#utdr analysis

When Ralsei said that he hoped that if they were kind and spared everyone, there would be a different outcome, I don't even think he realized that he was right, even though the prophecy itself didn't change!

By sparing and recruiting the Pippins and Shadowguys in Chapter 3, they were LIKELY able to save Tenna from his fate in the prophecy, since he wasn't. yknow. completely cleaved I suppose. Regardless, he was never completely cleaved by blade.

Also, Queen's chariot IS STOPPED in chapter two's normal route

A helpful little index of all my Deltarune theory & analysis posts specifically involving Berdly thus far, in vague chronological order.

Berdly and the Sky Mantle (aka the observation that started it all)

Some visual similarities between Berdly's dark world sprite, Queen's beta design, Giga Queen, and the bird teacher from the Undertale anniversary livestream.

Berdly and Spamton cutscene parallels

Details regarding the relationship between Kris and Berdly that get completely taken for granted

Semi-joking theory about Queen and Berdly

Berdly's Speedrun Strats

The Bird Teacher connecting the dots, and strange similarities between UTDR and Touhou (this one's wild. seriously.)

Shop 3 and Bluebird of Misfortune (this one's just rambling based on audio first impressions. But seriously what is with this game and melancholy waltzing.)

Chekov's Berdly!

Berdly's importance in a meta sense

Ask 1 - Berdly and Romance

Ask 2 - Colour Theory (my take on an idea based on an analysis I really have to watch)

Ask 3 - Berdly and incel ideology (aka why does everyone have such bad faith takes)

Hypoglycemic Berdly (aka over-analysing a single interaction because I can)

The Happiest Outcome and Berdly/Alphys Parallels

Berdly's absence of presence and Being Important By Omission

Ask 4 - Aromantic Berdly!

An in-depth analysis on Berdly's treatment in the eyes of snowgrave players... in the form of yet another incredibly long winded rant about dark humour and bad faith readings

SCC and the alleged music ban (which may or may not come up again sometime soon)

Deltarune and Joke Choices (most of which involve Berdly)

Berdly reflecting the player base and why misinterpretations say more about the gamer making them

Berdly's life is a tragedy hidden in plain sight seriously why does no one bring this up?

Golden Berdly and the NEO Vessel

Allegedly incomplete character arcs and plot twists in Undertale setting a precedent

Ask 5 - Berdly’s completely normal home life

Ask 6 - The lack of context regarding Berdly and a certain somebody else...

Rambling about fanon misunderstandings of Noelle and Berdly’s relationship (with hopefully some coherent points in the tags)

Instances in which Hometown feels less Deltarune and more Chicken Little

Common misconceptions about Berdly that somehow make their way into serious DeltaTheories and irk me endlessly

Ask 7 - Burning arms, burning eyes

Wonder what that spelling-based encounter was doing in chapter 3's journey to nowhere?

Berdly's self-fulfilling prophecy.. oh no..

Man, those Birds sure are Weird.

Vagueposting about a certain line in chapter 3 that always gets used as a gotcha

Berdly’s descriptions of Susie being more revealing than you'd think

The NEO machine's creator and interesting parallels to characters we already know

Ask 8 - we take Berdly seriously around here

An interesting use of motifs.. specifically the part you don’t pay attention to..

Ask 9 - Berdly's presence or absense in the prophecy

Like a chicken with its head cut off...

A PSA towards anyone writing a Chapter 2 Roaring AU

Ask 10 - Ralsei and Unexpected Kindness towards someone you wouldn't think about

Noelle’s relationships with Berdly and Spamton (and how the fanbase has them completely backwards)

More over Friend Inside Me you ain't the only Toy Story parallel in town.

Lancer Parallels? Lancer Parallels.

Pattern recognition and noticing Berdly connections where you'd least expect them

Berdly being relevant outside the Weird route? Inconceivable.. right?

Bonus: theories that aren't necessarily about Berdly but may involve Berdly significantly!

Birdcage Blue and Yellow (aka why Pink and Yellow isn't the only omnipresent colour scheme)

Snowgrave and Fatality

The Angel, The Titan... and The Weird Birds.

A very serious and meaningful take on equipment effects and monetary gains

Slash HJ theory about the librarbian bird npc

Hometown’s hospital wallpaper

Reaper Bird's importance to Deltarune

"How do you feel about losing your face?"

The power of sine wave birds

Librarby part 2 - Elec/Holy boogaloo?

Crack theory about a normal bird

Reaper bird is so goddamn strange.

Don't worry bout those butterflies I'm sure it's nothing.

There's no shame in an egg...

