it really pisses me off when adults sit there and drill it into kids’ heads that their youth is fleeting and tell them things like “enjoy your childhood while it lasts because this is the best it’s gonna get”. why are you telling children that adulthood is the worst thing they can experience? seriously what the fuck is wrong with you, why are you trying to make them feel like growing up is a fate worse than death? trying to convince them their life is over before it even begins? i’m tired of that shit. because tell my why my 12 year old cousin told me when she turns 30 she’ll be so depressed she’s just gonna cry all the time. what the fuck. kids don’t need to hear that their already stressful and overwhelming lives are never going to get better, that the abuse and lack of autonomy they face is apparently the highlight of their lives. they need to hear about adults who are happy to be alive and happy to have made it to their age. they need to know that growing up rules, it’s a gift and life does not have to suck for them, that they have a future that’s worth sticking around for. this rhetoric is so damaging mentally and i’m about to start hitting the adults who parrot it. i’m sorry you hate your life but you don’t get to dump your issues on these kids. don’t piss me off and leave these babies alone!
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after seeing so many different responses the idea of transfem ralsei as of ch5, and how kris tends to be brought up as a comparison, i've kinda realized something. i think a lot of people misunderstand what this alludes to in terms of deltarune's story progression. if we assume that transfem ralsei is indeed the intended reading based on everything we've seen so far, then this is a slowly developing gender-realization-and-coming-out arc that's STILL going - and i think this is what gets lost on some people who argue against it. long as hell analysis incoming
i think kris and how their gender is portrayed is a good example for explaining this, but it's mainly bc of how different their cases are. kris is referred to exclusively with they/them pronouns since the beginning. this includes their family, friends, and literally everyone else they know. kris is also, importantly, not verbally gendered in any other way - not even as nonbinary! at least not so far. based on this and their ambiguous appearance, we HAVE to assume that this is how kris is supposed to be viewed. this is what the game's text supports and wants you to understand. and it only makes sense for this to be their own choice:
some monsters in the world of deltarune have nonbinary or otherwise ambiguous genders, but they seem to be a minority. in fact there's a LOT of details (especially in ch5!) implying that hometown upholds some pretty cisheteronormative standards despite their hospitality. while i don't think this is gonna come up as a plot point anytime soon, i DO think it's an intentional way of telling us that kris feels like an outcast, as with their humanity. but while kris may be seen as weird for being the only human in hometown, it doesn't seem like humans are rare or unheard of in this world, just wildly misunderstood in monster-dominant spaces (it's also often theorized that susie used to live in a human-dominant town, there's evidence to this but not much). THIS IS MORE OF AN ALLEGORY FOR RACE THOUGH.
my point is: if monster society has a perception of gender that's open-minded but still largely binary and encourages stereotypical gender roles, and if we assume human society is similar and just another normal demographic in this world (implied segregation aside), then i don't think kris is referred to with neutral pronouns and deliberately Not Gendered just because no one knows. it's GOTTA BE something they've chosen for themself, something they've had to express to the people they grew up with; AKA they've already come out. this is further supported by a lot of hints at them being raised as a boy initially (their wardrobe + emphasis on only getting to experiment with clothes in the dark world, the comically masculine body spray that they refuse to use, so much of their history with noelle, mancountry, etc). and while everyone seems to be accepting of this, they may not all fully understand/know what to "do" with it - which is a very common trans/nonbinary experience btw 💀 it definitely feels like another layer to their awkward family dynamic, like the dreemurrs just don't really know how to best support their queer child, and in an effort to avoid upsetting them a lot of things just kinda...... get glossed over.
and i'm bringing up all of this because, even if kris still doesn't feel like they're truly allowed to express themself, the game INTRODUCED US to kris as openly nonbinary and has since done nothing to convince us otherwise. this is not what's going on with ralsei.
ralsei is, before we even see their face, established as a boy. a prince. he/him pronouns only in every context. because the prophecy says so, and the prophecy was all they ever knew to begin with! they saw literally their whole existence as an inarguable law of the universe chosen FOR them. then over time, thanks to their friendship with kris and susie, they slowly start breaking out of their shell in various ways: revealing (ALL OF!) their face (hiding under 2 disguises at once is wild), making jokes, trying new things, expressing anger and negative opinions, indulging in their own desires, accepting that violence in self-defense is sometimes needed, trying to make sense of things that upset them..... and eventually, questioning the prophecy in favor of something better, even if it seems impossible, because the alternative would just hurt too much. questioning their own role in the story. even without the more blatant bits of gender discussion, and the fact that ralsei REALLY wants you to think they're cute and pretty while still getting all bashful and talking about it like it's more of an act/costume than anything, all of that other stuff on its own could easily read as a trans allegory.
and for a long time that WAS the general consensus for many in the fandom - that their journey of self-discovery and will to defy fate was enough for a transfem reading to make sense, even just as a headcanon. but ch5 has clearly done more than any other chapter so far to stress that gender IS a key element in ralsei's overall arc. and this arc isn't finished yet. and i do think it's relevant that the 2 instances of ralsei being referred to with they/them pronouns are what they are; 1) the description box, that always seems to have a greater understanding of the party's current status than anything else; and 2) asgore, who doesn't know anything about ralsei and can only guess, and only Thinks about them to himself, rather than talking to kris like he did with susie in that scene. so far, flowery is the only character who has VERBALLY implied that ralsei isn't a boy - to their face. in secret. and honestly? i DON'T think ralsei is gonna stop being referred to with he/him in the next chapter. at least not immediately. i acknowledge this as a sign of things to come, i just don't think ralsei themself, or the game, are ready to spell it out just yet. but that doesn't mean they're not thinking it.
