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kenomacreature · 2 months ago

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SEMI-COHERENT MUSINGS ON THE METAPHYSICS OF DELTARUNE

Exploring such topics as: - "what are the Depths?" - "what's with all the water references?" - "why do Darkners know all that stuff?"

Chapters 3 & 4 are fast approaching, the time we have before we’re faced with an influx of novel topics for speculation is running out, and I still have some leftover thoughts on the first two chapters that I'd like to get out there in writing before that happens. These thoughts primarily center around the metaphysics of Deltarune’s diegetic world, and various discursive methods that might be employed to help elucidate its nature.

This will be a loosely structured collection of thoughts that draw heavily from philosophy, literary theory and mythology, so if you don’t like pseudointellectual ramblings this is your warning to close the tab.

All of the points made here will be ancillary to the premises I argue for in my essay titled The Magic Circle. You should probably read it first!

Crossing the Fountain – art vs. byt

Much of my Magic Circle essay is concerned with the almost magical way in which one’s experience of reality is mentally transformed when under the spell of art or fiction. Indeed, this is the source of the essay’s title, and what I argue Darkness in Deltarune represents. I wanted to illustrate this idea a little more.

In the essay, I quoted J. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens – in that book he's talking about games and play specifically, but one of his most salient observations is that play is undergirded by an impulse to abstract from immediate reality that is shared between many branches of culture, including all aesthetic traditions. Huizinga is not the only theorist who noticed that art (which I define to include games and play) is experienced as a break from ‘immediate’ or quotidian experience. Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky posited that art was a transformation of everyday life into its own seperate realm. In his analysis, he put forth an oppositional model between art and what the Formalists called “byt” – an evocative term which could be translated as “life,” but also evokes the way in which life stabilizes into predictable molds.

Within the realm of byt, we experience events causally – and causality, as David Hume famously noted, is at bottom arbitrary. Art, on the other hand, is constructed towards certain ends – it is teleological. In art, essence precedes existence.

In byt, there's material – paper, canvas, film reel, computer code. In art, there are (artistic) devices – stanza, perspective, montage, mechanic.

Byt produces recurring patterns and routines that threaten to turn us into automatons. Art de-familiarizes, jolting us out of the narcotic patterns of everyday experience by presenting us with novelty to reflect on.

Now, you may or may not find this model for understanding art convincing or all-encompassing, but I think it provides a useful idea for understanding Deltarune's metatext.

When we interact with art or fiction, we voluntarily undergo certain illusions. When I read a story, I condition myself to think that I’m reading something that actually happened. When I watch theater, I condition myself to think that the actors are actual people, and the stage is a real environment. When I watch a film, I condition myself to think that the camera doesn’t exist; that it is a window into a different world which is also somehow not of that world. And when I play a (narrative) game, I condition myself to think that I am not interfacing with a program, but a world of its own. Of course, these self-imposed illusions are in no way totalizing. There is always a part of us that remains aware of the artifice. But our experience qua art operates under these illusions – we might say that there is always a part of us experiencing byt too, but this part is marginalized when we’re absorbed in an aesthetic experience.

Some readers might be scratching their heads at what any of this has to do with Deltarune, so I'll make the connection clear: Deltarune itself explicitly formulates Dark and Light – obvious analogues for fiction and reality (or art and byt) – as separate worlds, existing in a similar oppositional balance. Darkness transforms everyday objects – the raw material so to speak – into narrative devices, like characters and settings. In Deltarune there is a dual-reality to everything that comes into contact with Darkness (or the power of art). Might we climb one step up the hierarchy and try to use something akin to this oppositional model to explain the ways in which Deltarune refers to reality from within its fictional domain?

For example, there is the uneasy fact that we are an active force within the narrative, instead of just an invisible spectator. Sidestepping the question of whether the force we’re embodying in the game is supposed to literally be us, the player, at the very least the characters can only understand us in more conceptual terms, as some sort of in-universe deity or anomalous entity. So there’s us – the player – and there’s the Angel – our in-universe embodiment.

So what about the character who contacted us – what about Gaster? In The Magic Circle, I discussed how the information we have about Gaster leads us to think that he exists in some sort of transcendent state as a result of his experiments with Darkness. From that, I extrapolated that Darkness was the fundamental substance underlying Deltarune’s reality (which we can fit into another binary: there’s Darkness, the magical substance that makes up the reality of Deltarune’s world, and there’s what the concept clearly allegorizes: the creative or imaginative capacity of human beings – which is what gave rise to Deltarune, the video game). Gaster’s “transcendent” state trades heavily on video game creepypasta tropes; he’s like a ghost haunting the code of the game. And as it turns out, Deltarune has explicitly made the move to extend its diegesis to its code with the inclusion of a character who seems to be stuck there.

