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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2046 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 29, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In the current cultural moment, progressivism is mostly associated with shoddy, preachy art. I could name names, but I think everyone has at least one example that comes to mind. So: is there an example, today, of good progressive art? I’d say yes, and point to Toby Fox’s DELTARUNE.

DELTARUNE is a pseudo-sequel to the extraordinary success of Undertale, with most of the same characters but almost none of the same plot points. Both games are fairly linear 2D turn-based RPGs with some puzzle and real-time elements.

First, in what way is it progressive?

  • The game is absolutely saturated in gender non-conformance. The fighter of the party is a tough girl. The healer is a sensitive boy in a dress. The main character is deliberately androgynous, and is referred to as “they.” The main romance that features is lesbian.
  • Ditto pluralism. Most of the characters are “monsters,” which are generally anthropomorphized but come in all varieties. The main character is the one human. They all live happily together.
  • To expand on this, the “enemies” in the game are not really enemies. Persuade them a little, and they will lay down arms. Mistake theory predominates.

So, what makes the game good?

  • On the aesthetic front, the obvious standout is the music. Toby Fox is a competent and creative composer with a real flair for making catchy tunes.
  • Equally, the game oozes creative vision and whimsy. It’s full of interesting ideas - like a computer-themed level replete with viruses, ads, and a “Tasque Manager” - which it executes on splendidly.
  • In that vein, Toby Fox also is superb at tying everything in the game together like an auteur. The sound matches the gameplay matches the story matches the graphics. It is very hard to find anything seriously out of place. (I do not call him an auteur simply because that implies that all ideas for the game source from him, when there are very obviously sections that match someone else’s vision. What he does is seamlessly mesh those sections into the overall experience.)
  • The gameplay is also quite expansive. It includes elements of bullet hells, rhythm games, etc, all as they make sense. The game is never shy to add something new if it might be fresh or interesting. This especially livens up the combat.

But what I think makes this a good PROGRESSIVE game is something a little different:

  • The game is not slavishly progressive. It is set in a small town, where everyone knows one another and goes to church on Sundays. This is portrayed as a little stifling but also kind of sweet. There are plenty of straight and gender-conforming characters (though it’s pretty low on typical machismo). It does not follow line item requirements on any topics du jour, and indeed there is a section lampooning a polyamorous “throuple” (Toby’s words, not mine) run by a deeply obnoxious busybody pushing around two hapless and unhappy orbiters.
  • Real-world politics are totally absent. There is no sexism. There is no analogue to any real racial group. There are rich and poor people, and differences between them, but there’s no hatred for one or the other.
  • The characters themselves are compelling. I’m not going to go so far as to say they’re particularly deep, but Toby is great at showing rather than telling, and overall they ring true. Small example: at the start of the game, you wake up in a room with two beds. One has a shelf full of trophies and awards and all kinds of cool games, music discs, and so on. The one you wake up in is barren and gray. It very quickly becomes apparent that your older brother is off at college. This paints a picture that does not need extensive textual elaboration. You get a sense of who your character is from the world you inhabit and how people talk to you. This pattern is repeated over, and over, and over, and it’s quite refreshing.

These points are where most progressive art falters. It slavishly follows a set of predefined norms, instead of the artist’s opinions; it drowns itself in politics and analogy; its characters exist purely to push one or another point, which must be driven home explicitly, and wind up flat because of it. This creates something pretty drab and uninteresting, no matter the political stance which generates it.

I’ll leave off there. I don’t want to point too much attention to the line-items of progressive ideology in the game, which are better suited to the CW thread, but draw out how art is able to include ideology without being consumed by it, which I consider fun enough for Friday.

Opinions on DELTARUNE or other ideological but non-terrible art welcome.

The Harry Potter game was mechanically awesome. The main story was good too.

Harry Potter has always been very progressive in its outlook. JK Rowling had the TERF fight. But the video game distanced itself from that with a Trans character. I think they did the trans character badly, but it's mostly only a side quest.

I didn't finish Hogwarts Legacy because it turned out not to be my type of game, but I also recall that the student body seemed rather more diverse than what one would expect there in the early 20th century, with one student who was a major supporting character coming from some wizarding school in Africa.

Wizards can teleport at will and express their ethnic bigotry towards muggles/muggle-borns and sentient magical creatures. Also, African wizards would have the oldest magical tradition and probably live like Wakandans. If they have a negative stereotype in the wizarding world, it'd be being a bit full of themselves.

Maybe current-day hogwarts is a second-tier School and doesn't attract as many international students as it used to. It'd fit thematically with the general decline of Britain, many of the old pureblood families have fallen on a hard times by the time we reach the late 90s.

Also the game depicted Slytherins that weren't evil, and added lore that Merlin was in Slytherin house.

I was always annoyed that in the final book the entirety of Slytherin house sided with the Voldies.

Also, African wizards would have the oldest magical tradition and probably live like Wakandans.

African-American wizards, on the other hand...

Wizards aren't going to get enslaved by black muggles and sold to white muggles to pick muggle cotton.

Nor were there wizard dutchmen involuntarily transporting African wizards to the Caribbean.

There wasn't a parallel wizard British empire that established a wizard Raj in wizard india, and German wizards didn't holocaust Jewish wizards during Wizard War 2, wizards iraelis arent currently genociding wizard Palestinians in an open-air wizard prison. Wizards have their own history, they dont just ape muggle history but with wands and silly names.

I suppose that most african-american wizards would be muggle-born, and thus would carry with them whatever dysfunctions an 11-year-old African American would have.

Was there a wave of ellis-island wizard european immigration to the Americas? Or would almost all American wizards be WASPs?

This also brought me completely out of the experience. There are mods to fix it but I haven’t got around to trying them.

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