Welcome to my little corner of the internet! You can call me Pris! Expect a lot of of reblogs about my current interests- currently rebloging lots of UTDR (especially about the Dreemurr siblings since they make me indescribably happy). Minor. (he/they)
JOYCE MESSIER: So you'll accept the funding from Wild Pines? The branding on the new computer lab will be minimal, per your request. (smiles like a shark)
CAROL HOLIDAY: I'm so grateful that you agreed to that. Always nice to see a business that truly cares about local communities. Joyce--may I call you Joyce?
JOYCE: Of course, Carol. All of my associates do.
CAROL: Mm. (with a venomous grin) Of course, Mrs. Messier. I'll video call you later this week to work out the details. Friday.
JOYCE: Dinner, perhaps? I can fit it in.
CAROL: I have expensive tastes.
JOYCE: I'm sure.
(the meeting ends)
CAROL (musing to herself): Rudy wouldn't mind. I don't mind him and Asgore, after all.
JOYCE (to her assistant): So we both just saw that was a talking reindeer, yes?
In Undertale, the difference in physical structure between humans and monsters represents their different... let's say "ontological" status; humans are more physical because they're more real that monsters, right, they're the ones with real agency and moral patienthood; the world is implicitly telling you that monsters don't matter, they aren't moral patients, they are to humans as NPCs are to a player. They aren't real people made of flesh and blood, they're made of magic! That's the joke, I think.
Now Deltarune, with Lightners and Darkners, takes that subtext of ontological superiority and brings it even closer to text; the Darkners are literally not real, Ralsei encourages you to disregard their lives; the Lightners stand above them in the great chain of being, and closer to the Sun.
It would then stand to thematic reason that Monsters, as Lightners in the world of Deltarune, where we already know they don't have Magic, all bleed. This is what I have been staunchly defending for years now. And yet the game has just danced around it the entire time— if it's just a simple fact of the world, why not be straightforward about it? Why treat Susie bleeding four chapters in like a big deal? Why let Darkners so consistently talk about blood?
—Deltarune does not borrow Undertale's symbolism here; blood does not anymore stand for "real", or, rather, if it does, it stands for "real" as in "visceral", as in the opposite of "sanitized".
I don't actually know if Lightners bleed or not, but it doesn't matter, because either way, this fact would not be brought up. This is not a place where things like violence or blood are talked about (just ignore the weird man in the weird costume). This is just a quaint little town! Nothing bad ever happens here. We especially wouldn't talk about it around the kids! We're protecting them from it! Kids shouldn't worry about things like blood or trauma— So even a giant bloodstain on the floor goes unacknowledged.
The Light World doesn't allow talking about anything uncomfortable. Horror movies and rock music that may contain references to scary things are banned! But in the Dark Worlds, where the kids are free from the eyes of the grown ups, and can talk about everything weird and uncomfortable they're going and have gone through, the things they know are there just under the surface but aren't allowed to speak of— they can talk about blood. The Darkness itself manifests gushing from a wound in the Earth!
And Susie— well she talks about blood all of the time. She bluntly acknowledges the truth that "everyone bleeds". And when she rejects the prophecy, when she calls out the lie of the religion which claims to be all about everyone being always nice to one another, she, herself, bleeds.
And because of that, the kids noticeably and consistently lack the conceptual vocabulary to talk about what's happening in Hometown, and have to use the language they do have to approximate it, badly – first and foremost the language of games; toys; stories.
Noelle can't say "Kris did something," she can only say "it snowed," and "It was snowing so hard, I couldn't see anything." Kris goes to Art Therapy, trying to depict what they saw behind the tree, and draws the trees of Card Kingdom instead – and the Forgotten Man and Mancountry are games, too. The closest we've gotten to the "core" of what Kris is hiding was through MANTLE, game abstraction wrapped in game abstraction wrapped in game abstraction like the shielding of a nuclear waste disposal site, while some shrieking, giggling, unspeakable fear sits at its center and writhes hard enough to tear through that defensive layer and torment Kris in flesh.
They can't say it without a video game to do the talking for them – and that game, derived from Dragon Blazers / Lord of the Hammer / The Prophecy, carries its own conceptual load, doesn't it?
like, if disco was more of a classic Detective Game in the la noire mold, then not being able to go to the island until it gets signposted after the tribunal would be really fucking annoying. but because disco isn't actually About solving the case it's fine. the dead man tells you what killed him! going to the island isn't about having solved that mystery, it's about finally having gotten to a point where you're ready to confront love and communism face to face
"The shadows come to dance, my lord,"
"The shadows come to stay, my lord,"
(Art used in this banner created by Avielsusej on Twitter)
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.
If you only knew how strange it is to be there.
[…]
When the lights go out in the room in which Lumiere's invention is shown, there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture, 'A Street in Paris' — shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings and people in various poses, all frozen into immobility.
[…]
It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows. Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eternal sleep, come to mind and you feel as though Merlin's vicious trick is being enacted before you. As though he had bewitched the entire street, he compressed its many-storied buildings from roof-tops to foundations to yard-like size. He dwarfed the people in corresponding proportion, robbing them of the power of speech and scraping together all the pigment of earth and sky into a monotonous grey colour.
Under this guise he shoved his grotesque creation into a niche in the dark room of a restaurant. Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you—watch out ! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building.
But this, too, is but a train of shadows.
This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim…
Maxim Gorky, review of the Lumiere programme at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair, transl. Leda Swan
In the opening sequence of Chapter 3, Ralsei finally takes a moment to give Susie – and the player – a broad metaphysical explanation for how the Dark Worlds operate. And as Gaster alluded to when he mentioned photon readings turning negative back in Undertale, Ralsei asserts that Dark Worlds form from the negation of the negation of light, allowing for sensation through the dark. “Another side” is reached through the filter of the mind navigating the indistinct darkness, with the imagined made manifest. And yet, the word Ralsei uses to describe this process is telling: it’s an illusion.
Disregarding some questions that Ralsei’s very individuated, phenomenological description poses (how do the spaces themselves transform if the worlds are illusory - and more importantly, how is the experience mostly stable and shared between those who enter a given Dark World?), it nonetheless adds new depths to this central metaphor of Light and Dark, a metaphor I already felt was layered and well considered.
To begin with, I want to articulate a reading of the Dark Worlds which had already been occupying some space in my brain but which this new explanation really solidified: the idea of Dark Worlds as allegorical for animated pictures.
WHY I OPENED THIS POST
ON THAT GORKY QUOTATION
By animated pictures, to be clearer, I am referring primarily to what we might colloquially call cinema. At first this might seem like a strange suggestion – why would the video game Deltarune be allegorizing cinema, specifically? Well, for one, I don’t think this is really a direct allegory as much as a curious subtextual wrinkle. It’s not the sort of thing where you just substitute one concept for another to unlock the Correct Reading (‘it was always about cinema all along!’) - no, rather, the connections between Dark Worlds and cinema are more on the grounds of their shared relationship to illusion and imagination, which is why I also want to make it clear that I’m viewing cinema here in a more general sense than the restrictive quotidian idea of “the movies”. Instead, I refer more broadly to that technology which, through the interplay of light and shadow, can conjure images beyond this world - a technology which is certainly relevant to the hybrid medium of video games.
The very first steps towards what would later be termed “cinema” were accompanied by a marriage of astonishment and fear. From a 1897 recounting of one female journalist’s childhood memories of magic lantern shows:
I am reminded suddenly of a long-forgotten childish terror of the Magic Lantern show. The drawing-room in darkness, the ghastly white plane stretching away into the unknown world of shadows. It was all very well to call it a linen sheet, to say it was stretched between innocent familiar folding doors, it nevertheless divided the known and safe from the mysterious beyond where awful shadows lived and moved with a fearful rapidity and made no sounds at all.
(Magic lantern shows, for those unaware, were a kind of proto-cinematic entertainment show which utilized essentially primitive slide projectors to display images of moving figures on a screen. Example here)
And the film medium as we know it today is no less wanting for popular associations with the concepts of darkness, illusion, fear and dream. I touched on these connections a little in the opening of a previous Deltarune essay of mine, titled the Magic Circle, but seriously, there is no end to the amount of writing on film I’ve read which my pattern-seeking brain has immediately tied back to Deltarune.
The cinematic experience is a recreation of this ancient practice of theatrical renewal and bonding in modern terms, except that the flames of the stone-age campfire have been replaced by the shifting images that are telling the story itself. Images that dance the same way every time the film is projected, but which kindle different dreams in the mind of each beholder.
With a theatrical film, particularly one in which the audience is fully engaged, the screen is not a surface, it is a magic window, sort of a looking glass through which your whole body passes and becomes engaged in the action with the characters on screen. If you really like a film, you're not aware that you are sitting in the cinema watching a movie.
The paradox of cinema is that it is most effective when it seems to fuse two contradictory elements - the general and the personal - into a kind of mass intimacy.
Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye
Okay, so what is my point here? Dark Worlds and Film do be kinda similar in some ways? Well, as I implied earlier, video games are a visual-temporal medium, innovations in part on the cinematic form itself which has integrated a further degree of immersion via interactivity. And though video games are not typically projected onto a big screen in a dark room the way movies are, I know that when I play Deltarune, the lights are off.
It goes back further than the magic lantern. In antiquity, cut-out figures were puppeteered behind a screen, their shadows creating the illusion of movement. For most of human history we’ve sought out ways to trick our sensory organs into experiencing that world beyond our everyday lives, into manifesting that which is bound to the cerebral through make-believe. And if there was anything I neglected to analyze when I described the Dark Worlds as analogous to the concept of the “magic circle” – impositions of the imagination on reality – it’s precisely this; the ways in which we convince ourselves, temporarily, that we really are in that fictive domain.
That’s the realization I had about the Dark Worlds. They function as a sort of rough allegory for the ways in which humanity has used technology to immerse themselves into other realities via illusion. But you’ve surely noticed a throughline; these illusions are not always just analogous to dreams, but to nightmares as well, and this power to make nightmares come real is what I want to primarily focus on in this essay.
MOVING POSTERS
In the Darker than Dark sequence that Chapter 3 opens with, Ralsei goes on at some length about how darkness is intertwined with fear. Given the relative absence of this theme of fear in the preceding two chapters, the fact that it occupies such a central role in this vitally important scene where we're finally given a formal explanation for what Dark Worlds are feels quite significant. Indeed, fear as a theme becomes much more prominent going forward, particularly in Chapter 4. This new preoccupation also recontextualizes some things that came before; the Sweepstakes blog post highlighting a young Noelle's "ICE-E sighting", wherein she supposedly catches the mascot winking at her, may previously have seemed like somewhat arbitrary bait for tinfoil theorizing, but can now be more properly understood as foreshadowing for the ideas being explored in the upcoming chapters.
Note how Noelle's description of ICE-E winking at her in the dark more or less directly prefigures Ralsei's explanation of how in the dark, "a chair can look like a monster... a poster can look like it's moving... your eyes can't see the truth anymore." Note also how both incidents illustrate this idea of the static image coming to life - the moving picture. Likewise, a chair changing shape is a de-familiarization of the inert and ordinary.
This specific incident with ICE-E may be even more relevant to the game's narrative than just simple groundwork for its themes; not only does ICE-E also make an ominous cameo appearance in Tenna's Doom Board...
... but the mascot is repeatedly referenced in Chapter 3's Mantle quest, specifically with the track BURNING EYES (in reference to Noelle's sighting), which is internally referred to as nightmare_boss (a connection to the infamous Undertale Fun Event).
(The level of psychosis this junior jumble can cause is certainly something to behold)
I've gone over in a separate post why I personally believe that FRIEND and the Mantle in Chapter 3 are the same character, but "nightmare_boss" is also a reference to the final boss of Link's Awakening, the inspiration having been made explicit even before the release of the chapters, with the Sweepstakes page "romb" which quotes the fight directly.
The Nightmares in Link's Awakening take on different forms throughout that battle, embodying the shadows of Link's psyche, the greatest threats he has faced with the player - including other bosses fought throughout the game and, memorably, Ganon, who never appears directly in Link's Awakening but which any player familiar with the Zelda series will have memorized the moveset of, as Link surely has through his multiple clashes with the demon king.
