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tvlandofficiall · 2 days

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i really like seam. with a sizable amount of dialogue, a wonderfully composed theme song, some very interesting connections, and a sharp personality that lends well to thinking up interesting character interactions, they’re a character who more than deserves to be recognized in their own right. surprisingly though, i don’t see a whole lot of analysis out there when it comes to this slept-on stuffed animal, especially when compared to more recent introductions to the speculation scene like dess holiday or big plot movers like the knight. a lot of the analyses i have seen, both the kind that aligns with or has informed my own reading and the kind that does not, has either been long-deleted or lost to time. but tucked away inside seam’s seap is one of the most interesting characters in the game to me, and i want to shine a light (or perhaps, more fittingly, take a step into the darkness) on just what makes them such a fascinating addition to deltarune and its writing here, since most of the other seam analyses i’ve seen around are either long-deleted or are few and far between.

ANALYSIS

FATE

to start talking about seam (or any darkner, for that matter) we’ve got to talk about fate.

after all, fate and agency are all but literally the name of the game here. and seam has quite a bit to do with both of those things. right away, they tell us a couple of very important things. the lightners, they tell us, are like gods to the darkners, and they’re the ones who give the darkners their purpose.

they are actually the first to bring up the concept of a darkner’s purpose to us, and for good reason.

purpose is a concept set up all throughout chapter one, and then paid off at the end of it – once we see that the darkners are all objects, it all comes together.

an object’s fate is to serve and assist the person using it, much like kris’ fate is to serve and assist us as a player in using the game deltarune. (you need a player character to play, after all.) this setup lets the concept be further explored in chapter two, especially with spamton, but we’re here to talk about seam.

seam, being a darkner, is an object – a stuffed doll, to be exact. they’re actually the one ch1 darkner with a unique sprite in the light world, interestingly enough – so even if you end up missing their seap, there’s a little clue left to catch your eye and prompt you to seek them out. this is something that will come up again in later sections – they’re someone that’s made out to be quite important to a certain segment of the game.

but seam isn’t the soft and fluffy sort of personality a stuffed animal might typically be assigned as. (that honor goes first and foremost to the prince of the dark himself.) no, seam is a fairly snide old cat, and they certainly don’t have any pretense of considering you heroes when you first meet. they’re a doomy, gloomy, type of person;

and they do it all with a smile on their face to boot. they’re also quite a nihilistic personality, making no secret of the fact that nothing much here matters and that they sure aren’t too bothered about that. unlike their king, they don’t express much anger at their situation nor struggle against it in any way. they’re plenty content to stay right where they are – they don’t even come out to celebrate with everyone when the party goes to seal the fountain!

and there’s an additional reason for that, too –

seems they not only know the kingdom’ll vanish, but they know it’s fate that our party’ll make it happen, too. (lancer, as a contrasting example, doesn’t know until it’s already happened.)

as for the fate of an object, though – well, they tell us themselves. neither light nor dark hold anything for them.

as demonstrated through the other characters; be a useful object, and you’ll be rewarded with fulfillment, love, and attention. be a useless object, and you’ll be left abandoned, unfulfilled, and desperate. but either way, every object becomes useless eventually – no matter how many times you’re patched up without a choice in the matter. either way, you’re still an object – and either way, your fate is a pretty bleak one.

so why try fighting against something as steadfast as fate? it’s fate, after all! seam’s certainly not spamton – they don’t bother themselves with any pretense of breaking strings or defying destiny. and unlike the companion that led their worldview down such a dark path in the first place, they don’t find any freedom in their nihilistic outlook or in the kingdom’s purposelessness.

though such nihilism does, in an ironic twist, cause them to be the one who poses the question – if they’ve lost any care for the light or for its absence, could they find “purpose” in another darkner instead? could they find meaning in what little is their own?

TELEGRAPHED IMPORTANCE (OR; GAMEPLAY AND STORY INTEGRATION)

jevil and seam used to be quite close. before the knight arrived and all four kings ruled together, the two of them were a part of their court – seam the court mage, jevil the court jester. one day, jevil met a strange someone, and the things he’d told seam since that time have led their worldview to grow – in their own words – darker yet darker. this seems to have been the cause for the mindset described above – if the seeds of such a mindset hadn’t existed already.

seam doesn’t exactly know if they’d consider him a friend. but he was the only one who could match them in the games they’d play together – but match up to what, exactly?

through the power of setup and payoff, we can find out. when talking to jevil before his battle, the jester mentions wanting to play one of his games with everyone once he’s out. and he’s happy to play this game with the party, too.

the game itself is, of course, his boss battle. it’s a deadly “numbers game” where he holds most of the cards as one of the (if not the) strongest bosses in the game. and so when seam mentions playing games with jevil before he began to see the whole world as such, we can infer from this context what those games were. it’s a payoff to what jevil set up during his fight – like two people throwing a ball back and forth in narrative form.

we get some good characterization out of this, too. seam’s not just a fan of the games they played with jevil, they’re downright ecstatic about them – even asking the party eagerly to tell them what happens when they meet with jevil, saying they almost wish they could watch! a little chaos is nothing short of thrilling to them.

but this isn’t the only setup and payoff seam’s got going on. jevil’s fight also introduces the secret bosses’ main throughline – the shadow crystals. after the party defeats jevil, a crystal is added to our inventory, and talking to seam lets us do something with it.

the shadow crystals are a popular point of speculation, and seam is sitting at the very center of the mystery. it’s they that collect the crystals, supposedly to stitch together something incredible for us. there’s also the added mystery of the unused purecrystal item – seemingly, seam may also have the ability to purify these crystals too – but i’ll get into that in a later section. for now, let’s talk about the crystals.

