'Sup

Surprisingly... [[Silly Strings]] is really different in Japanese.

JP: [[人生のコントロールを失った]]　 な　　　　ら [[運命の　　い糸]]　　つかんで　 たぐり　　よせること　でs ROMAJI: [[jinsei no kontororu o ushinatta]] nara [[unmei no　　i ito]] tsukande taguri yoseru koto des ENG: IF YOU [[Lost control of your life]] THEN GRASP THE [[Strings of fate]] AND PULL THEM TOWARDS YOU

[[Silly Strings]] is localized into [[Strings of fate]].

A note is that [[運命の　　い糸]] (strings of fate) has a clear gap between "fate" and "strings". It's a gap of two characters. There is a stray い (i) before 糸 (ito), 糸 meaning "strings". It makes me think the omitted word is an adjective describing "strings", because い is used to make nouns into an adjective. However, I cannot say what that word could be. Or if it's even an adjective at all. There isn't much to go of.

To me it seems "strings of fate" could be foreshadowing for Chapter 4 and what that reveals about the prophecy. The Fun Gang, which of course includes Kris, has strings of fate attached to them that pull them as the three heroes of the prophecy. I think it also connects with what Spamton said after the Spamton NEO boss fight. Maybe the Fun Gang can break their own strings.

And those would be strings of fate. The Japanese localization is a little more on the nose with the foreshadowing for Chapter 4

Which would then be a reference to the "red string of fate"! 運命のあかい糸, or "unmei no akai ito".

"Cool" Dog or Wolf....?

Skimming through Deltarune's ch 3 soundtrack on Spotify made me realize something...

…there's 2 "ROOTS" songs. Not just that, but they sound the same but in different sound fonts. They both even play in thematically similar places. Digital Roots plays in Queen's basement when you have to do the teacup ride challenge to retrieve the empty disk/plugging in the loaded disk in order to get the Spamton NEO. BIT ROOTS plays in the third part of sword route when u enter a dungeon and have to kill every monster in order to get the ERAM fight. Both play during the challenge required to get to a secret boss fight, both involve actively going behind the respective dark world's rulers backs, both involve plugging in something connected to image_FRIEND (the loaded disk having Spamton on it and the odd controller being a knockoff controller with FRIEND's colors), both involve retrieving an item mentioned by a shopkeeper ("MANSION... BASEMENT! FIND IT!!" for the empty disk and Seam's dialogue where they realize someone stole their shadow mantle).

The digital root is also a mathematical process of adding the digits in a number together to get a sum, then (if there are multiple digits in the sum) adding the digits in the sum together to get a new sum, and doing this until u get a single digit (ex: the digital root of 1225 is 1 because 1+2+2+5=10 and 1+0=1). It's used as a "checksum" in programming to tell u if there are any errors in what u input. If a checksum fails it means the data is incorrect, corrupted, or incomplete.

So, looking at Toby Fox's Bandcamp, the digital root of the place of Digital Roots in the ost would be 1, because 3+7=10 and 1+0=1. The digital root of the length of Digital Roots is 6, which is the same number associated with Gaster in Undertale's code.

The digital root of BIT ROOTS is-

not there?

It's not in the Bandcamp ost. In fact, none of the sword route music is on the officiial Bandcamp, but you do get them if you buy the entire album.

Here's that same section of the ost on Spotify for reference:

Turns out this isn't the first time Toby has hidden music that plays during any in-game moment/mention of the snowgrave route

In fact, the music that plays when the snowgrave route is continued in ch 4 is also hidden. So it seems that the songs that mention the weird route are hidden but can still be found by chance whereas songs that play ONLY on the weird route are completely hidden and can only be found by intentionally trying to find it, like how the sword route can be accessed if someone happened to be good enough at the boards to get s rank (or bought s rank) but the weird route has to be intentionally sought out.

To find the digital roots for BIT ROOT I needed to use Spotify (as a bonus I included all the other sword route songs too in the following screenshot edit)

It has the nearly the same place on its chapter's ost as Digital Roots (36 vs 37), with the digital root being 9 instead of 1, but the lengths are different, something that feels intentional considering they're basically the same song. The digital root for the length of BIT ROOTS is also 9... Chara's favorite number is 9, something they associate with absolute power. I don't know if the correlation between ROOTS and Chara has any foundation but the 2 ROOTS songs being different lengths seems significant. Especially since in BIT ROOTS, after the 0:33 mark the song stops looping perfectly and starts sounding glitched out with notes being dropped off or incorrect notes playing. The second loop of the (corrupted) melody finishes around 0:54 (digital root of 9), which means it's not a perfect loop because if it was the song would be 1:06 (2 segments of 33 seconds) minutes instead of 0:54, and the rest of the song is just static noise... garbage noise? Not "garbage noise" as in the sound file mus_smile but like conceptually garbage, noise that means nothing.

