Noelle Holiday: the myth of innocence
Everyone loves Noelle. She's sugar and spice and everything nice. She's the mayor's daughter,a choir girl, she's a cross country team member, she's a straight A student, she's a not-so-straight girl, she's Berdly's study-buddy and has "snake sundays" with Catti and Jockington.
No one, except Kris. Which is probably why she keeps longing for them even after years of being apart, despite her having other friends.
This is why she dreams about the new girl in class no one likes, and imagines that deep down there's more to her if only someone gave her a real chance.
Noelle is surronded by people, people who really care about her, but she still feels alone.
Noelle is a good kid. She's soft and innocent and fragile and she NEEDS to be protected. Everyone thinks so.
The world is dangerous, the dark world is dangerous, how could poor, helpless, innocent Noelle handle it?
And she seemed to have internalized it too. Noelle is a good kid. Noelle is innocent and fragile. Because no one will ever let her be anything else.
The picture of Noelle people have in their minds is so suffocating for her she started to dissassosiate from her own identity.
Everything has to be baby-proofed for Noelle. She shouldn't read out loud in class and she shouldn't be around Susie and she shouldn't know about the dark world because come on, it's Noelle we're talking about! Of course she can't handle herself.
And of course we shouldn't ask her before deciding for her.
But if we do ask her...what does she want?
Noelle doesn't want her world to be baby proofed. She is going out of her way to explore glitches and secrets and the dark corners of her video games. She watches horror movies and misses exploring near the graveyard after dark. She wants the class's bully to push her around.
She wants the catharsis of feeling scared and hurt in a safe enviorment, and get comforted afterwards.
She feels safer with Kris who does things like pretend to rip their heart out, and Susie who treathens to eat peoples' faces than with her mother who made their house into an Impregnable fortress and cancel school when it's raining.
And when you think about it, this sentiment of "protecting Noelle" is a little ridiculous when you realize that this girl has been through more terror and heartbreak than many other people her age.
Yeah she's rich and popular and has her own nice room with a computer and a large flat TV, but her older sister in an event where it's implied to have been traumatic for her and her father is sick. And in her mother's wish to protect her, she made her nice room into a golden cage.
Noelle isn't ignorant to the harshness of life, she knows it intimately, and pretending like she's a sweet innocent angel who'd break under any kind of duress is frankly insulting, and makes her underestimate her own abilities and doubt her own judgment.
Not only that, it's also a part of what leads to her getting actually hurt in the weird route.
The sad part about abuse, is that it always comes from people we're supposed to trust. Noelle wasn't wrong about trusting Kris, Kris would never hurt her. But we would, and right now, we're wearing their face.
Kris had to have known we'd come to possess them, they prepared a cage ahead of time. Carol, Noelle's own mother, certainly acts like someone who's aware of our existance as well. We're crucial to whatever they're planning, odds are that they're the ones who brought us here.
So she's left to wonder why is Kris acting so strange, and she ignores her instincts when they scream at her that she's in danger, and she lets them lead her through the dark because it's KRIS, and... she's just a Noelle. She couldn't handle this strange place herself, she's weak and scared and fragile. It's best if she lets other people take charge.
Then, Susie tells her she's dreaming and Kris backs up the lie, they reassure her and comfort her and do everything to keep her blissfully ignotant of the horrors she's been through and committed,
So when we come back for more, she's taken off guard again.
If Kris or Carol had told her about the soul, or Susie told her about the dark world, or literally anyone else had taught her to trust her own instincts and provided her someone she could talk to once she realized something was wrong with Kris, we couldn't have taken advantage of her.
Before chapter three, the weird route was considered to be just the evil route of deltarune, something we can do as the players of this game if we're determined enough. And since we knew that chapter three likely wouldn't have Noelle in it, the predictions were that we could recreate it with Toriel, use our evil magic powers to get her to kill people.
But it's not that. We as the player of this game have some powers no one else does, but a lot of them were GIVEN to us. We know that Ralsei could have solved every puzzle on his own, but he lets us do them ourselves. Before Susie agreed to it, she wouldn't take our commends in battle, and she still would refuse to do certain things if she doesn't want to.
We can talk because we have Kris to relay our words and we can act because we have them to follow our instructions. To be our vessel. And even they can choose how to interpet our commends and often use loopholes to gain agency.
Even our save files are seem to be ran by Gater.
Our power over this world isn't natural and it isn't law, it's given to us and we're reminded every single chapter that it can get taken away, too.
And our power over Noelle specifically is a result of her trust in Kris and lack of trust in herself.
It's the result of everyone else coming together and deciding that the best thing they could to for her is to keep her innocent, without asking her on the matter, and now she's the one who has to pay the price for this decision.
