Basically Babbling

I got a Sylveon plush yesterday and it made me think. Why is Sylveon Like That?? The ribbons are prehensile, and they don't look like they have bones, so are they a tongue-like material? Sylveon doesn't have hands. If a Pokémon's diet includes berries and stuff, being able to reach its food with its ribbons would be a huge advantage. What's with the bows? Are they like a fat-and-skin sorta deal? They seem to mostly just be decorative. Are they for display, like peacock feathers? Do Sylveons with bigger bows and brighter colours get more mates? The neck bow is also over a vulnerable spot, so could it also serve as protection? What's with the forked bit on the tail, does it give better balance? And most importantly, how Eevees evolve into Sylveons - with love for their trainer. They're a later addition to the Eeveelutions. Does that mean Sylveons only started appearing once Pokémon had Trainers? Did they evolve specifically to be more loveable as a survival tactic so that their Trainers would keep taking care of them? Their whole thing is being loveable, soothing hostility, infatuating attackers, etc. A good bond with your Trainer is an excellent way to survive as a Pokémon, and Sylveon seem almost tailor-made for the job. Are there any wild Sylveons, or do they evolve as Sylveons entirely because of their bond with their Trainer? Almost all the other Eeveelutions make sense as wild Pokémon - Vaporeons adapt to the ocean, Flareons to hot environments, Leafeons to better blend into forests, Glaceons to the cold. Jolteons likely existed before electric power, but only became commonplace once electricity was being more widely used. Even Espeons and Umbreons, who also evolve based on a bond with their Trainer, seem more adapted for the wild - Umbreons are nocturnal and blend into the night, and an Espeon's psychic abilities, while very suited to a battle, would also be very helpful for survival. Idk, maybe I'm selling Sylveon short, but it definitely seems to me like it evolved to be more appealing to humans.

As I write this I am currently inside with the windows locked and doors closed because my gardener is here and people are scary- so I’ve decided to get mad about demons lol If you’re going to depict the seven deadly sins in media, they should be one of two things:

A representation of the most depraved version of the sin OR

The thing that tempts you into it.

Pick one. Stick to it.

If Lust has to be hot and sultry for fan service reasons, then guess what: Gluttony should be a five-star fucking Michelin chef.

Sloth should be like that guy from Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle who’s mastered finding the cosiest nap spot in the middle of chaos.

(after a quick search I hast determined his name is Hypnos)

Wrath? A little gremlin who keeps poking at you like “you gonna cry? you gonna fight me?”

or you know- how our annoying fuckers Razz and Money are often depicted

Greed should literally be an accountant. Or like, a really sleazy car salesman. Or maybe a lawyer- Someone who knows exactly how to get you to say “I mean… it’s only money, right?” Or conversely if you’re greedy about getting money convince you that screwing everyone else over for a penny is the action of the century (with a *chef’s kiss*)

You can do “overindulgence” or “tempter,” but you can’t just mix and match at random. That’s not lore, that’s ✨vibes✨—and they’re BAD vibes at that.

I was sitting around imagining different skeleton related scenarios as one does, when a question popped into my mind- WHAT HP DOES SWAPFELL PAPYRUS EVEN HAVE??? And so being the responsible fandom follower I am I went straight to the wiki for canon facts, but lo and behold, I found there was no canonically listed specific stats for Swapfell Papyrus.

And I didn't just check one wiki, I skimmed all the various official seeming ones that at least linked the original content, though it has been down for many years now so I cannot personally verify validity

No Canon Stats, So Now What?

