Hello There

I compare Brooks backstory to Sanji's, were these characters backstories already great? Yes. Am I complaining that we got more for both these characters? No.

The snow stretches on for miles, a white sheet that blankets over the vast forest, casting everything in a bright, unyielding sparkle that looks almost beautiful. It glimmers, wet and clear, shining in the sun that is somehow so bright despite the curtain of clouds decorating the sky. Snow pours endlessly from them, it has for five years, and for those five years, you’ve traveled this same path, tracing your fur covered fingers on the sides of cliffs, finding your way around the Wildwoods. 

The snow rains down, the only reprieve coming from the thick trees high above you. The leaves and branches act as a buffer, allowing you to move easily during these trips. Preferably, you wouldn’t have to come back here at all, but with Fimbulwinter, you have no other choice but to make the journey to and from. Even with Ragnarok imminent, these woods provide. They provide you food, rabbit and deer that use these very woods for their own reprieve, and shelter, though rarely. Caves scatter the forest, becoming a common place for raiders. You can’t help but feel some sympathy for them, for they are like you, trying to survive. Occasionally, you’ll catch a few on a hunt, watching from the thicket as they move about ungracefully, searching for game and forage, before they disappear into the endless snow. Their numbers are dwindling, the thought makes you pause. 

Your eyes drift behind you, there lays a deer, dead, tied onto your sled that you’re forced to pull. You let out a breathless laugh, if only you were graced with the power to talk to dogs, then all the mutts in the nine realms would be forced to drag your food for you. As if paying for your sardonicism, the rope over your shoulder begins to slip, forcing you to sling it back over with a groan. It breaks the quiet noise of the woods, somehow making you keenly aware of your situation. You’re almost home, you remind yourself, ignoring the pain in your shoulder. 

You pull your face covering higher up, blocking the lower half of your face from the elements as you continue to move. One hand holds the rope, the other moves back to the cliffs, tracing your memory back to the cave that’s become your home. It nearly makes you laugh, home, you haven’t had a home for years. The thought makes hold on the rope nearly falter, but you refuse, pulling it impossibly tighter as if somehow it will keep you from remembering. You know you can’t remember, not because you’ve forgotten, but because thinking of your home means forgetting what’s currently at hand. Fimbulwinter, Ragnarok, survival, it all matters more than hopeless memories. 

You trace the cliff side until you feel your fingers reach a familiar ridge, forcing you to a halt. Your shoulders sag, the rope dropping from your hands as you let out a deep sigh. Your face covering blocks your breathing slightly, but it doesn’t concern you, a sense of calm washing over your entire being in that very moment. Wasting no time, you crouch down to untie the deer, twisting and turning at the knots with a repetitive precision. The motions are second nature to you, five years of back and forth journeys between the depths of the Wildwood and your cave, five years of sneaking around their home, pretending as if it doesn’t exist. Five years of keeping your distance from the stave, from their feud, from their grief. 

You can’t move any quicker away from the deer, the knots coming loose as you ignore the aching feeling in your chest. Bury it down, you tell yourself. Stay strong, a voice says, a voice like your mother and your father, like Kratos and like Faye, off all the people who have left you and forced you to be strong all for nothing. They don’t just echo, they stick in your head, stay strong, stay strong, stay strong—

You let out a sharp cry, falling to the ground suddenly, your chest heaving as warm tears race down your face. The boulder blocking the cave has been moved to the side, but you barely process the fact as you sit in the cold aftermath. Your tears warm you, they offer you a small comfort, before eventually falling onto the snow. Your face stares, emotionless as the tears join the frozen ground, becoming one with all the nature around you. It’s as if your tears themselves have become one with the birds in the sky and the critters in the forest. The thought calms you in a way, grounds you, steading you as you rise slowly. You move back towards the deer, ignoring the thoughts in your head about what it might be feeling, or if it felt anything at all, and slinging it over your shoulders. It weighs heavy on you, but you endure.

As you place the animal down into the safety of the small cave, something loud in the far distance scares the birds, they caw and fly away from the woods. You wait, counting the seconds, before hulling the stone and covering the entrance. 

—

The knife tares into the tick hide of the deer, its fur cold, small snowflakes decorating its body miscellaneously. They form endless shapes, ones that glitter and disappear in an instant. It’s skin nearly peels open, it’s blood already drained, what lays inside of it already ripe for the taking. 

