I NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE NEW DELTARUNE CHAPTERS OR I WILL EXPLODE
I wanna primarily talk about my take on the knight’s identity, but I’ll sprinkle a few other thoughts of mine in if I can, cause HOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Anyway
MASSIVE spoilers for Deltarune chapters 3 & 4.
DO NOT CLICK READ MORE IF YOU DO NOT WANNA GET SPOILED!!
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!
So
To me, it’s down to Dess & Carol Holiday.
Like
Look at this design.
Those are DEFINITELY antlers.
Toby knows his audience.
He’s poked fun of it in the game before (ie the theorist rant about Mike)
To me, he wouldn’t just include a design detail like that & NOT expect us all to think about the Holiday’s
So either he intentionally made them look like horns
Or it’s a red herring
& I highly doubt it’s the latter.
I DO think there’s a potential red herring, but it’s not in the knight’s design.
SPEAKING OF TOBY KNOWING HIS AUDIENCE & LIKELY HAVING THESE SPRITES HAVE SPECIFIC DETAILS
THOSE HAND HOLES ARE NOT A COINCIDENCE, & I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL!!
However, I don’t think it’s as mind blowing as it may seem at first.
Most of the fandom already agrees that Gaster has SOMETHING to do with the plot of Deltarune.
The hand holes don’t feel like something that indicates that Gaster is the knight.
Instead, it feels like it merely connects the knight TO Gaster.
Either the knight serves the former scientist (since there is no knight without a leader they follow)
OR
They BOTH are of equal power, people who were once of the light now prisoners of the dark.
Whether they have the same goal is… not clear.
However, the very fact that we now have solid (even if unspoken & rather interpretive) confirmation that the knight and Gaster ARE related
Is a big deal
Even if we all kinda knew that already.
NOW
Back to the Holiday’s.
I actually played through chapter 3 & 4 myself without looking anything up beforehand.
Yes, I missed some things, but from what I DID see, I first came to the conclusion that Carol, Noelle’s mother, was the knight.
In chapter 4, Kris talks to someone on the phone.
Kris seems to be working with someone who wants the dark worlds to spread & grow, hence why they stop the player from reading the bunker code written inside Dess’ guitar (keep that last fact in mind).
We don’t know for certain who this voice belongs to.
Is it the knight?
Gaster?
The same person Spamton spoke with back before his fall from fame?
It all seemed ambiguous
Until this happened.
Kris tells the person on the phone that they failed to stop Susie from getting the guitar.
The person then says they’ll be “right there…”
Which leads to
You cannot tell me with a straight face that this is a coincidence.
Noelle KNOWS her mom’s work hours.
Why would Carol suddenly come home so early?
If Carol was not the one on the phone, then someone or something HAD to come over to Noelle’s.
The voice specifically says “I’ll be right there.”
Not “I’ll stop her”
Or “I’ll send someone.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Carol is the ONLY person who arrives at the house before Susie’s kicked out & Kris follows her.
Not to mention
Like
Toby didn’t highlight “you” in RED merely to create emphasis.
He rarely does that.
We see him highlight stuff in YELLOW in this chapter, sure
But the only other thing he’s highlighted in red (from my recollection) was when Noelle talked about listening in for the presumed “mouse” while she & Susie wait in Dess’ room
& the red text hinted for you to make noise.
Considering that hint was for YOU & not KRIS (since you’re separated from Kris during this scene)
Me thinks it legitimately means something
& wasn’t just Toby deciding to be a lil funny & switch up his text colors for kicks (even if that WOULD be hilarious…)
THE POINT IS
I highly doubt Carol’s talking to Kris in the above scene, or at least, not JUST Kris.
I think she’s talking to the player.
The “you.”
We know from chapter 2’s Snowgrave route (specifically when you are about to defeat Spamton) that “you” refers to the player, not Kris.
Carol’s line here feels intentional.
ANOTHER INTERESTING THING
This COULD be seen as like
A metaphorical thing
(ie to show how “cold” Carol is toward others)
But considering Noelle’s whole thing in chapter 2
& the background ambiance when she arrives
& how Susie comments on FEELING the ACTUAL temperature drop…
It just feels
Too odd to be purely metaphorical.
Do I think this confirms she is the knight?
No.
To me, it merely shows that Carol is a PART of whatever this whole thing is.
Carol COULD be the knight
But to me, it doesn’t feel as thematically fitting as Dess being the knight.
Cause like
Dess is MISSING.
We don’t know HOW she went missing.
No one hasn’t seen her in quite a long time.
It makes sense that Dess, either willingly or forcefully, became the knight.
& when I say “became”
I mean like
MORPHED into it.
She IS the knight.
It is no suit of armor she can take off.
It is no dark world form she can shed if she were to enter the light world (assuming she ever could).
She IS the knight, & the knight is HER.
She is forever warped by a past event we have yet to see.
Plus
Carol feels like she has a few intentional red herrings that would make fans point to HER as the knight
Mainly the kitchen katana that she apparently uses to cut fruitcake with.
