TEETERING ON THE VERY BRINK

OPTION 1: chapter 6 will release december of next year (between the 20th and christmas day). it will be the culmination of the knight plot; during the climax, the roaring is begun in full in some way, and also it is revealed that kris was working with the knight. the chapter ends with susie breaking off from the group (or she kicks you out and keeps ralsei in the divorce) and the world being in grave danger. big cliffhanger style

chapter 7 will then be the roaring, and reveal what the deal was with all that mike/friend stuff, maybe we'll get to talk to gaster at some point (i deeply do believe tricky tony at least loves his fans enough to give us a canon design with a bit more detail than the mysteryman sprite), and will culminate with us fighting the angel (or some other avatar of the prophecy/fate), and susie NOT dying because of the power of friendship. it will probably release roughly june 2028

OPTION 2: chapter 6 and 7 release together, also in late december of next year. it will contain 2 dark worlds: the first is in the holiday manor, but the climax of the game happens after you fight the boss there (probably carol). rudy may appear as a character, having died during the events of chapter 5, because toby fox hates his fans actually and wants us to suffer. the knight's identity is revealed at the end of chapter 6, but the ritual that carol and kris are trying to perform to bring dess (the knight) back goes awry (or perhaps goes exactly as the angel intended) and fuses her with the angel, kickstarting the roaring.

chapter 7 will then be fighting through the last dark world (the bunker, which spans the entire underground of the town...?) and culminate in you defeating the angel (hopefully by convincing them they don't have to return to heaven) and putting dess to rest (thematically speaking, there's no way she's coming back. let the dead rest; they'll be with you in your heart).

either way, there will likely be an epilogue chapter/extended epilogue sequence, where asriel comes home and we get to see his dynamic with all the hometown residents, and noelle and susie get to kiss, kris is still everyone's friend, except they're not being controlled by the player anymore (or perhaps they have entered into a more equitable partnership with the us possessing their soul). the epilogue sequence will also have access to castle town; maybe featuring remixed secret boss fights in the dojo? (please for the love of god tony give us jevil content)

SEAM is probably going to be an optional boss at the beginning of chapter 6. defeating him will prove that we have what it takes to wield whatever he creates out of the shadow crystals (the mythical artifact, "shirt that reads 'i beat all these secret bosses and all i got was this lousy shirt'")

i have lots of thoughts about ralsei, but i do think them being an entity of pure darkness, not based on any specific object, is pretty likely. also they're going to crack their egg and get a new name and design and you CANNOT change my mind about this

kris WILL lose a hand... but only in the neutral ending. they'll lose it saving susie's life and subverting the prophecy. in the good ending, where you get all the shadow crystals and forge the mythical artifact, "shirt that reads 'i beat all these secret bosses and all i got was this lousy shirt,'" which is the key component that will allow you to save kris's hand AND susie's life. (or maybe saving kris's hand is hidden behind the eggs, instead? since those are all about Traumatic Incident When Kris Was Younger. i think facing their own trauma and past makes sense as the conclusion of their arc)

(i could also see it as being a choice between saving dess and saving susie, aka trying to revive the past vs not losing what you already have. susie and dess could work really well as parallel characters to each other, from what we know of december anyways)

also there's going to be at least 3 endings: good ending, neutral ending, and weird ending. the epilogue, however, will have tons of little differences depending on what you do throughout your run. aborted weird route won't get its own dedicated ending, because that would add like 17 endings to the game, but it will affect the epilogue sequence

the final boss is probably gonna be defeated power-of-friendship style like the final boss of chapter 1 if you get all the recruits, with all your friends from all the dark worlds coming together to save you and help defeat the bad guy. maybe that's too close to undertale's true ending? but it feels right, in my heart

W.D. Gaster is the inevitable pit that all deltarune theories eventually fall into, the biggest long-standing mystery of the undertale deltarune unrelated runteldae multiverse, the black hole we orbit, drawing ever closer to its light-devouring maw, until eventually we will cross its event horizon and be stretched apart forevermore

he's also a character that exists more in deltarune than the game he's supposed to be from, a character whose motif is so simplistic it feels like it, too, was shattered across space and time, to the point where you can hear it in songs outside of toby fox's repertoire, and he might just be the BANISHED ANGEL | FALLEN STAR.

for starters, there's the fact that he calls the game "MY DELTARUNE" which either means he made the game that we're playing (he definitely made the gonermaker/survey program, at least, given that the version # for the first chapter was 0.6.6.6), or that he made the prophecy - you know, the angel's prophecy? governed by fate, the fate spawned from the bitter tears of the fallen star?

and, to connect gaster further to an angel, there is an absurd amount of association between him and the number 6, specifically the number 666, which you might know as "the mark of the beast," a number heavily associated with either the anti-christ or satan.

you know, satan? the angel fallen from heaven, who is also sometimes known by the name "lucifer," who is associated with venus aka the morning star?