Previously, I've speculated that FRIEND may be a shapeshifter. If we assume that this core part of the Nightmares fight in Link's Awakening may be applicable to Deltarune, we find that perhaps the connections between the ICE-E sighting and FRIEND's introduction in Chapter 3 are more literal than one might initially image. An open question is why exactly FRIEND manifests in what seems to be Susie's room, from a chair, given that we've had little reason to suspect that Susie is acquainted in any way with this mysterious being, unlike Kris, Noelle and Dess. A possible explanation is that FRIEND can inhabit the forms of people's fears; if that's the case, ICE-E would certainly be a suitable vessel, given that the mascot is regarded as a kind of cryptid and internet urban legend known for its terrorizing effect on children.
THE FEAR-OF-DARK
If FRIEND can take on the form of individuals' specific fears, Titans are a sort of complimentary opposite force as embodiments of the abstract concept of fear itself. As Ralsei evocatively puts it: "It's the fear-of-dark. It's the bump-in-the-night. It's the shadow of the backside of your mind." Sounds very applicable to FRIEND as we see them appear during Ralsei's spiel in Chapter 3, but the Titans seem to be more general, more universal. They represent the feeling of fear itself common to all people. Where FRIEND is the perceived, Titans are the act of perception. This broad, universal tendency is illustrated in their single-mindedness: "They have no consciousness," Ralsei says, "they only exist to destroy." Blind destruction - an anxiety of the lowest common denominator.
A check description of Titan Spawn reveals that they are "shards of fear, found in places of deep dark", whereas checking a Titan reveals that it is "the fear of dark, which appears in many forms." Though this wording is a tad ambiguous, I choose to interpret it as meaning that Titans are just one form of this fear of dark; though it could be alluding to other types of Titans existing (and we do know from the Roaring exposition cutscene in Chapter 2 that that is the case), the word "titan" implies a very specific sort of being and we know that there are other creatures birthed by the deep dark that do not fit that bill; not only FRIEND, as previously discussed, but also other creatures we meet in the new chapters. In some of Chapter 4's many deep dark sections (where Titan Spawn and FRIEND also make appearances), stringy, serpentine creatures with only the internal title "Unknown" can be found.
A running theme of these types of beings is their black, monochrome palette, only distinguished from the foreground with white borders (and other times blending into pitch-black spaces, such as with Titan Spawn, Unknowns and FRIEND in Chapter 4, or the Mantle in Chapter 3).
But undoubtedly the narrative's main example of a deep dark being would be the game's primary antagonist, the Roaring Knight.
Not only is the visual design of the Knight in-line with other beings of the deep dark, but they literally look like a miniature version of one of the Titans from the Chapter 2 cutscene.
They also exhibit this glitchy, frequency-looking effect, shared by Titans and Titan Spawn.
Now, honestly, the soil might be a little too fertile for speculation about the "how" and "why" of this. You could come up with any number of explanations for how the Knight ties into being an embodiment of fear. Does Dess (who the Knight clearly is) represent a fear of Kris's; the spectre of a troubling, traumatic past coming back to haunt them? Does the Knight, as the game's villain and frankly a sort of self-conscious archetype of JRPG villainy, share the simple-minded malicious nature of the Titans? Maybe. But I want to restrain myself even more and just point out an intuitive, obvious, and well-supported connection: the fact that the Knight is the Roaring Knight. All else failing, the Knight has a clear and explicit connection to the Titans in the form of their role as the harbinger of (and perhaps the one destined to bring about) the Roaring, which will be actualized with the Titans' destruction.
THE ROARING NIGHT
Given the new information we received with these recent chapters, the Roaring is overdue for a reconsideration. A somewhat common interpretation from the first two Chapters of the game, and one that I held as well, posited that the Roaring was a sort of thematic endpoint of the idea of Dark-Worlds-as-escapism. If you're familiar with self-reflexive anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Paranoia Agent or Serial Experiments Lain, all of which touch on the topic of storytelling or constructed worlds, this will be a familiar motif - the increasing insularization of the stories' protagonists metaphorically and/or literally signals the threat of apocalypse as the line between fiction and reality, the personal and the universal, the self and the other, collapses. The metaphorical breakdown of social life is literalized as societal destruction. To put it in very simple terms: escapism brings about the apocalypse.
Now, over the course of the 1-2 era I became increasingly skeptical of the idea of Dark Worlds as pure escapist fantasies. While there is certainly something to the idea (and it's a very explicit part of the text in both Chapters 2 and 3), I became alienated with it when I started feeling more and more like it was an approach which encouraged a flattening, moralistic outlook on the story. Does Deltarune really just amount to a parable about how fiction is powerful, but you can't let it become too powerful? It felt platitudinous, especially if you're like me and have seen other works articulate this idea in what felt like a more considered, deeper way. This reading also felt like it was inspiring some especially facile takes on what the Dark Worlds are supposed to be. To this day, it feels like the consensus reading remains "Dark Worlds represent escapism via [X medium]", something which already struck me as both too shallow and too specific back before the new chapters came out, but which I now regard as essentially textually invalidated by Chapter 4. My feeling that there was something much richer going on is part of what inspired my first essay and now this one, where I've tried to articulate that the Dark Worlds are not, in fact, some easy concept-substitution allegory but a far more symbolically complex narrative device - that they were much less schematized than some people made them out to be and in themselves more akin to unstructured communal play.
So let's take another look at the Roaring, and let's pay attention to what we're told about it.
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.
It was easy to miss before, but you certainly can't ignore the focus placed on fear here. The earth is anthropomorphized almost as having a heart attack or something.
When the LIGHT is subsumed by SHADOW
When the FOUNTAINS fill the sky
All will fall into CHAOS.
The TITANS will take form from the FOUNTAINS
And envelop the land in devastation.
The surviving Darkners, crushed by the darkness
Will slowly, one by one, turn into statues...
Leaving the Lightners to fend for themselves
Lost eternally in an endless night...
Is that your idea of paradise?
We now know that the Titans are specifically representative of fear - when the light is subsumed by shadow, the terror of the total, enveloping darkness is what brings about the world's devestation.
IF FOUNTAINS FREED, THE ROARING CRIES.
AND TITANS SHAPE FROM DARKENED EYES.
THE LIGHT AND DARK, BOTH BURNING DIRE.
A COUNTDOWN TO THE EARTH'S EXPIRE.
The fountains are "freed" - and the titans shape from "darkened eyes" (once again alluding to Ralsei's perspectival explanation of Dark Worlds).
The Knight...
The Roaring Knight...
...
The one who's making the dark.
The one who's trying to destroy the world...
... so that's our enemy.
I do feel that there is a sense in which the Roaring boils down to this basic fact: the Roaring is, simply put, an apocalypse scenario. It's Game Over. It's the player's failure state, the black screen which literally envelops the "world" of the game window in darkness. Like much in Deltarune, I feel like the trope is being self-consciously invoked and, at least partly, employed nakedly for the sake of storytelling value itself. Why is there an impending apocalypse in Deltarune? Because the story needs stakes, damn it. Don't forget - there is a diegetic storyteller in this world playing god with our characters.
But there's more to it than that, of course. The Roaring is, as the Chapter 4 track calls it, a Neverending Night.
Lost eternally in an endless night...
...If I could choose… I guess... I wouldn't have an ending! It's just better if stuff just... goes on forever, right?
Gah ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! Well ain't that somethin'. At this late hour, with the bells ringing out their justice. You choose eternity.
Can I tell you... a stupid dream I have? ... No matter what... I... want to keep being friends with you and Ralsei. When the sun comes up again... I want tomorrow to be the same as yesterday. And the next day... to be just the same as that. That in the end... we can always go back to the way things were.
There is merit to the perspective that characterizes the Roaring as escapist. In a way, it is just the logical outcome of the understanding of Dark Worlds as allegorically linked to the concepts of fiction and imagination - which they are. Dark Worlds empower narratives - personal and communal journeys, the playful animation of objects and ideas. If the Roaring is a night which never ends, the "story" goes on forever... Which, on some level, it has to, right? We're outside Deltarune's diegetic dimension of space-time and capable of resetting the story at our convenience. This fact was a core focus of Undertale's narrative, and I'd be very surprised if Deltarune neglected to comment on it at all. Ralsei says of the Roaring: "Is that your idea of paradise?", and Susie initially identifies with the Knight, regarding their actions as potentially positive; there is clear set up for the Roaring as temptation. Right now, it's hard to see why anyone sufficiently informed about what the Roaring entails would ever willingly choose to bring it about... nevertheless, there is a sense of thematic necessity demanding that exactly that will happen.
Let's not lose sight of the main focus of this essay, though - the Roaring is characterized by fear, by terror. There is a simple elegance to this fact which makes it pretty humorous that this subtextual aspect of Deltarune's Light/Dark distinction went unnoticed for so long - things, as it turns out, tend to be scary in the dark. Dreams happen during the night, but so do nightmares.
Fiction can serve as an escape, sure, but this dynamic cuts both ways. A coherent, meaningful experience of fiction as play and art relies on our tacit, unstated understanding that it's not actually real.
Emotional reactions may be strongly invoked but intellect and judgement are never completely submerged. The subconscious does not take complete charge of the film-dream as it does of the real one. Part of our mind remains unengaged in the fantasy. We know that the experience is unreal and in an important sense unimportant. We are freed from the responsibility of acting upon what we see and feel. Consequently, we can trace our reactions with a detachment which is unattainable in dreams and very difficult in any real situation of like intensity. We can analyse our dreams and our real experiences after the event. In the cinema we can observe our involvement while it is taking place. We enter the film situation but it remains separate from ourselves as our own dreams and experiences do not.
V.F. Perkins, Film as Film
And when fiction gets overwhelming we retreat back to reality.
It is revealing that the words a parent uses to comfort a child frightened by a nightmare - "Don't worry, darling, it's only a dream" - are almost the same words used to comfort a child frightened by a film - "Don't worry, darling, it's only a movie." Frightening dreams and films have a similar power to overwhelm the defenses that are otherwise effective against equally frightening books, paintings, music.
Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye
"Reality" might be boring by itself, but it is safe, speaking relatively... - not so with the realm of the imagined, its wonders and terrors. Without the ability to assume a distance...
Oh sweet rotisserie Santa! The nightmare IS become real.
It is one of the elementary human fears: the loss of distinction between the real and the imagined, not being able to impose order on your surroundings, the desertion of one's rational faculty - the very essence of human existence in the estimation of many a philosopher.
ATHENA - You hesitate to see before your eyes
someone in a raving fit?
ODYSSEUS - Yes, I do — if he were sane I’d not avoid him or hesitate . . .
ATHENA - But he won’t see you now, not even if you stand beside him.
ODYSSEUS - How will that happen, if he still can see with his own eyes?
ATHENA - His eyes see very well, but I will make them dark.
Sophocles, Ajax
We require an operating dialectic between the real and the imagined to imbue either with any meaning. The shadows can't dance without a light shining on the object. And absent the ability to demarcate, to order, to distinguish, we lose ourselves in neverending chaos.
For whatever nightmares the cinema stoked, reality ultimately remained intact. The train speeds towards the screen-window and yet before the impact - even as the audience shields its eyes in terror - the vehicle dissolves at the window's borders, rendering the former danger an inert geometrical form. Just a train of shadows.
In recent months, a certain reading of Deltarune has been steadily gaining popularity within the community, particularly here on Tumblr. This reading has a pithy name: ‘Krissociation’, a portmanteau of ‘Kris’ and ‘dissociation’. Its analysis is premised on a denial of the player’s diegetic existence, and thus a denial of any overt, not-purely-allegorical metafictional elements within the narrative. It explicitly refutes the idea that Kris’s relationship with the SOUL is characterized by a supernatural possession, and instead presents it as a person’s relationship with their “alter”, terminology borrowed from the discourse of dissociative identity disorder (DID).
The relative popularity of this reading is one that I’ve found interesting and, perhaps more to the point, quite frustrating, because it’s so obviously deficient, and yet it still somehow manages to catch on to some fundamental aspects of this relationship between Kris and the SOUL which the average, mainstream understanding continues to neglect.
This post is not intended as a systematic takedown of Krissociation – I don’t believe that’s actually needed. As far as I’m concerned, Krissociation doesn’t even manage to get its feet off the ground, because denying the overt metafictional elements of Deltarune’s narrative is, to put it a little dramatically, interpretive violence of such magnitude that it immediately disqualifies anything that could come after it. To me, the metafictional elements are so self-evidently a core part of the diegesis that any reading which denies that has automatically failed the most basic condition for gaining a useful understanding of Deltarune, which is presumably the goal of any analysis of its narrative.
Instead, my goal with this post is to independently analyse Kris’s character and how they relate to the SOUL (that is to say, to us) in order to make sense of the biggest questions pertaining to that relationship, such as how exactly they utilize us and how we utilize them, what the nature is of our control over them, how Kris and us are connected to things like the Shadow Crystal quest, the Egg hunt and the Weird Route, and, most important perhaps, which one of us is really in control.
But first, we need to take a look at our relationship with another vessel.
THE HUMAN IN UNDERTALE
In the introductory sequence of Deltarune, Gaster fashions a vessel based on our feedback. Keen-eyed players might notice a conspicuous detail about this Vessel, which is that their topwear always contains two stripes, calling to mind the player character of Undertale, in opposition to both Kris and Chara, who wear a shirt with only one stripe.
Lest you believe this connection is merely incidental, Toby has doubled-down on it with the single-stripe Important Person’s Shirt, a piece of merchandise which is listed under both the Undertale and Deltarune brands, alluding simultaneously to Chara and Kris’s clothing.
The double-striped shirt of Undertale’s protagonist, meanwhile, is sold separately as the Human Shirt and listed only under the Undertale brand.
Given, then, that the vessel is made to remind the player of Undertale’s protagonist specifically - and that the Vessel is discarded and defined in opposition to the game’s true protagonist, Kris - having an understanding of Undertale’s protagonist might, conversely, help us demarcate what is and isn’t going on with Deltarune’s.
In Undertale, your vessel is a human; the Human. The nature of the Human and their relationship to its two identities ‘Frisk’ and ‘Chara’ is and always has been one of the most contentious and knotty topics of discussion in the entire series. Suffice it to say that this post is not equipped to definitively solve the issue of Frisk and Chara, nor do I really think such a thing is possible, but I do want to establish a basic, functional understanding of the Human for the purposes of our analysis.
All else failing, the most important thing to understand about the Human, especially in relation to Kris, is that they are pliable.
Most often you’ll see people discussing this in terms of the Human being younger than Kris is, and thus more impressionable and willing to follow the guidance of the SOUL. This is a cute and relatively harmless idea, but I think it tends to paper over how strange the protagonist of Undertale actually is. The level of control we have over them, especially outside the Genocide and Pacifist Routes, is pretty staggering. Guidance is one thing, but we can mold the Human into either a friendly, benevolent tree-hugger or a ruthless killing machine with barely any resistance or preference for either shown by the Human. Notably, the fallen human - Chara - was presumably the same age as the Human that we control is during the events of the game. We know that Chara was extremely willful and set on their path, and we can see that in practice on the Genocide Route (more on that later), so it is clearly not the case that any child this age would unquestionably follow our directions.
We can say, then, that the Human is fairly unnatural in this regard. They don’t seem to be driven by any will of their own, they don’t show much in terms of disapproval or preference when we make them do things, and we are kept in the dark about any potential backstory which could help elucidate their ‘true’, independent personality.
Of course, this is actually not at all unnatural in story-driven games and JRPGs, which often have protagonists with deliberately ambiguous personalities and backstories which exist mainly for the player to project themselves onto. However, since Deltarune has introduced another protagonist to the series, one who decidedly does not fit this mold, and is contrasted with an empty vessel manufactured for us to inhabit - a vessel which is, again, symbolically aligned with Undertale’s protagonist - we can no longer take this fact about them for granted. We are forced to view Undertale’s Human as rather peculiar in their willingness to be our vessel.
The how of that is ultimately not what's important. Whether you believe that the Human is just an unusually impressionable kid, or that they suffer from amnesia, or that they only came into existence at the start of the game, the end result is the same: the Human is pliable. It is ours for the molding.
Except in one regard.
It’s not entirely true that the Human has no will of their own. The Human is moved by one distinct will – one which is inherited from the fallen human.
In a missable moment early in the game, the Human makes a rare display of autonomy and performs a concrete, significant action on their own. When Toriel tells you to go back to your room before her boss fight, you can actually comply with her demands. If you return, you can direct the Human to the bed to go to sleep. When you do, they have a dream, or a vision – the same one they have whenever they die:
And the Human gets up from bed. They refuse to sleep through to the next day. They refuse to let Toriel seal the Ruins.
And the reason why is clear: it conflicts with the purpose they are compelled, or rather determined, to follow: to be the future of humans and monsters, to set the Underground free. The Human harbors the seventh SOUL needed to break the barrier. They have been chosen by fate – willed into existence by it almost – to resolve the history of humans and monsters. To see the prophecy fulfilled. They must confront Asgore, who beckons them away from sleep, from death.
That is the only true purpose the Human has.
Incidentally, it is also your purpose as a player. It is how you “win” the game. And it is derived directly from Chara, the fallen human. It’s their memories and their will which drives the Human forward.
Notably, in one of the scant few times the Human expresses themselves, they reminisce about Chara’s experiences:
Again, it doesn’t really matter what you think is happening here – whether the Human is Chara’s reincarnation, or revival, or whether they’re simply being possessed by their ghost. But it is clear that Chara is a living force within them – on all routes.
On the Pacifist Route, Chara’s will is given expression in a rather abstract way. The Human makes good on the ultimate goal of their plan - to free the Underground - and, in the process, saves their best friend. Asriel, who seemingly spotted Chara’s determination within the Human, ultimately emphasizes the distinct individuality of the Human from Chara, and in response, the Human christens themself with a name of their own: Frisk. The child comes of age, Pinnochio becomes a real boy, the monochrome copy is colored in with care. And the Human stops being our vessel. The curtains close and Flowey implores us: let this world go, this new future which is embodied in Frisk, this future you made happen with your will, your determination, your power, let it retain its independent existence, let it be “the end”.
Of course, a good player doesn’t let that happen. It’s on the Genocide Route where our relationship to the Human becomes clearer. As you systematically kill every monster in the Ruins, you awaken something which had been lying dormant within the Human. Much later, having fully completed their transformation back into Chara, they reminisce:
At first, I was so confused.
Our plan had failed, hadn't it?
Why was I brought back to life?
These lines are incredibly important. Chara says – speaking about the beginning of the game – that they were initially “so confused” after having been “awakened from death”. Their experience was continuous with their previous life – one of the first things they think of is their plan and how it failed.
It’s important to note that Chara is not talking about the player’s killing spree in the Ruins having awakened them. Chara mentions that separately:
You.
With your guidance.
I realized the purpose of my reincarnation.
Power.
Together, we eradicated the enemy and became strong.
No, it’s clear that Chara is referring to the very beginning of the game, after the player “calls their name” and inhabits the body of the Human in the flowers. In fact, Chara’s awakening is a very deliberate parallel to a certain other character who awakens from death in a bed of flowers:
I remember when I first woke up here, in the garden.
I was so scared.
I couldn't feel my arms or my legs...
My entire body had turned into a flower!
The game eludes any easy logistical answers as to what has happened and why. Only the broad strokes are clear: the power of us, the player, awakened Chara from death, who then inhabits the body of the Human – a human with a red soul, which Chara says belongs to the player, and Flowey likewise calls Chara’s “stolen soul”.
This human, who possesses Chara’s spirit and memories, can then be molded by us throughout the game. The actions we guide them towards determine their disposition towards the world.
(You tap the dummy with your fist.)
(You feel bad.)
(You hit the dummy lightly.)
(You don't feel like you learned anything.)
(You sock the dummy.)
(Who cares?)
(You punch the dummy at full force.)
(Feels good.)
This highly impressionable nature might have something to do with Chara’s “confusion” and professed aimlessness near the start of the game. Why had they been “reincarnated”? It seems the player is there to answer that question.
On the Pacifist route, you direct the Human towards actions quite unlike their past self. As the route progresses, they more frequently take actions of their own accord. Through your guidance they become the sort of person to never hit Undyne with anything but a pretend blow in their duel, regardless of how you choose to attack. They become the sort of person who can actually stir Asgore’s conscience during their battle, firmly telling him to stop fighting. They become the sort of person to smile when fleeing from a battle. And at the very end, as their final act of separation from both the player and their past self, they take – or perhaps reclaim – a different name from Chara: Frisk. In overcoming their past identity, they also help Asriel reach a fuller understanding of his best friend, allowing him to move on from his grief and hopelessness, which was largely centered around the presumed irreplaceability of Chara.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can guide the Human towards an accelerated, demonic form of their past identity in the Genocide Route. Though it’s correct, as Chara says, that it is us who guide the human in this direction, it is equally important to note that the impulse towards the Genocide Route was already latent within Chara, and that it is only something we bring to the surface.
My best friend's favorite number is nine.
It's because
there isn't a number that's higher.
9. 99. 999. 9999.
If everything gets high enough,
You become invincible.
Nothing can hurt you anymore.
Nothing can hurt anyone anymore.
They were the one that picked up their own empty body.
And then, when we got to the village...
They were the one that wanted to...
... to use our full power.
Chara was already very attached to the idea of becoming all-powerful. They were already a hateful, even callous person – probably the product of a whole lot of hurt and abuse themself. We can speculate about sympathetic traits they may have had in their time alive but if Flowey is anything to go by, those would’ve been burned away in the process of death and (soulless) reincarnation.
So by the time we guide them to slaughter the Underground, there aren’t any inhibitions left to stop them. They know what to do and eagerly play along. Hell, they start dictating the terms of the route to us. They take over narration, they inform us of how many and who to kill, they abort the route when we fail to meet their demands. We rub off on each other.
Fundamentally, Chara and us are aligned, and this is the root of our special connection. It’s why Chara is our player character. Their desire for power is analogous to the JRPG player’s conditioned impulse to increase their stats, a behavior naturally emergent from the game’s mechanics. Beyond this, Chara’s determination to fulfill the prophecy, which I believe the Human’s recurrent dreams of Chara’s dying moments testify to, is analogous to our desire to see a “satisfying ending” to the game.
And when we get either one of those “satisfying endings”, the truth is revealed that the player was never in full control of the Human, not any more than they control us.
The Human simply allowed themself to be guided by you. Even something like the Genocide Route is, as a potentiality, fundamentally immanent from the Human’s own nature.
But how is this relevant to Deltarune?
THE HUMAN IN DELTARUNE
The most notable fact about Kris is that they are not impressionable in the same way that our human vessel in Undertale is.
This is not just an arbitrary fact about Kris - it stems from their specific circumstances: Kris is an angsty, rebellious teenager who both has strong desires of their own and is also caught up in the machinations of others – but most importantly, they were aware of the nature of the SOUL preceding their possession and are deliberately using its powers in service to their own ends. This is completely unlike the situation in Undertale, where we take control of a mysterious vessel containing the confused, impressionable soul of a reincarnated child, who allows us to mold their personality. Unlike Undertale, that is, except for the Genocide Route, where some similarities start to show.
In the Genocide Route, Chara begins to develop their own plans which they dictate to the player, not unlike how Kris uses the SOUL to achieve specific goals. Kris’s forceful resistance against the player throughout Deltarune’s story feels like a deliberate mirror to Chara’s hostile reactions to the player disagreeing with them upon the fulfillment of a Genocide Route. In this regard, Kris and Chara are quite similar – they are willful and meticulous planners with specific ends in mind.
Somehow, I still occasionally see (even after Chapters 3 and 4!) the misinterpretation that we are wronging Kris by inhabiting their body, and that they are completely opposed to our control over them and in a constant state of discomfort and terror. This frankly does a disservice to Kris's character, who would probably overcompensate with some scary anime villain laugh if they heard this idea about them put to words.
It is clear throughout all of the Chapters not only that Kris is by and large more aware and prepared to handle us than we are them, but also that they frequently have no issue with how we choose to pilot them. They develop a deep and earnest bond with Susie (and eventually Ralsei) despite the fact that we are in control of them during practically all of their moments together. They often play along with gags or silly things we make them do and even improvise plenty on their own.
When Kris doesn’t like how we’re controlling them, they typically let us know. Not only does Kris act on their own more than Undertale’s Human does, but they also subvert our commands which Undertale's Human rarely, if ever, does. Our inhabiting their body seems to involve them needing to follow our commands in some sense, but Kris is aware of this and cleverly finds ways to work around it.
If we make them say something they don’t like, they’re liable to drown it out with a cough or yawn, or deliberately alter the delivery to subvert our intentions.
Sometimes, Kris’s opposition to us goes beyond mere distaste or disagreement – sometimes our interference risks ruining some plan of theirs, which necessitates urgent intervention.
