❄️ Receives pain to become stronger. ❄️

The Ferris Wheel

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The darkness – its unformed creative potential, for good and for ill, reflecting our fear and our love, and notice how many times it's identified with the ocean! – freezes, and becomes a mirror of still water: a prophecy. No longer a manipulable medium, but a single way things must be, unbreakable.

Imagination, storytelling, freezes, and becomes nostalgia. A story, still, a story we love, but a story we retreat to, too, when fear of the unknown becomes too much. A circle of light, a defined and bounded Known, inescapable; a set of JRPG archetypes, Hero and Childhood Friend and Dragon in their appointed positions, defying them at their peril; a small suburban town where everyone knows each other, and a mandatory girl-next-door romance, and marriage. Father Alvin's retread sermons, which he refuses to change because he'd be dirtying Gerson's legacy; Asgore's fixation on a marriage and family he can't possibly repair any longer.

The Weird Route is on some level about the denial of the possibility of writing something better than Undertale, or Earthbound, or Mother 3. You retreat to a relationship with the girl next door, the girl who in another story would be the one you're Supposed to like, instead of the bully with something more to her. The nostalgic JRPG that made you feel something when you were a kid is still there. Why deviate from it? There's a single story there, a mirror of still water, an inevitable ending, and you gravitate towards it because you know how it ends and because it made you happy.

all there in the manual