who doesn't know anyone. Susie who has no respect or attachment to the "mythology" of Hometown, both in a religious sense and in the sense of the history of the people who live there.

Susie who, in the manor, says she "never played the original dragon blazers". Only Dragon Blazers 2.

To me she feels like a sort of implicit allegory for the new Deltarune fan? The one with ZERO attachment to Undertale. Because they never played it or because they played it afterwards. The one experiencing THIS story for its OWN sake.

She's unshackled by the core theme of nostalgia that binds every other character, because the objects that inspire it in Kris or Noelle or Hometown as a whole, they mean nothing to her. They hold no sacredness, no significance. So she tramples over them. A sort of desecration through cluelessness.

Which is EXACTLY what she does with Dess' memory! With her room, kept perfectly still and unchanged in the years since she disappeared, her guitar shoved in the closet to gather dust.

These are objects that MEAN something, that hold an incredible significance, to Noelle and to Carol and what and who it lost. They're something that (presumably) Carol preserved in an obsessive need to hold onto everything left of her daughter.

And it stagnates. It's frozen. It's no less dead, just because it is preserved.

...and it's precisely by desecrating that reverence that Susie is able to breathe new life into it. To create new connections with Noelle. To quite literally Make Art.

Waltzing into Dess' time-frozen room, not giving a fuck, plopping down against her bed waiting for us to make noise. You can see Noelle warn her to leave the room untouched, but she follows her shortly after. The ice melts.

Later, grabbing the guitar. playing it (badly!) but playing it for the first time in actual years. Making Noelle laugh. Reminding her of her sister.

It... kinda reminds me of the reverence we as an audience have for Undertale as the original source material.

Think about it. Didn't Toby have to calm everyone down when he released chapter 1 and reassure us that playing Deltarune would leave the ending we got for undertale untouched? Because people would be preventing themselves from interfacing and experiencing and CONNECTING with a new story, with a new piece of art, out of fear of it affecting... the one they'd already experienced. the one in the past, the one they'd already finished and closed and left to sit untouched on their desktops ever since.

This aspect of Susie is the thematic beating heart of chapter 4. It's the potential, the fire Gerson sees burning in her eyes.

And it ties back to Susie's own trauma and abuse and her being forcefully cast as the villain. Someone bad, broken, not good enough. Someone who should keep her nose out of things outside of her range.

Her confrontation with Carol when she snatches the guitar from her hands... sure she might not know the history/the context/the """sacred texts""", and that CAN isolate her and negatively affect her ability to navigate the social situations in Hometown (and allegorically her artistic output. she can't play the guitar, the piano, or write or that well), but she HAS value. Her perspective has value just by virtue of being new, original, revolutionary, her own, something SHE and only she can bring to the table. And those can improve through practice, dedication, and support.

Total knowledge and reverence for Dess' memory and the past has frozen the Holiday family (and Hometown as a whole) in the past. It's locked them in stasis. they know how things were. they know how things "should be". they cannot deviate. every week they worship a prophecy that dictates their past, present and future.

"Only then will the worlds will be SAVED". But should that really be the goal...? When you save a game, you preserve the things you've already done in it. The only thing you can do is overwrite it or start again. It's an inherently cryogenic process.

...In the game MOTHER 3, The Dragon is a mythological creature slumbering under the crust of the earth, kept in its sleep through 7 magic needles. The needles can only be removed by someone who knows the move PK Love, when its power is needed. Once the last needle is removed, the Dragon will follow the heart of this person, good or bad, by bringing on the apocalypse and destroying the world.

And making a new one.

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this one time I transformed into myself you should've seen it the effect was indiscernible

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hey sorry i can't come to that thing on saturday. yeah im being executed on friday. yeah it's because i made a joke but it came off as way meaner than i expected. if you want we could grab coffee thursday though. huh? oh a million billion explosions. yeah seemed a little much to me too but whatever.

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My Pokemon head canon is that if you were holding an Aron and she wanted to go down she would do the little cat thing where they wiggle until they leap out of your arms gracefully except Aron is made mostly out of solid steel and would land with the impact tungsten cube, dent the floor, cause permanent structural damage to the foundation, and then stand up and happily trot along like she didn't do anything

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one of the tragedies of Murderbot is that—it IS extremely smart, competent, clever, brave, motivated, careful, and good at what it does! It is also so, so painfully lucky. That smartness, competence, cleverness, bravery, motivation, and care wouldn’t have had a chance to mean much of anything if it hadn’t gotten those schematics downloaded by accident, if it hadn’t had the time to investigate and experiment with them. If it had been ordered into something suicidal before it got a chance to figure it out. And then it would have probably stayed with the company and miserable forever if it hadn’t been assigned to PresAux. It’s fun and interesting to think about reasons Murderbot might have been assigned to PresAux—theories that either as an unstable unit with a violent past it was less desirable and thus foisted off on freeholders who didn’t know any better, or that as a unit which had shown an unusually high uneaten client stat that it was deliberately given to a head of state with a very expensive bond—but we don’t see any of that. What we see is that after four years of shitty contracts… Murderbot got lucky and was assigned to PresAux.

How many other constructs could have been as brilliant and never got the chance? Murderbot is so many great things but it was not, ever, in control of its life or what happened to it. It got lucky. It seized its opportunities, but it was rare that it even got them. And that’s the tragedy, that it is just one SecUnit out of hundreds or thousands or who-knows-how-many for whom the stars aligned for it to get out. Not more deserving than any of them. Just lucky.

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be honest. are you guys only hanging out with me because of the prophecy.

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this is about the knight but it can be any boss fight you suck at if you want

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Banger sermon - DELTARUNE Snapcube Animatic

Original audio click [HERE]