Everything About DETERMINATION in Deltarune Chapter 2

[Music] many times over the last two years i've been asked by friends a seemingly simple question would i recommend they play deltarune though the answer should be obvious it's a question i've nonetheless found myself replying to time and time again with a shrug a nervous chuckle even over the course of three long years my feelings about chapter one refused to crystallize they remained liquid and messy too complex to fully articulate too complex that was until september 17 2021 and to explain this personal revelation i can think of no other place to start than the quiet brilliance that we're talking about lore you saw the title of the video you know why you're here let's stop messing around a lot of information has been dropped on us by this new chapter properties of dark worlds implications about the nature of chris and of course the regulation-sized bale of fodder to be shoveled into the all-consuming furnace of gaster speculation i would be content talking about any of these really but due to some practical considerations such as this being the literal first video project i've ever attempted in my aunt sized and rapidly shrinking life i've decided to focus on something a bit more modest for now something familiar [Music] yeah so determination is canonical in delta room now honestly wasn't expecting that but sure i'll take it seeing it pop back up after so long kind of feels like having my wedding crashed by a high school band mate there's an element of anger of terror and yawning dread as the dusty memories tumble back in from long-term storage and i wonder how exactly they found my address but you know mostly i'm just happy to see them determination is never not fun to have around it just tends to complicate things so the question i'd like to ask now and maybe even answer if we get lucky is what exactly determination is in deltarune what properties does it share with its counterpart from undertale what doesn't it share and that's basically it that's the question before getting too deep into deltarune stuff let's cover our bases and review how exactly determination worked in undertale even though i'm sure that'll be redundant for my target demographic of vastly intelligent no life uber fans right well let's see in universe it was a metaphysical power derived from human souls or that is mostly from human souls you could also ring just a tiny little bit out of monsters but not enough to really do anything useful unless apparently you're undyne in which case you can pump the out like mountain dew from the 7-eleven drink fountain you can use it to rewind time if you die but only one person can do this at once ostensibly whoever has the most of it and whether that person who has the most of it actually means within a given universe or any given cave system or just in the same script is anyone's guess but don't think about that too hard for now if you have a really super duper great deal of the stuff it can also bring you back from the dead without rewinding time and generate you know edible dreams and stuff actually it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with time at all in the hands of a monster it's also a generic power source that can be used to among other things turn into a giant plant shoot rainbow lightning and open very large doors unless of course the power of seven human souls that everyone is going on about an undertale is actually just some other kind of innate ambiguous property of souls in general independent from determination which could very well be the case since the goal of alfie's research in the true labs is not to harvest determination itself but huge determination to sort of embalm the souls of dead monsters so they could build up a big stockpile somewhere and eventually use them to break the barrier which of course wouldn't be possible if not for the fact that determination could be somehow harvested from the souls of dead humans and could also be turned into presumably some kind of liquid and physically injected into living bodies or recently deceased bodies or plants apparently that have never even had a soul in which case it will not only still give them time powers but will also grant them sentience but only if the plant accidentally turns out to have contained the essence of someone who used to have a soul but is now dead what is essence i don't know and neither does toby fox that's just a literal interpretation it's also supposed to be a metaphor for being able to save and load as the player of a video game because you know you're playing a video game but except it's diegetic now so in that case it doesn't really come from being a human it comes from being a protagonist genocide monologue what the was i talking about right deltarune determination is in delta room now which is to say throw all that i just said of the nearest window immediately because a new universe means new determination and we need to try to figure out how this stuff works from scratch so first question does determination still come from human souls answer well no this one at least seems fairly clear-cut the reason determination gets brought up in the first place is to explain how the dark fountains are made a sufficiently determined being needs to stab the ground with a pointy object simple enough and the two characters who were candidates to do this noel and birdly are both monsters so there case closed lightners in general now seem to have determination including monsters but not darkners or case closed that is until you broaden the question to whether or not determination even comes from souls at all now if you recall the bit at the end where chris actually does stab the earth and create a fountain which is only supposed to be doable by very determined beings you'll remember that his soul is at that point in time stuffed into the living room couch this could just be a case of a plot convenient grace period being employed before the determination i don't know sort of trickles out from chris or something like that i mean if we use as real as an example then apparently that stuff holds its charge better than the battery in my laptop but i still feel this basic assumption is worth questioning mostly because the concept of souls in general has really been swept under the rugged delta rune but maybe that's a topic for another video question 2 does determination still let you control time answer deeply unclear in undertale the main observable effect of having determination was being able to save and load the game we see in deltarune that chris can do this but once again this isn't undertale for all we know saving and loading in this game could just be saving and loading reading and writing files to a disk separate from the diagesis like in almost any other video game ever made sure also has a couple lines where he acknowledges the existence of save points but rousey also has lines about pressing zed when the white rectangle is in the blue rectangle in other words he has more tutorial in his dna than toriel and his dialogue about game systems can easily be explained away as utilitarian fourth wall breaks some text i do think is relevant is the narration that appears the first time you interact with the save point in chapter one this reads at times you see it flickering the light only you can see by second nature you reach out and this does imply that saving is a power unique to chris but as you probably noticed the narration goes out of its way to never mention determination by name in fact all save points so far in deltarune i'm pretty sure have been careful not to reference determination and their flavor text if you want further evidence there's actually a cut version of rousey's battle tutorial dialogue where he tells chris that his soul has the power to quote determine fate in the final game of course he instead states that chris's soul holds the fate of the world tiptoeing around the word determination like this is such an obvious subversion of what any returning player would expect from undertale that i can't not read it as toby trying to leave room to redefine the concept in his new universe or at the very least to drive a wedge between it and the concept of saving either that or he's just being koi about it for no reason which while not exactly inconceivable for a being such as toby would strike me as a pretty cheap trick another weird point is that chris now has access to three independent save files compared to frisk's one this is obviously a no-brainer improvement in terms of game design but it's not like undertale's lack of multiple saves was caused by toby being a programmer or something in general with programming if you can scrape together enough brain cells to get something to work once then you can get a hundred thousand of it without too much additional effort undertale had one save file because that's all frisk was capable of creating later on when flowey absorbs six human souls you get six files thus the expectation is set one soul equals one save file for delta rune to break this precedent means one of three things one the rule is just different in delta rune for some reason and now everyone gets three saves for the price of one two chris secretly has three souls or some fan fiction like that or three saves are no longer tied to human souls at all and toby just gave you three for convenience there's no silver bullet evidence for or against any of these as far as i know but my money is firmly on the third one because it's the least stupid even then savings still might be diegetic but just handled by some other obscure obtuse arcane fragment of the lore that is yet to be revealed to us such as the joy of analyzing a game 20 years before it will actually be finished [Music] question 3 why why is it in the game again after concealing it for two whole chapters what is this big reveal supposed to mean to me at least this is the real question combing through the mechanical details is important for the sake of getting our bearings of course but ultimately it's all pavement on the road to the one true goal trying to guess what toby fox is thinking in undertale determination wasn't just a piece of flavor text to world building it was arguably the crux of the whole story the game's entire deconstructionist mindset boiled down into a single easily parroted word essentially it was a weapon that toby could use to cut through the layers of long cultivated abstraction that separate game worlds from the pragmatic digital logic that gives them form and for that task it was brutally effective with all that in mind the question i guess becomes why does deltarune need a weapon what meta-textual dragon has it set out to slay now that saving and loading are dead and buried it definitely has at least one hefty target on its hit list that being the uncanny relationship between player and protagonist the nature of chris as a puppet to a higher will etc that's all very interesting and i have no doubt that toby is hiding some other kind of ludo narrative scalpel up his sleeve for when the time comes to fully dissect that concept but from everything we've discussed so far especially the newly broken link between determination and human souls it seems like that side of the lore is being kept deliberately separate from anything to do with determination so then if not that what is it for what if anything is being deconstructed well to be perfectly honest the evidence is running a bit dry at this point to tackle this question in any conclusive way determination has only just been introduced to the game after all nonetheless i do have the inkling of an idea so if you'll excuse me for a minute i'll drop the empirical facade and indulge in some good old-fashioned speculation deploy the diagram here i've plotted the roles of determination in undertale and