The Stanely Parable (referring to the first game) was largely about this notion of author versus audience--who is actually in control of a story when it's told? Each ending in the Stanley Parable explored different ways of resolving the power struggle--does the Narrator have power over Stanley? (Countdown, Mariella, Apartment, Freedom endings) Or does Stanley have power over the Narrator? (Wrong Choice, Zending, Not Stanley, Games)? Or maybe it's the player who has ultimate control? Or the game designer? The Stanley Parable was "about itself", but really the deeper themes I think are about the form and structure of narrative, and how narrative control is a type of power.
(also I've decided that the Homestuck Epilogues are just a worse version of the Stanley Parable, sorry everyone.)
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (referring to the second game as a whole) is also about itself, and the Stanley Parable, but is more generally about ideas of nostalgia, sequelization, and how we compare the past "great works of art" to the present. If the first game was interested in how the audience and authors of a work interact with each other, the second game is interested in how prior works of art interact with future works of art--specifically how The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe interacts with The Stanley Parable.
The overall structure of the Stanley Parable 2 (specifically referring to the Narrator's in game Stanley Parable 2, not Ultra Deluxe as a whole) is clearly riffing on the original Stanley Parable. Each ending gets a new Bucketified ending if you pick up the Bucket at the start. All the dialogue becomes about the Bucket in some way, and some endings are outright changed. For example, the Museum ending has the Female Narrator tell you to "let Stanley die"--not quit the game! It seems like each of these new endings is meant to be a reply to the original ending in some way.
These new endings reveal more and more information about the nature of Buckets. Here are some of the endings and what they reveal to us:
-
The Bucket seems to have an overriding effect on the narrative. It changes whole endings to be completely different--the Freedom ending becoming one where Stanley is trapped forever, or the Countdown Ending becoming about silly birds. This seems thematically similar to The Beginner's Guide, where Beginner's Guide!Davey Wreden ends up altering Coda's games to fit his personal desired narrative. However, instead of seemingly "illuminating" (THE LAMPPOST ANYONE?) the meaning of Coda's games, Davey's alterations end up making those games reveal more about himself--it forces the narrative of Coda's games to be about himself, not Coda. The Bucket, in the same way, overwrites the original narrative of the Stanley Parable to be, well, about Buckets!
-
Buckets have a massive influence on society. In the Bucketified Museum ending, we see how Buckets are apparently God-like entities--meant to be worshiped and treated with divine respect. It seems that Buckets are more important than people in this world. Disrespecting a Bucket is punishable by death. Everyone also has a personal Bucket which is assigned to them. It provides guidence and reassurance. Losing it, as Stanley does in the Mariella ending, can be a death sentence. A Bucket is incredibly personal and individually important.
-
The Bucket is possibly sentient, as evidenced by the times that the Narrator says that Stanley is hearing the Bucket talk. Also the Bucketified Out of Map Ending, where it seems that the Bucket is some sort of monster. The Bucket also has some sort of strong mental effect on people. In the Bucketified Apartment ending, the Narrator attempts to convience Stanley to give up the Bucket, but ends up succumbing to the same mental effect and wants the Bucket. The Bucket then seems to kill(?) the Narrator before the game resets. Similarly, in the Vent Ending we hear a man on a tape talk about how powerful and valuable the Bucket is, before he is killed by Gambhorra'ta. Stanley is also unwilling or unable to destroy the Bucket as evidenced in the Bucketified Confusion Ending, and the Narrator talks about how the Bucket is a dumb character compared to the old Stanley parable "characters" like the Adventure Line.
-
In the No Buckets Ending, we find out via the quiz show that "Everything is a Bucket"--when removing all the Buckets in the game, the Stanley Parable itself vanishes. The game is quite literally a Bucket.
-
In the original Elevator Ending, Stanley becomes incredibly famous for riding the elevator up and down over and over. He has a public speech and a huge crowd is there to welcome him. In the Bucketified Elevator Ending, Stanley thinks he is incredibly profound for putting in the number 3 over and over into the Boss's Keypad, but when he goes to the same public speech, no one shows up.
