I wish I could love this game.
Just unironically, wholly, love it.
I love something in it. I mean, not one of the jokes. Not really something in the game but something in the experience of sharing the game.
I love Toriel.
I don’t love Toriel because of my experience with her. She’s a bit of a wet blanket, and the game tries to have its butterscotch-cinnamon pie and eat it too when she tells you to wait for her then makes sure she’ll never come. Let’s face it, the fact she appears out of nowhere, is incredibly nice in this super suspicious way, and she literally holds your hands through parts of the game. Her name is a pun – you’re going To Toriel and the game explains its mechanics along the way.
I mean, she’s kinda just there. At best she’s just a neutral experience.
On the other hand…
… on the other hand.
Toriel is my friend’s goatmom.
I love my friends. I don’t like feeling at odds with my friends the way I do right now about this game. I hate that this game was bought for me as a gift and all I can really do is talk about how the game twists my guts and makes me feel alien and gross and weird. And when my friend talks about how she loves her goatmom, about how she just wants to be hugged and tucked in at night by her goatmom – that is meaningful to me.
I consider stories very important. I mean, hey, I just wrote essays with citations and references about that. My entire last session of classwork could just be summarised as Hey it’s okay to feel good, and it’s okay to make things that make people feel good. I read Huinzig’s Homo Ludens (which is quite good), where we read about how games preform culture and stories of joy and simulations of love are ways we practice these ideas. This stuff is very important to me, as a personal value. It’s the kind of thing I am proud of extolling.
I really love that Toriel makes my friend feel good. I love that she gives her a feeling of warmth, of comfort. I wish I could be as wonderful a thing to my friends as this story could be. I wish I could share a story that was as powerful as the story of Toriel, someone who just plain out loves, and cares for, and takes care of you. No strings. No manipulation. No cruelty. No evil or narcissism or selfishness in her – well, not really. I mean, we’ll set aside interpretations of the narrative.
God, I wish I loved this game.
Hell.
I wish I could affect a tenth of the people affected by this game as much as this game has done. I wish I could reach as many people.
but oh well.
Undertale is successful! Hoorah, for those of you that like it! It’s very successful! It’ll get a lot of Game of the Year awards! People will be very impressed!