Latest / The Autistic Mile / The Ideal-ist: Episode 13 (Ralsei)
Transcript
- Shane: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Autistic Mile. My name is Shane Gaffney and this is episode 13 of the Ideal-ist. As you can see, I'm working with some new equipment here in the form of these headphones that I'm wearing. So we'll see how that goes. See if it works better than what we were doing previously. But regarding the character we'll be talking about today, it will be Ralsei from the game Deltarune. I imagine a lot of you are already familiar with Deltarune. It's a very popular game made by Toby Fox, the same guy who made Undertale, which is another game that took the internet by storm a few years back. Normally with indie games like this I don't usually give them the time of day because why would I want to play a game that looks like it was made back in the Atari era, to put it bluntly? But with games like this, it has very good writing and characters that make it too good to pass up. So regarding Ralsei, he happens to be my favorite character out of the main cast. And perhaps in the game as a whole, as of recording this. To let you know, as of making this video, Only chapter 5 and before have been released. So if you don't want to be spoiled on any story content up to that point in the game, then I would advise you click off now. However with Rasei, he's a character who is very easy to get accustomed to, in that he is a character who is polite, timid, self-conscious, conscious and always eager to please. And those are all very defining traits of his. However, it is also not necessarily the whole story, in that though initially he seems like nothing more than the supporting healer of the party, definitely fitting into the archetypical personality that fits that role, deep down, Ralsei is plagued by emotional burdens and a sense of trying to live up to expectations because Ralsei happens to be a Darkener, which is a character from the Dark World. A sort of fantastical and otherworldly plane that exists alongside the normal world that the characters inhabit. And it's heavily implied that the Dark World is not real, but rather a figment of imagination, that all the adventures everyone goes on is all in their heads, not in the sense of hallucinating all of it, but rather that it's all just pretend. And Ralsei is in a very peculiar situation in that he is aware of all this. He doesn't let on initially that he knows all this, but he is a guy who knows that he is not real, and that his entire reason for existing is to serve the needs of someone else. And how he reacts to all this is very interesting in that whereas a character like Sans, who I also relate to on some level, reacts to the harsh reality that nothing he does matters by sort of just succumbing to passively looking on from the sidelines as the world moves on with or without him, Ralsei takes a very different approach in that he feels a sense of responsibility that he has to be the person that he is told it's his purpose to be. He feels he has to make the other people in the party feel welcome that are from the real world. He has to do a good job as a guide and a walking encyclopedia. As well as being good at generally supporting them and getting them where they need to go in terms of the in-game prophecy that they're all a part of. Because he feels if he doesn't do as he's told, then things will spiral off course and bad things will happen and it will be his fault. And yeah, that is a rather interesting catch 22 because that's the burden with freedom. When you take a path that's predetermined, maybe you don't necessarily like everything that you see, but at least you know where everything is going. You can mentally prepare for it and sort of do damage control wherever possible, which is what Ralsei does. And that is heavily contrasted with his fellow party member Susie, who is the exact opposite in terms of worldview. Always upsetting the apple cart, always disregarding the rules of the game, and just sort of dancing to the beat of her own drum. Regarding which approach is more appealing, that depends on your own experiences and your own beliefs as a person. Some prefer to be more like Ralsei, some prefer to be more like Susie, and some think that there's a middle ground in between the two. But as the story goes on, both of these characters are sort of made to dabble in the perspective of the other to some degree. Susie learns to start taking her role as a hero seriously, and try to act as one of the team instead of just going off and being a rebel all the time. And Ralsei, by contrast, is taught to sorta open up and try not to be so hard on himself for not being perfect all the time. To try to be more genuine with what he thinks and feels in any given situation. It's not something that comes naturally for him, because perhaps on some level he doesn't really remember what his true beliefs and personality were like before he sorta suppressed it all underneath this idealistic image he projects. But over time he starts to relax a bit more and start to let himself be a person rather than just A means of moving the plot along. And I imagine that's something that is relatable to a lot of people on the spectrum