#They're the model couple

[ruthariandbluecookies]

Rayla in one episode with Lujanne: Strong relationships need honesty. The full truth.

Me: Wowee, I wonder where she got THAT from *side eyes ruthari*

[beneathsilverstars]

idk it sounds reasonable to me for a teenager to run away bc they didn't want to eat their veggies!

one hopes that by the later stages of childhood a parent will have figured out which veggies and preparation styles work for the kid, and the kid will have resigned themself to what they do and don't have to eat according to their parents, and it's all settled into an equilibrium instead of a daily fight. and hopefully as a teen your palette is expanding and you're even willing to eat more veggies then you did as a child.

however, if the kid is extra picky and stubborn, and the parent is extra determined to make sure they eat a good variety (or just eat whatever the parent prepared no matter what it is), it could absolutely continue to be a regularly-repeated fight. and if something is a continued point of contention throughout childhood then it absolutely makes sense for a teen to go FUCK this, i am nearly an ADULT i am done being told to eat my veggies i am gonna prove my independence and make them realize i don't have to just sit there and let them boss me around!!

like, the childishness of the fight is exactly why a teen would run away about it.

[breakbeatbun]

y'all have gotta learn to act normal about other people's characters

just bc you think they're hot doesn't mean the person who made them wants to know if, or how, you'd fuck them. i feel like that's common sense. it doesn't make it OK now just because it's not a real person you're sexualizing. you don't know what they mean to the person who made them, and if you do, well what the fuck, then.

[kit-teung]

rolling my eyes real hard at everyone who calls peaceful property a queerbait

[desiringparadise]

me and the chick i pulled

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

this guy just made a mentor proud of him for the first time in his life and he is trying SO HARD to be normal about it

(guess who's been playing personal story on a tiny rat lately...)

[bonefall]

Sorry to bother with my maple tree questions (again), but I was just wondering what books you’d recommend for me to become more familiar with England’s tree ecology? 👀 i… I feel rather silly having to look up “do maple trees / apple trees / insert plant life here exist in northern England” every time I want to talk about the spring flowers :;

But also if I don’t describe the native plant life changing then what am I to write about in the heavy silence that follows awkward questions I just gotta talk about the whirlybird seeds falling a hair too early for the season or I’ll turn into a puddle

A really good intro to the types of flora you'll see in England can be found by visiting Woodlandtrust.org.uk! They do education on woodlands specifically, so I use them a lot when I'm writing about ThunderClan territory.

From there, I take a tree they're talking about and try to read more about it, then use iNaturalist to confirm if it's in my modeled region. There are also times I work backwards, using iNaturalist to browse the sorts of trees and flowers that exist here and learning more about how they got there, and if the cats would have it in their territory.

For the non-woodland biomes, I find Wildlifetrusts.org helpful sometimes. Sadly though, this site is not nearly as well managed as Woodland Trust and there's some dead links, so I find that researching rivers, moorland, and bogs is harder.

I think I've got forest ecology research down to a good science, but the other biomes, I have to tap into my search engine skills. It's probably a symptom of how non-forest biomes kinda tend to get neglected by casual conservationists. LOVE YOUR LOCAL WETLAND, GOD DAMN IT

[got-the-cool-shoeshine]

They're a dysfunctional family.

[sans-guy]

What's your take on Mafiafell Sans?

big monster man kill me

in all seriousnesses i Love anything to do with prohibition era it's all so fascinating to me

the music, the dress, the way people used to talk and ifkd literally everything. my own sona's story is gonna based around that time too so. sfsg.

[mirror-ralsei]

THEORY: The Colorful Core

Someone once made a very sharp insight about the CORE. It's been years and I still can't find it, but I distinctly remember a YouTube commenter pointing out these colored tube sprites in the CORE. They said they were specifically the same colors as printer ink: cyan, magenta, and yellow.

Ignorant, I looked it up.

And, um.

Yeah we can start to guess why these were thrown in with the "darknesstotems," huh.

For anyone else that wasn't aware, CMYK color model acquires the color black ("K" or "Key") by subtracting light using pigments. The pigments in question? CMY - cyan, magenta, and yellow.

This might have some implications for Deltarune.

PART 1: Photon Readings Negative

As we all know, the creator of the CORE and our "SURVEY_PROGRAM" is none other than Gaster himself. (Unless there's anyone else out there using typer value 666.)

Gaster is heavily tied to the concept of "darkness" through his infamous Entry 17 experiment.

And between the "darknesstotem" sprites in the CORE, the mercenaries emerging from the shadows, and these apparent CMYK references, we might infer that the CORE has something to do with that too.

Specifically, the "PHOTON READINGS NEGATIVE" description seems... more or less the exact function of a subtractive model like CMYK. (As far as i can figure. Not an expert, here.) This seems to further support the idea that the CMYK model may either literally or metaphorically serve some role in the "darkness" concept that was teased in Undertale, and a focal point of Deltarune.

