John English: Candy Corn Vampire and Night President
At the end of the Meat Epilogue, John is infected with some kind of poison that prevents him from regenerating. We aren’t provided with a Heroic or Just ruling on his demise, and his slow, painful fading away in Terezi’s arms seems uncharacteristic of a death afforded by the Immortality Clock. Most importantly, the Dead Cherub tells us that “[John’s] resuscitation remains a theoretical possibility for those still striving for it.” So it seems most likely that it is English’s poison that stops John from being revived instantaneously; possibly related to his breath that allows him to destroy ghosts.
This might seem like a strangely ambiguous end to the story of our protagonist since page 1 of Homestuck, but in truth, the Epilogue itself explains what this poison is; because in Candy, a version of Jade faces the exact same problem.
JANE: Well, something is blocking my Life powers.
JANE: It’s as if she has… a sort of poison in her. Not a literal poison, mind you.
[…]
JANE: It’s attacking her on… perhaps this sounds crazy, but…
JANE: A metaphysical level??
And we soon find out what that poison turns out to be; it’s the Dead Cherub, about to use Jade’s body as a puppet host. So if Jade becomes infected with Calliope’s poison and becomes Calliope’s host; is John, her brother, slated to become Lord English’s host now that he’s infected with Lord English’s poison? Let’s look at some other parallels in their situations.
Before becoming the Dead Cherub’s host, Jade falls through a black hole that represents Calliope herself. Before John is poisoned, he falls into Lord English’s mouth. Note that Lord English himself is like a black hole. Before Jade falls into the Dead Cherub’s event horizon, she receives a slice of the broken fabric of reality through her chest. John receives a similar wound from Lord English’s tooth; but it isn’t just any one of Lord English’s teeth. It’s his gold tooth, cracked off at the base. Where does Caliborn get his first gold tooth?
It’s a piece of candy corn he knocks from the header of the MSPA website. Just like the piece of the Furthest Ring that gets Jade, Lord English’s golden tooth is a broken piece of the frame that the story takes place in.
Let’s take the candy corn angle a little further. A fantasy creature well known for its ability to pass on likeness through a bite is the vampire; and importantly, Caliborn’s use of a candy corn tooth is a direct reference to a vampire within the MSPA mythos, the Candy Corn Vampire.
Beyond comparisons between Kanaya and human mythology, vampires are mentioned sparingly in Homestuck, but come up twice in the Epilogues. Once in mention to John recoiling from light as if he is one (noteworthy), and then another time in a strange sequence of internal monologue Jane has.
[…] Jane is pretty sure that Karkat Vantas would probably literally burst into flame if too many people happened to look at him at the same time, like a vampire walking out into the sun.
Wait. Jane lowers the pillow from her face and stares at her brass-and-glass art deco ceiling. Was that vampire thing xenophobic against Kanaya? Or whatever it was that Kanaya was supposed to be? No, of course not, she assures herself. With trolls it was the other way around: vampires were the only members of their species who didn’t balk at the sunlight. Another reason Karkat would make a poor president. Unless… he ran as the Night President? No, the idea is foolish. Best not to give him any ideas. There can only be ONE president.
The title ‘president’ here is obviously being used in the same sense as in US politics, but it also merely means ‘someone who presides’. This paragraph and a half invokes a very easy to read concept; two beings, one presiding over Day, the other presiding over Night. Light, and Darkness. And the latter is a vampire. It is possibly worth noting that the word ‘preside’ is mostly used in reference to the Green Sun, which later becomes a black hole, which is actually the Dead Cherub. And just like Lord English and the Dead Cherub, vampires and the sun are mortal enemies.
Jane rejecting outright the idea of a dual presidency is also an obvious reference to the dual juggalo presidency of Earth B2. This is important because Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are two of the characters in Homestuck who are implied to be the subjugglator religion’s Mirthful Messiahs. Andrew’s commentary in Homestuck book 4 has this to say about the Mirthful Messiahs:
[…] the Mirthful Messiahs can refer to different “mirthful” pairs of people, depending on at what point in the story the idea is discussed.
But what we do know for sure about the subjugglator religion is that it heavily concern a “paradise planet,” which Earth C is compared to again and again. So who do the Mirthful Messiahs refer to now that the story is at a point where the subjugglators’ paradise planet actually exists? The invocation of this question speaks volumes on its own.
Let’s take the vampire connection just a step further before it starts to wear thin. If John / Lord English is some kind of cosmic vampire, is there a similar but contrasting creature that Jade / the Dead Cherub can be compared to? Perhaps a werewolf. Werewolves receive very little attention in MSPA - even less than vampires; Problem Sleuth, from whence the Candy Corn Vampire originated, did not have any kind of werewolf monsters in it. But it is worth pointing out that by the time Kanaya was introduced to the story, Hussie had at least heard of Twilight, which can probably be credited with putting vampires and werewolves at odds with each other in modern western fiction. And werewolves do receive three mentions toward the very end of Homestuck, all in reference to Jade in her “grimbark” state, which puppet Jade is directly compared to.
To finish off this train of thought, take note of the use of the term ‘puppet’. The way the Dead Cherub controls characters in the Epilogues is compared to puppetry multiple times. This is hardly surprising, given the prevalence puppets and puppeteers maintain throughout Homestuck. But it’s notable because Lord English has used a puppet body as a host before; and one with similar canon-breaking power, symbolised by the same white orb that John’s own source of power sometimes manifests as.
