#Deltarune thoughts

[carcan64]

You know, I haven't seen anyone point out that a lot of the characters in Deltarune chapters 1 & 2 that are talked about but not seen are siblings of other characters that appear. Dess, Noelle's older sister, is missing, Asriel, Kris' (albeit adopted) older brother, is away at college and definitely won't be seen until chapter 6 at the earliest, and Papyrus, Sans' (presumably younger) brother, is "busy", according to the steam description. Could this be a coincidence, or is something going on?

[silverstormsxx]

just a little observation

so y'all know how at the end of the sans fight in undertale he kinda scoots off screen so we don't actually see him turn to dust?

well I was thinking about that and it reminded me of something.

at the end of the berdly fight in snowgrave, noelle basically does the same thing sans does. she leaves even though we're still technically in a battle.

one interesting thing about noelle is that reality just sorta.. malfunctions around her. she has a history with breaking video games and finding glitches.. not to mention that the snowgrave route is literally an example of this.

you're not supposed to be able to kill enemies. but noelle is able to. she can break the rules of the game. the snowgrave route is quite literally called "the weird route". you are straying from a set path, and noelle is the key.

and whaddya know? a huge part of the sans fight is him abusing game mechanics against you. aka.. breaking the rules of the game.

I do not know what any of this means. thank you for coming to my Tedtalk.

[orion-ringz]

While Im on the fence about knight Papyrus being canon, the idea fascinates me.

Taking the one character in Undertale who believes that everyone can be good if they just try. Who is the only monster in the game that you can’t die to, and turning him into the villain is such a fun concept.

Not to mention Papyrus is the only main Undertale character whose name hasn’t even been brought up. Seems like a really, really interesting choice, if you ask me.

Plus in Undertale, it’s highly speculated in his fight that he doesn’t go all out with the human. So imagining a Papyrus who doesn’t pull his punches, who gives it his all to try and stop you, is absolutely terrifying.

Also, it’s said that Sans and Pap moved to town recently, so they could have moved around the same time the portals started opening.

It also doesn’t seem like Undertale characters are exempt from having important roles, as it seems like Toriel is going to play a bigger role in chapter 3.

(I don’t want to make any concrete assumptions about who the knight is, I mean we haven’t even had a canon appearance from them. But, honestly, if Papyrus does end up being the knight, I wouldn’t be surprised.)

[unlimitedhearts]

Im having a Deltarune thought.

Sans is not Deltarune Sans. He is Undertale Sans. We know this from context clues in his dialogue and the fact that his convenience store is fucking Grillby's from Undertale.

This leads me to believe that Deltarune - despite being a separate story and not a continuation of Undertale - is connected to that world by way of at least a few of its characters.

So my thought is this:

Ralsei is Asriel, but not Deltarune Asriel. He's Undertale Asriel.

Supporting evidence includes this lint I found in my pocket, meaning I have none. Its just vibes.

Like how the town in the Dark World is named after whatever name you picked in the Goner Maker when starting a new game.

Like how he's immediately attached to you, the player, and to Kris before even really getting to know either, as if he's been friends with one or both a long time. As if he knows you already.

Like how Ralsei is acutely aware of you the player being separate from Kris and how he has at present talked the soul into leaving him alone with Kris. When we come back to the pair, Ralsei is finishing a sentence always.

"So that's why, okay Kris?"

Like how he's aware of Kris' super special RPG abilities. (Which makes me think he's aware of saving and reloading, but I have less than the lint in my pocket for that one).

Like how Ralsei is shown to have a distinct like of Kris only while the player is around, but we see nothing of how he feels about Kris without the player. In the acid tunnel of love sequence, he says very specifically, "I like that you're you." This is done in front of the player. Implying he's not talking to Kris. He's talking to the player or maybe the soul that the player is piloting. This is moments before you can take a picture with him at the end of the ride where you can recreate the iconic hug between Frisk and Asriel (undertale version). Ralsei is both embarrassed and flabbergasted that Kris would even think to do that.

But it's not Kris doing it. It's the player. And he knows this. He's surprised the player would want to recreate that scene and be shy and embarrassed about being put in that position before ultimately going along with it.

