An in-depth discussion of the themes, cultural impact, and history of Deltarune by Toby Fox, with a rotating panel of guests.
Reading the feed…
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.
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. 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
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?
Okay it’s not actually a Milklooker episode. It’s a filler episode. Xtine returns to terrorize Kate for an hour of somewhat Deltarune-related talk. I dunno guys. This one got out of control.
Kate hears BQ’s reactions to playing Chapter 2 for the first time in 2026. Topics: Charlie Rose for some reason. Kris’s room. The funniest theory of Ralsei’s origins yet. Dangerous amounts of Benadryl and weed. Berdly as Scott Pilgrim. Increased scale and scope of Chapter 2. Metaphorical Darkner designs. A World Cup diversion. The…interesting aspects of Tasque Manager and Werewire’s designs. Noelle’s history. Being put in the girl box. First exposure to the Weird Route. “Smuggling in” mature ideas. More thoughts on gamers. Introducing a brand-new Chapter 2-era Kris Demonology Theory. It Means
Kate and Sophia talk dads, dads and more dads: Asgore, Rudy, Gerson, King, and even Mr. Cattenheimer. They break down the role of fatherhood in the story, and the ways dads fail across the story. (This is a sequel to Episode 3, on moms.) Topics: Cat yurts. Deltarune is a land of contrasts. Milves. More Pink talk. Deltarune dads are dead or distant. Asgore’s contrast with Undertale. Child murder. What the flowers represent. The growing seriousness of Kris’s plan. A novel new caller idea. Tenna as an Asgore parallel. A brief diversion on cats and the Cattenheimer family’s role, eh, sploinky? Twi
Kate and Jackie reconvene for a follow-up on new advancements in the Chapter 5 weird route, and the complicated feelings playing it surfaces. Previous WR episode: Episode 11. Topics: Noelle’s agency. What’s wrong with Hometown. Dess’s absence. Lore-character reconciliation. Can anyone escape? Looking for who to blame. What is the nature of the soul? You can’t even say “stop” like you used to. Carol’s place in all this. What it means to get stronger. Something else. ESRB T for Teen. How do we find a way to talk about the most intense and personal implications of this story?
Kate and Valerie reconvene for a Chapter 5 update on what Deltarune is saying about gender in what is the trans-est chapter yet. (This is a sequel to our Kris and Mettaton episodes.) Topics: Kris fans be like “I love when they suffer,” the blue closet of subtext, Flowery did nothing wrong, more musing on what Ralsei represents, the Forgotten Man, MEW MEW MAGIC RETURNS!, Pink/Kris/Spamton parallels, soul and body, returning to closets again, a few rare notes about takes we don’t like, more on Kris and Noelle’s childhoods, Seth, some speculation about what Kris and the Knight actually want.
Kate and Elsie kick off Season 2 with their first reactions to Chapter 5. Full spoilers ahead!
Substitute Games Month is brought to a shuddering halt by the arrival of Chapter 5. But, before the drought ends, Kate and Lucretia gab about ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies, the controversial sort-of successor to Disco Elysium.
It’s SUBSTITUTE GAMES MONTH, where SURVEY_PROGRAM talks about new games that aren’t Deltarune before Chapter 5 snipes us! Kate and Nillin kick off festivities by breaking down AP Thomson’s Titanium Court, modern fae stories, and metatexuality. Within, Kate grapples with the question: can you love a game to death? Topics: Fairies and ferries. The Mountain Goats. Games that don’t want you to play them. Inspirations from Shakespeare. Self-insert characters and gender. The legacy of mobile games. Kane Parsons’ Backrooms and The Oldest View as fairy stories. Cars aren’t real. Kinds of Kindness. Gam
BQ rejoins the show after discussing playing Undertale but not Deltarune in Episode 19 to react to playing Chapter 1 for the first time. Reactions include gonermaker, religious ska, gender, Greenster, divorce, school experience, the symbolism in the Dark World, and first encounters with every new character, and checking back in with Undertale favorites, immediately picking up on Kris-player dichotomy, and more.
