!

but there’s a bit more in ch5 that i find could add some interesting context to him, too. the initial bit that struck me, before i got into the dark-world segment, was the introduction of the festival king and queen tradition. for a long time, i couldn’t pin down why the festival was treated with a romantic connotation, but this seems to be its source. (it even comes with a couple’s parade!) contrary to popular belief, i feel that fate and founding fables in deltarune’s world are represented not by the dark but by the light that presides over it.

and of the lightners, asgore seems the primary originator and enforcer of this particular fable. he and toriel have won year after year, and his shop is named for his series of victories. to him, even kris and asriel exist in relation to this tradition.

according to noelle, asriel and dess were "supposed to win", too. no one outside of dess’ family seems to even think of her as anything other than “asriel’s girlfriend”.

this, then, frames kris and noelle’s childhood games of play-pretend in an interesting light. i’ve always been partial to the idea that spades and queen’s relationship was fated in some way – not that they didn’t love each other, necessarily, but that a romantic relationship is something they spawned in as having “because they were supposed to”. to me, it tracked with the arbitrary way a lot of the other couples were presented. similar to the prophecy and its many reinterpretations, the older children were "supposed" to follow in the footsteps of one party’s parents, the younger children followed in the footsteps of the older children, and the toys followed in the footsteps the children that played with them. even the character who mentions these games offhand is the herald of a weird-route-esque game, and said route is one where we coerce kris and noelle into performing a romantic relationship complete with wedding ring.

seeing the festival’s king-and-queen tradition in ch5 really tied this all together for me. queen calls spades her ex-husband “or something”, as though even she is somewhat aware of their relationship’s arbitrary nature. the two of them being tied together by fate is definitely a stronger read now than it was before. and in keeping with that, so too does the relationship between kris and noelle seem influenced by this tradition. they play pretend as a king and a queen, though noelle admits they were never sure of who should take which role. it’s all asgore ever talks about, especially when kris is alone with him, and ch5 draws more attention than ever to his symbolic weird-route connections. even susie tells kris that she’d been under the impression kris and noelle were a couple in a way that suggests such an expectation is self-evident in hometown. she hesitates around noelle because she fears noelle is someone a girl like her isn’t “supposed to” be with, but i think that she hesitates because she’s thinking “wait, but aren’t kris and noelle together?” too.

i don’t think everything between kris and noelle was caused by their parents, as evidenced by some of noelle’s new anecdotes. but noelle is a biased source of information, too. a lot of noelle’s coping mechanisms reason around ascribing herself agency in situations where she lacked it in a way that terrified her. their relationship is intentionally portrayed as very ambiguous.

but when we enter ch5’s dark world, i think we see another way in which spades follows in the tradition of “kings” that kris is familiar with. it seems easy to forget when one sees how flowery proudly declares he’s living completely on his own merits, but flower kingdom is shaped not only by its status as a light-world location cultivated by asgore but by kris’ “power of will,” too, their literal determining. elements from card kingdom that just shouldn’t be there, like the toy-based puzzles and “blocky foliage”, are. flowery is not unlike a more dutiful lancer. the dark-world forms of asgore and toriel, both of which show up in kris’ dark worlds, are even a queen and a king. kris looked at the place where their father lives and thought, “this should look like the place ruled over by a neglectful and cruel tyrant.”

of course, there are some key differences between the two. while spades is driven by vengeance quest on the lightners who have power over his king, asgore is the opposite, a powerful lightner driven by a quest for revenge against what he sees as darkness’ corruptive influence on his suburban small-town lifestyle (and thus, that power). they occupy different roles within the hierarchy that frame spades as a more sympathetic figure. but kris’ drawing of a line between the two of them is still significant to me. it only causes me to feel greater concern at the ways in which flowery and the other flowers desperately try to get him to let his scheming go.