Me when I'm in an edgy autistic loser competition and my opponent is ASRIEL DREEMURR GOD OF HYPERDEATH (affectionate)

Page 261

Familiar dialogue.

Just a heads up, the next 10 or so pages are going to be dealing with references to suicidal ideation and implied child abuse that some may possibly find upsetting.

(Links coming in afternoon reblog!)

[DELTARUNE] Kris eyes!

Reference of Brief of Panty and Stocking? Well, YES.

Instagram; thetimelimit17

Deviantart: TheTimeLimit

Yes, (((THEY))) are.

kris and noelle discuss critically acclaimed fps game half dead 2, their missing siblings, and obscure human musicians like claude debussy

Cant not reblog this 

One of the smaller, yet significant mysteries in Deltarune is whether or not Monsters are magical beings as they are in Undertale, and if Magic is even a thing outside of the Dark World.

And I can conclusively say… we need way more chapters before we can even begin to have a definite answer for this one.

The evidence we do have doesn’t paint a complete a picture and given how the writing in Deltarune and Undertale is in general, very few things can be absolutely taken at face value.

Take for example the stove top at the Dreemurr house.

Now as we all know, in Undertale Toriel’s stove is pristine, with it being suggested she uses fire magic to cleanse it. Yet here, its dirty, or at least dirtier than it was in Undertale. So surely that would be good evidence that Toriel can’t use magic here, right?

Well, not exactly. While it is a pretty good argument for the idea that there is no magic at all for monsters in Deltarune, from another perspective it might be evidence that Toriel simply doesn’t use magic to clean the stove here. Why might that be? Well, I would theorize that she might refrain from doing so because of Kris’ presence. Whether out of fear for their safety or in an attempt to give them as much of a ‘human’ upbringing as she can.

Which may or may not be something that fuels Kris’ apparent feelings of alienation from their family and community… but we’ll see, won’t we?

Another good example of how weirdly open-ended this can be can be seen in the second hospital visit with Noelle and Rudy-

Again- at a glance this would seem to confirm that magic might not be a thing, save for in the Dark World. But then there’s that ambiguous, interpretive syntax rising up again. Does this mean that magic isn’t real and Noelle wishes it was? Does it mean that magic is real and Noelle wishes she knew it? Does magic exist, but healing magic is a thing of fantasy?

If ‘Healing Magic’ is indeed a thing here, then you’d think Rudy wouldn’t be having his troubles. You might argue it COULD exist and whatever Rudy’s going through is beyond it, but then that’d make Noelle’s certainty that she could cure Rudy a very, very odd statement in-universe.

The Healing Magic thing gets another wrinkle in the form of this guy-

One of the frustrating things about UT/DT’s writing is that it DOES operate on a certain level of Toon Logic. Rule of funny and all that… but at the same time it has a certain tendency towards meta-humor and deconstruction, so there’s always a good chance of something that WOULD operate under Cartoon Logic being taken literally.

So where does the Warrior fit in? When we first meet him he’s clearly been badly injured and is babbling about ‘White Mages’, the traditional healer class of RPG video games. Now he’s clearly meant to be unhinged, but the very next day we see him all healed up and no worse for wear.

And thus the question comes up again- is he all healed up because It Is Funny, or are we to take it he really DID just heal overnight despite having both his hands in casts? Could it be the doctors really DO have the capacity to heal? Again, no idea! Rule of Comedy and Rule of Drama blurs considerably in this game. 

And then of course there are the monsters themselves- how similar are they to their UT counterparts? 

Signs would seem to point to… pretty similar! Maybe!

For example, there is Hometown’s very own cemetery.

In Undertale it is established that the funerary practices of the monsters arose from the fact that when they die, they disintegrate into dust. The funeral ritual, as such, is to spread that dust onto an object that was of great significance to the deceased so that their essence may live on in their possessions.

This would seem to be the same case in Deltarune’s world, where the graves in the cemetery are themed around various objects, as we can see here. So, that would seem to be pretty solid evidence for the DR monsters being the same, right? Well… it’s definitely more ‘for’, but its not exactly a slam dunk. While it would strongly suggest the same thing is going on here, one might also interpret that a similar tradition of focusing on Objects of Significance arose within the culture of Monsters, even without the prerequisite of them turning to dust when they die. For all we know that when they die here, they decompose just as we do, and they are remembered by they similar reached a similar cultural point for unrelated reasons.

The biggest hint we get into the nature of monsters here comes from a few comments from a somewhat nosy rabbit child. The child in question blithely asks Kris if it hurts to be made out of blood.

And later expresses confusion about how humans can have skeletons while there are skeleton monsters walking around. So, this would seem to strongly indicate that, like in Undertale, Monsters are made of magic rather than flesh and blood as humans are. So naturally, a young monster would be rather confused about how that exactly works out for us.

Likewise, there is the bathroom-

At face value this, again, would seem to indicate that monsters have… a bit more in common with us, compared to Undertale. In Undertale, monsters don’t have toilets. They don’t need ‘em (and boy they are lucky for that!). They are magical and as such do not expel waste as animal life does. So, slam dunk for Monsters Are Mundane here, right?

