Il est interdit de faire smashy-smash.

Chapters 3 & 4 are fast approaching, the time we have before we’re faced with an influx of novel topics for speculation is running out, and I still have some leftover thoughts on the first two chapters that I'd like to get out there in writing before that happens. These thoughts primarily center around the metaphysics of Deltarune’s diegetic world, and various discursive methods that might be employed to help elucidate its nature.

This will be a loosely structured collection of thoughts that draw heavily from philosophy, literary theory and mythology, so if you don’t like pseudointellectual ramblings this is your warning to close the tab.

All of the points made here will be ancillary to the premises I argue for in my essay titled The Magic Circle. You should probably read it first!

Crossing the Fountain – art vs. byt

Much of my Magic Circle essay is concerned with the almost magical way in which one’s experience of reality is mentally transformed when under the spell of art or fiction. Indeed, this is the source of the essay’s title, and what I argue Darkness in Deltarune represents. I wanted to illustrate this idea a little more.

In the essay, I quoted J. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens – in that book he's talking about games and play specifically, but one of his most salient observations is that play is undergirded by an impulse to abstract from immediate reality that is shared between many branches of culture, including all aesthetic traditions. Huizinga is not the only theorist who noticed that art (which I define to include games and play) is experienced as a break from ‘immediate’ or quotidian experience. Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky posited that art was a transformation of everyday life into its own seperate realm. In his analysis, he put forth an oppositional model between art and what the Formalists called “byt” – an evocative term which could be translated as “life,” but also evokes the way in which life stabilizes into predictable molds.

Within the realm of byt, we experience events causally – and causality, as David Hume famously noted, is at bottom arbitrary. Art, on the other hand, is constructed towards certain ends – it is teleological. In art, essence precedes existence.

In byt, there's material – paper, canvas, film reel, computer code. In art, there are (artistic) devices – stanza, perspective, montage, mechanic.

Byt produces recurring patterns and routines that threaten to turn us into automatons. Art de-familiarizes, jolting us out of the narcotic patterns of everyday experience by presenting us with novelty to reflect on.

Now, you may or may not find this model for understanding art convincing or all-encompassing, but I think it provides a useful idea for understanding Deltarune's metatext.

When we interact with art or fiction, we voluntarily undergo certain illusions. When I read a story, I condition myself to think that I’m reading something that actually happened. When I watch theater, I condition myself to think that the actors are actual people, and the stage is a real environment. When I watch a film, I condition myself to think that the camera doesn’t exist; that it is a window into a different world which is also somehow not of that world. And when I play a (narrative) game, I condition myself to think that I am not interfacing with a program, but a world of its own. Of course, these self-imposed illusions are in no way totalizing. There is always a part of us that remains aware of the artifice. But our experience qua art operates under these illusions – we might say that there is always a part of us experiencing byt too, but this part is marginalized when we’re absorbed in an aesthetic experience.

Some readers might be scratching their heads at what any of this has to do with Deltarune, so I'll make the connection clear: Deltarune itself explicitly formulates Dark and Light – obvious analogues for fiction and reality (or art and byt) – as separate worlds, existing in a similar oppositional balance. Darkness transforms everyday objects – the raw material so to speak – into narrative devices, like characters and settings. In Deltarune there is a dual-reality to everything that comes into contact with Darkness (or the power of art). Might we climb one step up the hierarchy and try to use something akin to this oppositional model to explain the ways in which Deltarune refers to reality from within its fictional domain?

For example, there is the uneasy fact that we are an active force within the narrative, instead of just an invisible spectator. Sidestepping the question of whether the force we’re embodying in the game is supposed to literally be us, the player, at the very least the characters can only understand us in more conceptual terms, as some sort of in-universe deity or anomalous entity. So there’s us – the player – and there’s the Angel – our in-universe embodiment.

