Haunted House Uquiz By Streetlighthalo

This year I got to work on a tabletop RPG doing some MonHun inspired characters and it was a ton of fun ✨ The game revolves around the wilders, mutated rangers that try to stop the frenzy, a virus that makes monsters violent and self-destructive. Not only hunters but also chefs! WILDERFEAST is live on kickstarter right now, you can check all about it and support it here!

design comm for a mimic mage with both angelic and demonic elements

War

Famine

Pestilence

Death

Research

gromstein and wough aren’t real, they can’t hurt you

why is he so

if you have an android phone get newpipe

thank me later.

NewPipe

NewPipe - a free YouTube client

Undertale's usage of wordplay in the key phrase of 'Determination' is something which fascinates me in its complexities of interpretation.

First of all, we have the most standard definition: 'firmness of purpose; resoluteness.' This is the most obvious of the meanings. one's sheer willpower. and the ability to inflict that will upon the world.

Next, we have a secondary definition: 'the process of establishing something exactly by calculation or research.' This may seem to be rather unconnected to the concept of determination itself, other than perhaps tangentially by the extensive research of Determination and the subsequent formation of the Amalgamates, but I would posit that it may also refer to something different, something I was reminded of by the exact phrasing:

this secondary definition could also refer to a pattern of behavior which seems to arise when a given entity has reached the tipping point of Determination needed to create a Save Point- namely, the need to 'see everything that can happen'. To establish it exactly, by way of experimentation.

Next, there is 'a judicial decision or sentence.' This one is barely anything, nothing more than simple neuron activation against the scene within the Hall of Judgement. Moving on.

Now, we come to something very interesting indeed. 'the controlling or deciding of something's nature or outcome.' It can definitely be said that the player character, the possessor of the highest level of Determination within the underground, is the one responsible for the outcome of monster society- after all, this is the entire reason the Routes exist to begin with. This is likely not an aspect of Determination itself, but more of a consequence of its holding almost always resulting in one being powerful. However, there is a much more significant aspect to this choice. Or rather, to the fact that it is Choice. To summarize, this definition is essentially a statement that Determination is a synonym for Choice. And, extrapolating from this, if this line of dialogue is as important as people seem to think...

It might be interpreted to mean that Determination or the possession of such may hold ultimately no importance within the wider story of Deltarune(which, seems relatively obvious so far, but you never know what might happen).

And this serves as a great segue to the last item I have here to present:

Determinism:

'the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.'

This has some fascinating implications about The Player as an entity within the context of Undertale and Deltarune, primarily Deltarune. What those implications might be, however, I shall leave to others- I am content to simply point out the existence of the link.

Whether any of this has true meaning or not, I genuinely do not know. Confirmation bias might have conjured this out of thin air. But, I felt it was interesting enough to post nevertheless!

Addendum:

I believe this particular bit has been pointed out somewhere before, but it is worth cataloguing nevertheless: De-Termination, or, the undoing of death.

It's a little crazy to watch the dungeon meshi fandom explode. As I say this, at the start of april 2024, there are 694 dungeon meshi fics on ao3 which looks like a modest number especially if you consider that the earliest fic in the tag is from 2017. But that's not taking into account that 544 of those 694 were posted 2024 and a whopping 299 were in march 2024 alone. And considering that the average lifetime of a fic from initial idea to writing and editing to publication is months we are actually at a very early point on the exponential curve, the real explosion is yet to come.

To illustrate my point, if you look a little more closely at the fics you'll realize the vast majority of them are oneshots, not multichaptered fics. Like. Much more compared to more established fandoms.

(If you want hard numbers for proof: the number of fics updated, not posted, in march 2024 was 326. That means that of all the fics updated in march ONLY 27 were fics posted earlier than march. And of the 299 posted, only 64 weren't oneshots. For all fics updated in march 72.1% were oneshots, 27.9% not. Compare that to a randomly chosen other fandom I'm in, Deltarune, where only 35.5% of the fics updated in march 2024 were oneshots, and 64.5% were not. The difference is staggering dunmeshi literally has twice as many oneshots comparetively)

And that's because oneshots are quicker to write, while a multichaptered fic takes much more planning. The longest fic in the dunmeshi fandom tag is currently only 67K words which is impressive but nothing compared to the behemoths you usually see occupying that spot. All those longfics? Those are still coming.