If the code is a part of the diegetic world, we can extrapolate another binary: there’s the code or internal workings of the program, and there’s “the Depths” – a higher (or deeper) metaphysical layer of Deltarune’s world that transcends time and space. Worded differently, the Depths are what we get when the 'eye of the narrative' turns its gaze towards the code of the program.

To close off this section, I want to mention that in Shklovsky’s theories about art and narrative, he makes heavy use of a machine metaphor; he wanted to focus on the ways in which art was a constructed object abiding by its own internal rules. The specific word the Formalists preferred is “device”. In fact, one of Shklovsky’s most well-known essays is titled “Art as Device”. Just something to think about for you Device Theory fans.

Water, Darkness and Chaos as Symbolic Motifs

Water is everywhere in Deltarune. The magical worlds we explore are given form by “fountains” and “geysers”. Onion-san talks of ominous songs under the sea. Ocean.ogg briefly plays after we fall into the supply closet Dark World. And the source image of IMAGES_DEPTHS, the background of the GONERMAKER segment, is apparently of an ocean. What gives?

The basic gist is that water has an extremely long and prominent symbolic history in mythology, and figures especially prominently in ancient creation myths. One of the earliest creation myths we have, derived from Enūma Eliš, a Babylonian poem of the 2nd millenium BCE, describes a primordial state consisting of nothing but two deities – Abzu, god of the freshwater ocean, and Tiamat, god of the saltwater sea; from the “comingling of their waters”, all of creation emerges. This is consistent with what we know of ancient near-eastern cosmology in general; they viewed the world as essentially like an air bubble. In the beginning, there was water. Unordered, chaotic, formless. Then, something happens to produce the earth and firmament, both disc-shaped, which separate this cosmic ocean into heavenly waters above the earth (the source of all rain), and lower waters of the deep (the source of all rivers, springs, fountains and geysers).

This cosmological account survives into the Biblical narrative. From Genesis 1:6:

and God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”

The ancient near-eastern flood narrative, which likewise is preserved in the Bible as the story of Noah’s ark, is made less arbitrary with this in consideration; its basis is not merely that drowning in a storm is a scary concept (though it certainly is) – the real symbolic threat of the flood is of a return to pre-creation chaos. The gates of heaven opening and all of creation coming undone. From Genesis 7:11:

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.

(Sound familiar?)

The idea of water as underlying all reality cropped up not just in religion and mythology, but also philosophy. Thales of Miletus, credited since Aristotle as the world’s first philosopher, famously believed that all of reality was made up of water. Thales and his philosophical successors are sometimes called material monists for their belief that all of reality was composed of a single ultimate substance – the arche from which everything originates.

Thales’s idea was no doubt influenced by the cosmological picture painted by mythology. Though not identical to the near-eastern accounts, the world of ancient Greek mythology is preceded by a state of primordial Chaos – a vast chasm, abyss, or emptiness. Though we in the present day might be tempted to understand Chaos as something like space, ancient commentators such as Pherecydes of Syros interpreted it as water. It was the fluid, formless and undifferentiated nature of water that made it such an enticing candidate for the pre-creation substance.

Chaos was also associated with darkness. Unambiguously born from Chaos are Erebus and Nyx – deified personifications of Darkness and Night. And this is a point of similarity with the ancient near-eastern accounts. From Genesis 1:1-3:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

In short, the primordial state across world mythology tends to be that of an infinitely dark, chaotic ocean.

The parallels to Deltarune are obvious, and having tracked the symbolic history which the game is working with can, I think, lend us a better understanding of "Darkness" as it appears in the game. Needless to say, all of what I've discussed supports the thesis I laid out in The Magic Circle: that Darkness is the arche of Deltarune, the underlying substance that its reality is made of. Likewise I think we can intuit what “the Depths” are – simply what in the Hebrew Bible is referred to as “the (great) deep”. A mass accumulation of formless Darkness which sits below reality itself. Dark Fountains are formed when the fabric of reality is pierced, creating a gap from which Darkness bursts forth. And since Darkness is the “raw material of reality” so to speak, the Darkness forms a new reality within the old one. But too many holes in reality threaten to “burst the air bubble”, so to speak, and flood the world with Darkness.

