Irrigoed Bones @cringy-undertale-theorizer - Tumblr Blog

Unshattering Gaster: A Deltarune Megatheory

Introduction: Who's This Wise Guy?

Hi, I'm Toast. My main handle these days is AbsurdToastling, and here on tumblr, I drop the "absurd" for simply the "toastling", but I sure still act the part! And I'm something of an Undertale fan. I guess you could say I was even a bit obsessive!

Upon first playing through it in 2017, I was profoundly moved by the characters, and the world, and the story, and the music, and the emotion, and… well, everything, I guess. I ate up just about every little piece of Undertale content that I could. Maybe not so much in the way of fan content, really, but I did what I do best with things I think are the best, and I hyperbly focused my autistic mind to learn every little secret and piece of trivia about the game and its background and chance events as I could find.

By 2018, I knew just about everything there was to know about the game, and like everyone else who tore into the game that deeply, I was pretty damn fascinated with the character idea of W.D. Gaster. I’d heard every theory and knew every line of text in reference to him by heart, but had never really considered him to be much more than a pastiche of the ideas of internet video game creepypastas and hidden characters as a whole.

I thought, as many came to think over time, and as some still believe to this day, that Gaster was something of a joke by Toby – something just hidden enough that normal people would likely never find him, but in plain sight enough that theory crafters, game decompilers, and super nerds like him would find his traces and learn how to trigger his events manually.

I thought that the intent was that everything about him was supposed to be some super rare, typically unreproducible chance event, the kind of thing that would prompt people to talk and theorize and spread rumors about these weird characters or secret doors they found once but could never find again, odd little events and aberrations that no one else seemed to encounter. A modern day video game urban legend built from the ground up to spread like wildfire across the modern day playgrounds of internet social media.

Given the messages found buried in the code of the game’s initial releases, things didn’t quite go the way Toby had expected – or asked. There was a subsection of the fandom that had essentially gone ‘mad scientist’ themselves, disregarding the intended message or experience of the game to uncover its secrets and spread them far and wide for all to see like a video game paparazzo, laying bare every flowery scandal and mystery man artifact the Dogfox had tried to hide.

And of all these things, nothing tickled the theorist’s brain quite like Gaster. The character intended to be an urban legend became instead a prerequisite piece of knowledge and primary focus of theorycraft for any would-be Undertale superfan, your own personal Anti-Jesus gateway into dark yet darker depths of the fandom’s more dedicated lorekeepers.

But I never fully commit to that plunge.

I'm not terribly social, to be very honest with you. I don't interact in fandoms very much, and on the odd occasion that I do, I quickly form a tiny clique and almost never stray outside of it. To put it simply, I’m more interested in being a fan than I am in being in a fandom. When I started Undertale, I arrived almost 2 years late to the party, as is often the case for me with just about any piece of popular media.

This is very intentional on my part, too, as it helps me avoid as much extraneous fan nonsense as possible and cut right to the heart of what actually matters to me. By the time I arrive, the more dramatic fairweather fans have already moved on, the most popular fanons have already been established, and the first several generations of theorycraft have already come and gone. Whatever still remains upon my arrival is thus much more solidly backed up and, as such, more interesting to start deep diving into.

But all of this also means that, when I finally made my debut as the New Home Wing Dings’ #1 New Fan, a lot of what I had to say, others had already said before me. A lot of my theories were built on foundations laid by those who were there from the beginning, and whatever little flairs all my own I had to add onto them weren’t terribly important contrasted with the breadth of what was already there before me. So I just kept it to myself and my few other Undertale-playing friends. I saw no need in beating a shattered horse. And besides, I was pretty confident Gaster was just a joke, anyway.

Deltarune Chapter 1 dropped out of nowhere in October of 2018. Of course, Undertale superfan that I was, I tried it. But I didn't like it. I got to around the Field of Hopes and Dreams and immediately recognized it as a certified banger, but put the game down to do other things and never felt compelled to pick it up again.

"Toby lost his touch", I thought.

"The music wasn't really gripping me", I mistook.

"Susie is bad and annoying," I gaslit myself.

Flash forward some 3 years later, and with the arrival of Chapter 2, the internet promptly exploded over the banana, the funny little e-mail man, and the tiny little deer girl we could traumatize if we wanted, provided did some really weirdly specific fucked up shit in-game. Even while watching from afar, I was intrigued by all of it, of course – especially after hearing for myself just how much of a banger Big Shot was – but I also saw how long the wait was between Chapters 1 and 2, and despite my intrigue, it gave me considerable pause.

See, I have a rule: I don't partake in unfinished media. Not if it's finishability is uncertain or impossible, anyway.

For shows, this means I don't watch anything that was canceled before it concluded. For books, I don't read series whose authors I know died or gave up before it ended. And for games, this means I never play something that's releasing in chunks until everything is out to play at once.

With video games in particular, this rule comes from my long history playing Pokemon fangames. A lot of the best ones, especially nowadays, never release all at once – they're passion projects by unpaid teens and fans, so I don't hold that against them, but I’ve been burned by one too many broken promises or slow as molasses update cycles. Now to be fair, it's not as if this is their job, they just want to get out what they can when they can while they still feel like doing it. But I find that I just don't like the format.

By the time a new part is released – which could take anywhere from months to years – I've already forgotten everything about the gameplay, my party or equipment composition, the overarching story, small little character details, and I always just end up having to start over from scratch anyway, and frankly, it pisses me off.

Pokemon Reborn, one of the series’ largest scale fangames, took more than a decade to finish, for example. So I never touched it until it finished. And I do not regret that choice, even with as fun as I found it to be to finally play in the end. So that was to be my rule with Deltarune, too.

But... it nagged at me. And so did my friends. They were having fun, and wanted to know what I'd have to say. They thought I'd love it. I was beginning to think I'd love it! Chapter 2 had such a different feel from 1 from what screenshots I’d seen, what I’d heard others say, the theories that were being crafted. It seemed like everything I’d hoped an Undertale followup would be and more.

Flash forward to 2025, and Chapters 3+4 were dropping just before my birthday, literal days. So, I finally decided to bite the bullet, and bought the whole game to this point from Chapters 1 to 4 as a birthday present to myself.

Suffice it to say, I loved it. I've been spinning theories with friends ever since. And now... for the first time ever since becoming an Undertale fan all those years ago, or a Deltarune fan just last month, I am ready to share my theories with the wider world and engage with the fandom at large.

As of the time of me writing this intro, the date is July 13th, 2025. I’ve never written anything like this before and I have no clue when this will be finished or how novel any of my ideas will be by the time it finally is and is actually tossed haphazardly online like a bone to a dog for all to read.

But I’m going to give it an honest go.

Until I’ve finished this very long, complex breakdown and Grand Unified Theory of Deltarune, I will not be watching or reading any other people’s theories or ideas as to keep things as original and consistent as possible. Thus, if I am to refer to anybody else’s theories, they will all strictly be from the Undertale era and have as little to do with Deltarune’s as possible.

Now, with all that being said, here’s what I’ve come up with.

I give to you, The Unshattering of W.D. Gaster.

Table of Contents: I. What We Must Accept Is True II. Who is The Angel? -IIa. We Can Get to That Heaven! III. Only Your Choices Matter, Kris IV. You Must Construct Additional Vessels V. 666xFallenXAngelx666 VI. A Deal with the Devil -VIa. Spamton & The Great Receiver -VIb. Desstined Pain -VIc. Asgore Goes Caroling -VId. Kris Washes Their Hands -VIe. Bringing It All Back Home -VIf. Noelle, No How -VIg. G is for Goner VII. The Old Song from the Sea -VIIa. The Freedom Motif -VIIb. Something More Important than The End VIII. Elsewhere, It’s Raining Cats and Dogs -VIIIa. It’s Them, Your Best Friend -VIIIb. It’s Them? Your Grocer??? -VIIIc. Equals Opposite -VIIId. True Freedom IX: The Unshattering of W.D. Gaster -IXa. Pink Odds, Yellow Ends

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Part I: What We Must Accept As True

But wait! There’s more! But this part should be pretty quick, ast least quicker than the preamble.

This theory begins from a couple of starting presuppositions, things that we must first accept as being true before we can go any further, but which are all, for the most part, pretty heavily supported by the text of Deltarune and Undertale both. And there are really only four, all of which will be touched in in greater detail later on in this incredibly long post.

First, W.D. Gaster was not a joke, and is more relevant to Deltarune than he ever was to Undertale.

There are a lot of different ways you can frame this presupposition that don't really matter much to the rest of this theory – you can think that there are multiple Gasters (as "ANOTHER HIM" might imply) who suffered similar fates, or that he was never really part of Undertale's universe to begin with… but outside of his intentions, these dressing details don’t really matter.

At this point, the mountain of circumstantial evidence for Gaster’s existence is so high, it would be more of a surprise if he wasn't somehow involved. Therefore, I think it’s pretty safe to presume he’s real, and as this Grand Unified Theory is literally named after him, obviously, you must accept this as fact as well if we’re going to go any further.

Second, Kris is in conflict with the SOUL, which represents us the player and our control over them as much as it does their own human soul, but is not themselves evil, or Chara, or a demon, or anything like that. But, neither are we evil, or Chara, or Gaster, or anything intentionally or unintentionally nefarious like that. Why we are in conflict, I will explain in greater detail a little further on, but for now, we must accept that the two of us are not always on the same side. But neither are we sworn enemies, either.

What’s more, we must also accept that Kris and their personality and motivations are all the same across all "routes" in the game, including the "weird route", "neutral route", and what I will be calling the "secrets route" from this point on, regardless of however the fandom has elected to refer to them to this point. Firstly because I can't be assed to find out what people have actually been calling it, and secondly because I think it's a more fitting name when taken in context with this theory. You'll see why later on.

Either way, no matter the route, Kris’ motivationsdo not change.

Third, Sans is originally from the Deltarune universe. This isn't even a theory at this point, nor is it particularly subtextual, it's just straight up fact. Go play through Undertale again if you don’t believe me, or watch clips of his conversation at the MTT Resort, or the descriptions of the items in the workshop behind his house, or everything he says in Genocide, and *especially* True Pacifist as you try to save him during the God of Hyperdeath Asriel fight.

This is the world Sans originally came from, and for better or worse, this is where his dealings with Gaster begin and end. Gaster likely no longer exists in Undertale's universe by the time Sans arrives, but Sans likely remains very, very familiar with him, regardless... or, ANOTHER HIM, as the case might end up being.

But this means a lot of classic Sans theories are being unceremoniously dumped out the window right off rip. He's not a former assistant to Gaster, nor is he one of the "two" Gaster mentions in Entry 17. He might be related to Gaster, as both they and Papyrus are all named after fonts, but perhaps not terribly closely. Sans is not a piece of the shattered Gaster, either – though, he might very well be holding on to part of him. But we'll dig a little deeper into that idea later.

Fourth, and finally, Dess Holiday, long-lost sister of Noelle, is the Roaring Knight. I think this is pretty much just confirmed by the end of Chapter 3, albeit somewhat ambiguously, but it is absolutely critical to everything to follow that we accept that Dess Holiday is the Roaring Knight and always has been.

And there. Now that all that's out of the way, we can get into

Part II: Who is The Angel?

The Angel is you.

The Angel is me.

The Angel is us,

The truth of the prophecy.

In Undertale and Deltarune both, there is a prophecy, and in that prophecy, a familiar icon is universal. It’s on Toriel’s gown when we first meet her in the Ruins and was adopted as the symbol of monsterkind as it became their greatest source of hope (and later, despair), and is even more front-and-center in the game named after its visage, the mysterious delta rune.

In Undertale, Waterfall shopkeeper and living fossil Gerson Boom explains the prophecy to us and names the sigil behind him which represents it. According to him, it’s the prophecy of an “Angel”, one who has seen the surface and will one day descend into the Underground and set monsters free.

It’s heavily implied that following the fall of the first human, Chara, this prophecy was adopted as a message of hope by monsterkind, who believed this fallen human to be that Angel. And why wouldn’t they? Near as we can tell, monsters only knew of the existence of humans and monsters and nothing more.

Unlike Deltarune, Undertale’s is a world conspicuously devoid of any religion or religious imagery, so the “Angel” designation was always supposed to be metaphorical. And in a colloquial sense, an Angel is something kind, something innocent more than it is divine, as an Angel would be incapable of sin. And what could be more innocent in this world than a child?

In this era, it was believed that, somehow, together, Chara and Asriel as a human and monster hand-ion-hand could break the barrier and lead to a future where peace could be achieved between the two races and monsters could once again go free. But as we all know, this does not come to pass. Chara takes their own life, Asriel loses his in turn, and the Underground falls into despair. The Queen departs from the capitol and is never seen again, the King declares war on humankind, and the hunt for human souls officially begins.

By the time Frisk arrives, Gerson explains that, lately, people have taken a different outlook on the Angel of The Prophecy. That in reality, the only Angel that is coming for them is the Angel of Death, there to set them free from the mortal coil and leave the Underground empty by leaving it devoid of life.

In either interpretation, he notes that the true meaning of the symbol has been lost to time, implying even these interpretations of the prophecy, or even the prophecy in and of itself – in both its hopeful and despairing form alike – are just permutations of the original message, reinterpretations of a far older symbol. He says that when he looks at the delta rune and its Angel, he just thinks it’s neat. He pays it no mind.

But it’s not hard to see that the prophecy was actually true all along. And not only was it true, both interpretations of it were true, depending on what route of Undertale we choose to take.

Undertale was a game that very heavily emphasized its multi-route, multi-ending nature, with just about every minute facet of its being having been carefully constructed with this multiple choice nature in mind. From freedom to annihilation with a myriad of neutral routes in-between, in most endings, while the status quo may change, the entrapment of the monsters remains. But it is on those two routes on the most opposing extremes that the game’s real legacy was built, and the truth comes into focus.

Named Pacifist and Genocide respectively, while these names are unofficial, they pretty cleanly describe what each route entails. In one, we spare everyone and kill no one, briefly restoring Asriel to life and breaking the barrier to set all monsters free. In the other, we spare no one and kill everyone, emptying the Underground of life before moving on to the wider world beyond and erasing it, too.

In other words, it’s exactly as the prophecy describes. An “Angel” that has seen the surface descends from above and the underground goes empty.

The monsters assumed that this Angel was Chara. Most players assume it was Frisk. Some believe it to be both Frisk and Chara, as Chara is a constant presence in all routes of Undertale according to the narrachara theory (its own separate bag of worms about which people are highly opinionated on the exact interpretation of, but for the sake of clarity, I subscribe to this now defunct blog’s extremely detailed account of the theory).

I believe that these assumptions are wrong, however. The Angel and the prophecy were never referring to Chara, or Frisk, or any other character in that world. It was referring to us. It is only when we arrive and insert ourselves into the story that anything actually starts to change. Flowey loses his SAVE file and control over the timeline, and the countdown begins toward a final conclusion, good or bad, for all monsterkind.

Flowey assumes it’s because of Chara’s Determination. Some fans assume it’s because of Frisk’s. But in reality it’s neither. We are the real reason why, and Chara and Frisk simply facilitate our ability to do so. They are not themselves the Angel, but they are integral to our ability to do anything and change anything in this world. Through them as our avatar, we make the choices that determine the fate of the entire Underground. We are the deciders, and they are our facilitators.

This is the understanding that will formulate the base level of the entire theory to come, so I will state it once more for clarity’s sake. In Undertale, we, the Angel, are the deciders of the fate of the world, and Chara and Frisk facilitate our ability to save or destroy it at our leisure.

Shifting focus now to Deltarune, despite being more front-and-center and expounded upon than ever before, the Angel and its associated prophecy, and even the titular delta rune itself, are all left even more ambiguous.

In the light world, it is known as a prophecy, while among the darkners it is referred to (at first) as the Legend of the Delta Rune. Given what Gerson later tells us in Chapter 4 about writing our own endings, I think this distinction in nomenclature between the worlds is more important than it might seem on the surface.

Regardless of what it’s called though, the broad strokes appear the same. As the story goes…

Once upon a time, a LEGEND was whispered among shadows. It was a LEGEND of HOPE. It was a LEGEND of DREAMS. It was a LEGEND of LIGHT. It was a LEGEND of DARK. This is the legend of DELTA RUNE For millenia, LIGHT and DARK have lived in balance, Bringing peace to the WORLD. But if this harmony were to shatter... a terrible calamity would occur. The sky will run black with terror And the land will crack with fear. Then, her heart pounding... The EARTH will draw her final breath. Only then, shining with hope... Three HEROES appear at WORLDS' edge. A HUMAN, A MONSTER, And a PRINCE FROM THE DARK. Only they can seal the fountains And banish the ANGEL'S HEAVEN. Only then will balance be restored, And the WORLD saved from destruction. Today, the FOUNTAIN OF DARKNESS- The geyser that gives this land form- Stands tall at the center of the kingdom. But recently, another fountain has appeared on the horizon... And with it, the balance of LIGHT and DARK begins to shift...

For the most part, it’s pretty standard fare for a by-the-numbers prophetic RPG adventure. Of course, being a Toby Fox game, it’s anything but standard, but what stands out most to me, and what I would like to draw your attention to the most, is one term in particular…

The ANGEL’S HEAVEN.

Part IIa: We Can Get to That Heaven!

This is not the first time Undertale superfans will have seen this term before; the ANGEL’S HEAVEN, presented to us in call caps so that we know that it’s extra important.

Prior to Deltarune Chapter 1’s surprise release on Halloween day 2018, the official Undertale twitter account was “hacked”. Some cryptic messages were shared that are heavily implied and broadly assumed to be from W.D. Gaster, messages that refer to and continue on in the “survey program” later linked to by the account – a survey program that we quickly discover to be Deltarune Chapter 1 in disguise.

But even before all this, all the way back in 2016, on the Undertale official website, a hidden image called him.png could be found. In it is depicted a message, written in all caps wingdings font, that makes the first official mention of the ANGEL’S HEAVEN a full 2 years before Deltarune’s release:

(Screenshot and translation sourced from Reddit)

Two lines ripped straight from the prophecy, the Legend of the Delta Rune. What does this mean?

In Deltarune, there is a lot of focus put on the Angel and the prophecy both together and apart from one another. Far more than there is in Undertale, where it is a lone shopkeep and a single ancient slab of text that makes any mention of it. In Deltarune meanwhile, the prophecy is more than just a prophecy. To the lightners, it is a religion unto itself. At the very least, it’s the basis for one. It is so strongly revered, the Angel spoken of within it is seen as being akin to a deity, and hymns are sung of it and to it in Hometown’s church, where children dress up as it in community plays.

And one child in particular dresses up as this Angel more than any other – Noelle Holiday. A childhood friend of Kris and their older brother Asriel, and the youngest daughter of Asgore’s best friend from college and the best man at his wedding, Rudy Holiday.

Noelle is interesting enough in her own right, and there’s a lot that can be said and theorized about her (and will be later on), but ultimately, she doesn’t factor into the basement level of this theory right now too much beyond the fact that she, in reference to the infamous holiday reindeer Rudolph before her, is little more than a great big red-nosed herring.

This is because one of the most defining visual and textual traits of Noelle is that she is very, very strongly associated with the Angel. As previously stated, she always played the Angel in church plays as a child, but more than that, when she enters a dark world for the first time in Chapter 2, she’s wearing wings and a gown like any proper angel would.

Noelle is innocent and naive and seemingly solely well-intentioned without a bad mote of dust in her fearful, blood-filled body. An entire route of the game’s story is predicated on corrupting and controlling her through various out-of-the-way and not-at-all-clearly-marked means. But she is absolutely not, in any sort of literal sense, the Angel. Because beyond just her, there are other mentions, other depictions, of the Angel in the game.

In Rudy's room in the hospital, for example, there is an Angel figurine, said to have been made by Noelle and her older sister Dess in youth group. On the surface this would again seem to be hinting that Noelle – or if not her, then perhaps Dess – is the Angel, but I think this just goes to show that while she is not the Angel, she is still critically important to it and its purposes. Which she most definitely is, as she and her family are clearly key to the entire plot of Deltarune – but more on that later.

There is one more instance in which a faceless figurine of the Angel appears however, one that is much more relevant to the plot and to our theory, and also much more prominent and difficult to miss for us, the player. And that is in Chapter 4, in Noelle's basement…

...where it falls and traps the SOUL Kris has removed from their chest. The SOUL which represents us. The Player. We're even lit up in a spotlight, as though it is our very own halo, just to really hammer home just what it is that’s being implied here.

Deltarune's universe seems in a lot of ways to be a funhouse mirror version of Undertale's. Or... perhaps it's more accurate to say that it’s the other way around, given just how long Toby's been plotting out and thinking about Deltarune and its literal fever dream of an ending. But however you want to look at it, the two worlds share characters, themes, music, elemental pieces of lore, and there are a lot of jokes, statements, and allusions that don’t really hit or make any sense unless you’ve played Undertale first.

But similarly, there are just as many jokes, statements, and allusions in Undertale that take on a whole new meaning or make a whole lot more sense after you’ve started playing Deltarune. Just about anything and everything involving Sans, for example, including the riverperson’s mysterious mention of being aware of “the man from the other world”.

All this means you can actaully get pretty far in either game when it comes to predicting plot beats, character arcs, or story elements by using the other as a reference point and then asking "Now what if this character/element veered to the left instead of the right?" And while that won't always get you to 100% the right place, and in fact it usually won't, it'll get you a helluva lot deeper into the right ballparks than you might initially think.

There is a lot that is shared thematically between the games, so it's not much of a stretch to assume that the nature of the prophecy and the Angel may be no different, which is what brings me back to Undertale and the nature of the ANGEL’S HEAVEN that Kris and co. are so prophesied to banish in Deltarune.

