#human queen

a very stupid thing

i’ve been noodling away at these human!Deltarune designs in between midterms, and i think they turned out really well!

these are fully inspired by All roads lead to Rome by @tiedsoftspoken. you should read it. you should read it right now.

something that i ask myself a lot is if the “main idea” behind my au comes through; more than a love story, this is someone peeking through a peephole. we, as readers, peek inside the holiday’s mansion and see what’s going on. we see queen grieving, noelle coping, and sal… sal doing his own thing.

these three characters are all bound by the same thing; conditional love. i think families often tend to struggle with the same thing without noticing, and that’s because kids tend to inherit their parents’ fears, mistakes and whatnot. this family, as strange as it is, it’s no different, but let’s dive deeper into it, shall we?

sal, especially in SBLC, is the poster child of conditional love. will anthony still love me even if im not brave enough to say it yet? sal needs time and yet feels like he’s not allowed to ask for it. the fact that we know next to nothing about tenna is intentional; sal is so scared of being trusted by him that he’d rather keep him at distance. being honest with tenna, telling him “i need time, i value you and our relationship but i struggle with this and this and that” means that sal needs to trust both himself to actually work on himself to get where he wants, and anthony to respect his struggle and stay at his side.

sal doesn’t believe he’s worth all that trouble. he doesn’t even believe he’s worth loving anthony. he’s scared to love anthony because he still feels like a screw up.

the question isn’t “will tenna love me back?” but it’s “will tenna keep loving me even if i fuck things up again?”

queen’s whole relationship with carol was built on rules, or, to be fair, one big, important one; what they had didn’t matter. what they shared didn’t matter. if carol came knocking at her door in the middle of the night, seeking comfort, they were not speaking about it the next morning. queen was allowed to love her on the condition that she never spoke of it.

in the fics it’s left more ambiguous on purpose because queen doesn’t want to talk about it and even when she does, she’s ashamed, but since she can’t listen right now, let me get in the details; the timeline of the fics is, admittedly, a bit confusing, but the relationship between queen and carol basically spans across two years. they graduate from college and, after being roommates in a homoerotic friendship for years, they spend a night together, right on graduation day. after college they (basically the holidays and the dreemurrs + queen) all keep living in the city, and queen learns carol’s pregnant, and had been since before graduation. despite the very complicated feelings this gives her, she decides to still stick around and help. though, one could argue she helped a little too much because she and carol eventually end up developing a relationship that’s a 100% physical at first because that’s the only way they knew to communicate those feelings.

carol was a very closed off person. she would not speak of her feelings or even entertain someone speaking about theirs, but the thing between her and queen was so… so big, so confusing and overwhelming that she needed to let it all out. because they don’t talk, they act. when they find each other at a loss of words, they kiss. queen keeps staying at her side and she ends up being taking more and more the role of a partner more than a friend, even outside their physical relationship; she’s there for the pregnancy, she’s there when dess is born, she takes care of her and carol, she spoils them both rotten, not to mention that she’s still there physically too as soon as carol asks.

though, carol is scared of this because comphet from being raised in the 80’s by one of those conservative, well-off families that value their image above anything, so she runs. she protects her image. she suffocates her needs and her feelings. a year after dess’ birth, she marries rudy.

it makes sense, nobody ever suspects anything, and on the night of the wedding, queen vanishes.

it’s for the best, carol supposes. she never stopped thinking about her, though.

queen carries the scars of being a secret long after she distances herself from carol. she never has stable relationship, she vanishes after one night stands because that’s what’s she’s supposed to do, even after moving to hometown, even after living with sal and noelle, she still feels like she needs to earn their love. as kris says in chapter four “she’d kill a bear for you[noelle]”, and that’s because queen has learned that love is only possible if she completely annihilates herself for it. her arc here is learning to accept that sal and noelle don’t need her fighting bears for them. they love her anyway.

noelle is both deeply tied to queen and also the complete opposite. she panics upon learning about queen’s feeling for her mother because then she starts to ask herself if queen’s love for her is conditional. does she only love her because of her mother?

though, this soon gets disproven, and this is where things change; the kids in this fic represent hope. where the adults have failed, the teens are getting a chance to do things right. carol wasn’t raised properly and ended up hurting the people that loved her the most, but queen and sal are giving their best shot at raising noelle. they both have their issues but they’re also very self aware; sal sometimes even slips into therapy talk because rehab had that much of an impact on him. queen is a well adjusted person that took the time to reflect on her and her life, and wants her daughter to flourish.

noelle isn’t as scared to speak as sal is. she tells queen immediately that she’s scared of that conditional love, and she does without fear because queen makes her feels safe. when queen tells her that she loves her for who she is, noelle believes her because queen built that trust with her.

noelle trusts her parents guardians, thus making communication in the household flow much easier, and avoiding growing up with the same issues her parents guardians had.

it’s even clearer during the phone call with kris and susie. she talks with them without filters and they do the same. kris is pragmatic, down-to-business, but they’re never rude. they respect noelle and their feelings. susie is earnest and impulsive but she’s so, so heartfelt, and handles noelle’s moment of crisis with care. noelle calls them because she trusts them to not hurt her in that moment and they don’t.

when susie says she loves noelle during that phone call, it’s not followed by a rule, a condition, or noelle being scared of something. they just love each other.

the only relationship in the fic that isn’t plagued by fear is between them, the youth, two people who are honest with each other and are learning to communicate safely. queen is actively teaching noelle how to not repeat her mother’s mistakes, and she is succeeding.

ok yeah i got carried away and by carried away i mean i lezzed tf out. human fem tenna (femma), spamton (femton), and queen (queen)

closeups for the txt bits