Rola

Hey, thanks so much for reading!

Perhaps it is Kris's equlivilent of the lingering piece of red soul in Noelle in wierd route chapter 4?

This seems the most plausible explanation for now. I'm seeing two ways to justify how/why Kris has this fledgling red SOUL in them:

1) The Red SOUL bonded to Kris through their and Dess's years'-long unbroken association, with Kris's submitting bodily control to her SOUL (a la Susie/Ralsei through S-ACT and Noelle in the Weird Route)

or

2) A red SOUL fragment remains in Kris's body to sustain their life for when Dess's SOUL is temporarily removed, e.g., when Gaster uses the Vessel survey to attune Dess's SOUL to the Player for us to assert agency over and synchronize with their body and soul. This takes place physically in the Depths and shows Gaster summon the SOUL, so it's fair to call this process diegetic. Therefore Dess's SOUL left Kris's body while they're asleep the night before Chapter One, however briefly.

One of these seems our surest bet. I'd lean towards the former; if a SOUL controls a body and mind long enough, the SOUL will adapt to and incorporate into the host's body and mind. You could even say it “takes root”, which is relevant in terms of flower imagery in Chapter Five and the Weird Route in general, as well as ROOTS theory, which places Dess’s tragedy and/or disappearance at the lake and seems, oh, 100x more likely after Chapter 5’s lake scenes.

On the flower imagery: the Thorn Ring may be a means of accelerating the SOUL’s body-rooting process, as it's acquirable only in the Weird Route, which Gaster seemingly sowed to entrap dedicated players and reverse-psychology them into forging the Roaring Knight for him. The Thorn Ring perpetuates the Weird Route (controlling Noelle), but why would Gaster incorporate an item like this into his trap specifically? My guess is he knows Dess and Kris had years together for body-SOUL synchronization, and he knows there’s just no time to draw out the Weird Route over years. Nor can Gaster bank on any straightforward way of us willingly giving Noelle the Thorn Ring, outside of 'curiosity' and an illusion of 'transgression' from his game. Therefore he inserted an item to force body-SOUL synchronization like Kris had with Dess's SOUL (the violent nature of the Thorn Ring only works in his favor, if anything, preserving the Player's illusion of us 'breaking his game' by doing something unintended). Prior to Chapter One, Kris probably just gave their bodily autonomy entirely over to Dess out of trust for her and personal guilt over her death/disappearance. The Weird Route, on the other hand, portrays both of them (Kris and Dess) actively resisting us.

This explains why Kris, despite experience being puppeteered by Dess, struggles to assert any agency over the red SOUL once the Player is brought in; they never felt the need/right to do so until now. This is crucial. The puppeteer’s identity and motivations have 100% changed overnight: into something unknown and unpredictable. I'll address Kris’s role in and reaction to this shift at-length in a moment.

As an aside, there's potentially a 1b explanation too: rather than the red eyes being Kris's fledgling SOUL, like Noelle on the Weird Route... what if it's the inverse? What if Dess's mind has rooted itself so firmly in Kris over years that she's almost taken a 'fledgling body' within them, so to speak: a modicum of physical agency? There's no real foreshadowing to suggest a Thorn Ring-esque process could occur inversely (i.e. from the SOUL to the body, as opposed to vice-versa), not that I'm seeing, but yeah. Food for thought, since I do consider the Player’s presence even more of an invasion of Dess than of Kris,ironically; and so the ending of Chapter One being Dess>Kris would be even more compelling imo. But I digress. Let's address Kris's reaction to the SOUL:

does Kris know that the soul now has a new controller?

Yes. It’s safe to assume Kris knows something happened to Dess when Chapter One starts. Kris knows Dess very well, doubly so after sharing a body with her for years. Dess’s internal voice and manner of acting (e.g., personality, keeping Kris out of harm's way) are very specific to Dess as a person. Therefore, logistically, when Kris wakes up and Chapter One begins, Dess's voice will have suddenly shifted entirely due to someone else (the Player) controlling them now. As Chapter One progresses, this inner-psychological 'shift' will only grow more pronounced regardless of Player choice--with every idiosyncratic decision we make in dialogue, reading flavor text in a far more sterile way when the game first begins (initially, we as the Player are just as disoriented as Kris in terms of our attempts to orient ourselves to this somewhat-familiar-yet-entirely new world; this Player-voice sterility is readily apparent if you go back and read the flavor text at the very start of Chapter One).

Kris's inner dread of "whoever is controlling me definitely isn't fucking Dess anymore" becomes doubly blatant once we start fighting enemies and torturing Noelle, her little sister, on the Weird Route. But... really, ANY choice that we the Player make will inevitably make it obvious to Kris that Dess is no longer in control of them, for the simple reason that the Player doesn't know much about what Dess was like during her life (let alone the fact that we should try acting/talking 'Dess-ier' so Kris doesn't notice; Gaster couldn't exactly warn us without tipping us off to the horrific reality of this arrangement, but that's fine because he could almost certainly work his knowledge of this into his favor, which I will go over towards the end).

