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Touching on this is a big part of what I love about Ralsei being sort of a slowly healthy growing take on masculinity. He's living a Spartan existence with no thought or care for his own wellbeing, sacrificing the self to "provide" for those he sees as in his care and it's killing him but...

His interactions with Susie especially are shattering that mindset, making it clear he's allowed to be a person, not just a cog in a machine greater than him, he has worth outside of being useful and productive, he's allowed to want and dream and evolve as a person...

And that resonates heavily with my experience as a man. The societal pressure to be the stoic producer. Worth = job. Worth = usefulness. The only status that matters is the display of wealth since that means you're a good worker.

i just rarely ever see this discussed as much

I’m writing about this right now for a class, mainly juxtaposing a trans reading of Ralsei with the ret of Toby’s queer representation, to kinda go like “hey this gives Toby the opportunity to explore gender performance in this way!” But there’s so so so much more to talk about

it's very good that dess as symbol of the helpless victim lost girl is juxtaposed against dess the spiky punk sibling against (implied) dess the puppeted corpse roaring knight and invoker of the apocalypse. deltarune is so filled with gender and womanhood and manhood

the most unique and idk if intentional thing deltarune does to me is that fitting into manhood is associated with a kind of psychological castration that results in an absence of being. gaster fell, asgore failed, tenna failed, spamton fell