dawntheduckrb
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rb+non art page for @dawnthefluffyduck | they/them pls ("she" is fine occasionally)
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Looking Glasses Bonus Content
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Rules 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11
Canon Mini Comics
Ralsei Meets Toriel
Non-Canon Mini Comics
Lancer Eats Glass
Valentine's Day Newsletter 2024
Related Art
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Ralsei New Year 2023
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The Monster from Beyond the Dark
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#ajdjsj yay :D compilation post :D#I'll be sure to peek through these soon#to see if i missed anything or just to enjoy them again#thank you for the fanart link btw!! its an honor that you decided to share them here :D#looking glasses#deltarune
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Hello tumblr, I present you a duck
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Scenes from the park
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Gregg the Grebe Earlswood lake UK
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There's a strange kind of nostalgia in revisiting MyHouse.wad over a year after its release, which I feel adds even more pathos and melancholy to the experience.
It's like the fine wine of Doom mods. A wine made from the grapes of sadness.
#i wanna carve again but it always reminds me of this game#i spent so many hours watching people play that game while shredding my hands#mini nostalgia over the me that was me 12 months ago#combined with the already melancholic atmosphere and the longing for what has already passed in that game#:')#myhouse.wad
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It's next Thursday 🥳
I drafted this on the wrong blog and I can't go back and change it, so here's some early doodles from church
Posts resuming on my main on next Thursday (tentative plan) :D finals are almost over!
#my semester is (save for one project) over#im not really counting that one as a project that needs a lot of work#most of it is already done and also i have an entire week to finish it#i can't say I'm happy with my finals at all but its over and i shall sleep#i have had four hours of sleep in the past 30 hours im going to crash any minute now
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66 - So Small
Don't stand so close, my sweet, for the heat of your skin might cause me to catch and burn away to nothing. Oh, that I could stand to look upon you for just a moment longer, but you shine so bright that I cannot see clearly…! There is nowhere to hide from the merciless rays of your attention - the darkness melts at your approach and between your warming hands I feel so small.
Don't look to me, my dear - your gaze might pierce my frail veneer and you'll see the insufficiency I disguise. For what succour might a shadow such as I provide to the very sun which casts it? I have no gifts to lay at your feet - you already gifted them all to me. You have so much more than I could ever offer and in the shadow of your greatness I feel so small.
Don't leave me here, my love - for I'm nothing without you, don't you see? What is a moon without its sun, or a sky without its shining stars? Though I fear the feelings you inspire in me, to feel nothing at all is more terrifying still. So abide with me a moment in this lonely cosmos, my brilliant light, though you are so big and I am so small.
______________________________
The Dark Menagerie No. 66
<-<-First || <-Prev || Next-> || Index
#''what does a shadow have to give to the sun that casts it'' what a beautifully written line#at the end of the day he may not exist without the lightners so this makes sense#offering your own love is enough but i guess its hard for him to see that#re tags; hope you're doing alright :)#short reply since I'm reading this over breakfast and gotta go now lol#beautiful work as always <3#crow writings#ralsei#deltarune#fanfiction
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The RalsAlmanac, Volume I
Okay, here it is! A series of essays that will attempt to definitively explain just who or what Ralsei is, referring to scenes from the game as evidence, as well as external sources where appropriate.
There will be some conjecture, as there's just so much we don't know about him, and what little we are given isn't exactly the most revealing. However, I've done my best to cleave as closely to the source material as I can, and I believe there's a strong case to be had here.
Hopefully you'll be able to see where my points come from, or at the very least you'll learn something you didn't know before. Either way, thanks for your consideration!
Volume I - Ralsei Is A Character In A Role-Playing Game.
Self-indulgent reference out of the way, lemme ask you a question.
Who is Ralsei?
It's a question that seems like it should be easy to answer. He's the Prince From The Dark, the third of the three Delta Warriors, he exists to serve the lightners, and is the most precious little cinnamon roll that ever lived. He enjoys baking and crochet, can hold a tune, is a decent interior-decorator, and holds his friends Kris and Susie in very high regard.
Thing is, that's about all you can really say about him without veering into speculation and headcanons, and they're more surface-level observations than anything else. What exactly does "Prince From The Dark" mean, for instance? Prince in what sense, exactly? Ceremonial, or with the actual power that royalty conveys? Where does he rank in comparison to, say, King or Queen, both actual rulers of actual kingdoms? The title of "prince" would suggest that he answers to them, but while they rule their own municipalities, Ralsei's title implies he rules over ALL dark worlds. You could go on asking these questions forever, but I think you see what I'm getting at.
A more productive avenue of questioning might be: What role does Ralsei play in the story of Deltarune? Perhaps more of his underlying character and motivation could be gleaned by looking at what he does for the story and the game. And this would be correct... sort of.
We tend to think of him as the squishy healer of the party, the Heart and moral centre of the Fun Gang. And he absolutely is that, but he's also quite a bit more. He plays all sorts of different roles and character archetypes in the first two chapters of the game, including but not limited to:
the old man whose purpose is to wax poetic about the ancient prophecy...
the know-it-all tutorial fairy who walks you through the basic game mechanics...
the straight-man DM trying to keep everything on the rails...
the young sheltered noble experiencing the outside world for the first time...
the demure love-interest to the main protagonist...
the Polyanna determined to see the good in everybody...
the mysterious waif who knows things he shouldn't...
...eye candy…?
...and so on and so forth.
And so what, I hear you cry. Characters in video games can have more than one personality trait, after all. And yes, this is true! But usually, the different aspects of a character's roles, how they interact with, reinforce or contradict each other, can tell us more about their inner world - what motivates them, what they actively like and dislike... in short, it grants them depth and allows us to engage with them as actual people, rather than just a series of game functions and character traits dressed up in a pretty bow.
But that's not what we see with Ralsei. In fact, far from showing us any real, deep aspect of his character, each new guise he dons and part he plays in the narrative further obfuscates him from us. We learn no new meaningful information from any of these exchanges... except for one thing, but we'll come to that in a moment.
This vexes us, because we WANT to know more about him, but all we end up getting is stock JRPG tropes dressed up in a warm, fluffy coat. There HAS to be something deeper, we reason - he's hiding things from us, so he must be a secret villain. Or his backstory is so tragic, so traumatising, that he cannot properly articulate it to us right now. Or maybe what we see really IS what we get - a simpering, airheaded fool whose only desires in life are to be cute, please his betters and do what he's told. Yet even this explanation seems... unsatisfying, especially since we KNOW he harbours some angst about himself and his sense of identity.
And speaking of which, that one thing we learn? Right at the end of Chapter 2's Acid Tunnel sequence, he utters a single sentence:
This is arguably one of the most significant lines of dialogue in the entire game up to this point. But what does it mean, exactly? I believe most people assume it means he doesn't have a clear sense of who he is outside of his ordained purpose, which is certainly valid, and definitely something I believed for a long time. And yet, this explanation does not deepen our understanding of his character in any meaningful way; looking back over all his interactions with the cast, it does not allow us to glean any further information about him.
And you can say that's because he himself doesn't know what he's like... but again, this doesn't actually change anything, and we just end up with a circular logic trap. We don't know anything because he doesn't tell us anything, and he doesn't tell us anything because he doesn't know anything, so how can we be expected to know anything, except that no-one seems to know anything about him… which is very frustrating to us Ralsei scholars, and gets us no closer to truly understanding him.
But look at what he says again. Really look at it. It’s a very strange way of saying “I don’t really know who I am”, isn’t it? After all, if that’s what he means, then why doesn’t he just say that? I’m certain you’ve realised by now, but it’s because that’s NOT what he’s saying at all. He literally has no clue what being “himself” is supposed to be, because he wasn’t even created with a sense of “Ralsei-ness” in the first place. Little wonder, then, that we can’t discern anything about his internal world, when there is nothing there to be discerned.
But before I elaborate any further, I want to talk about a couple of scenes in Deltarune that are just... puzzling. This is relevant, I promise. The first is during the dialogue with Rouxls Kaard before the rematch with K.Round. Ralsei says something interesting in the lead-up to the fight:
Note Susie’s baffled reaction to this. Then not long afterwards, he continues with:
Throwaway joke, right? We laugh because Susie's right - K. Round and its crown do look exactly the same to us, and so Ralsei's dramatic utterances are deflated and lose their impact. We laugh, beat the boss with Susie's help and forget all about it. But here's the thing - if K.Round looks the same to us, and it looks the same to Susie, and presumably by extension the rest of the in-game characters... when why exactly does Ralsei take the time to insist otherwise?
Is he... lying? Our most precious little boy, guilty of perjury? Say it ain't so! :O
The second scene is in chapter 2 - Queen has challenged us to a game of Punch-Out on her absurdly tall arcade machine, and we can talk to the characters before trying to interact with it. Talk to Ralsei, and if you answer "Gaming is my life" to his prompt, he says this:
Most people don't even come across this in their playthrough, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's new to you reading this. But again, note this strange discrepancy between what Ralsei reports is happening and what Susie says is actually happening. It becomes apparent to most people that Kris can affect the tone of their voice when saying what we tell them to, which affects how the response is taken by other characters and gives us a subtle clue about how they actually feel about certain characters or situations.
Are we to assume, then, that Ralsei isn't actually listening to how Kris says things, but only what they're saying? And if that's correct, then... what does that say about him?
Taken at face-value, within the context of the game, neither of these events really make much sense. It just looks like Ralsei is being overly-dramatic, or lying, or perhaps even insensitive to what their friend is trying to tell him, which doesn't quite track with his per-established shallow traits of kind, all-loving and moralistic. It's perplexing and seemingly out-of-character for him. So it might help to consider, in each of these scenarios, who exactly Ralsei is talking to.
Is it Kris and/or Susie? This would make the most sense, but it's actually not that likely, considering the aforementioned discrepencies between his descriptions and Susie's observations. So is it himself? Again, if he can see things the same as everyone else in-game, that wouldn't make much sense, because then he's just saying stuff that... isn't true? Or in the latter example's case, just completely ignoring what Kris is saying, which doesn't seem to entirely gel with what we know about him.
So, who does that leave? Well, the only other person - or should I say entity - who is present for both of those scenes is... us. The player of Deltarune. And that might seem even stranger than the previous options, until you realise what it is he's actually doing - providing flavour text, additional exposition informing us of details that we wouldn't - or shouldn't - be able to make out on a pixelated display with no voice-acting, attempting to give us a richer sense of these events in order to increase our sense of immersion in the game and world of Deltarune. In effect, he's playing the part of a character in a role playing game, doling out “flavour text” that contradicts another character’s experience of the same scenes, and he's doing it entirely for OUR benefit. Not Kris’s, not Susie's – ours.
He tells us that K.Round's crown is different, and that it is in pain from its forced control, to try and increase the stakes of the fight, and to give us a motivation that's not "here's the exact same boss again lul". He responds to Kris's words the way he does, not because he doesn't understand the nuances of their tone, but to try and amp us up for the upcoming challenge, and to validate our choice when we select the dialogue option "Gaming is my life". Because we cannot hear Kris's tone of voice - and Ralsei knows that. To him, Kris's tone literally doesn't matter, because he doesn't believe it matters to us in that exact moment.
And here’s the thing: if not for Susie’s asides immediately contradicting him, we’d likely take what he says here as what’s actually going on. To Ralsei, the reality he and his friends experience is not important – it’s the image of that reality that he’s trying to convey to the player. It’s like he knows he’s part of a game, meant just for us to experience and enjoy, as opposed to a real world filled with real people having real experiences.
And the reason I brought this up is to illustrate what I believe Ralsei to actually be - namely, that he a walking, talking, singing and dancing amalgam of stock JRPG characters and tropes that's trying very hard to present as an actual person, to the point of knowing absolutely nothing about who he even is outside of that. Put in even blunter terms, he's literally a fluffy goat-shaped vehicle to set the player on their journey through the game, to keep them playing and to keep them invested. People looking for deeper aspects of his character come up short and are disappointed because they're looking for something that does not currently exist.
And just so that I'm clear, I do not mean that Ralsei is "acting", or that he's "wearing a mask", because that would imply that there was actually something underneath his "facade" to begin with. No, this is who the Prince of the Dark is - a very convincing fascimile of a person, following his directive to ensure that the story of Deltarune is resolved, and that the game of Deltarune is played to completion. And once you realise that, a lot of things that Ralsei says and does that seemed strange before suddenly make a lot more sense.
As for the why... well, that'll have to wait for another time. But hopefully you can begin to see how my future essays in this series all tie in to this one, because I think you can only really understand those with the framework that this text provides. I hope that my reasoning made sense and wasn't too difficult to follow, but I'll be happy to provide additional information, clarification, or even just discussion on any aspect of this essay... even if we just wind up (respectfully) agreeing to disagree. Would love to hear what people thought about this!
Thanks for reading!
