A Floret And Her Mommy

sketches for the parents of the other kids in the Cul-de-Sac

So the Megamind sequel came out and, uh, yeah. It feels so weirdly disconnected from the first movie and I don’t mean because the animation is lower budget and the voice actors are different. That’s to be expected for a direct to streaming sequel. I mean it feels like it was written by entirely different people which I thought was super weird because pretty much the only people who returned are the original writers! 

So I did some digging with my writing partner and learned that, apparently, Megamind was *heavily* tinkered with between the OG script being written and it being produced. Justin Theroux and Guillermo del Toro were creative consultants and I think, despite not having writing credits, they and maybe others must have edited the story in a big way because I found the original script and…

You can check it out here if you want (or check out a recap post here) but it’s very clear that what they wrote was a raunchy adult comedy that through the movie making process got transformed into a family-friendly flick. 

So the disconnect, imo, is two guys who are probably more interested in writing for Adult Swim than for kids being told to write a movie with no R rated jokes and without any of the other writers who worked on the first movie behind the scenes. I just wanted to put this out there because a lot of reviewers seemed confused at the fact that the writers were the same and I was too until I learned all this info.

Can you believe Clifford the big red dog and Biscuit are Jewish? Icons.

ok alphys was a character ahead of her time and too good for this damn fandom honestly. she isn't some evil gaslighting lying cringey manipulator who only exists as comic relief for the love of god look at her with eyes less poisoned by cynicism and irony. she is a love letter to... well, a lot of things. a love letter to "cringey" people, to video game fans, to people who try to drown their sadness in fiction. she's so achingly relatable to so many of us that it really feels like toby knows his demographic like the back of his hand. we've all met someone like alphys. maybe we are that someone- awkward, nerdy, can't get over their past mistakes, terrible at phone calls, far more eloquent online than in person, only wants to make people like them to distract them from the fact that they don't like themself. normally, this character archetype is the butt of a great deal of jokes- just a gross nerd who needs to touch grass. but alphys is different. she is, as i said, a love letter. she is one of the best-developed and most complex characters in the game. her nerdiness isn't "fixed" or mocked, it's celebrated. her unabashed love for her interests and her 100% attitude is a big reason why undyne loves her. games, especially in 2015 and before, are not often so genuinely kind to characters like alphys! and in deltarune, too- alphys is still a nerd, despite not being nearly as traumatized as her undertale counterpart. her rambling about shows she loves is a constant across all universes, a fundamental and important and good part of who she is.

and i just think that's very kind, and very important.

(kicks down ur door) GUYS OH MY GOD HE LOVES HE WIFE

Too many people thinking Ralsei is sus; not enough thinking his whole Dark World is sus!

An essay.

Deltarune Spoilers under the cut.

Each Dark World (DW for short) clearly has a history dating before the heroes get there. A history that seems to have been disrupted by the “Knight” who opened a Fountain and made the ruling leader go crazy. We know by now that all the DW citizens are inanimate objects of some kind, with the exception of Ralsei, who we’ve never seen inert (inanimate and not in a DW) before.

Darkners are also said to feel unfulfilled if they don’t aid Lighteners, which seems backed up by the behaviors of both Queen (who kidnapped Noelle to bring her happiness) and King (who grew bitter at being in an abandoned classroom). But even so, they seem incompatible with a DW that isn’t their own, turning to stone when they enter it, though it sometimes works faster on others since Rouxls was able to leave the pocket upon entry and stay animate the whole adventure until you meet him, but Lancer pretty much started becoming stone within minutes of leaving Kris’ pocket. So Darkners can’t go to other DWs both because it’s dangerous and because they’re very far apart. And in the real world they’re inert unless in a storage space (ex: Kris’ pocket).

The one exception to all this though, seems to be Ralsei. & by extension Ralsei’s kingdom. Which has its own fountain, true but is also… very empty for something that’s supposed to be a supply closet. Every other DW has been populated and themed off the area it occupies in the real world. So if Ralsei’s kingdom is in a school supply closet where’s the pencils, scissors, and glue? And why does everyone from other DWs seem compatible with it, since no one in Castle Town shows signs of turning to stone? And why was Ralsei able to get to the library so fast and stick around without getting hurt?

I think that each DW already exists, but that they’re on a level inaccessible to Lighteners and Darkeners from other DWs. Hence the title Dark Worlds. Think alternate planes in DnD, or how in Into the Spiderverse the alternate spiders keep glitching because their atoms don’t belong with that universe (or whatever the explanation was, I got distracted by Doc Oc right after it was given). Each DW is effectively “out of sync” with the real world and other DWs, and they aren’t compatible with other DWs because of that sync, but they can’t reach each other anyway so it doesn’t seem to matter.