to bring seam the crystals at all, we’ve got to talk to them in their relocated shop. they’re the only shopkeeper who retains their full shop menu in castle town – spamton is absent from town altogether, rouxls and swatch do not have menus at all, and sweet cap’n cakes’ shop is remodeled into a jukebox with limited options. as such, they are the one to retain the updating, lengthier talk menu afforded to the shopkeepers. they also retain their unique shop theme – a waltz remix of the battle theme, “rude buster”. already, they’re set up to stand out.

and when we do talk to them, they has a number of varying reactions to the crystals based on the order in which you collect them. many of these contribute to the mysterious nature of seam as a character, as the context in which they occur changes what would otherwise be quite similar dialogue.

if you defeat jevil and bring his crystal to seam, they’re surprised to see that he had one. but, if you haven’t, seam pesters you about it – clearly implying they know you’d have gotten a crystal from him if you had. still, they’ll say the same surprised dialogue once you do bring jevil’s crystal to them – causing you to wonder if they were playing coy about it or not the first time around too. how do they know how that mechanic works? was there some strange intuition how they’d learned his defeat gave us the crystal, or did they know all along?

regardless, we know one thing’s for certain – seam knows what a shadow crystal is. they recognize the first crystal you bring them immediately, explaining what a shadow crystal is, that they’re held by powerful darkners, and later, implies they may come from special connections to the lightners. they’re obviously quite familiar with these crystals, leaving us to wonder just how they did and what the extent of their familiarity really is. what exactly do they want with these crystals? why do they know so much about them? why do they act so sketchy when we talk to them – there are quite a few moments that read like they’re trying to scare or bore us away given how often they say such things.

(seriously, they do this a LOT.)

and there are a few more moments where they allude to knowing things they shouldn’t, too – like the power of the next foe we’ll face and the nature of the neo body.

this mystery is, as mentioned before, another way in which setup and payoff are used to keep seam within the loop of the secret bosses’ storyline. seam prompts us to discover more crystals and tells us how to do it, we go to discover more crystals and meet spamton (who has both incredibly important thematic stuff and a difficult boss fight in his arsenal), and we bring spamton’s crystal back to seam. this sets seam up as the connecting thread of the “secret boss” arc of the game. (in other words, similarly to how ralsei and susie are central characters of the main story, seam is the central character of this section of the story.)

(and if you've ever played slay the princess, these segments are another good point of comparison.)

overall, they’re telegraphed as an important character both thematically and to this storyline of the game in a more strictly mechanical sense.

EXTRACANONICAL MATERIAL AND OTHER LOOSE THREADS

EXTRACANONICAL MATERIAL

to really get into the weeds of why seam is being telegraphed as an important character, i’d like to talk a bit about some extracanonical material as well. this information, while less immediately relevant to the game itself, is recent enough (specifically, it is all official content published after ch1’s release) that it’d like to consider it here – albeit in its own separate, much smaller section.

there are several pieces of extracanonical material and one or two unused items that are relevant to seam. the first of those is the seam ripper, a weapon detailed in the undertale cross-stitch book.

there isn’t much to say about this that isn’t explained in and of itself.

the second of those is this answer from the twitter qna that followed the spamton sweepstakes;

“cat/puppet” seems to match up to seam pretty accurately. plus, in addition to the obvious “puppet” status that darkners have at the whims of fate, “poppet” can be another word for “doll”.

finally, there is this unused item that draws a fair bit of speculation.

because it remains unused, it is far more dubious than the former two in terms of relevancy. it could end up remaining unused due to not making sense with the presented version of the game, or it could end up being implemented later due to it seeming like something to be introduced later as opposed to an older concept that got scrapped. however, because it is such a dubious item, i likely won’t be dwelling on it in this section as much as the former two things i’ve mentioned. still, i feel it’s worth mentioning. seam may have yet another trick up their sleeve when it comes to the crystals.

UNDERTALE

keen-eyed players may have also noticed another thing cueing seam as important – namely, their similarities to a certain character from undertale. deltarune, being a game not only about us as players but about us as players of undertale, uses symbols and signifiers of it to induce a variety of reactions in the player. although they are not identical to these characters – nor should they be, as this is a story about a new cast first and foremost – the cues still let us know these new focal characters can at times be similar to ones found in undertale. think of it a bit like how a character losing their shoe on a staircase can often be meant to make you think of cinderella.

seam has a few of these cues. the first is their eye – a dead ringer for one of flowey’s creepy faces. it spins clockwise just like a face flowey makes before his boss fight at the end of a neutral run. this cueing makes a lot of sense, given flowey’s also a bit of a nihilist (i’d suggest going back and watching flowey’s monologue at the end of a no mercy route – the whole thing is very relevant.)

they’ve also got a face that, when flipped horizontally, looks much like the mysteryman sprite – often speculated to be gaster – as well as the aforementioned drop of the infamous “darker, yet darker” line in reference to their descent into madness.

the secret bosses all seem to have more than a few signifiers of the man, and it makes perfect sense that the darkner standing at the center of the mystery would have them too. perhaps such a strange person is a part of what motivates them…

CONCLUSION

overall, however, we don’t yet know much about seam. they’re keen to tell us a lot of things about a lot of people, but their own story and motivations remain unknown at this point in the story. however, that doesn’t mean they’re unimportant – i’ve detailed here why i think they’re set up to be a central character to the secret boss arc, and i think that they’re far more worth keeping an eye on than they might seem at first glance.

#ooc #seam #deltarune #PHEW. this took a while. it's sort of a masterpost and cleaner version of all of my older seam posts that've been making the rounds again #i couldn't include screencaps of all the text due to there being so many of them but all of the dialogue referenced is in the text dump if #you want to check it out for yourself!

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