#yes the original games exist and we can use context clues

[resizura]

the thing too is that by not creating a re1 remake within the same continuity and not MENTIONING the events of re1 in the re2r, its no wonder re3r was so bad! obv its not the ONLY reason but how can you have re3r which is directly reliant on the games before it as the third in a trilogy, and you DONT have the first installment AND the second installment doesnt have anything to set up the third! namely the stuff with irons who later dismantled stars

[vgfm]

Deltarune Theory: More Musings on Everyman and Gaster

Hey all, it’s been about a month since my big Everyman Analysis Post and I just wanted to make a quick follow-up that ended up being quite long.

This follow-up includes some things that I left out of the original post, as well as a couple of new revelations and developments I’ve uncovered since then.

This new post also segues into a theory I’ve been building about Gaster, since I feel like both characters are connected.

I recommend you read the original post (if you haven’t already) otherwise this follow-up may not make much sense.

Sections

Quick Recap

Further Foreshadowing

The Curious Case of Mettaton

“Strange” Times

Revisiting Reaper Bird

Creating Reaper Bird

Ice-E’s Odds and “E”nds

A Deeper Look into Father Alvin

Heroes of the Dark, Villains of the Light

A New Challenger Approaches!

Gaster’s Connection to the Knight

Creating a New Future

Gaster is ???

Gaster the ???

What are Skeletons, Anyway?

Conclusion

Quick Recap

If for whatever reason you haven’t read the previous Everyman post, here’s the cliff notes version:

Everyman was the bullet attack from the Reaper Bird amalgamate in Undertale’s True Lab (the one whose head got eaten by butterflies)

Everyman appears twice in Deltarune Chapter 1, implying a greater role in the full game

In Undertale, Everyman was likely an actual person/monster who became part of an amalgamate like Snowdrake’s mother and Shyren’s sister did

Everyman is likely to be “The Knight,” mentioned in Deltarune (see first post for full argument/evidence)

Jevil and the King of Spades are connected to both the Knight and Everyman, implying they’re the same person (again, see previous post)

The word “strange” is associated with Everyman; his sprite in Undertale is called “strangeman” and Seam refers to the Knight as a “strange knight”

The Knight may or may not have a “strange son”, according to Seam (it’s unclear because the line is worded vaguely)

The Knight/Everyman is probably connected to Gaster

If Everyman is an existing character, then he’s likely either Father Alvin or one of the Ice-E’s employees (long story, see previous post)

[Image transcript: Two text boxes from Rouxls Kaard. In order, he says: “Lost...? Frightened...? Confused...? GOOD!! HA HA HA!!!” end image transcript.]

Need some help? Otherwise, we’re moving on...

Further Foreshadowing

I wanted to touch a bit more on the concept of character foreshadowing in Undertale/Deltarune, since it’s one of my foundational arguments for why I think Everyman will be important in Deltarune.

I still can’t help but find it remarkable that Toby took the time to include multiple Everyman “cameos” in Deltarune Chapter 1. The Jevil fight cameo especially gets me because it’s in a secret fight that most players already won’t experience on their initial playthrough, and on top of that it’s a rare event in said fight. It reminds me of how the “Mysteryman” event in Undertale has a strong chance to not trigger even if you have the correct fun value. This all feels like a lot of trouble for Toby to go through for what is an otherwise extremely obscure character.

Last time I gave examples of how characters like Mettaton and Rouxls Kaard were foreshadowed before they were properly introduced, but I found another example of a foreshadowed character that better illustrates my argument:

Muffet was a fan-made boss included in Undertale as a backer incentive for the game’s Kickstarter. In other words, she was (presumably) not part of the initial plans for the game or its demo (which was released prior to the Kickstarter). In the finished game, Muffet, while not as important as other boss characters, still ties into the spider bake sale seen in the Ruins and she’s (possibly?) one of the mercenaries hired by Mettaton to kill you.

Muffet’s inclusion in the full game retroactively makes the Ruins’ spider bake sale serve as foreshadowing for her character. However, Toby didn’t stop there.

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side screenshots of Undertale. In the left one, the narration says “(It’s a spider web.)” In the right screenshot, the narration continues: “(There’s a flyer for a bake sale on it.)” end image transcript.]

Toby also added a bake sale flyer in Napstablook’s house as an additional reminder and gave Muffet her own introductory bake sale room in Hotland before she’s properly fought.

Note how once again Toby took the time and effort to foreshadow a character multiple times, even though that character wasn’t even part of his original plans. And, as was the case with MTT and RK, the foreshadowing wasn’t just a one-off hint or nod, either.

Muffet is also an example of how foreshadowing doesn’t need to include a character’s name or a direct reference in any dialogue or flavor text. Mettaton and Rouxls Kaard are both mentioned by name (or initials) by other characters, yet Muffet’s name is never spoken before her fight.

A first time player going in blind would have no way of knowing that Muffet exists as a specific character in the narrative, but her presence would still make sense and be foreshadowed from contextual clues. The spider bake sale, while not telling us exactly who Muffet is, clearly builds up to the eventual reveal of her role and motivations. This is what I meant when I said that some foreshadowing only makes sense in hindsight, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is foreshadowing.

The Curious Case of Mettaton

Think back to what I said last time about foreshadowing:

“For all we know there could be other, more-cryptic Everyman references already in Deltarune that we don’t have the full context to understand yet.”

While I didn’t specify it at the time, I meant this as a subtle hint that Deltarune’s mentions of the Knight would double as foreshadowing for Everyman (assuming they’re the same person, as my theory alleges). Obviously I didn’t start my original post with this argument because it would be putting the cart before the horse and I had to first establish why I think Everyman is the Knight.

Speaking of the Knight, another thing that I hinted at but didn’t fully spell out last time is the fact that the three most prominent characters who mention the Knight (Seam, Jevil, and the King of Spades) all coincidentally leave “clues” that point to Everyman as well. Seam uses the word “strange” more than any other character and is the first one to mention the “strange” Knight. Jevil mentions the Knight and has the rare Everyman bullet. The Spade King mentions the Knight several times, including as his final in-battle line, then right after allows his cloak to fly away as a butterfly (an image associated with Everyman, per my last post).

If my theory is correct then it would mean that Everyman is foreshadowed even more heavily in chapter 1 than just his two visual “cameos”. It would also mean that every mention of the Knight would serve as a “namedrop” for Everyman, like how Mettaton and Rouxls Kaard are namedropped before their introductions.

This type of foreshadowing, where namedrops are seemingly “unconnected” to visual cameos, isn’t unprecedented. Mettaton is namedropped several times in Undertale before Hotland, but we also see his rectangular form powering the Snowdin colored tile puzzle.

[Image transcript: An Undertale screenshot of Frisk looking at Mettaton’s deactivated body next to the colored tile puzzle in Snowdin. The narration says “(The machien isn’t working.)” end image transcript.]

I also want to clarify that, yes, that’s actually Mettaton--Papyrus mentions that Alphys designed the tile puzzle and you can see that Mettaton disappears from that room later on before eventually reusing the tile puzzle himself in Hotland.

[Image transcript: An Undertale screenshot of Frisk talking on the phone with Papyrus in the Snowdin colored tile puzzle room. Papyrus is saying “OH HO!!! THE PUZZLE THAT DR. ALPHYS MADE!” end image transcript.] 

But here’s something you may not have ever thought about: there’s absolutely nothing prior to Hotland that outright says that the mysterious “MTT” and the machine powering the tile puzzle are one in the same, just like how there’s no line of dialogue in Deltarune Chapter 1 that outright says Everyman is the Knight.

In fact, I’d argue there’s more evidence to suggest that Everyman is the Knight than there is to suggest (to a new player, pre-Hotland) that “MTT” and the tile puzzle machine are the same person (or even a person at all), and yet we know the latter is true. Just something to think about.

“Strange” Times

Something else I wanted to expand upon was the use of the word “strange”. I pointed out last time how Everyman is called “strangeman” in Undertale’s game files and how Deltarune’s dialogue uses the word “strange” very deliberately. 

What I didn’t touch on was how the word “strange” is used in Undertale. Long story short: it’s used a lot more often than in Deltarune but its usage also feels a lot less deliberate. On the one hand, “strange” is used to refer to important things like Alphys’ Lab, Sans’ room, Toriel already “knowing” humans after a reset, and the broken machine in Sans’ workshop.

[Image transcript: An Undertale screenshot of Frisk staring at a curtain in Sans’ secret room. The narration says “(There’s a strange machine behind the curtain.) (It seems to be broken.)” end image transcript.] 

On the other hand, “strange” is also used to refer to more mundane things like sleeping in Toriel’s house, quiet echo flowers, or Mettaton rattling off the features of the game-shaped bomb.

In truth, I don’t think the word “strange” has much meaning when it comes to dialogue in Undertale. However, Everyman is the only sprite in Undertale with the word “strange” in its title. Almost all of the non-dialogue strings with “strange” in their name also relate to Everyman. There are a couple of other strings referring to a “strangetangle,” but I’m not exactly sure what that is.

My personal theory is that Everyman and the True Lab may have been one of the later additions to Undertale’s programming, and by that point Toby had likely written most of the game’s dialogue and didn’t feel the need to retroactively limit the use of the word “strange”. That’s purely my own speculation, of course.

The point still stands that Deltarune uses “strange” in a way that feels much more planned. Unlike Undertale, Deltarune tries to limit “mundane” uses of “strange” as much as possible. I must also reiterate that the first mention of the Knight and the first usage of “strange” in Deltarune is Seam referring to a “strange knight” in bright red letters.

[Image transcript: A Deltarune screenshot of Seam saying “But, recently, a strange knight appeared... And three of the kings were locked away.” end image transcript.] 

On the flip side, Toby has gotten a lot more careful with filenames for sprites in Deltarune. There are no sprites named “everyman” or ”strangeman” in Deltarune’s game files, just as there’s no “Gaster” or “mysteryman” either (save for the vessel name flag that restarts the game). The Everyman bullet that appears in Jevil’s fight is simply “spr_carousel”, and the graffiti is part of “bg_alphysalley”. Toby left far fewer secrets in Deltarune’s files than he did in Undertale’s, likely as a conscious effort to avoid spoiling any future reveals.

Revisiting Reaper Bird

Speaking of covering tracks, when writing my previous post I was a little disappointed to find that Reaper Bird’s battle text was something of a dead end for clues. Almost all of the dialogue and flavor text in Reaper Bird’s fight is repurposed text from the Astigmatism, Final Froggit, and Whimsalot fights.

[Image transcript: An Undertale screenshot of the Reaper Bird battle. Reaper Bird has three text bubbles. In order, they say: “Someone finally gets it,” “Ribbit ribbit,” and “Courage...” end image transcript.] 

When you think about it, Everyman is the most noteworthy thing about the Reaper Bird fight. Without him, Reaper Bird would be the most forgettable amalgamate. Reaper Bird doesn’t even show up again during the True Pacifist “victory lap” walk-around. Endogeny, Lemon Bread, and Snowdrake’s mother all show up in the overworld and have additional dialogue (or dog noises) with their family members. Reaper Bird and Memoryhead are the only amalgamates never heard from again.

I do think that Reaper Bird and Memoryhead are meant to serve a purpose beyond being general amalgamates. Memoryhead at least has the distinction of being the first amalgamate fought, having the unique “bad memory” item associated with it, and (arguably) being the most mysterious of all the amalgamates due to having no easily-identifiable “component” monster parts. 

Still, there are a couple of Reaper Bird tidbits worth pointing out. First is the name: I find it interesting that Everyman has been associated with two different “reaper”-affiliated enemies (i.e., Reaper Bird and Jevil w/ his scythe). It’s also interesting how the artbook shows an early concept for Whimsalot that carries a scythe as well:

[Image transcript: Two entries from the Undertale Artbook. On the left is a spritesheet for Everyman. Beneath it says “spr_strangeman_losinghead.png by Toby Fox. Name: Everyman Description: Just a good guy who shows up on occasion. To the right of this entry is an image of a Whimsalot holding a scythe while wearing a skull mask. Beneath it says “spr_whimsun_reaper.png by Toby Fox. Different idea for Whimsalot.” end image transcript.] 

The sprite is even called “whimsun_reaper”. Funny coincidence how Whimsalot’s design was changed to become more knight-like in the end.

While we’re on this page, there’s something I wanted to take another look at:

Madjick and Knight Knight are grouped with Everyman and Whimsalot despite neither of them being represented within the Reaper Bird’s design or dialogue. This page is immediately after a page that shows concepts for Final Froggit and Reaper Bird:

Wouldn’t it make more sense for Everyman to be on the same page as Reaper Bird, rather than being grouped with with Madjick and Knight Knight? The only things that Madjick, Knight Knight, and Whimsalot have in common are (1) they’re Core enemies and (2) they have the strongest “knights and wizards” theming out of all the Core mercenaries. Final Froggit and Astigmatism’s designs are more ambiguous, and the latter isn’t even included in this section of the artbook at all (despite being a component of Reaper Bird!).

Looking at this page, the earlier design for Reaper Bird’s eye-mouth thing does remind me of something...

It’s a somewhat tenuous connection and could just be a coincidence. Then again, Spade King is connected to the Knight and I already made a big deal out of his butterfly-shaped cloak. Interestingly, Spade King never uses his Chain of Justice attack after his cloak flies away and instead resorts to basic spade bullets to put down the Fun Gang. If the cloak was a gift from the Knight, perhaps it was endowed with sort of power that heightened the King’s abilities?

It is odd how the Chain is the only part of the King’s sprite that’s grey instead of black, white, or blue. Lancer’s sprite doesn’t have any grey on it, nor does he have his own “Chain” appendage. As far as I know this shade of grey is not used on any other character. Grey seems to carry a very specific connotation in this series: New Home is entirely in grey, the overworld sprites for the Amalgamates are grey, and Gaster Followers/Goners are associated with the color as well. We don’t fully know what it means yet, but it seems to be significant. Best make a mental note of it, at least.

Creating Reaper Bird

What especially sticks out to me now is Toby’s line above Reaper Bird’s Artbook entry:

“I created Reaper Bird first but I realized it wasn’t creepy enough so I gave it longer legs in-game.”

Now, when Toby says he created Reaper Bird “first”, he doesn’t specify what that “first” is in relation to. Was Reaper Bird the first amalgamate he designed? Or does Toby mean that he designed Reaper Bird “first” and then designed the Core mercenaries afterwards so that they’d fit as “components” of Reaper Bird’s body?

That latter interpretation may seem like a bit of a stretch, but it’s worth noting that Reaper Bird is the only amalgamate shown in the art book whose concept art does not have a step-by-step “breakdown” of how it was created from the designs of its component monsters. Endogeny and Lemon Bread both have full-page spreads showing earlier concepts alongside the regular monsters that make up their components.

What’s especially interesting is the artbook also includes a scrapped “Royal Guard” amalgamate and a page for Snowdrake’s Mom, whose final design only takes inspiration from Snowdrake.

And yet despite the fact that Reaper Bird has one of the most obvious designs in terms of how its components “fit together”, Toby did not show his early design process and instead only shows three frames of Reaper Bird’s idle animation. Assuming Reaper Bird was designed first and the Mercenaries’ designs were created or modified afterward, this would fit with my theory that the Core Mercenaries were deliberately themed around Everyman and his “knighthood”.

Even the design of Reaper Bird itself evokes some traits of Everyman’s design. Namely, both characters are bipedal, both have long necks, both have a beak/proboscis, and both have a single visible eye mounted on the side of their head. That last part stands out the most to me, as every major character in Undertale and Deltarune has forward-mounted eye sockets, like a human would. Even among random encounter enemies and background NPCs it’s a rarity to find wall-eyed characters.

It could just be my over-eager imagination, but the fully-stretched Reaper Bird looks like it even matches Everyman’s proportions to a degree, almost like it’s a skeleton or outline attempting to regain its “true form” out of the cobbled-together mercenary parts.

I said before that Reaper Bird becomes the most “boring” amalgamate without Everyman. In many respects Everyman is the centerpiece of that amalgamate, and by extension he may also be the centerpiece that informed the designs of the Core mercenaries.

If that’s going too far out on a limb, consider how many places and characters in Undertale are connected to Gaster despite the fact he has no real role in the game’s main plot. Sans, Papyrus, the Core, and the True Lab are all “informed” in some way or another by Gaster’s “existence” even though he never properly appears. Is it so unlikely to imagine that another “unseen” character who may be important in Deltarune also had a large impact on aspects of Undertale’s world?

Ice-E’s Odds and “E”nds

Speaking of impact... I don’t really have a segue lined up, so let’s talk about Ice-E’s instead. In my last post I brought up the idea of Everyman being one of the Ice-E’s employees that we see in Hometown. The bulk of my analysis focused on The Warrior, but I neglected to talk about the other unknown mascot: the “purple guy”.

In truth, there’s not a whole lot to this character. He only has one line of dialogue and he seems to be a deliberate reference to the “purple guy” from Five Nights at Freddy’s. Still, he’s just as mysterious as The Warrior and could very well have a larger role to play in the full game.

Interestingly, the purple guy’s sprite is named “icemascot_fake” in Deltarune’s files, whereas Burgerpants and the Nice Cream Bunny are “icemascot1″ and “icemascot2″, respectively. This fits with Burgerpants’ line where he questions whether the purple guy “even works here”.

[Image transcript: Two Deltarune screenshots side-by-side. Both feature Kris talking to Burgerpants in Hometown. On the left, Burgerpants says “Purple Guy - Man, THAT GUY, you gotta...” and on the right he continues, saying “... actually, does that guy even work here?” end image transcript.] 

The purple guy is also the only Ice-E’s mascot whose costume’s body doesn’t match the color of the costume’s head.

His colors do match the Everyman/Ice-E graffiti, though. Judging from his “fake” costume, he’s apparently some sort of Ice-E’s fanatic who made his own Ice-E’s getup and pretended to work there. I’m not sure how that would tie into the Knight’s motivations, if at all, but it certainly fits the bill for being “strange”.

Ice-E’s is apparently strange and creepy enough in-universe to inspire urban legends about it

But Kris was only kidding, right?

Getting back to Ice-E’s as a brand, it’s interesting how the company focuses on the letter “E”, inserting it into the word p”e”zza and other places where it doesn’t belong.

[Image transcript: A Deltarune screenshot of Burgerpants saying “Ice E’s P’E’ZZA, You’re number ‘1′ Spot for a piping hot pe’E’ce of PEZZA.” end image transcript.] 

Could the focus on “E” be pointing towards “E”veryman’s involvement? Eh, mayb”E”. 

Something that was pointed out to me by gantaloupe on Reddit: In the Core we see two branching paths: the sage’s path and the warrior’s path.

[Image transcript: An Undertale screenshot of Frisk reading a sign in the Core. The sign says “(North, the warrior’s path.) (West, the sage’s path.) (Any path leads to The End.)” end image transcript.] 

While this could just be a coincidence, it’s an interesting factoid in light of how Everyman is connected to the Core mercenaries and possibly connected to a character named “The Warrior” in Deltarune.

One last thing that I noticed is how Everyman’s bullet sprite and the Ice-E’s costumes both have nubby arms and legs without any defined fingers or toes. Everyman’s body and Ice-E’s head would fit together like a glove. It would certainly be easier to picture one of the mascots abstracted into Everyman’s bullet design rather than, say, Gaster or Father Alvin. Speaking of which...

A Deeper Look into Father Alvin

Father Alvin kinda got the short end of the stick in my previous post when I said he was “less likely” to be Everyman than one of the Ice-E’s employees. I still hold that opinion, but that doesn’t mean he’s not worth exploring further.

One thing that I glossed over was the topic of Alvin’s potential connection to Gerson. Now, there’s nothing in chapter 1 that outright says Gerson and Alvin are related, but it’s easy to intuit based on the fact that they’re the only two turtle monsters that we see in the series. Both characters are connected to Hometown’s school, and one could infer that Alvin’s drawing in the supply closet could be a drawing of Gerson rather than a self-portrait.

[Image transcript: Two Deltarune screenshots side-by-side. Both feature Kris looking at a drawing on a cabinet in the unused classroom. In the left screenshot, the narration says “(It’s a yellowed, poorly-drawn picture of a green turtle.)” The right screenshot continues: “(It’s signed ‘Alvin’.)” end image transcript.] 

Gerson himself seems to have no connection to the Knight’s machinations, and it’d be difficult to imagine otherwise since he’s, y’know, dead. Still, it is eerie how Gerson was the only character in Undertale who provided any information on the deltarune symbol and now he’s “conveniently” absent from Deltarune’s narrative.

[Image transcript: An Undertale screenshot of Gerson saying “That’s the Delta Rune, the emblem of our kingdom.” end image transcript.] 

Instead we have a different turtle character who also makes mention of an “angel” like Gerson did.

[Image transcript: A Deltarune screenshot of Kris talking to Father Alvin. Alvin says “Let the Angel’s power light your way.” end image transcript.] 

