My buddy reminded me of this remarkably prescient post from back in the dawn days of Undertale fandom, which posited that UT was in fact a work of fanfiction based on a game that didn't exist. While the author gets every detail about the putative ur-Undertale wrong, they deserve massive credit (and a groveling apology from the UT fans who dragged them over it, and who must be adults by this point and capable of reflection) for noticing the Deltarune-shaped hole in the world.
(On further reflection it's entirely possible that I was one of the fans who dragged them over it, and I was old enough to know better at the time, so I'll throw my apology on the pile just in case. Sorry! Anyway:)
Now that DR Chapter 3 is out we can take another look at why UT's moral universe is like that. A sentient camera guides us through Frisk's journey in one sentence: from the fridge to the sink to the stove, Undertale took place in the same house Kris is dreaming in, its underground dimly visible from the vast purple plains of the couch. With our newfound understanding of dark worlds and how they're made, we can conclude that Undertale is, canonically, a pretend game that a traumatized pre-teen made up with their older brother. It is a fix-it, as the UT Prime post postulates, but the target of the fix isn't Dragon Blazers: it's the life of one Kris Dreemurr, who created the half-archetypes in UT by attaching JRPG tropes to their real (and boy is that a loaded word) friends and family. The "I can save anyone" morality presented in UT is the perspective of a child, and of a child who isn't completely sure that they don't want to kill their dad.
We were primed to receive UT as a critique of video game violence because that was the topic du jour, with games like Spec Ops: The Line raising similarly adolescent questions about whether playing a military training simulator makes you a bad person. Something weirder was obviously going on in Undertale - my take at the time was that the very existence of the Genocide route pointed to something more complex than the standard read re: the game's moral system, and I stand by that - but we couldn't know how weird until we got a look at the story one layer higher in the continuum of truth and fantasy that is the UT/DR cosmology.
Undertale turns out to be Kris Deltarune working through a bunch of their anxieties. It's about the divorce of their parents, their alienation from their friends, their guilt over their (possibly genuine) culpability in the death of the neighbor kid who fell through the ice and drowned in the lake. (At least I think that's what happened, here in June of 2026.) Add to that their lingering feeling that they're not a real person, that they're not in control of their own life, and that there might be some other, realer version of themself out there who made all the right choices and ended up happy. Is it possible to do this reading without knowing that Deltarune exists? As the UT Prime post demonstrates - yeah, kind of! UT Asriel's chuuni powers and presentation tell us that this a story written from a child's perspective, and the way it presents violence and evil is freighted with a child's guilty fascination with transgression and with one's own capacity to do harm. UT has a secret scary route because kids love those. (Corporate art has noticed this and is now building multi-million dollar franchises around the idea.)
There are a bunch of fascinating things to dig into given this interpretation, but my favorite right now is this: all the major characters in Undertale are based on people Kris knew, except two. Kris invented Sans before they met in "real life." Can you imagine? The funny scary creepypasta man you made up with your brother lives here now, and he's dating your mom? Think about what's happening in Kris' head the moment you first see Sans Deltarune. The external scream of the nostalgic streamer echoed by the internal scream of a mentally ill teen as what remains of their ontological framework falls apart.
The punchline of Deltarune is that Kris is, in fact, a fictional character. DR is ultimately about trauma and unreality, and the thing about delusions is that they are self-evidently true within the framework of your subjectivity, your narrative - that's why you can't reason your way out of them. DR asks the question: what if there's something realer than you, the player? That's what all the religious symbolism is about, right, and why everyone talks like they're on drugs while they're in church? The derangement that comes from the incursion of a higher being into your sense of self, irrespective of whether it's "really happening" or not?
The horrible epistemological implications of believing that a person you invented might have some kind of consciousness - or to put it more succinctly, the question "what if my imaginary friend was real?" - has been a central theme in Toby's work dating back to the Halloween Hack. It's a question that Homestuck asked back in the day, it's a question that The Amazing Digital Circus is asking now. (It's a question I used to ask in my terrible teenage fiction. I have a core memory of an improv skit I saw at camp as a child where Winnie the Pooh learns that he's just a figment of Christopher Robin's imagination. The way the actor said "I don't want to be just a figment" has stayed with me ever since.) It's a silly, childish question, until it isn't - until you notice your parents believing in imaginary people and organizing their life around imaginary stories, until something in your life makes you wish you were imaginary too, until something breaks in your head and you don't remember how to be real anymore.
All that being said: I am fascinated to meet Asriel in Deltarune and to learn more about his part in Undertale's authorship. Please release Chapter 5 soon, Mr. Fox, before I succumb to depersonalization or AI psychosis or DID or whatever the spirit of the age is doing to us all right now
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