"[Trash heap]! YOU KEPT IT! YOU REALLY DO CARE!"

i will run out of these soon i promise. more under the cut

So, as I'm sure most of you are aware, some very interesting new dialogue was added into Deltarune Chapter 5 today via a patch. For those unaware, this dialogue is spoken by Pink in her shop, and only if you speak to her after interacting with the red IMAGE_FRIEND in this Chapter and also after collecting the egg from this Chapter. Here is a transcript of her new dialogue, to make things a bit easier:

(Suddenly, the shopkeeper's body took your hand, and talked in a low voice only you could hear...) Kris, is your hand okay? It looks like... you've got a cat bite, mew. Cats can be nasty creatures, can't they, mew...? ...I once met someone who REALLY liked cats, mew. They liked cats so much, they owned a whole hunting pack of them, mew! Of course, cats are fickle creatures, but they were very good at finding protein. Kris, if you have any protein, you must keep it hidden, and never let anyone see it. The cats are not too smart, but once they find a target, they never stop chasing it until they get bored. And when they find you, they bite... very, VERY hard. Some people would do anything to get away from them, even change their appearance, or go into hiding... Oh, Kris, it's terrible, mew. It's terrible... Please be careful, Kris... promise... H...huh? Wh... why am I trembling? Was my body saying something...? Hey, don't have a conversation without me!! Communication is key, right, body? Body!?

Right out of the gate, let's get the obvious point out of the way – this is IMAGE_FRIEND. Not one entity, but multiple. Exactly how they appear in the battle against Eram, funnily enough! The answer was there the entire time; in part, at least...

We'll put a pin in this for now and come back to it later. For now, I want to address the point that inspired me to make this post in the first place: how this links back to Spamton.

I know what some of you are thinking. I've seen it being said plenty of times online today in response to this new dialogue...

“Some people would do anything to get away from them, even change their appearance!! This is why Spamton is a puppet, he chose to change his body to escape from the cats!”

Except, this is incorrect; Spamton didn't choose to change his appearance.

Let's start with the Spamton Sweepstakes! And before anyone tells me that they're not canon, please do remember how much they've actually foreshadowed in the game and how much real information we've been able to glean from them. First, I'd like you to consider the following:

HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO MAKE ME INTO YOUR [living puppet] AND [enslave me] WITH [visions of glory]?

This says, quite plainly, that someone made Spamton into a “living puppet”. Not that he chose to do this, not that this is some sort of disguise, but that he was made to change.

There is also this interesting answer from the Sweepstakes q&a:

JUST ANOTHER [lasting effect on my health from] BECOMING A [Big Shot]!!!

Again, this suggests that his transformation was something that happened to him, as opposed to something that he actively chose. A “lasting effect”, almost like a side-effect rather than the result of a conscious decision.

If you'd like something from the game itself, then look no further than Ralsei's dialogue after the Spamton NEO fight:

A corrupted program. Corrupted, broken and unrecognisable. His very code is broken and warped; this is a horrific transformation that he had to endure.

Thematically, this makes a lot of sense. To briefly go on a slight tangent, my opinion on this is that there's some sort of power in contracts in Deltarune. This seems to have been implied before, even down to the fact that we essentially enter into an agreement with Gaster when we play the SURVEY PROGRAM version of Chapter 1, which leads to us taking control of the red soul. So if Spamton made a contract/deal/agreement with his benefactor, then there's inherently a power in that. Breaching the contract by signing Tenna's contract instead had a very real effect - somehow corrupting Spamton's code and breaking the poor guy, turning him into a literal puppet as opposed to simply a metaphorical one (with the benefactor metaphorically pulling his strings from behind the scenes for all that time). It's very satisfying from a narrative standpoint, especially when a huge driving force for Spamton is the pursuit of freedom.

A freedom he can never attain because, in his own words...

“It seems after all I couldn't be anything more than a simple puppet.”

A puppet - the antithesis of a free person. The last image that one would choose for themselves if they were so keenly and desperately seeking freedom.

Now, let's get back to the cats.

It's interesting to me that obtaining the Chapter's egg is a requirement for getting this “pack of cats” dialogue. This of course has plenty of implications regarding the Forgotten Man (and the possibility that he's “gone into hiding” to avoid the cats or is somehow connected to them in another way), but he's not the only character associated with eggs, is he?

Let's not forget Spamton and his pipis! Which he does, in fact, directly refer to as “eggs” in the Spamton NEO fight when he says:

“KRIS!! THINK! WHAT ARE MY [Eggs] GOING TO DO!?”

I think it's fair to say that eggs might be the “protein” that Pink refers to, especially considering that you cannot get this dialogue without the egg. If the Forgotten Man perhaps isn't connected to the cats, but rather the eggs are connected to them, then that gives us another link back to Spamton via the pipis.

But why would the cats be so good at tracking eggs? Simple – because, at one point, they were in fact sent after Spamton. And instead of making him physically change his appearance, they instead made him adopt the attire that he wears now as a disguise. Pink and yellow glasses, a black jacket... the “cats are not too smart”, after all, so perhaps this could fool them; a crude camouflage of-sorts. This also neatly explains why Spamton opts to live inside of dumpsters after losing his actual home, because they're a good place to hide!

