hey, okay, so, we learnt a fair amount about the Angel in this chapter. a lot of characters are seen praying, and it raises the questions: is the Angel actually doing anything?
also read my thoughts on the Angel from the 3&4 era if you'd like!
in the Castle Town church, we can see some Darkners praying, asking for "Good cheeses" and "for Maus to get smashed with a giant cartoon mallet".
Divine Angel, Master of Order and Chaos... Please, bless my cats so they may do extra fire damage. And blesseth the cats of others, so that they may also do extra fire damage.
Pray to the Angel, Kris!
Tasque Manager wants cats to do extra fire damage. sure enough, Pink's bomb attacks are, uh... strong. i love the epithet of "Master of Order and Chaos", and it shows something pretty important about the Angel; no one really knows what it's like. they're just projecting based on their own expectations. of course Tasque Manager, who has the order element, is going to be thinking the Angel is all about order and chaos.
meanwhile the Wafer has a pretty different opinion:
Those who ask nothing, shall receive mountains in return. Well met.
okay so. should people be praying to the Angel or not..? what must it actually be like..?
okay, so, let's look at Alvin and the Church for a moment.
I realize now the great hall was not harmed in vandalism, but swept, by the Angel. In the winds of great change. ... even so, there's just one detail that does not fit.
... a number of smaller items seem to be missing...
or
A jack-o-lantern we use for the Festival was severely damaged. Why would the Angel befall harm to that one object...?
Ah, well. The Angel's ways are mysterious.
see, we know how that happened. the "winds of great change" was the Titan, the "smaller items" were our recruits the "severely damaged jack-o-lantern" was Jackenstein.
when I've been thinking about the Angel in the past, I've tried to trust what we're told, because I've never had any reason not to. but we do now. we could be the Angel, or maybe the Angel acted through us, or maybe the Angel did nothing at all.
if the Angel is really influencing the world in any way, it's impact is completely invisible. there're no traces, no logic. you kind of just have to have faith.
(It's an angel doll.)
(Its lack of facial features is unsettling.)
I'm imagining an Angel that's completely blank, completely pure. blank enough that any trait can be projected onto it. I'm imagining that the "lack of facial features" extends to its every aspect. the Angel as an alien, uncomprehending of the Light World and of Darkners and Lightners.
prayer is really unnerving in this kind of context. asking for help from someone who doesn't understand, and equally someone you are at the mercy of the whims of.
in Chapter 4, when we check Asriel's wallpaper with Susie, she points this out:
Hey, and in the corner, that's that cat thing from Castle Town! You know, the shop thing? The... cat... the stitch thing! Whatever.
presumably, Seam belonged to Asriel; we know that Kris and Asriel's belongings were regularly donated to the school, like the "kids' books [that] used to be yours", and regularly stolen from the school, like the Pippins "from Card Castle".
meanwhile, in Dess' room:
It's a box of odds-and-ends. Dig through?
You dug through the box and found... [...] frayed yarn and buttons.
Seam tells us how "Over the years, I've collected odds and ends." and I feel like the shared phrase is intentional. looking at Seam's shop, we can see how it's made from "frayed yarn" and from "buttons". I feel like the link here is really intentional too.
presumably, Seam belonged to Asriel. notice the letters to the right, like how Asriel seems to have been writing a lot of letters. when Seam got damaged... or maybe to be put together in the first place... Dess stitched them together with yarn and buttons.
Eventually, maybe in a different order, Gerson died, Dess disappeared, the playing cards went unused, Asriel went to university, and Seam was forced to lock Jevil away.
As the court mage, and his only companion, I was forced to lock him away...
so, Jevil then. if Seam belonged to Asriel, which there's very strong evidence to say, and given that Seam and Jevil were the other's only companion, doesn't it make sense that Jevil belonged to Dess?
just to say quickly, I'm going to be presuming Dess Knight is true from here... there's other interpretations but this one supports my analysis best lol. okay, so, Jevil references the Knight a handful of times.
Jevil, Chapter 1
IN THE SHADOW OF THE KNIGHT'S HAND... / THE HAND OF THE KNIGHT IS DRIFTING FORWARD.
King, Chapter 4
It was he, the clown, that told me the Knight's brilliance...