My first thought with trying to investigate the matter further was looking into Underfell Sans, considering based on the way universes are set up he would be one of the candidates for closest approximation to him, position-wise in worlds that have a similar way of running, but found he does not have it listed either. His power/strength instead is most oftenly illustrated in his behaviour and the vibes around him rather than in numerical stats like with cannon Undertale. [Swapfell is a combination of two alternate universe concepts: Underswap, and Underfell, I use Underfell Sans because while normally a 'Papyrus' would be closer, due to the reversed personalities and habits of characters the 'Sans' of the universe becomes a more similar individual]

The 1 HP Problem:

It looks like he's standing in front of Carol's conspiracy board here (I'm assuming it's a conspiracy board or something of the sort). He wanted to go look at something in another part of the house. Couldn't he have been going to look at a Black Shard that Carol keeps with all her conspiracy board stuff because there's a link to her missing daughter and whatever bigger mysteries are going on in the town? Sure, he could've just gone to check clues again, but then why would he have brought up the Shard in such a way? It's also less likely (not impossible, mind you, but less likely) that he just carries around a Black Shard while cleaning a house.

But Tenna also seems to care a lot about his Pipis, despite being ashamed of having kept her and not wanting anyone to know about her.

So what gives? Why would he be grinding up Pipis if he cares about his 'little darling' so much? Especially since it seems to be an egg with a living thing inside it.

Well... we know from Noelle that Pipis multiply.

So the duplicates probably pile up pretty fast, and Tenna needs some way to get rid of them all. And if he can make some POINTs off it, too... well, it's not like grinding up the extras is harming his precious blue egg.

Idk, I have a million thoughts that I don't know how to put into words.

-Pup

aaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA -

Additionally, a Theory on the Time Period During Which Monsters were Trapped Underground

OKAY SO hi Pup here with more UTDR insanity on a topic that I do not have the historical knowledge to be properly qualified to talk about, but am going to talk about anyway because it's been lingering in my head for a long time.

The monsters in Undertale and Deltarune use terms like 'hell', 'god', 'damn', etc., implying that they have enough of a concept of hell, god, damnation, etc. ingrained into their society for it to be used in casual speech. But that stuff comes from human religions. It fits easily into our understanding of language, given that those are the terms we commonly use, but monsters don't follow human religions as far as we see, and the widespread use of those terms comes from the influence that Abrahamic religions have had on our society. We don't see any established monster religions at all in Undertale, and in Deltarune there's obviously the Angel.

The Doylist reason for monsters using those terms despite the lack of human Abrahamic religions in their society is obviously just that Toby Fox is a human living in our world who is used to using those terms and likely didn't think twice about including them in his game. However, that reason is not nearly as fun as going insane over minor details in video games. Thus, this lengthy post.

In Deltarune, the religion we see in Hometown is the one that worships the Angel. We don't know how prevalent this religion is in the wider world, nor how many people in Hometown actually worship it, but it's a commonplace enough belief that the town has a church in it that seems to have been around for a decent amount of time.

While it's highly possible that the worlds of Undertale and Deltarune are entirely different from ours, I am going to be operating on the assumption that they both take place in worlds that are pretty much the same as ours, with only minor differences aside from the existence of monsters, which I'd say counts as a pretty major difference.

Now, as the Angel religion doesn't have a concept of sin, we can assume that there's no concept of punishment for sin either, and therefore no hell. However, through Alvin's wording of "our religion", combined with Asriel confessing to his 'sins' despite the lack of sin or confession in said religion, we can infer that there are indeed other religions in the world of Deltarune, and at least one relatively prevalent other religion contains the concepts of sin and confession. (Susie and Lancer both actually directly mention Christmas at one point, which means that Christianity exists in Deltarune, alongside the religions and practices that are the origins of many Christmas traditions.)

Assuming that monsters were never trapped underground in Deltarune, they were likely living alongside humans that whole time, and it's therefore quite likely that they would have picked up popular phrases that reference human religions. In fact, it's likely that monsters themselves followed the beliefs of Christianity, Catholicism, or the like at some point, given those religions' prevalence. (It's also possible that this influence is part of why monsters in Deltarune don't seem to use magic like their counterparts in Undertale do, given Christianity's whole thing about magic and stuff.) Monsters, like humans, probably don't all follow the same religion (Monster Teen, for example, wears a necklace with a cross pendant. While this choice could simply be aesthetic, it's equally likely that they're Christian, Catholic, etc.). And, given the whole Angel thing, it's possible that Hometown's predominant religion is an offshoot of a pre-existing Abrahamic religion.

