That show was so weird and I loved it. Like a show from an alternate timeline, it feels like a window into what fiction could have been if it took another path. It's floaty, like the polar reverse of grounded, a work rooted in drag and camp. It reveals the absurdity of its own genera by removing all the grounding and realism to the point where it's reduced to pure aesthetics, the lie it always was, an arbitrary set of narratives with no basis in real feelings. It's a show where recognizable story arcs constantly threaten to happen before being undercut and made pointless, narrative structure being shown to be meaningless. We expect the prince to rescue the princess but the prince never makes it to her and the princess fails to be in danger, and both feel worse about themselves for it.

The show is what I've dubbed and anti-coming of age narrative. It's a story that problematizes the process of growing up. It discusses how narratives around adulthood are constructed fictions that will actively hurt both yourself and others to try to follow. The men are expected to be princes, empowered and self-driven people who take on the suffering of others and feel nothing so that they can save the weak disempowered princesses. The women are expected to be princesses, vulnerable and desireless objects who are passively courted and protected by the self-centered prince. Every single character in the show fails to meet their own gender's expectations and are repeatedly punished for it, becoming the fallen prince and the witch. A man without desire or power and a woman with both. The women seek out romance and desire others while the men can't figure out what they want and end up getting nothing. All suffer from this, are punished, and end up never changing, stuck in the status quo forever. Not allowed to change their world until they meet an ideal they never will. The power of Dios is forever locked off because nobody could ever be the prince.

Akio tries to recreate the ideal of the prince in an attempt to consume that ideal and achieve what he lost, but he never can, no iteration of his rose prince will be enough, Anthy will always reject them as her prince because being the prince is not a role worth having. Dios could not handle having less than ideal power and fell into Akio at the first sign of a woman taking agency over him.

If I just like something, appreciate what I liked about it, criticize myself what I disliked, and move on. I get peace and resolution.

But if I find out what others disliked about it... I just get stuck on that and can't move my brain past it. So I avoid that situation in the first place because even years later I still think about the criticisms people had of Steven Universe, Homestuck, Puss and Boots Last Wish, both justified and not, and can't seem to just let it go.

I've been thinking about the dynamic between Kris and the player a bit. Now we still don't really know the dynamic in detail, and what has been determined though implication is suspect.

Regardless though, I find the implied dynamic FASCINATING. To Kris we are not a captor, a person, or deity, but a tool. The soul is needed for Kris to accomplish a goal, and it seems like Kris went into this arrangement of possession willingly. Most notable to me is that Kris went in prepared, and maybe they were selected for the position due to having a natural skill that aids them in resisting the soul (I suspect that Kris's struggles with intrusive thoughts has actually made them better at resisting our influence through experience with unwanted impulses.)

Kris generally knows our limits and how to exploit them. They rip us out, understand when chapters end and exploit that time to act without us, has a thorough understanding of the choice system such that they can work around it, and take actions themself during moments the soul doesn't have control. It seems like Kris knows a lot more about what is happening with the soul's connection to Deltarune's world than we do.

Yet despite going in prepared, Kris is still dealing with an eldritch force. A being they cannot understand who they've willing let possess their body in the hopes they can can push this incomprehensible being into helping them. From Kris's POV they are a horror protagonist. One who has dabbled in dark forces far beyond them and suffer the consequences for doing so.

We treat Kris's life as a game and force them to act like they never would. In the weird route we meticulously circumvent every plan Kris has to control us and commit horrible actions. We act as the horror Kris could only have most feared us to be. An eldritch force that cannot be controlled even with the ritualistic precision they employ.

Intro: I recently watched PootStablook's animated take on Friend Inside Me (art is from that video) and I LOVED the visuals, vibes, and sound. The atmosphere and design was perfect for the fandom brainrot-born pseudo-character Friend Inside Me but made into a real design. It was able to capture the deranged creepiness the meme implies. However, I found the writing and lore for the animations a bit lacking, so I figured I'd give my own shot at coming up with lore and a narrative for Friend Inside Me. I will be referring to my version as Pete N VB as well as I feel like that design is already so perfect that it would be dishonest for me to pretend to make my own.

The AU:

During Chapter 5 you can learn about the existence of a taped copy of the old canceled cowboy show Asgore liked that he's been watching over and over again since the original show went off the air. If you then return to chapter 1, you can have Kris search Asgore's flower shop and procure the tape for yourself. "An old VHS tape. The insides are worn from overuse. Take it?"

