peace + love on catgirl earth

my spoiler tag will be #deltarune spoilers ! I assume if you care about spoilers you have already blocked this or will soon, but in case you haven't, here is your reminder

the thing is even as someone who agrees that ralsei could very well end up somewhere very nonbinary in regards to their gender I don't really like that that reading is the one I see rising to prominence. it obviously does not help that at least some people are framing it in opposition to transfem ralsei (as I've had to restate about a million times: transfem is specifically a term inclusive of nonbinary identity), but in some cases it feels very clearly like "I don't want to stop calling them 'he' or a 'fluffly boy' or have to actually reframe how I think about them in my head" and I just don't think that's a great place to approach anything from

the first time I played through the green & orange fight I only acted on orange, which eventually leads to susie saying "guys, can we… do this different? [...] like, just… beat them up or something?" because of how badly ralsei fails to be nice to orange. except I didn't realize at the time that the fight is able to play out differently, so when susie said that I thought it was signalling that she was backsliding into violence again. which made the immediate next scene that features ralsei begging the prophecy to "have mercy on susie" specifically have a huge impact on me in the moment. I really thought that post I made about ralsei emphasizing pacifism because they hoped if they were just nice no one would want to kill susie was getting confirmed before my eyes