I wish that if people are gonna portray Ralsei as evil they would characterize him correctly instead of the cliche ass “muahaha I was just pretending to be cute and friendly I was evil this whole time”. if he was a villain he would still be the most insecure little loser about it and try to sincerely convince Kris that. nevermind I just found the funniest image ever
originally, i was planning on drawing spamton getting whacked in the face by tenna’s big nose, but i was unimaginative with it so i swapped their places instead
So Kris as we know them is a pretty quiet, deadpan and stoic person. It’s one of their main identifying features that the game constantly draws attention to via both comedic and serious moments.
But like with everything we think we know about Kris, it is always worthwhile to consider how much of their behavior is natural or real, and how much of it is a result of our influence as a possessing entity, or simply colored by our biased and partial look into their life.
First things first, it’s important to remember Kris isn’t quite as quiet as they might seem to us, because we’re incapable of hearing them talk. We can only really gleam when they said something from the reactions of the other characters around them. So there’s plenty of times we can’t quite judge how much Kris was actually talking.
And that also extends to their emotional reactions to some degree there are plenty of times times where other characters note how Kris is smiling, laughing, shouting, looking scared or having another kind of reaction that is not conveyed by their still and stoic Sprite.
The thing about not being able to hear Kris is actually very curious, cause it’s also consistent with the Humans of ‘Undertale’. Frisk and Chara’s voices were also imperceptible to us, only gleaned from the reactions of the other characters. Even when it comes to a recording of Chara’s voice.
The only exception is our little ‘conversation’ with Murder-Route Chara, but this is when they became something not-quite-fully-human beyond our control and it still lacked voice-bleeps for the text, which might indicate that we’re still not quite able to hear them.
So… not being able to hear a character’s dialogue might be a side-effect of possession/sharing a body (since one could say we’re kinda controlling both Frisk and Chara throughout Undertale)…. Or it might be a feature of Humans in the Toby Fox Multiverse? That their voices are imperceptible to Unkillable Body-Snatching Time Gods? After all, we can’t hear Kris even when we’re outside their body.
Whatever it is, their lack of visible emotional reactions might be connected to it as well. Although, it is a lot less… absolute. While we never hear (read?) their voice, there are a few times where Kris’ sprites do have facial expressions and body language that clearly convey an Emotion. And there seem to be more and more of them in later Chapters.
Maybe these are just moments that are… so extremely expressive that they shine through the general obscuring mask of stoic-ness that usually hides Kris’ expressions from us? Are the expressions that are imperceptible to us just too subtle to show up on their Sprite? Or is it because these actions were technically taken totally independent of our possession?
...But also, despite it being sometimes hard to determine how much Kris is really talking and how expressive they seem to the characters in-universe, there are a few indications that they are seen as a generally quiet and stoic person from the other characters' perspective as well. Even if it’s not as exaggerated as it seems to us.
And if you combine that with the few more-expressive Sprites they have, and how these only occur as part of actions Kris takes of their own will, and they’re more frequent in recent Chapters as Kris’ independence from us is growing… it’s not unreasonable to assume their laconic deadpan-ness is purely a result of our influence, and without us they’d be a lot more emotional and expressive.
But… hmmm… the thing is that others do notice that Kris is kinda acting Out-Of-Character, but never really point out their quietness or lack of expressiveness as the reason for it. If anything, the SOUL’s possession of Kris makes them come off as uncharacteristically social and talkative.
Folks who have known Kris for their entire life (like Noelle), do seem to characterize them as a quiet person who does not show their emotions easily. The "Newest Girl Girl" shows us pre-Chapter-One Kris barely reacting to Susie's bullying, annoying her by not speaking before demolishing her with just a well-placed softly-said word and both it and the other Noelle Blog Post about Kris repeat the sentiment that 'who can tell what Kris is thinking'.
Most notably, I think, is how Weird Route Noelle describes Kris’ Real Voice (specifically contrasted against the SOUL’s ‘voice'), as ‘deadpan and mumbly’ - and that’s the thing that makes it feel real and familiar and authentically Kris for her. The SOUL’s voice was weird and unnatural because it wasn’t deadpan enough to be the Real Kris.
Also, in the Normal Route, when Noelle is trying to talk to Susie about Kris acting odd, which Susie doesn’t understand cause she hasn’t known the pre-possession Kris all that well, we have this exchange…
The implication, especially paired with Noelle’s Weird Route dialogue, is that ‘yelling’ is the default for the SOUL’s voice, while mumbling is generally for when Kris is saying things of their own volition, because deadpan mumbling is the honest expression of Kris' free will.
