Murder and violence is a bad thing.

Perhaps you see where I am going, but I have yet more proof to display before I arrive at my conclusion. For you see, this is not the initial moment of the red dot’s debut: the dot could be seen prior to the new chapter drop within the updated spamton sweepstakes. The page deltarune.com/chapter4/message/ is seemingly blank, but drag select across the screen and you will reveal several small clickable objects. These objects are displayed in the shape of a keyboard and correspond to letter keys. Clicking on these keys will play one of two sound cues, indicating either a correct or incorrect letter. Combining the correct letters will lead players to the page deltarune.com/chapter4/thankyou, a title which has connections to a chapter 4 weird route scene which contains the red dot. And furthermore, within the Message page, as more sounds are listened to, the red dot will start to appear central to the keyboard, growing more and more vibrant.

Let us return to our suspect, Nubert. Perhaps you have wondered to yourself before: “what in the everliving hell is he?” In a computer themed dark world, an organic red blob sticks out (rather literally, from the ground,) like a sore thumb. However, it is commonly believed that, due to his shape, size, color, and initial orientation next to a keyboard themed puzzle that Nubert is a dark world manifestation of a pointing stick. You may recognize these as a strange, outdated piece of laptop hardware: a small red dot in the center of the keyboard.

I do not deceive you, dearest reader. Nubert and the Evil Red Dot from the weird route are one and the same.

“No!” You clutch your pearls! You stagger back! You hurl obscenities at me! You cannot stand to believe that Nubert, YOUR man, could ever stand for such a thing. But trust that you have my empathy: I once felt the same way.

The first counterpoint one might wearily rise to wield against me is that Nubert strongly advocates for pacifism, and will leave your castle town if you harm any opponents. But doesn’t it all seem too good to be true? I argue that this front-facing facade is a farce. No, this jelly bean is not what he seems. In advocating for peace, Nubert serves to maintain his outward appearance in order to greater deceive others. We see glimpses of this true side in Nubert’s thirst for conquest in his ravenous desire to “move up in the world,” scaling the capitalistic system so that he may be considered better than all else. And yet still in his philanthropic guise does he slip, willing to donate to others only while maintaining that he is richer, greater, STRONGER than them.

And perhaps Nubert’s absence during the weird route speaks greater volumes to his evil. When he sees the player following that twisted path, he knows there is no need to maintain his facade anymore, and that he may act as his true self, manifesting as an ominous red pixel, working in tandem with the player to make Noelle stronger. His apparent disappearance is but a cover for the new role that he plays behind the scenes. Not to mention that Nubert has extra dialogue if you backtrack to the trash heap, dialogue in which he expresses an interest towards “Nuelle,” twisting her name in his image, in mirror of what the player does during the weird route. This is a clever trick to plant a subtle seedling that you will need to backtrack and bring Noelle to this very place during said route and exposes Nubert’s dark and evil side. And after all, it cannot be understated the only two chapters that Nubert can appear in are ones in which the weird route is playable…

Nextly one might say that it would be underwhelming and tonally jarring to attribute this ominous symbol of the weird route to a comic relief character. But they should consider that such a development would actually be genius on Toby Fox’s part. Nobody (except for me of course) would see it coming. Imagine the shock! By now we should have learned not to expect Deltarune to fall anywhere near our expectations (and I mean not even remotely near in the slightest.) After all, it is well known among scholastics such as myself that the greatest mark of timeless writing is how far towards the left field you can twist the plot. In fact, it is such the correct choice that I would lobby to say that Toby Fox would be a bad writer for coming to any other conclusion!

Yes it seems that Nubert, despite his outward displays, has dark intentions for Noelle. It is seemingly under his influence, in his strange new form as the red dot, that Noelle is in this strange trance-like state she is in chapter 4. Yes… truly… it is his fault that this is happening. Not mine… and somehow not even Kris’s. And here, from our vantage point at this conclusion, it seems all too obvious. His dark, soulless eyes have betrayed the truth from the start. His rosy red cheeks, burning bright with inner blood that is only perhaps his…

his face, its self-satisfied expression, it taunts me!