-
At it's core, a Bucket represents a piece of media as it exists in the mind of a person. They are typically cherished and beloved works of art that a person uses to guide themselves through the world. For me, this includes things like Undertale. It's important to note that a Bucket isn't actually about the specific art itself, but rather the "art in one's mind". What the actual piece of art is is less important than what the person individually thinks about it. As comparision, I've asked myself "Do I like the Homestuck that really exists? Or do I like the Homestuck that lives in my brain?" A Bucket represents the Homestuck in my brain, not the webcomic.
-
A Bucket can overwrite the actual text of a work. The Undertale that lives in my brain is probably a distored, cherry-picked version of the game that actually exists. I care so much more about Gaster and Asriel than I do, say, Undyne and Alphys. Hence, to me, Undertale is more about things like cut content, game as narrative vs game as systems, completitionism, than it is about mental health, lesbiab romance, or self-forgiveness--those themes are also in Undertale, but they aren't the themes that I carry with me.
-
It's an object you literally carry around everywhere--ever heard the phrase "That story really stuck with me"? Hence, it is incredibly hard, if not impossible to change a Bucket. Doing so by force is often painful to the person doing it, since it means losing a some of the mental foundation that makes up your worldview, and it's easy for someone else trying to destroy a Bucket to accidentally become enamoured with it (think about how many people who say they would Never Listen to 100 Gecs and then end up really liking 100 Gecs). Buckets are resiliant to change, because doing so requires reevaluating your own relationship to the original art. It's also what makes them powerful. A Bucket can speak to you--because it's media and all media can speak to you. A Bucket is powerful, because media is incredibly powerful. A valuable Bucket can be make tons of money, which is why people often fight over Buckets.
-
Note that a Bucket doesn't have to be positive--negative Buckets exist, although the above points still typically apply (you can hate a thing even if the reasons for why you hate it contradict the actual text, the reasons why you hate something can influence how you see the world, it is usually hard to get people to change their minds on a thing they dislike, etc)
-
The Stanley Parable is a Bucket--that is, it's clearly an influential and important piece of media that lots of people really loved. It influenced how people think about choice and narrative structure in video games. People, myself included, carry the Stanley Parable Bucket around with us, and can reach back to that Bucket when questions about player choice come up in discussions--the exact same way that Mariella uses the Bucket to guide and reassure her and give her answers to the "confusing questions" she encounters at work.
The New Content (that is, the content consisting of the Jump Circle seqeuence, the Memory Zone, and the Skip Button Ending) is about the Narrator's worries if his Bucket is actually true to reality, or if it's merely a convient fiction, as well as the difficulty of trying to preserve other people's Buckets whilst changing the same piece art. The Narrator initially bemoans the Jump Circle for being a stupid cashgrab joke thing, and then has us go to the Memory Zone, a museum dedicated to the original Stanley Parable. It has a bunch of screenshots of sceens from the game, trailers, and most cherished: positive reviews of the Stanley Parable. The Narrator has a shrine to various positive review of the game and talks about how he is so happy that his game was Important and Successful. The Narrator has a Stanley Parable Bucket that reassures him that he is a good game design and story teller.
(It's interesting to note the parallel here with the Beginner's Guide, where BG!Davey also has this same Bucket about Coda's work--he finds Coda's work to be a way to draw self-worth. Coda's games reassure Davey that he's a Smart Games Designer)
Of course, this idea collapses when the Narrator reads out negative Steam reviews of the game. He is upset at how the Bucket in his mind doesn't match everyone else's Bucket. He ends up creating a Skip Button in response to a negative review asking for one in a building. You try it out, skipping a few dialogues from the Narrator, but both of you realize that the exit to the building has disappeared. You press the skip button over and over, and the Narrator realizes that each time you do this, he is stuck waiting for the skipped time to pass. As you do this, the skipped time intervals get longer and longer, and until it's days, weeks, months between skips. He starts to lose his mind from the isolation and rants about various things--how you are deliberately going to hurt him by skipping, how it feels to be totally alone, isolated and trapped with nothing but your thoughts, how it was arrogant and foolish for players to demand that the Stanley Parable be anything but what it was.
After enough time skipped, the Narrator disappears, fate unknown. After some more skips, the building you're in collapses, and you are freed. You climb out of the building to find a desert, stretching far into the distance.
The game resets.
I think this ending is about the dangers of letting your Bucket become too important to you--of letting it consume you. The Narrator ties too much of his self-worth to his Bucket, and when that Bucket happens to not match reality in every aspect he wants to, he is devasted. He ends up creating a monsterous object that destroys him and the game world--transporting the player to the end of time, where it's clear that nothing about the Stanley Parable would survive. In the long run, nothing can last forever--buildings decay and get lost to the sands of time. Simiarly, no piece of art will ever matter forever--everything becomes irrelevant eventually and forgotten. All art dies--so don't tie yourself to it. If you need what you make to relevant and loved by everyone for eternity, you will never ever be able to satiate that desire, and it will destroy you.
The Narrator announces the Stanley Parable 2 with his own "convention", where he shows off the new "features" for his game. Most of those features are terrible or janky nonsense.
The Narrator tries to make the Stanley Parable 2 in order to "fix" the nonsense non-content shown in the New Content route that is, he finds the Ultra Deluxe's Jump Circle to be a stupid, greedy attempt to cash in on the Stanley Parable and retroactively harms the quality of the original game. This is similar to how audiences will bemoan lazy cash-ins or how some sequel has Retroactively Ruined the original of some work (Even though the original work is still there and has actually changed). It's the tarnishing of a Bucket, essentially.
However, the Narrator's approach to these new features means he is unable to make something good. He went in with the idea that he could just "organize some features around a central theme" and let the core of the game magically spring up from there. None of his features can come together to make a whole because of this. He doesn't really know what he wants to do with his hypothetical sequel--questions like "what would your sequel to do expand upon the original ideas in the first game" go unanswered by the Narrator in favor of things like "what if Infinite Hole". In the same way that companies which churn out cheap imitations of an original while failing to understand what makes the original work in the first place, the Narrator is unable to understand why the Stanley Parable was interesting in the first place--as he says, he just has a "collection of gags".
Ultimately, I think what this says is that not all pieces of art require or benefit from a sequel--if the Stanley Parable was a masterpiece, as the Narrator seems think it is in Skip Button, then there is nothing you can add to improve or fix it. If the Stanley Parable is fine as it is, then why make a Stanley Parable 2? What do you have to bring to the table?
I've said before that there's a number of parallels between Ultra Deluxe and The Beginner's Guide. In a lot of ways, both Stanley Parables and the Beginner's Guide are about the same thing: Who has control over the narrative? The Stanley Parable's characters fight over control for the game's narrative--the player at odds with the game designer over the intended way of playing the game, with no clear winner on who really is in control, with the narrative being. The Beginner's Guide instead sets the conflict around the narratives people craft about creators based off their creations--the player's desire to know more about the author is pitted against the author's wishes to make the story their own. The game concludes that, ultimately, it's impossible to really know someone from their work--the author really is in controll and the audience, no matter what they may read into the game, never get any close to being able to accessing the author's true thoughts (to claim otherwise is to try to write the narrative of the author's life, something only the author has control over). Finally, the Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe sets its conflict between the game as it exists in the mind of the player and the intended idea--not a question of intended play or choice as the original game was, but instead a question about what a work of art mean, and who gets to control what it means--who makes and controls the Bucket. It seems like it concludes that, while we do craft our own Buckets, we don't have full control over their influence--a game can grow to be much larger than the developer originally intended, to the point where it can become somewhat monsterous--setting expectations so high it's impossible to make anything afterwards without being compared to it or causing a creator to mistake any dislike of the game to being an attack on the creator. We each get our own Bucket we have absolute control over, but that Bucket has still has influence over us. Really, the conflict takes place outside of the game--in how you want to reevalutate your relationship to the Stanley Parable (or any other media, really)--what sort of Bucket do you want?