Keeping in mind that we ourselves are the Angel, the one big element of the prophecy that is shared between games – games where everything else is either an odd reflection of what we knew before or otherwise something entirely new painted on top of it – then as Undertale went on to show, as that Angel, we are capable of either bestowing salvation or inflicting damnation depending on the actions we take and the choices we make.

Back in Part 1, when I established what we must assume is true, I said Kris and their motivations remain static across all routes, and I 100% stand by this. However, there is a caveat, and that is that we do not. Whether or not the Angel is an enemy to be fought or a helping hand to hold onto is entirely up to us.

“But wait,” you may be wanting interrupt, “isn't it implied, if not outright stated by Deltarune, the game, that our choices don't matter? That there’s only one ending?”

Well, about that...

Part III: Only Your Choices Matter, Kris

As the game goes out of its way to make abundantly clear for us again and again and again, we are absolutely not in any way, shape, or form, or under any circumstances ever to be confused, with actually being Kris Dreemurr.

Deltarune is not a role playing game in as much as it is a role hijacking game – Kris is their own person, someone far beyond some voiceless vessel for us to play the game through, and this is made clear to us as early into the game as the initial survey presented to us by the mysterious and presumably translated voice of one W.D. Gaster. We may control the SOUL, but we do not control Kris' SOUL.

Does that make sense? Maybe not. But it will.

As we can see in the screenshot above from our first meeting with Annual Best Girl Award Winner 7 Years in a Row, Susie Deltarune, and as was also hinted at earlier on by Gaster’s survey, it would seem to be that our choices don’t actually matter to the same extent they did in Undertale. And there’s a lot more than just some in-game text to back that up – text which can just as easily be construed as being directed at characters within the game more than it is at us. It’s in the game’s marketing, as well.

On Steam, as well as being described as a game for people who’ve finished Undertale, Deltarune is also described as a game that only has one ending.

Unlike Undertale, with its dozens of different endings and three distinct routes, Deltarune is and has always been sold to us by Toby as only having one great, big, mysterious, all-inspiring ending. An ending so powerful, so important, that when it came to him in a literal fever dream like a vision from an angry god, he had to reshape the modern gaming landscape in his image just to gain the experience necessary to see it through.

This, in conjunction with how our attempt at a vessel and our first meeting with Susie ultimately turn out, really would seem to suggest that none of our choices in Deltarune matter.

But…

Remember a paragraph or so back when I mentioned that this sort of text could also be construed as being directed at characters within the game? Well, in that scene, Susie wasn’t breaking the fourth wall and talking to us, she was actually talking to Kris. And I don’t just think that distinction is important, I think it’s the most thematically relevant line in the entire game. Because as it happens, ironically, I believe it’s the other way around. I believe Kris’ choices are the only ones that do matter. At all. Forever.

We are not Kris. Kris is not us. This much is beyond contention and has been hammered home to us again and again and again and again, stated plainly to us by the game itself right at the start. Our choices don’t matter.

Meanwhile, outside of the game, we’ve also been told by Toby that there’s only one ending, and when we take a step back and see how Undertale and Deltarune reflect and contrast each other in so many other places, this would seem to make a good bit of sense. Remember in Part 2 how I talked about how the two inform one another, and how going left where one would go right would often land you relatively close to the truth of the matter? Yeah, same thing applies here.

And yet…

When you look at the chapters that have been released to us so far, we have seen through our very own gameplay through things like the unlocking of secret bosses, the collection of shadow crystals, or the instigation of the “weird route”, that this is not strictly true. Not only is there more than one variation of the endings to each chapter depending on what we do or don’t do, all of these variations seem to be predicated entirely on our choices.

The events we do or don't trigger, the answers we give when presented with options in dialogue, the very dialogue paths we choose to explore or leave alone – all of these things are remembered and kept track of by the game, same as they were in Undertale. All of this means that your experience of Deltarune and the story beats you get are likely going to be different from mine, from your friends', from the person you watch play the game online, all depending on what you do or don't choose to do or are even aware that you have the option to choose to do.

This seems to fly in the face of the notion most broadly accepted by the community that in Deltarune, our choices don't matter. And the mere existence of the weird route, a path so far afield of the regular story in which Noelle is corrupted and Kris is further traumatized and Berdly is fucking dead, no matter how esoteric and out-of-the-way it is to trigger, all on its own seems to be suggesting pretty damn strongly that it’s headed for a completely different ending than your ordinary play through, if not also a swifter one.

But these plot line divergences are not exclusive to the weird route. You can also encounter new dialogue or tidbits of lore and meet with new characters or fight secret bosses by engaging in what I call the “secrets route”. This secrets route, as its name suggests, is triggered by thoroughly exploring and pushing the boundaries of the game and what it presents you with without going so far as to make the world worse by killing or corrupting any of its characters.

At the end of each chapter, as you suss out these new secrets, you end up fighting a hidden boss substantially more challenging than any other encounters in the game, and by besting them in combat, you collect shadow crystals for purposes yet unknown.

At first, it was to create an item called the Shadow Mantle at the suggestion of the shopkeeper Seam, an item of clothing he suggests to be necessary if we are to survive a particularly gruesome fate, and this does ultimately prove to be true – though in a way I’m sure nobody quite expected, in which we must first fight and best this Shadow Mantle, as well, before we can actually acquire it.

But the Mantle and the Crystals are interesting objects which hint at deeper secrets yet to be discovered at the core of Deltarune proper. The Mantle for example is sentient and alive, and speaks as if it knows Kris, taunting them, while the crystals are invisible to the naked eye and show no evidence of existence beyond the shadows that they cast. Yet, by looking through them in the Dark World, you catch a glimpse of where you really are beyond the dark.

All of these things introduce new story elements and produce encounters and scenarios that change the flow of that story, such as the team pushing back the Roaring Knight, only for Kris to be knighted in turn and receive a shard of its blade, or Spamton ascending to echelons of power hitherto unknown as Spamton NEO. But up until Chapter 4, you could argue that what the crystals and bosses and secrets amount to is ultimately negligible, and is more akin bonus information than it is anything literally game changing.

And indeed, even your choices to spare your enemies as opposed to kill them do not seem to amount to much more than aesthetic deviations and conclusionary set dressings, as each chapter will largely end the same regardless of what you do or don’t do. The only things that can truly be said to change in engaging with these secrets or making these choices are us, our view and interpretation of the world and its story… and Kris. Kris is not us. So in seeking out these secrets, we are not the only ones learning them, experiencing them – Kris is, too.

All of this only truly changes with the secret fight with Gerson Boom and how he teaches and influences Susie, pushing her to her limit in a one-on-one fight which ends with the bestowal of yet another crystal. This is the first major event in the story to truly elevate Susie to a level of relevance equal to that of Kris.

And even in the main story, outside of the secrets route side of things which culminate in that duel, Susie is already being challenged in her philosophy by Gerson, led along to question the prophecy and her supposedly immutable role in it, something which clearly affects her by the time she learns the truth of everything it entails.

But going out of our way to spar with the Hammer of Justice really hammers this all home. It really seems to suggest that, little by little, all of our choices do seem to be building up to something important. Aside from the crystals we obtain and the experiences we undergo, we really do seem to be getting something more out of this.

So what's the deal, then? Do our choices matter or not?

Well, ultimately, no, our choices really don’t matter in the long run, even on the occasions where we’re allowed to make them.

But Kris' do.

When you really think about it, all of the choices we make in a video game are ultimately scripted. Even in Undertale. No matter how many branches the dialogue tree may have, no matter how many choices we are presented with to peruse at our own leisure, even the entirety of Baldur’s Gate 3 was written and scripted by a team of writers long before we ever came along to pick a path to follow.

All of these paths were already paved by the time we came across them, and while there may be more to follow in more directions and combinations than any one person could hope to find on their own, they are all nonetheless limited in number and scope, predetermined for us long before we ever deign to walk down them. It’s not like it is in real life.

As a game developer himself and somebody clearly fascinated with metatextual stories, this is not lost on Toby Fox. I think we can take that as a given. And I think this understanding is more important than others might be giving it credit for.

I think the reason such a clear delineation is being made between us, the player, and Kris, the human, is because this understanding – that none of the choices we make in a game are truly our choices – is the crux of the conceit of the entire game. If these choices aren’t ours, whose are they? Who decides what we can or can’t do and then presents this to us as dialogue options disguised as freedom, another core conceit of the Deltarune world?

Well, Toby Fox, writer and director of Deltarune, of course, but this is a piece of metafiction so the real answer goes even deeper than that. The reality is that all of these choices we are presented with in the world of the game as far as they exist within the world of the don’t come from Toby. They come from Kris.

If Undertale was a story in which the Angel has all the power, and the characters of Chara and Frisk are merely there to facilitate our will as the player to save or erase the world as we pleased (be it because they are empty, too young to have such agency, or are merely going with the flow in a bid to survive), then the Deltarune compare-and-contrast version of that core mechanic would be that the role between player and character has completely inverted.

In other words, in Deltarune, Kris has all the power to save or destroy the world, and we as the Angel are merely there to help facilitate their will.

Kris comes up with and presents the choices. Kris binds our capacity to help or to harm according to their own innate desires and sense of morality or play. Kris only ever does what Kris wants to do, so any time we pick a dialogue option, Kris is only ever saying what Kris wants to say. We are the servants of their will, not the other way around.

But why? If these worlds are so closely connected, shadows and reflections of one another, then what makes the difference between them and our role within them? Why are we so central to everything in Undertale but seemingly tangential to Deltarune? What does it even mean for us, the player of the game in which Kris inhabits, to only be able to facilitate the will of this character in this game? If we really are the otherworldly Angel, a literal higher power, then why do we have so much less agency now?

The answer to that, I believe, lies with W.D. Gaster and the survey program he presented us with all the way back on Halloween of 2018. He told us all exactly why, right from the very start. If you want to make a playground of this world like you once did in Undertale, then first,

Part IV: You Must Construct Additional Vessels

Souls in Undertale and Deltarune are strange and mysterious things. Oddly both physical and metaphysical at once, these culminations of being present in all the characters in both worlds are not all created equal.

In Undertale for example, human souls are stated to be able to persist outside of the body even after death. Most monster souls can do no such thing, and disappear immediately as the monster turns to dust. The only exception to this rule are the sturdier, more powerful monsters known as boss monsters, whose souls can persist out of their bodies for the most fleeting of moments before disappearing.

The fact that human and boss monster souls can persist outside of the body at all, even if only for a moment, became the core narrative device of the plot of Undertale. The entirety of the story was about protecting your human soul from the desperate monsters who would take it and add it to their collection in order to escape their imprisonment. And this imprisonment was only a thing because humans learned that while monsters cannot absorb each other’s souls, and humans cannot absorb each other’s souls, monsters can absorb human souls, provided they are already deceased and outside of their body.

And there seemed to be no limit to how many human souls a monster could absorb, either – King Asgore’s plan revolved around combining 7 human souls with his own singular boss monster soul in order to become “God” and shatter the barrier forever.

But even though these souls can persist outside of the body, they are visibly and narratively distinct from ghosts, which also exist in Undertale and in Deltarune and are well-known to be a category of monster that is physically incorporeal but nevertheless its own distinct, soul-having being. And that’s important. Because while ghosts are just monsters which can live and fight and make choices of their own, a soul outside of its body has never, on its own, demonstrated that same sort of capacity.

Now, you might argue that the six souls Flowey absorbed did make their own choices when they chose to rebel and help you defeat his Photoshopped Omega Flowey final form, but note how I specified that a soul outside of its body has never made a choices on their own. It was only by being inside of Flowey and resonating with the embodied living soul of Frisk, the human, that they ever gained any degree of agency and rebellion. They never acted against Asgore when he had them in jars, after all. They never did anything at all.

It would seem, then, that for a soul to be able to interact with the world at all and not just float about as a passive observer or source of power, it must first have a vessel.

A lot is made of this word at the start of Deltarune. Vessel. We are invited, instructed, to make one by the voice of Gaster. In fact, actually, we are told under no uncertain terms that we must.

And we have seen this exact term used in the context of souls before, in Undertale. It’s the expression used by Alphys during her experiments with Determination, when she realized that she couldn’t just inject it into monsters without destroying those monsters’ bodies in the process. It’s how she refers to the flower she toys with that ultimately that becomes Flowey, a special flower that originated from the outside world and, unbeknownst to Alphys, had long ago had the dust of Asriel Dreemur fall upon it.

When a monster dies and turns to dust, during their funeral, that dust is sprinkled onto their favorite thing, and it is said that their essence then lives on in that thing from that moment on. This is as true in Deltarune as it was in Undertale, and appears to be one of the universal constants between the two. In Deltarune, it’s how Gerson’s able to come back as a ghost inside of the church’s Dark World, and in Undertale, it was how that first dust-covered flower, when injected with the Determination extracted from a human soul, called Asriel back into existence in the diminished form of Flowey.

Similarly, it is only when Frisk falls into the Underground that Chara is woken up and able to exert any sort of influence whatsoever on the world around them again. Chara was originally a human, not a monster, but had planned for their soul to be absorbed by Asriel upon their death – which he did, exactly as promised.

But Asriel refused to fight where Chara would have, resulting in mortal wounds that killed the new body that they now shared. Chara’s soul was no longer in a human body, and monsters turn to dust when they die, so as Asriel turned to dust and his soul faded away, Chara’s, which had been absorbed by Asriel and fused with/subsumed into his own soul, faded alongside it.

Except… they didn’t fully fade. Asriel’s remains, his dust, was imbued into a flower. Chara’s remains, meanwhile, being made of physical matter, persisted and decayed slowly to provide nutrients for the flower bed at the start of Undertale, the one Frisk first lands on. It is Frisk’s human soul and its Determination that wakes Chara, and human Determination in isolation that wakes Asriel as Flowey. Their essences remained, but their souls were gone. Flowey states as much in describing himself as empty, and explaining how beings that lack a soul also lack compassion and the capacity to love or feel loved.

But beings that lack a soul can still make choices and influence reality. So long as they have a vessel, they can learn and grow and, while they may still lack some key characteristics intrinsic to a soul such as love, they can still be a part of their world. So much so that, for a brief moment, Asriel achieves what Asgore had promised he would do and became “God”. But in having so many souls inside him, he regained his compassion alongside that godhood and was swayed away from destruction by Frisk’s determination and kindness.

This is an important and interesting distinction, because it appears that even the soulless have more agency than a whole entire soul does if that soul is without a body. More important than a soul itself, it would seem that a vessel is the final, ultimate determination as to whether or not we can influence reality and how far we are able to go in doing so. Without a vessel and all on its own, a soul is an invisible, a neutral observer. It might as well not exist at all.

So, if we are going to have any say in what happens in the world of Deltarune, we really are going to need a vessel first. We are not Kris, but a soul disembodied, so the voice is simply telling it as it is.

And so, we go through the trouble of creating one, naming one, answering all of Gaster’s myriad, leading questions, all under the assumption that our answers will flavor the protagonist of our game...

...only to be told by another voice that all of our answers will now be discarded. That voice then tells us that we are Kris. But… we already know we aren't Kris. Kris is their own entity, completely independent of us.

This discrepancy combined with the change in font, lack of music, and difference in speech pattern, as well as the way the dialogue seems to be struggled letter by letter as the screen fades to white, has caused some to propose that this second voice may well be Kris, not Gaster, and that they are defying us and our attempt to assert our will on this world.

Remember the second thing I said we must accept as true back in Part 1? That Kris and the player are in conflict with one another? This could well be our first encounter with that conflict. Somehow, Kris knew that we were trying to enter their world, and Kris told us no. Not without them there to cage us, limiting our options by stealing our agency and anchoring us to theirs.

The reasoning for this and the exact nature of the conflict between us and Kris will be explored more in depth later on. More important to our purposes right now is explaining the why. Why our vessel was discarded. It’s because as Undertale goes to show, even without a human or monster soul, with a vessel of our own, something with its own name flavored by our own answers, we would be able to directly interact and interfere with Kris and their family and friends. Just like Flowey.

And that’s more important and more dangerous than you might think, because let’s not forget, we’re not just anybody, here. We are the Angel. We are other, we are divine, this world has built an entire religion around the very idea of us. Look at what we could do in Undertale with two children and no competition – on Genocide, we could erase their entire reality and cause untold suffering with nothing anyone there could ever hope to do capable of stopping us. Sans tried. It didn’t work.

That’s why Deltarune is “a game for people who’ve finished Undertale”. That’s why Undertale is Deltarune’s companion piece. Undertale answers any questions we may have had by letting us live out exactly what would happen if we actually had unlimited agency in a sandbox world. We saw the dark side of that, the inevitable boredom of that, with Flowey. Maybe even lived it ourselves by engaging in the Genocide Route.

If we had been able to finish our vessel, Deltarune would’ve been no different. We would have been the ones who had all the agency in that world, more powerful than anybody else, stealing their freedoms away from them by virtue of our nature as the Angel, just like we stole it from Flowey when we occupied Frisk.

By denying us that right and stopping us from finishing our vessel, Kris gets to maintain their agency. And not only just theirs, but everybody else’s, too.

Or, so they might hope.

We still end up saving over Kris’ name with the name of our discarded vessel on their first trip into a Dark World. But I think this has another meaning, and that despite that, by discarding our vessel, the intended effect was still achieved – all of the choices we are presented with, all of the paths we are allowed to take, none of them are really ours. None of them came from us or our head or our thoughts, positive or negative or in-between.

We do not get to type into a text box and answer the questions posed to Kris by the characters, we’re just given two options out of seemingly nowhere and then bound to a path by being able to pick only one of them. But as we’ve just established, these options don't come out of nowhere. They come from Kris. And Kris doesn’t seem to very much care which path we pick, even if it makes them seem like a jerk to the people around them sometimes.

Kris is the one with both a body and a soul, whereas we’re merely taking them out for a joyride, hanging around in the back of their heart. But as they have shown us time and time again, we are not in control here. They stripped us of that power at the start, and they are more than capable of ripping us out and doing their own thing whenever they damn well please, taking a breather or getting up to some weird shit of their own that we are, thus far, utterly powerless to stop. Hell, they even have a literal cage they lock us inside of at night when they sleep, likely so that their (hopes and) dreams stay their own.

...A cage that strangely seems to predate our arrival by quite some time. One that Kris is more than capable of and knowledgeable enough in to know how to trap us inside of. Is this really the first time any of this has happened, or is Kris stuck in a loop, trying to achieve something over and over again? It’s something to think about, I suppose.

Regardless, at the end of the day, in this world, Kris holds all the cards, so we can only ACT within the confines of what Kris was already thinking of doing.

Normally.

On the weird route, things are a bit different. I think that's actually where it gets its dev name from, what makes it so "weird" of a route for the story to take: Kris is doing things that they very extremely clearly do not want to do.

At our discretion, Kris can respond in a voice that sounds nothing like themselves, as we are presented with dialogue options with a completely different, colder speech pattern. Hell, we’re even presented with response options in dialogue boxes that are completely blacked out so we can’t see what we’re even choosing. Because Kris isn’t the one presenting the options to us. They have nothing to do with any of this. They’re in the dark, and so are we… or, perhaps those responses are coming from the dark?

What’s more, in this route, Kris is scared of us. That is very much not the case in normal gameplay routes. They might get frustrated with us, ignore us, even shove us out of their way sometimes, but they don’t fear us.

But they know we're listening, and in the long scene with Noelle in Chapter 4, certain response options will abort the weird route entirely and have them run away from us with Noelle in tow. It’s as if Kris is pleading with us to not do this, trying to use what little power they have left to sway us to abort and walk away from what we’re about to do. And if we do, they literally run away with Noelle and the route resets.

Kris might be pretty antagonistic toward us at times, sure, and sometimes even seems to act in ways that seem detrimental to those around them – like opening fountains and slashing tires, for example – when they’ve ripped us out of them and we can no longer tell them no, but they are never as deeply opposed to us as they are in the weird route.

In this route, something speaks through Kris in a voice that isn't theirs, a voice that Noelle has heard before in a dream. In this route, we are Kris, in the sense that we are making choices that are not theirs but doing so through their body, and every single one of them is for the worse. But we still aren’t Kris in the sense that they are still their own person.

And we’re still not in total control, either! Again, Kris is still there, fighting, giving us another option, the chance to not do whatever we’re about to do to Noelle. They can no longer stop us from acting how we wish, but we cannot totally eliminate their voice, either. This is the only time in the game we are allowed full agency outside of Kris' own desires,. One option is theirs, the other one is… whose, exactly?

In Undertale's Genocide, we were the ones guiding Chara. We made them into the monster we meet at the end. Meanwhile, in Deltarune's weird route, we are led to believe we are making our own choices by rebelling against Kris’, but this scene in Chapter 4 makes it clear that we're actually just following the choices of somebody else instead. We have not gained any more agency than we had in the other routes where Kris is the one calling the shots – we have simply shifted focus from the one whose choices we are facilitating.

It is also important, I think, that we consider the way in which these circumstances are created, too. The weird route is not something you accidentally bumble your way into. These are extremely specific choices and items and encounters that you have to engage with in order to activate it, you really have to go out of your way. In other words, it’s secret hunting. Just like the secrets route, but… darker. We don’t seem to be finding things that strip away power from those who shouldn’t have it, like Jevil, or Spamton. We don’t seem to be making things better. But we are still finding little secrets by engaging with this route.

It’s almost as if someone put all these breadcrumbs here in hopes we might notice them and, curious, follow their trail to the end. As if somebody was trying to remind us of our more negative proclivities from back in Undertale’s Genocide Route to see what might happen if we kept going, even if it feels wrong, even if it’s uncomfortable.

It’s as if somebody is appealing to our curiosity as a means to manipulateus, the Angel.

No matter what route we take, it seems this is the role to which we are always to be relegated within the world of Deltarune. Even when we’re led to believe otherwise, even when we think we’re the ones choosing to take Noelle from Kris and burn it all down.

