#dr c3

Playing DR chapter 3 again- basically asked friends during C3 "Oh I didn't miss out on anything by just messing up S rank did I?" and they said no- only to find out oh, I can't continue the game thingy after board 2 S rank or whatever cuz I didn't do the first game bit, which annoyed me and I didn't continue to C4 and planned to redo C3 at some point.

so it's been a bit but now I have a tumblr account I actually post to, and boy do I have thoughts! (which I can't share to friends cuz im playing it again without telling anyone out of spite after all the questions I've received about if I've played chapter 4 yet) so it's time to share!!!

Basically what prompted me to make this post was seeing the first game session and going back and- wow I never really thought too deeply about it, found it interesting that Kris might enjoy taking a darker route in games- but also that might just be our projection, but it's interesting that we're forced into violence in that scenario- honestly it's really interesting. Like, it made me think about "yeah the game is trying to force us to do this... but it isn't..." we can just close the game, we can just stop playing. It's really interesting in relation to Kris' agency, I wonder if this is the main takeaway here? "Well I gotta do it" like playing the game as it's intended is necessary.

Even if you're playing in-character as much as you want, setting aside ideas of internality and you don't know what they'd truly want and the fact even if you are doing what they want, it's you doing it, you're in power of their own life even if you are doing what they want. Setting aside all of that, this really makes me think about how by playing a game, you are forcing them to not play by you, but played by you through the game. No matter what you choose, they are restricted to the rules of the game. If we take the little game as the microcosm/metaphor for our control over Kris that it seems rather overtly to be implying, if Kris didn't want to kill those monsters their it's not because of us choosing that they must die that they do, it is because we are "playing", by accepting the rules of play, we put those same rules on Kris.

All of this is just a side tangent I has nestling in my brain while I was playing, the actual thing I wanted to bring up is- it sounds like Kris may've had issues expressing freedom in games in the past via a certain protective mother.

The Dark World is meant to be a reflection of the real world and ideas within it. The fact the Green Room has a game system set up like this doesn't read to me as another extension of representing our relationship to Kris, but rather one of Kris' younger days. I'm sure many people here have experienced parents being restrictive on how you play games when you were much younger, and I can definitely see this being a possibility for a mother as protective as Toriel.

There's also this, where the controllers and systems are all "locked up dentist-office-style", which is also weird to me. could play more into this but honestly I'm unsure fully what to make of this.