2025-07-08 9:12:05 ¶ ●

some new thoughts after a Deltarune Chapter 4 replay:

1. the jack o’ lantern eyes sewed all over Jackenstein’s body - in addition to looking like funny nipples, hehe - serve to further connect him to the Titans, who are covered in eyes.

(eyeballs and funny nipples might even be more interlinked than is immediately obvious, with the Titan’s eyes always secreting those weird black tears, and all those Titan babies floating around…? but I digress for now)

ALT

2. though I’ve previously dismissed the Titan Spawn as hokey tributes to the foetal imagery in Evangelion and EarthBound, just one of many layers of deliberately cliched imagery surrounding the Titan - with the above line of flavour text appearing in their first encounter, they also seem to be very deliberately invoking abortion and the philosophy of fetal personhood!

the question of when a fetus becomes a person - when “you start being yourself” - serves as the perfect metaphor for Deltarune’s central conceit: if something suddenly comes into being from inert matter, be that from darkness or from microscopic cells, is that something “real”? when does it make the transition from unreal to real? does something inevitably become more real as it grows, or does it only become real because we ascribe the significance of reality to it? and naturally we are led to ask the further question: how “real” does something have to be before it is no longer acceptable to kill it? can it even count as “killing” if we do not ascribe reality to the thing we are destroying?

so long as we’re still considering the mythology of Frankenstein and Prometheus, though, this analogy doesn’t just have significance for the story’s darkner characters. because the philosophy of when a fetus becomes a person is so often intertwined with the spiritual debate over when the fetus is imbued with a soul - and Chapter 4’s prophecy, of course, tells us that the identifying characteristic of one of our three heroes is that they are a vessel “with human soul and parts”.

(to me, this fetal metaphor could even call all the way back to Chapter 1, wherein Ralsei starts off cast as a shadowy blob - not at all unlike the creatures of darkness that appear in Chapters 3 and 4 - and only takes on a recognisably ‘human’ (monster) form at the very end; forcing the player to think of him as “real” by taking the form of a character we are already inclined to be emotionally attached to!

given recent discussions about Ralsei’s connection to Kris’ sense of self, their older brother and their parents, I can’t help but feel that comparing him to an undeveloped fetus has even deeper implications… but again, for now I will abstain)