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The remorseful player

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.⋆

₊˚

˙⋆ I laid with you in the biggest grass

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the me that did and said those things

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thanks for answering my last ask! Do you have any thoughts about the December puzzle scene I have lots of thoughts about it but i realized it is genuinely an underrated scene and rarely see any discussion of it

Honestly, I think it says less about Dess herself than it does about the nature of the Dark Worlds and Noelle's particular issues.

On a first run, it's not totally clear why we're spelling DECEMBER to switch off a puzzle gate. But when we get Berdly's flashback, in context, we can see that Noelle was asked to spell DECEMBER as a little girl, and froze up – presumably because, you know, something terrible happened to/involving her sister – and that Berdly doesn't realize that (because otherwise he probably wouldn't be bragging about beating his traumatized best friend at a spelling bee).

In the Dark World, though, with her childhood friend by her side (albeit one she's been distant from) and surrounded by the city lights she dreamed of, Noelle can spell DECEMBER no problem, and recognize her nostalgia, her pain, how her good memories mix with the bad, and how she can still live the dream Dess promised her even if Dess isn't here any more.

This is why I don't think Dark Worlds are best understood as purely escapist romps. Cyber World is like therapy for Noelle and Berdly – it uses familiar imagery to help them confront fraught emotional issues, and unless you really screw up it's harmless and low-stakes. It's really the same thing with Susie, whose presumable abandonment issues are reflected in King (Quiet people piss me off is to drive home that he's kind of a shadow-archetype of her), and who gets railroaded into scenarios that drive her to stop lashing out.

"Why aren't the Dark Worlds helping Kris?" you might ask. Well, Kris's problems are esoteric, complicated and off-putting, and they're reticent about letting us understand what those problems are, so – like some bad therapists – the Dark World just kind of tells them "alright, so you can never have the freedom you want without going Insane, a non-pathologized condition I definitely won't restrict your freedoms for having. You won't be treated like a pariah at all, or be involuntarily committed to Carousel Jail / the Trash Zone. Have you considered destroying yourself to become useful to the people I can still save?"

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4 holy noles...

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negative space

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Love your meats and thoughts about UTdr they are very interesting I wonder what do you think about dess holidays? The recent poem from Noelle's POV(from the December newsletter) paints dess as a person that gave her "wings" & all the dialogue from ch2 from Noelle about dess makes me feel that Noelle idolizes dess to some extent what do you think?

Thank you kindly!

Noelle strikes me as being as nostalgic for the time in her life that Dess represents – prior to the unspecified incident/accident that fractured her family and, very likely, her relationship with Kris – as she is for Dess herself. She's also got a clear interest in finding people like Dess – strong people who'll stay with her and comfort her. I don't know that I'd say "idolize," per se, though she does kinda launder her role models.

It's pretty hard to figure out December Holiday herself, though. Deltarune Asriel is obscure to us because Hometown's got a skewed perspective – not to mention our skewed perspective. But Dess is that but even more so – she exists near-exclusively as an image in the heads of people who miss her very dearly and who, I think, haven't seen her in some time. She's a dependable big sister, she's Asriel's friend, she's (by fandom consensus) a cool jock with a baseball bat and varsity jacket... but what else is she? Outside those relationships? Outside that archetype?

Part of the reason I suspect that Kris's motivations involve Dess is because – like them, though Kris seems to have engineered these circumstances for themself – December Holiday's true nature is shrouded in darkness.

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Digital reality

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the happy end

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but now...

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I don’t think we’re an uncomplicatedly good force in Deltarune’s universe, or here to help in an un-fraught way. I also don’t think we’re an unconscionable invader who seized Kris’s life by force without recourse.

After all, Kris has taken steps to obscure themself from our perspective. The objects that go into making a Dark World reveal the character of those they interact with; Kris cleared out their room prior to canon and so Ralsei’s ideal room for them is mostly half-baked guesses and imitations of Asriel, with a few personal touches like the moss and manual trash can. No scary pranks; no occultism. They’ve got a cage for us, too, and Ch. 2 closes with a premeditated plan for another Dark World — yet they never tell anyone we’re here!

At the risk of wild, unfounded speculation — I think the Dark Worlds are a kind of bait. Someone (sometimes Kris) opens them; lured by the prospect of adventure and valuable moral lessons, we venture in and close them. Notably, we appear to absorb or enter each Fountain to seal it, and the party levels after each one. If you’re like me, Kris’s deliberately-obscured nature and motives are a prime motivator here, too, and they certainly do their best to drip-feed that out. And, well, they do put us back after extracting us.

What if we’re being baited around to conduct some kind of ritual, or bring the Roaring? Needing something that can seal the Fountains would be a perfectly good reason to summon and bind a demon, after all.

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My precious memories

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smells like rotten tea... as sad as it is that we can't use it past ch2, it makes sense that with potential new party members and the gang's feelings on one another developing and changing, keeping the teas through the whole game might be a lot to juggle. but whatever the case may be – au revoir, character-flavored tea!

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Stepping on your shadow.