I created the above diagram a while back, and used it in The Magic Circle - no doubt you'll notice the similarity between this and the earlier diagram of the Biblical cosmology. The funny thing is that this connection wasn't consciously intended at all; I was barely aware of what the Biblical cosmology was like when I made the first version of this image. That makes me feel like I'm on the right track.

I do want to make something clear; the world of Deltarune isn't necessarily a literal Biblical style air bubble, with a disc-earth and dome sky. The air bubble thing is just for the sake of visualization. I think the Depths are more like a different layer of reality, simultaneously "higher" and "deeper". It's not that there's literally a bunch of dark water under the ground; what Kris is really stabbing is, again, the fabric of "phenomenal" reality itself.

Another thing I want to note; these early mentions by Toby of concepts relating to twilight or the meeting of light and dark have long been a topic of discussion in the community. I want to formulate my understanding of what its significance is.

The first thing God does in the Biblical creation story is summon light. Light meeting the darkness is presented as a precondition to any further creation. Likewise, fiction (darkness) can not exist without an observer in reality (light). The meeting of light and dark is a fundamental condition of art; it can't exist without somone to "shed light on it".

It could also well be referring to the Roaring; when the distinctions between light and dark threaten to dissolve, that is when we must travel to the "edge of the shadow" (the outer boundaries of the dream, near where reality is), and "shatter the twilight reverie" (twilight: when only the sun's afterglow remains) (reverie: being lost in a dream).

On Darkner Knowledge

As established earlier, Darkners are teleological beings whose essence precedes their existence. That is to say, they’re created with an inherent purpose. This purpose is what Ralsei and Queen call “the will of the Fountain” – a guiding force determining the nature of the Dark World and its inhabitants, originating in the Fountain’s creator. In my Magic Circle essay, I used this fact to explain the behavior of Darkners, and why certain ones (like King and Queen) know things that they seemingly shouldn’t (like the fact that the Knight exists, and what their title is). On this latter part, however, I didn’t go into too much detail. Here, I want to elaborate on it a little by invoking an argument made by René Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy, known as “the trademark argument”.

(Don’t worry, I’m not actually going to get into the weeds of Descartes’ philosophy. It might be fun to talk about how Descartes’ idea of hierarchical degrees of reality, which consist of infinite substances, finite substances and modes, correspond to Deltarune’s Angel, Lightner, and Darkner hierarchy, but I don’t think it would unearth any particularly useful insights.)

The (very simplified) trademark argument goes something like this: God must exist, because I can conceive of God, his features (that he is an infinite and eternal substance), and the fact that he is altogether more real than I am despite me not possessing this degree of reality. The idea can’t have come from me, but it must have come from somewhere – consequently it must be that I have this idea innately as a sort of “trademark” of my creator.

Now, I very much doubt anyone who's reading this finds the above to be convincing evidence for God’s existence. Thankfully, we aren’t setting out to find out whether God exists or not. The God in this scenario – the Knight – is someone we know exists, and how the relevant knowledge is possessed really does require an explanation (unlike in Descartes' argument, where the notion that an explanation is needed for how we can conceive of the idea of God is dubious at best).

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that the trademark hypothesis is the only possible explanation you could offer. Obviously, you could posit that the Knight entered the Dark Worlds and imparted the knowledge personally. But to do this you’d have to deny the Kris Knight hypothesis, marginalize the religious subtext, assert that there’s no meaning to certain patterns between Chapter 2 and 3 (such as the main Darkner bosses being activated before the Fountain Creation), ignore the latent implications in Queen’s dialogue, among other things – and I’m not interested in doing all that. For the moment, the trademark hypothesis seems much safer, not least of all because it explains other mysterious details too.

Consider the fact that Darkners are aware of the battle system, and know how it works. Do we suppose that someone went around telling each and every Darkner the mechanics of the game? Or does it just make intuitive sense that Darkners would be created with certain ideas that are consistent with their purpose?

Granted, there is still some weirdness left over that we’d have to explain. For example, Darkners – most notably Ralsei but others as well – know about the player’s button configurations. We might be tempted to just chalk this up to the necessities of tutorializing, but the game calls attention to this by having Susie ask questions about it. The trademark hypothesis doesn’t explain why Darkners specifically would be stamped with this knowledge while the Lightners are left out.

The best explanation I can come up with is that since the Dark Worlds are created by Kris, and Kris almost certainly has forbidden meta knowledge imparted by Gaster, the Darkners likewise inherit that knowledge since Kris knows that the player will be controlling them when they go to seal the Fountains, and is aware that we will need some level of guidance.

