winter???

In storytelling, the possibility space is the yet-unwritten or unread parts of the story, the things that are implied but not fully stated, the space where the audience fills in the gaps with theorizing and wild mass guessing. As every story goes on, the possibility space becomes more and more constrained; if you want to end a story, you have to answer questions and cut off the branches. The moment one word is written on the page, the possibility space begins to shrink, if only in the sense of "the next word has to follow from the previous in a way that is grammatically correct".

I've read books, watched shows, and played games that set themselves up with incredibly open possibility spaces. Fertile ground for theories, implications of things happening behind the curtain, dazzling conspiracies, and a possibility space with endless promise. And for some of those stories, the single ending they eventually narrowed to left me unsatisfied and mourning lost potential. When a story starts, it could end in an infinite number of ways, but when it's over, there's only one ending.

For the stories that disappointed me, the drop off usually seemed to start around the halfway point. It's where the story stops introducing new characters, focuses in on the important ones, and pinpoints the key plotlines. By the start of the final act, almost every story has already narrowed to one conclusion; all that's left is to see it through. 

For simplicity's sake, let's say the ending of a story really begins around... 5/7ths of the way through.

WE LIKE MIKE

Every chapter of Deltarune hides a secret(or not-so-secret), optional, and extremely hard extra boss. In classic RPG fashion, beating these bosses grants you powerful and unique equipment, but even more tantalizingly, gives you little breadcrumbs of capital-L Lore™️that point to a wider myth arc, deeper mysteries, and characters manipulating events behind the scenes. For a fanbase where a large portion migrated there from a separate but similarly conspiracy-obsessed fandom (more on that later), these secret bosses are the real draw of Deltarune. They're simultaneously proof of being a god gamer who could surmount the biggest challenge the game had and induction to a secret club of players who know the "real lore" of the game. When new chapters drop, you'll probably focus as much on figuring out how to get the secret boss as you will the main story.

The extra boss of Chapter 4 is one of my favorites, but beyond that fight, there's another, even more extra boss (a phantasm boss, even. IYKYK). After beating the main boss of the chapter, a door with the name MIKE on it unlocks, and Kris gets to go in alone. MIKE is a name that first showed up around the extra boss of Chapter 2, with hints that whoever MIKE was, they might be extremely relevant to the myth arc going forward.

The MIKE behind the door turns out to be three guys who are filling in for the real(?) MIKE; they don't know who MIKE is, are obsessed with trying to figure out who MIKE is and what he means to Tenna (the main boss of the previous chapter), and have assembled a pin-and-string conspiracy board trying to figure it all out. The fight itself is a fun little gimmick battle that fully changes depending on whether you're playing on certain consoles or PC, isn't impossibly difficult, and is an obvious joke about/tip of the hat to the rabid fan theorists. When you inspect the pinboard after the three MIKES leave, the narratorial voice says "You don't really like looking at this sort of thing."

After Chapter 2 came out a few years prior, I made exactly that kind of pin-and-string conspiracy board with some friends. So I thought the scene was hilarious.

Behold, pepe_silvia.pdf

To play both sides of the field for a moment, fan theorizing is fun. When a story places a bunch of puzzle pieces in front of you (and Deltarune certainly does) it's a natural instinct to try and fit them together. It encourages community; ask someone else what they thought this or that line meant, and maybe they'll have an insight that you never would've gleaned. When the possibility space is wide open before you, you feel encouraged to run around in it and turn over every potential stone and map out all the possible paths forward.

The problem comes when that possibility space starts to run out.

ENDINGS OF ONE SORT OR ANOTHER

Permit me a couple of semi-personal tangents before we get around to talking about Chapter 5. I promise they're relevant.

Kinda unsurprisingly, Stephen King has been one of my favorite authors for most of my life. The guy can write, this is known. Out of the many, many books he’s written and will continue writing until the second he dies, my favorite is far and away The Dark Tower series. I read the series through high school into college, and of the seven books, the final one holds a pretty special place in my heart, and the ending most of all. 