No. We are not the Great Decider that we got to be in Undertale, where others existed only to facilitate our own desires and curiosity and enjoyment. That role is reversed here, remember? Now, we are just the facilitators. The means by which another’s choices can be enACTed, perhaps even where ordinarily they could not.

In Deltarune, we are a disembodied SOUL to be used and abused as a means of becoming God, not the one who would use or abuse them.

So then, if we’re still walking down a path somebody else paved, even in the weird route, then whose is it? It’s not ours, and it certainly isn’t Kris’, so who else could it be? Who else could possibly be speaking through Kris as a vessel, depending on us to make such a thing possible for them? And if they have such power to begin with, why do they need us to fully realize that power? Why do they need our help to instigate the weird route?

I think you already know who I’m going to say. But to get a better grasp of not just the who, but the why, let’s first ask another question for some additional perspective:

If we are the Angel, what kind of Angel are we?

We already know that if we choose the path of destruction, we fall and become a demon, or create one that we leave behind in our wake. But if we choose the opposite, if we choose pacifism and salvation, does that not make us a Guardian Angel?

In the church, we learn of the existence of hope candles. Hopes and Dreams, especially together, are a pretty common theme in and connective tissue between Undertale and Deltarune. Well, in the religion of the people of Hometown, the Angel is a being to which they pray and sing their praises, and by lighting candles with a person's name under it, one’s hopes and dreams for that person is sent up like a prayer to that Angel in hopes that they may intervene.

Hope candles. In hope that we intervene. Do you see where I’m going with this?

We do not have agency in the world of Deltarune. Perhaps we tried to acquire some by crafting a vessel of our own at another’s suggestion, but that plan fell through. Kris told us no, afraid of what we might be capable of – or be misled into doing – should we have one of those. So we cannot choose to save or destroy on our own, but we can do the next best thing and pal around in the soul of somebody else and empower them to do the saving for themselves – with just a little extra help from above.

In Deltarune, we do not choose whether or not we are a fallen or guardian angel. Not of our own volition, anyway. We are the guardian, whether we like it or not. We are the answer to Toriel's prayers. Not just for Kris, but for everybody. With a little push in the right direction and some cooperation from Kris, we can save this world, stopping the Roaring Knight and facilitating Kris to fulfill the prophecy and restore the balance between light and dark.

So what about the weird route, then? If we don’t get to make the choice to save or destroy, but we can be misled by our own curiosity into doing the latter anyway, who is the one who plants the seeds to make such a thing possible? Come to think of it, who was it that suggested we try creating a vessel in the first place? Who could really be behind all of this?

The Roaring Knight is still just a knight, after all. A servant. A warrior servant, but a servant all the same. So to whom does this knight swear its fealty? Asgore is no King, but there is still a higher power to whom their allegiance is ensured. Not us, but our own warped reflection, the one who covets everything we have and are, who wants so badly to be an Angel themselves and play a game of their own.

I'm speaking of course of…

Part V: 666xFallenXAngelx666

In Undertale’s so-called Genocide Route, we kill all the monsters and give birth to a demon. The Demon Chara. Initially a human child and then a confused, soulless, semi-conscious essence looking for identity and guidance. But through our actions and our guidance, Chara can fall even further than the original fallen human. They can fall in a way that a human ordinarily can't, shouldn’t, in a way that only an Angel like us could.

Because do you know what else we can call a Fallen Angel? A demon.

The Demon Chara, the demon that comes when you call its name, is a reflection of us, the Player, the Angel, and our own fall from divinity into something truly reprehensible. The most reprehensible thing imaginable, in fact, as far as Toby Fox is concerned: A gamer. Which is why Berdly is secretly the antichrist and has been all along – look out for that theory next.

And this, finally, brings us to Doctor W.D. Gaster. Good Ol’ Goner Bones himself.

Something very very interesting about Gaster is his strong association with 6's.

Hidden deep in the files for Undertale, there are actually monster stats for a Gaster fight that we are led to presume was scrapped or deleted from the game before release. All of these stats are quite high and comprised entirely of strings of 6's, including gold payouts.

Undertale also has an obscure chance event mechanic known as a FUN (Functional Universe Number) value, a randomly generated number at the start of every playthrough set between 1 and 100 that determines whether or not you’ll encounter certain rare events in the game, such as a prank call by Sans or the Wrong Number Song.

The FUN values which trigger the chance events generating Gaster's followers, the lore keepers erased from time and space who are where we first learned of his history and unexistence, are all located in the 60's. And an additional FUN value, which triggers the appearance of a secret door in Waterfall that leads to a room empty save only for a lone figure labeled mystery_man in the game’s code we all presume to be Gaster himself, is 66 exactly.

So what’s up with that? Why all the 6's?

Well, if you know even the tiniest bit about Christian mythology, which you most likely do and almost even more likely only do so against your will, then you should know that the number 6, and especially three in sequence as 666 in particular, have a strong association with Satan, the Antichrist, and an entity in the Christian bible known only as the Beast.

Christianity is weird, ancient, and has more splinters than you could scrape from a thousand oak trees, so the specifics of these entities and the number and the relations between them all can vary from denomination to denomination and branch to branch, or even from era to era. But pretty universally, 666 is the “evil number” and is always at least Satan adjacent. But like, very, very strongly adjacent. If it’s not Satan himself, it’s something super immediately subservient to him.

So, that's it then. Gaster is some sort of Satan allegory, and therefore evil. Right?

Well... it's a bit more complicated than that, I think.

See, Satan, Beelzebub, the Devil, El Diablo – he was not always the all-powerful evil anti-god some Christians today still see him as. Once upon a time, he was actually an angel. The most beautiful and favoritest angel of them all, in fact. Back then, he was known as Lucifer – “light bringer”, the morning star – but he staged a rebellion against God and was cast out as a result, becoming the first fallen angel and being known from then on as Satan – literally, “the enemy”.

Well, falling down is something that has a lot of thematic weight and resonance in Undertale, too, doesn’t it? Chara is the original fallen human in the same way Frisk is the last, and through them, we, the Angel, set monsters free, one way or another. But humans are not the only things said to have fallen in this world. Gaster, too, is described as having fallen – and more specifically, into his own creation.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, his goner friends are a little vague about that part. What is known is that before Dr. Alphys, Gaster was the original royal scientist, and one of the things he did during his tenure was create the CORE. Immediately after this is told to us, his followers then say that he fell into his creation. There’s enough leeway in how it’s described to us to theorize that it could be something else, like the experiment of Entry 17, but the implication of proximity is that it’s the CORE.

Now, as far as we know, the CORE is just a large machine+building wombo combo that takes geothermal energy from the Earth and converts it into magical electricity. That much is explained to us by Alphys, but she declines to tell us any more about the specifics than that, probably because Frisk is, like, 7. But either way, we don't really know the exact method by which this conversion happens or what sets magical electricity apart from regular electricity.

But something you'll see pretty commonly in Undertale is the capitalization of specific words and terms. Names, like FLOWEY, and descriptors, like the FLOWER, are one example, but are usually only capitalized once or in key moments. Acronyms, like LV and EXP, are another, and are always capitalized no matter what. Important things like SOUL are as well.

So, what about CORE, then? I mean, it does stand out quite a bit when we first see it on the horizon, and like many important things in Undertale, it’s capitalized when it first gets mentioned to us, but then it never stops being spoken of in all caps. Why? Is it an acronym? While possible, it's unclear what that acronym might be.

But when you really think about it, what even is a core, anyway? Well, one synonym for the core of something could be its center. And one could suppose that another synonym for something’s center could be its heart. And in common parlance and in many modern media franchises, heart is used pretty interchangeably with soul. And you could certainly describe somebody's soul as the core of their being, just as easily as you could describe it as the culmination.

But note again that the CORE is always spoken of in caps. So if one of the synonyms for “core” could be considered to be “soul”, well, there's a SOUL that's always spoken of in all caps in Undertale, too. And the avatar of us, the player, in Deltarune is what, exactly? Why, it’s a SOUL, of course. The means with which we interact with the world in a limited but nevertheless higher-than-normal level as compared to most of the other beings inside it.

So if Gaster fell into his creation, and that creation was the CORE, then you could suppose that what's really being said there could be taken to mean that Gaster fell, like a demon, into a SOUL.

Gaster is explicitly never stated to have died by any of his followers. He is said to have disappeared, or even to have shattered across time and space, but never to have died.

Even the strongest of boss monsters do not have a soul that can persist for more than a couple of moments after their death. But if Gaster never died and simply got “shattered” instead, then his soul may have suffered the same fate. Or perhaps his soul remained intact while his body was shattered across time and space. Or, maybe, when his physical body and soul were shattered across time and space, the pieces embedded themselves into countless different universes and spaces and gained a higher level of being in the process.

Perhaps, by the end of his fall, he no longer had a regular monster SOUL, but a human SOUL. Not human like Frisk’s, but human like ours. And if Gaster has a soul like ours, then perhaps he can interact with the worlds of Undertale and Deltarune in all of the same ways we can.

Now, this may be a bit of a contentious point, but I really don’t think the SOUL we see in either Undertale or Deltarune belongs to either of the characters whose bodies we use as vessels. I think Deltarune makes it abundantly clear that that SOUL is ours, specifically. It’s described similarly every time “your human SOUL”, “a human SOUL”, but we’re just as human as Frisk or Kris are even if they would look at us and think us divine as something from beyond their world were they to be aware of us. Like an Angel, let’s say. You know, for the sake of argument. So whenever a character points out or talks about Kris or Frisk’s SOUL, they’re actually talking about ours. Ours is the one Kris removes, and ours is the one that dances around the bullets and moves the characters out of harm’s way.

I’m going to stop capitalizing it every time now because it’s annoying, but just as monster souls and human souls are not created equal, our human soul and Kris’ or Frisk’s human souls are not created equal. We are beyond them, outside the game, so while it might be recognized as human, they are just assuming it’s Kris’ or Frisk’s. After all, they wouldn’t think the Angel to have a human soul, would they? So what I’m theorizing here is that in falling into the CORE, Gaster transformed, and gained a soul just like ours. One I will henceforth refer to as an angel soul, for clarity.

If true, then this means he would also be bound by the same limitations we are, or that if he were to speak directly to us, that he might be able to inform us of the limitations that we both share as disembodied beings of pure soul. As a monster of science and experimentation, he might be able to tell us with great certainty that in order to have any agency in this world at all, you must first take or construct a vessel, as a soul without a vessel are mere neutral and inert observers. It is only when they have a physical tether that anything can truly get done.

Now, we don’t know too much about Gaster’s personality. We have three pieces of text confirmed to be him, all of which are written in wingdings font – Entry 17 and two mysterious hidden images on the Undertale website circa 2016. We also have the mysterious voice in Deltarune, who also hijacked the Undertale twitter account prior to Chapter 1’s release, which are almost definitely also Gaster, with a margin of error no greater than 1% if we’re being completely honest with ourselves.

Suffice it to say, it’s not very much to go on. It gives us a few key repetitious phrases and speech patterns to watch out for, and some insight as to his level of knowledge about the world in which he lives and our own existence outside of it, but a lot of what we accept to be true about Gaster is very “god of the gaps” in its nature.

This is part of the reason he was dismissed early on in Undertale as a meta prank by Toby. It’s because, at least at that point in time, he was so vague and unrelated to anything going on that you really could insert him into any mystery or unanswered question about the world of Undertale and insinuate he was somehow related to, if not directly responsible for it.

And the fandom certainly did that! There is so much fanon around Gaster right down to his very likeness and presumed (though not without merit) relation to Sans and Papyrus that it was, for many years, very difficult to parse what was and wasn’t true or reasonable to consider as a possibility.

But it’s not 2017 anymore. Deltarune has been an ongoing project for 7 years now and 4 chapters of a planned total of 7 have since been released. We have very good reason to believe Gaster is real and responsible for something, if not everything, going on in Deltarune with regard to the prophecy and perhaps even the imagery of the delta rune itself.

From the ominous sound effects around the bunker in Chapter 1 being a super slowed down version of Gaster’s Theme from the hidden Undertale sound test room, to the association of garbage noise with the dark worlds and the corruption of Spamton into someone who knew more of his world than he was supposed to or knew how to deal with, garbage noise that also plays in the background in Undertale when Entry 17 is triggered.

From the radiating darkness like negative photons emanating from portals into dark worlds, to the fact that dark worlds exist in darkness darker than darkness – a dark yet darker, as Gaster so famously described. From the fact that there are mysterious invisible crystals that seem to both exist and not exist at the same time and are described in the light world as shards of broken glass. Like pieces of somebody’s body that was shattered across time and space, perhaps?

I didn’t state at the start that Gaster being real is something we must accept as true for no reason. There are countless hints that he’s here, somewhere, lurking. But the reason I’m pointing all of this out and the reason why I’m writing this theory post isn’t just to expose the monster behind the curtain. The community at large has already mostly accepted that Gaster is Deltarune’s big bad.

No, the real reason I’m pointing these things out is because all of them tell us, indirectly, a little bit more about Gaster than we knew before. They give context to him and his actions as a character and give us a better idea of who and what he is and the themes his existence imply that Toby is trying to convey to us.

If Gaster has acquired the power of an angel soul, he is a competitor to the role of the Angel. If he is a competitor to the Angel, then he is a competitor to us, and is effectively the second player in a competitive, multiplayer video game.

But if that’s the case, then Gaster isn’t actually a new idea for this franchise at all! We’ve seen this all before in Undertale proper, in the timelines that occurred after Gaster had already ceased to exist. We’ve seen this same exact sort of competing player-like power to influence the world used against us by another character, broken in another sort of way and pushed to their limit as a result of their own diminished state and personal despair.

Flowey.

In Undertale, Toby is not subtle about all the ways in which Flowey is meant to directly reflect and contrast us as players. I have an image limit here on tumblr, so I’m not going to embed the many, many relevant screenshots of text from Flowey in the Genocide Route alone that point this out – if you want to see his exact wording, let’s plays and videos of the route are a dime a dozen on YouTube to this day.

But through a series of bizarre and likely impossible to replicate circumstances, the soulless remains of Asriel Dreemurr regained consciousness and a will of their own and asserted the power to manipulate timelines and plumb the depths of his reality in all the same ways we, the player, can, and ultimately do, depending on which route we choose to take in the game.

Flowey talks about how he tried to be nice and play the Pacifist run himself a few times, but eventually grew bored. He could never find a way to break the barrier or get Asgore to show him the human souls, no matter what he said or how he acted. He could never “win” the game. So, he experimented instead. He became curious.

And like any curious player presented with a multiple choice question in a video game, he set off to find out what would happen if he’d done things differently. If he killed this person but spared that, if he helped that person but hindered this, if he said what was needed or gave what was desired or withheld it all zealously.

And by his own admission, in the end, this sort of curiosity for curiosity’s sake numbed him. As a soulless being, he could no longer feel compassion or love, but in increasing his LOVE, he grew more distant from each. He stopped feeling bad, or apprehensive. The very memory of compassion, a facsimile he could have potentially used to hold himself back, faded from his mind. In the end, everybody just became a set of bounded variables, lines of dialogue. They became predictable.

This is exactly how it is for a nosy gamer, too. Someone who explores every option just to see what would happen, who checks the game’s code to find hidden events and squeeze every last bit of content out of the machine. Engaging in a dialogue over this sort of behavior and where it stems from and how it might affect others and what it says about you was the entire point of Undertale from day one, and part of why it became the genre titan it has today.

But, as YouTube theorist Misty Sparkles outlined in their video “Who Dr. Gaster Is and Why That Matters to Deltarune” 3 years ago, this also pretty accurately describes the mentality and mindset of a particularly emotionally detached scientist, doesn’t it? Somebody whose curiosity and thirst for knowledge outweighs any sort of ethical concerns, the very concept of which being entirely foreign to their brilliant, unmatched mind. If there is science to be done and secrets to learn, if there is knowledge to be unearthed, then the pursuit of said knowledge is the only path of any value.

Indeed, that aforementioned video, which I linked to in the paragraph above in case you missed it, became a central piece of foundational groundwork for this greater attempt at unshattering the mysterious W.D. Gaster. If you’ve since watched it, you’ve probably noted by now that a lot of what I’ve said in this section about fallen angels is just retreading a path they already paved beforehand. And I don’t deny that – their video was what got me thinking and deciding to write this whole post in the first place. So given how integral this interpretation of events is to the end state of this theory, it is important that it is restated, and more importantly still, understood.

Because all of this also dovetails perfectly with Gaster’s association with Satan and Lucifer and fallen angels as a whole, as a demi-divine antagonistic force. Because it is that curiosity without ethical constraint and that pride in one’s own intelligence and capacity to understand that became the original sin of Lucifer that started his rebellion and led to his casting out by God in the Christian mythos in the first place.

Lucifer's greatest sin was that he believed that he was equal to God. That he perhaps even knew better than God. Lucifer felt as though he were entitled to know the mind of his creator and challenged his authority. He didn’t fall for no reason or just for shits and giggles, Lucifer fell because he questioned God and tried to learn a truth that was never his to know, going so far as to stage a rebellion in protest when he was refused the answers he believed himself entitled to.

But why did Gaster fall? What was his greatest sin? We're never told directly, though we can presume the experiment outlined in Entry 17 regarding what are very clearly just dark worlds and dark fountains had something to do with it. But we know Gaster was a scientist, the original royal scientist, and somebody whose brilliance precedes him in the few instances in which he is mentioned by his fellow goners, or obliquely referenced in any blueprints he may have left behind.

After all, in Undertale, Alphys plainly states in her own data entries that she creates the Determination Extraction Machine from "the blueprints". She does not state that they were her blueprints are that she wrote them, implying that they existed beforehand and that Determination was not only already known to her predecessor, but that said predecessor had already drawn up plans to experiment with it.

Could experimentation with the extraction and injection of Determination be part of why Gaster persisted after his fall, his shattering? Could it be that Determination that allowed him to obtain a soul like our own? I think it’s very likely. That with the right set of circumstances, and perhaps even a dark world of his very own, such a thing might just be possible.

But back on topic – as a scientist of such brilliance and renown, two traits we could pretty safely assign to Gaster would be pride and curiosity. Hence, Toby’s continual insistence on tying Gaster to the number 6, a number already tied pretty definitively to the Devil. By following these breadcrumbs to their logical extremes, we can begin to piece together the true nature of Gaster’s fall.

While performing experiments at the CORE, likely in regard to energy production for the expanding population of the Underground, Determination, the nature of the soul, or some combination of the three, Gaster chanced upon something “very, very interesting”.

Somehow, some way, in a universe that otherwise never showed a capacity for such a thing, Gaster opened up a fountain and created a dark world. Did he read it in a book? Is the entirety of Undertale’s universe itself just a Dark World? Did he do it on his own entirely by accident? We don’t know. But somehow, it happened.

His curiosity gets the best of him, and in experimenting with, or perhaps even brazenly walking into, this dark world, Gaster’s experiments go awry. Perhaps the dark world was unstable and it closed while he was inside it. Perhaps it was itself an aberration, a glitch, and never supposed to be possible in the reality in which Undertale takes place. Or, perhaps the dark world did as dark worlds are described to do, and responded to the deepest desires of the one who had instantiated it.

Regardless of the reasoning, Gaster falls into the dark world he created – the “his creation” his one follower had specified – and ends up broken. Shattered across time and space and completely erased from his home reality. He exists now in Undertale only in fragments of homeless code, untriggerable events, and mystery sprites. He no longer has a place in the realm in which he was born, a realm which no longer seems to remember him, at least not in full. If the dark world was a glitch that wasn’t supposed to happen, in entering it, Gaster became glitched as well and disappeared.

But in experimenting with Determination beforehand, perhaps even injecting it into himself and suffering the consequences in an already destabilized and melting form like the amalgamates that would succeed him, he survives this shattering with his consciousness fully intact. Perhaps it was even because his form had already been destabilized by human Determination that he was able to be shattered in the first place, as opposed to simply dying or being erased entirely.

But regardless, he now existed in a dark yet darker place with no place, somewhere that reality was malleable and up to the whims and the fears of those who entered into it. And somehow, all these things came together to turn Gaster’s lowly monster soul into an angel’s soul. Thus, through what amounts to a series of glitches and exploits in the nature of his video game reality, Gaster becomes a warped reflection of a monster-made Angel. A reflection of us, the player, in both power and in curiosity.

As we have already established however, in order to have a stake in this or any world, we first need a vessel. Gaster may now have an angel soul, but he no longer has a body. That’s now scattered across time and space in pieces or in chunks, tainted by his own glitched nature and locked in a state of tenuous existence teetering on the brink of the non (sound familiar?). To build a vessel from scratch would be ideal, and the most efficient means of enacting his will and experimenting with his reality on a far deeper level than he ever had before. But this is where Gaster hits a snag.

Gaster now seems to exist in the darkest of all dark worlds, the basement of his very reality, that being the code of the game in which he now exists. He has no sprite or dialogue or physical tether to this world, but instead his being permeates its every line. He is aware of, and perhaps even subtly directs, its very flow.

But as Ralsei makes clear to us early on, darkners don’t really exist outside of the dark world they are born into. They can do or be anything when inside of a dark world, but outside, in the light world, they are all represented by inanimate objects whose meanings and importance are imbued by those who own or make use of them.

Lancer isn’t actually a monster, but a playing card upon which Kris and Susie are projecting an idea in the same way Tenna isn’t a monster but rather a reflection of the trauma and separation anxiety Kris experienced in their family life that was “witnessed” by their television. When outside of a dark world, a darkner loses their sentience and sense of self. They return to being another ordinary run-of-the-mill everyday light world object.

But Gaster isn’t a darkner. He is – was – a monster. He’s more now, but he’s still no inanimate object. So what about lightners that don’t have an anchor to the light? Lightners that don’t have a physical form at all? How do they act inside of a dark world?

In Chapter 4, we are given the answer.

