You can hold me like a small animal, but NEVER feed me meat!

consider the operative fantasy here. asgore is wracked with guilt and wants to prove that the incident wasn't his fault, so yellow is innocent and falsely accused. he feels that his family blamed and shunned him for what happened, so the flowers support asgore unconditionally and see him as their hero. with the fantasy ultimately revolving around a young girl succumbing to some sort of tragedy, what does that girl have to become in order to absolve asgore's guilt for failing to protect her?

someone capable of avoiding the tragedy entirely. someone mature, competent, and fully able to protect themself.

it's blue who has to protect yellow, not the other way around. it's also blue who frees yellow from his self-imposed cage and helps him realize he wasn't at fault for blue's flowers getting crushed. immediately after this, the blue/yellow battle begins, where the gimmick is:

unsolved cases i wonder if there's a really major unsolved case that maybe is sort of important to this chapter? involving dess and asgore maybe? i don't know i can't really think of anythi

where yellow's intro has him blaming himself for a crime committed against blue('s flowers), the last round of the justice act is a crime committed against yellow himself...'s flowers. his, uh

his secretest petals done was stolened

importantly, these secretest flowers were for blue. this time around, yellow's reaction is notably angrier:

the shift here is the same one that happened with asgore. while he obviously cared about dess, the prevention of another tragedy now consistently comes second to the act of revenge.

more importantly, asgore's revenge plot is leading him to the knight. if dess turns out not to be the knight in any way/shape/form then beat me and take my blood but we're not playing around rn.

yellow makes a big show of cursing out whoever took the flowers that were supposed to be for blue, only to find out that blue was the one who stole them all along. the evidence we use to pin the crime on him is a blue string he left behind.

listen i know this bit looks insane i know it does i have tried to put it as take-it-or-leave-it as possible and the larger idea here doesn't hinge on this. but. asgore is looking for the person that created the original fountain so he can get revenge for his life falling apart after what happened to dess. if the knight really did make that fountain, however the hell that would've worked, he's looking for dess. like with blue, she's part of what's getting avenged and she left something behind that seems to prove she did it. (attempting to figure out what is going on there is too close to lore theory type territory and that's not what we're doing rn. i don't touch that stuff. let's move along)

there's also the more immediate concern re: fountainmaking with kris having created the flower kingdom and asgore conflating its creator with that of the first fountain. regardless of whether it was kris or dess/knight that made that one, it's worth noting that kris and the knight's dark worlds are uniquely identical. it's also worth noting,

it's blue rose all the way down. it's blue rose all the way down. let's look at the blue rose. why the hell were these things crawling all over the ch5 countdown page despite having nowhere near the plot significance that would suggest?

welllll. a blue rose is associated with impossibility, unattainability, mystery. that's relevant to deltarune as a whole, but it's especially relevant to the entire dess situation. ch5 is all about the unsolved mystery of her disappearance and asgore's years-long attempt to prove the existence of the impossible thing that caused it. for both the characters and the audience, the truth of what happened to her is out of reach. beyond that, dess herself is inaccessible. we know next to nothing about her.

a blue rose is also an artificial object. it has all those associations in the first place because it doesn't exist in nature and has to be manufactured. everything we do know about dess has come secondhand. hometown really can't be trusted to give us an accurate read on her, seeing how every hometown segment is packed with people rattling off their skewed perceptions of other characters. no one can accurately describe susie or kris, nevermind a missing girl whose image has most certainly been warped over time. she's defined by blurry memories that are just fading further and further into the distance.

even dess, if we attribute gml_GlobalScript_UNUSED to her, has been losing herself in this same way. appropriately enough, the best example of this comes from her chapter 5 text:

our idea of dess is a thirdhand construction based in already biased perceptions from people who haven't seen her in years. she's a figment of our imagination, and for those close to her, a collection of memory.

blue's introduction immediately plays on these ideas of perception and transformation:

from his first lines, he's talking about reducing an abstract concept to a simpler shape, attempting to "put a face" to someone we've only heard of, and oscillating between different forms. the butterfly schtick on its own establishes transformation and shifting images as part of his character. this bit is also just him saying he can control his talksprites and he'll use whichever one he feels like. his awareness of and control over his talksprites (plus having them at all when the only other talksprited flower is flowery) indicates a level of meta knowledge, pushed even further by his constant use of what i can only really call lore buzzwords.

