Rabbit Cube

You've escaped containment once again

"Hah! Sounds like some lazy emptor isn't happy about the prospect of a million more caveats!"

"Hah! Sounds like some lazy emptor isn't happy about the prospect of a million more caveats!"

the main issue is that while the head priest was away for the summer, they'd hired a House Manager (i.e. "guy whose job it is to draft the floorplan whenever it resets") who fibbed on his resume and isn't actually an initiate, and has been unknowingly drafting it "wrong"/sacrilegiously, thereby offending the building (or the god?) and provoking it to do horror movie shit

2. When the demons speak to each other, they are acting

And sure, it has uncomfortable and direct links to real life fascist thought, but at least it's done in a way that will make most of the conflicts of the show incredibly boring and pointless and that make you think the writers don't pay attention to their own characters.

Like, if people had reacted to it like they react to Goblin Slayer that's one thing, but people acted like it was a good show for so long!

USAmerican culture fuckin hates folks with disabilities and their families but its like a high vis jacket disguise if you look like you are a medical professional. The reaction goes from "oh god theres a disabled child or adult, and their stupid family that also sucks" to "wow thank goodness someone is taking care of this obvious problem"

And to Ralsei’s original naïve ideas of ‘how to be a friend’. Them thinking it’s a simple matter of always ‘being nice’ - paralleling ‘Relationship Mechanics’ in games that are mostly about choosing the friendliest and most placating options, and that's really all you need to 'max out' your relationship with whoever.

Only for them to realize that it’s more complicated than this as they grow closer to Susie, someone who absolutely is not the person who chooses only the ‘nice’ options all the time, and realize that they love her for it. But also at the same time, their sweet and passive demeanor seems to have pretty much failed to endear them to Kris, despite their best efforts.

That relationship only progresses when Ralsei stops trying so hard to be Lovable….

And then also Our Choices Don’t Matter meaning that there’s no Choice a Player can make that can meaningfully change Kris’s most important relationships. These relationships also don’t depend on simply picking ‘positive’ options (because if one likes Kris, that also goes hand-in-hand with liking some amount emotionally detached teasing and pranks). AND the most important moments of relationship development happen of Kris’s own volition, and they will rebel against words that are either too cruel or too sappy to their own taste. Which in previous Chapters was mostly a positive, hopeful thing. No matter our influence, Kris’s friends will always be Kris’s friends first and foremost. We don’t have enough power to ruin their most important relationships or to make their friends love them for something that they’re not.

But in this Chapter, there’s a new melancholy wrinkle added to it. Through the whole Festival Sequence, you’re presented with a bunch of choices that under standard ‘Game Logic’ might be expected to influence the relationships between Kris, Susie and Noelle - but in true Deltarune fashion, regardless of your choices, Susie and Noelle always start their romance at the end of it. But while this could be a heartwarming story about Cute Teenaged Lesbian Love triumphing over a manipulative Amoral Time God… the whole situation also makes it very clear that even if Kris was able to make choices freely, there’s nothing they could choose that would make Susie love them either. No matter how close they and Susie get, she just doesn’t seem to be attracted to them that way.

You can also add to it the way the Flowery Final Boss plays on the ‘Power of Friendship’ bit that’s generally expected at the end of a Pacifist Run…

Where Flowery has his own Recruits that instead seem to team-up with Flowery and against you, regardless of your choices. Because the cute little ACTs you did to Recruit them were nice and all, but were they really enough to make them truly love you more than they already loved Flowery and the other Flowers? More then they loved their Dark World?

And then there’s Flowery’s whole thing. Like in many other aspects of their characters, he and Ralsei are two sides of the same coin. If Pre-Character-Development Ralsei is like someone who tries to please and befriend everyone in an RPG, Flowery is someone trying to powergame his way through a dating sim. His (and the other Flowers) constant showering of Asgore with admiration, gifts and ideal hang-outs/dates that are all just perfect for him are partly just trying to repay Asgore for the kindness he’s given them and making him happy… and also to try and make Asgore choose Flower Kingdom and his Flower Family over Hometown and his Light World Family.

As much as Flowery teases Ralsei over their jealousy of him, his behavior often reveals that he’s jealous of Kris, for being part of that family that has, from his perspective, have given Asgore nothing but grief, and yet he still seems to love more than the Flowers. Kris is a living demonstration of how his gifts and dedication to Asgore is secretly just as ‘useless’ as his fake made-up overpowered stats. Flowery is also well aware that Kris is the one that opened the Fountain in the first place, and that they seem to have some sort of hidden agenda that’s not beneficial to their dad, and Flowery still feels like Asgore will always choose them over him.

And, well, the resolution to the Flower Kingdom arc is a mixture of that (especially considering how much he was motivated into exploring the Dark Worlds out of a belief that it will magically make his family life ‘go back to normal’…. Literally pushing the Flowers away for the sake of that goal...)

But also, it’s kind of a matter that Asgore does absolutely love the Flowers, just not in the way they wanted to. The Flowers wanted Asgore to love being around them so much, he’d choose their fantasy even if it means their deaths, but Asgore loved the Flowers so much that he wanted them to live.

And in way, that’s also kind of a mirror to Kris’ situation with Susie. She definitely loves Kris, they just feel like she’d never love them the way they’d want her to.