Gerson Boom is dead. The affable shopkeep, historian, and former Hammer of Justice from Undertale has since passed on from this mortal coil in Deltarune, and is now survived by his son, Alvin, the deacon of Hometown’s only church. But Gerson Boom is not gone. For reasons we have yet to learn (but about which we may speculate in Part 6 of this theory), his son dug up his dust and the object upon which his dust was spread, and hid it in the drawer of his desk in the church.

When the Roaring Knight shows up later that night and opens up a fountain and a dark world in turn, this allows for something very, very interesting to happen: Gerson Boom returns from the dead, in a form not at all dissimilar from what he was prior to his passing.

It is believed that a monster’s essence lives on in an object upon which its dust is scattered. This is a constant across Undertale and Deltarune both. In a similar way, W.D. Gaster’s essence lives on in the codes of Undertale and Deltarune, the space and time upon which his existence was shattered.

But while Gerson’s dust provides a small amount of physical matter he can tether to so that he may appear in multiple dark worlds so long as his dust is present in the area of their creation, Gaster has no such luxury. He has no dust because he has no body.

Therefore, it is safe to assume that in whatever form it is that Gaster currently exists, even with all the power of an angel’s soul at his proverbial fingertips, he can only truly exist right now when he is inside of a dark world. If he wants to appear somewhere, say something, influence someone, then somebody must first create a fountain and spawn a dark world.

Unlike darkners who are bound to the dark world made in their place of origin, who cannot leave that place of origin for an extended period of time without ultimately turning to stone, Gaster is quite literally universal. That’s what it means to be shattered across time and space, to be splattered like Papyrus’ spaghetti all over the code of your game.

He exists anywhere and everywhere all at once, but cannot manifest beyond neutral observation from the shadows unless a dark world is spawned. Then, he can show or do whatever he wants in any dark world across his universe. Indeed, it might be better to say he is the darkness itself right now.

Dark Worlds are not an unnatural part of the world of Deltarune, though. In the beginning, Ralsei explains that light and dark are supposed to be in balance, and that there is only an issue now because multiple fountains, and therefore multiple dark worlds, are being instantiated at once. This implies that there's always supposed to be some small number of naturally occurring dark worlds, be they permanent or transitory and shifting, even if that number is as low as just one.

Given the narrative importance and discomfort associated with the shelter at the edge of town and that this is where the Knight runs off to hide at the end of Chapter 3, and that they, too, are seemingly unable to exist in the light world for very long, it is pretty safe to assume there is, and potentially always has been, a Dark World inside of that bunker. And really, what better place for a naturally occurring Dark World than a sealed windowless chamber buried under who knows how many feet of solid earth? That's not just darkness in there, that's advanced darkness.

But what if it wasn’t natural? Or, what if it was, but it was subsequently and unintentionally hijacked after it just-so-happened to manifest in that spot? What if the one true dark fountain is a transitory thing, something that pops up in one place for a brief period of time, then naturally dissipates only to reform somewhere else, somewhere potentially very far away. What if, at the moment this dark world was beginning to reform, another fountain was opened and another dark world was created?

But what if this other fountain and other dark world weren’t even in the same reality, the same universe, but the concurrence of their event allowed them to be connected in some way? And what if this connected dark world, like a worm hole, opened one end in the CORE, and the other in Hometown’s forbidden shelter?

It’s an interesting idea, isn’t it?

Gaster, alone in the darkest of dark worlds, in possession of godlike power but with no capacity to use it to explore his new world and learn about the reality around him outside of an extremely rare and specific set of circumstances. He’s kind of like a genie in that sense, isn’t he? UNLIMITED COSMIC POWER, itty bitty living space. He is a god trapped inside of a narrow pocket of reality outside of which he cannot hope to learn or experience or influence anything.

But Gaster is curious. He is ambitious. Determined. If he is to push buttons and transcend boundaries, then he needs more space in which he can operate. At first that means he needs to create more dark worlds, but that’s only a temporary solution – no, what he really needs is a vessel, something physical tethered to the light world so that he can enbody his soul and become the Angel he has always fancied himself to be.

But he can’t do anything outside of a dark world in his current state as a disembodied soul. Or at least… he can do very, very little.

Remember Chapter 4, when Kris rips out the SOUL in Noelle’s house, and we wander through the vents and the basement? We actually can interact with the outside world in extremely minor, tiny ways. We can ring bells, turn on electronic devices, maybe even, if we’re lucky, knock over a particularly lightweight physical object. You know, like a ghost. Like the ghost inside of the machine code that Gaster has become.

Even if he cannot manifest and influence the world through his decisions, he can scare the shit out of some lightners. Through his actions, he can start rumors, urban legends. Ghost stories. He can, through calculated action, prompt others to create a narrative for him on his behalf, to lead them along through tiny hints and incidents to reach a conclusion all their own, but one that is useful to him.

Conclusions like, say, stories about a haunted locked shelter at the edge of town. Something nobody wants to talk about and that is maintained by the church, the state, and the police, all three of which know whatever is inside it to be dangerous. Stories meant to scare but at the same time entice somebody who is particularly curious, adventurous, and daring. Somebody who is a little bit like him.

Somebody like, perhaps, Dess Holiday?

Part VI: A Deal With the Devil

It is in the nature of devils to make deals. As powerful as they are and as easy as it may seem for them to take what they want, they are often bound by rules and contracts of their own, imposed upon them by gods, higher devils, or even themselves just to keep things fresh and interesting.

But in almost all instances, the final goal of every crooked deal is always the same: the devil wants the mortal’s soul. Gaster is a little bit different. This devil only wants a mortal form, and he has made many deals in order to try and achieve just such a thing.

Part VIa: Spamton and the Great Receiver

Across the chapters of Deltarune, if you engage with the secrets route, there are objects known as shadow crystals. These strange shards of what seem like glass when taken to the light world reveal no form but cast only shadows, and are imbued with a strange and unknown but still wicked power. Every secret boss so far has been in possession of one, which we receive as one of our rewards for beating them, and doing so seems to have a negative effect on those who come into contact with them.

From Jevil’s madness and obsession with games upon glimpsing the truth of his reality to Spamton’s deeply broken nature – these crystals of temptation promise power and knowledge, but at the price of one’s sanity once they recognize what they truly are. Even Gerson was intended to have one, and perhaps this was even Gaster’s initial plan, but Gerson immediately recognized the dark power coming off of it and didn’t like it, locking it away instead.

I don’t think Alvin dug up his father’s dust for no reason – he only did that because somebody suggested he do, because they promised him his father could return if he did, that they could talk. He was not informed of the price it would exact from his father when it did.

Gerson is a powerful monster, and Gaster would’ve likely tried to make him somehow one of his pawns – perhaps by using the power of the shadow crystal, perhaps by threatening his son – but Gerson refused to play his game. Asgore, also, seems to have one now, though he’s clearly yet to use it.

But others have. Others like Spamton.

It is heavily implied by Spamton that it was coming into possession of a shadow crystal and receiving those phone calls from the mystery voice (now doesn’t that sound familiar?) that drove him mad and gave him knowledge he was not equipped to handle.

At first, speaking on the phone with this mystery voice gave Spamton great success. He was making sales left and right and seemed to know just what everyone wanted and how best to appeal to them, and it made him the envy of his brothers, the other members of the Adison clan.

So great was his success in fact, he was invited to live in the Queen’s Mansion and became the biggest of big shots. It was almost as if he knew the hopes and dreams of all his marks in advance, as if the voice on the other end knew more about the world around them than they reasonably should.

It’s not hard to see that the voice on the other end was buttering him up, drawing Spamton in with unearned success and ensuring that he was dependent on it to do anything or be anyone. So when the voice stopped calling and sales dried up, it came as no surprise that Spamton became desperate. He started spending more time in the basement of the mansion, praying for some sort of sign, for the voice to return, and it was at this time he found an odd crystal in a strange machine.

And I’ll pause for a moment here to note that it’s interesting that a shadow crystal again appeared somewhere that a monster would be able to find it – that old machine, the NEO body, was made for a lightner whose plans didn’t come to fruition, and the NEO designation and musical cues from the fight with Spamton NEO make it pretty clear that that lightner was Mettaton. Perhaps Mettaton giving up was a brief setback, and Gaster was forced to recalibrate, buttering up Spamton to end up with it instead. He seems to greatly prefer monsters having these things over darkners.

But what about Jevil then, you ask? We’ll talk about that in Part 8.

Back to Spamton – as he was set to be evicted from the Queen’s Mansion for good, the Adisons arrived to try and speak to their sibling. But all they found in Spamton’s room was a phone that was left off the hook, one that was spouting garbage noise when a curious sibling put it up to their ear in hopes they might have a chance to hear the mystery voice for themselves. Maybe even become a Big Shot like Spamton did.

This was same garbage noise we hear anytime we try to use Kris’ cellphone in the dark world, and the same garbage noise that played in the background when Gaster spoke in Entry 17 all the way back in Undertale. The implication is clear that the voice was that of Gaster, and that Spamton had been amongst the first of the deals the Deltarune devil had made, though to what end is unknown.

Spamton is one of the darkners for whom we do not know the light world counterpart. It’s uncertain what he is, if he is a laptop or a puppet or a program or just an e-mail, but what is certain is that he already knows and has a connection with Kris. A connection that Kris does not seem to deny or react to in any way. He also appears to have some connection to Tenna, which in the light world is little more than the family TV, implying he may have spent a good deal of time in Kris’ house.

But we do not meet Spamton in the dark world of Kris’ living room, we meet him in the dark world of the computer lab, a dark world that is centered around the computer and searches of Kris’ childhood friend, Noelle Holiday. Therefore, it is safe to assume that Spamton may be a program, e-mail, or virus of some sort that is on Noelle’s PC. But why is this important?

Well, a big question in the first two chapters of Deltarune was the identity of the Roaring Knight. Everybody and their annoying dog had a pet theory of their own, with one of the most popular being that the Knight was actually Kris in a sort of Chara situation. This, however, I feel misunderstands Chara’s character and nature, as I’ve already made clear my support of the narrachara theory and my preferred version of it, never mind the paradoxes it raises in regards to Kris’ own character. But the end of Chapter 2 almost seemed to confirm it for some, when Kris suddenly makes a dark world in their living room. But why?

I think it’s because everything we have talked about in this section so far – the shadow crystals, the mystery phonecalls, the garbage noise, Noelle’s computer, Kris’ erratic behavior, Gaster – is far more intimately connected than it might first appear. But where do we start to unravel this web of subterfuge and deception, and pinpoint the deals that have been made and between whom and why? I think the only proper place to start would be at the beginning and with the answer to the question as to the Roaring Knight’s true identity, an identity all but confirmed by the end of Chapter 3: Dess Holiday.

Who the hell is Dess Holiday?

Part VIb: Desstined Pain

This is Dess Holiday.

…That doesn’t exactly clear things up very much, does it? Let’s try this again.

December “Dess” Holiday is the fourth and final member of the Holiday family, a family who have been longtime friends of the Dreemurrs. Dess’ dad, Rudy, was the best man at Asgore’s wedding and a college friend of both him and Toriel. Rudy’s wife Carol, meanwhile, does not seem to get on well with many people, and is seen as cold and uncomfortable to be around, but a nevertheless competent and dependable leader as the town’s mayor.

Dess’ younger sister, Noelle, features prominently in Chapter 2 and in the first half of Chapter 4, and is even briefly a party member when Susie and Ralsei are separated from Kris in the Cyber World. She is the focus of many of the game’s mysteries as a red herring for the identity and nature of the Angel, and the target of the weird route whose corruption the entire route seems to be predicated on.

She is also one of only two people in the entire game to ever speak of Dess.

That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?

Dess is nowhere to be found in Hometown in any of the chapters and is spoken of by nobody in the town in any of their dialogue or memories relayed with Kris of their time together as kids. The only two people who ever mention her at all, by name or otherwise, are her father, Rudy, when examining the Angel doll in the hospital in Chapter 1, and by Noelle. And of the two, Noelle speaks of her the most.

Dess was a member of the same friend group Kris, Noelle, and Asriel were in, and it’s very heavily implied that she and Asriel in particular were pretty close. Asriel’s old retainers are hidden in Dess’ room in Chapter 4, she is implied to have sewn some sort of clothing or toy for him, and the two seemed to share a love for dragons, lizards, and alligators in bikinis.

She was a musician who owned a guitar and is believed to have written the song Raise Up Your Bat that is played as a rhythm game in Chapter 3, and she was a fan of the creepy and macabre. It was because of her love for horror movies and watching them with her little sister, and her very close and protective nature in regards to her, that Noelle now finds comfort in such horror movies despite being an otherwise prototypical scaredy cat archetype in antlers.

But Dess isn’t here anymore.

The specifics aren’t something Noelle has made clear or that have been spelled out to us just yet, but with what little we know of her and a few additional pieces of information, some inferences can be made.

As stated previously, Chapter 2’s dark world is centered around Noelle and her computer, with the light world counterpart of the Queen being Noelle’s laptop in and of itself. As such, all of the elements in this world are reflections of Noelle and her computer and her interests and her search history, with the latter in particular being especially important as it is something Queen mentions on a couple occasions and even uses as passwords to make it through certain areas.

And one password in particular that sticks out, one spelled out letter by letter as Noelle has a heart-to-heart with Kris, is “December”. Now, it could be that Dess had a profile on the computer and shared it with her sister. But more likely, I think, is that her name is in there because Noelle had been searching online for mentions of her sister in the local news. Like information in an ongoing investigation, perhaps?

For some reason, Kris’ family and the Holidays aren’t as close as they used to be. Kris has been stated to have intentionally been keeping their distance from Noelle for reasons we are not told directly, and that some time in the past, once happy gatherings of family and friends around the television descended into arguing and fighting on more than one occasion.

Asgore was once the chief of police, but has since been forced out of the position for reasons Kris refuses to read, and thus, allow us to know. Asgore has also since separated from Toriel and is no longer a regular part of Kris’ life, though from his demeanor when we choose to talk with him, this does not appear to be on Asgore’s part. Rather, it seems Kris is the one who has a problem with Asgore, and they no longer respect him or care for him as a father.

The implications one can draw from this are that one day, Dess disappeared without a trace and Asgore, as the chief of police, was tasked with finding her. But Dess is not around in present day. Nobody ever talks about her outside of the family anymore, and Noelle was searching her name online. Asgore never found her and that failure saw him removed from his office, perhaps at Carol Holiday’s demand when she thought him too inept to get it done.

But… that no longer seems to be the case.

Part VIc: Asgore Goes Caroling

While Asgore and Rudy no longer seem to speak, he does still leave fresh flowers by his hospital bed everyday. It can be inferred that after failing to find Dess and being removed from the force, their relationship broke down, and Carol likely didn’t help matters in that regard as nobody seems to have much nice to say about her.

And yet, Asgore is curiously employed by Carol to clean their house when they are away. What’s more, since losing his job on the force, Asgore set up a flower shop that is notoriously bad at making a profit since he keeps giving his flowers away, but for some reason, he is kept afloat and all his bills are paid by the mayor. By Carol.

This would imply that while tensions were high between him and the holidays for a time, at least Carol has come to forgive him. But why?

In a hidden scene we can spy on Asgore talking to himself in front of a picture of an “old friend”, talking about how “this time for sure, Tori will finally see. They all will”. He mentions just having wanted to protect them, and then muses about how beautiful this strange little item in his hand is – a black shard, like glass… or perhaps a shadow crystal? What’s more, when you take a look inside the back door to the Flower Shop and see into Asgore’s basement, the narration makes note of a corkboard and newspaper clippings.

Asgore has never stopped trying to find Dess Holiday. I don’t think it’s to get his job back or to prove some sort of point, at least not entirely – Rudy was his best friend, the Holidays and Dreemurrs were close as could be, and all that was ripped apart because of Dess’ disappearance. Rudy’s health is failing, Toriel is moving on with her life with Sans, but Asgore is stuck. Or… he was. He seems confident now, more than he was before. He seems to have an idea of what has happened now, something he has told others but that nobody has taken seriously.

But maybe someone did. Maybe Carol did. The fact that Carol maintains a relationship with him despite likely removing him from the force in the first place, and goes so far as to foot his bills for him as well, would seem to imply that whatever it is Asgore thinks he knows or has discovered, it has caught Carol’s interest.

Carol Holiday is an interesting presence, because we are primed from the start to dislike and distrust her. We are told again and again that she is cold and cruel. Noelle also seems to be scared of her, but this isn’t saying much as she’s often scared of her own voice. But Rudy maintains she’s not as bad as others think she is, and that suggests that this coldness of hers might be a front. That she might not be as bad as everyone thinks.

Carol is somewhat paranoid and keeps all of the things most important to her as close to herself as possible, with the most most important things of all being stored for safekeeping in her home, her personal fortress, the space in which she feels safest herself. She is somebody we only ever hear about until Chapter 4, where we finally meet her in the most unflattering situation possible.

But I would like us to stop for a moment and look at that Chapter 4 introduction again from her perspective.

A strange girl is in her home playing the guitar of her missing daughter in front of her youngest, a guitar she has forbidden even that youngest child from ever touching or playing. That child then acts completely out of character, arguing with her, saying it was her fault, that she’s always longed to hear it again. And that’s not like Noelle at all. Noelle does not argue or make excuses like that, and she certainly doesn’t let strangers into their home and touch Dess’ guitar.

And Carol does not react positively, to say the least. She immediately admonishes Susie and orders Noelle into the kitchen to talk and everybody else to exit the house. But honestly, can you blame her? She has no context of what’s going on. She just knows her daughter is acting completely out of character, her missing daughter’s prized guitar has been defiled, a stranger is in her house, and that same stranger then snaps back at her and declares she’s taking her daughter to the festival…

Genuinely, what would you do in that situation? All these years later and you’re still grieving. Your daughter is gone. Maybe forever. That guitar is all you have left of her. You are obviously not going to be thinking straight. You’re not going to hear anybody out, not then and there. I think her crash out was perfectly reasonable, in all honesty.

But before we leave, she approaches Kris and says this…

Despite what just happened, and despite whatever has happened between Kris’ family and the Holidays, Kris is welcome here “any time”. But something is made to feel off by specifying “YOU” when speaking to Kris in all caps, and in red no less, as if she is not speaking to they themselves but rather to the red soul inside of them – which is to say us, the Angel.

And given I just defended her crash out a paragraph before, you might not be surprised to see me say that I believe this, like most things about Carol to this point, is also a misdirect.

I think that red coloring is a less jokey application of Sans’ blue stop signs from Undertale, something meant to confuse us metatextually since we know the last time that happened the person who did so had an idea that we, the player, actually existed behind that screen and was pranking us. Here, it’s Toby that’s pranking us.

See, another popular theory in regards to the identity of the Knight before Chapter 3 was that it was somehow working for Carol, if not Carol herself. Nothing we heard about her was flattering, she sounded like some sort of scheming supervillain, and worst of all for any potential defense of her character, she’s a politician. So another common interpretation of this scene has been fuel for the fire that she and the Knight are somehow in cahoots and that Kris is also somehow part of that conspiracy.

And while close to the truth, I don’t think that’s quite it. At least, not in the way people are thinking.

Toby is not a bad writer, and very little of what he presents to his audience as obvious is ever as obvious as he intentionally overexaggerates it to seem. So to me, as a fellow writer, when I see a game go out of its way time and again to intentionally make us uneasy and distrust a character in all of the ways Deltarune has with Carol, and I know that game was written by somebody as competent as clever as Toby Fox, I am absolutely not going to be taking that bait.

Because every single thing going on between her and Asgore suggests that she is desperate to find her daughter and bring her home, and that she, like Asgore, believes that Dess is still alive. Because as I laid out as an accepted fact in Part 1, the Knight is Dess Holiday, and with as desperate as Carol is to protect her family, I cannot ever see her subjecting her daughter to that fate.

So what is going on, then? Why does Carol believe Asgore when nobody else does? Why does she still welcome Asgore and Kris with open arms when their families are supposedly no longer close? Asgore’s tale is so tall, the whole town has practically disowned him for sticking to it all these years, implying all manner of terrible things about him as an explanation for his increasingly desperate and pathetic behavior. So why, why does Carol stand by him?

Because Asgore isn’t the only one telling that story. Because if Asgore witnessed what happened or otherwise pieced together some of the details, he is not the only one. Because Kris knows what happened to Dess too, and has from the very beginning. And they blame themselves for everything.

Part VId. Kris Washes Their Hands

Kris Deltarune has been a paradoxical enigma right from day one.

They seem aware enough of us to stop us from making a vessel and more than capable of ripping our soul out of their body. They don’t want any genuine harm to come to anyone they love, especially Noelle, but are nevertheless skulking around doing incredibly dangerous and harmful things when we’re no longer able to stop them, like slashing the tires to Toriel’s car or opening a fountain and a dark world in their own living room.

Strangely, they even make a point to leave their front door open when they do so, almost as if they were expecting someone to come in once the Fountain was pulled from the Earth…

Why?

Kris is supposed to be a hero whose purpose is to restore balance between light and dark and banish the ANGEL’S HEAVEN, but every chance they get, they kick us out of the driver’s seat and seem to act against not only their own best interests, but their friends’ and family’s best interests, too.

Nobody is benefiting from these dark worlds appearing and the Roaring occurring, and Kris seems to agree with at least that much since they play along with letting us use their body to close all these fountains and hinder the Knight in the first place.

But… never hinder them too much.

Come to think of it, Kris seems very familiar with the Knight, almost as if they’re somebody they’ve met before. They seem protective of them, even. To the point that when you close the Fountain in Chapter 4 and explore the room after doing so, and try to open the door in the top right… Kris refuses. Even though the narration makes note that somebody could fit behind it, and strongly imply the Knight’s true lightner form is hiding inside it, they only grab the doorknob. They refuse to turn it.

