Essay about Deltarune on Sidequest

I recently had the immense pleasure of writing an article about the latest chapters of Deltarune for Sidequest. This piece features some story analysis and theorizing, as well as a personal anecdote about an extremely awkward moment during my job search in my last year of grad school, but it’s mostly about the joys of retro media and the lost art of having fun. Here’s an excerpt…

Nostalgia is a difficult subject to approach. Cultural nostalgia, which often takes the form of a glorified version of an earlier decade, is a hallmark strategy of conservative political movements that attract sympathy by engendering a fantasy of a time when, supposedly, things were better. Nostalgia for childhood media can be fraught as well, especially when we view the more problematic aspects of this media from an adult perspective.

Still, nostalgia has its uses. When approached with care and attention, indulging in nostalgia can be an exercise that facilitates a rediscovery of play. In its celebration of the television and video games of an earlier era, Chapter 3 of Deltarune invites introspection into the aspects of play that a younger version of yourself understood to be “fun.”

You can read the full essay on Sidequest here:
https://sidequest.zone/2025/08/04/deltarune-remembers-how-to-have-fun/

As an aside, my corner of video game fandom spent the month of July going wild for the character Tenna, an anthropomorphic personification of a CRT television who plays a central role in Chapter 3 of Deltarune. Tenna’s status as the Summer 2025 Tumblr Sexyman is partially due to his eye-catching visual design and flashy personality, but I also get the feeling that his near-instant popularity was due to the way he speaks to a particular type of cultural malaise.

As a consequence of the concomitant collapse of social media platforms and the proliferation of AI-generated “content,” everyone is exhausted by the effort it takes to wade through (and compete with) soul-numbing machine slop. What Tenna represents is an era of media that, though it might not have been “good,” was at least intentional. My essay doesn’t touch on specific issues relating to gen-AI, but I was directly inspired to write this piece by the very enthusiastic reception of the recent chapters Deltarune in online creative communities. There’s definitely something interesting going on there culturally, I think.