hainuwelle

[hainuwelle]

please tell me I'm not the only one that reached Susie's part of the prophecy and instantly saw that it's the typical RPG "The hero, the mage/guide, and the girl" being used for more rpg meta playing around from Toby?

idk, I'm surprised I haven't seen many people viewing it this way? We love Susie, she's a great character and she has a lot going on, but in the prophecy (also possibly read more meta-ly as the rpg's plot), Susie's just...

The Girl.

And what does this girl in this rpg do?

Love finds her. She's the hope in the party.

(small note: She doesn't find love. I found that interesting. She won't find it, it'll come to her)

[hainuwelle]

obsessed with just. every fucking susie implication. how her bedroom in the light world is almost entirely empty and broken down. how based on her dialogue at the end of chapter four (if interacting with the building) she lives in the same apartment building as alphys. how she doesn't have a stable living situation or family life regardless of the way you look at it (foster care/also a child of divorce/military family/just moves around a lot coupled with poor/absent/neglectful parents). how she clearly faces discrimination partially from being a stereotypically "scary" monster from her classmates, her teachers, people in hometown, and even random adults from her past (the piano incident). how she reads very strongly as someone with undiagnosed ADHD. how she feels she has to be strong all the time. how she rightfully yelled at ralsei and then immediately tried to comfort him once she realized what was wrong. how she connected with lancer because nobody really liked him either and he wasn't trying to force her into a role like ralsei was. how she immediately latches onto gerson as a parental figure. how she tells the story of toriel finding her crying on the graveyard bench and then in her dark world she looks human (unconsciously wishing she was adopted by toriel as well.)

[hainuwelle]

I thought its worth mentioning that empty chairs usually symbolize grief. The wait of someone's return. The chair for someone who has left.

So maybe thats why there's a empty chair (with a coat on it, not Susie's.) in the middle of Susie's room

[hainuwelle]

!! Chapter 4 Spoiler !!

Look I know it is concerning that the stain in Kris's room is in fact blood, but I am somewhat more concerned Susie knows exactly how to clean it up, and in such a casual tone....

And we also have confirmation she bleeds....

Susie what have you been through?

[hainuwelle]

Kris's war on the word "tsundere":

[hainuwelle]

So… I’ve been thinking about a scene from the end of chapter 2 with the context of chapters 3 & 4 in mind.

‘Kris does this sometimes’ …hm…

Has Kris just been regularly sneaking out at night to go to the shelter…?

Because these scenes from the ends of chapters 3 & 4 really make me think that they do.

That’d also (partially) explain why theres evidence pointing towards kris removing their soul even before we started playing.

[hainuwelle]

Hey guys so this is kind of fucking me up

[hainuwelle]

People have talked a lot about how Spamton wanting to "get big" has to do with breaking free of the game, breaking into reality. In Chapter 3 we have an example of Kris being big, at least in relation to the inhabitants of the Shadow Mantle game.

[hainuwelle]

a hero

[hainuwelle]

things get better before they get worse (a chp 4 weird route analysis/ramble)

(AKA how toby somehow managed to make the weird route even more awful and upsetting than it already was)

the weird route's continuation in chapter 4 is genuinely so much more sickening than i was expecting, but the thing that really hurts me is how the events of snowgrave have been recontextualized, and how all of us ended up being wrong about what the "point of no return" is for this route.

obviously, massive spoilers for deltarune chapter 3&4 weird route below.

to really explain the main point i want to focus on in this post, let's first briefly go over where the weird route left off at the end of chapter 2 and how the fandom generally expected things to go from there.

after returning to the light world, noelle assumes (or at tries to convince herself) that it was just a dream. and even if you make kris wear her watch, it's vague enough that noelle could still reasonably try to convince herself that they just somehow swiped it off her when she wasnt looking.

however one of the main things was that noelle vows to figure out why kris has been acting so differently recently.

thus myself and many others assumed that when we next saw noelle, she would be trying to investigate kris's behavior. maybe trying not to act uncomfortable around them, or maybe even making excuses to hang around them (despite the trauma she endured) to try and figure out what's going on with them.

we all also seemed to kinda assume that kris is just kind of stuck as our puppet here. they can't do anything about any of this, they're forced to just stand by in horror as we force them to do these things to her. a captive in their own body.

so when i started chapter 4 on my weird route save file and noelle took initiative to be the one to invite kris and susie over, that's immediately what i assumed was going on. i assumed she was trying to act somewhat normal and was bringing kris over in order to analyze their behavior in her quest to figure out what's going on.

i WAS a bit caught off guard by how really none of her dialogue around holiday manor changed, and i started to almost get a bit nervous that the effects of snowgrave on her mental state werent really being shown like i thought they would.

then she says she wants to speak to kris in private and i thought oh god, ok. this is where it's gonna kick in. she's putting on a happy face in public but when they're alone together she's gonna crumble and start asking why they did what they did and everything.

and this is when the cruelest part of the route hits.

because when we eavesdrop on their conversation, we find out some devastating information.