Furthermore, ghost-Dess almost certainly acted very differently inside Kris, both on behalf of Kris (protectively) and just by virtue of the fact that, yknow, experiencing death and being imprisoned inside your BF's little sibling is probably gonna change you a little lmao. Ghost-Dess's behavior is something only Kris is privy to, so we have no way of knowing how to be 'Dess-ier' inside of Kris even if we theoretically had infinite player-options and control over flavor text and could therefore mimic Dess to trick Kris. Thus, the second we enter the body-mind equation and take control of both, that once-pure system of Kris and ghost-Dess erodes and never returns: because we never leave. Even if you do interpret some of the later flavor text as 'Dess-ier' (like the examples I gave in my initial post, e.g., the horror games and How To Raise a Human book), it can be explained. By that point, the Player not only knows a good bit about Dess, but the relationship between us and Kris has largely uprooted. Think of the Player-Kris relationship as the inverse of the Kris-ghost-Dess relationship; where those two slowly gained body-mind affinity over years, the Player quickly uproots all of this by coming between the two, feeding off their trust/understanding of each other to fuel our forced autonomy. This may explain how Dess's voice seemingly 'leaks back in' more and more into our mind/the flavor text over the course of the game, regardless of the route, but especially on the Weird Route, wherein Kris and Dess have spent the entire game learning how best to resist us.

as someone who obsesses over this detail from chapter 1...

This question of 'whether Kris is aware something happened to Dess inside them' is a perfect one to raise because it indirectly explains the ending of Chapter One in a way I’ve been baffled by ever since the Program Survey dropped (and have only gotten more and more baffled by over time). Whether we control Kris pacifistically or ruthlessly during Chapter One doesn't matter to them so much as the fact we're clearly not Dess. It's a stranger, and they don't understand why or what is happening to them. They don't know what caused this, nor do they know if Dess is even present inside them still, initially. They don't care beyond the terror this presents. Having your body piloted by someone else is horrifying enough already, but at least with Dess it was someone Kris loved and trusted and felt they owed a debt to. Some nondescript third entity? That's a very different proposition.

So by the end of Chapter One, no matter what we do, Kris will be thinking: 'Okay, so Dess is clearly no longer in control, nor am I: so what the fuck happened to her, and who the fuck is this new entity?' This mindset quite handily explains Kris's actions at the end of Chapter One. By the time we reach the credits and see Kris draw a knife and smile creepily at… well, seemingly nothing... Kris has had a chapter's-worth of gameplay and decision-making and Player-centric narration (the SOUL's reaction to Sans is the perfect evidence to conclude the narrative voice is neither Kris's nor Dess's, to start out, but ours; either that or it was planted by Gaster to gauge our familiarity with Undertale but I digress). Anyway, in this light, Kris's actions during the ending are quite clear: it was Kris's way of both revealing to us that they are aware of us/the intruder in them and, more importantly, drawing a knife and smiling to scare us. It's posturing, but how else can they 'fight' whoever is controlling them?

Long-term, Kris's posturing doesn't accomplish much, hence why we never see something like it again. But in their mind, it was worth trying before they headed off to the shelter, to try and trick the Player into concealing their terror about the nature of this self-invasion and silent motivations and powers. But in the short-term... it kinda worked? Most players took Kris as a Chara figure when Chapter One dropped, since that's all we had to go off. But over time that false impression inevitably crumbled in inverse relation to our accretion of context regarding DR's backstory and Kris's personality in general.

As an aside: generally (like you, and like most) I would err towards details never being “spooky for spooky’s sake” since this is Deltarune, but for this instance one point of contention may potentially contradict my framework: the Susie opening a Dark Fountain scene. Her eye turns red. I guess what this comes down to is... a human SOUL is required to seal the Dark Fountains, but is one necessary to open one? And what does this entail, exactly: that the 'opener' themself needs a human SOUL or simply that the bearer of a human SOUL is present/on-hand? If it's the latter, that explains that, since Kris/Dess were right there in the church with Susie. But is that enough? Conversely, is this another instance of "Kris/Dess spent so much time with Susie, specifically with Dess’s SOUL giving commands (via the Player, including S-ACTs) for so long a fledgling bond forms in Susie"? We have proof this is possible for monsters via Noelle in the Weird Route, even if it was unnatural. Furthermore, Susie diegetically comments on the logistics of S-ACTing in Chapter 5 during the big platforming finale, saying: “Ralsei, let’s not wait for Kris to give us our orders,” after which both Susie and Ralsei instantly and perfectly use their S-ACTs independently of the Player's input. This tells us they didn’t just learn this independence, but rather haven’t had any need to defy Kris until circumstances (i.e. us, the Player, being mega ass at platforming) demanded it.

Anyway if by process of elimination Kris has known Dess isn't in control since Chapter One (like Kris with their own body), Kris would seek out answers. Like, immediately. The second they are free to do so. i.e. the end of Chapter One, after it cuts to black. We know Kris has an active understanding of the goings-on in the shelter, where Gaster has surely set up shop. Because Gaster is the one who inserted the Player-buffer between Kris’s body and Dess’s SOUL to begin with, he could leverage his awareness of what happened to Dess however he wants (however best serves his end goal). Needless to say, I highly doubt Gaster would come right out and tell Kris about what he did, that the invasion was his fault, that he chose to silence Dess and summon someone/something from another plane of existence, etc. Now, Kris may not have any direct contact with Gaster, but even if they do, would Gaster play oblivious or straight-up lie to Kris? e.g., would he tell Kris "Dess's loss of control is her latent humanity running out, so you need to hurry with carrying out my plan or risk Dess becoming a vegetable inside of you"? Well… who knows.