ralsei has been pushed to extreme frustration and come to a lot of realizations this chapter, and they're still working through a lot. we don't really get to know how they're doing at the end since they ask to be left alone. while they were able to open up about a lot of things and be consoled in the previous chapter, ch5 ends on a much more.... uncomfortably tense note for everyone (UUGHHHH KRUSIELLE UOOGUGHUGHGHGHHHH). multiple storms are brewing.
so my question is: why aren't more people treating ralsei's current gender thoughts like any other part of the story that slowly, gradually evolves as it's being revealed? or rather, why is it CONTROVERSIAL to treat it as such?
in order to dissect a still-ongoing story like this, you have to take both past and current information into account, but also how the information is given to us, and whether or not there's a pattern to it. and we ARE going to do this, obviously, because it's such a big part of what makes UTDR special! analysis and predictions are half the fun! so why is ralsei different? why does it cause such a stir in so many people, including other trans people, if you claim that ralsei's current sense of self is only temporary? why is it controversial to talk about what their future self might be like, if it's a completely earnest prediction based on facts, and not "just" a headcanon? why do people seem to be more tolerant of the concept when it IS "just" a headcanon, than when the text genuinely seems to support it? why is this not more widely considered to be what the writing WANTS you to think?
there's a pretty simple answer to this of course, but i don't think it's what a lot of people want to hear.
There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.
Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but it’s a game that actually exists:
[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]
Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if you’ve played or enjoyed this game. It’s just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud.
The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesn’t. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like it’s above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. It’s so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something “problematic” that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive.
To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:
(What the fuck do they think an “explorer” is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)
Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, it’s ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldn’t just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.
The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)
The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be “the good guys.” All of the “problematic” aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them..
(Don’t worry guys there’s no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)
..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:
(Don’t worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this district’s points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)
There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novel’s worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just don’t have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the “radium girls” where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:
Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just “bad actors who hold terrible beliefs.” Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they don’t go anywhere either. They don’t belong to any social movements, they don’t get organized, they don’t push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals.
You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? They’re under assault.
That’s right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of… uh, “Otherwhere.” (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) That’s where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!
Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the “colonists.” With nukes chain lightning.
(That last sentence continues on “tens of thousands..” You get the picture.) So, whew, glad that’s over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:
You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldn’t want to hear its thoughts on Israel.
You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, “perform questionable acts in the name of the common good,” and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.
It’s actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaire’s society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.
The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. “Gay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!”
On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscura’s gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create “actual-play” shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, that’s more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because it’s not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. It’s intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.
It seems like the game really doesn’t want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.
However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscura’s approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Don’t have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Don’t have actors say foreign words they don’t know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Don’t show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."
We’d like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that “they don’t want to be disrespectful by playing it” because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - don’t buy or support their game!
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The infuriating part is that people apply the pop-psychology definition of "trauma-bond", but apply the actual psychology judgement of it, as in, "obviously bad, duh, everyone knows that".
The number of times I've been given shit for my relationships being "trauma-bonds" specifically cause I date fellow disordered people for the mutual understanding, is fucking astonishing.
[image description: flyer clarifying the meanings of various psychological terms, cut in two, which says "pop psychology" on the left and "actual psychology" on the right.
In pop psychology, "trauma bonding is when you're bonding with someone over shared trauma or similar past experiences." In actual psychology, "A trauma bond refers to the situation where someone develops strong feelings of sympathy, loyalty, dependance, and attachment towards their abuser."
In pop psychology, "Gaslighting is when someone lies to you, questions you, or disagrees with you over what happened." In actual psychology, "Gaslighting is an abuse tactic where you are manipulated to question your reality, memory, or sanity—not just a disagreement over what happened."
In pop psychology, "Being triggered means that something makes you uncomfortable or annoyed." In actual psychology, "A trigger is something that causes a sudden increase in symptoms—like flashbacks in PTSD or compulsions in OCD. Its not just a source of general discomfort."
In pop psychology, "Intrusive thoughts are random impulses you might want to act on; e.g. wanting to do something unexpected like dye your hair pink or eat cake for dinner." In actual psychology, "Intrusive thoughts and unwanted, involuntary thoughts that go against your real value and desires. You dont want to act on them, and them coming true would be your worst nightmare. They can be very prominent and distressing in disorders like OCD and PTSD."
quick heads up, it seems avid has also changed his name in spotify to Great Divide, so anyone who might have blocked him there will have to do so again, or his music will not be blocked to play for you since you blocked a different profile
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also looked through his posts and apparently he might be trying to also rebrand his music to "Great Divide" though his genius page is still under his original name
he also seems to be purposefully(?) making these match existing users and band(s) that go by similar names to make him harder to search, in the case of Delta Archive there are multiple channels with that name
and then great divide just brings up a bunch of other shit, mainly about tectonic plate movement or other songs/artists going by that name
I think he should shoot fireballs as he flies around once the babi dragon grows (idk it's name yet, i'm behind on streams)
Also my first attempt at drawing him!
I wanted to render him better but I probably wasn't gonna really and i feel left behind with everyone drawing him rn I'M HERE TOO I LOVE THE FLIGHT SO MUCH I LOVE DRAGONS AND I LOVE FIRE POWERED CHARACTERS !!
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