"hand" here could refer to the idea of a "hand of cards". in Japanese, the phrase "の魔の手" is used, meaning something like "the clutches of evil". Jevil is referring to the Knight as someone who can grip you, take you.
and, likewise, the Knight references Jevil:
Your vision narrows. ... The world revolves around you.
beating the Knight without the Shadow Mantle rewards us with a comparison to Jevil:
Hee hee... You three! You might be even sicker than that old clown!
the Jevilstail, with allusions to demons and devils, feels similar to Dess too, Raise Up Your Bat in particular.
meanwhilez, there are multiple allusions to Jevil in Chapter 5, as if he'd had some sort of influence on it:
Aqua
Is the world revolving, like they say?
Hee hee! What's going on!? Is the whole world revolving!?
The enemy revolves. The world revolves, too.
Aqua's references reflect this like, childhood wonder with this world. We see "chaos, chaos" quoted a couple of times in reference to Noelle and Kris playing with all the Cyber Worlders and Card Kingdomers. Kris seems influenced somewhat by Jevil too, maybe.
Blue
Who revolves - the world, or I?
Aqua: Blue, Blue! What is "love"!?
Blue: Oh, my sweet dear. Love is how the world revolves... A revolution, written in feathered pen, clashed by feathered sword.
Blue's discussion of love, I think, supports my theory really well. it echoes Dess and Asriel's relationship while tying in Jevil and Seam.
Leafling
The world revolves with freedom...
Leafling, who "smells like burnt leaves", echoes the "burnt lighters" and "old mint cans with unique leaves inside of them" in Dess's room.
events in the Dark World constantly echo events in the Light World. i think that Jevil being locked away is a parallel to Dess's disappearance, i think that there's a pretty strong argument to be made that Dess and Jevil are linked.
thinking about how the balloon variation of the chapter 5 ending has the SOUL positioned between kris and susie, like a little heart between them on this romantically-coded walk back home
and it's only at the school that that's no longer the case (with the music 'walking home' going silent as the chirping of crickets takes its place)
specifically, the entire mew mew fight is a parody of tokimeki memorial, a long-running dating sim series.
in tokimemo, you can ask your love interest to walk home together (or, if your love interest likes you enough, they'll invite you *looks at susie*)
and the walk home is basically a mini-date!
aaaaaaaand if your love interest REALLY likes you, you can trigger a confession scene when they walk you to your house (though it'll always get interrupted)
tl;dr yes it's a throwback to an old romance trope and one that's explicitly referenced in the game itself with mew mew and tokimemo!
it was really cute how Susie and Ralsei got so into it when Kris got a right answer, like they were clustered around Kris's 3DS getting hype for when it looked like they were winning their dating sim game.
your description triggered a weird memory about me reading something about a dating sim where someone got eaten by a bird, so I looked it up and it seems like Toby did an interview about playing Tokimeki Memorial (and fully made that shit up).
it's a good thing no one in deltarune has ever.............gotten eaten.....by birds...............
in Chapter 2, in the police station, we can see these photos:
(Photos of Chief Undyne and Deputy Napstablook.)
(Undyne is rescuing all of Catti's family from a tree.)
(... Napstablook is also stuck in the tree somehow.)
in Chapter 4, Mom Cat and Dad Cat are stuck in a tree... and Catti has to get them out by herself because Undyne can't help, because Undyne's in the shelter.
also before i forget, a friend and i found that its actually the same chord as the one at the end of the scrapped main theme/chapter 3+4 trailer music!
hi! yeah this is amazing thank you for @deltarunedebby for noticing! it sounds a little changed? like there's a minor interval instead of a major interval? but otherwise they're really really similar.
i love that this FRIEND is possessing a vending machine full of TVSlop.
(IN... TENNA'S... WARDROBE... A SUPPLY... HE'S GRINDING THEM UP... FEEDING IT TO US...)
(What? People? Is he grinding up people?)
(OH NO... LOL... IT'S NOT PEOPLE IT'S JUST P...)
given that TVSlop is presumably made from Pipis... the Vending Machine has an IMAGE_FRIEND infestation. and the FRIEND is grinning at us and saying "always at your humble service!" while feasting on garbage.
Full of nutrient
i like how the TVSlop is full of nutrient, singular. just one nutrient.
hi everyone! i started this post back in 2025 but I realised I could probably finish it now. I'm gonna talk about mus_smile and how Noelle's house is basically a haunted house.
what is mus_smile?
mus_smile is a hidden track found in both Undertale and Deltarune. in Undertale, it's the sound of room_gaster, aka Entry Number Seventeen.
in Deltarune, it's used in three places.
(1) as snd_smile, the sound that plays when you use Kris's cell phone in the Dark World.
[Chapter 1] (You tried to call on the Cell Phone.)
But it doesn't seem to be working.
