look i know nobody's following me for deltarune and this isn't really a fully formed theory or argument, but i need to get it out of my head
from back in chapter 1 there's been fan speculation that asriel is actually missing or dead or hiding somewhere in the dark world and kris is covering up his disappearance. i have always been skeptical of this, because all indications are that asriel was in regular communication with everyone in hometown up till the very recent internet outage.
that is still true. but.
take a look at the UNUSED voice in the game code. the vast majority of the fandom assumes this is dess, which is understandable, because dess is the one significant known character who's clearly missing and could be trapped somewhere. for pretty much any other major character you have to reach to come up with a convoluted explanation for why nobody's noticed they're gone. (well, except papyrus, but come on it's not papyrus.)
but...ignore that for a second and just imagine for a minute it was asriel. interestingly this would pull several different things together:
the UNUSED voice sounds a lot like asriel, both as we knew him in undertale (at least in his ensouled state) and in terms of the hints about his deltarune personality. it sounds nothing at all like the singer of raise up your bat.
it leaves dess free to be the knight without having to explain how she could be simultaneously acting as the knight but also lost in the game code, or how she got out of the code and turned into the knight.
if asriel were UNUSED he would definitely qualify as a "prince alone in deepest dark" (not only is he a prince in undertale, but deltarune toriel appeared as a queen in the dark world, and asgore said this chapter that kris and asriel are both royalty since their parents were festival king & queen). a second claimant to that role in the prophecy would have rich narrative implications.
it would pay off the strong connection between asriel and dess if asriel entered the darkness to help her or look for her.
raise up your bat, taken literally, in fact suggests dess was asking someone to follow her into the dark. that could be kris, but it could be someone else.
we still don't know what ralsei is, and if asriel entered the darkness and then something weird happened to him it could help explain why there's this very strange darkner who seems to be some kind of echo of asriel.
kris definitely knows some sort of important information about asriel they're trying to keep secret from us. nearly every time they attempt to hide information from the player it involves asriel somehow. this probably involves ralsei's resemblance to asriel: kris' adamant denial that they look alike is obviously defensive, and flowery also wants to hide the resemblance from asgore.
one of the last things asriel says to us in undertale is "just forget about me." what's the UNUSED voice saying in chapter 5? "maybe that's all i am at this point. a collection of memory...then all i can do is...not forget, right? don't forget."
does this mean i am arguing that asriel is definitely the UNUSED voice? no, based on the information we currently know i still really have a hard time believing everyone in town would be confident asriel's safe at college if he's actually been trapped somewhere for any significant length of time.
it's just...weird how much this would line up.
anyway though it's definitely not dess