We don’t know much about Alvin yet, but the impression I get from him is that he’s Gerson’s opposite--mild-mannered, patient, and more interested in divine matters than history or research. Alvin also shows reverence for the Angel, capitalizing the name, whereas Gerson uses the term “angel” with quotation marks and treats it as a quaint curiosity.

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side Undertale screenshots of Gerson talking. In the left screenshot, he says “Most people say it’s the ‘angel,’ from the prophecy...” The right screenshot Gerson says: “I jus’ think it looks neat! Wahaha!” end image transcript.] 

Getting back to Alvin’s drawing, it was pointed out to me that Alvin’s green turtle drawing and the drawing of three people smiling in Sans’ lab are both described as “poorly drawn” by the narration.

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side Undertale screenshots of Frisk in Sans’ secret room. In the left screenshot, the narration says “(It’s a poorly drawn picture of three smiling people.) (Written on it...)” The right screenshot continues: “don’t forget.” end image transcript.] 

This may sound minor, but these are the only instances where the descriptor “poorly drawn” is used in either game. It’s also significant because the drawing of three smiling people only shows up when Frisk talks to Clamgirl, who mentions “Suzy” and is eventually revealed to be a goner/Gaster follower. This means both drawings are tied to Deltarune’s world.

I’m not entirely sure what the significance of the drawings is, since we still don’t know for certain who the three smiling people are or which green turtle is in Alvin’s drawing. If Alvin is the Knight, I could see him using drawings to attempt to bring specific types of darkners to life with the dark fountains he pulls out of the earth. In the case of the turtle drawing, maybe he was hoping to bring Gerson back as a darkner by recreating his likeness?

In Deltarune we’ve already seen a possible darkner “counterpart” to a lightner in the form of Ralsei, so maybe the idea of “recreating” lightners as darkner doppelgangers will be explored further in the full game? Chapter 1′s dark world was in the school and Gerson was a teacher there before he passed away. Chapter 2 seems poised to take place in a hospital dark world, and we see Rudy in a poor state of health at the hospital just prior to chapter 2. It’s too early to tell, but maybe these “holy” fountains and darkner doppelgangers are the Knight’s idea of bringing about life after death, or an “angel’s heaven,” if you will.

It goes without saying that my ideas of the Knight’s motives are purely speculative, but one last note I’ll leave on is how Gerson is mentioned an awful lot in Deltarune, more so than he was in Undertale. Gerson’s name is also one of the names that triggers a special response in the vessel creation sequence. Seems like an awful lot of attention for a “dead” character with no further role to play in the story, and remember what I said earlier about repeated character foreshadowing. All I’m saying is, don’t be too surprised if we meet a darkner by the name of “Snorge” or “Resong” or “Goners” or--hmm... Goners...

Heroes of the Dark, Villains of the Light

Now’s as good a time as any to bring up something I and a lot of others have noticed: Deltarune’s heroes are dark. Ralsei is a prince from the dark with horns, Susie is a bully described as a “dark knight” in one of her equip screen titles, and Kris is described by some Hometown residents as “creepy,” to say nothing of how Chapter 1 ends. Others in the fandom have pointed out how Deltarune’s battle system places Kris & co on the left side of the screen, in contrast to many classic JRPGs where the heroes are positioned on the right side of the screen.

On the other end of things, Ralsei’s prophecy refers to the “heroes of legend” sealing the “holy” dark fountains in order to “banish the Angel’s heaven”. That doesn’t really sound like a typical “heroic” goal. There’s also the speculation that sealing Card Castle’s fountain may have had negative repercussions for the Castle’s inhabitants. I’m not saying this to argue that the fun gang is somehow “evil”, but merely to point out that they have the trappings of darkness. 

Angels, on the other hand, are typically associated with light and goodness, and we know that Alvin serves the angel (whether this is solely in an abstract/religious way or in a more direct way remains to be seen). We know that sealing dark fountains somehow relates to banishing the Angel’s heaven, so it’s not a stretch to assume that the Knight is in league with the Angel due to his desire to create fountains.

I already entertained the idea of the Knight and the Angel working together in my last post, but something else that ties into this is Toby’s refrain of describing Everyman as “just a good guy that shows up on occasion.” He uses this description in the Everyman tweet as well as Everyman’s entry in the Undertale art book. It’s clearly meant to be a significant phrase.

[Image transcript: On the left is a Twitter thread by Toby. On the right is an excerpt from the Undertale Artbook featuring a spritesheet of Everyman. In both images, Toby writes “Everyman. Description: Just a good guy who shows up on occasion.” end image transcript.] 

We can infer that the Knight will be a major antagonist going forward, and I’ve already argued that Everyman is the Knight, so this paints the picture of a Knight with good intentions--a “Knight in shining armor,” if you will. This could be another argument in favor of Alvin being Everyman/the Knight, since he at least tries to project the image of piety and fits this theme of "holy” villains to contrast the “dark” heroes.

Now that I think about it, a “villain” like that would be an interesting inversion from the likes of Flowey--instead of an antagonist who’s trying to kill people, we have an antagonist who threatens to smother the entire world with the unchecked new life he’s creating. His actions at Card Castle show that he doesn’t go out of his way to kill, given that the three kings were kept alive as prisoners, but we also see how his actions enabled an evil King to abuse his power in the name of protecting his “holy” fountain.

While Flowey illustrated the lesson of “don’t kill and don’t be killed,” perhaps this Knight would be meant to show the dark side of appeasement and how “good intentions” only get you so far? The Spade King definitely comes off as a subversion of the typical “don’t fight!” approach of Undertale, and if Alvin is the Knight then he might push that “lesson” further going forward.

Still, for every champion of the light there is one who waits in the dark...

A New Challenger Approaches!

That’s right, there’s a third Knight candidate to cover. I’m sure some of you have been eagerly awaiting this one, so give it up for...

spr_normalnpc!

Ok, in all seriousness a couple of people wanted me to talk about this character who shows up in the Hometown Library. Their name isn’t given in-game and they’re simply known as “spr_normalnpc” in the game files. As of right now their only purpose is to block Kris from visiting the upstairs floor of the Library.

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side Deltarune screenshots of Kris talking to Normalnpc in the Library. In the left image, Normalnpc says “I love reading books. Especially the books upstairs. You should really.” before finishing in the right image, saying “Read them!” end image transcript.] 

As far as we can tell, this character is the Deltarune counterpart to the elusive Gaster Follower 3 from Undertale.

Not all of the character design details line up, but both characters cut a similar silhouette and that’s good enough for me.

After my initial Everyman theory post, I’ve been asked whether I think normalnpc might be Everyman/the Knight. I never gave it much thought before now, so let me start with the points in this character’s favor:

Normalnpc shares some of Everyman’s basic design traits, namely a beak/proboscis, a single eye visible on the side of their head, and a long neck

“Normalnpc” and “Everyman” are both such generic names that they immediately arouse suspicion

Normalnpc acts “strange,” repeating placeholder-ish dialogue about reading books while simultaneously blocking you from going upstairs

Normalnpc maintains a positive tone, making them a “good guy”...?

Both characters are connected to Gaster, maybe?

Ok, look, I’m not saying that Normalnpc can’t be Everyman, but there’s very little to work with here besides the general design, the name, and vague Gaster connections. And even then, I’d say Normalnpc’s and Everyman’s designs have too many differences for my liking. While some of the basic features are there, their silhouettes, proportions, and stance/posture are all completely different.

Another complication is the fact that Normalnpc’s “goner” counterpart already exists in Undertale, and I said last time that Everyman would have to be a character who isn’t seen elsewhere in Undertale because he was busy being stuck inside Reaper Bird.

On the other hand, we do see goner counterparts for characters that already exist in Undertale, as is the case with Gaster Followers 1 and 2 (for the sake of simplicity I’m assuming that Gaster followers are the same thing as “goners”).

But I’m not sure whether these “goners” are meant to be alternate “versions” of these specific characters or whether they’re just other members of the same “species” as their counterparts. 

Monster Kid and Goner Kid, for example, have many differences in their designs, including different shirts, different spine arrangements, and slightly different facial features.

Clamgirl muddies things even further, undergoing a total transformation when she “becomes” Gonerclam. This raises the questions of what causes someone to “become” a goner as well as how and why their bodies change in ways beyond just turning grey.

So far we’ve seen instances of goners coexisting alongside their “originals,” like with the two Monster Kids, but we’ve also seen Clamgirl get “replaced” by her goner by becoming one. Based on our limited and seemingly-contradictory knowledge of how goners work, I can’t even say for certain whether Normalnpc’s presence in Undertale would be accounted for or not with the existence of Gaster Follower 3.

And that’s kind of the problem with Normalnpc as an Everyman suspect: we know far too little. Father Alvin and the Ice-E’s employees each have a smoking gun that makes them likely Everyman candidates: in Alvin’s case it’s the drawing in the closet, and for Ice-E’s it’s the graffiti plus the Warrior’s hospital stay potentially lining up with Chapter 2′s setting. The best things Normalnpc has going for them are a vague resemblance and having a more obvious (yet vague) connection to Gaster, the latter of which is hardly a unique thing in this setting.

Moreover, there’s nothing that specifically ties Normalnpc to being the Knight other than through Everyman, and the “connection” between Normalnpc and Everyman is already tenuous. Alvin is independently connected to the Knight by virtue of leaving his drawing as a “calling card” in an area the Knight has recently been. The Warrior’s roleplaying shtick would make him a natural fit among a “swords and sorcery” setting that the Knight evokes. Of the three candidates, Normalnpc definitely has the weakest claim to Knighthood.

That all being said, Normalnpc is still a character to keep an eye on. The name alone comes off as Toby hiding a secret in plain sight. Even if this character doesn’t wind up being Everyman or the Knight, I’m sure their role will be bigger than that of a mere NPC.

Gaster’s Connection to the Knight

Now for the moment you’ve really been waiting for! Truthfully, a lot of this is Gaster stuff that I wanted to talk about last time but didn’t have room to fit in.

I made clear in my last post that I favored Everyman being the Knight over Gaster being the Knight, though the two could be interchangeable in the event that the Knight has a “strange son” working alongside him (which is a prospect I still can’t fully commit to).

Still, a lot of Deltarune speculators have latched onto the idea of Gaster being the Knight. Near as I can tell, here’s the evidence:

Both characters are associated with darkness

Seam, who’s familiar with the Knight, uses the Entry 17 phrase “darker, yet darker” in reference to the “strange someone” Jevil met (who may be the Knight)

Jevil says “THE HAND OF THE KNIGHT IS DRIFTING FORWARD”, and Gaster is associated with hands

Gaster is believed to be the “man” who gives Kris an egg. The word “EGG”, in all-caps wingdings, is written as three hands pointing in the “L-shaped” movement pattern of a knight piece in chess

I can see how this evidence would be compelling, especially in the absence of any competing theory for the Knight’s identity. I can’t refute all of this, aside from saying that the “darkness” association is overly broad in a game where half the cast are darkners and the “EGG” thing, while neat, could be a coincidence. I do think this evidence could point to Gaster being connected to the Knight, but I have two main reasons for believing he isn’t the Knight himself.

First off, I don’t think Gaster’s goals align with the Knight’s. For this argument I’m going to assume that the mysterious voice from Deltarune’s intro, game over screen, and pre-release Twitter takeover is Gaster. Gaster, at least nominally, seems to be on the same side as the red soul, or is at least willing to work with them. The fun gang’s goal of sealing the dark fountains would almost certainly put them at odds with the Knight, if the Spade King’s reaction was anything to go by.

When you get a game over and continue, “Gaster” says “THE FUTURE IS IN YOUR HANDS”.

While he doesn’t urge you to continue like Asgore does during Undertale’s game over, he certainly doesn’t discourage it either. When you refuse to continue, Gaster says “THEN THE WORLD WAS COVERED IN DARKNESS” and the melancholic song “Darkness Falls” plays.

One could argue that Gaster is trying to maintain objectivity or “neutrality” when the red soul dies, like a scientist would in an experiment.

Nonetheless, I would imagine that if Gaster was the Knight then he would be adamantly opposed to anyone who threatened his creation. Ralsei mentions that the prophecy of legend was foretold by “time and space”, and Gaster is said to have shattered across time and space.

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side Deltarune screenshots of Ralsei talking to Kris and Susie. In the left image Ralsei says “A LEGEND that one day, two HEROIES of LIGHT will arrive.” In the right image he says “And fulfill the ancient prophecy, foretold by time and space.” end image transcript.] 

It would be odd for the Knight to deliver a prophecy that predicts the undoing of his own handiwork, and then deliver that prophecy to a prince who would assemble the heroes to do just that.

Creating a New Future

I want to touch a bit more on Gaster’s use of the word “future”. He also made mention of this during the Undertale Twitter account’s takeover just before Deltarune Chapter 1 released:

[Image transcript: A Tweet from the official Undertale Twitter account, dated the day of Deltarune Chapter 1′s release, saying in all-caps “I LOOK FORWARD TO CREATING A NEW FUTURE WITH YOU.” end image transcript.] 

For whatever reason and through whatever means, Gaster wants to help the red soul create a new future. Choosing to continue from a Game Over causes Gaster to reiterate this goal, while the “opposite” of that, i.e. giving up, is seen as allowing the world to be covered in darkness. This implies that the “future” Gaster wants to create is one where darkness isn’t running amok. Even if Gaster is trying to remain neutral or merely observe, it still sounds like he prefers for the fun gang to prevail.

All this emphasis on the word “future” reminds me of something from the Reaper Bird fight...

[Image transcript: An Undertale screenshot of Reaper Bird’s check text description, stating “REAPER BIRD - ATK ?? DEF ?? This relentless future finally looks brighter and brighter.” end image transcript.] 

Now, this check text is a combination of the three check texts for Astigmatism, Final Froggit, and Whimsalot. To wit:

[Image transcript: Three Undertale enemy check text descriptions arranged from top to bottom. In order they say “ASTIGMATISM - ATK 32 DEF 26 This relentless bully ALWAYS gets its way. FINAL FROGGIT 7 ATK 2 DEF Its future looks brighter and brighter. WHIMSALOT - ATK 34 DEF 12 It finally stopped worrying.” end image transcript.] 

But as I said before, Reaper Bird may have been designed first and then “informed” the designs of the Core Mercenaries afterwards, and that could hold true for their check text as well.

I find this use of the phrase “relentless future” interesting. A “relentless” future could mean one that’s inevitable or predetermined, and the phrase “finally looks brighter and brighter” could signify that the future has finally changed for the better. Gaster’s goal seems to be to create a “new” future, which would imply an outcome different from a “predetermined” future where your choices don’t matter, which is a running theme in Deltarune. I don’t think Gaster would describe the future as being “created” by people or “in your hands” if he felt that choice was an illusion.

This isn’t the first time that Gaster has been associated with unpredictability or defiance of “fate”. Most Gaster-related events in Undertale were tied with the fun value, a randomly-generated number that changed with each playthrough. Although this mechanic had little impact on the story, it did give each playthrough a greater sense of identity and made events less set-in-stone.

Now, compare this “optimistic” interpretation of Gaster to the “strange someone” that Jevil met.

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side Deltarune screenshots of Seam talking. The left image says “One day, he met a strange someone... and since then, he began to change.” The right end image continues, saying “ Soon, he began to see the world as a game, and everyone as its participants.” end image transcript.] 

Seam says that Jevil began to see the world as a “game” and everyone as its “participants,” which doesn’t imply a lot of agency. This mindset is a big red flag when we remember how Flowey viewed others when he saw them as part of a “game.”

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side Undertale screenshots. The left one shows Flowey tying Frisk’s friends, saying “This is all just a GAME.” The right image shows Flowey talking in New Home, saying “Sets of numbers... Lines of dialogue... I’ve seen them all.” end image transcript.] 

Seam’s own view of the world becomes “darker, yet darker” after talking to Jevil, and Seam asks “would I have found a little more purpose in my life...?” if not for the experience of locking up Jevil (and, presumably, the experience of listening to Jevil’s words).

[Image transcript: Four Deltarune screenshots arranged in a grid, all featuring Seam talking. From beginning to end the four images say “Since that time, the strange words he’s said have stuck inside my cotton... And my view of this world has become darker, yet darker. And I wonder, if I hadn’t been asked to lock him up... Would I have found a little more purpose in my life...?” end image transcript.] 

In order to understand what “darker, yet darker” truly means, we need to view the line in its original context:

ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN

DARK DARKER YET DARKER

THE DARKNESS KEEPS GROWING

THE SHADOWS CUTTING DEEPER

PHOTON READINGS NEGATIVE

THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT

SEEMS

VERY

VERY

INTERESTING

...

WHAT DO YOU TWO THINK? 

The phrase “darker, yet darker” originally referred to something that Gaster was observing in Entry Number 17. Although the phrase has come to be associated with Gaster, it doesn’t necessarily refer to something that he’s causing or wants to happen--part of a scientist’s job is to observe and comment on results as they unfold, after all. And the “interesting” experiment Gaster refers to is something that’s happening “next”, which implies that the experiment is happening after or in response to whatever is causing things to become darker, yet darker. It also suggests that he’s not calling the “darker, yet darker” event itself “interesting”.

The impression that I get from all this is that Deltarune is meant to be a struggle against inevitability, with Gaster seemingly in the “choices matter” corner of the conflict. If the Knight is the “strange someone” Jevil met then that would imply that he’s very much on the opposite end of that spectrum. If, for example, somebody like Father Alvin is the Knight then I could see him rationalizing his position as fulfilling “fate” pre-ordained by the Angel. In this dynamic, the Knight would serve as an agent of faith and order to oppose Gaster as an agent of science and invention, further tying into the “dark heroes vs. holy villains” theme I posited earlier.

Okay, phew, that was all the first reason why I don’t think Gaster is the Knight. As for the second reason? Well...

Gaster is (Probably) a Darkner

Boy, that’s sure a loaded title, isn’t it? I made an offhand remark about this in my original post but didn’t want to get into it there. I only bring it up now because I previously argued that the Knight is a lightner and that would rule out darkner characters from filling the role.

So, why do I think Gaster is a darkner? Well, part of the reason is because I think that Sans is a darkner as well. Two Left Thumbs’ "Sans is a Darkner” video is probably the most accessible way to understand the theory, but there are several posts about it on Tumblr already if you look hard enough. Either way it’s not required viewing in order to understand my arguments for Gaster, but long story short there’s a lot of evidence to suggest Sans is a darkner and it’s strongly implied that Sans and Gaster are related (if not by blood then through other means), which makes it likely for Gaster to be a darkner as well.

Aside from the Sans connection, another reason I think Gaster is a darkner is due to the line about him being “shattered across time and space.”

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side Undertale screenshots of Frisk talking to Gaster Follower 2 in Hotland. Follower 2 says “Alphys might work faster, but the old Royal Scientist, Doctor W.D. Gaster? They say he shattered across time and space.” end image transcript.] 

We can infer from Deltarune that, for whatever reason, darkners are more difficult to kill than monsters due to Deltarune’s enemies all being unkillable. Whether this is an inherent trait of darkners or some “rule” of the dark world or Deltarune’s universe is unclear, but given that defeating Sans doesn’t contribute towards your kill counter in Undertale, there’s a strong likelihood that darkners are difficult to kill, if not outright impossible.

So how is this relevant? Well, it seems like a darkner would be far more likely to survive being “shattered across time and space” than a monster. When a monster’s body is broken apart it means they’ve either turned to dust or will soon, but the fact that “pieces” of Gaster persist (as seen with Gaster Follower 2) implies that he’s made of something sturdier than dust.

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side Undertale screenshots of Frisk talking to Gaster Follower 2 in Hotland. Follower 2 says “Ha ha... How can I say so without fear? I’m holding a piece of him right here.” end image transcript.] 

Not only do I believe that Gaster is a darkner, but I’m pretty confident that I know what “kind” of darkner he is. Most of the darkners we’ve seen in chapter 1 can be linked to real-world objects that exist in the Hometown school’s supply closet. While we don’t know what objects (if any) were used to create Ralsei or (possibly) Sans, at most those two are exceptions to the otherwise-universal rule that darkners come from inanimate objects. In Gaster’s case there’s definitely an object that’s associated with him:

Gaster the Egghead

[Image transcript: A Deltarune screenshot of Kris hidden behind a tree. The narration says “(You received an Egg.)” end image transcript.] 

In Scarlet Forest “a man” gives an egg to Kris before vanishing, much like how “Mysteryman” vanishes in Undertale. The song that plays during this scene is called “man” in the game files and sounds a lot like Gaster’s theme. The egg itself exhibits strange dimensional properties, reappearing when used, prompting the narration “what egg?” when you try to get rid of it, and becoming two eggs when put into Asgore’s fridge.

When Kris leaves the dark world at the end of chapter 1, their inventory turns into a “ball of junk”, i.e. the real-world objects that were given new form by the dark fountain.

[Image transcript: A Deltarune screenshot of the inventory menu open in Hometown. The only two items are “Ball of Junk” and “Egg” end image transcript.] 