“Wait.” A stray hand stops, pausing close to a fleshy intestine. “You have to pull the hide first, continuously, so that it stays intact.” The woman says. She sits near you on the forest floor. Colorful leaves decorate the ground, light patches of mushy snow sticking to the ground, mixing into the dirt and creating this gross sludge that sticks to your clothing. The woman, who sits uncaring on the sludge, watches as you huff, your hand moving away from the deer’s insides and towards the hide of the animal. Your fingers grip the sides of the fresh cut, your blunt, dirt caked nails dig into the fur and you begin to pull, pull with all your might. The hide peels, not quickly, but clean, separating from the rest of the muscle after what feels like so much pulling. You pant, and for a moment you wish you could peel off your own skin if it meant keeping the sweat off you forever. But then you look up, and you see the woman smiling, and you smile too. 

She takes your knife from you—you let her, cutting along the meat and intestine in careful precision. You’ve always wondered how she does it, how she knows where to cut and what to cut, what to keep and what to throw away. She doesn’t look old, not like mother did, but she knows so much. She knows so much about these woods, how to map out the depths of the forest without any markings. She claims the forest itself is the markings, that the songs of the birds and the crossings of the branches leave enough traces to find your way through. The stories she spun always seemed like too tall a tale to believe. Even so, you’d find yourself journeying to the edge of your home, to where the trees grew too tall and gathered too thick, trying to make your way through to the opposite end. You’d do as she told, trace your hand along the tree bark, trying to find the familiarities in the shapes and curves, trying to remember the endless routes you could possibly take, inchinging seemingly deeper and deeper, only to find yourself back at your cottage. The first time you failed, a wave of embarrassment washed through you. The recent times, you’ve come to expect the outcome. You never told her, keeping your failures to yourself, but when she’d return to you, she’d always have a look on her face that told you she found your attempts amusing. 

Her knowledge of hunting was outmatched by none, though you had little to compare to. Your father once tried to teach you how to hunt. One morning in the early winter, not too long ago, he took you from your bed and brought you deeper into the forest, further than you’d been at the time. You barely could keep your eyes open, feeling the bumps and turns as he carried you through the trees and into a small clearing. It was there when he placed you down and put a knife in your hand. The weapon was too big for you, your fingers barely wrapping around the handle, but you were so afraid of disappointing him. You kept your grip tight, watching in quiet horror as your dad took his bow and watched as a deer and her child entered the clearing. It was so quiet that morning, and it was even quieter when the deer fell, the poor fawn crying as its mother bled. You couldn’t tear your eyes from the snow, the blood turned so much into a pink sludge. But it was when your father pushed you forward that you realized why he put that knife into your hands. 

You remember he told you that this was how life was, that things die. It’s our job to honor those deaths faithfully, he said, wrapping his larger hands around your shaking ones. He held them tight, looking at you with such a calm and caring look, but it felt hollow somehow, as if he was miles away while you were trapped here. In these moments, we honor our living creatures by not allowing them to suffer. The animal wasn’t dead, your eyes widened, and you became keenly aware just how much it was twitching. You wanted it to stop, that was all you wanted. 

Your father took your hands, wrapped in his, rose the knife up, and plunged it down in the deer's neck. 

Not too long later, your father died. 

You found him next to your mother, strung up on a post in a cave. You’d never seen a dead body before, only knew what happened because your mother told you. She told you stories of raiders that were killed, bravely in combat or by their own foolishness. When you refuse to fall asleep, she’d tell you how they would come back as Hel-Walkers, thirsting for the glory they never received in the living, spooking you with promises that the men and women would rise from the dirt below and tear you limb to limb, that their green skin and hollow body would rush towards you and force you into the ground with them—that is if you never fell asleep. 

When you found them that day, their skin wasn’t green. It was sickly pale, like the pale you see in an illness, one that hurts, one that signs the end. Your mother told you stories of your old home, a village surrounded by hills. You never remembered a time before your small cottage in the Wildwoods, but your mother spoke of it with a reverence you rarely saw. Tales were whispered about the home she once had, one with her father and her mother, the home where she met your father, the home where she had you. She’d always tell the story the same way, telling you how she watched her own father build the home for her and her siblings, how they all shared a bed together and slept near the hearth, smelling the remnants of the day's meal as they drifted off to sleep. Her voice would slip into a soft whisper as she told you about your father, about how she fell for him at first sight, and how she carried you with so much love you came out huge. The story would always end with awkward silences and quiet tears as your mother choked out muffled words you could only rarely make out. Some days it was sickness, others it was plague, but at some point you knew, and that was enough for you. 

In that moment, staring up at the two, you wondered if your grandparents looked the same way when they were dying. If their skin peeled off and began to blue, freezing in the cold. You didn’t know if the village was cold, but everywhere in Midgard was. You assumed it was the same. You wondered, if when your mother watched her parents take their final breaths, she felt as hollow as you did. You wanted to weep, you really did, but you didn’t have any more tears left in you. Too many were shed for the dears, and for the parents you mourned in the days that passed without them, and for the journey it took to find them. It wasn’t their fault that they left, they didn’t pray for the storm or expect the lack of food, nor did they know to expect the raiders traveling through cover of the snow. What they did know is that they had a child, and that they’d protect that child even if it meant death. 