If you have the tape, during the end of chapter 2 Susie will have alternate dialogue asking "Have anything good to watch?" She then notices Kris has the tape and takes it from them, putting it into the tv, before immediately being disappointed on seeing the cowboy show. "Oh it's that cowboy show for babies. Kris do you seriously like this stuff?" She then changes the channel to the monster movie marathon and the scene plays out the same from then on.

During chapter 3 Pete first appears after your first meeting with Tenna among Tenna's crew, where he repeats some generic cowboy themed dialogue that has little relation to anything going on. After completing board one, the first physical challenge is replaced with the cowboy minigame, ending with an encounter with Pete. He goes on a clearly scripted monologue about how he's the sheriff and needs to apprehend "ya bunch of rulebreakin' troublemakers!" Though mostly innocuous, this monologue has a few allusions to the weird route, like Pete accusing the Fun Gang of "stealin' jewelry from auctioneers!" among other crimes. Ralsei speaks very little during this section, and looks uncomfortable, his gaze shifting towards the camera. This culminates in a boss fight against Pete that's relatively easy. If you attack him he takes no damage, instead just creepily shaking, making a cracking noise as he does. His check dialogue says "Sherriff of these parts! It doesn't look like HE'S breathing." You defeat him by winning against him in 3 duel mini-games where you need to shoot before he does.

If you head to the S rank room after board 1 you can find Pete behind one of the shower curtains, only his eyes visible. If you talk to him he says this: "howdy partner, that was a good show ya put on, real convincing stuff" "watcha doing back here for? looking for secrets?" "nahhhh i getcha, neither of us are supposed to be here" "but kris i gotta thank ya for freeing me from that old king" "if i had to say those same blasted lines in that same blasted script in that same blasted show i outta snap" Pete plays a distorted sound laugh as his eyes shake back and forth. "say, partner, ya gotta script of yer own dontcha? golllly" "is that why ya brought me here?" "say, i can help ya out, dontcha tell anyone but i gotta plan to defeat tenna" "and once he's outta the way we could darn well run the place ourselves" "write our own script" "but, i like ya kris, so i'll give ya warning" "if you do this, you will experience pain" "do you accept that?" [yes/no]

[no] "no hard feelins' kris i getcha" "ya cant enjoy pain like ya used to can ya?" "not since-" "i shouldnt say it" "not with so many friends of ours listening" The dialogue ends and his eyes vanish from the curtains.

[yes] "wonderful, i knew ya hadn't changed partner" "…" "See you soon." The dialogue ends and his eyes vanish from the curtains.

If you say no, chapter 3 goes back to normal. If you say yes, during board 2 Tenna will mention "that cowboy escaped? Get him back!" in the conversation that Susie overhears. The set will have bullet-holes on it. A few NPCs will mention that something with the cowboy happened that was disturbing and Tenna is freaked out about it, but there isn't enough information to get a clear picture.

This culminates during the board 3 section, the final encounter will have Tenna send Pete at you with him instead of the Zapper. Pete will just be standing there, eyes black, completely motionless. The first attack will just have the box be empty and Tenna will get confused why Pete is unresponsive "Mike! Get this guy out of here!"

The camera zooms in on Pete. "Kris, I need help from that little friend inside you." Camera zooms back out. Pete shoots the capsule open before lassoing Kris, yanking the soul out of their body. Kris collapses to the ground as Susie starts banging on the capsule and Ralsei looks terrified. Pete catches the soul and holds it up as Tenna says "What the-" flash of white light with the same animation as purifying the titan spawn. Where Tenna was, there's now a hole in the dark-world showing the light-world tv. Pete then starts to twitch and convulse as his body cracks open and black tendrils crawl out. The screen goes black, then a slashing animation appears over where the tv was on screen. Sound of shattering glass. Cut back to the dark world and Tenna is on the ground, head cut in half just as depicted in the prophecy panel during chapter 4.

Susie finally smashes the capsule open which also opens Ralsei's. Susie is pissed. She yells at Pete for hurting Kris, killing Tenna, and scaring Ralsei. Pete tries to appeal to her by explaining how using Kris's power and the power of the friend inside him, Pete can turn this dark world into a paradise for Susie too. She tells him to shut up "I'm not living in a world run by YOU!"

