nomorebluess

with the knight and ERAM, any kind of strong "story and logical" connections will have to be made speculatively, as one of them has no confirmed dialogue at all and the motives of both are unclear. that being the case, i am going to start by drawing a bunch of visual and symbolic parallels between the two, and see where that takes us. i will link other good posts on the matter as i go through all of this.

the very basic first point: ERAM is generally referred to in the files as "nightmare," connecting it to the FUN event ice-e "nightmare" image in the undertale word search. however, ERAM, or "mare" backwards, is only one half of "nightmare." the other half is... "night." the homophony between "night" and "knight" is used CONSTANTLY in UTDR (knight knight, the save point dialogue before the knight fight referring to a "cold night" approaching). "nightmare" = "knight eram," then, is not very much of a stretch.

now, let's get into the audio and visuals. i want you to listen to the first 40 seconds of this mashup someone made (credit to searchableusername of course).

these two songs have the same bpm and the same bassline, which appears to be taken from burn in despair!! in undertale. BURNING EYES is a chiptune variation that uses the chaos king/card castle motif in the melody (explainable as ERAM is holding the king's mantle). black knife, potentially-hallucinated lost girls aside, is a variation with more traditional instruments that uses the door/the chase motif associated directly with the knight. BURNING EYES is to black knife, maybe, as NORTHERNLIGHT is to flashback (side b): representations of the same musical track inside MANTLE and outside it... just as i think ERAM is to the knight.

let's talk about lighting for a minute. dess has the northern lights on the wallpaper of her room, connecting her to NORTHERNLIGHT. she also has a lot of stars. the stars are all over her blanket as well, and her blanket/bed are red and purple, while the rest of the room is blue and green.

if you believe dessknight, which i think you should, this connects dess strongly to the knight, since the shadow mantle protects against dark/star, and the knight, accordingly: uses a lot of stars in its attacks, has flavor text relating to stars, and has a big finisher drawing stars into itself, reminiscent of asriel's "hyper goner," that ends in a "spinner" with multiple arms, while the background fades between blue, purple, and red.

hey you know who else has a background that goes from blue to purple to red as the battle progresses? you know who else has a fucking spinner attack with multiple arms, while titan eyes (heavily associated with the knight, who has what looks like an eye in their chest) cover the background? fucking ERAM.

ERAM, most notably, attacks with fire, paralleling them with asriel once again. however, another of their attacks has them turning themselves into a shooting star that falls from the top of the screen, leaving a trail.

(their smaller fireballs, seen above, also have a plus-sign that you could take as reminiscent of a four-pointed SAVE star at their center, but that could really be taken as anything. it's five pixels. still, i noticed it, so i'll leave it here.)

while we're on some not-that-strong evidence, let's also talk about the colors of those fireballs. i made a half-joking comparison a couple days ago between the fireballs and dess's guitar. the colors are different, but they're about the amount of different that orange's dark world colors are from her light world colors, and those are clearly meant to be the same character.

one of the other notable things ERAM does is summon instances of IMAGE_FRIEND to attack. this connects them, most obviously, to the "strange someone" or "cat owner" indicated by the various secret boss dialogues. the knight... has the same or a similar laugh to instances of IMAGE_FRIEND when it laughs at susie. it could be that the knight has friend's laugh, implying that FRIEND "controls" the knight, but i'm of the interpretation that FRIEND has the knight's laugh, implying that the knight "controls" the instances of FRIEND, and is thus the "cat owner." it's worth noting that the knight is visually similar to tasque manager and even has some parallels with pink/mew mew. to summarize, tasque manager is a triangular cat who controls cats, while pink is a older sister "magical anime catgirl" whose theme song has lyrics about burning in hell (hell's roar) and a pretty cutie revolution. both are musicians who are also a bit tsundere. anyway, before i get too far off track, this would mean the knight is ERAM by syllogism.

speaking of FRIEND stuff, it's commonly believed that FRIEND "is" the tail of hell, based on FRIEND's connections to the circular cats in cat petterz 2, even though FRIEND is notably never depicted with a tail of any sort on-screen. to this, i would like to present a counterargument: cat petterz 2 is legally-distinct catz/petz. and catz tails do not fucking look like that

unless you're saying this is a very heavy stylization, petz tails do their best to emulate what an animal's actual tail looks like, even with the circles. this. Is Not That. it shares far more similarity with spamton's heart on a chain, or jevil's appearance when attacked... or, for that matter, the trail of circles ERAM leaves in "shooting star" form. or, hey, maybe, THIS:

