Pun Addict

This was probably one of the most gut wrenching moments in the chapter for me it doesn’t even feel like flowery said this it just felt like toby turned to me through the screen and said it

There’s a lot of discussion now surrounding the recurring themes of escapism and moving on, and in particular I think I rly agree with moving on’ being a theme that is going to be a really big part of whatever the ending is. (I don’t think that escapism itself has a large part in the themes other than playing a part within ‘moving on’. Like you can choose to turn to escapism as a means of trying not to move on.)

I don’t have the amount of nostalgia for undertale like a lot of other fans do, I watched play throughs of it when younger and did consume the entire story so id call myself a fan but I don’t think I had the nostalgia hit me playing through chapter 5 like others did (I mean this in the sense of emotionally, not literally. Yes I picked up on the very literal parallels like the humans vs the flowers and flowey vs flowery lol)

But Im coming to undertstand that the chapter was like scientifically engineered to take the ending of undertale tp and warp it right in front of our eyes (beyond the obvious parallels). Flowery being fucking named FLOWERY at first made me think he was going to literally parallel flowey more but as I played it became obvious that wasnt the case, i think flowery like. Parallels undertale as a whole to an extent? I don’t think I know how to put it into words. It felt like we fought undertale/our memories of undertale itself in that final fight, in a way.

The flowers in general are such a strange cast of characters to think about. The dead humans in undertale were a mysterious and tragic group that we were never given the chance to learn much about, and that was probably on purpose. But they were given a chance to actually appear, to actually live in and through deltarune. One last adventure where we can even have fun with characters that were never meant to have actual characters.

The sheer amount of times the general theme of ‘remembering the past’ comes up in this chapter alone let alone previous chapters. Remembering the past but not letting it cloud your vision ahead of you, the major motif of the entire game being called ‘don’t forget’ because while you need to be able to move on what you can do is not forget. The way I went back to tobys post about the original piano rendition of sunset of seven suns, and the caption is him again talking about him having played this himself 10 years ago, reminiscing about it, then telling us that the version in the present is different and we shouldn’t be surprised. Man

Anyway I've been thinking more about the concept of "you can't go back" wrt chapter 5 and specifically Flowery because he is such a fascinating intersection of everything about this theme.

As the counterpart to Asriel/Flowey from UT, you can't help but have expectations of him as you play. I think most of us expected he would turn traitor at some point just like Flowey. Even at the last moment me and my friend were so sure the soul would rise up to seal the fountain and flowery would show his true colors and try to grab it... but. No.

Because, yes, he's this world's version of flowey- but as it turned out, he's also this world's version of pacifist Frisk. He is the one with the recruits that lend him power- he's the one who gets the super rainbow power from the doomed 'souls' to stand up to the one who would keep him and his friends from freedom. He's the one who is full of love and hope and dreams.

We can't go back to being Frisk in DR- that role is already taken.

And- possibly even worse to realize- it doesn't matter even if we could.

Because Flowery fails.

The ultimate power of Undertale- the power love and friendship and care and comradery... fail. Kris beats Flowery, and the Knight kills him.

Everything that made Frisk the hero of UT left Flowery as nothing but a flower of DR.

And this has been messing with me deeply because I- like I feel many of us have- was betting that something like this would come into play in the finale of DR like it did in UT. Yeah, okay, we were told our choices don't matter- but surely if we're kind to everyone like in UT we can have a good ending!

Surely if we just try hard enough! Surely if we explore wide enough! Surely if we get enough secrets! Surely our choices will matter in the end, just like in UT! But Flowery was given the power that saved everyone in UT and it just. Didn't work.

Because, no matter the similarities, Deltarune is not Undertale.

And while I'm a firm believer that something good comes from (and will ultimately come from) kind choices we can make in game- that things like Queen's joy and Lancer getting friends and Tenna being alive at all are worth it no matter how the story goes- I can't deny that I expected that these things would lead to a "good" ending because that's how it worked in Undertale!

And chapter 5 really forced me to realize that we can't go back to that.

We can't go back to Undertale.

I've also seen a lot of ppl in general bringing up frisk/flowery comparisons and I hadn't thought of that before (beyond me thinking that flowery kind of can represent undertale and its themes/ our memories of it as a whole) Though in retrospect like yeah he uses hopes and dreams and has recruits help him

Flowery is just neat to me because its like. Toby what do you mean you made a character that has references and connections to flowey/asriel, frisk, chara, rudy, and undertale as a whole. Is named FLOWERY. and is somehow wrapped up in a package that presents himself as an annoying anime man that says 'here i come san frandisco'. AND with all this in mind, flowery still is (within only deltarunes story, not thinking about undertale) a very solid character and 'antagonist' with understandable motivations and was there to build up ralseis character and conflicts. Like bro is doing 500 things at the same time and I dont get it and he's just played 100% genuinely DAMN YOU TOBY

Context is that ppl are talking about the random yellow pixel that can be seen on the knight during the clash with flowery, and it makes you think... one of the golden flower’s main characteristics in utdr are its seeds that stick onto you and won’t let go…

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them

are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

More on the health point:

"US Department of Labor proposes more than $1M fine following worker fatality at New Jersey vegetable processing facility"

Name the chains! At this point in the article it seems like contracting with prisons is the default for meat plants ☹

was it Hillary Clinton who lived in a mansion staffed by prison slaves? somebody please tell me which politician was called out

and meanwhile Susie is out here with biblical levels of greed wanting both Noelle and Kris all to herself /lh

kris doesn't face left automatically at any point in this scene in-game

in other words, the ARG email writer made it so they're purposefully set to face left here

set to face susie...

susie is the reason the weird route can't happen

susie is the reason both kris and noelle feel like they can live for a better future instead of dying in their deepest darkness

susie is the one who brings the background music back in kris's life

susie is the one who causes them to smile despite it all

susie is the singular last thing keeping kris back

but you only need to see her once