#deltarune discourse

[arty395]

deltarune chapter 4 spoilers

deltarune fans on their way to take the most extreme stances on a half-comedic moment. deltarune fans on their way to kill each other because a character does a questionable thing.

not even gonna go into my own opinion here, this stuff is so ridiculous. do you remember the roaring knight guys. undyne? dess name drop? no? guys. please. the prophecy? do you guys remember the 'only one ending' thing? no? just toriel? oh okay.

[the-planet-mercury]

hello deltarune tumblr poster. in front of you is a post about romantically shipping ralsusie. if you call them 'gay' or 'lesbian' for this ship, you will get mild tinnitus for a few days. good luck

[charafansmile]

On one hand I want suselle to have some sort of conflict in chapter 5, but on the other if it doesn't get resolved immediately then that means 3 more years of suselle discourse (who am I kidding, they've done nothing but get along and there's BEEN suselle discourse)

[justa-side-blog]

Responding to your post about Susie, I don’t think the game is trying to force you to like her really? Kris is a character that has formed their own opinions on everyone else before we came into the picture unlike Frisk who just fell into the underground a few minutes ago. Also the whole 180 with her character didn’t really come out of nowhere I think. High stress situations require change and cooperation to get out of and that is exactly what happened. There’s the whole bullying thing with Kris that I wish was addressed but… idk there was sort of a friendship between them was implied in the game “get in the car loser” so maybe something happened between them afterwards????? I might be coping but I just wanted to share my thoughts lol.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and in such a respectful way too! Yeah honestly like - I really like hearing all kinds of different opinions, even if I don't always agree. It's a shame that fandoms aren't very good at this kind of discussion; a lot of the time, you either praise the media uncritically or gtfo, is a lot of how these discussions go. People see you don't like a character that they do, and they take it as a personal attack. Everybody has their reasons.

In regards to what you've said; I could imagine another world where I like Susie, were she written in a different way. What if Susie was given a lot more time to develop pre-redemption? There's also the issue - it's hard for me to see Susie as anything rather than a collection of tropes rather than a unique character. How do I put this...

I don't know if you've ever seen the film Good Will Hunting, but it's a story in my opinion which deals with Susie's archetype much better. Will, similar to Susie, came from a poor, abusive environment and, like her, had no stability in early life. He went through the foster care system. So, like Susie, it's understandable why the character has learnt to become "tough".

But what sets Good Will Hunting apart from many stories about bullies is that, unlike in Deltarune, the hurt that Will does to other people is NOT taken for granted, or swept under the rug. Yes, Will had a traumatic childhood. But that isn't an excuse for how he treats the good people in his life - he lashes out and almost destroys his relationship with his girlfriend AND - important moment - he learns that SHE has her own problems to deal with. Yes, she came from a privileged, upper class background, but she lost her father, and she says to Will that if she could give all her inheritance away in return for her father, she'd do it in a heartbeat.

Will doesn't get special treatment. Nobody in the story does. Everybody has their own pain they carry with them, and they also have to take responsibility for their own actions.

I think when it comes down to it, Susie is just a very flat character for me. She's not unique from the typical bully character with this "mean - to softer - to kind" progression. It probably doesn't help that Susie is one of the only characters who doesn't have any connections to bring out the nuances in her character. All of the relationships we see Susie have in the story are relatively new with no history, so we don't really learn what Susie's values are beyond very, very basic things like "be kind" and "treat others how they treat you" and "agency is important". Which is strange, considering for Toby Fox, character dynamics are usually one of his strongest areas in writing. Susie isn't challenged in any meaningful way either, save for a very short time during Chapter 1. In another world, maybe Susie could've been very interesting for exploring the theme of "rebelling", and how blindly rebelling against everything isn't the same as rebelling for a cause, to bring about real positive change.

There's more I can say on this topic, but in summary, it's strange to me that Susie is so popular. Kind of like watching people worship cardboard with cool fashion sense.

But, whatever 🫤

[doransoran]

this is such a chronically online thing to complain about but am i the only one kinda uncomfortable with how desperatly people try to pigeonhole kris into being one gender or the other especially male even when it just wouldn't make sense for the specific ship or just kinda. straight washes it in a way??

I see this happen with susie and noelle which lowkey pisses me off not because susie and noelle are lesbians (because tbf that was never confirmed) but more so that like. its usually not the other way around for the male ships (like kralsei or kerdly) ykwim? it just reminds me how strangely male centric fandom is bc wdym you have a character who's whole point is that they have agency outside of the players opinions and I'm seeing people like "OMG KRIS AND HIS TOMBOY GF DXX" ..