Ralsei has all this information about Kris and the player. He's shown repeatedly to utilise this information, but we never see where he got the info from. He already had it. The second you entered the dark world, he had all that information and more. He had to have learned it from somewhere.

About you the player. About the souls mechanics. About your piloting of Kris. He's came preloaded with knowledge. Where would he have gotten it?

From Gaster? Maybe. But my explanation is simply that he got it by living it.

Ralsei is Asriel at the end of Undertale, having been put into the world of Deltarune. Just like Sans is implied to have been. Having lived his life as Azzy, then Flowey, then the God of Hyperdeath, then Azzy again. He's intimately familiar with the soul and its mechanics because of his life experiences.

Whatever his major plans and motivations are, I do not know. What he's talking to Kris about when the player/soul are not there, I don't know (though if i could have a less than evidence based guess it would be why Kris has to stumble around with the soul a little longer). Good, evil, neutral, I TRULY do not know, and I make no attempt to know. But I get major vibes that we have met him before. We have maybe fought him before. And he's using what he's learned for.

Something.

[inkblotsonmyhands]

okay im having some thoughts about the bosses/secret bosses of deltarune.

it's generally accepted that the boss and secret boss of a chapter mirror themes—re: the king has power over his subjects, despises the lightners for the control they have over him, thereby keeping him trapped, and eventually ends up imprisoned in a cage by a team consisting of 2/3 lighters, meanwhile jevil starts off trapped by the king himself in a cage, has no power whatsoever over anyone, yet wholeheartedly believes that he is free and the rest of the world is trapped, and seems to achieve a greater personal satisfaction than the king ever does through that belief. the king and jevil also display dynamics characteristic of their inspirations; the king is amongst the most powerful of playing cards, superior to almost all others except the joker, which operates outside the rules, likewise, a king reigns supreme in court, but the court jester has freedom to do whatever they please and is bound by no law.

the queen and spamton display similar parallels. queen believes she knows best, she craves control and takes it by force in a misguided attempt at actually satisfying her subjects; spamton is a salesman who hopes to sell things to others to satisfy them, through which he hopes to satisfy himself. spamton is obsessed with personal freedom; queen limits others' freedom. while this is a massive simplification of spamton's larger, deeply compelling narrative, im keeping myself from rambling about spamton and the concept of choice to try to stick to the original purpose of this post. these two characters' ends are also reflections of each other: queen ends up happy, but in a sense trapped and powerless—she becomes a resident of Castle Town. spamton gains the freedom he craves and ceases to exist. a motherboard thrives under proper maintenance and control; a spam email has no identity outside the force that propagates it.

having established all that, i want to talk about the narrative roles these bosses/secret bosses play.

jevil is a truly hidden character. you have to investigate the map thoroughly to find him; if you don't, you may not even know he exists unless you're particularly observant. you certainly won't know what he looks like, his musical themes, his attacks, his interaction with other characters, or any part at all of his story. regardless of whether or not you unlock jevil's fight, the main boss of chapter one is still the king.

spamton is different. spamton appears prominently in any playthrough of the game—you do not have to go looking for him. multiple characters talk about spamton before you see him, and once you meet him, he further elaborates on his interaction with them. spamton's main musical motifs are all heard in the main game. you battle spamton in all runs of the game, albeit lesser and more powerful versions—regardless, even a normal playthrough familiarizes you with spamton's attacks. spamton is a character in the game with as much presence as any other without any need for you to go out of your way to find him—he arguably has a larger presence than any other miniboss, because spamton's scenes and fights are striking, memorable, and dramatic right from the first, "normal" time you encounter him. he's called a secret boss because to unlock his boss fight, you have to either perform a long, long series of steps which spamton himself guides you through, or you have to manipulate the main character's childhood friend into performing some truly chilling (hah) actions which dramatically alter the course of the game. if you do this, you do not fight queen, the real boss of chapter two, at all, and instead fight spamton, the secret boss, in her position.