To make an extremely long fantasy epic short, after a long journey, series protagonist Roland Deschain reaches the Dark Tower he’s spent the entire series striving for. He enters, the doors shut behind him, and the story’s camera pans away. “Here the darkness hides him from my storyteller’s eye and he must go on alone,” as the book says. There’s a brief epilogue where Susannah, one of Roland’s companions who earlier on quietly and voluntarily exited the story to another world, arrives in a parallel version of New York City and meets a parallel version of her late lover, Eddie, and another one of their companions, Jake. The final lines of the epilogue have always stuck with me;

“And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live… …That’s all. That’s enough. Say thankya.”

It’s a beautiful, soft, touching ending that sees Roland’s dear companions reunited, in a fashion, and being allowed by the story to live out their days in peace.

There’s a little more after this ending, however. 

Following the epilogue is a chapter called “Coda” that opens with the authorial voice speaking to the reader; telling them to be satisfied with this ending, to not want to follow Roland into the Dark Tower they’ve spent seven books searching for, to be happy with this small happiness and a bit of ambiguity. 

“I hope you came to hear this tale, and not just munch your way through the pages to the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page and see what is writ upon… …What’s behind it won’t improve your love life, grow hair on your bald spot, or add five years to your natural span (not even five minutes). There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal “Once upon a time.””

But in the end, the authorial voice relents, and we follow Roland to the top of the tower. When he reaches the top, he’s pulled through a door marked with his name, and the series starts over again at the beginning, seven books ago; “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

I loved this ending, too. To me, it felt wholly natural, like the only way the series could’ve ever ended. It wasn’t until a long time later that I learned the reaction to this ending from the broader Stephen King fandom at the time was almost entirely negative.

Speaking of negative fandom reaction to endings, Homestuck.

Love her or hate her, you watched. It was all you could do.

For basically my entire teenage years and a little into college, I was deep in the Homestuck mines. I wasn’t reading at the very start, but I was there for the vast majority of it. I was on Tumblr the whole time, right on the front lines of the fandom, the fan theories, and the discourse. To say it defined my teenage years wouldn’t be inaccurate.

By the ending in 2016, however, I felt I’d mostly moved on. I was there to watch Act 7 drop, and I let that be the end for me. It felt as satisfying as it could have for a weird, scattershot webcomic that went through multiple massive hiatuses and obvious swings in planning and concept. It arguably defined modern fandom while still being fairly niche and obscure; Homestuck truly did make this world.

Anyway, I let that book close, and moved on.

A lot of people hated this ending, too. It would be considerably more trouble than it’s worth to fully explain the ending of Homestuck in detail, so to summarize; some fans were mad their favorite character wasn’t relevant in the ending, some fans thought it was a wet fart of a finale that unceremoniously declared the story over, the moments weren’t hype enough, the aura wasn’t strong enough, and worst/best of all? Vriska was there.

The fan theorizing around Homestuck was constant, and it was only made more intense by the multiple months-long or even year-long hiatuses leaving fans grasping for anything to talk about with their favorite hyperfixation. It didn’t help that the comic itself leaned into this: the number 413 (the date the comic started) is some sort of significant in the story, and it was evaluated and cross-referenced with enough outside material to make Nostradamus scholars blush.

In the end, most of it didn’t matter. The symbolism, the numerology, the endless theorizing about which character out of dozens would be the key to understanding the story; it ended with a few short, flashy animations that wrapped up the central conflicts and that was that. Some fans moved on, some didn’t, the lone and level sands stretched far away.

For our purposes, the most important thing about Homestuck is that one major contributor to the project was a guy named Toby Fox, who composed a lot of music for the series’ iconic flash animations. If you’re reading this, you might have heard of him. Undertale was released about a year before Homestuck came to its conclusion, and in one of the many hiatuses in that timeframe, a huge fandom migration from the latter to the former occurred (including me!). Undertale owes a pretty significant amount of its early popularity to this cross-pollination, with longtime Homestuck fans forming an early base for the new fandom.

And part of me can’t help thinking Toby saw all the fandom reactions to Homestuck, especially the ending, and remembered.

Okay, we can finally get around to talking about the thing I said I was going to talk about: Deltarune Chapter 5!

DELTARUNE CHAPTER 5

Toby, that’s scary.

The experience of playing Chapter 5 as a “normal” fan of the series vs. as someone even passingly aware of the fan theorizing space is really weird. Despite not being extremely deep in the fan theory mines for a while, I have enough of a passing familiarity with what’s going on in there that playing Chapter 5 felt like watching someone read a phrasebook of sleeper cell activation phrases. However, they were reading it in a way that suggested they were also doing a standup comedy routine. Just, y’know, in a Manchurian Candidate-sorta way.