All of this does seem to paint a picture of Kris as a generally withdrawn and quiet sort of person with an air of Edgy Teen Apathy to them, albeit when they do allow themself to show their feelings openly, they can be very expressive and emotional. It’s just a rare occurrence even without the whole possession problem.
But… the complicating factor about that interpretation is Tenna. And specifically his secret bonus dialogue in the second Board of the Sword Route.
Which adds a lot of context to some his other dialogue aimed at Kris and his general anxiety about whatever they’re enjoying his games.
I said before that most characters talking about Kris acting ‘weird’ generally will not talk about their stoicism, but Tenna is the exception to that. He is extremely troubled by his inability to make Kris ‘laugh and cry’, seeing it as a failure on his part. If his Games were truly fun and engaging, Kris would've been more reactive.
This conversation with Susie especially, feels very much like a mirror of Susie and Noelle’s conversation in Chapter 4.
Someone who has known Kris since childhood is bothered by their behavior, while Susie, who has only really gotten to know Kris while they’re under our control, can’t understand what the problem is cause that’s just what seems normal to her with Kris.
Tenna thinks Kris should have a more emotional responses to their show, and that their stoicism demonstrates that they’re just not having fun. For Susie, Kris is just kind of emotionally withdrawn by default and has no reason to assume that they’re not enjoying themself just because they’re not expressing it as openly as she or Ralsei do.
So that makes me think, like… if Kris’ deadpan reactions are normal for Noelle but concerning for Tenna, that might still be a relatively recent development?
Well, if that's so, then Kris’ lack of expressiveness might still be related to their peculiar situation with the SOUL, and the reason why no one’s saying that they’ve only gotten really unresponsive recently is that….
Something has been going on long before we came in.
Or it could be just something totally mundane. Maybe they just became withdrawn and kinda emotionally-numb due to their parents’ divorce, or Asriel moving to college, or Dess’ disappearance or the mental exhaustion of following Evil Phone Voice's instructions all the time or some sort of combination of these factors? So for anyone who sees Kris every day and saw them gradually close themself off to the world, that is their normal behavior now… but Tenna still thinks of them as the happier and more expressive child who used to watch him regularly.
Or maybe this is some sort of a mix of the two options?
Kris's SOUL & The Player in Deltarune - A "SOUL Influence" Theory
okay I have not ever posted about Deltarune before but I've been bingeing tons of Deltarune theory videos on YouTube and had some Thoughts so here they are:
I think the general consensus regarding the player's relationship with Kris's SOUL is wrong.
This will more or less be a written version of a Deltarune Theory video; big wall of text under the cut!
What do I mean by that? First of all, the "general consensus" regarding the player's relationship and Kris's red SOUL, the thing we control in Deltarune, is that the SOUL is, or has been controlled for a long time by, something external to Kris, and this external influence is the player. Either Kris was born without a SOUL and woke up one day with one that would puppet them around sometimes, or one day something started controlling Kris's SOUL (and thereby Kris). I think the latter makes more sense; I don't want to rely on any carried-over Undertale lore but I think it's fairly safe to assume that Kris was born with a SOUL. This indicates something we already knew: our control over Kris as the player is limited to their SOUL, not their entire being.
A common point of discussion in Deltarune circles is the idea that the story will use this direct connection between the player and Kris's SOUL (as well as some other stuff, e.g. Ralsei and Kris's off-screen conversation in chapter 2) to dig more explicitly into the fourth-wall-breaking stuff regarding the player vs. controlled protagonist that Undertale only really hinted at. I think this is an awesome direction and I really hope that it's true as I would love to see Toby Fox dig into that kind of thing even more. However, I don't think this possibility is guaranteed; in fact I think there's a very interesting option that foregoes this direct character-player connection, one that has been sitting under our noses the entire time.
We are not directly controlling Kris.
Of course, we already knew that; we are controlling their SOUL, not their body (and mind). However, I think that there is a separate influence on Kris via their SOUL that isn't us.
Undertale did something very similar: by having an ambiguous influence of the previous fallen child (Chara) on the protagonist (Frisk), a lot of stuff that could be read as being directed at the player was actually directed at Chara, and vice-versa. The chain of influence went a little like this:
Player -> Chara -> Frisk
I am proposing that there is something similar going on in Deltarune, of the form:
Player -> SOUL -> Kris
The question you're probably thinking is, "okay, I see, but what IS this middle-man influence on Kris's SOUL? Just spill the beans already!"