Then… the Fountains. The Fountains seem to allow an excess of dark energy into the DW they’re created in, making a little hole that allows Lighteners and other Darkners to come through & “syncing up” that DW with the real world. However, Darkeners that come there from their own DWs won't sync & if too many Fountains are made and too much Darkness released, the DWs will probably try to overwrite each other, which would expose all the Darkners to a reality out of sync with them- turning them to stone- and leave the Lighteners in a hellscape world constantly trying to be dominated by this or that DW. All makes sense, right? Well great cause there’s a part that doesn’t and I think you know what I mean.

Ralsei. He and his kingdom aren’t affected by other DWs or Darkeners from them. Which is what allows Ralsei to help gather people from other DWs and bring them to his own. No one seems that concerned about the Fountain in his DW, either. It’s almost as if everything from Ralsei’s kingdom is some sort of Type-O/AB blood where he can go anywhere and his kingdom can receive anyone without Ralsei or Castle Town inhabitants getting hurt.

Which is good since Castle Town looks to be made solely of Darkeners from other worlds.

At the start, Ralsei is completely on his own, but seems to know both a lot about the way DWs and the Light work & is pretty confident that he’s a prince of his DW despite the apparent lack of anyone to rule. Which means that either the castle has a very extensive library for some reason or Ralsei traveled to other DWs and learned everything that he could. I think that it’s more likely there’s a big library or that the information somehow came to him because otherwise he’d have no reason to return to Castle Town given that he’s obviously impossibly lonely. If he had already used his ability to both travel to other DWs and be unhurt by them, I think he would have just stayed in the classroom or somewhere else. As it is, he’s only using this power to help Kris, Susie, and the Player recruit/rescue citizens of other DWs.

And here’s another little snag. We don’t know what happens to the DWs after the Fountains are closed. They have some sort of history before we get there and no one really tells us what happens when we leave. The only real indications that something bad happens is Ralsei telling us to recruit them and a dialogue from the Queen if you don’t recruit everyone where she asks where Nubert is. But even that seems less “they’re all dead now” and more “we’ll never see them again” which while that could mean they died from the Fountain being sealed, could also mean that they simply no longer have access to that DW. It’s out of sync with them now. There’s also something about how you have to “recruit” everyone. Not “save” or “rescue” but “recruit.” Toby Fox chooses his language very carefully, as observed in the LV → LOVE → Levels Of ViolencE pipeline. Given that this is the same person who’s last game had 2 hidden bosses and a mystery you had to hack the game to so much as see, I think he chose the word “recruit” very intentionally. What you’re recruiting them for I can’t tell- other than being citizen’s of Ralsei’s kingdom and living in a town that is eerily named after the player.

I don’t want to make any hard and fast “this is what so and such is up to and this is how this and such works” kind of calls just yet. The game is set to have 7 chapters and we’ve only seen 2 of them. It’s literally too early to tell.

And I don’t think that Ralsei is working with malicious intent. I really don’t! I think we would have seen that by now (unless he’s hiding it from the Player, who I think he’s aware of given that he both talks to Kris during cuts to Susie and is distressed when in Snowgrave you don’t cut to her). However. You can do the wrong thing for the right reasons or act on emotions in ways that aren’t healthy. I mean just in the Fox-verse alone there’s examples of that in the whole Dreemurr family, Alphys, and even Undyne to some extent.

But it’s also too early to tell if Ralsei’s actions are wrong since, again, it’s only Chapter 2. I will agree, though, that some things aren’t adding up about him and his Dark World. I think it’s interesting, though, that another word for Supply Closet is a Storage Room. And that the one in charge of it seems focused on collecting inanimate objects and taking them to stay there…

baseball peach doodles

The “Kris is a Good Kid” December Holiday Theory

Great Big Massive Spoilers under the cut.

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Timeloop domestication fractionation.

One little sprout gets domesticated, mindwiped, and re-domesticated every day. The local florets and affini have all agreed to repeat their routine, and the echoes are starting to add up. Can our plucky protag figure out what's happening and escape it before they simply cave on sight to their new mistress? Hint: They can't.

harry dubois would end death note in one episode. he'd be unkillable bc he has no fucking idea what his name is and then he'd go drink driving and accidentally run light over and the killings would mysteriously stop