Right from the jump, there’s an extremely unserious optional boss right in Castle Town versus Nubert (SSJ Forme), Trashy, and Ball. The fight isn’t a pushover, but it’s not extra boss level either. The soundtrack is called “Inappropriate Recycling”, and, as the name suggests, it jokingly remixes the leitmotif used in each one of the extra bosses up to this chapter. This gets explicitly called out when the three “MIKES” from the previous chapter show up at the end of the fight and turn the fight into a cartoon cloud-of-dust brawl. “I THOUGHT I heard someone misusing the BATTAT motif!”

The unserious references to hidden content in past games and prominent fan theories keep coming through the whole chapter. Here’s an incomplete collection of phrases that are completely innocuous unless you are touched by a kind of madness: eggs, justice, speaking in hands, Omega, all yummies. If none of that made sense to you, that means you’re a normal person who engages with things in a normal way.

But never mind all that. We’ve got an extra boss to find, and every crumb along the way seems to indicate this chapter’s boss is going to be a big one. Seam, the shopkeeper of your Castle Town, calls this one out as being the final extra boss. When you get to the Dark World of this chapter, you’re greeted with a character that’s explicitly modeled off Flowey, one of the final bosses of Undertale. Like most extra bosses, the first direct signposts towards them are dropped at the shop right at the game’s midpoint, with a strange key only available for purchase if you collect pink coins scattered around the world. To actually get to the boss proper, you need to go almost all the way to the end of the game, where a large pink door is hidden slightly off the main path. Foxes seem to be significant. There’s a lot of buildup!

Anyway, the extra boss is an anime catgirl.

✌️

The fight, while definitely up to the difficulty standards of the other extra bosses, is a complete joke in terms of tone. Pink is a fight where you flirt with her to build up her DOKI meter and try to get her to be honest with her feelings…which unfortunately leads to her body and soul being separated and her throwing copious amounts of bombs at you in the middle of dating sim. Her body wants to flirt with you while her soul hates you. Ralsei turns into a marketable plushie again. I think Hatsune Miku is on the track. It’s a lot.

After the fight, Pink gives you a Shadow Crystal (the plot reward for beating each extra boss) and leaves. No explanation for why she has that, no plot breadcrumbs, no link to the rest of the bosses, just hands it over and exits stage right.

My initial reaction to the fight was, understandably, shock. We’re doing this? This is the big extra boss? The last one? The one we’ve been building up to? This?….Okay, I guess we’re doing this now.

But after actually completing the fight(which, purely from a gameplay perspective, I think has a LOT of design flaws that don’t mesh well, it’s set up as a gimmick fight you’re expected to clear easily which is common in these games but the damage is scaled like a superboss that kills you in four hits and every time you reset you do the same exact inputs on the menu and click through a lot of obligatory dialogue and every reset drains your will to keep going because you have to do the SAME THING over and over and it doesn’t feel like you’re getting better at the parts that actually killed you and the BOMBS god damn it the BOMBS they do so much DAMAGE and the screen shakes SO MUCH that you can’t see where they’re GOING and AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH), I started to like what it was doing more and more.

Treasure this world, won’t you?

There’s a lot of things going on in the fight. I was delighted to finish it, finally get to talk to people about it, and find almost all different takes from different people about what the fight was doing in a narrative sense. Pink is a trans allegory. She’s an allegory for Kris and the player character. She’s about BPD and plurality. She’s doing a lot.

But out of all of it, I found myself focusing mostly on what her place in the story is - or more precisely, the place she was expected to have. She’s not just the chapter’s extra boss; she’s explicitly stated to be the last extra boss in the game. It’s one of a million signposts that wherever the story of Deltarune is heading, it’s almost over. And instead of one final, climactic boss that places the last few story tidbits we need into our hands, she’s a silly gimmick fight that’s also a huge homage to Tokimeki Memorial. And the more I thought about her, and put it together with other things the game and Toby himself have said, the more I felt that she was exactly what the game needed at this exact moment.