[Chapter 2 onwards] (You tried to call on the Cell Phone.)
It's nothing but garbage noise.
(2) at 1/6.66 speed as you approach the Shelter.
(3) at 1/6.66 speed in the Holiday Mansion basement, before the breaker's pulled.
what can we tell about mus_smile?
we know that mus_smile is an electrical sound; it comes from phones, it stops when there's no power in Noelle's house.
that it's associated with W.D. Gaster; it plays in room_gaster, it's at 1/6.66 speed near the Shelter and in Noelle's basement.
that it supercedes UTDR's cosmology: as in, it can be heard in both universes, and in both the Light World and the Dark World.
that it had come through Spamton's phone; "When I put the receiver to my ear... There was nothing but garbage noise."
haunted houses
okay, so, i think we can analyse Noelle's House as being a sort of haunted house.
Noelle's house is somewhere between a dollhouse and an elaborate theatre set. it's layout is choreographed so every door and every character will be facing us. it's improbably pristine; there's no signs that anyone's living there.
Noelle goes home from school every day, gets rid of Berdly, and sits alone in her room. she finds secrets in video games and writes fantasies on her blog.
in Chapter 5's Weird Route, Noelle describes herself disassociate, seeing her life the way we see her house.
Since Dess left... All I've been doing has just been... Marching down my path.
Staying quiet. Getting good grades. It feels like... I've just been watching myself through glass. Watching someone else move me through my life.
her house is haunted by Dess. Noelle doesn't find comfort there, she involuntarily inhabits it, "marching down her path", wishing she could run away. Dess's room, kept in eternal stasis, is a sort of grave, a dead weight that can't be moved on from. in the Weird Route, when Noelle can't sleep, she has to go outside.
in the Ice Palace, a sort of surreal depiction of Noelle's house, is soundtracked by GLACEIR, which to me, is a genuinely unnerving song. it constantly marches forwards, going somewhere but never reaching it, echoes forming a maze within it's trance-like-rhythm...
from what Noelle's computer tells us, she spends most of her time at home chasing ghosts.
There's this, um, awesome bug that lets you get... glitchy pets. I have a save file with like, seven headless cats. Faha.
Noelle's house then feels overshadowed by these ghosts - I've discussed in another post about her potential role in creating IMAGE_FRIEND. it makes sense mus_smile is playing because she basically did everything she could to invite it in.
a haunted house is basically a place where the unfamiliar and the familiar can meet. a house is domestic, normal. a haunted house is a transgression against that, letting the spirit world in.
Noelle's house is probably going to be a Dark World
at the start of Chapter 5, Susie tells us she's planning to get into Noelle's house again.
If things go well today, we might have another shot at getting... Into Noelle's house, right?
at the end of Chapter 5, Susie tells us she wants Noelle to be part of their team.
We can't mess up anymore. We have to tell someone. Someone closer to the Shelter codes. Someone who can help us fight. Kris, this can't just be a me and you thing. It needs to be... Noelle's thing, too.
with this all set-up, I think it's pretty likely that we'll be going to Noelle's house again at some point.
Flowery warns us about the approaching darkness underneath Hometown. Noelle's house is a place where this darkness is present, where it's basically been invited in.
Something horrible is stirring underneath the town. A darkness beyond your imagination. Susie... Kris... The road ahead of you is draped in shadow...
i feel like i kinda forgot just how alien the Roaring Knight is.
in a game full of characters who behave like people, where Darkners and Lightners alike are cute and rounded, the Knight is so weird... their arms and legs are just bones, they're a shifting outline containing a pool of darkness. they feel like they don't belong in this world or in this game.
Black Knife is such a strange song too... the synth is so weird sounding, the drums are so harsh and relentless. the transition from Hall of Fame to Breath reminds me a lot of Pokey Means Business from Earthbound; the sudden shift from something recognisable to something entirely alien.
Crickets and Breath sound really similar, like the latter is a distortion of the former. i really love the contrast between nature and darkness, how these two worlds are compared through sound.
Ralsei starts using she/her. exclusively in Chapter 7 Side B.
we aren't told how it happened and it isn't our privilege to know. all of the control we had over Noelle and Kris and, to an extent, their identities? we wouldn't get that any more if the prophecy is just fully broken. she'd just be a girl now.
hewwo! do you have any thoughts/theories on the not-goner on the libraries second floor? love to hear your feelings on them
normalnpc
hi! thank you for the ask!!! i'm going to try and focus on interpreting and analysing normalnpc, as i don't really have any specific theories or explanations for them.
i'm going to catalogue how they've evolved chapter-by-chapter, analyse their appearance, discuss the books upstairs, and explore how poorly what they're saying fits together.
and yeah, thank you for the ask!! everyone please ask me stuff if you want to :)
normalnpc, chapter by chapter
this section just goes through normalnpc's appearances throughout the game so far. feel free to skip it if you're already familiar!!
normalnpc is introduced in Undertale as the third Gaster Follower.
their filenames are g_follower_3 and gaster_follower_c.
in Undertale, they do not have an equivalent NPC.