there is, so much to say about this type of talk popping up so frequently with blue but the important thing for my purposes is just the presence of it. with dess, we have a character who is defined by a lack of definition and by an uncertain connection to the more esoteric pieces of the game. the people that were close to her are still in the dark on what really happened to her. both in and out of the game, all anyone can really do is cobble something together in the vague shape of her, a shifting image informed by personal preference and ultimately dictated by whatever they need her to be.

with asgore in particular,

i mentioned back at the start how blue as a representation of dess fits into the overall fantasy construction of the flowers. this fantasy, much like asgore's obsession with getting revenge, exists not as a response to her disappearance itself but as a response to his own feelings of guilt and abandonment in the aftermath.

now. uh. stick with me we got this far. let's flatten the whole situation out a little. we're looking at a man who was at the scene when some as-yet-unnamed tragedy happened to a young girl. in the fallout, his wife divorced him, he was removed from the police force, and he stopped seeing his kids despite living down the street. he blames himself for what happened, but still feels he's been unfairly ostracized. he thinks that if he can prove it wasn't his fault, he'll get back everything he lost. what happened to the girl herself is an unmentionable footnote in his attempts to prove his own innocence.

it sounds...bad. it does not sound good. it sounds "Bad." the fact of "sounding bad" doesn't instantly mean something in its own right but it does mean that there's a returning theme to consider here.

so. the two crimes that bookend blue and yellow's plotline are about special flowers getting crushed and secret flowers getting stolen.

you know what this thing is and i don't need to explain the themes and such of it. when the animation (rose/shatter/whateva) plays here, it is accompanied by this sound:

(sidenote there's no ominous_stab_harsh_1 or an unharsh ominous_stab. it's just this one. idk)

there are currently six sounds beginning with the snd_ominous label, all of which come from the weird route. snd_ominous itself is the "weird route jingle." snd_ominous_stab_harsh_2 makes its first appearance here, when you force the thornring onto noelle. it is only used in two other instances.

the second time is later in wr chapter 4, when you have the option to make kris close their eyes and think of noelle. the sound plays when the screen cuts to red.

the third and final instance of this soundbite is not in the weird route. it's at the end of standard chapter 5.

and. it happens. at the exact same time. just like the last noelle scene (and similar to the rose/shatter), the sound plays just as the screen cuts to red.

again. this sound only appears three times. the first two are well-trodden ground as to their implications irt sexual violence. the third one is here. as far as i could tell from (desperately) going through the code, there are no other instances of an snd_ominous-tagged sound playing outside of the weird route. the only almost-exception is snd_board_ominous, the 8-bit version of snd_ominous that plays during the sword route. otherwise, nothing. on a similar note, that red screen only appears during these two scenes, both times accompanied by snd_ominous_stab_harsh_2.

so. what the hell?

the fantasy the flowers embody in the dark world is about innocence. the idealizations they represent are built around restoring the innocence thought to have been destroyed by the incident. the crux of yellow's connection to asgore is in relieving his guilt through an image of him that has only ever hurt himself, not his loved ones.

in the weird route, the rose imagery (and snd_ominous_stab_harsh_2 as the sound linked to it) corresponds to innocence being violently destroyed. we also now know that it signifies a point of no return. it's not clear how much a weird route failure in ch5 really counts as a cancellation, but whether or not you've aborted the route, you're still not getting the thorn out. there's no restoring the kids you break here to the way they were before. can't uncrush the blue flowers.

if blue acts as a representation of dess in response to asgore feeling responsible for her "shattering" (let's discuss that language another time...), blue's relationship with yellow is doubly significant in that blue is much more levelheaded, competent, and knowledgeable than him. blue displays a higher understanding of the world and a stronger sense of agency than any of the other flowers, save for flowery. the imagined dess here then exists not to restore her innocence, but to bolster asgore's, just as the tragedy itself motivates him towards revenge far less than his own suffering at taking the blame. blue isn't one of those shatterable flowers. he's the one the others go to for advice. he knows more about the world than the rest of them do. he's...mature. an adult.

i am not interested in claiming that a csa angle is either strictly literal or strictly metaphorical for the same reason that i'm not interested in doing so for the weird route. we are looking at a game structured around exploiting and violating children's autonomy. the story is heavily predicated on the systemic abuse and endangerment of children by caretakers who feel entitled to using them as tools while repeatedly insisting they only want what's best for them. things like the thornring and the lake act as symbols while still carrying the full narrative weight of what they signify, and the distance of "metaphor" is frankly useless in a story deeply invested in granting the real and the symbolic equal legitimacy.