plus, one of the only clues we get as to who drove spamton cuckoo-bananas is the addison who tells us that the other side of the phone just sounded like "garbage noise," a sound heavily associated with gaster; and spamton seems to associate the phone with heaven.

but here's where i have to stop and wonder about the nature of deltarune, about why it feels like there are so many different theories that seem to fit perfectly. even this one, which i have to admit is kind of a stupid theory, feels like the logical conclusion of all of the threads we have so far, but there are so many counterarguments to be made: 1) gaster definitely made the gonermaker, but the gonermaker sequence is interrupted by a voice that says something along the lines of "nobody can choose who they are in this world," which indirectly associates the theme of Fate and Determinism as opposed to gaster and his goals 2) gaster roots for you when you're fighting against the knight, who's part of the whole "do the prophecy (probably)" faction with carol and kris; granted, he could just be rooting for you because he's a huge fuckin nerd who likes it when he gets interesting data. hard to tell, he's a mystery-type man 3) none of this brings up image_friend aka friend aka mike aka "the guy handing out shadow crystals (probably)" aka "the tail of hell (probably)" aka "noelle's cats petterz glitch" 4) gaster is also either related to the forgotten man (unlikely nowadays) or directly opposed to the forgotten man's whole schtick (something about the ps4 achievement for "beating the game without issue" being invalidated if you get the eggs?) 5) the angel is heavily associated with noelle, and while she (and dess) do both probably have gaster's motif in their songs, there's very little else connecting them 6) there's also another popular theory that the angel is the player; to be blunt, i don't buy it, but it's popular enough that it's worth mentioning i think 7) from a less lore focused point of view, gaster being the Final Antagonist would be a bit strange, given that we've seen nothing but text from him all game, and that he's posed as more of a narrator of the story, someone who's showing you this cool game they found. toby likes to go meta, but i don't know if "kill the narrator" is the level of meta he's on

to be blunt: i don't know what the fuck is going on. nobody knows what the fuck is going on in the story of deltarune, and if they tell you they do, they're either lying or trying to sell you something, because we're only 70% of the way through the game, and we do NOT have all the puzzle pieces. gaster might be the captain of the pirate ship that's in the bunker dark world, and we go talk to him and he's like "yo ho ho it be me, W.D. gaster, who also be green" and we fight fucking normal_npc as a secret boss or some shit. anything could happen! but the main point of this series of posts, as i said, is for me to get my thoughts out, largely so that i can point at it and go "I WAS RIGHT" when i get 1 tiny little detail correct upon the release of chapter 6.

next up: misc. predictions

it is easy to interpret this as being after the end of the prophecy, the "banishing of the angel's heaven," however i propose an alternate reading: the angel was banished from heaven. it used to be in a realm above ours in the same way the dark worlds are below ours, but has been cast out of its home, and is seeking a way back. further into tin foil hat territory, i posit that the prophecy, the roaring and the subsequent "banishing of the angel's heaven," details the steps to some sort of ritual to either send it back home, or to bring its home to hometown.

the fallen star book highly resembles a passage from the book of revelations: "The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter." (Rev. 8:10-11) (interesting note: i don't know where this fits into anything, but the genus of plants that wormwood most likely refers to (according to wikipedia) is "artemisia," which is the plant ralsei is associated with in their title at the start of chapter 5)

the similarities support that the star is from heaven, and is either an angel itself or the creation of an angel, or perhaps that it is simply a celestial entity that mere mortals would interpret as an angel, or maybe even that the star wants to be an angel and so describes itself as such; really it's all speculative, but all of the above readings can coincide with it and the prophesied angel being the same entity, so when combined with the fact that the angel and the fallen star are both put in positions of ownership/authorship over the prophecy (albeit the fallen star is only associated with the prophecy through 5 layers of metaphor), and the fact that even ignoring the bible quote fallen stars still fall from the "heavens," i feel decently confident that these two entities are connected.

regarding the final boss thing, it's simple: after chapter 4 we know that the prophecy is a Bad Thing, and that we are actively struggling against fate, and it contextualizes the other chapters as being part of the game's actual Main Theme (not fucking escapism, stop talking about escapism like the escapism theory's been relevant since chapter 2) - deltarune is a game about not letting your past or prescribed future define you, a game about living in the present, a game about forging your own path no matter where you came from, a game about defying fate. deltarune is also a jrpg, and, well, all good jrpgs end with you killing god via the power of friendship.

jokes aside, while thematically speaking i do think we will fight the angel (or some other Literal Interpretation Of The Concept Of Fate), i don't think we'll have to kill it; likely, we have to convince it that it can live a happy life in the light world, and so to let go of the past (the heaven it came from) and the future it thought it needed (the prophecy, through which it would get back to that heaven).

hey, interesting that we brought up revelations, though, isn't it? you know, revelations? that weirdo book of the bible that's all doom and gloom and, well, apocalypse? sorta sounds like the roaring, doesn't it? i wonder if there's anything else that comes from the book of revelations that is specifically relevant to the worlds of undertale/deltarune...

up next: the mark of the beast