Now spell: Heaven Says (less the post itself more the details in the tags)

It's time for Egg Delivery

The illusion of power as a means of control

I've seen a lot of people who believe that "The Girl" was meant to be somebody else- particularly, Noelle. To be blunt, this is false, and I'm tired of seeing this interpretation pop up everywhere. I can understand how one could come to this conclusion initially- hell, I used to believe this theory- but when you look at all the evidence, it just doesn't line up whatsoever. So let's get into why.

First is Aqua, who is deeply impatient but constantly striving to find something to hold her attention. She is mischievous and disobedient, but never purposefully so, always genuinely trying to help and listen to those around her. The Aqua child in Undertale is noted to carry around dyed red ribbons and a plastic knife, which can be found scattered in the Ruins. Putting these together, we get a picture of a very young child (which explains the toddler shoes and toys in Toriel’s home), one that was constantly searching for something stimulating enough to hold her attention. That and her mischievous nature are both common results of neglect in young children, so it’s likely her parents were as attentive as she is. Especially given that her ribbon talks about “looking cuter so you aren’t hit as hard” Aqua having bad parents is very likely, and probably why she assumes violence to be the correct answer to most situations. Perhaps she went up the mountain out of curiosity when her parents weren’t caring enough to watch her. What’s clear though is that she was taken in by Toriel, got bored and went exploring, and either lost her stuff or died nearby (hence why her stuff is only a few rooms away from Toriel’s home). If she survived her own curiosity, I doubt she made it past Snowdin Forest before being captured. And as she is the first to confront Asgore in the Flower Castle climb, she may have been the first to be captured/killed and brought to him in Undertale.

The next to confront Asgore in Flower Castle is Yellow, followed by Blue, so I’ll cover them next. Yellow, Blue, Green, and Seth could all be read as adults by some, but I would argue that there is a lot showing that they’re all just kids striving to be older than they really are. That said, Yellow and Blue are likely the oldest amongst them, and I would guess they fell as young teenagers, supported by the mention of shoes for older kids and teenagers. Yellow in Deltarune is shown to have a childish understanding of what a cowboy is and a need for justice, coupled with being exceedingly naive and extremely self-flagellating. Given his constant jumping to suicide as a response to any perceived wrongdoing on his part, it’s likely that he went to Mt Ebbott on purpose, attempting to die. We know that he made it as far as Waterfall’s trash zone, though it’s unclear if that’s where he was captured or if he simply lost/threw away his items. My guess is that he threw them away after losing Blue, deciding he wasn’t worthy to be a cowboy, and then…well…given his behavior and the fact that Trash Zone is heavily associated with suicide in Undertale…I don’t think he needed to be killed by the Royal Guard.

As for Blue, we get the least screentime from him so it’s a bit harder to tell, but he seems to be a bit of a liar with a well meaning heart. He also has this false maturity to him that I wouldn’t doubt came from adultification. Given that he’s a queer, gender-nonconforming man who’s whole thing is living your inner truth (even if he struggles with that himself), perhaps a queerphobic/misogynistic family was what pushed him to Mt Ebott. Either way, he fell into the Underground (perhaps with Yellow, perhaps instead just meeting him while living with Toriel), and made it to Waterfall. His tutu can be found earlier on, be described as “protective” and “dusty”, which might imply he had to kill a monster to protect Yellow. Perhaps this sparked the Royal Guard to chase him more fervently, explained why the unused echo flower that was meant to spawn in the same room as his shoes says “I can’t run anymore…somebody, anybody…”. Perhaps he died or was captured here, leaving Yellow to survived for a few more rooms before succumbing to himself.

Next on the Asgore order is Green, by far our hardest nut to crack because they don’t speak. Green seems to strive to be kind but instead ends up as just nice, struggling to actually comfort anybody and consistently betraying their friends by helping the Fun Gang. The need to please outweighs the need to do right by people, sounds like a fellow people pleaser to me. Their items seem to indicate they made it the farthest of anyone but Chara and Frisk, dying/getting captured in Hotland, which makes sense given how effective pacifism is in the Underground. Their items only have mechanics in their description, but one of them is called the “Burnt Pan” which is generally something pans are designed not to do, so their defeat being at the hands of a fire enemy seems likely. Other than that, not much to glean.

Orange is next, and is very clearly a “are you a man or a mouse” joke. I already went into her deal, but to reiterate, she’s got a whole thing about pretending to be bigger than she is because she’s scared of being weak. Her items are pink gloves (hence her friendship with Pink) and the “Manly Bandana” which has abs drawn on it, all an attempt to seem manly and scary when she’s not. Her items can be found in Snowdin, meaning her weakness likely got the better of her. One thing to note, though, is that she’s the only flower to refer to the others as siblings (specifically Pink, Flowery, and Green). Given that Pink is a monster that we meet in Undertale and Flowery has his own stuff going on, it’s entirely possible she went up the mountain searching for her sibling, Green. That’s getting into fanfiction territory, but I thought it was a neat idea.