so! what am i interested in claiming.

i think that asgore sees the incident as a massive destruction of innocence, with himself and dess at the center of it. to this day, it's still just them and kris who know what actually happened. it's evocative of csa in the same way kris's own guilt and repression surrounding it is. dess's abstraction through hometown's memory and players' guesswork makes her an extra malleable subject for the construction of a self-affirming fantasy, especially with asgore defining her by his own suffering in the wake of her disappearance and by the mystery/impossibility/unattainability attached to it.

for all the flowers, the connection to a lightner primarily serves to alleviate asgore's guilt by providing him with a simplified version of someone who does not blame him for what happened and whose personality attests to his innocence. with dess, this manifests as someone who is not hurt if he fails to protect her, who tells him outright that he didn't wrong her, who affirms his victim status, who personally absolves him.

as an end note: blue, like i went over, is very self-aware. he knows what his role is in both the overarching story and the fantasy within it, and he uses this understanding to recalibrate his life's structure into something desirable. to return to his first lines:

he has some wiggle room in the margins, and he goes against the direction he's supposed to be set on when he can manage it. his dream for his limited time in the dark world was all about having agency and autonomy after a lifetime as a flower.

his outlook is an optimistic one, but like the others, he knows that his existence only goes as far as the fantasy world he's tied to; when we stop watching the dream, it comes to an end. the memories stick around, but the autonomy does not.

ultimately, it suggests an existence that depends on being witnessed and imagined by someone else, within the confines of their desires and their fantasy.

Quick note: Flowery isn't part of this because he's explicitly a replacement child/wife/BFF multitool. He encompasses all of them. I'm going to talk about Blue, because he IS part of this, but not here. Blue is getting his own post. This one kind of only exists to set a foundation for the Blue post. I'll link it here in an edit once it's up.

I'm starting with Aqua here just to illustrate each of these factors and their significance using an obvious and agreed-upon example. The explanations for the others won't be as long.

Aqua mirrors Kris in a lot of very superficial ways. She's small, blue, easily bored, and just as easily temporarily amused. She likes knives and uses them on both friends and enemies, which she doesn't get the difference between. These similarities are surface-level but establish an obvious connection to Kris, especially with Kris having to face her alone in their first meeting. Just as obviously, she's extremely different from the Kris we know, though it isn't hard to link her to the mischievous child Kris is frequently described to have been.

It seems clear that Aqua reflects Asgore's memory of Kris as a child, filtered through a lot of distance and a lot of wish fulfillment relating to that distance. His memory is warped by his own flawed perception of them and his restructuring of them through idealization, especially in regard to what he'd want from them in the aftermath of Whatever Happened. Aqua is chronically 4 years old and never unhappy. When something bad happens, she doesn't understand it enough to be upset by it and can move on right away. She's very gullible and she believes whatever narrative the older people around her want her to believe. Basically, if something pretty terrible were to happen, it's unlikely she'd be permanently traumatized by it. It's also unlikely that she'd be at fault.

The really important aspect of the idealization the flowers represent is its connection to Whatever Happened, which we're assuming from here on was the Dess incident. The flowers act how Asgore wishes their real-life counterparts would act, or otherwise in accordance to what he thinks/hopes their behavior means in relation to it. With Aqua, she lacks enough of a concept of good and bad to do anything legitimately bad. During the Justice act, she takes credit for every crime regardless of how unrealistic her guilty claims are. Even the one crime she did commit is phrased to sound like something a little kid would make up:

Given Kris's guilt about what happened to Dess (assuming that that's what the "you promised" business and their thing with Carol is about), their trauma likely stemming from it (considering art therapy and their fear of the shelter), and the fact that they know about the Dark World before chapter 1, it would make sense if they tried to blame themself as a kid and Asgore assumed it was just baseless self-blame from a child who didn't really understand what was going on. Kris's claims being glossed over or not believed is something that's popped up over and over again from the jump:

Kris obviously does have an understanding of what happened back then, and a lot of what they're up to here and now is connected to it. I think a big part of Aqua's wish fulfillment for Asgore is just, like, a happy Kris. One who's too young to process the weight of difficult events enough to be upset by them, who doesn't understand good vs. bad and therefore can't really do anything bad, who doesn't beat themself up over a tragedy. The imperative for a happy Kris, in Asgore's eyes, seems to be innocence.