Kate interviews Shadow of Roserade about Undertale: Cooking with Kindness, a new Undertale fangame about the green Kindness soul, with cooking minigame mechanics. Can you make the greatest restaurant the Underground has ever seen? Topics: What makes a prequel or sequel worth it? Indie dev timelines. Fate and death. Luna!!!! Why climb the Mountain of Dying? Minigame design and conveyance. Kate is bad at slicing bread. Cozycore indie games. An RPG with no fighting at all. Why to not create different routes. Games set in single neighborhoods. The 10th anniversary stream. Game engine choice. How t
Kate and Valerie discuss Undertale and Deltarune as art made by a millennial and ask “what defines millennial art?” For this, they define what a generation means as an analytic context, what experiences millennials share that go into their art, and the indie game as the modern equivalent to the personal film. Topics: Other generations flippantly characterized by Friends, Tung Tung Tung Sahur, Buddenbrooks, sex, lies and videotape, and Woodstock, Steven Universe and Fionna and Cake as parallels, economic stagnation and the Great Recession, video games as the eighth art and Toby Fox as one of th
Jackie tells Kate about playing Earthbound for the first time in 2026. They discuss the game’s influence on Undertale, Deltarune and the genre at large. We talk about coming-of-age stories and what looking through the eyes of children in our narratives tell us. Topics: RPG mechanics, grinding, the recent translation and tour controversies, Kate learns a distressing fact about Chick Corea and shares an embarrassing drug story, Weird America, what we learn about Ness indirectly (and how that compares to Frisk and Kris), influence on the genre, parallels between Noelle and Paula, and more. We sha
PODISM 1999 is back with our 23rd episode about YIIK: A Postmodern RPG! In our latest deep dive into the defining indie RPG of this era, Kate asks Lucretia the most important YIIK question yet: What kind of ska would Alex Eggleston listen to?
Kate and Goomy finally discuss the spammy little mailman and ask YOU for help defining the difference between a blorbo and a tumblr sexyman. At the end, we get an EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE (56:40) of the all-new Black Knife remix by Hywell. Topics: Slay the Spire 2. First playthrough reactions. Whither Jevil? Comparing Spamton to Harry du Bois. Pre-Tenna yaoi. Half-Life VR but the AI Is Self-Aware. It’s sad streamers don’t play Deltarune anymore. AO3 stats. The adult role models in Deltarune sure are bad, huh. Spamweed. Who was phone? Where the hell is Grillby?
Kate and Nillin make a pitch: Deltarune needs sports spinoffs. They talk the recent Winter Olympics, 2026 being the Year of Lancer, Raygun hitting ‘em with the dinosaur, Mario Sports RPGs from the developer of Golden Sun, the dire state of AAA sports games, the collapse of the nerd-jock paradigm, the Glup Shitto Super Bowl, Mode 7, Return of the Obra Dinn, Mario Hoops 3 on 3, Kate comes out as a golfer, potential indie crossovers, and more.
Griever introduces Kate to the influences the Final Fantasy series has had on Deltarune, and the characters across the series that parallel the main cast. We discuss a variety of — Wait, there’s a DR. GAST??? Topics: Swoon, contrasting Dragon Quest’s influence, how each game remixing the setting but keeping some common elements mirrors the Undertale-to-Deltarune transition, a love triangle, loss of player control, and more. Kate takes a brief detour into yelling about Knight identity contrarianism.
Kate has one friend that’s played Undertale but not Deltarune, and another friend that’s played Deltarune but not Undertale. Let’s experiment on them for content. First, Kate and BQ talk about playing Undertale, including sidetracks into the subtle difference between being a fujo and a faghag, gay and furry bars in Seattle, the pronunciation of Papyrus, the relative difficulty of both games, early Reddit sasquatch holes, Alphys as a great female character. Then, I ask them what they think happens in Deltarune. Then, Kate and Triumph talk Deltarune without Undertale. We talk a cavalcade of Sans
NowIOnlyWantATriumph joins Kate and Valerie for the first ever UNDERTALE/DELTARUNE BASEBALL DRAFT! Each of us put together a team of 19 Undertale and Deltarune characters to take the field, and it’s up to YOU to decide who wins!
Is Mettaton the key to everything? No, but Kate and Valerie talk about him anyway. We talk parallels with Spamton and Tenna, the difference tonally between adults in Undertale and Deltarune, and Valerie blows my mind by suggesting Mettaton and Catty are the same age. We take questions from our listeners on Discord about our expectations for the future and various goofy subjects, including Jersey Shore. Would you smooch a ghost?
Kate and Valerie do some emergency podding about December Holiday, just in time for Christmas. It’s just the start of our talk about the most important absence in the game… We also cover the new newsletter, ARG, and Christmas in the game in general.
Kate and Shadow of Roserade talk about the ways the fandom has gone crazy in the hiatuses between chapters. We also chat Alvin, the false dichotomy between theory and fanfic, the Deltarune equivalent of the Zootopia abortion comic, and Azzypants.
That ain’t Falco. Jackie returns to talk Berdly with Kate. We continue the podcast’s grappling with What Gaming Means and the breakdown of the nerd-jock dichotomy. Topics: Our experiences in the fighting game community. The courage to lose again and again. Ice Climbers discrimination. Krerdly talk. Kate makes a rare statement. We take listener questions.
