i'm sure people are curious about why i like to draw tenna as a small child/baby with the dreemurrs sometimes, so i wrote down some thoughts below the cut.
this is a discussion of how i see darkners, and tenna specifically. take from it as you will.
for me, tenna has a lot of themes that surround family, nostalgia and lost childhood innocence. they're there in the EN version of deltarune, obviously, but they're even more pronounced in the japanese localization of deltarune, where he speaks like a children's show host.
small mike already establishes that he likes childish things — like bedtime programs and being tucked into bed. but tenna also slips into childish ways of speaking.
in japanese, this is pretty obvious: he changes his personal pronoun from "watashi" to "boku" (a pronoun mainly used by young boys), and he refers to a lot of objects in babyish ways ("okane-chan", "pluey-chan", "channel-chan.") but i'd argue this style of speaking also shows up in english ("i don't wanna be thrown away...", "i wanna see my li'l pluey!")
"okay mado but what does all of this have to do with your thoughts on darkners"
i'll cut to the chase. i don’t see darkners as simply one-to-one people, but as living dreams — ephemeral existences (based on light world objects) that reflect the thoughts and feelings of the people who created them...
the first comparison i had in mind were the penguins in mawaru penguindrum, where their interactions with each other often pointed to the true feelings of the takakura family members they represented.
like, when you look at king, his cruel behavior mirrors susie's when she had her emotional walls up. when you see queen, she's likely mirroring carol with her misguided, controlling but genuine love for noelle.
and coming back to tenna... he has traits and behaviors that stem from memories of all of the dreemurrs (that we know of, anyways. )
calling toriel "tori" like asgore, making corny puns like toriel... and if dr's asriel is anything like ut's asriel, his reluctance for the games, and the time with his loved ones, to end.
and then we get to kris, the creator of tenna's dark world. it's established in ch4 that the dark worlds (and their inhabitants) reflect the thoughts and feelings of their creators, and i think it's especially true for tv world — and for tenna.
people have already talked about tenna's overlaps with kris, but to come back to my own take, i think i'd argue that he experiences some of kris's childhood memories as though they were his own.
the most famous example being the pipes scene:
tenna (ch3): "i'm sorry about the pipes. i knew. i knew i shouldn't have done it. but you know, every pipe goes SOMEWHERE! they had to go SOMEWHERE!!!" toriel (ch2): "you did not put a bath bomb in the toilet again, did you? kris, if anything bad happens, you are paying for the plumbing bill."
so when i draw tenna as a child/baby with the dreemurrs, you could take it literally... or you could take it in a more doylist approach — where he's not really "experiencing" these memories. rather, they're kris’s memories with his face pasted over them, because he's their creation.
