Oh my goodness, does this place rank of teen angst and autism...
Hello, hai, howdy to all of ya! I have been here in a LOOOONG time. Last time I posted here was in 2019, wow! Deltarune was the first amino I ed, and really helped me come out of my shell and learn my identity. So I have a lot to thnk this community. I am so sorry for how cringe and bad and weird I was, but let's be honest, all of us were like that at that age. I'm so glad to be back, I have a lot of ideas to share and projects to take on. One of them is to revamp the self insert I had here all the way back when I first ed, as I have changed a lot as a person. But that's a project for another day, I have an interesting idea to share first.
Ever since the snow grave route, I have had a concept floating around. We're all familiar with monster catching games; pokemon, digimon, palworld, etc. and we're all as familiar with the game mechanic of evolution. Once your little creature earns enough experience by killing its brethren in battle, it "evolves," changing its appearance and becoming stronger. Commanding Noelle to attack anything she sees grinding out exp reminded me of going through the tall grass in pokemon commanding my partner pokemon, so I questioned... what if Deltarune had something similar for the snow grave route? After killing so many darkened, Noelle's body morphs into something grotesque and monsterous. Something far stronger, far more vicious, and barely any conscious left to think or act on her own.
I decided to take inspiration from the cryptid of Native American mythology; the wendigo. It's said that humans that commit cannibalism will be transformed into this beast as karmic punishment, cursed with a never ending ravenous hunger that blinds ever sense, leaving nothing but the primal instinct to hunt. While traditionally wendigoes are tall, extremely thin, and sickly pale humans, pop culture depicts theme monsters as anthropomorphic deer, usually caribou. They are nothing but skin and bone, their spines forming spikes along their backs, transitioning into a tail of bone, and a skull perched on their head. Wendigoes are commonly associated with ice and snow, being cryptid of the vicious north where the Inuit tribes that conceived them reside. Some modern depictions even have won digits able to wield extremely deadly ice magic. Doesn't that sound like someone we know? While Noelle certainly isn't human, she is a monster who killed other monsters, pretty close to the creation of a wendiogo. She is a caribou monster who wields ice magic, a version of her drove to insanity with LV would certainly mirror a Wendigo. So I made a design for her! Warning for some gore though, she got really excited over some strawberry pie.
I'll definitely be drawing her design more, she's a lot of fun to draw! I need to do some more reference ones showing her in more poses. I imagine her usually being in a very hunched over position standing up with her arms dangling, only to go down on all forms in a weird gorilla esc fashion to chase down her prey. Her hair is longer and matted, her fur has grown darker, her robes are ripped up and stained, and her antlers have grown to something far more threatening. The thorn ring has fused to her body in the transformation, a constant presence of pain as the thorns dig into her entire arm. I don't know what those weird silver things on her shoulders are suppose to be, but I think they're wings. So I made them bigger, looking like the wings of birds that have been completely stripped of feathers. Her face is covered in shadow, leaving only red dots in the place of her eyes, glowing in the darkness just like the master that commands her. The only sign you will have that you're being hunted in the blinding blizzard, is the red glow of a nose and a pair of eyes deep in the white abyss. I imagine this Noelle being far more... hands on when it comes to gaining LV, freezing the corpse afterwards like a deranged sex-inclusive Frostlass.
I have another idea I have for monsters being able to evolve is how monsters interact with LV. Consider it similar to determination, but with different effects. A human can sustain LV perfectly fine, but LV in a monster works very differently. LV by its very nature eats away at the mental stability of the person, as it's the value of copacity someone had to kill; the more you do it, the easier it becomes. For humans, violence is natural. It's their first response to danger and things they don't understand, so they can keep a level head and most of their humanity even with high LV. Killing is just in their nature, it's in their blood and their soul: but monsters don't have blood, and their souls are made of kindness. Not only do they gain LV slower, but it's far more potent. Sanity drains rapidly, they start to loose their minds and sanity, and their bodies are forced to mutilate itself to compensate for their own strength and desire to kill. It's just not natural to a monster, so they're forced to become something else to handle it. So a monster that has evolved due to LV cannot distinguish friend from foe anymore, they're nothing more than a feral, wild animal driven by instinct. Incapable of emotion or recognition, they have turned into a weapon. Where as determination resolves a monster's body till nothing is left, LV destroys their mind.
I'd love to turn this into an au, and I have a lot of ideas for how Noelle would become this, but I want to wait until the new chapters come out. I'm not much of a theorized myself, I feel like it spoils a lot of what could happen, and if you aren't right, then you've just disappointed yourself. Feels counter intuitive to get hyped for a story that doesn't exist, but I certainly have respect for the craziest of theorists out there, and dabble in it some myself. I love to make predictions and see if they come true, I seem to have an uncanny ability to call out what will happen in a video game's story, catch twists miles before they're over the skyline. But that is because the twists are hinted at well, and I've only done them with completed games. So I'm not going to try and make my own dark worlds and story events around a route that isn't complete yet inside a game that isn't complete yet. But if cannon goes against some of my ideas, I'll still probably go with them anyway. That's the fun of aus! Despite all this, I do want to state a prediction I have for the game, just so it's recorded and I can come back here and say "HAH I KNEW IT!" I think Rudy is going to kick the bucket either in chapter 4 or 5, probably inside a dark world, either due to his disease or my Noelle herself. In the normal route, he simply succumbs to his disease, and are left with the inevitability of this outcome even with the fantasy and wonder of the dark world. In the Snowgrave route, Kris convinces Noelle that killing him now would be a mercy, making sure he doesn't have to suffer, and that his exp doesn't go to waist. So we'll see if this happens in chapter 4, and if not, I still got my bets on the next update.
I'm so glad to be back, showing off my well improved art, and all the new ideas I have. I'm making my 13 year old self so proud, I just know it. I have loads to share in the future, and I'm certainly not going anywhere anytime soon. As for what's next? I want to show off the Deltarune au and character that inspired me to even come back to this amino in the first place, single handedly reigniting my hyperfixation with this fandom, and sharing my interpretations of the character. I want to show off how I'd go about inserting myself into Deltarune now that I'm a full fledged adult who has matured a lot more, and gone through WAY more stuff than 2019 me did. And of course, after we get more Deltarune content, expand this au a bit more. Hope you're just as excited for my grand return as I am! Have a nice day, and have some proof shots on your way out the door.
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