Ever since chapter 3+4 came out, there's been a bit of discussion on whether the Knight is ACTUALLY strong or they're just bullshitting, mainly because we can ""defeat"" it in chapter 3 and most of the times after that it runs away or attacks from far away.
The thing is that the Knight isn't weak, hell no, it's just that they're petty.
Extremely petty.
I feel like the Knight loves being the big bad scary guy the heroes are trying to defeat. I mean, look at how they were moving. They LIVE to be sassy dude.
But there's a couple of times where they drop that evil playful shtick and go straight to the point.
-When Tenna ignores their orders.
-When Susie thinks they're weak.
-When Susie thinks they're weak Again.
-When Flowery tries to defy them.
There's a common pattern among those cases.
The Knight isn't seen as threatening.
The Knight could've defeated the Fun Gang at any moment during their battle, - hell, they could've killed them - but where's the fun in that? So it lets them struggle, because it wants to making itself seem undefeatable, a looming threat that will haunt them until the end of their journey.
But then they manage to get their health down by like, 30%, and Susie chips their sword. And at that moment, it isn't fun anymore. If they aren't scared, then what's the point?
And what do they do to Kris, who gets an attack boost as soon as their friends are swooned during the fight?
They get them on 1HP and remind them of their place. Remind them that they will never be in control by making them kneel.
In the Dark Sanctuary, the Knight prefers to watch from afar, being an ever-present threat hanging over the heroes' heads.
But when they reach it at the end of the dark world, they go back to toying with them, mocking them for thinking they even have a chance.
(Also they dodge Susie's Rude Buster so they were probably purposefully letting themselves get hit by it in the fight.)
But, yet again, they stop playing pretend because of Susie. Because she implied that they are weak.
So what does the Knight do seeing a 16 year old talk shit about them?
They summon a goddamn Titan.
The Titans are never mentioned in the Prophecy unless it's about the Roaring, so the Knight was fully willing to start the Roaring early because Susie made them mad.
Of course, they could've thought that, in the end, it wouldn't actually kill the Fun Gang, but for all we know, they didn't know that either. But it shows that the Knight doesn't like not being taken seriously.
And finally, there's the most recent one: Flowery.
Flowery already didn't think much of the Knight before they even appeared, but when they come to take Asgore, he immediately rushes to save him.
And I think that the most important part here is that, when Flowery taunts the Knight, they actually speed up, to the point they crash into a wall due to being distracted.
Flowery poses no threat to the Knight, not only is the Knight far more powerful than any character we've seen, but Flowery is constantly said to be very fragile, even by Darkner standards; the Knight had no reason to even attempt to outrun him outside of competitive pettiness.
And when he does catch up to them, the Knight stays kneeling for a moment, not necessarily because the wall genuinely hurt them, but at the sheer shock that the goddamn jarona guy is trying to put up a fight against them.
The same way they ended the fight as soon as Susie got too confident, the Knight barely bothered to play along with Flowery. He isn't scared, he isn't cowering, and that's not what the Knight wants, so it gets rid of him.
My point is that the Knight is powerful, but it doesn't want to be just that. It wants to be threatening, it wants the heroes and anyone that opposes it to be terrified of their mere presence. But when they don't? When they do try opposing it? It gets mad, because it takes away the enjoyment they get out of purposefully holding back and toying with them.
It's like if an adult was play fighting with a kid, and as soon as the kid punched a bit too hard, the adult beat their head in with a sledgehammer.