Other times, their emotions get the best of them.
And yet other times, Kris acts against us simply to keep us at arm’s length.
Of course, at the most pivotal moments, Kris goes beyond petty disobedience and simply rips us out of their body to ensure they can act uninhibited.
And of course, this can only be a temporary measure, because they need us for the Dark Worlds, as their mysterious caller highlights.
Note that four chapters in, we still don’t have any indication that Kris will die without their SOUL or anything like that – in fact, we’ve seen quite a lot of speculation in that direction explicitly undermined by Chapter 4! Now, it’s still totally plausible that Kris needs the SOUL to live, but my point is that this is not something the game highlights at all, which speaks to the fact that Kris lets us inhabit them for other reasons than self-preservation. We are useful to them.
So, in this sense, Kris’s control over us is quite overt and easy to see. Not only do they know plenty about how we operate, allowing them to predict our actions and deliberately interfere when we’re not aligned, and not only do they control when we inhabit their body in the first place, but they are also in direct contact and working with the individual responsible for the Dark Worlds which we spend the bulk of these games going through, and at times they even take on the responsibility of creating them on their own. Our experience of the game is heavily structured by all of these factors.
But this begs the question – aside from these very overt displays of control, are we at least free agents when we’re inside Kris’s body? We may be externally caged by Kris, but are we at least free to choose whatever we want, according to our own wills and desires, within those parameters, regardless of how Kris chooses to resist us?
Well, even here the answer is, in fact, NO! We are NOT free to act however we want. Our range of options is still very much limited! But in what way?
In some regards, the actions we’re able to perform seem constrained by the simple fact of how the game works. For example, we can only view the world through a top-down perspective. We can typically only damage monsters to the point where they flee, unlike in Undertale where we can kill them. Certain fixed events seem like they must always take place. Insofar as there’s anyone to blame for these things, it would presumably be Gaster.
This only gets us so far, though. Because other times, our range of possible options doesn’t seem backed by the same kind of necessity. For instance, take dialogue or inspection options:
These seem rather arbitrary – and in fact, they’re often quite presumptuous. Who’s to say wanting to hear more from Pizzapants is a “lie”? I personally know someone who I think would take issue with that judgement. And who’s to say that I want to say those specific things to Susie?
Well, I’ll tell you who.
It's what they call "you."
Yes, there’s really only one candidate for who would be the operating factor whenever a choice suddenly takes a clear disposition. It’s not Gaster, it’s not some AI in the “DEVICE”, it’s not a third entity, it’s not even Toby. It’s just Kris.
But how come, then, that the things you say and do sound so unlike Kris to those who know them best, like Noelle? How come Kris resists your choices sometimes, if they’re in control of which ones are presented in the first place? How come you sometimes get options which only seem relevant to the player, like talking to Sans as if you know him already?
Well, Toby has graciously already provided us with an answer.
It’s because Kris is us. And we are them. We don’t always act in perfect concordance. But we are in their SOUL, and we are one, for now.
This may seem strange. Isn’t the whole point of the SOUL and Kris’s relationship that they are distinct?
Well, to a degree, yeah. But to a degree, the point is also precisely the opposite. Even when we have different desires and goals, we’re chained to each other, and we influence one another. We are learning to become Kris and Kris is learning to become us. The result is internal strife.
Take for example, this scene by the lake. Kris and Susie have been battling with the Knight since the previous night, come within a hair’s breadth of failing to prevent the apocalypse, and were given a glimpse of the grim fate that is awaiting them at the end of the road. The town is quiet, and staring across the dark waters with your best friend, a prompt suddenly pops up:
The very appearance of the prompt cannot be taken for granted. The fact that it only triggers after minutes of waiting communicates something about the person you’re inhabiting.
The outcomes are even more telling:
Kris subverts both choices, but steers them in the same direction. Make them say it and they will – with their mouth closed. Kris isn’t apathetic to the bond you’ve formed with Susie over the course of the game. They have a burning desire to tell her “the truth” – but they know they can’t. So they find the compromise – they say it without vocalizing.
Direct them to drop it, and they can’t. Instead of saying nothing, they literally verbalize the word “Nothing”, out of the blue, which Susie sees through. It's clear, then, that the urge to say something is coming from them.
This provides us with a good clue for how the dialogue and choice systems work. The prompts are heavily influenced by Kris, but they’re not necessarily what Kris consciously decides they need to express. They’re sort of like intrusive, or spontaneous thoughts. Whenever external circumstances produce a choice for your vessel, a prompt is fired up but not before passing through a kind of Kris-filter first (and remember that Kris is influenced by your inhabiting them!) which produces a list of plausible Kris-like things to say or do.
But these aren’t the only choices we get in the game. If we take a broader look, we can see that there are a number of optional decision paths we can take throughout. For example, we can collect the Shadow Crystals by seeking out strong – nearly impossible – enemies to battle. We can also exploit strange, glitch-like supernatural occurrences to hunt for “Eggs”, bequeathed by a strange Forgotten Man. Are these our will alone?
It doesn’t seem that way. As is revealed in Chapter 3, the Egg hunt is a deeply personal mission for Kris – far from an arbitrary decision stemming from our will, it seems that seeking out the Man is only something we can do because we are Kris. The Forgotten Island – the last place the Man is able to talk and the part where the Egg quest is properly “initiated” (with him guiding you to their locations in future and past) – is quite literally a materialized chunk of Kris’s unconscious.
The Shadow Crystal quest is not dissimilar. Before Chapter 3, many had already caught on to how the quest seemed tied to Kris’s personality specifically, with the circumstances of Chapter 2’s Secret Boss Spamton pointedly paralleling Kris’s. Spamton, like Kris, seems to have received gnosis of his own arbitrary yet deterministic place within the universe, and sought to combat his fate, pursuing “freedom” at all costs by augmenting his form into something more Powerful. For Spamton, this was the NEO Body, and for Kris, this seems to be the light inside their SOUL – us. And yet, the rude awakening for both lies in the fact that they remained chained – the NEO body is a puppet on strings, and the light, as Spamton says, is also a “Chain” for Kris's soul. When the NEO Body falls lifeless to the ground after you cut its strings, it’s a nasty reminder of the Faustian bargain that Kris seems to have made – one which shakes them to their core.
Where many went wrong in interpreting Chapter 2 was in their assuming that the “freedom” Kris seeks is a freedom from us, rather than a freedom which they hope to attain through us (though they presumably would like to be rid of us eventually too). Likewise, Kris’s negative reactions throughout the quest had many assuming that we are pressuring them into a quest they have no desire to be a part of, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Kris takes important measures to ensure that the plan can be fulfilled correctly. For instance – Kris honors Spamton’s deal, meeting with him, and retrieving and delivering the disk alone, without giving the player any opportunity to botch his requests by taking Susie and Ralsei with.
As with the Egg quest, Chapter 3 – which can very much be viewed as “Kris’s chapter” – clarifies matters further. Again we have a character personally connected to and paralleling Kris expositing a whole bunch about the quest’s central motif: “freedom”. Ramb doesn’t mince words – freedom is the thing which Kris wants.
If what was happening with the Shadow Crystal quest wasn’t obvious already, the Mantle holder just spells it out for us. Despite being aware of a distinction between Kris on their own and Kris when they’re controlled by us, the Mantle holder positions the Shadow Crystal quest as something which Kris wants, something which is important to Kris’s plans.
But there’s one last thing we haven’t looked at yet. The clearest example, it would seem, of the contradicting wills between Kris and us: the Weird Route.
Yes, the successor to the Genocide Route, the part where the player gets to exploit a loophole in the game’s rules to break out of the cage the prophecy has placed them into, where the player gets to force different events to play out than those which are destined to happen on the main route, where the player finally gets to sublimate Kris’s will into their own and make some real decisions.
…Right?
I mean, look at how Kris fights back against it!
Obviously the Proceeds are the player’s will, and the other options represent Kris trying to talk you out of it, right?
Kris takes the opportunity to sabotage the Route and attempts to undo all of the damage you caused in Chapter 2 between Chapters 3 and 4 – isn’t that a testament to how clearly delineated “you” are from Kris?
Well, yes, except…
Except reading the Weird Route as totally separate from Kris and their will was always a bit strained. Look at who Spamton identifies as the instigator of the Weird Route:
Not the player, not the heart-shaped object, not “the Angel”, just you. Kris.
But a lot of people were content to ignore this, in part because Kris could never be culpable in any sense for something as horrific as the Weird Route, right?
And so a lot of people were pretty startled when the Mantle holder said this:
Even though the connective tissue between the Shadow Crystal quest and the Weird Route – that of “Freedom” – was ALWAYS pretty obvious, and set up from the very beginning.
Take a moment to consider this. Set aside the broader idea of “freedom”, which most players undoubtedly do seek (conditioned as they have been by expectations from Undertale), and ask yourself this: does it actually make any sense to view the specific actions which happen in the Weird Route as stemming solely from the will of the player?
For example, does it make sense as an organic expression of the player’s will that Kris would try to force a romantic relationship between themself and Noelle?
I mean, of course there’s a kind of brute logic to it – Noelle seems to be the one with the game-exploiting powers, but we are chained to Kris and their SOUL. Since matrimony is traditionally mystified as a union of souls (and since the practical purpose which has historically motivated marriage as a construct is the reduction of the woman to docile property), it makes some sense to have Noelle joined with our vessel in wedlock.
But is this something most players are consciously thinking about? Is marrying Noelle a strategic choice which players are actually making? Or is it rather the case that the Weird Route feels as if it unfolds almost on its own, often to the bewilderment of the player, who has maybe a vague idea of which direction to push things in, but is far from totally aligned with it in purpose – is in fact rather alienated from it by virtue of their continual surprise at the shocking developments which take place? (Observe how many people initially don’t “get” that you’re supposed to enter Kris again in the pivotal scene of Chapter 4’s Weird Route)
Then consider the fact that in the Genocide Route, not only was the basic undergirding motivation behind the route (the pursuit of absolute power) latent to the vessel’s own personality and will, but that whenever something not directly caused by the player happened, it had a readily identifiable diegetic reason – the vessel itself was responsible!
Okay, but Kris clearly is not on board with the Weird Route the way that Chara clearly is for the Genocide Route. I mean, that is indisputable. Kris is clearly in a lot pain during its events and they fight tooth and nail to sabotage you whenever they can. Don’t interpret what I’m arguing here to be a minimization of that – it’s an absolutely essential part of the route that Kris does not want it. In fact, the Mantle holder (again!) spells out exactly what is happening:
Pay attention to their wording. They don’t say that Kris loves the Weird Route, or that they want it to happen. They say that Kris specifically enjoys the fact that they can say to themselves that “it’s not really them”. In other words, the part which they “enjoy” is the idea that WE are doing the dirty work for them, and that Kris can wash their hands of it - even resist it.
But the unspoken implication is that it “not really being them” is something of an excuse. True, there is clearly a difference between what Kris wants and what we make them do in the route. But we and Kris are aligned in our pursuit of the ultimate goal: Freedom.
That is the narrative significance of Kris being scared to enter the shelter, that is the significance of Kris looking away as they kill their friends in MANTLE but continuing to play, that is the significance of Spamton saying that it’s Kris who tried to see to far, that it’s Kris who will be crying in a broken home.
It's conventional wisdom that people aren’t defined by their thoughts – especially not repressed, unconscious thoughts – but rather what they choose to act on.
In the Weird Route, you draw out and forcefully manifest Kris and Noelle’s unconscious.
“Snowgrave”, seemingly the memory of a traumatic snowstorm; the subconscious guilt over losing the person who mattered to you the most; the wish to become stronger, to overcome your fears; to eradicate that vulnerable part of yourself that you associate with the one you’ve lost, the part you may blame for not being able to prevent the bad things that have happened to you; the desire to have someone with you to tell you what to do.
Freedom; the ability to transcend destiny; becoming so powerful that nothing can hurt you anymore; asserting your autonomy on the world; the sublimated playful urge to hurt and destroy other beings; the conviction that the ends justify the means....
and, perhaps, an abandoned childhood crush (Take note of Carol’s call at the end of Chapter 4 - her odd, ominous support for a romantic relationship between Kris and her daughter, and Noelle’s memory of an awkward, “forced” ferris wheel ride in the past – there seems to be a history here).