Battle starts. Pete is still holding the soul. The player doesn't get to control Kris, as Susie and Ralsei start taking their turns automatically. Instead, the player needs to dodge both Susie and Pete's attacks as they're caught in the middle. All the while Susie and Pete are arguing. Every time Susie damages Pete, no damage numbers appear, instead his body shakes and cracks more and more. As the fight nears its end Pete starts begging for Susie to stop as "I was the only thing holding it back! You can't let VB out! It'll destroy this whole Dark World!" She ignores him.

Once Pete is destroyed, a powerful titan spawn is left in his place, Kris gets their soul back, and the real boss-fight begins. VB gives the player very little TP throughout the fight, only just having enough by the end to banish. Its attacks are quite surreal and it babbles incoherently about the dark throughout the fight. A shadow crystal and a new item, Negative Scraps, are obtained. Negative Scraps is an equip item that significantly increases damage against normal darkners (not the Titan or Titan Spawn).

The TV world is left a wreck after the fight ends, the party directly walking to save Toriel, only to find Undyne already there trying to fight The Roaring Knight, before it takes her and flies off, the rest of the ending of chapter 3 playing out the same.

Final Notes:

Essentially with this AU I want to make Pete a parallel to both Kris and the player. He's someone who's experienced the same events over and over and over again as Asgore rewatches his tape and is desperate to break free of that script. Mirroring the player's drive to replay Deltarune to see if they can make something change through adjustments to their actions. Like Kris, Pete is trying to accomplish his goals by letting an otherworldly force possess him at great personal risk.

I have been writing lore for a Hollow Knight Pathfinder campaign for a few weeks now and after having finished it I feel it high enough quality to release to the public.

Solpyre is a kingdom obsessed with games and gambling who drive themselves to destruction over constant paranoia. A god full of hate guides their claw towards immolation. This is the kingdom who's the origin of the Grimm Troupe.

CW: slavery, death, lot's of fire-based death, eugenics, allegory for real world events, guns, gambling, suicide (only alluded to), genocide, imperialism, these bugs are real terrible to each other

CW: discussions of abuse and manipulation

I recently rewatched Madoka Magica for the 5th time and I had some thoughts about one of the show's most famous scenes.

I think the scene where Kyubey explains his hyper utilitarian worldview to Madoka is often misunderstood, and all analysis that tries to argue Kyubey is any way correct based off of it is entirely missing the point.

Kyubey is an abuser, and more specifically he is older and more knowledgeable than his victims. Madoka, and by extension the audience, do not understand the grand picture of the show's universe. We have never heard of the aliens Kyubey desires to protect and we do not know the rules the setting operates on. All we and Madoka understand is what Kyubey has told us.

It is worth noting that throughout the show whenever Kyubey is made to explain something he doesn't want to his language becomes more clinical and academic. He positions himself as someone more logical who knows better than his victims. He justifies himself like the older abusive male authority figure he allegorically is.

So when he tries to justify his abuse to Madoka by invoking concepts like entropy there is no way Madoka would be able to understand enough to argue against him. The audience too is put in this position. We only know about the grander setting what Kyubey has told us and so he's able to shape our perception of what is justified through only revealing information that supports his argument. This is something he does a lot.

[spoilers for all of Deltarune so far and Undertale]

So since I wrote my last theory about the Weird Route I've had lot's of time to think about it and I've come to a different conclusion than I did last time.

I believe the Weird Route serves a very similar narrative purpose to the No Mercy route in Undertale. It's a reflection of what will happen if the player refuses to care about the fiction presented.

Toby clearly wants to get across with these games that caring deeply and fully about fiction is ultimately good. In Undertale he provides a route designed to get the player attached to characters and make the player, on some level, believe that the characters are real and that out-of-universe actions affect them. The characters in Undertale are just lines of code, and yet the story implies that reseting the game will bring existential harm upon them. Flowey's monologue at the end of Pacifist implies that the characters in Undertale will continue to live full lives after the events of the game. Toby wants you to become attached to his fictional reality and to care about it deeply.

Same goes for Deltarune. The game shows through how the player treats the darkners that showing care towards fictional characters provides a more fulfilling experience. Castle Town grows with the care the player shows fiction and the game punishes you for being mean to them by providing you less in Castle Town and there being tons of dialogue jabbing at the player for being mean. For example the King saying "You left them. I have nothing more to say to you." Blue Rudin saying telling you that you don't care about the town. Tenna dying and Susie saying "maybe we should have been nicer." Ralsei's entire arc so far has related back to this theme that it's good to treat fictional characters as being with their own value and that it's bad to treat them poorly.