I understand why ASGORE waited so long to hire a new Royal Scientist.
The previous one... Dr. Gaster.
His brilliance was irreplaceable.
However, his life... Was cut short.
One day his experiments went wrong, and...
Well, I needn't gossip.
After all, it's rude to talk about someone who's listening.
in Chapter 1, normalnpc blocks the stairs to the upstairs library. in their dialogue, they encourage us to read the books upstairs.
[Chapter 1]
I love reading books.
Especially the books upstairs.
You should really.
Read them!
I love reading books.
Especially...
The books.
in Chapter 2, normalnpc's dialogue is slightly altered. they tell us how much they enjoy reading books.
[Chapter 2]
I love reading books.
Especially the books upstairs.
I love reading.
Especially books.
they're now blocking the four left bookcases upstairs. i'm going to include what these books say, as i wanna discuss them later on.
How To Care For A Human
(It's a book for monsters on how to care for humans.)
(According to the card in the back...)
(... looks like your mother took it out repeatedly many years ago.)
(There are photos of unfamiliar humans inside.)
(It's Book 1 about SOULS. Read it?)
The SOUL has long been called many things.
The font of our compassion. The source of our will.
The container of our "life force."
But even now, the true function of it is unknown.
in Chapter 4, normalnpc has moved left by a single bookcase. they have new dialogue again.
[Chapter 4, library]
I love reading. Especially... wait.
Wait. The books upstairs. The books upstairs. Wait. The books are...
... Wait. Wait, love.
and we can now read one more additional book.
(It's a book about Monster Funerals. Read it?)
... When monsters die, their dust will be spread over what they loved.
An object that symbolizes their existence. That object will be buried...
And in such a way, their soul be able to rest, within that object, and the earth.
Of course, everyone knows that. That's why this is the introduction...
if you've talked to Onion in Chapters 1 and 2, a short scene plays out with Susie by the lake. if you then leave and re-enter this room, normalnpc now stands there.
normalnpc is one of the simplest monsters in the Light World. almost every other monster has more colours, and if not, more sprites. but normalnpc is weirdly low effort. two sprites, three colours.
they're always looking down and smiling. this has a weird, slightly disquieting effect. especially when we see them by the lake in Chapter 4... if they stood upright, they'd be towering and imposing. but instead they nervously hide themselves, like they're trying to appear as small as possible.
when we see them by the lake, or we see them upstairs, they're by themselves- they feel like, out of touch with the rest of reality.
this next part touches on body horror, so feel free to skip it if you're uncomfortable with that.
Gaster Follower 3 comes from altering normalnpc's sprite. specifically, altering normalnpc's speech frame.
all colour is lost,
their eyes narrow,
their open beak becomes a jagged tooth,
their outline becomes thicker,
the gap between their head and neck becomes a grin,
their raised wings become a jagged lower jaw,
their smile extends upwards, folding on itself, into a sharp point,
and their legs melt into the ground.
when GF3 goes to talk, their face just sort of lowers, pulled closer to the rest of their body, while a bone juts out from their forehead. they have to sort of hunch into themselves to talk. their neutral sprite has their mouth hanging open, like closing it is too painful.
as GF3, they lose their ability to interact with the world. they can't move, they're rooted into the ground. they don't have any limbs. they're stuck looking away from whoever talks to them.
GF3 is normalnpc, frozen mid-word, and then contorted and rearranged. the process of them becoming a goner looks sudden, painful, physical. like with Clam Girl, whose face becomes an eye, their path to becoming a goner is... biological.
where the amalgamates seem melted, GF3 looks rigid... this makes a lot of sense if they're from Deltarune, because monsters there aren't made of magic, but made of flesh and blood. remember "Meat Factory", from the Sound Test in Undertale.
it's weird, because in almost every way, normalnpc doesn't feel real. they're just a video game character, they're an abstraction. everything about them makes it feel like they barely exist.
when normalnpc becomes a goner, their bones will start to really matter.
crossed through because this point doesn't make sense in retrospect !!
the library books and growing up
the upstairs library is an absurd, impossible room.