So what does this mean? Well, as it is depicted in Deltarune so far, "darkness" seems to symbolically represent "fiction," and more diagetically, it's the source of the Dark Worlds and all Darkners within it. That seems to be the black color's meaning more or less solved for. What's unclear is how this darkness, or "K," will be produced.

(One could say... how could we "Gen" this "Key"? A "KEYGEN," in other words?)

okay that's just a quick tangent but hey spamton very much does cycle through rainbow colors okay it's not totally unrelated--

In any case. We have K solved for, so the remaining elements that would "combine" to create it are CMY. While there's not any known themes or plot elements across UTDR that would relate to the colors cyan, yellow, and magenta, there certainly are some characters...

PART 2: The CMY Trio

Did those colors look familiar?

That's right: Kris, Susie, and Noelle each have the respective CMY colors attached to them!

While Kris does have blue skin, Susie pink skin, and Noelle yellow hair, it's their HP bars that are the biggest tells.

No matter how you colorpick it, that's a cyan-magenta-yellow.

And wouldn't you know it, these three characters happen to be the ones mentioned by Gaster, pursuer of darkness, to be "VERY, VERY WONDERFUL."

But aren't we forgetting someone?

PART 3: Not Easy Being Green

Ralsei is already a character with a lot going on, and i'm not going to get into that here. Needless to say, though, there's much about him that's slightly different from Kris and Susie, and sometimes even Noelle. The green-associated Ralsei not having as definitive a place in the CMYK model is just one more space he's an odd one out in.

The counterargument here would be that Ralsei himself is meant to represent "K." That's certainly possible. He is the (or a?) prince of darkness, and is associated with black roughly as much as green. So i'm not going to discount that as much as say: if Ralsei is meant to represent darkness in such a significant way that Gaster was summoning him up in Undertale, I almost think we'll have more questions than answers. So to keep things simple for now, i'm going to assume that Ralsei's associated color is, like the others, in his HP bar.

Under that assumption, i think there's a couple places Ralsei could fit.

It's possible he could still squeeze into CMYK, being the secondary-color intersection between cyan Kris and yellow Noelle.

But since Ralsei is so different from the others, it might stand to wonder if he's not part of another model entirely. Namely...

PART 4: The RGB Trio...?

...RGB. An additive model that acquires a given color by combining colors of light. The more colors that are added, the closer it gets to white.

In other words, more or less the inverse of the CMYK model.

The existence of the RGB model may mean that Ralsei does have a place in a trio - just maybe not the one we're led to believe.

If this theory holds true, and if this model also has an associated three characters, then there are two other members of Ralsei's trio that are unaccounted for: a red character and a blue character.

Now, i'm not the kind of theorist to run through every individual candidate with a... in this case somewhat literal color swatch. Especially when it's quite possible we haven't met these other two characters yet.

But for those who want to, i would just note that red and blue are the associated colors - Noelle isn't yellow, after all, and Light World Kris doesn't have a trace of cyan. We're lucky that all four of the main cast have HP bars that are definitively certain colors. So just keep that in mind if combing through the cast.

PART 5: Mixing It All Together

Now that we've established a possible CMY trio of Kris/Susie/Noelle and explored the idea of a RGB trio of two unknown characters and Ralsei, what might it all mean?

Well, we know that CMYK is used to produce black, or in Deltarune terms, something pertaining to "darkness," while RGB is used to make (any color up to) white, and could be used to achieve something "light" related.

So it would be a simple assumption that the CMY trio has something to do with darkness or the Dark Worlds, while the RGB trio has something to do with light or the Light World.

This is interesting because Kris, Noelle, and Susie are all Lightners, while Ralsei - and perhaps his other two comrades? - are Darkners. This flips the easy correlation of Lightners with the Light World and Darkners with the Dark Worlds on its head.

But haven't we seen this before? As far as we've seen, it's only possible for a Lightner to create a Dark Fountain. Could Darkners have some special kind of interaction with the Light World in the same way?

Moreover, do the trio of Kris, Noelle, and Susie have some sort of darkness-related power or knowledge available only to them? What makes the three of them so special? Even Gaster comments on it, though he may be biased toward the subject of his research, and even that, if true, is valuable information.

If we can't figure out what exactly is special about the CMY trio yet, i'm not going to hazard guesses about a purported RGB trio which we don't even know exists. But I would assume based on their inspirations that it would be basically the inverse of whatever the CMY three have going on.

Finally, there's one last property of these models that seems noteworthy. While CMYK and RGB seem like inversions of each other, a crucial difference is that CMYK is used for print media, while RGB is used for screens. There's nothing relevant about that I can think of at the time being, but it's something worth keeping in mind for future speculation on the topic.

CONCLUSION

So, there we are! While this is "theory" is more on the broad and speculative side, I hope that these ideas are useful going forward. We know very little about the role of the CORE, but a possible link between it and darkness and three of the main cast is valuable information. And perhaps we can learn some more about Ralsei and an unknown red and blue character at some point, too.

Thanks for reading!