Holy cheese and crackers, I might be onto something.

As a disclaimer, this is a Part Two to the essay I posted yesterday, which is an exploration of the SOUL and the Knight individually and as they pertain to one another. You can read that here:

But as a summary: the red SOUL is essentially Dess's conscious ghost, while the Knight originates from the Weird Route and is the red SOUL (ostensibly with Kris and Noelle's latent consciousnesses) puppeting Dess's physical body/corpse. If that sounds insane, you should probably start with that post (and the videos I wrote it as a response to), because this is about to get FAR more complicated.

The Vessel creation sequence is not 'the SOUL being calibrated to Kris,' but rather, the Player being calibrated to the SOUL such that we can take over for Dess in controlling Kris. First, just look at how Gaster (who is clearly talking to us with/through a literal computer monitor, typing his responses one letter at a time, btw) talks about this process: “SELECT THE HEAD YOU *PREFER.*” “THIS IS YOUR BODY. DO YOU *ACCEPT* IT?” This one is crucial; Kris likely experiences bodily dysphoria (due to them being nonbinary and their physical, literal depersonalization from being marionetted by their friend’s ghost). Dess too is operating someone else’s mind, explaining the “NOW, LET US SHAPE [Dess’s] MIND AS YOUR OWN” and the subsequent personal questions. So a body and mind that the Player choose on their own, to OUR exact specifications, makes perfect sense as something Gaster would want to know for logistic reasons. All of the language in this vessel creation segment perfectly reflects its purpose as a means for Gaster to get a handle on us, body and mind, as thus allows us to get a handle on Dess’s SOUL. Through this optimal synchronization with Kris’s body/Dess’s soul, we are allowed to, 99% of the time, override them both.

This of course begs the question: why? If Dess is already cognizant and in control, why introduce yet another outsider into an increasingly crowded body?

Most likely, Dess was emotionally compromised by the trauma she endured through disappearance/death and, more importantly, due to her guilt in having inflicted trauma on Kris through their witnessing of her death, their survivors guilt, and in having ostensibly "caused" her death. With that context, before Chapter One starts (by which point Kris already had the SOUL), Dess was likely controlling Kris using her SOUL entirely on her own, but because she was emotionally compromised, she was going easy on them, i.e. refusing to put them in harm's way. This would explain why Kris, despite prior arrangement/association with the fucking Knight, is still Lv1 at the start. Dess was attempting to pilot Kris towards a pacifist run, but Gaster's means require power (we *will* circle back to this at the end, and trust me, it is worth it.) Thus, Gaster stepped in. He needed or wanted, and so tested in real-time, the incorporation of another entity to control Dess's SOUL FOR her, ideally a neutral entity free of the diegetic sentimental bias afflicting Kris and Dess as lifelong friends and mere traumatized children. Gaster, however, needs a buffer who thinks of his game as a game, not as literal real life. Thus, of course, the entity and buffer he ended up summoning was us: the Player.

Is it really a coincidence that the fluditiy of us the Player, who Gaster clearly cannot comprehend or anticipate (his reaction to the Knight fight is damning evidence here) is introduced/summoned to/incorporated into Deltarune via the Vessel creation screen: against a backdrop of the depths? Y'know, that thing which harkens to the primordial cosmic ocean from the cosmology of the ancient Near East? ...Well, maybe. But it certainly aligns in the sense that our existence, that of we the Player, must account for all possibile avenues of play, every little decision and button input simultaneously, which in essence frames us, via our fluid autonomy over the SOUL (i.e. indeterminism; the game has one ending, but the physical act of playing it requires infinite microdecisions), as the Other to Gaster's own ego and identity (in the sense of the Other/alterity). This makes sense, since in the context of Deltarune, both we and Gaster are essentially Gods, or the two aspects of god, those which give each other shape and form through the Other.

This, IMO, would be a fantastic metanarrative explanation for the player's incorporation with/between Kris and Dess, as the superego to their Id and Ego. Interestingly, Blue (which is the color of Kris’s SOUL) introduces himself as having been “baptized with name and ego.” This not only aligns with Kris preserving Dess’s SOUL and thus sorta-kinda redeeming themself: both through that and through whatever schemes they are acting out behind closed doors of the shelter with the Knight (and Gaster?). This idea of cleansing has come up multiple times, though I’ve already addressed these in Part One. But the idea of baptism, divine cleansing for Kris’s role and original sin of summoning FRIEND with Catti, seemingly a demon from Hell/or an entity which brings forth Hell, works on so many levels. In fact, the only other instance of “ego” showing up in Deltarune’s entire script is, get this, the HOLY Water Cooler, a reservoir of BLUE water which “Just seems like a normal water cooler *with an ego*.” Fuck.

Gaster, having summoned the Player much like Kris summoned FRIEND, would know the Player exists beyond the confines of Deltarune/Hometown, and therefore knows the Player initially lacks all narrative context for what the SOUL is (Dess) and by extension the moral and ethical implications of Gaster forcing this teenager's ghost to marionette Kris--her childhood friend, her little sister's best friend/love interest, her boyfriend’s little sibling, and a child who she traumatized and/or who killed her--all while both Kris and Dess are fully and actively cognizant of what they're being made to do despite neither having little say in how things transpire. Prophecy/Ralsei internal conflict parallels are off the charts, here, btw.

