Your Best Nightmare removed?

I find it odd that the entire section for Your Best Nightmare was entirely removed from DR's leitmotif page on the basis that Susie isn't Flowey when Deltarune already deals in using motifs more thematically. With it's very clear appearance in The Dark Truth it seems like the point of it is less to connect it to Flowey and more to incite fear and unease in the listeners who recognize it, especially with Deltarune being a game made for people who've played Undertale and it's incredibly limited use in Undertale proper. It just seems strange to me to imply it's just a coincidence?

2 Likes

I think upon listening to Susie's themes again they personally don't sound nearly as much like Your Best Nightmare to me as I remembered (the end of Imminent Death seems the closest out of the Susie-related ones), but I do think that whatever's been going on with the leitmotif page lately has seemed very aggressive and poorly communicated. I guess it's the nature of only having the edit summary to communicate these things in being nigh-unworkable when talking about music, but it seems like things keep getting removed with little more explanation than what basically amounts to "Nuh-uh".

Some of the cuts kind of feel like the approach here is refusing to believe that Toby Fox is also capable of noticing when he makes a song that sounds kind of similar to another song that doesn't have exactly the same notes...I know saying something like that would risk opening the floodgates to random nonsense, but also like. That one part of Burning Eyes is obviously supposed to remind you of BAaTH/Power of NEO. Come on. (Not an invitation for anyone to try to argue with me about Burning Eyes.)

Those edits did not come from nowhere. We are currently working on a rework of the page, and we are discussing the details over on our Discord server. This the ideal place for discussing wiki matters.

The editor's reasoning was that the intervals don't match up at all between these tracks and Your Best Nightmare. It's easiest to discuss these things when we can directly compare transcriptions of the parts being referenced — can you provide those? It's not enough for something to "sound similar" for us to claim that it has a motif, otherwise the article would be full of very dubious claims.

I agree with you, and sorry about that. The changes being made recently are a result of a months long discussion about restructuring the Leitmotifs pages on both wikis. I mostly left Gil to lead this effort, and he mentioned a bit ago that he'd make a post in Discussions to discuss this, but, being both busy with real life and other tasks relating to the wiki's infrastructure, the efforts to coordinate and communicate all this have been slow. So in the meantime, Photon started removing claims that he believes are dubious from the Leitmotifs article. I've mostly been keeping myself out of this, save for attempting to prevent edit wars.

The Leitmotifs articles have long been a target of users adding very dubious claims to them and it takes a lot more effort to verify these than for any other article. You first have to listen to the track (did the editor provide a timestamp?), listen to the motif (do we have sheet music/audio of it on the article?), and if the referenced motif is particularly short or in an otherwise unusual place in the track you'd have to find the relevant sheet music and notes for that particular part. We've been having trouble with this since 2016. Lately, we've started telling people that it's best to put additions up for discussion before making changes to the page, because it's really frequent that something "sounds similar" but musically doesn't make sense to be a motif.

I won't argue about whether Toby intends certain tracks to evoke other tracks (for instance, I agree that Burning Eyes reminds me of Power of NEO), but that isn't relevant to a discussion on motifs or leitmotifs, and it definitely isn't cause to edit the wiki page on them. Feel free to discuss interesting musical similarities elsewhere (like these discussions), though.

In general, I think Kocka's response above is very good.

I re-added these tracks while renaming the section to The Dark Truth for now. To be clear, this is all up for discussion.

As for BAaTH in BURNING EYES... I don't know, it's 6 notes, and the last 2 don't even properly match the ones in BAaTH. I'm not sure what argument could be made there musically, and I'm especially not sure what would be the lore reason for this. But if you feel strongly about it maybe it's best you start a different post on that topic. :P

Ah, I see. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a proper notice on the Leitmotifs page about how they need to be discussed first? I've only been seeing the edits pop up occasionally, but it seems like mostly all that gets added in that vein are comments in sections like "Don't put this one specific song back unless you can explain it", so it may just be better to have something at the top of the page about it if this sort of thing will probably keep coming up.
There's kind of been no context for what's been going on with the page if you're not in the Discord server (and I'm still not, so I speak from experience), so I feel like that's probably just been making people kind of confused and annoyed about it all, since from this perspective it just seems like things that have been long-accepted have been disappearing randomly.

There's an edit notice at the top of the page saying this already. I guess it's not particularly visible?

I think it's better now. I removed the notice signifying the protection level of the page and changed the message box color for the edit notice.