The Antediluvian imagery in Deltarune Chapter 4.
Disclaimer: the following section was written before Chapter 5 was announced yesterday, meaning that it is significantly more coherent than what follows. Thank you, and proceed with caution.
I’m not the first person to notice this, but I have Angel’s Egg on my mind and I need to get this out.
In case you haven’t noticed by now… Deltarune Chapter 4 sure has a lot of allusions to real-world religious texts, which makes perfect sense for the Dark Sanctuaries formed from the church and a metanarrative regarding fiction and storytelling.
Not just in relation to the stories themselves, but in how these ancient writings are recorded and interpreted.
To show what I mean… here’s some extracts from my old high school study edition Bible.
There’s a lot of references to the Genesis chapter specifically, (the act of creation, trees and fruit related to forbidden knowledge, the separation of dark and light, etc.), but the one I want to focus on is the story of the Ark.
The TaineBot01 abridged version is as follows:
Following the consumption of the forbidden fruit (commonly believed to be an apple), the invention of fratricide by Cain (the farmer not the AI ringmaster), and the proliferation of the Nephilim (the semi-divine offspring of humans and supernatural beings), God decides its time to wipe the slate and start over.
Noah, being the one human God considered righteous, was instructed to build a massive boat and preserve a mating pair of every kind of creature, plus enough food for everyone to survive, so life can continue after the world has been washed clean.
Noah followed these instructions to the letter, and seven days later the rainfall began on the seventeenth day on the second month, resulting in a flood that lasted 40 days and nights, sparing no one but Noah and his descendants (sidenote, but Japhet the firebird from the OFF is named after one of Noah's sons. anyways back to the summary)
One hundred and fifty days after the rain stopped, at which point the mountain peaks were seven meters underwater, the waters started to recede and the boat came to a rest on the seventeenth day of the seventh month. As the waters continued to recede, the mountaintops reappeared on the tenth month.
Forty days after, Noah sends out a raven and a dove. The raven kept flying but the dove returned, then another seven days later Noah sent out the dove again for it to return with an olive branch, indicating the presence of land and vegetation. Another seven days later, Noah sends out the dove again, only it does not return.
God then promises to not flood the earth again, the rainbow being a sign of this promise (another sidenote, the word used to describe this sign, or "mark", is the same word used to describe the mark of Cain, or stars as a sign or omen. unlike the first sidenote this one is actually important)
Life begins anew and sinful thoughts still exist in the world, but the flood will not happen again as per this promise.
That's the version most people know, though details may vary based on transcripts.
(For reference here's some rather blurry photos from the aforementioned study Bible. This one's a contemporary edition meant for high school divinity studies but you get the idea.)
Simple and has absolutely nothing to do with Deltarune, right?
The allegorical story of an imperfect world washed away by its divine architect, mirroring the creation of the world from the primordial ocean of chaos, may have rather important implications in the world of Deltarune, where Water and Darkness are symbolically connected through Dark Fountains.
A flood of ink to wash it all away, hell’s roar bubbling from the depths, fountains overflowing to cover the world with darkness…
And the bridge from Raise Up Your Bat.
Come follow me into the dark
With your heart as the ark
Which shall shine you the way
Because I'm with you in the dark
With your heart as my mark
Which shall guide you the way,
The only part that Ralsei doesn’t completely change through the Kidzbop cover version, and also the part where the Lost Girl motif shows up.
In addition to the recurring ideas of rainfall/floods and the divine imagery of the Angel, the numbers seven and seventeen show up quite a bit throughout the story of the ark. The rain began seven days after Noah was instructed (mirroring the seven days in which the world was created), Noah brings with him seven pairs of every kind of bird, the flood began on the seventeenth day of the second month, and the ark came to a rest on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, Noah waits in seven day intervals when trying to find out whether the waters receded.
If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed I’ve left out a rather important element of the original story.
I left it out because Deltarune also left it out.
That’s right folks, it’s birds again.
Birds are one of the most important aspects of the original story - to find out if any land remains after the flood, Noah sends out a raven and a dove, and eventually the dove returns with an olive branch, indicating that some form of land is out there.
(As for why the raven didn’t find anything… being a pretty ancient story the idea is that the dark carrion-eater bird was “wrong” while the light, pure bird was “right”. Birds don’t work that way irl, don’t assign morality based on feather colour folks.)
So birds are kind of important to the story of the flood, because they’re involved in what happens after everything gets washed. But it doesn’t end there.
The versions of the bible most people know feature an interesting word choice when it refers to the animals of the world. You’ll often see phrases like “all animals, reptiles, birds, and fish”, or “every kind of animal and bird”. Why aren’t birds considered animals?
The reason for this is due to the Bible being an ancient text that has been translated many times. The original word means something like “winged creature” or “flying creature”, thus these phrases mean something like “animals of the earth, sea and sky”, or “animals on the land and in the air”.
This has lead to some funny instances where bats are referred to as birds, when we know now that they very much aren’t birds. They’re bugs.
We understand that birds are a subset of animals thanks to a little thing called taxonomy, but this wasn’t the case for the people who recorded these stories long ago and just saw flying things in the sky. So now, it seems really weird to make an exception for birds specifically as if they’re something other than animals.
Deltarune really doesn’t acknowledge the presence of birds at all. Unless it’s to make a joke about Berdly or as an offhanded comment like with Kris's birdcage or the Weird Birds sounds in chapter 1. There are, however, several birdlike darkners that show up on occasion. Swatch and the Swatchlings, Poppup the dolphin-birds, the Starwalker Bird, Spamton and the Addisons if you squint (I always see artists draw them like birds of paradise so I’m throwing them in here), Guei the Ghost-Birds made from the hope candles, the fire extinguisher chicken guy, even the Titan has feathered wings.
And the Winglade darkners, based on the same quill pens as their sword equivalent, are described as halo_bat in the code despite moulting like birds… which is pretty funny for reasons described above.
And the quill pens they form from are specifically described as made of white feathers.
A white pen, known as Hope.
I think you see where I’m going with this.
This was written before the trailer for Chapter 5 showed us this.
I wanted to go further and talk about possible allusions to Gnosticism which invert the typical associations of the Old Testament (with Yaldabaoth as the malicious creator of the imperfect material world, and the first humans consuming the fruit of the tree of knowledge being a step towards enlightenment rather than an act of sin), as well as the possible implications of the Gnostic Phoenix (the bird not the lawyer) towards Deltarune's avian imagery and connections to the birdcage/wings/angel.
However my brain is too fried to go on after receiving the greatest hit of confirmation bias in the form of this single white feather.
All I have to say now is I am happy to confirm:
Bird Theory is Biblically Accurate.
(Postscript edit: since this one's super messy for further reading I'd recommend these posts for a more in depth look into the water/darkness imagery and connections to the story of creation and Deltarune's metafiction okay thanks ^^)
annaxmalina
romaincrisis
dededos
janainaart
theartofmadeline
areudirty
yousharknotpass
pixelskylines
gummygunk