[mbharestuff]

I could not give less of a shit about what 4chan thinks about Deltarune or anything else, and neither should you. don't give them that real estate in your mind.

"did you know what they said about Weird Route?" no and I super don't care, I like to read good opinions from interesting people.

[papertute]

So I had those comments under my "crack treated seriously/crack & angst" fic where Player is a funny shitposter and gremlin who definitely uses social media at the same time being manipulative and careless about others' feelings, which I think helps me to properly form into coherent thoughts the whole point of Deltarune's fandom main discussion at this point.

The difference between how commenters perceive one and the same character (portrayal of Player in this case) is very curious to me.

[virovac]

I wish people wouldn’t downplay how bad the chapter 4 ending is when defending Toriel

(though with her ex continually walking her i understand how bad her mental state is , but that explain not excuses)

Toriel isn’t. an alcoholic no, but that isn’t the only problem people can have with alcohol

I’m not saying take Kris away from her but counseling might be in order.

We often forget how young Kris is

[themosscycle]

I knew there is a lack of usual elements in the chapters… we don’t have shopkeepers with close up portraits and things like that.

Gerson didnt had a portrait at all in the speaking box (I wonder if this could be because he is dead?? But well, we didn’t got them for Tenna either…).

The criticism about this lack of portraits for characters are valid.

However…

I think we have to consider too that the new chapters have a lot of other elements and things that haven’t been in any other chapter.

The mini games

Fights with different mechanics that don’t requiere healing items or that don’t have TP like usual.

Very detailed backgrounds and different rooms (like Gerson’s studio, some piano puzzles… etc…)

Like… the work that was put into those chapters is evident and huge.

[mofsblog]

"This is some gay shit" Good. Silly. Fair enough. Doesn't inherently invalidate other interpretations of the relationship. Honestly yeah, it is kind of gay regardless of their canonical relationship status

"There's literally no platonic explanation for th-" WRONG!! KILLING YOU WITH AMATANORMATIVITY KILLING LOBSTERS 🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞

[babybluey]

The player is extremely encouraged by the game to like ralsei, it's only in ch 2 where he started to act more suspicious.

Kris not feeling comfortable with a person and not immediately falling head over heels for him just because he's nice doesn't make em a bad person, and the fact he (as far as we know) looks identical to Asriel could make em feel uncomfortable is incredibly logical, like, imagine just seeing a mini version of your brother???? Walking around???? That's incredibly off putting.

Kris wanted to be friends w Susie who literally threatened to kill them, they're not charmed by niceness is what I'm saying.

They probably don't hate him, but there's obviously a contrast with their indifference they have towards him, and the way the player feels (omg fluffy boy must be protected!!!!! Or even the grrrrrr i hate him I don't trust him counts)

Ultimately we simply don't know enough about either of them right now to truly realize what's going on. We don't know if ralsei is lying or how, we don't know what they're talking about when we're off with Susie, we don't know the precise details of Kris' feelings towards both ralsei and Asriel, and we don't even know the nature of the former. It's all speculation

What I'm saying though is that if Kris LIKED him, it would be much more obvious, the same way it's clear how they feel about Noelle, berdly and especially Susie, but it's left intentionally ambiguous.

yknow what I'll be honest not only do I think that Kris probably likes Ralsei I think that if they're really as uncomfortable around him as most of the fandom seems to think, then they're an asshole and can go fuck themselves

if they're unwilling to give a really basic complement to someone who has never been complimented before and basically has no fucking self-image and has been nothing but kind and supportive to them, because that person might.. look a little bit like their brother? Who they like? I'm sorry it just does not make a lick of sense to me and if it does end up being true I'll be really upset.

just to be clear, I dont believe Kris is an asshole for not liking Ralsei, I believe that Kris probably does like Ralsei.

frankly it looks more likely to me that Kris wants to be friends with Ralsei and the players are the ones forcing them to be cold and distant because they think they know better.

I'm not sure why the fandom is so obsessed with this idea, because the only evidence it ever really had was tea theory and even thst was kind of just an assumption, and a really weird one because even if it's true it still means that Kris would, in the span of a single day, grow almost as close to Ralsei as they are to Noelle, their closest childhood friend.

I know it might sound petty, but it honestly does reek of people not liking Ralsei and wanting to project that onto Kris. I've seen this attitude in the fandom for a while, there are people who talk openly about wanting Ralsei to be replaced by Noelle and it's every strange to me. I think it's had a very negative effect on how people view Ralsei as acharcater, and ironically, I feel the people who are always talking about Kris being seperate from the player are the people who are quickest to project that stuff onto them.