The egg is the only other object that remains after chapter 1, implying that it’s a “real” egg and that the egg itself is not a byproduct of the dark world like the dark candies and other items are.

The fact that the “man” disappears when he hands you the egg implies that his presence or “form” is somehow contingent upon the act of giving you the egg. If Gaster is a darkner, if he’s “the man”, and if his form is based on an egg then it makes perfect sense why he’d disappear in that moment--he’s turning back into an egg and surrendering his “true form” (or a piece of it) to you for safe keeping. Given that Gaster seemingly wants you to seal dark fountains, it would make sense that he’d want to hitch a ride out of the closet’s dark world before its fountain goes caput.

This isn’t the only time we see mentions of eggs in Undertale and Deltarune:

[Image transcript: An Undertale screenshot of Papyrus’ dating HUD. On the left is a small white egg, labeled “EGG.” end image transcript.] 

Papyrus (who’s connected to Sans and likely Gaster as well) has a conspicuous “egg” on his dating HUD.

[Image transcript: Two side-by-side Undertale screenshots of Frisk talking to a Temmie in Temmie Village. In the left image, Temmie says “tem... WATCH EGG!!!” In the right image, the narration says “(It’s hard-boiled.)” end image transcript.] 

In Undertale, one of the Temmies is watching over a hard-boiled egg. However, in Deltarune we see a Temmie with a very different kind of egg.

[Image transcript: A Deltarune screenshot of Kris examining an egg on Temmie’s desk in their classroom. The narration says “(It’s a black-and-white hardboiled egg.)” end image transcript.] 

Specifically, it’s described as a “black and white” egg. Needless to say, that’s an odd way to describe an egg. Not all eggs have white shells, but most people wouldn’t describe a white-shelled egg as “black and white”. Of course, we know someone who’s also “black and white”.

[Image transcript: An Undertale screenshot of Mysteryman in his grey room.” end image transcript.] 

And he’s “black and white” in the very literal sense. Unlike the Gaster followers, Mysteryman solely uses pure black and pure white in his color palette, and he’s one of the only characters with an all black-and-white overworld sprite. Note also how Mysterman’s head is vaguely egg-shaped and has lines resembling cracks.

Out of all the objects that I could imagine a darkner being made from, an egg is one that I could picture “shattering” like Gaster did while still leaving some small pieces scattered around. I’m not sure whether this would be a “real” egg or a similarly-fragile facsimile like a Faberge egg--either could work in this scenario.

What are Skeletons, Anyway?

“Now wait,” some of you might be saying, “isn’t Gaster supposed to be a skeleton?”  Well, I don’t think Gaster being a skeleton is mutually exclusive from Gaster being based on an egg. Egg shells are made of calcium carbonate, one of the mineral components that make up bones.

We see in Deltarune that darkners’ forms in the dark world don’t have to match their “true” forms completely. Pretty much all of the darkners based on playing cards are abstractions that barely resemble a rectangular card. And while we don’t know what Ralsei’s “true” form is (if he has one), it’s very unlikely that he’s a small goat with a hat and scarf in the light world. If Sans is a darkner then there’s also the possibility that his “true form” isn’t a skeleton either.

The rules of the dark world and its inhabitants aren’t entirely clear, so in spite of my arguments I can’t say with certainty that Gaster is a darkner because I can’t even say with certainty that Sans is a darkner, despite him having much stronger evidence supporting that conclusion.

As compelling as Sans’ case is, it still invites questions like how he’s able to exist in Hometown without the apparent aid of a dark fountain, or why Papyrus turns to dust in Undertale despite being Sans’ “brother”. Similar concerns crop up with Gaster in light of his connections-by-proxy with Papyrus and his implied presence in the mysterious Hometown shed.

I still think the possibility of Gaster and Sans being darkners is one worth discussing and it’s a possibility that many fans are sleeping on. Moreover, it’d be fittingly poetic if Deltarune’s main conflict was engineered by a lightner trying to spread darkness and a darkner trying to seal away the darkness.

Conclusion

So this ended up being a lot longer than I originally planned--almost as long as my original Everyman post!

A lot of what I’ve said here is meant to provide further context and elaboration to my earlier theories, but I admit that some of this was pure speculation, namely in regards to Gaster/the Knight’s motivations and the “dark heroes vs. holy villains” theming.

While a good argument should have evidence to back it up, at the end of the day a work of fiction is still a story and is governed by the conventions of storytelling much more than it is by logic or the laws of physical science. This is one reason why I lean so heavily on Toby’s use of foreshadowing, since it’s a narrative tool he’s leveraged consistently in the past.

My attempts to second-guess the motivations of unseen characters and chart the plot’s trajectory would be downright conspiratorial if I were talking about some real-world event, but Detlarune is a story and stories have to go places. A well-written story doesn’t take the time to set up or foreshadow certain characters or exposition if it doesn’t plan to pay off that setup down the road.

Normally I wouldn’t make theory posts this long and esoteric about a work of fiction, since a large amount of writing consists of revision, retcons, and changing things as you go along. Undertale and Deltarune are partial exceptions to this rule in no small part due to Toby planning Deltarune before he began Undertale and planting many “seeds” referencing Deltarune in Undertale’s narrative as a result.

A lot of my conclusions haven’t significantly changed since my previous post: I still believe Everyman will appear again in the full game, I think he’s the character most likely to be the Knight, and I think the most likely Everyman candidates are the Ice-E’s employees and Father Alvin, in that order.

As far as which of my conclusions have changed, I’m now more apprehensive of the idea of the Knight having a “strange son” and of Gaster being the Knight himself. I still can’t discount either possibility entirely, however. I was always shaky about the “strange son” and I often went back and forth on it, but further probing Gaster’s motivations has made me far less convinced that he could be the Knight or in league with him. I’m sure there’s still a connection between both characters, like a shared origin or some past falling out that they had, but I no longer think that they would be on the same side.

Another thing I’ve (sort of) changed my mind on is that the “purple guy” Ice-E’s employee and Normalnpc have both risen in prominence in my eyes. I don’t know if I’d put either of them down as top candidates to be Everyman or the Knight, but something is definitely up with them and I’m sure Toby has plans for them in the future.

Deltarune is shaping up to be a much longer game than Undertale, likely following the mold of traditional RPGs whose stories span several hours. In the time that it would take to play through Deltarune’s story, we may see narrative payoffs to every loose thread and Everyman candidate I’ve brought up. If the identity of the Knight is meant to be a mystery then some candidates might even be deliberate red herrings set up by Toby. Who can say? We’ll just have to wait and find out.

I closed my previous Everyman post by remarking that I had said all that I can on this topic and hopefully this time I mean it. I can’t really think of much else to say about Everyman until Toby releases more information himself, and that’s not likely to happen until the next Undertale anniversary or Deltarune’s full release.

As I said before, my main goal with all this is to spark conversation within the fandom on what is an otherwise under-discussed topic. I might still make other theory posts in the future, but for now I think I’ve bled this topic dry.

[silver-wield]

Let's talk politely, this is not to disrespect anyone, so you don't need to curse me or even block me, that would be a childish attitude, I believe everyone is aware of what they're saying, ok, let's go.

The Ultimania, the question is, can we still consider everything that the Ultimania of old say, and take it into account today? Quick answer, no. but in detail let's look at the context behind them.

It is noteworthy that Ultimania is a guide that has some information such as character characteristics, memorable scenes, maps, information about places in the game and has some interviews with the game creators. And Ultimania exists for all Final Fantasy. Ultimania is just a guide, it was never like the "Word of God". Besides the fact that Ultimania were not written by the creators but tertiary people. For this exact reason you can find contradictions in the information, how many times have Square's official materials contradicted Cloud's birthday, it's been August 18th several times and August 11th others, but it was only definitive on the 11th, when Nomura congratulated once the character on that date. Remember that in the past, it used dismantled for FF7, before Ultimania, and there are quotes from it that were even placed in Ultimania, but over time games like Crisis Core contradicted these statements by Ultimania, like that quote about Aerith loving Cloud more than Zack, who has ultimania. So Ultimania does have contradictions, and the creators do not follow Ultimania but what they have written or are going to write. If it were for Ultimania, Zack would just be a womanizer guy who flirts with any kind of girl, and Crisis Core somehow contradicts that, or even Tifa's feelings for Cloud, who in Ultimania just tells us she's just started to take an interest. by the boy after the promise, and just wanted to be saved by a SOLDIER (Which these statements made Tifa's feelings pretty shallow). Remember this was never mentioned in OG, but it was what was in Ultimania at the time, nowadays you can't take this outdated statement from Ultimania into account anymore, when we know that she did have an interest in the boy before the promise , and it wasn't because he would become SOLDIER. Nojima he contradicted what had been written in the OG, ? No, as they always left that question open. But did he contradict Ultimania's claim? Yes, as he never took that into account, but what was supposedly written in the OG game, not what a guide says.

So it's always important to remember that over time, the plot will update and guides like Ultimania make mistakes, and you can't even take it into account, beyond the basics that are already shown in the game. Guides were always wrong or contradicted information from a game, movie, series, manga. Daizenshuu is a Dragon Ball guide, but there are things in it that contradicted information from the original manga, that's why it is an official guide.

The only thing relevant in a guide, is why it shows interviews with some breeder, it's usually the most important thing and also what people are always looking for.

I actually have no clue what your point is in this. I've always said the most current ultimania is the best reference guide, and anything in it that contradicts the old ones means the old one is out of date.

That said, none of the ultimanias contradict cloti since the info is always repeated in them. Minor details might change, but the facts remain the same.

[rdr2dd]

Goals, Moving Forward, Etc.

Because I’ve gotten a few comments/questions asking about the other projects I’ve mentioned, and also for the purpose of giving myself some clear goals to work toward, I want to nail down the direction(s) that this project is probably headed. Excuse the gratuitous detail, but as is likely becoming clear from my posts, that’s how I work best :p

Project 1: Arthur’s Hidden Family

Goal 1: Finding Eliza -

Accomplished, largely, so hurrah for that. There was a lot of background work to get to this point, even beyond the details I gave in the most recent post about it, so I am beyond glad to have finally gotten it done. This step has already laid a lot of the groundwork for future steps. And also, I’m just happy to finally have a face for her.

Goal 2: Conjuring up Isaac - No progress thus far, but I’ve done some planning on how I want to handle this. No files exist for Isaac, at least not that I’ve been able to find thus far, so any models/textures for him would be entirely non-canon/custom work. There’s no element of bringing hidden assets to light here, like there was with Eliza; having a workable model for Isaac would be purely for my own heart’s sake, and for the sake of being able to do fanart renders involving him. This probably involves:

Using Jack (4 yrs old) as a base model, as I’m not talented or experienced enough to sculpt these models from scratch. Facial features would need to be altered to find a resemblance to both Arthur and Eliza.

Digging through the files to see if there are even other young children in the game to draw assets from - Arthur Londonderry’s son comes to mind, but I’m not sure if he’s the right age range, and I’m honestly drawing a blank beyond that. If anyone remembers seeing any kids in the game, please drop me a note as to where you saw them. 

Possibly resizing/altering adult NPC assets such as hairstyles in order to give Isaac a fitting and unique appearance. This sounds like a headache, but may be reasonable enough to do. We shall see.

Lots of custom texture work, largely for his face, which will be especially hard/dicey if there aren’t other children’s models to borrow textures from. 

Goal 3: Finding the Time - Less technical and more research-oriented, I need to nail down a timeline that I’m personally happy with with regards to when in Arthur’s life the events with Eliza and Isaac occurred. Once this is done, it’ll make it easier to decide what to do with Arthur in any renders I may want to do with the three of them. Which ties into...

Project 2: The Old Guard (Expanded)

This was the project I originally had in mind when I started scrounging around for these files. I have an unreasonably huge soft spot in my heart for the ‘curious couple and their unruly son’, but also, just the young gang in general. Hosea back when he’d steal anything not nailed down? Dutch, young and idealistic and years before his downfall? Arthur, young and broody but not yet hardened? Little John, still feral and a menace? Badass, gorgeous young Grimshaw? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes, please. Not to mention Bessie and Annabelle, who must have mattered so much to these characters, but who we hear and see so little about. I want to be able to do fanart renders with them, but that’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.

Goal 1: Nail Down the Timeline - I’ve started working on this, but there’s a lot I still need to do in terms of skimming audio files and digging deep in the lore. I want to get a general idea of when it seems folks joined the gang, that way I can get an idea of which models I even need to work with. Heavy focus on figuring out: 

When Tilly joined the gang, as I lean toward her being around quite early, but would like to review the audio. I know there are some numbers dropped in a few missions, with regards to when she joined the Foreman Brothers and when she left them to join the Van der Linde Gang, and I want to get this as accurate as possible. 

When Hosea went off with Bessie, and when she passed. We have some context clues, I just need to nail down the math and then feel out the dramatic timing for the rest.

What the deal was with Annabelle. Maybe I just have a passion for the ladies name-dropped once in the game, but good god do I love Annabelle despite knowing absolutely nothing about her. She should be a non-character, but this is a passion project, so there’s no way I’ll be ignoring her.

What to do about Sean. He couldn’t have joined until after 1889, but depending on what year I want to deal with for renders, I may need to account for him. That wouldn’t be a hardship, as he’s one of my faves.

Goal 2: Knock Out the “Easy” Models - By which I mean Hosea, Dutch, Arthur, and Susan. This will involve some custom sculpting work, but not a whole lot, as their base models for 1899 shouldn’t actually require that much alteration. I imagine I’ll be ironing out a bunch of wrinkles, smoothing out a bunch of normal maps, and then using the clone brush and a sampling of generic NPC face textures in order to create younger-looking face textures for this lot. “Easy” is definitely a relative term here, but I’m counting my blessings in that there are, at the very least, reference images for what this lot looked like in the early days. I still have no idea if I’ll be able to accomplish this, or how hard it will be if I can.

Goal 3: John - An intermediate difficulty step, for John alone. We have no reference images of young, 12/13 year old John, but we do have Jack’s 12 yr old model, and that will serve as a decent base to work from, hopefully. I’ll have to make sure to alter his features to be more in line with John’s, and will have to work heavily with his skin/face textures from there. Clothes will be another hurdle, especially as (referenced above), we see like, next to no children in the game for me to borrow NPC clothing parts from. I’ll need to work with what we get from Jack and otherwise resize and rework adult NPC clothing.

Goal 4: Bessie (and Others) - Stepping up the workload again, though in different ways. Bessie will be a task to work out, seeing as we have a single, not particularly great reference image of her facing straight ahead. It’s not much to work with, but it’s something to work toward matching. No two ways around it, she’ll be mostly custom work and mash-ups of generic NPC materials, but it’ll be a labor of love. Also sliding Tilly and (potentially) young Sean in here, as depending on their age there will be a lot of work to do on them, possibly including custom model work, and we don’t have references for what they looked like when they were younger. I’ll make do.

Goal 5: Annabelle - The holy grail in terms of custom work, or the ultimate slog uphill, we shall see. We have no reference images of her. No traces of her exist in the files. We hardly have any clue about how she died, let alone how she lived. And yet, I love her, or at least the potential of her. Hopefully all of my work on the ‘known’ quantities of this project will give me some hope of turning out a unique and fitting model for her, but who knows.

Project 3: Audio Directory

Goal ??? - On pause for the foreseeable future, mostly as I’ll need to do some networking before I’m totally comfortable putting this out there, and also because holy hell have I set up a bunch of other work for myself. The Dream(TM) was to find a way to set up a directory for folks to more easily find audio files on their own. There’s no way to host all of the assorted cool audio from RDR2 online, but it would theoretically be possible to set up a sort of file directory online, a list of file names and descriptions, to help folks browse their audio files on their own without having to reinvent (or in this case, rediscover) the wheel personally. I’m of the opinion that pulling apart the game files should be an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation, but there are a lot of folks who have already put in this work individually, and I don’t want to step on any toes. I also don’t want to be responsible for anyone mucking around with their game files and having trouble down the road, so I’d need to sort out a clear explanation of what precautions to take, etc. It’s a lot to consider, so I’m obviously open to input. 

Wrap-Up

If you’re still reading, congrats(?) and also, thank you. This is all a bunch of planning for some real pie-in-the-sky shit, but I felt that way about finding Eliza in the files about two months ago, so I have hope. If you’ve got thoughts on any step, please, hit me! I want to hear what folks want to see, though I can’t make any promises on what I’ll deliver. Got thoughts on the timeline or headcanons for the less-referenced characters? I’d love to hear. I would also love to hear from anyone with experience on projects like this; goodness knows I’m a self-taught novice. 

[randomnameless]

@lochnessies I didn’t want to reblog your post since it was long but if you don’t mind me adding my 2 cts to the Empire and your Empire essay

honestly i’m so glad i’m not the only one who nerded about the empire

I’m totally on board with your assertion about Agarthans and the Empire, the agarthans are the one who are the masterminds behind everything wrong happening in Fodlan (Nemesis 1 to Nemesis 2) and how the Empire who started good ended up being the decadent place we’re told about in-game that disappears in 75% of the endings.

However, I have several nitpicks or additions to make.

From the interview, apparently, humans already got their hand on “relics” before Nemesis pulled his stunt. Nemesis wanted to most powerful weapon available, so he ended up tearing Sothis, the leader of the nabateans, apart.

In the fake Church-approved story, Nemesis was king of the Liberation because he got rid of invaders coming from the North. We actually don’t know why the guy styled himself as “King of Liberation”, he apparently wanted to get rid of “liars” in his info blurb in VW, but then in the same route, when Billy fights against Maurice, Maurice asks if Billy’s come to “liberate” him... From this, I’m assuming Maurice, a former Elite, thinks “Liberation” is some sort of euphemism for death or a merciful death, idk. Bar Edel’s story, there is no real clues in game, or even outside, that Nemesis wanted to get rid of “divine beings”. I personally think he wanted to be the strongest so if lizards had to die for this then so be it, but bar that? I have no ideas about his own, personal motivations (save for “Thales’n’pals asked me to do it and they seemed so nice so I did it”).

Wilhelm Paul Hresvelg being one of Nemesis’s men who was lured away by Seiros and her dragon bros is a take that is very prevalent in the fandom, but has no basis in the game.

The Adrestian Empire officially existed in 0 when Seiros crowned the guy, but Enbarr was chosen as its capital because it was the largest city. The War of Heroes “properly” started 3 decades later as Wilhelm wanted to unify the continent.

Lycaon I’s death heralds the end of the war, meaning Wilhelm died during the WoH. Apparently the Church of Seiros was created before the war, even before the Empire, by followers who were inspired by her miracles or something. 

But yes, there used to be a religion before the “Church of Seiros” given how Seteth met his wife in a church in Enbarr, still I cannot say for sure it was here before the first Agarthian war.

Word of God also said Seiros and her friends rewrote history because the Elites and Nemesis were too popular at that time and she wanted to “quell the flames of war and chaos” and keep balance. Kind of unrelated, but given how Marianne is treated in Modern!Fodlan because her ancestor was a (literal) monster, if Seiros revealed the truth about Gloucester, Daphnel and their friends maybe Lorenz and Ingrid would be persecuted and hated like Marianne is... 

I don’t have anything to add to the rest, but some tidbits regarding the Empire and what I could hc i mean interpret from them :

Apparently, in the jp version of Hanneman’s C support with Dorothea, Hanneman says in the beginning nobles were supposed to guide and protect people, but in Modern!Fodlan it’s now just a way to discriminate between nobles and non-nobles.

Maybe at its inception the Empire had this idea about what nobility meant, but with time, the notion became used as a tool and emptied of its original meaning, idk. 

We also have the “Feast of Decadence” novel, it is fiction (apparently?) but the author, writing this book, thought it was perfectly normal to have northeners being torn apart in the background. 

This novel is supposed to happen way after the WoH ended (the Emperor is Lycaon III and we know from Ferdie’s support with Edel (or was it in Feh??) that the Emperor in 100~ was a woman, so she couldn’t have been Lycaon II) but in this context it was normal to have slaughters during a feast celebrating the wedding of the new Emperor.

Given how Rhea has bad history with slaughters for “fun” (as far as she knows Nemesis had no reason to kill everyone in Zanado?) I am pretty sure that if she had been around for Wilhelm I’s wedding, this spectacle would never have happened. Same thing for Lycaon I, the two Emperor she’s sure to have met. Which signifies that either post-Rhea the Emperor thought it was fun to watch northeners suffer, which also adds another kind of discrimination between people from the North and those from the South or the author of this novel had a blood kink and thought it’d be a nice detail, or the author wrote this “decadent feast” to criticise the Empire.

Which ultimately leads to : During Lycaon III’s time, or shortly after, northeners being torn apart during the highest ceremonies were something that happened casually, or it was plausible enough that people from that time could believe it happened.

So combining Hanneman’s “at first nobility was supposed to be this but ended up twisted” and “people ate a lot of bread and fish in honour of Saint Cethleann it was wonderful and northerners were being torn apart and we all laughed” means that even before Ionius IX pulled his centralising policies in place, the Empire was heading down a dark path.