These repressed drives are excavated on the Weird Route, lulled to the surface via a “trance”, carried out with dead-eyed, zombie-like resolve.
Are Kris and Noelle responsible? Of course not. They would never be doing this if it weren’t for you.
But it all comes back to the Important Person’s Shirt.
WHAT IS THE POINT OF DELTARUNE'S SHADOW CRYSTAL QUEST?
A lot of people think the Shadow Crystal quest will be instrumental to "subverting the prophecy". From my observations, when people are working out how they think the rest of the game will unfold, they tend to conceive of the Crystal quest as being more or less analogous to the Pacifist quest in Undertale. You can complete the game normally, get an unsatisfying ending, and then if you go back and complete some missable tasks you can get the "happy" or "true ending" instead.
This is not a totally unreasonable take. We've seen throughout these chapters that recruiting every Darkner often nets a more favorable outcome, even saving some characters from their potential demise. And the Crystal quest centers around facing seemingly insurmountable odds, with Seam, the quest-giver, becoming progressively more hopeful that fate may not be decided with each powerful foe brought to heel. One of Toby's recent teasers even hints that the power of the Shadow Crystals may in fact be Determination, described in Undertale as "the resolve to change fate". Gerson urges the heroes not to put so much stock in the prophecy's exact words, and Susie comes out of Chapter 4 resolved to struggle against the fate that's been written for her. It almost seems like a foregone conclusion that there will be some happy ending where we and the heroes defy fate.
But... more and more, I'm beginning to doubt this notion, personally. So with this post, my goal is to rain on everyone's parade. I'm here to say: no, actually, we won't just change fate, because that's boring and it goes against the themes of the game.
I know many people will be resistant to that notion, but please hear me out.
The first and simplest point I want to make is that the existence of a true, happy ending would be a retread - and a boring, predictable one at that.
One of the very first things Deltarune establishes about itself is that it is a thematic foil to Undertale. In Undertale, you are god of the world and get to make choices freely, with your Determination bending the world towards whatever your desired ending is, whether that be a "happy" or "evil" one. This makes a lot of sense for the narrative of that game; Undertale is in large part a metatext about branching path choices, the dissonance between player freedom and structured narrative, absorption in and attachment to fictional universes, etc. Deltarune is also about these things, but it's approaching it from the opposite side. Whereas Undertale highlights video games' tendency to offer the player agency and the opportunity to carve out their own power fantasies, and how that can coexist or conflict with narrative priorities, Deltarune, like the Earthbound Halloween Hack, emphasizes the fact that all narrativization is ultimately pre-decided, and that the only "freedom" away from the hand of the author is to step outside the bounds of the narrative itself - into Nowhere.
Toby has long been intrigued by this theme of narratological fate, with it playing an especially prominent role in his early EarthBound fanfiction projects; it can be traced to ideas explored in Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 2, a formative game for the young Toby Fox.
Now, I'm not here to say that Toby hasn't grown at all from his somewhat juvenile teenage perspective, where his reaction to this conundrum between choice and fate in video game narratives was to contrive a "big joke on the player". But I also want to point out that if a story about fate has you simply disregard it because you don't like it, does that story have any bite at all? Or is it like all those other games which young Toby describes as "making you feel so empowered when you're really not choosing anything"?
The reason why defiance of fate worked in Undertale is because your "happy ending" was counterbalanced by the game's awareness of your alternative timelines. The game asked: "what does your happy ending matter where there are hundreds of other timelines where these characters are suffering? What makes this ending realer or more meaningful than the other ones you've played or seen?" Ultimately, it left you to answer that question. By contrast, it is rather hard to conceive of how a Deltarune where the bad stinky ending can just be undone by fulfilling the right conditions wouldn't just be a straightforward execution of the standard wish-fulfillment video game narrative tropes which young Toby was so tired of. Ask yourself, is the version of Deltarune where you just need to collect X many McGuffins to trivialize the prophecy, formally speaking, any different to any other "True Ending" quest you've seen a billion times before?
Structurally, it doesn't really pass the smell test either. Undertale's Pacifist ending could feel earned in part because an unspoiled player was unlikely to fulfill all the conditions of the pacifist route on their first go. Even a player on LV 1 was likely to miss some of the optional dates before reaching the end. Contrast this with Deltarune where - yes, the secret quests are missable, sure - but most players with any serious investment in the story, especially with the current release structure, are playing through each Chapter sequentially on their "main pacifist save". The wait between Chapters affords anyone who cares to plenty of time to find and complete all the secret optional quests before moving on, assuring that the vast majority of players, at least until the full game is out, will never even get the opportunity to see fate unfold before their eyes because, apparently, they've already fulfilled all the conditions towards getting a happy ending. It doesn't really matter that Toby's initial plan was to release all the Chapters at once; ultimately, part of the issue is that we're already familiar with Toby's tricks from Undertale. Toby expects most players to be on pacifist (and tries to railroad you onto that path harder than he ever did with Undertale) and he expects most invested players to snoop around for secrets as they're playing. There's no way around the fact that just doing Undertale again has huge diminishing returns.
But you know what doesn't? Using people's expectations from Undertale against them. Getting people to hope against hope that the ending can be changed, getting them to think of it as a foregone conclusion even, before revealing that no, that just won't work this time.
Back in Chapter 1, riding high off our victory against Jevil, Seam warns us that one day soon:
And you know what? I have yet to see this particular gun fired. At this point in the narrative, Susie and most players are still convinced that they can outrun fate. And so is even Seam themself, funnily enough! The reveal of the full extent of the prophecy in Chapter 4 may have spooked us a little, but most are pretty sure we've still got this. So why would Seam say this (and think Doylist here!), that we will realize the futility of our actions, if that's not something we're ever really gonna get the opportunity to feel? Remember that this is Crystal quest exclusive dialogue. Toby, through Seam, is saying: you may feel pretty invincible after defeating that Secret Boss. But when all is said and done, you too will understand Jevil's perspective.
You may think this is cringy, nihilistic hogwash. Bear with me! I promise I'm not suggesting Deltarune will go pure grimdark. But I think we may need to consider that fate might actually mean fate, in the game with fate as its central theme.
Maybe you're wondering by now: if Deltarune really does just have one ending and it's this unavoidable tragedy, what's the point? What's the point of Seam becoming more hopeful? What's the point of Gerson urging you not to stick to what the prophecy says? What's the point of Susie's naive hope? What's the point of the Shadow Crystals?
Let me start by addressing Susie. Most players are fully, 100% aligned with Susie when she rejects the power of the prophecy at the end of Chapter 4. From what I can see, the general opinion is that Susie is the game's true protagonist and from now on it will center mostly around the player and her working together to resist the fate that's been set in stone for them, using the power of friendship and hope and anime. It's not hard to see why, of course. Most people don't want an unhappy ending for their blorbos. It would just be too sad. So screw what the prophecy says.
That's all well and good, but might we also consider that Susie is being a little naive? I mean, of course she is, Ralsei says as much, but maybe this naivety won't just be completely, unconditionally rewarded? If you've read literally any tragedy you should know that a hero rejecting the power of prophecy is definitely not a surefire sign that the impending tragedy will be prevented. Usually, actually, it's a sign of dramatic irony. In ignoring or even trying to prevent their prophesied fate, the tragic hero usually ends up inadvertently bringing it about.
Are there any signs that Susie is being too naive? Well, let's look at how her perspective has been presented by the game.
Susie is undoubtedly the least informed of the story's main characters. Kris is in a conspiracy with the Knight and possibly Carol, Ralsei knows the entirety of the game's events and the "rules of this world", Noelle senses that something is up with Kris, even Asgore is actively investigating the Dark Worlds, and almost every character has some degree of knowledge about the backstory with Dess's disappearance, the shelter and the Angel's religion and prophecy. Almost everyone - except Susie (and us, to an extent). This makes her a perfect player analogue, but it also means that it's hard to put much stock into her opinion, when even we know a bit more than her. And not only is she ill-informed, she's sort of slow on the uptake and often neglects to ask some pretty crucial questions (such as: "why the hell is there a Dark World in Kris's house", or "hey, this local religion's prophecy sounds awfully like our adventures"). In Chapter 4, she starts taking things more seriously and tries her best to do some detective work, but one can't help but feel that she's mostly serving as a red herring exposition machine. We should take it as a clue that the Knight just laughs at her when she speculates about its nature.
But okay, the extent of Susie's knowledge isn't really what's important here, it's her outlook and attitude, so let's look past what Susie specifically says and instead pay attention to how Susie feels and orients herself towards the world. There's no doubt that the game treats Susie's hope and self-assuredness as a positive, admirable attribute. It enables Ralsei to start self-actualizing and treating himself as an actual person who deserves his own wants and desires. It helps Tenna get over his predicament and move on from his past. Her passion and reckless assertiveness is presented as the antidote to many of the story's ills.
And yet, there's also a subtle, yet ominous undercurrent to her naivety.
* The Roaring Knight...
* Whatever they are, they're making these fountains...
* But... is that really a bad thing...?
* Since they started showing up,
* Everything's gotten a lot more interesting, hasn't it...?
Of course, Susie loses this ambivalence about the Knight next chapter, turning firmly against them, but it's, I think, pretty telling that Susie initially feels sympathetic towards their actions. You may think she's gotten over this, but...
* An ending, huh...
* ...If I could choose… I guess...
* I wouldn't have an ending!
* It's just better if stuff just... goes on forever, right?
The funny thing about this interaction is that it's right before Gerson says that Susie wields the pen of hope which can counteract the dark which threatens to wash across the whole world. Many, understandably, interpret this as meaning that Susie is the only hope against the Roaring. But - things going on forever? A story "burning bright and black"? "Burning up everything"? This is itself the language of the Roaring. The impulse to continue the story forever is precisely what motivates Berdly, Noelle and Susie to almost cause the Roaring in Chapter 2. King's bitterness over being cast away and Tenna's desire for his show to continue forever are their main motivating flaws and what the Knight used to recruit them to its side. Susie describes the Knight as someone who wants to "see everything burn".
What do we make of this seeming contradiction? Well, I think part of it is that Gerson actually positions Susie as someone who can only use her white pen of hope after the ocean of ink has spilled across all the pages - so, maybe not as much of a contradiction there as we're thinking.
But either way, Susie's perspective is ideologically aligned with the Knight's seeming goals, of course culminating in the Roaring, which has thus far been presented as a pretty bad thing! So I think we can at least say that Susie's naivety and hope is limited. Which is something I expect she'll have to confront, especially since acceptance has been such a big theme of the game so far, especially where the antagonists are concerned. Acceptance of change, acceptance of things ending.
Gerson himself is often interpreted as someone staunchly opposed to the prophecy, someone who thinks that stories can be changed. So it's natural to think that the wisdom he imparts to Susie is that she should simply dab on the prophecy, right? Screw what it says!
But if you look a little deeper into it, it's a tad more complicated.
* Hmm! The prophecy! A very nice fairytale, that...
* Well now, a fairytale is a pretty little thing.
* Ain't it nice to believe a glimmer here and there...?
* I jus' think, those words shine a bit too bright.
* A path so blue, it's all you can see.
* So I say... why don't we go between the lines?
* It's darker there... Geheh... geheheh!
Right. So as we can see, Gerson's viewpoint isn't exactly that the prophecy just sucks. It's nice to believe a glimmer here and there. But staring at it too long can also blind you, so what's Gerson's avenue for subverting it? It's not to erase the words, or replace them, but to go between the lines. That its to say: to read between the lines. To impose your own interpretation and viewpoint on the text. And to go between the lines, there need to actually be lines to go between, yeah?
* The words on a wall called you a hero.
* ... Whatever you end up being, I'm sure it'll be tremendous.
Again, not a flat rejection of the prophecy! Gerson just advocates the freedom to interpret things differently. The words say you're this, but maybe you're something else. It's notable, I think, that Gerson focuses on the symbolic, the descriptive. Gerson doesn't focus on actions or events, what Susie is said to do, but instead focuses on what the prophecy designates Susie to be.
My impression of Gerson is that he basically has an unconditionally celebratory view of hermaneutics (and Becoming more broadly).
Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness — that of the seemliness of religious symbols — had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it.
Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation"
He doesn't seem much for essentialism and teleology. A perfectly admirable view, except for the fact that he's in a story, and stories - insofar as they are stable and comprehensible - are characterized by exactly that, which is kind of the whole point of the game's occupation with fate, really!
