Scarlet Hollow And Slay The Princess

Here's a WIP on another animation thingy I'm working on.

I love how dorky the nomai are. They're this ancient, stupidly advanced civilisation so you'd expect them to be all high and mighty, yet you get lines like:

"Also I very much wanted to make a model"

"Hypothesis: there can exist too much lava"

"Science compels us to explode the sun"

Resources on Israel and Palestine?

I want to do more research into Israel and Palestine, but I'm not sure where to find reputable sources.

Any links to sources would be greatly appreciated

source

The conversations about accountability & apologies that we've been having in social justice circles these last few years have basically trained everybody to fawn.

We've been telling people that if they are accused of any wrongdoing or of hurting anybody's feelings, it is their obligation to apologize immediately, and never to hedge, disagree, or to explain their rationale what they've done.

In their apology, we expect them to articulate every single thing that they have done that was damaging in the strongest language possible and to declare outright that they have harmed someone, often multiple groups of people, even if they are not sure of the impact (or could not even possibly be sure).

If a person's apology is anything but immediate and entirely self-excoriating, we accuse the person of downplaying the damage they have done, failing to be accountable, and manipulating others.

In this way, we've made it impossible for a person to ever take their own side lest that be taken itself as a form of wrongdoing. We have trained our fellow social-justice-minded people to believe that if they do anything but worsen the case against themselves, they are being irresponsible.

I say we, in all of this, because I have partaken in all of this rhetoric, made these kinds of criticism, given accused people this type of advice.

And I have followed it myself, often to a damaging effect.

I have taken responsibility for problems in which I truly did not believe I played a part, I've overstated the damage that I've done so as not to risk understating it, I've ascribed malice to my intentions when I knew it wasn't there, I've agreed with people's most negative, bad-faith narratives about conflicts involving me that they were not even present for, offered up information about myself that was not a third party's business in the name of transparency, apologized for things I haven't done -- and in doing all of this, I have denied my loved ones the opportunity to really hear me about what I was going through and my motivations when I was in conflict with them, things that any true friend or close associate would obviously want to hear about if they cared about me.

This aim of giving the perfect apology and taking perfect accountability has been nothing but an isolating force in my life, because it has barred me from openly entering into necessary conflict with people when our needs were incompatible or they had hurt me just as much as I'd hurt them. The fear of being a manipulative, unaccountable DARVO-er has led me to roll onto my back and expose my belly, falling over myself with panicked apologies and the most unflattering information possible cast in the least explicable light, almost outright begging for others to become angrier at me and believing that it was only way I could ever possibly be accepted back.

We've drilled into people that the way to be good and responsible is to allow people to view us as negatively as possible, to even arm others with information that will confirm that point of view, and to never insert our own perspective or needs on the matter at all.

And yeah, there are a lot of shitty people out there who dodge accountability easily because their power ensconces them from any consequences. but the primary problem with that was never that they wrote a shitty notesapp apology that used the unforgivable phrase "I am sorry if you felt XYZ." The real problem was that there was no community that held enough influence to hold them to account, and for their victims there weren't ever adequate supports or protections.

instead of addressing any of that in a remotely systematic way, we have taken to picking apart every accused person's every word and deed for evidence of inner moral failure and created a culture in which we think we can determine a person's safety by how artfully they put words together when they are under threat. and what do you know, plenty of bad faith actors and conflict avoidant cowards and people who just dont understand what they are even being accused of can do that just fine.

Alright, a sort of part two to this post.

About my “Mike is Gaster” theory.

I worked on this one with @allseeingmoth

Theory and long convoluted rambles under the cut

So, for context, i follow the headcanon that Sans, Papyrus, and Gaster all are related in some way. I won’t go into detail with that, it’s just the only way to explain some of these discord screenshots.

Entry #17 from the true lab is also important here, and i translated the whole thing because that makes this nice and easy. For those who don’t know, it reads:

“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?”