Could John Egbert’s dead body potentially be the next host of Lord English, just as many of Homestuck’s earliest and most prevalent theorists once predicted would happen to his father Jake English?
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 of 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, and the rest trapped in contracts that bind them to certain conditions.
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.
SHUTTAH - When its eyes snap shut, memories are made in grey.
It's about memory. The preservation of something which is gone.
The Aces in turn tell us what goners are.
COPIES ARE MONOCHROME,
BUT YOU COLORED EACH OF US IN WITH CARE.
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.
* Today's "GAME" SHOW will be... A VIRTUAL ADVENTURE THROUGH TV DESERT!
* Each of you will use our CUTTING EDGE, PROPRIETARY CONTROLLER PADS...
* To control FANTASY VERSIONS OF YOURSELF in a world so REAL, you'll forget IT'S NOT!
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.
Of particular note this chapter are also its numerous ties to Link’s Awakening. This connection is immediately apparent from visual, musical and structural similarities in the Boards, which are clearly modeled after the old top-down 2D Zelda games. Though technically only one of the Boards is said to take place on an island, as Link's Awakening does, that setting is the most emphasized by the game; not only does Gerson single it out for his description of his variation of Chapter 3 as 'The Isles of Northernlight', but the MANTLE versions of the Boards also all play the same ambient sound effect of waves crashing against the shore. The name of the island - Kodakoda Island - is also an obvious reference to Link's Awakening's Koholint Island (along with the camera company Kodak for equally obvious reasons).
One especially transparent connection is the way in which the Sword Route's final battle against the Shadow Mantle alludes to the final boss of Link's Awakening against the Nightmares - shadowy beings formed from a kind of collective unconscious of the world, which can inhabit the forms of one's fears - in Link's case, previous bosses he has gone up against. The Nightmares of Link's Awakening are quite reminiscent of the deep dark creatures introduced in Chapters 3 and 4, like Titans, Unknowns and FRIEND, but more than that the encounter with the Shadow Mantle was carefully designed to evoke the final confrontation of Link's Awakening. They're both fought in blue underground areas, both antagonists have a pre-battle monologue scored with very similar ambient music, both bosses are simple all-black figures, and both fly and teleport around the arena with almost identical sound effects. And if there was any doubt as to whether this was all just a coincidence, the Spamton Sweepstakes page /romb/, which was used to tease the Sword Route and Shadow Mantle battle ahead of time, just straight up quotes the Nightmares. Not only that, but in Chapter 3's data, the music in the final area of MANTLE is titled "nightmare", with one earlier variation of BURNING EYES, "nightmare_boss_links" (as in, links awakening), making it especially clear that the track interpolates and remixes the boss theme against the Nightmares. If there's any major difference between the Shadow Mantle and the Nightmares it's in the outlook of the respective bosses - whereas the Nightmares are fighting Link to prevent him from awakening, the one controlling the Shadow Mantle seeks to "awaken" Kris further, longs to see their eyes "burn", and takes gleeful joy in the artificiality of the game.
For those unacquainted, the plot of Link’s Awakening revolves around Link’s gradual realization that he is trapped inside an artificial dream-world of a deity known as the Wind Fish, who slumbers encased within a giant egg at the top of Koholint Island. At first, Link and the player are led to believe that Link has stranded on a real island, but gradually, the true nature of Koholint becomes clear, both explicitly (the game's bosses allude to the island's contingent nature and eventually plead with Link to not awaken the Wind Fish), and implicitly (it may dawn on the player that many of the elements of the setting and plot mirror aspects of previous games, seemingly drawn from Link's own memories - one example being the game's love interest, Marin, who Link initially confuses for Zelda; the player may also question the general surreal atmosphere and dream logic Koholint seems to operate on). The ultimate goal of the game becomes about cracking open the egg and awakening both the Wind Fish and Link from their shared dream; a structure bearing obvious similarities to the sealing of the Dark Worlds, and what feels like a somewhat ominous portend of what the ending of DELTARUNE itself might entail. The Wind Fish himself speaks in all-capitals, and his dialogue carries an authoritative yet often poetic air, much like both Gaster and the Forgotten Man. Ultimately, he says, the dream of Koholint must end, but its memory can live on within Link, to be revisited any time as long as he doesn't forget.
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. At bottom, it's all dark. There is no reality or fantasy and certainly no hard separation between the two - there is only DELTARUNE. This world and its illusory boundaries are 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?
Running a horror-themed D&D one-shot, and my players asked me to make pre-gens for them. My secret hope is that they’ll be too distracted by their own character sheets to realize What I Did Here.
A lot of folks don’t realize that they I have, unfortunately, been committing very heavily to this bit. On this Hallow’s Eve, let me remind you.
Monsters & Mysteries is a webcomic and my pet project, inspired by tabletop RPGs and absolutely nothing else how dare you imply these are derivative characters.
Currently, three chapters are complete and online for free (though you can pay what you want for high res PDFs) with the fourth about halfway done. (Patrons also get early access at the highest resolution). Funding goes back into webhosting: I’m just happy when people read and enjoy what I put out for free, and what better day than today! :D
Sftware Shark @sftwareshark - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
