breaking free from your own self — yap about noelle (deltarune) and nikolai (bsd)
i think something that has always fascinated me is the idea that we cannot escape who we are. if i were to escape being me, i would cease to be me. humans cannot imagine a better fate for themselves than the inevitability of death because we only know a reality in which things die. no afterlife myth really satisfies me in the end when i think about how it would actually work. we argue about concepts and abstractions we invented, wondering whether there is such a thing as objective reality.
spoilers for deltarune's chapter 5 weird route and for bsd (season 4 in the anime and volume 14 in the manga)
[ID: Pictures of a copy of the manga Bungo Stray Dogs volume 14. Nikolai, a man dressed in a jester or magician-like way, explains to a government official:
Nikolai says: i'm so envious of you. a bird born in a cage never realizes it's a prisoner. it doesn't even know it's not free. it just dies happily in its cage.
the other man says: what… are you saying?
Nikolai says: can't see it, can you? the cage is here... it's your skull. there's no chance of escape...... not from this warm, humid hellscape.
Mysterious person writing on a piece of paper says: "not from this warm, humid hellscape" ...he said. /End ID.]
[ID: More BSD manga, this time it's volume 18. Sigma, a man with long two-color hair, is on the ground and bloodied, talking to Nikolai.
sigma says: gogol... you're a crazy, anything-goes skill user. i'm sure you know how to fake your own death well enough. that's not what surprised me. in this plan …you were supposed to really die. hiding the true culprit would give the agency no choice but to flee. i heard you agreed to that.
nikolai says: yes. you're right. and i was ready to die… …to prove it was truly my own free will. i didn't expect anyone to understand that motive… …and nobody ever did…
...except …for dostoy. he told me — "that's wonderful. you're fighting against god… in order to lose sight of yourself." that moved me. he saw the essence of it. dostoy's my only friend… the only one who gets me. that's what i thought. then i noticed.
if i kill that friend… …we'll be free from the brainwashing we call emotions. we can prove that we're truly free as a bird! /End ID.]
[ID: Stitched together screenshots of Noelle Holiday from Deltarune, an anthropomorphic deer girl, giving her monologue at the lake in Chapter 5's Weird/Snowgrave route. She says the following: *That's why I want… to do something crazy. *That's why I want… to break free. *But, I can't. I couldn't. *Because I'm just Noelle. *A Noelle that has to do Noelle things. *Just like Kris has to do Kris things… *But Kris… you changed. *Kris, YOU actually changed! *You found out how to stop being Kris! *And no one else has noticed… *Because they don't want to! *They don't want to see how INTERESTING you are now! *They'll just keep marching down the same path… *Without even thinking where it goes! /End ID.]
both of these characters are trying to break free of being theirself through weird suicide-not-suicide.
i analyzed the lake scene in my analysis on how noelle (deltarune), liza (TBK) and harumi (ninjago) have a similar "only being able to conceptualize their own destruction, either as a harsh violent event of their own agency or as a slow and cruel crushing of them inside the roles they were assigned" but this is a slightly different angle here.
both noelle and nikolai want to become something they are not, for the sake of becoming something they are not. they conceptualize their very self as a prison, and i've always found that idea fascinating.
noelle's idea of selfhood seems to be associated with actions. noelle does noelle things. nikolai's is more with the urges to do those things. both of these have the built-in problem, that by definition, noelle cannot do not-noelle things and nikolai can't have not-nikolai urges, because noelle things are the things that noelle does, and nikolai urges are the urges that nikolai has. as soon as noelle does a not-noelle thing, it becomes a noelle thing, and as soon as nikolai wants to act against not-nikolai urges, that in in of itself is a nikolai urge, because nikolai had it.
and although with noelle, her "noelle does noelle things" and idea of breaking free partly comes from social expectations, the way she's learned to behave, but when she says "you figured out how to stop being kris", she is referring to events where kris truly does do things that kris would not do, because someone else is guiding their decisions.
i wouldn't say it's fair to say she's just saying "kris figured out how to stop being what was expected of them. they act different now." no. she's drawn in by the fact that there is something weird about them, she recognizes a foreign presence (the soul, which tells her to "proceed"), as in the way deltarune associates the word weird with breaking the game-reality.
kris, who figured out how to stop being kris, is something that could not exist within the limitations of the normal world. it's some gaster bullshit. it's weird.
transcending the limits of reality. the idea that humanity is built a certain way with inherent "contradictions". fascinating but not something i would want to argue with someone about because it just becomes word games and talking in circles in the end, makes for great stories though. everything is an abstraction, which is another limit of humanity.
(this is also kinda why i love dottore and pantalone's dialogue about death in that one irminsul quest at the end of nod krai/sumeru. i will not elaborate because this isn't about that. i love that dialogue for a lot of reasons.)