Conclusion

All right, that’s pretty much everything I wanted to get out there before Chapters 3 & 4 release. Thanks for reading! I hope this wasn’t complete babble to anyone who’s not as knee-deep as I am in random literary theory and philosophy.

#deltarune #undertale

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magnet-lattice · 1 year ago

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(Lifesteal s5 spoilers for my understanding of The Players' plans, from catching incomplete sections of streams and osmosis. I do not think this is spoilers for any of them but I am not keeping up very well, so please correct me if I am wrong and I'll edit this. It's a little bit rambly, sorry.)

So, aside from the unrequited pitchflirting, my understanding of the Players' main finale plans are that they want to remove all of the buildings and restore the server or at least the main areas to looking the way they did at the start of the server, before anyone built anything. And this has some justification about like being a fresh start to the world, aside from the fact that it's a cool dramatic thing to do, but also!

It's really neat how the thing it does is specifically making the server look as though nobody ever played on it. Because the Players' whole thing, their primary conflict with primarily Jumper and Minute (I don't think they have a team name?) is that they're the only people willing to play heel, to do cool evil dramatic shit that other people can make content by fighting against, and almost everyone else (no offense intended to Squiddo or Wemmbu but they haven't been on much lately?) is either neutral, inactive, or insistently playing face?

And in the arguments between the players and Jumper and Minute, it has come up that the opposing side wants to end the server without conflict, and the Players' argument in favor of what they're doing is that it's interesting content which creates a reason for the other players to log on and participate. (This has consistently been their motivation since early in the Abyss arc)

And I think that in addition to the other justification, restoring the world to look untouched is a pretty powerful statement of "This is what you're advocating for the world to be: one where nobody ever logs on and does anything or fights or builds things that matter."

(In the interest of fairness, I know Minute was talking about like, getting people onto the server by having temporary mods during the sessions, and Branzy does have his carnival, and I do enjoy this content, but... at least to me, the fundamental strength of Lifesteal content qua Lifesteal (Minecraft's deadliest SMP), as a reason to be watching this rather than something else-- like a modded or survival series that happens to be made by the same people-- is the social effects of a bunch of people who are mostly tryhards in a competitive environment that encourages conflict and teaming and subterfuge and paranoia and big dramatic clickbaitable gestures?)

(I do in fact think it's fun and interesting when there are some people on Lifesteal who care about morality and want to do the nice thing! This is a fun source of conflict! I just... think it's more fun when that's not the majority of people who are logging on and doing anything, because then there's the risk of them uncomplicatedly winning, or successfully preventing or mitigating or discouraging the majority of the dramatic evil/annoying stuff, and then nothing happening? Lifesteal content is primarily about conflict. It's maybe a little more fun when the people involved have in-universe justifications that are not just "it's for content", painting the fourth wall with a thin veneer of "it's because it's cool and asserts our power" or some galaxybrained self-serving philosophical/metaphorical justification explaining why this supervillain stuff is the real moral thing to do, or whatever? But it's still fun as long as people are like, logging in and doing stuff and fighting or arguing with each other, and maybe having some big feelings? and at least one person is live or making videos so we can see what's happening)

#Lifesteal SMP

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seelestia · 1 year ago

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who are a few mutuals that you appreciate alot? mutual appreciation day 🥰❤️😊🤩💐✨

OOOO FUNFUNFUN!!! thank u so much for sending this in and for essentially spreading positivity, nonnie. this is appreciated ♡ also, instead of strictly moots, i decided to extend my appreciation to everyone! moots, anons, friends and readers alike ໒꒰ྀི´ ˘ ` ꒱ྀིა

some odeliaesqué sappy appreciation under the cut:

@yvnaology - one of my fav facts abt yona was that she's one of the first moots i ever had on tumblr!!! and she's a lyney kisser and a fellow aventurine kisser (#taste). also she's so silly (/aff) and easy to talk to! like u'll feel at ease around her. she deserves good great and awesome things in life, so make sure to water ur yona daily with love <3

@solarisfortuneia - mika wished me congrats when i reached 1k and i still remember it till this day <3 she's friendly in a shy/modest way and suchsuchsuch a good writer! e.g. i cry over this every day actually. mika also has her silly moments sometimes too. someone save her /j

