✦ ikana ✦

On a typical playthrough, DELTARUNE seems to be gearing up to convey the message that fiction and fantasy are just as important as reality, and shouldn’t be treated with less respect or care. This is present in the game itself, with respect to Dark Worlds; and it’s also something that Toby has been exploring on a meta level since UNDERTALE, which gauges your ability to treat video game characters as real people with their own hopes and dreams. It’s worth noting that Susie is the character who embodies this idea most clearly in all of its aspects: 

We don’t know exactly what this will lead to in the Normal Route. The Prophecy as seen in Chapter 4 encourages treating the Dark Worlds like a story with a definite, unchanging plot, and its unknown but harrowing Last Prophecy seems to parallel the fever-dream ending of DELTARUNE itself. The exact wording of the Prophecy—“ONLY THEN WILL THE WORLDS BE SAVED”—suggests that we can “win” in the end, but only by doing something terrible or suffering a painful loss. Susie’s desire to defy the Prophecy may lead her to “break the game” and find a better ending. However, this is all uncertain, and in any case not the focus of this theory. What I want to discuss is how the Weird Route fits in with all of this.

Starting with the obvious, the Weird Route parallels UT’s No Mercy Route in many ways. We’re doing to Noelle what we did to Frisk and Chara, and what trauma and time manipulation did to Flowey: we lead Noelle to see the Dark World as a game, as unreal and thus unimportant. This makes her more willing to hurt its inhabitants and treat them as an expendable means of getting stronger. 

In the process, we seem to be slowly placing her into the role of the Angel, a title whose symbolism surrounds her already but becomes much more blatant on the Weird Route. 

The Angel, it should be noted, is associated both with the power Noelle is gaining and the light that wipes away fantasy and seals Dark Worlds. 

It all looks very much like we’re using Noelle to enact a rejection of the Normal Route’s themes, and this conclusion is supported by how the Weird Route increasingly pushes Susie (embodiment of the Normal Route thesis) out of plot-critical scenes. This conflict will probably come to a head in some way during Chapter 5, which is on track to be drastically different depending on whether Noelle is going to the Festival with Susie or Kris. I couldn’t begin to predict exactly what will happen; but we already know that Chapter 2’s Weird Route sequence culminates in Noelle grievously injuring Berdly, a Lightner. So her growing willingness to kill for the sake of getting stronger probably won’t be limited to the Dark World for long…

There’s a missing piece here, though. Why are we making Noelle stronger? What is the point of defying the Normal Route’s themes and treating the cast of DELTARUNE as free EXP? 

Chapter 3’s Sword Route, which parallels the Weird Route, might be able to clarify this. In the second session of Ramb’s game, we use the magic of the White Cloak (a character that represents Noelle) to instantly obliterate unkillable enemies, solve unsolvable puzzles, and ultimately unlock an impassable door. Even when Noelle isn’t there to help us, we are always guided by the game to “BECOME STRONGER,” and if we follow its guidance by killing enemies to level up, we can do things we couldn’t do before. Should the foreshadowing be accurate, this hints at what the purpose of the Weird Route is: to augment Noelle’s power until she’s strong enough to face some kind of otherwise unbeatable challenge or obstacle. 

Here's the point. In the Weird Route, we lead Noelle to treat the world as a game, like Dragon Blazers. What is the purpose of level grinding in a video game? Why would you want your character to become stronger? To fight the final boss. And the new chapters have given us a perfect candidate for the enemy we may be preparing Noelle to confront…

The Knight, DELTARUNE’s main antagonist, is prophesied to duel with the heroes, and absolutely wipes the floor with them in nearly every encounter. This is especially evident during its fight in Chapter 3. No matter how hard we struggle against it, no matter how much it may look like we can win, the Knight will always strike the heroes down in the end. And that’s without mentioning that it can permanently kill at least two beloved characters, Tenna and Jackenstein, if the wrong choices are made. The terrible ending of the Prophecy may have to do at least partially with the Knight: perhaps it can only be defeated at great personal cost, or can’t be defeated at all. 

