#princess

people are so quick to compare kris' situation in deltarune to demonic possession, but in my opinion it's a lot closer to sainthood. having your will imposed on by a greater authority (the player metanarratively, but also carol and potentially others diagetically) with immense pressure on you to succeed, martyring yourself for a cause you can't fully explain to anyone because (you believe) they wouldn't understand, sacrificing your personhood for a "higher purpose", the themes of psychosis and disordered identity and being in a state of stress-induced crisis which were exceedingly common - and an implicit condemnation of the consequences of ignoring or recontextualising them as divine influence instead of making any attempt to meaningfully help the person experiencing them - in so-called saints, the imagery of being a cage for a soul formed of "human parts"... and at the end of it all, you were just an ordinary person whose suffering was retroactively made meaningful (and more palatable) by narrativisation and mythologisation. that's not possession, that's sainthood.

not to mention the seemingly loosely catholic-inspired properties of hometown's dominant religion and the occult practices associated with some of its counterculture. the nature of darkners as objects personified by their emotional, bordering on spiritual, significance rendering them forces by which pure darkness can be illuminated and made sense of, which necessarily implicates those who hold them in that regard in their creation, not unlike relics. the roaring knight being very possibly the horrifying culmination of the consequences of that, and both a dubious ally and source of terror to kris. the fun gang's assumption of roles of servitude to a preordained narrative (the prophecy).