#I have always been fascinated by how Deltarune and Undertale treat the game with the situational irony that players are human. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

acaciapines · 3 years

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SO DELTARUNE CHAPTER 2 HUH

spoilers under the cut but oh my god guys oh my god what a good game this chapter was so worth the wait and i liked it even more than the first one. everyone should play this video game i think.

anyways with that out of the way onto the theorizing

RALSEI WHAT ON KRIS’S PERSON MAKES YOU APPEAR.

like. look. i love ralsei. i Do Not Think he is a bad guy in any possible way. i feel so strongly that all these kids are friends and love each other and no matter what happens in the rest of the game that is where things will end up. but ralsei can’t be the same type of darkener as lancer bc ralsei DIDNT turn to stone. and like. hmm.

a lot of times ralsei was just--ignored by the non kris and susie people. like noelle, i think she maybe acknowledges him a few times? and berdly like....not at all? and queen even less so! which makes me think...this dark world was very much built from noelle’s mind, i think, bc i think the way queen treats her is parallel to how her mom treats her, which i assume we’ll get into more later on, and like--ralsei is not native to this dark world. lancer and rouxls were there bc they tagged along in kris’s inventory....but ralsei didnt. ralsei just kinda...appeared on his own, for some reason, and was fine the entire time....even if he really was only acknowledged by his own friends. which makes sense! this dark world is noelle’s problems, she doesn’t need ralsei to deal with them.

i think the darkeners are in some way....toys? as in....they’re here for the lightners entertainment/betterment, which ralsei pretty much outright says to queen that one time, paraphrasing based on my memories but something like “why are you hurting [noelle, kris, susie, etc], they’re the lightners! you’re supposed to want to make them happy!” and i think this is FASCINATING with regards to the role the player plays in the game--we, the player, control kris. kris is our vessel to experience the game by. in a similar way, the darkeners are there to better the lighteners that visit them. to make them happy. so what...makes them people, i guess, if there’s someone controlling the strings?

ralsei is there for kris, i think, and i think kris has something on their person that becomes him, but i dont think they know it. probably something of asriel’s, bc, like, cmon. and ralsei...knows this. he knows this is his purpose. why he was created, you might say.

so...what do we, as in, the game and its players, do with any of this? at the end of the chapter kris creates a dark fountain in the middle of their house. ralsei explicitly states that the dark fountains will lead to chaos, that they shouldn’t be opened. but like. of course kris wants to have the dark world forever and always. they’re a lonely kid and one of their best friends lives there.

i think deltarune is about...the ethics of playing a video game, not in the same way undertale is, but in a similar way. undertale was about...choices. i think the player matters in that game, but--not in the same way it does in deltarune. undertale was a game that involved the player, deltarune is a game that’s ABOUT the player, yknow? or, like, the player is a major role in what’s going on.

i dont know what’s going to happen next. apparently theres seven chapters total, which, holy shit. thats a lot of time for things to keep happening, to learn more about the dark worlds, about kris, about ralsei. i know how i would answer these questions--this game gave me so fucking much to work with for my daemon au twine fangame and im so so excited to keep writing that--but i cannot wait to see how the game itself deals with these questions.

and onto the lighter stuff:

the kris&susie and kris&ralsei friendship moments. they got me so hard. these kids are just friends...theyre just friends! they love each other! also susie&lancer THEYER FRIENDS.......

NOELLE AND SUSIE OH MY GOD they were so cute together ndfkgdfg i died the entire ferris wheel conversation. noelle shaking berdly at the end when he revealed he ALSO had a crush on susie. everything about that brought me so much joy.

i loved queen as the antagonist she was so fun. her dialogue is just. i love that.

EVERY TIME KRIS WAS THEY/THEMED I WAS SO HAPPY......they’ve always been canon nonbinary but i love to see it hammered home like YES kris is nonbinary here are their friends and mom using they/them pronouns for them. kris nonbinary :)

anyways. deltarune fucking good. god. cannot wait for the next chapter to come out and to finally get to start just throwing my money toby fox’s way for this game i cannot believe these first two chapters are free.

#deltarune #deltarune spoilers #kris #ralsei #deltarune speculation #i write #i quess this technically fits under that tag #also just to add. oh my god kris im so so sorry kris i love u im sorry #if there is an option to give up control i will take it in a heartbeat #even tho im sure that means i wont get to see the ending #thats what i MEAN when i say this is about the ethics of playing a viddy game #kris is not us but we control them #do we keep controlling them to see how their story plays out #to fulfill our desire to reach a satisfying conclusion #or do we let them go #and live forever wondering what will happen #like undertale calls you out for trying to wring every scrap of content out of the game #and i just think deltarune will take that even further

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