So what about the character who contacted us – what about Gaster? In The Magic Circle, I discussed how the information we have about Gaster leads us to think that he exists in some sort of transcendent state as a result of his experiments with Darkness. From that, I extrapolated that Darkness was the fundamental substance underlying Deltarune’s reality (which we can fit into another binary: there’s Darkness, the magical substance that makes up the reality of Deltarune’s world, and there’s what the concept clearly allegorizes: the creative or imaginative capacity of human beings – which is what gave rise to Deltarune, the video game). Gaster’s “transcendent” state trades heavily on video game creepypasta tropes; he’s like a ghost haunting the code of the game. And as it turns out, Deltarune has explicitly made the move to extend its diegesis to its code with the inclusion of a character who seems to be stuck there.

If the code is a part of the diegetic world, we can extrapolate another binary: there’s the code or internal workings of the program, and there’s “the Depths” – a higher (or deeper) metaphysical layer of Deltarune’s world that transcends time and space. Worded differently, the Depths are what we get when the 'eye of the narrative' turns its gaze towards the code of the program.

To close off this section, I want to mention that in Shklovsky’s theories about art and narrative, he makes heavy use of a machine metaphor; he wanted to focus on the ways in which art was a constructed object abiding by its own internal rules. The specific word the Formalists preferred is “device”. In fact, one of Shklovsky’s most well-known essays is titled “Art as Device”. Just something to think about for you Device Theory fans.

Water, Darkness and Chaos as Symbolic Motifs

Water is everywhere in Deltarune. The magical worlds we explore are given form by “fountains” and “geysers”. Onion-san talks of ominous songs under the sea. Ocean.ogg briefly plays after we fall into the supply closet Dark World. And the source image of IMAGE_DEPTH, the background of the GONERMAKER segment, is apparently of an ocean. What gives?

The basic gist is that water has an extremely long and prominent symbolic history in mythology, and figures especially prominently in ancient creation myths. One of the earliest creation myths we have, derived from Enūma Eliš, a Babylonian poem of the 2nd millenium BCE, describes a primordial state consisting of nothing but two deities – Abzu, god of the freshwater ocean, and Tiamat, god of the saltwater sea; from the “comingling of their waters”, all of creation emerges. This is consistent with what we know of ancient near-eastern cosmology in general; they viewed the world as essentially like an air bubble. In the beginning, there was water. Unordered, chaotic, formless. Then, something happens to produce the earth and firmament, both disc-shaped, which separate this cosmic ocean into heavenly waters above the earth (the source of all rain), and lower waters of the deep (the source of all rivers, springs, fountains and geysers).

This cosmological account survives into the Biblical narrative. From Genesis 1:6:

and God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”

The ancient near-eastern flood narrative, which likewise is preserved in the Bible as the story of Noah’s ark, is made less arbitrary with this in consideration; its basis is not merely that drowning in a storm is a scary concept (though it certainly is) – the real symbolic threat of the flood is of a return to pre-creation chaos. The gates of heaven opening and all of creation coming undone. From Genesis 7:11:

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.

(Sound familiar?)

The idea of water as underlying all reality cropped up not just in religion and mythology, but also philosophy. Thales of Miletus, credited since Aristotle as the world’s first philosopher, famously believed that all of reality was made up of water. Thales and his philosophical successors are sometimes called material monists for their belief that all of reality was composed of a single ultimate substance – the arche from which everything originates.

Thales’s idea was no doubt influenced by the cosmological picture painted by mythology. Though not identical to the near-eastern accounts, the world of ancient Greek mythology is preceded by a state of primordial Chaos – a vast chasm, abyss, or emptiness. Though we in the present day might be tempted to understand Chaos as something like space, ancient commentators such as Pherecydes of Syros interpreted it as water. It was the fluid, formless and undifferentiated nature of water that made it such an enticing candidate for the pre-creation substance.

Chaos was also associated with darkness. Unambiguously born from Chaos are Erebus and Nyx – deified personifications of Darkness and Night. And this is a point of similarity with the ancient near-eastern accounts. From Genesis 1:1-3:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

In short, the primordial state across world mythology tends to be that of an infinitely dark, chaotic ocean.

