i’m giving everyone lore bc i can’t help myself sorry not sorry.
(ruth’s tragic backstory under the cut)
ruth joleigh flemming is the second born child of five. her older brother, nathaniel, is two years older than her. he is the family golden child that does no wrong, he got all the good genes, attractive, taller. he played baseball and was popular in high school. in the hallways he would pretend not to see her, refused to acknowledge her, made her walk home when he drove his friends so he wouldn’t be associated with her. he’s their parents favorite and can do nothing wrong.
ruth on the other hand is only useful of invisible. she is given the most chores, is asked to watch her younger siblings constantly, expected to follow a curfew nathaniel never had. her parents marriage follows traditional gender roles, roles they push fiercely into their children, and ruth is put to work the most. she’s not allowed to drive her parents car when nathaniel was, etc.
her next sibling, henry, is three years younger than her. he is kinder than nathaniel, also often invisible to their parents, for he is more academic than his older brother. he likes science and is always holed up in his room working on smothering or other. he loves animals and learning about them, wants to be a vet. he and ruth walk home with richie every day (bc richie lives a few houses down). he’s quiet, mostly keeps to himself.
after henry is melanie, who’s only a year younger. she also has a lot of expectations on her to be a good girl, good wife, etc. all that sexist, 50s house wife bullshit. ruth tries to shield her from it by doing most of the work, but melanie is a better, less sarcastic help in the kitchen, so she often had to help their mom with the food. she does gymnastics, is really good at too, but her parents write it off as just a hobby. she could do really well professionally if her parents took it seriously.
the youngest is harvey, who’s two years younger than melanie. he does a lot of sports, but all of them in the kid way where he doesn’t really do anything. he likes soccer the best, and wants to continue that when he gets older. he’s a boy scout and plays a lot of video games. he’s the stereotype of the youngest sibling, he gets whatever he wants and doesn’t realize it.
ruth was put in dance at 4 because her mother danced as a kid, and she absolutely loved it. ballet and tap, but she wasn’t graceful enough for ballet. tap she stuck with for a long time. she had this class with peter, who she became friends with at like 12ish. she was expected to be a dancer because it was feminine and quiet and all that shit, so she became insecure about her loudness and lonely. she quit dance in her freshman year when she was picked for a dance solo and had a panic attack on stage.
she fell in love with theatre and joined the tech booth. she wanted to perform, but couldn’t get herself back on stage after what happened. she watched the shows from the back of the auditorium with jealousy.
she knew she was bi watching shake it up bc she fell in love w zendaya at 8. she never told her parents bc she knew it wasn’t worth the hassle. she knows they won’t believe her, will think it’s a phase, and thinks it’s better to just leave it all alone. it’s not like she’s ever getting a girlfriend anyways.
she hates wearing skirts, but if she goes like two weeks wearing just pants her mom sits her down and talks to her about being a proper lady. she’d rather just wear them then hear any of it. she wears a skirt every other thursday and it’s enough that her parents only give her looks instead of actually talking to her.
she likes star wars, absolutely hated the choices made in the new ones but watches them anyway bc the people are all hot. she has star wars merch and shit in her room but not too much bc it’s a “boyish” interest.
she had long dark curls her whole life, hates them. hates managing them, hates the curl routine, hates having such long hair, so in a fit of rage had richie and pete chop it all off in the middle of the night her sophomore year. she got it touched up by her moms hairdresser, but refuses to let it grow any more.
she got her headgear the summer before eighth grade, when she was 13, and has had it ever since. she despises it, but refuses to admit it to anyone but richie and peter. she owns it, matches her clothes to it, acts like she doesn’t give a shit when people call her metalhead or something equally uncreative.
she inherited her fathers anger issues. she keeps a lot of it inside bc she hates social interaction if she isn’t close to a person, but it makes her have a lot of hate for people who annoy her. like trevor, who always mixes up his cue lines and makes her look bad. or caitlin, who likes to spend her breaks annoying ruth in the tech booth.
