Created an OC for The Freak Circus! Shes a mime and her ability is to erase memory
You won’t see her talking in public for an obvious reason which is heavily compensated with hand gestures and facial expressions
Rouxls is a foil to Dess? Ha! Yeah sure, then where's her little child that she pretends... To not like... But secretly cares a lot about... Hm. Okay I see...
one of the things i think gets brought up the most when discussing rouxls’ future importance are his knight signifiers – while he doesn’t have a lot of them, they are, i would argue, intended to come off as fairly eye-catching. rouxls’ entry into any room is just as dramatic as he is; heralded by a flash of light and an accompanying sped-up version of the sound effect that plays upon a fountain’s creation. his introduction names him by his initials – “rk”, the very same as the roaring knight. he’s got a similar white-outlined aesthetic. he declares himself the party’s “greatest adversary.” and while this isn’t knight-exclusive, he’s got quite a few peculiarities about him – like being able to alter the rules of a battle, and almost always staring directly at the camera – that often raise eyebrows in a similar manner.
but why? i think the knee-jerk reaction of some would be to label these things as facets of rouxls as some sort of red herring for the knight’s identity – but i don’t quite agree. i’ve touched on this a little here, but to go into a little more detail – were rouxls to be a red herring, he would need to be presented as a convincing misdirect, and he isn’t. we don’t learn that he shares the knight’s initials or that his teleportation sounds like a fountain’s creation until we’ve already established that the knight must be a lightner, ruling him out before he could even convincingly seem like a candidate. additionally, rouxls is framed as a character that isn’t taken very seriously – he’s incredibly prevalent in three out of four chapters so far, but each time he appears, the characters react in a sort of “you again?” way and roll their eyes. and with good reason – he’s patently not very threatening, and to boot, he’s more than a little absurd. it feels as though the framing would suggest, were he a red herring of any sort, that we’re meant to prematurely write him off, not that we’re meant to see him as a false candidate for anything.
but to circle back – what other reasons, then, could there be for these signifiers? i do think there is one – as aforementioned, they’re very eye-catching for their seeming sparseness, and rouxls kaard takes up so much unavoidable screentime that it feels as though he’s there for something. and i think this reason becomes clear when you take a step back and look at not just the signifiers rouxls kaard has, but what he brings to the table as a character. i’ve gone into detail about this a little already too – which you can take a look at here – but to reiterate; rouxls’ arc primarily revolves around his somewhat unusual relationship to his role as a darkner. he’s someone who lives in a world where his kind are expected to defer to those above them, but he's been mistakenly deferring to the people "on his level" instead of the ones with the real power, eager to play second-in-command to an “evil ruler”. but at the same time, he still wants to be second-in-command, and delights in pushing lower-ranking darkners around to get his way.
this, then, makes the implication of his knight signifiers become apparent – first and foremost, they’re meant to give us a gentle nudge towards the idea that rouxls’ll probably end up their second-in-command by the endgame. the knight, after all, is looking for route bosses that act just like rouxls – darkners it has control over, but that use wires or contracts – or perhaps “control crownes” – to keep their subjects in line. while rouxls chasing after a character like asgore is certainly a funny thought, and i don’t doubt it could happen, i think there’s enough to the way he’s being teed up as a lackey to the knight in particular to strongly convey to me that that’s where rouxls’ recurring role is going to really start to pay off.
that’s a pretty open-and-shut case, then, isn’t it? i think it is, at least. but if you’re like me, and think a lot about the knight’s identity as a lightner, you’re probably wondering “well, what if?” and i think there’s a little more we can add to this if we really get into those weeds – both for the sake of the above conclusion, which i feel very strongly about, and the more speculative conclusion you brought up, which i’ll get to in a moment.
there are two potential candidates for the knight right now – dess and carol holiday. i tend to pick who i think is the knight at any given time based on what would best corroborate my speculation – and here, as expected, i’ll be going with dess – but either way, there are many signifiers that the two of them share, being family members. it can be assumed that, for example, dess shares her mother’s color scheme, given that noelle largely resembles her father. noelle and carol both have a similar hairstyle that both seems to be evoked by dess’ silhouette – bangs swooped across one side of a long face, shoulder-length and “fwippy” in the back. and these things make rouxls look a bit like the holidays do – not to mention the jacket in dess’ closet that just is his jacket in a darker color. these things are small, and i’m not really sure if they’re there to corroborate all the knight-related signifiers or if i’m just stringboarding, but they definitely fascinate me.
while rouxls and the knight’s eventual convergence as allies is the only reason for their similarities that i feel sure is intentional to some degree – well, to finally get to why we’re here, i do think it’s curious to consider if he is meant to be a foil to the knight, too. they’ve still myriad differences (spamton and kris, for example, have a lot of differences in ambition and drive, as do tenna and susie, and so on,) but most (though not all) of the major recurring darkner cast are deliberately played as character foils to one or more of the lightners. this is a part of the way deltarune toys with genre; in the wizard of oz, for example, the friends dorothy makes in the fantastical world of oz are all mirrors of the people she knows in the grounded world. in majora’s mask, the otherside world of termina is populated by spitting-image lookalikes of hyrule’s townies. and this aspect of portal fantasy fiction is lingered on twofold in deltarune; both in regard to how the lightners reflect undertale’s cast and the aforementioned situation pertaining to the darkners. it’s somewhat vague as to if rouxls himself falls into this pattern, but i do think the idea is interesting to play around with. rouxls being something of an aimless young adult saddled with taking care of a child that i think – opposite to your read – he’s clearly not super interested in nor equipped to be caring for could be interesting when it comes to the dynamic between dess and noelle and the dynamic between dess and kris – though quite evidently it’s an older sister and family friend, not any kind of surrogate parent.
most of what we know about dess’ personality, though, comes from the way it acts while moonlighting as the knight. and i think that constitutes the biggest point in favor of rouxls being some form of foil to her. while i think her relationship to the hierarchy is much more akin to that of her other foil, spamton – happy to join in on the way it exploits others and can allow her to exploit others for the sake of her personal goals – rather than rouxls’ aforementioned fledgling attempts at submission. dess wields its power to its fullest as the knight, and rouxls acts in opposite. but with that said, i think a lot of the similarities i like to use to characterize dess come from dess’ penchant for showboating – in the dark world, dess’ attitude is theatrical and grandiose, and the “guardians” it recruits are shaped to frame it as a grand, deific figure borne from the dark fantasy genre. (tangentially it’s easy to read this as perhaps being motivated by a feeling like “fine, call my wants those of a big bad,” with regard to the prophecy, spitefully aiming to prove casting someone so capable and so motivated to be the one defeated at the end as a mistake.) rouxls is similarly dramatic – i don’t think i need to describe how he similarly puts on airs. that overconfidence, that utter surety in one’s dramatics – that already comes off as being something the two of them have in common, and quite evidently so. and – well, i think that dramatic, pompous quality, especially set against rouxls, is just a fascinating point to work off of when it comes to dess. i’d really like it if it ended up being taken a step further in the game itself.
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