The parallels to Deltarune are obvious, and having tracked the symbolic history which the game is working with can, I think, lend us a better understanding of "Darkness" as it appears in the game. Needless to say, all of what I've discussed supports the thesis I laid out in The Magic Circle: that Darkness is the arche or prima materia of Deltarune, the underlying substance that its reality is made of. Likewise I think we can intuit what “the Depths” are – simply what in the Hebrew Bible is referred to as “the (great) deep”. A mass accretion of formless Darkness which sits below reality itself. Dark Fountains are formed when the fabric of reality is pierced, creating a gap from which Darkness bursts forth. And since Darkness is the “raw material of reality” so to speak, the Darkness forms a new reality within the old one. But too many holes in reality threaten to “burst the air bubble”, so to speak, and flood the world with Darkness.

I created the above diagram a while back, and used it in The Magic Circle - no doubt you'll notice the similarity between this and the earlier diagram of the Biblical cosmology. The funny thing is that this connection wasn't consciously intended at all; I was barely aware of what the Biblical cosmology was like when I made the first version of this image. That makes me feel like I'm on the right track.

I do want to make something clear; the world of Deltarune isn't necessarily a literal Biblical style air bubble, with a disc-earth and dome sky. The air bubble thing is just for the sake of visualization. I think the Depths are more like a different layer of reality, simultaneously "higher" and "deeper". It's not that there's literally a bunch of dark water under the ground; what Kris is really stabbing is, again, the fabric of "phenomenal" reality itself.

Another thing I want to note; these early mentions by Toby of concepts relating to twilight or the meeting of light and dark have long been a topic of discussion in the community. I want to formulate my understanding of what its significance is.

The first thing God does in the Biblical creation story is summon light. Light meeting the darkness is presented as a precondition to any further creation. Likewise, fiction (darkness) can not exist without an observer in reality (light). The meeting of light and dark is a fundamental condition of art; it can't exist without somone to "shed light on it".

It could also well be referring to the Roaring; when the distinctions between light and dark threaten to dissolve, that is when we must travel to the "edge of the shadow" (the outer boundaries of the dream, near where reality is), and "shatter the twilight reverie" (twilight: when only the sun's afterglow remains) (reverie: being lost in a dream).

On Darkner Knowledge

As established earlier, Darkners are teleological beings whose essence precedes their existence. That is to say, they’re created with an inherent purpose. This purpose is what Ralsei and Queen call “the will of the Fountain” – a guiding force determining the nature of the Dark World and its inhabitants, originating in the Fountain’s creator. In my Magic Circle essay, I used this fact to explain the behavior of Darkners, and why certain ones (like King and Queen) know things that they seemingly shouldn’t (like the fact that the Knight exists, and what their title is). On this latter part, however, I didn’t go into too much detail. Here, I want to elaborate on it a little by invoking an argument made by René Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy, known as “the trademark argument”.

(Don’t worry, I’m not actually going to get into the weeds of Descartes’ philosophy. It might be fun to talk about how Descartes’ idea of hierarchical degrees of reality, which consist of infinite substances, finite substances and modes, correspond to Deltarune’s Angel, Lightner, and Darkner hierarchy, but I don’t think it would unearth any particularly useful insights.)

The (very simplified) trademark argument goes something like this: God must exist, because I can conceive of God, his features (that he is an infinite and eternal substance), and the fact that he is altogether more real than I am despite me not possessing this degree of reality. The idea can’t have come from me, but it must have come from somewhere – consequently it must be that I have this idea innately as a sort of “trademark” of my creator.

Now, I very much doubt anyone who's reading this finds the above to be convincing evidence for God’s existence. Thankfully, we aren’t setting out to find out whether God exists or not. The God in this scenario – the Knight – is someone we know exists, and how the relevant knowledge is possessed really does require an explanation (unlike in Descartes' argument, where the notion that an explanation is needed for how we can conceive of the idea of God is dubious at best).

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that the trademark hypothesis is the only possible explanation you could offer. Obviously, you could posit that the Knight entered the Dark Worlds and imparted the knowledge personally. But to do this you’d have to deny the Kris Knight hypothesis, marginalize the religious subtext, assert that there’s no meaning to certain patterns between Chapter 2 and 3 (such as the main Darkner bosses being activated before the Fountain Creation), ignore the latent implications in Queen’s dialogue, among other things – and I’m not interested in doing all that. For the moment, the trademark hypothesis seems much safer, not least of all because it explains other mysterious details too.