But that is where you are mistaken, dear reader, as I have in fact already strewn the beans at your feet.
I think the influence that Kris is rejecting is not ours, but the influence of their own SOUL.
There's a lot of explaining I have to do to justify this so let's get into it: first off, what does it mean for Kris to reject the influence of their SOUL? Well, what is a soul? As Ralsei puts it, "the culmination of your being." Similarly, "the essence of your being." The SOUL is the truth and entirety of who you are.
By rejecting their soul, Kris is essentially rejecting who they are. There is some part of themselves that they are denying.
What could Kris be denying in themselves that they feel so strongly about as to rip their own SOUL out? Well, let me flip that on you: what would removing their SOUL allow Kris to deny?
Think about it: what fact about themselves could cause them such distress? What upsetting truth is made apparent by the very appearance of their SOUL?
That's right: I am proposing that Kris rejects their SOUL because it represents the undeniable truth that they are a human and not a monster.
This gives an explanation for why Kris would think to remove their own SOUL- it likely happened in a burst of emotion while thinking about how different they are from their family, friends, and community, so angry/upset that they ripped out the most immediate reminder of their humanity on hand: their red-colored, downwards-pointing SOUL.
This also lines up very nicely with a huge question that the Player-Kris direct influence interpretation doesn't have a good answer for: we have not controlled Kris prior to the events of Deltarune, so why does Kris know how to remove their SOUL, and has almost certainly done so before?
We know that we haven't controlled Kris before the game because, well, it's self-evident; we are the player, so we know when the game started. Yet Kris has the bird cage in their room, ready to go and already stained, and does so promptly at the end of Chapter 1. (Then later again in Chapter 2.) Kris already knows how to remove our influence; because it's tied to something else they already know how to remove!
The opening message of the game is that you cannot choose who you are in this world. Under this theory, this is a message both to the player and to Kris: the player cannot choose which character they are controlling, while Kris can neither choose what they are (a human) or their circumstances (the only human in a town full of monsters.)
Alright, that's the bare bones of the theory, but I also want to get into some objections you might have and some counter-objections I have:
What does it mean for Kris to be able to move around and act without their SOUL? Well, we know they can, we see them do it twice; I don't know exactly how their actions differ with their SOUL vs. without, but the SOUL being one's essence makes it pretty damn important, so it might mean that SOUL-less Kris is embracing the same urges that caused them to reject it in the first place: strong emotions, anger, being upset, self-loathing. (This theory also dovetails VERY nicely with Kris Knight theory; in fact it was thinking about Kris as the Knight that led me down this train of thought in the first place.) There's other conclusions we might be able to jump to based on how beings lacking SOULs behaved in Undertale, but I don't want to lean on UT lore too much.
If Kris hates their SOUL then why are they so afraid of Spamton taking it in Chapter 2? Because they need it. We've seen how sluggish and odd they act without their SOUL; as much as they hate it, and while they can remove it for a time, they need it, and cannot fully reject it without ceasing to exist.
Does the player matter at all in this theory? Of course; but obviously, not quite as much as in other interpretations. This, however, answers another big question those other interpretations raise: if Kris is able to temporarily free themself from the influence they are rejecting, why don't they go ask Toriel for help instead of getting up to shenanigans? If I was suddenly a passenger in my own body for an entire day as another force controlled my actions, and then I finally managed to free myself from that influence for a short time, I would scream, not go eat pie. Under this theory, the actions that Kris is taking while under the player's control are still essentially their actions, as they are actions being chosen by their SOUL (the culmination of themselves and thus, by definition, their choices!) However, this is still the same amount that the player matters in Undertale (or basically any other video game where you play as a character that isn't a purely blank self-insert), so I don't think it's an unacceptable outcome.
Except, of course, there is a point where the other characters start to recognize Kris is behaving out-of-character: Snowgrave. This theory in tandem with the existence of an alternate Weird Route may just let us have it both ways: a route where the player's influence is at odds with Kris's choices on top of the normal route where the player's choices are in agreement with Kris's. We can have our pie and eat it too! That's a big assumption of course, but I personally find it quite compelling.
