Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just past midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The picture?  I'm taking a momentary break from chasing down photos of my lineage. Today is the spring equinox here in the northern hemisphere, one of the holy days of the Druid calendar, and this is a photo of the spring equinox sunrise as seen from an ancient stone chamber at South Royalton, Vermont -- one of many astronomically oriented megalithic sites here in New England. The photo's courtesy of New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA), which was gracious enough to send it around yesterday morning.

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Except, you need to keep in mind that when the exchange happens there is no game world because it has been obliterated, and there is no player character either, for the same reason, and the ghost has left for somewhere else. Additionally, this is one of the only times you can change your name without using a hack; suggesting, to me at least, that this your character is already gone.

Finally, the game breaks the fourth wall a lot, especially on the genocide run. So, it seems at least possible that this is intended that way; and that depending on who, or what, inspired this game, it may very well have the effect it claims....

[(Anonymous)]

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.