It's at least implied that the ghost is the one who has taken control and is conducting the negotiations. It's the same ghost that shows up in the later corrupted pacifist endings, after all.
This is a little bit of a sore spot for me because I come from a Christian background, where the idea of "action X constitutes knowing consent to be deceived into refusing rescue by grace and coming to fully deserve Hell, and trying to rationalize how this idea might be pathological and wrong also constitutes knowing consent to be deceived into refusing rescue by grace and coming to fully deserve Hell" behaved like a malignant cancer, that tried to attach itself to anything related to a different view of the supernatural than the Christian one. It's tied in with the whole binary internalization-projection self-hatred complex that critical theorists talk about: if you consent to the influence of anything your cultural authorities have labeled as the encroachments of the devil anywhere, it supposedly erodes your bright lines everywhere, and eventually blows up your whole moral practice and you start deserving the fates of the artificially-beat-upon outcast reprobates who are the projection-targets and internalization-sources for your repressed badself. For example, I think the mother of a family that was friends of ours banned her kids from playing any video games that had magic in them. This was not particularly uncommon in America thirty years ago.
However, of course that soreness wouldn't overrule hypothetical good epidemiological data about correlations between demonic-flavored derangements and playing the Undertale genocide route. And anecdotes are just a weaker form of epidemiological data, that are confounded by unknown latent cultural and individual degrees of propensity for data cherry-picking.
If Undertale were interpreted as a mundane artifact, there would be a quite coherent story in which Toby Fox was just trying to use the fourth wall as an additional medium of producing an artistic effect, presenting the player with the idea of potentially not having either moral or practical immunity from the consequences of using save/reload to try all the contingencies in the game to see what happens. This is literally the reasoning criticized by the last-ditch enemy on the genocide route: "and just because you 'can', you 'have to'". It's also the motive cited by the antagonist with the determination powers, for their descent into a horrific version of Groundhog Day (already undone before the game begins) and eventually ennui. The character who's the last-ditch enemy in the genocide route also, in the normal route, makes a number of pointed comments about whether you have a responsibility to go back and be more pacifist, since you're the only one who can control whether the underworld's problems get solved in a way that doesn't add to the pre-existing tally of tragedies. I suspect that the above story does, in fact, contain Toby Fox's actual conscious reasons for why to design the game that way.
That "moral of the story" is, of course, somewhat confounded by the fact that the final battle on the genocide route has arguably the best and certainly most iconic music in the game, though the final battle on the pacifist route has the second or third best.
It seems strange that "who or what inspired this game" should have bearing on how consent is construed here, if it wouldn't particularly be knowable to the person ostensibly doing the consenting.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2023-03-21 01:03 am (UTC)This is a little bit of a sore spot for me because I come from a Christian background, where the idea of "action X constitutes knowing consent to be deceived into refusing rescue by grace and coming to fully deserve Hell, and trying to rationalize how this idea might be pathological and wrong also constitutes knowing consent to be deceived into refusing rescue by grace and coming to fully deserve Hell" behaved like a malignant cancer, that tried to attach itself to anything related to a different view of the supernatural than the Christian one. It's tied in with the whole binary internalization-projection self-hatred complex that critical theorists talk about: if you consent to the influence of anything your cultural authorities have labeled as the encroachments of the devil anywhere, it supposedly erodes your bright lines everywhere, and eventually blows up your whole moral practice and you start deserving the fates of the artificially-beat-upon outcast reprobates who are the projection-targets and internalization-sources for your repressed badself. For example, I think the mother of a family that was friends of ours banned her kids from playing any video games that had magic in them. This was not particularly uncommon in America thirty years ago.
However, of course that soreness wouldn't overrule hypothetical good epidemiological data about correlations between demonic-flavored derangements and playing the Undertale genocide route. And anecdotes are just a weaker form of epidemiological data, that are confounded by unknown latent cultural and individual degrees of propensity for data cherry-picking.
If Undertale were interpreted as a mundane artifact, there would be a quite coherent story in which Toby Fox was just trying to use the fourth wall as an additional medium of producing an artistic effect, presenting the player with the idea of potentially not having either moral or practical immunity from the consequences of using save/reload to try all the contingencies in the game to see what happens. This is literally the reasoning criticized by the last-ditch enemy on the genocide route: "and just because you 'can', you 'have to'". It's also the motive cited by the antagonist with the determination powers, for their descent into a horrific version of Groundhog Day (already undone before the game begins) and eventually ennui. The character who's the last-ditch enemy in the genocide route also, in the normal route, makes a number of pointed comments about whether you have a responsibility to go back and be more pacifist, since you're the only one who can control whether the underworld's problems get solved in a way that doesn't add to the pre-existing tally of tragedies. I suspect that the above story does, in fact, contain Toby Fox's actual conscious reasons for why to design the game that way.
That "moral of the story" is, of course, somewhat confounded by the fact that the final battle on the genocide route has arguably the best and certainly most iconic music in the game, though the final battle on the pacifist route has the second or third best.
It seems strange that "who or what inspired this game" should have bearing on how consent is construed here, if it wouldn't particularly be knowable to the person ostensibly doing the consenting.