I am just now finding your wonderful theory about the souls and their colors, Dess, all of it, and digging backwards for my own joy, but as someone who obsesses over this detail from chapter 1... If Kris's soul is blue, what is your interpetation, if anything, for how soul-less kris's eyes flash red with the soul interaction sound at several points, while posing? I have thought in the past about this being an additional red soul in thier head or something, and eventually settled on it being lingering essence of the soul which allows them a modicum of agency without it, but it could just as easily be a spooky detail with no actual context. Perhaps it is Kris's equlivilent of the lingering piece of red soul in Noelle in wierd route chapter 4? A piece of the Dess soul still inside them even when the proper soul is removed? And, perhaps more importantly, does Kris know that the soul now has a new controller? Kris seems very callous to the soul, locking it up, throwing it, attacking it as it explores, ect in a way a guilty Kris likely would not about what's left of Dess. Perhaps you have adressed this already, I'm still reading back.
Hey, thanks so much for reading!
Perhaps it is Kris's equlivilent of the lingering piece of red soul in Noelle in wierd route chapter 4?
This seems the most plausible explanation for now. I'm seeing two ways to justify how/why Kris has this fledgling red SOUL in them:
1) The Red SOUL bonded to Kris through their and Dess's years'-long unbroken association, with Kris's submitting bodily control to her SOUL (a la Susie/Ralsei through S-ACT and Noelle in the Weird Route)
or
2) A red SOUL fragment remains in Kris's body to sustain their life for when Dess's SOUL is temporarily removed, e.g., when Gaster uses the Vessel survey to attune Dess's SOUL to the Player for us to assert agency over and synchronize with their body and soul. This takes place physically in the Depths and shows Gaster summon the SOUL, so it's fair to call this process diegetic. Therefore Dess's SOUL left Kris's body while they're asleep the night before Chapter One, however briefly.
One of these seems our surest bet. I'd lean towards the former; if a SOUL controls a body and mind long enough, the SOUL will adapt to and incorporate into the host's body and mind. You could even say it “takes root”, which is relevant in terms of flower imagery in Chapter Five and the Weird Route in general, as well as ROOTS theory, which places Dess’s tragedy and/or disappearance at the lake and seems, oh, 100x more likely after Chapter 5’s lake scenes.
On the flower imagery: the Thorn Ring may be a means of accelerating the SOUL’s body-rooting process, as it's acquirable only in the Weird Route, which Gaster seemingly sowed to entrap dedicated players and reverse-psychology them into forging the Roaring Knight for him. The Thorn Ring perpetuates the Weird Route (controlling Noelle), but why would Gaster incorporate an item like this into his trap specifically? My guess is he knows Dess and Kris had years together for body-SOUL synchronization, and he knows there’s just no time to draw out the Weird Route over years. Nor can Gaster bank on any straightforward way of us willingly giving Noelle the Thorn Ring, outside of 'curiosity' and an illusion of 'transgression' from his game. Therefore he inserted an item to force body-SOUL synchronization like Kris had with Dess's SOUL (the violent nature of the Thorn Ring only works in his favor, if anything, preserving the Player's illusion of us 'breaking his game' by doing something unintended). Prior to Chapter One, Kris probably just gave their bodily autonomy entirely over to Dess out of trust for her and personal guilt over her death/disappearance. The Weird Route, on the other hand, portrays both of them (Kris and Dess) actively resisting us.
This explains why Kris, despite experience being puppeteered by Dess, struggles to assert any agency over the red SOUL once the Player is brought in; they never felt the need/right to do so until now. This is crucial. The puppeteer’s identity and motivations have 100% changed overnight: into something unknown and unpredictable. I'll address Kris’s role in and reaction to this shift at-length in a moment.