And, if you manage the herculean task of surviving the fight with it in Chapter 3 for long enough and after dealing enough damage to it, there’s even a moment in which the Knight literally knights Kris.

This flies in the face of everything we, the player, are trying to accomplish and everything Kris has ever demonstrated in the choices they present us with, or any of the choices that they beg us not to make on the weird route. It straight up makes no sense. It’s a contradiction. And stuff like this has confounded theorists for years.

So let’s take a step back for a minute and talk about Kris in and of themselves again, all by their lonesome.

Kris is a character who seems to express an immense amount of guilt. The topic of “washing your hands” comes up a lot and has new dialogue in every chapter whenever you examine a sink, though not always the same sink. It’s almost as if it’s a compulsion. In Chapter 2 for example, are told it is not yet time to wash our hands. Then later on, after Kris has done some weird shit after removing the angel soul from their body, they finally do.

Then later, in a super well hidden and difficult to encounter secret egg room in Chapter 4, there is another, invisible sink in a featureless black room of arts and crafts. After drawing something in the dark and receiving an egg, if you go to the sink, Kris will wash their “dry hands” but there will be mention of “a faint glitter of graphite that stubbornly refuses. You can never wash it all away”.

Glittering graphite-like fragments, of course, raise immediate comparisons to the Knight and their armor. The armor we chipped a shard from. So whatever sort of guilt Kris is contending with that has cemented this fixation with washing their hands, it seems to revolve around the Knight. Why?

Kris is clearly a very traumatized kid. They have no friends, and this appears to be by choice. Noelle is never unkind to them and does not seem to hate them or have any animosity toward them, but Kris keeps their distance regardless.

They grew up in a broken home with parents who fought loudly and frequently, with each other and with the people who were supposed to be their friends. They were incredibly close to their older brother Asriel and have clearly felt bereft and betrayed since they left them for college. Kris also does not hold Asgore in high regard at all from anything we have seen.

When Noelle talks about Kris to Susie, she mentions how they no longer sound like themselves, that their voice sounds different. Quiet, muffled, distant, as though it’s coming through a speaker.

Some have theorized this is because Kris isn’t talking, we are, by picking the dialogue options for them, but that I feel is too literal of an interpretation. We have to keep in mind how traumatized and self-isolated and distant Kris is as a person right now.

When I see someone described as sounding muffled, different, not themselves, speaking in another’s voice, sounding like they’re on a speaker, combined with all of Kris’ life choices? All I can think of is that yeah, they don’t sound the same. They do sound like somebody else. Distant. Because they are. They’re depressed, Harold. Their spark is gone. Why would Kris sound the same, after everything that’s happened?

Noelle may know them best, but even she seems completely oblivious to just how much pain Kris is really in, not even recognizing their hurt for what it is.

And it’s not just Noelle that Kris no longer interacts with, but all of the friends they used to play with when Asriel and Dess were around. They’re no longer close to Catti, but it can be surmised from her demeanor and love for horror and the occult and her protectiveness over Kris from Susie that she and Kris were especially close to Dess before she disappeared.

Catti’s entire goth style is not difficult to see as having come from a childhood interest in horror movies, the occult, and summoning demons for fun – a story relayed to us by Susie in church in Chapter 4, where she asks Kris if it was true that they tried.

But why would Kris try to summon a demon? And why would they intentionally cut themselves off from friends and family, especially now after Asriel is no longer there to be their last hopeful anchor?

Well, for that first part, Kris used to be an unruly gremlin of a child who was constantly pulling pranks. They were always described as quiet and creepy but with a big personality. It’s not hard to see how they’d make good friends with a horror aficionado and a goth like Dess and Catti.

But they don’t do any of these things anymore. They’ve stopped wearing their horns and hoping to become a monster like the rest of their family. They’ve stopped pulling pranks and creeping people out for fun. They’ve stopped engaging with everyone and everything entirely.

When they were a kid, they scared the hell out of Noelle by convincing her there was a human under her bed that would get her, and then hiding under there themselves before jumping out to terrify her. What happened? Where did that kid go, and what happened to their sense of joy and whimsy?

Do you see where I’m going with this, yet?

One way or another, word has gotten around about the shelter and how creepy it is and what sort of terrifying things might be hiding inside of it. It’s the exact sort of urban legend a small nowhere town like Hometown would have about an old and abandoned structure somewhere along its outskirts, and exactly the sort of story a group of creepy, rambunctious, and mischievous kids like Kris, Dess, and Catti would be all over in a heartbeat.

It’s not hard to imagine that the three of them had a fascination with Hometown’s own little ghost story. It’s so well-known there’s something off about that shelter, even Alphys is recounting tales of how maybe it wasn’t meant to protect the residents if something happened outside, but to protect them from something the locked shelter door keeps inside. And we know for a fact that regardless of whether Kris or Catti ever investigated it, Dess Holiday absolutely and unequivocally did.

How do we know this?

Well, when the Knight disappears into the shelter with Undyne after running away from our fight with it, Kris follows it there only to find it’s too late and the door has shut behind it again. In frustration, Susie hits the door and a plate falls off of the wall revealing an electronic lock with three passcodes signified by three images: a Christmas tree, the delta rune, and a badge. The mayor’s office, the church, and the police. The three most powerful and prominent people or institutions in Hometown all have one part of the key to the most mysterious and potentially dangerous structure in its confines.

But Susie was not the first to figure this out. While she prompts us to begin the process of finding the three codes and unlocking the shelter so that we can stop the knight and rescue Undyne, Kris already knows where one of the keys is, and it doesn’t take long for Susie to put it together while doing some research either. It’s in the Holiday household, where Carol keeps everything she wants to keep safest.

Inside of Dess’ guitar.

I don’t think Carol was the one who hid that code there. After Dess’ disappearance, I don’t think she’s even looked at that guitar once, let alone touched it. But Kris knows it’s there, immediately ripping our soul out of their body as soon as we enter and try to write down the code, stopping us just shy of its final digit. Though we can piece it together pretty easily, they still didn’t want us to know it.

Why? Maybe because they’ve done all this before and they’ve seen what happened. We did save over Kris’ file, after all, one that already existed.

Either way, I do think Dess found all three codes. I think it was something Kris helped her out with, too, if not suggested to her in the first place. I think they thought they were solving the big mystery of Hometown together, that they would find all the passwords, open the shelter, scare the shit out of each other for fun, and then see there was nothing inside and all of the rumors were just that. All in good fun, just as it always was.

So that was what they did. They collected all three passcodes. I don’t think it would’ve been hard for Kris to find the police’s given their father was the chief at the time. So Kris and Dess went down to the shelter together and they opened the door.

It was dark inside. Really, really dark. But it was quiet. It seemed like it was empty. And that’s when Kris, the little prankster that they were, had a devilish idea. The bunker was a letdown just like they knew it would be, but they could still have a little fun and scare Dess like they liked to scare her little sister. So Kris pushed her inside while the door was open and then quickly closed it behind her.

It was supposed to be a joke. They’d immediately input the codes again, open the door, and let her back out.

But Dess never came back out.

Dess Holiday was gone.

How many times must Kris have put the codes in again? How many times did they open the door and call her name only to receive no response? No doubt that at first they would’ve thought they were being pranked back in turn. “This isn’t funny, Dess,” they’d say, “why aren’t you answering?”, they’d call.

But Dess isn’t there anymore. And that darkness… it’s really, really, really dark. Darker than Kris had ever seen before.

So Kris ran away.

I’m sure they would’ve told their parents. Asgore especially, being chief of police and all. Maybe not immediately, but when it became clear Dess really wasn’t coming back and they got even more worried, they’d definitely say something. And that’s when it all began to fall apart.

Part VIe. Bringing It All Back Home

This is a pretty big segment so far, huh? Let’s take a moment real quick to tie together everything we've covered to now.

It was the disappearance of Dess that ruined everything, for everyone, forever. It was likely what started, or at the very least worsened, the fighting between Asgore and Toriel, and their family and the Holidays’.

Noelle, traumatized and desperate, begins searching online for her sister’s name, trying to stay up to date or learn any sort of new information. The adults won’t talk about it, Kris is distant and despondent, so they turn to the internet. Gaster notices this, and begins feeding her information through targeted ads, the true form of Spamton. Why? Well, put a pin in that for a sec.

Obviously, seeing ads that say or imply something to do with Dess and her disappearance would cause Noelle to click on them constantly. This is how Spamton became a Big Shot, why the clicks were through the roof. He was told what to advertise, and it was the biggest success anybody in Queen’s Cyber World had ever seen. But the truth is, there is no news. The ads are a lie.

Eventually, Spamton stops receiving calls. Then he receives one that terrifies him so much, he runs out of the room and leaves the receiver hanging in his wake. We don’t know what this was or why, but it might have something to do with his purpose having been served.

At some point, potentially after Spamton’s ad campaign, Carol and the Holidays turn their backs on the Dreemurrs, and after failing to find Dess, Asgore is fired as chief of police. He and Toriel get separated, and Asriel is all Kris has left. Then, eventually, Asriel heads off to college, and Kris is left all alone.

What does Kris do now? They’ve distanced themselves from everybody but their brother, and now their brother is gone too. Dess was never found, and the guilt has never subsided, even after all this time. Even after a potential stint in therapy, if one takes the Chapter 4 Egg Room being a doctor’s office with a blacked out art therapy room as being confirmation that, no, Toriel is not a neglectful mother and did notice Kris’ decline and try to help them by putting them in therapy.

But it didn’t work. Dess’ disappearance was Kris’ fault, and they know it. And they always will.

But… Kris still knows the codes. From Kris’ perspective, nobody is or has doneanything in years, and without Asriel there to keep them grounded, all those negative feelings come rushing back full force. So they go back to the shelter, they open up the door, and Kris steps inside.

So, why does Kris help the Knight? Why does the Knight knight Kris? Why did Kris create at least one fountain in their home, and may have even made others in the past?

Because Kris found out what happened to Dess and has made a deal with the devil to get her back.

But there’s one more person we have to talk about before we can fully get into that.

Part VIf. Noelle, No How

Up until now, I’ve been adamant in saying that Noelle has been a red herring for the true identity of the Angel, and I stand by that. But my saying that was in itself also a sort of red herring. Because no, Noelle is not the Angel. Yet. But that doesn’t mean she won’t become anAngel.

As the weird route makes clear, Gaster wants Noelle as a vessel. Why? That remains unclear. But there is something special about the Holiday family, something that has drawn Gaster to them specifically, above all others. Is it some hidden potential only he knows how to unlock? Their psychological makeup? A particularly powerful soul? Or… perhaps it is a pure light?

This is going to be the most speculative section of not only this extremely long segment, but possibly the entire post. But it’s also going to be the biggest key to unraveling what I believe Gaster’s master plan to really be. Why he’s doing everything he is and has done. Buckle up.

Let’s start with the Holidays themselves. In Undertale, they don’t exist. At least… not directly. We find out through tertiary out-of-game material that in that universe, Rudy Holiday is dead, but was no less close a friend to Asgore as he was in their past in the Deltarune universe. The two often talked and dreamed together, and it was Asgore’s greatest regret that he didn’t get to live to see the day monsters went free – though his daughters did.

There’s not much more we learn about them in that world. Though I will note that Asgore makes mention of Rudy having had a cottage in Snowdin, and that on the bridge into Snowdin, in the background, at the bottom of the valley in a clearing of trees, there is a single lone cabin. One that, if you wait, may occasionally have someone step out of it. Is that Rudy’s home? Is that figure Carol, or one of his daughters? Who knows. But we know Noelle’s shyness was shared between Undertale and Deltarune, as Asgore mentions it in regard to Rudy’s youngest.

Along with her kindness.

What if Kris and Dess heading to that bunker weren’t a coincidence?

I’ve mentioned before that while a disembodied soul cannot influence reality in any substantial way, our souls as the Angel are a little different, and can at least nudge small objects, ring bells, and perhaps most intriguingly, turn on and off electronic objects.

What was it that’s said to be not working in Hometown right now? The internet? And the internet being down drove Queen into a frenzy, acting desperately to appease Noelle specifically because without the internet and without her, there would be no one to answer her “sad” searches, right?

If Gaster created the urban legends around the shelter, then perhaps they were not conjured in hopes of attracting somebody who might one day be interested in the spooky and macabre, like ghosts and demons. Maybe he created that legend with a specific target in mind.

Was it his goal to lure Kris to that shelter that night, or did he just want Dess? Perhaps he expected Dess and Noelle to go together instead of Dess and Kris? Scary movies were something they had in common as a bonding activity, after all. But I can’t see somebody so supposedly smart and meticulous not being aware of the lone human in town also sharing those interests.

I think the plan was always to lure Dess there, and Kris being how they were, have her trapped in the dark by an unfortunate prank. But I think from there, his plan was never to use Dess as his permanent vessel. I’m not sure he’s even using her as a vessel now, even as she acts as his Knight. I think Dess was always supposed to be bait. Not for Kris, but for Noelle. Maybe all that Angel imagery around her isn’t just coincidence. Maybe it’s Gaster’s little in-joke with himself, a marking of his future vessel, the one who will see his ascension completed.

So again, why Noelle?

Well, in the Dark World, she has frighteningly powerful magic. She’s a healer by default, but she doesn’t have to be. The weird route in fact is predicated on you forcing her full potential out of her, on you “making her strong”. Because Noelle is not strong, not in her own eyes. She’s well aware she’s fearful, cowardly, anxious, and she’s not exactly a fan of these traits. In this route, you exploit these things with the promise of making her stronger, culminating in the mastery of the Snowgrave spell and the death of Berdly. Or, comatose state, as the case may be.

It’s the most powerful attack in the game by far. Noelle’s potential is through the roof. Obviously, one who aims to become the Angel would covet such power, but I think there’s another aspect to it, as well, which is that darkness all on its own is not the fullness of reality. It is dark and light together that creates the world, and dark and light together that would give Gaster his greatest desire.

But I don’t think light is something Gaster has anymore. He has become one with the dark, the King of Darkness, you could say. It’s all he has left. So if he wants light, if he wants to be whole, he has to find it somewhere else.

It’s Noelle’s kindness. Her light, her hope, her purity. That is what Gaster covets most of all. He just has to empty her out enough through our cooperation that she makes it to him. Then, he can kick that unnecessary extra soul out of that perfect vessel of his and finally be able to use the full extent of his power as a Fallen Angel. He fell, and with our help, so has Noelle, only for both to rise again. One in soul, the other in body, now a true god over their world.

And in doing so, Noelle – or the culmination of her being, her soul – will be Used Up. In convincing us to use Kris to bring her vessel to him to be occupied, Kris, too, will be Used Up. And with nobody left to protect with her servitude and Gaster having no further use for a lowly knight, Dess will also be Used Up.

It is the worst ending possible, and Gaster’s ultimate desire.

Or… that’s my best guess, anyway.

If anything in Part 6f here is completely undeniable though, it is that Gaster is intensely focused on luring Noelle to him – either through spammy ads or manipulating us – and that Noelle’s potential for power is through the roof. Nobody is as plainly indicated to be as strong as she is. Except for, maybe, one day, Susie.

What exactly did Susie see at the end of the prophecy that made her so angry? What was it that shook her faith? I don’t think it was her own death. I don’t think she’d care about that. But Noelle? Now that would be another story entirely.

What if the end of the prophecy is something like I outlined above? What if Gaster is always fated to get his hands on Noelle’s vessel, somehow, some way, and the only way to win of which the prophecy speaks is to destroy that vessel and Noelle and Gaster both along with it?

I think as the original writer of the prophecy, that would be a pretty strong failsafe for guaranteed success, and exactly the sort of thing Gaster would engineer. Wouldn’t you? After all, the legend of the delta rune isn’t just any old prophecy. It’s…

…foretold by time and space. The very same things Gaster is said to have been shattered across.

And the delta rune isn’t just any old symbol. It’s…

…his delta rune.

And that rune itself, that delta, it’s a lie. A delta is a triangle, yes, and a triangle has three sides. And the delta rune as we normally see it is indeed made up of three triangles, with an Angel above them. And given that this is his prophecy and his rune, I think it’s safe to assume which Angel that might be.

But… the delta rune is not always three below and one above. In at least one very special instance, it is four. An instance along the path of the secrets route in Chapter 3, where Kris plays a modified Dragon Blazers to acquire the Shadow Mantle, but in so doing, kills everything around them in the game. Birds. Yellow dinosaurs that self-delete after a fish slain. A white cloaked mage with ice powers who gets Used Up.

“But Toast, couldn’t that just be a part of the Angel? On the doll, that fourth triangle looks like it could be its body.”

It’s true, it does. But we’ve seen the delta rune in a larger size before, and it does not look like that.

See that? No fourth triangle. No body. Nothing at all, not even close.

That fourth triangle has never been patched out, and it’s not like Toby to leave an honest mistake like that in the game. Not one that’s so visible. Players might overlook it, but Toby? I’m not so sure. And when you think about it, this prophecy is about more than just Kris, Susie, Ralsei, and the Angel. Noelle is the only other playable character aside from our core three that we’ve ever encountered. Gaster seems to want her more than anyone or anything.

He even taunts Kris with it in the modified Dragon Blazers, how Kris turned Dess into what she is and how they’ll bring even worse misfortune upon Noelle. And Kris knows this. Why do you think they’ve kept themselves so distant from Noelle? It isn’t just guilt, it’s for her protection. Right now, Kris has a deal they have to keep their end of. They’re too dangerous for a bright, pure light like her to be around.

But I think Kris wants to do more than just protect Noelle like they’ve promised her in the past, when they stepped up to do so after Dess was no longer there to. That was their fault, after all. More than anything, Kris wants to atone. They want to bring Noelle’s sister back. To thwart Gaster’s plans. No matter what it takes.

That’s what Kris’ deal with the devil is really all about.

Part VIg. G is for Goner

Buried in the code of Deltarune, a lost and confused voice can be found, talking to itself in pitch black darkness.

Given all we know and have surmised to this point, it’s achingly apparent that this voice is Dess Holiday.

Do you see what she says there, in the first screenshot? Walking into the darkness with the light shining from the doorway, then the door slams behind her. It was a nightmare she’d had before the actual event occurred.

As a ghostlike omnipresence embedded in the fabric of reality itself, Gaster might be able to do something as subtle as give nightmares to children and those who are similarly unprotected or unprepared. Prophetic visions, even, not of things to come, but of things he wants to come, things he will force to come.

As outlined at the end of the subsection above, the prophecy this game was built around isn’t just any old prophecy, but a prophecy of time and space, written by Gaster’s own hand. And as any good writer or manipulator knows, a prophecy isn’t some mystical truth or divine prognostication, it’s a psychological trick. So long as you make it sound certain and you put the idea out there, someone, somewhere, will believe it as truth so wholeheartedly, they will act and perceive and contort their own surroundings in order to see that the prophecy comes true.

The term self-fulfilling prophecy is something of an oxymoron because all prophecies are by their nature self-fulfilling. Not because they’re “destined”, but because people are desperate for certainty and will do, say, and believe anything in order to achieve some sense of it. If a prophecy comes along they happen to like the sound of, they will always work to see it fulfilled. And the opposite can be true as well. If a prophecy comes along that terrifies them, they will desperately do anything to avoid it, and that desperation can be easily taken advantage of.

That’s the beauty of prophecy. The one who wrote it originally never has to lift a finger themselves, others will do it for them, invariably. It’s one of the oldest and most effective of cons in the book.

So who better to whip up a prophecy of Angels and fate than somebody who already fancies themselves that Angel? And if you’re going to go through all the trouble of sowing those seeds at the start, why not plant some additional ideas in the heads of others to keep them in proximity of your little con? Things that seem innocuous at first, but then suddenly profound when they read what you wrote long before.

It’s a game. And in this game, Gaster was in need of a player character. Not somebody to be his vessel – that was the ultimate prize, after all, the goal of the game he was setting out to play – but somebody to do anything and everything he asked without question and enact his will in the side of the world he, incomplete as he was, could not reach. Somebody who had been fooled by prophecy once before already, and who would submit to him of their own volition if it meant protecting somebody they loved more than anything in the world.

I believe the deal that Gaster offered to Dess was simple. Be his Knight, open the Fountains, and instigate the Roaring, or he’d use Noelle instead.

I don’t think he approached her right away – it’d be to his benefit to let Dess stew in the dark for a bit, to really drive up her desperation and loneliness, so that she wouldn’t even question it at first when she finally found another person out there in the dark, the same basement level, fundamental darkness of the code that Gaster resides in. He acts as though he has no idea how she got there, but it’s always been the plan to get her to this moment, so that he might be one step closer to his grand prize.

Note how the colors of the Knight and Gaster are inverted – the once and normally black outline and empty eye sockets are now white, and the once white hands and flesh are now pitch black. What once looked liquefied and melted is now sharp and hardened like lacquer, but when the Knight first appears, it too seems as though it is barely holding itself together, being malleable in size and shape and dripping some sort of black liquid. Note also how the Knight’s hands have the same holes as Gaster’s own.

The Knight is not Gaster in the same way that Kris is not us, but I do believe that she, Dess, has a portion of Gaster’s power. Perhaps a larger portion than anybody else we’ve come across to date. As our warped reflection and Deltarune’s second player, if we cannot act directly without Kris to facilitate us, neither can Gaster act without Dess to facilitate him. Is it coincidence? Mockery? If the latter, is it from Gaster toward us? Or from Kris toward Gaster? How deep does the subterfuge go, on both sides?

What exactly were the terms of the deal Kris made with Gaster? Kris, a child, wracked with guilt, led along without ever knowing it, specifically so that they would now find themselves in the very position they’re in today. Isolated, angry, and desperate to undo everything they’ve done.

I think when Kris went back to the shelter and entered it for themselves, they didn’t get pulled into the deepest dark like Dess did. But they did still enter a Dark World. One in which they could confront Gaster and Gaster could finally meet with them in-person.

Kris is desperate to get Dess back and fix everything, and they don’t care what happens to them so long as they can see that done. In fact, if they were to lose their life in the process, they might even encourage it. They deserve it after all the pain they’ve caused, is likely what they would be thinking. So what do they do when they come face to face with the man responsible, who may very well be standing there with Dess in full Knight armor behind him, watching them in silence?

They offer up the only thing they have with any potential value in exchange for Dess’ freedom. They offer their soul, their servitude, their vessel. If Gaster just wants a vessel and to run amok as the true Angel, then he can take theirs. Free Dess, return her to her family, and Kris will do anything that he asks of them.

Gaster agrees. Dess looks pained, but says nothing – perhaps she can’t, not at that time. But as Kris’ servitude begins, she somehow reveals to them what Gaster didn’t say. That Dess was never the point, and that Gaster doesn’t care about her or about Kris’ vessel. He wants Noelle. It has always been about Noelle.

I will refer you to the phone call at the end of Chapter 4.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this mysterious voice through the phone in this chapter. And the fact that it’s coming through a phone and after everything that happened with Spamton, we’re primed to believe it could be Gaster.

But I don’t think so. That doesn’t look like Gaster’s text, in either font he uses. The sound isn’t his usual garbage noise, either, nor does it use his speech patterns. In fact, it seems… struggled. Like whoever is speaking is fighting tooth and nail just to do so.

It’s Dess.

Through sheer force of will, through love for her sister, she is able to speak just enough and work behind the scenes just far enough that she can talk to Kris and help them figure all this out. But it isn’t easy, and it isn’t foolproof. If at any point Kris gets cold feet or deviates from their plan, everything could be in jeopardy. Kris must keep up appearances at all times, they must continue to do what Gaster asks as they ask it.

Let’s go back to Chapter 3 for a second, to give you a better idea what I have in mind and just why it is Kris seems to be of two minds about us, about helping Gaster, and about helping their friends.

Gaster asked Kris to open a portal in their home, to leave the door unlocked for his Knight to enter, and likely intended to take Toriel as collateral, giving the order to Dess to take her unbeknownst to Kris. But Dess never intended to follow through, only make it look like she was. I don’t think she would have pulled on her capsule so slowly had she actually intended to get away with her.

Then Kris, Susie, and Ralsei fight her, and depending on us, either Susie surprises Gaster by outlasting her and chipping her blade, or simply being defeated. Dess again must make it seem as though she intends to take Toriel, but it’s at that point that Undyne appears with her energy spears and interrupts. Dess is forced to retreat, but takes Undyne with her, so she “doesn’t come back empty handed”.

On all sides, appearances get kept. Kris does Gaster’s bidding while protecting their family and new friends, but never truly harms Dess throughout the fight. Nor does she ever truly harm them – there’s a reason they’re the only one who never gets swooned, why they’re the one who gets knighted if we, the player, win. It’s spelled out for us along the journey to this point, when Kris is asked about why they opened the fountain in their own home.

They just wanted to have fun with Dess again. And Dess felt the same.

Meanwhile, in all this mess, Dess fulfilled her role as the knight perfectly. She bested the heroes and tried doing exactly as Gaster asked, she couldn’t have known she’d be interrupted like she was. Right?

So, that phone call at the end of Chapter 4. I feel the context is important. When Kris is about to escape out the window, given everything we’ve seen up until this point, we’re led to presume they’re going to do more creepy shit that makes no sense. Especially given how they were just tossing and turning in bed, though that was very clearly due to their mom finding a new boyfriend and their turmoil over that fact. But we’re out of the body and in the cage, so again, we assume.

But also right before then, Susie is outside. She’s talking about how she refuses to let what the prophecy dictates actually come to pass. She doesn’t care what it or anyone says, she will make her own fate, just like Gerson taught her. That is when Kris is about to climb out the window. And that is when Dess’ voice comes through the receiver. A reminder that they promised, not just to help her, but to save Noelle. Perhaps she was afraid they were going to run away. But running away is no longer an option.

No matter what, Kris must keep up their end of the bargain.

And that’s why Kris’ interactions with us are so inconsistent. Why they interrupted our vessel creation to strip us of any real power, but offered up their body as a cage to house us. Perhaps they hoped Gaster would think they were volunteering to keep us in check. But we’re the heroes, we’re fighting Gaster every step of the way. And that’s what Kris wants too, but there are certain things we cannot be allowed to interfere with if they’re going to save Dess. They have to keep up their end of the bargain.

So while they recognize we aren’t doing any harm and don’t stop us so long as we continue to help the ones they love, they also resist us by any means necessary when certain pieces have to be put in place. We can’t be allowed to stop them from opening a fountain in their living room. We can’t help Susie find the codes and end up like Dess.

So as time goes on and we get closer and closer to the truth, Kris becomes more violent with us, throwing things and beating us with sticks, anything to stop us from blowing their cover. Because if they didn’t, and they let us completely undermine some aspect of the prophecy, then there’d be no hope.

But that’s the thing Kris doesn’t understand. There was never any hope. Gaster already knows, and always has. Even Undyne’s intervention and being taken in place of Toriel – that jab of the exploding yellow dinosaurs, of Alphys on losing Undyne, was the tell. Everything is still going exactly according to plan. Because this is his delta rune, his prophecy, and his story.

And his story only has room one ending.

Part VII: The Old Song from the Sea

Phew. Part 6 sure was long, huh? And it covered quite a bit, too. But not everything. We still have some loose ends to tie up to make everything make sense. So hey, I know, why don’t we take a quick break and talk about something a little lighter?

Let’s talk about music.

Before anything else, Toby Fox is a musician. Music isn’t just important to Undertale and Deltarune, it is part of its DNA, its identity. It tells and foreshadows the story just as much as the characters, text, and events do, if not more in some cases. In in those cases where it foreshadows more, it usually does so through leitmotifs.

Broken up into pieces and shattered across the story and the soundtrack, these little melodies act as connective tissue tying one character, theme, idea, or event to another. When a character’s leitmotif appears in multiple songs, it means those songs are in some way connected to that character, and if it’s in another character’s song, it connects those characters together through that song.

And we’ll talk more about motifs in a bit and one motif in particular, but first, there’s another bit of music we need to talk about. One we’ve never heard, but that has been mentioned in Undertale and Deltarune both, a lingering question that as of yet has no immediate answer, but one I believe I may have deduced. And that is the old song from the sea.

In Undertale, we hear of it from the enigmatic river person. This is also the character who first warns us of ol' Wing Dings Gaster, “the man who talks in hands”, and of Sans’ true nature, the “man from the other world”.

It’s a rare piece of dialogue, and was completely out of place in Undertale, more than anything else they said. But we didn’t really have much to go on. All we could do was speculate it had something to do with Waterfall, perhaps even Asriel’s music box.

But in Deltarune, we learn something interesting. In our second encounter with Onionsan in Chapter 2, he tells us something strange – a song he’s heard, but can’t quite place. Again, I have image limits to worry about, so you can look up the exact scene on YouTube, but he says:

“Just a little piece of a song, y’hear. It… sounds like it’s coming from under the water. Deep. …I’ve heard that song before… coming from the sea. The whole thing. It’s not a “new” song. But… I can’t remember… I can’t… Can’t remember, y’hear!”

The song from the sea, also coming from under the water. Deep under the water. And Onionsan isn’t the only one to hear it. After the events of Chapter 4, if you sit at the lake with Susie and remain still for around 5 minutes, a scene will very slowly play out, boxes of dialogue from her talking to Kris when she mentions something odd… she hears music. She asks us if we can hear it to. Kris doesn’t respond, and we hear nothing but the wind and waves. So she continues,

She hears it too, the same song as Onionsan, the same song as in the sea, as under the water, but this time, it’s on the other side of the lake. What does all of this mean? What is this song? What does it represent? I think the fact it’s associated with the water, and with the sea specifically, is the key.

The old song of the sea… is freedom.

It is the oldest gateway to and representation of freedom mankind has. The freedom of the open ocean. No masters, no kings, sailing to discover new lands and start a new life. To discover, to be, without restriction. It is an escape, but also, it is hope. It is a dream. The sea is all these things and more, vast and limitless with possibilities as endless as its blue expanse.

On the sea itself, the song is the loudest. It is everywhere and it is everything. It is known, heard, played along with. So why then does Onionsan hear it coming from deep below? Why does Susie hear it across the lake? Because neither Onionsan or Susie are free. No one and nothing in Hometown, in the entirety of Deltarune, is free. Not right now. So that song is always just out of reach, and where, specifically, somebody hears it coming from tells you a lot about what it is that character wants and why that freedom is relevant to them.

Onionsan hears it from below because they’re already free. But they struggle to remember the song because they, like all of Hometown and Deltarune, are currently trapped. Everybody is currently ensnared in Gaster’s plans, his prophecy, his delta rune, and Onionsan hears it deep because it’s everywhere under the lake and town. Everyone yearns to be free but for everyone, that freedom is just out of reach. That freedom is in the ground. That freedom only exists when Gaster initiates the Roaring and this world comes to an end.

Susie, meanwhile, hears it across the lake because in that moment, they haven’t made up their mind yet. They haven’t talked to Kris outside their window and resolved to fight to change fate yet. So in that moment, all they want to do is run, escape, be anywhere but there. To not have to deal with any of this, to not have to kill or watch Noelle be killed to save the world. They’re no stranger to moving around a lot and starting over, they could do it again if they needed to.

On the other side of that lake is likely another town, or even if it’s just woods, it’s still not here. It’s not Hometown. Susie hears it across the lake because across the lake is somewhere else.

But… hey. Hang on a minute. Freedom… music… isn’t there a melody in the game called the Freedom Motif? Why, I’m glad you asked!

Part VIIa. The Freedom Motif

The Freedom Motif is a repeating melody we have heard prominently at least twice thus far in the two secret bosses most closely related to, and most severely affected by, the Shadow Crystals. This would be Jevil and Spamton. Its name, while given by fans, is not without merit, as both these characters are constantly talking about and completely obsessed with freedom.

For Jevil, Seam tells us of how one day he just changed, and began ranting and raving about how everything was a game, how he was the freest of them all now, how everybody else was stuck in a cage. As we bring him the Shadow Crystal after Jevil’s defeat, he seems to recognize it for the power it holds and as what changed Jevil.

In this same conversation, he remarks how over time, as his words have sat with him, Seam has taken on a view of the world that has – in his own words – become “dark, yet darker”. Hmm. Put a pin in that – we’ll be coming back to him and Jevil both in Part 8.

In Jevil’s song The World Revolving, the Freedom Motif makes up the song’s “chorus”.

For Spamton, his whole thing was that he wanted to be a Big Shot again, the Biggest Shot of all. After obtaining the Shadow Crystal, along with going slightly made like Jevil and, in his case, beginning to glitch out, he began to gain a deeper understanding of the world around him, his place in it, and just how it was he’d been used by the voice on the phone.

Now that he held a fragment of the voice’s power, he could see just how it was that voice made him so Big. He could see the strings and knew how to make them ring. He could see the audience, us, watching him struggle and prayed to us, the audience, the Angel, for salvation. He could see our [Heaven].

People have long presumed that [Heaven] is the Light World due to the mural in his shop of a blue sky, the sky only the Lightners get to see. And in peering through a Shadow Crystal, that is absolutely correct. He likely did see the Lightners’ sky. But don’t forget, he can also see us. I don’t think [Heaven] is the Light World, I think it’s ours.

So does that mean our world is the ANGEL’S HEAVEN of the prophecy? Well, maybe. It’s certainly one interpretation. But I don’t find our world all that heavenly, even if we have agency and freedom any characters in a video game may lack.

When it comes to the ANGEL’S HEAVEN, I find it more likely to be one of two things, perhaps even both simultaneously. For us as the player of the game, the heroes looking for a happy ending, what is a greater paradise to us than the game itself? In banishing the ANGEL’S HEAVEN, what Kris, Susie, and Ralsei would be doing would be ending the game, “banishing” our playground, our “heaven”, because now it’s over. Everybody’s happy. There’s nothing left to do.

For the fallen Angel, Gaster, it would be his complete and total victory, or the continuation of his scheming. In banishing the ANGEL’S HEAVEN in that instance, they’d be vanquishing Gaster for good. In either case, only by banishing the ANGEL’S HEAVEN is anybody allowed to truly go free. This is the truest freedom of all, the one Spamton longed for most.

But he was not Jevil. He didn’t want to play a game, like we do. For all his chaos and havoc, Jevil just wanted to have fun, which makes him a stand-in for us in this Two Angels aspect of this grand unified theory of mine. Spamton didn’t want our freedom, he wanted Gaster’s. He didn’t want to be on any strings at all. To be completely free, a Big Shot again, the Biggest Shot Of Them All. He wanted to be the one who made the calls. And he thought by taking that Lightner’s design, by becoming NEO, by using the power and knowledge of the Shadow Crystal, he might finally have found a way to do it.

But he was still on strings all the same. Because that wasn’t why Gaster put him there. He didn’t want to make a rival, he wanted to prove a point. Not to him, not even to us, but to Kris. There’s a reason why Kris was screaming after watching Spamton die. Why Spamton was allowed to attain so much power. Because Gaster wanted to show Kris that no matter what, no matter what they did, no matter what power they obtained, no matter who they worked with in secret or in the open, they would never, ever, ever be free of their strings, just like Spamton.

Why? Well, what is another way to describe a man who talks with hands?

A puppeteer. And a puppet is exactly what Susie described Spamton as. Exactly what Spamton had shrunk and devolved into after he stopped being a Big Shot, after he found a Shadow Crystal, after he became obsessed with freedom. The allure of freedom in and of itself is the most devious set of strings in Gaster’s repertoire.

He holds it out in front of people only to take it away and hoard it for himself. It’s always promised but never delivered, and when others try to steal it for themselves, they end up like Spamton, tethered to his strings tighter than ever before. There was nothing visible until he ascended to NEO. There were more strings than we could count when he finally did.

And this was alluded to long before the strings were cut in front of Kris. As much as Spamton was trying to make a deal with them, they were also aware how dangerous this was. It’d already happened to them before, after all, so Kris was well forewarned.

After all, the option to leave Spamton’s shop before the keygen is acquired isn’t to Exit. It’s to Escape.

And that could be to escape these strings, these chains, and to be free, sure. Or, it could be to run away. To not make the same mistake Spamton did and to get as far away as they can. Kris persisted. Thus, Spamton’s function was to show Kris the freedom they so desired and then crush it right in front of them and their resolve along with it.

This is also why Kris didn’t hear the song at the lake when Susie did. Whether you go out of your way on the secrets route to encounter Spamton NEO or not, everything in this game is tailor made to drive home the point that Kris’ choices don’t matter. We’ve already established that they do and it’s only ours that don’t, but breaking Kris’ will is absolutely critical if Gaster is to win.

He can’t be having such a powerful human soul determined to rebel against him, so he has to seal that determination away with doubt and fear instead. Show Kris what happens when they try to steal some agency, even if they wield power on par with Gaster’s or even a piece of his own themselves. Reaffirm through person after person, event after event, that there’s only one ending and Kris’ choices do not matter.

Luckily, Kris has us around. But because we’re the Angel, their Guardian Angel, we’re not trying to solve this mess ourselves. We can’t, we have no agency. We’re not Kris, they’re just letting us hitch a ride in their vessel. We’re not actually trying to reach a good ending here, that’s not something we’re at all capable of achieving in our current state.

What we’re really trying to do is we’re trying to reach Kris, and by helping their friends and repairing their relationships, give them real hope and true freedom. Kris is the one who has to earn that ending. We’re just the facilitators. And that means it’s our job to give them the strength to see it through.

That is our function, and the Angel’s true purpose.

Part VIIb. Something More Important Than the End

In both interviews and on the Deltarune website, Toby has said something interesting. “There’s something more important than reaching the end”.

We’ve discussed before how Deltarune is a game that claims time and again to have only one ending, that our choices don’t matter, but how we can seem to make decisions that change at least the minor details of the ending of each chapter we get.

We can also choose to obtain or ignore secret bosses, Shadow Crystals, and literal easter Eggs, but again the claim is repeated – there is only one ending. I’ve also laid out how I think that while our choices don’t matter, Kris’ do, and that if anyone is going to change how things turn out, it’s going to be them.

So, you might presume then I’m here to tell you that just as the lack of choice was a clever trick, a truth within a lie, that so too is the widely touted one single ending. Well, I’m not. Sorry. Deltarune really is a story with only one ending.

Gaster wins.

And Gerson warns us of as much. After Chapter 5, there’s only one more. After that… it all stopped. And that’s because in Chapter 6 of Deltarune, we will reach the ending of the game. Everything we’ve done has all been for naught. All of Kris, Susie and Ralsei’s struggles will have been for naught. Gaster will win. He will claim Noelle’s vessel, he will flood the world with darkness, he will instigate the Roaring, and then, with his perfect vessel and Angel power, he will recreate the world in his image and begin his next experiment.

We lose.

And it is then, in that moment, that we must remember what Toby has been saying. What Gerson’s philosophy implies must be true.

There is something more important than reaching the end.

And that something is continuing to press forward even after the end occurs, because there are very few true endings in one’s life. So long as you’re still breathing, nothing is truly “over”. More often than not, every new ending is really just the beginning of something new in disguise.

So, we lose. Gaster wins. But Kris, Susie, and Ralsei likely won’t be dead. Not all three of them, at least. And if any are destined to persist, to survive, to twist fate and force a do-over with new conditions or to struggle on and restore the others to fighting condition, I think the most likely candidate is Susie. The Girl With Hope Crossed On Her Heart. And I think Gerson realized that, too. That her strength of heart, her love, her determination, were the key. And he was right. Because her heart is so strong, she makes Ralsei believe it too.

Just as in life, there is more than one ending. But only if they choose for it to be so. If we give up, if we roll over, if we take what life has given us and what those who deign to claim themselves ordained by fate have left for us, then that really is it. Same goes for our Heroes of Light. But there is always another option. You can always pick yourself back up after you fall. You can always choose to keep fighting even after you’ve lost. You can always try to start again.

Remember how Kris had a file before that we overwrote? I think Kris really has done all this before. They’ve tried and tried and always reached the same conclusion, but reset and tried again regardless. But nothing ever changes. They’re stuck in a loop, their soul’s Determination allowing them to manipulate save states, but never able to win on their own.

And then we show up. And suddenly, Kris can’t access their SAVE File anymore. Because it’s gone, and we’ve worked out a replacement for them. We are the first new element that will twist fate and make it possible to start again even after the one true ending has been achieved.

The second, and much more important one, is Susie. Because as I keep saying, we have no agency here, Kris does. And we can try all we want to boost Kris’ morale, to protect them, to show them the way to a happier life and a happier ending, but we are not the ones they’re willing to trust or to listen to. Susie is.

Susie is the only one who has ever gotten through to Kris in any capacity. Susie is the one who brings the old Kris out of their shell again, who wakes the prankster gremlin child from their sleep. Susie is the one who gives Kris hope again, who renews their strength to fight again, who respects their boundaries when they need space but always comes back and fights back against their isolation when it’s needed, purely on instinct. Susie is the one who understands Kris better than Toriel, better than Noelle, better than anybody than perhaps Asriel himself.

That’s the difference. That’s what makes Susie so important. Susie gives Kris the strength to carry on and the hope to keep fighting. Kris gives us the option to befriend her because they don’t care what happens anymore, they probably assumed Susie was as bad as everyone says. Or, maybe they’ve tried befriending Susie in past runs only to have it end in failure again because we weren’t there to help. Ralsei is pretty adamant we accept her, after all.

So maybe when everything wipes after Gaster’s victory in Chapter 6, Kris is indisposed, and we, the Angel, have to play as Susie on her own for a bit, just like we did all the way back in Chapter 1, so that through her, through facilitating her choices and her hopes and her dreams, we can bring back Kris and Ralsei and save the world.

There is something more important than reaching the end. And genuinely, literally, in the most achingly obvious and cliche way possible, it is the friends we made along the way.

Befriending Susie is not a meaningless choice. Helping and befriending and recruiting all the Darkners is not a meaningless choice. Repairing Kris’ relationships and empowering everyone around them is not a meaningless choice.

Even though it all ends the same, we can choose to keep going after that end comes and carry forward the seeds of positivity that we’ve sown. Evil only wins if good men do nothing, if they believe they’ve already lost. And that is Gaster’s greatest deception of them all, and that is the lie Susie, Kris, and Ralsei must see through for anything to ever truly change.

Part VIII: Elsewhere, It’s Raining Cats and Dogs

So, there’s something you’ve probably noticed I haven’t touched on at all, not even remotely. Something important. Something major.

In all this incessant maddened rambling, not once have I ever mentioned image_friend.

Part VIIIa: It’s Them, Your Best Friend

For the uninitiated, this is the entity we currently know only as the Friend:

He’s a cat. Presumably. I mean, those sure do look like cat ears, huh? He shows up a lot in random places, mostly in the same manner as Flowey did in Undertale where he’d just barely be visible as he slips back into the darkness if you backtracked far enough, but also in some hidden rooms such as in Chapter 3’s first stage of “secrets route” Dragon Blazers gameplay, or in the higher difficulty segments of the Airwaves minigame in Mike’s Room in Chapter 4.

But… isn’t there something kind of familiar about him? And not just one thing, either. It’s three things. Let’s touch on them in order of importance.

First, the eyes. Pink and yellow. This is a recurring color combination in Deltarune, and any time it shows up, it’s always in reference to Gaster’s power, the power of “freedom”, the power that corrupted Jevil and Spamton.

We first see it in earnest in Chapter 2, at first directly referencing Friend in a mural of pink and yellow cats in the city, though we do not realize it at the time until after our first playthrough, and the second time and most obviously in Spamton’s glasses, patterned directly after Friend’s eyes.

But as I said, this color combo appears in multiple places, and always in reference to Friend, “freedom” and its power, or Gaster. Remember how I called Gaster the second player? That didn’t come out of nowhere. The game spells it out for us pretty clearly in Chapter 3. A literal second controller with pink and yellow buttons, one that nobody wanted to use, is the controller with which we play the modded Dragon Blazers.

And it’s in that modded Dragon Blazers where we see oblique glimpses of Gaster’s intended future and Kris is then mocked by the Shadow Mantle, likely a piece of Gaster himself. And that’s actually the second place we should recognize Friend from – one of the Shadow Mantle’s attacks is summoning heads with pink and yellow eyes that look a lot like him, heads which sometimes drop health.

Spamton wasn’t enough to dissuade Kris seeking Freedom, so after mocking Kris, the Mantle lets them take it if they’re good enough to do so. They don’t think Kris will survive the Knight either way. But then, through us, they do. And it genuinely impresses Gaster that we made it that far with a Knight of his own creation. She still wins in the end, of course – none of us, not even Susie, could put her down – but we gave it an honest go. Chipping her armor, we get our third Shadow Crystal.

But there’s one more thing the Friend I shared above should remind us of. Endogeny, the Amalgamate from Undertale. The one that was a bunch of dogs melted together, the one between whose legs the silhouettes of other dogs were hidden and then made visible upon its contentment. Friend is the same way, only now it’s all cats. Not dogs.

That’s genuinely important and I’m not kidding.

The most common and important dog in all of Undertale and Deltarune both is, of course, Toby Fox himself. It’s his avatar, his representation of his truest self, he is the Annoying Dog. We players, we are mere Angels. If anybody lays claim to the title of Deltarune’s God, it is obviously its literal creator, Deltarune’s God Dog, Toby Fox.

And what is commonly portrayed as the polar opposite of dogs? Cats. And what’s the polar opposite of (the Western, Christian idea of) God? Satan. And who is very clearly painted to be Undertale and Deltarune’s Satan? W. D. Motherfucking Gaster. If Toby says puppy power, Gaster says kitty chaos.

Remember how at the very start, waaaaaaaaaaay back in Part 1’s Things We Must Accept As True, I very quickly mentioned that since he’s from Deltarune’s world actually, Sans wasn’t one of the “two” Gaster was speaking to in Entry 17? Yeah. That’s right babes, it all comes full circle now. You thought the Noelle, No How segment was a bit of a reach in places? Well here comes the double reach around in ridiculous defiance:

Gaster is a cat dad.

The two he was talking two weren’t other scientists, or Sans and Papyrus, or Alphys and Asgore. He was talking to his pet cats.

He probably even had more than two at some point. And maybe they weren’t pets, maybe they were just cat-like monsters acting as lab assistants, but he’s an amoral experimentalist and a scientist through and through. If he was going to inject himself with Determination, you didn’t think he’d do so without first testing it on someone or something else first, right?

Friend looks like an amalgamate for a reason: it very well might be one. Before injecting it into himself, he tested it on some of his lab cats, and perhaps he saw that melting not as a flaw, but as an opportunity. Perhaps he knew more about the Dark World going in than we presumed.

But hey, that’s just one cat. Or multiple fused into one, anyway. It’d explain that heterochromia some beyond just the whole “that’s common in cats actually” thing. But what about the second one? Is it still around?

Well, yes actually.

Part VIIIb. It’s Them? Your Grocer???

Seam.

A stuffed animal filled with secrets, by his own admission. A “former court mage to a king”, one of the four of Chapter 1 as he claims at the start, and the only true friend of Jevil before he went mad. The one who was impacted most by Jevil’s words and internalized them, using a veeeery familiar phrase in describing how that’s impacted him since.

Unlike Friend, who was Gaster’s original cat(s) though, I think Seam is more of a later adoption with a more complicated past.

Inside of Dess’ room in Chapter 4, when you investigate the box of odds and ends, you are inundated with a flood of random items that all say a lot about who and how Dess was as a person before she disappeared. From paintball equipment to shoes for hooves to Asriel’s old retainer for some reason, a lot has been made about most of it, but what I want to draw your attention to most right now are the frayed yarn and buttons.

It could be surmised from her having these that Dess might have had some interest in arts and crafts, at the very least sewing, though it’s unclear how good she was or not. Why is this important? Because Seam is very, very old. Old, ragged, and covered in repair patches with a missing eye, replaced by an old button.

When we first meet Seam in the first Dark World, it’s inside of the school’s unused classroom, potentially the classroom Gerson once taught in back when he was a teacher at the school. While it’s said that Kris never got to have Gerson as a teacher before his passing, his death was only a few years ago – meaning two people who would have had Gerson as a teacher would have been Dess and Asriel.

In Toriel’s classroom, the little kids’ class, in investigating the closet the narration will make note of how some of Kris’ old toys and books from when they were a kid are in there. After they grew out of them, Toriel repurposed them for other kids around town rather than electing to throw them away. Which brings us back to Seam in the old classroom, the old classroom Asriel and Dess once would have gone to school in.

When Asriel grew up, did he give his old, favorite stuffed animal to the school? Or did he accidentally leave it behind, but then elected to let it stay when he saw other kids loving them as much as he did? Whatever the case, I strongly believe that Seam isn’t just some random stuffed animal, but another Dreemurur hand-me-down. I believe it was Asriel’s, and that he loved that stuffed cat monster more than anything as a kid. Two of his best friends were cats, after all. He probably found it familiar, comfortable.

And as an aside, Seam, pronounced “Shawm”, like Sean, is exactly the sort of bad pun a child of Toriel would give as their most cherished toy’s name, don’t you think?

But years of love and play leave a mark, as Toy Story taught us. Asriel and Dess were clearly close – she has some of his music CDs (unopened) and his old retainer, and seemed to have a shared interest in dragons. So I think in seeing him sad at Seam’s ragged state, she would offer to repair him for him, even if haphazardly. Large patches to cover up tears and gaps and a button where an eye used to be.

Seam is an old presence in the first Dark World. Older than just about anyone there, as if he predates them all. He claims to have once been the court mage for the Four Kings, while Jevil was their jester. And being court mage, he was once a powerful being and privy to many secrets spoken of amongst the royals. Until, one day, Jevil goes mad, and it falls on Seam to stop him.

Seam knows a lot that he probably shouldn’t. He’s the one who tells us about the origin of Spamton’s NEO body, and who explains the Shadow Crystals’ value to us. He’s the one we first learn of the Shadow Mantle from, as well, and seems to know future events well in advance, having been warning us ahead of time of the impending fight with the Knight in Chapter 3 and fully expecting us to fail, and acting surprised when we come back and say that we won.

Odd, isn’t it? Seam’s not the only one who reacts that way. If you make it far in the Knight fight but nonetheless game over, the text from Gaster acts exactly the same way. Surprised, having expected us to fail, but curious if we’ll try again.

Now, one could chalk up Seam’s knowledge and foresight to simply knowing the prophecy, which in Chapter 4 we discover covers even trivial things like Queen’s car or Jockington growing a beard. Ralsei confirms that it is extremely accurate and everything listed in it will happen as described no matter what – further evidence that Gaster’s victory is initially guaranteed, if only temporarily. Perhaps Seam knows as much as Ralsei.

Except, Ralsei doesn’t know how they know what they do, just that they do. And Ralsei is special. We don’t know what his Light World counterpart, his true form, actually is, but his Fountain isn’t like the others. It’s made of pure darkness. It’s a Dark World where ANY Darkner can exist without threat of turning to stone. It’s a naturally occurring Dark Fountain, perhaps the naturally occurring Dark Fountain.

This seems like a bit of an aside, but is also somewhat related to Seam and Asriel, but I don’t think Ralsei has a Light World counterpart. I think Ralsei is special. Ralsei is just a shadow. Either Kris’ literal shadow, or just a shadow or the concept of a shadow in general. They have no physical form in the Light World, only lack, so Ralsei instead takes a form familiar to Kris, but different. They look like their brother Asriel, but not. They are Asriel’s shadow as Kris perceives him, just as Asriel is Kris’ shadow… or is it the other way around? Who really shadowed who? Just some food for thought.

But this nature of a formless shadow is why Ralsei is special. It’s why he’s the Prince of Darkness, born of the natural fountain, one of pure dark. But if he’s the Prince, who is the King? Nobody else but the one who is the darkness itself, literally. The one who’s shattered across space and time and now at one with the code hidden in the deepest darkness of his reality that makes everything possible.

Good Ol’ Gaster rears his ugly head again. And as the King of Darkness – nay, as the darkness in and of itself – this is how Ralsei gets all his knowledge he can’t place and information he can’t understand. It comes from the dark. It flows through him, makes up his very being. It comes from Gaster.

If Gaster wrote the prophecy, the legend, then as his Prince, Ralsei is that tale’s keeper. His function is supposed to be to guide Kris along the “correct” path, reaffirming that the prophecy is unshakable and that while Kris’ actions are admirable, they are always doomed to the same ending.

This isn’t to say I think Ralsei is a villain. He’s not aware of where his knowledge comes from, remember? I think he’s just being used. He’s a puppet, a shadow puppet, and he knows not who or what casts the shadow that he is.

So if all that is true, if Ralsei is just a shadow and nothing more and this is why he knows so much – what about Seam? How does he have knowledge of future events on par with Ralsei’s intimate understanding of the prophecy?

Another option you may present is that it’s because of Jevil and what Jevil told him, that him simply revealing the nature of reality glimpsed through a Shadow Crystal to somebody else while having the power of “Freedom” has had a similar, if delayed, effect on Seam after all these years.

And sure, that could be it, but we have no indication that Shadow Crystals can have a delayed effect like that, or even that “Freedom” is contagious in that way. Seam had no Shadow Crystals of his own until we brought them to him, but he knew of what they were due to Jevil having come across one.

So, let’s finally talk about Jevil.

Part VIIIc. Equals Opposite

Jevil, I believe, was Gaster’s first experiment. And also, in a way, his first failure.

Why do I call this theory “Unshattering Gaster”? Well, one reason is because it really does attempt to piece his whole story together bit by bit, trying to figure out exactly who and what he is and why he’s in Deltarune and what it is he aims to achieve. But it’s also far more literal. I’ve implied before that I believe Shadow Crystals are not just shards of glass, but pieces of Gaster himself, from when he shattered. And for this I once again refer you to the Knight.

Her armor, the way it melts like Gaster’s mystery man sprite and inverts all his colors. The holes in her hands. When we chip her sword and armor, we gain a weapon for Kris and also a Shadow Crystal. And I believe that Shadow Crystals are exactly what her sword and armor are made up of, that they’re what give her a form and power just like Gaster’s.

If Shadow Crystals are pieces of Gaster, gazing through them after he’s become one with the dark is the same as gaining some of his forbidden knowledge, and wielding them is the same as channeling fragments of his dark power. The larger the shard or the more shards you have, the more of his power you can channel.

And there are hints toward this in Undertale, as well. The Goners, those who come from timelines that never came to fruition but who all have knowledge of or have come into contact with Gaster in some way before. And somehow, this has displaced them, allowing them to appear in places they shouldn’t, transients in time and space. But how, exactly, did that happen? I think one of them actually gives us the answer.

Unlike everything else in Gaster’s grand plan, I don’t think this particular trait was intentional at all. I think this was just a natural side effect of his shattering. He isn’t breaking off pieces of his already fragmented soul and giving them to others – those pieces breaking off are why he’s so fragmented. And because of the process he underwent in his Falling, all of these pieces have the same strange properties his Angel soul does. But how far do these properties extend? What happens if someone else comes into contact with them?

We get Goners.

In the wider Undertale fandom, the Goners are often referred to as simply “Gaster Followers”, and held as being separate from Goner Kid – but seeing as I’m referring to them all collectively as Goners, obviously, I disagree with this notion. While Goner Kid never mentions Gaster in any direct fashion, the state he finds himself in that he relays to Frisk is not unlike the state Gaster finds himself in. The state Dess finds herself in. All of them have disappeared, vanished, been removed from the front-facing light of reality entirely.

Deltarune is no different. I don’t think it’s for no reason that the only ones we’ve seen transformed by Shadow Crystals so far have either been Darkners, like Spamton and Jevil, or only demonstrate any degree of strange power or traits when inside a Dark World, like the Knight and, given how he seems normal right now despite holding one, Asgore.

Just as the Goners have been removed from the light of reality’s front-end, of the graphical UI of sprites we perceive to be the game’s world, but remain nonetheless hidden in the code if the right FUN value is landed on, the power of a Shadow Crystal only truly takes hold in the Dark where fantasy can become reality and where one’s desires, exploited and empowered, can be made manifest.

Jevil was Gaster’s first stab at seeing what would happen if he gave one of these pieces to a Darkner. And Dess was an experiment to see what happens if he were to obtain a vessel with his current powers. Because if his power no longer works in the Light World, then in order to become the true Angel, the Light will have to be extinguished.

This is why he’s trying to initiate the Roaring and summon the Titans. He can only become all-powerful when he both has a vessel – as the Roaring Knight shows with its unfathomable, unmatched power, incomparable to any other secret boss we’ve faced so far – and darkness with which to integrate and manipulate his surroundings. And this makes sense. Remember, he is the darkness now. He is its King. Its embodiment. The code and the plot of Deltarune itself.

So, Jevil meets with a strange someone, and comes back changed. He’s also now holding something odd, an invisible shard only Seam recognizes. And he’s gone completely mad, having gained forbidden knowledge of his true nature and the nature of the world around him. It was all just a game, a game Jevil desperately wanted to play. But nobody else understood.

Maybe, like the Old Song from the Sea, like freedom, the form that this knowledge takes or how it impacts somebody depends on the nature of the person who gleams it. Jevil was a jester, a playful entity by trade, so of course he would understand that his world is a game and would want to play it like we do.

Equal but opposite to this then would be Spamton’s interpretation, somebody who was manipulated and, now, with a glimpse of freedom, sees the strings that manipulated him and wants to be pull at them himself. He recognized he was just a puppet, but lacked the nature to see that this “puppet” is an NPC inside of a video game like Jevil knew.

And I think that’s where Gaster’s first experiment failed, and that that’s what made Jevil dangerous and why the order was given to Seam to lock the clown away. I’m sure the actual order was likely to just kill him, but Seam opted for compliance in another, less final fashion. He was the jester’s only ‘friend’, after all. And that order probably came from Gaster, if not directly then mediated through the Four Kings. If Jevil had a piece of “Freedom”, and he wanted to play the game, to play Deltarune, that would have made him the same as Gaster. The same as us. A third player. And three’s a crowd.

So, Gaster removed his piece from the board before Jevil got to finish setting up. But Gaster still learned something new. Pieces of him now existed out there in the world of Deltarune, and by bestowing them to specific pieces on his game board, he could do some very interesting things – just as he does with Spamton, using him to hammer home to Kris that in the end, the house always wins.

So what about Seam? Was he always one of Gaster’s cats, or were all of those merged into Friend and Seam is just a later addition? I think the latter is more likely.

I think that, while Jevil’s threat was unintended, he did still serve to further Gaster’s goals in the end by gradually swaying Seam to his way of thinking and seeing the world. He’s an old, tattered Darkner, one who says in our first meeting that neither light or dark have much of a future for someone in his condition. He’s falling apart and knows his days are numbered, especially now that he’s locked away in an unused classroom and Dess is no longer there to repair him or Asriel to love him.

This makes Seam an especially useful point of pressure for Kris. An item once important to the Siblings Dreemurr, now nearing the end of its life and questioning its reality and its place within it. Jevil’s glimpse at “Freedom”, false though it may have been, tainting Seam’s world view darker yet darker. If none of this is real, if it’s all a game, if nothing matters, then why worry? Why bother doing anything? Why not side with the winner?

If it doesn’t matter, if it isn’t real, if it’s all a game, then there’s no real right or wrong. If the world ends in darkness, it’s no different from a happy ending – the story’s over either way. Again, neither light nor dark holds a future for a darkner in his condition. A condition not just of disrepair and age, but of understanding.

Seam understands that Jevil was right and is now just looking to see where things go. One eye in the light, the other in the dark, serving two masters but ultimately siding with whoever wins. And as we know, Gaster always wins.

Gaster cannot see past the prophecy he wrote, and neither can Seam, so neither would know that there’s something more important than reaching that ending. But there is. And one can only hope that by the end, that one eye in the light will lead Seam to True Freedom.

Part VIIId. True Freedom

So if the power of “Freedom” and everything Gaster offers is false, what is True Freedom? I think the nature of this has actually already been divulged by Ralsei. True freedom is acceptance. And I think Susie proves it.

Let’s take a look at our four prospective inheritors of “Freedom”, one last time: Jevil, Spamton, Gerson, and Asgore. Two accepted it, one rejected it, and one is on the verge of making an even bigger mistake than his marriage. And what do the first two have in common with Asgore that Gerson doesn’t?

Neither of them could accept their lot in life.

Jevil couldn’t accept that he was the only one with the “Freedom” that he had obtained. His partial ascension was a glitch, a mistake, an unintended consequence, and from the perspective of those without his new knowledge, it had driven him completely insane. So, he tried to uncage the world only to end up caged himself.

Spamton meanwhile couldn’t accept that he’d been used or that he was never meant to be Big on his own. He couldn’t acknowledge his own limitations or flaws, and it blinded to him how he was so easily used the first time around and from the fact that it had happened again. He couldn’t face the truth until it was too late, and it cost him everything. Twice.

And then there’s Asgore. So convinced that he’s simply been misunderstood, that everybody will come around once he proves how right he’s been all along, when he makes everything good again by finding Dess and proving that all his crackpot theories were right. Deluding himself into thinking he has a chance to make things right with Toriel, that things can go back to the way they were, unwilling and unable to accept that things have changed, that Toriel has changed, that Kris and Asriel have changed.

Now contrast them with Gerson, the one who refused the power of the Shadow Crystal entirely, locking it away without a second thought. There was nothing left for him to accept. He’d made peace with himself, his life, his circumstances, long before he was ever brought back as a ghost in a Dark World. He didn’t chase Gaster’s “Freedom” because he was already free, truly free. He didn’t believe in anything the world was selling him, from fate and prophecy to power and infallibility. None of it interested him at all.

And I put that power of “Freedom” in quotation marks because the freedom Gaster offers isn’t free. It isn’t even truly freedom. It’s servitude. Just more strings with which one can hang themselves, just like Spamton ultimately did. The power is real but comes at too terrible a cost, a total surrender of one’s agency, be it to madness, obsession, denial, or the sheer corrupting influence of the King of Darkness.

True Freedom, then, is the opposite of all these things – True Freedom only comes when one accepts their lot in life. And Ralsei has been trying to tell this to all the troubled Darkners we’ve come across from day one.

Darkners aren’t supposed to live in rebellion. The fact they exist and have any degree of sentience or independent thought and emotion at all is something of an unnatural aberration, an artifact of the Dark Fountains and Dark Worlds that pop up around them. The true purpose of Darkners is to be given meaning by the Lightners and bring joy or comfort to them in turn.

So, what, Ralsei is arguing for… slavery? Is True Freedom, is acceptance, just another form of servitude? Well, that depends on who you ask. But ultimately, it doesn’t have to be.

To answer this question more thoroughly, let’s look again at our three Shadow Crystal bearers caught in a mire of their own denial, and this time consider what it could have looked like had they chosen acceptance over an easy out.

What if Jevil had chosen not to forsake who he used to be in favor of who he’d become, but reconcile the two, instead? What if he made peace with his knowledge as to the true nature of his reality instead of trying to exploit it? We actually don’t have to think too hard on what that might have looked like, because we already have a quasi-example of this from Undertale: Sans.

While he fell just short of recognizing that he was a character in the video game, Sans had a similar degree of forbidden knowledge, being aware of the starting and stopping of timelines and having acquired powers beyond anyone else in his reality – powers born of Gaster himself. And it weighed down on him, sure. He was a troubled guy, but that was why his brother was so important to him. There seemed to be a degree of understanding as to Sans’ true powers by Papyrus, if some of his remarks in regards to his brother are to be taken at face value.

It was because he had Papyrus that Sans was able to be his jokey, laid back self. Because yes, he was depressed, and nihilistic, and he feared nothing he did or accomplished would matter when the timeline could reset at any moment with everybody else none the wiser, but that connection and implicit trust and acceptance of his state of affairs that Sans had through his brother made it livable. That’s why he goes off the rails if you kill him and stops appearing, why he holds it against you no matter what. That was all he had left.

What if instead of trying to force the world to get on his level or play the game he’d uncovered, Jevil maintained his friendship with Seam and confided in him what he’d learned? If the two of them shared in that burden together, would things have turned out the way that they did? It’s something Seam himself questions when speaking to us.

And what about Spamton? His fate was a lot more undesirable. He had everything and lost it all, then gained more than he had before only to lose it all over again and his life along with it. Was he supposed to just accept his defeat and his betrayal and stay small forever? Well, paradoxically, yes!

Because Spamton, again, is meant to stress a point to Kris, specifically that no matter what they do, the end will always be the same. So, what if they had stopped trying to fight it and just accepted it, instead? What if Spamton accepted his loss, and tried to start over after doing so? What if he’d turned that bad ending into a new beginning?

Well, if Spamton had done that, he would’ve given Kris the answer. The one Gerson found long ago, the one his tutelage has begun inspiring in Susie.

Sometimes, you lose. Sometimes, no matter what you do, how hard you try, it will never be good enough, and you will lose. Completely. And that’s okay! Life is all about setbacks. It’s about pain, and struggle, and difficulty, and getting back up to try again regardless.

Where Spamton faltered was in refusing to accept his loss after it had occurred and continuing to fight anyway. Where Kris will falter, has faltered before, is in not accepting their loss and that Gaster really can’t be beaten and the end can’t be avoided.