...Well, this blissful ignorance from the Player works in Gaster's favor initially, but what about when we learn the truth of the SOUL they're puppeting later? Well, since that clearly won't happen until at least Chapter 6, if at all, Gaster must figure the Player will be in too deep at that point to turn back or be too appalled to cease the simulation, which would theoretically prevent him from returning to Undertale; if anything, Gaster thinks the Player will go "oh god, now I HAVE to keep playing, so I can fix all that I've done!" because by that point they too will care about Dess and Kris and thus do we the Player end up emotionally compromised, just as Dess's consciousness had been leading up to Chapter One, to the point we the Player had to step in for her in the first place. Legit the ultimate sunk cost fallacy. Gaster attempts to set up the Player’s awareness such that we are not initially aware of the existential ramifications of our control, and by the time we are, we are already in so deep that we are more sympathetic to Kris and Dess and Noelle than we are disgusted at our role in their suffering; and if anything, the discomfort we feel in our complicity is simply yet another point in Gaster’s favor: another engine driving our motivation to “set things right” for these characters, but in doing so are seemingly only continuing to play into Gaster’s (er, holy… hole-ey) hand.

If nothing else, the Player not understanding the Kris-Dess fusion's diegetic internarrative conflict buys Gaster time to plan out and execute a contingency from the shelter while the Player plays his game, all while we are oblivious to the silent abomination unfolding before our eyes: puppeted by our own fingers. In this light, just as the Player is puppeting Dess and Kris, by extension: Gaster is puppetting us by continuing to play his game; his Deltarune.

As an aside: viewing Deltarune through this framework does open up one possible explanation regarding why entering Gaster's name into the character select screen resets it. There is only one way for Gaster to see and interpret this series of inputs: as an acknowledgement that we, the Player, are aware of him and thus perhaps even his goals. Naturally, this would probably freak him out, or at the least provide him ample reason to abandon us entirely. And because the Player (as a collective 'we') is anything but a uniform entity (i.e. we are every iteration of every player to ever touch the application), could Gaster view this resetting process as him 'simply retrying until I find an entity who isn't aware of me and thus is more easily manipulable'? Even if we are aware of him, by simply choosing not to input his name into the application (y'know, so we can actually play the game), Gaster has no way of knowing we're aware of him. Granted, because this 'Gaster name reset' thing also happens in Undertale, this opens a massive can of worms regarding the nature of the application housing Undertale; is it a simulation of Undertale within Deltarune post-Deltarune or--y'know what, I'm not even gonna try. I am not smart enough for this shit

Getting back on track: the Weird Route is, seemingly, the Player's only way of 'breaking the game' Gaster has presented us with, thus making the Weird Route the Player's only way of regaining autonomy from him, despite the cost: the trauma we inflict on Kris, Dess's ghost, and Noelle. Well, at least until Chapter Five of the Weird Route, during which Noelle and Kris take the Player's cue of reasserting agency, and doing the same for themselves by committing suicide: recursively seizing back their autonomy from the Player just as You've been seizing autonomy back from Gaster ever since Chapter Two by 'breaking his game.' While he does still give his "HOW MUCH LONGER" spiel during the Chapter Four Weird Route ending, I think the silence (and POV shot, ostensibly from Gaster's POV) at the end of Chapter Five allows for the interpretation that Gaster did observe you giving the thorn ring to Noelle but could not anticipate Chapter Five's Weird Route playing out as it did. Either that, or perhaps he let it happen out of necessity, or as punishment to us for defying his established rules because he knows/realizes this outcome creates the Knight, or even out of mere intellectual curiosity for answers (which would be funny, given that that is the entire fucking reason literally all of us do the Weird Route in the first place, furthering the Player/Gaster parallels) to witness with his own eyes the origin story for the Knight he has employed in pursuit of his goals.

It is easy to see Kris and Noelle clipping out of bounds on a super secret Weird Route as 'the Player breaking the game, thus finally snapping the string on which we've been puppeteered since the moment Gaster summoned us'. But just look where the Weird Route has led us: in terms of the traumatic implications on Kris and Dess and Noelle, in terms of the temporal and causal distortions of a closed time loop, and, physically, most crucially: it has led us straight into Gaster's fucking shelter. Was our last-ditch effort to seize autonomy through the Weird Route, as the Player, as that which controls and thus influences Kris and Dess and now Noelle, really our only way of breaking Gaster's strings? The vast majority of players will never even know about the existence of Gaster in Undertale, about the existence of multiple routes and thus form an expectation to seek one out. We are the ones insane and dedicated and curious enough to actually find him, to find the Weird Route, and to pick apart Deltarune down to its literal code. We are the ones who will 'stumble upon' this route. A framework like this brings everything into question. Just look at ‘normalnpc’… by this logic, is ‘findme.ogg’ and the unused in-code dialogue that sounds like Dess really Dess? Or is it Gaster luring us with something meant to sound like her?

With that in mind, I ask again, about the existence of the Weird Route: was THIS our only way to 'snap the strings' and 'free us' from Gaster's influence? Were we REALLY breaking the game? Or was the Weird Route put in place by Gaster, as reverse psychology, to ensure that the Player remains firmly in his grasp while simultaneously manipulating us into following his breadcrumb trail of 'transgressions' (the SWORD Route being his most blatant clue) to trick us into both forging and delivering to him, on a silver platter, the Roaring Knight: his ultimate weapon?

Here is more evidence and ostensible clues for Dess being the SOUL.

At the end, I will also state my case for my own Knight theory (it may not be “new,” and I doubt it is, knowing yalls crazy asses, but I’ve not seen it myself). The Knight is not necessarily a Kris-Noelle amalgam, or not merely so, but may in fact include the fusion of Kris’s body to Dess’s SOUL, or vice versa upon returning to Dess’s body in the shelter. Some of this comes from reading the 'description flavor text' as Dess talking to/for Kris (and possibly even to herself), which would explain Kris’s reactions in these moments. Dess speaking to Kris/herself isn’t *always* the case; almost always her voice leaks through in the later chapters when assessing objects directly related to her; think of this as a loose analogue to the dual narration of Frisk and Chara in Undertale’s Genocide Route (which, by the way, is delineated by, you guessed it, RED text.) It’s clearly not always Dess, and early on her voice is especially muted, but the potentiality of this lens alone opens up an entire potential secondary layer through which to read the entire game’s flavor text, often yielding VERY, VERY INT—ahem—neat results.

The evidence itself is supplementing a series of videos by soydesu, as well as providing slight pushback on the Kriselle Knight theory video by JRVanity. However, in broad strokes, these are both excellent theories and I suspect they are mostly, if not entirely, correct.

- Noelle talks about Carol collecting [red] heart pillows "for some reason." Noelle doesn't understand why. Why would that be, if her own mother LOVES (no pun intended) "red, heart-shaped objects" to the point of collecting them, the notoriously cold blue Carol collecting tacky red hearts, if the reason wasn't both personal and highly secretive? This in tandem with Carol using the red-color capital font YOU in "As you know, YOU are always welcome here" confirms that Carol both knows Dess is inside of Kris (a literal friend inside of them....) and that Dess's SOUL is the color red; Kris has both shown and identified Dess’s SOUL to Carol.

- The library book on 'how to care for humans' being checked out by "your mother" could very easily be Dess talking about Carol, not Kris about Toriel. The “other people” Dess sees in the photo who just by glimpsing makes her/Kris slam the book shut might even be her birth family.

- Her desk having "All the horror games you never got to play" COULD be talking about Kris being too young, but what if it's just a backlog situation? The Hollidays are rich. Dess surely owned a bunch of video games she never got around to playing, especially since she became preoccupied with Asriel and music and--if the Asriel/Dess/Seam prophecy theory holds--her adventures in the Dark World. Or, just as likely, it’s just Dess reminding Kris they were too young to play the horror games rather than Dess talking to herself (since this isn’t a dialogue option in which Dess “speaks”)

- The entire 'you couldn't find your hand' bit in Chapter 3 (which, I'll remind you, is accessed by Dess inputting her birthday into the lottery machine). This makes even more sense if it's talking about something that already happened and cost Dess her hand/life/autonomy than it does as foreshadowing for Kris losing theirs. This is because even moreso than piano (which you could at least *kinda* play one-handed), guitar REQUIRES two hands. Note that if, in Chapter Four, Dess's SOUL chooses "I'll never play again," Kris instantly starts gnawing their hand. This might be the single most 'Dess-voiced' line of the game. It implies Kris believes whatever happened to Dess/her hand was their own fault, likely caused by their (Kris's) own hand, given the motif of 'never being able to clean it off,' the Blue and Holy Water baptism allusions (which I address in Part Two), and the constant gag of Kris choosing not to use their hands whenever possible and instead simply stack holdable items on their head; Chapter Five's watering can draws explicit attention to this gag with Ralsei's "...Okay." line. The "I'll never play again" line isn't necessarily foreshadowing Kris losing the hand (though they might and I kinda hope they do, given the potential for a Kris-Susie piano duet at the end), nor is Kris necessarily grieving their inability to play due to the SOUL controlling them: no, it's just the pain of hearing Dess tell them "I'll never play again." This immediately causes Kris to want to inflict the same pain on themself they believe they're responsible for inflicting on Dess.

- In Chapter 4, the SOUL, upon reaching the Holliday family's basement, can short-circuit the breaker or cause the large stereo to play Lost Girl. Y’know, while Dess is literally lost, separated from her (i.e. new, not-her, Kris's) body.

- Don’t Forget is a female vocalist and a pianist. It is implied that Kris cannot enter Dark Worlds (let alone seal the Fountains) without her SOUL. The lyrics can be read as Dess comforting both Kris, “I’m with you in the Dark [World]”, and Noelle; the lines “and the places that you know seem like fantasy,” and “that’s still shining in the cold” allude to Noelle’s sense of depersonalization (“I feel like I’m watching my life through glass”; she literally tells this to them btw, meaning Dess hears exactly how her being ‘lost’ has affected her only—unless she had blood related ones but who gaf—sibling), and Snowgrave respectively (“cold” referring to the ice shit, “there’s a light inside your SOUL” likely referring to the fledgling red SOUL). The “promise” could be to Kris, or to Noelle, or both. The last line almost certainly is about them, perhaps simultaneously; and if what I’ll soon propose about the Knight’s identity is true, this could not be more literal.

- On the Weird Route as a whole: the Player controls the SOUL, but Dess still seems to have some sort of apperception of what she and they are being forced to do. In this light, the Player torturing Noelle is also torturing her childhood friend AND her sister, even pushing our own responsibility for our actions ONTO Dess in the same way Kris blames themself for whatever happened to Dess/her body at the lake. The “please don’t” dialogue option in the Chapter 4 Snowgrave scene is even more powerful when you consider Kris’s body and Dess’s soul/consciousness are simultaneously being puppeteed, with Dess even literally positioning herself above the house’s piping to try and trap herself outside Noelle’s room. When Noelle asks “who would hear,” Dess also answers “Me.” Dess answers “Red” instead of “Blue” because Blue is the color of Kris’s SOUL. She then says “Black,” which uh… yeah. Knight.

- This is a small thing, but I never noticed Dess' guitar is described as “a *red* guitar”. My brain glossed over it because I’d not associated Dess with the SOUL until Chapter 5 (plus it just looks orange to me…) but that's pretty telling.

- When viewing the sink, the flavor text is "(Your hands are clean.)" Could this be Dess trying to comfort Kris, who sees themself as at fault for whatever happened to Dess, thus destroying both the Dreemur and Holliday families? They can 'never wash it all away' is a pure Kris moment, clearly, and this directly contradicts that. Kris wouldn't genuinely say this about themself. Dess is trying to tell Kris they're innocent/not at fault for whatever happened to her. Compare this to how Kris reacts when Dess says "I'll never play [music] again," which they react to by immediately closing their eyes and biting their fucking hand, perhaps the hand they used to harm Dess if we’re going the OMORI route. The Knight has giant holes in its hands like Gaster btw. It's uncanny.

- In the weird route, Kris and Dess are both, together, "trembling [when Noelle takes their hands]". This is because Dess remembers the lake: what happened. This also presents the possibility that Dess is no longer in control and in fact Kris is turning things back on them--asserting the same sort of agency that Noelle is, and THAT is why Dess's SOUL loses control during this pseudo lovers' suicide.

The Knight - Kriselle, or…?

The trembling hands is important. I think the Knight could actually be Kris and Dess fusing into one rather than Kris and Noelle like most people are jumping to assuming. It could also, technically, be all three of them. There’s clearly enough evidence to say Dess is the red SOUL. But because we know both Kris (eating the apple core for cyanide) and Noelle (she tells them outright) are suicidal, what if Noelle simply dies in the barrier passage, whether by drowning or by being absorbed by Kris/Dess (to save/spare Noelle—granting her the death she has chosen for herself, after telling and acting out that desire explicitly TO Kris—from whatever is about to happen to them, which they are ostensibly aware of to some extent given their cooperation with the Knight?). This would serve as a dark mirror to Pink and Mew Mew’s merging, showing the flip side of this process in which the two aren't 'made complete' in the sense of fulfillment, but are destroyed/de-individualized in the process.

This Knight identity (or lack thereof, ig) preserves both the Kris-Knight parallels and the Susie-Dess/Knight parallels, which is IMO important since Noelle finds comfort in Susie, seeing Susie as someone to move forward from her trauma of losing Dess with and through, specifically because of how Susie fills the void (their similar personalities are a major factor in the 'how/why' here) that Dess's disappearance/death left behind. This alao explains why Kris and Susie become as close as they do; Kris misses Dess too, not in the same way as Noelle but perhaps as strongly. Especially since Dess’s disappearance is implied to be something Kris considers their own fault, ‘destroying’ the Dreemur and Holliday families' lives singlehandedly; my theory is that the Catti-Kris demon summoning ritual summoned FRIEND--due to the 'tail of hell' shit--and whatever hell this raised led to Dess's body being destroyed alongside Kris's soul in her attempt to protect/save Kris from death.

The Weird Route also seems to link the SOUL event, the origin of whatever happened to Dess and now to Kris, to the lake (the Knight fight dialogue from Chapter 3 is almost ALL lake-related), which is where the SOUL begins (Vessel creation, Dess disappearing or dying at/in the lake/shelter below it) and is reborn through its connection (thorn ring, fledgling SOUL in Noelle's body) to Noelle’s monster soul, which is then used to pass the barrier into the shelter. However, this is where I think Noelle simply dying has the most evidence against it; between her line of “you actually changed” and wanting “wings” (which the Knight has in bird form), it does feel like either her body/monster soul remain in the Knight to some extent. Either that, or Kris/Dess use the bird form/wings as a homage to her.

Anyway, the underwater sounds Onion heard and got takoyaki’d for are likely the Knight/Dess’s body quite literally SOULlessly playing music, exactly like Kris is wont to do in their fleeting spare time.