spamton is not a secret boss in the same capacity as jevil. jevil's existence and boss fight are both a secret, while spamton himself is not inherently a secret at all—only his boss-ness (boss-ship? boss-hood? boss-form?) is. this development between chapters one and two, between jevil and spamton, makes me wonder how bosses and secret bosses will develop in upcoming chapters.

ive started thinking about how the differences, similarities, parallels, and overlaps between the boss and secret boss could be explored in further chapters. right now spamton becomes the main boss of chapter two after making some disturbing choices—but they're still your choices, you're still the one who made them, you were too curious for your own good. what if bosses overlapped and interchanged based on softer, less damning choices? what if the choices were just as damning as they were in chapter two, but you were desensitised to their gravity? what if the game itself directs you to make these damned choices, to the extent that you never even realize that you're making them, and the "secret" boss starts rising up as an increasingly prominent antagonist, until they fully replace the normal boss?

two further elaborations:

(one) toby fox has set up the boss and the secret boss's character inspirations in a very precise thematic manner, especially the primary bosses. the main boss of a chapter based on playing cards is the king of the set; the main boss of a chapter based on a computer lab is the motherboard. the secret bosses are a little less obvious in their inspiration, but a thread i see between them is that they're based off something almost irrelevant, forgettable, yet also overwhelmingly in your face. the joker and a spam email. my purpose in pointing this out is to clarify that im not suggesting that this theming will change in future chapters; i expect a main, overt boss and a secret, covert one to be present. what im suggesting change in is how you encounter them, to what degree, and as a result of what action. the two secret bosses so far explore ideas of freedom, control, choice, and perception. i think there is great potential to explore these and further ideas through playing with the way one encounters these characters in addition to their personal character traits. after all, encountering any character at all is a result of control and choice, which are results of freedom, and perception guides the choices, the very feeling of control, and the opinion one makes of the character. perhaps these secret bosses will cease to be perceived as antagonists at all—or maybe they'll start to come off more antagonistic, in contrast to how the secret bosses so far have been characters it's almost too easy to sympathize with.

(two) the average deltarune player has already played and been deeply immersed in undertale. undertale teaches you many things, but i want to highlight two here: it teaches you to be kind, and it teaches you that a kind heart is only an entertained one. the first of these informs a lot of players' instincts in deltarune—we tend to choose the "nice" options and go for the "morally right" thing. as we have been taught, when one does that, they meet the real boss as the final antagonist, who they know is definitely a bad guy, cause they, the player, have been nothing but good. i think that deltarune wants to teach us something about morality even further than the point undertale made with its no mercy run, where we were shown how one loses their pretence of kindness to a burning urge to be entertained. i think a very interesting way to do that would be through un-teaching us the nice!nice!nice! instinct that undertale hammered in, potentially teaching a completely different, possibly chaotic instinct in its place, then manipulating the game and its bosses based on those choices we start making instinctively. a key aspect of a toby fox game is the fact that any choice, regardless of how or why you made it, is finally your own, and i fully want to be punched in the face with that fact once again through deltarune, which i think it could achieve by subverting our understanding of a "normal" play of the game. i fear i am rambling too much for my point to be clear, so to illustrate with an example, what i mean is this: we accept that the normal chapter two occurs by playing the game the normal, obvious way, while the weird route occurs by playing it the intentionally absurd way—but what if those lines between normal and absurd started blurring? what if you started feeling unsure of which was the "correct" way to move forward in the chapter? what if you started having to take morally ambiguous decisions to achieve the "normal" ending of a chapter, which conditions you to start making morally ambiguous decisions in general, until chapter six rolls around and the fandom talks about the normal route and the weird route, but somehow, the weird route is the one where everything is fine and all four friends who fall asleep in a librarby wake up?

i have never typed the word boss this many times in my life. good night, humans and monsters.

cross posted on reddit.