@floraldresvi - simply the sweetest & most supportive moot EVER! vivi is full of love and she's good at giving some of that love to others <3 her selfships are like bottles of serotonin to me. 100% would drop anything and everything in my hands to support her!!! and ik she'd do the same for me <3 mwah mwah 💐💐

@monicahar - the moot who comes online once in a while and drops absolute meals when she does. ate, left no crumbs 🔥🔥 also SUPER FUNNY!!! and unhinged, i'm concerned but amused at the same time. i hope she's having a nice break!! thank u for ur past & future services ma'am. we love u 🤭🤭

@milk-violet - MIREI !!! sunshine personified but also vv precious. i'm the leader of # protecc mirei squad (real). best person to have ever appeared in my notifs and i lovelovelove when her username pops up. take care & good luck with school! IK U CAN DO IT. remember what i said: slay before ur slayed 🗣️

@xianyoon - the butterfly moot 🦋 !!! both socially and aesthetically hehe. sosooso sweet & kind. has creative projects and executes them well at that too. i personally crown her as genshinblr's best hostess™! also, send her a moodboard and she'll cherish u forever - that's one of her love languages <3 ++ her pretty & aesthetic rb's are such a good refresh for my dash. love her for it!!

@hermosacolibri - the name, 'starlight' fits them sm bcs i feel like if we were to take a peek into their mind, stars will burst out!!! /pos (<- unique complimenting skills ik pardon me). their ideas are brilliant and i can tell they put their all into pursuing their vision <3 it's truly an honor to be a witness & reader. if u want to check them out, they write over at @/starlightlacrimosazpsff !!! ★

@wolfhookk - aaaaa ri !!!! booping her x1000 rn bcs i cannot believe boop trend ended when she came online. the discrimination 😔 /j i'll always remember ri as my first ever moot on here like first, 1st, #1!!! i forever thank her for swooping into my inbox back then and she's welcome to do that even now any time she likes <3

@kaiserkisser - skylia is the true angst consumer, the realest of it!! even in different fandoms LOL. she's nice (and gremlin-ish) when u get to know her more and she reciprocates energy really well! i'll never forget the disaster of boops in my notifs /lh

@callilouv - COOL MUTUAL ALERT !!!! cool art & cool interests. truly, picasso w/ the finger and fandoms!! idk if cal still draws with his finger dhjahshsj but still vv mega cool!

@manager-of-the-pudding-bank - the grandpas & old men kisser where art thou 💔 /j loqua has that awkward & silly rizz!!! idk if she still does wax stamps but i still think it's really cool. bcs qua's just cool in general !!! hehe

@calxlu - aaaaa vi!!! the one who enables my rambles and selfships shhshsh i am so thankful <3 rambler 🤝 rambler is the best. i love talking to her and it's super reassuring to know that it's mutual! even if i take some time but i always look forward to seeing her replies in my inbox. it's like we're penpals across the screen talking abt irl stuff and our f/o's ꒰✿´ ꒳ ` ꒱♡

& honorable mention: @/zhongrin. rin does not interact with minors anymore (which i respect and so should everyone!), so we count as former moots. but !!! i still think she's an amazing person regardless <3 (note: her blog is equally as great but plsplspls be mindful of her rules beforehand.)

brainrot anon - A REAL ONE!!! always there when i come back from the grave each time. i get reminded of them whenever i look at my inbox, it's an instinct atp. their brainrots are so fun & random (but that's a charm in itself /pos) !!! tbh i love elaborating them all so never stop sending the brainworms in <3 feel free to treat my inbox as a drop-off for ur thoughts LMAO /gen. come by again soon!

michiki anon - MY COUSINNNMNMN!!! i still love and miss when they'd come into my inbox to chat. it was so nice getting to know someone in a casual way <3 i hope ur doing well wherever u are, michikinon! i'm doing well these days and i hope u are too 🤍

rix anon - their series still has me FLOOOORED. i still think it deserves a proper platform than just thru my lil ol inbox. it deserves more recognition :( but just the fact that i got to help share their writing alone is an honor of its own!!! i hope ur doing well too, rix anon <3

++ everyone who has left a nice feedback / said anything nice in my notifs or my inbox!! even a simple 'cute' or 'this is good' or even just leaving a note means sososo much to me. i'm just a measly guy in my own little corner on this site, really - so thank u thank u thank u all !!! 🫂

#SORRY FOR THE PINGS Y'ALL 😵#this is giving 'end-of-the-year post' energy LOL (it's literally the end of april)#but yes why not <33 #ask box! 📬#anon visitors!

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