On a Magical Adventure

i've seen a number of people notice that there's some repeated imagery and sounds in asgore's monologue about "That Day" and various scenes in the weird route, specifically when the screen goes red and the same sound effect plays (ominous_stab_harsh.ogg), then this isn't a direct repeated image but it Feels Intentionally Similar (it's hard to tell if it's the exact same sound that plays in both but it definitely sounds similar)

i was thinking about what this means, maybe what happens to kris and noelle on the weird route is the same as whatever happened on That Day, maybe asgore himself got afflicted by another thorn ring or something else with the trance trait. and that could be the case but personally i find it more interesting to analyze this from the perspective that the thorn ring isn't really all that significant and is moreso just an endcap of asgore and noelle's respective descents into insanity.

when we look at the weird route from noelle's perspective it starts off fairly reasonably; she's being attacked by these Violent Things and finds if she listens to her friend kris and attacks enemies when they tell her to she is Safe, kris is Protecting her. (for brevity i'm skipping over the addison/freeze ring thing but to summarize i think it's her going up To an arbitrary line and not her Crossing it) then noelle gets the thorn ring. again, i think it's more interesting to not ascribe that much significance to the ring itself. the main Thing that's happening with the thorn ring is that it's actively hurting noelle with a massive power increase as the trade-off. it's now no longer a simple matter of kris protecting noelle from harm bc noelle Is being harmed by kris (again, from noelle's perspective, she doesn't know the soul is a separate being). noelle clearly doesn't want to think of her friend as the kind of person who would hurt her so she reframes the thought as kris simply helping her become stronger. the thought being cemented is no longer 'kris will keep me safe', it's 'i need to listen to kris no matter what'.

this is where the asgore parallels come into play, after That Day asgore becomes obsessed with proving that whatever happened wasn't his fault. again just like noelle this is pretty reasonable. where asgore's 'thorn ring' comes into play is when he becomes So obsessed that he drives his wife away, becomes estranged from his children, and loses what respect he had left as everyone thinks of him as this sad crazy obsessed guy. it's a sunk cost situation, asgore can't accept that this pursuit is what ruined his life and can't accept the possibility of abandoning his quest and having lost everything with nothing to show for it. so he shifts blame for all his problems on whoever is responsible for That Day and convinces himself that if he just keeps doing what he's doing then he will get his old life back. it isn't until he sees kris injured after the flowery fight that he realizes that what he's doing is wrong and stops, he 'removes the thorn ring' and 'snapped out of the trance' so to speak. before that asgore's obsession was starting to get scary and i was worried that at any point he'd snap and hurt the flowers, we can only guess what would've happened if he didn't come to his senses.

noelle meanwhile put her friend berdly into a coma and instead of snapping out of it she's just sunk further into the 'trance'. i think it's noteworthy that telling noelle that the dream was real and forcing her to equip the thorn ring are a package deal, you can't Just tell her that she snowgraved berdly, the story leads to you either recanting and saying it was just another cruel prank or she gets the thorn ring again. when that happens because she can't accept that she did such a thing (and again can't accept that kris who is her friend and who she trusts went and hurt her) she rewires her brain to make what happened into something she Can accept. she tells herself that the reason she froze when kris made her equip the thorn ring wasn't because she was too terrified to get away but because she actually wanted the thorn ring back, she wanted kris to drag her down a dark path. she tells herself that she's actually better than all the other townspeople because she's strong now and won't just do what everyone thinks she's supposed to do. she focuses on how using snowgrave made her feel more powerful than she ever has before and yet can't even outright say what snowgrave Did because she's so ashamed, after vaguely mentioning what happened her new facade cracks and she starts crying before composing herself. i think that's part of why she's also so adamant about how she and kris have become Different People and how she's no longer Noelle. she very vocally despises "noelle" for being too weak but this way of thinking also insulates the idea of "noelle" from what she has done and what kris might tell her to do in the future.

assorted thoughts: