"Swatch Is Crowbar" Okay Mafa. Tell Us More

"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.

I feel like Spamton would enjoy gambling, slot machines especially. I’m not sure why, it’s just a thought I had

I don't think so. He does say he is not in it for the money, but for the freedom. Plus you tend to lose more money than you gain...He would not want to re-live that.

I did hear a long time ago that casinos are apparently designed in such a way that it's easy to get lost in, and I think he would hate that.

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.”

"the player is a character in deltarune" not as in "the player is not us" but as in "we are playing a role in a role-playing game, and that role comes with certain characteristics that we are assumed to have. there is a construct of 'player' that the game assumes we are."

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

I went ahead and did some important setting maintenance to this blog, including setting up a real theme. Let me know if it looks cool enough, i'm still tinkering with colors. I've got some good metaposts cooking in the oven right now to share