Lunch With Your Affini

Maya in Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright doodles

feat my crappy handwriting :)

Too many people thinking Ralsei is sus; not enough thinking his whole Dark World is sus!

An essay.

Deltarune Spoilers under the cut.

Each Dark World (DW for short) clearly has a history dating before the heroes get there. A history that seems to have been disrupted by the “Knight” who opened a Fountain and made the ruling leader go crazy. We know by now that all the DW citizens are inanimate objects of some kind, with the exception of Ralsei, who we’ve never seen inert (inanimate and not in a DW) before.

Darkners are also said to feel unfulfilled if they don’t aid Lighteners, which seems backed up by the behaviors of both Queen (who kidnapped Noelle to bring her happiness) and King (who grew bitter at being in an abandoned classroom). But even so, they seem incompatible with a DW that isn’t their own, turning to stone when they enter it, though it sometimes works faster on others since Rouxls was able to leave the pocket upon entry and stay animate the whole adventure until you meet him, but Lancer pretty much started becoming stone within minutes of leaving Kris’ pocket. So Darkners can’t go to other DWs both because it’s dangerous and because they’re very far apart. And in the real world they’re inert unless in a storage space (ex: Kris’ pocket).

The one exception to all this though, seems to be Ralsei. & by extension Ralsei’s kingdom. Which has its own fountain, true but is also… very empty for something that’s supposed to be a supply closet. Every other DW has been populated and themed off the area it occupies in the real world. So if Ralsei’s kingdom is in a school supply closet where’s the pencils, scissors, and glue? And why does everyone from other DWs seem compatible with it, since no one in Castle Town shows signs of turning to stone? And why was Ralsei able to get to the library so fast and stick around without getting hurt?

I think that each DW already exists, but that they’re on a level inaccessible to Lighteners and Darkeners from other DWs. Hence the title Dark Worlds. Think alternate planes in DnD, or how in Into the Spiderverse the alternate spiders keep glitching because their atoms don’t belong with that universe (or whatever the explanation was, I got distracted by Doc Oc right after it was given). Each DW is effectively “out of sync” with the real world and other DWs, and they aren’t compatible with other DWs because of that sync, but they can’t reach each other anyway so it doesn’t seem to matter.

Then… the Fountains. The Fountains seem to allow an excess of dark energy into the DW they’re created in, making a little hole that allows Lighteners and other Darkners to come through & “syncing up” that DW with the real world. However, Darkeners that come there from their own DWs won't sync & if too many Fountains are made and too much Darkness released, the DWs will probably try to overwrite each other, which would expose all the Darkners to a reality out of sync with them- turning them to stone- and leave the Lighteners in a hellscape world constantly trying to be dominated by this or that DW. All makes sense, right? Well great cause there’s a part that doesn’t and I think you know what I mean.

Ralsei. He and his kingdom aren’t affected by other DWs or Darkeners from them. Which is what allows Ralsei to help gather people from other DWs and bring them to his own. No one seems that concerned about the Fountain in his DW, either. It’s almost as if everything from Ralsei’s kingdom is some sort of Type-O/AB blood where he can go anywhere and his kingdom can receive anyone without Ralsei or Castle Town inhabitants getting hurt.

Which is good since Castle Town looks to be made solely of Darkeners from other worlds.

At the start, Ralsei is completely on his own, but seems to know both a lot about the way DWs and the Light work & is pretty confident that he’s a prince of his DW despite the apparent lack of anyone to rule. Which means that either the castle has a very extensive library for some reason or Ralsei traveled to other DWs and learned everything that he could. I think that it’s more likely there’s a big library or that the information somehow came to him because otherwise he’d have no reason to return to Castle Town given that he’s obviously impossibly lonely. If he had already used his ability to both travel to other DWs and be unhurt by them, I think he would have just stayed in the classroom or somewhere else. As it is, he’s only using this power to help Kris, Susie, and the Player recruit/rescue citizens of other DWs.

And here’s another little snag. We don’t know what happens to the DWs after the Fountains are closed. They have some sort of history before we get there and no one really tells us what happens when we leave. The only real indications that something bad happens is Ralsei telling us to recruit them and a dialogue from the Queen if you don’t recruit everyone where she asks where Nubert is. But even that seems less “they’re all dead now” and more “we’ll never see them again” which while that could mean they died from the Fountain being sealed, could also mean that they simply no longer have access to that DW. It’s out of sync with them now. There’s also something about how you have to “recruit” everyone. Not “save” or “rescue” but “recruit.” Toby Fox chooses his language very carefully, as observed in the LV → LOVE → Levels Of ViolencE pipeline. Given that this is the same person who’s last game had 2 hidden bosses and a mystery you had to hack the game to so much as see, I think he chose the word “recruit” very intentionally. What you’re recruiting them for I can’t tell- other than being citizen’s of Ralsei’s kingdom and living in a town that is eerily named after the player.

I don’t want to make any hard and fast “this is what so and such is up to and this is how this and such works” kind of calls just yet. The game is set to have 7 chapters and we’ve only seen 2 of them. It’s literally too early to tell.

And I don’t think that Ralsei is working with malicious intent. I really don’t! I think we would have seen that by now (unless he’s hiding it from the Player, who I think he’s aware of given that he both talks to Kris during cuts to Susie and is distressed when in Snowgrave you don’t cut to her). However. You can do the wrong thing for the right reasons or act on emotions in ways that aren’t healthy. I mean just in the Fox-verse alone there’s examples of that in the whole Dreemurr family, Alphys, and even Undyne to some extent.

But it’s also too early to tell if Ralsei’s actions are wrong since, again, it’s only Chapter 2. I will agree, though, that some things aren’t adding up about him and his Dark World. I think it’s interesting, though, that another word for Supply Closet is a Storage Room. And that the one in charge of it seems focused on collecting inanimate objects and taking them to stay there…

pride month or whatever

“unwound future” (beta version!!) screenshot i found while googling layton stuff in japanese (trying to find rare stuff :D)!!!!

it seems like this NPC (Roy, who is now a scotland yard constable) was originally going to be a bus driver!!

Lady Detective Reinhold is on the case! 🎀🔎✨

see what rogen & co dont seem to get here is that you need to do more than cross a singular boundary over and over again to be funny, and stuff thats like “oh it looks like its supposed to be for kids but its unexpectedly ~mature” is only really like… actually jarring/intriguing when you cant ever be entirely sure of the creator’s intentions, which is the case in foodfight! (was this meant to be a movie for kids? was this meant to be a movie for anyone? we cant really ever know) and definitely not the case with sausage party (yes seth, we get it. what if tacos could be lesbians. what if pixar characters did drugs. what if supermarket products were racist although i guess that was sort of also larry kasanoff’s cinematic thesis wasnt it)

which is to say that while foodfight! is certainly not a comfortable viewing experience in of itself (and it’s not funny in any of the ways it intended to be) the singular line, “i’m not the one who’s going to be puppy whipped, you cold farted itch” is and will always be funnier than an animated potato yelling “fuck” repeatedly for like 90 minutes

July 14 2019 - A woman deplatforms famous Brazilian Catholic priest Marcelo Rossi, who has called homosexuality a disease. [video]

The Beginning.

the scene where layton asks future layton what color pen is in his pocket makes no sense to me because why would future layton have lived through this before? that implies that in this narrative layton goes back to the past after saving the world from his future self and becomes that future self anyway which seems? implausible? surely this would be a divergence into an alternate timeline not a closed loop. i know the time travel is fake but this has bothered me for a decade. clive clean your story up babe

girlie pop