the knight turns into a circle, and leaves a trail of circular afterimages. one might even say a tail. if they are the one contacting the various secret bosses, this would make coherent the similar motif of circles in a chain that spamton and jevil share. one of the biggest allusions to "hell" in the game so far is jevil dialogue that directly connects hell to the roaring, as well as the knight:

jevil also is the one who told the king about the knight, implying that he knows them directly. yet another notable mention of "hell" comes from spamton, who makes a reference to burgerpants undertale genocide route dialogue, of all things, after seemingly being threatened by... someone...? to discourage him from talking about the knight:

i'm partial to the interpretation advanced in this post, that the pointed tail is really a "pointed tale," or a deliberate and accusatory story (that is, the weird route), and the children following it are kris and noelle. the one problem with that being the "tail of hell" is that the prophecy panel directly states that [someone] WILL see the tail of hell take crawl, which is pretty fucking definitive when the weird route is completely optional for us to see. as is ERAM, for that matter, at least thus far. we can speculate that ERAM will become non-optional in the future, but you know who is, one hundred percent, non-optional to see in a circular form creating a "tail of hell"-like image? The Knight. we have to see them taking that form when they fly up towards undyne in chapter 3, before they turn into a bird for some reason, as well as on multiple other occasions.

it's pretty common knowledge at this point that the sword route mirrors the weird route, and that ERAM seems to be the one advocating for it. the weird route also links directly back to "hell," with the "ominous" jingle variant that plays when you walk into the lake being called "snd_ominous_hell." if ERAM is just the knight, and they are both "the tail of hell" and creating a "pointed tale," this neatly ties together all of these associations, while also giving our ostensible main antagonist a major role to play.

actually, it gives them a lot of roles to play! let's talk about the second gonermaker voice and the /thankyou/ ARG. the second voice, ERAM, and /thankyou/ write in ways that mimic chara. they have a lot of linguistic commonalities in japanese, but i want to specifically mention thejr sentence case in english and use of hiragana/kanji in japanese. undertale, the light world of deltarune, and MANTLE all almost entirely lack kanji (mimicking old games that couldn't store that many characters), but both chara and ERAM seemingly "hack in" kanji to their games just to maintain their preferred speech patterns. this is reflected in english with MANTLE using all-caps, but ERAM nonetheless using sentence case, "hacking in" lowercase letters. i have a longer post on this with other details that i may release later.

(unrelatedly, ERAM and the /thankyou/ ARG both use ellipses to break up their sentences, like, a lot. this is superficially similar to the rather knight-y phone call kris gets in chapter 4, but those ellipses generaly denote missing words, so it's different. i'm putting it down as weak evidence as well. they also have tendencies to allude to gaster, but this is of a similar level to asgore hitting the "very, very interesting." i don't think they're necessarily allied with gaster.)

anyway, the second voice notably renders the pronoun "omae" in the hiragana script, while chara does so in kanji. this leads me to believe these two are categorically not the same character, but rather, parallels. namely, they are "vengeful ghosts with tendencies for gamebreaking."

ERAM does a lot of gamebreaking. you can find them out of bounds in MANTLE's first area. they write, often, using unreadable black text that you have to highlight to read. they damage kris directly from inside the game, accessing a higher "reality level" directly. the second voice is similar - their only known action is to interfere with gaster's "game" by discarding our vessel and shunting our soul into kris. /thankyou/ can access higher "reality levels" too; seemingly hijacking gaster's DEVICE, they open a connection from deltarune's light world and/or DEVICE layer to mess with the deltarune website and send emails to us. we can even bring up the "strange someone," who apparently made jevil and spamton Weird And Meta Like That.

and finally, the knight is also apparently capable of accessing higher "reality layers" than the one they are currently on. the way they attack tenna and flowery is by destroying their light-world objects, bypassing the prohibition on actually killing enemies that exists in the dark worlds. they use a SWOON attack, which no other known character has done and knocks party members into a state worse than DOWN that they cannot naturally recover from during battle, as if they're also knocking them unconscious in the light world, rather than just knocking them down. they tear the battle box apart like it's nothing, and at the end of their final attack, they look directly into the fucking camera, teleport our soul if we're on the wrong side, and cut our screen in half as well.