The Southern Church is banned in 1065, way after the Kingdom and the Alliance were recognised as independant nations. In some localised versions (the SP one I think?) it is explained they were banned because they led an insurrection.

So even before Ionius, we have the Empire growing intolerant to its own citizens, stopping being “nobles” in the first sense of the notion, and apparently their ally since creation leads an insurrection. Then, the agarthans happen and they wreck things. 

If I had to compare, I’d say Ionius IX and his extreme policies (destroying Hrym and sending Agarthans to Ordelia, a territory in the Alliance, because they helped the people from Hrym) were inevitable since due to the Empire’s decadence, but Edel getting the means and opportunities to start her war was brought by the Agarthans.

It’s as if the Empire is going downhill and you can either choose to let it disappear (SS/AM/VW where the Empire doesn’t exist anymore, it crumbled) or go with it to the bottom of the hill (CF).

[ageless-aislynn]

meta ask questions for you! 3, 5, 6, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 25!

Ooo, thanks so much for playing along, hon! I appreciate it! :D

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

You know, I really don't have one. I plan on eventually doing them all, if I can!

5. What character that you’re writing do you most identify with?

Usually Caitlin because she tends to be the one who's lost and Eobard is either deliberately withholding things from her or is in someway messing with her and she's trying to catch up, lol! I do really love pairing her with Harry, though, too, even though their dynamic is different. :D

6. What character do you have the most fun writing?

Eobard, definitely. Most specifically, I love getting into his head and getting his p.o.v., like in the "Partners In Crime" series. It's much rarer that I'll give you only Caitlin's p.o.v. and it almost always has a plot reason as to why, such as "The Thousandth and the First." Secondly, though, I adore writing Frost and Nash, especially in all of their oblivious or just straight up "don't care" shenanigans. I still have a particular fondness for "Star-Marked" which was the first time I really got in there and wrote them like that. ;)

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

Heh, yes. "*With Benefits" has a completely different version out there. It was originally a lot darker and angstier. It still technically met the "friends with benefits" prompt but, well… Let's just say there's a reason why I started off calling it my "dom!Harry" fic where he's a bit more consensually dominating and aggressive than I generally write him. It still exists and I'm still considering finishing it one of these days. I'll have to decide whether to just basically write it as a second fill for the same prompt (so I don't have to worry about the similarities, since they were the same fic at one time ;) ) or to try to replot it and make it as different as possible. The tone itself is pretty different from "*With Benefits" because I wanted that one to be lighter and funnier than the first fic was turning out. But I think the other tone still has some merit to it. I dunno if anybody’s really down for that alllmost BDSM feel or not. *shrugs* The other fic is titled "Here" so you'll know it if you ever see it. ;)

19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)

I have a bad habit of using "very" way too often, so I always try to scour my final drafts a final time by doing a find either in Word or in the browser looking to see how many times I've used it. I also inevitably find I fall back on a similar word and over use it in pretty much each fic depending on the circumstance. Like for "Three Little Words," I didn't want to repeat "frozen" and other such icy descriptors but I didn't want to have to go far out to get some unusual/unnatural ones that probably nobody would really think to themselves. ;)

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

I don't know if this quite fits but one of my writer friends asked me if it's hard to have so many variations of the same characters and honestly? No, it's not. If you look at just my original ReverseSnow/ReverseFrost pairings, "Partners In Crime" Eo/Caitlin have a different dynamic to me than "Good Day" Eo/Caitlin. "The Ghost of Eobard Thawne" is going to show us a little more obsessed Eobard than my other series!Eobards (some of the one-shots have touched on that before, though). Weirdly, in "Haunted"'s continuing chapters (I swear, y'all will get to read them eventually ;) ), Frost and Eobard have several scenes together and normally that would start pulling me in a ReverseFrost direction. BUT. This particular Frost is just so set on Nash that she's not even tempted and Eo is equally as set on Caitlin, so, while he has no problem needling Frost, Cait is never for a moment not who he has his heart and mind aimed at.

Then you've got something like the ReverseFrost pairing in the "It's All Fun And Games When You're A SuperVillainous Power Couple In Love..." series and it's like there's NO DOUBT they're meant for each other. (This couple feels actually like the more "show-current" version of "Partners In Crime," honestly. "Partners…" is distinguished by my characterization and "rules" for Caitlin/Frost's powers having been drawn more from the comics since we hadn't seen them yet in the show at that time.)

21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

Heh, I think a lot of mine would have to go to a channel where they can show more explicit stuff, like HBO or something, lol! ;)

25. What part of writing is the most fun?

Finishing it, reading it back and thinking, "Yep, that's what I wanted to say," and then getting comments where it sounds like other people enjoyed it. That's definitely the most fun in my opinion! ;)

Thanks again! 

♥♥♥

Fun meta asks for writers

[fabula-novo-mundo]

Theonymy: On the Names of fal’Cie

The gods of Fabula Nova Crystallis (FNC) are, as the title of the mythology would suggest, multifaceted. This post will be the first in a series that attempts to analyse them from a polytheistic, specifically, a fictional or otherworld reconstructionist perspective.

Names are essential to storytelling. In the Final Fantasy series of games especially, names are drawn from many different cultures and languages, even within the same title: Nomura Tetsuya, the series’ lead character designer for the last 22 years, and one of the creative leads behind the original Fabula Nova Crystallis project, drew from Okinawan (“Yuna”, night; “Tidus”, sun), Ainu (“Wakka”, water), and Arabic (“Lulu”, pearl) while creating the characters of the Final Fantasy X series. These names often subtly allude to the positions of the characters or their future arcs in the context of the story or its themes, and understanding their etymology can frequently be illuminating.

This doesn’t hold a candle, however, to the significance of the names of gods, which describe their relationship with the world itself, and have their origins in epithets used to describe them by their worshippers. For example, the chthonic jötunn Hel, whose name derives from the Proto-germanic *haljō, from the Proto-Indo-european *kol-, “to cover/hide”, as one covers a corpse in the soil of a grave; or the Irish psychopomp an Morrígan, whose name either translates to “Great Queen” or “Phantom Queen”, as befits a goddess who manifests to doomed warriors; or Nebt-het, the netjert of death, whose name translates to “Lady of the Temple Enclosure”, describing her role in ritual.

fal’Cie

Firstly, the term “god” itself should be addressed. Often applied in english-language literature across religious traditions to describe a wide array of entities, it often fails to capture the nuance that culturally specific terms have for these entities. For example, in norse tradition, the word “god” is typically applied to the Æsir and Vanir, but not their enemies (such as the Jötnar) despite the latter often being of equal power and cosmic significance to the former two; additionally, the word often fails to describe the nuance of the word “kami” in Shinto tradition.

This word, kami, in fact is the term often used to describe the higher deities in the original japanese scripts of the Fabula Nova Crystallis franchise (this term became “god” in the english, of course), particularly concerning the most supreme living being in the mythos: Bhunivelze, the Shining God (Kagayakeru Kami), for whom the terms for lesser spirits in the mythology were considered inadequate or degrading by his historical worshippers.

However, being apathetic (at best) to the Shining One myself, i will use this term for him anyway: fal’Cie, the name for a living, material god in the various worlds of the setting[1]. In the rest of this post, and in subsequent writing, i will use the collective and singular term “fal’Cie” to refer to inorganic spirits in Fabula Nova Crystallis that are themselves descended from inorganic spirits.

The term “fal’Cie” itself deserves analysis. In the original japanese scripts, the kana for this term is ファルシ, “faruShi”, which is very nearly a correct transliteration of the english-language word “fallacy” — whose definition is of course “a mistaken belief or error in reasoning.” This will become incredibly important later when i discuss the nature of mythology and cult within the setting, but for now let it simply be noted that it is important that the term used for spirits in this world is nearly synonymous with the concept of “misconception.”

The related term “l’Cie” provides another avenue for analysis of the theonym. l’Cie, written ルシ, ruShi, are (formerly) human servants or slaves of fal’Cie. The term, especially in the original scripts, is pronounced almost exactly the same as the italian “luci”, or “light”, and when romanised, is quite clearly just the french word “ciel“ or “sky” with the last consonant shifted forward. Both of these concepts allude to the origin and master of all living fal’Cie and, indeed, all souls and Matter in the FNC, in the most exalted Lord of Light, Bhunivelze.

The fa- prefix that forms the word fal’Cie is then theorised by FNC fans to have its origins in the Latin famulus “servant,” in line with the origin of the “fa” note in solfège (Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti) from the Latin hymn Ut queant laxis. This would, fittingly, give us an etymology for the term fal’Cie that comes to something along the lines of “Servant of Light/Heaven.” Personally, i’m not sure how much merit this association actually has, convenient though it is, so i’d like to propose an alternate theory.

There is only one obvious association that the fal- prefix could have in west european languages. It has already been covered, indirectly, but bears discussing again: the word “fallacy” derives ultimately from the Latin fallere, “to deceive,” and the fal- stem in descendant romance languages still retains this association with falseness (french and italian, used in the “l’Cie” part of the word, are, of course, romance languages, which makes an italic etymology for fa(l)- the most likely). This would give “fal’Cie” the etymology “Heavenly Deception” or “Deceiving Light,” both of which could help elucidate the beings’ true natures.

It should be further noted that words in japanese containing the syllable シ (shi), which is a homonym for 死 “death,” often become associated with death by association: for example, the japanese numeral 四 “four,” also pronounced shi, is historically considered inauspicious.

[1] i am aware that in the brand change from Final Fantasy Versus XIII to Final Fantasy XV, the term “fal’Cie” was replaced with “Astral” as a term specific to the world of Eos, but insofar as these entities still exist as the crystalline descendants of the Fell Trickster Lindzei and the Hallowed Tyrant Pulse, the theonym “fal’Cie” is still correct, and i will use it when describing these entities in the context of the wider setting. The word “Astral” itself shares connotations with the celestial etymology of the original term, which hints at the Astrals’ true nature, even after the rebranding.

Pulse

Stout fashioned earth, that future might take root. — Analect I, “The Vanished Gods”

The first theonym i would like to address is the most simple. Pulse, the Terrestrial Potentate, is a male fal’Cie who is credited with shaping the physical world. Concretely, this means he is the entity responsible for the creation of, well, nearly everything that can be seen, touched, or otherwise mundanely sensed in the mortal realm.

His symbol is ten bidirectional prongs or arrows emanating from a central eye, five upwards, five downwards. In Final Fantasy XIII we find its analogue in the many-pronged double-headed spears of the Gran Pulsian l’Cie Oerba Yun-Fang, which makes it doubly clear that this symbol is supposed to be phallic, and possibly a symbol of fertility or rulership, an association strengthened by the fact that the Etro-venerators of the Kingdom of Lucis and the otherworldly leisure house Serendipity depict Hallowed Pulse as the King on their playing card sets, and give him the title “the Mighty Potentate.”

The origin of the english word “pulse” is Latin pulsus, both words to describe a beat, throb, flow or stroke. This highlights the deep connection that the Hallowed Pulse has to the mortal world and all parts of nature that lie within, as the source of and indicator for the terrestrial realm’s strength and vitality.

The etymology of pulsus can reveal more, however: pellere, to push, drive, affect, compel, expel, propel, repel, dispel, impel, strike, banish, or conquer. This helps us see the significance of the ten arrows as a symbol of force, power, domination, and divine kingship, and solidifies the Divine Pulse’s associations with violent rulership or tyranny. Pulse is very much the archetypal patriarch, and the domineering attitude of his descendant fal’Cie towards the mortals they live alongside reinforces this.

Lindzei

Sage turned mind's eye inward, seeking truth profound. — ibid.

The third and youngest offspring of Light, the etymology of “Lindzei” is much less transparent than her elder sibling’s, but by examining the Heavenly Ruler’s iconography and associations, it is possible to determine some likely candidates.

Analect II, titled “Lindzei’s Nest,” from Final Fantasy XIII, gives us the following from the perspective of a Gran Pulsian demagogue:

And lo, the viper Lindzei bore fangs into the pristine soil of our Gran Pulse; despoiled the land and from it crafted a cocoon both ghastly and unclean.

Lies spilled forth from the serpent's tongue: 'Within this shell lies paradise.' Men heard these lies and were seduced and led away.

O cursed are the fools who trust a snake and turn their backs upon the bounty of Pulse's hallowed land! For those who dwell in that cocoon are not Men, but slaves of the demon Lindzei.

Ye who honor Pulse: rise unto the heavens, and cast down the viper's nest!

The serpent imagery here would seem oddly out of place if it weren’t for the universal symbol of Lindzei used by his descendant fal’Cie and the mortal societies she patronises. Lindzei’s symbol is that of a statuesque feminine figure with exaggerated hips, arms, and a headdress, whose stylised silhouette strongly resembles a uterus and ovaries. However, seen from another angle, this extremely stylised shape also resembles the hood of a cobra. It is fitting that a fal’Cie who is so associated with duplicity and tricks would be represented by such a multifaceted symbol.

This gives us a clue to the origin of the first part of Lindzei’s name. The germanic stem lind-, seen in the english word “lindworm” (dragon) and in many other germanic words for “snake”, has its origin in the Old norse linnormr, ultimately deriving from Proto-germanic *linþaz “flexible.” This is by far and away the likeliest candidate for the etymology of the Fell Lindzei, and strengthens the already existing trickster archetype or Satanic associations the gender-ambiguous (yet highly feminised) fal’Cie possesses.

The other associations of the word *linþaz are also worth discussing. The english word “lithe” descends from *linþaz, and the concept of flexibility or bendsomeness is itself highly relevant to the nature of this uranic fal’Cie. Lindzei is, above anything else, noted for his “dark cunning,” her skill with words, and, in the history of the Etroites, is effectively considered the midwife of the mortal races, who cultivated the very first human civilisations after their Goddess’ death. Given that societies patronised by Lindzei’s offspring (e.g. Cocoon, Milites) tend towards being extremely technologically and politically advanced, as well as lacking in superstition or fear towards the natural world, this idea has significant merit.

Which brings me to the Linden tree. Originating again from *linþaz, the Linden in germanic cultures has associations with femininity, divine protection and fertility, as well as truth-seeking, jurisprudence and political deliberation in general. All these associations are relevant to Lindzei, who above all his siblings is associated with the political life of humanity, and to whose followers is the true salvator and protector of the mortal peoples from nature or Pulse’s violent tyranny.

This leaves only the suffix -zei, pronounced “zeɪ” as in “say”. In fact, the word “say” — being of ancient germanic origin in *sagjaną, whose descendants are frequently pronounced as “z” (e.g. german sagen, dutch zeggen (past singular zei)) — is my personal best guess as to the actual etymology. Lindzei being so strongly associated with language and society, it seemed natural to me that this would be alluded to in her name.

Overall, this would give an etymology for the theonym that comes to something along the lines of “Speaking Serpent,” very fitting for a Lucifer-esque trickster figure.

In Analect VIII of Final Fantasy XIII, Lindzei is given an additional epithet “the Succubus,” which strengthens the Trickster/Satanic archetype associations, and yet further feminises the fal’Cie who is so demonised by devotees of Hallowed Pulse.

In Serendipity and on Eos, playing cards depict Lindzei as the Jack, with a caption describing him as “the Solemn Ruler,” who is “commanding from his throne on high.” This solidifies the uranic and political associations that the fal’Cie has.

Etro

Fool desired naught, and soon was made one with it. — Analect I, “The Vanished Gods”

For the Infernal Goddess, who is barely acknowledged by most mortal cultures in the setting, the problem of naming is particularly pertinent. To most peoples, She is simply Death, the embodiment of their mortality — but to those of Her children (for all mortals are born from Her broken corpse) who venerate Her, She is also known as “Her Providence”. This epithet is in fact the only name by which She is known specifically in the version of Eos depicted in the rebranded Final Fantasy XV, where the remnants of Her crystalline soul provided the Lucis Caelum[2] dynasty with its magic.

The epithet “Providence” of course alludes to Her gift (or curse) of prophecy, and associations with probability/entropy — misfortune, and prudent preparation to stave it off in particular.

Given that the Crystal of Lucis is referred to as the soul of the planet Eos itself, and yet is also termed the “Light of Providence” by the Astrals, it is possible that “Eos” is in fact itself another epithet for Her Providence Etro. Eos, originally greek ἠώς, means “Dawn” and is also the name used for the hellenic thea of the Dawn herself. This word ultimately derives from the Proto-Indo-european *h₂éwsōs of the same meaning.

It may seem counterintuitive for a Goddess of the Underworld to be referred to as the Dawn personified, but it is worth noting that She is also associated with entropy and disaster and yet is still called Her Providence. As the Lady of Chaos, She may bring the dawn if She so chooses by drawing the darkness back into the Unseen Realm, and in fact this is the role She plays as the Queen of Valhalla and by protecting the people of Eos from the Starscourge (which is a manifestation of the Unseen Chaos).

Like many death deities in our world, it is possible that Her true name is so rarely uttered because of this fal’Cie’s deathly nature, and how tied She is to destruction, chaos and entropy in general — it is not uncommon for such terrible spirits to often be referred to with euphemisms to avoid invoking either their wrath or their destructive natures. Surprisingly, one thing both Pulsian and Lindzeian cultures agree on is their fear of or even hatred for this entity.

Unlike Her sibling fal’Cie, She is entirely absent from the mortal realm and Her influence can only be felt through the chthonic Unseen Realm which awaits Her children between death and rebirth. Also unlike Fell Lindzei and Hallowed Pulse, Her Providence bore no fal’Cie of Her own, as She was granted no divine gifts in life.

The concept of the Unseen Realm will be revisited later in this series, but for now let it simply be noted that She is depicted as the Queen on playing cards created by Her devotees, and referred to on the writing below the illustration as “the Veiled Goddess.” Personally, i believe this epithet refers to mourning veils, as well as the veil between the Visible and Unseen Realms which is Death — i.e., “Veiled Goddess” is a euphemistic manner of describing Her nature as the Dead and Death Goddess.

The actual name of this fal’Cie (if indeed She can be considered a fal’Cie alongside Her kin) is not even alluded to until the very, very, very end of the post-game in Final Fantasy XIII, and outside its two direct sequels Her name is even then seldom referenced except euphemistically. There are many possible reasons for this, but that’s a topic for another post.

Children of Hallowed Pulse scour earth, searching substance for the Door. Those of Fell Lindzei harvest souls, combing ether for the same. So have I seen.

The Door, once shut, was locked away, with despair its secret key; sacrifice, the one hope of seeing it unsealed.

When the twilight of the gods at last descends upon this world, what emerges from the unseeable expanse beyond that Door will be but music, and that devoid of words: the lamentations of the Goddess Etro, as She sobs Her song of grief.

— Analect XIII, “Fabula Nova Crystallis”

Etro, written エトロ (Etoro) in kana, has an extremely ambiguous etymology, as is noted by several fans of the setting. i will list what i consider to be the likeliest possibilities here, and describe the reasoning behind each as best i can.

Firstly is the french être ”to be,” triply relevant due to the presence of french and other italic languages in the FNC’s theonymy already; the nature of the Veiled Goddess Etro as mother to all human-kind, midwife of all re-born human souls, and as She who endows mortals with the formless heart that delineates us from our fal’Cie cousins; and, lastly, due to a possible connection with the etymology of Her cosmic antithesis, the Shining God Bhunivelze, which will be covered in the next section.

Second is the italian tetro “gloomy”/”grim,” which has obvious connections to Veiled Etro’s chthonic nature as She resides in the perpetual twilight of the Unseen Realm of Death.

Third, the Breton etre “betwixt,” whose etymology is entirely distinct yet is geographically proximate to the previous french. Veiled Etro, powerless in the world of Her birth, was  granted a power beyond any living fal’Cie in the Immortal Realm of Chaos, and used this power to grant this primordial force to Her mortal children in a perpetual cycle of death and rebirth, between one world and the other. Thus, the concept is relevant to Her nature.

Fourthly is the Proto-Indo-european *kʷetwóres “four,” an association that might be clearer when examining the numeral’s descendants, but which i am fond of as a potential etymology for Her Providence due to the association that the number has with death in japan, as discussed previously. The reconstructed *kʷetwóres becomes Latin quattuor, italian quattro, greek τετρα- (tetra-), Proto-balto-slavic *ketur-, and many others whose stems all resemble the name “Etro.”

Fifthly is the italian etra “heaven,” ultimately derived (via italian etere) from greek αἰθήρ (aether, transliterated into japanese kana as エーテル, “ēteru,” which is remarkably close to “Etoro”) which is a good way of describing the formless fluid nature of the Chaotic realm over which Her Providence Etro presides.

Last, but certainly not least, is the option that i personally find the likeliest: the Latin ceterus, or greek ἕτερος (heteros), both of which mean “other one,” both descended from the Proto-Indo-european suffix *-(e)teros — a suffix which means “one that is especially more than [prefix],” making fundamentally important word stems such as *ḱe- (here) or *sem- (one), into a general term for “that which is distinct from this.” This is incredibly important to understanding the Veiled Lady, who has largely been defined by being set apart from every other fal’Cie in Her lack of godliness, Her dominion over Chaos, Her cosmic opposition to the source of all living fal’Cie, and most notably, Her total absence in human culture or the majority of historical accounts concerning the world’s fal’Cie. Etro is the Great Other who is set apart from wider society, ostracised, scapegoated, and painted as a childish Fool or terrifying monster, regardless of cultural context or era.

Etro’s symbol is quite mysterious, as befits the Veiled Goddess. Similar to the etymology of Her name, there are many possible interpretations of Her sign.

The most obvious might be the image of a sprouting seed, which fits Her rebirth function and also matches the possible french etymology être.

The second is that of an eyeball cut in half longways, pointing downwards, which matches Her associations with prophecies and visions, as well as the world below. Etro’s Gate, the other of Her prominent symbols, which is the Door of Souls through which the dead and newly-reborn must pass to enter or exit the Unseen Realm, is also, notably, in the shape of an eye as seen from the front.

The silhouette also somewhat resembles an avian head viewed from the front, with the eyes near the base of the image, and this has immense importance to Her avian associations (the presence of (white — possibly swan) feathers is Her single most important omen/symbol after the Door of Souls). The softly-thinning curved prongs arguably resemble feathers themselves, or perhaps multiple sets of wings stretched upwards to the sky.

The fourth thing to note is the sphere of something fluid at the heart of whatever the image is depicting, which represents an organic flow of some kind, most likely the primordial Chaos that the Unseen Realm and the hearts of Her children are composed of. Within this dark fluid seems to be concealed some sort of staff or spike, which might represent a concealed blade or other weapon of some sort. Either way, this strengthens the already existing associations Her Providence has with concealment.

It might also possibly speak to the twin martial and spiritual functions, or, in DnD-esque Final Fantasy terms, physical and magical power — two things that are extremely relevant to Her Providence, who is so delighted by contests of violence. The fact that this dark fluid and the weapon concealed within are surrounded by the husk or wings/feathers of the symbol could either be an allusion to the Chaos that lies at the heart of every mortal (and Etro Herself), and the Unseen Chaos that Etro is charged with keeping at bay to preserve the Visible World.

[2] Note the connection to italian luci and french ciel here in the Latin Lucis Caelum, which are both referenced in the theonym “fal’Cie.”

Bhunivelze

Luminous lamented, for creation spiraled unto doom. — Analect I, “The Vanished Gods”

This supreme fal’Cie of light, “the god who rules all things,” and “holds the world in his palm” is in fact primarily referred to not by name, but simply as “God,” singular, monotheistic and absolute. He is also given many epithets related to light and the sun, such as “the Shining God,” or simply “Luminous.” All fal’Cie depicted in the setting, and thus, all Matter itself — everything that doesn’t stem from Chaos, to be clear — stem from this being’s great, near-absolute power as the self-made centre of all existence.

But his etymology is much less transparent than his realm. There are only a few narrow possibilities i have been able to find, and they are even then only tentative, so of the five entities discussed here i am most likely to revisit the Shining One at a later date.

“Bhuni-” may have an origin in the Latin bonus “good”/”right”, whose romance-language descendants often mutated the word into bun- stem words, all associated with correct morality. This has a credible link to Shining Bhunivelze’s associations with purification and correct action.

The second option i find more credible, myself: Proto-Indo-european *bʰuH- “to become”[3], which becomes Proto-germanic *beuną “to become” (from whence the english “be”/”been”), Kurdish bûn “to be,” Sanskrit भूमन्  (bhū́man) “world,” भू (bhū́) “earth”/”matter”/”world,” and particularly भूमि (bhū́mi) “limit”/”extent”/”foundation”/”earth.” As Bhunivelze is the foundation of everything that can be seen in the material realm, and possesses absolute control over all visible Matter, his name being to do with the world itself, or the concept of limits/extents, or even matter/substance itself, would be extremely fitting.

The concept of Bhūmi is particularly relevant. The word represents the earth element in Hinduism, and is embodied in the devi of the same name who is analogous to “Mother Earth” and is also known as Prithvi; however, the term Bhūmi is used differently in Mahayana Buddhism. Within Mahayana-thought, the bhūmis are the ten[4] stages of attainment that must be passed in order to reach bodhi, or enlightenment. This concept is most certainly relevant to the self-declared most enlightened being in all creation.

“-velze” requires some more work. In katakana, his name is written ブーニベル (Būniberuze), which could help with finding more candidates.

Firstly, the dutch/Middle german vels(e) (plural velzen) “rock” — it is arguably a stretch, but i think it bears mentioning due to the fact that the Lord Bhunivelze does in fact have associations with stone/mineral — not just in that he is the god of all solid Matter (something that i will discuss later in the series), but that he is associated with crystalline structures in particular. In Final Fantasy XIII-2, we are given the following Oracle of Etro, which is the first time the Shining One is actually referred to by name:

In the physical world, it contains within its form endless chaos. By the will of the deities, it gives birth to all living things. I speak of crystal.

The eternal dream world of the crystal lies within the Unseen World. Even the gods long to find their way to that place. In all crystal, the heart that shines most brightly is called Bhunivelze.

— “Bhunivelze’s Sleep,” Yeul’s Confessions

With Proto-germanic *beuną this would give Bhunivelze an approximate etymology of “Stone Coming Into Being,” “Stone Appearing,” or “Growing Stone.”

Second is the Hindi वली (valī) “lord”/”saint”, which is even more of a stretch than vels to be honest, but is worth mentioning. This would give him an etymology akin to “Lord of the Universe.”

The last guess i have for this etymology is the english “verse,” from Latin versus, based instead on the original japanese pronunciation. The reason i think this is plausible is due to the Shining One’s connections to the Biblical God, whose words speak creation into being. This would, with Latin bonus or Proto-Indo-european *bʰuH-, give the Shining One an etymology something along the lines of “Good Verse” or “Verse Coming Into Being,” both of which are quite fitting.

We can go one step further from “verse,” however: If we take Proto-Indo-european *bʰuH-, and the original japanese pronunciation, we can form Bhu-niverse, which is to say, the english word “universe” (ultimately derived from Latin ūniversus, “turned into one”) — a lot more plausible given the numerous Sanskrit bhū́- stem words listed above meaning “entire world.” This is the likeliest etymology for Shining Bhunivelze, in my opinion, and gives us a final meaning of “the World Coming Into Being.” This concept is incredibly relevant to the nature of Bhunivelze and Matter in general in Fabula Nova Crystallis, and will be discussed at length later on.

[3] Here the possible connection to the speculated french etymology être for Etro, also “to be,” which would highlight their shared cosmic significance as the ultimate light and dark principles.

[4] The number ten is incredibly important to the Shining One, who bears ten wings in his full manifestation and whose Latin-alphabet name (not coincidentally, the Latin alphabet is sacred to him) is composed of ten characters.

Mwynn

Maker forged fal'Cie, from fragments Maker's own. — Analect I, “The Vanished Gods”

Barely referred to except by the hints of hints even in the most hidden parts of the Fabula Nova Crystallis video-games, the majority of our knowledge about this most ancient of deities comes from the 2011 Square Enix video describing the central mythology of the entire setting.

Mwyn is a Welsh word with a dual meaning, the more common of which is neglected by FNC fans, so i will cover the less common first.

Mwyn is an adjective meaning mild, tender or gentle, which alludes to the Deepest Mwynn’s role as Mother to all creation, and particularly in raising Her offspring Shining Bhunivelze (in the Mortal Realm) and Veiled Etro (in the Unseen Realm) and instructing them on their respective cosmic positions as the wellspring of all Matter and the shepherd of all Chaos. Unfortunately, the etymology of this word is unclear, but it might possibly originate from Proto-Indo-european *men- “to think.”

Mwyn also means “ore” or “mineral.” Similar to the hypothetical bhū́mi and vels etymology for the Shining One Bhunivelze, this is relevant to our Deepest Mother Mwynn as the ancestral crystal of every soul and heart and speck of Matter that exists, as far as can be known. The etymology for this word is not much better-attested, though likely ultimately descends from Proto-Celtic *mēnis, meaning the same thing, and ultimately from Proto-Indo-european *(s)mēy(H)- “to cut”/”to hew.” The concept of cutting/hewing crystal is central to the almost parthenogenesis-like method by which fal’Cie (and, indeed, the ancestral mortals born from the Veiled Goddess Etro’s blood) are created, so i ultimately find both definitions of mwyn to be relevant here.

Unfortunately, there is only one depiction of the Deepest Mother available for analysis, but unlike Her chthonic daughter, who is frequently depicted badly wounded, sleeping/comatose or dying, She is depicted with Her body and all Her limbs intact; and within a great tapering double helix, a great disc — likely the universe — lies beneath the soles of her feet. This symbol is ultimately the logo used for the Fabula Nova Crystallis setting as a whole, and it warms my heart to know this long-forgotten Goddess receives some recognition in this form.

In time the gods departed, leaving all by their hands wrought.

Fal'Cie were as Man forsaken, orphans of Maker absconded.

— Analect I, “The Vanished Gods”

i dedicate this etymological analysis to The Dead Goddesses: to my Veiled Infernal Queen, Etro, and to my Deepest Ancestral Mother, Mwynn. We stand guard over your legacies still.

[bookenders]

11/11/11 Tag Game: Round... uh... 5, 6, & 7?

I got tagged by a bunch of people ( @quilloftheclouds is this how your 77 question one felt??) so here are a bunch of answers! I think this is the most I’ve ever talked about myself in my life. 

Good gracious, you’re all so nice and have such good questions.

Tagged by: @surroundedbypearls, @waterfallwritings, @bigmoodword, @sundaynightnovels

Rules: answer 11 questions, tag 11 people, give them 11 new questions!

[I’ve done this enough to be able to break the tag rules. Fight me.]

44 questions and answers below the cut!

But I’ll be nice and put my questions right here:

What would you do for a Klondike bar?

When do you title your WIPs? It is the first thing you do? The last? Does it come to you during drafting?

How many inside jokes do you put in your WIP(s)?

Your WIP’s antagonist is now The Riddler. How do your OCs handle that?

Do you use sticky notes?

Laptop or desktop?

Your OC is a wrestler. What’s their hype music?

Do you own any craft books/books on writing?

What’s your favorite book cover?

How many unread books do you have sitting around right now? Which are you most excited to maybe get to eventually some time?

How committed are you to your outline(s)?

Bilbo Taggins: Literally anyone, but also @francestroublr, @sahados-shadow, @a-story-im-writing, @bethkerring, @citruschickadee, @bos-ingit

If I’ve tagged you before, you can totally ignore this. In fact, I encourage you to.

From @surroundedbypearls:

What’s your favourite genre to write in and why? Literary fiction! It’s what I learned in university and the one that fits my themes best. Sci-fi is hard, I’m just getting into writing fantasy stuff, I can’t do thrillers, romance is hard for me, and historical is too much work.

Do you think you have a style/voice that you use more often in your writing? When did you develop that style? If you’ve read one of my stories, you know exactly how my writing voice sounds. It doesn’t change too much. I write like I talk, but if I had a lot more gravitas and charisma. Honestly, I’ve always had that kind of style, but it really developed in high school. It’s been getting stronger since then. It’s one of the things I always got comments about from my teachers and fellow workshop writers. “Your voice is so strong!” Yep. It’s mah thang.

Do you play video games? What’s your favourite? YES I DO. It’s hard to pick faves, but I’ve played Dragon Age: Origins too many times. 

If you were going to do a WIP crossover, which OCs would be most interesting together? (If you’ve only got one WIP crossover with something else) A crossover between H2H and AOPC? Interesting. I think Mel and Keema would get along the best, Oz would have some fightin’ words for Elder Sanga, and Gemma and Teva would be a force to be reckoned with, my god. Two stubborn nerds who believe totally different things but are also very determined to be very good at what they want to do and love their communities to a fault? Fear them.

Do you prefer to plan WIPs in a document or through handwritten notes? I used to do it by hand but I couldn’t read it because my handwriting is terrible and I kept losing papers. I do it in docs now. Much easier to organize and incredibly legible.

Do you multiple languages exist in your WIP? If so how do you address that in the story? H2H is set in the “real world,” so yep. It hasn’t been addressed too much yet, but I have a way for tackling languages. I’ve written multilingual-ish stories before. I never write phonetically and use hella context clues so the reader knows the gist of what was said if another character doesn’t translate.

What’s your favourite animated film that’s not Disney or Pixar? AN AMERICAN TAIL. All of them. It’s on Netflix go watch it and marvel at the way a kids movie talks about Jewish immigration, poverty, and cultural oppression via mice. As a young Jewish child, this movie was my jam. It’s very dark, though.

Do your real-life surroundings influence your WIP’s settings? Nope! One time I tried to write a story set in the same area where I lived and I couldn’t do it. Too weird. Sometimes I’ll write in an item I see near me, or like, a painting or poster on the wall if I need some set decoration, but that’s about it.

Which OCs would be most likely to break the fourth wall? Oz. Lookin’ at the camera like he’s in The Office.

How do you work out your OCs’ personalities? Hm. I look at the story I’m trying to write and make a protagonist that would have the most interesting experience in that narrative. For H2H, I wanted someone who would be loyal as heck to the people they loved while still being experimental enough to try new things and get into shenanigans. The story called for someone like that, and there she was. Mel came about my thinking of someone who would compliment other characters in the story while still being their own person. If that makes sense. I think of dynamics and interactions with the story world in relation to the theme(s). Most of the time they just happen, though.

Do you prefer worldbuilding or character building? Character building! As much as I like making stories about places, making characters is more fun for me, and more interesting. You should see all the DnD character sheets I have. 

From @waterfallwritings:

1. How do you come up with ideas for your WIPs?

At random. Seriously. It’s like my brain has to be running something in the background to function normally, and usually that something is whatever story I happen to be working on. Or I’ll look at a thing and go “huh.” My brain also likes to twist normal things to be a little bit different.

2. How do you get past gaps in the plot?

No idea, man. It’s like throwing spaghetti at a wall. I like to work backwards. If this is what I want to happen, what needs to happen before that to ensure that it occurs? I look at all the elements currently in the story and see if one can be manipulated to fill in the hole.

3. What motivates you to keep writing?

If I don’t, my brain gets all constipated and angry until I write something down. Like, seriously, I get grumpy and frustrated like I’m hangry or something. Aside from physical need, I love writing. I love word puzzles and feelings puzzles and figuring them out. Sometimes I think of how my stories could help someone, or make them feel something that they enjoy. 

4. Do you do any other kind of creative writing?

Oh, man, I’ve done it all. Screenwriting, playwriting, poetry, video game-ish writing, interactive storytelling, short stories, flash fiction, proposals, essays, DnD campaigns, monologues... You name it, I’ve probably tried it. I tend to stick to prose and poetry these days.

5. Do you have any other creative hobbies besides writing?

I’ve gotten into graphic design a little bit. I kind of wanna learn how to knit again. I’m not really very crafty. 

6. What do you do when you’re stuck on a scene and don’t know how to get it out / write it?

Write a different scene, stare at the screen in frustration until I give up and go to sleep, meditate for a few minutes, go do something else to get my mind off of it, clean, work on a different project.

7. How do you decide how to end your WIP?

I mean, see the next question for part of my answer. How did I decide to end H2H? My friend, that’s a big ‘ole spoiler. But I decided to end it at a place where everything, and everyone, comes together.

8. When in the process of writing do you decide how its going to end? Or do you kind of just wait til you get there?

Right at the beginning. If I don’t know where it’ll end, I have a hard time writing the arc. I work backwards: start with the idea, then think of where I want it to end up, then work back to the beginning until I know where its going, then start writing.

9. Why did you decide to join writeblr?

My reasons are pretty personal, but the least personal is that I needed some accountability and motivation. And I missed being in a good writing community.

10. What’s your favourite food?

Pasta! I’m eating spaghetti right now.

11. If you had to kill off a character in your WIP, who would it be and why?

Oz would be the most tragic. Treena would be the most logical. 

From @bigmoodword:

1. using one sentence summaries, can you tell me about your wips?

Nerdy potion woman meets cute odd stranger who helps her solve magic mysteries in their quirky small town.

2. what inspired them?

I saw a zine accepting submissions for magic stories, then an open call for queer shifter stories, and thought “what if wholesome magical lesbians?”

3. which of your ocs do you most identify with?

Gemma!

4. if you’ve ever cried while reading, which book cued the waterworks?

THE SONG OF ACHILLES.  My God, my soul was weeping. Honestly, it still is. Doesn’t matter that I knew the story from the Iliad. Madeline Miller is a feelings wizard.

5. how do you conduct research for your wips and what’s the most interesting thing you’ve discovered in said research?

On an as-needed basis. I used to do way too much research to avoid actually writing the damn thing, so now I only do it when I actually run into a problem that can be solved by Google.

6. thus far, which scene has been the most difficult to write?

The ones that aren’t hugely emotional. Which is... unfortunate.

7. which of your ocs do you like the least?

Rude. On a personal level, Jill. I love her, but I would not be friends with her. We wouldn’t mesh at all.

8. which pov and tense do you prefer to write in?

Third person limited present tense! To the bane of everyone who’s ever edited my work.

9. do you write poetry?

I do! Not often, though.

10. who is your writing role model?

My freakin’ writing professor from college. He is crazy disciplined.

11. if you could give your younger writer self some advice, what would it be?

Hey, you know those people who say your writing is too dark? Yeah, they suck and they’re wrong. They just want kids to live up to their expectations and write happy sunshiny stories about unicorns and dinosaurs having ice cream. And you’re not depressed because you wrote that one sad poem one time and someone asked if you were depressed. What you have is called feelings and they’re very useful for a writer, nay, a human, to have.

From @sundaynightnovels:

Who is your biggest role model? Okay, so I got crap all the time in grade school for never having a role model, and I still don’t have one. The teachers were concerned about me. But my reasoning was, “why should I want to live someone else’s life?” Yeah. They didn’t really know what to do with that...

What are your OCs favorite foods? Sort of answered here!

Which OC is most afraid of the dark? Oz and Mary!

What made you want to start a writing blog/participate in the writeblr community? Answered above!

Did you sleep with a stuffed animal as a kid? Do you still? I did, indeed. I don’t anymore, but I have two that I shuffle around my room when they get in the way. One is a highland cow I got in Scotland (he has a plaid hat), the other is a blue whale I got at the Museum of Natural History in NY.

Do you like donuts? I love donuts. Especially jelly filled ones. Mmm.

Do/would your OCs like donuts? All of my OCs like donuts. I don’t think Mel has ever had a modern one, though.

What is your least favorite food? Cauliflower? I’m the household taste-tester, so there’s been a lot of stuff I don’t like.  ( @sundaynightnovels I hate sparkling water, too, you’re not alone!)

What is your ideal writing environment? Comfy seating, a chair with no arms (stupid elbows), alone, plenty of chosen beverage within reach, headphones.

Favorite line from your WIP? So far, it’s this one!

Favorite quote from a book? Oh, man. There are so many. From recent memory, here are a few: “’Give it time,’ she replies. ‘It won’t be a story forever.’“  and “Everyone has heard stories of women like us, and now we will make more of them.” (both from The Ladies Guide to Petticoats and Piracy) “When he smiled, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled like a leaf held to flame.” and “I lean forward and our lips land clumsily on each other. They are like the fat bodies of bees, soft and round and giddy with pollen.” (I could write a goddamn essay about the imagery in this scene.) (It is quite possibly my favorite description of a kiss ever. And the metaphor extends through the rest of the scene so artfully ugh.) (both from The Song of Achilles) “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.” (from The Things They Carried)

[davidmann95]

The Kingdom Hearts III Reaction

First thing’s first: yes, I got the responses to my initial reaction letting me know I could use L2 to cycle through triangle commands, and oh my god that made things so much more manageable, so thank you.

Gameplay wise, I said what I had to say right off the bat earlier: lot of fun, best version of the traditional playstyle. Gorgeous except for when it’s the most gorgeous. Way more game than I could handle on the margins, but it felt like fun available options I could choose whether to pursue or not rather than overwhelming.

Under the cut I’m gonna talk some broad structural stuff; I’ll avoid anything overtly spoilery, but it would certainly be understandable if you’d rather stay away. Under another bolded sign though I’m going to get into MAXIMUM spoiler territory, so those who just want my basic impressions but would prefer to hold off on more than that until they have their own go at it can know where to get off.

So this game does like 90% of everything I ever wanted it to do, plus so much MORE than I ever would have expected, resulting in a finale even more grand and resonant and satisfying than I might have imagined after nearly 13 years of waiting. The problem is that all that stuff is in the last 8 hours, and it is very, very clear that’s the part of the game Nomura and company actually cared about. This wasn’t interested in being Kingdom Hearts III, it wanted to be Kingdom Hearts III Part 3/3: The Finale after Dream Drop Distance and A Fragmentary Passage covered the other biggies, to the point of as mentioned before critically compromising the beginning of the game. It reached the point where Dream Drop Distance went from just baaaaarely pulling ahead of 358/2 Days to dead damn last in my ranking of these, because it not only set the tone for what went wrong here - even if this succeeded in the end in a way that couldn’t - but sponged off vital reveals and the conclusion to Riku’s character arc, both of which 1,000,000% needed to be in here so this could be a complete sequel rather than in an intermediary story where they were weakened by context.

Long story short, Nomura and Square are going to have to think very, very hard about what kind of a role the Disney worlds are going to play in these going forward, because the enthusiasm for them on the part of the writers is visibly dead. Not across the board, passion clearly went into the likes of the Toy Story and Big Hero 6 worlds, but it could not have been plainer that Monsters Inc. and Frozen were checkmarks being crossed off, perfunctory in a way I genuinely don’t feel the Disney worlds were in the past (though that may be in large part because this time around Sora is literally just there for level grinding, rather than an immediate search for friends, stripping away the central underlying emotional urgency of I and II). It would’ve been alright if there had been a major act break of the sort II had to provide a sense of forward momentum, but as is it really is just marking time while characters other than Sora drive the plot in the background, mostly in the form of catching up with what the audience already knows. They’ll always be a part of the franchise, and obviously the iconic Disney figures in Mickey and the rest will always be central, but unless the powers that be find a fresh new angle I think it’s getting to be time to scale the movie settings back in favor of the main story and original worlds, if not to the extent the Final Fantasy elements have received.

So I spent most of the game disappointed, figuring it would pull it all together for the finale and more than satisfy me, but not enough to retroactively redeem the game as a whole. And then it retroactively went and redeemed the game, because when I say it kicks off in the last 8 hours I don’t mean that that’s where things start getting parsed out in time for the finale. I mean it’s 8 solid hours of climax, physical and plot and character, the most intense and overwhelming of the franchise, answers to real-life-decade spanning mysteries and character resolutions and endgame-scale setpieces and catharsis being delivered just one after the other after the other. It’s the entire emotional underpinning of the game in a single titanic endrun, in an experience and at a pitch I’ve never seen before. Even the parts that should have been set up earlier in the game still have the entire rest of the series and years of anticipation leading into them, and while it’s a shame it had to bank on that advantage, it worked, because when I look back on the game in years to come it’s going to be this that I’ll remember, and when I someday a long time from now play through the franchise as a whole, I’ll go through the parts that previously irritated me with a smile on my face because it’ll just be a charming interlude rather than a dead stop. I can’t put this over II’s more well-rounded experience because of those structural issues, but while 0.2 is maybe the purest expression of intent thus far in the series, its brevity, and the fact that as good as it gets its best isn’t as good as this gets, puts III neck-and-neck with it as the franchise runner-up for me.

Okay, BIGGEST SPOILERS IN THE FUCKING WORLD UNDER THE IMAGE

So being a person who exists online in the 21st century, I had some key images of the ending spoiled for me well in advance, which sucked but was also maybe a blessing in disguise, because if I hadn’t been braced when those last three seconds came...that would have been rough. It was startlingly rough as is, which is odd because as much as I’ve always liked Sora as a character and appreciated the odd way his nature as a Disney hero in a Final Fantasy dark epic makes him a perfect lead and counterpoint, I never realized the depths of emotional investment I’d attached to his specific fate until the rug got pulled out. It would be as blatant a “but there’s no body!” moment as any there’s ever been even without the secret ending and the confirmation on Nomura’s part that Sora will remain the main character, it’s an emotional blow and a setback and a mystery for the others to solve rather than a full tragic ending (and one would have to imagine the characters themselves would believe that and will act accordingly given this entire story was itself about bringing back a bunch of Very Definitely Dead Folks), but it’s harsh as hell even if it’s very clearly the next step in a Master Plan rather than purely blueballing players for the cruel joy of it. Still, even if it’s reminiscent of stuff we’ve seen before, a melancholy-at-best ending is fully within the franchise wheelhouse; if I’m right and there’s one full trilogy of main games remaining in the series (I’m guessing without many if any spinoffs, Nomura’s bosses are definitely going to have his nose to the grindstone to get through the remainder of this thing on a sane timescale so as not to have another...well, this), maybe it’ll fully establish a sad-odd-numbered-ending, happy-even-numbered ending pattern, with IV having a gleeful reunion, V ending with all seeming lost, and the grand finale letting the heroes have their happily ever after.*

Before getting into the gushing praise for the rest of it, the reason this is at 90% of everything I wanted rather than complete: Kairi is bizarrely shortchanged here compared to every other central character, especially given her relationship with Sora is the foundation of the very end and she’s the logical main protagonist for IV. Even her ‘death’ isn’t my issue so much - by the end of the game Sora has rescued literally every other main character from beyond the veil of the afterlife or a living hell in fairly rapid succession, she’s just the last and biggest deal to him personally - as that even a few more scenes with her would have shored up so much. Not that her material isn’t good when she is there, I absolutely do think it was, and the emotional buildup from the series up to this point was more than enough in my opinion to carry her stuff through, but it’s the equivalent of, say, Lois Lane appearing out of nowhere at the end of a Justice League story to provide the impetus for Superman: obviously this works and makes sense because we know how much they mean to one another, but in the context of this as a lone narrative it’s a little out of nowhere. Riku gets it pretty bad too, if not as much so, but he has the ‘excuse’ of having his character arc resolved in Dream Drop Distance. Still though, it means the central trio is scarcely a thing in here the way it was in the past, though it looks like the next game is going to be entirely about getting them back together and hopefully they’ll stay as a complete unit from there on out.

Also prior to gushing praise: if Dream Drop Distance hadn’t happened, it would be so easy to restructure this in a way that would make the whole thing satisfying instead of just a perfect chunk of it. Open the game with Sora and Riku going into the Realm of Darkness to save Aqua, have Sora succeed but in the process of THAT lose his powers (making it a noble sacrifice on his part foreshadowing the end rather than a non-fuckup that the player pays for); Aqua has to recuperate, preferably with Kairi and Lea so they can get more screentime, Sora’s off regaining his powers and tracking down clues to the location of Castle Oblivion since it was under Organization control and therefore hidden, and Riku’s off with Mickey having his DDD arc. Stick the reveal of the real Organization XIII midgame, and keep the finale almost exactly as is. That way, plot and character’s doled out throughout, character screentime is rebalanced, and everything that worked stays working and comes to the exact same conclusion.

Gushing praise time: holy fuckin’ cow, this hit me in ways I did not see coming. The reunion of the other two trios was something I looked forward to well enough but not anything I fully expected to outright bowl me over, but by god they pushed those buttons as hard as they could and made them everything anyone could need them to be. But that was expected, to one extent or another; what I don’t think anyone could have seen coming was, in the final gasp of this saga of hilariously, broadly Arch villains, every single one of them turning out to be a real goddamn human being with understandable emotions and motivations and implied history and arcs. Monsters see the light (with the contextually hilarious exception of the one character fandom MOST wanted to see get a face turn with Vanitas, and even he finds understanding and peace) after a whole series of believing there’s one in the darkness when only one or two major characters had made a turnaround, and it doesn’t just make this game richer, it retroactively improves the entire series thematically and emotionally, as well as setting the stage for more of that approach based on what we know of what’s to come. And action-wise, it really does go for trying to beat II’s last Xemnas fight, and while I don’t know that it manages it in sheer cool thanks to that final laser blocking/dual wielding finale, it I think really does come out on top in the fights leading up to it and the spectacle and the emotional power and the beautiful interface screw (after the shit with the tornado earlier!), nevermind the absolute end where Our Nerd Dad Luke Skywalker** shows up to give his blessing to the franchise and usher out the story as it was.

As for the pair of post-credits scenes: in each instance I had something spoiled for me, but also in each instance not the BIG thing. I knew Xigbar would live and summon the Foretellers, which honestly is not that shocking for me. That he IS one of them, that he’s been putting on an act (one clearly in the shape of his teacher) and been a bigger villain than Xehanort THE ENTIRE TIME? I believe that got a literal gasp out of me, and THAT’S before it turned out that after bullheadedly clinging to the idea that she’s still a main villain for all these years, Maleficent might actually end up a main villain again. And the secret movie? I had the title spoiled - and god what a perfect twist, the most gleefully apeshit moment in the game and already probable best moment in gaming of the year coming back around in a completely serious way to define the future of the franchise - but assumed wrongly that it meant Sora would be in some way ‘reincarnated’ amnesiac as Yozora and needing to be returned to himself. But nope, Sora’s for real out there alive as himself in...something like the real world? Or The World Ends With You, which I understand is at least a lot closer? And Riku’s gonna wind up stuck out there too? And because Yozora’s there it means they’re in some kind of fuckin’ Flash of Two Worlds! situation?! Or if it’s in the same physical realm (which I have to doubt or Sora would rush home as soon as he got a ship) it’s the equivalent of that dope two-part Terra Obscura arc in Tom Strong?! Sora and Riku, trapped in a world where Kingdom Hearts is a Dark, Realistic Modern Urban Fantasy (which, if Sora got here by dying, does...does that mean Gritty Realworld! AU Kingdom Hearts fanfic is that universe’s version of hell? Because that would be beautiful) (did “This is a fantasy based on reality” end up carried over as the logline to Final Fantasy XV from Versus XIII? Because if not, absolutely use it here to keep that gag going) and having to fight their way back to their world and friends, hopefully with Kairi going on her own playable adventure on the other end of the cosmos to find them since there’s no way she wouldn’t be leading the search? And with the Master of Masters waiting in the wings, the perfect villain in general because if Sora is the MOST Disney character in this universe he appears to be the LEAST, and especially perfect here now that Sora’s symbolically if not possibly literally on his turf? Waiting I’m guessing another 3-5 years is gonna be hell (I’m guessing IV’ll be announced next year or maaaaaaaybe late this year because thus far Kingdom Hearts has never gone with no announced games on the horizon longer than the end of the next calendar year, and we’ll see how development goes after that; like I said, I imagine the pressure is on for Nomura), but this could not look more like my shit.

So that’s, after all these years, Kingdom Hearts III: an understandable, maybe unavoidable, but still crushing disappointment that undermined itself narratively before it even began production and ran on a burned-out crew that could never meet the impossible expectations surrounding it. Until it suddenly winks, brushes itself off, and lives up to damn near EVERYTHING on its shoulders in the most incredible ways possible while also transcending its previous limitations as a story right in front of you, and then breaking your heart before planting the seed to repair it and charting a path towards an even more exciting future. All said and done, I liked it a whole lot, and it’ll always be special to me.

* At this point, I really could go for the ending of the whole thing literally being Sora and Kairi walking into the sunset together, with the camera panning up into the sky and text (not mysterious narration like in the past, but old-school Disney-cartoon-style outside-the-world of the story cursive text) appearing to declare 𝒜𝓃𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓎 𝓁𝒾𝓋𝑒𝒹 𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓅𝒾𝓁𝓎 𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇 𝒶𝒻𝓉𝑒𝓇. That is the level of closure and myth and satisfaction it’s gotta be building towards after everything thus far and everything to come.

** If you are reading this without having played or watched the game: given I know that’s now in the realm of possibility, no, I don’t literally mean Luke Skywalker showed up.

Yet.

[soyosauce]

On Using Culture As Language In Last Tango In Cyberspace

“THIS REVOLUTION IS FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY.”

Last Tango in Cyberspace makes culture a character to be explored in equal measure as the main character. Lion, an empathy-tracker, or em-tracker for short—uses his unique talent to consume curated content provided by clients and extrapolate a future; not at an individual level, mind you, rather as a glimpse at the cultural significance regarding the content in the future. It’s an amalgamation of genetic drifts which hardwires an em-trackers’ pattern recognition. Hacking their intuition to do a sort of cultural prognostication.

“A small robot standing on a busy city street corner, looking around. I SEE HUMANS BUT NO HUMANITY.”

Em-trackers methods vary with the person and there are very few known trackers, at least in so far as ones operating in the same capacity of Lion, doing this very niche work for a living. A very good living at that.

Lion, in particular, is rigged to make these deductions from words and logos, though it’s gestured that each tracker would be completely different. He processes the content he’s given, reacts, and tells the client if he sees a future or not. It’s usually a binary answer; a “yes” or a “no.”

“His journalism days are behind him. No longer does he get paid for the plot. Now, he’s paid for saying yes or no—the sum total of his contractual obligations. His work in the world reduced to one-word responses. When, he wonders, did his life get so small?”

Superficially, this book is about Lion being contracted by a major corporate entity to take a look at a crime scene and apply his talents… but this is a very unorthodox application of his gifts and one which ends up taking him down a rabbit hole. Ostensibly it’s a murder mystery wrapped up in noir trappings, something people might expect from cyberpunk. This is where the clear iterations from the sub-culture come into play, however. Within the tropes of a pleasurable whodunit, there’s much more to be consumed.

“You can’t scrub everything,” says Lorenzo. “Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.”

A specific trope that follows noir elements in cyberpunk, the investigator in over their head, is a unique vernacular used. There is typically a colloquial dialect that is foreign to the reader and makes them feel a fish out of water. The reader interprets what these cultural elements are in the future with the remix of certain words or the use of completely fictional words, from time to time. Interestingly, the dialect used in this novel is pop culture itself. Not in the very limited sense of Ready Player One, where games, gamers, and gaming is the language—but in landmark moments in cinema and literature that is reasonably absorbed into the general intellect of society. The most common being the novel Dune. Lion carries it with him all the time and is the cornerstone for the explanation of Lion’s gifts and poly-tribalism, a central component to the way Lion looks at culture in the story. People are intersectional beings with complex identities. Tracing the identity back to its origin is possible with technology these days. Appealing to particular facets of the identity can be a predictor for if something is to be successful and thrive or be consumed by another identity that dominates it.

'“Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope.” He points at the images. “This doesn’t feel like hope.”

I think this approach both hinders and helps Last Tango in Cyberspace. For one, it’s an interesting use of the trope which proved satisfying to read for me, personally. I had never read Dune but it is explained as needed. I never felt lost. However, I could see some people who had read the book and disagree with the cultural impacts asserted in the text having a problem with most of the book, as it draws from it heavily at a personal level for Lion, as well as a fundamental shorthand for what is happening in the plot; ingrained in the theme and a permanent fixture.

“Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It’s wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It’s automatic. It creates empathy.”

The frenetic pacing that accompanies cyberpunk literature is replaced with a sort of artificial acceleration with the structure of the book. Lots of very short chapters, in other words. This allows for expounding on the cultural aspects that are conveyed during the text. You notice what Lion notices. These details becoming foundational to the extrapolations he draws on later. What this means though, is the pacing is somewhat sacrificed in order to get the reader to do the same types of pattern recognition Lion does during the book. It’s clever, but a slow burn.

”Hybridization, he figures, is destined to become one of the ways this generation out-rebels the last generation. How we went from long-haired hippie freaks to pierced punk rockers to transsexual teenagers taking hormones.”

For me, the slower pace made it feel reminiscent of Takeshi Kovach in Altered Carbon. Envoys in that novel “soak up” culture in order to fit in and navigate foreign cultures. Lion’s talent feels like it takes that idea and explores it more thoroughly, engaging with it more, and this method allows you to soak up the information as well. If it were frenetic some of the details would be lost, I feel.

“Lion glances back at the pigeons. Sees a flicker he didn’t notice before. Remembers that the de-extinction program was a failed effort, realizes he’s looking at a light-vert. An AR projection of an almost. The bad dreams of a society disguised as a good time.”

A concept continually being reiterated in the novel is “living the questions.” Something that also subverts first wave cyberpunk, the characters of which are generally on the spectrum somewhere, unlikeable and/or anti-social, and live on the fringes of society in a sub-culture of some kind.

Lion, however, is an embodiment of empathy. He is in stark contrast to those protagonists, relating to most everyone and so can assume their point of view. To the extent, in fact, he resolves to not use his talents on other people.

“We ache for this feeling, but it’s everywhere. Booze, drugs, sex, sport, art, prayer, music, meditation, virtual reality. Kids, hyperventilating, spinning in circles, feel oneness. Why William James called it the basic lesson of expanded consciousness—just tweak a few knobs and levers in the brain and bam. So the drop, the comedown, it’s not that we miss oneness once it’s gone; it’s that we suddenly can’t feel what we actually know is there. Phantom limb syndrome for the soul.”

Last Tango in Cyberspace feels like a love letter to cyberpunk while updating it. In Neuromancer, for example, Gibson’s Rastafarians were a source of major critique. They are also featured in this novel but the author instead traces the cultural aspects and importance of Rastafarian influences on western mainstream culture. It felt as though it was making a point to correct the caricature found in the original source material. Whether or not it succeeds I leave up to someone who’s more educated on that and can speak to it—but the intent is clear.

“the failure of language.” “It’s a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.”

This led me to the only thing I didn’t like about the novel and a personal pet peeve of mine: authors phonetically using foreign language in dialogue. It’s usually done as a form of cultural appreciation and authenticity, I’m sure… but it results in the author needing to clarify what is being said regardless and it just feels uncomfortable. It’s pretty much always from a Western perspective on a minority culture and usually is the default assumption of what the culture sounds like. Lion is able to converse with them for plausible reasons, often not the case when this is encountered, but it’s always left me feeling squeamish. Just tell me they have an accent, placing them in whatever area if that is relevant.

“…what is genuine emotion and what is business strategy. The modern condition.”

As Lion navigates the mystery and ping-pongs about the globe consuming the clues surrounding the mysterious death the reader, too, is engaging in this meta-language. Both in terms of how it subverts or remixes cyberpunk tropes, as well as the cultural context and information Lion imparts as his process. All of which is given weight. Hooking the plot into these details down the line as it comes together.

Most interestingly of all perhaps, the author goes out of their way to state that all of the technology exists in the world today, or is in a lab somewhere being worked on, at the very least.

“The car sees emotions. Signals have been pre-programmed, down to the basement level, below Ekman’s micro-expressions, getting to the core biophysical: heart rate variability, blood oxygen levels. And all from pointing a laser at a tiny vein in the human forehead. The car sees emotions, yet feels nothing. So morality too has to be pre-scripted into the code. Aim for garbage cans and not pedestrians; aim for solitary pedestrians rather than large groups. Empathy programmer, he’s heard it called, someone’s job now.”

This makes the future we are presented with prescient in the same way Neuromancer did with the advent of the Internet and the rise of technology in the ’90s. But where technophobia is firmly rooted in first wave cyberpunk. Last Tango in Cyberspace is making a virtue of humanities peculiarities, some of which we barely grasp. While the Internet is not something we may understand, so too are we learning the same of our own minds. Empathy, after all, is not something we gained from modernity.

“Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What’s truer than that?”

And empathy seems to be the thing we desperately need right now, rather than the consensual hallucination that allows us to connect to others while, at the same time, enabling us to dehumanize each other.

“Last tango in cyberspace…the end of something radically new. Copy that.”

“Pitch black again. Like someone extinguished an angel.”

[leonhaxor]

Hello, yes, welcome to a Deltarune Theory

So, we all know how Gaster was the royal scientist for King Dreemurr. Built his greatest creation, the CORE - which we know that is a massive power source - and that Gaster famously "fell into his creation." Most interpreters thin it's the CORE he fell into, but it's not exactly elaborated upon. We also know what whatever he fell into, he basically became a glitch in the system of UNDERTALE's reality.

Do we really know HOW his CORE works, though?

The CORE was Gaster's greatest creation. Which, as far as we ever knew, was an absolutely MASSIVE energy reactor that provided power to all of the Underground. These are the facts here. Judging by all the lava, it'd be safe to say the power source was geothermal in origin.

The thing is, as far as 'greatest creations' go, this seems a little bit... too mundane. Yes, it's massive. Yes, it looks like Shadow Moses and Hollow Bastion had a lovechild (the castle in KH1, not the variant with an actual town around it). Yes, the overworld theme there is a banger. But at the end of the day it's still a glorified power plant. To his credit, it's unknown how long it actually took him to make it, as well as the implied time period they were sealed away being at least around Medieval Times, if not further back.

But even then... what about the CORE could shatter Gaster's existence across time and space (assuming it was the creation at all)?

Monsters can die to a lot of the same things any other living being can die to. There might be certain allowances, based on what kind of monster they were. If the CORE was geothermal in nature, if a fire elemental was to fall into its workings... well, barring the "drop of water in an ocean" possibility, it's highly likely they'd survive intimate contact with such high levels of heat. A monster that may or may not be a skeleton, like Gaster is widely believed to be? Probably has a melting point.

With the heavy implications that his fall into the CORE spread his essence across time and space, and the specific attention to getting those details across... would a fall into a mere geothermal reactor, no matter how large, actually spread one's being across existence in such an anomalous manner? What would set it apart from dying in literally any other part of the Underground, where monsters turn to dust instead?

