I'm not used to my home state getting actually depicted in media so whenever I find out about a series that actually acknowledges us I'm like that one monkey brain :neuron activation" meme

Obviously the Dark Worlds, Castle Town especially, do stand in for escapist fantasies a lot of the time. And obviously the game has something to say about getting lost in escapism. Asgore's entire arc in chapter 5 is learning that his obsessive need for a Hero Fantasy where he beats the Knight and solves the mystery and everyone loves him and will go back to normal is deeply unhealthy and is in actuality hurting the people he cares about. Susie is retreating further and further into living in Castle Town full time as a way of avoiding having to acknowledge her actual problems, even calling Castle Town her actual home.

But I do not think the ultimate message of the game is going to be that you need to give up escapism forever altogether so you can Live In The Real World. For a multitude of reasons. For one thing, the Dark Worlds are actually textually real, in-universe. Things that happen in them have an affect on the real life environment they're based on (Tenna's Knight-induced injuries breaking the TV, the Titan trashing the church, etc.). It is seemingly antithetical to how Toby Fox views art, and goes against basically everything he said in the 10th Anniversary stream. It would significantly undermine Ralsei's arc of learning to accept that Darkners are, in fact, people too and capable of their own wants and needs independent of the Lightners.

But the biggest piece of why I think that's not the message is the fact that Mew Mew's entire method of transitioning is intrinsically tied to the Dark World. We know based on Undertale and Deltarune that possessing a body and bonding with it are like, The Way that the trans ghosts transition. Part of the reason the Deltarune incarnations of Mettaton and Mew Mew are anti-social shut ins at the start of the game is because of the relative mundanity of the game's worldbuilding compared to Undertale. They don't live in a sci-fi fantasy world where Alphys is the genius scientist of literal royalty with the resources that come from that, they live in a world where Alphys is just, like, a random middle/high school teacher in a very small normal American town.

This is literally why Mew Mew even initiates her boss fight. She does not want the Dark World she's currently living in to end because if it did she'd have to go back to the Light World because that would mean she'd either have to live her life stuck in an inanimate doll (which is what the body she is currently posessing is in the Light World) or go back to living as her pre-transition ghost self. The only reason beating her boss fight isn't framed as a mean-spirited tragedy is because Castle Town is there as an alternative, as the Dark World that is not going to be sealed.

And I want you to seriously think for a second about what the implications of all of that would be, in a hypothetical Deltarune that did end with Castle Town being sealed and all the thematic statements that entails

Positioning transitioning literally at all as an impossible pipe dream accessible only in escapist fantasy you will eventually have to permanently leave behind forever to go back to living in your pre-transition body because That's The Real World. That is a remarkably transphobic, not to mention bizarrely nihilistic, stance I just do not see Toby taking. At best that would feel like Toby getting so caught up in the Cool Fantasy Worldbuilding and not really thinking through how that affects the allegory and at worst that would mean Toby Fox would have been violently transphobic this entire time and just hiding beneath a veneer of progressivism.

And, okay, look, I will be the first to admit I think Toby Fox still has a few ingrained biases from his childhood in American Christianity and his old Radiation edgelord days that he's yet to really interrogate (like the increasing use of Susie's masc-leaning gender presentation as a source of unwuestioned feminization jokes, or treating polycules like innately absurd one-note gags where the punchline is "WOAHOHOH LOOK HOW WACKY AND UNSTABLE WE ARE XD"), but this escalates so far from "unexamined cultural bias" into "overtly hostile violent bigotry" that it makes me legitimately question how someone can genuinely believe this is the conclusion that Toby Fox is leading up to and still call themselves a fan.

If I honestly thought Toby Fox was building up to a story that positions the best ending for the trans woman as being forcibly detransitioned because the oppressive religious institution was right about the thing helping her transition being responsible for The Apocalypse, I would not still be a Deltarune fan. I'd be appalled and vocally ripping the series apart as much as I could.

