Make Total Create

For now, though, I'll at least give you the title:

THOU ART LISTENING TO

*fireball explosion*

102.3

*bubbling cauldron*

REAL WIZARDS FM

*shimmering mana crystal*

WHERE WE PLAYETH NOTHING BUT CHANTS, CHANTS, AND MORE CHANTS

*wololo*

THIS ART NOT THINE ELDER MATRIARCH'S STATION

last song listened to: well, weirdly, it's a remix of Gator Gallop from Mina the Hollower, because I just read a tumblr post where someone posted the last song they listened to and I clicked on the video link. so i--

wait no hang on my alarm just went off because i woke up a little earlier than i set it for so actually it's my wednesday alarm music:

protodome makes a lot of really good blue-themed music.

favorite colors: astute readers may be able to use context clues to uncover the answer to this one.

currently watching: don't have any shows i'm watching currently. not a big TV guy- i tend to only watch something when it's like, an inescapable part of the local discourse and i need to be conversant. though i guess i do have an 11-hour youtube livestream of a pokemon invitational tournament going in the background? that's kinda like TV. it's sports. Brian David Gilbert is fucking crushing it so far and that's what i like to see. hubris unpunished! punch the sun, baby!

currently reading: uh, i've got a couple books i'm in the middle of but haven't touched for like a month because things have been really busy- A Madness of Angels and The Quincunx. also sitting in a tab i'm halfway through is half-man-half-lime's Excitement and Adventure tv script, which is doing some fun stuff. i played in a tabletop campaign of this story for a while and i'm interested to see like. how it was intended to go before we derailed everything.

currently working on: too many things! besides day job, i've been fractionally working on Datasouls and Izuka Simulator (glacially, due to day job), and also a Slay the Spire mod that's still under wraps. we've got a Flower demo that's basically done and we're just figuring out release logistics for now, and there is also a secret project that i recently finished and will debut... at some unspecified future time.

currently wearing: blue sweatpants. blue shirts. blue socks. blue underdrawers. these are the context clues i was alluding to earlier.

last search: fuck, it's just wolfeyvgc because i needed to grab that link to the livestream earlier. and google doesn't show recent searches anymore, it just shows a list of trending searches that i'm sure they're making ad revenue off somehow because who the fuck else cares about any of this shit. i swear it's on purpose- on my phone any time i go to google anything the trending searches show up for like two seconds before the keyboard loads for me to type something in, and i've started averting my eyes just to avoid giving them the sick satisfaction. fuck google.

who to tag: lessee, intersection of people who do this kind of thing and haven't already been tagged by people previously... probably farn, and flairina, and uh... does rankinbassarmageddon still exist?

last song listened to: another 'Flower Man' remix. don't judge me. Also, Erykah Badu's Didn't Cha Know.

favorite colors: ominous, baleful yellow; gray; oddly, red's been growing on me

currently watching: tele... vision...? i haven't heard that name in years... [cough] come closer...

currently reading: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (thanks, @chicken-tamer); it's interesting to see someone articulate the notion of the "magic circle" in this very prototypical form!

currently working on: Questing Beast, despite being blocked to hell; Deltarune side-project about Carol Holiday; [redacted] mod; learning to cook a little better

currently wearing: oversized T-shirt with lightbulbs on it and polka-dotted red pajama shorts that make my thighs look good apparently?

last search: 'homo ludens' (I didn't remember the entire title, sue me!)

It isn’t clear why this is the case; the most obvious cause would have been when the Queen of Annihilation destroyed you with her staff, and you were only barely brought back through the power of your friends’ love for you, but you’re pretty sure you sometimes didn’t exist before that point, too. 

The staff thing just made it happen a lot more often.

Your teammates have reassured you time and time again that they still love and care for you, no matter how often you slip into nonexistence, but you aren’t blind. It wears on them, and it wears on the bonds between you all. It might not be your fault, but it still hurts them when you don’t show up to whatever coffee date or book hunt or monster fight you were invited to because you’ve stopped existing.

