Glup Shitto Conissueer

wrong answer

Did I think Fluttershy bonding with Soundwave's cassettes in the MLP / TF crossover was super cute? Yes.

When really it is "I find it unnerving how fast people make fun of physical disability and equate it to moral goodness when you make it slightly ok to do so in context."

Well, you see, I'm talking about them as real historical people with real disabilities and not the Targaryens.

However, there's so much going on with that approach to it, so here are my thoughts in no particular order:

This idea presumes so much choice that just did not realistically exist for so many people. Archdukes and Archduchesses more often than not had no say in their marriage partner, because marriage wasn't about what they wanted. You, woman in this family, have to marry your cousin because it's what is best politically, and how you feel about the concept doesn't matter one way or another. This happens to men too, though less so, but off the top of my head you can look at Crown Prince Rudolph's marriage being more or less decided over his head. So, preference to marry a cousin you barely know really isn't factored in at all. You're lucky if your parent cares about you being happy in the marriage.

It's not about purity, it's about politics. The rule isn't that you had to marry a relative, it's that you had to marry a Catholic from a ruling dynasty. Add in the idea that this was chosen for you from a set of politically advantageous matches, because daughters and sons are assets to be used strategically, and you get a lot of marriages into the same set of families. As crass as it is, letting your children marry downward is wasting a bargaining tool. For the Habsburgs, the religious bar is also important and pretty constraining, especially when they aren't on good political terms with the other major Catholic powers (France and Spain) so you get Italian state and Bavarian marriages. If you keep reinforcing those alliances through marriage, that also means you're probably marrying a relative. Look at how quickly they leap at having new options when Belgium is established as a friendly Catholic state.

The above problem is complicated when someone in your family becomes Grandmother of Europe. Maria Theresa's extensive marriage politics means that a lot of the possible marriage candidates are almost certainly related. This is also, by the way, how we get Victoria's hemophilia being so widespread in the Courts her children married into, and everyone seemingly being cousins by World War I.

There is a lot of "might" going on with how disability works here. Ferdinand I's Wikipedia page ("citation needed" all over the place by the way) is littered with how his disabilities "might" be caused by heredity. But they could also be caused or compounded by many of the other things that caused birth complications or disability to be more common historically, like insufficient medical knowledge about prenatal care, insufficient maternal nutrition, or infections during pregnancy or after birth. Epilepsy certainly isn't constrained to just when your parents are related to each other.

Look me in the eyes and tell me that historians routinely acting like this man (who actually functioned pretty well in a world without anti-seizure medications) had no sentience because he had a disability from birth is schadenfreude.

When talking about the meaning of the dress in this instance it's important to recognize that the dress can't be separated from the mannequin, both contextually and literally.

They are a package deal. The dress is permanently attached to the mannequin and must be analyzed with this context in mind. The dress being unobtainable on its own and instead being affixed to the mannequin makes this item inherently different from the dress in Undertale.

In Undertale, the dress is wearable. It's free to be given or taken with nothing to get in the way of that. In Deltarune, the mannequin flips this aspect of freedom on its head. The dress is unable to be taken off the mannequin or given to anyone else. The choice is taken away and the object is rendered useless.

The mannequin represents a lack of choice in the ill-fitting roles imposed upon oneself by others, and I think chapter 5 bolsters this idea even more with Pink's comment about how it "doesn't fit" just like how Spamton won't fit into the mannequin in chapter 2. Conversely, Ralsei likes the dress, but would be unable to wear it because it is instead being forced onto someone who doesn't want it.

What did Drift want to be when he was young?

To be happy.

YES i love rumble XDD

(based on that one meme.....)