SURVEY_PROGRAM: A podcast about DELTARUNE

Valerie and Jackie discuss Kris and the Knight as T-for-Teen analogues of modern media about school shootings, troubled teens and problem children. (Featuring a lot of discussion of Matt Johnson’s The Dirties.)

Topics: Seriously looking at dark worlds. Kris brings a weapon to school! Dess as a bad influence. Deltarune’s use of humor to couch serious topics. The Roaring. The sword route as a Doom level of Hometown. The power of violence and play. Susie’s role in this. Satanic Panic. The Weird Route and suicidal imagery. Noelle’s derealization. Abuse is a product of circumstances. The normal route might be worse! More Suselle pessimism on SURVEY_PROGRAM podcast. Personal stories about small town life. The ending. Can Kris be forgiven?

Sources: The Dirties. Baldur’s Tumblr analysis of Kris and Card Kingdom.

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Music: Hywell’s Black Knife remix and

Shadow of Roserade returns to talk to Kate about Deltarune’s flowers and how they’ve changed the world of talking about Undertale humans, as well as post-demo updates from Undertale: Cooking with Kindness. At the end of the episode, we get an exclusive preview of a new Cooking with Kindness NPC.

Check out the Undertale: Cooking with Kindness soundtrack on Bandcamp, or previous Shadow of Roserade episodes.

Topics: SLEEPY_PROGRAM. Weather talk. Materia Collective. A24 and the SCP Foundation. Kate still hasn’t played UTY. Metroid Dread and Kirby and the Forgotten Land diversions. Playing Smash with Sakurai. Green vs. Sunny vs. Wile E. Coyote. Coyote/Roadrunner yaoi. Diversity of body types and communciation styles in UT/DR. What is going on with Susie and humans? Flowey’s transgender themes. Blue/Yellow. Everyone’s secrets. Aqua and flowers’ subversion of their soul traits. More Earthbound talk. “Good artists copy, great artists steal, and the best artists steal and make them transgender.” Then we take some listener questions.

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Nillin and Serena talk about Kingdom Hearts and what we can get out of viewing Deltarune through its lens, plus what makes it such a weird, unique and enduring story.

Topics: Forgetting about Disney. The pervasive aesthetic influence of KH on 2000s youths. Light-dark duality across fiction. Mickey Mouse is here. The world without adults. There’s so many of these games dude. Sora gets shot with a gun. KH1 has a gonermaker sequence. Twilight Town and Hometown. Inexplicable mechanics. Soul/heart mechanics…does this remind you of anything? Is Gaster DiZ? Yoko Shimomura arranged Megalovania. Riku is the most susceptible to cartoon villains of all time. Kris-Riku parallels. The Only Girl and other weird gender stuff. The force of protagonism. Theorybait all the time.

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BQ’s blind playthrough series continues with Chapter 3. Kate asks them about being the only person on Earth who has played Ch 3 but not Ch 4, and how it stands on its own.

Check out BQ’s past episodes in the blind playthrough series.

Topics: Huge tone shift. Actual Spamtenna discussion on SURVEY_PROGRAM. Doing taxes while drunk. Kate briefly forgets the name of the podcast. The overall plot. The omegaverse, again. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. 30 Rock. Is Chapter 3 even good without Sword Route? Ramb. Learning more about Dess’s shadow. Ralsei and darkners’ self-conception. IMAGE_FRIEND. Listener questions about Susie, Tenna, The Amazing Digital Circus and more.

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Deltarune video essayist Andrew Cunningham joins Kate to discuss his oeuvre of video essays, his background with the game, how theorizing and the community has changed over time, and his upcoming Ink Theory Part 2.

Topics: Initial letdown at Chapter 1. Differences in sentimental approach between Undertale and Deltarune. What got us into thinking more deeply about the game. The Device Theory. Mad about the Knight. Early ideas about the Soul. If you know Gaster, you know ball. Noelle the game-breaker. Inspirations from Jon Bois. Dess-Chara overlap. Kris knight history. Where Carol fits into all this. The symbols behind Ink Theory. Whole-text internal corpus analysis vs. comparative views. Echoes, loops, and duality in Deltarune. Why Tesla? A certain webcomic. Disappointed reactions to Chapter 5. What is a ‘lorehead?’ The Mike trio. The Twitter doppelganger.

Subscribe to Andrew Cunningham on YouTube or Patreon.

Cover art by Jett (Cordyceptic on Tumblr).

The top international logistics podcast in the world returns to discuss the crisis in international shipping due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Kate, Jackie and Jade also discuss romance, shipping and fanfiction in Deltarune.

Topics: We play Tradle. Shipping in Deltarune vs. Undertale. Berdly fans’ people’s war. Suselle investment advice. The Festival. Somehow even more discussion of Pizzapants. Susie and the prophecy. What the weird route DOESN’T change. Why people ship. The conflict between “loreheads” and character-driven fans. How people write Kris. AO3’s shitty tag system. Susie’s thoughts on love. Ralsei’s marketability. And then we get to the good stuff: Ranking ships. (We don’t actually rank them.) Kate tries to sell the gang on Kralsei. We talk about Berdly more. The shadow of Dessriel. Do diehards have Suselle fatigue? Oops, we ran out of time to talk about Spamtenna!

Check out Jade’s fic.

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Kate is joined by Malady to discuss the yellow lizard scientist/teacher lady, her flaws, relationships, and her place in the worlds of Undertale and Deltarune.

Topics: Marmite. Golf. Jay Leno. Undertale as a gateway to literary analysis. Mental health, masking and guilt. Does Alphys suck? Relationships with Undyne, Sans, Asgore, Gerson, and Mettaton. Hetgems. Loneliness and alienation in Hometown.

Edited by Malady. Check her out at Weedhacker.net.

Cover art from Undertale tarot cards by Dogbomber.

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Kate and Goomy are joined by first-time guest Ana for a discussion on their papers “Who Is Carol Holiday?” and “DELTARUNE: Life Advice” plus more discussion about the Knight, Carol, the main narrative thrust of Deltarune, and more.

Check out Goomy’s new Lost Girl remix and Bandcamp.

Topics include: Basic narrative structure. When Deltarune really hooked us. YOU are an obsessive. Time capsules of community thought. New information about the shadow crystals. More on the weird route and agency. The shadow Dess left. Parallels between Kris and the Knight. The Knight and prophecy are not engines of staid conservatism. A little of bit of trans Ralsei vis-à-vis the prophecy. The Knight is genderweird, too! What Gerson’s really saying. Which could mean nothing. Some talk on “other knights.” Are we stagnating as a community? I’LL BE RIGHT THERE. What if we gave Laura Palmer a big $$$$-ing sword?

Shoutouts to fallencalf and “What’s Up With That Gaster Fella?” by Baldur.

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Political organizer Samuel Lipson joins Kate for questions about the politics and government of Hometown and a perspective from outside the fandom.

Topics: Escapism vs. reality is a little more complicated. Prophecy talk. Sword Art Online. Our history as political organizers. Ettingermentum. Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed. Primary night stories. What makes New England small towns different? Hometown government’s abnormal structure for a city its size. Dying small towns and the appeal of the Dark World. Who did all the adults vote for in the 2020 presidential primary? Is Toriel a normie lib? Hometown’s Bernie Bros. Much Carol talk. Kate unfriends the guest mid-recording. Asgore divorce spiral. What Sans knows.

Support SURVEY_PROGRAM’s Green Room for bonus episodes!

Join the SURVEY_PROGRAM Discord or follow on Bluesky.

Check out show musician hywell on Bandcamp!

Subscribe on YouTube / Spotify / Apple Podcasts / RSS.