wizard of problem town

-Asriel is already here. The weird route establishes that at least for the duration of our playthrough the town is a locked room.* (You need to resort to speedrunning strats to break out of it.) He's in this game - it would be insane if he wasn't - and that means he's currently within its boundaries, hiding.

-The Asriel from Undertale who turned the world into an eternal nightmare loop just to keep playing with Chara is not going to take the death/disappearance of his girlfriend lying down. Chapter 5 ramps up the references to Undertale to remind us of this.

-I think it makes a lot more sense for Asriel to be the voice on the phone with Kris than for it to be Carol, both logistically and in terms of tone. It's a much stronger baseline motivation for Kris to go along with the conspiracy and hide things from their friends if it's their brother enforcing the promise.

-Themes do not flap around loose in this game. Puppets keep coming up. Mind/body duality keeps coming up. The effect mind/body duality has on gender and attraction and identity keeps coming up. This is about Kris but it's not just about Kris. It should be obvious that Ralsei is in some way connected to Asriel - I'm leaning toward their being a part of Asriel that broke off when the disaster happened, at this point - and I don't think Ralsei's gender feelings in Ch 5 are irrelevant to the larger plot, because so little is. Inhabiting a girl's body is doing something to/awakening something in Asriel and if I'm correct about this it's going to be fascinating to watch the narrative try to handle it in a way that isn't transphobic.

-This gives us a Doyleian reason for the encounter with Gerson's statue in Chapter 4. We know that under some circumstances the remains of monsters can become nightmare versions of themselves in dark worlds. The Knight has Dess' bat initially but it transforms into a sword - a baroque, decorative sword as it appears in their bullet patterns, which fits UT Asriel's design sensibility far better than it does Dess' cool teen vibe. The knight has an eye in their chest where Kris has a heart.

-On the topic of Asriel's aesthetics, which we know carry over into Deltarune from our morning forays through his things, I have been thinking for a while that the Chapter 4 dark world that the Knight created does not jibe with what we know about Dess and her vibe - all the little cups climbing impossible heights to rescue fair maidens, etc. The combination of high-flown, slightly cringe philosophy and white knight romance on display feels a lot more like the nerd we are led to believe Asriel is than the punk Dess is meant to be.

-Last but not least, Illusion of Gaia, which is now maybe the most heavily-referenced bit of media in a reference-heavy game, ends with the main characters - the boy and the girl - fusing bodies, turning into a being called Shadow which fires phoenixes from its slashy arm in its battle against death.

Final thing I'll say on the subject is that there has been foreshadowing of something nasty and broken in Asriel's relationship with Kris from the get-go (Ralsei's attempts to flirt with Kris being a big signpost there) and I'm interested to see how that shakes out.

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Chapter 5 is once again really good, the text is again complex enough to reward close reading while still being entertaining and full of jokes, the gameplay is significantly more fun than it's ever been, it's all beautiful to look at and listen to, etc. If Toby completely fumbles the last two chapters we will still be at masterpiece level overall. My personal favorite bit of Ch. 5 is how the flower kids all feel like someone's OC - or, more precisely, how they're so stylistically varied that they feel like a bunch of different people's OCs - and how you can buy fanfic interactions between them with in-game currency. Collectively they constitute a big salute to the game's forebears, collaborators, and audience. Some of the specific shoutouts I noticed:

-Aqua looks a lot like the little ghost girl from Baman Piderman (smallbu studios, animators on ch 3 and 4)

-Seth is Seth from Illusion of Gaia (they're Morris in Japanese, which is also what the character was named in the JP version of IoG), but is also Jade Harley wearing Derse pajamas

-Green looks like a Splendidland design (ch 2 concept designer)

-Orange, I don't know. (I did enjoy the Ratatouille joke as yet another iteration of puppet theming.)Yellow, besides being a nod to Woody theory, absolutely scratches something in the back of my brain but I cannot put my finger on it. His squareness reminds me of Everhood in a way that is not at all supportable.

-Blue is incredibly Steven Universe, in a way which is both loving and slightly nasty. All the flowers are abused/neglected kid archetypes, and Blue is the mediator, which (along with the occasionally nausea-inducing tweeness of some of the paid-for interactions) is absolutely a gentle critique of that show and its messaging.

If you can think of any shout-outs I'm missing here, let me know!

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Other notes - I'm interested in how themes of suicidality are being handled here. (Again, no themes flap around loose in this game, and Yellow's comical attempts to off himself are a signpost.) Kris ending up with a package of poison seeds at the end of Ch 5 is particularly alarming if you're playing the aborted weird route, but even normal route Kris is not, I would say, a hundred percent trustworthy re: self harm. Noelle's attempt to leave the game in the weird route is, of course, heavily coded as a suicide, and is played scary and tragic, but it still carries the excitement of transgression and escape about it, which is nuanced, for a piece of media with a huge teenage audience. Suicide and suicidality have been underexplored themes in Toby's work since Undertale (Why did you go to the mountain nobody comes back from, Frisk?) and I think we're going to be dealing with it more explicitly here.

Finally - as a Krusie partisan I enjoyed the way that this chapter was designed to torture me specifically. One of the very very loudest themes the game keeps coming back to is that you can't change the way people feel about you using game mechanics, and this has always been an important lesson for lovelorn nerds, but man. Man. There's a part of me that thinks that we're steering into a throuple endgame, but a larger, more sensible part of me looks at the pizzapants fiasco and thinks that it's going to be very hard for Susie to forgive Kris once the truth comes out. It is very clear in this world that you don't get the girl by winning the game, no matter who the girl is. Questions remain about the game outside the game.

The only note I can think to end this on: as someone who grew up fascinated by Illusion of Gaia and convinced that nobody else on earth cared about it, watching Toby's dream unfold has been a complete mindfuck and I can't possibly be normal about it. If you're still reading, thanks for indulging me.