And then, the way Pink interacts with the whole Dating Sim Pastiches adds in some wrinkles of important nuance. She’s the one notable occasion (well, outside of the other even bigger exception we’d get to in a moment) where the Gamification of Relationships is actually useful, both for the Player to progress and beat the Fight and for Pink’s Body and Ghost to solve their relationship issues. In a way, it’s kinda like saying “Well, of course, just because you can’t make anyone love you, that doesn’t mean Choices don’t matter at all in relationships, obviously. Making Choices of consideration and healthy communication is important.”

And even then, part of the resolution is Pink’s Ghost accepting her Body’s needs even if it means she won’t necessarily have her all for herself. She there’s still there’s this undercurrent of accepting that you can’t make people love you the way you want them too.

But, of course, the biggest and obvious exception of the concept of ‘You can’t make someone love you’ is, well, the same as what seems to be the biggest exception to the concept of ‘Your choices don’t matter’, and that’s the Weird Route, of course.

The Weird Route is the one exception to the idea that we and our choices can’t have a meaningful affect on Kris’ relationships, and it very intentionally uses a lot of the Tropes and language of, like, going on a Romance Route with a character in a Video Game, complete with a supposed ‘climax’ when said NPC decides to invite you to the big romantic Festival, and it also uses every storytelling tool in its disposal to showcase how it’s utterly creepy and manipulative and wrong.

It’s adding to the point of ‘you can’t make people love you’ with ‘also, even if you can make people love you, you probably fucking shouldn’t”.

But I suppose, in many ways it is still a case of one not being able to control how people love them…

One of the first lines in Spamton's introductory monologue, in which he's projecting onto Kris, is "All your friends, abandoned you for the slime you are?". He insults himself and frames the abandonment as the result of something just being wrong with him that made him unworthy of care. Yes, he's (rightfully!) angry at those he considered his friends for abandoning him (the Addisons and Swatch are assholes for doing that, and it hurt him both emotionally and materially); he's also angry at Tenna, who he thought understood and adored him, but seemingly ended up throwing him away just like everyone else. But he ultimately believes that it was his own fault, somehow. That he wasn't good enough. That he's unlovable. That no matter how much he loves other people and how much he gives them, he will never be good enough and will always end up being thrown away. And that this is more because of his own innate unworthiness than because of a flaw in those other people.

On the Weird Route, in his battle monologue, he's angry at Kris for trying to seal the Dark Fountain, which he perceives as a betrayal after he had given them the Thorn Ring to enable them to do what they wanted. But he's ultimately angry at himself. He was "too honest, too trusting" and "should have known [they] would have used [his] ring for evil... oh, right. that's why [he] sold it to [them]". He's angry at himself for naively believing that Kris would let him keep his current position, which is already less than what he had hoped NEO would give him (he's more powerful now, but still stuck in the Dark World). Why would they care about him? They just went around freezing everyone in the city, and all those people are seen as having more worth than him, so why would they be any kinder to him? Of course they wouldn't, and he thinks he's stupid and naive for ever believing otherwise.

Through projecting onto Kris, he also reveals that he's angry at himself for choosing to trust Tenna and sign the contract ("you lost it when you tried to see too far..."), thus blaming himself for his current situation, and he's resentful of himself for ever hoping anyone would help him out of it ("you make me sick! muttering your lost friends' names at the bottom of a dumpster! no one's gonna help you!!!").

Now, as for Tenna, anytime he says something is not his fault, it's a weak attempt at denial - he does actually believe it to be his fault. He blames himself for the Dreemurrs no longer watching TV and thus planning to throw him away; their loss of interest in the TV is outside of his control, in the Light World the TV is just an object with no autonomy that is completely at its owners' mercy, but he blames himself and believes he wasn't good enough, and this is why they're throwing him away. He was trying to become useful again, believing that to be the only way to justify his continued survival, because he doesn't believe he has worth outside of his usefulness; he never brought up his dream of co-hosting and starting a family with Spamton. In response to Ralsei telling him to accept being thrown away, he didn't challenge the idea that his worth is tied to his purpose, just tepidly tried to push back on the idea of accepting death. He even tried to lean on his usefulness to Lightners to justify why his Darkner employees should stick around, and when this didn't work, he had nothing else to say for himself other than beg them to come back and help him.

While he's angry at Spamton for running away and supposedly "ripping him off", he takes full responsibility for the contract, which was what caused Spamton's disappearance. He blames himself for something terrible happening to Spamton, believing he "made" Spamton sign the contract (and then failed to help him afterwards); in truth, Spamton signed willingly (he wanted to sign it), but Tenna just can't bring himself to blame Spamton for his own doom. He believes he ruined Spamton's life, if not ending it entirely, and killed his own dream of lifelong partnership with Spamton in the process. Look at the shattered mirror, but untouched posters in the Z-Rank room; he couldn't stand to look at his own reflection. His anger at Spamton is an expression of grief, irrational anger towards a missing or dead loved one for "leaving" him, and his claims about Spamton "ripping him off" are denial that Spamton went missing, because believing he was tricked and left behind is slightly less painful than believing he doomed someone who loved him. As of the Chapter 5 cutscene, he has even dropped the "ripping off" claim; the one thing he's truly upset about is Spamton being gone.

One year ago today I created this miniature Indiana Jones photo using real lighting, figures and miniature sets