Why Is Swatch A Class Traitor???

Why is Swatch a class traitor???

Thank you very much for asking :)

In this post I'll be using he/they pronouns interchangeably to refer to Swatch. I enjoy the idea of they-pronouns Swatch but at the same time I refuse to believe that the only instance of canon pronoun usage to refer to him is misgendering, as some people posted about before, because that's not how Toby flies.

That being said, before talking about Swatch specifically, I need to explain the logic behind this reading of them. Swatch being seen as a "class traitor" is derived from the marxist idea of class consciousness, or in different terms, the fact that people who are in the same economic position understand each other and therefore owe each other solidarity, the idea that people need to be conscious of their position in their society and side with people who will help their situation and improve their lives.

In this sense, a class traitor is a person who, despite understanding their position in the social strata, refuses to side with their peers and instead either shuns them to appeal to a higher social class, to "appear as one of them", so to speak, or completely refuses the idea that they are part of that class to begin with. A good, palpable example, are snobbish, classist doctors. Doctors are employed by someone – be it a hospital, a clinic, an insurance company, the government in some countries, even in private practice, etc, but they are not, by Marx's definitions, owners of capital, aka someone with the exorbitant amount of money that allows them to control production in a large scale (in other words, conglomerates and billionaires). However, having a higher material condition on average, and having attained this social position through study that was allowed by a higher material condition in the first place, some doctors don't realize that they are just as much of a proletariat as the poor man they are treating, and thus exhibit behavior like discrediting, ignoring or even being hostile to people they identify as lesser, despite the fact that they're supposed to be together, sociologically speaking.

What the fuck does that have to do with Swatch, you ask? Well, Swatch is, to put it bluntly, literally a servant to aristocracy. They are, by definition, part of the working class, and therefore they owe solidarity to their fellow workers. Spamton, in direct counterbalance, is a member of the working class who has been elevated, by one way or another, into a position that makes him just as, if not more powerful than aristocracy. Spamton had become burgoise, though he still retains his origin as a working class salesman, that much hasn't changed in him, as far as we can tell. This seems to be going on just fine, if we are to believe Spamton's response in the Q&A, until Spamton needs a support system, when his business goes belly up to the point that he ends up homeless.

I really need to emphasize this point. Spamton isn't a "funny little guy who lives in a non-house cuz it's funny", not even in-universe. He is, put it simply, destitute. He does not live in the trash because he wants to. And, I think that every clear-headed person understands this, you cannot go from being one of, if not the, richest person in your entire world, to a homeless man living in a garbage can who people pretend doesn't exist, unless your peers and your society have wronged you tremendously. Spamton didn't become a homeless man just because he fucked around and found out, he became a homeless man because he fucked around and found out, AND none of his peers from this time wanted to help him. And, most importantly, this includes Swatch.

As a servant, he must know what poverty looks like. He must know what having a material condition worse than the ones you surround yourself with is like. And they did nothing to help, or maybe even contributed to Spamton's isolation, which is a separate can of worms I don't have the energy to look at gameplay videos for at this time of night.

For real, does the guy who sells Spamton's bowties with the label removed, and refers to him as a "crooked salesman", and plays it coy and laments when Spamton goes off the deep end sound like they have class consciousness?

Do they sound like they wouldn't shoo off a poor, hungry plugboy from the palace's kitchen back door?

Swatch has apparently rejected his origin not only as a metaphorically working-class artist, but the fact that he could empathize with other working-class people as well, including the less fortunate and the desperate. This makes him a class traitor, by Marx's own theory.

Of course, there's a lot more nuance to Swatch and Spamton's relationship, especially the fact that Spamton isn't the perfect portrait of a poor victim and is very combative and aggressive, which doesn't make people very willing to empathize with him in the first place. There's also the power inbalance and dynamic involved in the fact that, when Spamton lived in the Pandora Palace, Swatch was his butler as well, and that might complicate things from Swatch's end.

At the end of the day, this is just my own takeaway from Swatch's words about Spamton, and Spamton's words about Swatch. This doesn't mean much for anything besides my own understanding of Deltarune and what sort of fun dynamics I can explore in fanworks, nor does it mean I am claiming it as truth, but I do think it's an interesting exercise in media analysis.