Click here for Part 2

ETA: Oh Kenju in the artbook just outright confirms the CMYK tubes apparently.

Well done, Youtube commenter.

[keeps-ache]

ggghhg i hate vehiclessssssss ghghghhghhhhh [dies dies dies forever]

[squid-boo]

I made a HDD outfit for my MC to match with Levis 😭😭😭

[imwritesometimes]

I have been missing my grandma a lot lately so while I was at the store today I grabbed some of the lotion she used to use all the time and I'm very 🥰 rn

[tomwambsmilk]

This is such a long post that nobody asked for but I've been seeing Discourse again...

I feel like something that’s missing in most of the discussions I’ve seen on Tumblr about how streaming companies like Netflix have changed TV production for the worse is the profit motive. Or at least, it’s misunderstood. For example, I see a lot of people complaining about how Netflix only considers a show worthwhile if a bunch of people binge it as soon as it comes in, which is true - but I don’t know that everyone understands why, and it's lead to a skewed perception of what's actually going on, and why various studios and platforms make the decisions that they do.

The thing about Netflix is that it’s a public company that's currently unprofitable - so, every single thing it does is oriented toward "growth" (gaining new subscribers). Every show they decide to invest in, they do so because they think it’ll make people who don’t have Netflix want to get Netflix. And if they launch a show, and a whole bunch of new people join the platform, AND their viewer data shows that this show received disproportionate viewership in the same month all those people joined the platform - then it was a good investment. The further out you go from the release, the less correlation there is between the viewership of a show and new subscribers, so the less those viewer numbers matter to them.

Additionally, people talking about the show is more valuable to them than people actually watching it, because people talking about the show gives them free word-of-mouth marketing. Once your friend has bought a Netflix subscription, Netflix doesn't care what they watch, or at what pace. So obviously, if you can make everyone feel like they need to watch the entire show RIGHT NOW because everyone is talking about it and they can't avoid spoilers, that's a much stronger marketing strategy than letting people watch at their own pace.

And that’s why seasons are so short - a longer season costs more money and won’t bring in any extra subscribers, so it's a bad investment. It’s also why Netflix shows tend to be cancelled after only a couple of seasons - if a show hasn’t brought in many new subscribers after the first two seasons, it’s not likely to do so in the future, and so it becomes a poor investment, regardless of how many people already on the platform love it. And even beloved shows like Stranger Things eventually reach a point where everyone who loves it is already on the platform, and even though it's still massively popular it's no longer profitable on the same scale.

All of this is to contrast with network TV, where the revenue comes from advertisers. The more eyeballs are on a show, the more money a network can charge for ad space during that show. So the more beloved a TV show is, the more episodes you want in a season; even if the quality of some of those episodes is poor because the creative team is overworked and underpaid (ie exploited), people will still tune in and you’ll still make money. And that’s also how you end up with shows of 10-15 seasons, even if the show starts to suck around season 8 or 10; as long as enough devoted fans are still watching the show, they can still charge mega ad dollars and make a lot of money. A long-running show with name recognition will make more money, even when it sucks, than an excellent brand-new show with no name recognition. It also means that shows that are self-contained “plot of the week” type shows do a LOT better than stories with season-long arcs, because those shows are more likely to attract casual viewers in addition to regular ones, and people are less likely to abandon the whole show if they miss an episode or two. Plus, if you don't need to worry about the order a season airs in, you can make a lot more money off of rerun adspace outside of the regular season.

And finally, growth looks different for a network. On Netflix, a single person can only provide a single unit of growth, because you're only going to purchase one subscription, so there's very little incentive for Netflix to cater to existing subscribers so long as the platform is 'good enough' for them to avoid cancelling. On the other hand, network growth is calculated based on viewership. So, let's say I watch "The Office" on NBC every week, and nothing else. And then one day, a friend tells me how much they love this other NBC show, "30 Rock", that's halfway through its second season, so I start watching that. That's growth for NBC! They can now charge a little bit more for ad space on 30 Rock than they could before - and it's happened without a whole new person needing to be introduced to their network. So there's a strong incentive to pay attention to what existing viewers want, rather than just focusing on what brings in new viewers. After all, not watching one specific show is a much easier decision than cancelling an entire platform subscription. (The downside of this is that network TV creators are far more beholden to the demands of the audience than a show on a platform like Netflix or HBO, and that can lead to sacrificing some creative integrity).

Overall my point is that the entire structure and shape of TV shows has ALWAYS been motivated by profit. That doesn’t mean the complaints about Netflix are invalid - they are VERY valid and I agree with most of them - but I think it’s important to diagnose the problem correctly: the people with the money to make a tv show are also usually the people who would like to make as much money as possible off your tv show, and will manipulate it accordingly. What’s the solution? I’m not sure, but pretending that these studios are making decisions based on “bad data” or “not understanding what people want” or just pure caprice is simply naive. Its not that they don't know what you want - they just don't care.

[snzunii]

model yn steps out with non-showbiz beau, bonten's ran haitani.

[sysig]

I have made

the rough

of an improv card game