And if either of them were to just accept that and move forward anyway, everything would change. What if Kris stopped trying to avert the ending and instead chose to make a new beginning after it came to pass?

Your life and circumstances are only ever what you make of it. The power of your mindset is everything. If you’re ready and willing to close the book when it needs to be closed and start a new one when it’s done, then the possibilities are endless. Because that new book is one you get to write from scratch, now. You’re no longer subject to the same story as before.

Asgore refuses to accept the loss of his family, and in a way, so does Kris. Their trauma runs deep. From the divorce to Dess, they cannot accept what has happened to them, and because of that, they are trapped in a cage of their own making. True Freedom only comes from accepting the state of affairs you are presented with for what they are and moving forward from there. You cannot ever hope to make progress by deluding yourself or denying the reality of your situation, no matter how objectively bad or undesirable or even unavoidable it may be.

So with all that in mind, let’s look at Ralsei’s assertion to the Darkners again, that their joy comes from accepting their purpose to serve the Lightners. After all, the Lightners made them in the first place, and it was their feelings and ideas that gave them meaning and form, even in these unnatural Dark Worlds. To accept this state of affairs is not to blindly accept slavery as the King of Spades, Lancer’s dad, presumed – it is the only way of moving forward.

Because their purpose isn’t a question, it’s their reality. They were made by Lightners to serve a function. They are – at least supposed to be – inanimate objects. Tools, games, entertainment – they aren’t going to get anywhere by pretending that they’re something other than they are. If they wish to change their situation, or if they want to be something more, then first they have to engage with their circumstances as they are and work together with the Lightners in order to achieve it.

And that can be as simple as Tenna’s ultimate resolution: pleading their case to their former Lightners and being gifted to another who can appreciate them more, now that their original owners no longer need them. Or, it could be something much more unprecedented, as I feel Ralsei’s ultimate resolution might end up being.

Does that still sound like slavery and servitude? Just like before, that depends on who you ask. But I think it’s important to remember that what else Ralsei said is also true, that Darkners aren’t supposed to exist. That inanimate objects aren’t supposed to have thoughts and feelings and existential crash outs. The fact that they are is a mistake that must be corrected before the world is plunged into the final chaos of the void, of infinite black darkness.

Perhaps if they were truly alive, it might still just be servitude – but they’re not. What they need is different from what a truly living being would, and accepting this fact is the only way they will ever be able to move forward and find a way to be happy.

But acceptance is hard. It can be the hardest thing you’ve ever tried to do. That’s why Gaster is so effective, what makes his power so tantalizing and his “Freedom” so dangerous. It’s an easy out. Or, it seems like one at first. By the time you realize that there are no easy outs, it’s too late, and you’ve already chained yourself to a fate worse than anything you might have had to face previously.

You can’t win all of the time. Sometimes, you are going to fail, spectacularly. And that’s okay. Only be accepting that can you be stronger. And only by keeping that hope that can be found in starting over in your heart can you ever hope to be a true hero.

This is why if anybody is going to be truly free, before anybody else, it’s going to be Susie.

Part IX. Unshattering Gaster

This is it – the final chapter. If you’ve made it this far and haven’t already tried to kill me for making this so goddamn long or repeating myself (sometimes) unnecessarily just to drive a point home – thank you.

And if you’ve read all of this in one sitting, may I recommend seeking out a nice psychologist, or perhaps checking in with your friends and family? It’s okay to ask for help. It’s healthy to touch grass from time to time.

Either way, here we are. The grand finale, and the namesake segment of this entire theory: Unshattering Gaster. Let’s weave all these nice, colorful threads we’ve sewn into a beautiful tapestry now, shall we? And then, at the end, I will tell you exactly how Gaster can finally be defeated and why all of this had to be. So, one last time, let’s take it from the top.

W.D. Gaster is a scientist, an artificial fallen Angel, the author of the Legend of the Delta Rune, the second player of the smash hit video game Deltarune against whom all of us are playing, and the King of Darkness. He arrived in this world after an experiment that may or may not have been intentional in his home world, the parallel reality in which Undertale takes place. Just as Sans Undertale was actually Sans Deltarune all along, Gaster Deltarune is in actuality, and has always been, Gaster Undertale. Get swap'd, idiots!

By opening a dark world in a reality in which dark worlds aren’t supposed to exist, where magic is already real, and where monsters are mostly made of magic, he ended up creating something of a “glitch”. Entering into this dark world, Gaster ends up being “glitched” himself and shattering across time and space, with time and space in actuality being the code of the video games that are Undertale and Deltarune, the only realities he has ever known.

This particular dark world he opened, because of its glitchy nature, connects him to the one true permanent dark world in Deltarune’s reality, if only briefly, and the majority of Gaster ends up being splattered all over its code in particular. Now at one with the game, he knows what he is and understands the nature of his world better than anyone else, but does not lose himself to despair. Rather, he takes this as an opportunity to perform an experiment.

Now that he is the code, now that he is the darkness which makes dreams and desires manifest as light – as pixels on a screen – he wants to do the next logical thing and play the game. Literally. To be and to interact and to explore in all the same ways we, the player, can. But he can’t. Being a ghost in the digital machine, he has no associated sprite – no vessel – with which to exist and interact in that world.

But he’s not completely powerless. While he cannot act directly without a vessel, as the code underlying their reality, he can subtly manipulate the smallest things in order to entice, befuddle, frighten, and direct others. He can mess with dreams, guide actions, present people with leading questions. The work must always be done by them, but he can at least nudge them in the direction he wants them to go.

In searching for a vessel, he wants one he knows will be strong, that will let him do the most and overcome the most challenges with the most ease so that he can really play around and push buttons, to break the game in a literal sense. For this, his vessel must be the most capable, minmaxed character possible, and he has set his sights on one in particular – not the one that the true Angel, the player, will ultimately use, but on Noelle Holiday, the most unassuming of all but with the highest ceiling in terms of total stats.

Claiming her vessel for his own will not be easy, however. He still cannot do anything directly, and even if he could, he would face monumental resistance. So instead he engineers a situation that will lead to her sister, Dess, acting as his Knight and performing his deeds on his behalf under the pretense that she is protecting Noelle, while initially unbeknownst to her, she is only actually ensuring Gaster will claim her as his prize in the end. Along the way, the eventual true protagonist Kris is looped in to the conspiracy, promising to do what Gaster says if he gives Dess back to her family in return. All the while, Kris, like Dess, was unaware in this moment of desperate dealmaking that the table was tilted from the start, and that Dess was never the point, but merely bait for both them and Noelle.

Once Dess has a moment in which she thinks he’s not looking, she informs Kris of the truth of Gaster’s plan and how she is only a means to an end. In the shadows, they begin conspiring together to try and trick Gaster in order to serve him and to thwart him at the same time while he is none the wiser, but unfortunately for them, Gaster is the shadows, and being embedded in the underlying fabric that gives form to their reality, there is nowhere they can go and nothing they can do to shield themselves from his knowledge… not yet, at least.

It is around this time that we enter the picture in the form of the Angel. The answer to a prayer Kris’ mother has been sending up for years. Gaster has been anticipating our arrival from the beginning, however, and intercepts us immediately. After all, if he knows his reality is just a game, that game must eventually have a player – he knows it was never supposed to be him. So when we show up, he’s ready, and he begins guiding us along the process of creating a vessel with which we can influence the world.

And we do.

But, before we can inhabit the vessel we have created, Kris interjects and locks us in their “cage”, their body and soul, instead. We are now stripped of our agency and the level of control the player of a game might ordinarily be given over thwarting the actions of a villainous character like Gaster, a metatextual conflict he’s been prepping for long before we showed up in the timeline of the world he’s been presented with and embedded in.

When he was shattered across time and space, pieces of him splintered off and formed into crystals, indistinct and invisible fragments that, when held, give their holder a unique view of reality and unprecedented power, as if they were accessing the game and raising their stats to a level of absurdity. They can do anything and everything they desire and believe themselves Free, but are now more trapped than ever before.

As pieces of Gaster, using these crystals binds them to the fate he has written, and they become in a sense part of him, secondary vessels with which he may mess with reality. These are not entities we’re supposed to interact with, however, not as far as Gaster's grand plan goes. And this fact is what brings us back to the present, and is the fact after which this entire theory has been named, the revelation all this has been building to, and one you've probably put together yourself by now.

Gaster does not want the shadow crystals to be located and obtained, because he has no intention of ever being made whole again.

This is why every single one of them is relegated to the secrets route. Why all of them are optional, hidden behind secret bosses we’re not expected to be able to defeat. It’s also why the largest concentration of them have been funneled into Dess, his Knight, as a corrupting and overwhelming power we are not supposed to be able to survive. But through grit and determination, we can. We do.

This isn’t done as a means of testing Kris or the Angel or as part of the game. He's concentrating them into what’s intended to be an unbeatable boss known as the Knight because he never wants these pieces of him to ever be returned. Because that’s his big secret. W.D. Gaster’s shattering across time and space is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to him.

It has granted him insight and power beyond his wildest dreams, and put him on par with the agency of a player should the right conditions be met and a vessel acquired. If he can step out of the code and into the overworld, he will be unstoppable, just like we would be - at one with the shadows and the light together.

It is only by instigating the Roaring, however - by acquiring a body of light and dragging the world it hails from into the darkness of his soul - that he can not only play the game, but shape and reshape and reshape again every aspect of it to his whim. This is why Dess is necessary, why the Titans are the goal, why everything else must first fall before the fallen angel can rise.

But this is only possible because Gaster iss broken. He’s shattered. He’s glitched. And that’s what the true purpose of the secrets route, of the shadow crystal collection, really is. If we can gather all the errant pieces and defeat his Knight, and we restore all these missing fragments with his soul and unshatter him, he will be just another ordinary monster all over again.

And that cannot ever be allowed to happen.

To this end, I believe Gaster has created a multitude of contingencies. Kris has already bargained their own vessel in order to free Dess, and I can see him hopping into them if presented with enough shadow crystals and at risk of being depowered. I can see him ripping Kris out of their body and tearing their soul asunder to take the magicless Second Best for an ultimately more difficult, but still playable, game than what he would have had if he’d inhabited Noelle.

But if that fails, there’s also the trump card he tricked us into making right at the start, the empty vessel we were denied by Kris. Maybe interrupting us was one of Gaster’s orders, part of the deal Kris had to uphold and didn’t understand the significance of. Maybe Kris was told just enough to know that we, the Angel, could be much worse than Gaster if we had a vessel like he was after, and they interrupted in fear of what we might do on our own – a fear that isn’t unfounded given how badly things can go in Undertale, should we so choose.

Either way, there’s now an empty vessel out there in the void, down in the deepest dark, that we were not allowed to make use of but that Gaster can hop into if absolutely necessary. Something better than Kris but worse than Noelle. The point of Noelle is to orchestrate events so that she comes to him in a state where she’s already at max power, be it through the corruption of the weird route or the natural flow of the prophecy, likely via incredible amounts of trauma.

But as the originally intended player character, the empty vessel we created and named would have a capacity of growth as strong if not stronger than Noelle’s – but also as a player character, it would obviously start from Level 1, making the assumption of total control over his reality an even longer affair than it already was should he take it.

But if we come knocking on the shelter door with 5 shadow crystals in tow and somehow manage to best his Knight in front of him completely and rip that shadow crystal armor right off of her, what other choice would he have but to escape into Plan B and contend with us directly?

Or, if even that plan fails, if he rips Kris from their vessel but Kris’ soul inhabits the one we made, or some confluence of events leads to none of his intended vessels being available, Gaster might go even further still and inhabit the mindless destruction that is a Titan instead as a final, last ditch effort to banish our Angel and reassert control. To reset reality the hard way and try again.

The secretest truth of all of W.D. Gaster is that he’s actually desperate and playing a losing game, and he knows it. But it is in his interest that we don’t know it. That we can’t tell what is or isn’t important, and that we buy in to the lie that our choices don’t matter, that there’s only one ending and only the ending matters. That was the mistake Sans made, that Flowey made. But it's not the only thing that matters. It doesn't have to be the only ending forever. Gaster's pre-planned ending is really just a new beginning. The honest truth is that 9 times out of 10, Gaster will, in some fashion, lose.

Maybe it’ll be temporary if we don’t meet the right conditions, scenes implying a loop or the promise of Gaster’s eventual return. Maybe it’ll be unfulfilling, and depending on what’s happened to this point, the ending will be bittersweet with his ultimate defeat but the loss of a beloved character or two along the way. The game we play with the wannabe Angel is played on more than one game board. It is, I think, as much of a psychological one as it is a video one.

Does that sound reasonable? Maybe not. Maybe by now, you’re thinking I’ve completely lost the plot.

“Gaster isn’t real, Toast”, you’re probably saying, “he’s not playing anything with any of us”, you would assert, “I think you might need some sleep”, you insist. And you’re right!

But Toby is real. And Toby is playing Deltarune with us. And I think that’s what all this metafictional nonsense really boils down to in the end. I think the facts that Gaster is in many ways a reflection of the player of a video game like Flowey was but also a dark reflection of Toby as the game’s planner, coder, and creator are intimately connected. That the one really playing Deltarune with and against all of us, in the most literal sense, is and has always been Tricky Tony himself. Gaster isn't just any darkness, or any shadow - he's Toby's.

And maybe I’m wrong about that part – maybe I’ve nailed all the in-game plot threads and character and lore implications, or maybe I’ve misread a few of them, or even all of them. Or maybe I’m right that Gaster doesn't want us to find the shadow crystals and to be unshattered, but I’m way off-base in what Gaster really is or what he represents on a metatextual level.

But I think if you take a step back and look at everything we know about Undertale, Deltarune, and Toby Fox himself, when you remember that all this is just one great big piece of conjoined metafiction, I don’t think it’s as out-there as it might seem. I don’t think it’s as insane as it’d sound if I’d just come out and said it like this right from the start.

That’s why all this build up and puzzle solving was necessary. Because as far as I’m concerned, Deltarune is and has always been a competitive two player game. Whether you want to think that’s between us and Kris, us and Gaster, or us and Toby, the fact remains that we are very much a part of this story as much as Susie and Ralsei are. We, too, are a character in Deltarune.

Because we are the Angel.

And holy force that we are, we’ve got a demon that we’ve got to help Kris exorcise.

So let's get running on that holy treadmill, shall we?

Part IXa. Pink Odds, Yellow Ends

Phew. We finally made it. That’s the end of the theory, folks. All 38,000 words of it. Christ, I’m long-winded. But to be fair, Deltarune is a pretty layered game – there was a lot there to untangle and put into context.

I fully admit that I could be wrong about most or even all of these little mini theories in a Gaster-shaped trenchcoat, but I think they’re fun to consider regardless. I think there’s more merit to them than there isn’t. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered to spend the last 3 months writing this.

While I don’t expect everybody, or even terribly many of you, to agree with every single point I've laid out in this monster of a post, I do hope it was at least fun to read and follow along with as you traced my threads of logic along with me, and that maybe one or two of my proposals resonated with you in some way or have you thinking up a (counter?) theory of your own.

So even if you don’t agree with me fully, or even at all, I hope there was at least something of value in here for you. I’d be kinda surprised if there wasn’t honestly, I kinda touched on everything, and I still haven’t gotten to the miscellaneous stuff I didn’t know where to put anywhere else yet! That’s up next, though.

As of this writing, it is now September 23rd, 2025. It took me a long time to research all of this (re: multiple playthroughs) and put my thoughts in order in a way that I thought was at least partially coherent, at least enough for others to also follow along with. But in that organization process, there were a few little odds and ends – micro theories or brief musings and asides – that I couldn’t really figure out where to place in the grander structure of the megatheory.

This is their story.

1: Jockington Grows the Beard

Ever notice that Jockington seems to be getting… stupider? It’s like he’s devolving, or even dissolving. Losing form and function a little more with every passing chapter, like a melting amalgamate. And he’s not the only character like this, actually. There’s also Striped Bird, the NPC that blocks the upstairs of the library.

But, in Chapter 4, if you try again to talk to Onionsan after Susie tells you she doesn’t think Kris’ friend is coming today, Striped Bird will be standing there on the little circle of bare soil, preventing you from doing anything. And if you talk to them, they start freaking out, speaking in an even more incoherent manner than Jockington is by that point.

I think both of these characters might actually be, if not Gaster followers, then in some form creations of his. Maybe they're amalgams of shadow crystals, or maybe having held onto one for a very long time without knowing what they are, they're losing themselves as the end draws near.

Striped Bird, after all, is merely a recolor of the sprite of a known Goner/Gaster Follower from Undertale, the only one who had a unique sprite in fact, the giant smiling face. Perhaps that is its true form and has been all along, instead of the other way around as we’re led to presume with the compare-and-contrast nature of these two games’ relation to one another.

As for Jockington, I believe his true form is actually that Devil’s Tail we see in the prophecy. He’s not real, and he was very intentionally placed with Catti in order to separate her from Kris. Why? Because unlike other monsters, her magic is real, and if she and Kris were still friends, she might be able to protect them with a charm or make Gaster’s job harder than it needs to be.

So instead, Jockington was created to act as her friend and pull her away from Kris after Dess disappears and Asriel goes to college. I really don’t think Catti’s hatred of Susie is her own. I think it comes from rumors or lies fed to her by Jockington, her friend whom she trusts. She’s chasing the Devil’s tail and has no idea. I hope she can figure it out before the end.

2: Justice for Spamton

The fact that the SOUL turns Yellow when fighting Spamton NEO, the color of the Justice SOUL from Undertale, is another little tidbit that I think points in the direction that Spamton’s whole little segment is a puppet show put on to demoralize Kris.

In taking Gaster’s power through his advice, and later in taking the shadow crystal and getting tangled up in strings, Spamton shows that even were Kris to get desperate and steal some of Gaster’s power for themselves, Gaster would still be the one pulling the strings as its source. He presents his power and nature to others as Freedom, so what he’s trying to say is that even on their own, even if they were as free as he is, Kris could never hope to actually stop him.

I think the Justice SOUL then is just icing on that cake. By portraying Spamton’s demise as not only being inevitable, but being just. Being right. Spamton deserved it and so does Kris, and if Kris tries to outmaneuver the puppet master, they’ll deserve it twice as hard.

3: Sans and the Gaster Blasters

I never really got to talk about Sans much anywhere in this megatheory because Deltarune isn’t really about him in the same ways Undertale was. But to answer an inevitable question before it is asked, what exactly was up with Sans in Undertale if he came from Deltarune – where magic isn’t real – and he had no relation to Gaster?

I think like Gaster, falling through a portal, likely via a Dark World, to end up in the other world may have had some sort of lasting effect on him and his code. He glitched out just like Gaster did, just not as badly. Gaster was already falling apart when he fell through, which is how he ended up shattered and gained all this otherworldly power.

Sans was not melting from Determination overload nor even the same kind of monster as Gaster was, having a more physical body not made of magic. This is why he bleeds when you kill him in Genocide, just like Susie does when she punches glass. Since Deltarune has no magic in the light world where monsters reside, their bodies naturally wouldn’t be made of it, and thus have blood and organs and the like.

When he fell into Undertale’s world, possibly with Papyrus in tow, possibly not, that connection between the two worlds was severed permanently. He can never go back. Ever. Not unless Undertale Hard Mode comes out after Deltarune is finished to complete Sans’ story, anyway – but even then, would he choose to?

But he and his brother are still kinda glitched, which is why he can teleport and is aware of timelines changing, but cannot hop them himself. It’s more implied that he and maybe Alphys noticed through some sort of device some strange temporal readings in one of Flowey’s timelines, and due to his glitched nature, he’s retained that knowledge while no one else did.

He doesn’t seem to be aware of his “past selves” when we’re the one with the SAVE file, only claiming to make educated guesses instead, but that might be because we’re more special than Flowey as the Angel/Player. He’s not privy to us. This would also imply Papyrus really is as strong as Sans and Undyne hinted he was, he’s just too nice to use that power, whereas Sans is too defeated to do so.

And as for the Gaster Blasters? I think he just found them at some point. He worked with Alphys in past timelines trying to build a machine to go back home, the machine we see covered in the room behind his house, but it didn’t work. Still, building that probably took a lot of time, study, and parts collecting. I imagine he found the Gaster Blasters in Gaster’s old lab seeing as he was the previous Royal Scientist.

The fact that Sans is glitched similarly but still different is also possibly why his eye flashes yellow and blue when he uses his powers instead of yellow and pink as is associated with Friend and Gaster. It comes from a similar origin, but it isn’t the same.

4: W.D. Gaster Breaks the Internet

This is pretty strongly implied in the theory but I just wanted to make it clear that, seeing as disembodied souls can interact with electronic devices like battery powered Santa dolls and turn them on and off, this is not only more evidence that Gaster is a disembodied soul in need of a vessel, but also why the internet is down.

Wherever the internet “is”, if that’s a thing that can be said about the internet, that’s where Gaster’s soul is currently hiding. His being there is making it wonky and knocking it offline. He doesn’t want anyone to escape or receive outside help while he’s working toward the grand finale.

5: Is NEO, too, an acronym?

I don’t know! But I did have one idea in regard to this that I ended up discarding and not including in this megatheory, that if NEO is an acronym, it might stand for NEutral Observer. NEO power seems to have to do with souls, and a disembodied soul without a vessel is, again, a neutral observer. So perhaps the power of NEO is in reference to the power of these disembodied souls, namely ours and Gaster’s?

I thought it was more tenuous and less interesting than the other tenuous ideas included regarding Noelle, so I didn’t really follow through on it. But I’m adding it here in case anyone else wants to play around with it.

Could This Be Goodbye!?

Yes, I’m tired. This was incredibly long and took forever to make. Thanks for reading this far if you did. Have some lemon bread on your way out, my treat.

Until next chapter, that’s all from me, theory pals. Probably. Okay byeeee!

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