[shippyo]

the duality of these ships 🩷🖤

[patchwork-crow-writes]

No, actually, you get the Kralsei "incest" rant now, I've decided.

The ship being considered incest or incest-adjacent is largely a result of several assumptions that are being made about Ralsei, and to a lesser extent about Kris as well. For this to work, you have to assume the following:

Ralsei is modeled primarily on Asriel

All Boss Monsters of a certain age look identical to one another and are related to one another

Kris had absolutely no hand in Ralsei's creation

Kris is heavily uncomfortable with Ralsei's existence

The entire implied romantic undertones of Ralsei's feelings towards Kris were designed to be incestuous from the start

In order, I shall deconstruct and debunk these. Very long post below the read more, you have been warned.

While it is true that Ralsei does share some superficial similarities with Asriel, he's actually much, MUCH more similar to Kris in many ways. All he shares with Asriel is an anagrammed name and a passing likeness. They're not similar in terms of personality, and that goes regardless of which Asriel we're even talking about. Many people associate Ralsei with Undertale's incarnation of Asriel, who doesn't even exist in the same universe. Any similarities between the two are inferred entirely by the player, aided and abetted by the game making these subtle hints that they're "connected" in some way. Yeah, about as connected as Undertale is to Deltarune. To take this a step further, consider Kris and Frisk. No-one is conflating these two, not in a million years. And yet look, they share an anagrammed name and a passing likeness, so they're basically the same person, aren't they? I mean, we both control them through the SOUL, and they're both protagonists of games made by Toby Fox, so if anything they're more similar to each other than Ralsei is to Asriel. But of course, that's utterly absurd, and we all know it. *

I refer you once again to the humans. And before you tell me "they all obviously look different to each other" - and of course I'm not saying they're not different when they obviously are - consider how a monster might look at these humans if you placed them side-by-side. Pale-ish skin, brown hair, no obvious gender markers, similar height profiles. Any monster who's not intimately familiar with any of the humans in question might perhaps confuse them. And so it is with us and Boss Monsters. Just because Ralsei and Asriel share certain characteristics common to ALL boss monsters does not make them the same, or even similar, to each other. You only have to look at the sprites for the two side-by-side to see that there are plenty of differences between them. And as for Deltarune's Asriel? We haven't even seen this guy, we have NO idea what he looks like. We're just making assumptions again based on incomplete information. And if we assume that all boss monsters are related in some way due to how similar they might appear, then what does that make Toriel and Asgore, two boss monsters who have canonically produced offspring in both continuities? I don't need to say it, do I? *

It should be clarified here that I don't just mean Kris consciously made Ralsei at any point, either as an imaginary friend or monster-sona or what-have-you, but that Ralsei's creation as a darkner is somehow linked to how Kris saw themself/wished to be seen in their childhood. The most obvious piece of evidence supporting this is the horned headband that Toriel mentions at the end of Chapter 1. It's heavily implied that Kris would wear it so that they could be the same as their adoptive family, before they supposedly lost it somewhere down the line. It's not too much of a leap in logic to infer from this that Ralsei was created from that headband, at least in part. That said, there are certain aspects of Ralsei that don't exactly fit this neat mold, and I am willing to concede this point if it turns out that the headband thing is a massive misdirect. Nonetheless, I would say that the evidence we currently have to hand points more resolutely towards Ralsei being an aspect of Kris than of him being an aspect of Asriel. *

So I'm just going to say it: WE DON'T KNOW. Because Kris is our protagonist and POV character, it's incredibly easy to forget that we know next-to-nothing about the inner workings of their mind. They have no dialogue except what we tell them to say, and anything we CAN say about them is inferred from how other characters respond to their tone of voice. Of course, we can infer that Kris doesn't fully consider Ralsei a good friend based on his tea healing 60HP, but that on its own doesn't really tell us anything of much substance because you can't exactly cross-reference those numbers against a handy chart or anything - it's all context-dependent. We do at least know that they are comfortable enough around Ralsei to play the odd prank on him, which we know is something they used to do a lot of with Noelle and Asriel, two people they were close to growing up. They will, of their own volition, interpret our instruction to "take a bite" of Ralsei's dummy's clothes to make it look like they're kissing it on the cheek. I don't think that's something you would do with somebody who freaked you out on an existential level, or somebody who reminded you of your brother. Again, I am willing to concede this point should it turn out my interpretation of these clues is incorrect. *