So there's a conflict here. Gerson's view is positioned as wise and admirable by the game, and yet it's also incomplete because there's clearly some value in a story having at least a temporarily stable being, right? To reinterpret, like Gerson urges, there needs to be a coherent story to reinterpret. And if the point of the game is to allow players the freedom to reinterpret, it needs to actually tell its story for us to do so.
Changing "fate" with the Crystals isn't meaningful freedom at all - it just means following another fate, every bit as pre-decided as the one in the prophecy. The main difference, really, is that a happy ending would narcotize most with easy, shallow contentment; hardly something which incentivizes creative interpretations of the text.
Toby, as Gerson, may believe that everyone deserves the freedom to tell their own stories, and to have their own perspective on the stories that others tell.
But here's the thing: Toby has his own story to tell, too.
For the past 3 years I've been waking up in the middle of the night unable to go back to sleep because I've been thinking about the scenes that happen in the game. Even though so many details are still hazy, I really want to show you the things I've been thinking about. That's really my only reason for making this game. If I don't show you what I'm thinking, I'll lose my mind.
I HAVE SOMETHING
SOMETHING I WANT TO SHOW YOU
SOMETHING
I THINK YOU WILL FIND
VERY
VERY
INTERESTING
If you ever wonder what I'm doing, I'm vibrating rapidly and working on my game. Every year it doesn't come out I shake more. I don't want it to take too long, but after a few more years I can clip into the floor while doing an ollie and earn tons of points, so it's not all bad
AFTER ALL
YOU AND I,
WE HAVE BOTH BEEN WAITING
SUCH A VERY LONG TIME.
SO TO BE HERE
FINALLY
ON THE VERGE OF CONNECTION
IS
QUITE
EXCITING.
I don't want anyone to burn out waiting for this... But... we haven't burned out making it yet! Actually, the opposite!! We're on fire!! A lot!! Ouch!!
ONCE MORE
I THANK YOU
FOR YOUR PATIENCE
IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMES.
YOU HAVE DONE
EXCELLENTLY
TO PERSEVERE.
I understand what it's like to have to wait before you can talk about something.
...because I was waiting.
BUT
IT
IS STILL
WAITING.
HOW MUCH
LONGER NOW...?
MY
DELTARUNE.
And it's a story which was born from an ending.
In 2011, when I was away at school, I got very sick. I ended up having a terrible fever and couldn’t get any medicine for it, and while I was sleeping I had a vivid dream about the ending to a game. Since then… I felt like I had to make the game with that ending.
I have to make what I saw in my dream. I don’t even know if it’s particularly good, but I have to do it…
Toby worked backwards from this dream. He contrived characters and a plotline to bring it to fruition. Getting to show it is the whole reason Deltarune exists at all. And I don't know if you noticed, but we haven't seen the final prophecy yet. Toby is trying to preserve its impact. Because we're gonna see it. We're gonna see the dream. In fact, us getting to see his dream is the crux of the narrative; it is, put simply, Deltarune.
But I still haven't answered the question. What's the point of the Shadow Crystals, then?
* Treasure? There is no treasure... only experience.
The point is experience.
Ask yourself. Do you not feel the same, ultimately?
Rewind back to Chapter 1 and consider. Did you embark on the Shadow Crystal quest to change fate? Was that even an inkling in your mind? Or did you do it because you wanted to? Because it seemed intriguing? Because it seemed... fun?
That's why you're searching for them, aren't you?
The SHADOW CRYSTALs...
Do you honestly think it'll get you what you want...?
... no, part of you is just... enjoying this, isn't it?
Because it meant something to you, to prove to yourself that you could? Because you got to spend a while longer with these characters and this world? Because it gave you assurance that, truly, you did everything that you could do? That you reached the absolute?
It has no special powers. However, in order to attain this item, you became much stronger!
Because the harder the challenges you faced, the more you felt accomplished. The more your eyes lit up.
* Don't have a long face, now. We all knew nothing would come of this.
* But it was fun... to pretend it might, for a little while.
* Thank you.
And even if you didn't accomplish everything you thought you could... Even if the change wasn't very big in the end...
* Hmm, a treasure, is it? Here, why don't you take it?
* Well now... suppose there ain't much after all.
* But even if your path don't lead nowhere...
* Least you got some exercise goin' down it. Geh heh heh.
* (For some reason you felt healthier to a minuscule degree.)
* (Your Max HP increased by 1.)
You felt a little better. Because...
Deltarune is a game about Connection, absorption, the experience of playing it. What you give it is what you get. And what Undertale's Pacifist route and the Crystal quest do have in common is that they are rituals of devotion. Far from undermining the narrative and its fate, they serve to crystalize your love and faith for this secondary world you belong to. And so;
DELTARUNE
GLOWS BRIGHTLY
FROM YOUR HOPE.
What is Deltarune? What isn't Deltarune? A survey program. Lines of code, some assets, audio files. Words on a wall. Inert and meaningless until you make it not be.
(It’s a strange letter. It’s more or less completely illegible…)
(But, if you squint your eyes, and, you squint your heart…
For some reason, you feel you could understand it.)
Which is why the diegetic author-figure, almost certainly responsible for creating the prophecy, does not chide you but rather looks on in awe as you threaten to defy fate.
INCREDIBLE.
I FELT IT THERE SHINING.
YOUR POWER.
There is no contradiction. Because from the start, the Crystal quest was never characterized by a hostilty towards the story being told and always, conversely, by how far you were willing to go to actualize Deltarune in your mind and your heart. It was never about collecting some silly crystals. Oh, to be sure, Seam will cook up something interesting for us. It will lead to something we will "quite enjoy". But these rewards, whatever they will be, are formalities almost, as are the Crystals themselves, retroactively added as they were from Chapter 2 onwards mainly, I have to imagine, to serve as a reward structure for the quest. The Crystals provide such an intriguing mystery that we almost forget that they are post-hoc, pats on the back, Deltarune's acknowledgement of the effort you put in, but they've never been the impetus for said effort. Any player who collects the Shadow Crystals was always going to do what they did regardless of what they got out of it, simply on the basis of their determination.
* This is a dream that grows with love and care.
* Don't be afraid to dream!
So will the Crystals change the ending? Of course they will. How could they not? The path you took to collect them fundamentally altered your experience with the game, led you to a different outlook, to a new understanding. You gave it your all and dared to hope that something would come of it. And hope isn't dependent on outcomes. Hope simply exists for itself, as Deltarune does, sustained by your power and will in the face of sheer oblivion as long as you don't forget.
(Much of this post was inspired by the opening parts of the Deltarune essay Life Advice. I hope I still had something novel to contribute to the topic, but I urge anyone who enjoyed this post to also check out ana's work.)
Chapter 3 is odd. Conceived and teased ahead of release as a breaktime chapter of fun and frivolity, light on story and drama, this presentation conceals the fact that it contains more strange and inscrutable details than perhaps any other chapter in the game, not to mention the most elaborate installments to date of the Shadow Crystal Quest and Egg Hunt, and is only more dissonant for its constant assurances that nothing is wrong and everything is normal.
It is a pretty banal observation at this point to say that Chapter 3's strange atmosphere and structure is a reflection of Kris's inner thoughts - their memories, interests, fears. But perhaps the most disquieting element of Kris's TV World is the way in which immanent features of DELTARUNE - the story, world, and game - repeatedly manifest as structural motifs of this synecdochical Dark World. What's more, concentrated within it are more allusions to the enigmatic, demiurgic Gaster-shaped figure at the core of everything than in perhaps any other chapter of the game. Enough even for us to possibly sketch a vague image of what desires and motivations may lie behind that fallen angel - and, hopefully, to elucidate what his presence all over Chapter 3 may imply about him, Kris, and Deltarune itself.
THE THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE
One of the primary recurring ideas in Chapter 3 is a duality between an untouched, primordial world and a new one which was born from it – one altered, directed, manufactured.
The most fundamental evocation of this idea is in the very nature of the Dark World itself, as explained by the “camerathing” Darkner Shuttah, whose cryptic and esoteric dialogue can be hard to make sense of but ultimately proves extremely meaningful. Get familiar with this weirdo, because it is relevant to basically everything I discuss in this post.
* The couch cliffs, how purple and majestic they were.
* The dusty, the empty, such are the worlds such as those.
* Ooo la la. The purple worlds, you think they give the creeps.
* Tsk... You have seen not but that tempered by light.
* You should thank Tenna for brightening everything up.
* In the once upon a time, there was a land like purple cliffs.
* A frozen waste, watery basin, a metal desert.
* But, this theater was built upon that... and, it grew.
* Not everyone liked the change. Some people left.
* Of course, that was in the days of the black-and-white.
* There once was a great wilderness here! Yes...
* But, the world became the theater, and us, children of Tenna's contract.
* Those that did not sign the paper, set off for the far land and were forgotten.
* Now... only the legend old hermit still knows the way to the place.
* ... Kris? Do you not know him so much?
* Even the water spirits were put to the bottles and coo as coolers...
* A liquid contract... a waste of their natural figure. Ooh la la.
Shuttah speaks in riddles, but let’s try to parse what it’s saying. Shuttah says that preceding Tenna’s “brightening everything up”, there were “purple worlds”. It mentions the “couch cliffs” – referencing the opening area of Chapter 3, which resembles the empty cliffs area which Kris and Susie likewise wake up in after falling into the supply closet Dark World in Chapter 1. Shuttah makes the connection between these two areas clear when it says – “the dusty, the empty, such are the worlds such as those” – in both areas, dust piles can be found scattered about, and it seems that the reason behind their peculiar natures is their ‘emptiness’. The supply closet is barren, devoid theming and influence – except, one assumes, for whatever objects Castle Town might correspond to. Similarly, it seems, the Dreemurr living room, abandoned and bereft of purpose, would’ve resulted in another barren Dark World, reflecting the broken state of the Dremurr family. That is, if it weren’t for Tenna (i.e. the plugging in and turning on of the TV). In itself, this information is interesting, but not necessarily super meaningful yet. The truly curious part comes when Shuttah says:
“A frozen waste, a watery basin, a metal desert”
I know this line made some ears perk up when playing through the Chapter because there was actually a theory before the release of 3 and 4 that TV World would mirror the theming and progression of Undertale.
An archetypal example of this theory, by u/Jackofriend
Most people dismissed this speculation as crack, and while TV World’s progression didn’t end up conforming to this pattern, it, as it turns out, was actually integrated into the narrative of the Chapter with Shuttah's lines here! The question, then, is of what narrative significance this connection is. It's not relevant to the experience of actually going through TV World, and it doesn't change anything about the basic fact that the Dark World would've been empty and reminiscent of Chapter 1's Cliffs if Tenna hadn't been there.
The only reason to establish this connection would be to further an idea or motif. Once Upon a Time (Before the Story, even) there was an untouched Undertale-like world - but upon that foundation, a "theater" was built, and it grew. Not everyone liked the change, Shuttah says, so they left. The only Darkners we know of that left are the Flying Aces, and it's a bit of a simplification to say that they "left" - rather, they were forgotten, and thus consigned to "Nowhere" - a paradoxical realm of manifested nonexistence, evoking the idea of a forgotten memory which sticks in the unconscious. You could interpret the dialogue to mean that there may have been other potential Darkners which were forgotten more permanently and had all traces erased - but in any case the point remains that everything in the Dark World of the Dreemurr household had to conform to the will of this new world, lest it be consigned to Nowhere and forgotten - in other words, erased. This is why the water in the Dreemurr household manifests as Watercoolers rather than Mizzles - within the diegetic logic of the Dark World, the Mizzles have been encased within the watercoolers to fit the TV theming - Tenna's theater.
Let's digress. The bulk of your time in TV World is spent playing Tenna's game show. It's made up of multiple "boards" in a top-down Zelda style video game which the Fun Gang is made to play. It's a pretty ordered experience, with many set goals you must fulfill. But here and there, cracks start showing. Go off the beaten path and you may find remnants of another experience which Tenna tries his best to cover up. Go backstage between the boards and you find Ramb, who informs you that the game show is a modified version of the "ORIGINAL game" - nothing but a "big ol' blasted line from A to B", in contrast to the free form nature of the original where "YOU decide what to do."
Boot up the original game - which is seemingly called 'MANTLE' - and you find that many of the enemies deliberately parallel the inhabitants of Hometown, most of which are returning characters from Undertale. There are even parts which allude to Undertale-exclusive events, like this room where killing a grey armored fish enemy leads to yellow lizards killing themselves - a blatant reference to one neutral ending of Undertale.
