An Essay on Noelle brain rot ('Doerot')

Introduction

Is it just me, or does doebrainrot seem to be accelerating? I wanted to write something up, express why I personally like the character, and see if others here agreed with my assessment or not. I’m an older anon, so I’m coming at this by looking at my high school memories with the advantage of hindsight. However, that said, I’m an older anon coming at this by looking at my high school memories with the disadvantage of rose-tinted cynicism.

This essay is split into three parts. In the first, I want to start off by teasing out a few select personality traits of Noelle and trying to back up that personality assessment. In the second part, I’m going to be a faggot and describe my own high school experiences and how it feels like this hits me so hard. In the third, I want to generalize from my own experiences and list a number of common (American) high school experiences that (and this will purely be a guess) would fit a large demographic of the community playing Deltarune.

Part 1: Noelle’s Personality

I think it’s easiest to begin to explain Noelle’s personality by starting with her family situation. Noelle’s life appears to be dominated by her mother, since Rudy mentions specifically that he’s worried that he’s not ‘balancing out’ Noelle’s mother. We also get a lot of hints from city hall that Noelle’s mother is “frigid” and got her position through work rather than charisma, which likewise implies that she isn’t very charismatic nor is she very empathic. Likewise, her staff seems to indicate that she is a very demanding person to work with. Moreover, Noelle seems to be scared of her own mother, since she’d rather wait outside her own house than ask her mother if she could just drop by and pick up a spare key. Further, through solo conversations with Rudy, we get the impression that he does want to be in Noelle’s life more, but is unable to. This likewise implies that Rudy has been pushed out of a lot of Noelle’s life. In short, Noelle likely has a helicoptering mother and a slightly absent father.

A natural consequence of this is that Noelle puts a lot of focus into academics and extracurriculars, but interestingly we never hear her talk about them. That “fact by omission” is interesting, because it indicates that her motivation for these pursuits is pushed from external position rather than internally. Moreover, it’s clear she puts an intense amount of effort into academics, since she notes that she essentially had a spare “lesson plan” set up for Kris, by Berdley’s admission she practically tutors him, and most of the time that we see her, she’s carrying around a bunch of books. Now, this I don’t have evidence for other than personal, but a helicoptering mother looking for a vanity project with an absent father is a perfect goddam recipe for this sort of thing to happen and I’m not surprised that Noelle has this kind of situation given her circumstances.

Of course, this large focus on academics and extracurriculars, which is all externally imposed, and at the cost of a great deal of time and effort from Noelle means that she likely hasn’t developed herself at all. In other words, Noelle seems to have an empty inner life and personality. We can see this in not only how easily she’s manipulated in the Snowgrave route, but also how she hangs out with Berdley despite...not seeming to really enjoy his company at all. Again, from personal experience I have to say that this is also a common thing I’ve seen, where people who are extremely busy managing and juggling other tasks to the detriment of their own personality and social abilities tend to have a friend group that consists of people that they actually really despise being around and yet feel they’ve been shoed into such a position simply by going with the flow on it because of all the other things they have going on. It also explains her naive nature, easily falling into pranks, her inability to interact with Susie, and implied conversations with her father that almost seem “too” open. For what it’s worth, it also fits the “JRPGs fans are nerds” stereotype.

Part 2: Personal Connection

With that said, I think this is why Noelle hits me so hard and why I have the ‘doerot.’ I had a father who went through the divorce courts and got destroyed, and yet tried to do whatever he could for me despite the obstacles put in his way. Meanwhile, my mother was helicoptering and also a severe alcoholic, which wasn’t exactly a pleasant combination.

So, the consequence was I spent an inordinate amount of time with academics (due to my mother’s helicoptering when sober, and to get AWAY from her when she was drunk). In retrospect, I spent way too much time on academics that have not helped me in the end. Like...way too much fucking effort, and I think I misplaced my time in two ways: in the short term and in the long term.

As for in the short term, in preparing for this essay I looked back at some of my notes from high school and college. The level of detail I’d put into even just making notes was way way WAY over the top. And that’s just the notes. The effort I’d then put into assignments and studying for exams was ridiculous. It was clear that I would’ve understood the material just fine with a tenth of the effort, or that a lot of the effort I put in was in doing things that really wasn’t helping me learn the material. It felt like a lot of my time was spent to make myself and my ego “feel” like I was studying too much.

As for the long term, I went this way all the way until postdoctoral work. Now when I look back at it all, I’m really rather cynical about it. I feel like I misplaced an enormous portion of my youth, and I don’t feel like I got much of anything out of the time I put into academics. I feel like I robbed myself of a lot of interests that I could have had instead of being the boor that I am now. I feel like I’m living the consequences of that ‘lack of an inner self’ I keep mentioning when talking about Noelle. I feel like the reason I continue to play rather grindy and empty linear-plot JRPGs is likewise a consequence of this.

All this is one big reason I empathize with Noelle. When I play through or read her dialog I start self-inserting and hope that she doesn’t end up becoming like me. I feel like I’m living that old cliché daydream of going back to high school to “make my life right.”

Another thing I find really eerie is Noelle’s relation with Berdley. In high school I was likewise “shoehorned” in with another academically inclined person (call him “S”), and now looking back I realize I made high school hell for myself. Whenever I think back on when I interacted with him, I can feel this adrenaline flight response. He was just this incredibly arrogant and irritating personality to be around, and I have mixed feelings seeing Noelle and Berdley’s interactions. On the one hand, when I’m thinking of Noelle as some sort of self-insert, I start thinking of “S” and my adrenaline starts pumping and I just want to get away. On the other hand, I feel like I understand a lot better why I stuck around in a friendship with “S” that was really just toxic, and that feeling of understanding myself a little bit better makes me want to follow their interactions with a fine-toothed comb. Seriously, though, Berdley is so remarkable close in temperment to “S” that it REALLY CREEPS ME OUT. It’s a big reason I have “doerot,” I feel It’s also what makes me think that “academic overemphasis leads to poor or toxic friendgroups due to lack of developed social skills” might be a much more wide-reaching trope.

As a sidenote, thinking about Noelle got me to think about a gal I knew in high school (call her “L”). We knew each other when we were kids. She was gifted. But something dark happened. She seemed to “drop out.” She was also always so quiet. I wonder, was she going through something similar?

In short, whenever I look at Noelle, it’s like looking into a really disturbing mirror that I feel explains what was going on to me in high school way too much. So, on the one hand, I’m rooting for her in a sense, but on the other hand, I’m also cringing. It’s an interesting dynamic and feeling. In any case, she feels like an odd sort of placeholder for me to make amends with my past.

Part 3: Generalizations to the Fanbase?

From all of this, I think there are a few, key generalizable points. Lots of Noelle-fans are obviously fans of Deltarune. If they’re fans of Deltarune, then I’d infer that they also played a lot of other JRPGs (maybe Earthbound). Following the chain of inference and implication, that likely means they fit the ‘socially isolated nerd’ stereotype, which means that at least in high school they did (or are doing) well, and studied a lot, but at the expense of a richer connection or social life. All these are characteristics that make it easy to identify with Noelle and ‘root’ for her.

Conclusion

That’s more or less my theory for why there’s so much ‘doerot’ in these threads. If not with the reader themselves, players probably at least know someone like this (“L”). The consequence is that they see Noelle as a self-insert and way to see how their own life could have gone differently, or to find out what happened with that person with which they fell out of touch.

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Pub: 12 Nov 2021 00:27 UTC
Edit: 12 Nov 2021 01:02 UTC
Views: 1178