Let's rewind a second and look at why the cats might be going after Spamton in the first place.

Could it be because he breached his contract with the benefactor, and that this was the nature of the final phone call before he fled from TV World? Perhaps. That call really frightened him after all, and this pack of cats sounds absolutely terrifying. But really, it depends on who actually owned the cats to begin with.

Gaster? Doubtful. I know a lot of the game's mysteries do tie back to the Mystery Man himself, and I truly believe that he was Spamton's benefactor (and thus the root cause of Spamton's corruption)... however, this doesn't explain how Pink's body would know him. Gaster doesn't seem the sort to just casually make himself directly known to Darkners on a whim. He very probably spoke to both Jevil and Spamton, but these feel like outliers; huge events that changed both characters forever, and literally no-one else speaks about Gaster directly either.

But, there is a connection between the cats and the mysterious shelter. And it all comes back around to Eram...

In the fight, we see Eram summoning these little IMAGE_FRIENDs. So it makes perfect sense for Eram's real-world counterpart to be the one who owns (and therefore summons) the cats. Perhaps from inside the shelter, which ties it back to Gaster in a round-about way.

However, there's no link between Eram and Spamton outside of Gaster, is there?

Yes. Yes, there potentially is.

The song that plays when you fight Eram is called BURNING EYES. And Spamton has some interesting dialogue in his initial battle with Kris:

I mean... could this be a coincidence? I'm willing to accept that it might. But it lines up really nicely, and is exactly the sort of cryptic hinting that I'd come to expect. A subtle implication that Spamton knew the real-world Eram.

I don't know who Eram's real-world counterpart could be or why they'd send their pack of hunting cats after Spamton (unless it does all tie back to Gaster again via the shelter like I said earlier, and he asked Eram to send the cats as a punishment for breaking the contract). But it's possible that the real-world Eram did know Pink, especially given Asgore's connections to the shelter and the fact that Pink resided at Asgore's Flower King shop. I don't necessarily think Eram is as elusive as Gaster, especially after they made themself known to us on the Sword Route. In contrast, you can't even enter the name “Gaster” into the game without it crashing.

And finally, the other reason why Spamton chose to wear his glasses. The Dealmaker. A piece of armour in the game that grants the effect: “reduces damage received from Puppet/Cat attacks by 40%”. CAT attacks. Almost as though this is something that he was actively afraid of and wanted protection from.

After all...

Susie stimboard for @oopsshesbasic

!!CHAPTER 5 SPOILERS!!

Based on this interaction people have noticed with the mannequin:

Tenna has spent his whole life serving Lightners, he loved the Dreamurrs and cared deeply about them, but they never loved him as a person.

They never viewed him as a person.

To the Dreamurrs he's just their TV, an object. As a Darkner of course he loves to be their TV, it's Darkners' purpose to serve Lightners. But loving a higher power that doesn't even view you as a person isn't love, it's worship.

"Worship isn't love. It's distance, dressed as devotion. You can't hold someone from a pedestal."

Every Darkner we meet, we bring back to Castle town. Because in Castle town they're not just possessions, they're people.

Darkners in Castle town aren't living for a higher power that doesn't view them as a person, they're living with people who are equals, people who view them as people. The Darkners we bring back to Castle town are living for themselves for once, and the people who care about them don't need to be The Almighty Lightners, because they actually care about eachother as friends and equals.

But Tenna feels lonely.

He wants to be wanted, he wants to be wanted by Lightners. He has lived his whole life based on the idea that the only thing that matters is being loved by the Lightners, that the only thing that matters are the Lightners, and it's not easy for him to just let that go. He's so focused on being cherished as a Lightner's object that he doesn't even see that people like Susie actually care about him as a person.

He feels lonely in Castle town, but giving him to Mettaton just doesn't feel like the right thing to do. It's giving into his idea that the only thing that matters is being a Lightner's object.

Mettaton is thrilled to have Tenna, to have entertainment. But Mettaton doesn't know about the dark world, he doesn't view Tenna as a person.

Tenna struggles with letting go of the past, he holds onto the memory of being watched by Lightners and he wants to get that feeling back. He doesn't want to move on from being a Lightner's object, he just can't fathom the idea of living for himself.

Giving him to Mettaton is the quick fix, the short term happiness as opposed to a long term solution. It's the Dreamurrs all over again. What happens when Mettaton eventually discards him like the Dreamurrs did? Will he just find a new Lightner to worship? How long will he chase the idea of trying to recreate the past of being someone's TV?

Isn't it better to live for yourself, than to worship someone else who doesn't even see you as a person?

I feel like in Castle town, he can learn to live for himself, he can learn to see that the people around him actually care about him as a person, and that he's loved for being himself.

Sure, it's not easy to move on from trying to impress people who don't see you and to realize that people care about you. Of course he will feel sad and lonely, healing and recovery and moving on isn't all sunshines and rainbows, but I truly think that he can find a real happiness with people who care about him.

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt