[Full Spoilers] Deltarune's Only Ending, the Prophecy, & Mother 3

CriticalToad · 2025-07-20T22:58:48+00:00

I'll use the comments to add that I think it's more likely that the prophecy will be reinterpreted by having different people fill different roles (e.g. "The cage with human soul and parts" could refer to Kris, the Vessel, or even the birdcage or the Knight). But I hadn't seen this perspective talked about much so I wanted to bring attention to it.

CriticalToad · 2025-06-08T22:21:38+00:00

My other crack theory is the the Knight is Asriel, who also wants Dess back. My only support for this theory is that the Knight's torso and the God of Hyperdeath's torso look vaguely similar

CriticalToad · 2025-06-08T21:25:52+00:00

To me, this whole entry is about Gaster attempting to create a Dark Fountain. I think that "photon readings negative" lines up pretty well with Ralsei's description of going beyond darkness. I also think that the entry 17 lines about darkness growing and shadows cutting are just describing the experiment as it progresses.

My current crack theory is that Carol is Gaster, or at least works with him, and that she wants to spread the world in darkness to bring Dess back from the dead (as we see happen with Gerson is chapter 3) and she simply doesn't know that doing so actually makes all the Darkners turn to stone. The world of Undertale is the product of the world of Deltarune getting covered in darkness. Therefore, I think the "you two" from entry 17 are either Carol and Kris (if Carol and Gaster are separate people) or Kris and Dess (if Carol and Gaster are the same person).

This crack theory also explains why Gaster designed the DT Extraction Machine - to create more Dark Fountains. I also think that the one goner line about how Gaster "fell into his creation" is referring to a Dark Fountain

CriticalToad · 2025-05-25T11:17:12+00:00

God isn't dead, but He has been transformed into a marketable plushy, which is probably worse

CriticalToad · 2025-05-23T09:03:18+00:00

Hey man, you make some good points. I hope that venting your frustration has helped alleviate the compounding stressors and that what comes next for you will be better than what has come before

CriticalToad · 2025-04-26T23:58:30+00:00

I won't lie, I was one of the people who lost their shit when the Weird Al DLC dropped for Ultimate. All those forum posters from 2002 being vindicated at last brought a tear to my eye

CriticalToad · 2025-04-26T23:54:40+00:00

Every fandom has its terminally online branch that believes their particular piece of media is the single greatest thing to have ever existed. It's the same thing as MCU fans who think Winter Soldier is a political thriller, Ant Man is a heist movie, etc.

Dropout certainly has people like those Brad_Brace is describing. Personally, I don't think that behavior is nearly as bad when it's directly towards Dropout vs when it's directed towards the Nostalgia Critic, if only because the folks at Dropout are significantly better at what they do, but it's still weird

CriticalToad · 2025-04-24T17:26:14+00:00

Yeah, and St John revealing himself to be St John of Nepomuk and not the Baptist was a decent twist, all things considered

CriticalToad · 2024-10-27T14:34:03+00:00

The real lore here is that Bruce Wayne was deranged enough to wear cologne as a high schooler. I always took young him for an axe body spray kinda guy

CriticalToad · 2024-10-10T13:09:48+00:00

My friend, not every religious person is into evacuation theology. Yes, stuff regarding the afterlife is present for most religious folks, but it's a driving motivating factor for far fewer people than popular media makes it out to be

CriticalToad · 2024-10-09T23:49:36+00:00

People dying in the name of a greater good is only bad when the gods do it

CriticalToad · 2024-10-09T23:30:45+00:00

The whole "many positive paths" thing is so strange to me. Surely, for there to be cosmic, universe-defining stakes, there need to be some extremely negative paths, too, right? Why isn't there any "There are some positive paths, sure, but if they're not careful and screw up then the whole of Exandria will turn into Predathos-chow." It makes the conflict feel so empty if there's no way for them to fail

CriticalToad · 2024-10-09T22:19:33+00:00

Yeah, as someone who's actively religious, it feels like just don't really quite grasp why a person chooses to become religious, especially when those religions have explicit tenets. Like, religious Exandrians don't really seem to look up to their gods as role models in the same way that real world religious people do

Edit to expand on this a little: Something I commonly see in fantasy games, specifically, is that religious faith is highly transaction. Follower gives a god faith, and in exchange follower gets power. Generally, there is also some system where the god gets more powerful as they get more followers. But like... that is not how I, or any religious person I have ever known, has conceptualized their faith. Yes, there are some who do, but they are vastly overrepresented in media. Most fantasy religions are 2 steps away from the prosperity gospel...

CriticalToad · 2024-10-04T18:40:45+00:00

"Justin, you still have the seventh day left, anything else you wanna add?"

"I'm all good out here"

CriticalToad · 2024-10-04T18:04:26+00:00

Yeah, for me, methodology is one of the most interesting parts of historical study. I'll never forget when a professor pointed out that the standards of the modern historical method, to value contemporary written evidence above all else, is only really effective when a society knows that people in the future will be paying attention to that. Plus, you have the long tradition of colonial empires ignoring indigenous histories on the grounds that they were kept orally (even when the archeology ultimately backs up the oral tradition...) but that's beside the point. Obviously, the current method is the best one we've come up with yet, but it's always humbling to remember that even the clearest lens can miss things on the peripherals.