Once you’ve beaten Pink, you can return to the shop at the midpoint of the game where you first unknowingly met her. She doesn’t have a lot of new dialogue, and none of it is the Lore™ most extra bosses leave behind, but what she does have made the pieces fall into place for me.

“I guess…I’ll be ‘graduating’ from here soon.” “I… I’m not just ready to leave my friends behind yet…” “But, is that something… anyone is ever ready for?”

When you leave, she bids you farewell with the line that stuck in my head and refused to get out.

In the Deltarune newsletter on the eve of Chapter 5’s release, Toby described the chapter like this:

“Let’s turn around and watch the sun, before it goes down completely. Let’s smile again. Let’s have one more fun adventure, okay?”

It’s exactly because Pink is completely disconnected from the Lore the game has built up; exactly because she’s a goofy, unserious character; and exactly because she’s a character who’s going to stick around as this Dark World fades along with all its inhabitants that she’s the perfect extra boss to send Deltarune into its closing act.

Deltarune is a game that constantly drops little breadcrumbs of lore and encourages you to play it in weird, idiosyncratic ways just to see all the little secrets and hidden things. Sometimes it’s as simple as dropping an NPC behind you after a plot beat to give you some funny dialogue if you backtrack. Sometimes it’s hints to a whole greater-scope mystery that cast the events of the game in a different light. Sometimes it’s [screaming, sobbing, wailing and gnashing of teeth in the dark void where none can help you and you’re trapped of your own volition as punishment for your misdeeds], or as everyone else calls it, the Weird Route. But for the whole game, Deltarune clearly wants you to pay attention.

But, you also don’t have to, and the game doesn’t want you to.

Like I said earlier, part of me thinks Toby remembers the fan reaction to the ending of Homestuck, an eight-year webcomic with a massive fan theory industrial complex and an ending that left a huge portion of the fanbase unsatisfied. Now, as Deltarune might be on track to finish on its tenth anniversary (christ I hate the passage of time) and has grown an even more massive fan theory industrial complex, Chapter 5 takes on the feeling of trying to ease the audience into an ending. Not necessarily a specific ending, but just “an ending” in general.

Let’s have one more fun adventure, okay?

The pitfall of fan theory is getting too attached. You start thinking everything is evidence, everything is pointing towards your theory. You become certain you know where the story is going. You’ve solved this one. You’re going to get a good grade in playing this video game/reading this book/watching this series, something which is both reasonable to want and possible to achieve.

It’s a mindset with no winning outcome. Your theory is wrong? You’re unsatisfied and think the story should’ve gone differently. Your theory is right? The fun of being surprised is stolen from you because the story, to you at least, becomes predictable. At its worst, theorizing can turn a narrative into a math problem.

Enter Pink, a silly, out-of-place extra boss who doesn’t do the thing she’s “supposed to” in the story. No lore, no ‘freedom’, no air crackling, just a silly, fun, and a little bit heartfelt character. She feels like she’s offering an offramp for the theorists, a way to ease the audience into the gradual closing of the possibility space. Right before we go to the climax, let’s do a silly one. Just as a last reminder that this is all for fun, to some degree.

To be continued in Chapter 6

Alright, so, big ending take time, if I even have one. 

After finishing Pink’s fight, I could feel Toby Fox putting his hand on my shoulder and saying “Hey, I know I’ve put a lot of puzzle pieces around for you to play with, but the story is going to end soon. If the picture these pieces make isn’t the one you thought they were going to make, I hope you’ll still enjoy the ride anyway. If they don’t make a picture at ALL, I hope you still enjoyed playing with them. A lot of people put a lot of effort into this whole thing, and I hope you come away satisfied for sticking around, and not just for whatever the ending in and of itself was.”

I feel a lot of echoes of The Dark Tower, where King’s authorial voice sighs and tells you he only wrote this specific part of the ending because it was expected of him, and that the journey was the point, not the destination. I remember watching Act 7 of Homestuck on my crappy Lenovo laptop in my college dorm, feeling relief as a chapter of my life closed and a sort of gratitude for the story that shaped my teenage years, for better or worse.

As the possibility space of the story begins to close in around its characters, more than in almost any other story I’ve read, I feel ready for it to happen in Deltarune. It’s almost there. I want to see how it ends, regardless of whether I’m ‘right’ or not with the few theories rattling around in my head. It’s been a great ride.