In the Spamton Sweepstakes, Tumblr user @humunanunga calculated the digital roots for the unique gateway windows on the pages /windows/ and /window/ (their post here), the 2 pages that look like the window hallway that leads to the ch 4 egg. These are 2 separate pages btw that look basically the same so for simplicity's sake I'm going to be referring to them as "plural" (windows) and "single" (window). Both plural and single have 51 windows (digital root 6), single's unique room is window 18 (digital root 9), and plural's unique room is window is 36 (digital root 9).

So we have the digital roots for ch 2: 1 and 6, Spamton Sweepstakes windows: 6(x2) 9 and 9, and ch 3: 9 and 9. Considering the window/s pages from the Spamton Sweepstakes are related to the egg in ch 4 which is found behind window 100, that would give us another digital root of 1. So all digital roots we have are:

-ch 2: 1, 6

-SS: 6, 9, 6, 9

-ch 3: 9, 9

-ch 4: 1

Fun values:

In Undertale the fun value is 1 number assigned out of 100 (digital root 1) given at random upon starting/resetting the game. Whatever fun value you get will give you a random event or no event at all (here's a chart for what fun value gives you what events). All of the Gaster related fun events have a 1 out 100 (unlike all of the other random events) chance of happening; the Gaster followers + sound test room + "mystery man" have fun values in the 60s range with "mystery man" being assigned to fun value 66. This gives us a strong association between Gaster and the number 6. The clam girl event happens in the 80s range but the clam girl goner event (that unlocks the "don't forget" picture of 3 people in Sans workshop event), while not a Gaster event, only happens at a fun value of 81 (digital root 9). The room where "mystery man" is located in room 269 (both 6 and 9 are present) and getting the door that actually leads to room 269/mystery man only has a 10% chance of activating (digital root 1). Maybe this implies that double 6 and double 9 have some sort of significance, but I feel like this is a stretch. Leaving the hallway with the door to room 269 causes the fun value to become 0. The only times when the fun value goes from whatever you got to 0 is after any Gaster-related event.

So, from what I can glean:

-the number 6 represents a connection to Gaster

-the number 9 (as the highest value you can get from a digital root) represents power or the world of Deltarune

-I have no clue what the number 1 could represent, if it represents anything

-there is no way to get a digital root of 0, this could mean 0 represents intentional manipulation from an outside source

adding some more parallel...

...very peculiar isn't it?

The Japanese version of this prophecy interestingly is not a direct translation of the English line. Instead, it reads:

It led to a lot of people speculating that Kris does need a SOUL to some level. Maybe the SOUL is Kris’ but we’re a foreign entity that has taken it over, or that Kris’ original actual SOUL has been removed and replaced with us. If Kris needed the SOUL to live, that would explain their slow, deliberate movements and also why they keep putting us back inside despite clearly hating being under our control.

So now, with Chapter 4 giving us a much better glimpse of SOUL-less Kris doing stuff… it’s notable that they seem… fully capable of moving ‘normally’. Angrily, but normally.

Even when they do the whole Creepy Zombie Walk thing they are notably faster than they seemed to be in Chapters 1 + 2

They can do things that require fine motor skills, focus and swiftness like playing the piano, handling glasses, and beating the shit out of us with a hockey stick and it's all animated as smoothly as most other Deltarune Animations. Not really implying effort or stiffness the way that original Creepy Zombie Walk animation did.

And while Susie only gets a brief moment to interact with SOUL-less Kris in the Normal Route

Noelle has prolonged interactions with them in the Weird Route (both on-screen in Chapter 4 and off-screen in-between Chapters 2 and 3) and... while she does note that they sounded 'weak and shaky' and obviously their behavior seems weird on account of the whole 'traumatized by the Unkillable Evil Time-Demon only they can see" thing

... There's nothing to really indicate that there's anything outright unnatural or 'zombie-like' about the way Kris moves and interacts with her while SOUL-less. Since this is the Weird Route, Noelle even note this is the most natural and Kris-like they've acted in the last few days.... until we take over again.

And now we know they can go without the SOUL for a fairly prolonged period of time. The Ominous Phone Voice of Probably Carol does tells them they need the SOUL, it seems unclear why.

So… what that means for SOUL-less Kris’ behavior before? It’s possible that even if Kris can operate without a SOUL, it still hurts like hell. So right after tearing out the SOUL they are in Maximum Pain and it's hard to ignore, causing them to move in a struggling and slow manner. But the more they go without it, they kinda get used to it and the pain fades into the background - allowing them to do stuff more-or-less normally.