In Deltarune, it is not at all out of the question and in fact makes complete sense for monsters to be referencing things like god or hell.

In Undertale, monsters have been stuck underground for an unknown but very long period of time, to the point where most of the adult population has never even seen the surface. (I am NOT going to be theorising about how monsters age, because I have already been down that rabbit hole multiple times and have nothing to show for it except confusion.)

My current theory is that they were trapped sometime during the 11th, 12th, or 13th centuries, most likely the 12th. If we look at the architecture of the Ruins, the first place that was settled by monsters:

It's quite similar to Romanesque architecture, which lasted from the 10th century to the 13th and was predominant in the 11th and 12th centuries.

This style is mostly reflected in New Home

Except for in the Last Corridor

Where the pointed arches are reminiscent of Gothic architecture, which was active from the late 12th to 16th centuries.

While we know that monsters receive human garbage via the dump in Waterfall, I'm going to assume that nobody would be throwing out schematics for their Gothic windows. Therefore, considering the timeframes of both these architectural movements, monsters were likely trapped underground in either the late 12th or the 13th century, with my money being on the late 12th given the prevalence of Romanesque architecture as opposed to the much rarer cases of Gothic architecture that we see (acknowledging, of course, that we do not see all of the Underground, and that I am only working off the knowledge I have here).

More potential proof for this time periods comes from the intro, where we see the silhouettes of several humans.

There are no guns or other firearms shown, meaning that the War of Humans and Monsters occurred in a time when spears and swords were used in wars instead of guns. While I couldn't find a spearhead that matched the one depicted, there is a human shown holding a sword, which we get to see at two angles.

I originally assumed from the first image that it was a leaf-shaped blade, but looking at both the first and second images, I theorise that this is depicting a knightly sword, also known as an arming sword, used as a one-handed sword, usually alongside a shield, in the high middle ages (1000 - 1300 CE).

While still used in the late middle ages (1300 - 1500 CE), longswords were more common as a primary weapon, and arming swords were often employed as a sidearm in addition to a primary weapon. While the sword depicted in the image is too short to be a longsword, it seems to match the length of an arming sword fairly well, and we can see that its wielder is using it as a one-handed weapon, rather than the longsword's intended two-handed grip.

Now, I'd say it's likely that most or all monsters only lived around one area, since it would have been a bit difficult for the humans to trap every single living monster underground if they'd been spread all over the world. If monsters only existed around one area in the high middle ages, they could have been fought against in the war and trapped underground much more plausibly, and they could have been easily dismissed as myth in later millennia.

The prevalent religion during the Middle Ages was Christianity, and we know that there were some pretty strong opinions about things like magic and other belief systems. It's stated in the game that the war started because humans were scared of the monsters' power to absorb human SOULs, and while that was probably part of it, it's not hard to see how the humans of that time could have turned on the monsters out of fear of their magic, or even just not being human, in addition to the stated provocation of monsters being able to absorb human SOULs. We also have to remember that we only get information about what happened from the monsters' perspectives, written on stone plaques, thousands of years after the fact. We don't have the full story here, and I suspect that the conflict was already brewing, and that the monsters' recorded reason for the war was simply the thing that tipped it over the edge.

Anyway, if monsters were living amongst or near humans during the Middle Ages, they were probably following or at least had a lot of exposure to the prevalent religion and its effects on commonly-used language. (It's also possible that the symbol of the Delta Rune and the prophecy about the Angel who has seen the surface is a remnant of the Angel belief system we see in Deltarune.) Their use of language could have evolved in a similar way to ours over the centuries, words like 'hell' and 'god' becoming more detached from their religious connotations when used in everyday expressions, and, with the added influence of human media that began falling into the garbage dump in Waterfall, their use of those words, as well as language in general, became remarkably similar to our own, despite them having been trapped underground for all that time.