Seth probably gets the most characterization in both games. Seth is, as Deltarune puts it, someone who “only has the perseverance for study”. They are desperate to be taken seriously by those around them and fail miserably at it, and aren’t able to get through much of anything without having a breakdown. They also have a habit of idolizing people. They are also the only one to get a name meaning Seth is likely their Undertale name too. They chose it themselves in Deltarune, and with the break scene about their gender identity I think it’s likely they chose it in Undertale. Their items don’t give us much other than that their handwriting is illegible, but the location of their items seems to indicate Gerson is the only who caught/killed them.

The Asgore climb order clearly means something (going Aqua, Yellow, Blue, Green, Orange, then Seth) but doesn’t tell us much, so I’m guessing it’s the death order. But given its implied Blue got killed first and that Seth got killed by Gerson (who hasn’t been a Royal Guard in a long time) it might be the reverse order. In fact, there’s one more piece of evidence for that. At the end of the climb you see a conversation between Asgore and Flowery.

Which is why I think Flowery might represent Chara a bit. This is going into wild speculation territory so bear with me here. Flowery and Chara are both characters with heavy, heavy ties to golden flowers, Asgore’s happy memories, and the number 999. Both are characters with notable habits of coping with distress and their loved one’s distress by smiling. Both have heavy emphasis on the color of their eyes, both are willing to die for the cause, both believe the surface world is full of cruel people who they need to protect their family from, both are willing to risk potential disaster in order to give their families the world they deserve, both have the ability to affect the narration of the game, and both have some amount of fourth wall breaking power. If Flowery IS meant to represent Chara is some way, that could tell us a lot about their behavior when they were alive. As for who represents Frisk…

The obvious and most definitely correct answer is Kris. Identical faces, near anagram names, matching color schemes (in the Dark World anyhow), being the protagonist, it’s incredibly clear. But what if, and this is definitely a crackpot theory, it’s Ralsei? My main evidence is the strange parallels between Flowery and Ralsei and how their weirdly echo that of Chara and Frisk. There’s also the mistaken identity beat with both Frisk and Ralsei, funnily enough both connected to Asriel (albeit in different ways). But the main evidence is entirely on the hypotheticals of certain theories on Ralsei’s light world form being confirmed, hence why I said this part of the analysis is complete crackpot bullshit, so please take it with a grain of salt. The two prevailing theories for what he is are the Red Headband/Kris’ Ideal Form, which would tie him to Kris and therefore to Frisk, or a red flower. There’s a lot to get into regarding the Ralsei Is A Plant Theory and others could explain it better, but trust me, there’s a lot of could textual and narrative evidence. But if he’s a flower and the flowers represent humans, him being the notably absent red flower would mean that he ties into the one human unaccounted for. I don’t know, just a thought.

Skimming through Deltarune's ch 3 soundtrack on Spotify made me realize something...

…there's 2 "ROOTS" songs. Not just that, but they sound the same but in different sound fonts. They both even play in thematically similar places. Digital Roots plays in Queen's basement when you have to do the teacup ride challenge to retrieve the empty disk/plugging in the loaded disk in order to get the Spamton NEO. BIT ROOTS plays in the third part of sword route when u enter a dungeon and have to kill every monster in order to get the ERAM fight. Both play during the challenge required to get to a secret boss fight, both involve actively going behind the respective dark world's rulers backs, both involve plugging in something connected to image_FRIEND (the loaded disk having Spamton on it and the odd controller being a knockoff controller with FRIEND's colors), both involve retrieving an item mentioned by a shopkeeper ("MANSION... BASEMENT! FIND IT!!" for the empty disk and Seam's dialogue where they realize someone stole their shadow mantle).

The digital root is also a mathematical process of adding the digits in a number together to get a sum, then (if there are multiple digits in the sum) adding the digits in the sum together to get a new sum, and doing this until u get a single digit (ex: the digital root of 1225 is 1 because 1+2+2+5=10 and 1+0=1). It's used as a "checksum" in programming to tell u if there are any errors in what u input. If a checksum fails it means the data is incorrect, corrupted, or incomplete.

So, looking at Toby Fox's Bandcamp, the digital root of the place of Digital Roots in the ost would be 1, because 3+7=10 and 1+0=1. The digital root of the length of Digital Roots is 6, which is the same number associated with Gaster in Undertale's code.

The digital root of BIT ROOTS is-

not there?

It's not in the Bandcamp ost. In fact, none of the sword route music is on the officiial Bandcamp, but you do get them if you buy the entire album.