the knight may also have some level of omniscience and ability to interfere when one of their "puppets" is about to deviate from their plan. i'm 50/50 on knight caller vs. carol caller at this point, but if we do believe knight caller and also that the knight has some kind of meta-awareness, then it makes sense how the knight "knows" to call kris's phone and guilt-trip them about the "promise" as they're about to leave and follow susie (representing them "choosing susie" over the knight). this is also supported by the aforementioned bit with spamton, who has... something happen to him when he tries to mention the knight to kris. again, it could be interpreted as kris threatening him out of our sight, but i don't know if i buy that kris is that aware of what spamton knows or was about to say. spamton also seems to be heavily controlled/influenced by some higher power when we see him so i think we can also guess that the knight is activating his proverbial shock collar when he's about to say too much. pink, who is a knight parallel, has the same green strings that puppet spamton, but they extend from her fingers, which could imply that she is the puppeteer...

we could say that the knight and ERAM are separate entities that just have similar kinds of awareness/powersets, of course, but i like the interpretation that very few characters actually have these gaster-flowey-chara abilities. i don't think i should be stumbling onto someone who remembers my snowgraves at every step. i truly believe there are only two characters in deltarune who legitimately have this kind of power, and one of them is gaster.

now, why would the knight, as ERAM, create the weird route, especially if they are a holiday, someone who cares about noelle? well... why does asriel, as flowey, easily murder his parents, people he used to care deeply about? potentially curiosity or detachment, of course, but also, i think, as an expression of dissatisfaction and pain. real authors write stories with difficult subject matter because they cannot think of another way to convey the thoughts/opinions/feelings they wish to. ERAM, the ARG voice, and the second voice both seem very bitter and accusatory towards us, gaster, and even kris. as for the knight, i certainly don't think you become a fucked-up emaciated melting cervine wraith by having a perfect and happy life with zero material or psychological obstructions. if they have gained a greater awareness through experiencing something like a "weird route" themselves, it may be that they're continuing the cycle of abuse by goading us to inflict it upon noelle. it may be that they want kris and noelle to understand them, in the worst way possible. this kind of speculation, though, could be a post of its own, so i'll leave it at that.

i think one of the strongest things the knight and ERAM share is their relationship to kris/the fun gang. kris and the knight are working together; ERAM thanks kris for their "hard work" and ends their battle by saying they "both have a lot of work to do." ERAM talks to kris kind of like a ragebaiting older sibling telling them all about how they suck, which mirrors the knight's ragebaiting-aurafarming behavior and would make sense for a dessknight (since she is an older kid kris hung out with). ERAM and the knight are both also manipulating kris into being more violent and betraying their friends. kris and the knight being allied tends to put people off from thinking ERAM, who tries to murder the fuck out of kris, could be the knight, but, like. the knight has no problem with harming kris. they fling kris off a balcony and badly hurt them in 4, passive-aggressively "knight" kris by pushing them down with their sword if we complete their chapter 3 battle, and generally hit kris with blades repeatedly and often. the only consideration kris ever gets is being DOWNed instead of SWOONed. this would actually make sense if the knight is meta-aware and knows kris/the SOUL can always just try again, so there's really no issue in killing them or beating them within an inch of their life. kris also seems unhappy with the relationship, what with how they flop down despondently on the table after they conclude the call in the holiday house kitchen, their evident guilt and self-hatred over hiding their secret schemes, and the whole ending scene of ch4-normal. knightERAM, imo, just reinforces the existing relationship between these two.

(also, as i've said before, it's funny if the knight is late because they're chilling backstage waiting for kris to come play their weird SAW-trap evil creepypasta with them. what else do we actually think they could have been doing? no. the answer has always been Roaring Knight Gaming)

a minor point that i couldn't really fit anywhere else: a knightERAM would give them both motive and means to steal the shadow mantle. an armor that can defend against them is not something they would want the heroes to have access to, unless it's on their terms (i.e., finish my secret evil manipulative game if you want to even stand a chance, jackass). as for means, the knight's battle has loads of flavor text about the wind, implying they can control it or passively cause Wind To Happen to some degree. the wind blows the shadow mantle away from the king. yeah, i think that was the knight stealing it from off-fucking-screen.

i will end by addressing the probably-clear objection that i am making my favorite character responsible for everything and not leaving anything for anyone else. yeah, i agree. i wouldn't be surprised if this was too much dessknight. however, i feel like a strong concentration of "responsibility" and "importance" in exactly two characters was... what happened in undertale, as opposed to a large web of different characters scheming against each other. most of the undertale characters acted, in some way, in response to the deaths of asriel and chara. they were the two the main endings were most clearly about, and strange occurrences along the journey could almost all, with the benefit of hindsight, be attributed to them. that focus on a tight central core is part of why we cared about them so much, and why undertale's ending hit so hard.

s.s. van dine had many bad takes on mysteries, but he had some good ones. here is a good one: