On the Abandoned Weird Route she's gonna Snowgrave Ralsei and be like "There, you killed someone I care about, I killed someone you care about, now we're even."
She gave them flowers?!
Say I'll want to buy a Toxic attack that lingers for 10 seconds, doing 1d6 damage each cycle. That's 40 points.
Oooor I could just buy 10d6 Toxic damage for the same 40 points that's all applied at the same time with no need to wait.
What am I missing here?
That seems like a very clear Advantage over most swords, but I can't seem to find anything that'd actually fit.
It's not Rapid Healing or Regeneration, because those assume regular healing ability as base. I don't want it to heal particularly fast, I just want it to be able to heal at all.
There's no Unhealing to remove because most normal items don't have that added to them in the first place, it's just automatically assumed by virtue of logic and common sense. I'd have to add the disadvantage to every other item in the game just so I can remove it from this one sword, which seems like an incredibly pointless hassle.
What other options have I got?
We've all been focusing hard on Kris and how bad they feel, and that's fair enough. But how about we turn our eyes on Susie for a bit instead: what she's about, what she wants, and what she knows.
Poor girl is starved for affection. In Chapter 1 she realized she could actually be friends with others, and immediately dropped the whole mean bully persona she's been cultivating for years and became one of the sweetest characters in the entire story. In Chapter 4 she's informed that even love might be on the table, and she goes all in on that too: she lets it cloud her mind and uses it to deny all of the bad Prophecy shit and feel high on happiness instead.
But as seen above - and elsewhere - she has an almost hilariously false idea of what being in love actually entails. She doesn't know Noelle very well and her crush is basically all founded on a lone act of kindness, on Noelle being pretty, and on Noelle crushing on her first. And she was excited to even be just Noelle's friend, and this extra romantic layer is overwhelming her: way too much for her to handle at this stage.
That's all very well for a troubled teenager. Very realistic. But then you also add a whole lot of dark fantasy shit Chapter 6's about to throw her way. Horrible cold winter, death of a loved one, burden of dark Prophecy, weird grinning cats on the prowl, and at least one of her oldest friends (possibly both, depending on how badly she takes Ralsei not telling her everything) betraying her.
Put together all of this baggage. Obsessive yearning, total ignorance, and terrible dramatic death-flags. Now imagine she'd gone for Kris instead of Noelle. Learned it was them crushing on her instead. Laser-focused on them. Everything Noelle got in Chapter 5 would've been given to Kris. Wouldn't that have been nice?
Well... think about it some more. How do you think that would have turned out?
It would have been a fucking disaster, that's how.
True enough, she and Kris know each other quite a bit better than she and Noelle do. They've been through adventures and fought monsters back-to-back and learned to trust fully in one another. But it'd still have started the whole romance on the exact wrong foot. Neither of them would have had a clue on how to deal with it. Going forward, it would only distract them from what matters. And, at the end of the day, it wouldn't be enough to prevent Kris from going through the betrayal - it'd only make it hurt them both a thousand times as hard.
That would have been a fatal blow to Krusie and no mistake. Even once all of the plot/prophecy stuff is cleared out of the way and they reunite, it'll never be the same again. Love couldn't overcome.
But now... it's Suselle that has all of this to look forward to.
Here Susie has a chance to try out love with training wheels on. Learn what is actually needed for a good romance. Get all the obsessive crush-stuff out of her system. A whirlwind teen romance, the heat of the moment, soon put out by the frigid chills of the Ice Palace.
And then when the betrayal hits? Why, Noelle is going to betray the gang too. It's her sister they're trying to bring back, after all. If she and Susie are still together when that happens - something that's hardly a given, what with all the other shit they need to deal with - then it's Noelle that will crush and scar Susie's heart.
And unlike if it'd been with Kris, Susie will pretty quickly realize that it was doomed from the start. She will be smarter now.
And, unlike if it'd been with Kris, she hasn't already been to the top with them and come crashing down from there. Instead that's still something to look forward to. Her love for them will not be a catalyst for heartbreak and suffering, but rather the impetus for a heroic second-wind - the rise from the abyss, the end of the Darkest Hour.
I have already seen it. In a year, maybe two, you will see it as well.
I had this theory back before Chapter 5 came out and I thought it reasonably likely then. Now with the chapter out and with all of us having seen how the Weird Route ends? That clinched it, this is 100% going to happen.
Kris has been working with the enemy all game. They don't want to, they've grown increasingly reluctant to, but it's clear they can't see a way out of their predicament. At the end of Chapter 4 they can shake a shadow crystal in front of the Prophecy in a desperate attempt to see it change, in vain. And the end of Chapter 6 seems the most narratively-appropriate timing for this twist to drop: that's when shit goes bad for everybody and the Darkest Hour begins. Then Chapter 7 is where we work hard to fix the damage and put everything back together.
But what about Noelle? Noelle is an innocent sweetheart, she would never betray anyone, certainly not Susie. Why would she even want to start popping up fountains and causing the Roaring? What good could that ever do to her?
Well, how about getting her precious lost big sister back? How about turning things back to how they used to be, back when everyone was happy? The times her mother was content, her father was healthy, Kris was her friend, and more than anything else, Dess was here to protect her?
Susie and Ralsei don't care about the past: nothing but bad memories of cold and loneliness for both of them. But Noelle reminisces about the past every time she and Kris have a moment. Now her father's going to be gone, too - the last link to the happier past is about to be snapped. Her only link to the present is Susie...
...but Susie's had all game to work on Kris and bring them out of their shell, and yet in their mind that still isn't enough. With Noelle, she's only getting started. Some good progress with a few safe steps into the lake, with getting her to work up confidence and to defy her mother, but that link still isn't very strong. I don't think it can last when all the stuff from the happier past days comes rushing back at Noelle with an offer she can't refuse. Make it all happy again.
And so it is that even on normal route, Noelle and Kris will drag each other into their dooms, and by the end of it the Holiday Manor dark fountain is closed and... the two of them, they're gone.
End of Chapter 6. Big cliffhanger.
I can't say how we're still going to get only one ending from this, as Toby Fox has promised. Perhaps both tapes will run parallel. Perhaps Side A will be Susie and Ralsei's final stand, while Side B focuses on Kris and Noelle, and they come back together at the end somehow? But they're already so different... Kris and Noelle are so much worse off mentally on one route than on another... I don't know. We'll see. But they're gonna split up the same way for sure.
The dragon book and alligators in bikinis aside, it'd be nice if Kris didn't have their crush on Susie from the very beginning. It would make them the same as Noelle, just a bit more subdued about it. It would undermine the meaning in the current conflict if, between them and Noelle, Kris was simply the unlucky one.
Unlike Noelle, they've gotten to know Susie very well since we started - but if that knowledge was founded on them wanting to get to know her and get closer to her, like hers, then it'd still stand on a bit shaky foundation and we couldn't quite trust in what they think of her now. But if they resisted it every step of the way and found themselves attracted to her regardless, then their feelings would really stand the test of time.
I don't know, this feels like a very specific sort of thing that might not even make sense to anyone else here. It's a small miracle if something like this ever occurred to Toby. It won't happen. But, if by some chance, when Kris finally spoke in a way we could hear, some of their first words to Susie were something to the tune of "You know, I used to hate your guts", I'd be so happy.
Toby is sparing no one on his massacre. Every ship is torpedoed.
Toby Fox is an overall talented author that's written a great story that gets us all invested. It has characters and relationships and growth, action and tension, and hopefully a happy ending. We all hope for a happy ending, and I'm sure there will be one.
But imagine if there wasn't. Imagine if the Roaring happened without a hitch, the Prophecy got shattered, everyone died, and the world fell into a deep darkness from which there'd be no escape. We'd all be crushed, wouldn't we? You could still write such a story well, make it a tragedy, harness those bad feelings. But it'd be way harder, especially with this kind of cheery build-up.
The problem with ships is that they are stories within stories. Stories with all the same dramatic growth and investment potential, and yet, ones the author did not often intend to write to begin with. And, therefore, stories with no guaranteed happy endings.
And yet we get precisely as invested in them. We feel for the characters, we want to see them happy, and we think, we genuinely do, that the author is intending for this as well. That this is where it's going.
And then... it doesn't.
Not even as a tragedy. As a terrible sadness that we're supposed to feel. No, rather there was another happy ending that we were not invested in. Toby Fox was never on our side in the first place. All that buildup we were sure was there... just wasn't.
Something like this was bound to happen no matter what. Deltarune had so many such mini-stories in it, and uncountable people getting genuinely invested in every single one and convinced theirs was the way. So many of us got their personal Roaring this day.
And even those that are getting their happy ending, I keep hearing that they too felt it extremely rushed and underdeveloped. So it goes. There was no way of building this up so well to begin with.
I'm sure Chapter 6 will fix much of the damage and develop the romance properly. Maybe we'll get to be on board after all, if this is how it must be. Maybe we'll even see just why it had to be this way for Toby Fox's decade-in-the-making dream to go how it was going to go.
But even so, if this development has put a wound in your heart because a story did not end like you wanted it to end, that is true for many of us. Let us heal together.
We had to go out on our way to see some of the best Krusie content in the previous chapters. I propose that if this one has similar secrets, we'll put the instructions here. No spoilers. Nothing of what'll actually happen. Just let us all know how to get there and see for ourselves.
Good luck, have fun, and may the best dragon win.
Let's just make one tiny-ass random change to throw fate and destiny and all the plans of God Hand completely out of whack: in their duel, Guts doesn't break Griffith's sword. Just knocks it away or something. So after Griffith does an oopsie with Princess Charlotte, he's armed and therefore able to fight his way out. He quickly gathers the Hawks before shit goes really down:
"Okay so I fucked it up real bad and now the king wants us all dead. Sorry. We gotta bail and try somewhere else."
"How about east?"
"East is good."
Void flips his chessboard and revokes whatever cosmic luck he's been laying on Griffith to guarantee his success up until now. From here on out he's on his own. Just him and a sword and whatever skill and tactics he's got in his own right, and five-thousand-ish men still loyal to his cause.
The Band of the Hawk arrive in China in the fifth year of King Zheng Yi's reign, shortly after the Coalition Invasion arc. This puts all the main characters at about the same age. Meanwhile, Guts's own warrior-pilgrimage coincidentally also takes him east. Maybe the Skull Knight hinted him there's plenty of strong folks there to help him improve further. He will rejoin the Hawks one year later, as he did in canon. No hard feelings.
Any chance of Griffith realizing his dream in this new land? What, if anything, would they change about Kingdom's story going forward?
No matter how many people picked red, they find that everyone that picked blue disappears once the dilemma is over. Simultaneously, those pressing blue see the ones that pressed red vanish before them.
You're not told about any of this until well after the fact, of course: stick with the choice of button you'd already committed yourself to.
Question is: which world would you rather live in? Would it be the same one or different one than what you pushed for?
I'm wondering whether anyone else notices or whether I'm just crazy.
If you press the red button, then you're confronted with a dire situation and potentially terrible consequences... and you duck out of it and carry on with your life. There's nothing wrong with this as far as you're concerned. Some people will call you a murderer but you think them illogical. If anything, logic dictates that you are in the right and this choice would in fact result in the least amount of woe if only everyone else were as sensible.
Then if you press the blue button, that means you have very strong feelings about the red button and ultimately cannot go through with it. Your upbringing has impressed in you a strong sense for the sanctity of all life, and you must take a stand even at a risk of inconveniencing you and those around you. Even if it might end up creating even more misery, actually, or at least bothering those around you with your preaching, you cannot back down from what you know is right.
Am I on to something? If not, what am I missing? What prompted you to choose the opposite this time around?
Let's think about this on a bit grander scale than just ourselves: how do we make it so nobody dies? How do we save everybody?
Either 50% of us press the blue button, or 100% of us press the red button.
Getting 50% of humanity to agree on something is often a fairly safe bet. Plenty of things at least half of us can agree on. Killing is usually wrong. Civilization is pretty handy. We should keep our kids safe. Chicken pot pie is delicious. More.
Getting 100% of humanity to agree on something? Agree on anything at all? It doesn't matter what's on the line, that's never ever going to happen.
Pressing the red button is believing that at least 50% of humanity agrees on the notion of "Better you than me": they're afraid to die, enough to be willing to let some others die to save themselves. It's therefore logical what you must do, you gotta save yourself, right? Even so, it's almost a certainty that some of the people you care about are less afraid than you, drawn to the intuitive ideal that "Maybe no one has to die": they couldn't wait for your logical reasonings and have already pressed the blue button. Shouldn't you try and save them? Sure, if only you COULD save them, but there's nothing you can do. What would it serve if you pressed the blue button alongside them? You would only die as one of them. No. You will grieve for their loss, but life goes on.
But, you know, this is the exact same logic tyrants and oppressors everywhere rely on.
They keep us separate. They keep us feeling small and isolated. They keep us afraid. They feed us this "logic" that this is the way for most of us to survive and it's the best we could do as a species. Sometimes, somebody rejects that logic and refuses to be afraid and stands up anyway, and is immediately shot with a bunch of guns, and the rest of us look at them and shake our heads and take that as proof. We curse the world we live in, but we don't want to draw any of that heat to ourselves, so we remain silent and look away and keep on trucking the best we can.
Little by little we are being whittled down, because we are afraid.
But what if we stopped?
Remember the scene in Bug's Life?