I think that the Thrash Machine is foreshadowing for the vessel.

Let's look at the things they have in common.

We were told to make them by someone else

We put them together from options provided to us by that someone else

They were supposed to be significant to the scenes directly afterwards (the vessel as the character we play as, the Thrash Machine as an enemy)

They were unexpectedly discarded in the scene directly after we complete them

Despite being discarded immediately, our choices were recorded by the game

They have a lot of stuff in common, and the Thrash machine comes back in chapter 2 as an enemy despite having been exploded in the chapter before.

I've thought for a while now that the vessel is probably going to return in some way, shape, or form, and this theory has only cemented my belief.

Except they do.

Maybe they don't change the narrative. Maybe we'll continue like the beads in the hospital, marching along our set plotlines. Maybe there will only be one ending, and maybe the Weird Route is the only way to truly break free of the course set out for us by the game.

But even without the Weird Route, it's our choices that decide how many Darkners get to find a new home and how many are lost. We choose whether or not Berdly's arm is hurt. Whether we support or dismiss the characters we're going through this with. Deltarune goes out of its way to emphasise that our choices don't matter, except our choices still change things for the better or worse. They might not be the game-changing differences that Undertale has, but we can still choose to make things better for the characters, even just a little.

Um. Yeah. Just something I was thinking about while watching some Deltarune analysis videos.

Heya, Pup here, and I'm back again to talk about how Toby Fox has once more driven me insane.

Usually the newsletters have a black background and white text, but the background is white this time! Thematically appropriate, I suppose.

*glances outside at the warm summer morning*

Or, well, it's thematically appropriate if you don't live in the southern hemisphere lol.

Toby has a Bluesky account now, apparently.

...Yep, that belongs to Toby, alright.

And he even made an archive of the roast chicken posts "in case Blueski flies away". Excellent, those are exceedingly important, we wouldn't want them to be lost.

(Skipping over the stuff about the GameMaker updates and bugs because while it's interesting it's not what I'm here to talk about.)

*(...) *(...Pup slowly puts down the microwave they were holding and steps away.) *(All the settings on the microwave say 'spaghetti' anyway. It's unsure if that would work on frozen dogs.)

But in all seriousness, the reviews Toby shared seem pretty solid, and we are definitely, 100000000000% getting chapters 3 and 4 in 2025. I am incredibly excited and can't wait to see what the new chapters have in store.

(I wonder when they'll come out...? Place your bets, everyone! My money's on Undertale's 10th anniversary, since Toby has a habit of releasing and announcing important stuff on or around the anniversaries.)

We also have some text from chapter 4 that has been translated into Japanese. I cannot read Japanese, so unfortunately I don't have anything to say on that part, but I do have some things to say about some of the bits I can read!

"Inferno,&Inferno!" We don't have any context on who's saying this or what it might be about. My first thought is Dante's Inferno, given how much religious symbolism is in these games, but I'm probably wrong lol.

Lancer: "Susie, can you enrich my enclosure?" Susie: "Uhh, I can punch a hole in drywall and hide toys inside." Lancer: "Thank you. Someday, I will do the same for you..." This COULD just be about Lancer's room. Or it could imply that Lancer gets trapped somehow? Idk.

"To by, or not to by?" I don't have much to say here. But it's a Shakespeare reference, so I'm legally obligated to point that out.

Berdly: "Listen. It disgusts me to say this, but... as an ACT. OF. CHARITY. I will let you... Be the breeze under my wings. You... Me. Festival." My guess is that he's saying this to Susie. If so, Noelle is going to FLIP and I can't wait to see it lol. I'm very curious about this festival, too... I feel like something big's going to happen.

