When did you start being yourself?

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.

I'd individually render the poses to get that early 3D shine ✨ Here's some of them at their original resolutions! I would work from text descriptions from Toby, and sometimes there'd be a Paint sketch to help out. Gigi drew the concept that I modeled from and some poses too!

I had a lot of fun pushing myself to match the dynamic poses Toby had in mind for Tenna - making him so crazy and expressive was something I couldn't have done without his prompts. He'd draw the faces on afterward too, which really brought Tenna to life!

(lots more after the Read More cut...!)

Deltarune Fun Fact:

+ bonus