Both Berdly And Spamton Need Someone Else To Help Them As Well: Berdly Relies On Noelle And Spamton Relies

Both Berdly and Spamton need someone else to help them as well: Berdly relies on Noelle and Spamton relies Kris

Yeah, it's things like that! If you wanted to, you could even make the case that Noelle is to Berdly as the Addisons are to Spamton, friends as (presumably) kids, before one became to egotistical and was left behind. Noelle hasn't left Berdly yet but...who knows. We only see two chapters so far.

So when you listen to ruler of everything do you think of mort or are you normal.

Some Minecraft Charts

Some of these may be useful to builders or designers

First time posting on this blog!

So I've been thinking of some characters limbos recently. And uh. I might have thought to much.

Sam

He's stuck in Pandora's vault, with alarms constantly going of. The rooms are never in the same order, redstone breaking at random. Sometimes he's the warden, desperately trying to make sure the prisoner can't escape, a feeling of absolute terror at the idea. Sometimes he's the prisoner, avoiding the guards prowling the halls, half starving and in an unwashed uniform.

(Rest under cut)

Techno

He's reliving his life from others perspective. He's there at the Red Festive as Tubbo, trying to convince himself not to shoot, and he's Tommy in the community house feeling the bitter sting of betrayal, and watch as the man he considered a friend allies with his abuser, and he's every single L'manburg citizen watching in defeat as there home is destroyed for a final time.

Jack

He's stuck in the nether, always hearing the sounds of laughter and singing in the distance. He can never quite make out the words, sounding as if he was under water. Sometimes he'll see a figure turning the corner before he can reach it. Sometimes he'll feel the sharp pain of an arrow finding it's mark, tumbling down into lava.

Charlie

It's an empty, decrepit Las Nevadas. The sign is fallen down, cracks littering it. Tubburger is torn down, only rubble remaining. Gouges in the earth where there's charcoal black stains that kill anything near. Only the needle, high in the sky, stands. Sometimes, the wind will blow, leaving dust in it's wake. He's not sure who he needs to find, and so he looks, constantly walking until he can't anymore.

Quackity

A never ending argument with an ever changing opponent. Sometimes he's in front of the white house, nocking an arrow and yelling. Sometimes he's in a courthouse high in the sky, with George at his side. A viewing platform over looking an elaborate revenge. A chained platform yelling at a child in a purple suit about a stupid fucking book.

Hey so I'm watching jrwi riptide for the first time. Does the bird die. I need to know.

Something I’ve been thinking about is the reason why Berdly’s death at the end of the Snowgrave route feels so impactful. Why it hits so hard for me, especially.

The thing about Hometown in Deltarune is that it’s meant to do what the name implies: it’s meant to feel like coming home. It’s a place completely disconnected from the Dark World, where there’s nothing that can hurt you. Everyone there knows Kris and is on good terms with them, talking to NPCs nets you insight into Kris's backstory and showcases that they have a lot of history in this town, and even when your adventures in the Dark World change those worlds for good, Hometown remains a constant.

And I feel like the COUNTLESS references to Undertale within Hometown serve to make it feel like home on a meta-level. The people you spent hours befriending in Undertale are here, slightly different, but here all the same. The UI is the same as in Undertale, Hometown’s theme has bits of Snowdin’s leitmotif in it, Asgore greets you the same way he does in Undertale, Toriel’s house has the same reading chair and the exact same musical theme as it does in Undertale, Sans is virtually unchanged and even makes a tongue-and-cheek reference to you, the player, already knowing who he is, the list goes on. Hometown is new to anyone who hasn’t played Undertale, but anyone who HAS will INSTANTLY feel at home in Hometown.

Hometown, in essence, represents the status quo. The monster-of-the-week format of Deltarune means you’re going to get a completely new world to explore with completely different people in it in every chapter, so a feature like Hometown is something that’s sorely needed to allow the player to decompress in an environment they recognize as safe.

And yeah, there are some wider mysteries in Hometown itself (the bunker in the woods, the street blocked off by police tape, Onion-san hearing a song from deep in the ocean, Papyrus’s glaring absence, Kris’s antics whenever they rip the soul out of their body, etc), and I guarantee the status quo of Hometown will be broken at some point, but for now, it remains intact, and functions as an anchor point for Kris and the player.

Berdly’s death shatters that status quo.

You get this a little in certain normal routes too. If you attack Queen during the final fight instead of trying to loosen Berdly’s wires, Berdly will get himself free, but gets horribly electrocuted in the process. When he wakes up in the Light World again, he finds that his right arm, the one that got the shock, is completely paralyzed.

And yeah, a character, a teenager no less, suddenly receiving permanent nerve damage is a pretty big shock, but the thing is, it doesn’t need to destroy the status quo. Berdly will need to learn to live with a disability, but he can still function with one arm, and considering he got it through electrocution, he can reasonably explain it away to any adults asking how it happened. Like, there was a broken wire and he grabbed it by accident and got a shock or something.

But when Berdly dies, the status quo is completely shattered, because the status quo of Hometown as a sleepy little village cannot continue on if a teenage boy is mysteriously found dead in the library. And even if Kris managed to hide his body, or it turned to dust after they left, Berdly would still be missed. He has parents to go home to, he has a job, he volunteers at the library and he still goes to school, people will notice if he disappears.

For the moment, the status quo in Hometown is preserved. People still wander around town like they usually do (there’s a corpse in the library), Noelle still visits her dad in the hospital (she killed one of her best friends), Toriel still teaches Susie how to make pie (someone’s son isn’t coming home tonight), and in the end, everyone goes to bed while Berdly is still Fucking Dead, face-down on a table in the library, or stuffed in a supply closet with the rest of the garbage.

The normal route of Chapter 2 ends with a cliffhanger, sure, but the status quo of Hometown is still preserved. In the Snowgrave route however, it almost feels like the town is holding its breath. At some point, somebody is going to walk into the computer lab and find a child’s corpse in there. At some point, Berdly’s boss is going to wonder why her employee hasn’t shown up. At some point, Berdly’s parents are going to call the police wondering why their son hasn’t come home.

Shattering the status quo of the peaceful hometown is a standard trope in this kind of fiction, and there’s a lot of setup for this to happen near the end of Deltarune, when Asriel comes home. It’s not supposed to happen in Chapter Two. It’s not supposed to happen by your hand. Deltarune has been hammering in over and over that your choices don’t matter, and you’ve just gotten a teenage boy killed.

Chapter 3 with a Snowgrave save can go one of two ways. Either Hometown is thrown into absolute chaos, Kris, Susie and Noelle are subjected to questioning, school will be shut down, and the status quo will be obliterated, or… Nothing could happen. Characters could treat Berdly as if he’s still alive, just busy, or they could forget about his existence entirely. Deltarune’s Snowgrave route overall feels like the game itself doesn’t know how to handle what you’re doing, and just tries to shove plot elements together to still make a cohesive story out of the fucking mess you’ve made, twisting the plot so that Berdly’s death goes unnoticed wouldn’t be a stretch.

Either way, I’m very nervous for what Toby has up his sleeve for Chapter 3.