Edited to include a few more words on Spamton becoming burgoise cuz I meant to do that but forgor lmao

We see Mike as evil because we pity Spamton so much we feel like we need to blame an external force rather than the real situation which is Spamton’s own hubris and insecurity. Mike could have played a part for sure but we can’t forget that Spamton has some serious personal faults he has to take responsibility for

Like that Bojack quote, “it’s you, it’s ALL you.”

I'm replying on my UTDR metaposting blog, I hope that's fine

As more people pointed out, Chara is not a "prince", even if they were to be in the game in this sense. Toby Fox wouldn't literally misgender a character just to do a red herring in a prophecy he wrote. Second of all, Undertale and Deltarune are completely unrelated. There are themes that were introduced in Undertale that carry over to Deltarune, and there are definitely parallels between the two games, but these worlds are not the same continuity and the creator explicitly told people that they should not be thought of as the same continuity.

It also does seem weird that of all three of the characters you point as "fitting the prophecy to a tee" Kris is the only one who actually resembles the character sillouette shown in the prophecy image. You'd think either all of them match, or none of them match. It's really hard to find inconsistence like the one you're theorizing to be real in Toby's storytelling. This is simply not how these games are constructed.

List of other characters that fit the prophecy to a tee according your own logic:

- Kris, Susie, Ralsei (this i personally believe is a red herring because Ralsei is an unreliable narrator AND he doesn't resemble the sillouette of the prince of the dark as closely as Kris and Susie resemble theirs)

- Kris, Susie and Lancer (he's more of a prince than Chara because he's literally the son of a king in this same continuity)

- Frisk, Sans and Asriel (since we're putting undertale into the mix)

- The player, Monster Kid and Gaster (you have to wonder why Gaster is always associated with the dark, no? He certainly fits the role of a prince)

- Chara, Asriel back from university, The Knight

Seriously, the list goes on. If all you're evaluating is the single sentence ("A HUMAN, a MONSTER, and a PRINCE FROM THE DARK"), it is way too vague to draw any conclusions. It could literally be anyone. Chara is not in Deltarune in the same way they are in Undertale, if they're there at all. I know about the theory that they interrupt Gaster in the goner maker and I do believe it has merit, but I don't think we have enough information to say anything conclusive about Chara, the prince from the dark, or anyone else in this prophecy.

I'm sorry, but the fact that Kris, Gaster, and Chara fit the Deltarune prophecy to a tee just can not be overlooked.

P.S. And when you consider that both Chara and Gaster are shown to have knowledge of other worlds and that ALL THREE OF THESE PEOPLE KNOW OF YOUR EXISTENCE, all of a sudden it doesn't seem so coincidental.

yknow i think the fact that the utdr community tends to skew younger is a little unfortunate for how some of toby fox’s utterly brilliant writing is lost. i dont think younger people quite see the full scope of the meta horror element of video game easter eggs without having been a part of the pre-internet/early-internet world. icepalace_glaceir and egg especially i dont think will hit people quite the same if they never played games in the era before social media.

it’s hard to overemphasize how isolating playing video games was before the internet became an organized, tagged, easily-searchable universal database, or even before it existed at all.

if you were lucky, you knew maybe one other kid who played the same games you did, or had a sibling close enough in age to you to take interest. that was it. other than that, you navigated these worlds completely on your own, having to learn their rules and what their “normal” is without any outside guidance. if you were poor (and you most likely were), you only had a very small number of games that you would play and replay endlessly. you would explore every inch of terrain, examine every polygon, out of pure habit more than anything.

so when something in that familiar lattice is suddenly, unexplainably different, it’s horrifying in a way that’s really hard to put to words. it’s coming home to your solo apartment to find your furniture newly askew. it’s the unknown, the fact that all the rules you thought you understood are being broken. and through all these gnawing feelings, there’s absolutely no one you can tell who will understand, and those rare few that can will most likely not believe you. so whether it’s an easter egg, a glitch, or something else - it’s you, alone, having to newly rationalize this foreign invader to your world. will you shut the game off, hide it away on a shelf to never think about it again? or will you investigate further to try and grasp it? every individual reacts differently - but they all know the overpowering emotion that came with finding it.

it’s why we fell for mew under the truck, for san andreas’ bigfoot. almost every single one of us had some personal event, some elusive experience that sounded so unbelievable to any outsider - and yet it happened. the concept of what could and couldn’t be in a video game became muddy, uncertain. “every copy of ___ is personalized” might be a joking phrase, but that really is an accurate way to describe how it felt. or, with the fact that having a dirty cartridge could cause bizarre, unique occurrences to occur - how it actually was. some people question why one would be afraid of antipiracy screens. well, this all is exactly why.

