#i just don't want to spend too much energy couching every single statement in rhetorics of probability and gentle suggestion

[deltaruminations]

undecided if i'll do a full writeup about this with Actual Evidence And Stuff eventually, but i feel pretty strongly that Kris is better understood as the Deltarune equivalent of the First Fallen Human (FFH)/Chara Undertale than as equivalent to Frisk or some combination of the two. partly because it just makes the most immediate sense (they're Asriel's adopted human sibling with emotional problems. come on) but also because like... if this is a universe where Asriel gets to be alive and experience growing up, isn't it only fair that the FFH/Chara gets that chance too?

like, DR is this alternate universe where we get to see every (well, sort of, more on that later) Major Character from Undertale in a new context. based on what we've seen, we know that they're all fundamentally based on the same "model" in Deltarune as they were in Undertale -- the context of their lives, and the options available to them, are just different here.¹

NarraChara Theory (NCT) aside,² the FFH was the one Major(!!!!) Character in Undertale who didn't really get a chance to tell their own story (or at least do so in an explicit way). players who don't finish No Mercy will never even "meet" them directly; to most players, Chara is little more than someone else's experiences and memories.

with that in mind, i feel like creating a very obviously Chara-shaped hole in the fabric of Deltarune's universe, one that correlates pretty closely to a life they didn't get to live in Undertale, and filling it with the "model" of Frisk instead just kind of... erases Chara, I guess? and having Kris be a combo of the two diminishes Chara & Frisk and undermines the whole deal of them being separate people.

not that it's unthinkable that this choice could have been made, but to me it doesn't really feel like a meaningful choice. i have a hard time imagining what that choice would be saying beyond something kind of vaguely cynical, and that doesn't really feel consistent for how these stories have been written thus far. Frisk already has their story in Undertale, we already love Frisk, and we already gave them the best outcome we could. it feels pointlessly cruel, to me, to force them into the role of this honestly pretty troubled teen, with a difficult healing journey ahead of them, when there's clearly another character in the repertoire who better matches this role and would benefit from this kind of journey more than anyone else.

anyway i don't necessarily think Deltarune/Toby is ever going to explicitly state Oh By The Way This Kid Is Actually Who Chara Undertale Would Be In This Context, and clearly Kris as a character and Deltarune more broadly are intended to explore a whole, whole lot more ideas than just Hows Stuff Relate To That Other Game. but I do think some of Toby's choices for Kris might be in conversation with his choices for the FFH in Undertale and how those choices impact how we end up feeling about them.

in Undertale, Chara has a voice, but depending on how you feel about NCT, that voice is either mostly limited to the darkest possible manifestation of their character, or it's so subtle that it's commonly overlooked or even disregarded except when they're at their worst. Kris's lack of an explicit "voice" (so far) and complicated relationship with player control begs us to read between the lines about who they are and how our influence affects them in a way that's much harder to ignore. after all, we have well-accepted precedent for understanding a "vessel" whose voice we can't hear.

i also think this is partly why Kris's name and sprite call to mind Frisk's.³ it's not to suggest that they are literally equivalents of one another; it's to get us in the mindset of treating them in the same way as we treat Frisk, to pay attention to the ways in which they do and don't exercise their agency and consider what it means about them.

if we can come to forgive or at least understand Flowey/God of Hyperdeath Asriel after learning who he was and how his situation shaped him, how would seeing Chara from a different angle affect how we think about them? would we reconsider how much our influence affects what we see of them?

i think this might be partly why Asriel isn't really present so far in Deltarune. IMO, having him be at college isn't just Toby Epic Trolling The Fans Because He's A Mercurial Trickster God. i think it's Toby saying, "hey, there was someone you didn't get a chance to make friends with before. maybe you should spend a little time with them instead." and that's a choice that does feel meaningful to me, you know?

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¹ freaking universe-hopping skelebros sort of aside, if we assume they're From Deltarune, but we could still argue that changing contexts will probably impact their personalities across DR & UT, just in a way that involves continuity of their same characters instead of separate instances I GUESS LOL???? also yeah, take any thoughts you may be having about about Doctor Mister Gaster "The Blaster" and set them somewhere that is not here for a little while because this post isn't about him OK!!!!!!

² I personally like to think NarraChara Real and may have been intended to stand in as their "voice," but even if it WAS intentional, the fact that Chara As Diegetic Narrator 1) has many skeptics (including me, originally) and can be (and often is) disputed with pretty reasonable arguments and also 2) isn't picked up on by most players in the first place (again, including me) means it's too subtle on its own to outweigh the popular fanon opinion that chara has always been an Evil Demon Murder Baby and not just like. a troubled but fundamentally well-meaning kid who just needed some direction after making the worst mistake of their entire life. and i have to imagine Toby would have thoughts he might like to explore about that also fwiw i don't actually think NarraChara has to be "real" for there to still be room for more nuanced/compassionate readings of Chara just based on the explicit info we have about them lol. and also, it's entirely possible that chara is meant to be viewed unsympathetically in UT, and DR is meant to play on that. I Don't Know OK!!!!!!

³ this is aside from the fact that I'm not convinced the No Mercy Chara sprite is really supposed to be taken as like, the literal canon representation of how they looked when alive, just like how "Chara" probably isn't meant to be understood as their literal true name in-universe (it's their True Name in a metanarrative sense -- like, if you know to input this name, then it's because you know enough about this game to know that the name you're putting in represents neither the body you control nor you, the player; as well as that "Chara" is the placeholder name this character would have had in development -- i.e., before any players had "called their name"). if i had to guess, i'd say Toby probably made No Mercy Chara look like that as a way to make it as clear as possible that the person talking to us isn't Frisk. (i wanna point out the unused Waterfall reflection sprite here -- this could be seen as an easter egg showing that Kris and Frisk were meant to be equivalent, yeah, but contextually I think it makes just as much (if not more) sense for it to just be seen as a scrapped indicator that chara was hitching a ride. in that case, this may have been the design we were originally meant to see at the end of No Mercy. what im trying to say here is toby is human and making choices based on what he thinks are the best options at the time and it's reasonable to think he might just change his mind about things like what an undead child looks like as the options change lol)