I may write more on this in the future. Some other people have also figured it out too, and have gone way more in depth than I will. Because really, Toby's done an INSANE amount of foreshadowing here with the details and I'm kind of kicking myself for not noticing it earlier.
But lets talk about the Roaring Knight.
If you're thinking about the Roaring Knight and their identity, then there's a few things that you should really ask:
What is the Roaring Knight's motive?
Why did they start creating fountains when they did?
Is their will explicitly represented in each of the Dark Worlds that the Roaring Knight has created?
The four members of the Holiday family are the most clear cut candidates for the Roaring Knight: Carol, Rudy, Noelle, and Dess. And you can ask these questions of each of them to figure out.
I think you'll find very quickly that Dess is ruled out on these three points, and that DessKnight as a concept doesn't make sense. There's no motive, you can't figure out why she started creating fountains at the plot's outcome, and because we've barely learned anything about Dess after five chapters, you can't clearly say her will is represented in ANY of the four Dark Worlds that the Roaring Knight has made.
Recall that the Roaring Knight has made four confirmed Dark Worlds so far: Card Kingdom, Cyber World, Dark Sanctuary, and 3rd Sanctuary. Susie suspects they were behind the original Dark World, but Ralsei immediately points out it doesn't make sense.
I saw someone recently describe Dess as the Roaring Knight an interesting way. Paraphrased, she's "a mystery antagonist without a motive, and that's like a tree without wood." Or another way to put it, when you have a bat, everything looks like a ball.
You can really stretch Dess to try and fit anything. But the game itself doesn't support her in there.
Carol and Rudy, on the other hand, have an immediate implied motive: Dess. It's implied, because they don't express it outright in game anywhere. Carol implies it with the nature of Dess's guitar and her room in Chapter 4, and how she doesn't want Susie to touch it or how people aren't suppose to go in there.
Rudy has a second implied motive for being the Knight, and also for why he might have started now. His failing health. His health is mentioned in game too as a reason he needs to get better.
Rudy has the same problem as Carol, however. He doesn't explicitly mention Dess as a motive. In fact, his only mention of Dess is if you examine the angel doll in Chapter 1. Outside of the photos from previous festivals showing that him and Dess were on good terms, there isn't much in the game really connecting Rudy acting as the Roaring Knight to Dess.
Rudy and Carol also have another really glaring issue - you can't explicitly show that their will is represented in the four Dark Worlds that we know the Roaring Knight made. This is almost always involving Chapter 1 most noticeably. It is very difficult to find Rudy or Carol's will represented in Card Kingdom:
They're not reflected in King. King goes on a rant about purpose, and we haven't seen that from them.
They're not reflected in Lancer, despite Lancer making a bunch of Christmas puns. Lancer is someone trying to be a scary villain, and not being very effective at it until Susie comes along.
They're not reflected in Jevil, who feels he's the only one free and everyone is trapped. You don't see Carol or Rudy express this sentiment.
And they're not reflected in the Darkners you encounter or aspects of the world.
A similar issue occurs with Cyber World and the two Sanctuary Dark Worlds as well.
But there is one character who accurately reflects the world of all four Dark Worlds that are created by the Roaring Knight.
In Card Kingdom, we see Lancer reflecting all the things she finds scary, but aren't actually scary. We see King reflecting her desire for purpose and to break free. In Jevil, we see someone who is trapped, watching themselves through glass.
In Cyber World, we see a reflection of what she feels in regards to the mother features in her life in Queen. We see the spam emails she discarded in the trash in Spamton, which she responded to. We see the destroyed highway at the start, before Queen appears and captures Noelle, showing devastation the likes we don't see again in Chapter 2. And we see romantic elements all across the city, in the Ferris Wheel, in the boat rides, and in the tea cups. As if someone was waiting for Susie to arrive.
And in the Dark Sanctuaries, we see someone who is very familiar with the religion of Hometown. We see someone who knows the book of hymns well enough to read it, and for it to become an enemy Darkner.
She has multiple motives to be the Dark Knight, both in the form of Dess and in the form of her sick father.
She has a reason to start making Dark Fountains when the game starts, as Rudy is shown to be sick and he even notes they found something if you talk to him in Chapter 1.
And she expresses why she wants healing magic - to heal her sick father.
And her and Kris suddenly have a reason to start being in a rush from Chapter 5 onward.
Noelle is the Roaring Knight.
Not Dess, a character we barely know anything about, and who more haunts the narrative much like Chara did in Undertale.
Not Carol or Rudy, whose wills are not reflected in the Dark Worlds we've seen so far. And whose on screen motives have not been explicitly shown in a way that we, the player, can figure it out.
And definitely not something like Kriselle, which would require knowledge of Undertale to even begin to come to the conclusion of.
The whole Kriselle Knight theory is basically what happens when someone catches onto the soft confirmation, but doesn't draw the most immediate obvious conclusion from it. Yes, Deltarune's Knight was hiding in plain sight the whole time, and the creator gets major kudos for picking up on a lot of foreshadowing Toby put in the game. But no, it's probably not going to require knowledge of things that have never been presented in Deltarune as of Chapter 5 to solve. Toby doesn't work that way typically, and it would be very odd for him to start now.
The girl who has been there since Chapter 1. Who had a unique portrait from Chapter 1. Who was foreshadowed as important in Chapter 1. Who's family has been there indirectly in some way (via Rudy and mentions of Dess) since Chapter 1.
The girl who has been right behind Susie and Ralsei in terms of how important they are to overall plot of Deltarune.
The game has been telling you this for awhile now, and Chapter 5's Weird Route was the soft confirmation. And this is why the Weird Route is Side B - it's the second half of the cassette tape. The other side of the floppy disk.
I'm certain in Chapter 6 we're going to find out why she's the Roaring Knight, and get a lot of the game's biggest mysteries answered. But I think if you're on another Knight theory train, you might want to very carefully think over the three questions above and ask yourself "Does this person really fit?"
Oh, and if you haven't figured out who was responding to us in the Thank You Survey ARG, I'll just say this. Toby did not break character at the spelling mistakes, or at the person who submitted an email.
titsay
vaporwave
snowghoul
blakekathryn
