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ch5 weird route ferris wheel

❤️ (Grab her/do not below)

ok. i'm back to yapping about metanarrative of deltarune guys strap in

noelle's character trajectory in chapter 5's weird route felt so much like that of a secret boss. let me just start off with that. it felt so much like what we've seen from jevil and spamton especially, where the weight of the nature of their existence drove them to insanity, and to actions that ultimately led to their downfall. but it's just generally a throughline between all the secret bosses that their arcs concern attaining freedom or challenging the narrative in some way.

noelle's breakdown feels like one of a person trapped in a daily tedium that feels limiting, yes. but i find it more interesting and poignant to read it as one of a character slotted into a very specific role, one they've grown aware and tired of. noelle's theme is literally called "girl next door". she's The Neighbor in the play that is deltarune, the one that's centering kris. she's The Healer Mage Girl in the game played out by the prophecy. she sings in the church choir, she lends you pencils and she has a sick dad and a strict mom. as far as archetypes go, she's not "supposed" to be mean, show assertiveness, or like creepy things. and no one knows this about her, that she wants to do all this. well. mostly no one.

considering this piece of dialogue, it is somewhat interesting to me how the weird route centers the two weird kids, ones who don't fit the tale's mold. i don't really mean kris being weird in-character here, by the by. they're just. weird, narratively. they're not the vessel we made. and the player surely didn't expect the character they're controlling to be literally controlled, having their own agenda and actively opposing their actions. they're very atypical in this way. just what does the "weird" in "weird route" imply, exactly?

anyhow. noelle's breakdown is one of the rebellion against the script of the game. much like the secret bosses, and just the concept of the prophecy in general, her arc enters a conversation with the prescriptivism of the game's storyline, of "this is who you are. you're just a construct. you're supposed to be this thing specifically, in order to fulfil your function in the story." and, since kris, acting unlike themselves, is the living proof for noelle that it doesn't have to work this way, she sees the line to break free, by any means necessary. even if those means require using her childhood friend for it by dragging them into a lake to drown, just like the player used her to get onto this route at all.

there is some sort of tangent here i'm struggling to not indulge too much about the connection between glass and water in the game. shadow crystals are glass in the light world, ones you can look through to see different things. much like you can see things through your screen. it is not baseless to consider those pieces of glass, given to characters that break off from the story, as fragments of screens - deltarune is already weird with its diegesis this way. we do find some glass shards beside water. and water also is known to make devices malfunction or break. sort of curious noelle uses the depths of the lake to break away from this fully digital story by literally going out of bounds.

this is certainly A Choice because well. literally what does lan wangji have to resent wei wuxian for. apart from being kind of a dick about lan wangji's love confession right after wei wuxian's shijie fucking died. come on man.

Bolaire wearing anyone else:

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