Consider the fact that Darkners are aware of the battle system, and know how it works. Do we suppose that someone went around telling each and every Darkner the mechanics of the game? Or does it just make intuitive sense that Darkners would be created with certain ideas that are consistent with their purpose?

Granted, there is still some weirdness left over that we’d have to explain. For example, Darkners – most notably Ralsei but others as well – know about the player’s button configurations. We might be tempted to just chalk this up to the necessities of tutorializing, but the game calls attention to this by having Susie ask questions about it. The trademark hypothesis doesn’t explain why Darkners specifically would be stamped with this knowledge while the Lightners are left out.

The best explanation I can come up with is that since the Dark Worlds are created by Kris, and Kris almost certainly has forbidden meta knowledge imparted by Gaster, the Darkners likewise inherit that knowledge since Kris knows that the player will be controlling them when they go to seal the Fountains, and is aware that we will need some level of guidance.

Conclusion

(Art used in this banner created by Avielsusej on Twitter)

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. […] When the lights go out in the room in which Lumiere's invention is shown, there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture, 'A Street in Paris' — shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings and people in various poses, all frozen into immobility. […] It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows. Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eternal sleep, come to mind and you feel as though Merlin's vicious trick is being enacted before you. As though he had bewitched the entire street, he compressed its many-storied buildings from roof-tops to foundations to yard-like size. He dwarfed the people in corresponding proportion, robbing them of the power of speech and scraping together all the pigment of earth and sky into a monotonous grey colour. Under this guise he shoved his grotesque creation into a niche in the dark room of a restaurant. Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you—watch out ! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building. But this, too, is but a train of shadows. This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim… Maxim Gorky, review of the Lumiere programme at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair, transl. Leda Swan

In the opening sequence of Chapter 3, Ralsei finally takes a moment to give Susie – and the player – a broad metaphysical explanation for how the Dark Worlds operate. And as Gaster alluded to when he mentioned photon readings turning negative back in Undertale, Ralsei asserts that Dark Worlds form from the negation of the negation of light, allowing for sensation through the dark. “Another side” is reached through the filter of the mind navigating the indistinct darkness, with the imagined made manifest. And yet, the word Ralsei uses to describe this process is telling: it’s an illusion.

Disregarding some questions that Ralsei’s very individuated, phenomenological description poses (how do the spaces themselves transform if the worlds are illusory - and more importantly, how is the experience mostly stable and shared between those who enter a given Dark World?), it nonetheless adds new depths to this central metaphor of Light and Dark, a metaphor I already felt was layered and well considered.

To begin with, I want to articulate a reading of the Dark Worlds which had already been occupying some space in my brain but which this new explanation really solidified: the idea of Dark Worlds as allegorical for animated pictures.

WHY I OPENED THIS POST ON THAT GORKY QUOTATION

By animated pictures, to be clearer, I am referring primarily to what we might colloquially call cinema. At first this might seem like a strange suggestion – why would the video game Deltarune be allegorizing cinema, specifically? Well, for one, I don’t think this is really a direct allegory as much as a curious subtextual wrinkle. It’s not the sort of thing where you just substitute one concept for another to unlock the Correct Reading (‘it was always about cinema all along!’)  - no, rather, the connections between Dark Worlds and cinema are more on the grounds of their shared relationship to illusion and imagination, which is why I also want to make it clear that I’m viewing cinema here in a more general sense than the restrictive quotidian idea of “the movies”. Instead, I refer more broadly to that technology which, through the interplay of light and shadow, can conjure images beyond this world - a technology which is certainly relevant to the hybrid medium of video games.

The very first steps towards what would later be termed “cinema” were accompanied by a marriage of astonishment and fear. From a 1897 recounting of one female journalist’s childhood memories of magic lantern shows:

I am reminded suddenly of a long-forgotten childish terror of the Magic Lantern show. The drawing-room in darkness, the ghastly white plane stretching away into the unknown world of shadows. It was all very well to call it a linen sheet, to say it was stretched between innocent familiar folding doors, it nevertheless divided the known and safe from the mysterious beyond where awful shadows lived and moved with a fearful rapidity and made no sounds at all.

