Land of Twangs and Buzzing

“Liar.”

Tired of normal kitchenware?

Well I've a thing that I must share.

It seems to be a normal fish,

that's destined for a fishy dish.

And yet, it hides a sharp surprise,

disgorging it before your eyes!

My latest, dearest Christmas wish:

The sharpest lad,

Are... are your organs covered in blood??? Since blood tends to flow thru the blood vessels, and if your body is healthy and all your blood vessels are imtact then your organs shouldn't be covered in blood, right? But just saying that feels wrong.

(On further reflection it's entirely possible that I was one of the fans who dragged them over it, and I was old enough to know better at the time, so I'll throw my apology on the pile just in case. Sorry! Anyway:)

Now that DR Chapter 3 is out we can take another look at why UT's moral universe is like that. A sentient camera guides us through Frisk's journey in one sentence: from the fridge to the sink to the stove, Undertale took place in the same house Kris is dreaming in, its underground dimly visible from the vast purple plains of the couch. With our newfound understanding of dark worlds and how they're made, we can conclude that Undertale is, canonically, a pretend game that a traumatized pre-teen made up with their older brother. It is a fix-it, as the UT Prime post postulates, but the target of the fix isn't Dragon Blazers: it's the life of one Kris Dreemurr, who created the half-archetypes in UT by attaching JRPG tropes to their real (and boy is that a loaded word) friends and family. The "I can save anyone" morality presented in UT is the perspective of a child, and of a child who isn't completely sure that they don't want to kill their dad.

We were primed to receive UT as a critique of video game violence because that was the topic du jour, with games like Spec Ops: The Line raising similarly adolescent questions about whether playing a military training simulator makes you a bad person. Something weirder was obviously going on in Undertale - my take at the time was that the very existence of the Genocide route pointed to something more complex than the standard read re: the game's moral system, and I stand by that - but we couldn't know how weird until we got a look at the story one layer higher in the continuum of truth and fantasy that is the UT/DR cosmology.

Undertale turns out to be Kris Deltarune working through a bunch of their anxieties. It's about the divorce of their parents, their alienation from their friends, their guilt over their (possibly genuine) culpability in the death of the neighbor kid who fell through the ice and drowned in the lake. (At least I think that's what happened, here in June of 2026.) Add to that their lingering feeling that they're not a real person, that they're not in control of their own life, and that there might be some other, realer version of themself out there who made all the right choices and ended up happy. Is it possible to do this reading without knowing that Deltarune exists? As the UT Prime post demonstrates - yeah, kind of! UT Asriel's chuuni powers and presentation tell us that this a story written from a child's perspective, and the way it presents violence and evil is freighted with a child's guilty fascination with transgression and with one's own capacity to do harm. UT has a secret scary route because kids love those. (Corporate art has noticed this and is now building multi-million dollar franchises around the idea.)

There are a bunch of fascinating things to dig into given this interpretation, but my favorite right now is this: all the major characters in Undertale are based on people Kris knew, except two. Kris invented Sans before they met in "real life." Can you imagine? The funny scary creepypasta man you made up with your brother lives here now, and he's dating your mom? Think about what's happening in Kris' head the moment you first see Sans Deltarune. The external scream of the nostalgic streamer echoed by the internal scream of a mentally ill teen as what remains of their ontological framework falls apart.

The punchline of Deltarune is that Kris is, in fact, a fictional character. DR is ultimately about trauma and unreality, and the thing about delusions is that they are self-evidently true within the framework of your subjectivity, your narrative - that's why you can't reason your way out of them. DR asks the question: what if there's something realer than you, the player? That's what all the religious symbolism is about, right, and why everyone talks like they're on drugs while they're in church? The derangement that comes from the incursion of a higher being into your sense of self, irrespective of whether it's "really happening" or not?

The horrible epistemological implications of believing that a person you invented might have some kind of consciousness - or to put it more succinctly, the question "what if my imaginary friend was real?" - has been a central theme in Toby's work dating back to the Halloween Hack. It's a question that Homestuck asked back in the day, it's a question that The Amazing Digital Circus is asking now. (It's a question I used to ask in my terrible teenage fiction. I have a core memory of an improv skit I saw at camp as a child where Winnie the Pooh learns that he's just a figment of Christopher Robin's imagination. The way the actor said "I don't want to be just a figment" has stayed with me ever since.) It's a silly, childish question, until it isn't - until you notice your parents believing in imaginary people and organizing their life around imaginary stories, until something in your life makes you wish you were imaginary too, until something breaks in your head and you don't remember how to be real anymore.

anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.

about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.

now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.

this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.

in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.

so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.

you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,

- act like you didn’t say anything wrong and gaslight them

- loudly and dramatically self-flagellate and threaten to kill yourself until the trans person reassures you that you don’t have to treat them with respect to be a good person

- roll your eyes and joke with the other cis people “ugh I’m so bad at this! Lol.” bond with everyone over relatable humor about how new and confusing this trans stuff is

- immediately accuse the trans person of something so they have to defend themselves and the misgendering appears like the “lesser” aggression or maybe retroactively justified to others

- talk about how hard you’re trying to humor accommodate them, rationalize why your circumstances are unique, and make a show of pleading with the trans person for mercy, as if they are a judge and the room is a jury and correcting you is equivalent to leveling a cruel punishment

- simply correct yourself and move on like you would do if they were cis