THAT feels like a straightforward red herring
Cause it’s TOO obvious.
Besides
The knight doesn’t wield a katana.
If Carol were the knight, I feel like the knight’s sword would be a lot more elegant looking, more katana-like.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see Carol KNOW about her eldest daughter’s fate & actively be working with her.
…
Also WHY IS THERE A NOTE IN DESS’ GUITAR??
Who put that there?
WHEN did they put that there?
I doubt it was Carol. That feels like a weird place to put a code. She feels like the character to have the code on HER at all times.
The code was likely from Dess herself.
Why was it put there?
To remind Dess how to open it (likely causing her to explore the shelter & later go “missing)?
Or perhaps
Somehow
It was written after her disappearance
As a quiet call for help
For SOMEONE to open the bunker & end the nightmare.
Carol could still know about the code without being the one to write it.
If Kris can spot the note so easily after only looking through the guitar ONCE
We can wager that Dess’ MOTHER, who LIVES in that house, likely found out about it at some point, ESPECIALLY if she truly is a part of the madness somehow.
Assuming this is all true, I wonder if Carol never plucked the note out because doing that would require breaking the guitar in some way, & she does not have the heart to do it.
That idea’s more headcanon-y than anything
Cause I’d just love to have a scene like that play out
Where she mumbled to herself about just getting rid of the damn note
But can’t without hurting the strings
Showing that she DOES still care. She DOES have humanity.
It’s just buried in the freezing cold.
…
… so while this seems like a good ending spot
I wanna say one last thing.
Fellas.
F e l l a s.
The later chapters don’t HAVE to abide by a set formula.
I keep seeing people argue whether this or that was the secret boss
& I’m just like
Fellas
It doesn’t have to match chapter 1 & 2’s format.
Hell, chapter 2 diverted from chapter 1’s format by making IT’s secret boss someone you encounter in game no matter how you play, a stark contrast from Jevil, who you can play the entire game without ever seeing a LICK of dialogue about him.
I think, out of everything, we shouldn’t worry about “who the secret boss is.”
No.
We should be more concerned about the shadow crystals & where they end up.
Cause APPARENTLY
DEFEATING THE KNIGHT IN CHAPTER 3 LEADS TO SUSIE CHIPPING OFF A PIECE OF THEIR SWORD
& WHEN YOU GO TO PICK UP THE SHARD
YOU ADDITIONALLY GET A SHADOW CRYSTAL!!
At first, I assumed the shadow crystal came FROM the sword, but that may not be entirely right.
Even still, I think the crystals either come FROM the knight
Or the knight & the crystals come from the same place.
Now, how specific characters get a hold of it
Is… up in the air.
We see Gerson hand one to Susie in chapter 4.
He tells her that someone likely wanted him to use it, but he didn’t find it interesting, so he never really did anything with it.
Perhaps someone (the knight, Carol, Gaster, who knows) is giving certain Darkeners shadow crystals for some unknown reason.
Whatever the reason is, considering the bosses to get these shadow crystals all tie to EXTREMELY hard boss fights, it’s likely a source of power the corrupts the user, just as it did with Jevil & Spamton.
So
By that logic
I suppose the knight IS the secret boss
But more so that the secret to the boss is that it’s winnable
Which feels
Very hilarious & overall Toby-ish to me, not gonna lie. IWNWODMWOCKSOMXOSMXODCM
But uh
Seriously.
We gotta look at how these bosses connect on a far less shallow level. We can’t be too occupied with interpretive patterns in the chapters’ varying story beats
Cause those story beats aren’t always gonna be repeated.
After all, repeating story beats make the rest of the potential chapters predictable
& I doubt Toby’s gonna be doing that…
Anyway uh
That’s all for now.
…
Ya know
Aside from how we finally got concrete confirmation that monsters bleed (so the whole “when you kill sans, you cut through some ketchup he had hidden away to make it look like blood” debate no longer matters)
Ralsai directly addressing how there MUST be another ending to their story (& suggesting that Toby’s “one ending” claim may be tied to the prophecy specifically)
Dead monsters having the capacity to be “revived” in the dark world, even if we can never be sure if it’s really “them”
THE FUCKING SNOWGRAVE CONTINUATION SCENE IN CHAPTER 4
LIKE HOLY SHIT
But that last one’s for another time
… probably.
For now, imma just
Close off my ramblings here before I spend another 2 hours of my day talking about how these two chapters absolutely DESTROYED my brain.
GUYS WAIT I might be misremembering things, in which case ignore me, B U T
Norm never named Wanda. This makes me HELLA sus that Agnes is the one who's really in control and who needs to be stopped. I think shes doing like 90% of it and Wanda's doing a little bit on the top, mostly just centred around her family. Maybe Agnes offered to capture the town for her as a safe haven or something. Agnes is like the one who's keeping things going and moving along (like sending Pietro to them) so Wanda will stay in West View. Who the hell knows why though.