(Magic lantern shows, for those unaware, were a kind of proto-cinematic entertainment show which utilized essentially primitive slide projectors to display images of moving figures on a screen. Example here)

And the film medium as we know it today is no less wanting for popular associations with the concepts of darkness, illusion, fear and dream. I touched on these connections a little in the opening of a previous Deltarune essay of mine, titled the Magic Circle, but seriously, there is no end to the amount of writing on film I’ve read which my pattern-seeking brain has immediately tied back to Deltarune.

The cinematic experience is a recreation of this ancient practice of theatrical renewal and bonding in modern terms, except that the flames of the stone-age campfire have been replaced by the shifting images that are telling the story itself. Images that dance the same way every time the film is projected, but which kindle different dreams in the mind of each beholder. With a theatrical film, particularly one in which the audience is fully engaged, the screen is not a surface, it is a magic window, sort of a looking glass through which your whole body passes and becomes engaged in the action with the characters on screen. If you really like a film, you're not aware that you are sitting in the cinema watching a movie. The paradox of cinema is that it is most effective when it seems to fuse two contradictory elements - the general and the personal - into a kind of mass intimacy. Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

Okay, so what is my point here? Dark Worlds and Film do be kinda similar in some ways? Well, as I implied earlier, video games are a visual-temporal medium, innovations in part on the cinematic form itself which has integrated a further degree of immersion via interactivity. And though video games are not typically projected onto a big screen in a dark room the way movies are, I know that when I play Deltarune, the lights are off.

It goes back further than the magic lantern. In antiquity, cut-out figures were puppeteered behind a screen, their shadows creating the illusion of movement. For most of human history we’ve sought out ways to trick our sensory organs into experiencing that world beyond our everyday lives, into manifesting that which is bound to the cerebral through make-believe. And if there was anything I neglected to analyze when I described the Dark Worlds as analogous to the concept of the “magic circle” – impositions of the imagination on reality – it’s precisely this; the ways in which we convince ourselves, temporarily, that we really are in that fictive domain.

That’s the realization I had about the Dark Worlds. They function as a sort of rough allegory for the ways in which humanity has used technology to immerse themselves into other realities via illusion. But you’ve surely noticed a throughline; these illusions are not always just analogous to dreams, but to nightmares as well, and this power to make nightmares come real is what I want to primarily focus on in this essay.

MOVING POSTERS

In the Darker than Dark sequence that Chapter 3 opens with, Ralsei goes on at some length about how darkness is intertwined with fear. Given the relative absence of this theme of fear in the preceding two chapters, the fact that it occupies such a central role in this vitally important scene where we're finally given a formal explanation for what Dark Worlds are feels quite significant. Indeed, fear as a theme becomes much more prominent going forward, particularly in Chapter 4. This new preoccupation also recontextualizes some things that came before; the Sweepstakes blog post highlighting a young Noelle's "ICE-E sighting", wherein she supposedly catches the mascot winking at her, may previously have seemed like somewhat arbitrary bait for tinfoil theorizing, but can now be more properly understood as foreshadowing for the ideas being explored in the upcoming chapters.

Note how Noelle's description of ICE-E winking at her in the dark more or less directly prefigures Ralsei's explanation of how in the dark, "a chair can look like a monster... a poster can look like it's moving... your eyes can't see the truth anymore." Note also how both incidents illustrate this idea of the static image coming to life - the moving picture. Likewise, a chair changing shape is a de-familiarization of the inert and ordinary.

This specific incident with ICE-E may be even more relevant to the game's narrative than just simple groundwork for its themes; not only does ICE-E also make an ominous cameo appearance in Tenna's Doom Board...

... but the mascot is repeatedly referenced in Chapter 3's Mantle quest, specifically with the track BURNING EYES (in reference to Noelle's sighting), which is internally referred to as nightmare_boss (a connection to the infamous Undertale Fun Event).