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How did Toriel react to Ralsei at first and vice versa?
An ask on the Looking Glasses website prompted me to have feelings about Ralsei meeting a parental figure who cared about his well-being.
More thoughts under the cut
Okay, so I’m assuming this scene takes place sometime during chapter 3 (Probably well before they reach the dark fountain, but it made for some dramatic lighting). I think at first, Toriel is shocked to see someone who looks a lot like her own son, but pretty quickly notices some differences in appearance. Notably, Ralsei looks about three years younger than Asriel. This leaves her in a place where she’s mostly just curious about who Ralsei is, and how he got to be here. When he explains how long he’s been alone, her instinct to Mother any wayward child that roves into range kicks in.
Ralsei, for his part, is less surprised by her appearance than her presence. He rushes to assure her that he isn’t Asriel. Toriel expresses interest in who Ralsei is as a person, sympathy for his isolation, and even initiates a hug, all things that Ralsei has never experienced before. It’s an overwhelming feeling to say the least.
Toriel continues to keep an eye on both Ralsei and Lancer from a distance. Ralsei is, understandably, pretty self-sufficient, but is happy to have a supportive parental figure in his life. While Ralsei is dating Kris, Toriel makes sure to have him over for dinner frequently, and after they break up she still finds ways to have him and Lancer over, like cooking lessons.
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Looking Glasses Page 80
<- Prev First Next -> Website
King picked a bad time to lecture the first random lightner he stumbled across.
Next page Monday, April 28th
#the scorch marks on the dress 🥺🥺 what a shitty power to have in a state of high stress#the parallel of her fire and noelle's ice just clicked with me but i like it#both can be dangerous in excess and both match their personalities so well#i will slap king into another dimension i swear to god-#i get he's trying to be a more involved and better parent but this is not the way to do it sir#im glad all it took was a deer girl setting herself on fire to convince him to hear her out and nothing craaazyy /s#i love how protective she gets over them#i also wonder if king is gonna hop along with dess to go looking for them? that would be really interesting#would love to see his character development in action while going to find his son#btw the shirtless king was an amazing choice#it gives him an aura of confidence i think#he doesn't own the place but he sure as hell walks around like he does#plus i really cant imagine him wearing much else either#king in crop top would be an interesting sight for sure though lol#mwahaha made it before the evening reblog >:) pushed myself to get my paper written a little faster so i could check this out#awesome update :D#deltarune comic#looking glasses
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Me with my proboscis sucking all the serotonin I can out of a video game soundtrack I've just come across, like a mosquito who feeds exclusively on bangers:
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65 - A Pocket Full Of Smoke
My hands pass through the ghost you left behind;
Memories of a smile that ne'er was mine,
Clinging to my fur like a bad habit
Or ill-fitting clothes. A musty nostalgia
For a home now lost, a heart turned to stone;
There's a chill in my soul now I'm alone.
Is it too much to ask for one last touch
As a memento, proof that we were real?
Oh woe! Scour my heart and make me unfeel
The exquisite scars left by your embrace!
Wipe clean the tears I left upon your face;
Grant me grace to turn from your loving gaze!
I suppose I should send you on your way;
And yet my fingers refuse to unfurl
From betwixt the curling, coiling vapour
Of your dear-departed breath. Here you stay;
My lungs full of the smoke left in your wake,
As warm as the promise you had to break.
A shadow can't cradle you as you cry
And a flame trapped in sable can't survive.
So leave me and my ersatz love behind
And I'll remember how it used to feel;
The promise in the soft light of your eyes
That a dream could dare to dream it were real.
______________________________
The Dark Menagerie No. 65
<-<-First || <-Prev || Next-> || Index
#the last paragraph (poetry? so stanza? idk) stood out to me a lot#maybe it's the strong imagery but you know that hollow feeling you get when you wanna cry but can't#i got that#which means excellent writing on your behalf as always#it's gonna be crushing when the lightners inevitability leave the dark world for the last time#i feel like before the heroes got there he had a hope to hold onto and didnt know what he was missing in terms of friends#but after he gets a taste for what having good company feels like#it'll be all the more devastating for that to he ripped away from him#even if its for the best#i feel like this captures that feeling well#I'd re-read this like normal to see if i had more to say but i might actually cry if I do lol#beautiful writing ^-^ heart-wrenching but beautiful#ralsei#deltarune#fanfiction#poetry#crow writings
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