Ramb's description of a freeform original game with real, meaningful choices which is superseded by a linear adventure where you don't get to decide what to do is maybe the most on-the-nose metaphor for the relationship between Undertale and Deltarune in the game, with the former emphasizing the player's freedom of choice and the latter emphasizing their lack of choice. And once more, the culprit for the new world is the same - Tenna is positioned as the one who constructs a controlled experience on top of an Undertale-like foundation. Of course, the description of MANTLE as a truly "free" game with meaningful choices turns out to not be very accurate, arguably railroading you even harder into a Genocide Route-esque hunt for the Shadow Mantle. It could be that Ramb simply misrepresented the game to Kris, or it could be that the "someone" who Kris feels backstage with them (the same someone possessing the Mantle and in all likelihood the same person as dropped the pink-and-yellow Odd Controller you need to play the game) made their own adjustments to the structure of the original game, like Tenna. An allusion, perhaps, to the fact that Deltarune's Weird Route - the alternative to following the prophecy's script - itself restricts the player to some pretty specific steps they have to perform, arguably moreso than the normal route.
Lastly, the final evocation of a new world which was built on an old one is rather more abstract than the preceding two examples, and comes in the form of a speech given by the Forgotten Man. He tells you a far-fetched tale:
* ONCE UPON A TIME, THE WHOLE WORLD LOOKED LIKE THIS.
* DO YOU THINK SO?
...
* WELL, THE WORLD CHANGED. SOCIETY WAS DEVELOPED.
* THE EARTH WAS COVERED IN WATER, DINOSAURS APPEARED, AN ICE AGE,
* HM... ACTUALLY, THERE ARE STILL DINOSAURS... IS IT MIXED UP?
* IN ANY CASE, THIS ISLAND IS THE ONLY PLACE LEFT I CAN TALK.
* DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M SAYING?
These lines require a little more interpretation, but taking a broad look, it conforms to the same general pattern as the other examples. Once Upon a Time, there was a different world - a world which looked "like this". What exactly "this" would be isn't exactly clear; 8-bit? Green? Monochrome? But this line of questioning may be missing the forest for the trees: the world presumably bore a resemble to this corner of Nowhere. Evidently, this world that was has been erased, forgotten. Paved over to make way for a "changed" world, where "society was developed". How much meaning we can ascribe to the 'developments' the Forgotten Man describes or even his fable in general, which he readily admits is just an absurd story, I can't say... But it is important that we take note of this repeated pattern:
Old world. New world. Erasure and forgetting of the old.
The Forgotten Man is what bridges the gap between this pattern's significance to Chapter 3 and the rest of the game.
GUYS TRAPPED IN THE PAST
TV World is centrally concerned with the topic of nostalgia. In a sense, all the first three Dark Worlds are, as they're all manifestations of the same childhood game of make believe which the Dreemurrs and Holidays played with various objects from Hometown. But TV World is where this theme is most prominent by far, as not only is it the Chapter where the nature of the Dark Worlds and their relation to Kris's past is fully divulged to the audience, but it's also set in the location where the make believe games are implied to have been mainly played. Of course, it's also the location Kris grew up in.
The theme of nostalgia is embodied in the Dark World's central Darkner character, Tenna. Having recently been plugged back in after years of disuse, Tenna not only still mentally inhabits a bygone past but is also desperate to recapture and restore it. As the Chapter progresses, Tenna continually reminisces about the happy memories of the now broken Dreemurr family and displays an inability to reckon with the fact that those times are gone for good. In contradiction to these nostalgic inclinations, however, one of Tenna's other core traits is his desperation to stay cutting edge and relevant. Somewhat aware of his own outmoded nature, Tenna often copes by deluding himself about being "modern" and "cutting-edge", while privately despairing about airing only "the same old reruns", even being willing to make contracts and deals that harm or endanger others if it means he might be able to "plug in" and "become big" again. Tenna's crippling insecurity over his own dwindling relevancy and his fear of abandonment is the driving force of the character, motivating most of the actions he takes in Chapter 3. The tragic core of his story, though, is that these attempts to reinvent himself into something shiny and new are doomed to fail, as he remains firmly and immutably anchored to the past. His only hope, ultimately, lies in accepting that his world has changed.
Ramb, in contrast to Tenna, is totally disinterested in changing himself to stay modern and relevant. Whereas Tenna's concern is keeping up with the times, or simply indulging in the delusion that the times are static and unchanging and that there will always be a place for him, Ramb is a true-blue oldhead. He likes how it was in the good old days; none of these new developments can compare. If things are different, that's just a reason to dig your heels in, spurn the future, spurn change, and go back to the way things used to be. That's the basis of Ramb's hostility to Tenna's game; he resents Tenna's presumptuousness in thinking that anything he makes could be better than the old classics. No, Ramb knows that's not what Kris wants, Kris wants the ORIGINAL game - in reality, likely a dream-amalgam of formative video games Kris played and expressed themself through as a child. But as selflessly devoted to Kris and their wants as Ramb must think himself to be, this aspect of him is really more a reflection of his own experiences than any kind of special insight into Kris. Ramb is himself a product of Kris's childhood gaming experiences. An average plugboy from the Cyber World until Kris picked him out; like an angel chosen by their god, he was marked as special, colored in with experience. Eventually, though, things came to an end. Kris stopped playing with Ramb and he was left stranded in the Dreemurr household, away from his cyber-kin, unable to integrate with the rest of the living room objects, left with nothing but the meaning he once held to Kris to define himself by, alienating him from every other Darkner - grey and hardened on the inside, grey like a lifeless statue, or a photo of a bygone time.
The Most Hateful Pippins In TV World just spells out the connection to those not caught on yet:
And you know who else is trapped in the past? Like, literally?
These other guys, they have it pretty bad - still, I am inclined to give the "living in the past" prize to the guy who's literally been metaphysically consigned to the decaying memories of some nonbinary teenager. And, y'know, it feels important to just get this out of the way right now: this dude is Gaster. I don't know how or why, when there's another perfectly acceptable Gaster already in our story, but he is. He appears 'in-between' regular rooms (as the mysteryman in Undertale did) and he and all traces of him have been metaphysically erased from the world, including everyone's memories (which I've had to hear for a decade is technically not fully confirmed to have been what happened to Gaster). And the Seven Flying Aces that have set up shop in his Mancountry? There are actually only six of them.
Funnily enough, the Gaster we've become used to - the one that speaks to us in the black void every now and then - doesn't seem too fond of this other version (part?) of himself. On PlayStation, collecting an egg bars you from getting that Chapter's "COMPLETE WITHOUT ISSUE" trophy, and Gaster was even initially planned to mention it in his dialogue at the end of Chapter 4.
And if we need any further evidence that memory is an incredibly important and prominent symbol in Gaster's story we need look no further than the one major character who is unambiguously, brazenly connected to him - Sans. If there was ever a bad case of homesickness. When we meet him in Undertale, he's seemingly been multiversally stranded. Though his machine is irreversibly broken and he's given up on "going back", he evidently has not been able to forget, as the note on the back of that poorly drawn picture in his workshop testifies to.
I'm not sure I need to spell it out, but Tenna is clearly a Gaster parallel. A showman spinning a story for our heroes which some complain is too ordered an experience, too railroaded in comparison to an "original game" which served as its foundation - with everyone and everything that didn't fit that vision consigned to Nowhere. What's maybe less obvious is that Ramb parallels Sans. This is made unambiguous in the fact that they share an identical anecdote where they make the same joke - but whereas Sans is quickly welcomed among his new peers, Ramb is shunned and unable to integrate.
In spite of Sans's easier time fitting in, he too is stranded in an alien world, seemingly working in a somewhat subservient role to some higher powers ("our reports"? "gasterblasters"?) and yearns, deep down, for a lost past; whereas Ramb deludes himself into thinking that going back is still attainable, Sans, in some sense, lets himself be spiritually defeated by the fact of his past being gone forever, only finding solace in pictures which have captured and preserved moments of a time now impossibly far away.
PICTURES OF THE PAST
Which takes us back to Shuttah. With everything we've considered so far, it perhaps shouldn't really surprise us that the camera Darkner is the most Gasterpilled thing on the planet. What are photos? Reality - light - captured, transmuted, by chemical or digital means, into a lifeless, illusory copy of itself; a moment mummified, plucked out of timespace, preserved in stasis. A frozen memory. A way of going back without moving an inch.
For a long time we wondered what the motif of grey meant in relation to Gaster. Shuttah answers it.
It's about memory. The preservation of something which is gone.
The Aces in turn tell us what goners are.
Lifeless copies given life. Given experience.
Frankly, this should've been more obvious to us earlier.
Knowing this, we can look to other notable instances of grey and compare. An interesting thing that sometimes happens to Darkners is petrification; when they do not belong within the "will" of a given Fountain, Darkners turn into grey, lifeless statues. This makes a fair bit of sense when we consider that petrified Darkners literally belong elsewhere in time and space; when given form in a world they don't belong to, they can only exist as lifeless replicas of what they are supposed to be elsewhere.
And this photocopy metaphor has broader implications. The allegory the Aces present - mechanically copying something already existing and using it as a basis for renewed life - is exactly what Tenna does with his Boards, and it is, in a sense, what Deltarune is as a game. From the foundation of Undertale - its setting, designs, systems, expectations - something new and a little uncanny is created. Like the aces are colored in and made real through being passed off as authentic, we bring Deltarune to life with our "hope" and our experience playing through it.
CONSTRUCTED WORLDS
But... at bottom, it's not real, is it? As with the Dark Worlds, DELTARUNE is only "real" for as long as you're actively absorbed within it - or, perhaps more optimistically and sentimentally - for as long as you keep it alive inside your heart. But outside of your belief, your engagement, your hope? It's little more than a program, comprised of some assets and lines of code.
The parallels between the game of DELTARUNE and the experience of the Dark Worlds have been obvious to most since at least Chapter 2, but what makes Chapter 3 so interesting is that it introduces yet another layer to this recursive analogy.
Indeed, the bulk of the Chapter takes place in these fictional video game "boards". You could say we're "three layers" deep in fictional worlds. And yet, what makes these boards stand out in comparison to something like the Dark Worlds, as well as pre-Chapter 3 speculation about hypothesized "darker than dark worlds", is how clearly established from the beginning these are as *fake worlds* - even if Tenna says that you'll forget they're not. We always see our heroes on screen with controllers in hand, literally framing the action visually as artificial and second-order. Unlike the Dark Worlds - whose artificiality are initially treated with a sort of "wink, wink, nudge nudge" attitude (this one's for the Media Literacy Understanders!) - Chapter 3 takes pains to firmly establish a clear division between the comparative reality of the Dark World, and the obvious unreality of the boards.
All the more interesting, then, that the presentation of the boards evolve in the opposite direction to the presentation of the Dark Worlds up until Chapter 3; whereas Deltarune has become more and more explicit about the artificial, contingent nature of the Dark Worlds, Chapter 3 progressively complicates this division in the boards between "the real" and "the fake" which seemed so clean and simple to begin with. As Kris (and you) go through the first board of MANTLE - which pushes the player into an imitation of Undertale's Genocide Route, where every enemy needs to be killed for your player avatar to become maximally strong - solace is taken in the fact that none of this is "real" and that you (and Kris) aren't truly responsible for anything that happens within this game; even if there is a spooky disembodied voice asking if you're having fun... But come Board 2, you may find an in-game avatar of Tenna, hidden off in one of the rooms, seemingly having escaped into MANTLE for a place to air out his anxieties in private. Is that really Tenna? Is that someone else playing as Tenna? Is that some sort of imitation of him spontaneously generated by the game? What is happening here, exactly? Progress further into the ICE PALACE, and things become more disquietingly real. You meet Noelle in the guise of the "White Cloak". You use her to open a door visually alluding to the often referenced headband Kris used to wear, and speak to that mysterious voice again before it grants you the Shelter Key. When I played this moment for this first time, a shock ran through my body and I briefly thought I had just gotten the actual key to the Shelter in the Light World - I had forgotten that this was all just "fake". Come next board, you're not just killing random enemies - you are (Kris is) killing digital representations of your (Kris's) friends. You go through a final dungeon, reminiscent of Queen's Mansion in Chapter 2 and possibly alluding to the site of some traumatic event in Kris's past, and after you cut down some Hometown-looking trees, you enter a digital recreation of the Shelter, fight the Shadow Mantle (with your "real" SOUL taking "real" damage), before your (second) player avatar simply exits the screen, causing Kris to drop the controller, terrified.