(caitlin actually has a crush on ruth and has for years, but ruth’s so annoyed with someone pose being in her safe space that she can’t tell she’s being flirted with.)
her parents don’t want her to work, so she can spend time at the house looking after her siblings, cleaning, and all that, so she doesn’t have a job. her parents also don’t want her to go to college, since they think it’s unnecessary. she still applied to schools all over the country to get the fuck out of hatchetfield. she’s marked her major down as math, since she’s okay at it, but she has no interest in doing it with her life. she has no idea what she wants to do. (that’s not true. she wants to act. dance. perform. but she has absolutely no faith in herself, her talent, her ability to overcome her anxiety, so. math it is.)
she’s never told anyone this, she’s ignoring it and pretending she didn’t, but she did send a self tape to a drama school in california. she hasn’t heard back, though.
her favorite color is red, which is why she picked it for her headgear when they made her chose. she likes it because she can get away with wearing it in masculine ways since it’s close enough to pink, but it also represents fire, anger. she thinks color theory is super interesting. she had to learn it when her mom made her learn about flowers, and the flowers part bored her to death, but she loves colors.
her father is named walter, he’s a business executive about thirty years older than her mother. her mother, doreen, wants desperately to be a stay at home mom, but they can’t afford it, so she works at a flower shop. she says that if you must work in life, it might as well be a position for a lady. she still makes dinner every night. she only wears dresses and heels. sometimes ruth thinks her mother was brainwashed or something.
because ruth’s sanctuary is her grandparents. her mothers parents are not at all the stereotypical housewife/working husband couple. they are fiercely strong and interesting people with interesting stories to tell. from their stories, her mom used to be the same way, at one point. she went to college for prelaw, and dropped out her sophomore year after meeting walter. they say she changed a lot, but they don’t talk about it enough for ruth to get real details. she can only pull them by their teeth if they have a lot to drink, which they don’t often do. it’s a mystery shes piecing together slowly.
she knows her parents don’t care about her much. they don’t give a shit about her grades, never go to parent teacher conference night, stopped going to her dance recitals when she was ten, never came to one of the shows she worked on with the school. she was only ever scolded but never really treated like their daughter, more like a misbehaving help they need to set right.
they never hit her, but she’s well aware she’ll be fucked up forever. she is counting down the days until she gets to college and she can get a tattoo and burn her skirts and go to therapy. she loves her friends, and her siblings (most of the time), but she despises hatchetfield and her parents.
she can’t wait to get out.
(she never gets out.)
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ok this is going to sound crazy but hear me out: undertale might be the best game ever.
when i say a statement like that, i don’t mean it as “undertale is my favorite game ever.” if i’m being honest, it probably doesn’t even crack my top 5. i also don’t mean “undertale is objectively amazing and you’re wrong for disliking it.” there’s been plenty of critiques of undertale, and i think all are valid. besides, there will never be a game that every single person enjoys playing, no game will be fun to everyone, and that’s just a fact of life.
what i mean is that there’s no other game that has had a similar impact, and i don’t mean impact in terms of scale, let me explain.
throughout the history of art, art is made with the intention to create something meaningful and impactful. the earliest known art found is the apollo 11 stones found in africa, and while we will never be sure if these were created for recreation, religion, or some other purpose, we can assume they were made because someone, even if it was just one person, thought it would be important. and art has continued to exist for a number of reasons, but it was mostly for recreation, fun, or artistic expression.
i’m unsure of when, but somewhere along the way, art began to be culturally recognized and enjoyed, and as such it began to churn profit. when technology arose to new forms of art in the 1900s, it was created for artistic reasons, but was quickly funded to create profit. but there’s no specific movie or music album that changed public perception of those forms of art, instead they were recognized as art gradually throughout decades. this isn’t true for video games.
unlike film and unlike music, video games were invented for the sole purpose of making money. and i can’t really be mad about that, there’s not a lot of meaningful art one could produce using an atari, or original nintendo.
back to undertale, i’m not calling it the first video game created for the purpose of being art. games like yume nikki, and other early 2000s/late 90s games probably hold that title. but undertale was likely the first popular game that was created like that.
undertale, a low budget game made almost entirely out of recreation, funded by community interest outgrew multi-million dollar games out of sheer quality. it showed a generation of people, my generation of people, that games could be more than just a product. and that’s kinda cool i think.
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