With the foundations out of the way, I think I can just rattle off the rest. Aqua brings us to Seth.

Seth reads pretty straightforwardly as Asriel to me. They fill an older-sibling type role with Aqua, who they're basically inseparable from throughout the chapter. They treat Asgore like a personal hero in the most childlike (as in "like they're his child") way out of the bunch. They're a textbook Undertale-brand "Nerd" who sees themself in Ralsei, another botched image of Asriel.

Like Aqua, Seth is too young to think less of Asgore for his flaws or leave him. They're old enough to know when not to bother him, but young enough that they still want to. They want his affection and to make him proud by emulating him. It's worth noting how they try to take charge of the group when Asgore's not around, taking responsibility for things that he's too busy for, though they still fall short of being the "man" of the house. When they do leave him alone, it's at his own wishes, not theirs. It's Seth that feels desperate for Asgore's approval and company, rather than the other way around the way it is for Asgore and Asriel now.

Yellow is (imo) the most obvious connection after Aqua. He's the local hero who seeks justice even/especially when it comes at his own expense, blaming himself for things he obviously didn't do and that everyone around him knows he didn't do. He's willing to dispense justice when his loved ones are in the wrong (so he's a Good Cop) but he's also completely harmless (so he's a Good Guy). He's essentially Asgore's ego ideal, a fantasy self who only ever wants to do what's right and whose wrongdoings are quirky misunderstandings at their worst. All of the flowers look up to him and he'd sacrifice everything to make them happy and protect them.

Beyond the hero aspect, the central fantasy Yellow embodies is being a needlessly self-flagellating victim.

Asgore's primary goal is to prove that what happened to Dess wasn't his fault. Finding out who was at fault is just an instrument in achieving this. His search for justice is a revenge fantasy at heart, specifically revenge for tearing his life apart by committing the crime that got pinned on him rather than the act of the crime itself. He obviously does care about what happened to Dess, but at this point in the game, "preventing a tragedy" is consistently secondary to proving his own innocence.

The person who suffers the most from Yellow's actions is Yellow. He punishes himself for crimes he didn't commit after some ragtag bunch of kids tricks him into thinking he messed up to cover their own asses. He represents what Asgore hopes he is in regard to the incident: wrongly accused and harmless to anyone other than himself.

Keeping these last two short. Green is a silent cook who prioritizes the kids' wellbeing over anything else. They don't speak and they rarely do anything that doesn't involve taking care of the kids/flowers. They disagree with the flowers' method of supporting Asgore and preserving his fantasy, but Green's intervention only helps the kids without directly jeopardizing anything involving Asgore.

If you lose the Flowery battle, they'll give you all your items back, but they'll still fight you again when you retry the fight. They're a version of Toriel that is unobtrusive and passive while maintaining her clear moral stance of giving precedence to the kids' safety over Asgore's goals. They can disagree with Asgore, but they can't verbally say so. Their role is taking care of the others and. Again. Cooking. I think of this as an idealization that sort of declaws Toriel in a way that allows the traits Asgore likes about her to stick around without posing a threat. A simplified and silent version of her who just wants everyone to get along is the only one that would be able to exist within this fantasy.

Orange is the last one I wanna pin a specific character to. I went over her a little bit in another post, but I'm gonna go again just to have everything in one place. Orange is a sensitive little kid and tries to pass as ultra-strong and ultra-tough but fools nobody. She's a mouse, and she considers this to be the scariest, toughest shape she could possibly take. She's especially sensitive about people talking down to her:

Her go-to move is to accuse both the kids and the flowers of bullying her and run off threatening to tell on them. She reads as a young Noelle, with certain traits emphasized in order to frame her as overly sensitive and easily upset by the smallest of things. I think this comes in part from Asgore's memory of her growing more and more infantilized the more distant it gets and in part to reduce the guilt associated with making her upset. With Noelle's response to Dess leaving likely being the worst out of the bunch in terms of Asgore-guilt at not preventing whatever he should've prevented, I'd say the purpose of this is to be able to look at Noelle at all without feeling constantly nauseatingly guilty. She's always upset and extremely sensitive, so you don't have to feel bad for setting her off.

It's also worth noting that Orange is the one whose "big sister" is terrified of FRIEND and gives us crucial information regarding why Dess would have left...and that this sister isn't really her sister at all...