The boundaries are shattered at this point; it is clear as day that the divide is illusory. This is all a Dark World. None of this is real. All of this is real.
Remember that the boards are not just functioning as an allegory for the Dark Worlds, as the second-order "fictional worlds", but also, as we established at the beginning, an allegory for the games of Deltarune and Undertale themselves. This contradictory semantic layering achieves the effect of, again, tearing down boundaries.
Going into Chapter 3, it felt like the obvious thematic conclusion that the Dark Worlds werent truly real - they only appeared as such. Ralsei articulates this sensible perspective at the start of the Chapter. And yet the question the game actually seems much more interested in, especially with the coming of 3 and 4, is: what if they are real?
Light and Dark seemed like such fixed boundaries to us. Until the horror monster appeared on screen, killed the personification of "escapism" itself, and kidnapped a real person into the real shelter. Until the mystical fantasy prophecy was actually revealed to be the basis of the mundane suburbia's local religion all along. Until the game-logic of "equipping items" is forcibly imposed on Noelle in the real world. Until the Titan - bred from the deepest dark - appeared as an angel of light.
It's all real. It's all fake.
One of the most underdiscussed and unsettling moments in the game for me happens in a missable scene near the end of the chapter. You won't have the opportunity to see the final parental lock puzzle if you've already claimed the Shadow Mantle and turned off every screen in TV World, but if you boot it up, you're greeted with this screen.
A perfect facsimile of Kris's Light World home. Inside the "fake game".
Continue through it and you'll suddenly pass back into the obviously 'fictive world' of the boards, before you eventually pick up the camera. Snap some pictures and its eye will reveal the reality lying underneath.
Take enough and the world crashes.
Grey, hissing static - and endless, empty strings of zeroes. This world and its many boundaries are all artificially constructed. It's what the Secret Bosses came to realize. And our heroes are marching, chapter by chapter, towards a confrontation with that inevitable truth.
THE KRIS OF IT ALL
There is a giant unanswered question at the heart of this essay. Why? Why is all of this present in Kris's Dark World specifically? Why is it Kris's mind that generates these constant subliminal allusions to the artificiality of the world? These parallels to the demiurgic creator at its root? What is Gaster to Kris?
Let's go back to the Egg Rooms.
For all their strangeness, the Egg Rooms were rather inconspicuous in the preceding two chapters. The description of the Eggs said: "not too important, not too unimportant", and we all took them at their word. It's really only in Chapter 3 that we began to have any comprehensible idea of what they mean. As we've discussed, they are in Nowhere - a metaphysical layer of reality which is the domain of all that has been erased or forgotten - but these are corners of Nowhere specifically modelled after Kris's memories, with deep ties to their childhood. After you've collected the third egg, Shuttah will remark:
* Kris! You suddenly look much more adult.
* What is it? Did you make the journey?
* Well, slow down! Let me get the picture of your youth!
* Kris! Our Kris...
Undoubtedly the most conspicuous addition to the Egg Rooms in Chapters 3 and 4 are the Flying Aces, also linked to Kris's past: to cheat at card games, Kris photocopied certain cards and colored their grey, monochrome forms in to pass them off as real. Eventually they got lost between the couch and forgotten about, and they end up manifesting here in Nowhere.
We've already discussed how this functions as veiled exposition about goners, the eerie grey creatures tied to Gaster. For example, it is quite likely that the strange striped bird in the Librarby (internally titled "normalnpc", in case there was any doubt about its normalcy) is an undercover goner, sharing a design with one of the Followers from Undertale.
Note this character's emphasis on "waiting" and deferring progress until later.
But isn't it just a little bit odd if these new characters, present only in the "Kris repressed backstory rooms", and deeply tied to their childhood, only exist to provide random exposition about... like, some spooky henchmen guys? And yet this is the overwhelming consensus. It just feels like something is missing. Again, why? What is Toby communicating here?
And isn't it an odd detail that the blue Seventh Ace (blue, always blue) mentions being small (like how Kris is noted to be small), but says that "knockoffs don't have the right to complain"?
And how about the fact that the Goulden Sams - the "cages" - make a return in Chapter 3? And not only them, but new variants colored blue and grey? And there seems to be uncertainty about which one is "original"?
Okay, there's no real point beating around the bush. I think Kris is a goner vessel. I think they were artificially created by Gaster to house the SOUL - a mutual SOUL, jointly created for both us and Kris. A SOUL which is a red heart, representing LOVE and CONNECTION - the bond which ties us to DELTARUNE, and holds the fate of the world.
I think Kris was "colored in", and passed off as a real human. Inserted into Hometown, and allowed to develop individuation and an autonomous personality through their experiences, and the relationships with the people that took them in.
This very good and incredible and lovely art was created by chubbidust
I think this is at the core of their identity struggles and their depersonalization; not only do they have to reckon with the artificiality of their world, as the Secret Bosses do, but even moreso than the other Lightners they're forced to confront that they are "false" - an artificial creation stuck with one purpose: to be the Cage.
I think this has the potential to explain and contextualize a lot about Kris that other theories can't really, such as their odd relationship to their own body, and the fact that, by all accounts, Kris's relationship with their SOUL has been strange for a very long time - certainly preceding "our" first arrival (for example, the wagon and cage having already seen many crashes, the bloodstain near it, the anecdote about them miming ripping out their heart as a child, etc).
But I know that many are gonna think this doesn't make any sense. There is entrenched fanon consensus around a lot of stuff with Kris and the Vessel. Perhaps the most prominent objection people will have is that the Vessel was made by Gaster to impartially house our pure, unfiltered will, and Kris is the opposite of that - why make this so complicated instead of just going with the Vessel as we saw them at the beginning of the game? And this is not even to mention the Second Voice.
I don't want to get too into the Second Voice since it is a topic we simply don't know anything about beyond there being another speaker in Gonermaker besides Gaster - but to put it lightly, I do not think the common proposed scenario of an intruding presence who forcibly scrapped the "freedom Vessel" (odd, given that Gaster seems otherwise strongly tied to fate, not freedom), thwarting Gaster (who apparently was powerless to stop this but also unphased and uninterested in expressing any sort of opinion or concern about this at any point), only to then bemoan that "no one can choose who they are in this world", actually makes any sense at all. The whole idea is a logistically implausible and thematically jumbled mess and I think we're better off just razing it to the ground and starting over from firmer foundations. We can't know precisely what's going on, but we can probably figure out which themes are being conveyed.
The opening sequence of Deltarune is a misdirect. We are led to believe that we will be creating a custom vessel with two stripes - alluding to Frisk from Undertale (one of the head options also strongly resembles them), who was for most of the game a very impartial player character that allowed us to make all sorts of choices while we inhabited them. But at the end, the vessel is discarded (for what literal, logistical purpose - again, we don't know yet), and another speaker bemoans that this isn't the sort of world where people get to choose freely. We play as Kris instead, and as we progress through the Chapters we learn that this world is in the grips of an all-encompassing prophecy which determines every major event of the game. We are given approximately ten trillion hints, in game and outside it, that this prophecy is linked to and probably created by Gaster, as the metaphorical author of the game. And we learn that the First Hero - ostensibly Kris - is the Cage.
I can hear the objection already: it being Kris is a misdirect - it's actually the Vessel, and the prophecy's roles are malleable. Without even getting into how the prophecy being malleable would kind of completely undermine the whole established point of it being all-encompassing, down to insignificant details, and that everything it says will come to pass - I have to ask, does "Cage" make sense as a descriptor for our custom-created freedom Vessel? Isn't the role of a Cage to... imprison? Constrict freedom?
So if the Cage is Kris - and it is - we should probably take note of the fact that it is described as being made of "parts". Kris is uniquely dehumanized by the prophecy. Susie is referred to by her gender and personality traits, Ralsei is referred to by his status and role, but Kris is only given emphasis as a (constructed) body to be inhabited.
Many people react to the idea that Kris is a goner vessel with a kind of kneejerk revulsion, and this is why it's actually a good twist. It feels like a suckerpunch - people have invested a lot in the idea that Kris is real, they're authentic, they have human parents and an unrelated backstory, they're an outsider, whose life was unjustly hijacked by a foreign force. What would it mean for Kris to have actually been created for this purpose all along? If the idea feels bad and tragic, it's because it is.
But this painful confrontation with artificiality is at the heart of the game - it is a microcosm of the reckoning that is coming to EVERY character. What does it mean for the Dark Worlds to be fake? What does it mean for the Light World to be fake? What does it mean for DELTARUNE to be fake? Did it all mean nothing?
Or was it actually real all along - and still is real - because you choose to believe that it is?
kris ocd interpretations are also worthwhile in their own right but now that i've been sitting on player-as-daimon meta it's really hard for me to read it any other way
if i'm reading it correctly, May uses the mythological daimon (a quasi-divine entity that inhabits and acts through a person) to describe drives, like hunger and libido, that arise outside of the ego and encompass structural possibilities for creation and destruction present in all people, which can motivate personal growth but also threaten to overwhelm or "possess" a person. this is a pointed critique of the concept of the "demonic," which carries specific baggage of moral sickness and therefore an imperative for extrication and eradication. a "daimon," in contrast, is morally neutral and neither purely constructive nor purely destructive; it's more of an impersonal shadow, not unlike ex. a hapless player of a video game acting through a "player character" and approaching the structural possibilities of the game (choices available within the structure of the program, possibly influenced by possibilities arising from within the player character's unconscious) independently of the character's own egoic desires or intentions. at best, the psychological daimonic can be integrated and constructively directed; attempting to remove it or repress it only distances it from consciousness and makes its manifestations more insidious(1)
importantly, May considers the "daimonic" in general to be the site of synthesis between "will" (briefly, to shape the other) and "love" (to be shaped) or, rather, the context in which those forces are held in productive dynamic tension, like the mitochondrial battery underlying much of sapient motivation. also importantly, Love and Will is specifically concerned with reinterpreting the daimon "Eros" (see also: player represented as funny valentine heart) as a symbol representing not only romantic-sexual love but a more generalized passionate yearning to overcome the limits of individual human existence and become greater than oneself, which occurs in contact with other people – affecting and influencing them, and also receiving inputs around which to grow. It's a drive to exist beyond a single body or mortal lifespan through psychological union with others. That is to say: it's the drive to connect. Gold, determination or Will; Rose, love (according to May) or perhaps Compassion (to use the language of the game); red, the power between them (see RGB & CMY models), which is connection -- perhaps Eros by May's definition, or "Love" in a deltarunic sense, which i can imagine means something similar
(1) this is related to weirdroute and i believe kris's personal potentials for destruction are among the vulnerabilities being exploited in that BUT to be clear i'm not blaming Kris for our actions on the basis that they failed to "integrate" or effectively "direct" us. i think it's more complicated than that and this is partly why, imo, the "meta" aspect to our presence in the world can't be dismissed without losing something important. we're both a metaphor for the psychological daimonic and a literal mythological daimon in our own right, an extradimensional third party that arises and exists outside of kris; they aren't the only person through whom we're capable of action, and they aren't really the person "responsible" for us. there's evidence that kris themself actively resists weirdroute to the point that Someone Else has to step in and issue the commands they refuse to speak just so we can continue. consider MANTLE being "backstage" in TV World, operated under tenna's nose, and weirdroute exploiting oversights in the DEVICE; Legend of Tenna as a feel-good game about the Power of Love aside from some playful TV-Y7 sparring, and mainline DELTARUNE having a notable lack of true violence, as if a certain someone remembers ou're No Mercys and doesn't want them reproduced if he can help it. there's a relationship here between things "backstage" and "unseen" and things pushed away from the light of consciousness. Kris isn't actually responsible for the "structural possibilities" available to the daimon that gaster summoned -- gaster is. gaster is seemingly the one who actually "repressed" the structural capacity for destruction within his own program, and predictably failed at eradicating that potential; all it did was make the path of destruction all the more interesting and enticing to the daimon by virtue of its secrecy and forbiddenness. if HE won't direct his pet daimon's capacity for darkness and danger, then that just creates the opportunity for someone else to harness that energy for their own ends. i've said it before and I'll say it again: the ultimate point of weirdroute is possessing The Actual Fucking Angel and i don't mean noelle
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