Perhaps now you can think of that day more clearly, perhaps you’ve had no choice. The day eventually became night, and the night eventually became day once more, and your parents were still dead, burned and turned to ash as you knew must be done. Your stomach still roared for food, your body still urged for protection, and as if nothing had happened at all, life went on. 

Perhaps you did cry that day, perhaps you screamed and begged for them to come back, but that doesn’t matter now, because life moves on. 

The woman finished carving the dear, placing it on a thick piece of wood near the cottage. She hulls it easily, plopping it onto the blood covered wood unceremoniously. The stump is deep red, the groves in the fibers soaked in old blood from previous kills, ones you tried to carve yourself, ones you failed, before meeting Faye. You always found Faye strange in a particular way, something you couldn’t exactly place. Strange in the way she simply showed up one day, in the section of woods you now dub “yours”, with a basket of forage you couldn’t help but ogle at. She caught you fishing, judging your form and supposed “savagery” as you attempted to catch the fish with your bare hands. You were so caught off guard, appalled at the random women’s injection, that you barely reacted at her trekking into the shallow water, standing close to you. Not even a second passed before she reached into the water and pulled out a fish so large you fell into the river below in shock. 

Is there larger significance to the shelter code Kris and Susie find in Flowery's roots being the date Undertale released, or is it just meant to be a reference. I personally think it details how this game and their worlds don't exist linearly.

Speaking of which, I've seen a lot of people take the Sans's "draw yourselves on this paper so I don't forget your faces" line as proof that Deltarune takes place before Undertale, however I'm still a big believer that Deltarune and Undertale are separate universes with shared circumstances, if that makes sense. While we're totally meant to connect both "Don't Forget" scenes in both games, I don't think these games exist linearly, with one game happening strictly before the other. Proof I use are Asriel being older in Deltarune than he is in Undertale (remember he technically died when he was a child), characters personalities being different from game to game (like Mettaton being reclusive), the prophecy/angel being interpreted differently in Undertale than in Deltarune, and probably more that I forgot. In fact I think things like the Gastor Follower monster using G instead of dollars is more proof that these games are separate universes. I'm not necessarily against the idea of these games taking place back to back, it just doesn't make sense to me personally.

Kris turns green after one night of not having the Soul in them. I think this kinda proves that the Soul is Kris's, not someone like Dess's.

The settings and menus do exist in the context of Deltarune's universe, with Susie even knowing that battle menu exists in the back of her mind. I feel like this only makes the device theory stronger.

This changer only proves even more that Ralsei knows way more than he lets on, and I personally think, similar to how there are moments where Ralsei is talking to Kris specifically, there are moments where Ralsei is talking to us (the player) specifically. There's a moment in Chapter 5 where Flowery says that if the dark world are bad then the person making them must be a bad person, which angers Ralsei. In turn, Ralsei tells Kris that there's a reason why they are the hero, and because of that he trusts them. This might be a stretch, but I really feel like Ralsei is talking to the player and basically saying "I'll always trust you."

I still think Dess is the knight, however a line in Chapter 5 confirms that the Dark World that was supposedly created long ago, around the time that Dess went missing, was opened by the same person who created the Dark World in the computer lab. This means that Dess opened the Dark World and became the Knight simultaneously, which I don't think is too crazy but is definitely confusing. This kinda gets into the Device theory, but I believe that the lake is connected to the physical memory of the game itself, so when Dess "drowned" she actually became fused with the games code/memory, which is why we see her speaking in the code of the game. Perhaps this game code is literally a Dark World itself, and this is how she became the Knight. It is a lot more believable to assume that Carol or Rudy is the Knight as a way of reviving Dess.

Finally, there's a lot of links to Gastor. Noelle saying that Kris became "interesting" in the weird route, the Normal NPC feeding Onion San to the town (a reference to the Meat Factory song), Happy Town playing in the weird route (another song linked with Gastor's theme), Seam saying that what they can make with the Shadow Crystals is "very, very interesting", the last scene of the Weird Route possibly being the Device that Gastor uses, the Gastor NPC's mentioning Fun and Values, and probably more.

This chapter not only makes Susie x Noelle cannon, it implies that Kris has deeper feeling for Susie that they can't act on due to so many factors (our control, caring about Susie's feelings, not wanting to hurt Noelle, etc), shows how Ralsei's friendship with Kris and Susie is making him less of a pushover and causing him to stand up for himself more, details how Asgore slowly lost touch with his family and deeply seeks a connection with Kris, how Noelle is becoming more brave as she becomes closer with Susie and rebuilds her relationship with Kris, AND further details Kris's separation from and hatred towards the Soul/the Player.