...kris apologized to noelle after snowgrave.

when they pulled the soul out at the end of chapter 2, they went to noelle's house and apologized for everything. they gave her her watch back (if you took it). they pulled the thorn (that becomes the thorn ring) out of her finger. they desperately tried to salvage their relationship with her after we ruined it.

but the thing that hurts the most about this, is that it WORKS.

noelle believes them. she accepts their apology. she's just so, so devastatingly happy that kris is back to being themself.

and we can see that without our involvement, at least for the time being, this is how it stays. if you just select either of the regular options, the aborted route jingle plays and things go back to normal.

i dont think ANYONE really expected that things would be salvageable after snowgrave. freezing berdly was treated as the "point of no return," where things would never be the same and kris and noelle's relationship would be forever tarnished. it was tragic, but it was expected.

but this makes it SO MUCH WORSE. because now we know that WASN'T the point of no return. by some miracle, kris successfully managed to clean up after us and mend things. there is a world where snowgrave happens and things still manage to mostly go back to normal.

which is why it hurts SO much more when we're able to ruin things again - for good this time.

this has to be one of the most devastating lines of the whole thing to me. think of how terrified and confused noelle is. kris had told her that everything would be fine and they were sorry. that they would protect her. and now from her perspective, its like all that was just a lie to get her guard down. it's awful.

this is the real point of no return. because there's literally no coming back from this, even aside from the noelle trance stuff. the first time she was able to trust them, but we've broken that trust forever now. if kris tries to do the same thing they did before, to apologize and fix things, she'll never believe them.

and that's of course not even discussing the presentation of this scene. the way the colors drastically shift and the screen darkens the second you say "me", the way everything sounds, how utterly horrified noelle looks the entire time, the way kris moves towards her and grabs her arm all zombie-like. and of course, when they actually stab her with the thorn... it's genuinely sickening.

the fact that it all happens in her room too just makes it feel so much more awful. this is her private space, where she should feel the safest, and yet...

but i think one of the other major reasons why this chapter's portion of the weird route was so upsetting is that we're finally getting to REALLY see kris's reaction to everything.

in chapter 2, we had the few bits of dialogue like susie's comment about kris looking off and the abort dialogues, and just the general understanding of kris as a character, to be able to determine that kris did NOT want to do snowgrave. they were suffering too, and it really adds to the horror of the route that kris is a victim as well.

but just like a lot of stuff with kris before these new chapters, it was pretty vague. if you paid attention you could get an understanding of what they were probably feeling, but it was very much in the background and sort of just implied.

but here? we finally get to REALLY see how our actions in snowgrave affected kris. and we get to see firsthand just how upset they are and how much they hate us for what we've done.

learning that kris tried desperately to salvage their relationship with noelle afterwards and specifically told her to not mention that they did in order to protect her from us is... i mean it's not surprising, it's what i've assumed they'd want to do all this time, but seeing it actually happen in the game after so long of just speculating... it's really really upsetting. they were trying so hard to keep us away from her.

and then, god. the scene afterwards of them kicking us in the bathroom. i was genuinely so shocked, i had my hand over my mouth when i saw it for the first time. seeing firsthand just HOW furious and upset they were, how loud the noises were every time they kicked the trash can, how hard they hit the soul and how long it went on for... it made me feel so bad that i legitimately whispered "im sorry" at the screen without even thinking about it.

and the fact that even after that scene, we get more moments of kris clearly not being ok. them starting to hyperventilate when theyre made to think of noelle, them getting so angry at us trying to make them "pray for noelle" that they smash the hope candles... literally no one can try to say that kris wanted to do snowgrave EVER again. toby's made it abundantly and heartbreakingly clear just how much they hate what we've done.

there's obviously more i could talk about when it comes to the new parts of the route, but these were the main points i wanted to focus on as i really think these two things (the reveal that snowgrave wasn't the point of no return, and kris's reactions being much more overt) are what make it so upsetting.

and from what we've seen, it's only going to get worse from here.

[hainuwelle]

Are. Are we really not gonna talk about clamgirl lurking around in hometown in chapter 2 or how unsettling it is when you notice her...

Like. She's the final character to become a goner in undertale, the one who declared mere months before deltarune chapter 1's release that we'd be meeting 'suzy' soon. Then she's just... Standing by the lake, facing away from the camera if onionsan has been scared away?

If you try to interact with her, it's clam guy who instead turns towards the camera. They're different colours. They have different sprites. Before they turn around... That. Wasn't. Clam guy.

Pictured: front facing sprite of clamgirl from undertale, and the same clam monster facing away by the lake in hometown. Below, screenshot of back facing sprite of clam guy in undertale, the same clam monster facing forward in hometown.

Edit: see this reblog here from @charaviolet, who very helpfully provided the file names for the deltarune clam npc! Interestingly, both the front and back sprites used in deltarune are both named clam guy, make of that what you will. Did Toby mistakenly add the wrong sprite? Intentionally use the wrong sprite and rename it? It's unclear, but bizarre.

[hainuwelle]

deltarune spoilers

i just remembered the cracked hockey mask in dess's room. that's totally a friday the 13th reference. the film where someone drowns in the lake. the depths. fuck.

[hainuwelle]

The rainy kid in Hometown asks about tsunamis:

Raise Up Your Bat calls your heart an ark that guides your way through the waves:

In the Pluey minigame you bring cats to an ark while it rains:

The second board in chapter 3 has Atlantis:

Will there be a flood? Should we worry?

[hainuwelle]

So like. What’s up with this.

[hainuwelle]

toby when i get you toby

[hainuwelle]

"Now, where's my haircut?!"

[hainuwelle]

btw can we talk about how absolutely tragic it is that the first adult that susie truly feels comfortable and valued with is a man who is already dead. she only gets this brief time in the dark world to feel what its like to have a truly trusted adult in your life. someone who guides and protects you. someone she is genuinely comfortable laughing with and really being herself. my heart hurts so much for her.....