...wait.

WAIT.

Jevil's fight was in a carousel. Spamton's was on a rollercoaster.

...am I overthinking this, or are the secret bosses somehow foreshadowing the festival???????

Elnina: "Did it hurt when you fell? Your tag says you're... um, the moon." If I remember correctly, Elnina is one of the weather forecast themed enemies. Since this is chapter 4 dialogue, my guess is that this text is from Castle Town after you recruit them.

Chapter 5 is in development! Yay!

I was going to make a post about some of the new merch before the newsletter came out. Now I guess I'll just include my thoughts on it in this post.

SO. We have a Kris shirt.

Following the trend of the Frisk merch, Kris isn't named. All Frisk's merch refers to them as 'the human', and now Kris' shirt is the 'Important Person's Shirt'.

Here's all the text I've found describing it, from both the newsletter and Fangamer.

Listen. I am going insane over this. I have far too many thoughts and I don't know how to put any of them into words. BUT I'M GONNA TRY.

Okay. So.

Firstly, the love thing.

We already know that LOVE = Level of ViolencE. But while that adds an interesting layer, it's not primarily what I'm going to be discussing here.

Kris and the player have a connection, obviously. Their love will become yours - the love they receive from their mum, their dad, their friends, isn't meant for us. Yet it feels like it's directed at us, because we are Kris. Your love will become theirs - we decide their actions. If we express love for another character, we're expressing it through them, which means that the other characters are seeing it as their love instead. Us and Kris are separate entities, and yet we have an undeniable connection that makes us difficult to separate.

Also, I'm not entirely sure how this relates, but my first thought when I read this was about the default options for the vessel. The game records your choices in the vessel creation sequence. However, if you start a chapter 2 save file without continuing from chapter 1, the choices are automatically set to the first option of each question, except for the gift, which defaults to Mind. It also has default options for all the choices in the game, which all seem to follow what we know of Kris' characterisation. Essentially, if we haven't played chapter 1, Kris seems to play through it for us. In the vessel creation sequence, the question 'HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR CREATION? (IT WILL NOT HEAR.)' has 'LOVE' as the first option. I don't know how this might relate and it might be entirely unrelated but in my head I feel like some dots have been connected and it's driving me crazy. TOBY FOX YOU'RE GOING TO BE THE DEATH OF ME.

(Please picture me with one of those conspiracy theory boards with the red string and pictures and scribbled notes. That's the most accurate depiction of me right now.)

The mask thing seems important too, but I can't think of what it might be referring to. Maybe something to do with how the actions you choose for Kris aren't how they're really feeling?

There's also a Seam plush, which I wasn't originally going to talk about, but then the newsletter happened.

Firstly, look at it. Look at this battered old wizard cat. I want it.

Secondly, we get a sort-of-canon Seam design! So that's cool.

...dusty magic. Broken dreams. No tail, torn off by cruel and loving hands. The tail in your mind should be stronger than anything I show you.

THERE IS SOMETHING HERE RELATED TO THE DARK WORLDS AND DREAMS AND IMAGINATION AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO SAY ABOUT IT BUT IT'S THERE.

If they keep releasing merch, my entire house is going to be UTDR themed. I can feel my wallet getting lighter and lighter each time they release something new, and I haven't even bought any merch yet.

And finally, if you click on this antlered snowman at the bottom...

You get a message...

DESS LORE DESS LORE DESS LORE

She called Noelle 'Elly' I'm gonna cry -

More angel Noelle... and "I wish it could snow whenever I wanted"... kind of ominous given the Snowgrave route and the whole Angel's Heaven thing.

AAAA I'M SO EXCITED TO SEE WHERE THIS GOES IN THE GAME

I actually missed the snowman link at first, so obviously I'm going to be clicking everything in all future newsletters just to be sure lol.

Uhhhh... yeah. That's all.