Deltarune does have a lot of non-euclidean architecture; like, try and work out a floor plan for the Dreemurr house. because Undertale, comparatively, has so little, i do think it's an intentional artistic choice.
if you look closely, there are two layers of bookcases, in a way that just doesn't make physical sense.
and even if it did, it wouldn't make sense for monsters to put books there and make them completely accessible.
from the library's outside, while it is ambiguous, i don't think there's an upstairs.
the corridor has too little space. normalnpc shouldn't even be able to turn around.
it's maybe the sparsest and smallest location in the game so far. it's made from like, two textures.
overall, it feels like a non-room, like it somehow isn't real. when we see normalnpc by the lake, it feels off, like Deltarune's reality is starting to collapse.
every new day, normalnpc moves, allowing us to progressively read more books in the library.
in Chapter 1, we can't read any books upstairs
in Chapter 2, we can now also read "How To Care For A Human" and "Book 1 about SOULS"
in Chapter 4, we can now also read "a book about Monster Funerals"
from a game design perspective, i think this makes sense. Toby provides relevant information for each chapter, without overwhelming us.
but every day too, we learn more about Kris's past. we learn about their upbringing, then their soul, then funerals.
in the Dark World, every subsequent chapter is adding more depth to Kris's past. like the "DECEMBER" scene in Chapter 2, the flashbacks in Chapter 3. in the library too, we see Kris's life get, like, coloured in.
when normalnpc tells us to "wait", it reminds me of the Forgotten Man.
WHETHER 11 HOURS OR 11 YEARS, DELTARUNE WILL BE WAITING.
SO TAKE YOUR TIME, WASH YOUR FACE, AND GET DRESSED!
as we wait, we grow up, and new chapters of Deltarune come out. with each chapter, the characters- and the whole world- grow up with us. and normalnpc grows up, becoming more complex and more aware.
The books are... ... Wait. Wait, love.
The books are [...] love.
"The books upstairs" help us colour the world in, give the past details. the books are, in a way, love.
every day we can come back here, and see Deltarune develop form more and more.
Clam Guy
in Chapter 2, if you didn't wait for Onion in Chapter 1, Clam Guy explains how to. then, in Chapter 4, normalnpc tells us not to.
these are both characters with compromised realities, characters whose roles in the game design are conspicuously obvious, with some connections to W. D. Gaster.
but then, at the same time, they're essentially competing with each other. Clam Guy encourages us to wait by the lake, normalnpc prevents us.
even without considering Clam Guy, normalnpc is opaque. upstairs, they're telling us to wait; outside, they're telling us not to.
i think interacting with normalnpc in Chapter 4 shatters our comfort within Deltarune. expected patterns get broken, we see a little past the visage of a Fantasy RPG. even though we can't exactly understand what we're being told, it feels imposing anyway. like, that this entire world is completely out of our hands.
other characters
a lot of other NPCs in Deltarune are becoming progressively distorted. I've covered a lot of them on my blog before:
hi! normalnpc ate someone. I can't say I predicted this... or came close to predicting this. however, i think i got the body-horror themes/imagery right.
it's interesting that Purple Guy, who's an eldritch critter in their own right, also has a stand based around water? like you dunk him into the tank, and he, dies???
hi! okay yeah so i think everyone's seen this by now.
to see this dialogue:
you have to be playing on a version later then v0.0.247,
you have to have defeated Pink,
you to have encountered Chapter 5's FRIEND,
and you have to have collected the Chapter 5 Egg.
okay, so, remember that we're told that Noelle immediately discarded every egg she got in Cat Petterz. we're told that even discarded, corrupted data survives in the Dark World. and we first saw FRIEND with corrupted data in the basement, and since then it's shown glitchy broken behaviour.
... I once met someone who REALLY liked cats, mew.
They liked cats so much, they owned a whole hunting pack of them, mew!
so is this "someone" Noelle? is the "hunting pack" the pile of body-horror-cats that Noelle discarded? wouldn't they have had to survive on like, the deleted eggs?
Found out Japanese fans call NormalNPC Tokuni-Hon (as in "Especially books") and was initially like oh that's cute but apparently they specifically do so because of this ???!!!
Chapter 5 feels like having one last chance to look at everything that's about to be washed away before the tide comes in.
it's weird to me that we never get any more than a couple of glimpses of the approaching darkness. it's weird to me that Deltarune still keeps it's darker side from ever really being shown. it's like a wave that keeps building and building but never crashes down.