That's all I have for now; I might add onto this later (in a reblog, not an edit) if I remember stuff that I missed. Feel free to tell me how I'm totally wrong because of very huge pieces of evidence that I completely blanked on during the course of writing this.
In the Winter 2024 newsletter, the author of the anonymous Valentine's letter tells us to "put on [our] face":
If the expression can be used to refer to applying make up, the act of putting on a face as if it were a mask also sounds like a reversal of these lines:
This is the battle message for « G-BODY », Deltarune Chapter 1’s placeholder enemy, and it is part of a series of cryptic failsafes that rhyme, in English as in Japanese, much like the dialogue of Gaster Follower 2, a faceless NPC that’s holding a piece of Gaster that looks like a mask.
In their seven-part Deltarune theory series, Aurora already talked about how Gaster's connection to placeholders. Interestingly, here the placeholder enemy’s name is written in all caps, like the DEVICE files named by Gaster involved in the Goner Maker sequence, and is similar to the file name for the Vessel’s torso, « IMAGE_GONERBODY ». Is the G in G-BODY short for GONER ?
(Note : In Chapter 2, the name of the placeholder enemy is "Echidna". Was it named by a different person ?)
The "wonderful place" in the first line can easily be interpreted as referring to a Dark World, but the second one proves more confusing. Shouldn't the mask be on one's face, instead of beneath it? In the Japanese translation that equally rhymes, the word "under/below" (下) is used as well.
What does it mean to tear a mask from under one’s face? Is it literally under the skin? Is the face also a mask? Is the mask figurative, like a false self? The fact that they took the effort to officially translate the battle message of a placeholder encounter in the Japanese version (Thanks to Space Core for confirming this.) and to make it rhyme as well, means it might be relevant.
While googling the expression, I found a book which title fit it almost exactly : "The Mask Beneath the Face" by Elaine L. Konigsburg. Now, am I telling the failsafe place holder is a reference to this book? No. Still, its contents could help us understand the meaning of that puzzling second sentence.
The book’s subtitle is "reading about and with; writing about and for: Children", which at first, doesn’t sound very relevant to our question. Except, it talks about writing for children through the prism of… masks. Carnival masks.
* So the festival is coming up, right?
* That thing where the town becomes... a carnival.
(Susie at the end of Chapter 2.)
LC 1.2:M37Digitized from IA1177304-11-0074.
The author begins by telling us that if we truly want to get to know someone, we should take them to Mardi Gras :
When wearing a mask that covered their face and hid their identities, the party-goers started acting in disinhibited ways.
While hiding behind a mask, the line between socially acceptable and unacceptable behaviour seemed to disappear. Did the mask make them take on a persona, or did it allow them to show their true self ?
Let’s now try to analyse the failsafe placeholder through the prism of this book. A mask can be something you wear to conceal your true self, but it can also be something you wear to reveal it.
Masks conceal. In the Weird Route, we figuratively use Kris as a mask in order to manipulate their childhood friend Noelle into freezing Darkners and Berdly, while keeping our own presence concealed. As things are now, Kris is the one at risk of being confronted by their friends for the damage done during the Weird route, and not the person who’s controlling them.
Masks reveal. Your face is a socially acceptable façade you put on to be presentable to the world. However, at Mardi Gras, the mask you chose shows your real face, your inner truth. That's why the mask is beneath your face. And that's why the Valentines letter tells you to put on "your face", as if it were a mask. Your face is a mask, and your mask is your true face.
If your face is a mask and the mask that conceals it shows your true face, then tearing off the mask beneath your face could mean discarding your previous identity in the Dark World.
This could apply to the Roaring Knight, who, maybe masked by a knight helmet, could be leading a double life between unsuspecting Hometown inhabitant and creator of Dark Fountains. It could also parallel some Lightners like Berdly or Noelle, who show a different side of themselves in the Dark World and act more uninhibited, partly because they think they’re dreaming.
Interpreted this way, the placeholder encounter's battle text becomes relevant to Deltarune’s themes of identity and choice : "No one can choose who they are in this world." You can’t choose the face you were born with. But in the Dark World, this wonderful place, you can choose the mask you wear.
The festival is approaching. It would be interesting to see if in the future, masks will be brought up again in Deltarune...
Finally finished it! I’d like to do the rest of the scene, but I think six pages is a good chunk. If you like this comic, please like and reblog! It helps others find my work. If you have a favorite panel, thoughts, or comments, please let me know below! I read every single comment and tag.
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