all this is why i find utdr’s current direction for gaster so transfixing. “he” is not a character to me - to me, “he” represents this concept. of being able to peer through the tiniest crack in the foundation of a digital world, and to see something peering back at you.

i guess i should wrap this up with an example of this phenomenon that i actually personally experienced, so people don’t think i’m dramatizing this.

in the original animal crossing for gcn, there’s an incredibly rare easter egg which can occur when traveling from the main town to your island via kapn’s boat ride. there’s a very, very small chance that your boat will pass over a massive shadow, far larger than any catchable fish you can encounter in the game.

whenever this event was posted about on early internet forums and personal sites, it was met with an inevitable wave of irritation and scorn. posting about this “huge fish” would earn you the title of liar, attention seeker, or - if you managed to take a blurry photo of your CRT - hacker/troll.

but it was real. it was always real - a purposeful, scripted event so rare and specific that it could easily pass as fake. documentation nearly 20 years after the game’s release could finally confirm it as such, beyond a reasonable doubt.

but the thing is, as someone who played a lot of animal crossing, i had a personal experience that colored my view of this event very differently. i’ve come to internally refer to it as the “big fish nightmare”. it’s very much what it sounds like - a nightmare about animal crossing, where you encounter a huge fish. you might only glimpse it, or you might try to catch it, among many other things. but it involves a massive fish, and a sense of fear from the fact that it absolutely did not belong there.

the only problem is that this description isn’t a personal experience. my siblings had this dream. my friends at school had this dream. and in the tags of another post i’ve made about animal crossing fish shadows in the past, i could see complete strangers mentioning having this dream. it’s understandable why, because of how much time you spend in these games assessing fish sizes, that it might show up in your dreams in one way or another. psychologically, it’s very normal, and not something i consider any way in paranormal.

but knowing this experience, it gives me a greater insight to the visceral reaction that posting about this easter egg would garner. i have the lingering sense that, to at least one person, their stirred emotions weren’t exclusively over the thought that someone was clogging discussion with a bunch of screenshots of an edited save.

it was the thought that, somehow, the big fish that you saw in your dreams wasn’t content with staying there.

"Swatch is Crowbar" okay Mafa. Tell us more

I'll do you one better, watcher, I'll make a List:

Both are triangular

Both are in charge of well-dressed buff men (and women) (who wear bowties)

Both have horizontal-like relationships with strong women that use whips as their primary weapon and are all about commanding other things or people

There's more similarities but I'm fast approaching the image limit and tumblr doesn't like it when I do that on an ask. Here's the rest of the list:

Both can be very rude (Swatch moreso passive-aggressively or behind people's backs, but they can definitely be rude if they want to; Crowbar takes a more physical stance to rudeness)

Both take pride in their leadership, even though Swatch seems to have a better relationship with the Swatchlings than Crowbar has with the rest of the Felt

Both are middle-management (they lead other people, but also have a boss they respond to, and in both cases they respond to that person with passion and loyalty)

They're both weirdos (affectionate)

Both are bisexual royals

Both the Felt and the Swatchlings rely heavily on colors for self-identification

Knowing how many other references to Homestuck there are in Deltarune, this can't be just a Very Specific Coincidence. I'm not sure what this means in the grand scheme of things though.

On Spamton and Villany

I thought about writing this because I think reflecting on his role in the narrative is interesting

He's a villain in the sense that he's an antagonist. Literally has a mini boss battle, a secret boss battle and is the main antagonist and final boss of the alternative route. When you lay out his story and his actions he quite literally behaves like the evil corporate guy from a late 90s movie about dogs saving the day. It's impossible to deny he's a villain, even as sympathetic as his story as told by him makes him seem to be

Just because a villain is sympathetic and relatable doesn't mean that they're not a villain, and just because a character is a villain by definition doesn't mean they can't be sympathetic and relatable. More often than not, villains really do turn out to be more sympathetic and relatable simply because they need to be more developed for them to make sense as a villain (have motive and reason, etc), which isn't always the case for protagonists and heros.

That being said, Spamton is a fascinating character because while he's a villain and he's a pretty shitty person in general, his backstory, the way he frames it for the player, and his entire side quest make him extremely appealing, to the point you're pretty much willing to forget or brush aside all his bad behavior, because after all, he's nothing but a poor little meow meow

And that's exactly what he wants you to think.