This one is based on my growing up in 2000-2010 and playing games on my sister's computer. Kinda inaccurate inclusion of Warrior Cats because they came to Poland waaay later, but I had to include them + I used to watch animations and play clan simulator games with them on Scratch so it counts
Me and @afoxinstars are waiting for tommorrow so our epic theory we had after the ARG turns out to be wrong
Dess might as well be dead, just because it's, ironically, narratively very unsatisfying both for the player who's turning the whole game upside down to find out all it's secrets and for the characters that really want to believe she isn't really dead. The same characters that can create Dark Worlds that were shown to reanimate dead people and make the impossible come true if there's someone to engage with it and believe it. The same Dark Worlds closely tied to themes bodies of water and flowing water, with the Weird Route being related to a character that has ice and freezing powers
Maybe Dess really is dead and the Weird Route will let Noelle find the closure she needs, finally opening the box with a deer-shaped Schrodinger's cat that we really hope is there somewhere, alive, or at least maybe there's a way to bring her back
Probably not because there is no predicting this game, but
1. it was fun to wonder
2. and I'm a sucker for a generally unsatisfying answer for a very hyped-up mystery everyone believes to be something deep and meta that somehow maybe even more interesting, can a character really even be dead if it's a fictional person in a very mallable video game?
3. We want to put it out somewhere because we're going insane
Anyways here's my Dess-ign I did for this drawing only to not use it because she's totally obscured ah