In No Mercy in Undertale the player is called out for treating the game like an experience. Mere content that can be discarded when they're finished with it. Chara deletes the world at the end because at the end of No Mercy the player is finished with it. You have seen all it has to offer and optimized a run to perfection, you can stop playing, since clearly you don't care about the world beyond that. If you restore the game you sell your soul, now becoming a souless being like Flowey, because like Flowey you are stubbornly refusing to move on from a world you've already exhausted. No Mercy argues that it's bad to treat a fictional world as mere content to consume as it causes the fiction to become meaningless and you are worse off for it.

The Weird Route is similar, but relates to Deltarune's expanded scope as a reflection on fiction in general rather than just video-games. In The Weird Route the player strips Noelle of her agency and tries to force her into a stock archetype, the girl side-kick love-interest. You implant a growing soul inside her which puts her in a trance where she'll do whatever the player wants. You are hollowing her out and turning her into a vessel.

The explicitly romantic nature of this confused me until I realized what it parallels. I think Toby is criticizing fan-works here in contrast to the praise Gerson levels on them. Gerson explains that the prophecy has been re-interpreted over and over again providing the power of hope which can change the ending of a seemingly tragic and restrictive tale. That Susie can make the ending what she wishes it to be because writing is never fixed. This is framed as positive, and yet in The Weird Route we see the same dynamic in a different light. The Player has the power to change the outcome and Ralsei is terrified of it, mentioning that he's scared what the player will cause will be worse than the original prophecy. Ralsei is shown in the normal route to want to change the prophecy too with his monologue about how he thought maybe the ending would change if we were nice enough. Yet, in The Weird Route every change he notices shocks and scares him, including small things like skipping Susie's sections. What this shows is that even though there is hope in the ability to change the prophecy, that power can easily be used poorly.

given the old game look of the whole thing its easy to imagine that the 'RAM' part stands for Random Access Memory, as for the E i cant be so sure.

deltarune as a whole has a nag for talking about the past and has really been focusing on kris' coping with whatever happened. using the egg rooms its safe to assume they have been pressing their memories of the event or forgot them completely

Random Access MEMORY has a whole different meaning in this context, but then again im still missing the E in ERAM, which could be anything really, and maks it not hold much water

but looking at this in the most literal sense, whatever ERAM is, it might be going thru kris' memories and bringing back to the surface those they chose to abandon

Interesting idea!

I will say Eram likely is Mare backwards given it's also referred to as Nightmare in the game files. Which could reference the fact it proceeds The Knight or hint at something deeper. So I'm thinking the RAM connection is a coincidence.

That said I do like your idea that Eram might be a darkner with power over memory rather than a being specifically familiar with Kris. It fits with a theory I have about how darkness works in general.

I noticed a connection between all the strongest darkners in Deltarune, being that all of them have a connection to things lightners don't want to think about. Titans are the fear of the dark, The Knight evokes and recreates Dess's disappearance, Ralsei seems designed to make Kris insecure, The Forgotten Man tries to remind Kris of their trauma, and Eram calls Kris's worst traits out.

Dark Worlds are also mentioned to generally reflect the will of their creators and often have ideas taken from the lightners visiting them. Ralsei also mentions that dark worlds are just the light world viewed through another lens.

It makes me think that darkness has this innate ability to reflect what it put into it. Which becomes horrifying when it starts to reflect the worst aspects of the light world and magnifies that which lightners do not want to think about.

So I think it's very possible Eram is a darkner powerful enough to have the ability to reflect on the worst traits of the lightners its exposed to. That by Kris playing a game within the dark world and therefore going more fictional than fiction it exposed their whole mind to be reflected on by darkness, allowing Eram in.

We have this mysterious darkner who was never alluded to previously or since who shows up in the game within a game world and seems to understand Kris's mind better than anybody else and proceeds to mock them while alluding to having watched the entirety of the weird route. It apparently stole the shadow mantle from Seam and has the ability to cross between barriers of fiction. It has no clear name and can summon IMAGE_FRIEND which is another entire mystery.

I AM SO CURIOUS, WHAT IS ERAM?????