• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


Yes, I do think these two things are related.

The magical lore in Toby Fox's Undertale is very thinly sketched, but there's one feature clearly enunciated anyway: the Monsters' magical powers are tied to their emotional state. When the Monsters' emotions are strong, their magical defences are also strong. Emotional distress weakens them magically, reducing the strength of their attacks and lowering their defences. There's also a book in the Librarby which associates the Monsters' use of magic with joy, as seen in the illustration above.

There's clear analogies to be made, then, between the emotional dimension of the Monsters' deployment of magic with familiar human activities. Humans, too, tend to be stronger and more forcible when they're feeling good, weaker and more vulnerable when they're feeling bad.

When you meet a Monster for the first time in the game, it's emitting magical attacks, and some players interpret this as aggression. I feel that it's more in the nature of accidentally kicking a wasp's nest or stumbling into a bear's den: Frisk / the player has blundered into a Monster and now they're upset. Their magical attacks might merely be a kind of autonomous reflex, venting excess emotional energy from the tension of the encounter. When you get to be on better terms with the Monster the tension drops and the magical attacks stop.

Again it's possible to see human analogies, except that when human beings are emotionally riled up they tend to emit words and actions, rather than (say) spraying magically summoned vegetables. The person is presumably doing roughly the same thing as the Monster: they're tense and hoping to vent some excess energy in seek of emotional stability. Both words and actions are capable of being vectors for emotion—as long as there's another human being around to absorb it. It's not as effective when there's no audience, though I suppose you can always yell at the sky.

I suggest that memes have come to be the most economical and efficient method that human beings, especially on the Internet, have found for packaging some of their emotional energy in hopes of sending it elsewhere. Let's say you're angry, and you want to vent some of that: there's curses and insults and such, but somehow it's more effective—more relieving, that is—to shape the anger into an appropriate memetic quotation. Instead of just being a ranting doofus, you can be a ranting doofus temporarily stepping into character as (say) Joe Pesci from GoodFellas. The mythic resonance of the famous source material helps to spread the load a bit and make the cursing less awkward and painful.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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