They don’t invite you to stuff as often as they used to, you think, but you can’t really prove that and maybe they never invited you to go out that often to begin with?

For a while you kept worrying that you’d stop existing in the middle of a monster fight or something, and then everyone would be in trouble, but it turns out that the role of cups isn’t actually super necessary? Your teammates certainly benefit from healing when you’re around, but you’ve all been doing this for long enough that everyone is pretty experienced and no one really gets that badly hurt anymore. So that’s good.

it's fun to be helpless :)

it's fun to be helpless :)

it's fun to be helpless :)

In Undertale, the difference in physical structure between humans and monsters represents their different... let's say "ontological" status; humans are more physical because they're more real that monsters, right, they're the ones with real agency and moral patienthood; the world is implicitly telling you that monsters don't matter, they aren't moral patients, they are to humans as NPCs are to a player. They aren't real people made of flesh and blood, they're made of magic! That's the joke, I think.

Now Deltarune, with Lightners and Darkners, takes that subtext of ontological superiority and brings it even closer to text; the Darkners are literally not real, Ralsei encourages you to disregard their lives; the Lightners stand above them in the great chain of being, and closer to the Sun.

It would then stand to thematic reason that Monsters, as Lightners in the world of Deltarune, where we already know they don't have Magic, all bleed. This is what I have been staunchly defending for years now. And yet the game has just danced around it the entire time— if it's just a simple fact of the world, why not be straightforward about it? Why treat Susie bleeding four chapters in like a big deal? Why let Darkners so consistently talk about blood?

—Deltarune does not borrow Undertale's symbolism here; blood does not anymore stand for "real", or, rather, if it does, it stands for "real" as in "visceral", as in the opposite of "sanitized".

I don't actually know if Lightners bleed or not, but it doesn't matter, because either way, this fact would not be brought up. This is not a place where things like violence or blood are talked about (just ignore the weird man in the weird costume). This is just a quaint little town! Nothing bad ever happens here. We especially wouldn't talk about it around the kids! We're protecting them from it! Kids shouldn't worry about things like blood or trauma— So even a giant bloodstain on the floor goes unacknowledged.

The Light World doesn't allow talking about anything uncomfortable. Horror movies and rock music that may contain references to scary things are banned! But in the Dark Worlds, where the kids are free from the eyes of the grown ups, and can talk about everything weird and uncomfortable they're going and have gone through, the things they know are there just under the surface but aren't allowed to speak of— they can talk about blood. The Darkness itself manifests gushing from a wound in the Earth!

And Susie— well she talks about blood all of the time. She bluntly acknowledges the truth that "everyone bleeds". And when she rejects the prophecy, when she calls out the lie of the religion which claims to be all about everyone being always nice to one another, she, herself, bleeds.

tl;dr :

Noelle can't say "Kris did something," she can only say "it snowed," and "It was snowing so hard, I couldn't see anything." Kris goes to Art Therapy, trying to depict what they saw behind the tree, and draws the trees of Card Kingdom instead – and the Forgotten Man and Mancountry are games, too. The closest we've gotten to the "core" of what Kris is hiding was through MANTLE, game abstraction wrapped in game abstraction wrapped in game abstraction like the shielding of a nuclear waste disposal site, while some shrieking, giggling, unspeakable fear sits at its center and writhes hard enough to tear through that defensive layer and torment Kris in flesh.

...and when she gains the "strength" to "do something crazy" she seems to be still imitating and borrowing from her behavior in video games, replicating a noclip glitch -a kind of liberating act that comes natural to her- in real life.

...and if the words are forbidden, committing the act is such a taboo the world will retcon it away rather than let Kris and Noelle drown, and pushing forward breaks the world itself.

Meanwhile in the Dark World we get an extended segment about a joke character just straightforwardly trying to kill himself. Also this visual: