Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

Hm. How to tackle this problem...I have talked before about espying a faint resemblance between #Deltarune and #Chesterton, namely The Man Who Was Thursday. And it seems I may be compelled to commit to that intellectual task, now that I have already emitted so much noise about it.

Jeanne is asking me to do it. Chesterton wrote about Jeanne...I haven't read his work yet and Jeanne would like me to rectify that error. Anyway I cannot say "no" to anything Jeanne requests so, well! That's one thing at least that needs to be done. Just as well, because it's about the days of the week—those old enemies of mine.

What do you know, Deltarune also has an implicit division into seven parts, and Chapter One begins on Thursday! I haven't assumed that the chapters would entirely line up with the progress of days, the first two chapters at least line up with successive days.

A different seven-fold symmetry pervades the earlier game, #Undertale, in the form of the seven colors mapping to seven virtues.

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

Why are the Seven Days thematic to The Man Who Was Thursday? My own speculation is that G. K. Chesterton was either subconsciously drawing upon Gnostic motifs, or perhaps was even risking some deliberate reference to them. The Gnostic Christians glimpsed a multi-leveled hierarchy of subsidiary gods ruling over sub-domains divided up among various lines—groups of Archons, seven sub-Lords of sub-Heavens (or 30 or 365 or other suspiciously calendrical numbers) who were thought to be individually addressable, as by ritual magical invocation.

It's as though Gabriel Syme through his conflict with the poetaster of anarchy, Lucian Gregory, breaks through the surface of orderly polite society (kept running smoothly by a single omnicompetent God) and is hurled into the gears and clockwork underlying that illusory surface world. "Breaking the veil", they call it. Both Syme and Gregory are propelled into a world where familiar things and trusted authorities are suddenly and inexplicably in the grip of a murky and terrifyingly powerful man named "Sunday", and his Council of the Days. Seven Archons, perhaps?

Apr 7 at 7:20amWeb
Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago
Now back to #Deltarune, in which something slightly similar happens. Kris and Susie are brought into sharp conflict, as with Syme and Gregory (Chesterton strongly implies they might otherwise have ended up in a sordid duel with each other, but not for their adventures with the Council of the Days) but rather than coming to blows, they fall into a netherworld ruled by very different laws and rulers. Chapter One features a Dark World divided into four parts, the card suits fulfilling something of the same purpose as the Seven Days—i.e. being an obvious set of balanced parts. Or, at least, they ought to be balanced. They aren't, until Ralsei and the Lightners set things to rights.
Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

One of the most perplexing aspects of The Man Who Was Thursday is that all of the supposed anarchist leaders on the Council except for the leader, Sunday, turn out to be undercover police agents—all of them getting themselves up in ridiculous outfits and spouting revolutionary diatribe and set to spying on each other, merely it seems as an elaborate prank which Sunday pulls on Gregory, to bring him to the point of confessing that his anarchism is far less sincere than his hatred. But it's also a prank pulled (maybe) on the group of men who would be silly enough to imagine that there was a secret intellectual police force with a special brief to go after a secret priesthood of evildoers.

There's nothing much like this in Deltarune (the bits I've seen) but there is at least this point of similarity: great enemies turn out to be far less fearful than they seem.