As we have seen in both UNDERTALE and deltarune, a Fall is an *incredibly important thing*. Chara/The First Human fell into the underground, arguably fucking up everyone as badly (if not more so) than the human wizards of old who trapped monsters in the Underground. The six human children that came after did the exact same thing, leaving only their SOULs and their gear behind for Asgore and Frisk, respectively, to use. Frisk... well, they too fell into the Underground, and gave us the means to interact with that world.

What do monsters call dying of old age in their culture? Falling down. You know who also did this by the time we're in Chapter 1 of deltarune? Gerson. There’s a book in the  The one person alive who knew what the delta rune was, and who has been getting an awful lot of mention for a dead turtle, but I'll get to that later. Note that there was a distinct difference in the way that it was described for Gaster - he “fell into his own creation,” but he did not “fall down.” Humpty Dumpty might have been pushed.

But the point is, Gaster's own fall is fascinating because like in the context of the human children's falls, his Fall marked a beginning of a story (most obviously, Alphys', but I'm not sure that's where it ends), and the context of an end (such as Gerson's fall in deltarune, and his posthumous reverence by the community that he was from, much like the Followers do).

...so, what exactly might be the cause for Gaster's non-existence, regarding the CORE itself? How exactly did any of that end up being relevant?

Let's talk about deltarune's story for a second.

Recall that the Knight has been referred to by Spade King in crimson text... which, if you recall, is rather similar in color to that of the human SOUL in Kris.

But what kind of creature could this Knight be, to fight the Spade King and instill such profound loyalty within this monarch? When he is so powerful, so cunning, so ruthless, as we see him in his boss battle (as well as indirectly, though his effect on the Darkners' Kingdom)? What if I told you... 

Ahem.

Jokes aside, we do have to consider what kind of monster this Knight would have to be, one with the power to create the Holy Fountains. One that we haven't actually seen onscreen, and have heard even less of than King. Except... we might actually have seen someone, or rather something, that DOES have ties with the Knight, or at least his ability to manipulate the Fountains.

Kris.

Or rather, their SOUL.

Or even more specifically... a SOUL that we simply control.

Let's walk back a bit from the stinger, and work our way from there.

Here's a picture from the final scene we have so far in the Dark World, specifically of the “fountain” that we encounter. 

If you are viewing this in-game, the pattern is constantly scrolling diagonally, along the same line but in different directions. If you pay attention to it, you'll see this strange symbol that looks like a chinese fingertrap with spades on the ends.

Now take a look at this picture from the vessel creation screen. It’s been taken from just before the other menu items appear, for maximum clarity. 

Note how, while there is a constant rippling effect from the center, not unlike water in a pool, we can clearly see that there is a shape being distorted.

One that bears a striking resemblance to that of the fountain itself.

Both times we see this pattern, texture, whatever you prefer calling it... there is a brief interval where we see it, before a *Red SOUL* is seen in the center of it. And, directly afterwards, we are shown a white light that encompasses the entire screen, before we are brought into the World of Light.

Curiously, in the earlier variant, the screen turns white from the center x-axis and outwards, where the second one turns white from the center y-axis and outwards. Not entirely sure of the significance of the differing choice in axis, but I think it has something to do with the context of each entry. The first is our entry into the game, or rather the prologue, while the latter is our entry into the epilogue.

I believe that the former is representative of the SOUL's entry into the CORE, while the latter is representative of it returning from the depths of the Dark World.

Yes, you read that right.

I believe that the entirety of this game take place inside the CORE.

Between the curious reactions to entering his name into either of the inputs, along with all of the references to sounds and words associated with him, most people think Gaster is the narrator in the opening sequence. Or Chara, according to @Squigglydigg's initial theories playing the game. But while that'd be interesting to explore, I'll have to go a third route for the moment, as I believe there is more evidence to back this idea up.

I might as well address the name input easter eggs before I go farther. Neither "Frisk" nor "Chara" happen to elicit any sort of unique response from the narrator whatsoever. If you name Gaster as the Vessel, the program soft resets. But if you name him as the Creator... it shuts down immediately, before you can truly enter the "R."

I believe that this narrator we are introduced to is actually a program designed by Gaster himself, made to oversee the CORE's operations.

If Gaster is named as the creator of this vessel, the program crashes. Note that this name is also used as that of the SAVE file's profile. As far as we know so far, the vessel's name is inconsequential. It's been hypothesized that this vessel will become relevant in later chapters, but it is unclear if and how it would actually be used.

My current thoughts as to what the creator has to do with this program... is that whoever is actually using the program is in some form of VR simulation. One that, as suggested by the cage at the end of the chapter, is meant to trap the player. I’ll get more into how it tries to do so in the next part of my hypothesis.

I haven’t forgotten about the "Chara" figure at the end of the chapter. I think this is actually a clue to the true identity of the Knight, or at least the World of Light's equivalent. Recall that the one in the Dark World is never seen, but is able to summon the Holy Fountains of Darkness. King, in his fight, has an odd hatred for Kris specifically, calling them the specific name of "Lightbringer" for the first and only time so far in the game. Picture the act of what the Knight *does*, bringing forth a fountain of shadows from the Earth. When Kris stands before that castle fountain, it erupts into light (and is presumably destroyed, but then again, we don’t actually see the aftermath of this action).

The Knight is implied to be obscenely powerful, in both conventional combat and enough to create dark fountains, enough to make King into a willing and eager servant. If we look back at UNDERTALE's genocide route, we see Flowey (who in terms of power and personality greatly resembles King) eagerly supporting "Chara" in their slaughtering of the Underground. And, by the time we have defeated Sans, we've made them into a truly unstoppable killing machine. Note how the Knight's colortext has a unique red and black gradient effect, representing their ties to the darkness while also bringing to mind the infamous red text that accompanied our player-made killer's thoughts. Thoughts laid out in simpler text rendering, but noticably brighter hue than that associated with the Knight.

Also recall the words of Seam the Shopkeeper, should you defeat Jevil. He heavily implies that Jevil is only a taste of what is to come, that later enemies will be even more powerful than that reality warping madman. In the world of UNDERTALE, what has proven more powerful than a human with high LV?

Apart from human error... not much comes to mind, honestly.

In the next part of my Game Theory(TM), I’ll be going over what I think Ralsei’s part to play in all of this really is, as well as what the CORE actually *does* to generate power for the Underground.

[warcrafttimemd]

Thoughts On The Criticism of AU!Draenei Direction

As the fallout from the revelations of the Mag’har Allied Race scenario continues to spread through the fanbase, I’ve seen plenty of good reasons why the decision to turn the AU!Draenor Draenei evil was a terrible one: it’s illogical, it invalidates the entirety of the Warlords of Draenor storyline, it’s a weak-ass excuse to set the Mag’har against a threat they need help with that they couldn’t get from the AU!Draenei that also completely ignores all the other nonsense going on like the crazy plants in Gorgrond, it’s the latest in the increasingly shameful exhibit of how Blizzard doesn’t know how to write female characters, it’s a pathetically lazy attempt to peddle the ‘both sides are evil’ narrative even though the AU@Draenei are not and have never actually been part of the Alliance, it’s just bad fucking writing, etc. It is an awful decision for all those reasons listed.

I have seen one that doesn’t work, though, and it’s been written a number of different ways:

“Draenei don’t/can’t work as oppressors because they’ve always been oppressed.”

“Draenei are victim-coded, so making them evil is wrong.”

“I can’t/don’t feel sorry for the Mag’har because they treated the Draenei so horribly in the past.”

It all basically boils down to this: Draenei, as villains, are impossible. Frankly, I don’t buy it.

“Draenei don’t/can’t work as oppressors because they’ve always been oppressed.”

Being oppressed or conquered in the past, whether as an individual or a group, doesn’t prevent an individual or a group from being oppressors or conquerors in the future. There’s no Ron Swanson-style card they get to hold up that says “I can do what I want.” What it does mean is that, having been treated in this awful way, they should know better than to turn around and do it to someone else. Unfortunately, you can look at the entire history of Azeroth to see how that lesson’s taken hold in others - or hasn’t, in most cases.

To the more severe version of the idea, that Draenei can’t be oppressors - that they are physically and morally incapable of the act on an objective scale, no matter the actual results of their actions - because of how they’ve been treated in the past, I also say bollocks. The ability to dominate and conquer is directly related to the power wielded by a person/faction; when we left AU!Draenor at the end of Warlords, the AU!Draenei were still on the back-foot (back-hoof?), but when we come back to AU!Draenor, even though we don’t have exact specifics yet, we can infer that they’ve grown in size and strength enough not just to challenge the Mag’har, but to become the dominant species/faction on the planet.

Whatever power of the Mag’har/Iron Horde wielded in the past, it’s now passed to the AU!Draenei. They have the power, and they’re happily using it to convert, enslave, and wipe out the Mag’har. When a faction starts outnumbering and enslaving other races, they don’t get to hold onto that ‘oppressed’ title. As Garrosh Hellscream himself said:

“Draenei are victim-coded, so making them evil is wrong.” 

This variation holds the most water for me, although I’d still argue it’s inaccurate. Is turning the AU!Draenei ‘evil’ morally wrong? No. Is it distasteful? Arguably. Is it a poor idea at this point in World of Warcraft’s story? Absolutely.

To a certain extent, I think I see what Blizzard is attempting to do: they’re pulling an ‘Arthas,’ showcasing how dire a threat is by showing that even the best and brightest can be turned into moustache-twirling villains by its influence. I think that Blizzard hopes that in doing so, not only will they add a huge amount of weight to Xe’ra’s actions in Legion, they’ll also be adding a huge amount of weight to the concept that the Light can be just as dangerous as the Void, which has, up until the Xe’ra stuff, seemed more like trite ‘all things in moderation’ philosophy than something concrete.

Xe’ra’s extremist approach was easy enough to pass off as a fluke for a number of reasons: because of existing in a fragmented state for so long, her sanity was questionable (wow, another insane female character, real original Blizz), she was ancient beyond reckoning, coming from a time and place far divorced from Azeroth (and Azerothian ideas about good and evil), etc. Xe’ra was really the first true instance of a Light-aligned character doing some really questionable stuff in the name of the Light; there have been other characters in similar circumstances (Arthas, the Scarlet Crusade, etc.) but all of those were shown to be ultimately under the control or direction of more nefarious forces. There’s no question what Xe’ra is up to. Xe’ra can’t be discounted as a rogue agent anymore. She isn’t the exception, she’s the harbinger, and the AU!Draenei (and potentially more characters in the future) are what she is heralding.

As to whether turning a ‘victim-coded’ race into conquerors is ‘wrong’...I guess I don’t even really understand that concept, that once a race/faction has been established as more likely to give ground than hold or take, then they’ll never, ever do anything but that, and that changing or reversing that behavior is morally incorrect on the behalf of the writers. Honestly, I addressed most of that in the first section. Yes, the Draenei have been shown to be naturally peaceful, and retreating from a fight or attempting to negotiate is their first instinct. However, they’ve also been shown to be easily swayed to drastic action when their faith is appealed to, something both Sargeras and K’ure took advantage of in the past, though for different reasons. A running theme in the Warcraft games is how absolute power corrupts, and there’s no good reason why any faction should be immune from that, no matter what they’ve been through. Dealing with shit in the past earns you nothing on a cosmic scale, which the World of Warcraft writers seem to enjoy reminding us a lot of lately.

That still doesn’t make the decision to have the AU!Draenei go Crusades on Draenor any better. It’s certainly in poor taste. The people of AU!Draenor got about as happy an ending as World of Warcraft affords: the bad guys were defeated, and everybody was pledged to a brighter future because, down at brass tacks, that’s what they all wanted. Then we come back years later - from the clues in the broadcast text, I’m assuming the Mag’har scenario takes place about 20-30 years after the events of Warlords - and find that literally everything is ruined. Nothing the players did really mattered at all; even though the Legion is no longer in the picture, Draenor is still in the hands of tyrants, it’s just religious fanatics instead of savage warriors this time. Who knows what’s happened to the Arakkoa. They were probably first on the AU!Draenei’s ‘to-smite’ list. It’s such an absolutely bitter pill that it almost defies belief. I joked about it in a post a while back, but Blizzard really did make Warlords somehow worse.

“I can’t/don’t feel sorry for the Mag’har because they treated the Draenei so horribly in the past.”

I call this the ‘Killmonger problem,’ because the folks who feel this way don’t assign an intrinsic negative value to certain actions/practices, but rather base their approval of those actions/practices purely on who’s performing them. In other words, they don’t have a problem with objectively evil actions like conquering and/or enslaving, but only as long as they’re the ones doing it or it’s happening to someone they don’t like.

Because the Mag’har were awful to the AU!Draenei in the past, there’s a tacit approval on some of the players’ parts of the idea that now the AU!Draenei should be able to be as awful as they want to the Mag’har. That’s not a perspective concerned with justice, but with vengeance, with ‘getting even.’ I’m not denying that the Iron Horde did some heinous things in the past, but visiting those horrors back on them does nothing but continue the cycle of violence.

Look, if the writers fail to elicit sympathy for the Mag’har, that’s partially on them. The way they’ve botched this entire thing, I’m not surprised. I’m having a hard time myself, although I suspect that’s mostly because I’m still trying to wrap my head around how the AU!Draenei could’ve possibly gone this bad in the first place. But I think the whole scenario also challenges us as an audience to look at this once completely sympathetic faction and what they’re doing now, and ask ourselves “Am I okay/not okay with this, and why? Am I getting a vicarious thrill out of seeing Draenei finally beat some Orc ass after years and years of oppression?” If the answer is yes, then own it, but don’t pretend like you’ve got the moral high ground to criticize story direction when you’re the one condoning or at least complicit with the faction that’s killing people for worshiping the wrong god. Glass houses and all that.

There is one more variation I’ve seen - not listed above - that explicitly has to do with how certain races in World of Warcraft are tied to real world equivalents, but that’s a complete can of worms that’s not really ever worth opening. Once we start talking about how certain factions are (insert race/religion)-coded, we project biases and opinions from the real world onto situations and people in completely different contexts, and we start debating about both as if they’re one, and they’re really not. Every race and faction in WoW is a mishmash of influences from multiple cultures, and trying to superimpose real world history over a fictional universe that exists as such leads directly to The Yawning, Dark Cavern That Nothing Good Ever Comes Out Of.

Sorry if this entire post has come off as completely bonkers. I’ve been drafting and rewriting it over the course of a couple of days, so I know it’s not the most coherent thing in the world, but, for whatever reason, whenever I saw justifications like this for hating on the Mag’har scenario, it just really ground my gears. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the direction that Blizzard has chosen to go with AU!Draenei, but I also feel pretty strongly that there are valid, logical reasons for disliking something, and then there’s just pseudo-socio-political nonsense. Feels kind of like people giving a politician a hard time about his/her looks or clothing choices when they're an abhorrent human being with no morals and terrible politics. If you're gonna go after a problem, go after it for the right reasons.

[bsidesthepoint]

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: DARK SOULS?

So apparently Nintendo is hiring a key level designer for the next Zelda game and that got me to thinking...so here comes a potentially unpopular opinion (I apologize in advance):

I've recently become enamored with the souls-like genre.  You know, DARK SOULS, DEMON SOULS, and my personal favorite so far, BLOODBORNE.  For those unaware, they are extremely hard, but not unfair games that take joy in killing the player, but not so sadistic that they allow you to learn from your mistakes and actually use death as a tool to figure out how to beat obstacles in the game.  That's skimming the surface of the subject but it's the basic truth. There is something I like even more about the souls-like games from From Software, and that is their level design.  It's not universal, but the thing that tend to be known for are their interconnectedness, and their surprising amounts of secrets.  Exploration may get you killed, but it's extremely rewarding when you find treasures hidden away in hard-to-reach areas, or when you find a door that leads you back to the start of the level so that you don't have to backtrack and hoof it as much if and when you die again.  

What's more, though, is how the games tell their stories.  Which, can be argued, I guess, is that they don't tell them at all, really.  There are sort of overarching narratives, but it's never really spoonfed to you, and it's never really the focus of the game.  It's up to you, through context clues and bits of lore mostly accessed through item descriptions, to kind of piece the story together yourself, and get a broad idea of what is going on in the game's world, rather than having it broadcast to you over loud-speaker the whole time.  It gives the games an air of mystery and really promotes player participation if they want to understand more about the world.

Now, when it comes to the next Zelda, no, it's not as simple as me saying, "YOU SHOULD MAKE IT MORE LIKE DARK SOULS."  Mostly because, weirdly enough, Nintendo already has.

I love BREATH OF THE WILD; it's ZELDA, undeniably, but in a lot of ways, I feel like it's the Zelda game that Miyamoto wanted to make originally, the kind that emulated exploration and the kind of gaping joy one has when finding something you didn't expect.  But to do that, Nintendo didn't just throw out everything and start over from scratch; they borrowed and lifted things that worked from other games to make them work within that familiar Zelda framework.  So it's not hard to look at BREATH OF THE WILD and also see echoes of SKYRIM, as an obvious example, or even weirdly surprising inclusions from games like MINECRAFT, etc.  I didn't realize until after having played BLOODBORNE how much BREATH OF THE WILD actually seems to have in common with souls-like games, even if it's circumstantial.

Not to outline every single instance of it, but to highlight a few things: it's markedly harder than some of its predecessors...it's possible for enemies to kill you in a single hit...it's entirely possible to find enemies and areas that will kill you mercilessly, because you aren't strong enough to defeat them yet.  That includes bosses, some of which are optional.  The game is packed with secrets and urges you to find them, but in doing so you put yourself at risk and frequently into peril to find them.  Some areas have interesting connections to other areas you don't know about till you explore them all.  And the story, while not as obtuse as anything found in BLOODBORNE (or DARK SOULS III, which I'm playing now), is very much up to you to put together, even if cut-scenes and exposition are a little more ham-fisted.  It's not a carbon copy, but there are certainly things in this game that remind me of a From Software game.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: it wouldn't kill me if Nintendo leaned hard on DARK SOULS for inspiration for the next Zelda game.  That comes with a ton of caveats and I will preface this by saying: that doesn't mean Nintendo turn it super dark, gory, and/or rage-inducing.  But they can keep what works in BREATH OF THE WILD and can continue borrowing things from the souls-like genre that makes it so engaging and addictive.  Ideally, I think it would be something like this:

Keep the storytelling minimal.  Not to say that we can't have a sweeping epic story (in a way, BREATH OF THE WILD denies us that, at least when it comes to what I feel is not a satisfying finale), but the way it was being handled in BREATH OF THE WILD is definitely the way to go in future games.  Accessing memories, cut-scenes not always giving you all the answers, having to find and earn certain story-beats instead of them happening in a pattern or a rigid structure.  I want to put the story together myself.  I would almost argue they could be MORE subtle and obtuse, but I don't think that would be too popular an opinion.  I'm probably alienating people enough right now.  But I know the idea of a Zelda game where I truly didn't know what the heck was going on and forced me to put the pieces together makes me super excited.  And I don't think I'm out of line by saying that I'm not the only fan who kind of wishes the series would let me just figure out what's going on myself, instead of forcing it down my throat.

No dungeons.  At least, not in the sense we've seen them in the past; and, being frank, I think the series could exist without them.  BREATH OF THE WILD more or less did away with them except for the shines and the Divine Beasts, and a similar dynamic can be preserved in future games.  But (and here comes another unpopular opinion) I think SKYWARD SWORD was onto something when it was taking things you typically found in a dungeon, and putting them in the overworld environment instead.  Puzzles, pitfalls, and bosses.  BLOODBORNE did that amazingly well; I never really knew what would be around a corner, because I wasn't going through the motions of finding a boss key knowing I was going to have fight Gohma for the nth time.  I had similar feelings rounding a corner and seeing a freaking Hinox asleep in the area in front of me, forcing me to stop and rethink my position.  It throws preconceived notions out the window; all the things you've learned through Zelda games of the past get thrown out the window.  Lean hard on that, Nintendo.  I want to feel like the overworld is one huge dungeon, so I never know what to expect.

More to the point, perhaps superficially, I like the idea of future levels looping back on themselves and connecting to places in surprising ways like they do in the SOULS games, only accessible through exploration, puzzle-solving, and toil.  Perhaps that won't work all the time, and that's fine; it's one false move away from being gimmicky anyway.  But I remember some of my fonder memories from SKYWARD SWORD, a game that has very little love from fans for good reason, was solving a puzzle that made an area accessible that previously wasn't, and looping back around to an area I'd already been, streamlining my progress going forward.  It felt like a reward.  I liked the idea that the puzzles were not confined to a dungeon and instead were out there in broad daylight, and on occasion a freaking giant scorpion boss would jump out unannounced, instead of me knowing I was about to fight one in a boss room.  Discovery and happening upon stuff like that made me instantly fall in love with BLOODBORNE, even though I died in Inner Yharnam easily around 80 times.  