Here's that same section of the ost on Spotify for reference:

Turns out this isn't the first time Toby has hidden music that plays during any in-game moment/mention of the snowgrave route

In fact, the music that plays when the snowgrave route is continued in ch 4 is also hidden. So it seems that the songs that mention the weird route are hidden but can still be found by chance whereas songs that play ONLY on the weird route are completely hidden and can only be found by intentionally trying to find it, like how the sword route can be accessed if someone happened to be good enough at the boards to get s rank (or bought s rank) but the weird route has to be intentionally sought out.

To find the digital roots for BIT ROOT I needed to use Spotify (as a bonus I included all the other sword route songs too in the following screenshot edit)

It has the nearly the same place on its chapter's ost as Digital Roots (36 vs 37), with the digital root being 9 instead of 1, but the lengths are different, something that feels intentional considering they're basically the same song. The digital root for the length of BIT ROOTS is also 9... Chara's favorite number is 9, something they associate with absolute power. I don't know if the correlation between ROOTS and Chara has any foundation but the 2 ROOTS songs being different lengths seems significant. Especially since in BIT ROOTS, after the 0:33 mark the song stops looping perfectly and starts sounding glitched out with notes being dropped off or incorrect notes playing. The second loop of the (corrupted) melody finishes around 0:54 (digital root of 9), which means it's not a perfect loop because if it was the song would be 1:06 (2 segments of 33 seconds) minutes instead of 0:54, and the rest of the song is just static noise... garbage noise? Not "garbage noise" as in the sound file mus_smile but like conceptually garbage, noise that means nothing.

In the Spamton Sweepstakes, Tumblr user @humunanunga calculated the digital roots for the unique gateway windows on the pages /windows/ and /window/ (their post here), the 2 pages that look like the window hallway that leads to the ch 4 egg. These are 2 separate pages btw that look basically the same so for simplicity's sake I'm going to be referring to them as "plural" (windows) and "single" (window). Both plural and single have 51 windows (digital root 6), single's unique room is window 18 (digital root 9), and plural's unique room is window is 36 (digital root 9).

So we have the digital roots for ch 2: 1 and 6, Spamton Sweepstakes windows: 6(x2) 9 and 9, and ch 3: 9 and 9. Considering the window/s pages from the Spamton Sweepstakes are related to the egg in ch 4 which is found behind window 100, that would give us another digital root of 1. So all digital roots we have are:

-ch 2: 1, 6

-SS: 6, 9, 6, 9

-ch 3: 9, 9

-ch 4: 1

Fun values:

In Undertale the fun value is 1 number assigned out of 100 (digital root 1) given at random upon starting/resetting the game. Whatever fun value you get will give you a random event or no event at all (here's a chart for what fun value gives you what events). All of the Gaster related fun events have a 1 out 100 (unlike all of the other random events) chance of happening; the Gaster followers + sound test room + "mystery man" have fun values in the 60s range with "mystery man" being assigned to fun value 66. This gives us a strong association between Gaster and the number 6. The clam girl event happens in the 80s range but the clam girl goner event (that unlocks the "don't forget" picture of 3 people in Sans workshop event), while not a Gaster event, only happens at a fun value of 81 (digital root 9). The room where "mystery man" is located in room 269 (both 6 and 9 are present) and getting the door that actually leads to room 269/mystery man only has a 10% chance of activating (digital root 1). Maybe this implies that double 6 and double 9 have some sort of significance, but I feel like this is a stretch. Leaving the hallway with the door to room 269 causes the fun value to become 0. The only times when the fun value goes from whatever you got to 0 is after any Gaster-related event.

So, from what I can glean:

-the number 6 represents a connection to Gaster

-the number 9 (as the highest value you can get from a digital root) represents power or the world of Deltarune

-I have no clue what the number 1 could represent, if it represents anything

-there is no way to get a digital root of 0, this could mean 0 represents intentional manipulation from an outside source

“chara is evil and committed genocide in undertale”

“omg chara is possessing kris during the weird route”

to the people who say that unironically, i want to made this perfectly clear.

you are chara.

chara is a general representation of your morals and mental state.

they can also be a stand-in for your conscience, because you are the one in control.

they use the name you gave them as a stand-in for your name.

by placing the blame on this fictional character that represents you and your actions, you are attempting to avoid responsibility for what you have done within the game.

if you replace chara’s name with your own, the statements you’ve made about them will still be accurate.

you just don’t want to believe that.

chara doesn’t want to believe that either.

so you both dumb it down to numbers, a level that’ll go up or down, strength and power and disconnection from this world that you both consider a game.

and when you both reach the end, you confront the other, knowing your sick sentiments identical to each other.

chara does not take accountability.

you are chara,