Today is Thursday. (my sibling Frisk was born on a Thursday! this means very little, probably.)
As a result I feel compelled to try hashing out a comparison that I made elsewhere, some weeks ago, about something that's been on our mind for a while: I think that Toby Fox's game "Deltarune" and G. K. Chesterton's famously confusing novel The Man Who Was Thursday share an important kinship. They both hint at a method for resolving disputes that might otherwise seem like they ought to end only in tragedy.
Chesterton is important to us, perhaps unfortunately; thanks partly to the influence of Chesterton's Heretics and Orthodoxy and other non-fiction writings, I temporarily converted to Catholicism in 2004. (I suppose we're still converted, but we stopped going to Mass only a couple of years after baptism.) I first read The Man Who Was Thursday while waiting for a Phish outdoor concert, of all places (and then broke the Kindle I read the story on...I think that was the same event, but I've been to a few outdoor Phish concerts at the same place and all these incidents blur into each other.) I didn't really get the story then and I'm not sure that I get it now, after revisiting it and chewing it over, but to me it feels a bit like a covert Gnostic text: Chesterton's "Council of the Seven Days" is highly reminiscent of old Gnostic ideas about seven Archons who happen to line up both with the seven "classical planets" and the seven days of the Roman calendar week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon_(Gnosticism)
("Deltarune" has seven chapters planned, right?)
But the similarity that I think I see between "Deltarune" and The Man Who Was Thursday isn't about anything Gnostic, but about something rather more down-to-earth: it's about conflict.
The protagonist of The Man Who Was Thursday is a hot-headed poet named Gabriel Syme, and at the start of the book he's gotten into a fierce argument with another poet named Lucien Gregory, who claims to be an anarchist. Syme is Chesterton's self-insert more or less, so Syme is a champion of orthodoxy and order. He ridicules Gregory's anarchism, proclaiming him to be unserious, which provokes Gregory into introducing Syme to the grand council of anarchists, the "Seven Days".
In the background of this squabble between Syme and Gregory, however, is Gregory's sister Rosamond, the "Rose of the World". She's barely a character to be honest; she's a haunting vision of loveliness in the background of The Man Who Was Thursday, and Gabriel Syme is clearly smitten with her. While there's no overt reference to Gregory's feelings about Syme's infatuation with his sister it's fair to guess that Gregory isn't happy about it, and thus he and his poetic rival Syme are at each other's throats—but, because they're gentlemen, they're fighting in the realm of political and philosophical abstraction rather than having a tawdry mudfight over a romance. But Gabriel Syme is shown to be an impetuous person, impulsive and even chaotic to the highest degree, equipped at all times with a sword-stick and a revolver; over the course of the wild events of The Man Who Was Thursday, Syme even gets himself into a sword-fight. I believe the implication is fairly clear: Syme is just the sort of person who might simply have murdered his rival Lucien Gregory, in a heat of passion over Rosamond.
Instead...they have a delirious adventure in a chaos realm ruled over by a sinister "Council of the Seven Days", in which nothing turns out to be what it seems on the surface. Gabriel Syme might have decided to settle his conflict with Gregory over Rosamond in a direct way, by going after Gregory directly, in some sordid and murderous way. Instead Gabriel Syme ends up fighting the murky ruling forces of the Universe that have set him and Gregory at loggerheads. Why should Gregory and Syme be unhappy with each other? Is it Syme's fault, or Gregory's fault? Or is it rather the fault of the world itself, the world that created both Syme and Gregory and set them against each other? Ultimately they have a common enemy: "The Council of the Seven Days" and its leader Sunday, who has been manipulating everybody. At the end, Syme's fight is not with Gregory but with him...and having arrived at that point, The Man Who Was Thursday melts away into light, and Syme and Gregory are somehow great friends again having a delightful conversation, and Rosamond is there at the end of it.
That brings me at last to "Deltarune", which begins with a horrifying collision. Susie thinks that Kris is bound to get her expelled over a triviality—eating chalk. What's especially cruel is that the teachers already know that Susie eats chalk, but they haven't been willing to call Susie out directly on the matter, which means that Susie has been suffering in an agony of doubt about it. She knows she's been doing something "wrong" (and maybe for a good reason too—some dietary issue perhaps) and finally she's been caught. Kris has no apparent intention to make trouble for Susie but she thinks her fate is sealed and that Kris is the instrument of it...so she slams Kris against a locker, and hints at worse to come.
...And then the world itself rips open, and propel Kris and Susie into a realm where they are compelled to fight alongside each other. and thus they are reconciled.
Gabriel Syme and Lucien Gregory go up against the "Council of the Seven Days"; Kris and Susie go up against the King of Spades, who recapitulates Susie's own hurtful words to Kris.
I suggest the parallel is in fact remarkable. Toby Fox and G. K. Chesterton!
~Chara of Pnictogen