"I'm going over this bridge and HOLY CRAP A BOSS BATTLE I'M NOT READY OH GOD I DON'T WANT TO DIE OH WAIT THIS IS FUN OH WAIT I'M DEAD...well, gonna get stronger and beat this guy later."  :D

It's hard for me to get into specifics, but I think I've belabored the point.  I think BREATH OF THE WILD built a pretty sturdy foundation for future Zelda games, but I feel borrowing smartly from DARK SOULS and BLOODBORNE could only make it more compelling.

(And, yes, I realize a key thing here that differentiates the two games: you can't climb everything in BLOODBORNE.  Yes, that might be a problem, lol.)

[erenthecoordinate]

I don’t entirely agree with your examples of Eren having similar responsibility for his actions in comparison to Reiner. I know Reiner and the warriors did horrible things to innocent people but they were naive children! None of them had any idea about the people in Paradis. Eren however had all that knowledge and still chose to destroy Marley. Don’t you think that makes him especially more cruel? Or is he really as naive? I like Eren but he seems off the rails now.

[TL;DR I got a little passionate and wordy here, but the simple answers, at least based on my analysis and what has been physically presented to us in the story as of Chapter 100, are Eren is not more or less cruel and what he did is not a product of being naive.]

I honestly don’t understand when people talk about Eren having some sort of apparent “advantage” over those who also shook their moral balance at a time, as if that excuses other people’s actions for being unaware of what was going on in the rest of the world.  It seems to come down to Eren having access to memories of the past, particularly his dad’s, seeing what life was like on the other side of the ocean, actually living among them and experiencing their society, etc. etc.  

No offense to those that think that but it is a very weak argument considering as far as we the readers know he only had clear access to his dad’s memories which are entirely full of hate for Marley.  It was all about Grisha seeking a way to avenge his sister’s death and when he couldn’t do anything about it he depended on his son’s discontent for their confinement and eventual mother’s death to accomplish the goal.  Even Kruger’s story painted nothing but a bad picture of Marley, even if he acknowledged a complicated Eldian history.  There were no “two sides” shown to him prior to him entering Marley.  He is not by any means all-knowing with infinite access to other memories and almost no sight of the royal side unless contacting with Historia and even that wasn’t a guarantee method of memory surfing.  As far as we know, he remains a young man with god-level abilities beyond comprehension stuck inside a locked box without any way to constantly activate them without an outside influence.  But I also mentioned that we lack context so this can easily be turned on its head and revealed otherwise due to any happenings during that timeskip.

On that note, ch100 showed us that Eren and Reiner are near exact parallels of one another and have been throughout the story; from their core intentions and placement in the world, the responsibilities they carry, the truths they both have access to, right down to the imagery.  It’s not just something Eren brings up, but Reiner thinks about before he puts the gun barrel in his mouth.  The only thing we are waiting for is whatever, if any, emotional aftermath Eren will experience after this whole ordeal is finished.  If the parallels continue he would probably feel just as guilty, despite what he ends up doing (i.e. killing the masses).

So in knowing that, Reiner experienced essentially the same things Eren did.  While he was a child, and I personally believe that manipulation played a role in his self-proclaimed selfishness, and he did suffer mentally from what he forced himself and his comrades to do.  He did grow up on enemy territory for 5 years.  He did experience the people that “pissed him off” but also encountered “good people.”  He may have reinforced a false persona to deal with the guilt, but even his “warrior” self is aware of the devastation he is causing and how innocent these people are—but no matter how innocent or vulnerable the Walldians are, he never wavers from his goal.  Even if he absolutely hates it.  He is one of the FIRST people to experience “two lives” and still chose to betray a side even though he realizes there are some non-truths to what Marley was feeding them.  The issue is that he is ultimately in too deep to pull himself out and thus enters his mental and emotional degradation and guilt that he lives with for 4+ years.

Nevertheless, the action is played almost to the illustration of what Eren eventually does, betrayal and destruction included.  They both follow a similar behavioral path and that’s what Eren has been raised on from the moment of his birth.  A large part of the reason both of them do what they do is because of an extremely dangerous version of “believing themselves.”  I don’t think Eren is working independently on this mission, it’s already been confirmed that there are others working with him, and the Survey Corps are absolutely not above killing people, even if they are manipulated innocents, so long as it is the survival of humanity, the one that they are part of, that prevails.  I don’t believe he is a bloodthirsty monster bent on destruction and I do believe there will be a lot of consequence coming his way, and he knows it.  He does what he thinks he has to do to survive.  To make sure his people are free in some way.  That’s what he is fighting for.  Whether this is the best way or not is up to future interpretation (you can take guesses now, but again we don’t have as much evidence as we’ve had throughout the series due to this timeskip).

Anyway on topic of who is most to blame for their cruelty, they both come off on par.  And you can argue that the mind of the child and the adult are different and should be treated different, and on a biological and societal standpoint that is entirely correct, but we are comparing how much information they have on the other side and the grey morality that comes with it and factually Reiner has years of experience and Eren was left in the dark longer.  By the time Reiner betrays the friends he’s known for 3 years, he is older and no longer that patriotic child that wants to bring honor to his family and himself, he has gone through enough that his naiveness gone; he was not much younger than Eren currently is.  Eren has a childlike, naive moral compass at the start as well, but I don’t think what he does now comes down to ignorance and it is definitely not impulse as he had done things.  This took a lot more thinking, a lot more dedicated planning.  This is not like the time he killed those kidnappers when he was nine.  Whether he is acting alone or not, there is thought and consideration on his part.  His very expressions are ominous and solemn, much like those of the warrior trio, when faced with the decision to transform, kill people, devastate lives, etc.  Even if there is anger and rage, they are not lone emotions within him.  He is aware of what is happening and what he is doing.

There have been theories that all of this has to do with his inheritance of the Attack Titan and/or Grisha and Kruger.  While I believe there is some influence, Eren has always been one to fight and motivate the underdog even as a child.  This takes a much larger scale.  He views his people as more vulnerable and he must stand up for them.  Because even if Marley is also manipulated, they are knowingly reacting to Eldian existence with direct violence, whereas Paradis never stood a chance because they had no knowledge to begin with.  Eren will always side with those people (unless something severely impacted that consistency then I don’t know what Isayama is going for haha).  That has nothing to do with his titan, he has always been this way, as he puts it.  I do have thoughts as to how the Attack Titan itself may influence him to act in certain ways, but the primary intent to protect the weak is just simply an Eren thing.  Whether that is something Grisha nurtured since in his childhood is yet to be told, though it seems more of convenience for Eren to be passed down that power.  He likely wasn’t raised quite like Zeke even if they eventually ended up getting swept up by their father’s involvement.

So I do not believe Eren is any less or more cruel with his actions than Reiner, for example.  I don’t think he is more or less cruel than a majority of actions taken by other characters who may also be blamed for risking innocent lives.  I also do not believe it to be a product of him being naive; and saying he is AS naive as Reiner discredits the things Reiner has learned along the way and the present inner turmoil he experiences now that he is less and less sure of the cause he was originally fighting for.  It’d be interesting if Eren came up to that point.  He did after all, despite all the memories of Marley being very negative and having zero experience with their society, have that vague reflection of his purpose during that ocean scene.  I think whatever it is he does from then on out will refer to that in more detail. 

But as it stands right now, yes what he did was morally screwy, what he does will likely follow suit, but it is poor thinking to say he is an aggressor when in reality he’s been a defender the entire time, to criticize him if he has a step ahead of his enemies even though they have always been leaps ahead of him, to assume he is acting in raw anger when recent visuals show otherwise– and there is absolutely no reason for Isayama to waste his time drawing those expressions just to say he was lying.  Any of these can change to be truth, but for now the context clues in this arc and arcs prior point to another direction and it does not paint Eren to be this careless, ignorant berserk monster with little sympathy for his enemy’s circumstances.  Be upset by it all you want and take sides, but I don’t believe he is any more wrong or right than any other character, Reiner or otherwise, who have done essentially similar things with the same amount of knowledge.  At this point in the story, it’s all fair game.

Thanks for the question, even though I went on tangent, but I still hope I explained myself well enough!  It got me to circulate some thoughts I’ve had about this chapter for weeks now!

[duchessofostergotlands]

1 I hear you, regarding Fassbender. Though I have to admit that as a swede I'm quite proud of Alicia. Not of her marriage (though good for her) but for making it as an international actress. Anything that Sweden internationally is known for that isn't safe cars or naked people, I'm happy about! Jup, we sure do. The Midsummer pole. When I was a child I used to think it had something to do with Christianity because it looks like a big cross with two rings hanging of it.

2 But apparently it’s an old Viking/heathen ritual on the longest day of the year when you dance around a penis that is supposed to stand for fertility and bring good harvest or something like that. Nevertheless, when the Christians arrived they tried to stop the heathen rituals, but when it proved impossible they tried to make them into Christian rituals and holidays instead. 3 Making June 21st John the Baptist’s Day, though in Scandinavia he’s known as Johannes the Baptist as Jon already existed as heathen Viking name. If I’m not misinformed basically the same thing happened with our Christmas celebrations “Jul”, though they moved it from December the 21st to the 24th and made it be about Jesus instead of the darkest day of the year. 4 Oh god, the first time I saw Morris dancers on YouTube I seriously had to take some time to contemplate if I’d mistakenly taken something that would result I hallucinations. Weirdly they never came up as British traditional customs when we learned about them in school. Lessons during which we learnt extensively about haggis, kilts and the highland games. I know, I had one of those moments today, because today’s something we call “Fat Tuesday” (I don’t know if it exists in other countries), 5 the first Tuesday after lent which we celebrate by eating a Semla. A bun split in half filled with marzipan and whipped cream. Apparently five million of those are sold today and I haven’t’ got a clue why we eat them! ;) Oh! Lucky you! :) Stupid question, is she as short as I imagine? I’m 180cm and in my mind I don’t think she’ll reach my shoulders. I hadn’t heard of countdown before I watched the Cat’s version but I now know that it has been around for quite a while. 6 I tried to watch the original 8 out of 10 cats, but to be honest most of the jokes went over my head (I’m not sure if you can translate that idiom to English). You might need a broader understanding of a British context. Another stupid question, what exactly is Made in Chelsea? I get that’s something to do with posh people (though I’m not entirely sure that I know what posh mean, more than a nickname for Victoria Beckham).You have no idea how much I love Eurovision! 7 As a child I hade to weird talents; I could name all the Swedish regents and spouses since the 1300s and I could name all Eurovision winners. A so called talent that I’ve mostly forgotten today. But my grandma, who’s almost 96, and I still have a tradition that during our national selection (four semifinals, one second chance and the final) when we’ve first heard the songs we called each other discuss which songs we liked and disliked (we rarely agree) no matter where I am. 8 So if I’m out with friends I have to plan that we go to a bar that shows the contest first or watch in my phone. Because my grandpa doesn’t want to watch it, fair enough, his 93 and can choose what he wants to watch, but she sits with pen and paper and takes notes on the songs every week and wants someone to discuss with. And, in difference to the UK, we have to qualify for the grand final of Eurovision. But that whole week is one of the highlights of the year for me. And my grandma! ;-) 9 Yes, Måns is what we in Sweden call a “mother in laws dream.” And I’ve had a crush on him since I was thirteen and he participated in Swedish Idol. It still hurts that he’s engaged…Thank you so much for your nice comments on my English! It means a lot since I’m really lacking in confidence especially when writing in English. I’m dyslexic and God, you have so many words that sound similar but is spelled completely differently!^^

I haven’t seen Alicia in anything yet but she’s an exquisitely beautiful woman and seems to be a genuinely lovely person. If Fassbender won’t marry me she’s a pretty good option. 

So many of our traditions are to do with fertility haha. Our ancestors were just obsessed with popping out babies, weren’t they? I love the fact they thought dancing around sticks would help haha. It sounds like you learned alot about Scottish culture. Personally I don’t think there’s much in the way of English traditions other than dancing around that damn pole. I think that when you’re a nation which has been historically oppressed you hold on to your culture a lot more than you might otherwise and it shows with Scotland. 

We do have Fat Tuesday! We usually call it Shrove Tuesday if we’re religious and if not it’s Pancake Day! We all make pancakes and eat them. Any tradition which revolves around yummy treats is good in my book! 

Oh yes Sandi is teeny weeny!! But still a strong presence as I managed to spot her despite the fact she was moving. Yes! We’d say that something goes over our head. If you ever need some translation of our idioms I’m happy to help haha. I don’t watch Made in Chelsea but it’s basically a show about people with money, good families, and no real talent. From what I can gather it’s just rich, posh people dating each other and splitting up. 

I AM SO EXCITED FOR EUROVISION!! Oh my gosh that is the sweetest tradition in the entire universe. I love the sound of your grandma. I’m so glad you have that special thing you can share. I think my mum would be delighted if I brought home Mans ;) 

I’m so incredibly impressed with your English. Not only is it not your first language but the fact you’re dyslexic and yet have learned the language so well is so incredible. I would never really know you weren’t a native speaker. I’m always so impressed with people who can speak other languages so well. 

[megacircuit9universe]

Covid19

FRI FEB 28 2020

I was really surprised to see that the stock market took a huge shit this week. Just after hitting another all time high, last Wednesday, the 19th, it began to drop last Thursday, and then all five days this week, Nasdaq, S&P, all of them across the board just kept dropping lower and lower every day, with the only thing stopping it being the closing bell of trading today.

It’s been the worst week of decline since October of 2008, with the banking collapse, after the housing bust was already in full swing... but this time, it was due to a sudden panic about Covid19, the coronavirus that emerged in China back in December.

There had been some global concern about Covid19 through January, when it was still contained mostly to China, but through February, cases have been showing up in other concentrated spots all around the globe, leading to a low level panic that finally affected the stock market.

Trump, of course, didn’t bother to address it at all until he saw his precious stock market was falling, and... it was actually his announcement about putting his VP Pence in charge of the virus that really caused the markets to break loose and go into free fall... because in the press conference, it was so painfully obvious to everybody, that Trump has no clue how to deal with a pandemic, and neither does Pence.

And it’s not just stocks, but other market warning signs are flashing, and... as mentioned above, people are talking about 2008, and everybody’s getting into their crash positions for another big recession suddenly.

Well... many are getting into crash positions.  Other pundits are assuring us that everything will rally back to normal next week, like the market’s been doing over and over again for the entire Trump administration.

Of course, my model here, holds that the economy since the early twenty-teens has been a self-driving one, kept on the road by AI bots who have gone to great lengths to fend off the panics that should otherwise have tanked it by now, being caused by a rogue US President and his incendiary tweets... not to mention insane policies like jacking up tariffs on China last year.

And they’re so good at what they do, that I’ve maintained for this entire blog so far, even through Trump’s Impeachment hearings... that a market crash, and/or recession was off the table... no matter how fortuitous one might be in getting Trump removed from office.

So I’ve been truly surprised this week to see this happening.

And now I have to speculate as to why it’s happening.

Are the bots behind this?

The short answer is no.  Their prime directive is, to the best of their ability, to keep the economy on track no matter what.  Same as a self driving car, which only wants to keep driving, avoid accidents, obey the rules of the road, and get from point A to point B as quickly, but safely as possible. 

But just like with a self driving car, there are some factors outside their control. One of these factors is Presidential tariffs... an arbitrary tax thrown in by one man on the outside, at his whim.

I’ve spent many an entry speculating about how the bots must have not only identified Trump as, essentially a virus attacking the system... but went so far as to form a coalition with smarter, more robust AI bots out there on the deep web, to hold Trump to account... by finding and leaking damning evidence to the House, who has the power to impeach him.

And that kind of worked... because Trump forgot about his tariffs.  He wasn’t removed, but the economically destructive behavior he’d been engaging in, was put on indefinite pause... which was good enough to keep things rolling and buy time to find a more effective solution.

As for elections... two entries ago, I talked about how this bot coalition is not interested in tampering with elections.  They’ll step in to prevent tampering if they can, like by crippling the Shadow app in Iowa, which was designed to subvert democracy... but this is a coalition of humanitarian bots, and economy bots, so... they all want to play by the rules, while also avoiding big upsets to society... like an assassination or something. 

But when something like Covid19 appears on the landscape... well, it’s even further outside their control than rogue tariffs.

Real viruses... the biological kind, are an extremely ancient form of life, operating under the complex rules of natural selection, on a very root level.  They’re unpredictable, and can be quite ruthless to higher life forms when they hit on a novel strategy for which existing biological immune systems are not prepared.

That said, biological immune systems are also insanely advanced, and do a very good job of neutralizing viruses... especially when they are helped along by human doctors who can study the DNA of the viruses and produce vaccines to teach immune systems how to fight them before they attack.

This is how we’ve managed to nearly wipe out polio, small pox, and dozens of other deadly viruses... and how we defend the world’s population every year against the latest strains of influenza*.

That said, I’m not convinced that Covid19 is the deadly pandemic threat that everybody’s terrified it could be at the moment.

Because it began in China... an authoritarian nation, we don’t have any reliable information about this virus at all.  We can’t trust their numbers, either of infected or of deaths... we can’t trust their information about it’s transmission methods, contagiousness,  incubation period, symptoms, or it’s origin... not just because we can’t trust them to tell the world the truth... but because we can’t even trust them to properly assess this kind of data.

Autocracies are notorious for brain drain, and clueless bureaucrats running big agencies they don’t understand, so... their data is useless.

Meanwhile, as far as news on the ground in China, all we have is a random sampling of smart phone footage, mixed with state reports, and first hand accounts from people supposedly spying from within China on behalf of the free world... but we have no idea what the true context is for any of this material... or what the agenda is of people who’ve fed this back to us over social media.

Long story short here, I do believe at the moment, that the panic is overblown, and that it’s being overblown by several layers of trolls around the world, who just want to create global panic for the lols.

People in the free world have been studying Covid19 in their own countries, as it’s spread to them, and are sharing that information but... we’re talking about three weeks worth of study on small sample sizes.  There just hasn’t been enough time to fully understand how dangerous this virus really is.

Earlier this week, the big panic was essentially triggered by comparing global death toll numbers, to global estimates for how many have been infected... and that’s resulted in the estimated fatality for Covid19 at 2%... compared to 0.1% for Influenza.

If accurate, that would be a Spanish Flu magnitude pandemic... highly contagious, and extremely deadly.  

But... if the infection numbers turn out to be far higher than we realize... it brings both the contagiousness factor, and the fatality percentage waaay down.  

And just here at the end of the week, this is what it’s starting to look like.

We’re starting to understand that Covid19 is probably a lot more like the common cold, than the common flu... and that the vast number of victims simply mistake it for a mild cold, and get over it quickly.

This, based on the way it’s beginning to pop up with people who are very far removed from any possible contact with known vectors.  

Does it still get serious and cause pneumonia in some victims, taking some of their lives, yes... but this may turn out to be a very small percentage of all infected... more like the 0.1% who die from the common flu.

If so, standard precautions are enough to keep the threat at bay, globally until a vaccine can be produced next year.

Maybe I’m wrong here, but, this is my best guess based on the knowledge we have at the moment... minus the disinformation and trolling.

Based on that... I’d predict that the markets go back to normal in the coming two weeks, as the deadly pandemic fails to materialize.  We shall see.

In other news, the South Carolina Primary is tomorrow.

Most polling suggests that Joe Biden will take first place, by a comfortable margin over Bernie Sanders, who will follow a distant second.  Some outlier polls had Sanders within only one or two points of Biden, earlier in the week, but the conventional wisdom tonight, is that Biden will enjoy a big win in SC.

I still think Bernie can pull off an upset and win SC.  

This is based on the fact that Bernie has so far, consistently over performed his polling... while Biden has consistently under performed his own polling.

You can poll well, but will those supporters actually go out and vote on election day?  That’s the name of the game.  

Biden’s supporters tend to be over represented in the polls, because they are the kind of people the pollsters know how to query... but they aren’t necessarily motivated enough to actually follow through.

With Bernie, it’s the opposite... his followers are under represented by contemporary polling techniques, but are also highly motivated to get out and vote for their candidate... thanks to his extraordinary ground game.

We’ll see tomorrow.

One thing is for certain... after doing so poorly in the first three states, and losing so much ground to Bloomberg in the polling for Super Tuesday states... Biden needs an unmitigated blow out in SC to stay relevant.

And even an unmitigated blow out might not be enough to save his campaign, as there are only two full days between the SC and Super Tuesday, for him to try and leverage the big win enough to influence voters.

On the other hand, all Bernie needs to do is come in a close second... close that gap to single digits... and he’s looking formidable.

Like I said, I think Bernie can overtake Biden tomorrow, at least by a few points... and if he does... he will crush Super Tuesday.

Exciting times.

But I’m going to bed.

*It should be noted here that unlike bacteria... which can be treated with antibiotics, viruses can only be neutralized by the immune system itself... once it knows how to identify the threat.

That’s why some viruses, like HPV, which causes common warts, can be so stubborn and near impossible to eradicate... because they’re good at avoiding immune system detection... but also don’t kill, or even seriously harm their hosts. To kill a wart virus... the only real treatment is salicylic acid applied directly to the spot, nearly constantly, for extremely long periods... months if not years.