Half of the reasoning I've seen people give for why they hate transfem Jax has just been self-centered whining from people being butthurt that Jax was actually confirmed to be transfem specifically because the "ambiguity" and subtlety allowed them some plausible deniability to try to retrofit Jax into a tool of their own self-projection, even if that would actively make the story worse and undermine the story Goose is trying to say.

Grow up. Frankly I wish more creators were obertly vocal about stuff like this so we can finally move on from the plausibly deniable vague "wink wink nudge nudge" bullshit that has been the standard form of any sort of LGBT+ rep, but especially trans rep, for the past twenty years. Now we can have representation that is actually specific and about things, with actual narrative purpose.

"If you want Luke Skywalker to be gay then he's gay" isn't good enough anymore.

Hi there. I'm going through another round of my Survivor hyperfixations and I decided to do something about it and write a fanfic season of Survivor that is a massive crossover with a bunch of different characters.

I haven't decided the teams yet but I have come up with a roster I think would make for a pretty fun story. And while this roster is pretty much set in stone I am curious to know the thoughts of other Survivor fans.

The roster of my fanfic that has yet to be written will be in no particular order:

Jax (The Amazing Digital Circus)

Felix (Red vs Blue)

Ochako Uraraka (My Hero Academia)

Saitama (One Punch Man)

Noelle Holiday (Deltarune)

Lynn Loud (The Loud House)

Chris McLean (Total Drama)

Velma Dinkley (Scooby Doo)

Steven Universe (Steven Universe)

Nathan Drake (Uncharted)

Eda (The Owl House)

Coco (Witch Hat Atelier)

Nepeta Leijon (Homestuck)

Applejack (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic)

Tigger (Winnie the Pooh)

Lake (Infinity Train)

Lux (League of Legends)

Kitty Pryde (Marvel)

Robert Robertson (Dispatch)

Lara Croft (Tomb Raider)

The Magic Railroad is a legitimately good movie.

​

I get why some of the people who prefer the more grounded in reality tone of the books and early seasons of the series (no shame in that I do too for the most part) don't like it, and I'm fully willing to acknowledge this could just be the bias of childhood nostalgia talking, but holy shit it's such a beautiful film to me.

I'm aware I may be Goolba Fallacy-ing here, but it legitimately feels like half the people in this sub's definition of niche and obscure is just "Anything that I, personally, do not know and/or care about specifically" because the things I've seen listed here as obscure or niche media is just...*not* that?

If you think Omori, Kamen Rider, and Slender-Man are "obscure" you are identical to the people who acted like Buffy, Sauron, and Misaka were some weird hyperspecific obscure unknowns. Where's the *real* obscure shit? Hell, Bucky O'Hare is more obscure than any of those and he appeared against *Fox McCloud* in season *2*.

My most wanted MU involves a character from a fan-made Doki Doki sequel webcomic/ask blog that is so niche the Discord server for the project only has 231 members (including me) and the increasingly lowering notes on the comics is an explicit plot point. I *wish* this community was as obsessed with obscure and niche properties as this subreddit claims we are. The most niche this sub is willing to get is, like, Homestuck. And don't get me wrong I *love* Homestuck, but it is very much just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to obscure media.

And no I don't mean the "HAHA THEMES ARE IRRELEVANT U JUST WANT FANFIC" whining whenever people want the characters to be treated like actual characters and not just context-less fight scenes, though that is annoying too.

I mean that a lot of people went into GruMind with the absolutely wrong expectations for what this battle was going to be. Some of it were mismatched expectations about the realities of animating (such as what they would realistically be able to utilize in a fight that required them to build basically all of the assets from scratch) but most of it was actually a mismatch in what people wanted the episode to be.

Y'all, this was never going to bs a Bowsegg fight filled with Hype Moments and Aura. Gru and Megamind are comedy characters first and action characters second. Almost every action scene in both franchises is mainly a vehicle for cartoon slapstick and comedic banter. If these two characters actually met in a crossover and had a fight, what we got in the DB is far closer to what we would actually get in that crossover than anything the fans were expecting.