is that your idea of paradise?

but ofc the reason kris isnt communicating and is drawing themself back is bc theyre in the Hell Situation and betraying everyone around them and think theyre doomed to die or worse and so on. the way kris shows love is through distancing themself from everyone around them, bc they think they can only hurt people by getting close to them. kris almost certainly started this whole thing planning to never befriend susie and never reconnect with noelle and just cleanly get the plan over with and then die in a ditch and be forgotten forever. the fact they want more than that, now, is Hurting Them Badly.

bc they are a stupid teenager trapped in the torment nexus they are not handling this with open communication and expression of their needs. instead, they keep turning away and hiding and hoping so, so bad that someone catches them. but because susie is a good friend and because susie is scared to demand more than she has been offered, and because noelle is a good friend and because noelle is scared to break something fragile and already half-broken, no one is pushing them the way they want to be pushed. kris is so, so loved, and if they reached out, they would be helped. but they can't reach out, and no one knows to reach for them.

I think more pressing than whether or not the goat's gonna transition, because Ralsei deserves to take it at his own pace, is whether or not we're only doing this whole battle rules thing because Ralsei wants us to.

like the way he specifically interacts with flowery as flowery simply ignores the "correct" solution to puzzles and doesn't really care about the rules of battle made me think that Ralsei's attempts at guaranteeing the prophecy doesn't happen include the way we interface with the world, to the point where maybe the entire RPG conceit of Deltarune might just be forced upon us by him.

Because Ralsei's attempt to overcompensate makes him want to conform really, really badly, and I mean he's literally the tutorial for the FIGHT and ACT systems. He does mention how they exist outside of his influence in chapter 5, but this is also the same chapter where we get the feather that allows us to turn this into megaman zero.

you gotta wonder, exactly how much of the game is the way the game is because of ralsei? Could we have been platforming this whole time, without needing the feather, if he just told us that's how you're supposed to do it? Rouxls Kaard has the power to alter the rules of combat, but who wrote those rules in the first place?

Undertale's rules seemed to just be how the world worked, because of how Determination interacts with magic. But the Dark World is a world of escapism and fantasy. Ralsei is there to force a happy ending into something that seems to inherently get darker every time they do anything. The Weird Route, by chapter 5, simply skips going to the Dark World entirely and does something else that seems far more disturbing than whatever the Knight is up to.

I guess I'm just wondering when the Dark World inevitably leaks out into Hometown, is anyone legit gonna go "Ralsei, do we really need to wait our turn, there's people dying"? Or is Chapter 6's gameplay gimmick going to yet again point out these rules of engagement are a lot more flexible than they seem?

It's also very telling that when you're not in a turn-based battle, there's no real option other than violence. The ACTs become support actions for Kris, but Kris is beating the shit out of everyone. Yeah, our choices don't matter etc et al, but when we don't use Ralsei's tutorialized ways to handle fights, we actually don't have a choice.

everyone lives AU in which, 10 years or so after chara first falls into the underground, reports begin to surface of another human roaming the ruins... and of course prince asriel can't leave well enough alone.

(bonus: their respective punishments)

punishment (everyone lives AU, takes place directly after this one)

+ bonus doodle that i couldnt figure out how to work in