Okay okay so I’ve been thinking about Kris. And I have many Thoughts.
Deltarune spoilers ahead! I’m on mobile and don’t know how to do “Read More” :/
One of those thoughts started off with the simple fact that Kris does not like hugs. We know this from Asgore in chapter 1. A lot of people think Kris is going to turn out to be evil. I don’t think Kris is evil, I think they’re a little shit but I don’t think they’re evil. Ppl list various reasons such as: They slashed their mom’s tires (allegedly. I wouldn’t put anything past toby at this point.), They opened at least one dark world, and they’re trapping us in places, to name a few. But I mean, they’re already possessed and that spirit is making them do things they don’t want to. At best It’s making them hug people, and they don’t like hugs. At worst it’s making them kill their classmates. So I have to ask, are they evil? How much possession could YOU take before you started doing irrational things like slashing your mother’s tires?
But then you think, “but if Kris was doing it for attention then why did they sneak out to allegedly slash the tires? Why didn’t they do it in full view of their mother?” And you’d be absolutely right. This leads into the question, how do they function without a SOUL anyway? And I propose a solution.
Kris is shown to have obvious difficulty operating without a SOUL but is capable of doing so. But why not operate like that all the time? Probably because they can’t for long. But maybe, just maybe, we’re not the only SOUL here. It’s possible that, for whatever reason, Kris’s SOUL that they naturally would have as a human is simply... broken. So they somehow were given a new one. So now they’ve got a SOUL and a half. This would explain how Kris has enough will/determination to act as The Knight.
Or another, darker hypothesis, Kris is not being possessed by one SOUL, but two. Us, and the other one. Maybe it’s malicious, but I personally hope not. I think it might just be... young. It would explain the difficulty of movement and erratic behavior. It doesn’t understand what’s happening, doesn’t know what it’s doing. It’s just doing what it knows how to do and whenever possible just wants to be left alone. But then it doesn’t know how to be alone or Kris has a louder voice when it’s just the two of them, so it has to pick its poison. It’s also possible that this is flipped, and we’re the young and naive SOUL, and the other one is reeling from the new “addition” and we’re interfering in what it was already doing. This is a shakier hypothesis but it’s a hypothesis.
Going back to “Kris’s SOUL is broken” it’s also maybe possible that their SOUL has been split. Maybe their SOUL is equally divided between the light world and the dark world, making them capable of breaking open fountains for whatever reason. I don’t have any evidence for this, but it would at least make a cool AU/fanfic if not correct.
And I don’t think we’re “making” dark fountains. This has to have happened at least once before. Especially since the characters talk as if there’ve been generations in these worlds. And it’s not some weird time fuckery because Ralsei confirms time is the same. Jevil and Spamton were both established adults in the world with a job, met someone, and then slowly descended into madness. So I think they’re being RE-opened.
An unrelated thought that would be interesting to pursue, what if we are how Gaster is testing Kris for a vessel? We seem to simply be cast out into Kris just after what is presumably Gaster does his thing and shows you that he has the power here. Or perhaps, we are Gaster. He was looking in the wrong place for a Vessel. He’s been scouring the dark world for a perfect, familiar vessel, when all he needed, was a human. After all, if a monster can absorb a human SOUL like we saw in Undertale and keep both consciousnesses at least mostly sentient (which Gaster would definitely have tried to research as the royal scientist, and may have seen when the player starts uncovering lore in UT.), why can’t a human do it too? Maybe he can’t will himself a full form yet,
But surely a human has enough will and enough determination for the both of them... right? And surely they won’t mind if he inspects the dark worlds with a fresh pair of eyes. He is a scientist, after all. And maybe as a scientist he believes his duty is to do things that benefit monster and humankind alike, and so naturally his moral compass comes in and says “Hey! You should keep the world in balance because no-one else will!” But, like many of us, perhaps his curiosity gets the best of him as he realizes he too, can SAVE. If nothing else, good AU/fanfic idea.
Deltarune focuses a lot on puppets. And it makes me wonder, since it is presumably Gaster who basically said “I hold the power over who you can and cannot be” in the beginning of chapter one, maybe Kris and Spamton aren’t the only ones. How do we know that we’re even making the choices that don’t matter? It’s entirely possible that Gaster could snap his fingers and boom.