As an aside, there's potentially a 1b explanation too: rather than the red eyes being Kris's fledgling SOUL, like Noelle on the Weird Route... what if it's the inverse? What if Dess's mind has rooted itself so firmly in Kris over years that she's almost taken a 'fledgling body' within them, so to speak: a modicum of physical agency? There's no real foreshadowing to suggest a Thorn Ring-esque process could occur inversely (i.e. from the SOUL to the body, as opposed to vice-versa), not that I'm seeing, but yeah. Food for thought, since I do consider the Player’s presence even more of an invasion of Dess than of Kris,ironically; and so the ending of Chapter One being Dess>Kris would be even more compelling imo. But I digress. Let's address Kris's reaction to the SOUL:
does Kris know that the soul now has a new controller?
Yes. It’s safe to assume Kris knows something happened to Dess when Chapter One starts. Kris knows Dess very well, doubly so after sharing a body with her for years. Dess’s internal voice and manner of acting (e.g., personality, keeping Kris out of harm's way) are very specific to Dess as a person. Therefore, logistically, when Kris wakes up and Chapter One begins, Dess's voice will have suddenly shifted entirely due to someone else (the Player) controlling them now. As Chapter One progresses, this inner-psychological 'shift' will only grow more pronounced regardless of Player choice--with every idiosyncratic decision we make in dialogue, reading flavor text in a far more sterile way when the game first begins (initially, we as the Player are just as disoriented as Kris in terms of our attempts to orient ourselves to this somewhat-familiar-yet-entirely new world; this Player-voice sterility is readily apparent if you go back and read the flavor text at the very start of Chapter One).
Kris's inner dread of "whoever is controlling me definitely isn't fucking Dess anymore" becomes doubly blatant once we start fighting enemies and torturing Noelle, her little sister, on the Weird Route. But... really, ANY choice that we the Player make will inevitably make it obvious to Kris that Dess is no longer in control of them, for the simple reason that the Player doesn't know much about what Dess was like during her life (let alone the fact that we should try acting/talking 'Dess-ier' so Kris doesn't notice; Gaster couldn't exactly warn us without tipping us off to the horrific reality of this arrangement, but that's fine because he could almost certainly work his knowledge of this into his favor, which I will go over towards the end).
Furthermore, ghost-Dess almost certainly acted very differently inside Kris, both on behalf of Kris (protectively) and just by virtue of the fact that, yknow, experiencing death and being imprisoned inside your BF's little sibling is probably gonna change you a little lmao. Ghost-Dess's behavior is something only Kris is privy to, so we have no way of knowing how to be 'Dess-ier' inside of Kris even if we theoretically had infinite player-options and control over flavor text and could therefore mimic Dess to trick Kris. Thus, the second we enter the body-mind equation and take control of both, that once-pure system of Kris and ghost-Dess erodes and never returns: because we never leave. Even if you do interpret some of the later flavor text as 'Dess-ier' (like the examples I gave in my initial post, e.g., the horror games and How To Raise a Human book), it can be explained. By that point, the Player not only knows a good bit about Dess, but the relationship between us and Kris has largely uprooted. Think of the Player-Kris relationship as the inverse of the Kris-ghost-Dess relationship; where those two slowly gained body-mind affinity over years, the Player quickly uproots all of this by coming between the two, feeding off their trust/understanding of each other to fuel our forced autonomy. This may explain how Dess's voice seemingly 'leaks back in' more and more into our mind/the flavor text over the course of the game, regardless of the route, but especially on the Weird Route, wherein Kris and Dess have spent the entire game learning how best to resist us.
as someone who obsesses over this detail from chapter 1...
This question of 'whether Kris is aware something happened to Dess inside them' is a perfect one to raise because it indirectly explains the ending of Chapter One in a way I’ve been baffled by ever since the Program Survey dropped (and have only gotten more and more baffled by over time). Whether we control Kris pacifistically or ruthlessly during Chapter One doesn't matter to them so much as the fact we're clearly not Dess. It's a stranger, and they don't understand why or what is happening to them. They don't know what caused this, nor do they know if Dess is even present inside them still, initially. They don't care beyond the terror this presents. Having your body piloted by someone else is horrifying enough already, but at least with Dess it was someone Kris loved and trusted and felt they owed a debt to. Some nondescript third entity? That's a very different proposition.