[yourlocaltiredartist]

alright more deltarune posting! this time the theory is “susie was raised in a human town/city”. this is gonna be a longgg post. let’s look at the evidence (and my own overanalysis lmao):

1: she’s weirdly insecure abt her tail. when noelle points it out, she immediately gets defensive and claims she doesn’t have one, and then admits, “i… just don’t like people knowing about. it.” she then says she doesn’t have one two more times, once when with the rest of the group, and again when they’ve convinced noelle it was all a dream. this is odd because for monsters, tails are as normal as arms or legs - every other monster in alphys’ class has one. but it’s also a very non-human feature, one that human kids would probably pick on. additionally, unlike her teeth or claws, it’s something she can’t use to act scary and play up her role as a scary monster, so that combined with it being very non-human might make her see it as making her appear vulnerable, which we know she hates.

2. she uses human phrases. she says some things referencing monster biology, like “crush you into dust” (iirc?), but at one point says “everybody bleeds, right?” we know monsters don’t bleed bc of aforementioned phrases referencing dust, and the kid in the apartment who says “does it hurt to be made of blood?” so it’s likely she instead picked this up from humans.

3. in chapter 1, she has the mindset that she is inherently bad and can never be good, so she leans into her role as The Bad Guy and rejects being a hero. we know the other students don’t help this, one example being how monster kid describes all her actions as malicious in their handball anecdote despite them just seeming more awkward than anything. but susie is like, pretty deep in this mindset - it’s clearly been going on longer than hometown. if she was in a human environment, she wouldn’t just be the weird kid, she’d be the scary kid, the, well, monster, especially considering she seems to be a type of dinosaur or dragon and has a lot of more monstrous traits, like her teeth - which, coincidentally, are what she uses to make herself seem like a scary monster.

4: it would be a perfect parallel to kris, a human who grew up in an all-monster town and grew to wish they were a monster and develop complex feelings about their own humanity.

5: speaking of kris, it would explain why she hated them specifically. she may not be the nicest to the other students, but we know from the_n3w3st_g1rl_g1rl that she specifically hated kris and relentlessly bullied them. it could have just been because of their mother, but this seems unlikely - kris can’t be the only kid in class with good parents. the only thing that really separates them from everyone else, at least to an outsider, is them being the weird creepy kid and them being human, specifically a human raised by monsters in an all monster town where almost everyone is fairly nice to them. you can see why that might bother susie.

anyways that’s all for now! might have missed something but i’ll just edit or reblog if i need to add anything later

[kooki914]

Haii Kooki!! First, i want to say that I love your theories, fanfic and yt videos!!

I came to ask what do you think about the possibility of Ralsei being a titan, if you think it's possible in any way?

Thank you if you see this!! Have a good day/night ✨💕

Hi, thank you for the compliments, and I hope you have a great day, too!

The idea that Ralsei could be a titan (the big one with horns specifically) was actually something my friend Shadowhaxor (@downlowbroyouknow) proposed on a server we're both in, and it kind of stuck with me since. I'm not sure if I fully buy into it yet (as there's no evidence for OR against it so there's no real arguing on the topic) but the symbology surrounding that idea just feels so specific to me that I think it might be intentional.

"The evil within" and "I choose to help when I was made to destroy" could be REALLY interesting roads to take Ralsei's character, and "your actions DO have consequences" being revealed through Ralsei turning into a titan himself would be a hell of a gut-punch and a really effective way to subvert the "your choices don't matter" beginning statement of the game. PLUS with Ralsei's inconsistent design choices there's really no telling if the resemblance to the largest titan is far fetched and impossible, or uncanny and undeniable - it can really swing both ways depending on which of Ralsei's sprites you're looking at, and I think that adds to the overall vibe of this "theory" as it adds potential layers to Ralsei's existence and identity that we wouldn't have otherwise.

He's both mysterious and malleable, he's well-meaning but not incapable of causing harm, and he was made for the prophecy but that doesn't mean he can't embody its ugliest side as well.

(I think there's also something between "The Legend" and "The Dark Truth" that feels like we're missing a piece between them, almost a missing link between the two songs that tells us the full story when we put them all together, but I'm not musically literate enough to expand on that idea.)

Again, as things stand right now I don't think this is 100% canon (no evidence = no concrete conclusion), but there's a lot of imagery and symbolism here that makes me feel like its justified to speculate about, especially knowing how neatly it could fit into Deltarune's overall narrative.

