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.”

You ever think about how Undertale uses Flowey to break the 4th wall, without actually breaking the 4th wall? The game merely imitates the vocabulary of 4th wall breaks...

...through the words of a grieving boy who just wants his best friend back

That's why the fallen human is essentially our "role" in the story. That's why Flowey is set up as a player parallel. From beginning to end, this was always a story about Asriel and Chara. In Undertale's story, the role of "player" is, metanarratively, the role of a ghost.

That's why the story is so heavily character driven. That's why progress is marked by helping people move on from the past. That's why the game ends (and can only truly end) by asking us to let go.

It's a ghost story. It's all a fucking ghost story.

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.

spamton is a funny horrible little bastard that exudes pure slime and sleaze. if spamton had a canon voice it would be some utterly hellish choppily bitcrushed hackjob combination of rocket raccoon, king candy, the clown from the animaniacs episode “clown and out”, bill cipher, and that horrible little demon rumplestiltskin from shrek 4, intercut with random clips of big shot autos and youtube poops. spamton has stolen someone’s gender twice and the half his personality that isnt pure concentrated essence of scumbag is obsession with becoming a pink mecha with built-in makeup because he saw mettaton once and got gender envy. the only emotions he still has the capacity to feel are hatred, hatred 2, hatred-misery flavor, and several forms of rage available only to birds and chihuahuas. spamton has rabies and every disease including several bird ones at once and is only alive because they’re all too busy fighting eachother. spamton is on a heartstopping amount of crack at all times. spamton has liead so much his nose is longer than his legs (to suck up crack more efficiently) and and spamton impales people with it. spamton looks like the guy from saw mated with a trollface. spamton is catholic but the g stands for god is dead. spamton would take candy from a baby. spamton would take a baby. spamton would get into black market organ sales. spamton spends his entire time onscreen remorselessly manipulating teenagers to get them to let him try to murder them or selling them sadistic torure-rings to get them to commit genocide and calling a teenage girl a hoochi mama multiple times. spamton is literally just flowey/chara without the power to act on the isolation-induced genocidal childmurder hate. spamton is a spam email gjinka. spamton looks like every single homestuck character at once. spamton says fuck. i guarantee “little sponge” is just toby didn’t think he could get away with calling kris a little shit. spamton is not smiling, it’s more like “i’m showing you the things i’m going to use to rip out your fucking jugular if you don’t give me your kromer right now bitch i’ll kill you I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU”. spamton is old man mcgucket if he used to be a used car salesman and when opening the back door of any establishment one must be careful to shoo away the wild spamton and it’s miniature clones with a broom lest it drop to all fours and hiss at you like a raccoon. spamton is the deltarune universe’s cut-me-own-throat dibbler. if the deltarune timeline of internet development was anything like the real world spamton is pushing 50. spamton sold cars but never had a driver’s license. spamton is either dark mettaton or mettaton 10 years from now after his mtt-tv brand falls apart. spamton’s parents are the guy in the kirby anime and ea-nasir. spamton has a typing quirk. spamton looks and sounds like the vengeful ghost of a woodpecker that drowned in a hair gel factory accident. there is a disturbingly large chance that spamton mpreg is canon. spamton would sell cryptocurrency

did i mention half of his attacks are throwing his implied mpreg spawn at you

I’m not trying to be like “Spamton was never happy” because I don’t think that’s accurate, but I don’t think that being famous was something he enjoyed as much as he makes it sound like he did.

A lot of celebrities will say that fame makes it harder to form relationships, because there’s always that question of “are they really my friend/lover/etc or do they just want to be near me because I’m famous” that lingers in the back of their minds.

Spamton probably had better relationships back when he was with the addisons, it’s easy for me to imagine him internally doubting his new friends and refusing to get overly close to them when he was a big shot, because he’s always worried about the possibility of them only liking Mr. Number 1 Rated Salesman 1997 and not the real, genuine Spamton G. Spamton that’s hidden behind his big image. 

And at this point, he doesn’t want anyone to see the genuine Spamton, that Spamton was unsuccessful and forgettable and it’s uncomfortable for him to think about who he really is. Or who he really “was,” because he’s trying his best to put his addison days behind him. He can’t fathom the idea that anyone else would want to see the genuine Spamton either, especially when he can be a big shot for them instead, so even if he made new friends that would have been supportive and would have wanted to get closer to him, he just pushes them away and stops them from forming any kind of deeper connections.

Also, it’s probably worse since he needed help to get famous. He wouldn’t be where he is without Mike and the person on the phone, and he’s so happy and grateful for his success, but it just makes his image seem all the more fake. He sees all the posters of his face around the city and thinks, is that really me? Is that really what people want me to be?

Oh god, and when he falls from grace and his business fails. That had to have been his worst fears coming true, because none of his new high-class friends were there to help him. As soon as he was no longer big, they just left him to struggle alone. 

What if he had tried to form a deeper bond with them, what if he hadn’t kept them at arm’s length the whole time and had been their friend instead of a friendly acquaintance? If there was something that he could’ve done to build those relationships, it was too late to do anything now, and he’d already left all of his old friends in the dust when he became big, so he’s burned all of his bridges. 

So Spamton has to face the consequences alone. Nobody hardly even notices him struggling. And after the neo fight, when it seems like he’s actually died, who is there to care about him? If his popular friends even noticed, they don’t comment on it, they don’t cry for him. 

The only one from his days of fame that seems to remember him? Swatch. Swatch has sympathy for him and his fate, but they’re giving him the kind of pity you’d give when you read in the paper that an old has-been celebrity died. It’s kind of them to speak of him in a sympathetic light despite everything, but at the same time it’s a cold, informal type of sympathy, not the kind of sympathy you’d show to a friend.

The only ones who on some level cared about Spamton through everything were the addisons. They pretend not to know him if asked, and if they were aware of what happened to him post-eviction, then they looked the other way, which was cruel of them. But there was probably bad blood on both sides here, and both Spamton and the addisons likely did and said some less than kind things to each other. I don’t think it’s fair to blame either party for the fallout Spamton had with them, it seems like they all had a hand in causing it.

But before everything went wrong, the addisons used to socialize with Spamton over at the cyber grill, they treated him like any other addison even back when he was small and unsuccessful. They were the only ones who even attempted to check on him after he was evicted. They go as far as to close their shops, the foundation for their sole purpose in life, just to take a moment to properly mourn him.

The addisons weren’t there for him as much as they should’ve been, but in the end, none of the people he knew when he was a big shot were willing to be a friend to him after things turned sour. It was only his old friends the addisons who still cared enough about Spamton to try to honor his memory in some way.