i know it's been said a million times but i just saw this tag on that post about kris dreemurr:
and i really want to just lay it out for people who have never played undertale or deltarune that you have NO IDEA how bad it is
spoiler alert, but the big twist in undertale is as follows: you play the whole game as a silent, androgynous protagonist. this protagonist has no real dialogue. every character calls them "the human" and refers to them as they/them because everyone you meet is a stranger. at the beginning of the game you're told to "name the fallen human" and a great deal of people input their own name. of course they do. there is no "suggested" name that autofills like in zelda or the like. you are meant to instinctively input your name.
in the 11th hour of the game's Good Ending you find out that long before you, there was another human. this human's death irreparably changed the world of these characters. the final boss of the game is a traumatized child driven mad by the grief of losing them. for the first time in the whole game, this final boss speaks aloud the name you input in the beginning--he spends the entire back half of the fight calling you by this name, distraught and begging you not to leave him again.
the reveal comes that he is talking not to you, or to your player character, but to the first human who died long ago. he is wrongfully projecting their face and voice and name and actions onto the player character. in the final ten minutes of the game, he asks--where no one else did--what the player character's name is, and they tell him that they are named Frisk. once that name is spoken aloud, all the other characters who previously did not know the player character's name call them by their correct name.
the game literally looks the player directly in the face and forces them to question their assumptions--why did you assume that this character was a standin for you? just because you were controlling them? if you projected a gender onto them, deciding them male or female, why did you do that when everyone in the game views them as their nonbinary self? as the player you are a passive observer. you are gazing into a window and watching the story play out. is that enough for you? can you appreciate these characters without forcibly inserting yourself into their story? can you appreciate frisk for who they are, if who they are has nothing to do with you?
the final boss apologizes to frisk for seeing them as someone and something they are not. depending on what you say and do, frisk has the opportunity to forgive him.
even after this incredibly heavy-handed, incredibly pointed commentary, where every character looks the player in the face and says "this is frisk. they are nonbinary, and they are their own person." for years after undertale's release, people still insisted on projecting a binary gender onto frisk, under the assumption that they were a silent, gender-neutral protagonist meant to be projected onto. quite literally, people will defy the very thesis of the entire game in order to be transphobic.
undertale's meta commentary is one of the reasons it has gone down as a classic. due to how the game presents the act of loading your save as an actual real-world superpower that effects the characters in big ways, a lot of people put undertale down and never pick it back up again. if they are paying attention, they feel the weight of their actions as a god who holds in their hands the lives of these characters. when i complete a Good Ending, that is it for me. i never touch that file again. i go to a different computer, or console, because i was profoundly affected by these meta elements and how i as the player have the power to hurt them.
deltarune was always planned. deltarune was always going to exist, because toby wanted to make deltarune long before undertale. but i also can't help but feel like the response to frisk's personhood and gender had an effect on just how much harder deltarune goes in on the relationship the player has with the player character.
deltarune begins with a character creation screen. you spend the whole time building this character with the assumption that you are going to play as them. within minutes, all your choices are thrown out and the character you create is discarded. you are playing as kris dreemurr.
kris is a person with an established life, family, friends. kris has a history that exists before you drop in, and it's all you will ever hear about. kris could not be more separate from you from the very beginning, and unlike frisk, the game does not attempt to trick you into seeing yourself in kris. kris is kris, a person you cannot name, who is decidedly nonbinary and only referred to as they/them by everyone who knows them, including their own parents. the only tie you have to kris is that you control them, and depending on your choices, kris actively fucking hates you for it.
we don't know why yet, but kris needs the player character to puppeteer them. there is some sort of dependency on us for kris to accomplish whatever goals they have in the story of deltarune. but kris often resists that control, or complies with it maliciously, and the characters around kris will comment that they haven't really been themselves since we dropped in. you can do some really horrible, really heinous shit as kris, and after the culmination of the worst of it, kris actively rips you out of their body and beats the shit out of you just to get the anger and regret and heartache and frustration out.
whereas undertale said "this is frisk! we tricked you into thinking they were meant to be you, huh?" deltarune says "this is kris. you are not kris. you will never be kris. kris fucking hates your guts. kris is only with you by necessity, in fact, the kindhearted thing to do is turn off this game so you never have to take kris's autonomy away again. you are not kris. look me in the eyes. you are not kris."
and still, the transphobes bend over backwards.
"this is kris :)" they say. "kris's gender is up to interpretation 'cause they're a silent protagonist meant to be projected on :)"
do you understand that you are the villain of deltarune?