The parallel with Kris and Noelle falling out of bounds in Deltarune, much like Gaster in Undertale, should not be overlooked. Especially since the two very clearly seem to be falling INTO Gaster’s creation or lab or whatever the fuck he’s cooking in the shelter. As for what happens to the fused Kris (and Noelle?) body/bodies and Dess’s SOUL after they pass the barrier into the shelter during Chapter 5’s weird route: there are options. Are they working with/for Gaster by kidnapping the main characters from Undertale so Gaster can either recreate his original world or return to it (say, in exchange for Gaster promising Kris and Dess to re-swap their bodies with the proper SOULS, or reset Hometown to before Kris summoned FRIEND, or to simply let the three die and rest peacefully) if Gaster succeeds? Well… who knows man it’s fucking Gaster

This does make me wonder about the purpose of the vessel. Could it be Gaster’s way of “recapturing” the SOUL by creating a husk to the exact preferences of the Player, we who control Dess’s soul, thus making us/it more receptive to Kris’s body? Was that Gaster testing Kris-like forms to see how her SOUL would take to them, and us to her? Who knows, man

Tying this to Chapter 3’s Dess Room scene: it’s worth noting the balls in the Green Room lottery machine. Balls are somewhat significant as a motif for Gaster, GONERslop, etc. The Knight transforms into a ball. Jockington (who is likely FRIEND and/or a GONER but I have another post on that) is obsessed with games/sports: especially sports with balls. FRIEND’s tail is made of balls. The Ball of Junk, which Kris’s hand shakes when being forced to drop it. Onion is cooked into, specifically, takoyaki balls. These balls in the Green Room’s RED machine are red and white, the colors of Noelle’s and Dess’s SOULs. Inside the Dess room, you find Dess’s guitar pick in a smaller BLUE machine, one which has zero balls in it; this most likely represents Kris’s SOUL. Its lack of balls, to me, suggests that the Knight’s power (or just the reality of animating the likely-dead and/or decaying body of Dess) means Kris’s original SOUL is either mostly or entirely GONE. USED-UP, you might say… Okay that’s enough Ramb-ing out mb

Anyway the Knight being Dess fused with Kris (and Noelle) explains the 'how' of Kris and Noelle being ‘used up’ in SWORD route; Kris is barely hanging on without a SOUL to begin with. And while their body is seemingly in better shape than Dess’s, that’s a very low bar. On the subject of Dess’s physical body/corpse: this idea of the Knight being a dead-yet-conscious entity also inverts what was established in Chapter 5 through the liminality of the flowers: a living-yet-unconscious entity (i.e. in the Light World, they function subconsciously as all non-human assemblages of matter operate, by virtue of lacking the intellectual capacity for inauthenticity: like sleepwalkers driven by the biological imperative. Pink somewhat already foils this idea, as a ghost animating their inanimate figurine, but again, the Knight serves as the foil-to-the-foil: fusion as abomination rather than unification; as self-erosion and de-individualization, rather than as spiritual and emotional completeness like with Pink and Mew Mew's fusion.

If all that remains of Kris and Noelle after the Weird Route suicide is Dess's soul, now augmented by Noelle's monster SOUL and the connective tissue of her thorn-ring-inherited fledgling red SOUL, this explains why the Knight looks more like Dess rather than Kris or Noelle: it’s her body, or what’s left of it. This especially works if her corpse ended up in the shelter and was reanimated and/or somewhat preserved that way… perhaps using Kris’s SOUL? It would explain why the Knight fights with a sword; these are weapons Kris trains with during the previous four chapters prior to fusion, which would perfectly mirror how Dess’s soul allows Kris to play guitar in ch3 while they cannot play piano using it during ch4–even despite the Knight’s mannerisms retaining their Kris-ity. Uh, Kris-ness. Krismas. Happy Hollidays.

It would be quite the inversion for Weird Route to have Kris’s (and Noelle’s?) bodies contain Dess’s SOUL, only for their SOULs to end up contained *by Dess’s* body, no?

PART TWO: The Red SOUL, the Knight, the Influence and Motivations of W.D. Gaster, and Us

Was Jockington the voice Jevil/Spamton heard on the phone? Or did Jockington hear the voice himself? Is there a thread of commonality between this and Spamton “turning pale” after picking up the phone, seeing as his speech pattern fits the same mold Seam is describing about Jevil?

Then there’s the fact Kris turns pale while their SOUL is inside/playing the SWORD game, wherein their avatar (vessel/cage allusion?) is “used up” which, idk, sure sounds like some GONER shit to me. Could something similar be why Jockington’s speech is deteriorating, i.e. is he slowly being “used up”?

Here's my take on the new "Shattered Cage Theory", as proposed by SpookyDood, as I find it both very plausible and very interesting. You can (and should!) watch the original theory here:

Shattered Cage Theory works on so many levels. Even in the immediate sense, which lends it more credence, since, for such a crucial and poignant scene as Susie breaking the final prophecy, Toby wouldn't write something like this if all it was servicing was a teasing of information for later on. On the surface, it does service the thread set-up about Gerson’s impact on her, convincing her to write the future on her own terms. But I suspect this scene’s symbolic implications goes beyond that. Whether or not Shattered Cage Theory is correct regarding the semantics of what the final prophecy says, I think the aspect of it that is most likely to be true is: the final prophecy will happen, if only due to the whole “if a plan is explained beforehand it will fail/veer, and if the specifics are withheld completely it will happen according to plan” thing, which is quite a reliable principle of the craft of writing in general. In this case, Susie’s physical and violent act of breaking the final prophecy inadvertently reflects the final prophecy itself: which, by extension, would embody the futility of her attempt to break the prophecy, both in terms of its literal depiction and the causality presented therein. Susie's act of refusal—which itself was violent, rather importantly, enough so to make her bleed—functions allegorically of her fate to “shatter it”… only, “it”, in this context would be Kris, not the prophecy nor its legitimacy. If that’s not “tragic” enough for “the final tragedy” the prophecy alludes to immediately prior, idk what is.

