[ SECRET POST #6445 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6445 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 13 secrets from Secret Submission Post #921.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

06. https://i.imgur.com/4POtVti.png

[(Anonymous)]

Never thought I'd see a take that implies Undertale is good for being genocidal. (For the record, I don't think the existence of a route should determine whether a game is "good" or "bad.")

[(Anonymous)]

That sounds like an extremely bad post. You can't woobify a canon character into being more of a woobie than they always were. That's just writing a character who is what fandom would call a woobie.

But well, thinking pacifism is bad tends to go hand in hand with thinking everyone is either black and white good or bad from the moment they were born and cannot be shaped by their experiences or grow and change, so we need to just kill all the bad people for everyone else's own good. No room for "woobies" there.

[(Anonymous)]

What do you mean by "pacifism"

[(Anonymous)]

In Undertale, pacifism or doing the Pacifist Route means going through the whole game without killing any enemies. Every time there's a battle you can choose to fight them till they die, or work out some other strategic action that eventually makes them stop attacking and let you go. The pacifist route involves choosing the latter option each time.

Obviously, some people think that's unrealistic and a bad lesson to teach that everyone ever can be talked out of killing you. On the other hand, we have a million games where the only choice ever is to kill all your enemies, and none of these people ever complain that that's unrealistic and a bad message (soccer moms who blame video games for school shootings aren't who we're talking about here). They're games, they're not 100% realistic, news at 11.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

It's nice that Undertale offers options and even themes around being pacifist.

But like... "maybe killing everybody is bad" has been a conversation in gaming since forever? Let's not pretend other games, especially in the stealth genre, haven't been pushing "no kill/least murders" as good paths and best ends and been critically acclaimed. And like, Spec Ops: the Line is an entire game that's literally all about how the PCs in war games would be monsters IRL.

There is a conversation. Maybe you're just not hearing it?

[(Anonymous)]

SA - yes, I know the particular game I mentioned is old (2012), but so is Undertale (2015). It's older than Undertale is, lol.

[(Anonymous)]

Not interested in hearing it. Interested in playing video games for fun and discussing things as-is. Doesn't mean I don't understand the conversation, just that I choose to ignore it because I'm not obligated to wax poetical about morals along with my enjoyment of fiction.

[(Anonymous)]

Are you the same anon that's complaining that "nobody is talking about it" and also not interested in hearing it if they are? Well I see the problem with that, what a confusing stance

[(Anonymous)]

All right, that's cool, but then don't complain that other people aren't complaining enough about killing being the only option in some games.

[(Anonymous)]

Ngl I don't get Undertale's fandom. Played it, it was okay, wouldn't ever play it again. It did not actually do anything very exciting if you've been playing... games, in general. I also found it to just not anything special other than being the exact mix of traits to appeal to the artsy Tumblr crowd of 10 years ago.

I wonder if it was a whole bunch of people's first quirky indie game and that's why they're still writing meta essays about it? Is this the first time they've run into a "no kill" achievement run in a game, ever? So they think it's new?

[(Anonymous)]

Is this the first time they've run into a "no kill" achievement run in a game, ever? So they think it's new?

Nah, nobody praises Undertale primarily for giving you the option not to kill. They like the story of the "true pacifist" route. Ironically, the mechanic that enemies die when they're killed doesn't really matter in that route; the story wouldn't have been meaningfully different if they ran away alive instead (and now that I think about it, this may be the very reason Toby did it like that in Deltarune)

The fact that enemies die when they're killed is only mechanically important to the genocide route.

Anyway. Undertale isn't wildly popular because it's wildly good. (It is good, imo, but not proportionately to its popularity.) It's popular because it only cost 10 bucks, because its creator was already moderately known in fandom for a couple of things, and because the popularity it got from those two + its quality bred more popularity because that's how popularity has always worked. And unlike, say, Twilight, people couldn't counter Undertale's popularity by being like "uhhhh it sucks actually" because even if it's not A++++ quality, it's still good enough for "it sucks" not to stick.

SA

[(Anonymous)]

Addendum: People made this comparison even at the time, but Iji also has a pacifist route and a good story, and unlike Undertale it costs $0. But it never exploded in popularity the way Undertale did because it just never got that positive feedback loop going.

DA

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know what Iji is, but if I'd heard the comparisons at the time I definitely would have been put off from it by the how dare you like this popular thing instead of this other thing that's like it that you've never heard of before. And is Iji a Japanese game? Well then you're also racist for liking Undertale but not having heard of Iji.

Real questions though, is Iji gay at all and does it have a character that screams Tumblr sexyman potential. Because those were was also a big part of Undertale's popularity.

Re: DA

[(Anonymous)]

Iji is not a Japanese game, and I don't recall anyone being mad that Undertale was more popular, or even making that particular comparison. They just compared the pacifism thing.

There's a lesbian alien couple, but it's easy to not notice that they're women if you're not paying attention. It also doesn't have a tumblrbait sexyman, but then, Sans isn't tumblrbait either and he became a sexyman anyway.