Wrong!

See, the thing is? This is the ONLY toilet we see. In the Dreemurr House. Where Kris, the only human in hometown, lives. We have yet to see any evidence that there are any other toilets in Hometown- and to be fair I can’t imagine many scenarios that could seamlessly bring us to one in a game- so maybe, rather than being more like humans, this is just evidence that the Dreemurrs had one installed for Kris’ use?

So far it would all seem to indicate that monsters are indeed like Undertale monsters… except for JUST one thing.

Susie.

This statement is perhaps the single biggest indicator of Things Being Different here we got, and its one of the biggest sticking points in the debate about Monster Nature in Deltarune. But the thing that REALLY adds to it? An unused sprite intended for Chapter 2. One that depicts Susie herself bleeding.

Yep, you can see clear as day! Red blood, just as humans. This might have been cut from the chapter, but it’d be shortsighted to dismiss it wholesale given that it gives an insight into the direction Toby Fox was intending to go with the monsters. So, if this is anything to go by? Maybe monsters DO bleed!

Maybe!

Or… maybe it says something about Susie. See, as we look over the chapters we already got, it becomes clear that Susie… doesn’t exactly add up with what we typically see of monsters. She seems fairly confident that all things bleed, but then coming from a monster that’s a bit of an odd statement since monsters, if magical, explicitly DON’T bleed. She seems weirdly shy when it comes to her tail, and when you take her to the Dreemurr house she seems a bit weirded out by the presence of Gingerbread Monster cutters in Toriel’s kitchen.

They’re small things, but small components lead to a bigger picture, and its entirely possible that this is all foreshadowing to something being up with Susie in particular. What that is, I can’t really say. I’ve seen theories ranging from her growing up in a human community in an inversion to Kris to her being half-human herself. Nobody can say for sure though, much like everything else at this point. What we CAN say is that SUSIE can bleed, or was intended to have that ability. Whether that reflects on other monsters though…

Well, anyway. At the end of it? It’s all just kinda up in the air. The middle ground would be that while monsters ARE magical here, they are ‘less’ magical than Undertale monsters and as such can’t use magic even though they’re made of the stuff. We don’t see any magic being used by monsters, and it’d be an odd thing for the game if monsters could use magic with out problem in the Light World, and from a storytelling perspective it’d render some of the wonder of the Dark World less than wondrous. Magic might be real, but it can’t do any of the fantastic stuff we see in fantasy- as such healing magic and the like is a bit like science fiction, fantastical while having a loose basis in real world stuffs.

But then that leads us to the monsters themselves- more specifically it leads us to the odder monsters like Napstablook, the Hand Monster at city hall, the diamond headed guy and of course our favorite skeleton Sans. IF Monsters aren’t magical here, then those guys make virtually no sense- monsters based off animals are one thing, but skeletons? Ghosts? Giant Hands attached to a humanoid torso? Bit of a tougher sell even with the caveat of Cartoon Logic.

You might say that Kris’ search history revealing they look into books on how to do magic being another definite indicator of things, because of course that would make sense for them. They want to be like their family, so of course they would want to learn how to do magic as well… which they can’t since, well, human. But then maybe it has nothing to do with wanting to be a monster. Maybe Kris just has a legitimate interest in stage magic and legerdemain.

That’s the troublesome thing about all this. For now, at the end of it, nothing is truly conclusive, and so much of what we see is open to interpretation. Until definitive answers come, anybody can be correct about the subject.

… yeah, whole lot of words to say “I have no idea!”, but hey, at least I’ve hopefully illustrated why that is. God those chapters can’t get here fast enough.

I love analysis like this, it's so captivating.

One thing I think is worth adding is that Susie herself admits to having some kind of obsession with blood and other "gross" things, which may help to explain her strange blood based slang.

We would really need to know what Toby was thinking when he designed the bleeding susie sprite, or perhaps more importantly, what he was thinking when he removed it. We don't really know if monsters have complex internal magical anatomy or if it’s just consistent magic, we don’t really know what happens to a monster when they get cut or injured. We can assume they heal but how specifically? Think about toriel when you kill her in Undertale, she’s got that massive cut across her chest, does that just not seap anything? They don't bleed but do they really have no physical reaction at all to getting injured.

And all of this is without thinking about Sans, who DOES bleed when he is hit because fuck you thats why...

i want asriel to know the inherent rage of being an older sibling and realizing ur parents dont know how to raise ur alienated little sibling

*Kris, er, does this sometimes.

which route will YOU choose??

Smiling goat vibes

they talk. as items.

The goat

Reblog because mood

i’m so normal about this game. anyways i think there’s a ton of potential for content around chara settling in with the dreemurrs and i wanna play with that more eventually when i’m not swamped with shit to do

but in the meantime ! this was based off of a post about chara not letting themselves sleep around the dreemurrs for a little while and yknow what. based take. grumpy sleep-deprived child with a side of trauma coming up !

ralsei asked calmly,

Huge if true