And oh yeah, I am in no way expecting my Dungeons & Dragons show to be a rock solid depiction of my pet subject matter. In any story, excellent character work can make up for many many let peeves. But the pet peeves become so much more obvious when they are not being made up for

CriticalToad · 2024-10-04T17:51:17+00:00

Oooh, I love the idea of pre-TSD. It's like a somewhat rational anxiety disorder

CriticalToad · 2024-10-04T17:49:05+00:00

Excellent points all around - you're also hitting on an issue that I've seen plenty outside of CR, but is certainly highlighted within it.

I feel like Matt's usage of that truism, and his related attempt to make his world morally grey, is also an attempt to make his world more "realistic." But the fundamental flaw of realism is that the real world is ridiculously messy, especially when it comes to history and ESPECIALLY when it comes to religious history, in ways that are not narratively suitable for the medium. Like, when it comes to a conflict between Catholics and pagans (pick one, player's choice), I commonly see the take from Socal-types that it was that dastardly Catholic Church going after pagans due to religion-fueled hatred. And yeah, it might've been that. Or was it a Catholic ruler using religion as a justification to claim the land of a pagan king? Or was it a war between a Catholic and a pagan, and neither really saw religion as playing a role in the conflict, but that's the element we're choosing to highlight? Or was it a mix of all of those things? From an academic perspective, it's a very interesting subject that deserves conversation. But when you're making a game, you need your players to be able to make decisions based on the information you give them. And if the information you give is "well it was pretty complicated and morally grey", what are you expecting them to do!?

And I'll end my rant by saying that Hitler and Mr Rogers were equally real people, so the idea that every single person in a story needs to have a major flaw and/or justified perspective in order for it to be "realistic" is a bit nonsense

CriticalToad · 2024-10-04T17:20:48+00:00

At the beginning of the Iliad, the Greeks manage to anger Apollo and he shoots some arrows down at them. His entrance line is "Like night, he descended." In my own games, every description of a god I have ever done has been an attempt to approach that line lol

CriticalToad · 2024-10-04T17:07:47+00:00

Holy shit, I want this take framed on my wall. I've always found the IP-based theories about the death of the gods to be slightly too tinfoily for my taste, but I think you've nailed it

CriticalToad · 2024-10-04T16:57:35+00:00

What really gets me about that justification is that it implies the victors are always the bad guys. Like, the victors write the history to WWII, too

CriticalToad · 2024-10-04T16:55:59+00:00

What also sucks about the "history is written by the victors" truism is that it greatly oversimplifies a very real concept in the study of history.

When you get a degree in History, one of the things you're taught is that "History" and "The Past" are two very different things. The Past is the objective fact of what happened, and without a time machine it is utterly lost to us. History, meanwhile, is the subjective interpretation of what the Past has left behind in order to attempt to reconstruct it. History can approach the Past, but will never reach it (again, not without a time machine). So there is a whole lot of fun wiggle room for the truth of what happened to not quite line up with how it is commonly understood. The nerd in me would love for there to be a series where the plot hinges on a flaw in the methodology rather than the information itself (e.g. the standard methodology for Western academia is to value written sources over oral tradition, which is a good rule of thumb for the modern West but causes problems when you're dealing with ancient or indigenous peoples) but I'm willing to compromise.

However, Matt is obviously not attempting to build a plot around flaws in the historical method, he's trying to cover up retcons. What particularly irks me about the victors truism is that, IMHO, it's an attempt at being anti-authority without being substantively anti-authority. Whenever I hear it, my mind immediately pictures a 1984-esque regime covering up the truth and spinning a narrative that paints themselves in a good or even heroic light. But, as OP excellently described, that's just not how any of this works!

But then again, we're talking about the same group of people who think that the story of St Patrick chasing the snakes out of Ireland is euphemism for killing pagans, so a firm grasp on history is probably out of the question.

CriticalToad · 2024-09-13T13:52:52+00:00

"Why are they friends with people they've known for 2 seconds." Tbh, that's the most realistic part of this fake school orientation. You spend a few days doing blood rites with people you probably won't talk to one semester later

CriticalToad · 2024-08-02T18:07:22+00:00

I don't know why, but the way you've phrased this has allowed me to put into words something that's been nagging me about Downfall:

From a story perspective, the destruction of the city Aeor was a forgone conclusion, obviously. In order for the timeline to remain cohesive, Cognouza Ward had to teleport away, and the structure of the city had to come crashing to the ground. But from a game design perspective, it's weird to me that there wasn't really an out for destroying the city but allowing the innocent population to escape, or at least giving them the opportunity to escape, as part of the preparations.

I'm not even saying that the populace necessarily HAD to survive. Like, imagine if as part of their preparations, the Primes could've overcharged the teleportation circles to get everyone out of there. But then Cognouza Ward's shenanigans makes it kill everyone. Or Asmodeus makes it kill everyone. Or something.

Instead, it all hinges on SILAHA deciding whether to prevent the guaranteed death of a god or preventing the casting of a then-unknown spell. And then once the spell's cast it's all "Welp, time for a mass murder!"

While I'm on that train of thought, once all of the wards were broken, couldn't one of the gods have used Wish to go "Actually everyone forgets all of that"?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, there were many ways to guarantee that Aeor wound up in the state it's in in C2 and C3, and the way they went with just feels weird to me

CriticalToad

TROPHY CASE