Ask yourself this: What would Kralsei being incest - or incest-adjacent, or pseudo-incest, or whatever - contribute to the characters of Kris and Ralsei, to our relationship to them as players, or to the narrative or wider themes of Deltarune as a whole? I'll tell you - nothing whatsoever. The most such an interpretation can EVER say is that we as players are so easily manipulated by window-dressing and flattery that we will, knowingly or otherwise, romantically pair two characters together who are related in some way, shape or form. And let's say that this IS the intent behind their dynamic - all it amounts to, all it can ever amount to, is a great bit gotcha from Toby Fox himself. Haha, I tricked you into shipping two characters who are secretly related, isn't that fucked up of you? Somehow, I don't think that was his intention with this, it seems such a petty and small-minded thing for somebody who we know is capable of creating moving, thought-provoking, horrifying and beautiful stories. He's better than that. It turns the entire thing into a glorified skill-check: are YOU smart enough to identify that you're being encouraged to engage in incest-shipping, or are you a dumbass who only sees what's presented to you and doesn't ask questions about it? Contrary to popular belief, we're not all 5-D chess grandmasters, and shockingly not everybody is going to interpret the clues in this way. All it does is make people who DO earnestly ship Kralsei feel bad for something the game WAS ENCOURAGING THEM TO DO. Which would be fine if we were playing, say, Spec Ops: The Line, which is very much built around that conceit. And hey, if you wanna feel shitty about shipping two characters together in an extremely unhealthy and harmful manner, Snowgrave is right there. The difference here is that the weird route is A) completely optional, B) difficult if not impossible to accidentally trigger, C) completely derails the game's story and emotional beats, and D) doesn't rely on the shock value of surprise incest to carry it. Snowgrave actually has something INTERESTING to say about the nature of former friends, forced romance, a player's control over a protagonist and how people can be manipulated to do horrendous things by proxy. All the incest interpretation of Kralsei has to offer is that... it's incest, and you're a bit yucky for partaking in it. I'll wrap up this point by saying: incest is a very emotive topic and produces visceral emotional reactions in a lot of people. It's very clever that people have looked critically at Kralsei and observed the possibility, the interpretation, that this could be what's happening, but if the aim in doing so was to promote debate and analysis on the topic, I'm afraid it's only succeeded in doing the exact opposite, causing people to disengage from it entirely. And I strongly believe that's going to severely harm the state of discourse going into Deltarune's future chapters, because how are you going to talk about the game and what it's trying to say if you keep dodging a major part of it for fear of being thought of as pro-incest? It sucks if you're invested in the ship because no-one wants to discuss it, it sucks if you're NOT invested in the ship because it's not likely going to just evaporate come chapter 3, it sucks for everybody.

Now, having said all of that, I am not here to convince you that Kralsei is the truth and the life and what-have-you - you can read any of my other essays on the topic if you want to be preached to in that manner. You're valid and based for not liking Kralsei for any reason, and I wholeheartedly respect your opinion. All I'm trying to say here is that, calling it incest because "Ralsei is/looks like Asriel" or "Kris hates Ralsei" or whatever doesn't do anything for anyone. There are plenty of valid reasons not to like the ship, I just don't think that this is one of them.

Rant over, have a lovely day :D

[justa-side-blog]

Also, am I stupid for hoping Carol wouldn't be so one-dimensionally like...evil? Terrible? Idk. The characters in Undertale are so complex and yet Carol ended up being what everyone expected her to be. I'm not saying I wanted her character to be inconsistent with Rudy and Noelle's words, but I was sort of hoping for a more complex, morally grey situation. Like, yeah, Carol's a bad mum but maybe she isn't coping well with grief and she refuses to get help, or something like that? Idk just like...

Ugh...I haven't gotten enough sleep to explain this well but Deltarune is such a childish game in comparison to Undertale. Like, it feels like a game for a much younger audience (except for the Snowgrave route, Spamton, etc). I think in general the character writing in Deltarune really pales in comparison to Undertale's writing.

But I mean, at least we have good characters like Noelle, Seam, Berdly, Jevil, Spamton...that's definitely better than nothing.

Oh, and I liked the pumpkin man. He was very sweet 🎃 what a cutiepie

[ultimateloserboy]

hey chat im an og deltaruner but ive been scared of the fandom for years. are yall normal abt kralsei now PLEASE be normal abt kralsei now please please please please

[xxcoreenforcerxx]

My solution to Deltarune shipping discourse is polyamory