In this context, “the girl will shatter the cage” can be interpreted to mean Susie IS “The Girl” from the prophecy. Or, as many people have argued, perhaps Susie altered fate by becoming/playing “The Girl” in Noelle’s stead. The cool thing about shattered cage theory is it works equally well in almost any case, whether you believe Noelle was truly The Monster in Ralsei’s legend/The Girl in the actual prophecy, or inversely if you think The Girl really was meant to be Susie all along; either way the fact remains that Susie has since fully embodied that role. It just so happens this ambiguous wording works INCREDIBLY neatly into the dual route system, since “The Girl” in the prophecy could theoretically play out the same in both routes, just with Noelle playing the girl and "shattering the cage" during Snowgrave instead of Susie doing so during the normal route. Or hell, it could even mean Susie shattering Noelle, assuming that's where the whole 'planting a SOUL in Noelle' during ch4's Snowgrave route is heading, which, god damn. In any case, the fluidity of the roles works incredibly well when viewed through the lens of Deltarune ostensibly having only one ending, just with two routes by which the player will ultimately arrive at the same end result: of the inevitable final prophecy.

Red herring or no, the prophecy certainly seems to be implying that The Girl™ is someone other than Susie, and if not Noelle, then at the very least, it's "not just/specifically Susie". In other words, perhaps the lack of a name/ambiguity in The Girl’s image in the prophecy is meant to represent all possible Girls™ simultaneously, even including Dess (this is the most tin foil part of my interpretation, I'll admit), as potential fulfillers of “The Girl” depending on how and when things play out. My interpretation of Dess having also played "The Girl" can certainly help explain (or at least provide a basis for) whatever the hell mess she and Kris got into prior to ch1, framing those events as a sort of “weird route” or bad end of its own. The possibilities here are pretty much endless, but just as an example, perhaps a previous attempt at 'shattering of the cage' or failure to do so is what lead to Dess' current state. In any case, given Kris' involvement in what we can safely assume was a disaster, this in turn makes the Snowgrave route even more tragic, since Kris went through something similar with Dess and is now being forced to watch another attempt unfold but this time with Noelle, who Kris was plainly closer to growing up.

Conversely, this fluidity of "The Girl" applies to The Cage as well, which lines up with the theory’s proposal that it was originally supposed to be the Vessel, rather than Kris, before (uh, something) discarded Gaster's creation. In both instances, the specific individuals do not affect the prophecy any more than the means (i.e. whichever of the two routes the player chooses) by which they’re achieved. I suspect the true differentiator will instead be the shadow crystals; a bit more on that in a moment.

Anyway, back to the shattered cage theory itself. Regardless of which Girl ends up shattering which Cage: the “cage” in the final prophecy’s text serves as a metaphor for the greater prophecy itself: a proverbial cage to suppress the party/Kris’ freedom to decide the future. This connects to the literal cage (both the birdcage in Kris’ room and the “Kriscage” themself, for lack of a better term… god my poor sweet they/them). This connection strengthens the idea Susie is currently in-line to kill Kris. Or during Snowgrave, Noelle will kill Kris, or Susie will kill Noelle, depending on how the fluidity of The Girl and The Cage roles come to pass.

I also particularly appreciate the focus this theory places on the angle of Ralsei's “kindness” allusions, which he has been making ever since the start of ch1 when he tells Kris “unless they’re kind and spare everyone, he fears Kris may not find the result favorable”. In contrast, the means by which Susie physically "shatters” the "cage" that is the prophecy—both literally in the moment, given her bleeding hand, and later on through the ostensibly unavoidable act of The Girl shattering The Cage—are decidedly, uncharacteristically, violent. As an aside, the fact her bloody hand ends up staining Ralsei strikes me as very evocative in how it reflects the imagery surrounding Kris' hand being stained in the egg plotline, but I digress. This ongoing desperation of Ralsei pursuing nonviolence to try changing the future culminates in this exact same scene (i.e. he says something like "I thought that if we were just kind enough, things would've changed by the time we got here, but they haven't", to paraphrase). Ralsei must've suspected (or even knew outright) Noelle was a/the original/intended “The Girl”, because Snowgrave is entirely defined by uncharacteristic violence. This is in line with why he would say to Kris “taking Noelle [to the festival] is a bad idea” in chapter 3, considering he will only say this during the Snowgrave route. Ralsei’s implication clearly seems to be less about 'taking Noelle to the festival' and more about the chain of choices being made (i.e. cautioning against the course Kris is taking; this is particularly striking since--aside from one line by a certain Mr. John Mantle--this is the last time Snowgrave comes up/is alluded to before Kris and Noelle's point of no return with the Thorn Ring).