(Just as Susie embodies hope, defiance of the prophecy, and love for Dark Worlds, the Knight seems to embody inevitability, fate, and the callous destruction of Darkners. It’s no surprise that the two are developing a bitter rivalry!)

In any case, I see two ways that this can be resolved:

It has been lampshaded that the Knight could have already started the Roaring if all it wanted was to see the world burn. It almost certainly has hidden motives, and might not even be fully in control of itself. Certainly, it poses a terrible threat and seems to be actively malicious in some respect; but in UNDERTALE, our good friend Flowey was even more openly villainous, and his story turned out to be the most tragic of all! If this is any indication of what will happen in DELTARUNE, there could be a peaceful way to defeat the Knight in the Normal Route, although perhaps we won’t be able to save it or return it to who it used to be. While the outcome would probably be bittersweet, we would avoid killing or being killed.  

But there’s another path. Over the course of the Weird Route, it’s possible that Noelle will become powerful enough to slay the Knight on her own — ignoring its possible motives in the process, as in every Weird Route encounter, and treating it as nothing more than an enemy that needs to be put down. If Noelle has become something akin to an Angel of Light at this point, it would be thematically fitting for her to be the one who defeats a being of pure darkness. However, the resulting victory would almost certainly be hollow and, well, cold, due to the terrible actions we took to attain it. There’s no telling how many people we would have to hurt in order to prepare Noelle for a battle like that. (In particular, the Sword Route suggests that Susie and Ralsei may end up dying by our hand…)

And there’s one final layer to this, which I consider the most impactful of all. If the Knight’s true identity is December Holiday, as many have theorized, we would be manipulating Noelle into unknowingly (or even knowingly!) killing a family member who she misses dearly. This is a truly unforgivable betrayal of her autonomy, and would fit perfectly as a thematic "climax" to all the things we've already made her do. If Noelle might have gotten any catharsis or reconciliation with the Knight in the Normal Route, the Weird Route would take that all away. It’s a possibility so interesting and tragic that it actually makes me even more inclined to think Dess is the knight! 

It’s worth noting that the Weird Route’s story may not end when the Knight is slain. After all, the climax of the Sword Route game involves Noelle being “used up” in order to obtain a Shelter Key. It’s possible that after Noelle defeats the Knight, we’ll end up sacrificing her in some way to gain entry to the Shelter. Or, perhaps the fight itself will “use her up” by being so physically and mentally taxing that she can’t continue, but her victory will still open the way into the Shelter for us. (I don’t have the slightest idea of what’s going to await us there. Perhaps a rematch against the Mantle Holder? Perhaps absolutely nothing?)

If the foreshadowing of the Sword Route is pushed to its absolute limit, maybe the final Weird Route boss we face will be Kris themselves, “leaving the game” and confronting their puppeteer directly just like HERO_SWORD did to them. Such a fight would, of course, be quite literally self-destructive. But that might be the point! It would serve as a bleak continuation of the scene in the Holiday bathroom where Kris throws the SOUL into a trash can and savagely beats it down to 10/20 HP: now they have nothing left to lose, so they’ll go all the way, obliterating their own SOUL and taking us with them. It’s hard to say for sure though.

Let’s sum up now. What is the Weird Route?

The Weird Route seems to be driven by our desire to play and “win” DELTARUNE, to obliterate everything that stands in our way, to treat the world and its inhabitants as nothing more than a game and force them to bend to our will, all in the pursuit of “reaching the end.” We treat Darkners like objects in the most literal way imaginable, reducing them to frozen statues; and then we do the same to Lightners, to everyone. The Weird Route is a dark reflection of the Normal Route, in which we try to prove that our choices are the only choices that matter. And it may culminate in us guiding a massively strengthened Noelle to defeat the Roaring Knight by force—a task that would otherwise be impossible.

But if UNDERTALE’s No Mercy Route is anything to go by, we’ll probably be forced to acknowledge that the harm we did in order to reach the end of the Weird Route was not worthwhile. It’ll be a Pyrrhic victory, an empty ending, that calls to mind a well-known quote from Toby Fox: