“i have to listen to my body’s needs” secret boss fight written by person who has chronic and disabling wrist pain which has fundamentally changed his relationship to his hobbies and his job <- i care it as someone who has also had chronic pain in my wrist/hand for 5 years
another thing i tend to think about with this. i also just think in chapter 5 there's a theme of care and dependency. the flowers have extreme guilt over being taken care of by asgore. flowery conceptualizes himself as weak and useless. in the dark world, his fantasy, he tries to return the care given to him to asgore to "make up for" asgore taking care of him when he should've died decades ago. it's an extreme example, but i also resonate with his feeling.
when your body or mind puts you in a situation where your reliance on other people becomes really explicit, you're trained by the world to see that as shameful or to see yourself as deficient. your efforts to ignore your needs just to avoid "being a burden," will leave you worse off. you punish yourself because of deeply internalized ableism.
regardless, even by virtue of being a living thing on this planet, you are already designed to need others. you have to listen to your body's needs even against a society that teaches you you shouldn't. you have to be okay with the fact that you have needs. sometimes your needs are different or are greater than the person next to you, and all you can do is listen to your body and turn to others when you need them. you're still a person when you need people.
when toby says this:
it's interesting to me how much he uses the language of deltarune to express this feeling. your hopes and dreams slipping away, and bitterness growing is literally the explanation we get for shadow crystals (and so wept the fallen star, making rivers with its tears. then, slowly, from the bitter water, something grew. it looked like glass). this is also the crushing feeling when you lose a sense of control when you're in pain, when you can't do things the way you want, the way you used to. but when you find yourself still able to fly, you do so because you've adapted. you've listened to your body. you've learned that listening to your body means changing the pace, letting yourself be cared for, letting yourself be helped.
as far as toby's said it, having to expand his team has made deltarune a better game. chapter 5 is so expansive because so many people helped to make it. Pink's fight has sprite work from guest artists, music with Camellia, bullets programmed by Toby's team. She is, to me, a love letter to Deltarune's development process as a whole and how it has shaped Toby, and a reflection of the kinds of thoughts Toby has shared with us about developing Deltarune alongside pain. I also think it's a beautiful follow-up to Gerson's themes of storytelling and authorship (letting go of "perfection" + accepting the contributions of others = both about rescinding control and embracing perseverance). Pink is also so much more than this, but I've been thinking about this a lot.
[IDs: Images 1 and 2: a screenshot from Pink's boss fight, showing her separating into ghost and body. Her body is kneeling down, looking hurt, while her ghost floats above and says "Why do you... why do you have to need someone else?" in the next image, she says "Why can't... it just be us?"
Image 3: text reading: "It would not be possible to make or release by myself," Fox writes. "Not only just in terms of sheer hours but also in terms of my physical condition. I still have wrist issues, which, while improved, prevent me from typing for an extended period of time. (I just use voice to text for everything). Also, it can be fun to work with other people and thinking of ideas together."
Image 4: pixelated text reading: Actually, this resonated with me. Because I've also had issues as well. Issues with one of my wrists. It stops you from drawing, from making music, from writing, from programming, basically from making a game.
There's times where it feels like your hopes and dreams are simply slipping away from you. That the things you wanted to achieve are floating away from you in the sky while you lie there, fallen in a crater, your wing torn off, never to grow back. Bitterness grows, and you feel like may never leave the ground again.
But
That's not true.
You can still fly. /End IDs]
[PT: letting go of "perfection" + accepting the contributions of others /End PT]