(The level of psychosis this junior jumble can cause is certainly something to behold)

I've gone over in a separate post why I personally believe that FRIEND and the Mantle in Chapter 3 are the same character, but "nightmare_boss" is also a reference to the final boss of Link's Awakening, the inspiration having been made explicit even before the release of the chapters, with the Sweepstakes page "romb" which quotes the fight directly.

The Nightmares in Link's Awakening take on different forms throughout that battle, embodying the shadows of Link's psyche, the greatest threats he has faced with the player - including other bosses fought throughout the game and, memorably, Ganon, who never appears directly in Link's Awakening but which any player familiar with the Zelda series will have memorized the moveset of, as Link surely has through his multiple clashes with the demon king.

Previously, I've speculated that FRIEND may be a shapeshifter. If we assume that this core part of the Nightmares fight in Link's Awakening may be applicable to Deltarune, we find that perhaps the connections between the ICE-E sighting and FRIEND's introduction in Chapter 3 are more literal than one might initially image. An open question is why exactly FRIEND manifests in what seems to be Susie's room, from a chair, given that we've had little reason to suspect that Susie is acquainted in any way with this mysterious being, unlike Kris, Noelle and Dess. A possible explanation is that FRIEND can inhabit the forms of people's fears; if that's the case, ICE-E would certainly be a suitable vessel, given that the mascot is regarded as a kind of cryptid and internet urban legend known for its terrorizing effect on children.

THE FEAR-OF-DARK

If FRIEND can take on the form of individuals' specific fears, Titans are a sort of complimentary opposite force as embodiments of the abstract concept of fear itself. As Ralsei evocatively puts it: "It's the fear-of-dark. It's the bump-in-the-night. It's the shadow of the backside of your mind." Sounds very applicable to FRIEND as we see them appear during Ralsei's spiel in Chapter 3, but the Titans seem to be more general, more universal. They represent the feeling of fear itself common to all people. Where FRIEND is the perceived, Titans are the act of perception. This broad, universal tendency is illustrated in their single-mindedness: "They have no consciousness," Ralsei says, "they only exist to destroy." Blind destruction - an anxiety of the lowest common denominator.

A check description of Titan Spawn reveals that they are "shards of fear, found in places of deep dark", whereas checking a Titan reveals that it is "the fear of dark, which appears in many forms." Though this wording is a tad ambiguous, I choose to interpret it as meaning that Titans are just one form of this fear of dark; though it could be alluding to other types of Titans existing (and we do know from the Roaring exposition cutscene in Chapter 2 that that is the case), the word "titan" implies a very specific sort of being and we know that there are other creatures birthed by the deep dark that do not fit that bill; not only FRIEND, as previously discussed, but also other creatures we meet in the new chapters. In some of Chapter 4's many deep dark sections (where Titan Spawn and FRIEND also make appearances), stringy, serpentine creatures with only the internal title "Unknown" can be found.

A running theme of these types of beings is their black, monochrome palette, only distinguished from the foreground with white borders (and other times blending into pitch-black spaces, such as with Titan Spawn, Unknowns and FRIEND in Chapter 4, or the Mantle in Chapter 3).

But undoubtedly the narrative's main example of a deep dark being would be the game's primary antagonist, the Roaring Knight.

Not only is the visual design of the Knight in-line with other beings of the deep dark, but they literally look like a miniature version of one of the Titans from the Chapter 2 cutscene.

They also exhibit this glitchy, frequency-looking effect, shared by Titans and Titan Spawn.

Now, honestly, the soil might be a little too fertile for speculation about the "how" and "why" of this. You could come up with any number of explanations for how the Knight ties into being an embodiment of fear. Does Dess (who the Knight clearly is) represent a fear of Kris's; the spectre of a troubling, traumatic past coming back to haunt them? Does the Knight, as the game's villain and frankly a sort of self-conscious archetype of JRPG villainy, share the simple-minded malicious nature of the Titans? Maybe. But I want to restrain myself even more and just point out an intuitive, obvious, and well-supported connection: the fact that the Knight is the Roaring Knight. All else failing, the Knight has a clear and explicit connection to the Titans in the form of their role as the harbinger of (and perhaps the one destined to bring about) the Roaring, which will be actualized with the Titans' destruction.

THE ROARING NIGHT

Given the new information we received with these recent chapters, the Roaring is overdue for a reconsideration. A somewhat common interpretation from the first two Chapters of the game, and one that I held as well, posited that the Roaring was a sort of thematic endpoint of the idea of Dark-Worlds-as-escapism. If you're familiar with self-reflexive anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Paranoia Agent or Serial Experiments Lain, all of which touch on the topic of storytelling or constructed worlds, this will be a familiar motif - the increasing insularization of the stories' protagonists metaphorically and/or literally signals the threat of apocalypse as the line between fiction and reality, the personal and the universal, the self and the other, collapses. The metaphorical breakdown of social life is literalized as societal destruction. To put it in very simple terms: escapism brings about the apocalypse.

Now, over the course of the 1-2 era I became increasingly skeptical of the idea of Dark Worlds as pure escapist fantasies. While there is certainly something to the idea (and it's a very explicit part of the text in both Chapters 2 and 3), I became alienated with it when I started feeling more and more like it was an approach which encouraged a flattening, moralistic outlook on the story. Does Deltarune really just amount to a parable about how fiction is powerful, but you can't let it become too powerful? It felt platitudinous, especially if you're like me and have seen other works articulate this idea in what felt like a more considered, deeper way. This reading also felt like it was inspiring some especially facile takes on what the Dark Worlds are supposed to be. To this day, it feels like the consensus reading remains "Dark Worlds represent escapism via [X medium]", something which already struck me as both too shallow and too specific back before the new chapters came out, but which I now regard as essentially textually invalidated by Chapter 4. My feeling that there was something much richer going on is part of what inspired my first essay and now this one, where I've tried to articulate that the Dark Worlds are not, in fact, some easy concept-substitution allegory but a far more symbolically complex narrative device - that they were much less schematized than some people made them out to be and in themselves more akin to unstructured communal play.

So let's take another look at the Roaring, and let's pay attention to what we're told about it.

The sky will run black with terror And the land will crack with fear. Then, her heart pounding... The EARTH will draw her final breath.

It was easy to miss before, but you certainly can't ignore the focus placed on fear here. The earth is anthropomorphized almost as having a heart attack or something.

When the LIGHT is subsumed by SHADOW When the FOUNTAINS fill the sky All will fall into CHAOS. The TITANS will take form from the FOUNTAINS And envelop the land in devastation. The surviving Darkners, crushed by the darkness Will slowly, one by one, turn into statues... Leaving the Lightners to fend for themselves Lost eternally in an endless night... Is that your idea of paradise?

We now know that the Titans are specifically representative of fear - when the light is subsumed by shadow, the terror of the total, enveloping darkness is what brings about the world's devestation.

IF FOUNTAINS FREED, THE ROARING CRIES. AND TITANS SHAPE FROM DARKENED EYES. THE LIGHT AND DARK, BOTH BURNING DIRE. A COUNTDOWN TO THE EARTH'S EXPIRE.

The fountains are "freed" - and the titans shape from "darkened eyes" (once again alluding to Ralsei's perspectival explanation of Dark Worlds).

The Knight... The Roaring Knight... ... The one who's making the dark. The one who's trying to destroy the world... ... so that's our enemy.

I do feel that there is a sense in which the Roaring boils down to this basic fact: the Roaring is, simply put, an apocalypse scenario. It's Game Over. It's the player's failure state, the black screen which literally envelops the "world" of the game window in darkness. Like much in Deltarune, I feel like the trope is being self-consciously invoked and, at least partly, employed nakedly for the sake of storytelling value itself. Why is there an impending apocalypse in Deltarune? Because the story needs stakes, damn it. Don't forget - there is a diegetic storyteller in this world playing god with our characters.

But there's more to it than that, of course. The Roaring is, as the Chapter 4 track calls it, a Neverending Night.

