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hirngespinst-phi · 15 days ago

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Two of Kris Theory ♥

There are two Kris-es going by the same name and inhabiting the same body. The playable character and owner of the red soul is one of them; the one working together with the Roaring Knight is the other one. And like the rest of the Light World cast, they have their Undertale counterparts - Frisk and Chara.

The most common interpretation of Kris in the fandom that I've seen is that Kris and their soul are two separate entities from each other; with the soul being a direct avatar of the player. It acts as a sort of parasite, while Kris is the unwilling host. I've had a completely different reading since the Survey Program / Chapter 1 was released in 2018, and even though I’ve seen similar takes, they never went beyond surface level UT and DR comparisons between Kris and Frisk and Chara - but I think there’s an entire rabbit hole here. So I want to share my interpretation!

There are multiple callbacks to Undertale that tie Kris directly to Frisk right from the get-go. Kris's character design is very evocative of Frisk's - they have the same hair and skin tone, they both have a perpetual -_- expression, they wear striped sweaters. In the Dark World, Kris switches to wearing clothing in the same colour scheme that Frisk used to wear. The vessel the soul creates at the beginning of the game wears a sweater with two stripes, just like Frisk. Their names are almost anagrams of each other, similiar to how Deltarune is an anagram of Undertale. The cast from Undertale is also present in Deltarune, so it would make sense for Kris to be Frisk. But most importantly - the two share the red soul.

An important point I want to make before diving in further is that I don’t think that the soul is a vessel for the input of the player from a narrative perspective. It was a similar thing in Undertale: most players would think that the player character is a blank slate to project upon; you go in thinking you are the one naming the character, you are making the dialogue choices, etc - and this is by design. Only at the end of the Pacifist run do you learn that the player character has their own name - Frisk. They are their own character and they get clearly separated from the player’s projection unto them.

I think it’s the same in Deltarune. The player character, the soul, isn’t just a blank slate for the player to project unto. Just like in Undertale, they’re their own character.

When the vessel gets discarded at the beginning of the game, there is a second dialogue voice popping up saying “Noone can choose who they are in this world. Your name is…” before it cuts to Toriel calling Kris’s name to wake them up. I think this establishes that whenever the narration is talking to “you”, they mean “Kris” - including the soul. I don’t think this sequence happens literally before the soul wakes up in Kris’s body, to me it reads more like a dream or a memory that suddenly resurfaced.

Chapter 1 also starts by drawing many parallels to Undertale, among them the scene where Toriel takes Kris by the hand and leads them into school, where she hugs them goodbye for the day. These are direct callbacks to interactions between Frisk and Toriel. There are many more - I’ll make a post collecting all of them at a later point!

The chapter ends with control over Kris's body being wrested away from the player and the soul getting locked away in a cage. Kris then turns around, pulling out a knife. Their eye flashes red while a grin spreads across their face. This scene is a direct callback to the corrupted Pacifist ending in Undertale, where Chara wakes up in Frisk's body, presumably to take away their happy ending. Chara is heavily associated with knives. They have their own knife, the Worn Dagger / Real Knife, just like Kris has their own.

Chara themselves has only been shown to have brown eyes before this ending, implying that it’s Frisk’s body that has red eyes. Kris has red eyes as well. This would fit with the earlier similiarities between Kris and Frisk - this is the same body. This Kris also seems to be lacking a soul, like Chara does. I’m also planning on making a post collecting the connections between Kris and Chara later on. There is also Deltarune concept art of Kris, where one expression of them is very similar to Chara’s smile. The other expression is a very subdued smile.

It’s interesting to me that Toby Fox shared only these two different smiling expressions for Kris in the concept art, as if he wanted to point out a duality of the character. (The Frisk comparison still feels like a bit of a stretch here, so technically I only want to point out the similarities between the right expression and Chara.)

But returning back to the ingame parallels - I think these were drawn on purpose. Deltarune purposefully first makes us think it might be set in a post Undertale pacifist run world on the surface, but we find out pretty quickly that none of the monsters have any recollection of the underground at all, as if it had never happened. The school is the first major setting of the game and it looks almost exactly like the school in the pacifist credits of Undertale.

Humans and monsters seem to co-exist for a long time in Deltarune. But the ending of Chapter 1 also implies a world that could be set after a post no-mercy run, since the world of Undertale gets destroyed there.

“[...] move on to the next.” - Does this mean the world of Deltarune? I think this is purposefully left ambiguous so far, but it’s a topic for a whole other post.

While we learn a little bit about Chara in a pacifist route in Undertale, it’s the no mercy route where we get the most characterization of them. They are one of the most important characters in the story, but you can only ever properly meet them in game if you play the no mercy route. There is a specific dynamic between Frisk and Chara that gets developed there.

And that is that ultimately, Chara ends up being the one in control. If you start a No Mercy run, the dialogue upon checking the mirror changes to “It’s me, Chara.” as soon as Toriel’s house in the ruins. The further you are in the story in the No Mercy run, the less input you can give. Chara walks straight through a lot of Papyrus’s puzzles. In the final encounter with Asgore and Flowey and even before, during the killing blow against Sans, it’s Chara acting on their own, taking control and choice away from the player - and from Frisk.