(Basically Kris has Chronic Pain but the only Painkiller that works for them is Demonic Possession)

…Or, knowing Kris, maybe this… was all an act. They were only behaving like This because they knew we were watching. It is pretty notable that they walk around normally in the Holidays' Kitchen while we're eavesdropping on them and only swap to the Creepy Walk Animation once they notice us....

about a week ago i decided to translate japanese deltarune because i was curious and bored. i found a lot of stuff that i haven’t heard anyone talk about before!

i only translated chapter 2 because i got to the cliffs and remembered that watching/playing chapter 1 over and over again is really boring to me. might do it when/if i finish writing the post.

uhhh a few warnings. i’m not fluent in japanese whatsoever (i’m like n4 level? i think?), and i might not explain this very well to people who don’t know anything about the language. if you’re confused about anything i say, just ask and i’ll explain it in better detail.

i got all of the gameplay from tsuwahasu’s playthroughs of chapter 2 (pacifist and weird route), so all of the screenshots will be from his vods. i picked his vod to watch somewhat randomly so i was very surprised when he not only got all the easter eggs/secrets on a blind playthrough besides the egg room, but also beat spamton neo in one try, god damn

also i’m not the first person to look at the jp version of deltarune. please look at these posts/videos if you want to see stuff that’s already known in better detail:

skellfamily (light/dark world writing, characters’ pronouns and speech patterns) | suzyundertale (ch2 character names, some jokes) suzyundertale again (the gonermaker sequence) | duxarcana and halfbreadchaos (character in the code) | kazarinn (comments from the translators)

reblogs highly appreciated—this took a ton of time!!!

NOW.

LET US BEGIN.

1. In one of the UNUSED texts, there's someone who speaks with the pronoun 'Boku' (which is often used for boyish kind of character, can be any gender. For example, Lancer/Ralsei/Asriel has boku as their pronoun.) this seems a bit different with the more feminine-sounding ones in other unused texts which are presumably Dess's.

The text says, “Boku ga Mieru?” or “Can you see me?”

2. The singer of "Don't Forget" uses the pronoun 'Watashi' (私)(specifically the kanji version), in contrast to Toriel's 'watashi' (わたし) which uses hiragana.

3. Minor stuff but during the acid boat ride scene - if you choose the "…" option, Ralsei excitedly remarks that it's just like Kris to be quiet.

Interestingly, the JP translation adds emphasis to this, with Ralsei noting that Kris not only becomes quiet but specifically "clams up" at "times like this." This wording could suggest he's recalling a past experience with Kris. (I always thought that his reaction is a bit strange if Kris is always quiet all the time).

＊ こ…こういうときに 黙り込むのってすごくクリスらしいよね。 (TL: It’s very Kris-like to fall silent at times like this, isn’t it?)

Well, it happens. This man wrote +50 pieces of flavor text, we can forgive a grammar mistake here or there.

As long as it only happens once or twice, right?

…Or more than that. 

These 3 items all seem to relate to Spamton in some kind of way.

The mannequin is implied to have been Spamton’s old body before the LoadedDisk.

The TensionBow is created from Spamton’s former wares: the B.ShotBowties.

The Silver Card boosts money, something Spamton is obsessed with, and is like the Dealmaker glasses Spamton’s fight drops.

It’s not TOO surprising that Spamton would prompt the narrator to break face and drop the sentence periods; here’s a post explaining some other weirdness he has with the narration. But it’s interesting that dropping periods is a consistent tic.

There’s a few other notable instances the narration drops periods:

so here’s the wikipedia definition of a daemon:

In multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon (/ˈdiːmən/ or /ˈdeɪmən/)[1] is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user.

I immediately thought of the narrachara theory. They work in the background, performing a service in such a way that you don’t even realize they’re there. And, also of note, they act without “the direct control of an interactive user.” Chara is not under our control, something they make quite clear in the murder run, but it’s still present on a neutral/pacifist run too.

now, the other connection i made was to the discussion of the heart in the machine. Based on the same reasoning as the linked posts (though i don’t agree with everything in the second link), it’s my headcanon that the heart is chara’s, and its power has been used as a backup generator for the lab.

folks in the chat agreed these were interesting connections, and i offered to add the elaboration on to babbybone’s original post. but then, as i was writing this all out, i decided to read about daemons as they appear in ancient greek thought, and, well……

Daimon or Daemon (Ancient Greek: δαίμων, “god”, “godlike”, “power”, “fate”)[1][2] originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy. 

(wikipedia again, emphasis on ‘guiding spirit’ mine)

So uh. They might also be a daemon in the (old) mythological sense too???

there’s no way to know if toby intended these connections by having chara call themself a ‘demon’ in their creepy speech at the end of a murder run. There’s no way to tell if it’s further validation for the narrachara theory. But it’s certainly Something, and aligns with many headcanons we fans may have about the first fallen human.