Lost eternally in an endless night... ...If I could choose… I guess... I wouldn't have an ending! It's just better if stuff just... goes on forever, right? Gah ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! Well ain't that somethin'. At this late hour, with the bells ringing out their justice. You choose eternity. Can I tell you... a stupid dream I have? ... No matter what... I... want to keep being friends with you and Ralsei. When the sun comes up again... I want tomorrow to be the same as yesterday. And the next day... to be just the same as that. That in the end... we can always go back to the way things were.

There is merit to the perspective that characterizes the Roaring as escapist. In a way, it is just the logical outcome of the understanding of Dark Worlds as allegorically linked to the concepts of fiction and imagination - which they are. Dark Worlds empower narratives - personal and communal journeys, the playful animation of objects and ideas. If the Roaring is a night which never ends, the "story" goes on forever... Which, on some level, it has to, right? We're outside Deltarune's diegetic dimension of space-time and capable of resetting the story at our convenience. This fact was a core focus of Undertale's narrative, and I'd be very surprised if Deltarune neglected to comment on it at all. Ralsei says of the Roaring: "Is that your idea of paradise?", and Susie initially identifies with the Knight, regarding their actions as potentially positive; there is clear set up for the Roaring as temptation. Right now, it's hard to see why anyone sufficiently informed about what the Roaring entails would ever willingly choose to bring it about... nevertheless, there is a sense of thematic necessity demanding that exactly that will happen.

Let's not lose sight of the main focus of this essay, though - the Roaring is characterized by fear, by terror. There is a simple elegance to this fact which makes it pretty humorous that this subtextual aspect of Deltarune's Light/Dark distinction went unnoticed for so long - things, as it turns out, tend to be scary in the dark. Dreams happen during the night, but so do nightmares.

Fiction can serve as an escape, sure, but this dynamic cuts both ways. A coherent, meaningful experience of fiction as play and art relies on our tacit, unstated understanding that it's not actually real.

Emotional reactions may be strongly invoked but intellect and judgement are never completely submerged. The subconscious does not take complete charge of the film-dream as it does of the real one. Part of our mind remains unengaged in the fantasy. We know that the experience is unreal and in an important sense unimportant. We are freed from the responsibility of acting upon what we see and feel. Consequently, we can trace our reactions with a detachment which is unattainable in dreams and very difficult in any real situation of like intensity. We can analyse our dreams and our real experiences after the event. In the cinema we can observe our involvement while it is taking place. We enter the film situation but it remains separate from ourselves as our own dreams and experiences do not. V.F. Perkins, Film as Film

And when fiction gets overwhelming we retreat back to reality.

It is revealing that the words a parent uses to comfort a child frightened by a nightmare - "Don't worry, darling, it's only a dream" - are almost the same words used to comfort a child frightened by a film - "Don't worry, darling, it's only a movie." Frightening dreams and films have a similar power to overwhelm the defenses that are otherwise effective against equally frightening books, paintings, music. Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

"Reality" might be boring by itself, but it is safe, speaking relatively... - not so with the realm of the imagined, its wonders and terrors. Without the ability to assume a distance...

Oh sweet rotisserie Santa! The nightmare IS become real.

It is one of the elementary human fears: the loss of distinction between the real and the imagined, not being able to impose order on your surroundings, the desertion of one's rational faculty - the very essence of human existence in the estimation of many a philosopher.

ATHENA - You hesitate to see before your eyes someone in a raving fit? ODYSSEUS - Yes, I do — if he were sane I’d not avoid him or hesitate . . . ATHENA - But he won’t see you now, not even if you stand beside him. ODYSSEUS - How will that happen, if he still can see with his own eyes? ATHENA - His eyes see very well, but I will make them dark. Sophocles, Ajax

We require an operating dialectic between the real and the imagined to imbue either with any meaning. The shadows can't dance without a light shining on the object. And absent the ability to demarcate, to order, to distinguish, we lose ourselves in neverending chaos.

For whatever nightmares the cinema stoked, reality ultimately remained intact. The train speeds towards the screen-window and yet before the impact - even as the audience shields its eyes in terror - the vehicle dissolves at the window's borders, rendering the former danger an inert geometrical form. Just a train of shadows.

But what if?