Adeline Area

i want to talk about the dark world and how what someone perceives in the light world influences what manifests in the dark world. to begin with, i do believe that there should have been a stronger prerequisite post regarding the nature of dark worlds reflecting the thoughts, feelings, and understanding of the lightners related to, or specifically creating, said dark worlds. i did touch upon the freudian nature of ego vs id factoring into dark worlds lightly here. however, 1) i feel like that is a given at this point of the game, and that everyone in the fandom is already aware of this, and the more important reason, 2) i'm too lazy to write it. so just take that thesis as a stepping stone and move on directly with me here.

(if you really want to talk about it then i guess you can read up on persona 4 golden's primer on jungian psychology because at this point i mostly believe deltarune is meant in some parts to be toby's p4 fix-it. lol. but anyway: different topic)

to open this post, i'd like to gather what we know of susie's knowledge regarding humans vs monsters. it's been established that she's new to hometown, and long established that she came from a human-dominant culture (or that the culture writ large, regardless of population, is human-dominant. see also: toilets being a staple in homes despite it being unclear whether deltarune monsters don't need to shit and piss like their undertale counterparts, the dreemurrs needing to buy pet shampoos instead of just having regular shampoo - that one's for kris). but what exactly does she know of the relationship between humans and monsters?

from chapter 1:

susie: i was a box for halloween once. ralsei: ...um, JUST a box? susie: well it's not like i can dress up as a goddamn monster.

susie: everybody bleeds, right? don't worry about it.

from chapter 2:

toriel: gingerbread men... and gingerbread monsters, of course. susie: gingerbread monsters, huh...? cool.

susie: a giant monster movie special! (always liked them better than the giant human movies.)

from chapter 4:

susie: ...what the hell is this giant bloodstain? just use VINEGAR, dumbass. vinegar and hot water. cleans it up.

susie: huh...? dude, there's a glass case in here. but... it's weird. the outside is clean, but... the inside is... covered in dust? ...huh? dude, it's just a dusty... h... hell no, you don't mean... when monsters die, their dust is... is buried...

and of course, we know that susie bled in the dark world in chapter 4.

from chapter 5:

ralsei: humans don't HAVE tails, right, susie?

susie: ... hey, ralsei? ralsei: what, susie? susie: ... nothing. doesn't matter.

to state the important things first, i don't believe that susie is mixed race or human-monster biracial. we still have two chapters to go, so of course i'm open to being proven wrong, but i'm genuinely just not getting that reading from everything susie has said.

the part that caused me to write this up to begin with was the chapter 5 quote. susie's dialogue was vague enough that you could reasonably conclude that she initially wanted to tell ralsei off from ribbing orange, but for some reason my first impression when playing the game - perhaps due to her sprite's expressions or other factors - was that she wanted to confirm with ralsei whether humans actually don't have tails, in conjunction with her insecurity about her tail. susie has constantly been self-conscious about her tail - something i initially chalked up to her being accustomed to bullying from previous human classmates - but now i'm considering if it may be deeper than that. does she genuinely think some humans have tails while some do not, the way monsters are? does she actually think she's a human herself??

(okay, that last line of thinking was shaky at best, and other people have referred to her as a monster repeatedly. but like. what if, lol. what if, everytime other people call her a monster, she thought of it as a pejorative adjective instead of a factual descriptor. what if she genuinely couldn't tell the difference between what makes a human and a monster).

rather than pursue a shaky foundation, i want to take a look instead at what has happened. people have taken susie bleeding at chapter 4 as proof that either, a) monsters bleed in deltarune, or b) susie is half-human. however, the thing is - susie never bleeds in the light world. she only ever bleeds in the dark world. in the light world, she only KNOWS how to clean up blood, which is necessary if you live your life surrounded by humans, but she herself doesn't bleed. (neat juxtaposition with human kris, raised by monsters, who either don't know enough or don't care to clean up bloodstains. i'm going to guess the former.)

which brings me back to the thing i was supposed to be talking about from the beginning: the dark world only works based on the lightners' perception of things, not the objective facts of the things themselves. the dark world is as a palace in persona 5 or a dungeon in persona 4: completely dependent on the lightners' cognition. the following conclusion wasn't mine (i'll cite the post that stated it when i find it), but it is all but confirmed when asgore couldn't read his notes in chapter 5's dark world because kris never looked closely at his notes. the notes are all illegible because kris, who opened the fountain, doesn't know what they contained.

susie only bleeds in the dark world because she thinks she's supposed to bleed. due to her upbringing, she doesn't realize that monsters and humans may differ in this case. she barely even knew how monster funerals work, or even to associate dust with fatal or mortal injury, prior to coming to hometown. her initial reaction is to dismiss dust before she recalled info.

susie: huh...? dude, there's a glass case in here. but... it's weird. the outside is clean, but... the inside is... covered in dust? ...huh? dude, it's just a dusty... h... hell no, you don't mean... when monsters die, their dust is... is buried...

...she needed to quote the book from the library, as if the knowledge on monster death isn't familiar to her.

...when monsters die, their dust will be spread over what they loved. an object that symbolizes their existence. that object will be buried...

following this logic, the flowers are humans in the dark world likely because asgore knows, to some degree, that there being a human is relevant or important to the establishment of and closing of a dark fountain. which is a major part of his obsession! i suppose metanarratively it also links to the gender allegory between humans and monsters and how asgore is shown to insist upon a fragile, lonely form of masculinity. (and how flowery refers to the flowers as 'the boys' regardless of their genders)

okay. now that that's established, i want to bring something else up. kris is deliberately purging their cognition to avoid bringing important things over to the dark world. is this to avoid friend, chomping at the bit at any protein? is this to avoid something else? god knows. but they emptied their room out of any single hint of personality; they prevent you from 'perceiving' things they consider close to them, like asriel's cyber city room, or his letters to dess, or what they did with noelle during past festivals in the photo album.

-> at certain points i think there is ample evidence to make the case that each of the chapter's final boss is the embodiment of the person currently affecting the fountain maker the most. strongest evidence is obviously noelle with queen (carol), but kris with tenna is very interesting. in the sense that you won't guess that asgore is the person who's currently stressing them out the most.

-> it is also very interesting that the final bosses reflect the characteristic of the stressors very accurately and very ... up-to-date-ly? god knows if i knew the english word for this. queen is a very bossy overlord who used to be better about ruling her people. it's easy to see that carol being a control freak only started happening around the time dess disappeared. it's therefore also easy to see that carol used to be a very silly person, regardless of whether that silliness is outwardly expressed or not - it's evidenced by queen's general humor and the amount of talking santas in their house. (i know this was because toby consulted hussie for the writing of this segment specifically. doylist vs watsonian reading etc etc you get where i'm coming from.)

at the same time, asgore being extremely clingy and wishing to make himself useful is stressful for kris. i have an inkling that this is also because they know there's nothing he realistically could do to fix the situation/anything he tries will make things worse, and they may very well perceive him as getting in the way. (this part is conjecture!)

it becomes clearer when chapter 3's/TV darkworld's final boss is revealed to be a fake-out - that after defeating tenna, we need to fight the knight, who slashed tenna apart anyway - that kris's true stressor is actually dess, whom they are in a truce with.

-> as a consequence, how does this read within chapter 4? dess's stressor is the titan, bringing about apocalypse. in essence, i think dess's character is chara's character brought to its extremes. (audience shouts in the background, what, a murder-suicide pact with your sibling isn't extreme enough?). i'm extremely partial to the reading that dess wants to be human (as a transmasc allegory) in opposition to kris wanting to be a monster (as a transfem allegory). dess took the prophecy to heart and thought that the solution that would save monsterkind from its untimely demise is if a monster took it upon themself and 'gained power' (i am likening this to undertale's no mercy and deltarune's weird route, to underline both routes' relation to power and humanity as a stand-in for gendered power/oppression ingame). anyway, in short, dess took it upon herself to transition so that she could become strong and see the prophecy to its completion all while ensuring monsterkind are safe. there is a blinding sense of EXTREMELY PARANOID DUTY-BOUND SELFHOOD enveloping her dysphoria and her journey to absolve herself from it.

i think however that this implies dess has a less than favorable view toward monsterkind. she doesn't want them to get hurt but only because she views them as weak enough to not be able to defend themselves or even to not want to be able to defend themselves. by 'becoming' the knight, she separates herself from monsterkind, transforming from prey into predator, from a thing that freezes in headlights into a thing that roars in the night. carol has, by far, seemed supportive of this (massive amount of heart-shaped plushies in her house, and also the way she has become a control freak is reminiscent of dess's line of thinking when she pursues 'becoming' human or 'embodying' humanity - condescension toward those she wishes to protect).

-> anyway, returning to final bosses. i think now that we can reasonably see lancer as a parallel for kris and the spade king as whoever is hurting kris, i feel like i can reasonably guess who made the closet darkworld. it's either dess or dess and kris together. the closet darkworld feels more personal than the church darkworld, with the pain more palpably felt and more childishly obvious (three pictogram codes to open gates, clover directly paralleling dess, forest backdrop). in the past toby has changed several things retroactively based on fandom feedback, and from what i understand, he does this only when things are not received the way he intends them to be/fandom interpretation strayed or snowballed too far from his intentions. (weird route imagery, degenerate changed into freak because he wanted the word to be harsh but not derogatory). another one of these changes that is a bit more subtle and therefore tends to go unnoticed is how he tried to soften spade king's abuse toward lancer ("he would've bounced"). correctly a lot of people have retorted that it doesn't matter, he doesn't care about lancer anyway, but - ultimately i think this is toby trying to say something about dess's relationship with kris. she is not abusive toward them, but she has never been a good older sibling figure, or role model, or friend, and kris's continued involvement with her throughout this entire ploy is actively hurting them.

-> on that note: i hate when dess's "knighthood" is removed from her agency. see my rant here.

-> all this to say: deltarune is toby fox's persona 4 fix-it.

-> while the final bosses are the main stressors for the fountain opener, i think the secret bosses are the stressors that they don't even realize existed. forgive me for getting freudian but i think it's an ego vs id thing. the final bosses are representative of ego while the secret bosses are representative of id. this is most obvious with dess's id being her idolization of the only mentor figure that ever understood her and kris's id freaking them out so much with the violent streak they didn't want to acknowledge they have. noelle's id is a little more subtly represented, but spamton is actually perfect in that he is trapped within his circumstances and any attempt to free himself will end up killing him.

-> with that being said, isn't it interesting that despite the antagonization, dess's id actually gets along extremely well with susie? she craves freedom so fiercely and so feverishly that in her desperation she can pretend that the isolation, punishment, and incarceration that comes with being half-alive as the roaring knight is actually a breath of fresh air - that she can and has transitioned into a person that is not beholden to anyone else for safety and emancipation.

-> let's return to dess hurting kris. (my god.) i think it's very interesting that the main source of tension in their relationship is ultimately the anguish that naturally exists between two trans people with this nature, that i very rarely see explored!, the rage of why would you want to be something i loathe the most? how dare you wish to become my worst enemy that i want desperately to kill and transform into something better, that i have to look at in the mirror every single damn day that i'm awake? dess was, in the beginning, i think, visibly angrier about this than kris, mostly also because she's older and therefore has more pull about what they or what their friend group did. which was why kris felt compelled to also play the part enforced to them by virtue of being human - being the vessel, to absolve themself from the guilt and also because dess's "sacrifice" cannot go to waste.

veering into headcanon realm, i think that while kris themself is predisposed to formal speech a la chara (on account of having toriel as a mother), their speech in the beginning of the game when discarding the vessel is also them channeling the person dess wanted them to become - channeling dess, who is their role model of what a cold, distant, yet powerful human is supposed to be.

this is on all accounts shaping up to be (internalized) misogyny.

-> on that note! i really do believe dess is shaping up to be a very fascinating character in terms of personality. i know this is very hard to imagine because in contemporary western fiction spheres, bad boys/bad girls are usually riotous, rambunctious, and have a very early 2000s pop punk feel to them, while silent, rigid, visibly judgmental characters tend to be goody-two-shoes or sticklers for the rules. bear with me here. i think dess is a combination of these two tropes. i think, like her mom, dess is an extremely icy rebel. she is rigid and unyielding and she is rebellious. this is not to say that she has like a hidden rebel streak underneath a prim, perfect image, because that's noelle. dess is offputting because she is cold, unfriendly, and she also goes against the grain in a way that actively scares people away with how wintery she can be. (suddenly the holiday house being kept in ice temperature doesn't seem all that befuddling anymore).

-> i want to say that ultimately, while very compelling, i don't really care all that much about the darkners except for how they parallel the central relationships of this game. (really on the nose going against the theme of the game here, but hey. my handle has dess' name in it for a reason.) in undertale, every meaningful relationship is a parallel for asriel and chara's dynamic in some way, shape, or form. i want to say that the central theme of deltarune is the exploration of this dynamic, extended; kris and dess are chara parallels, naturally asriel and noelle are flowey parallels - however, within kris and dess's relationship dess is chara and kris is flowey, to a degree; the dynamic is mirrored in kris and noelle's relationship; and so on, and so forth

i can probably elaborate more on a separate post, but essentially in deltarune i view all other relationships (while meaningful on their own) as parallels for the holiday-dreemurr siblings' dynamic.

And his name was doctor Alan Hart.

Important notes from the notes:

• Also James Berry

Reproductive rights and body autonomy are no fucking joke, and the patriarchy wants nothing more than to force them to be women. Cause, if people can just stop being women, if they can just be men, then the patriarchy has no real power.

The liberation of trans men is the final boss of the patriarchy, proof that people can be free to simply walk away from what it has assigned to them.

Liberating trans men is how we liberate us all; we have to stand with them, for our own survival just as much as theirs.

We can't lose them; I don't know why so many of my transfem sisters can't see how important transmasc people are, but know that if we lose them we are all damned.

~ lesbian sex

~ rpf

~ cheating in fiction

~ hating ozempic

~ women’s sports