So by the end of Chapter One, no matter what we do, Kris will be thinking: 'Okay, so Dess is clearly no longer in control, nor am I: so what the fuck happened to her, and who the fuck is this new entity?' This mindset quite handily explains Kris's actions at the end of Chapter One. By the time we reach the credits and see Kris draw a knife and smile creepily at… well, seemingly nothing... Kris has had a chapter's-worth of gameplay and decision-making and Player-centric narration (the SOUL's reaction to Sans is the perfect evidence to conclude the narrative voice is neither Kris's nor Dess's, to start out, but ours; either that or it was planted by Gaster to gauge our familiarity with Undertale but I digress). Anyway, in this light, Kris's actions during the ending are quite clear: it was Kris's way of both revealing to us that they are aware of us/the intruder in them and, more importantly, drawing a knife and smiling to scare us. It's posturing, but how else can they 'fight' whoever is controlling them?
Long-term, Kris's posturing doesn't accomplish much, hence why we never see something like it again. But in their mind, it was worth trying before they headed off to the shelter, to try and trick the Player into concealing their terror about the nature of this self-invasion and silent motivations and powers. But in the short-term... it kinda worked? Most players took Kris as a Chara figure when Chapter One dropped, since that's all we had to go off. But over time that false impression inevitably crumbled in inverse relation to our accretion of context regarding DR's backstory and Kris's personality in general.
As an aside: generally (like you, and like most) I would err towards details never being “spooky for spooky’s sake” since this is Deltarune, but for this instance one point of contention may potentially contradict my framework: the Susie opening a Dark Fountain scene. Her eye turns red. I guess what this comes down to is... a human SOUL is required to seal the Dark Fountains, but is one necessary to open one? And what does this entail, exactly: that the 'opener' themself needs a human SOUL or simply that the bearer of a human SOUL is present/on-hand? If it's the latter, that explains that, since Kris/Dess were right there in the church with Susie. But is that enough? Conversely, is this another instance of "Kris/Dess spent so much time with Susie, specifically with Dess’s SOUL giving commands (via the Player, including S-ACTs) for so long a fledgling bond forms in Susie"? We have proof this is possible for monsters via Noelle in the Weird Route, even if it was unnatural. Furthermore, Susie diegetically comments on the logistics of S-ACTing in Chapter 5 during the big platforming finale, saying: “Ralsei, let’s not wait for Kris to give us our orders,” after which both Susie and Ralsei instantly and perfectly use their S-ACTs independently of the Player's input. This tells us they didn’t just learn this independence, but rather haven’t had any need to defy Kris until circumstances (i.e. us, the Player, being mega ass at platforming) demanded it.
Anyway if by process of elimination Kris has known Dess isn't in control since Chapter One (like Kris with their own body), Kris would seek out answers. Like, immediately. The second they are free to do so. i.e. the end of Chapter One, after it cuts to black. We know Kris has an active understanding of the goings-on in the shelter, where Gaster has surely set up shop. Because Gaster is the one who inserted the Player-buffer between Kris’s body and Dess’s SOUL to begin with, he could leverage his awareness of what happened to Dess however he wants (however best serves his end goal). Needless to say, I highly doubt Gaster would come right out and tell Kris about what he did, that the invasion was his fault, that he chose to silence Dess and summon someone/something from another plane of existence, etc. Now, Kris may not have any direct contact with Gaster, but even if they do, would Gaster play oblivious or straight-up lie to Kris? e.g., would he tell Kris "Dess's loss of control is her latent humanity running out, so you need to hurry with carrying out my plan or risk Dess becoming a vegetable inside of you"? Well… who knows.
Point being, Kris clearly doesn't understand the 'how' or 'why,' even going into Chapter Six, most likely. But because Gaster is the only one who knows definitively what’s going on with the SOUL, the ball is in his court regarding how best to leverage that knowledge for his overarching plan, which is probably returning himself to Undertale, hence why he's gathering Undertale's original main characters (Toriel, Undyne, Asgore).