[thisisdefinetlyaname]

If Rouxls Kaard were a Cyber world darkner he would be the terms of service

Terms of service agreements are a lot like the rules card in the way that they both try to explain something to the reader but are almost never read

Also ToS agreements are mildly annoying just like him <3

Instead of the weird accent all his text uses the weirdest letter replacements to the point it’s nearly incomprehensible to the average viewer

He saw all the user’s having cool looking names and wanted to be cool too

His name is spelt (T£r^^$ []f $€r\/!e) as an example

If you struggle with reading distorted text you are in for a hell of a ride

Also he randomly gets in your way and forces you to solve a puzzle (just like a captcha or those “I am not a robot” buttons right before agreeing to a ToS)

[amayadrawz]

What if I said Kris (and humans in UT/DR in general) don’t have red eyes normally but only when they don’t have a soul and that this is what I think Kris’ normal eyes look like (dark brown in their light world version). What then

[loonyrhombus]

chat fr did i miss the uh,,, theorizers talking about this? i’m replaying undertale and man! i feel like an IDIOT if i missed someone saying something about this when talking about Deltarune the game LOL

[skelesharky]

i want Gaster to canonically kind of suck. good intentions. but he goes about it in all the wrong ways, or ways that end up hurting someone else. the way he talks about our creation at the vessel segment makes me think he's genuinely not some mustache-twirling villain. he wants to make things right, despite the likely unforeseen consequences of his actions. creating a whole other world inside this one, where it's inhabitants are heavily reliant on those they see as higher beings and have little autonomy. breaking the minds of at least 7 of those beings that would end up becoming secret bosses. potentially having a part in taking a child's autonomy away, for the sake of saving the world. even possibly leaving a different child, in the image of his boss' kid from another world; who seems to hardly value himself or have much of an identity beyond just being a "guide" for the heroes he's so eager to please when we first meet him. he's striving to fix the future of the fucked up little reality he made, but ends up harming those inside anyways, regardless of if he means to, and i kind of hope it's a recurring theme.

[ultimateempath]

If I may, I have a little theory about how our decisions in Deltarune are going to effect things in the future. So Toby stated that there will only be one ending, and if he's to be believed then our choices really wouldn't matter much in the end.

...except there's one thing we seem to be forgetting: the entirety of Deltarune is an experiment being conducted by an unknown entity, theorized to be Gaster due to the various connections to him that ya'll already know about.

So my theory is that while the ending of our adventure won't change (if Toby is telling the truth), our actions in-game will instead change the results of this experiment and thus also change whatever dialogue we'll likely get from Gaster afterwards. We still don't know what exactly he's trying to get out of this though, so there's no telling what he'll actually react to.

Either way, I wholeheartedly believe we'll hear from him again at the end of the experiment...and he'll have much to say regarding our chosen actions.

[silverstormsxx]

if you were an utdr character and had a boss fight, what do you think your attack patterns would look like? any unique mechanics?

i feel like my attack patterns would take heavy inspirations off fairy tales (they have been a big part of my life since i was a kid and got me into writing and reading.) maybe like... apples for snow white, glass slippers for cinderella, roses for beauty and the beast?

maybe my unique mechanic would be that if you get hit by the roses or apples, you get poisoned? like sans' karma but much less damaging and more slow?

[idiocytheater]

I have so many theories about deltarune with no one to listen about asriel and noelle and rouxls and ralsei

[dipperisms]

im excited but also kind of scared of the new dr chapters soon. ive been so obsessed with this game for years and letting it ruminate in my brain like a turkey in the microwave and all of it is getting recontexualized THIS YEAR? well alright.

[ace-of-digiorno]

Okay I'm just putting this out there so that I can say i called it if it's true - I had an idea that elnino and lanina were in a purely performative relationship (mainly just as a cool idea at first). But after the 'lets give this card to someone else to show them how much we love each other' and this awkward not even flirting (one of them has a moon for a head, so it's not outlandish to say it's directed at them) - idk it's adding up.

(Although why would they not know each other's names and rely on tags... Its not really all too supported, really)