(This is actually written in all caps in the entry but i didn’t type it that way so whatever)

NOW. Crazy thoughts time. First off; the next experiment mentioned. What if that’s the roaring? This is a bit of a stretch but… well, to me, Gaster feels like something thats separated from the game. They can’t totally interact with it, just influence bits and pieces. And his question at the end, “what do you two think?” I’ve seen some theories about the two being Sans and Papyrus, but they seem a little far fetched… not that mine isn’t, of course, as i believe they’re talking to Jevil and Spamton. And this is why i think Gaster is Mike.

Below are screenshots of my original thoughts on this.

Now, i do admit, i hyperfixated on Gaster because i found them interesting, and canon may have blended a bit with my fanon, but i’ll try to keep it as unbiased as possible here. I believe the “next experiment” is the roaring because in the entry, they state that “the darkness keeps growing / the shadows cutting deeper / photon readings negative” (for non-sciencey people, photon readings being negative could mean a complete lack of any light OR the opposite of light/negative light). These all point to, well, darkness, “dark darker yet darker” after-all. And what’s in deltarune? Dark worlds. Boom, theres the simple theory.

Now, why is Gaster experimenting with the dark worlds and roaring? Possibly because he’s trying to merge Deltarune, the game, with the real world. Think about the in-game explanation of the roaring:

“When the LIGHT is subsumed by SHADOW

When the FOUNTAINS fill the sky

All will fall into CHAOS.

The TITANS will take form from the FOUNTAINS

And envelop the land in devastation.

The surviving Darkners, crushed by the darkness

Will slowly, one by one, turn into statues...

Leaving the Lightners to fend for themselves

Lost eternally in an endless night...”

It mentions Titans. Who could the Titans be? Us, of course. We see the characters as, well, characters. Fun toys to be played with and explored. If all the Darkners turn into statues, they will be dolls for the Titans to play with.

So what if Gaster is trying to bring upon the roaring, but is also trying to bring Darkners here, alive? Hence the manipulation of Jevil and Spamton. That’s their experiment. Can they merge our worlds while bringing those who were previously only code to life?

Now, of course, this is all fun video game stuff that can’t happen, but it’s fun to think about.

Anyway have an extra little joke i made.

I feel so vindicated right now for my newly formed gut instinct to doubt the shitty rage-baiting news headline

Please don’t pay for his music.

Congratulations on finishing Arc 1! I've been following this comic since pretty much the beginning (I remember when everyone thought Alinua was a cat girl because of how her ears looked under her hood). This comic has come a long way since then, and it's been a pleasure and inspiration to watch your journey!

So with Arc 1 done, how do you feel? Any thoughts about the early days of the comic, or some lessons you've learned? What are you most looking forward to in Arc 2?

(Side note- thank you for Erin. My brain chews on him regularly and I gave a presentation on him in speech class. He brings me immense joy)

Whoof! I feel like it's slowly sinking in, tbh. I'm pretty bad at appreciating my own accomplishments - I have a tendency to Fire And Forget to avoid getting bogged down by "oh I'd have done this better now" or "eek I don't like how I did that" or "oh no this aged badly" or "what if I just redid it but Better this time" - but I've gotten better at accepting all those things as Not The End Of The World and they do not make me a Bad Artist or Bad Person, and as a result, I'm able to look back and just be happy about this one. It's an odd feeling.

At some point in the last several chapters I decided the ending of Arc 1 needed to feel like a conclusion. Not a full series finale, but a season finale. Character arcs needed to hit points of resolution; setup needed to pay off; cool moves needed to get some airtime. It's not in my nature to end stories, but as I worked on this arc I got comfy with the idea that an ending wasn't mechanically locking in the last part of a story and saying Nothing Past This Point, it was resolving the major elements of the story that cried out for completeness. Stories can have many endings before they're actually done, and in order for Arc 1 to feel like a complete thing, I knew it needed to bring those dangling plot threads home.

The fun thing about resolving chunks of the plot is those resolutions open the door for entirely new problems, and I'm excited to play with those! Part of why I wanted to make sure I had the rest of the year off was so I could take my time and just sit in the new status quo, because freeform creative idea-spinning is my favorite part of the writing process, and it's a rare treat for me to have such a wide-open swath of possibility ahead of me.