> Vriska: Proceed To Computer.

A continuation of this post

I was asked by someone to elucidate my take on the Weird Route, through the lens of the soul being part of Kris. A lot of people find it difficult to believe that any of this would happen if the soul were anything else but an alien entity.

SICKLY NOSTALGIA

The core motivation of weird route. The central conflict of Deltarune is facing your fate. This is the opposite of that - restoring the sweet past by force. It's the initial motivation of Asgore, Tenna, Spamton and King, likely the Knight. The game consistently frames it as harmful and/or futile.

In the weird route, Kris and Noelle regress into carefree childhood fantasy.

Both Kris and Noelle have a lot of macabre curiosity and desire to transgress - one they used to express free of consequences through video games and scary movies.

The violence in weird route is all play! What happens in the magic circle, stays in the magic circle. It may feel wrong to us - we see darkners and lightners as equally fake, equally real. But to weird route Kris and Noelle, only the dark world isn't real. Neither is any crime committed there.

Not because they don't know it, but because they choose not to see it.

Of course, the weird route seeps into reality, but such is the nature of play. Sometimes you get bruises, your toys get broken and stolen, HERO_SWORD swings at you. And of course, the experience stays with you. Once done for fake, it's much easier done for real.

It's hard to kill Tenna, much easier if you already practiced. Exactly 6x easier.

Kris used to scare Noelle (to the point dess hit them with a wiffle bat) - and they do so now, only for real this time.

THE RING SCENE

Kris tells Noelle not to talk about the dream - else somebody's going to hear, she supposes. Who's gonna hear? The soul? The soul saw it all. It was there, picking SnowGrave.

We get an answer - "me". I must not - or don't want to - hear it. If not the soul, who is this me?

Kris does not want to hear about the dream. Or live the dream. They want to stay the hell away from Noelle. Because they love her, and they know they're a radioactive person. They're going nowhere, and it's not a good idea to go nowhere with somebody else.

There is, rather obviously, a big part of Kris that we know nothing about. And it may very well be, that we don't know why yet. It may or may not have something to do with Oersted.

But, they also want to get closer to Noelle again. Because they love her, and this is the last moment before Susie takes her away. What if it could be just like back then? Forever?

The whole scene is a symbolic engagement. Kris tries one last time to distance themself from Noelle, covering her mouth. But this will not do. They're so close, they can hear each other's mind. All that's left, is for Kris to think her to say yes.

Noelle tells us, Kris's voice is like a speaker - not coming from their mouth. After all, we can't hear Kris speak - we wouldn't know the difference.

The thorn ring is only one. Not marriage, but engagement - a promise of marriage yet to come. The first engagement - in the dark world - was play. This one is real. There is no longer a barrier between them - we see the shattered glass.

Or maybe not. Maybe we say no and graze the bullet. Kris is rightfully horrified at this, drags Noelle out the room and goes to beat the shit out of their rotten heart.

WHY WOULD KRIS DO ANY OF THIS?

Many people don't want to see the player and Kris as the same either to absolve the player of whatever Kris does and explain the disconnect at the player character disobeying the player, or to absolve Kris of whatever sins the player is guilty of.

Deltarune will not deliver us either.

To understand how could the soul be an intrinsic part of Kris, it's necessary to deal with the fact, that you opened the fountains, you sabotage the code search, Kris ordered Noelle to kill and Kris put the ring on her. Neither of you will be happy with this, and that's just life.

The game very smartly makes Kris's morality seem (to the player, who doesn't know the whole truth) inverse to ours - when we try to obey the "good" route, Kris sabotages it, when we try to push for the "bad" route, Kris tries to save it.

There is no way for the player to be at peace with Kris, because Kris is not at peace with themself.

This is not new. When playing undertale on pacifist route, we eventually learn that Flowey confused us for Chara and projected his memories onto us, but was wrong - we are Frisk, a different person.

When we play genocide - we instead learn from Chara, that they were in the back of our head all along, and they eventually fully take over our person. Or perhaps Chara is speaking to Frisk, and we are Chara - the ambiguity works wonders and may even be intentional.

WHY ONLY KRIS COULD DO ANY OF THIS

We, the player, have no sickly nostalgia for Noelle. The engagement ring, Dragon Blazers, all their shared memories - mean less to us than the past 3 days, the only ones we've seen. Had the game given us chance to put the ring on anyone, the players would've done it. Had it not given us a ring at all, we'd have never thought of it.

But Kris cares. It has to be Noelle, because of the key people of Kris's childhood, only she is left - and that's also why it hurts so much. And if her, then it has to be by force, because that's the only way Noelle will ever do anything. She is the only boat ride to the past.

It takes nothing to make us quit, but awful pain to follow through.

What little force, to make her do it.

I?????

Pink is pretty damn good as system rep imo

But like I can't imagine Kris and the Soul being the same thing

Would be hella interesting tho

And I mean

In a way, ig??????????

- shadow crystals are pieces of glass that "move like water in the hand"

- the vision that the shadow crystal shows us differs depending when and where you are in the story

- "the idea of discarding this felt very, very wrong" / "felt like trying to throw away someone's ???"

- seam confirms that they are the discarded, broken dreams of lightners: a physical manifestation of grief.

SHADOW CRYSTALS ARE LITERALLY THE TEARS OF LIGHTNERS

- asgore kept his 7 wedding flowers alive and healthy in glass cases for 2 decades past their day long lifespans

- glass = dreams

- broken glass = broken dreams

- "even when broken, I am more than glass" —Flower Man

- the 7 flower's desire is to reciprocate the care that asgore showed them

- the 7 flower's dark world forms are not only the flower itself, but the ENTIRE CASE: flower, soil, glass, and anything else underneath

CARE + GLASS (symbolically, literally) ALLOWS A FLOWER'S DREAM TO BECOME REALITY.

A dream must be realized to be brought to life.

- seam will purify all 5(?) shadow crystals into the PURE CRYSTAL

- pure crystal is not only one but multiple lightner's broken dreams, fused into a single incredibly powerful dream.

- darkness = water

- shadow crystals are, again, water in the light world.

- a dark fountain transforms EVERYTHING within the dark world. darkness ANIMATES inanimate objects.

- water = life

If the dark world can bring a dream to life, then could the PURE CRYSTAL lift a dream out of the shadows and into the light?

– — –

Like, I've been talking with some of my friends about how one of the core thematic throughlines between Undertale and Deltarune - the examination of the ways people engage with fiction - are hella rooted in Homestuck, specifically in the way that, like... the specific things that Bioshock had to say about player freedom and agency in games are rooted in Ken Levine's previous work (particularly Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2).

Like, Hussie has this whole thing of kinda going back and forth on how they view fictional characters - as expressions of some platonic ideal that have agency of their own, or as mere tools for exploring a narrative space that one would have to be an idiot to become emotionally invested in.

- FRIEND leaves behind bite mark on kris's hand after interacting with them

- pink's body gravely warns them that cats will relentlessly hunt down "proteins" (eggs)

- ralsei begins to explore their gender in chapter 5