deltarune across both textual and meta-textual layers of the game's narratives in undertale's column both quantities are known textually determination is the ability to rewind time upon death meta-textually it represents the player's ability to save and load the game because the whole point of undertale was to traverse the boundary between these two layers and explore the relationship between both concepts you can outline a pretty solid mapping from each to the other the textual role of determination as time travel is simply the ability to save and load the game reimagined as a concrete supernatural power in the same way saving and loading can be considered a mundane and abstract version of time travel now what happens if we apply this model to deltarune fortunately for us the textual role determination is known with some degree of certainty it lets lighteners create dark fountains and by extension dark worlds the metatextual interpretation though is as of yet unknown the whole point of question three after all was to figure this out however once we bring the relational arrows back into the picture this blank space starts to look a bit more like an unknown variable from an algebraic equation and i can only think of one solution that might fit the bill creating fiction so far i've talked at length about themes and concepts from undertale that don't seem to be present in deltarune but not so much the reverse deltarune packs at least one major element that is predecessor lacks that is loneliness the fact that sometimes life kinda sucks even without ancient vendettas or magical imprisonment or an intricate network of supernaturally undead children to dampen the mood one quality the main cast of deltarune all share is that prior to their involvement in the game's story they weren't having a good time susie was an emotionally guarded bully unable or unwilling to express herself except through hostility noel was stuck alone with her distant mother facing constant anxiety over her father's illness birdly was and steadfastly remains an absolute degenerate but nonetheless was unhappy because of that and chris i think speaks for their self hand in hand with this unhappiness comes the appeal of escaping into an alternate world into a narrative where your problems may be grander by an order of magnitude and yet somehow are still preferable to another sleepless night in a deserted house eating way too many chocolates counting the days till your brother comes home now let me be clear i'm under no illusion that claiming deltarune deals with themes of escapism is a fresh take that's been pretty clear since chapter one but what i think has been slightly more overlooked is that the mirror of escapism its enabler in some sense is creativity in order to escape into a dark world whether metaphorical or literal someone must first bring that world into being this impulse to create fiction to claw yourself out of an intractable reality by fabricating your own is i'm sure familiar to anyone who would bother watching a video like this and likewise i'm sure you know all too well that in the hands of the right person under the right circumstances and given enough determination on the part of its creator a fictional world can become frighteningly real it can grow beyond its origin it can influence countless lives or even completely consume them and well i don't think it could actually summon titans out of the sky and destroy the world even if you got the sub reddit to brigade but you see where i'm going with this the determination that the lightners share the power to pull a fountain from the earth to create their own dark world might be the same power that toby fox used to create undertale back in 2013 [Music] ignoring for now how aggressively stupid that sounds when spoken aloud this interpretation lets us fill in our diagram nicely the dichotomy of mundane versus fantastical carries over from undertale one to one while the transition from abstract to concrete can be tweaked slightly to encompass how the dark worlds physically recreate the psychological effects exerted by fiction whether you actually like this interpretation or choose to write it off as the tenuous ramblings of a man who hasn't left his house since the release of chapter 2 i've got good news i probably agree with you i'm only 50 50 on this idea myself but at the end of the day it's the only conclusion i can reach by extrapolating from what little we already know and i've got to put my doofy fan theory chips down somewhere until the next chapters drop in 20 30. maybe it's just me projecting but it just makes a little too much sense that in the wake of the space-time warping success of his first game toby would envision a world wherein creative energy manifest itself as cataclysmic geysers of darkness bent on consuming the world and permanently severing its inhabitants from reality question four uh oh wait there's no more script huh well in that case [Music] hooray that's it that's the end of the video if you actually made it here and didn't reflexively click off during the fake out intro congratulations you have terrible taste but i couldn't be happier that you do if you disagree with any of the points of my analysis make sure to roast me in the comments notice the small factoid i got wrong or a word i slightly mispronounced roast me in the comments and if you liked this video and want to see more like it roast me in the comments hot tip the best time to mine a youtube creator for parasocial interaction is when their channel is small and pathetic like mine so strike while the iron is hot that's all i'm saying if this video gets 40 million likes i'll make a follow-up breaking down my top 600 people

Channel: Andrew Cunningham

Views: 308,866

Keywords: deltarunechapter2, undertale, lore, analysis, videoessay, tobyfox, determination, deltarune, theory

Id: wckITtf4hRs

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021