No matter what the concrete connection between Undertale and Deltarune is, I think this dynamic carries over to the latter. We’ve seen relationships between characters do that inbetween the two games: Toriel and Asgore’s breakup, Asgore’s and Rudy’s friendship, Toriel’s and Sans’s relationship for example. Even Alphys and Undyne seem to have a budding romance in Deltarune, despite them not even knowing each other at the end of Chapter 1.

And despite them having very different life circumstances in Deltarune, just like all the characters from Undertale, I think the dynamic between the two Kris-es is similar to the dynamic between Frisk and Chara.

All these points are why I think Chapter 1 established that there ARE two different people inhabiting Kris’s body and we are playing as one of them. The Kris that takes control at the end of the chapter later on turns out to be working together with the Roaring Knight, solidifying their antagonistic role in the story that has only been hinted at since the end of Chapter 1. Whenever I will need to differentiate between the two in this post, I will be calling the playable Kris “Frisk-Kris” and the one working together with the Knight “Chara-Kris”.

It is strongly implied though that the two Kris-es have shared a body for probably their entire life and that it has mostly been Chara-Kris in control of it. The narration saying “It’s only you.” in the mirror check at the beginning of the game can be taken literally - it is only one of them controlling the body at that moment. As in the earlier screenshot showing a No Mercy run, the mirror narration could be taken literally as well in Undertale - when it was Chara in control, the mirror straight up stated it. For some reason we can only speculate on right now, Chara-Kris has currently given up control over their shared body, save for a few instances. This probably has something to do with the red soul’s power to seal the fountains and the light it carries within - but that’s also a topic for a whole different theory post.

There is an old often used bird cage in their room, and dialogue by Noelle implies that Frisk-Kris getting wrested away from their own body has been happening since their early childhood. At the very least, Chara-Kris has known how to pull out their soul since then. They seem inventive about finding places to trap the soul in, as if they've done it many times before. They don't seem to expect resistance from it, since they also easily trap it inbetween the couch cushions at the end of Chapter 2, and expect it to stay in the Holiday's present store room in Chapter 4. It also sounds as if Chara-Kris had made a game of taking the soul out in the red wagon and crashing it, probably on purpose.

As early as the Hometown section in Chapter 1, there are scenes implying that Frisk-Kris is rarely in control of their body. Their behaviour seems so unusual that characters are pointing it out.

The two Kris-es seem to have a very unbalanced dynamic for two people sharing a body, overall. Chara-Kris enacts force on the red soul easily, like pulling control away from it or trapping it in the bird cage. And I think this is the reason for the core struggles of Frisk-Kris - a lack of agency and of a sense of self. This is the core character conflict that is brought up again and again. They are not used to making any choices for themselves. They are just an extension of their other half.

They exude sense of just being a bystander in their own life, often not reacting to abuse at all or not taking action without direct prompting. Susie is the only one to point this out.

They seem to consider themselves as no better than a puppet, something that is just there for someone else to control, which gets shown through their panic attack after the Spamton NEO fight.They relate to Spamton’s desperate attempts at gaining back control over his fate and that scares them.

Spamton's dialogue above acknowledges that it is the soul who feels trapped. „A heart on a chain.“ The prophecy's wording implies that "the cage" and "the human soul" are two different entities, while the illustration shows the heart being trapped inbetween two hands. The cage is their body and Chara-Kris is the keeping them prisoner. They can take ownership over their actions away from them at any point. The identity of Kris hardly even belongs to Frisk-Kris.

I think it's implied that the red soul is the exact same one as in Undertale, since it retains abilities it gained there, like the yellow soul mode Alphys installs in the fight against Mettaton. You are able to use it against Spamton NEO (a fight which has many callbacks to the Mettaton fights) without any prior mention or explanation of the mechanic in Deltarune.

There also seems to be the implication that Frisk-Kris remembers events from Undertale, specifically from Frisk’s point of view. For example: the option to greet Sans as if you recognize him, the dialogue on the jukebox in Castle Town saying something along the lines of “Seems like you’ll never find a functioning one”, referencing Grillby’s broken jukebox in Snowdin. There are a lot of small moments like that, I also want to make a post about all the ones that I could find later!

Ralsei and Susie recognize the soul as Kris as early as Chapter 1. Ralsei also openly acknowledges both the soul's existence and he seems to know that the soul can leave Kris's body, since he is most often the one prompting Kris to think of Susie when she is somewhere else. In Chapter 1 Susie then registers the soul's suggestions outside of battle as Kris's "voice".

There is also dialogue by Susie at the beginning of the Gerson fight suggesting that she understands the soul jumping in to assist in battle as Kris helping her out.

I think when Ralsei describes the soul as “the culmination of your being” and it contains “your WILL” and “your COMPASSION”, it gives us an important hint into Kris’s character arc. Kris’s entire arc seems to be about them ACTing, slowly starting to struggle against their chains, being encouraged to act and (re)gain their agency through their interactions with Susie and Ralsei. The soul is representative of their will. With every action the soul takes, they are slowly creating their own agency. They are making their own choices, forging their own bonds. They are growing through these adventures. I feel like it’d be counterproductive for this development for the soul, the very thing that LETS them act, to be the representation of an outside force taking control over their life. If the soul was a foreign entity or a vessel for the player, it would be an obstacle for Kris instead. I think it’s the other way around: Narratively, it makes much more sense for the soul to be the catalyst for their development.

It’s literally the embodiment of Kris’s agency.

#be ready for theory deep dive

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