because as we've said many times on this channel, both in my series and dad's we talk about how many on the spectrum are forced maybe not directly, but pressured to fit in and censor parts of ourselves in order to preserve the social order. And for some of us, sometimes you end up suppressing the parts of you people don't want to see so hard that you reach a point where you forget what your real desires even were. This is actually something that happened with me, believe it or not. I was always fearful of disobeying authority figures to varying degrees, and so my way of trying to stay out of trouble and to not draw attention to myself was to be the golden child for the longest time. Just stay inside the lines and try to keep the peace. Something I felt especially compelled to do in the fact that my two brothers growing up, back when we were younger, they were well, we all had our eccentricities. And I saw how the both of them got into a lot of trouble by poking the bear and doing things they know they weren't supposed to. And so seeing it all end badly for them, I decided to take the exact opposite approach. And it got to a point where as an adult, I no longer knew how to make decisions on my own to some degree, because for so long I was never in touch with what I wanted. It always had to be what someone else wanted what someone else expected of me and It's hard to really unlearn all of that after years and years of trying to be someone you're not. To this day I still don't 100% know what my authentic thoughts and feelings are. And at this point I really have decided that it's not a problem to me at this point. It does create challenges, but it doesn't bother me on a personal level because whether or not the me that is speaking to you is real or not, does it really matter at the end of the day? The fact is, fire or rain, I'm here, and so I just gotta work with that. And something else that I found relatable was in chapter 5 where we meet a guy who is the polar opposite of Ralsei in every way, a guy by the name of Flowery. And he is a guy who, to be blunt, is a total jerk to Ralsei. He looks down on him, always making fun of him, and generally showing him up and tossing passive-aggressive aggressive remarks his way every chance he gets. Because Flowery believes that he's found a way to defy the prophecy and to overcome whatever obstacles may try to put him back in line. And generally achieve "true freedom", quote unquote. And so psychologically he sees Ralsei as a sort of nagging old-timer timer who believes in something that is already redundant as far as he's concerned. And of course, Flowery ends up being wrong. He ends up having to face the Roaring Knight, the main bad guy of the entire game, and ends up getting completely destroyed by them because he overestimated his own abilities. But I actually do feel there are a lot of people like Flowery in the world. People who just assume that those who are all about these rules and regulations, all these different self imposed boundaries for themselves, that they do it because they're weak or because they're just ignorant. And obviously that couldn't be further from the truth. Sometimes it is. Sometimes there are bad apples who just genuinely take the path of least resistance simply because it's the path of least resistance. But everyone has a story of their own to share. That's what I believe. And by writing people off who we don't agree with or have different priorities than us, then it reduces them to a caricature and prevents any healthy dialogue between both parties because everyone's just talking past each other and letting assumptions blind them from reaching a consensus. So I was very glad that this is how Flowery's story ended, in my opinion. That's not to say that he had no good in him, obviously. He's merely a guy following his own path that happened to butt heads with Ralsei's. But I imagine that's really the point. You don't have to be some mustache-twirling trolling villain in order to unintentionally cause damage to someone else, or send messages that you didn't mean to send and end up causing harm because of it. Communication is very important, especially with those on the spectrum. And so it's very crucial that you make sure when you express something that it's not coming across in the wrong way, and that you're self aware of how your words and actions might be interpreted, because I have seen it before, not personally, but I've seen situations where that bad blood just accumulates over time and never gets resolved until the damage is already done and it's too late to fix the relationship. Back to Ralse though, I do greatly appreciate him as a character. And I can safely say that playing through Deltarune was greatly enriched by having him in it. Maybe you don't relate to Ralsei on a personal level, but hopefully what I said here at least establishes some kind of inner dialogue where you can at least see where he's coming from. And hey, maybe it'll help you understand someone else in your life who might think this way, or at least similarly. But that's about all I have to say about Ralsei. Thank you for watching. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe, and I will see you next time. Thank you.