Alright, fuck it, I'm ranting about how Deltarune theorists treat the Halloween Hack
Forewarning: I'm probably going to come across as rude here, but good LORD is this reading insidious.
Alright, so apparently there's an epidemic of using the Earthbound Halloween Hack to justify their Deltarune theories. Something to the effect of 'Well, the Halloween Hack was about you, the player, being a murderer and that the only ethical choice is not to play it and kill the innocent old man, so who's to say he didn't recycle those themes into Deltarune?'
Which would be fine and all if it weren't for the fact that it's wrong. And this has been spreading secondhand by people who have never played nor experienced a LP of the Halloween Hack, so I guess it falls to me to correct it.
There are some correct broad strokes here; the character we play as is a bounty hunter in a framing that portrays the job as being a more socially acceptable assassin, and there is a sadistic, possibly third party entity that takes glee in Andonuts' death. But the one thing we know for certain is that it is NOT the player. And by the start of the game, Andonuts is anything but innocent.
To elaborate on the latter, the Andonuts in the Halloween Hack is not the goofy old man from Earthbound, but a maniac driven insane with guilt trying to bring the whole world down with them. He's turned his immediate surroundings into a hellscape of bioengineered monstrosities and a few survivors desperately trying to survive, and said monsters are starting to encroach into other towns, it's implied even that those monsters are abducting people - or killing them without even leaving a body. And when Varik comes a'knockin', he doesn't try to deny that he caused this; he fluctuates between laughter and gibbering in terror, locking himself into the Magicant machine in the belief that it will in some way save him. Which brings us to the former.
Now, I'm not sure that Toby had a solid metanarrative idea in mind here - all interactions are portrayed as being spoken to Varik. But it's at this point that the narration (or at least the real world narration), who or whatever it may be, gets VERY pushy. It starts portraying Andonuts as less of a man, and more of some kind of beast, a monster to slay, and urges you to kill him in his sleep. If you choose to do so, it praises you, tells you/Varik that you did the right thing, and then the game ends because that's not the true ending. If you choose the blank second option, the narration gets annoyed, and tells you that you don't have the option to do nothing. But if you press the "B" button, it loses its shit. It starts trying to convince you, pleads with you, telling you that you want to, NEED to kill him, eventually devolving into the rage of the leftmost textbox as Varik enters Andonuts' mental world instead of committing cold-blooded murder.
As you explore his mindscape, you start to piece together the reasons Andonuts ended up this messed up - repressed sexuality, strained relationships, and, of course, the mistaken belief that he personally caused the death of his son and his friends due to a misunderstanding of how time travel works. You're informed that you need to gather Dr. Andonuts' "courage" in order to reach the deepest depths of his mind. As you progress through his memories and self loathing, you find entities that call themselves "courage". However, it becomes more and more clear, until Poo outright states it, that they are actually some kind of psychic projection (Earthbound is about kids with psychic powers FYI) from the kids who Andonuts thinks he killed (besides Ness, who for some reason that even the game seems to be confused about is narratively equated with Varik), from the new timeline they ended up in after killing the game's main antagonist. The motives get clearer too; at first, you're told that their goal is to 'help' or 'save' Andonuts in some vague way, but as you progress, it becomes clearer and clearer that Andonuts has gone far past the point of no return; Poo makes it clear that they know they can't save-save Andonuts, and the best thing they can hope for is to stop him from mentally torturing what little is left of himself in his dream world.
And then, the final battle. It starts with fighting Andonuts' Id, a gory, deformed creature that does nothing but be miserable and beg for mercy. This feels less like cruelty, and more of a necessary evil; the status quo is only making Andonuts lose his mind more, and killing it isn't the same as killing Andonuts, as evidenced by the fact that Andonuts is still there to fight you after you kill it. After that, you fight Andonuts' Rage, who claims that with the Id gone, his mind is nothing but hatred. Whether it's true or not, he makes it quite clear that the Andonuts we are fighting is pure anger; there's the memey dialogue, which, while somewhat tastelessly executed and overly crude by modern and professional standards, does the job quite well at portraying him as a being composed of hatred. There's also his most powerful attacks being "PSI Bitchkill" and kicking you in the dick really hard. Yes, really.
Ultimately, Andonuts' Rage is defeated, and Magicant fades away, and we find out the outcome - Andonuts is dead. The game muses on what the point of this whole thing was if he was going to die anyway, and closes out on Varik musing on how his life is pretty good, a fart joke, and a 'Happy Halloween' from Toby.
Now, while you could be forgiven for interpreting Magicant as being pointless, and you are intended to feel cheated on some level, I don't think it's quite so simple. Yes, Andonuts dies no matter what you do, but the portrayal of it is treated quite differently. Killing him right off, between the tone of the narration and the lack of ending, feels gross and wrong. His death upon beating his mental hangups feels more melancholic. Like you tried to do the right thing, but failed.
And I feel the weight of Magicant is important too - you actually come to understand and even feel bad for Andonuts, rather than simply writing him off as a monster and discarding him. The canon heroes, too, find it to still be worth it to try to put him out of his misery to try to give him some semblance of a peaceful death, given how they're all gung-ho on finishing the adventure and how Poo acknowledges that there's no way at this point that Andonuts can reach a happy ending.
So, to try to bring it back around to Deltarune, if there's anything that Toby took from this to bring to Deltarune's plot, I believe it is this sentiment:
Sure, Andonuts died either way. Whatever you try, that can't be changed. But still, there is value in your choice to disobey the narration. there is value in choosing to understand him, despite being doomed, in trying to give him a better death than being stabbed in his self-torture chamber. Yes, what you chose to do may not change anything. But there is still meaning in the fact that you chose to do it.
If Deltarune really does only have one ending (and that little question mark in that one description is putting that into doubt), you participating in Kris' story, and how to choose to do so, still matter. Snowgrave wouldn't be that big of a deal if they didn't. Choosing not to play might even end up being the worst outcome for that world.
